Abu Zubaydah Drawings: ProPublica, Seton Hall, and Court Battles

The Abu Zubaydah drawings are a set of dozens of images the Guantánamo detainee Abu Zubaydah made from memory in his cell, depicting the torture he endured during four years in secret CIA custody. Created between roughly 2018 and 2023 and released in stages through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit and two Seton Hall University law school reports, they are the most detailed first-person visual record of the CIA’s post-9/11 interrogation program, and they exist in part because the CIA destroyed the 92 videotapes that once documented his interrogations.¹²

Who Drew Them

Abu Zubaydah, born Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn on March 12, 1971, is a stateless Palestinian captured in Faisalabad, Pakistan, on March 28, 2002.³⁴⁵

He was the first prisoner in the CIA’s post-9/11 detention program and the first person subjected to what the agency called “enhanced interrogation techniques.”⁴³⁶

The CIA Inspector General later found he was waterboarded at least 83 times in August 2002 alone, exceeding the limits in the Justice Department’s authorization. The Senate Intelligence Committee report described sessions producing convulsions and vomiting, and one point at which he became “completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth.”³⁷ The Senate committee’s 2014 summary concluded that the torture of Abu Zubaydah and other detainees “failed to elicit any new intelligence.”¹

What the Drawings Show

Across the different sets, Abu Zubaydah depicts himself undergoing specific techniques the CIA used on him, most of them at the black site in Thailand in August 2002. Recurring scenes include:

Waterboarding, with him strapped nude to a gurney or, in one version, sealed inside a coffin-sized box filled with water.
“Walling” — being slammed against a wall by a collar, sometimes with a towel or duct tape as improvised padding, at times shown with a red towel highlighted against neutral tones.
Stress positions, with wrists cuffed to high bars that force the body onto tiptoes.
Confinement in large and small wooden boxes, one coffin-like.
Forced nudity, the presence of female interrogators while he was naked, and threats of sodomy.
Threats to desecrate the Qur’an and references to vats of bodily fluids.
Being forced to listen to power drills used on other detainees while being told the same would happen to him.
Force-feeding, shown as a restrained man with a tube inserted through the nose.
What he calls “the Vortex” — a continuous cycle of hitting, cold exposure, sleep deprivation, and stress positions applied without break for days or weeks.

He also draws himself with a patch over his left eye and black-clad paramilitary guards outside his cell.⁸⁹¹

How the Drawings Became Public

The 2018 ProPublica Release

Eight drawings were released by the CIA to ProPublica in 2018, in a partial response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic at Yale Law School. ProPublica published them on May 30, 2018, alongside excerpts from accounts Abu Zubaydah had given his lawyers and entries from personal diaries he kept before his 2002 capture.⁸ These earlier images are more abstract and symbolic than his later work, rendered in harsher black and white with recurring motifs of hourglasses and scorpions that stand in for the experience of indefinite confinement.¹⁰

The 2019 Seton Hall Report

In December 2019, Professor Mark Denbeaux and students at Seton Hall University School of Law’s Center for Policy and Research published a 61-page report titled “How America Tortures,” which included eight new drawings Abu Zubaydah had made at Guantánamo that year. Denbeaux had asked him to illustrate what had been done to him. The drawings were submitted and cleared as “legal material” rather than “artwork,” a distinction that mattered because the U.S. military had declared in 2017 that all prisoner-created art was government property.⁹ These drawings are more naturalistic, rendered in beige and blue with deliberate color used to highlight torture implements such as the red walling towel and blue restraint belts.¹⁰

The 2023 Report: 40 Drawings

In May 2023, the same Seton Hall center published a much larger report, “American Torturers: FBI and CIA Abuses at Dark Sites and Guantanamo,” containing 40 drawings by Abu Zubaydah, each annotated in his own words. The set covers the full arc of his treatment from 2002 through 2006 and at Guantánamo itself, and documents physical violence along with sexual, religious, and psychological abuse.¹¹¹ Denbeaux called them “the ultimate repudiation of the failure and abuses of torture” and said, “In short, the government has done almost everything it can to suppress what these drawings all too explicitly reveal.”

Why the Drawings Are the Record

During Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation at the black site in Thailand, the CIA produced 92 videotapes documenting the sessions, including the waterboarding. On November 8, 2005, Jose Rodriguez, then head of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, ordered the tapes destroyed, despite existing court orders requiring their preservation and congressional requests not to destroy them.¹²¹³¹⁴¹⁵ Denbeaux has framed the drawings as filling the evidentiary gap the destruction left behind.²

The Pentagon’s Ownership Rule and Public Exhibitions

In 2017, the Pentagon declared that all art produced by Guantánamo detainees was U.S. government property and suspended outgoing transfers of artwork, a policy triggered by the public exhibition “Ode to the Sea” at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. Lawyers for detainees challenged the ban as a violation of the Visual Artists Rights Act, and in November 2022 UN Special Rapporteurs told Secretary of State Antony Blinken that the ban contravened rights to free artistic expression. The Pentagon has since partially reversed course, allowing departing prisoners to take their art with them while maintaining that the works remain government property.¹⁶

