Former CIA director personally observed waterboarding of prisoner: Court testimony

A former US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director, who had overseen a secret prison in Thailand, personally observed interrogation sessions in which inmates were being tortured.

Gina Haspel personally observed interrogation sessions of a prisoner, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who is accused of orchestrating the bombing of the Navy destroyer Cole in 2000.

Seventeen American sailors were killed in the attack.

Citing testimony from James Mitchell, a psychologist who helped develop the agency’s interrogation program, the New York Times said Haspel watched while he and a teammate subjected Nashiri to “enhanced interrogation” that included waterboarding.

Haspel has previously written memos to Washington about what was done to Nashiri.

Mitchell’s testimony, however, offered a more detailed peek at her work on the black site in Thailand.

Mitchell testified that he held a cloth over the man’s face and adjusted it to direct the water as another CIA contract psychologist, John Bruce Jessen, poured.

During the process of waterboarding, a cloth is placed over a detainee’s face and water is poured over it as a form of controlled drowning.

Mitchell said he had a “general memory of what was done” to the detainee.

Interrogators used other coercive techniques, such as confining him in a small box, slapping him, or slamming his head into a burlap-covered wall, Mitchell said.

Haspel had been asked if she had overseen the interrogations of Nashiri, during a confirmation hearing to become director of the intelligence agency in 2018, but she declined to answer, saying it was part of her classified career.