London: The abuse and torture that a prisoner at the infamous Guantanamo Bay facility claimed to have experienced at the hands of US security personnel have been described in great detail.
Stateless Palestinian Abu Zubaydah, who was detained by US forces in 2002 in Faisalabad, Pakistan, produced drawings depicting the brutal treatment he endured while being held captive and interrogated at various US "black sites" and Guantanamo Bay.
In his cell, he drew them from memory and sent them to one of his solicitors, Professor Mark Denbeaux.
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A summary of the report, "American Torturers: FBI and CIA Abuses at Dark Sites and Guantanamo," co-authored by Denbeaux and based on Abu Zubaydah's account, was published in the Guardian newspaper on Thursday. It provided previously unheard-of insight into what the CIA refers to as its "enhanced interrogation techniques."
His graphic drawings expose the "complicity" of FBI agents in detainee abuse and mistreatment, as well as the various forms of torture used by the CIA against him and other detainees, according to the report.
The EITs, which include body slaps, punches, waterboarding, directing cold water at the genitals, and using loudspeakers and cold air continuously while chained to a cell wall, were first tried on Abu Zubaydah in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks.
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He was taken from Pakistan to a black site in Thailand after being apprehended by US forces, and over the next four years he was subjected to abuse and torture at CIA black sites in Afghanistan, Lithuania, Poland, and Morocco before being moved in 2006 to the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay.
Despite the CIA and FBI's admission that Abu Zubaydah was not an Al-Qaeda member as they had initially believed and that his case involved "mistaken identity," he has remained detained without being charged or put on trial ever since.
The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has criticised his treatment as having "no lawful basis." The group also stated that the removal of his freedoms was a "crime against humanity" and that the UK was "co-responsible for the torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of Mr. Zubaydah."
The drawings are currently the only proof, according to the authors of the Centre for Policy and Research report Denbeaux and Jess Ghannam. "Not only are these drawings a powerful testament to what the CIA and FBI did in the wake of 9/11, they are the only evidence now," they wrote.
"Justice' moves at a glacial pace in the Guantanamo Bay Military Commission courtroom. Nineteen years have been wasted while Mr. Abu Zubaydah and many other GTMO prisoners have neither been charged with a crime nor allowed to testify," they continued. "The CIA destroyed the only video evidence of detainee torture."
Abu Zubaydah's drawings, according to Moazzam Begg, a former Guantanamo Bay prisoner and outreach director for the London-based CAGE advocacy organisation for victims of the War on Terror, will be crucial in highlighting what happened at Guantanamo Bay.
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They refer to Abu Zubaydah as the "forever prisoner" despite the fact that he has been held without being charged or going through a trial for 21 years, he claimed.
Truth be told, it was a stateless Palestinian who inspired the US to create its 21st-century version of mediaeval torture, and it was his case that led the UN to designate Guantanamo as a "crime against humanity.
"Abu Zubaydah must be released because the law holds him to be innocent, and when he is free, the report's iconic self-portraits of CIA torture will have served their purpose," said the author.