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At the prison, a spokesman declined to say whether the raggedy clothing reflected a new policy or budget cutbacks but dismissed a question on whether there was a supply issue. Detainee provisions “have not changed,” Navy Capt. Christopher Scholl said tersely by email. The prison would not provide a list of what constitutes basic issue prisoner provisions these days. Nor would Scholl address a question about whether the quality of prison-issue items had degraded.

The International Committee of the Red Cross would not say whether delegates have raised the issue in confidential talks with the prison commander. The Miami Herald spoke, separately, with 12 attorneys who have met captives in recent months and describe detainees showing up at legal meetings looking disheveled and needing replacement footwear or clothes. The attorneys say the appearance is noteworthy because through the years all but mentally ill captives have tried to tidy up for their legal meetings.“They’re looking pretty threadbare,” attorney Cori Crider of the nonprofit Reprieve legal defense group said from the U.S. Navy base Tuesday after she bought shampoo and socks for one prisoner. “It’s an escalating complaint that people are being left in rags.”The lawyers quote their clients as saying some supplies have disappeared entirely at the prison, which boasts Muslim sensitivity and humane treatment. Some just aren’t replaced frequently enough, they claim.

Into this vacuum attorneys who represent the detainees at no charge have for about nine months routinely spent hundreds of dollars on each trip to buy their clients basic provisions at the base commissary, the Navy Exchange, or NEX.In March, Chicago attorney Patricia Bronte, a solo practitioner, spent $136.25 on shoes and Gold Toe socks for her two Yemeni clients. She left them with a prison lawyer, who got them to the clients after she left the base — something she knows because she got thank-you notes via the prison’s legal mail system.

“I have noticed that sometimes the client appears at the meetings with shoes that look pretty beaten up. So I went to the NEX and I bought shoes and socks.” Also $6.12 in toothbrushes and toothpaste, according to her commissary receipt.“Understand, I’m not complaining. I don’t mind buying my clients shoes to improve their conditions,” she said. “It’s the gall of this country. To detain these guys for little or no reason for 14 years and not provide them with shoes is offensive.”

Prison officials had already stopped spending taxpayers’ money on books, videos and electronic games for the detainee diversion program, according to media visits in the past year, leaving it to the Red Cross and lawyers to donate to the Detainee Library. Kassem, the attorney, said his clients quoted guards and other prison staff as blaming budget cuts at the prison where the Pentagon maintains a 2,000-plus staff for 114 captives and has spent more than $5 billion. “Sometimes it’s a problem of poor toiletries — soap that doesn’t lather, toothpaste that doesn’t froth, deodorant that doesn’t prevent body odor,” said Kassem, a professor at the City University of New York School of Law whose legal clinic represents five Guantánamo detainees. Captives he sees in the prison’s iconic orange prison uniform are wearing old, torn and much less orange jumpsuits, he said.The prisoners are perplexed, Kassem said. “They’ve heard how much it costs per prisoner. They wonder, where’s all the money?”“Somebody’s pinching pennies, it seems,” he said, describing the prison-issue footwear on Aamer, the next detainee to be released, as “Oliver Twist tattered” despite repeated pleas for a replacement pair.

Over at the secret prison for former long-held CIA captives, Camp 7, the detainees are taking vitamin D furnished by defense attorneys Cheryl Bormann and Air Force Capt. Michael Schwartz.Walid bin Attash spent years without exposure to sunlight in a so-called CIA black site before he got to Camp 7 in 2006. Now, he’s told his lawyers, his medical record shows a severe vitamin D deficiency. He asked his defense team for a halal version of the supplement, which the prison doesn’t provide. One attorney, who asked not to be identified, quoted a prison medical officer as telling detainees “there’s no money for that.”So bin Attash’s lawyers ordered kosher vitamin D — no forbidden products in those gel caps — and gave it to the military staff attorney assigned to Camp 7. The prison’s medical officer has apparently doled them out to other former CIA black site captives because bin Attash needs a resupply sooner than a one-a-day distribution would require, Bormann said.“We’ve been having to purchase vitamin D for our client,” said Bormann, a criminal defense attorney with death-penalty experience. “It’s crazy.” At a civilian prison, she said, the lawyers wouldn’t have to buy and furnish it. They’d go to a federal or state judge, who would order the prison to provide it.

Lists of purchases provided by more than a dozen attorneys include toothbrushes, toothpaste, bar soap, shampoo, deodorant, slip-on sandals that double as slippers, white socks, white T-shirts, towels, no-lace sneakers, canvas slip-on shoes, pillows, books, individual DVD players, video games and audio tapes. Those reached the clients after a guard inspection — as did tahini, ginger, allspice, mint oil, mint tea, ginger tea, Nesquik, olive oil, ground cloves, henna and almonds, around Ramadan. Lawyers also said they have submitted other items that were rejected — notably black socks, hairbrushes, combs and aftershave (probably for its taboo alcohol content).

A new outbreak of hunger strikes happened in early 2013. By July, 106 of the 166 detainees were on hunger strike, with 45 of them being force-fed.

According to Idris, those inmates who participated in these protests were “doubly tortured.” In November, a 19-member task force concluded in a 269-page report, entitled 'Ethics Abandoned: Medical Professionalism and Detainee Abuse in the ‘War on Terror', that since September 11, 2001, the Department of Defense (DoD) and CIA ordered medical professionals to assist in intelligence gathering, as well as forced-feeding of hunger strikers, in a way that inflicted “severe harm.” Gitmo officials announced earlier this month that the US military will no longer disclose to the media and public whether prisoners at Guantanamo Bay are on hunger strike, explaining that "the release of this information serves no operational purpose."

