LGC Newsletter – February 2024

 Guantánamo Bay

A month-long pre-trial hearing is currently underway in February /early March in the case of four men accused of involvement in the September 2001 attacks in New York City. With some of the witnesses heard in closed session, and the defendants not attending all sessions, the judge continued to consider pre-trial issues such as what evidence to include and exclude and evidence obtained through the use of torture. Witnesses on the stand included one of the architects of the CIA extraordinary rendition torture programme, psychologist Dr James Mitchell, who gave testimony about the torture techniques he and other CIA operatives used on the defendants to extract confessions, including waterboarding. He last gave testimony in January 2020 in the case. FBI special agents involved in interrogations with the four men were also called as witnesses to give testimony, as their defence is seeking to have some evidence from these interrogations suppressed due to the CIA and FBI working together on them and using information taken from torture-based confessions. The hearing will end in early March and resume with more witnesses in mid-April, after Ramadan.

https://www.lawdragon.com/news-features/2024-02-23-after-four-year-gap-former-cia-psychologist-retakes-the-stand-in-9-11-case

https://www.lawdragon.com/news-features/2024-02-17-tensions-escalate-in-911-suppression-hearings-over-security-interruptions

 

Two Afghan prisoners, Mullah Abdul Zahir Saber and Haji Abdul Karim, members of the Taliban in 2002, were released from Guantánamo to Oman in 2017, where they were held under house arrest and forbidden to travel. In mid-February, they returned to Afghanistan to a hero’s welcome following efforts to repatriate them by the Afghan government. One Afghan national remains at Guantánamo.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/ap-afghans-oman-abdul-karim-guantanamo-bay-b2494387.html

 

LGC Newsletter – November 2023

 Guantánamo Bay

Two weeks of pre-trial hearings were held in the case of the four (previously 5) prisoners accused of involvement in attacks on New York in September 2001, although they were marred by weather conditions and attendees having Covid-19. Looking at the issue of how CIA torture contaminated later FBI interrogations, an Iraqi-American linguist for the FBI testified how he had translated and identified the suspects through coded transcripts he had worked on that were taken secretly during the defendants’ early days (they arrived at Guantánamo after years of illegal detention in secret CIA torture prisons in 2006) at Guantánamo and their discussions with other prisoners. The information related to this secret spying on prisoners was declassified and prosecutors are seeking to use it as evidence if the case goes to trial. “The move comes as prosecutors have considered new ways to counter claims by defense lawyers that torture by the C.I.A. contaminated subsequent F.B.I. interrogations of Mr. [Khalid Sheikh] Mohammed and his accused accomplices to produce confessions the government considers its most important trial evidence. It also shed light on an eavesdropping operation whose existence has until now never been formally acknowledged.” A lawyer for one of the defendants, Ammar al Baluchi, has said he will challenge the admissibility of these recordings, which were obtained not only secretly through conversations between prisoners held in isolation during their recreation time but more than 5 years after they were detained: “From 2006 to 2009, he said, the prisoners were held in solitary confinement and each one was allowed to speak only with one other prisoner, during an hour reprieve from their maximum-security cells. At the time, prisoners in the custody of a special unit known as Task Force Praetorian or Task Force Platinum were given recreation time in specifically designated pairs. They were confined to separate enclosures, meaning the prisoners could shout back and forth but not see one another.”.

No further hearings in any case are due to be held until 2024.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/17/us/politics/guantanamo-9-11-case-tapes.html

https://www.lawdragon.com/news-features/2023-11-16-in-final-hearing-of-2023-fbi-witness-testifies-on-secret-recordings-made-of-9-11-defendants

LGC Newsletter – October 2023

Guantánamo Bay

In a ruling on 27 October, the British investigatory powers tribunal (IPT) “said it will open a second investigation into allegations that the intelligence services” were involved in the mistreatment of a current Guantánamo prisoner, Yemeni Abd Al-Nashiri, and would examine a complaint filed on his behalf.

“Lawyers for Nashiri have argued that there is an “irresistible inference” that the UK’s intelligence agencies, including MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, participated in intelligence sharing relating to al-Nashiri and “were complicit in his torture and ill-treatment”.

