Title: S1E19 Torture
Show: John Kiriakou's Dead Drop
Date: 2026-03-16
URL: https://sphinx.acast.com/p/open/s/68e695c6d798804c9e4bbd13/e/69b2005cbba705d7aa461cda/media.mp3
Duration: 0:29:44

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[07:28] head and neck must be supported with a rolled hood or towel that provides a collar to help prevent whiplash unquote. Next rungs up the ladder are the facial hold and the insult slap. The insult slap while physical is meant to induce shock, surprise, even humiliation, not to inflict any kind of long lasting physical pain. It's essentially just a smack across the face. Cramped confinement does what it says it does. The detainee is kept in a dark,

[08:01] cramped container for up to 18 hours at a time, depending on the size of the container. Wall standing is a stress fatigue tactic that stands detainees for maybe five feet from a wall with their feet spread to shoulder width and arms extended so that the fingers rest on the wall. Supporting the detainee's entire weight. It's all about exploiting muscle fatigue. Sleep deprivation has been around for a long time and it's incredibly effective. We know,

[08:34] thanks to the American Psychological Association, for example, that detainees subject to sleep deprivation begin to lose their minds around day seven with no sleep. They begin to die of organ failure around day nine. But the CIA was authorized to keep detainees awake for as long as 12 days. Rung number nine involved exploiting a prisoner's fear. Abus Abeta had a terrible case of entomophobia. That's a fear of insects. So Zane's interrogators stuck him in a cramped

[09:08] confinement box akin to a coffin and they poured a box of insects on top of them. While the insects were in fact harmless to the best of my recollection, they were cockroaches. Zane's interrogators told him that they were poisonous and that they stung. He almost lost his mind. The top most wrong, rung number 10 was waterboarding meant to be the harshest of all the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques. We all know by now what waterboarding is. It's brutal and it's terrifying

[09:40] and violent. But in that first torture memo, lawyer Bybee took a kinder, gentler view of its brutality, terror and violence. In that first torture memo, Bybee pointed out that if done correctly, the individual being waterboarded doesn't breathe any water into his lungs. They aren't actually drowning. They just perceive that they're drowning. Pull away the cloth covering the nose and mouth, the one preventing them from breathing by the way, and the whole sensation of drowning just goes away. See? No harm, no foul, no torture. The first documented

[10:14] waterboarding was in the 14th century. It was known alternatively as water torture, the water cure, or tormenta detoca, a phrase that refers to the thin piece of cloth that's placed over the victim's mouth. Then as now, the goal in torturing someone was to inflict significant, focused pain, but without causing death. That's why waterboarding always appealed to torturers. It checked off all the pain and terror boxes, but not the death box.

[10:45] During the Spanish Inquisition, a kind of golden age for waterboarding, they measured the severity of its inflection by the number of water jars used. Sometimes writes Henry Charles Lea in his book, A History of the Inquisition of Spain, they might use as many as six to eight jars of water on a victim. But here's the curious thing. During the Inquisition, the water torture was considered a normal part of normal legal practice, not unlike the way we view, let's say, a cross-examination today. Also curious, during the Inquisition, doctors

[11:19] took part in the waterboarding. According to Ed Peters, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania, a doctor's presence was required during interrogations. American soldiers encountered waterboarding during the Korean War. In fact, that experience in Korea led to a program in the U.S. Air Force called SEAR, which stands for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape. We subject Air Force pilots to the waterboarding experience to prepare them for its possible use should

[11:50] they ever be captured by the enemy. The difference between waterboarding as a training exercise and waterboarding as an enhanced interrogation technique is massive. The intention when we waterboarded Detainee is to convince him that his feeling of imminent demise is very, very real. It's physical and mental anguish without a finite end. The whole point is to induce a sense of hopelessness that can only be cut short by their full and unwavering cooperation.

[12:21] Bybee and you actually called it learned helplessness, but make no mistake, it's torture. Whether I'm traveling or staying at home, I reach for the same quints go anywhere pieces again and

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[20:40] which actually wasn't a toilet, it was a bucket. His food was reduced to just water and cans of insure. Every time he'd start to doze off, they would spray water in his face. After three weeks, Zayn was given rice once a day and allowed to lie on the floor, although still naked and still shackled and without a mattress. Two months after his detention, he was finally given clothes. Then he was given a mattress and a blanket. Then he was finally given toilet paper.

[21:12] But whenever his interrogators felt he was not cooperating, he would start to lose those privileges. From June 18, 2002 until August 4, 2002, 47 days, the CIA isolated Zayn. The FBI team left Site Green and did not return. They knew what was going to happen there. The CIA, knowing full well what they were about to do, sent a cable back to headquarters dated July 15, 2002, wherein they noted that, quote, in light of the planned psychological pressure techniques to

[21:44] be implemented, we need to get reasonable assurances that Abu Zubaydah will remain in isolation and in communicato for the remainder of his life, unquote. On August 1, 2002, JByB sent a classified legal opinion called Interrogation of Al Qaeda Operative to John Rizzo, the chief legal officer, general counsel at the CIA. The very next day, we began to torture Zayn on a near 24 hour per day basis using the full range of approved enhanced interrogation techniques.

[22:22] This is from the CIA's own records, quote, after Abu Zubaydah had been in complete isolation for 47 days, the most aggressive interrogation phase began at approximately 1150 AM on August 4, 2002. Security personnel entered the cell, shackled and hooded Abu Zubaydah, and removed his towel. Abu Zubaydah was then naked. Without asking any questions, the interrogators placed a rolled towel around his neck as a collar and used the collar to slam Abu Zubaydah against a concrete wall.

