WASHINGTON: The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) sometimes used rectal feeding on its prisoners kept at secret prison facilities overseas, The New York Times reported on Saturday.

Previous reports in the US media have highlighted the agency’s use of various torture techniques on its prisoners after the Sept 11, 2001 attacks, but this is the first report that focuses on this discredited practice.

The report is based on an expert’s testimony this week during pretrial hearings at the Guantanamo Bay prison facility in Cuba. Dr Sondra S. Crosby, a court-approved expert on torture, testified in a long-running defence effort by lawyers for Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who is accused of orchestrating the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole.

The lawyers are seeking to suppress from his eventual trial admissions he made to federal investigators as tainted by torture. “She held up a tube that is designed to be put in a patient’s windpipe and … CIA prison staff inserted one … into Nashiri’s anus in May 2004,” NYT reported. “Agency personnel then used a syringe to inject a protein-enriched nutritional shake into his body.”

At Guantanamo Bay hearing, expert gives graphic public depiction of torture after 9/11 attacks

Dr Crosby testified that at Guantanamo Bay in 2013, Nashiri confided that, years earlier, CIA personnel grabbed him from his cell, stripped him naked, shackled him at the wrists and ankles, bent him over a chair and administered the liquid.

He asked that she never again speak to him about it. And he did not attend the court session when she discussed it at length on Thursday. “This was a very, very distressing, painful, shameful stigmatising event,” Dr Crosby testified. “He experienced it as a violent rape, sexual assault.”

In December 2014, the Obama administration released a 500-page summary of a classified Senate study of the CIA’s so-called black site programme. It revealed the agency’s practice of using “rectal rehydration” and “rectal feeding” to punish prisoners, the report added.

The NYT noted that the CIA defended it as a sound medical procedure, but a group called Physicians for Human Rights condemned the practice as “sexual assault masquerading as medical treatment”.

An agency spokeswoman also failed to respond to Dr Crosby’s testimony that Nashiri also told her he was sodomised with a broomstick while the CIA held him in a cell, nude with his wrists shackled above his head.

The testimony emerged in pretrial hearings in which the judge, Col. Lanny J. Acosta Jr., is being asked to decide which evidence can be used at Nashiri’s eventual capital trial.

Nashiri, 58, is accused of orchestrating Al Qaeda’s Oct 12, 2000 suicide attack on the USS Cole destroyer that killed 17 US sailors during a refuelling stop at the port of Aden, Yemen.

“They left the tube in for an additional 30 minutes ‘to aid in colonic absorption’,” Dr Crosby said, dismissing the procedure as bogus. The liquid nutritional supplement “would have acted just like an enema, and it would have been expelled”.

Daniel Jones, who led the research for the Senate investigation, hailed the testimony as consistent with the findings of his team. “CIA officers consistently discussed it as a technique to punish or manipulate detainees — writing that it was done to gain ‘total control over the detainee’ or to help ‘clear a person’s head’,” he said. “No medical personnel or CIA officers were ever held accountable for these actions.”

In court, Dr Crosby held up a breathing tube, seven millimetres in diameter, that she said was like the tube the CIA used for Nashiri’s “rectal feeding”. She offered an explanation of how human beings process foods through the stomach — “it cannot be done in reverse”.

NYT reported that in October 2021, the since-released prisoner Majid Khan told his sentencing jury that CIA agents used “green garden hoses” connected to a faucet to force water inside his rectum. “His descriptions of what the CIA did to him so troubled a military jury that they urged the Pentagon to grant Mr Khan clemency,” the newspaper added.

Published in Dawn, February 26th, 2023