‘I didn’t know who I was any more’: how CIA torture pushed me to the edge of death

Abu Zubaydah has been held by the US without charge for the past 20 years. His own words and images depict the relentless, round-the-clock, prolonged and illegal abuse he has suffered

Abu Zubaydah, the Guantanamo prisoner who has been held by the US without charge for the past 20 years, kept notes of the torture to which he was subjected by the CIA between his arrest in 2002 and his transfer to Guantanamo four years later. In personal discussions with his attorneys, and in his own writings and drawings from inside Guantanamo, the detainee recalled in harrowing detail the torture techniques applied to him at secret CIA black sites in Thailand, Poland and other countries. In one month alone, August 2002, he was put through the barbaric water torture known as waterboarding 83 times. In his account he referred to the method, a form of controlled drowning, as the water bed".

The notes were first published in How America Tortures by the Center for Policy and Research at Seton Hall Law School where one of Zubaydah's lawyers Mark Denbeaux is professor emeritus. Here is an edited version of that account of the torture Zubaydah endured, in his own words and drawings.