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An interrogator covertly used a power drill and handgun to menace a prisoner, without permission from the agency’s headquarters.
Oct. 13, 2025, 5:00 a.m. ET
Most of the details are redacted. No full paragraph can be read.
But even in this fragmented form, a once-classified 2003 cable offers a near real-time glimpse into one of the earliest torture scandals in the C.I.A.’s secret overseas prisons.
One section of the document describes an interrogator revving a power drill near a blindfolded prisoner to scare him into divulging Al Qaeda secrets in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. In another, the interrogator is holding a handgun to the prisoner’s head.
—Placing a pistol to Subject’s head.
—Placing Subject in the standing Stress Position with arms affixed over his head hooded for a period of approximately two and one half days.
—Hitting Subject lightly (“cuffing” Subject) on the back of the head.
—Operating a cordless drill near Subject’s body.
The “subject” in the cable was Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who was later charged in the 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole.
Detainees held in the agency’s “black site” prisons were routinely beaten, deprived of sleep and isolated to try to get them to talk using specific acts of torture that were authorized by C.I.A. headquarters as “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Three of the prisoners, including Mr. Nashiri, were waterboarded.
But the tactics described in the 2003 cable were carried out without permission and omitted from reports to headquarters. Alarmed co-workers reported it, triggering investigations that, in time, allowed critics of the program to cast it as out of control, and eventually contributed to its being shut down.
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