Ammar al-Baluchi remembers the cold most of all. Held nearly naked in a cell lit around the clock by fluorescent bulbs, he referred to his detention “as if I was living in a refrigerator”.
The nephew of self-declared 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Baluchi was one of six to a dozen men believed to be held and tortured in a secret CIA prison in Bucharest between 2003 and 2005. The treatment of detainees at the facility, formally known as “Detention Site Black”, is described in detail in Guantanamo court filings.
Solitary confinement under lights that never switched off, sleep deprivation that at times meant being forced to stand shackled for days, repeated dousing with icy water, and forced shaving and physical handling that interrogators euphemistically logged as “attention grasps” and “facial holds” were common practice.
A photo released by Baluchi’s lawyers to the press in 2024 shows him stripped naked and photographed. It is believed to be the first published image – of tens of thousands – of a “war on terror” detainee in a CIA black site.
“We know they were tortured horrifically,” Ben Keith, a British barrister representing Baluchi outside the US, told Middle East Eye. “It’s not always possible to say which bit of torture took place because they were tortured for days and weeks, but you don’t detain somebody in a black site with the purpose of just talking to them.”
A quarter-century after the 9/11 attacks, which triggered the so-called “war on terror” and devastating US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq that directly killed at least 940,000 people, a US military judge has finally set a trial date for Baluchi: 5 June 2028.
Lieutenant Colonel Michael Schrama ruled this month that the case against Mohammed, Baluchi, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi will begin on that date.
Schrama is the fifth military judge to preside over a case that has been trapped for more than a decade in disputes over evidence, national security secrecy and, above all, whether confessions obtained under torture before the men ever reached Guantanamo can be used at trial.
That question runs directly through a basement in Bucharest, where the accused are believed to have been detained and tortured.
In April 2025, a Guantanamo military judge ruled that statements Baluchi gave the FBI in 2007 were involuntary and inadmissible, tainted by what the court called torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment inflicted on him in CIA custody, including in Romania.
The judge found that Guantanamo’s “modestly changed confinement circumstances” had not been enough to remove the “lingering taint” of what happened before he arrived there.
