Chapter Ten

Life in Guantanamo

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For over four years, Abu Zubaydah had been the subject of inhumane treatment culminating in actual torture while in CIA custody. Unfortunately for him, things did not get markedly better for him when he was sent to Guantanamo. There was more of everything in store—including torture.

On September 6, 2006, Abu Zubaydah and thirteen other men considered “high-value detainees” were sent from a CIA black site to Guantanamo Bay. While their days of torture in CIA custody were over, another round was about to begin. The DoD had its own torture program in place. This program has played out in Afghanistan and in Abu Ghraib, Iraq—but it was created in Guantanamo. The program was a mixture of CIA-approved techniques, along with “tricks” garnered from the North Koreans, the Soviets, and from CIA human experiments like MK-ULTRA.

For Abu Zubaydah, it began even before he landed. During the long flight to Guantanamo, the DoD placed rubber gloves on his hands, earmuffs over his ears, and goggles covered in black paint on his face. The effect produced is called “sensory deprivation.” The Soviets had used it effectively against Czechoslovakians in the 1970s. The technique caused subjects to feel panic, confusion, and helplessness—which ultimately led to submission.

Within just a few hours after arriving in Guantanamo, Abu Zubaydah was given a controversial anti-malaria drug called mefloquine. When taken at a dose of 250 milligrams, mefloquine is known to produce harsh side effects such as anxiety, paranoia, hallucinations, aggression, psychotic behavior, mood changes, depression, memory impairment, convulsions, loss of coordination (ataxia), and suicidal ideation. Even though Abu Zubaydah did not have malaria, and there is no malaria in Guantanamo, Abu Zubaydah was given 1,250 milligrams. Mefloquine is a quinolone, part of the family of drugs the CIA had experimented with during MK-ULTRA. Designed and operated by the CIA, the MK-ULTRA project involved illegal drug experimentation on both members of the military and on civilians. One of the goals of MK-ULTRA was to identify drugs that might be useful in interrogation and torture scenarios. According to the CIA’s own notes from the project, the use of quinolone drugs in interrogation settings was found to have potential. As the Agency put it: “an adversary service could use such drugs to produce anxiety or terror in medically unsophisticated subjects unable to distinguish drug-induced psychosis from actual insanity.”

Major Remington Nevin—an Army public health physician who formerly worked at the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center and has written extensively about mefloquine—has characterized taking this drug at such a high dosage as“ pharmacologic waterboarding.”149 Nevin believes administering the drug at the dosage Abu Zubaydah received involves “unacceptably high risks of potentially severe neuropsychiatric side effects, including seizures, intense vertigo, hallucinations, paranoid delusions, aggression, panic, anxiety, severe insomnia, and thoughts of suicide … These side effects could be as severe as those intended through the application of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques.’” Mefloquine is a fat-soluble drug. Unlike water soluble drugs, which are designed to stay in a person’s system for just a few hours, fat-soluble drugs have a very long half-life. This is important, since a massive dose of mefloquine—such as the one Abu Zubaydah and the other detainees at Guantanamo were given—produces effects that could last for weeks or months.

After being sensory deprived and overdosed with a known hallucinogen, Abu Zubaydah was taken to a top-secret base within Guantanamo known as “Camp Seven” and put into isolation. There he stayed for thirty days. He was not given the right to receive visits from the Red Cross or from a chaplain, which is explicitly called for for prisoners of war by the Geneva Convention. The only human contact he had was with his interrogators. This was intentional, and meant to instill in Abu Zubaydah a sense that they were the only ones upon whom he could depend, and the only ones who might ultimately be his savior.

After thirty days in isolation, Abu Zubaydah was moved to an isolated cell on a cell block in Camp Seven, and given limited recreation time and human contact. His new schedule also involved being taken to frequent interrogations. Interrogations at Guantanamo at the time were conducted using the Biderman Principle.

Albert Biderman was a sociologist who had studied methods employed by the Chinese communists to coerce information and false confessions from American servicemen captured during the Korean War. During that war, many captured US service members confessed to horrific war crimes of which they were innocent while in Chinese custody. The Chinese filmed these confessions and used them in propaganda. Biderman wanted to know what type of interrogation had made the US service members confess like this. After conducting an extensive study, in 1957 Biderman published his findings in the Bulletin New York Academy of Medicine, in a piece titled “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions from Air Force Prisoners of War.” The article contained a version of the chart reproduced here, illustrating the methods of interrogation, their effects, and variations upon them.