“The IPT’s decision to investigate the claims comes after it agreed in May to examine a similar complaint by another man held at Guantánamo, Mustafa al-Hawsawi.

“In its latest ruling, the IPT – a specialist judicial body that hears complaints against the intelligence services – said the underlying issues in both cases “are of the gravest possible kind”.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/29/second-investigation-to-open-into-role-of-british-spies-in-torture-of-guantanamo-detainee

 

Lawyers for two Malaysian prisoners, Mohammed Farik Bin Amin, 48, and Mohammed Nazir Bin Lep, 46, have negotiated plea deals with prosecutors, to be entered early next year, along with their sentencing. They agreed to “plead guilty to war crimes charges for being accessories” to the 2002 Bali bombings. Charged along with Indonesian prisoners “Hambali”, Encep Nurjaman, the former CIA secret torture prison detainees have had their case severed from his. They are accused of having served as money couriers and providing support to Hambali, who now faces trial alone. The maximum punishment is a life sentence.

“The military disclosed the existence of the deal this week with the release of a court filing by prosecutors and lawyers for Mr. Bin Amin, which scheduled a hearing starting Jan. 15 for the entry of a plea, assembling a military panel and sentencing. The terms were under seal, including any limits on his prison sentence, where he would serve it and whether his testimony was sought against Mr. Nurjaman. Less is known about when Mr. Bin Lep will be sentenced. On Thursday, his lawyer, Brian Bouffard, said only that “Mr. Bin Lep will fully cooperate with the U.S. government.” Christine Funk, the lawyer for Mr. Bin Amin, declined to discuss the deal. But people with knowledge of the agreements said the men were seeking to be sent to a rehabilitation program for Muslim extremists in Malaysia.”

LGC Newsletter – August 2023

 Guantánamo Bay

The periodic review board (PRB), the mechanism set up to decide whether prisoners should continue to be detained indefinitely without charge or trial, decided to uphold the detention of Palestinian prisoner Abu Zubaydah, whose torture, including waterboarding, at the hands of the CIA has been litigated successfully in several countries. The US also decided as early as 2006 that he did not pose any threat to it, however having suffered some of the worst torture in the post-9/11 war on terror, the US is reluctant to release him, even though he has never been charged and faces no charges.

The last Afghan prisoner held at Guantánamo, Muhammad Rahim, held since 2007, had his review on 15 August. It is the first time that he had a lawyer present with him at such a hearing. https://www.afghanistan-analysts.org/en/reports/rights-freedom/the-last-afghan-in-guantanamo-pressure-mounts-on-us-to-deal-with-the-remnants-of-its-war-on-terror/

 

The family of former Russian prisoner Ravil Mingazov, who was transferred to the UAE by the Obama administration in 2017, where he has since remained imprisoned and with little communication with the outside world, delivered a letter to the UK Home Office calling for the UK to grant him asylum. His son and his mother are refugees in the UK.

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/ex-guantanamo-inmate-detained-uae-pleads-uk-grant-asylum

 

In a ruling on 18 August, evidence obtained through the use of torture was excluded from the capital case of Yemeni prisoner Abd Al-Nashiri. A “military judge in Guantanamo Bay overseeing the pretrial capital prosecution of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the Saudi national accused of organizing the October 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, excluded Mr. al-Nishiri’s confessions as the product of torture. “Exclusion of such evidence is not without societal costs,” said the judge, Col. Lanny J. Acosta Jr., in a 50-page decision. “However, permitting the admission of evidence obtained by or derived from torture by the same government that seeks to prosecute and execute the accused may have even greater societal costs.” This decision raises serious questions about the admissibility of confessions made under similar circumstances by the five detainees accused of the 9/11 terror attacks and may affect the plea negotiations currently underway for these men.” With a new judge appointed to the case, Marine Lt. Col. Terrance Reese, the prosecution has decided to appeal the decision to the US Court of Military Commission Review. Excluding confessions forced through the use of torture, the US may not have enough real evidence for its case.

