In late 2006, in an effort to show the web page on a legacy of state-sponsored torture, prosecutors for the George W. Bush administration started an experiment at Guantánamo Bay. They arrange groups of legislation enforcement officers to attempt to acquire voluntary confessions from males who had spent years in brutal circumstances in remoted C.I.A. prisons.
A army choose declared that experiment a failure, a minimum of in a single case.
In a wide-ranging ruling, Col. Lanny J. Acosta Jr. threw out a confession that federal brokers at Guantánamo Bay obtained in 2007 from a Saudi prisoner who’s accused of plotting the suicide bombing of the usS. Cole on Oct. 12, 2000. The assault, within the port of Aden, Yemen, killed 17 U.S. sailors.
The brokers testified that they have been courteous and pleasant to the prisoner, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, and made clear to him that his participation in interrogations in January and February of 2007 was voluntary.
But Mr. Nashiri, who was arrested in 2002, had spent 4 years in secret C.I.A. prisons, the place interrogators used violence, threats and punishment to get him to speak. The choose wrote on Aug. 18 that “any resistance the accused might have been inclined to put up when asked to incriminate himself was intentionally and literally beaten out of him years before.”
In different phrases, Colonel Acosta discovered that the “clean team” interrogations at Guantánamo, as they have been known as, couldn’t undo the harm of C.I.A. torture and years of conditioning to compel prisoners to reply questions on demand.
The 50-page ruling is the primary main choice, primarily based on proof offered in pretrial hearings, concerning the admissibility of interrogations by federal brokers who have been supposed to construct contemporary circumstances in opposition to males who had spent years in secret C.I.A. prisons referred to as black websites.
Although the ruling doesn’t set a precedent and prosecutors are already interesting it, the choice has shaken a basis on which prosecutors constructed their circumstances in opposition to males accused of plotting Al Qaeda assaults.
Its impression has but to be seen on the court docket’s better-known case accusing 5 prisoners of conspiring within the Sept. 11, 2001, assaults. Both are demise penalty circumstances, and protection legal professionals within the Sept. 11 case are equally calling witnesses to argue that confessions have been tainted by C.I.A. torture. But one other army choose is presiding in that matter and isn’t sure by the Cole choice.
But Jeffrey D. Groharing, a veteran prosecutor in Sept. 11 pretrial proceedings, has known as the defendants’ confessions at Guantánamo Bay “the most critical evidence in this case.”
Next month, prosecutors in that case plan to name on the testimony of Frank Pellegrino, a retired F.B.I. agent. As a member of a “clean team” in 2007, he listened as Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the person accused of being the mastermind of the Sept. 11 assaults, described his function. The authorities argues that Mr. Mohammed voluntarily incriminated himself in his fourth month at Guantánamo Bay, almost 4 years after he was taken into U.S. custody.
By then, C.I.A. interrogators had waterboarded Mr. Mohammed 183 instances. He had additionally been saved in chains, left nude, disadvantaged of sleep and remoted — lots of the identical methods that have been first used on Mr. Nashiri. Both males have been threatened with return to “the hard times” if they didn’t cooperate with their captors within the black websites below the rendition, detention and interrogation program.
Colonel Acosta’s ruling “drives home that it is actually not possible to sanitize cases against people who were in the R.D.I. program,” mentioned Stephen I. Vladeck, a professor on the University of Texas School of Law who has studied the conflict court docket. “It is not as if this decision conclusively settles this question for every case. But both in its reasoning and in its symbolism I think it’s going to be a de facto precedent.”
Many of the problems are the identical. Like Mr. Nashiri, two of the lads accused of conspiring with Mr. Mohammed within the Sept. 11 assaults have been held incommunicado by the C.I.A. at Camp Echo in Guantánamo in 2003 and 2004 — the identical jail compound the place federal brokers received defendants to admit in 2007.
U.S. army docs have recognized Mr. Nashiri with post-traumatic stress dysfunction, for which, Colonel Acosta famous, he has apparently by no means been handled. Next month, the choose within the Sept. 11 case is anticipated to listen to from medical specialists on why they just lately discovered one of many accused Sept. 11 plotters, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, not competent sufficient to be tried or plead responsible.
In his choice suppressing Mr. Nashiri’s confession, the choose cited the forensic psychiatrist Michael Welner, who had testified as a authorities skilled.
Dr. Welner had argued that, primarily based on his interpretation of jail paperwork and transcripts, Mr. Nashiri freely selected to admit. But the choose rejected that opinion, citing testimony from Dr. Welner wherein he had additionally mentioned that if somebody had a alternative between compliance and “extreme pain or suffering, then that’s not a real choice.”
Dr. Welner can be a authorities paid skilled on the problem of Mr. bin al-Shibh’s sanity.
“Since the early 20th century, medical knowledge has concluded that there is no medical reason to conduct so-called ‘rectal feeding,’” Colonel Acosta wrote. “Although fluids can be absorbed through the rectum in emergencies, food or nutrition cannot.”
The case isn’t over. The choose has authorized different proof prosecutors wish to use at his trial, together with rumour testimony, to be delivered by federal brokers, that individuals in Yemen noticed Mr. Nashiri close to the port of Aden two months earlier than bombers blew up the Cole.
Colonel Acosta additionally allowed prosecutors to current what Mr. Nashiri advised a army panel at Guantánamo later in 2007. At a standing listening to, he admitted to figuring out Osama bin Laden and receiving cash from him for an unrealized delivery business challenge within the Persian Gulf, however he denied being a member of Al Qaeda and recanted earlier confessions, which he mentioned have been to cease his torture.
Yet to be seen is whether or not prosecutors, as they’ve within the Sept. 11 case, suggest that Mr. Nashiri plead responsible to sure crimes in change for a life sentence, slightly than the potential of execution.
Colonel Acosta retires from the Army subsequent month after 25 years of service. A brand new choose, Lt. Col. Terrance J. Reese of the Marines, was appointed to navigate the 12-year-old case to trial.
Source: www.nytimes.com