As the Senate prepares to reexamine the CIA’s dark history of torture amid mounting opposition to Gina Haspel’s nomination to run the agency, the family of an Afghan man who was tortured to death at a black site near Kabul, Afghanistan is demanding answers about what happened to his body.
Gul Rahman vanished from a refugee camp in October of 2002 and was taken to a secret CIA prison called “the Salt Pit,” where he was “beaten, doused with cold water, and left shackled in a cold cell, naked from the waist down.” He was found dead in his cell on November 20, 2002.
While internal investigations “recorded that the CIA ordered a freezer to preserve the body for an autopsy, and summarized an autopsy report that listed the likely cause of death as hypothermia,” the Guardian notes that “no records relating to the disposition of Rahman’s remains have been released.”
In 2015, his nephew sued the pair of psychologists who were hired to design the CIA’s torture program. The lawsuit led to a settlement that acknowledged “Gul Rahman was subjected to abuses in the CIA program that resulted in his death and pain and suffering to his family,” but pleas that the government “at least present the dead body to us” have gone unfulfilled.
Now, Rahman’s family, with help from the ACLU, has sent a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the U.S. government in hopes of finding out what happened to his remains.
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