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/confessions-of-guantanamo-detainee-in-death-penalty-case-excluded-as-product-of-torture

https://www.lawdragon.com/news-features/2023-08-18-judge-excludes-gitmo-defendants-confession-because-of-cia-torture

 

A military medical board has come to the conclusion that one of the five defendants accused of involvement in the September 2001 attacks in New York City, Ramzi Binalshibh, is not fit to face trial; he has a “mental illness that makes him incompetent to either face trial or plead guilty in the death penalty case”, according to a report filed with the judge hearing the case. “The question of Binalshibh’s sanity and capacity to help his lawyers defend him has shadowed the 9/11 conspiracy case since his first court appearance in 2008. Then, a military lawyer disclosed that her client was restrained with ankle shackles and that the prison had him medicated with psychotropic drugs. He has disrupted pretrial hearings over the years with outbursts, and in court and in filings complained that the CIA torments him with noises, vibrations and other techniques to deprive of him sleep.” The report was commissioned by the judge in April and it is now up to him to decide whether Binalshibh will be dismissed from the case. “According to their lawyers, at least four of the defendants have sleep disorders, brain injuries, gastrointestinal damage or other health problems they attribute to the agency’s brutal interrogation methods during their three to four years in CIA custody before their transfer to Guantánamo Bay in 2006”.

https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/man-accused-in-9-11-plot-is-not-fit-to-face-trial-board-says/

LGC Newsletter – June 2023

Guantánamo Bay

Ahead of the resumption of pre-trial hearings in the case of Yemeni prisoner Abd Al-Nashiri, in early June, the UN working group on arbitrary detention condemned the US and seven other countries “- Afghanistan, Lithuania, Morocco, Poland, Romania, Thailand, United Arab Emirates - which allegedly transferred or detained him between 2002-2006” for the torture and human rights violations he has suffered in detention: “The United Nations working group on arbitrary detention said he had been arbitrarily detained for more than 20 years and it voiced concern about his physical and mental well-being.”

https://www.reuters.com/world/un-body-condemns-us-others-treatment-guantanamo-inmate-2023-06-05/

During the pre-trial hearing, in a case which could see this CIA torture victim face the death penalty, the judge heard the last few witnesses on the issue of the admissibility of evidence from torture-tainted interrogations and the impact of years of torture on the statements he made admitting to terrorist acts. “The judge’s ruling is on track to be the first major decision at the war court about the admissibility of interrogations by federal agents who were brought to Guantánamo Bay to build a fresh case against former C.I.A. prisoners.” According to the final defence witness, former CIA officer Retired Colonel Steven M. Kleinman, “prolonged isolation, sleep deprivation and brutality like that experienced by the C.I.A. prisoners degrades memory and leads to false confessions. Such treatment impairs a prisoner’s “ability to answer reliably” even years later, he said, adding that a prisoner “may be willing but is no longer able to correctly recall events.””

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/17/us/politics/guantanamo-torture-cia-cole-prisoner.html

“The motion to suppress al Nashiri’s Guantanamo statements are among several critical motions pending before [Judge] Acosta, who intends to issues a series of rulings prior to his retirement later this summer. Al Nashiri’s team has asked Acosta to suppress the hearsay statements of Salim Hamdan elicited by federal agents in 2002, when Hamdan was a detainee at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. (Hamdan was freed shortly after his transfer to Yemen in 2008. An appeals court later overturned his military commission conviction.) The team has also moved to suppress the statements that a current Guantanamo Bay detainee, Walid bin Attash, made to FBI and NCIS agents in his interrogations in early 2007. Bin Attash, who is charged in the separate military commission over the Sept. 11 attacks, is suspected of playing a role in the USS Cole bombing. Both Hamdan and bin Attash have given information that implicates al Nashiri. Defense lawyers are also challenging more than 100 hearsay statements made by Yemeni witnesses and possible suspects to federal agents in the months and years after the attack on the USS Cole.”

https://www.lawdragon.com/news-features/2023-06-16-cia-abuse-rendered-future-statements-unreliable-expert-testifies

 

