By Jeffrey St. Clair

This article originally appeared in Counterpunch on October 6, 2023. It is reprinted here with permission. Read the original at https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/10/06/the-mind-breakers-the-case-of-ramzi-bin-al-shibh/

On the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Pakistani ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) forces raided several houses in Karachi, hunting for suspected members of Al Qaeda. In one of the incursions, the Pakistanis captured a young Yemeni man named Ramzi bin Al-Shibh. Three days later, the Pakistanis turned Bin al-Shibh and Hassan bin Attash, a 17-year-old Saudi, over to the CIA, who renditioned the pair into what was known as the Dark Prison outside Kabul, where, according to an account Bin al-Shibh later gave to the International Red Cross, he was stripped of his clothes, denied food and water and kept shackled from the ceiling in a painful position for the next three days while loud music was blasted into his cell.

This was just the opening act in the prolonged torture of Ramzi Bin al-Shibh that took him to torture chambers in at least seven different countries in four years– Afghanistan, Jordan, Morocco, Poland, Gitmo, Romania, and Lithuania–and left Bin al-Shibh a broken man, psychologically shattered and physically depleted.

After four days in …

Buddha of the Blues

by Jeffrey St. Clair, CounterPunch

In the summer of 1998, Alexander Cockburn and I spent a few days in North Richmond, California, a battered industrial city just outside of Berkeley. We had just published our book Whiteout on the CIA and drug trafficking and had been …