Last week in a federal courtroom at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, an American physician hired by the Pentagon testified about the CIA’s use of rectal “feeding” tubes on prisoners it detained and tortured in Thailand from 2001 to 2006.
The physician, Sondra S. Crosby, M.D., an expert on tortures and other trauma, described the painful repeated insertion of plastic tubes into the anal cavity of the defendant in the case, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, over a period of four years. Al-Nashiri is on trial for conspiracy to bomb the USS Cole in October 2000.
The hearing at which Dr. Crosby testified was ordered by the military judge when defense counsel told him the nature and extent of the torture visited upon their client by the CIA and its contractors. Dr. Crosby was given access to CIA raw notes and reports, some of which had not been seen by the investigators who produced the 2014 U.S. Senate 500-page documented study on CIA torture during the administration of President George W. Bush.
The site in Thailand at which al-Nashiri was tortured was run by Gina Haspel, the future CIA director, nicknamed by her colleagues “Bloody Gina.” The CIA infamously made videos of the torture of al-Nashiri and others, which Haspel destroyed.
Dr. Crosby, who was harshly critical of the CIA’s use of this internationally condemned interrogation technique, which is criminal under federal law, revealed that the CIA notes reflected that al-Nashiri and others who received this barbaric treatment were actually being fed nutrients via these anal tubes. She told the court that this must have been a subterfuge as there is simply no biological means to nourish a person via the person’s anal cavity.
Hellbound and Down 