CIA Photographs Captives Naked!

Local Editor

The CIA took naked photographs of people it sent to its foreign partners for torture, the Guardian can reveal. A former US official who had seen some of the photographs described them as "very gruesome".

The naked imagery of CIA captives raises new questions about the seeming willingness of the US to abuse captives in its post-9/11 captivity of "terrorism" suspects. Some human rights campaigners described the act of naked photography on unwilling detainees as a potential war crime.

Unlike video evidence of CIA torture at its undocumented "black site" prisons that were destroyed in 2005 by a senior official, the CIA is said to retain the photographs.

In some of the photos, which remain classified, CIA captives are blindfolded, bound and show visible bruises. Some photographs also show people believed to be CIA officials or contractors alongside the naked detainees.

It is not publicly known how many people, overwhelmingly but not exclusively men, were caught in the CIA's web of so-called "extraordinary renditions", extra-judicial transfers of detainees to foreign countries, many of which practiced even more brutal forms of torture than the US came to adopt. Human rights groups over the years have identified at least 50 people the CIA rendered, going back to Bill Clinton's presidency.

It is also unclear how many of those rendition targets the CIA photographed naked.

The rationale for the naked photography, described by knowledgeable sources, was to insulate the CIA from legal or political ramifications stemming from their brutal treatment in the hands of its partner intelligence agencies.

Stripping the victims of clothing was considered necessary to document their physical condition while in CIA custody, distinguishing them at that point from what they would subsequently experience in foreign custody - despite the public diplomatic assurances against torture that the US demonstrably collected from countries with a record of torturing detainees.

Relatively, international human rights law, to include the Geneva conventions, forbids photographing prisoners except in extremely limited circumstances related to their detention, to include anything that might compromise their dignity.

"Any evidence that the CIA or any other US government agency intentionally photographed naked detainees should be investigated by law enforcement as a potential violation of domestic and international law," said Nathaniel Raymond, a researcher at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and an expert on detainee abuse.

The CIA is known to have employed nudity in other aspects of its custody of terrorism suspects, however, the agency declined to comment for this story.

Source: The Guardian, Edited by website team