Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud

Last updated
Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud
Born1968/1969(age 52–53). [1]
Arrested2003
Somalia
Central Intelligence Agency
Released2011
Citizenship Libya
Detained atCIA black sites
Charge(s) extrajudicial detention

Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud was held, and tortured, in the CIA's archipelago of black sites, where it tortured individuals. [2] [3] [4] [5]

Reuters reports Ben Soud is a Tanzanian who the CIA kidnapped in Somalia in 2003. [2] The New York Times reports he is a Libyan who fled Libya and made a home in Pakistan, where he was seized. [1] This report says the CIA transferred him back to Libya, in 2004, the torture state he had fled, where he was imprisoned until the fall of the Muammar Gaddafi regime in 2011. Ben Soud said that, in spite of its grizzly reputation, he was treated better in Libya than he had been by the USA.

Shortly after the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on CIA torture came out the National Journal listed seventeen individuals who the CIA had tortured, without authorization. [6] The National Journal reported how, even though Ben Soud's foot had been broken, while in custody, his interrogators continued to subject him to cruel physical tortures, that aggravated his condition such that a subsequent medical examination concluded, "even given the best prognosis", he "would have arthritis and limitation of motion for the rest of his life."

Ben Soud was one of three individuals who sued Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell, the two psychologists the CIA paid $75 million to advise them on torture. [3] [4] [7] On July 28, 2017, U.S. District Judge Justin Lowe Quackenbush denied both parties motions for summary judgment, noted that the defendants are indemnified by the United States government, and encouraged the attorneys to reach a settlement before trial. [8]

On October 9, 2016, Pulitzer Prize winners Matt Apuzzo, Sheri Fink, and James Risen published a front-page article in the New York Times, entitled "How U.S. Torture Left a Legacy of Damaged Minds". [1] The article recounted Ben Soud's description of the torture he endured, in detail.

Related Research Articles

Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi was a Libyan national captured in Afghanistan in November 2001 after the fall of the Taliban; he was interrogated by American and Egyptian forces. The information he gave under torture to Egyptian authorities was cited by the George W. Bush Administration in the months preceding its 2003 invasion of Iraq as evidence of a connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. That information was frequently repeated by members of the Bush Administration, although reports from both the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) strongly questioned its credibility, suggesting that al-Libi was "intentionally misleading" interrogators.

Salt Pit Former CIA prison in Afghanistan

The Salt Pit and Cobalt are the code names of an isolated clandestine CIA black site prison and interrogation center in Afghanistan. It is located north of Kabul and was the location of a brick factory prior to the Afghanistan War. The CIA adapted it for extrajudicial detention.

Binyam Mohamed Ethiopian Guantanamo detainee

Binyam Ahmed Mohamed, also referred to as Benjamin Mohammed, Benyam Mohammed or Benyam Mohammed al-Habashi, is an Ethiopian national and United Kingdom resident, who was detained as a suspected enemy combatant by the US Government in Guantanamo Bay prison between 2004 and 2009 without charges. He was arrested in Pakistan and transported first to Morocco under the US's extraordinary rendition program, where he claimed to have been interrogated under torture.

Jose Rodriguez (intelligence officer)

Jose A. Rodriguez Jr. is an American former intelligence officer who served as Director of the National Clandestine Service Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). He was the final CIA deputy director for operations (DDO) before that position was expanded to D/NCS in December 2004. Rodriguez was a central figure in the 2005 CIA interrogation videotapes destruction, leading to The New York Times Editorial Board and Human Rights Watch to call for his prosecution.

"Enhanced interrogation techniques" or "enhanced interrogation" is a euphemism for the program of systematic torture of detainees by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and various components of the U.S. Armed Forces at remote sites around the world, including Bagram, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and Bucharest authorized by officials of the George W. Bush administration. Methods used included beating, binding in contorted stress positions, hooding, subjection to deafening noise, sleep disruption, sleep deprivation to the point of hallucination, deprivation of food, drink, and medical care for wounds, as well as waterboarding, walling, sexual humiliation, subjection to extreme heat or extreme cold, and confinement in small coffin-like boxes. A Guantanamo inmate's drawings of some of these tortures, to which he himself was subjected, were published in The New York Times. Some of these techniques fall under the category known as "white torture". Several detainees endured medically unnecessary "rectal rehydration", "rectal fluid resuscitation", and "rectal feeding". In addition to brutalizing detainees, there were threats to their families such as threats to harm children, and threats to sexually abuse or to cut the throat of detainees' mothers.

Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah is a citizen of Yemen who is reported to have been a subject of the United States' controversial extraordinary rendition program. The American Civil Liberties Union states that he was apprehended by the Jordanian General Intelligence Department and tortured and interrogated for days, in Jordan, where he was: "turned over to agents who beat, kicked, diapered, hooded and handcuffed him before secretly transporting him to the U.S. Air Force base in Bagram, Afghanistan." They report that Bashmillah was held in extrajudicial detention in the United States' Bagram Theater Internment Facility, and the CIA network of black sites.

James Elmer Mitchell is an American psychologist and former member of the United States Air Force. From 2002, after his retirement from the military, to 2009, his company Mitchell Jessen and Associates received $81 million on contract from the CIA to carry out the interrogation and torture of detainees, euphemistically referred to as "enhanced interrogation techniques".

Gul Rahman Afghan victim of CIA torture

Gul Rahman was an Afghan man, suspected by the United States of being a militant, who was a victim of torture. He died in a secret CIA prison, or black site, located in northern Kabul, Afghanistan known as the Salt Pit. He had been captured October 29, 2002.

In 2003, a secret compound, known as Strawberry Fields, was constructed near the main Guantanamo Bay detention camps, in Cuba. In August 2010 reporters found that it had been constructed to hold CIA detainees classified as "high value". These were among the many men known as ghost detainees, as they were ultimately held for years for interrogation by the CIA in its secret prisons known as black sites at various places in Europe, the Mideast, and Asia, including Afghanistan.

Abdul Karim is a Muslim male given name and, in modern usage, also a surname. It is built from the Arabic words Abd, al- and Karim. The name means "servant of the most Generous", Al-Karīm being one of the names of God in the Qur'an, which give rise to the Muslim theophoric names. It is rendered as Abdulkerim in Albania, Bosnia and Turkey

Bruce Jessen

John Bruce Jessen is an American psychologist who, with James Elmer Mitchell, created the so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" that were used in the interrogation and torture of CIA detainees. and outlined in the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's report on CIA torture. In that report, he was mentioned under the pseudonym "Hammond Dunbar." His company, Mitchell Jessen and Associates, earned US$81 million for its work.

The Temara interrogation center, also known as Temara secret detention center, is an extrajudicial detainment and secret prison facility of Morocco located within a forested area of Rabat, Morocco. It is operated by the Directorate for the Surveillance of the Territory, a Moroccan domestic intelligence agency implicated in past and ongoing human rights violations, which continues to arrest, detain and interrogate individuals suspected of involvement in terrorism-related activities outside of the Moroccan legal framework.

The General Directorate for Territorial Surveillance, is the internal intelligence agency of the Moroccan state. It is tasked with the monitoring of potentially subversive domestic activities.

Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture Report of the United States government

The Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency's Detention and Interrogation Program is a report compiled by the bipartisan United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) about the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)'s Detention and Interrogation Program and its use of torture during interrogation in U.S. government communiqués on detainees in CIA custody. The report covers CIA activities before, during, and after the "War on Terror". The initial report was approved on December 13, 2012, by a vote of 9–6, with seven Democrats, one Independent, and one Republican voting in favor of the report and six Republicans voting in opposition.

Mohammed Assad was a citizen of Yemen who, according to Amnesty International, was subjected to extraordinary rendition by the CIA, and held in the CIA's network of black sites—secret interrogation centers. Assad had been living and working in Tanzania. Amnesty International reports he was captured on December 26, 2003, and held by the CIA until May 2005.

Suleiman Abdullah Salim is a citizen of Tanzania who was held in extrajudicial detention, for five years, in secret CIA black sites. Salim was one of the individuals the United States Senate Intelligence Committee's inquiry into the CIA's use of torture identified as having been subjected to the most brutal torture. According to James Risen, in the New York Times CIA interrogators tortured him, even though he was a black African man, and the Suleiman Abdullah Salim they had intended to capture was an ethnically Arab man from Yemen.

Gina Haspel American intelligence officer

Gina Cheri Walker Haspel, formerly an American intelligence officer, served as director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from 2018 to 2021. The first woman to hold the post on a permanent basis, she had previously worked as the deputy director under Mike Pompeo during the early days of Donald Trump's presidency.