On 26 June, International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms while Countering Terrorism, Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, presented her report on her visit to Guantánamo Bay and other sites involved in the war on terror and meetings with victims and their families. She is the first UN Special Rapporteur to be given access to Guantánamo Bay since it opened over 21 years ago. In the report, she states that “The U.S. Government is under a continued obligation to ensure accountability, make full reparation for the injuries caused, and offer appropriate guarantees of non-repetition for violations committed post-9/11”. With respect to Guantánamo, she “concludes that the foregoing conditions constitute a violation of the right to available, adequate, and acceptable health care—as part of the State’s obligation to guarantee the rights to life, freedom from torture and ill- treatment, humane treatment of prisoners, and effective remedy—have resulted in the significant deterioration of the physical and mental health of detainees, compounding post-traumatic symptoms and other severe and persistent health consequences co-related to temporal continuities of healthcare provision at Guantánamo Bay. She finds that the cumulative effects of these structural deficiencies amount to, at minimum, cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment under international law. Moreover, the U.S. Government’s failure to provide torture rehabilitation squarely contravenes its obligations under the Convention against Torture.” She also calls for prisoners to have better access to their families, equal access to lawyers and fair trial rights and urged the US government to apologise to the prisoners. The US government has issued a one-page response which is covered here: https://www.justsecurity.org/87093/takeaways-from-the-un-special-rapporteur-report-on-guantanamo/

The report: https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures/sr-terrorism/us-and-guantanamo-detention-facility

 

LGC Newsletter – April 2023

Guantánamo Bay

In the ongoing appeal case of Yemeni prisoner Abdulsalam Al-Hela, 55, who was cleared for release by the periodic review board in June 2021, in an opinion in the case, “the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit ruled that the authorities may not be allowed to keep a man imprisoned in Guantánamo Bay after he is no longer deemed a threat.” However, that does not mean that he will be released any time soon. He is one of 16 prisoners who have been cleared for release and remain at Guantánamo as the US has not found safe third countries to resettle them in; 10 of them are from Yemen and in spite of recent peace efforts in the country, the US has not made any efforts to repatriate or release any of these Yemeni prisoners. The outcome of this case will impact on all of the 16 men, some of whom have been cleared for release for many years.

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20230413-guantanamo-yemeni-man-will-remain-in-prison-despite-us-court-ruling-he-is-no-threat/

 

Pre-trial hearings were held in April in the case of Abd Al-Nashiri. In the kind of  “justice” that can only be found at Guantánamo and under US patronage, Al-Nashiri’s torturers and former FBI agents were invited to give evidence, not at their trial for war crimes, but for the prosecution in respect to whether certain torture evidence should or should not be included in his trial. Al-Nashiri’s torture has already been well documented and prosecuted successfully twice at the European Court of Human Rights. One of the prosecution witnesses was CIA torture programme architect and psychologist Dr Bruce Jessen, who gave a demonstration of some of the “approved” torture techniques used against the defendant and others “at a secret interrogation site in Thailand in late 2002”. The judge allowed the demonstration “to show practices that C.I.A. officials had destroyed video evidence of two decades ago”. According to Jessen’s testimony, these practices “including waterboarding, nudity and isolation — were not meant to rob a prisoner of his will but to gain his cooperation and disclose Al Qaeda’s secrets to the C.I.A.” “Prosecutors have already agreed that nothing Mr. Nashiri said at the so-called black sites can be used at trial because evidence derived from torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment is unlawful. But they defend as untainted his 2007 law enforcement interviews, which took place at Guantánamo at a former C.I.A. prison where Mr. Nashiri was held by the agency in 2003 and 2004.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/13/us/politics/cia-torture-guantanamo-saudi-detainee-nashiri.html

Another witness called by prosecutors was forensic psychiatrist Dr Michael Welner who claimed that Al-Nashiri “voluntarily confessed to having a role in the attack after four years in the C.I.A.’s secret [torture] prison network.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/20/us/politics/cia-prisoner-confession-uss-cole.html

