Perspectives of Compassion, Condemnation

"[The Senate Intelligence Committee study of the CIA program found that waterboarding and other techniques were] brutal and far worse than the CIA represented."
"[Its use induced convulsions, vomiting and left Zubaydah] completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth."
Report of the U.S.Senate Intelligence Committee, 2014

Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn

"They kept pouring water and concentrating on my nose and my mouth until I really felt I was drowning and my chest was just about to explode from the lack of oxygen."
"[Some guards] noticed the colour of my hands, [moved me to a chair] and the interrogation vertigo resumed -- the cold, the hunger, the little sleep and the intense vomiting, which I didn't know whether it was caused by the cold, the 'Ensure' or the noise."
"[Agents used a method of] horizontal sleep deprivation [involving shackling flat on the ground in a painful position making it impossible to sleep]."
"[I was deprived of sleep for] maybe two or three weeks or even more."
"It felt like an eternity. To the point that I found myself falling asleep despite the water being thrown at me by the guard."
Abu Zubaydah [aka Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, Palestinian jihadist imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba

The man known as Abu Zubaydah, held for four years in secret prisons overseas by the American Central Intelligence Agency in the years directly following the attacks in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania by jihadists on that unforgettable day of 9/11, is the subject of a 61-page report, "How America Tortures", produced by a professor at the Seton Hall University School of Law, Mark P. Denbeaux. Mr. Denbeaux -- who acts as Abu Zubaydah's lawyer -- aided by some of his students used a firsthand narrative of his client, along with Bush internal administrative memos, prisoners' memories and the 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee report in their analysis of the interrogation method used on his client.

Zubaydah, now 48, had drawn sketches of the torture and interrogation methods used on him and other prisoners at Guantanamo Bay prison and they too were included in the finished report. He had been submitted 83 times to waterboarding, among other forms of torture and he documented them all through his detailed sketches. He had been captured during a gun fight that took place in Faisalabad, Pakistan in 2002. Injured badly, he was given medical treatment, then sent to a network of CIA overseas prisons.

Abu Zubaydah, Courtesy Prof.Mark Denbeaux, Seton Hall University School of Law

There, the agency hired two CIA contract psychologists to come up with a form of inquisition to determine Zubaydah's role in the 9/11 terrorist attack. The formula the CIA psychologists came up with was isolation, sleep deprivation and the violence associated with waterboarding, to elicit data useful to the CIA in their investigation. A hundred prisoners were subjected to these methods in secret sites which some have described as dungeons staffed by secret guards and medical officers.

Zubaydah was the first of the detainees to be subjected to the waterboarding technique and he endured it for no fewer than 82 repeats along with "a constantly rotating barrage" of methods whose purpose was to break his resistance to interrogation. Including being boxed within a small confinement. Zubaydah, it turns out was indeed a  jihadist, but had no knowledge of the 9/11 attacks, and hadn't been a member of al-Qaeda. Subsequently, he has never faced charges related to a specific crime.

Abu Zubaydah, Courtesy Prof.Mark Denbeaux, Seton Hall University School of Law

The man continues to be held at Guantanamo Bay at the secretive Camp 7, his release forbidden. He portrays himself in one drawing, immobilized, water pouring on his hooded head, right foot contorted with pain. Other detainees held in various black sites had their own descriptions, but Zubaydah drew himself nude, shackled at wrists to a bar over his head as he was still recovering from a thigh wound, attempting to balance weight on his uninjured leg.

"Long hours went by while I was standing in that position. My hands were tight to the upper bars", he divulged to his lawyers. Sleep deprivation was justified by the CIA, such that it "focuses the detainee's attention on his current situation rather than ideological goals". His ideological goals, as a jihadist would have been to engage in the slaughter of infidels and Jews, as enjoined by his faith's highest calling for martyrs to dedicate themselves to Islamic conquest. To that end, almost three thousand people were killed in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.