Maine Owl

Scrubbing torture from the Gitmo trials

It's not working.

The Ongoing Collapse of the Gitmo Military Commissions
Betrayals, Backsliding and Boycotts
By ANDY WORTHINGTON

Anyone who has kept half an eye on the proceedings at the Military Commissions in Guantánamo -- the unique system of trials for "terror suspects" that was conceived in the wake of the 9/11 attacks by Vice President Dick Cheney and his close advisers -- will be aware that their progress has been faltering at best. After six and a half years, in which they have been ruled illegal by the Supreme Court, derailed by their own military judges, relentlessly savaged by their own military defense lawyers, and condemned as politically motivated by their own former chief prosecutor, they have only secured one contentious result: a plea bargain negotiated by the Australian David Hicks, who admitted to providing "material support for terrorism," and dropped his well-chronicled claims of torture and abuse by US forces, in order to secure his return to Australia to serve out the remainder of a meager nine-month sentence last March. ...

In the world of the Military Commissions, al-Qahtani's case was damaging for two specific reasons: firstly, because, although the other five men were tortured in CIA custody -- and the CIA has publicly acknowledged that KSM was subjected to the torture technique known as waterboarding (a horrendous form of controlled drowning) -- he and the others have been reinterrogated by "clean teams" of FBI agents, who have solicited confessions without resorting to torture, whereas al-Qahtani, according to his lawyers, has not.

Leaving aside for a moment the implausibility of somehow "purifying" confessions obtained through torture by using "clean teams" -- and what it reveals, unintentionally, about the "dirty teams" whose activities are purportedly being airbrushed from history -- the second reason for dropping charges against al-Qahtani only reinforces the legal netherworld in which the Commissions operate. According to their rules, the records of al-Qahtani’s interrogations, which took place in Guantánamo, could be produced as evidence of torture, whereas those of the "high-value detainees," interrogated by CIA teams in secret overseas prisons, can be overlooked, because, as Time put it, "Military courts overseeing Guantánamo have indicated they cannot compel evidence from US intelligence agencies."

Worthington is an essential writer on the Terror War trials, the tortuous path of which is very fully chronicled at his site, HERE.