New Reports Say The CIA Tortured Suspects Close To The Point Of Death

New reports have come out claiming that after the September 11 attacks on the U.S. World Trade Center, the CIA tortured some Al-Qaeda suspects near to the point of death.

According to The Telegraph, the torture sessions went much further than the water-boarding method that the CIA has already admitted to using. Many of the Al-Qaeda suspects were nearly drowned in water-filled baths, held down under water to get them as close to death as possible before pulling them up for air.

“They weren’t just pouring water over their heads or over a cloth,” a source very close to the events said. “They were holding them under water until the point of death, with a doctor present to make sure they did not go too far. This was real torture.”

The news of these previously unreported torture methods has come to light due to a Torture Report that the United States Senate is preparing to publish. The 3,600-page report on extreme CIA interrogations, based on several million classified CIA documents, will soon be declassified and revealed to the public. The report should be published within a few weeks, but the Senate is still debating how much of the 480-page public summary should stay classified.

This is the most information that has come out about the CIA’s alleged torture sessions. So far, the most the organization has confessed to is water-boarding tactics and the use of black sites, which are secret CIA prisons opened up across the globe during the Bush administration to detain suspected terrorists. According to Express, the black sites were specifically used to detain and question three high-priority Al-Qaeda suspects using a method the CIA called “enhanced interrogation.”

Those three suspects included a man named Mohammed, who allegedly bombed the USS Cole, along with a man named Abd al Rahim al Nashiri and a man named Abu Zubaydah, the suspected senior aide to Osama Bin Laden.

A lawsuit filed in 2009 forced the CIA to reveal that Mohammed was water-boarded 183 times, while Abu Zubaydah was water-boarded 83 times. That may not sound terrible, but much of the report was redacted, leaving a large portion of the interrogation secret from the public. It is suspected that the classified information hides the darkest and most grisly details of the CIA’s torture techniques.

“Given the lengths that Bush-era CIA officials went to cover up the truth,” said Open Society Justice Initiative lawyer Amrit Singh., “including destroying videotapes depicting waterboarding of prisoners, it comes as no surprise that the torture was more brutal than previously revealed.”

Singh was the author of Administration of Torture, a book exposing the torture methods of the Bush administration. Singh says America should not be surprised to hear the new emerging details of the CIA torture.

“It is, however, something that the American public has a right to know about,” she said, “and an obligation to reckon with, and these revelations only underscore the urgent need for release of the Senate intelligence committee report.”

Yahoo News reported that a source said the soon-to-be published Torture Report will “deeply shock” the public with how graphic the CIA’s interrogation methods truly were.