Here’s a partial reading list of essential reporting on torture in Iraq and Afghanistan: Senate Report on Abuses of Military Detainees (2008): http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/pdf/12112008_detaineeabuse.pdf Haditha Killings by Tim McGirk: http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1174649,00.html Taguba Report on Abuses at Abu Ghraib: https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/torturefoia/released/TR3.pdf Abu Ghraib Abuses by Seymour Hersh: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/05/10/torture-at-abu-ghraib Special Forces in Afghanistan by Matt Aikens: http://www.rollingstone.com/feature/a-team-killings-afghanistan-special-forces Constitution Project’s Task Force on Detainee Treament (See especially chapter 3): http://detaineetaskforce.org/report/ “The Dark Side” by Jane Mayer: http://www.amazon.com/The-Dark-Side-Inside-American/dp/0307456293

“None of Us Were Like This Before” by Joshua Phillips: http://www.amazon.com/None-Were-Like-This-Before/dp/1844678849 The Killing of Dilawar by Carlotta Gall: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/04/international/asia/04AFGH.html “Pay Any Price” by James Risen (See especially Chapter 7): http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/pay-any-price-james-risen/1117916812?ean=9780544341418 “Dirty Wars” by Jeremy Scahill (a founder of The Intercept): http://www.amazon.com/Dirty-Wars-The-World-Battlefield/dp/156858671X “How to Break a Terrorist” by Matthew Alexander: http://www.amazon.com/How-Break-Terrorist-Interrogators-Brutality/dp/B0085S1S5K “The Black Banners” by Ali Soufan: http://www.amazon.com/Black-Banners-Inside-Against-al-Qaeda/dp/0393079422 “Kandahar’s Mystery Executions” by Anand Gopal: http://harpers.org/archive/2014/09/kandahars-mystery-executions/ “No Good Men Among the Living” by Anand Gopal: http://www.amazon.com/No-Good-Men-Among-Living/dp/0805091793

According to the petition, al-Alwi’s nostril passages have now swelled shut due to the extra large tubes prison authorities have repeatedly forced down his nasal cavity during this feeding process. He also maintains that the force-feeding sessions have led to heavy vomiting and daily blood loss. Shackled to a chair for hours each day during the force-feeding sessions, al-Alwi now suffers severe back pain and other debilitating physical injuries. In his petition, al-Alwi describes his life in Guantánamo as “an endless horror story.” In April 2013, a delegation from the International Committee of the Red Cross conducted a visit to Guantánamo to meet with detainees and assess conditions there. On the day immediately following their departure, armed guards raided a cellblock housing al-Alwi and several other hunger-striking detainees while they prepared for communal prayers.

The complaint further alleges that prisoners were physically assaulted by guards during this raid, some of whom fired rubber-coated steel bullets at them. Al-Alwi was among those wounded, with bullets hitting him in his thigh, elbow and back as he tried to flee from guards firing at him; those shots were allegedly fired from the other side of a chain-link fence. Al-Alwi says that he has never received adequate medical treatment for these wounds; he was handcuffed and left to bleed for 20 minutes by guards before a doctor arrived. A few of his wounds were rubbed with anti-infection cream while the remainder have remained wholly untreated to this day. As a result, al-Alwi says that he suffers chronic and debilitating pain and swelling from these injuries.

The circumstances leading to al-Alwi’s detention at Guantánamo are obscure. One of hundreds of young Arab men who were captured by Pakistani bounty hunters following the Sept. 11 attacks, al-Alwi was not a known or wanted terrorist, but was nonetheless turned over to U.S. troops by locals in Pakistan for a cash reward later that year. On Jan. 16, 2002, he arrived at Guantánamo Bay where he has remained ever since. A 2006 report by Amnesty International found that cash bounties offered for turning over “terrorists” to U.S. forces had effectively created a lucrative cash market for capturing young Arab men in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Fliers distributed by the U.S. government in the region offered “millions of dollars” in exchange for turning over purported Al-Qaeda and Taliban members, promising those who were able to render suspects to American custody “enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life.”

Al-Alwi says that American interrogators tortured him until he made false confessions about his involvement in terrorism. Despite having now spent over a decade in custody, with no foreseeable prospect of release, he has not been charged with any crime. Describing his brutal treatment by riot guards who come to restrain him for force-feedings, al-Alwi told his lawyers in the petition:  “I weigh less than 100 pounds. I wear braces on both ankles, and both wrists, and one around my lower back. I am five foot five … and they claim that I am ‘resisting’ … How can I possibly resist anyone, let alone these men?”

Richard Kammen, al-Nashiri’s civilian defense attorney, meanwhile, has already filed a motion with the military court to obtain a complete, unredacted copy of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report. The motion, submitted in September prior to the revelations that have surfaced about infighting between the CIA and Senate committee investigators, said the report “will be central to the accused’s defense on the merits, in impeaching the credibility of the evidence against him and in mitigation of the death sentence the government is seeking to impose.” If the entire report were declassified by the Intelligence Committee, it “would be huge because it would really eliminate the ‘need’ for military commissions, which are in my view mainly a vehicle to have what will look like trials but will keep whatever evidence of torture the judge ultimately allows secret from or sanitized to the public,” Kammen said.

