More than 22 years after Al Qaeda bombed the usS. Cole and almost 12 years after a prisoner was first charged with plotting the assault, a choose heard ultimate arguments Friday on a basic query within the pretrial section of the case: Can the accused bomber’s confession, after years in C.I.A. custody, be used towards him?
The choose, Col. Lanny J. Acosta Jr., acknowledged that probably related data was nonetheless being given to protection attorneys within the case, however he stated it was time to resolve a key impediment within the lengthy watch for the death-penalty trial of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. Colonel Acosta will retire from the Army in September and has been decided to wrap up a portion of the pretrial section specializing in the legacy of C.I.A. torture.
In closing arguments, he confronted a number of points straight on, together with whether or not what the C.I.A. did to the defendant — waterboarding him, depriving him of sleep, holding him nude in solitary confinement — constituted torture or merciless and inhuman remedy.
“I do not concede that at this time,” replied Edward R. Ryan, a prosecutor from the Justice Department.
By day’s finish, nonetheless, Mr. Ryan acknowledged that the Justice Department had already conceded that what Mr. Nashiri advised interrogators in C.I.A. custody “should be treated as ‘statements obtained by the use of torture or by cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.’”
Nevertheless, Mr. Ryan argued that, as soon as at Guantánamo, Mr. Nashiri voluntarily took half in three days of interrogations by authorities brokers in 2007 — and incriminated himself “about his role in the sneak attack bombing of the U.S.S. Cole that resulted in the death of 17 naval service members.”
Mr. Ryan devoted a lot of his argument to studying from a 34-page account of the interrogation by federal brokers and intercepted communications from the prisoner within the months after he reached Guantánamo Bay that solid him as a boastful and at instances smug prisoner who spoke to his interrogators freely.
To illustrate that Mr. Nashiri understood this, Mr. Ryan quoted from intercepted recommendation Mr. Nashiri gave one other prisoner at Guantánamo that “meeting with these people is not mandatory. Deny everything.”
But reasonably than deny all the pieces, Mr. Ryan stated, the defendant admitted to being “Bilal,” a person who rented a home and moved cash used within the assault by two suicide bombers on the American destroyer in a harbor in Aden, Yemen, on Oct. 12, 2000.
Annie W. Morgan, a protection lawyer, portrayed the Saudi prisoner as a damaged man on the time of his 2007 interrogations. He had already been interrogated 200 instances in C.I.A. custody and had no motive to imagine that “another American in another polo shirt” coming to query him wouldn’t harm him.
“There is nothing voluntary when you assess the totality of the circumstances,” Ms. Morgan stated.
She reminded the choose that Mr. Nashiri’s questioning by totally different interrogators — so-called clear groups — at Guantánamo in 2007 was held in Camp Echo, the identical facility on the U.S. Navy base that had served earlier as a secret C.I.A. jail, a black web site.
Mr. Nashiri was held there in 2003 till he “was kicked out of Guantánamo Bay for behavior issues,” she stated. He was despatched to a different C.I.A. black web site, this one in Europe, as punishment and “was raped,” she stated, referring to the time a C.I.A. worker compelled a respiration tube into his rectum in a discredited medical process. Four months after his return to Guantánamo in September 2006, the F.B.I. carried out the interrogations in Camp Echo, which had been repurposed for navy use.
The choose requested about testimony and information from 2006 and 2007 that portrayed the prisoner on the time as projecting free will, generally belligerent, controlling the tempo of interrogations and conscious of his rights.
Ms. Morgan pointed to the U.S. authorities’s latest disclosure of a secret cache of movies of Mr. Nashiri being forcibly faraway from his cell in 2006 and 2007. “This is someone who has given up,” she stated. Some of the movies had been screened for the choose on Friday in a labeled portion of the closing argument that excluded each the general public and the defendant.
She additionally cited a just lately disclosed C.I.A. “exploitation plan” from 2004 that described Mr. Nashiri as not in a position to have interaction in dialog, struggling to reply sure or no questions and displaying indicators of dyslexia.
A crux of the query confronting the choose is the precept of attenuation, the right way to get an untainted confession after a coerced one. Mr. Ryan stated the “clean team interrogations” at Guantánamo in 2007 met the authorized normal of a change in time, change in place and alter in id of the questioner.
Judge Acosta sounded skeptical. He stated authorized precedents had been primarily based on episodes that didn’t examine to what occurred to Mr. Nashiri within the black websites. At one level, he ticked off this record of his remedy: “The waterboarding, the box, the walling, the slaps, etc., the way in which he was shackled, solitary confinement, no bedding, concrete floor, stripped, shaved.”
After a pause, he added, “sleep deprivation.”
The choose cited testimony from the psychologists who as C.I.A. contractors waterboarded Mr. Nashiri in Thailand in 2002. They had stated their “enhanced interrogation techniques” had been supposed to create a social contract — so long as the prisoners cooperated, they might not return to “the bad times.”
The choose acknowledged this week that prosecutors had been nonetheless discovering and getting ready labeled proof for the case, together with extra movies from Guantánamo that had been being sanitized of sure nationwide safety secrets and techniques earlier than the choose and protection attorneys might see them.
Colonel Acosta had earlier indicated that the three-week listening to that ended Friday can be his final on the case, and that he would challenge rulings on key questions till his retirement.
Source: www.nytimes.com