The sketches should be seen only by adults, but they must be seen. Drawn by a victim of torture, they show, in raw and agonizing detail, the methods that Americans — soldiers, psychologists, spies, women and men — have devised to break down prisoners through pain, panic, brainwashing and other barbaric and illegal tools.

There is nothing in the crude drawings by Abu Zubaydah, a prisoner captured in 2002 and still held by the United States in the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, that hasn’t been described before in the various official and unofficial investigations into the moral travesty that was the C.I.A.’s program of “enhanced interrogation,” one of the more devious euphemisms ever devised. We’ve read of the waterboarding and sleep deprivation and humiliation and all the other horrors, and of the lasting effect they had, often on innocent men.

But as with the infamous photographs of prisoner abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the images strip away the euphemisms, justifications, lies and legalisms. They are published in a study titled “How America Tortures” by one of his lawyers and the lawyer’s students. Mr. Zubaydah was the first of the captives after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to be subjected to prolonged torture, and he holds the dubious distinction of having been waterboarded 83 times. Many of the C.I.A. tortures were devised for him and first tested on him by psychologists whose previous job had been to train American soldiers who might one day be tortured. He provided interrogators with considerable information — but that was to F.B.I. agents who questioned him before he was turned over to the C.I.A. for torture.

The drawings speak for themselves. They are in a Times article and the report by Mark P. Denbeaux, a professor at the Seton Hall University School of Law and a lawyer for several Guantánamo detainees, including Mr. Zubaydah. What is important not to forget is the deeply shameful and disturbing fact that the United States, admittedly at a moment of national confusion and panic following the 9/11 attacks, but unnecessarily, secretly and extensively, adopted barbaric practices banned by domestic and international law.