<i>The Report</i> (2019 film) 2019 film directed by Scott Z. Burns

The Report is a 2019 American political drama film written and directed by Scott Z. Burns and starring Adam Driver, Annette Bening, Ted Levine, Michael C. Hall, Tim Blake Nelson, Corey Stoll, Maura Tierney and Jon Hamm. The plot follows staffer Daniel Jones and the Senate Intelligence Committee as they investigate the Central Intelligence Agency's use of torture following the September 11 attacks. It covers more than a decade's worth of real-life political intrigue, exploring and compacting Jones's 6,700-page report. It is partly based on the article "Rorschach and Awe" by Katherine Eban which originally appeared in Vanity Fair in July 2007.

The Ministry of Finance of Libya is the finance ministry responsible for public finances of Libya.

The 18th Parliament of Jordan was elected at the 2016 Jordanian general election. 130 members were elected and had the right to sit in the National Assembly of Jordan.

References

  1. 1 2 3 Matt Apuzzo; Sheri Fink; James Risen (2016-10-09). "How U.S. Torture Left a Legacy of Damaged Minds". The New York Times . p. A1. Archived from the original on 2017-04-12. Retrieved 2017-02-15. Today, Mr. Ben Soud, 47, is a free man, but said he is in constant fear of tomorrow. He is racked with self-doubt and struggles to make simple decisions. His moods swing dramatically.
  2. 1 2 Eric M. Johnson (2016-04-22). "U.S. judge allows CIA interrogation lawsuit to proceed". Reuters. Archived from the original on 2016-04-28. Retrieved 2017-02-15. The ACLU filed the lawsuit last October on behalf of Suleiman Abdullah Salim, a Tanzanian abducted by the CIA and Kenyan security forces in Somalia in 2003, Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud, a Libyan captured in a U.S.-Pakistani raid the same year, and Gul Rahman, an Afghan national who died in 2002 in CIA custody from hypothermia caused by dehydration and exposure.
  3. 1 2 Spencer Ackerman (2017-02-15). "Deputy CIA director could face court deposition over post-9/11 role in torture". The Guardian . Archived from the original on 2017-02-15. Retrieved 2017-02-15. In a court filing on Tuesday, attorneys for two CIA contract psychologists who helped design the agency’s brutal interrogations for terrorism suspects have asked a federal judge to order Gina Haspel, a career CIA officer recently appointed as the agency’s No2 official, to provide a deposition discussing her allegedly pivotal involvement in an episode the CIA has tried repeatedly to put behind it.
  4. 1 2 Alberto Luperon (2016-04-22). "Psychologists Behind CIA Torture Program Try to Throw Out Lawsuit from 'Tortured' Prisoners". Lawnewz. Archived from the original on 2016-05-04. Retrieved 2017-02-15. Plaintiffs Suleiman Abdullah Salim and Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud say they are suffering from long-term mental and physical harm. The complaint states interrogators used tactics like sleep deprivation, beatings, sensory deprivation, forced nudity, starvation, and water dousing.
  5. Marisa Taylor; Jonathan S. Landay (2015-10-13). "Psychologists accused of 'criminal enterprise' with CIA over torture". Washington DC: McClatchy News Service. Archived from the original on 2015-10-14. Retrieved 2017-02-15. The lawsuit represents a new approach to seeking accountability for the CIA’s Rendition, Detention and Interrogation program. It is the first to rely extensively on the Senate Intelligence Committee’s five-year, $40 million investigation into the agency’s top-secret effort to unearth terrorist plots after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
  6. Emma Roller; Rebecca Nelson (2014-12-10). "What CIA Interrogators Did To 17 Detainees Without Approval". National Journal . Archived from the original on 2015-05-11. You probably haven't heard many of these names before. But they are important, both in terms of the terrorist plots they either planned or executed, and in how the U.S. government treated them once they became prisoners, according to the newly released Senate Intelligence Committee's torture report.
  7. Justin Rohrlich (2015-10-13). "Two CIA Contractors Are Being Sued for Torture and 'Human Experimentation'". Vice News . Retrieved 2017-02-15. Though plaintiffs Suleiman Abdullah Salim, Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud, and Gul Rahman were all abducted and held in CIA prisons in Afghanistan, none of the men was ever charged with a crime. Salim and Ben Soud are now free and live with their families. Rahman died in a CIA prison in 2002.
  8. Fink, Sheri (29 July 2017). "2 Psychologists in C.I.A. Interrogations Can Face Trial, Judge Rules". The New York Times . p. A18. Retrieved 29 July 2017.