Abu Zubaydah’s drawings have been shown publicly. A traveling exhibition, “Art & Justice: Abu Zubaydah,” produced by Human Rights in Practice and Human Rights in the Picture, premiered in The Hague in December 2024.¹⁷ In May 2026 it opened at the London School of Economics, where original drawings were displayed in glass cases alongside legal judgments in his favor, organized by his lawyer Helen Duffy with LSE Law School and partner organizations.¹⁸

Scholar Michelle C. Velasquez-Potts, writing in Art Journal Open in 2021, analyzed the drawings as both evidence and artistic work, describing a “visual grammar” close to that of graphic novels, with lines radiating from figures to indicate sound or impact and strategic color used to isolate torture implements. She proposed “listening” to the images, attending to the sounds of pain and the temporal experience of confinement embedded in recurring motifs like the hourglass, and connected them to the political cartoons of Palestinian artist Naji al-Ali as part of a broader tradition of the “will to record” under captivity.¹⁰

The Drawings in Court

The drawings exist in a legal environment where Abu Zubaydah has been almost entirely blocked from establishing an evidentiary record in U.S. courts. In United States v. Husayn (Abu Zubaydah), decided March 3, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 7–2 that the state secrets privilege blocked his discovery request under 28 U.S.C. § 1782 for information from former CIA contractors James Mitchell and John Jessen, which he sought to support a criminal complaint in Poland. Justice Stephen Breyer, writing for the majority, reasoned that confirming the existence of the CIA facility in Poland, even though it was widely known unofficially, would jeopardize classified relationships with foreign intelligence services. Justice Neil Gorsuch, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, dissented.¹⁹²⁰

European courts have gone the other way. On July 24, 2014, the European Court of Human Rights ruled in Husayn (Abu Zubaydah) v. Poland that Poland had violated the European Convention on Human Rights by hosting the CIA black site where he was held, ordering €100,000 in damages and €30,000 in costs.²¹ On May 31, 2018, the same court ruled in Abu Zubaydah v. Lithuania that Lithuania knew of and “acquiesced in and consented to” the CIA’s activities at what the Court called “Detention Site Violet,” finding violations of Article 3, though it categorized the conduct there as “inhuman treatment” rather than torture given the absence of evidence that techniques like waterboarding were used at that specific site.²²

His own civil suit against Mitchell and Jessen, brought under the Alien Tort Statute, was rejected in June 2025 by a Ninth Circuit panel that held the Military Commissions Act strips federal courts of jurisdiction over such claims and that the term “agent” in the statute extends to government contractors, granting them immunity. The two psychologists were paid more than $80 million by the CIA between 2002 and 2009.²³

Where He Is Now

Abu Zubaydah has never been charged. He is one of the last three “forever prisoners” at Guantánamo Bay, meaning he is neither facing charges nor cleared for release. After Periodic Review Board hearings in 2016, 2020, and 2021, the board issued a determination in August 2023 that he “remained a significant threat” but, according to his counsel, cited no reasons. His 2016 hearing was marked by procedural problems: counsel was denied an adjournment after a family emergency, he was represented by a military officer unfamiliar with his case, and he was not permitted to speak.²⁴ In January 2025, UN independent human rights experts called for his immediate release and a presidential pardon, relocation to a safe third country, and an enforceable right to compensation, noting serious health conditions related to injuries sustained during torture and that his communications with lawyers have been “seriously impeded.”²⁵ As of January 2026, he remains at Guantánamo, one of 15 detainees still held there.⁶

1
The Guardian. Abu Zubaydah Drawings Guantanamo Bay US Torture Policy
2
Democracy Now. Guantanamo Denbeaux Kiriakou
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The Rendition Project. Abu Zubaydah
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The New York Times. Abu Zubaydah Guantanamo Court Cases
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Amnesty International. Guantanamo Case Profiles
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Center for Constitutional Rights. Faces of Guantanamo, January 2026
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U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Report
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ProPublica. Pictures From an Interrogation: Drawings by Abu Zubaydah
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The New York Times. CIA Torture Drawings
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Art Journal Open. The Aesthetics of Torture: Listening to Abu Zubaydah’s Interrogation Drawings
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Seton Hall University. Law School’s Center Releases Report on US Torture
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ACLU. Twisted Logic and New Book: CIA Spy Who Destroyed Torture Tapes
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Brennan Center for Justice. Torture Tapes: Failure at All Levels
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U.S. Department of Justice. Statement of Attorney General Eric Holder on Closure of Investigation
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BBC. CIA Tapes Investigation
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Artnet News. Art Guantanamo Bay Detainees
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Human Rights in the Picture. Art and Justice: Abu Zubaydah
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Close Guantanamo. The Torture Drawings of Abu Zubaydah, Guantanamo’s Forever Prisoner
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Supreme Court of the United States. United States v. Husayn, No. 20-827
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SCOTUSblog. United States v. Abu Zubaydah
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Strasbourg Observers. Landmark European Court Decision on CIA Torture
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Strasbourg Observers. The Cases of Al-Nashiri v. Romania and Abu Zubaydah v. Lithuania
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Courthouse News Service. Ninth Circuit Won’t Let Guantanamo Detainee Recoup Damages From CIA Torture Program Designers
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UCLA Promise Institute. Abu Zubaydah UNHRC Submission
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United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Experts Call for Release of Guantanamo Bay Detainee Abu Zubaydah