The New York Times describes the experience of Abdul Khaliq Farahi, who spent more than two years in the custody of al-Qaeda (via Gene Healy):
“For the first six months, they gave me a lot of torture and a lot of questions,” he said. “After that, they treated me better.”
He said he was blindfolded and handcuffed, his feet manacled and chained to his hands, or was made to stand for 12 or 13 hours in a locked room. Then he would be questioned for an hour or more.
He was allowed to go to the bathroom only after 24 or 30 hours. Sometimes he was suspended painfully for three or four minutes at a time by his arms. During one period, he was kept down a well, in a space dug out from the side of the wall, for four or five days at a time. The room down the well, he later came to understand, was designed for people to hide from American drones and other air activity.
All of these techniques–forced standing, prolonged shackling, sensory deprivation– resemble those cleared as “legal” for use by the CIA by John Yoo and Jay Bybee during their tenure at the Office of Legal Counsel and for use by the military by then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld during the Bush administration. Perhaps one of the administration’s torture apologists, like Marc Thiessen, will write in and demand that the record be corrected, that Farahi was not tortured by al-Qaeda, but merely subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Perhaps David Rivkin and Lee Casey can explain that these techniques “are indisputably harsh, but they fall well short of “torture.” After all, it doesn’t sound like anything here would cause “serious physical injury so severe that death, organ failure or permanent damage resulting in a loss of significant body functions will likely result.”
In any case, it’s a relief to know that al-Qaeda’s interrogators aren’t doing anything that would “shock the conscience” of most Republicans.
