For the first time, a military judge at Guantánamo Bay on Friday entered the secure area housing the wartime prison and inspected a former CIA “black site” facility at the center of the dispute over traces of torture September 11, 2001case.
It was a remarkable moment in the two-decade history of the Guantánamo trials. Before that, no war court judge had made the five-mile trip to review detention operations, where the military maintained the only known, still-intact remnants of its network of prisons. overseas prison that the CIA ran from 2002 to 2009.
But Colonel. Matthew N. McCall, judgeis moving toward a decision on whether the alleged mastermind of the attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammedand three accomplices voluntarily confessed to plotting the attacks in their fourth year of detention, under questioning by FBI agents at Guantánamo prison.
And the prison site he visited, called Camp Echo, played a central but secret role in the case. From 2003 to 2004, the CIA held five highly regarded prisoners there, close to prison facilities but out of reach of the International Red Cross. It was part of a secret overseas network that hid about 120 “high-value detainees” in locations as far away as Afghanistan, Thailand and Poland.
In April 2004, the agency closed the black site at Guantánamo and transferred those five detainees to other secret locations, on the advice of the Justice Department, to avoid an impending Supreme Court decision. US Supreme Court later that year authorized detainees at US-controlled Guantánamo Bay. reach out to a lawyer.
After President George W. Bush ordered the transfer of Mr. Mohammed and 13 other CIA detainees to Guantánamo in September 2006 to stand trial, federal agents used the same grounds of Camp Echo to extract confessions The crime appears legitimate by what prosecutors call “clean teams.”
The issue now is whether the statements the men made in 2007 will be admissible at the final trial? Mr. Mohammed and three men were accused of being accomplices in helping the 19 hijackers who participated in the September 11 attacks.
Prosecutors review those interrogations the most important evidence in the case, which has been mired in preliminary hearings since 2012. They argued that the statements were voluntary and therefore would be admissible.
Defense attorneys argued that, by 2007, Mr. Mohammed and others had endured years of torture, solitary confinement and repeated CIA interrogation that they were powerless beyond answering questions on demand. bridge.
Military judges generally stay away from detention, which is capital currently holding 30 prisoners. Judges summoned commanders to court to answer questions and lawyers provided photos of prison conditions as evidence to the court.
Defense attorney for one of the defendants Ammar al Baluchiproposed a field trip to the judge, who spent less than 20 minutes examining the complex of wooden huts containing steel cells divided in two.
One half has a metal pallet to hold the sleeping mat, shower, sink and toilet, also made of metal, Alka Pradhan, Mr. Baluchi's lawyer, told the court on Friday to orient the judge ahead of his visit. The other half was set up as an interrogation room, with linoleum and pegs on the floor, where detainees' ankles were shackled during the legal meetings still held there.
“In terms of information and belief,” she said, there was also a time when “there was a chain point on the ceiling.” But she didn't say when.
In one part of Camp Echo, which reporters visited, wooden huts had windows. But the huts in the area where CIA prisoners were detained and interrogated had no natural light – unless the outer doors were opened.
Ms. Pradhan said the tour was intended to support the defense team's argument that Mr. Baluchi saw the 2007 interrogation as another stop on his torture journey through black sites. Interrogators testified that they shared meals from McDonald's and chatted with him.
But Ms. Pradhan said that just being there, at a location similar to previous black locations where he was beaten, shackled naked and deprived of sleep, “caused the intense fear within him” left him no choice but to tell his interrogators what they had done. want to hear.
Colonel McCall left his black coat at the courthouse and drove himself and an aide to the checkpoint controlling entrance to the prison complex, a 15-minute drive past an Irish pub, McDonald's and a courtyard. bowling serves its base of about 5,000 residents – most of whom have never been allowed on prison grounds.
In 2019, the US government declassified the fact that part of Camp Echo had been a black site at Guantánamo, but defense attorneys had known about that national security secret for years. Three defendants in death penalty cases told their lawyers they had been there before.
One of them, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiriaccused of orchestrating the Al Qaeda suicide bombing of the destroyer USS Cole off the coast of Yemen on October 12, 2000, in the longest-running death penalty case at Guantánamo Bay.
Last year, the military judge in that case, Col. Lanny J. Acosta Jr., made statements Mr. Nashiri was subjected to federal questioning at Echo in 2007, stemming from his years of torture by the CIA
“The 2007 FBI interview actually took place in the same complex — and perhaps even the same cell,” he wrote.