But not everyone expects the report to be released in great detail. Air Force Capt. Michael Schwartz, the attorney for alleged 9/11 co-conspirator Walid bin Attash, doesn’t believe the Senate committee’s report will ever see the light of day. If it is released, he said it will be highly redacted, rendering it useless to the public and Attash’s defense team. “This whole military commissions system is designed to make sure this information is never known to the public,” Schwartz said. “No one in my office is naive enough to think this report will come out in any unredacted form. Certainly that report contains a lot of mitigating information that would be relevant to the defense of this case. But I don’t believe for a second that we will see anything in that report that actually sheds light on the crimes committed by the CIA against our clients between 2003 and 2006.” Air Force Col. Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor at Guantánamo and a staunch critic of the military commissions, doesn’t believe the Senate committee’s report “is legally relevant” to the military commission trial of Mohammed and the other high-value detainees. But he does believe it will force the hearings more into the public.

“Where I do think it will have an impact is in the assessment of whether those legal relevance proceedings take place in open court or in secret closed sessions,” he said. “The report is likely to officially reinforce and amplify what the public already knows about this regrettable chapter in our history. It should further undercut the government’s claim that all this absolutely must stay hidden behind closed doors or else cataclysmic things will happen.” Army. Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale, a Pentagon spokesman who deals with detainee matters at Guantánamo, declined to discuss the Senate report or how its release may affect the commissions. "I can't imagine a world where competent counsel — be they from the government or defense — would announce in advance, any strategy they might pursue or make predictions on how any given issue might affect the progress of their case," Breasseale said.

Daphne Eviatar, a lawyer for Human Rights First who has closely observed and written about the military commission proceedings, said whether the Senate’s report is a game changer will ultimately depend on what is declassified. Perhaps details of the interrogations will be released, or they may be heavily redacted. “Either way, you can be sure the defense lawyers will try to reopen this issue, and the government will fight it, and the case will get bogged down once again in months of argument in pretrial hearings that are already taking forever,” she said.

The Prosecutor proceeds in 4 phases within any preliminary examination: (1) an initial assessment to analyze the seriousness of information received; (2) a jurisdictional analysis – the formal commencement of an examination involving “a thorough factual and legal assessment” of whether there is “a reasonable basis to believe that the alleged crimes fall within the subject-matter jurisdiction of the Court;” (3) an admissibility determination – assessing whether the gravity of the crimes or prospect of national investigations and prosecutions preclude the need for the ICC to proceed ; (4) prudential considerations — determining whether an investigation would serve the “interests of justice.” It appears that the examination of U.S. detention operations has reached the third phase and crossed over the important threshold of a finding that there is a reasonable basis to believe U.S. forces committed war crimes within the jurisdiction of the Court. Heller posited that some aspects of the Prosecutor’s Afghanistan examination had already reached this stage in 2013. The 2014 report provides further corroboration specifically with respect to U.S. detention practices. For example, paragraph 96 of the 2014 report states that the Office of the Prosecutor is now “analysing the relevance and genuineness of national proceedings by the competent national authorities for the alleged conduct described above as well as the gravity of the alleged crimes”—clearly a phase three inquiry. That said, paragraph 96 also states that the Office is “continuing to assess the seriousness and reliability of such allegations”—which sounds like phase two and even phase one.

95. Certain of the enhanced interrogation techniques apparently approved by US senior commanders in Afghanistan in the period from February 2003 through June 2004, could, depending on the severity and duration of their use, amount to cruel treatment, torture or outrages upon personal dignity as defined under international jurisprudence. In addition, there is information available that interrogators allegedly committed abuses that were outside the scope of any approved techniques, such as severe beating, especially beating on the soles of the feet, suspension by the wrists, and threats to shoot or kill. 96. While continuing to assess the seriousness and reliability of such allegations, the Office is analysing the relevance and genuineness of national proceedings by the competent national authorities for the alleged conduct described above as well as the gravity of the alleged crimes.

The OTP is considering whether the war crimes of cruel treatment, torture or outrages upon personal dignity were committed by U.S. forces. Article 8 of the ICC statute places something of a qualification on the jurisdiction of the Court over war crimes. It states that the Court shall have jurisdiction over war crimes “in particular when committed as part of a plan or policy or as part of a large-scale commission of such crimes.” In 2013, the Prosecutor’s annual report stated that the Office “continues to seek information to determine whether there is any reasonable basis to believe any such alleged acts, which could amount to torture or humiliating and degrading treatment, may have been committed as part of a policy.” That reference to the “as a part of policy” qualification does not appear in the 2014 report. And, on the contrary, the 2014 report highlights elements that indicate the existence of a policy such as the Presidential Directive of 7 February 2002 on the determination of POW status and the senior US commanders’ approval of interrogation techniques.

Will bilateral agreements between the US and Afghanistan preclude the ICC from investigating or prosecuting “U.S. persons”? One final question that might arise from these proceedings is the legal viability of the bilateral agreement between the United States and Afghanistan regarding the surrender of persons to the International Criminal Court (full text).  Since the case arises out of Afghanistan’s status under the ICC treaty, the United States might try to claim that the bilateral agreement provides US nationals and employees immunity for actions that took place in Afghanistan. I have briefly discussed the legal viability of such article 98 agreements in an  earlier post at Just Security.

The ruling, which predated the publication of the redacted version of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA program, brought important judicial scrutiny to the agency’s post-9/11 practices, including the controversial role played by U.S. allies. The Senate report has since provided some further details about Poland’s involvement, although the country is not identified by name. The AP report notes the frustration of those in Poland who view the ruling as unjustifiably punishing the country for CIA actions. An opposition Polish lawmaker has recorded his discontent, stating that the terror suspects remained in the sole custody of U.S. officials throughout their detention. Former Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski has similarly been quoted by the LA Times’ Carol Williams as saying:  “We might have to pay compensation even though our personnel did nothing wrong. You can imagine how Polish people feel about it … We just wish that intelligence matters were kept confidential.”

