The man is very slight of build, his hair shorn but his beard full. He is naked except for the handcuffs shackling his wrists in a clinically bright room.
This photo is the first published image of a “war on terror” detainee in a CIA black site. The man staring at the camera is Ammar al-Baluchi, one of five men at Guantánamo Bay accused by the US government of plotting the 9/11 attacks. (On Wednesday, the Pentagon announced that three of the five men, but not Baluchi, had agreed to plead guilty to all charges and would avoid possible death sentences.) Baluchi was first arrested in Karachi, Pakistan, in April 2003 and then secretly shuffled between five black sites from May 2003 to September 2006. Since then, he has been held at Guantánamo, though he has not been convicted of a crime.
This photograph, shared with the Guardian by Baluchi’s lawyers, is believed to be from early 2004, when he was 26 years old, and was probably taken at the CIA’s black site in Bucharest, Romania, known in US government communications both as Location No 7 and by the color-coded name of Detention Site Black. In the picture, Baluchi, whose story formed the basis for a character in the film Zero Dark Thirty, is probably being readied for transit to another black site. The black bar visible across his midsection has been added by his attorneys to preserve Baluchi’s dignity.
Between 2002 and 2008, at least 119 Muslim men were hidden, housed, and interrogated at these secret CIA prisons around the world, with 39 of them subjected to what the Bush administration euphemistically labeled “enhanced interrogation techniques”. In 2014, the US government admitted these practices constituted torture, when Barack Obama stated: “We tortured some folks.” No one at the CIA has ever been held accountable for the torture.
The CIA took some 14,000 photographs of their black sites and the detainees in their custody. The very existence of those photographs was hidden from the public until 2015, and the photos mostly remain classified. But defense attorneys representing Guantánamo detainees have been litigating the military court’s draconian classification system for years, which has gradually resulted in the release of more formerly classified material, including this photograph.
Although forced nudity was frequently used by the CIA as an “enhanced interrogation technique” at the black sites, Baluchi is naked in this photograph probably because of CIA transportation protocols. According to a previously declassified CIA inspector general’s report, Baluchi had already been subjected to “standard rendition procedures” when he was transported to Romania from his first black site, the Salt Pit, a secret prison in Afghanistan that was also known as Detention Site Cobalt. Transportation procedures between the black sites included “a body cavity check” and a medical officer examining Baluchi. CIA headquarters indicated to field officers that they needed to “take pictures of him to document his physical condition at the time of transfer”.
It was at the Salt Pit in Afghanistan, several months before this photo was taken, where Baluchi encountered his most brutal treatment at the hands of the CIA, including having the back of his head repeatedly bounced off a wall, a technique labeled “walling” by the government. Student interrogators seeking “official” job certification lined up to practice “walling” him as if he were a training prop. He was kept naked during the process, for sessions lasting two hours. (Medical experts for the defense have since reported to the military commissions that the walling might have resulted in permanent traumatic brain injury.)
At various times, Baluchi was also deprived of sleep for up to 82 hours at a time, forced into a standing position by having his wrists shackled to a bar in the ceiling, repeatedly doused with ice-cold water, forcibly shaved of his hair and beard, subjected to beatings, placed in stress positions, and deprived of food. When the US seized custody of him in mid-2003, Baluchi weighed 141lbs. By late 2003, his weight had sunk to 119lbs.
In late 2003, he was moved from the Salt Pit to Romania. The Romanian site has since been identified as having been in the basement of the National Registry Office for Classified Information, a sizable government building close to downtown Bucharest. Six prefabricated cells, painted white and tiled with impact-resistant glass, were installed on rubber feet to keep detainees disoriented. Romania, which was seeking entry into Nato at the time, agreed to cooperate with the CIA by hosting the site and was provided with millions of dollars in return.
At the Salt Pit in Afghanistan, detainees “were kept in complete darkness and constantly shackled in isolated cells with loud noise or music and only a bucket to use for human waste”, according to the Senate subcommittee on intelligence. The chief of interrogations at the site described the Salt Pit as “a dungeon”.
The Romanian black site, by contrast, was flooded with light 24 hours a day, which may explain the brightness of this photo. (In court filings, Baluchi has described his time there “as if I was living in a refrigerator. Here I finally had clothes, short pants and a blanket, which was not enough to ward off the cold of this place.”) At this site, detainees were subject to solitary confinement, sleep deprivation, and being physically manhandled with “attention grasps” and “facial holds”. They were allowed to shower once a week, a novelty compared with the black sites established before this one. But they were still held extrajudicially and incommunicado, disappeared from the world and never able to speak with anyone except their jailers.
The CIA report quotes a debriefer who called the Romanian black site “probably the ‘nicest facility’ she had visited”, stating that it was “clean, ‘sterile’, efficient and modern” with “an almost ‘surreal’ feel to it”. Another debriefer, who knew Baluchi from the Salt Pit, mentioned that since his time in the Romanian site, he now had “more meat on his bones”. As is clear from the photograph, his beard, which had been forcibly shaved when he entered his first black site, has grown back.
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Not long after this picture was taken, photos from Abu Ghraib prison shocked the world. In many ways, those images are the opposite of this one. In the Abu Ghraib photos, we see naked Iraqi bodies piled into a human pyramid; people dragged around on leashes; a hooded man standing on a box, arms extended with wires attached to his fingers. The American servicemen and women in the photos are seen smiling with a thumbs up sign next to corpses or engaging in other sadistic kinds of pleasures at the abuse they’re inflicting. Those photos, taken mostly as macabre mementoes by soldiers on duty, soon became visual evidence of the misbegotten character of the American invasion of Iraq.
Photos documenting the extreme brutality that took place at the CIA black sites may also exist, though if they do they remain classified and out of view. But this photo serves a specific bureaucratic aim rather than existing as a keepsake. The purpose of this photograph appears twofold: to diminish its subject, al-Baluchi, into nothing but a naked body and then to demonstrate that this body remains whole, despite everything that has been done to it.
The CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” were predicated on the fact that they would leave no lasting physical evidence on the body of the accused, as the Bush administration’s now notorious “torture memos” make clear. The memos defined torture as “permanent and serious physical damage” that “must rise to the level of death, organ failure, or the permanent impairment of a significant body function”.
As such, this photograph functions as visual proof of this now discredited argument while illustrating the humiliating and submissive posture Baluchi is forced into in front of the camera. Dr Vincent Iacopino, a physician who specializes in the medial consequences of torture, previously told the Guardian that such compulsory naked photography is both a form of sexual humiliation and sexual assault.
