Mohamad Farik Amin

Mohammed Farik Bin Amin (born February 16, 1975), alias Zubair Zaid, is a Malaysian who is alleged to be a senior member of Jemaah Islamiyah and al Qaeda.

He is currently in American custody in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.

He is one of the 14 detainees who had previously been held for years at CIA black sites.

In the ODNI biographies of those 14, Amin is described as a direct subordinate of Hambali.

Farik Amin is also a cousin of well-known Malaysian terrorist Zulkifli Abdhir.

According to Time Magazine, Amin, Hambali, and Mohammed Nazir Bin Lep were detained and interrogated on the remote Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, where they confessed to scouting out possible sites for terrorist bombings throughout Thailand.

DETENTION SITE COBALT housed 64 detainees between September 2002 and 2004.

DETENTION SITE COBALT housed 64 detainees between September 2002 and 2004.

The Senate Committee made a number of findings and conclusions regarding the CIA’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” including:

Time also reported that the three were captured together in central Thailand on August 11, 2003.

The ODNI document says that Hambali and Bin Lep were captured together, but only that Amin was captured some time in 2003.

"On June 8, 2003, [Mr. bin Amin, commonly referred to by the Government as “Zubair”] was detained by the government of Thailand. While still in Thai custody, Zubair was questioned about his efforts to obtain fraudulent [redacted] documents . . . Zubair admitted to seeking illegal [redacted] documents on behalf of Hambali."

“After being transferred to CIA custody and rendered to the CIA’s COBALT detention site, [Mr.

bin Amin] was immediately subjected to the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques.” After days of being subjected to these techniques, Mr. bin Amin was again questioned.

Mr. bin Amin “confirmed the same information he previously provided during interrogation by Thai authorities concerning the illegally obtained documents.”

The Government’s treatment of Mr. bin Amin, along with the treatment of other detainees, is detailed to a small degree in the Report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program.

(Mr. bin Amin is frequently referred to as Abu Zubair throughout the Report.) Specifically, CIA interrogators were authorized to and did subject Mr. bin Amin to “enhanced interrogation techniques,” as well as “standard interrogation techniques.”

Permissible “standard interrogation techniques” authorized by the CIA include, but are not limited to, the following:

The CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” were techniques that “incorporate[d] physical or psychological pressure beyond Standard Techniques.” The CIA identifies “enhanced techniques” as the following:

While in the custody of the United States, Mr. bin Amin was subject to both “standard” and “enhanced” interrogation.

Mr. bin Amin was also subject to treatment that was not authorized.

Specifically, an interrogator put “a broomstick behind the knees of Zubair when Zubair was in a stress position on his knees on the floor.”

From January to August 2003, the CIA's enhanced interrogations were primarily used at DETENTION SITE COBALT and DETENTION SITE BLUE.

CIA employees themselves referred to COBALT as “the dungeon,” and one CIA employee asserted, “COBALT was itself an enhanced interrogation technique.”

At DETENTION SITE COBALT, CIA detainees were subjected to multiple uses of “sleep deprivation, required standing, loud music, sensory deprivation, extended isolation, reduced quantity and quality of food, nudity, and 'rough treatment' of CIA detainees." Detention conditions independent of interrogation left detainees “shackled in complete darkness and isolation, with a bucket for human waste, and without notable heat during the winter months."

Detainees were forced to stand with their arms shackled above their heads for extended periods of time.

At times, detainees were left to urinate and defecate in adult diapers rather than being unshackled to use a waste bucket or latrine.

“At DETENTION SITE COBALT, detainees were often held down, naked, on a tarp on the floor, with the tarp pulled up around them to form a makeshift tub, while cold or refrigerated water was poured on them."

Unauthorized “interrogation techniques” used at DETENTION SITE COBALT included “rectal rehydration” absent evidence of medical necessity, or threats of same; rectal exams conducted with “excessive force”;  and allowing “groups of four or more interrogators.

. . to apply the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques as a group against a single detainee.

In at least two instances, mock executions were used at DETENTION SITE COBALT.

Despite medical complications such as a broken foot (2 detainees), a sprained ankle (1 detainee), and a prosthetic leg (1 detainee), these detainees were shackled “in a standing position for sleep deprivation for extended periods of time.” While Mr. bin Amin was at DETENTION SITE COBALT, “sleep deprivation” for a period of up to 72 hours was considered standard.

Prior to Mr. bin Amin’s arrival at DETENTION SITE COBALT, another detainee, Gul Rahman, had been killed as a result of coercive interrogation and harsh conditions of confinement employed by the CIA.

Those involved in the death “remained key figures in the CIA interrogation program and received no reprimand or sanction for Rahman’s death.”

The Committee found “a CIA photograph of a waterboard at DETENTION SITE COBALT.

While there are no records of the CIA using the waterboard at COBALT, the waterboard device in the photograph is surrounded by buckets, with a bottle of unknown pink solution (filled two thirds of the way to the top) and a watering can resting on the wooden beams of the waterboard.”  The CIA was unable to provide an explanation for this.

The Department of Defense announced on August 9, 2007 that all fourteen of the "high-value detainees" who had been transferred to Guantanamo from the CIA's black sites, had been officially classified as "enemy combatants".

Although judges Peter Brownback and Keith J. Allred had ruled two months earlier that only "illegal enemy combatants" could face military commissions, the Department of Defense waived the qualifier and said that all fourteen men could now face charges before Guantanamo military commissions.

Scholars at the Brookings Institution, led by Benjamin Wittes, listed the captives still held in Guantanamo in December 2008, according to whether their detention was justified by certain

common allegations: