Fragments of 2003 Cable Detail Torture in a Secret C.I.A. Prison

Politics|Fragments of 2003 Cable Detail Torture in a Secret C.I.A. Prison

Most of the details are redacted. No full paragraph can be read.

But even in this fragmented form, a once-classified 2003 cable offers a near real-time glimpse into one of the earliest torture scandals in the C.I.A.’s secret overseas prisons.

One section of the document describes an interrogator revving a power drill near a blindfolded prisoner to scare him into divulging Al Qaeda secrets in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. In another, the interrogator is holding a handgun to the prisoner’s head.

Detainees held in the agency’s “black site” prisons were routinely beaten, deprived of sleep and isolated to try to get them to talk using specific acts of torture that were authorized by C.I.A. headquarters as “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Three of the prisoners, including Mr. Nashiri, were waterboarded.

But the tactics described in the 2003 cable were carried out without permission and omitted from reports to headquarters. Alarmed co-workers reported it, triggering investigations that, in time, allowed critics of the program to cast it as out of control, and eventually contributed to its being shut down.

The nine-page cable was recently obtained by James G. Connell III, a lawyer for a different prisoner at Guantánamo who is accused of conspiring in the Sept. 11 attacks. Mr. Connell has been obtaining original, declassified information about the C.I.A. through the Freedom of Information Act.

And now the document is like a relic, a reminder of how the legacy of torture has impeded the terrorism cases of former C.I.A. prisoners whose lawyers are still uncovering details from the now defunct black sites more than two decades later.

The episode took place weeks after psychologists working for the C.I.A. had nearly drowned Mr. Nashiri while waterboarding him. They abandoned that effort in November 2002 because he was too small for the gurney that served as the board.

Mr. Nashiri was moved to a different site, where a different team took charge of him and brought the gun and drill to an interrogation.

The public first learned of what investigators called the “handgun and power drill incident” in 2009, when details began emerging from a C.I.A. inspector general investigation from 2004. The investigators referred the episode to the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, which on Sept. 11, 2003, declined to prosecute those believed to have been involved, according to the account.

The interrogator also went into Mr. Nashiri’s cell while his arms were shackled above his head and put a cordless “drill close to the Subjects’s body and pressed the ‘on switch’ and let the drill run.”

It is not publicly known how Mr. Nashiri responded because the next two pages are redacted. But a Senate Intelligence Committee study of the program that was partially released in 2014 said that he “did not provide any additional threat information during, or after, these interrogations.”

The handgun incident occurred after Mr. Nashiri had been forced to stay awake for two and half days in the “standing stress position,” an approved method in which a prisoner’s arms were chained above his head while he was naked or wearing only a diaper.

An interrogator brought the pistol into the cell and put it to the prisoner’s head. “Subject was still hooded. The hood was taken off Subject” and the interrogator “still had the weapon to the subject’s head.”

The account appeared to be quoting a witness, who could not recall if the gun touched the prisoner’s head or was pointed at his temple.

Mr. Nashiri is accused of conspiring for Al Qaeda in the suicide bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in October 2000. Seventeen American service members were killed in the attack, which crippled the destroyer off Aden, Yemen, during a refueling visit.

His trial is scheduled to start in June.

A military judge has rejected the use of Mr. Nashiri’s statements to law enforcement in 2007 because of his abuse in C.I.A. custody.

“Any resistance the accused might have been inclined to put up when asked to incriminate himself was intentionally and literally beaten out of him years before,” the judge, Col. Lanny J. Acosta Jr., wrote in his 50-page ruling.

A lawyer for Mr. Nashiri has said that in December, her client signed an offer to plead guilty to avoid a death penalty trial.

In court filings, his legal team has sought the dismissal of the case because the chief prosecutor has not relayed the offer to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has the authority to approve the plea agreement.

The filings themselves have been sealed at the court. But filings on the military commission’s public docket disclose its title, “Government Response to Defense Motion to Dismiss Due to Unlawful Influence and Prosecutorial Misconduct by the Chief Prosecutor of the Office of Military Commissions.”