New Testimony Reveals CIA ‘Rectal Feeding’ of Guantanamo Prisoners

Over the years, the CIA used waterboarding and other forms of torture in its secret prisons abroad after the September 11, 2001 attacks revealed in government leaks, testimony, and a tearful Senate investigation.

But this week’s testimony from an expert at pre-trial hearings at Guantanamo Bay provided some of the most publicized graphic details about the CIA’s mysterious use of its prisoners’ feeding, a discredited practice that remained secret long after other torture methods were revealed.

Dr. Sondra S. Crosby, an expert on torture and other traumas, testified in long-standing defense efforts by lawyers for Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who is accused of masterminding the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole.

The lawyers are seeking to prevent federal investigators’ confessions to federal investigators from trial confessions tainted by torture.

 

Feeding Technique

She held a tube designed to be placed in the patient’s windpipe and said that, according to previously classified agency records, CIA prison staff inserted a tube just like it into Mr. Nashiri’s anus in May 2004.

Agency staff then used a tube similar to it—an injection to inject a protein-rich nutritional shake into his body.

She testified that at Guantanamo Bay in 2013, Mr. al-Nashiri said that years ago, CIA personnel snatched him from his cell, stripped him naked, handcuffed him by his wrists and ankles, bent him to a chair, and took the liquid by force.

He asked her not to talk to him again about it. He did not attend the court hearing when it discussed the matter at length on Thursday.

“This was a very, very distressing painful, shameful stigmatizing event,” Dr. Crosby testified. “He experienced it as a violent rape and sexual assault.”

The New York Times reported, Friday, February 24, 2023, that the expert testified during preliminary hearings at Guantanamo Bay last week, and explained that Crosby’s court-selected testimony was part of the lengthy defense efforts of Nashiri’s team of lawyers.

Al-Nashiri is accused of involvement in the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, and his lawyers sought to prevent the use of confessions he made to federal investigators earlier during the final trial, claiming they were torture-tainted.

During her testimony, Crosby lifted a tube designed to be placed inside the trachea of patients, and then said, based on declassified agency records, that CIA prison staff inserted a tube exactly like it into Nashiri’s anus in May 2004, adding that agency staff used a syringe to inject a protein-rich nutritional shake into his body.

 

Shameful Torture

Al-Nashiri did not attend the trial session in which she discussed matters at length on Thursday, February 23, 2023.

It would be another year before Dr. Crosby discovered evidence to support the story.

The Obama administration made public a 500-page summary of a sensitive Senate investigation into the CIA’s “black site” operation in December 2014.

It exposed the agency’s practice of punishing inmates through “rectal rehydration” and “rectal feeding.”

The CIA defended it at the time as a safe medical practice. Following that, the practice was denounced as “sexual assault disguising as medical treatment” by the organization Physicians for Human Rights.

However, this week when asked for a response to the descriptions that the CIA was accused of making in open court, the agency refused. Additionally, a spokesperson for the agency declined to comment on Dr. Crosby’s evidence that Mr. Nashiri also disclosed to her that he was sodomized using a broomstick while the CIA held him in a cell, nude, with his wrists shackled above his head.

The testimony was presented during pre-trial proceedings, during which Col. Lanny J. Acosta Jr., the judge, was requested to make a decision regarding the admissibility of certain evidence in Mr. Nashiri’s upcoming capital trial

 Mr. Nashiri, 58, is charged with planning the suicide assault by Al Qaeda on the USS Cole destroyer on October 12, 2000, which claimed the lives of 17 American sailors while the ship was refueling in the Yemeni port of Aden.

The prisoner’s statements to interrogators in 2007, shortly after he was transferred to Guantanamo for trial, are said to have been made in violation of international law.

According to defense attorneys, the testimony, along with other litigation, should persuade the judge to exclude those statements or, alternatively, to avert the possibility of the death penalty.

Since the 1990s, Dr. Crosby, a Boston internist, has been diagnosing and caring for torture patients. She was given a security clearance and is being paid by the Pentagon to advise Mr. Nashiri’s legal staff.

Dr. Crosby stated that she was provided access to CIA materials in order to read them before her testimony. She presented the information she discovered in a professional manner.

“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 been expelled.”

Rectal feeding or hydrating is not health care, according to Daniel Jones, who oversaw the research for the Senate inquiry. He praised the testimony as being in line with his team’s findings after they contacted medical experts and came to the same conclusion.

“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 displayed a breathing tube with a width of 7 millimeters, comparing it to the one the CIA used for Mr. Nashiri’s “rectal feeding.” She gave an explanation of how food is processed by the stomach in humans, saying that “it cannot be done in reverse,” and then gave a history lecture.

 

No Medical Need

From a medical standpoint, the testimony was the most thorough public description of the procedure.

She said that in combat, medics inject fluid into the rectum of severely injured troops to rehydrate them. However, a 1930s experiment on medical students revealed that this method of attempting to feed individuals was ineffective.

“There is no medical benefit ever to administering any form of nutrition through the rectum,” she said.

Majid Khan, a prisoner who has since been freed, testified to his sentencing jury in October 2021 that CIA operatives forced water into his rectum using “green garden hoses” attached to a faucet. A military jury was so troubled by Mr. Khan’s descriptions of what the CIA did to him that they pushed the Pentagon to pardon him.

A prosecutor read aloud from a CIA cable during a hearing in the September 11 conspiracy case in 2018, describing what happened to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in March 2003, his first month of detention, for twice rejecting an interrogator’s request to consume a glass of water.

Mr. Mohammed was taken to another room, “placed on a plastic sheet,” and a CIA “medical officer” carried out the procedure. “When he was returned to the interrogation room, he then complied and drank water.”