Originally published on http://www.hrw.org on October 3, 2016—
“It’s public knowledge that following the 9-11 attacks on the United States, the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) detained and tortured terrorism suspects in secret sites around the world. But new Human Rights Watch research provides disturbing details about CIA torture techniques that have not been previously disclosed. In some instances, the torture eclipsed in brutality what was revealed in the Summary of the Senate Report on the CIA detention program released in December 2014. Ridha al-Najjar and Lofti El Gherissi, both Tunisian nationals, were arrested in Pakistan in 2002 and were among the first to be sent to a notorious CIA “black site” known as Cobalt in Afghanistan. Laura Pitter, senior US national security counsel at Human Rights Watch, interviewed the two men in Tunisia and talked to Stephanie Hancock about their ordeal.
The world already knows about the CIA torture program. Why are these new accounts so significant?
These two men were some of the earliest detainees in the CIA program – until now we’ve not heard directly from anyone detained at “Cobalt” during that time. And what their accounts show is that our understanding of the torture methods described in the Senate Summary is very limited, and that there were more brutal methods being used that the public didn’t even know about – and perhaps still further forms of torture that have yet to be uncovered.”
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HUMAN RIGHTS SOCIETY 