I am going to share part of a page from Jane Mayer’s book “The Dark Side”. In page 65 of this book she is outlining the treatment of individuals that have been called high value detainees.

But a closely held investigative report written by the International Committee for the Red Cross for the detaining authority, the CIA, which shared it with the President and the Secretary of State, in 2007 described the treatment regime that he underwent, categorically as (p.164)  “torture” and warned that the abuse constituted war crimes, placing the highest officials in the U.S. government in jeopardy of being prosecuted, sources familiar with the report said…. Abu Zabayda described being kept for prolonged spans of time in a cage that he called “a tiny coffin.” The credibility of his account is account is impossible to gauge. He clearly had political and self-serving reasons to exaggerate his mistreatment, and U.S. officials repeatedly stressed that Al Qaeda members were trained to invent accusations of torture. But interestingly, both the timetable he supplied and the euphemisms for torture he described dovetail with the legal maneuvering taking place at the same time in Washington. Additionally, the details of the Program, as described by the detainees, not only are consistent with each other’s accounts, despite the fact that they had no occasion to compare notes, they also echo uncannily, the ostensible mock torture of the SERE program. (Zubayda’s description of coffin) – it was too small for him to stand or stretch out, so small he said he had to double up his limbs in a fetal position. Because of his recently healed injuries, he described this position as particularly agonizing, since it caused his wound to reopen. He described the box as black, both inside and out, and said that it was covered with towels, which he thought was an effort to constrict the flow of air inside… Article 21 of the Geneva Convention (p. 165) -which applies to all prisoners of war- specifically prohibits such forms of cruelty, which are classified as “close confinement”  -CIA source confirmed this…Accurately or not, Bush admin officials later described abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guanta’namo as the unauthorized actions of a few ill-trained personnel. By contrast, CIA officials have never denied that the treatment of the high-value detainees was expressly approved by President Bush. The program was closely monitored by CIA lawyers (p. 166)

The idea that an individual would be put in a tiny coffin box is wild. This has impacted how other countries have viewed the United States. The idea of the United States violating the Geneva Convention is something that people should be made aware of.

Zubayda claimed to have been waterboarded 83 times in one month

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/29/abu-zubaydah-cia-torture-waterboarding-guantanamo