Document a Day: Interrogators Ordered This Treatment

This brief but vivid email sent by an FBI agent posted to Guantánamo gives a glimpse of the SERE techniques in action, and leaves little doubt that the techniques Albert D. Biderman described were in wide use at the facility and could induce suffering that rivals brutal physical tortures. It contains some of the most indelible images in all the torture documents: detainees shackled hand and foot in fetal positions to the floor, some lying in their own excrement; a barefoot detainee shivering in a deliberately refrigerated room; a detainee in an unventilated, overheated cell “almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him” who had “apparently been literally pulling his own hair out through the night.”

Document:

• FBI email re treatment at GTMO 8/2/04)

To read more about and see documentary evidence of the Bush administration's torture program, go to thetorturereport.com.