Torture Techniques from CIA Black Sites Were Used at Alligator Alcatraz

Edited by Sam Thielman

ONE OF THE MOST horrific torture methods that the CIA employed in its post-9/11 incommunicado "black site" torture chambers was the Confinement Box. 

Not many detainees in CIA custody experienced the Box. The most prominent of them is the man known as Abu Zubaydah, the first CIA detainee post-9/11 and someone the agency used as a guinea pig for all who came into their custody later. What follows is not pleasant reading. 

For 20 days in August of 2002, after the Justice Department approved a proposed CIA menu of torture including something it called "cramped confinement," Abu Zubaydah was subjected to what the Senate intelligence committee's 2014 inquiry called "enhanced interrogation techniques on a near 24-hour-per-day basis." While the intensive waterboarding the CIA visited upon Abu Zubaydah has forevermore defined whatever passes for the popular understanding of his torture, the waterboarding was by no means the limit of what the CIA did to him.

On his first day of the August torture, after agency torturers slammed Abu Zubaydah's head against a concrete wall, they removed his hood "and had Abu Zubaydah watch while a large confinement box was brought into the cell and laid on the floor." A CIA cable records that they placed the box on the floor of the interrogation room "so as to appear [to be] a coffin." No one can misinterpret that message. But because the CIA was interested in driving the point home, its personnel at the Thailand black site known as Catseye or Detention Site Green "told Abu Zubaydah that the only way he would leave the facility was in the coffin-shaped confinement box."

A CIA medical officer—don't be fooled by the title into thinking they were there to help the detainees—cabled that Abu Zubaydah's liturgy of torture "progress[ed] quickly to the water board after large box, walling and small box periods." ("Walling" is using a rolled-up towel, positioned behind someone's neck and held on either side by someone in front of them, to slam someone's head into a wall.) The large box was the coffin. According to the Senate report, during those twenty days, "Abu Zubaydah spent a total of 266 hours (11 days, 2 hours) in the large (coffin size) confinement box and 29 hours in a small confinement box, which had a width of 21 inches, a depth of 2.5 feet, and a height of 2.5 feet."

Imagine being made to spend 11 days inside a coffin. Imagine being made to spend more than a day inside a box barely two feet large in any direction. Imagine having to curl up, unable to extend any of your extremities, in the claustrophobic conditions of such a box, for more than a cumulative day. You can see pictures Abu Zubaydah drew of himself in the small box. Now imagine this being done to someone you love.

I say all this because the following description appears in an Amnesty International report released Friday into the conditions of confinement for migrants at Alligator Alcatraz:

The four men interviewed by Amnesty International, as well as Florida-based organizations, told the organization about the ‘box’, described as a 2x2 foot cage-like structure located outside in the yard of “Alligator Alcatraz” where individuals are sent for punishment. Individuals are put in the ‘box’, their hands are shackled and their feet are attached to restraints on the ground. They are unable to sit down or move positions, and are forced to remain there for hours in the heat with hardly any water or protection from the sun, heat and insects. According to a man seeking safety, “People ended up in the ‘box’ just for asking the guards for anything. I saw a guy who was put in it for an entire day.”

A "2x2 cage-like structure… [an] extremely small space that prevents sitting, lying or changing position" has dimensions startlingly reminiscent of those the Senate documented in the black sites. The major difference is that in Florida, the Small Box is exposed to the elements and constructed as a barred cage, whereas in Catseye, it was a closed structure inside the larger closed structure of the black site. And in Florida, the box is used as punishment. According to one of the Alligator Alcatraz survivors in the Amnesty report, people were put into the box simply for alerting the guards to someone's need for medication. "They were taken to 'the box' and punished for trying to help me," the person told Amnesty.

The CIA also wanted to put insects inside the confinement box, as it happens. Ron DeSantis' people figured out how to do it.

There's a certain candor in not pretending that putting someone for hours on end into a cage where they cannot stand or lie down and can barely sit is an "intelligence-gathering" technique. By August 9, according to the Senate report, CIA personnel cabled to Langley that they did not believe Abu Zubaydah had "actionable new information" to provide. They kept torturing him for two more weeks anyway. In 2005, when the Justice Department reconvened to assess the future of the CIA torture program in an atmosphere of scrutiny that did not exist in 2002, Langley did not request continued use of the confinement boxes. 

