Prisoner’s Self-Portraits of C.I.A. Torture Surface From Sealed Court Record

Alone in his cell with only dark thoughts of desperate times, the prisoner put pencil to paper and drew detailed portraits of how American agents tortured him 20 years ago.

Some of it was self-administered therapy of sorts for the prisoner, a Malaysian man named Mohammed Farik Bin Amin. The United States held him for years in solitary confinement, starting in 2003 in a dungeonlike prison run by the C.I.A. in Afghanistan. The Guantánamo prison does not offer specific treatment for people who have been tortured.

Some of it was homework assigned by his lawyer, Christine Funk, who negotiated the plea deal that sent him home on Wednesday. Ms. Funk had asked Mr. Bin Amin to draw what happened to him, rather than find a way to discuss it.

“This is what his nightmares are all about,” Ms. Funk said. “This is what he lives with.”

Mr. Bin Amin’s lawyers showed his artwork to a military jury at his sentencing trial in January. He had pleaded guilty to war crimes and spoke of his remorse for helping a Southeast Asian extremist group called Jemaah Islamiyah, which carried out the 2002 bombings in Bali, Indonesia, that killed 202 people. Mr. Bin Amin admitted to being an accessory to the attack, after the fact, by helping the main defendant elude capture.

Ms. Funk has been defending violent criminals since 1994 and has devoted years of her career to the interplay between forensic science and the law. So the idea of offering a forensic look at Mr. Bin Amin’s brutal treatment appealed to her as she was preparing for trial.

Mr. Bin Amin started his sketches about five years ago, and his legal team worked to get them declassified. Then on Jan. 25, without objection from government prosecutors, Ms. Funk showed them on an enormous screen above the witness stand, for both the public and his jury to see.