“Abd al Rahim al Nashiri made incriminating statements to agents of the FBI and Naval Criminal Investigative Service in late January and early February 2007 about his alleged role in the bombing of the USS Cole in October 2000. The sessions took place in the detention center on the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base nearly five months after al Nashiri’s transfer from CIA black sites, where he endured waterboarding, threats of execution, nudity, stress positions, sleep deprivation, cramped confinement and other abuses. […]The government team hopes to introduce the incriminating statements at al Nashiri’s as-of-yet unscheduled death penalty trial for the attack that killed 17 sailors off the coast of Yemen. His defense team contends that al Nashiri’s years of torture and isolation at CIA black sites conditioned him to say whatever his interrogators wanted, rendering his subsequent statements to the FBI and NCIS in 2007 involuntary. They have asked the judge, Army Col. Lanny Acosta, to suppress the statements.”

https://www.lawdragon.com/news-features/2023-04-20-government-witness-testifies-to-free-will-of-uss-cole-suspect-in-guantanamo-interrogations

The next hearing is scheduled for June.

 

Pre-trial hearings also took place in the trial of an Indonesian and two Malaysian prisoners accused of involvement in the 2002 Bali bombing. The hearing of the three men who were subject to extraordinary rendition in 2003 and have been in US detention since, although they have only been recently charged, saw prosecutors seek a 2025 trial for the case as much of the evidence is national security evidence (meaning it was probably obtained through the use of torture) and is secret. Lawyers for the defendants said that this timeline is too long, given that the defendants have been held by the US for over 20 years already and that prosecutors have yet to share the evidence they have almost two years after the case was first opened and the defendants brought to court. This hearing was their first since August 2021 when they were arraigned. The defendants protested about the use of interpreters, a persisting problem in the case with the wrong language being used, interpreters using English words – “For example, an interpreter could not remember how to say “interpreter” in Malaysian dialect” – which the defendants did not understand and could thus not follow the proceedings. “Separately, the judge declined to excuse an interpreter who had previously remarked that the U.S. government was “wasting so much money on these terrorists. They should have been killed a long time ago.” Instead, the judge cautioned the interpreters — who were working from a remote location — that he expected their translations to be “neutral, sanitized, surgical.””

According to the 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee on the CIA Torture Programme, in 2003, a CIA interrogator told one of the defendants “that he would never go to court, because “we can never let the world know what I have done to you”; the CIA is one of the agencies withholding the evidence in the case. One of the defendants’ lawyers “accused the U.S. government of misplaced priorities. It spent millions of dollars on “a systemic torture program,” she said. “But when it comes to administering justice, we want to penny pinch. We want to say, ‘We don’t have the resources. We don’t have the computers. It’s complex.’”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/24/us/politics/guantanamo-trial-bali-bombing.html

 

In rare and open criticism of prisoner conditions at Guantánamo, to whom it has access, a senior official at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said that prisoners are showing signed of “accelerated ageing” and that “physical and mental health needs are growing and becoming increasingly challenging” for current prisoners. The statement followed a visit in March by the ICRC to Guantanamo. The ICRC called for better healthcare provision and an improvement in “the quality of contact with families, most notably in terms of frequency and length of calls, while bearing in mind the total absence of in-person visits.” It stated that “the sooner the US can overcome the political and administrative deadlock to responsibly transfer out those detainees deemed eligible, and determine the fate of all other detainees, the better it can shape whatever plans are required.”

https://www.icrc.org/en/document/guantanamo-detaining-authorities-must-adapt-needs-rapidly-ageing-population

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/4/22/guantanamo-bay-prisoners-show-signs-of-accelerated-ageing-icrc

 

The last Algerian prisoner Said bin Brahim bin Umran Bakush was repatriated to Algeria just before the Islamic Eid holiday. His is the sixth release in six months and brings the prisoner population down to 30, over half of whom are eligible for release. He was detained in Pakistan in March 2002 and was never charged or tried. He was cleared for release by the periodic review board in April 2022. Release from Guantánamo is not freedom and involves ongoing US surveillance and restrictive measures on travel and contact with other persons.

