In late 2006, in an effort to turn the page on a legacy of state-sponsored torture, prosecutors for the George W. Bush administration began an experiment at Guantánamo Bay. They set up teams of law enforcement officers to try to obtain voluntary confessions from men who had spent years in brutal conditions in isolated C.I.A. prisons.
A military judge declared that experiment a failure, at least in one case.
In a wide-ranging ruling, Col. Lanny J. Acosta Jr. threw out a confession that federal agents at Guantánamo Bay obtained in 2007 from a Saudi prisoner who is accused of plotting the suicide bombing of the U.S.S. Cole on Oct. 12, 2000. The attack, in the port of Aden, Yemen, killed 17 U.S. sailors.
The agents testified that they were courteous and friendly 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 four years in secret C.I.A. prisons, where interrogators used violence, threats and punishment to get him to talk. The judge 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 other words, Colonel Acosta found that the “clean team” interrogations at Guantánamo, as they were called, could not undo the damage of C.I.A. torture and years of conditioning to compel prisoners to answer questions on demand.
The 50-page ruling is the first major decision, based on evidence presented in pretrial hearings, about the admissibility of interrogations by federal agents who were supposed to build fresh cases against men who had spent years in secret C.I.A. prisons known as black sites.
Although the ruling does not set a precedent and prosecutors are already appealing it, the decision has shaken a foundation on which prosecutors built their cases against men accused of plotting Al Qaeda attacks.
Its impact has yet to be seen on the court’s better-known case accusing five prisoners of conspiring in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Both are death penalty cases, and defense lawyers in the Sept. 11 case are similarly calling witnesses to argue that confessions were tainted by C.I.A. torture. But another military judge is presiding in that matter and is not bound by the Cole decision.
But Jeffrey D. Groharing, a veteran prosecutor in Sept. 11 pretrial proceedings, has called the defendants’ confessions at Guantánamo Bay “the most critical evidence in this case.”
Next month, prosecutors in that case plan to call 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 man accused of being the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, described his role. The government argues that Mr. Mohammed voluntarily incriminated himself in his fourth month at Guantánamo Bay, nearly four years…
2023-08-26 07:48:04
Article from www.nytimes.com
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