WASHINGTON — Abu Zubaydah was the CIA’s guinea pig.
He was the first high-profile al-Qaeda terror suspect captured after the Sept. 11 attacks and the first to vanish into the spy agency’s secret prisons, the first subjected to grinding white noise and sleep deprivation tactics and the first to gasp under the simulated drowning of waterboarding. Zubaydah’s stark ordeal became the CIA’s blueprint for the brutal treatment of terror suspects, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report released Tuesday.
The newly released report cites Zubaydah’s detention in Pakistan in March 2002 as a turning point in the Bush administration’s no-holds-barred approach to terror suspects and the CIA’s development of coercive interrogation tactics.
While CIA officials subjected Zubaydah to a growing array of harsh interrogations, legal officials working for President George W. Bush wrote memos citing Zubaydah as a key test case to justify the extreme measures, the report said.
Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in August 2002 alone, according to a previously released Bush-era legal document. The new Senate report said CIA interrogators had a pre-arranged plan about how to dispose of Zubaydah’s body if he were to die during questioning: He would be cremated.
The physical effects on the terror suspect were immediate and pronounced. Straining under a waterlogged cloth clamped over his face, Zubaydah became “completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth,” according to CIA emails cited in the report. He was body-slammed by his captors. He was hooded then unmasked and ominously shown a coffin-like box. He was locked in a cramped cell, reduced to wailing and hysteria, the report said.
Zubaydah’s torment became the template for the CIA’s black-site interrogations, the Senate report said. It provided interrogators with reams of data, CIA medical specialists with the limits of human endurance and Bush administration officials with the legal outlines of how they would deal with future terror suspects.
At the CIA’s request, the report said, top Bush administration Justice Department officials approved the use of waterboarding and other coercive tactics to humble Zubaydah and enshrined a harsh regime that controlled every aspect of his life.
U.S. and Pakistani officials grabbed Zubaydah in March 2002. He was taken to a prison site in an unidentified country described as “Detention Site Green” in the report but confirmed as Thailand, according to prior legal documents, media accounts and international investigations. While healing, Zubaydah was questioned by FBI and CIA interrogators. But the FBI veterans soon withdrew from the black site after protesting that CIA interrogators were using abusive techniques on Zubaydah.
In Zubaydah’s first waterboarding session in early August 2002, CIA interrogators hooded and shackled him and pitched him into a wall. They repeatedly asked “questions about threats” to the U.S., but Zubaydah insisted he had no information.
Interrogators strapped Zubaydah to a board, covered his face with a cloth and poured water over it. Zubaydah choked, vomited then blacked out, coming to under medical supervision after expelling “copious amounts of liquid,” according to CIA records cited by the Senate.
“So it begins,” a CIA officer wrote to superiors in a cable from the prison.
Through a spokesman, Jose Rodriguez — the senior CIA official who oversaw Zubaydad’s questioning from agency headquarters in Virginia — told The Washington Post that he never instructed employees not to send cables about the legality of interrogations.
In a 2006 speech that confirmed the detention and interrogation program and cited Zubaydah, Bush said the detainee was a “senior terrorist leader and a trusted associate of Osama bin Laden.” Rodriguez said on CBS’s “60 Minutes” that Zubaydah became “compliant within three weeks” and “gave us a road map that allowed us to capture a bunch of al-Qaeda senior leaders.”
More than 12 years after his capture, Zubaydah remains confined to the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He has yet to be charged with any crimes under the government’s military tribunals — a limbo predicted in 2002 by CIA terror experts, according to the Senate report.