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/guantanamo-us-releases-algerian-detainee-bringing-population-down-30

 

On 24 April, MPs, peers, human rights activists and former prisoner Mohamedou Ould Slahi started a new all-party parliamentary group to close Guantánamo.

https://www.amnesty.org.uk/press-releases/ukguantanamo-new-all-party-parliamentary-group-call-notorious-camps-closure

 

LGC Newsletter – July 2022

 Guantánamo Bay

Yemeni prisoner Khalid Ahmed Qasim, who has been held without charge or trial at Guantánamo for over 20 years, has been cleared for release by the periodic review board. He is one of 21 of the remaining 36 prisoners who have been cleared but will remain at Guantánamo for now as the US looks for safe third countries to host them. Only four of the remaining prisoners are “forever” prisoners, whose status has not been clarified and are being held indefinitely; three of them were previously tortured at CIA secret facilities around the world before arriving at Guantánamo.

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/07/20/politics/guantanamo-detainee-cleared-for-release/index.html

 

A three-week pre-trial hearing commenced in the case of Abd Al Nashiri, accused of involvement in attacking a US navy vessel in the Gulf of Aden in 2000. During the hearing, it was revealed that he had told FBI agents that he had been waterboarded by the CIA, as testified by an interpreter; however, this information is not included in the official account of his interrogations prosecutors want to use as evidence of his confession in his death-penalty trial. The interpreter’s testimony also revealed that “The C.I.A. had a secret role at Guantánamo in the detention and interrogations of the men by F.B.I. and Navy law enforcement agents, including collecting the notes from interrogations” and “The C.I.A. required that the interrogators write their accounts of what they learned on agency computers, which were classified”. During the pre-trial hearing, lawyers also raised arguments related to his mental health situation. As a member of the courtroom staff tested positive for Covid-19, the hearing was closed before the end of the first week until at least the middle of the first week of August.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/28/us/politics/gitmo-prisoner-torture-cia.html

https://www.lawdragon.com/news-features/2022-07-29-critical-suppression-hearing-resumes-in-guantanamo-uss-cole-bombing-case

LGC Newsletter – April 2022

 Guantánamo Bay

Algerian prisoner Sufiyan Barhoumi, 48, was repatriated in early April, after spending almost 20 years at Guantánamo. Kidnapped in Pakistan, he was never put on trial, and was cleared for release by the periodic review board in 2016. It took an additional six years to reunite him with his family in Algeria.

There are currently 37 prisoners held at Guantánamo, most of whom have been cleared for release.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-60970825

The last Algerian prisoner held at Guantánamo, Said Bin Brahim Bin Umran Bakhush, has also been cleared for release this month by the periodic review board.

In addition, the youngest prisoner currently held at Guantánamo, Yemeni Hassan Bin Attash, who was handed over to the US by Pakistani security forces in 2002, has been cleared for release. He was 17 at the time and has never been charged. Brother of one of the 9/11 defendants, he was brought to Guantánamo in 2006 at the same time as his brother but has never met him there.

https://www.democracynow.org/2022/4/28/headlines/guantanamos_youngest_prisoner_cleared_for_release_20_years_after_he_was_jailed_without_charges

 

Former Mauritanian prisoner, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, is suing the Canadian government for $35 million for its alleged role in his 14-year detention at Guantánamo. Ould Slahi claims that the Canadian government, “caused, contributed to and prolonged [his] detention, torture, assault and sexual assault at Guantanamo Bay."

“Slahi, a Mauritanian national, lived in Montreal from November 1999 to January 2000, during which time he was investigated by security services. Slahi, 51, is accusing Canadian authorities of harassing him during their investigation, with the stress forcing him to return to Mauritania.

“The core of Slahi's claim is that Canadian authorities shared false information about his activities and otherwise contributed to events that eventually led to his arrest, after which he was transported first to Jordan and Afghanistan, and then Guantanamo Bay, where he spent 14 years imprisoned without charge.”

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/guantanamo-bay-detainee-lawsuit-canada-1.6428886

 

Defence lawyers have visited the now-closed CIA-run camp 7 at Guantánamo where prisoners were held from 2006 to 2021. They have described the conditions they saw as “exceedingly disturbing” and that the prisoners, who were considered “high-value detainees” and had previously spent several years in various secret CIA torture prisons around the world, were held in conditions similar to being “buried alive”. They have called for any sentences given to prisoners held there currently facing trial to be reduced in view of the ordeal of being held prisoner there.