Here we have Florida jailers using CIA-pedigreed torture techniques on migrants accused of being in the country without proper authorization, a civil, not criminal, violation. I have many questions about whose idea it was to import the confinement box to Alligator Alcatraz. But in the absence of answers to them at present, I submit to you that its appearance here, structurally speaking, is the direct result of there being no criminal or even substantial political penalties for the architects of the torture program, either at Langley or within the Bush administration. When there is no consequence for torture, torture will persist, going into abeyance—at most—until politically empowered sadists reach for a tool of domination. The lack of consequence ensures it is a matter of time before people who owe their positions of authority to declarations that they seek to dehumanize the vulnerable play a sick game of Well, if we did this to these Terrorists there, why not to these other Criminals here…

There is much else in the Amnesty report that should prompt not only a shutdown of this entire enterprise but an immediate criminal investigation. According to Amnesty, the unusual relationship between ICE and Florida leads to disappearances, since migrants held by ICE and transferred to Alligator Alcatraz no longer appear in ICE's databases. "They are also not registered in any public database where their families and lawyers can search for and confirm their whereabouts. This means that there is no official record of their detention and no way to track where they are being detained," Amnesty writes. 

"Organizations shared that no one knows how many people are actually currently detained at the facility," it continues. Let that sink in. No one knows how many people, let alone who, are at this moment locked inside a torture chamber. Unless the architects of Alligator Alcatraz are convicted at trial for torture—indisputably illegal by law enforcement on U.S. soil—this will happen again, except worse, and against expanding target cohorts. Ken Klippenstein's reporting is a blinking red arrow showing where it's going next.  

"EVERYTHING WE SAY, they can see." The end result of mass surveillance is mass murder. But before the path of total information capture reaches its logical end, how do people live through the experience of ubiquitous surveillance by a hostile power? Mohammed R. Mhawish details the social and psychological effects of what can only be described as persistent unfreedom inflicted on Palestinians by the State of Israel. He is 25 years old. "By the time I was in my teens," Mhawish writes, "we had learned which rooftops blinked red with antennas and which alleys were blind." During the genocide, people told Mhawish that they didn't only avoid the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s Squid Games for fear of being shot, but for fear of the foundation's cameras matching their faces to unknown databases. 

He lives through a bomb dropped on his three-story home after the Israelis threaten him, in text messages, for being a journalist. Rescue workers saved Mohammed, his wife Asmaa and their son Rafik. His lifetime under surveillance makes the strike on a home full of noncombatants feel even more personal. "Four people were killed: two cousins and two neighbors, one of whom happened to pass our door as the bomb fell."  

Mhawish explains: "This is the dystopian consequence of technology, supplied in part by American companies, being placed into the hands of authorities who have virtually unlimited control over a captive population they have openly villainized. It is the culmination of decades of monitored occupation, a totalitarian nightmare spliced with genocidal terror, a system that is already evolving and growing for whatever comes next."

You should not oppose this simply because it is coming, at some point in the future, for you. You should oppose this because it is happening to anyone. But it is coming for you. Palestine is a laboratory for the persistent unfreedom of the future.

PUT ON UGK'S “Quit Hatin’ the South” while you read Alain Stephens' excellent Intercept dispatch on Appalachian and Carolinian resistance to ICE and CBP. 

A UK SPECIAL FORCES whistleblower known as N1466 has told a British government inquiry that the head of the SAS (UK special forces) covered up the killing of civilians in Afghanistan discovered in 2011. The cover-up, which is alleged to include planting guns on dead civilians to make the kills appear righteous in after-action reports, enabled the slayings to persist through 2013. The timeline here is shortly after an infamous group of U.S. soldiers organized themselves into a death squad around Kandahar.

N1466 told the inquiry, "We didn’t join UKSF for this sort of behaviour—toddlers to get shot in their beds or random killing. It’s not special, it’s not elite, it’s not what we stand for and most of us, I don’t believe, would either wish to condone it or to cover it up." 

SOMEONE READING THIS KNOWS where to find the Seed demo from 1994 so Charlotte can listen to her mom's New Jersey hardcore band. This is the most heartwarming story I read last week.