Revealed: first picture of war on terror detainee in CIA black site

In this exclusive report for The Guardian, I am able to reveal the public’s first look at picture of a War on Terror detainee–Ammar al-Baluchi, in this case–in a CIA black site.

The man is very slight of build, his hair shorn but his beard full. He is naked except for the handcuffs shackling his wrists in a clinically bright room.

This photo is the first published image of a “war on terror” detainee in a CIA black site. The man staring at the camera is Ammar al-Baluchi, one of five men at Guantánamo Bay accused by the US government of plotting the 9/11 attacks. (On Wednesday, the Pentagon announced that three of the five men, but not Baluchi, had agreed to plead guilty to all charges and would avoid possible death sentences.) Baluchi was first arrested in Karachi, Pakistan, in April 2003 and then secretly shuffled between five black sites from May 2003 to September 2006. Since then, he has been held at Guantánamo, though he has not been convicted of a crime.

This photograph, shared with the Guardian by Baluchi’s lawyers, is believed to be from early 2004, when he was 26 years old, and was probably taken at the CIA’s black site in Bucharest, Romania, known in US government communications both as Location No 7 and by the color-coded name of Detention Site Black. In the picture, Baluchi, whose story formed the basis for a character in the film Zero Dark Thirty, is probably being readied for transit to another black site. The black bar visible across his midsection has been added by his attorneys to preserve Baluchi’s dignity.

Between 2002 and 2008, at least 119 Muslim men were hidden, housed, and interrogated at these secret CIA prisons around the world, with 39 of them subjected to what the Bush administration euphemistically labeled “enhanced interrogation techniques”. In 2014, the US government admitted these practices constituted torture, when Barack Obama stated: “We tortured some folks.” No one at the CIA has ever been held accountable for the torture.

The CIA took some 14,000 photographs of their black sites and the detainees in their custody. The very existence of those photographs was hidden from the public until 2015, and the photos mostly remain classified. But defense attorneys representing Guantánamo detainees have been litigating the military court’s draconian classification system for years, which has gradually resulted in the release of more formerly classified material, including this photograph.

Read the rest (and see the full photo) here.