Quotes by Human Rights Watch

Many of the abusive interrogation methods that were being used at Nama were clearly authorized by the command structure at the camp. Jeff told Human Rights Watch that written authorizations were required for most abusive techniques, indicating that the use of these tactics was approved up the chain of command.
'There was an authorization template on a computer, a sheet that you would print out, or actually just type it in. And it was a checklist. And it was all already typed out for you, environmental controls, hot and cold, you know, strobe lights, music, so forth. Working dogs, which, when I was there, wasn’t being used. But you would just check what you want to use off, and if you planned on using a harsh interrogation you’d just get it signed off.'

Jeff saw a British SAS officer beat a detainee:
[It] was a beating in a kind of a bunker behind the main facility. . . . this British guy actually who wasn’t supposed to be interrogating anybody - a British soldier. SAS. That’s all I know about him. I don’t know his name or anything. But we went back there and he gave the guy a pretty good pounding. Nothing really in the face. A lot of stomach shots, and I would say two or three groin shots, very harsh. A knee to the abdomen. Thrown against the wall and so forth.

Typical first time interrogation consisted of some kind of heavy metal music really loud, strobe light, lot of yelled questions and stuff like that, until they finally would break down and cry and say “I don’t know anything, I don’t know anything!” If [the detainee] was a particular target of interest that they thought knew something, you know, they’d grab him, punch him—stomach, neck, arms—you know, right in here [indicating the back of the arm, above the elbow], you’d punch them in the back of the elbows—hold your arms up—you’d punch them in the back of the elbow, I guess, so not to leave a mark. . .. Particularly people of interest, they really want to talk to, they would use everything.

He’s on his knees, usually a rifle pointed at him, strobe light going, music going, whatever. Then the guys sitting at the desk asking him questions directly. It was always yelling at that point—you had to, in order to hear [over the music]... For the most part, that would drag on for quite a while. They’d ask and ask and ask and ask.
I would say, about, overall, about half the guys to 60 percent of the guys got at least one gut shot - either punched or the butt of the rifle in the stomach... I couldn’t put an exact figure, somewhere on the low ball, I would say, 60 percent...

“And if you were completely uncooperative?” Nick described one of the worst cases he saw, which took place around July 2003, involving a detainee who a Special Forces team had arrested... “They brought him back [to FOB Tiger] and he got the mess beat out of him,” Nick said. “He got the hell beat out of him.” Nick told Human Rights Watch what he saw when the detainee was brought into the interrogation building:
He wouldn’t say anything, and they kept screaming at him and screaming at him. And they picked him up and threw him against the wall—and it’s a concrete wall. They threw him up against the wall, they punched him in the neck, punched him in the stomach—you know, gut shot—they threw him down. [At one point,] they actually threw him outside—they had two guys [other detainees] outside watching—threw him outside the building, just threw him outside like that. And then they picked him up, dragged him back, pulling him by the hair and stuff. . .. They hold his arms like this [out behind his back] and then beat him down—enough so they could break it, to give you a little bit of the pain. Same with the kneecaps: kicked him in the kneecaps, you know, really hard, with those boots—combat boots.

"... Standard procedure, when I was there, you [i.e., the detainees] had twenty-four hour inside the Conex [container] . . . you’re blind-folded, you’re zip-stripped, your hands are behind your back; your feet usually weren’t, unless there was a particularly volatile prisoner—somebody who’d caused a lot of trouble, they’d hitch the feet as well. You were there, twenty-four hours: no sleep, no food, no water."
The temperatures inside the container, Nick said, were extreme:
"Early on, when I first got there, it only got up to about 115, but by July and August, we were regularly between 135 and 145 [Fahrenheit]. [Inside the container] it was really extremely hot, to the point where it was irritating to go into the back of the Conex to get somebody out to use the restroom, which is usually the only thing they were allowed to do... there was no talking, none of that inside there."

HRW: Was there any discussion of the Red Cross coming?
"Yeah, they said that the Red Cross would never be able to get in there at all."
Jeff explained that the colonel told them that he “had this directly from General Mc Chrystal? and the Pentagon that there’s no way that the Red Cross could get in.”... He explained that they were told: “they just don’t have access, and they won’t have access, and they never will. This facility was completely closed off to anybody investigating. Even Army investigators.”

He was stripped naked, put in the mud and sprayed with the hose, with very cold hoses, in February. At night it was very cold. They sprayed the cold hose and he was completely naked in the mud, you know, and everything. [Then] he was taken out of the mud and put next to an air conditioner. It was extremely cold, freezing, and he was put back in the mud and sprayed.
This happened all night. Everybody knew about it. People walked in, the sergeant major and so forth, everybody knew what was going on, and I was just one of them, kind of walking back and forth seeing [that] this is how they do things.

President Bush was asked why people were transferred out of U.S. custody to countries where torture is common... [He] was then asked specifically about returns to Uzbekistan, a country with a notorious record on torture: “As commander in chief, what is it that Uzbekistan can do in interrogating an individual that the United States can’t?” His response was: “We seek assurances that nobody will be tortured.”
Others spelled things out more clearly. One U.S. diplomat was quoted as saying: “It allows us to get information from terrorists in a way we can’t do on U.S. soil.”
A former CIA agent, Robert Baer, explained, “The ultimate destinations of these flights are places that, you know, are involved in torture.” In Baer’s words, “If you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan. If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear - never to see them again - you send them to Egypt.”