The lawyers “are currently gathering information and evidence, including taking photographs and bringing experts to inspect the now-abandoned site. The attorneys also want anything that the men said while detained at the camp to be excluded from their cases, arguing that the camp was "indistinguishable" from the CIA black sites where detainees were tortured.”

Pre-trial hearings in the 9/11 case involving five prisoners due to be held next month have now been cancelled.

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/guantanamo-detainees-cia-camp-reduced-sentences

A pre-trial hearing did, however, take place in the case of Yemeni prisoner Abd Al-Nashiri in the last week of April. Key witnesses in the hearing include CIA torture architect James Mitchell and army torturer Damien Corsetti. Other witnesses include agents who had interviewed another suspect in this same case.

https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2022/04/27/Cuba-USS-Cole-organizer-hearing-Guantanamo-Cuba/7921651100208/  

LGC Newsletter – March 2022

 Guantánamo Bay

On 3 March, in a 6-3 decision, the United States Supreme Court ruled to prevent CIA contractors, psychologists James Elmer Mitchell and John Bruce Jessen, the architects of the extraordinary rendition programme, from being questioned as part of a criminal investigation in Poland into the unlawful detention and torture of Abu Zubaydah, a current “forever prisoner” at Guantánamo. “The court found that the government could assert what is called the “state-secrets privilege” to prevent the contractors from being questioned because it would jeopardise national security.” and that “The contractors’ testimony “would be tantamount to a disclosure from the CIA itself”.” Nonetheless, as one of the judges, Neil Gorsuch, pointed out in his dissenting opinion, “much of what the government claims to be a state secret is already widely known. “There comes a point where we should not be ignorant as judges of what we know to be true as citizens,” Gorsuch wrote. “Ending this suit may shield the government from some further modest measure of embarrassment. But respectfully, we should not pretend it will safeguard any secret,” Gorsuch added.”” Commenting on the ruling, Dror Ladin, from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) stated, “Today a majority of the Supreme Court allowed the CIA to declare secret the widely-known location of its torture facility in Poland. US courts are the only place in the world where everyone must pretend not to know basic facts about the CIA’s torture program. It is long past time to stop letting the CIA hide its crimes behind absurd claims of secrecy and national security harm.”

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/3/3/us-supreme-court-blocks-testimony-over-guantanamo-detainee

https://www.scotusblog.com/2022/03/fractured-majority-allows-government-to-withhold-information-on-torture-at-cia-black-sites/

 

Saudi prisoner Mohammad Al-Qahtani is the second prisoner to be repatriated by the Biden administration. Currently, 38 prisoners remain at Guantánamo. Al-Qahtani, who suffers from mental health problems which have degenerated further through US torture and unlawful detention for over 20 years, was returned to Saudi Arabia to receive psychiatric treatment there. He had previously faced charges as a potential accomplice in the 9/11 attacks in New York, but this was dropped after it was established that his confession had been obtained through torture. One of his lawyers, Ramzi Kassem, stated, “After two decades without trial in U.S. custody, Mohammed will now receive the psychiatric care he has long needed in Saudi Arabia, with the support of his family. Keeping him at Guantanamo, where he was tortured, and then repeatedly attempted suicide, would have been a likely death sentence.”

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/after-20-years-at-guantanamo-mohammad-ahmad-al-qahtani-transferred-out-of-detention-facility-back-to-saudi-arabia  

 

A defence lawyer representing one of the defendants in the 9/11 case, Yemeni Walid Bin Attash, since 2011, Cheryl Bormann, resigned abruptly from the case after telling the court that her “performance and conduct” are being investigated by the Pentagon’s Military Commissions Defense Organization. The judge in the case, Colonel Matthew McCall, has since issued an order dismissing her and ordering the appointment of a replacement. While details have not been released concerning the investigation, Bormann has previously been forthright in her views on her client’s case, referring “to prosecutors as working for 'the government that wants to kill him.'” Finding a replacement could be a lengthy process and prosecutors have more recently asked the judge to reconsider his decision as her client, the defendant, has not publicly consented to this.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10600481/Defense-lawyer-9-11-suspect-resigns-performance-conduct-investigation.html

