BANGKOK, Thailand _ In February 2015, security forces in southern Thailand hauled in a 26-year-old Muslim man and demanded he confess to participating in a violent separatist insurgency. Officers tied him to a chair, covered his face with a shirt and poured water into his mouth until he choked.
It was one of dozens of torture cases documented by human rights groups in which Thais have been subjected to mock executions, held in painful "stress positions," deprived of sleep or waterboarded.
The methods were introduced here in 2002 _ by the CIA.
Thailand was home to the agency's first secret prison, or "black site," after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. There, American officers repeatedly waterboarded at least two high-profile detainees, part of the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques that much of the world would later describe as torture.
In all, 10 CIA prisoners were arrested or held on Thai soil before being transferred without due process to the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba or to other countries, according to a 2013 report by the Open Society Justice Initiative, which has studied the detention program.
That dark chapter in CIA history has reemerged with President Donald Trump's nomination of a new director, Gina Haspel, a career undercover officer who oversaw the Thai black site in late 2002. At her confirmation hearing, which is scheduled for May 9, Haspel will face sharp questions from senators who argue that the tactics failed to extract useful intelligence and damaged U.S. standing in the world.
But in Thailand, collaboration with the CIA ushered in an era of impunity for security forces, according to rights advocates, who accuse the army and police of adopting the agency's most extreme methods to punish Muslim separatists and other dissidents.
"The legacy of the CIA secret prison is a daily reality in Thailand today," said Sunai Phasuk, a Bangkok-based researcher with Human Rights Watch.
"Every week we have a new case of torture, and the tactics are very similar to what we learned about what the CIA did. These are seen as effective tools. We had never heard of waterboarding before _ it was only after 2004 or 2005 that it's been used here."
