Physician Denounces C.I.A. Observe of ‘Rectal Feeding’ of Prisoners

on

|

views

and

comments


GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — Over time, the Central Intelligence Company’s use of waterboarding and different types of torture in its secret abroad prisons after the Sept. 11, 2001, assaults has been revealed in authorities leaks, testimony and a damning Senate investigation.

However an professional’s testimony this week in pretrial hearings at Guantánamo Bay provided a number of the most graphic particulars made public concerning the C.I.A.’s shadowy use of rectal feeding on its prisoners, a discredited follow stored secret lengthy after different torture strategies had been uncovered.

Dr. Sondra S. Crosby, a court-approved professional on torture and different trauma, testified in a long-running protection effort by legal professionals for Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who’s accused of orchestrating the 2000 bombing of the united statesS. Cole. The legal professionals are searching for to suppress from his eventual trial admissions he made to federal investigators as tainted by torture.

She held up a tube that’s designed to be put in a affected person’s windpipe and mentioned that — in line with the company’s once-secret data —C.I.A. jail employees inserted one identical to it into Mr. Nashiri’s anus in Could 2004. Company personnel then used a syringe to inject a protein enriched dietary shake into his physique.

She testified that at Guantánamo Bay in 2013, Mr. Nashiri confided that, years earlier, C.I.A. personnel grabbed him from his cell, stripped him bare, shackled him on the wrists and ankles, bent him over a chair and administered the liquid.

He requested that she by no means once more communicate to him about it. And he didn’t attend the court docket session when she mentioned it at size on Thursday.

“This was a really, very distressing painful, shameful stigmatizing occasion,” Dr. Crosby testified. “He skilled it as a violent rape, sexual assault.”

One other yr would cross earlier than Dr. Crosby discovered corroboration of the account. In December 2014, the Obama administration launched a 500-page abstract of a categorised Senate research of the C.I.A.’s so-called black web site program. It revealed the company’s follow of utilizing “rectal rehydration” and “rectal feeding” to punish prisoners.

On the time, the C.I.A. defended it as a sound medical process. The group Physicians for Human Rights then condemned the follow as “sexual assault masquerading as medical therapy.”

However this week the company declined a request for a touch upon the descriptions that have been attributed to the C.I.A. in open court docket. Nor would an company spokeswoman reply to Dr. Crosby’s testimony that Mr. Nashiri additionally instructed her that he was sodomized with a brush stick whereas the C.I.A. held him in a cell, nude along with his wrists shackled above his head.

The testimony emerged in pretrial hearings wherein the choose, Col. Lanny J. Acosta Jr., is being requested to resolve which proof can be utilized at Mr. Nashiri’s eventual capital trial. Mr. Nashiri, 58, is accused of orchestrating Al Qaeda’s Oct. 12, 2000, suicide assault on the united statesS. Cole destroyer that killed 17 U.S. sailors throughout a refueling cease on the port of Aden, Yemen.

Protection legal professionals argue that the testimony, in tandem with different litigation, ought to persuade the choose to exclude statements the prisoner gave to interrogators in 2007, quickly after he was transferred to Guantánamo for trial — or, alternatively, to take away the opportunity of a demise sentence.

Dr. Crosby is a Boston internist who has been evaluating and treating torture victims because the Nineteen Nineties. She is paid by the Pentagon to function a marketing consultant to Mr. Nashiri’s authorized protection group and was granted a safety clearance.

In preparation for her testimony, Dr. Crosby mentioned, she was given entry to C.I.A. supplies. She associated the information that she present in a medical trend.

“They left the tube in for a further half-hour ‘to help in colonic absorption,’” Dr. Crosby mentioned, dismissing the process as bogus. The liquid dietary complement “would have acted identical to an enema, and it will been expelled.”

Daniel Jones, who led the analysis for the Senate investigation, hailed the testimony as according to the findings of his group, which consulted medical consultants and located the follow of rectal feeding or hydrating to be something however well being care.

“C.I.A. officers constantly mentioned it as a method to punish or manipulate detainees — writing that it was accomplished to realize ‘whole management over the detainee’ or to assist ‘clear an individual’s head,’” he mentioned. “No medical personnel or C.I.A. officers have been ever held accountable for these actions.”

In court docket, Dr. Crosby held up a respiratory tube, 7 millimeters in diameter, that she mentioned was just like the tube the C.I.A. used for Mr. Nashiri’s “rectal feeding.” She provided an evidence of how human beings course of meals by way of the abdomen — “it can’t be accomplished in reverse” — after which provided a historical past lesson.

In battlefield conditions, medics have compelled fluid into the rectum of gravely wounded troopers to rehydrate them, she mentioned. However an experiment carried out on medical college students within the Nineteen Thirties confirmed that the follow of attempting to nourish people who means was ineffective. “There is no such thing as a medical profit ever to administering any type of vitamin by way of the rectum,” she mentioned.

The testimony was essentially the most detailed public accounting of the process, from a medical perspective.

In October 2021, the since-released prisoner Majid Khan instructed his sentencing jury that C.I.A. brokers used “inexperienced backyard hoses” linked to a faucet to pressure water inside his rectum. His descriptions of what the C.I.A. did to him so troubled a army jury that they urged the Pentagon to grant Mr. Khan clemency.

At a listening to in 2018 within the Sept. 11 conspiracy case, a prosecutor learn aloud from a C.I.A. cable that described one thing related being accomplished to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in March 2003, his first month of detention, for twice refusing an interrogator’s order to drink a glass of water.

Mr. Mohammed was taken to a different room, “positioned on a plastic sheet” and a C.I.A. “medical officer” carried out the process. “When he was returned to the interrogation room, he then complied and drank water.”

Share this
Tags

Must-read

‘Musk is Tesla and Tesla is Musk’ – why buyers are glad to pay him $1tn | Elon Musk

For all of the headlines about an on-off relationship with Donald Trump, baiting liberals and erratic behaviour, Tesla shareholders are loath to half...

Torc Offers Quick, Safe Self-Service for Digital Growth Utilizing Amazon DCV

This case examine was initially posted on the AWS Options web site.   Overview Torc Robotics (Torc) wished to facilitate distant growth for its distributed workforce. The...

Dying of beloved neighborhood cat sparks outrage towards robotaxis in San Francisco | San Francisco

The loss of life of beloved neighborhood cat named KitKat, who was struck and killed by a Waymo in San Francisco’s Mission District...

Recent articles

More like this

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here