While some in Poland are expressing their exasperation with the Court’s ruling, the issue of compensation has sparked equal outrage among some in the United States who do not believe that suspects of terrorist attacks should receive payments, as noted by the AP. The controversy over compensation comes just as the U.S. faces renewed calls from some European and other countries to compensate victims of CIA torture. At the UN Human Rights Council last week, the Universal Periodic Review report on the United States documented other UN member states’ objections to U.S. practices.

Meanwhile, in Europe, more judgments are pending on this subject, including two involving the same detainees (see: Abu Zubaydah v. Lithuania and Al Nashiri v. Romania). While accountability within the U.S. still seems like a pipe dream, the European Court of Human Right’s more robust approach perhaps offers the only means of securing reparation for human rights abuses committed as part of the “war on terror.” The Court’s approach may also help to educate European citizens on the nature of complicity in grave human rights abuses. By calling for compensation, the Court has also served to weaken the forms of international cooperation that foster such violations in the first place.

The Senate Intelligence Committee is expected to vote Thursday to send an executive summary of the report to Obama for declassification. U.S. officials said it could be months before that section, which contains roughly 20 conclusions and spans about 400 pages, is released to the public. The report’s release also could resurrect a long-standing feud between the CIA and the FBI, where many officials were dismayed by the agency’s use of methods that Obama and others later labeled torture. CIA veterans have expressed concern that the report reflects FBI biases. One of its principal authors is a former FBI analyst,

“The CIA conflated what was gotten when, which led them to misrepresent the effectiveness of the program,” said a second U.S. official who has reviewed the report. The official described the persistence of such misstatements as among “the most damaging” of the committee’s conclusions.Detainees’ credentials also were exaggerated, officials said. Agency officials described Abu Zubaida as a senior al-Qaeda operative — and, therefore, someone who warranted coercive techniques — although experts later determined that he was essentially a facilitator who helped guide recruits to al-Qaeda training camps.The CIA also oversold the role of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri in the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, which killed 17 U.S. sailors. CIA officials claimed he was the “mastermind.” The committee described a similar sequence in the interrogation of Hassan Ghul, an al-Qaeda operative who provided a critical lead in the search for bin Laden: the fact that the al-Qaeda leader’s most trusted courier used the moniker “al-Kuwaiti.” But Ghul disclosed that detail while being interrogated by Kurdish authorities in northern Iraq who posed questions scripted by CIA analysts. The information from that period was subsequently conflated with lesser intelligence gathered from Ghul at a secret CIA prison in Romania, officials said. Ghul was later turned over to authorities in Pakistan, where he was subsequently released. He was killed by a CIA drone strike in 2012.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has previously indicated that harsh CIA interrogation measures were of little value in the bin Laden hunt. “The CIA detainee who provided the most significant information about the courier provided the information prior to being subjected to coercive interrogation techniques,” Feinstein said in a 2013 statement, responding in part to scenes in the movie “Zero Dark Thirty” that depict a detainee’s slip under duress as a breakthrough moment.

As with Abu Zubaida and even Nashiri, officials said, CIA interrogators continued the harsh treatment even after it appeared that Baluchi was cooperating. On Sept. 22, 2003, he was flown from Kabul to a CIA black site in Romania. In 2006, he was taken to the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. His attorneys contend that he suffered head trauma while in CIA custody. Last year, the Senate Intelligence Committee asked Baluchi’s attorneys for information about his medical condition, but military prosecutors opposed the request. A U.S. official said the request was not based solely on the committee’s investigation of the CIA program.

Officials said a former CIA interrogator named Charlie Wise was forced to retire in 2003 after being suspected of abusing Abu Zubaida using a broomstick as a ballast while he was forced to kneel in a stress position. Wise was also implicated in the abuse at Salt Pit. He died of a heart attack shortly after retiring from the CIA, former U.S. intelligence officials said.

According to the Senate report, Al Jazeera’s sources said, a majority of the more than 100 detainees held in CIA custody were detained in secret prisons in Afghanistan and Morocco, where they were subject to torture methods not sanctioned by the Justice Department. Those methods are recalled by the report in vivid narratives lifted from daily logs of the detention and interrogation of about 34 high-value prisoners. The report allegedly notes that about 85 detainees deemed low-value passed through the black sites and were later dumped at Guantánamo or handed off to foreign intelligence services. More than 10 of those handed over to foreign intelligence agencies “to face terrorism charges” are now “unaccounted for” and presumed dead, the U.S. officials said. The Senate report says more than two dozen of these men designated low-value had, in fact, been wrongfully detained and rendered to other countries on the basis of intelligence obtained from CIA captives under torture and from information shared with CIA officials by other governments, both of which turned out to be false. The report allegedly singles out a top CIA official for botching a handful of renditions and outlines agency efforts to cover up the mistakes. The Senate report allegedly accuses “senior CIA officials” of lying during multiple closed-session briefings to members of Congress from 2003 to 2005 about the use of certain “enhanced” interrogation techniques. The report says an agency official lied to Congress in 2005 when he insisted the U.S. was adhering to international treaties barring cruel and degrading treatment of prisoners, the U.S. officials told Al Jazeera.

