Gul Rahman was a prisoner who froze to death in CIA custody at the Salt Pit, the agency’s black site north of Kabul. John Kiriakou calls his “a particularly sad case”, and it is the death the agency admits to.[1][2]
How he died
The fullest account Kiriakou has given attaches the whole cold cell procedure to Rahman by name: “Gul Rahman was subjected to a torture technique called the cold cell, in which he was chained to an eyebolt in the ceiling like this. He was stripped naked. His cell was chilled to 50 degrees Fahrenheit, and then every hour a CIA officer would enter the cell and throw a bucket of ice water on him.” The outcome followed within the night: “Gul Rahman was killed with that technique. He didn’t make it through the night, and died of hypothermia.”[1]
The technique that killed him was not among the ten the Bush White House approved. Kiriakou’s standing description of the cold cell is that it was never authorised at all, and he has said the same of the deaths it produced.
No prosecution
“No one has ever been brought to justice for murdering Gul Rahman,” Kiriakou says, and he sets the absence against the programme’s own legal architecture rather than against morality: “certainly the Justice Department never gave CIA officers permission to murder detainees during the course of their interrogations.” Whatever the Office of Legal Counsel memoranda authorised, in other words, they did not authorise this.[3]
He attributes the supervision directly: “Gul Rahman’s torture and death were overseen by Mitchell and Jessen” — and again, “there’s no justice for Gul Rahman.”[3]
The lawsuit
Rahman’s family was the third claimant in the civil suit brought against the two contract psychologists, alongside the survivors Suleiman Salim and Mohamed Ben Soud. That case settled on sealed terms in August 2017 without reaching trial — an outcome Kiriakou said he was disappointed by, in part because a trial would have been the last chance to see the documents behind deaths like this one.[4][3]