[Ppnews] Another Torture Victim Gets Charged

[Political Prisoner News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/worthington07032008.html
July 3, 2008

Gitmo Trials


Another Torture Victim Gets Charged

By ANDY WORTHINGTON

The wheels of injustice grind so slowly at 
Guantánamo that it’s probably a coincidence that 
charges were announced against another alleged 
terrorist just hours after the details were 
revealed of how comprehensively the government 
had been ridiculed for its “War on Terror” 
detention policy in the Court of Appeals in 
Washington. The public barely had time to 
register that, in 
<http://www.counterpunch.org/worthington07012008.html>throwing 
out the case against the innocent Chinese Muslim 
prisoner Huzaifa Parhat, the largely conservative 
court had compared the government’s evidence to a 
nonsense poem by Lewis Carroll, before the 
charges against Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri 
unexpectedly surfaced to supplant the story in the headlines.

A Saudi who was held in secret CIA custody from 
November 2002, when he was captured in the United 
Arab Emirates, until September 2006, when he was 
transferred to Guantánamo with 13 other 
“high-value detainees,” including Khalid Sheikh 
Mohammed (KSM), al-Nashiri is the 22nd prisoner 
to be put forward for trial by Military 
Commission at Guantánamo, and the seventh of the 
14 “high-value detainees” to be charged.

In the charge sheet, al-Nashiri, who has 
previously been described as al-Qaeda's 
operations chief in the Arabian peninsula, is 
accused of conspiracy, murder in violation of the 
rules of war, using treachery or perfidy, 
destruction of property in violation of the law 
of war, intentionally causing serious bodily 
injury, and terrorism. The charges relate in 
particular to his alleged role in the attacks on 
the USS The Sullivans and the USS Cole in 2000, 
and the French tanker Limburg in 2002. To 
increase the impact the announcement, moreover, 
the Pentagon indicated that it would be seeking 
the death penalty if he is convicted.

The problem with this otherwise seemingly valid 
pursuit of justice against a genuine terrorist is 
that al-Nashiri is one of three prisoners whose 
torture at the hands of CIA operatives has been 
publicly admitted. In February, the CIA’s 
director, Gen. Michael Hayden, 
<http://www.counterpunch.org/worthington02072008.html>told 
Congress that three “high-value detainees” were 
subjected to waterboarding in CIA custody: 
al-Nashiri, KSM 
(<http://www.counterpunch.org/worthington02122008.html>put 
forward for trial in February and 
<http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2008/06/06/in-a-legal-otherworld-911-trial-defendants-cry-torture-at-guantanamo/>arraigned 
last month), and Abu Zubaydah (who has not yet 
been charged, perhaps because of 
<http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2008/04/26/the-insignificance-and-insanity-of-abu-zubaydah-ex-guantanamo-prisoner-confirms-fbis-doubts/>conflicts 
over his significance). Waterboarding is a form 
of controlled drowning, which the administration 
-- Gen. Hayden included -- refuses to acknowledge 
as torture, even though the torturers of the 
Spanish Inquisition had no hesitation in labeling 
it, unambiguously, as “tortura del agua.”

Al-Nashiri may well be guilty of all the charges 
against him, but it’s noticeable that, at his 
tribunal in Guantánamo last year, he was one of 
only three “high-value detainees” (KSM and Abu 
Zubaydah were the others) to claim that he had 
made false allegations because he was tortured. 
He said that he made up stories tying him to the 
bombing of the USS Cole and confessed to 
involvement in several other plots -- the attack 
on the Limburg, other plans to bomb American 
ships in the Gulf, a plan to hijack a plane and 
crash it into a ship, and claims that Osama bin 
Laden had a nuclear bomb -- in order to get his 
captors to stop torturing him. “From the time I 
was arrested five years ago,” he said, “they have 
been torturing me. It happened during interviews. 
One time they tortured me one way, and another 
time they tortured me in a different way. I just 
said those things to make the people happy. They 
were very happy when I told them those things.”

The administration seems confident that it can 
exclude all mention of torture from the planned 
trials at Guantánamo, either by using evidence 
obtained by “clean teams” of FBI agents, who 
politely asked the prisoners to repeat what they 
had previously confessed under torture, or by 
allowing the government-appointed judges to use 
their discretion to pretend that the CIA’s secret 
prisons -- and the torture that took place there -- never existed.

In the real world, however, where evidence 
obtained through torture is inadmissible, it 
remains unclear whether the government’s attempts 
to set up an offshore judicial system for alleged 
terrorists, which openly mocks America’s core 
values, will ever be successful. It is now over 
six and a half years since the system of trials 
by Military Commission was introduced, which was 
conceived by Vice President Dick Cheney and his 
senior counsel (and now chief of staff) David 
Addington, and the government has yet to secure a clear victory.

The only verdict to date is in the case of the 
Australian David Hicks, who was repatriated to 
serve a nine-month sentence after accepting a 
plea bargain, in which he admitted providing 
“material support for terrorism,” in March 2007. 
Conveniently for the administration, this 
involved Hicks renouncing well-documented claims 
that he was tortured and abused in US custody. It 
also, however, involved Hicks receiving a 
sentence far shorter than that which prosecutors 
had first mooted -- up to 20 years, according to 
some reports, which would have been comparable to 
the draconian sentence imposed in 2002 on John 
Walker Lindh, the “American Taliban” -- which did 
nothing to reinforce the government’s 
long-cherished claims that Hicks was one of “the worst of the worst.”

And elsewhere, of course, as the Court of Appeals 
reminds us, the quality of the administration’s 
post-9/11 detention policies is most 
realistically compared to the nonsense spouted by 
an absurd character in a late nineteenth century English poem.

Andy Worthington is a British historian, and the 
author of 
'<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0745326641/counterpunchmaga>The 
Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 
Detainees in America's Illegal Prison' (published 
by Pluto Press). Visit his website at: 
<http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/>www.andyworthington.co.uk

He can be reached at: 
<mailto:andy at andyworthington.co.uk>andy at andyworthington.co.uk




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