Tag Archives: Guantanamo inmates

Torture killed every single avenue for 9/11 terror prosecution, by John Kiriakou

Posted on April 9, 2022 | Leave a comment

The problem is evidence obtained by torture in inadmissible. From John Kiriakou at responsiblestatecraft.org:

The Guardian has reported that a recently-declassified CIA Inspector General’s report from 2008 found that CIA officers at a covert detention site in Afghanistan used a prisoner, Ammar al-Baluch, as a “training prop,” taking turns smashing his head against a plywood wall and leaving him with permanent brain damage.

Baluch is currently one of five defendants before a military tribunal at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo charged with participating in the planning for the September 11 attacks. The case has been stuck in the pre-trial phase for 10 years, in part because much of the information that the government wants to use against the defendants was collected using torture.

In addition to the five, Mohammed al-Qahtani, known as the potential “20th hijacker,” is to be transferred so he can be treated at a rehabilitation and mental health care in his home country of Saudi Arabia. Al-Qahtani was reportedly suffering from mental illness and brain injuries as a young man, which were exacerbated by torture after he was captured in Afghanistan in 2001, and was not deemed fit for trial.

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Civil Liberties, Government, Law, Tyranny

Tagged , ,

Bush and His Torturers, by Andrew P. Napolitano

Posted on March 31, 2022 | Leave a comment

Bush, Cheney and company threw out the Constitution for the war on terror and American jurisprudence has never recovered. From Andrew P. Napolitano at lewrockwell.com:

Last week, prosecutors and defense counsel at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, completed three weeks of plea negotiations. At the end of the three weeks, the military judge presiding over the trials of the five plotters of the attacks on 9/11 signed an order reflecting that progress had been made and anticipating a continuation of the negotiations in May.

Among the defendants is Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the admitted and acknowledged mastermind of the attacks.

All five have been defendants in the same capital murder prosecution for 10 years. None has had a jury trial. What were the lawyers negotiating?
Here is the backstory.

Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush opened a military prison at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to house persons arrested for 9/11-related attacks and other acts in what he called the war on terror.

Bush believed that since Cuba is outside the United States, the Constitution would not restrain the government there, federal laws would not apply there and federal judges could not interfere with the government’s behavior there.

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Geopolitics, Government, History, Propaganda, Tyranny

Tagged , ,

Torture Enters the Courtroom, by Andrew P. Napolitano

Posted on June 10, 2021 | Leave a comment

Evidence obtained by tortured confession should be inadmissible in a US court of law, but it no longer is. From Andrew P. Napolitano at lewrockwell.com:

For the first time in American history, a federal judge last week authorized the government to admit as evidence in a criminal case in a public courtroom words uttered by the defendant that were obtained under torture.

The fruits of torture — which is any cruel or degrading or intentionally painful or disorienting behavior visited upon a person in captivity to induce compliance or to gratify the torturer — are not permitted in any court in the United States, and their inducement is criminal.

Here is the backstory.

Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a low-level former member of the Taliban, is accused with others of plotting the suicide bombing of the USS Cole in October 2000 that killed 17 American sailors. He has been in U.S. custody since 2002 and at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, since 2004. When he was first captured, he was turned over to the CIA for interrogation, not the Department of Justice for prosecution.

The practice of the federal government immediately following 9/11, when it captured anyone overseas from whom it believed it could extract national security information, was to hand the person over to the CIA for torture — the feds call it “enhanced interrogation” — at a “dark site” in a foreign country with which the U.S. does not have an extradition treaty.

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Government, Intelligence, Law, Military, Politics

Tagged , ,

Those Torture Drawings in the NYT, by John Kiriakou

Posted on December 12, 2019 | 1 comment

The US has held Abu Zubaydah since 2002 as a prisoner of its war on terror without a trail. He’s most probably a terrorist, but even terrorists deserve a trial, conviction, and sentence, and not indefinite detentions. From John Kiriakou at consortiumnews.com:

In 2002, John Kiriakou captured the Guantanamo prisoner who drew those sickening pictures. Abu Zubaydah has a constitutional right to face his accusers in court, or be released, Kiriakou says.

The New York Times last week published shocking drawings by Guantanamo prisoner Abu Zubaydah showing in graphic detail the types of tortures he endured at the hands of CIA officers and contractors at secret prisons around the world.  The drawings were sickening.  With a child’s simplicity, they showed the irrational cruelty of the CIA’s torture program, which weakened our country, violated domestic and international law and ended up saying so much more about us, as Americans, than it did about the terrorists who wished us harm.

The Times did its duty of reminding us what monsters the CIA produced in the early years of its so-called war on terror, people introduced to most Americans in the Senate’s torture report.  These are people such as the CIA’s former Director George Tenet and Deputy Director John McLaughlin.  They include unapologetic torture proponents such as former Deputy Director for Operations Jose Rodriguez and current CIA Director Gina Haspel.  They are the creators of the torture program: psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. And in the photos of Abu Zubaydah’s drawing that the Times ran, the CIA dutifully blacked out even the stick-figure sketches of the actual torturers, those CIA officers who sold their souls to break the law, all in honor of that false god called “national security.”

Continue reading →

1 Comment

Posted in Civil Liberties, Crime, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Government, Law, Military, Politics, War

Tagged , ,

The United States of Incarceration, by Danny Sjursen

Posted on April 30, 2019 | Leave a comment

The US setting up nursing and hospice care units at Guantanamo says that the inmates there are never getting out, although they’ve never had trials or any semblance of due process. From Danny Sjursen at antiwar.com:

You’ve got to give it to the Defense Department – they’re assiduous planners. I know: I used to be one. So the latest news that the DOD is preparing its 40 remaining forever prisoners at the extralegal detention center of Guantanamo Bay for nursing home and hospice care, should come as little surprise. It still shocks the senses a bit, though, doesn’t it? The U.S. military, at the behest of the Bush-Cheney axis of secrecy, initially chose to detain post-9/11 “terror” suspects at Gitmo specifically, in order to keep the inmates “beyond the reach of usual US law.” How’s that for human rights and America’s self-proclaimed status as the world’s “beacon of freedom?”

To be honest, I actually appreciate the candor of the Trump administration and its soldiers-turned-prison-guards. It’s almost refreshing (if utterly disturbing). They’re essentially admitting what those us who follow the darkly absurd terror wars have long known – that these final prisoners are neverbeing released. Ever. Nope, DOD is simply planning to keep these folks under lock and key forever. The reason why is more than a little unsettling: most were tortured into confessions that can’t be used in a jury trial, despite the habeas corpus ruling of the court in favor of the Guantanamo inmates. Leave it to the US government to simply refuse to try them or to let them go – consider it penal purgatory without due process.

Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Posted in Civil Liberties, Government, Military

Tagged