At the same time, while pre-trial hearings did not go ahead in the case this month, discussions are underway, but are suspended for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan which starts in early April, to reach a plea bargain which would see the defendants avoid the death penalty in return for a guilty plea. Over the past decade, pre-trial hearings in the case have been mired in issues related to the torture of the defendants in secret CIA detention; a plea bargain could avoid the need to consider this.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/mar/15/september-11-khalid-sheikh-mohammed-prosecutors-plea-deal-report

 

The first pre-trial hearing at the military tribunal this year was held on 28 March in the case of Nashwan al Tamir (Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi) with a new judge, Lieutenant Colonel Mark F. Rosenow. The hearing consisted mainly of questions to the new judge by the prosecution and defence and other procedural matters. The next hearing in this case is scheduled to take place in June.

 

The Pentagon announced on 11 March that Majid Khan, whose confession was obtained through the use of torture and was convicted through a secret plea bargain that included giving evidence against other prisoners, had completed his prison sentence. He pleaded guilty in 2012 to “delivering $50,000 from Pakistan to a Qaeda affiliate. The money was used in the 2003 bombing of a Marriott hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia, that killed about a dozen people.” He was sentenced almost a decade later, when he was given a 26-year sentence in October 2021. Horrified by the nature of the torture that led to his confession, the military jurors urged the war court to show him clemency, which it did by reducing his sentence to 10 years; it thus ended on 1^st March. However, the Pakistani national is unlikely to be released soon, as he must be transferred to a safe third country. He cannot return to Pakistan as “when he first pleaded guilty, he became a U.S. government witness, and his life could be in danger were he sent there.” His lawyer J. Wells Dixon from the Center for Constitutional Rights stated, “There is no basis left to continue to hold Majid Khan at Guantánamo. The United States must send him to a safe, third country where he can be reunited with his wife and his daughter, who he never met.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/11/us/politics/terrorist-gitmo-sentence-majid-khan.html

 

Extraordinary rendition

United Nations human rights expert Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, submitted a report to the Human Rights Council, in which she “called on States to ensure that the post 9/11 legacy of secret detention, rendition and torture is not forgotten and its ongoing consequences are tackled head on.” While expressing particular concern “about the normalization and expansion of secret detention practices in northeast Syria and Xinjiang, China.”, she “highlighted the experiences of those rendered to the detention site at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba – and stressed that 38 Muslim men continue to be held at this site in conditions which meet the legal threshold for torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment under international law. “Not a single man who was rendered across borders, tortured, arbitrarily detained, separated from family has received an adequate remedy. Many who were returned home continue to live with long-term social and psychological trauma. No-one was held accountable for systematic practices of torture and rendition.””

https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=28288&LangID=E

 

From Matrix Chambers (UK): “The Court of Appeal has today allowed an appeal brought by Abu Zubaydah, a detainee at the US military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in a claim for complicity in torture against the UK Government. The claimant alleges that from 2002-2006 he was arbitrarily detained at secret US “black site” prisons located in six different countries (“the Six Countries”), where he was subjected to extreme mistreatment and torture by the CIA. He contends that from at 2002 the UK security and intelligence services were aware that he was being arbitrarily detained, mistreated, and tortured, in CIA “black sites” but nonetheless sent questions to the US intelligence agencies to be used in their interrogations of him for the purpose of attempting to elicit information of interest to the UK intelligence services. The claimant claims that by acting in this way, the UK security and intelligence services committed the torts of misfeasance in public office, conspiracy to injure, trespass to the person, false imprisonment and negligence.

“In February 2021 the High Court ruled that the applicable law for these claims against the UK Government was the laws of the Six Countries, meaning that the question of whether the UK Government was liable to the claimant would be determined by reference to the laws of Thailand, Lithuania, Poland, the United States (or possibly Cuba), Afghanistan and Morocco. In a judgment handed down today, the Court of Appeal overturned that conclusion, finding that the High Court had made a number of “important errors of law” and ruling that the claimant’s claims are governed exclusively by English law.”

https://www.matrixlaw.co.uk/news/court-of-appeal-allows-appeal-in-claim-by-guantanamo-bay-detainee-against-uk-government/