In the absence of any full accounting of a human rights disaster that violated both international laws and our government's own minimal guidelines, Zubaydah's drawings represent a singularly chilling look at this "long-festering. Though the CIA made videotapes of Zubaydah's torture, they later destroyed them in violation of a court order meanwhile, a 6,700-page report by a 2014 Senate intelligence committee remains secret. They are also one of the few surviving records of a sordid post-9/11 chapter of history the CIA and FBI have long labored to keep hidden - and that current aspiring despot Ron DeSantis, sometimes laughingly complicit in it, has denied. Zubaydah and his painfully detailed, precisely damning drawings, says attorney Mark Denbeaux, "are the ultimate repudiation of the failure and abuses of torture." "They went ahead anyway so they could get permission to torture other people." After years of savagery, roughly 120 victims and at least 26 detainee deaths at the hands of torturers at Asadadad, Bagram, Gardez, Abu Ghraib, Basra, Mosul, Tikrit, Bucca, CIA officials admitted they'd gained no new intelligence from the carnage. "Everybody agrees, they tortured the wrong guy," says his lawyer. The US initially claimed he was a top al-Qaeda operative, but was later forced to concede he wasn't even a member of the group.
There, he was used as "a human guinea pig," the first victim of George Bush's "21st-century medieval torture program" against terror suspects.
Shot multiple times, he was successively renditioned to CIA "black sites" in Pakistan, Poland, Thailand, Afghanistan, Lithuania and Northern Africa before being sent to Guantánamo in September 2006.
Now 52, the Saudi-born Zubaydah moved to the West Bank in occupied Palestine as a teenager, and was captured in Pakistan by CIA, FBI, and Pakistani agents in 2002. Still there, he's "the forever prisoner" - not for what he did (he was never charged) but for what was done to him. "Like clockwork," Abu Zubaydah was ceaselessly beaten, rectal-fed, hung by his hands, slammed into walls and waterboarded 83 times during Darth Cheney's grisly, senseless "enhanced interrogation techniques." In newly released drawings, Zubaydah documents his abuse during 21 years at Guantánamo. The searing images, by "the poster child for America's torture program," stun.
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