On Monday, the public got its first look at a CIA “black site,” including a windowless, closet-sized cell where a former Qaeda commander was held during his What he described as the most humiliating experience of his time in American custody.
The former commander, Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, led a 360-degree virtual tour of the site, Quiet Room 4, during the sentencing hearing at Guantánamo Bay that began last week. He described being blindfolded, stripped, forcibly shaved and photographed nude twice after his arrest in 2006.
He had never seen the sun, nor heard the voices of the guards, who were dressed entirely in black, including their masks.
Mr. Hadi, 63, is one of the last prisoners held in a network of black sites abroad, where the George W. Bush administration detained and interrogated about 100 terrorist suspects after the attack on May 1. September 11, 2001.
Even now, years after the Obama administration shut down the program, its secrets remain. But details are slowly emerging at the national security trial of former Guantánamo Bay detainees.
In court Monday, the audience saw Quiet Room 4, an empty 6-foot-square room, which Mr. Hadi said resembled the place where he was held for three months – except for a bloodstain on the wall of his cell at the time.
It was an extraordinary moment. Mr. Hadi addressed his U.S. military jury from the padded therapy chair he uses for spinal paralysis. He slowly read a passage of unclassified English, occasionally pausing to regain composure or wipe away tears.
Mr. Hadi described his living conditions as cruel but said his experience as a prisoner in the United States had been tempered by remorse and forgiveness.
In 2022, the prisoner pleaded guilty to war crimes. When addressing the jury on Monday, he apologized for the illegal conduct of Taliban and Qaeda forces under his command in wartime Afghanistan in 2003 and 2004. Some used cover civilians for attacks like turning a taxi into a car bomb. Others became suicide bombers or shot at helicopters evacuating wounded soldiers.
“As commander, I am responsible for what my people did,” he said in the 90-minute presentation. “I want you to know that I don’t have any hatred in my heart for anyone. I think I did it right. I did not. I’m sorry.”
In talking about his time in CIA custody, Mr. Hadi was describing the months after his capture in Türkiye in late 2006, when he disappeared into the last remnants of the black site program, in Afghanistan, for until April 2007.
He was initially held in a windowless cell with a built-in stainless steel shower and toilet, as shown in a visual presentation to the court. He was moved after months of repeated questioning about the location of Osama bin Laden, which he said Monday he did not know.
The next cell, presented to the court, was empty, with no toilet or shower – just three shackles on the wall. Mr. Hadi said during the three months he was detained there, it had a thin carpet on the floor, a toilet bucket and a bloodstain on the wall.
He said at one point his diet contained pork, which is forbidden in Islam. He refused to eat and became so weak that he could not stand. His captors then brought him a nutritional substitute, Ensure. He said he didn’t see sunlight and didn’t have a clock to know when to pray.
The images, if not the testimony, surprised one government lawyer. When Mr. Hadi’s lawyers began sifting through images of cells similar to those in which he was held incommunicado in 2006 and 2007, a prosecutor objected, only to learn that the material had recently been released. declassified.
The existence of the forensic photo was first revealed in 2016 in the September 11 case. Prosecutors provided defense attorneys with documents but did not reveal the location of the intact jail last known in the dark site program. Monday’s testimony clearly shows what happened in Afghanistan.
The jury will decide on a sentence of 25 to 30 years for Mr. Hadi. But the sentence could be shortened by US officials.
After another former CIA detainee, Majid Khan, was allowed to describe his torture at his sentencing hearing in 2021, the jury sentenced him to 26 years in prison. But the control panel also suggested he receive leniency for his abuse while in US custody. Mr. Khan was resettled in Belize and reunited with his family.
Last week, the victim who was attacked by Mr. Hadi’s forces testified to their continued grief from the mental and physical trauma they suffered in the early years of America’s longest war. Second, Mr. Hadi spoke to them directly.
“I know what it is like to see another soldier die or be injured,” he said. “I know this feeling and I’m sorry. I know you have suffered too much.”
He seems to have singled out a Florida man, Bill Eggers, who spoke about losing his first son, a commando, in a roadside bomb planted by Mr. Hadi’s troops in 2004. “I know what it is like to be the father of a son,” he said. “Losing your son – your sadness must be great. I’m sorry.”
Mr. Hadi opened his address to the jury by apologizing for sitting in a padded therapy chair, rather than standing up and addressing them. “I have problems with my spine,” he said.
When Mr. Hadi was first charged in 2014, he entered the courthouse with a military policeman by his side. He is now disabled by degenerative disc disease, after six surgeries, some unsuccessful, that forced him to rely on painkillers, a wheelchair and a four-wheeled walker to get around.
He describes his 17 years of detention at Guantánamo as at times lonely, an experience of isolation interspersed with acts of personal kindness. While recovering from surgery, the prison staff nurses “took care of me with tender kindness,” he said.
During the period that he paralysedA U.S. military doctor, he said, helped him get a place to stay in his cell and “would come play checkers with me, stay with me during my recovery from surgery.”