The report not only accuses certain CIA officials of deliberately misleading Congress; Al Jazeera’s sources say it also suggests that the agency sanctioned leaks to selected journalists about phantom plots supposedly disrupted as a result of information gained through the program in order to craft a narrative of success. The Senate report, like a 2009 Senate Armed Services Committee report (PDF), says Air Force psychologists under contract to the CIA reverse-engineered a decades-old resistance-training program taught to U.S. airmen known as survival evasion resistance escape (SERE). According to a SERE training document obtained by Al Jazeera titled “Coercive Exploitation Techniques,” Air Force personnel were taught that communist regimes used “deprivations” of “food, water, sleep and medical care” as well as “the use of threats” in order to weaken a captive’s mental and physical ability to resist interrogation. “Isolation” would be used, according to the SERE program, to deprive the “recipient of all social support” so that he develops a “dependency” on his interrogator. And “physical duress, violence and torture” are used to weaken “mental and physical ability to resist exploitation.” Ironically, perhaps, the SERE document (displayed below) notes that such techniques were used by the Soviet Union, China and North Korea to obtain false confessions.

Senate investigators allegedly obtained from the CIA a 2003 “business plan,” written by Air Force psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, that contained erroneous details about the positive aspects of the enhanced interrogation program and the veracity of the intelligence its extracted from detainees. The “business plan” states that Al-Qaeda captives were “resistant” to “standard” interrogation techniques, an argument the Senate report found lacked merit because torture techniques were used before they were even questioned. Neither Jessen, who lives in Spokane, Wash., nor Mitchell, who resides in Land o’ Lakes, Fla., responded to phone calls or emails for comment. Both men are featured prominently in the Senate’s report, according to U.S. officials.

According to Al Jazeera’s sources, Zain Abidin Mohammed Husain Abu Zubaydah was the only captive subjected to all 10 torture techniques identified in an August 2002 Justice Department memo. But the U.S. officials said the Senate report concludes that the methods applied to Abu Zubaydah went above and beyond the guidelines outlined in that memo and were used before the memo establishing their legality was written. The Senate report allegedly adopts part of a narrative from former FBI special agent Ali Soufan, who first interrogated Abu Zubaydah at the black site and wrote in his book “The Black Banners” that Mitchell was conducting an “experiment” on Abu Zubaydah. For example, the August 2002 Justice Department legal memo authorized sleep deprivation for Abu Zubaydah for 11 consecutive days, but Mitchell kept him awake far longer, the U.S. officials said, citing classified CIA cables. Abu Zubaydah was stripped naked, strapped into a chair and doused with cold water to keep him awake. He was then interrogated and asked what he knew, at which point, his attorney told Al Jazeera, Abu Zubaydah was “psychotic” and would have admitted to anything.

Additionally, the report allegedly says that Abu Zubaydah was stuffed into a pet crate (the type used to transport dogs on airplanes) over the course of two weeks and routinely passed out, was shackled by his wrists to the ceiling of his cell and subjected to an endless loop of loud music. One former interrogator briefed about Abu Zubaydah’s interrogations from May to July 2002 told Al Jazeera that the music used to batter the detainee’s senses was by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Abu Zubaydah’s attorney, Brent Mickum, hopes the Senate report’s executive summary will vindicate what he has been saying for years. “My client was tortured brutally well before any legal memo was issued,” Mickum said. He expects the report to “show that my client was a nonmember of Al-Qaeda, contrary to all of the earlier reports by the Bush administration. I am also confident that the report will show that, after he was deemed to be compliant while he was held in Thailand, that he continued to be tortured on explicit orders from the Bush administration.” The Senate report, according to Al Jazeera’s sources, says that CIA interrogators were under an enormous pressure from top agency officials, themselves under pressure from the White House, to use “enhanced” interrogation techniques to obtain information from detainees connecting Iraq and Al-Qaeda.

One interrogator who worked for the CIA and the U.S. military during Bush’s tenure and participated in the interrogations of two high-value CIA prisoners told Al Jazeera — speaking on condition of anonymity because he is still employed by the U.S. government — that the “enhanced” interrogation program was “nothing more than the Stanford Prison Experiment writ large.” (The 1971 Stanford University study shocked the public by demonstrating how easily people placed in authority over more vulnerable others resorted to cruelty.) “Interrogators were being pressured — You have to get info from these people,’” the interrogator told Al Jazeera. “There was no consideration that the person we were interrogating may not know. That was always seen as a resistance technique. ‘They [the detainees] must be lying!’ There was pressure on us from above to produce what they wanted. Not a single person I worked with knew how to conduct an interrogation or [had] ever conducted an interrogation.”

The decision to hold Zubaydah “incommunicado” was disclosed by the Senate report on torture, which was released last December. But the judicial inaction on his case has received virtually no public attention. In all, Roberts has failed to rule on 16 motions, 13 of which have been filed by Zubaydah’s lawyers. Several of those allege misconduct by the government.

One version of the Senate Intelligence Committee's executive summary had apparently identified Mitchell and Jessen by name, and a copy of the panel's findings and conclusions obtained by McClatchy Newspapers included a bullet point that said: "Two contract psychologists devised the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques and were central figures in the program's operation."But, according to current and former intelligence officials and committee staffers knowledgeable about the report, the CIA has insisted that the executive summary exclude any reference to Mitchell and Jessen by name, despite the fact that their roles in the program have been widely reported. The issue is part of a larger battle that has surfaced in recent weeks between the CIA and the Senate Intelligence Committee over the intelligence community's redactions in the executive summary that the committee's chairwoman, Senator Dianne Feinstein, said were excessive.

The names of countries where the CIA set up so-called black site prisons have also been redacted."Exposing details of past intelligence cooperation with specific foreign governments could jeopardize current relationships with those governments, cause domestic political upheaval in those countries, and undermine the willingness of foreign intelligence services to work with America in the future," the person familiar with the administration's redactions said.

