More than seven years ago, a suspected Afghan militant was brought to a dimly lit CIA compound north-east of the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan. The CIA called it the Salt Pit. Inmates knew it as the dark prison. Inside a chilly cell, the man was shackled and left half-naked. He was found dead, exposed to the cold, in the early hours of November 20, 2002.
The Salt Pit death was the only fatality known to have occurred inside the secret prison network the CIA operated abroad after the September 11 attacks. The death had strong repercussions inside the CIA. It helped lead to a review that uncovered abuses in detention and interrogation procedures, and forced the agency to change those procedures.
The CIA's program of waterboarding and other harsh treatment of suspected terrorists has been debated since it ended in 2006. The Salt Pit case stands as a cautionary tale about the unfettered use of such practices. The Obama administration shut the CIA's prisons last year. Little has emerged about the Afghan's death, which the Justice Department is investigating. The Associated Press has learned the dead man's name, as well as new details about his capture in Pakistan and his Afghan imprisonment.
The man was Gul Rahman, a suspected militant captured on October 29, 2002, a US official familiar with the case confirmed. The official said Rahman was taken during an operation against Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin, an insurgent group headed by Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and allied with al Qaida. A reference to Rahman's death also turned up in a recently declassified government document.
This account of the case was assembled from documents and interviews with both militants and officials in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and with more than two dozen current and former US officials. The Americans spoke on condition of anonymity because the details of the case remain classified.
Rahman was arrested with Dr Ghairat Baheer, a physician who is Hekmatyar's son-in-law and a leader of Hezb-e-Islami, an insurgent faction blamed for numerous bombings and violence in Afghanistan.
Baheer, who said he spent six months in the Salt Pit during six years in Afghan prisons, said in an interview in Islamabad that he never learned what happened to Rahman. Rahman's family repeatedly pressed International Red Cross officials about his fate, Baheer said. Rahman had driven from Peshawar, Pakistan, in the north-west frontier to Islamabad for a medical check-up. He was staying with Baheer, an old friend, when US agents and Pakistani security forces stormed the house and took both men, two guards and a cook into custody. After a week, Rahman was separated from the others. ``That was the last time I saw him,' said Baheer, now a member of a Hezb-e-Islami delegation that met this month in Kabul, the Afghan capital, for peace talks with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
Baheer said he was flown to Afghanistan and taken to the Salt Pit, the code name for the abandoned brick factory turned CIA prison. In small, windowless cells, detainees were subjected to harsh treatment and at least one mock execution, according to several former CIA officials.
Baheer said his American interrogators would tie him to a chair and sit on his stomach. They hung him naked, he said, for hours on end. Rahman was violently uncooperative in custody, current and former US officials said. At one point, he threw a latrine bucket at his guards. He also threatened to kill them. His stubborn responses provoked harsher treatment. His hands were shackled over his head, he was roughed up and doused with water, according to several former CIA officials.
The exact circumstances of Rahman's death are not clear, but the Afghan was left in the cold cell on the morning of November 20. He was naked from the waist down, said two former US officials. Within hours, he was dead. CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, sent a team to gather the facts, the current US official said. A CIA medic at the site concluded the Afghan died of hypothermia. A doctor sent later confirmed that judgement. But the detainee's body was never returned to his family, and Baheer said his friend's relatives still don't know what happened to him.
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