"A pistol, a drill, or a broomstick:" Charlie Wise and the CIA's Legacy of Torture
Torture administered by the former CIA chief of interrogations led a military judge to throw out confessions by a 9/11 suspect
CONTENT WARNING: This post contains graphic descriptions of torture.
Charlie Wise spent less than a year as the chief of interrogations at the CIA from 2002 to 2003, but his legacy of torture—and teaching agency interrogators to torture—lives on.
Carol Rosenberg of the New York Times reports:
The military judge in the USS Cole bombing case on Friday threw out confessions the Saudi defendant had made to federal agents at Guantánamo Bay after years of secret imprisonment by the CIA, declaring the statements the product of torture.
The Saudi defendant, in this case, was Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the alleged mastermind of the 2000 bombing of the Cole that killed 17 US sailors.
“Exclusion of such evidence is not without societal costs,” the judge, Col. Lanny J. Acosta Jr., wrote in his decision. “However, permitting the admission of evidence obtained by or derived from torture by the same government that seeks to prosecute and execute the accused may have even greater societal costs.”
Acosta found that between 2002 and 2006 Nashiri “was subjected by the CIA to physical coercion and abuse amounting to torture as well as living conditions which constituted cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.”
Acosta specifically references the treatment Nashiri received in December 2002 in a black site in Poland at the hands of Wise, aka “NX2” or “the New Sheriff.” Wise is referred to by codenames in Guantanamo because his name is classified along with his dark past in the CIA’s “dirty wars” in Latin America.
Judge Acosta wrote:
“CIA officer NX2, who at times was referred to as ‘the New Sheriff,’ took over the interrogation of the Accused, supervising several interrogators who used a series of unauthorized techniques. They placed the Accused in a standing stress position with his hands above his head for approximately two-and-a-half days. They put a pistol to the Accused’s head and also threatened the Accused with a power drill. They slapped the Accused multiple times on the back of the head and blew cigar smoke in his face. At least one interrogator told the Accused that the Accused’s mother could be brought in and sexually abused while the Accused was forced to watch. The Accused was forcibly washed and scrubbed, including his buttocks and genitals with a stiff boar brush which was then forced into the Accused’s mouth. The Accused reported to Dr. Crosby, a defense expert on torture, that he was sodomized with the brush. Additionally, the Accused was also placed in ‘improvised’ stress positions that caused cuts and bruises.”
Acosta then goes on to describe a stress position Wise placed Nashiri in that will be familiar to readers of my investigation into Wise.
“One of these stress positions involved tying the Accused's elbows together behind his back with a belt and hanging him from them. On at least one occasion, the use of this stress position caused Mitchell to intervene because he believed the Accused's shoulders might become dislocated. Mitchell also witnessed NX2 put a broomstick behind the Accused's knees, force him to kneel, and then lean back, causing him extreme pain. He also saw people lean the Accused's head against the wall and then lean their own bodies on him, putting all the weight onto the Accused's neck. According to Mitchell, NX2 was using some of these unapproved measures not for operational reasons but because the Accused refused to call NX2 sir.”
James Mitchell, the military psychologist who developed and helped run the CIA’s approved “enhanced interrogation” program, testified that Wise and the “newly-minted” interrogators that Wise had trained were hurting Nashiri unnecessarily because the Saudi was cooperating and providing useful answers.
Nashiri “looked like he was in pain,” Mitchell testified. “He was in distress, that’s for sure, and he was in pain.” While Mitchell objected to Wise’s treatment, he also took advantage of it. Mitchell warned Nashiri that he could be subject to more “hard times” if he failed to cooperate.
The judge doesn’t let Mitchell off the hook. Mitchell interrogated Nashiri using approved CIA techniques including the waterboard, the attention grasp, stripping him naked, walling (slamming his back against a plywood wall), and confinement in a box. Judge Acosta describes Mitchell’s treatment of Nashiri as “abusive.”
Wise was fired as chief of interrogations for repeatedly using a broomstick behind the knees of a kneeling prisoner and left the CIA in September 2003. Two weeks later, he died from a heart attack at the age of 53.
Wise was long gone and the “hard times” were a thing of the past when Nashiri gave a confession that is the focus of Acosta’s ruling. He was interviewed in Guantanmo by an FBI agent and an NCIS agent, both of whom spoke Arabic. The agents told Nashiri that he did not have to talk to them. They provided tea and pastries as Nashiri chatted away.
“During the three days of interviews, the Accused directly incriminated himself, providing extensive details regarding his direct role in the conspiracy that culminated in the attack on the USS Cole,” Acosta wrote.
While the judge found that the agents had treated Nashiri with fairness and respect and did not subject him to any form of coercion, it didn’t erase what had happened to Nashiri before.
“He had no reason to doubt that he might, without notice, suddenly be shipped back to a dungeon like the ones he had experienced before,” Acosta wrote. “He had no real reason to know whether NX2 lurked nearby with a pistol, a drill, or a broomstick in hand in the event he chose to remain silent or offer versions of events that differed from what he told his prior interrogators.”
“Even if the 2007 statements were not obtained by torture or cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment, they were derived from it,” the judge wrote. (emphasis in original)
The judge said it was telling that, a few weeks after he was interviewed by the agents, Nashiri recanted his statements in military court. He denied having anything to do with the Cole bombing and denied being a member of al Qaida. Acosta found this to be significant because, in court, Nashiri understood that he had rights, including the right not to incriminate himself.
Torture taints everything. To borrow a legal metaphor, Nashiri’s confession was the fruit of the poisoned tree. Until the cloud of secrecy that surrounds Wise is lifted and exposed, his legacy of torture will continue to haunt the CIA.