The CIA, which has responded to the Senate's report with a 122-page rebuttal, does not wholly disagree with the Intelligence Committee's findings. But there are vehement disagreements the CIA has with the committee over certain assertions the panel has made involving 10 detainees. The rebuttal includes a list of recommendations the agency intends to implement. The CIA response does not defend the use of torture techniques and it adds that there were instances when the value of intelligence was inflated.With that said, several committee staffers say that the CIA's response asserts that all of the intelligence obtained from detainees was valuable and saved lives. It also says there is no way to determine whether interrogators would have been able to obtain intelligence if the detainee were not tortured.

Although Miliband told MPs that detainees had not been held on Diego Garcia, others have contradicted this assertion.Manfred Nowak, as United Nations special rapporteur on torture, said he had received "credible evidence from well-placed sources familiar with the situation on the island" that CIA detainees had been held there between 2002 and 2003.General Barry McCaffrey, a former head of Southcom, the US military's southern command, has twice stated publicly that Diego Garcia has been used by the US to hold prisoners, saying in one radio interview in May 2004: "We're probably holding around 3,000 people, you know, Bagram air field, Diego Garcia, Guantánamo, 16 camps throughout Iraq."In 2003, Time magazine quoted "a regional intelligence official" as saying that a man accused of plotting the 2002 Bali nightclub bombing was being interrogated on Diego Garcia. Five years later the magazine reported that a CIA counter-terrorism official said a high-value prisoner or prisoners were being held and interrogated on the island.In August 2008, the Observer reported that former US intelligence officers "unofficially told senior Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón that Mustafa Setmarian, a Spanish-based Syrian accused of running terrorist training camps in Afghanistan, was taken to Diego Garcia in late 2005 and held there for months".

A defense attorney in another case said the prosecution wants to use a surreptitiously recorded conversation between two Camp 7 captives against an alleged al-Qaida commander. And in 2012 the journalist Daniel Klaidman wrote in his book “Kill or Capture” that the U.S. government had recordings made in a Guantánamo prison recreation yard of the alleged Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed talking about evidence that could be used against him.The latest disclosure comes at a time of decreasing transparency at the war court.On Oct. 29, the judge held a 13-minute secret session without advanced notice to the public. A day later the judge wrote in a three-page ruling that he closed the court at the request of “the Government” — war-court-speak for the prosecution — to protect state secrets whose disclosure “could result in grave danger to national security.”Pohl also ordered the court to issue a censored transcript of the parts the excluded public and accused would be allowed to see. No transcript has been released.Then the next day, Oct. 30, the judge held a daylong, open hearing on a restraining order he issued forbidding female guards from touching the 9/11 accused when they are being taken to court or legal meetings. The judge’s order has outraged members of Congress and the Pentagon brass.

In that public court hearing, soldiers called as witnesses from the prison discussed staffing patterns at Camp 7. Normally the Pentagon releases transcripts of open hearings the same day. Unusually, the court has not yet released the Oct. 30 transcript. A Pentagon spokesman suggested Thursday — 13 days after the open court hearing — that somebody was scrubbing the transcript of information already made public. “The security review of the Oct. 30 transcript remains ongoing,” said Navy Cmdr. Gary Ross. “We will provide an update once additional information becomes available.”Much of the October session focused on bin Attash’s question about how he’d act as his own lawyer in a system that does not let the accused terrorist see classified information in the case. The judge and attorneys devoted days to designing a script Pohl would read to any accused 9/11 terrorist who tries to take charge of his defense — and spent a full afternoon huddling in a closed meeting on the secret program.

In it, Pohl made clear that he never intended to let bin Attash dismiss his Pentagon-paid defense attorneys — Chicago criminal defense attorney Cheryl Bormann and Air Force Maj. Michael Schwartz. Instead, the script shows Pohl planned to appoint Bormann and Schwartz as “standby counsel” the judge could activate to carry out cross-examination of certain witnesses who might have “particular sensitivities” to being questioned by the alleged terrorist.“If you are represented by lawyers, then it is the lawyers, and not you, who will conduct the defense,” the warning says. “Correspondingly, if you represent yourself, you will be able to perform the lawyer’s core functions, but you will not necessarily be allowed to direct special appearances by counsel when it is convenient to you.”The language suggests a far more limited role by the American lawyers than those carried out in an aborted attempt to hold the Sept. 11 trial during the Bush administration. In those proceedings, alleged 9/11 terrorists serving as their own lawyer regularly had standby counsel write and argue motions in court.The script also envisions a scenario in which an accused 9/11 plotter serving as his own lawyer becomes unruly, disruptive or disobedient rather than respect “the dignity of the courtroom.” In such a case, the judge said he could deal with “obstructionist misconduct” by putting “physical restraints” on bin Attash or ejecting him from the court.Bin Attash, for his part, has not been noticeably disruptive across years of pretrial proceedings. An amputee, he was brought to his May 5, 2012 arraignment in a Guantánamo prison restraint chair routinely used for forced-feeding of hunger strikers — with guards carrying his prosthetic leg separately.

The narcotics, vice and anti-gang units operating out of Homan Square, on Chicago’s west side, take arrestees to the nondescript warehouse from all over the city: police data obtained by the Guardian and mapped against the city grid show that 53% of disclosed arrestees come from more than 2.5 miles away from the warehouse. No contemporaneous public record of someone’s presence at Homan Square is known to exist. Nor are any booking records generated at Homan Square, as confirmed by a sworn deposition of a police researcher in late September, further preventing relatives or attorneys from finding someone taken there.

But those documents do not tell the entire story of Homan Square. Chicago police have not disclosed any figures at all on people who were detained at Homan Square but never ultimately charged. Nor has it released any information about detentions or arrests before September 2004, claiming that information is burdensome to produce because it is not digital. (Chicago purchased the warehouse in 1995.) “It’s hard to believe that 7,185 arrests is an accurate number of arrestees at Homan Square,” said the University of Chicago’s Futterman. “Even if it were true that less than 1% of Homan arrestees were given access to counsel, that would be abhorrent in and of itself.”