[22:57] The interrogators then removed the hood, performed an attention grab, and had Abu Zubaydah watch while a large confinement box was brought into the cell and laid on the floor. Abu Zubaydah was unhooded and the large confinement box was carried into the interrogation room and placed on the floor so as to appear as a coffin, unquote. Zayn's interrogators demanded detailed and verifiable information on terrorist operations planned against the United States, including the names, phone numbers, email addresses, weapons caches, and safe houses of anyone and everyone

[23:34] involved. Each time Zayn denied having additional information, his interrogators would perform a facial slap or a face grab. At approximately 6.20 PM, Zayn was waterboarded for the first time. Over a two and a half hour period, Zayn coughed, vomited, and spasmed repeatedly while they continued to waterboard him. A medical officer wrote this, quote, the sessions accelerated rapidly, progressing quickly to the waterboard after large box,

[24:04] walling, and small box periods. Abu Zubaydah seems very resistant to the waterboard. Longest time with the cloth over his face so far has been 17 seconds. This is sure to increase shortly. No in capital letters, no useful information so far. He did vomit a couple of times during the waterboard with some rice and beans. It's been 10 hours since he ate, so this is surprising and disturbing. We plan to only feed and shore for a while now. I'm heading back for another waterboard session, unquote. During nearly three weeks of constant

[24:38] torture, Zayn spent more than 11 days in the coffin size box and 29 hours in the smaller confinement box akin to a dog cage. Throughout, Zayn, quote, cried, begged, pleaded, and whimpered, unquote. At times he became, quote, hysterical and distressed to the level that he was unable to effectively communicate, unquote. During at least one waterboarding session, Zayn, quote, became completely unresponsive with bubbles rising through his open full mouth, unquote.

[25:14] In the end, over the course of August 2002, the CIA waterboarded Zayn at least 83 separate times. What's more, the CIA videotaped what it did to Zayn, ultimately producing 92 tapes, including 12 which showed the use of enhanced interrogation techniques. At the very same time, in August 2002, on August 1st, to be precise, I went to work back at Langley as the executive assistant to Bob Grenier, the newly appointed associate deputy

[25:46] director of operations. That was for policy support. I was genuinely flattered that Bob wanted me for the job. The problem wasn't either Bob nor I was absolutely certain what the job would actually be as, aside from the words, policy support. There was no actual job description. In fact, the job was created specifically for him. On that very first day, Bob told me that I had to go upstairs to be read into several compartments. That is, an area of CIA business or an agency decision or policy that is so secret that knowledge of it was

[26:21] limited to just a tiny subset of people. What compartments, I asked. Bob said, I can't say. It's so sensitive that they won't even discuss it over the phone. They won't tell you anything until you go upstairs and sign the secrecy agreements. This was unusual, but not unprecedented. I had been read into a couple of compartments earlier in my career. Ironically, waterboarding had been a compartmented decision that only a bare few people knew about at first.

[26:52] I went upstairs to the office of the director of Near East Operations, but my host still refused to tell me anything until I'd signed the secrecy documents. Six of them altogether, page after page of secrecy agreements. The agency had been known to go overboard on that sort of thing. For all I knew, I had just agreed to never reveal the identity of the CIA cafeteria's new bottled water vendor. What did I know? After pursuing the documents though, my host finally let me in on the secret. Okay, he said, here's the deal. We're going to invade Iraq next February.

[27:26] It's a done deal. The decision's already been made. I was so dumbfounded, so flabbergasted that I could only stammer out, but we haven't captured bin Laden yet. It doesn't matter, he said. Everything's in place. The decision's been made. This was nuts. Here was someone at the CIA obviously plugged into the plans of the White House telling us that the public debate in Congress about this, and there was an active public debate in Congress, was total bullshit. America was going to war in and with Iraq regardless of what the legislative

[28:00] branch of the federal government chose to do. I just sat there wondering what in the world they were thinking over at the White House. And in fact, my counterpart in the Office of Near Eastern Operations said that battle lines had already been drawn. He said that the pro war faction was made up of the Office of the Vice President, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the National Security Council. The anti-war faction, ironically, was the CIA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the State Department. Later that day, Bob was formally named the

[28:36] Iraq Mission Manager. On the one hand, as Bob put it, quote, this is crazy. I'm not even sure how to proceed from here, unquote. On the other hand, Bob would become the agency's face to the rest of Washington on everything having to do with Iraq. Even better, Bob would have direct access to the Director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet. We might be detoured in Iraq, but at least we were going to be in the middle of the action. In the next episode of Dead Drop, you'll meet George Tenet, and you'll hear how the Iraq War changed things,

[29:06] including the ways that the White House would begin using intelligence. And meanwhile, our Abu Zubaydah problem began to settle in. If you're enjoying this podcast, and we sure hope that you are, please check out my other podcasts. I have deep program every day, Monday through Friday, from 9 to 10 a.m. on YouTube and Rumble, and Deep Focus, which drops twice a week on YouTube. Until next time, I'm John Kiriakou. Dead Drop is written by John Kiriakou and Alan Katz. Costart and Touchstone Productions

[29:39] produces the podcast, and John Kiriakou, Alan Katz, and Nick Mechanic are its executive producers. This podcast, it's a costar and touchstone production.