General Method	Effects (Purposes)	Variants
1. Isolation	Deprives victim of all social support of his ability to resist. Develops an intense concern with self. Makes victim dependent upon interrogator.	Complete solitary confinement. Complete isolation. Semi-isolation. Group isolation.
2. Monopolization of Perception	Fixes attention upon immediate predicament. Fosters introspection. Eliminates stimuli competing with those controlled by captor. Frustrates all action not consistent with compliance.	Physical isolation. Darkness or bright light. Barren environment. Restricted movement. Monotonous food.
3. Induced Debilitation and Exhaustion	Weakens mental and physical ability to resist	Semi-starvation. Exposure. Exploitation of wounds. Induced illness. Sleep deprivation. Prolonged constraint. Prolonged interrogation. Forced writing. Over-exertion.
4. Threats	Cultivates anxiety and despair	Threats of death. Threats of non [return?]. Threats of endless interrogation and isolation. Threats against family. Vague threats. Mysterious changes of treatment.
5. Occasional indulgences	Provides positive motivation for compliance. Hinders adjustment to deprivation.	[Occasional?] favors. Fluctuations of interrogator’s attitudes. Promises. Rewards for partial compliance. Tantalizing.
6. Demonstrating “Omnipotence” and “Omniscience”	Suggests futility of resistance.	Confrontation. Pretending cooperation taken for granted. Demonstrating complete control over victim’s fate.
7. Degradation	Makes cost of resistance more damaging to self-esteem than capitulation. Reduces prisoner to ‘animal level’ concerns.	Personal hygiene prevented. Filthy infested surrounds. Demeaning punishments. Insults and taunts. Denial of privacy.
8. Enforcing Trivial Demands	Develops habits of compliance.	Forced writing. Enforcement of minute rules.

Biderman found the techniques used by the Chinese to be “abominable and outrageous,” adding that “probably no other aspect of communism reveals more thoroughly its disrespect for truth and the individuals than its resort to these techniques.”

Even though Biderman detested the techniques and characterized them as torture, the DoD soon made them the centerpiece of its own interrogation program. As time went by, Biederman’s work apparently stayed at the fore of the DoD. Copies of Biderman’s chart—reproduced word for word—were found hanging on the wall in the Interrogation Control Elements Office at Guantanamo (and on a wall in an office in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq) during an inquiry of detainee abuse by the Senate Select Committee.

The motto at Guantanamo is “Safe, Humane, Legal, and Transparent.” No characterization of what goes on there could be further from the truth. Guantanamo is a place built, inaugurated, and maintained by deception and lies. Hundreds of men accused of being America’s enemies during the “Global War on Terror” were tortured and treated inhumanely at Guantanamo. None were given the right of due process, none were charged with a crime, and some died in custody. Many are still there.

To some observers, the hypocrisy and permissiveness on display at Guantanamo is connected to problematic trends running through other parts of American society.

When the housing crisis hit in 2008, politicians and bankers who had clamored for dangerous deregulation were seldom censured and never sent to prison, yet millions of poor and working people lost their homes. When incidences of abuse were brought to light at Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib, the high-ranking officers on the bases and the suits at the Pentagon—who had formulated and greenlit this behavior—were never held to account. Instead, any incidents that got as far as the media were always blamed on the low-ranking privates and sergeants that had been following their so-called “lawful orders.”

When innocent, unarmed black men in America are gunned down in the streets by police just for living in the wrong zip code, law enforcement officers are rarely held accountable. Neither are the police chiefs or the politicians who appoint the police chiefs. Instead, the crimes are blamed on the victims themselves. If he was innocent, then what was he doing in that neighborhood? In Guantanamo, when a detainee dies in custody, those charged with holding the inmates and keeping them alive until their status is resolved are never held accountable. Instead, the crime is blamed on the victim. It is, somehow, the detainee’s fault for having died. The death is characterized as form of “asymmetrical warfare.”

Abu Zubaydah now has spent fifteen years of his life in custody. Conditions have improved slightly at Guantanamo, but that is not saying much. While Abu Zubaydah may not be undergoing a regimen of torture at the moment, he is still in a maximum security prison far from the protections of the mainland. He likely wonders each day if he will ever be freed from the legal black hole in which he finds himself. In a way, not knowing if you will ever see your loved ones again—much less the larger world—has to be a kind of torture in and of itself.

Some of the accusations made against Abu Zubaydah are probably true. Many of the accusations made against him are demonstrably not true. But whatever his actual transgressions, a strong case can be made that he has now paid for them many times over. During the last fifteen years, he has withstood unimaginable torture, confinement, and cruel and inhumane treatment. He still has not been charged with any crime and has been denied due process. Abu Zubaydah needs something that is becoming rarer than it should be in a nation that was founded on the Rule of Law.

Abu Zubaydah needs a fair trial.

Failure to give him that is tantamount to failing to adhere to the basic precepts upon which our nation was founded. George Washington spoke out explicitly against the mistreatment or torture of prisoners of war on numerous occasions—including in his charge to the Northern Expeditionary Force on September 14, 1775, and in his famous missive following the Battle of Trenton on December 26, 1776. Even President Trump—who has stated that he believes torture “works”—has said that his anti-torture Secretary of Defense James Mattis will have the power to “override” him on the issue.

America is at a crossroads. We can build on our fundamental values. We can admit what was done, admit that it was wrong—a horrible misstep at the very least—and resolve to do better, to be better, in the future. Or we can fail to learn from the evidence showing torture is neither useful or effective, and do nothing.

But if we are to remain the acknowledged leaders of the free world—the beacon of light and hope and justice that the United States of America has always been—then we must come to terms with what has happened. We must make it right again. We must pledge ourselves anew to the rule of law.

And we must, above all, see that this man has justice.