11.8% of detainees in the Homan Square logs were Hispanic, compared with 28.9% of the population. 5.5% of the detainees were white, compared with 31.7% of the population. Of the 68 people who Chicago police claim had access to counsel at Homan Square, however, 45% were black, 26% were Hispanic and another 26% were white.

Twenty-two people have told the Guardian that Chicago police kept them at Homan Square for hours and even days. They describe pressure from officers to become informants, and all but two – both white – have said the police denied them phone calls to alert relatives or attorneys of their whereabouts. Their accounts point to violations of police directives, which say police must “complete the booking process” regardless of their interest in interrogating a suspect and must also “allow the arrestee to make a reasonable number of telephone calls to an attorney, family member or friend”, usually within “the first hour” of detention. The most recent disclosure of Homan Square data provides the scale behind those accounts: the demographic trends within the 7,185 disclosed arrests at the warehouse are now far more vast than what the Guardian reported in August after launching the transparency lawsuit – but are consistently disproportionate in terms of race and constitutional access to legal counsel. 82.2% of people detained at Homan Square were black, compared with 32.9% of the Chicago population.

Despite the lack of booking and minimal attorney access at Homan Square, it is not a facility for detaining and interrogating the most violent of Chicago’s criminals. Drug possession charges were eventually levied in 5,386 of the disclosed Homan Square arrests, or 74.9%; heroin accounted for 35.4% of those, with marijuana next at 22.3%. The facility’s use by police has intensified in recent years. Nearly 65% of documented Homan Square arrests since August 2004 took place in the five years since Rahm Emanuel, formerly Barack Obama’s top aide, became mayor. (The Guardian has filed a Foia request with Emanuel’s office to disclose the extent of its involvement in Homan Square.) The 68 documented attorney visits are actually slightly higher, statistically speaking, than the extremely minimal legal access Chicago police provide suspects in custody during the initial stages of their arrest. The 2014 citywide total at declared police stations, according to First Defense Legal Aid, was 0.3%. On face value, the lawyer visit rate at Homan Square, according to the newly disclosed documents, was 0.9% over nearly 11 years.

Chicago attorneys say they are not routinely turned away from police precinct houses, as they are at Homan Square. The warehouse is also unique in not generating public records of someone’s detention there, permitting police to effectively hide detainees from their attorneys. “Try finding a phone number for Homan to see if anyone’s there. You can’t, ever,” said Gaeger. “If you’re laboring under the assumption that your client’s at Homan, there really isn’t much you can do as a lawyer. You’re shut out. It’s guarded like a military installation.”

“Often,” Futterman continued, “prisoners aren’t entered into the central booking system until they’re being processed – which doesn’t occur at Homan Square. They’re supposed to begin that processing right away, under CPD procedures, and at Homan Square the reality is, that isn’t happening or is happening sporadically and inconsistently, which leads to the whole find-your-client game.”

According to police, when they took a woman the Guardian will identify as Chevoughn to Homan Square in May 2007 regarding a theft, they allowed her attorney to see her. Chevoughn says that never happened. “I was there a very long time, maybe eight to 10 hours,” said Chevoughn, who remembered being “petrified”, particularly as police questioned her in what she calls a “cage”. “I went to Harrison and Kedzie,” Chevoughn said, referring to the cross streets of central booking. “That’s where I slept. It’s where they did fingerprinting, all that crap. That’s when my attorney came.”

Police arrested another man, whom the Guardian will call Anthony, in 2006 on charges of starting a garbage fire, and moved him to Homan Square. Police identified him as receiving an attorney there. But Anthony told the Guardian: “That’s not true.”

Soufan described his briefing of Intelligence Committee researchers in his memoir, “The Black Banners.” “In early 2008, in a conference room that is referred to as a sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF), I gave a classified briefing on Abu Zubaydah to staffers of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence,” Soufan wrote. “The staffers present were shocked. What I told them contradicted everything they had been told by Bush administration and CIA officials. When the discussion turned to whether I could prove everything I was saying, I told them, ‘Remember, an FBI agent always keep his notes.’ ”  The committee tried to gain access to Soufan’s notes — then in possession of the CIA and FBI — after it launched a review of the agency’s detention and interrogation program in 2009. But Senate investigators were told, according to Al Jazeera’s sources, that Soufan’s notes were missing and could not be found in either the FBI’s or CIA’s computer system, where other classified records about the interrogation program were stored. More than a year later, the notes ended up with the Senate Intelligence Committee, although it's not clear whether they were turned over to committee investigators by the CIA or FBI or if they were in the cache of documents taken by investigators from the secure facility in Northern Virginia in 2010, which Senate staffers refer to as the Panetta review.

A few weeks before the 2009 announcement of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation, Abu Zubaydah’s attorney Brent Mickum was invited to meet with committee staffers in a secure conference room in the Senate Hart Office Building in Washington. Mickum recalled in an interview with Al Jazeera that committee staffers were interested in Abu Zubaydah’s recollections. “The committee was talking about torture and whether it was effective,” Mickum said. “I was able to relate to them what Abu Zubaydah told me. We talked about where he was tortured. I told them where we thought he was. I told them that the government confirmed he was never a member of Al-Qaeda. The drawings were then passed around the room.” Mickum and his co-counsel, Amy Jacobsen, presented to the committee staffers a set of ink drawings on yellow legal paper marked top secret by the CIA. Abu Zubaydah, they said, made the sketches to depict his torture and the torture of two other high-value detainees. One of the highly detailed drawings, according to knowledgeable intelligence officials, depict Abu Zubaydah being waterboarded. 

