This text was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Middle on Disaster Reporting.GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — When the C.I.A. strapped down Khalid Sh
This text was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Middle on Disaster Reporting.
GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — When the C.I.A. strapped down Khalid Shaikh Mohammed at a secret web site in Poland in 2003, these contained in the cell included a three-man waterboarding workforce, black-masked guards — and a physician.
The physician’s said function was to observe the well being of the detainee. He additionally stored rely of every close to drowning.
“Actually, the doctor had a little bit silver factor,” James E. Mitchell, one of many architects of the interrogation program, testified final week to the navy tribunal at Guantánamo Bay. The physician, he stated, “would click on what number of instances the water was poured” as a guard stored time with a stopwatch.
However the C.I.A. docs did greater than rely waterboarding classes. Authorities investigations and proof within the pretrial hearings of the lads, together with Mr. Mohammed, accused of conspiring within the Sept. 11, 2001, assaults, present docs performed “rectal rehydration,” carried out rectal cavity searches and examined swollen toes and legs of captives who had been sleep disadvantaged for days by being shackled in painful positions.
Right here at Guantánamo, the place the judge is hearing testimony in a pretrial listening to to resolve, amongst different issues, whether or not the defendants within the Sept. 11 case had been tortured, the proceedings are additionally placing a highlight on the function of docs who labored as medical officers within the intelligence company’s abroad jail program.
“The physicians had been current in interrogations that had been dangerous and life-threatening, and that violates the primary precept of medical ethics: First, do no hurt,” stated Stephen N. Xenakis, a psychiatrist and retired Military basic, who described himself as shaken by the testimony in regards to the physician with the counter-clicker. He was sitting in court docket as a guide to among the protection legal professionals.
Dr. Xenakis stated the function of the C.I.A. docs in this system was meant “to guard folks and preserve them secure,” not take part within the interrogations.
Throughout testimony Monday, Dr. Mitchell stated a “board-certified doctor” was within the room for each session of waterboarding and monitored Mr. Mohammed’s oxygen saturation stage by a tool on his finger, a pulse oximeter. Dr. Mitchell stated he held a torn T-shirt over the prisoner’s nostril and mouth for every one of many 183 cases of waterboarding, all carried out by him and his accomplice in growing the C.I.A.’s interrogation program, John Bruce Jessen.
Dr. Mitchell first supplied his description of the C.I.A. physician with the clicker final week, as a protection lawyer confirmed him a report from March 2003 describing Mr. Mohammed’s 15th waterboarding session. Mr. Mohammed had been sleep disadvantaged greater than six days, in line with a C.I.A. report. Twelve liters of water was poured in “water purposes of two of lower than 5 seconds, two of 10, three of 15, considered one of 20, considered one of 25 and considered one of 40,” the report stated.
Throughout waterboarding, the physician additionally “required that saline be alternated with water, to keep away from water intoxication,” the company’s chief of medical providers wrote in 2007 in an anonymous account that was declassified in 2018. “He repeatedly re-examined Ok.S.M. all through this era and was struck by how effectively Ok.S.M. had withstood the expertise.”
Partially redacted guidelines from the C.I.A.’s Workplace of Medical Companies dated December 2004 confirmed the company required {that a} doctor assistant be current at “enhanced interrogations” besides throughout waterboarding. Then, an precise doctor was required to be on web site, in case of respiratory arrest or different problems.
That’s apparently what occurred in August 2002 when Drs. Mitchell and Jessen had been waterboarding a prisoner often called Abu Zubaydah, for whom they designed the violent interrogation program.
Mr. Zubaydah misplaced consciousness throughout a waterboarding “with bubbles rising by his open, full mouth,” in line with a declassified portion of a research of the C.I.A. program by the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Drs. Mitchell and Jessen, who’re psychologists slightly than medical docs, dealt with it on their very own, the report stated, with “medical people edging towards the room.”
Not one of the medical officers have been recognized publicly. The C.I.A. has repeatedly defended its use of rectal rehydration as professional medical apply, slightly than punishment.
However one graphic episode, learn into the court docket file by a prosecutor within the Sept. 11 case in late 2018, confirmed the process as built-in into an interrogation of Mr. Mohammed in Afghanistan in March 2003, earlier than his switch to Poland.
An interrogator making an attempt to coach Mr. Mohammed to cooperate with him ordered Mr. Mohammed to drink a glass of water. He twice refused, so the prisoner was taken to a different room, “positioned on a plastic sheet” and a “medical officer rehydrated Mohammad rectally.”
Mr. Mohammed “clearly hated the process,” in line with the account. “When he was returned to the…