Senate staffers told Al Jazeera that Abu Zubaydah’s drawings were used in the report’s narrative but that the CIA objected to including copies of the images as exhibits.

When Panetta briefed CIA employees on March 16, 2009, about the Senate Intelligence Committee’s review, he said Feinstein and her Republican counterpart, Kit Bond of Missouri, had “assured” him “that their goal is to draw lessons for future policy decisions, not to punish those who followed guidance from the Department of Justice.” But now that some of the report’s conclusions suggest that some of the techniques used on Abu Zubaydah and other captives either went beyond what was authorized by the Justice Department or were applied before they had been authorized, the congressional staffers and U.S. officials who spoke to Al Jazeera said CIA officials are seeking further assurances against any criminal investigation. Thus far, no such assurances have been given, according to Al Jazeera’s sources, nor is there any indication that the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report would prompt a criminal investigation.

Chris Anders, senior legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, told Al Jazeera he's not surprised by the CIA's response, because many of those involved in the creation of the interrogation program still work at the agency and may fear being placed in legal jeopardy.  “Whatever is in the report is big enough and significant enough that the CIA has fought tooth and nail to keep it buried,” Anders said. “If what comes out in this report is as bad as some senators have said, it’s going to require a broader and deeper discussion about what took place, and it will be up to the president and Congress to lead the country through it, figure out what it means and how we need to respond to clean it up.”

The investigation determined that the program produced very little intelligence of value and that the CIA misled the Bush White House, the Congress and the public about the effectiveness of the interrogation techniques, committee members have said.The techniques included waterboarding, which produces a sensation of drowning, stress positions, sleep deprivation for up to 11 days at a time, confinement in a cramped box, slaps and slamming detainees into walls. The CIA held detainees in secret “black site” prisons overseas and abducted others who it turned over to foreign governments for interrogation.The CIA, which contends that it gained intelligence from the program that helped identify al Qaida terrorists and averted plots against the United States, agreed with some of the report’s findings but disputed other conclusions in an official response sent to the committee in June 2013.

Some current and former U.S. officials and military commanders, numerous experts and foreign governments have condemned the harsh interrogation methods as violations of international and U.S. laws against torture, a charge denied by the CIA and the Bush administration.They’ve based their defense on a series of top-secret legal opinions issued by the Justice Department beginning in August 2002. At that time, the agency sought advice on whether using the harsh techniques on Zayn al Abidin Muhammad Husayn, a close aide to Osama bin Laden who went by the nom de guerre Abu Zubaydah, would violate U.S. law against torture.The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel found that the methods wouldn’t breach the law because those applying them didn’t have the specific intent of inflicting severe pain or suffering.The Senate report, however, concluded that the Justice Department’s legal analyses were based on flawed information provided by the CIA, which prevented a proper evaluation of the program’s legality.

“The CIA repeatedly provided inaccurate information to the Department of Justice, impeding a proper legal analysis of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program,” the report found.Several human rights experts said the conclusion called into question the program’s legal foundations.“If the CIA fundamentally misrepresented what it was doing and that was what led (Justice Department) lawyers to conclude that the conduct was legal, then the legal conclusions themselves were inaccurate,” said Andrea Prasow, senior national security counsel for Human Rights Watch. “The lawyers making those assessments were relying on the facts that were laid before them.”“This just reinforces the view that everyone who has said the torture program was legal has been selling a bill of goods and it’s time to revisit the entire conventional wisdom being pushed by those who support enhanced interrogation that this program was safe, humane and lawful,” said Raha Wala, a lawyer with Human Rights First’s Law and Public Safety Program.

Among other findings, the report said that CIA personnel used interrogation methods that weren’t approved by the Justice Department or their headquarters.The conclusion that the CIA provided inaccurate information to the Justice Department reflects the findings of a top-secret investigation of the program by the CIA Inspector General’s Office that was triggered by allegations of abuse.The CIA inspector general’s May 7, 2004, report, which was declassified, found that in waterboarding Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, deemed the chief architect of the 9/11 attacks, the CIA went beyond the parameters it outlined to the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which wrote the legal opinions.Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times, while Mohammad underwent the procedure 183 times.Those cases clashed with the CIA’s assertion _ outlined in the now-declassified top-secret August 2002 Office of Legal Counsel opinion _ that repetition of the methods “will not be substantial because the techniques generally lose their effectiveness after several repetitions.”

The Office of Legal Counsel opinion stated that its finding that the harsh interrogation techniques didn’t constitute torture was based on facts provided by the CIA, and that “if these facts were to change, this advice would not necessarily apply.”The CIA inspector general’s report found that the “continued applicability of the DOJ opinion” was in question because the CIA told the Justice Department that it would use waterboarding in the same way that it was used in training U.S. military personnel to evade capture and resist the enemy. In fact, the inspector general’s report continued, the CIA used waterboarding in a “manner different” from U.S. military training.The CIA also failed to keep track of the number of individuals it captured under the program, the Senate report concluded. Moreover, it said, the agency held people who didn’t meet the legal standard for detention. The report puts that number at 26, McClatchy has learned.

“The CIA did not conduct a comprehensive or accurate accounting of the number of individuals it detained and held individuals who did not meet the legal standard for detention,” it found. “The CIA’s claims about the number of detainees held and subjected to its enhanced interrogation techniques were inaccurate.”“The CIA’s records were hazy, inconsistent and at times inaccurate,” said the former U.S. official.