An exceptional legal ruling issued from the depths of America’s secretive apparatus of military tribunals has thrown a wrench into the latest government efforts to whitewash the notorious Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) torture program.
This ruling—and the depraved and sadistic war crimes that it once again brings to light—underscores the hypocrisy with which the US government now claims to be defending “human rights” and the so-called “rules-based international order” abroad.
The ruling in question is a 50-page pretrial decision issued August 18 by Army Colonel Lanny J. Acosta Jr. in favor of Guantanamo Bay prisoner Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who allegedly played a role in the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. Al-Nashiri, who has been imprisoned for two decades without trial, is currently being prosecuted in the secretive pseudo-legal apparatus of military tribunals that was established as part of the “war on terror” and about which many Americans to this day remain unaware.
Camp X-Ray at Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on January 11, 2002. [Photo: DoD photo by Petty Officer 1st class Shane T. McCoy, U.S. Navy]
Under this framework, if a person is arrested and prosecuted as a vaguely defined “enemy combatant,” the judge, the prosecutors and even the “jury” all consist of military officers. The lopsided procedural rules are designed to favor prosecutors with every conceivable advantage. The US asserts the power to prosecute citizens of any country under this system, including US citizens. Those found guilty can be sentenced to death and executed.
After being abducted by the CIA in Dubai in 2002 without charges or trial, al-Nashiri was one of numerous victims subjected to extensive and systematic torture at Guantanamo Bay and at secret CIA dungeons known as “black sites” located around the world. He was repeatedly sexually assaulted by American torturers in a perverted and sadistic practice known as “rectal feeding.”
The depravity of al-Nashiri’s torture exceeds the most depraved of the depraved films in the horror film genre—and is all the more horrifying because it really happened, and at the direction and with the approval of the highest levels of the US government.
In an effort to extract a “confession,” American torturers operated a power drill next to al-Nashiri’s blindfolded head and told him they were going to drill into his skull. They told him that they would bring his mother into the torture chamber and force him to watch them rape her. They strapped him into excruciating “stress positions” reminiscent of the Catholic Inquisition and crammed his body into a small box. He was “waterboarded” repeatedly and subjected to meticulous and protracted sleep deprivation.
He was housed naked in a cold cell. Interrogators struck him in the head repeatedly and blew cigar smoke in his face. In one torture session, described by Acosta in his ruling, al-Nashiri was forcibly rubbed and scraped on his “buttocks and genitals” with “a stiff boar brush that was then forced into the Accused’s mouth.” Al-Nashiri reported that he was then “sodomized with the brush.”
Many of the torture techniques were designed by professional psychologists with the specific intent of destroying the victims’ sanity while leaving their bodies relatively intact. In addition to their physical injuries, many of the victims of this torture program now suffer from extreme psychological trauma. The sexual assaults, in particular, have been noted to have had a severe effect. In the cases of some victims, the trauma—left untreated for years—was so severe that they are now effectively incompetent. They can no longer think or function normally.
In 2007, confronted with the possibility that the “evidence” the torturers extracted with these methods would be found inadmissible, even within the network of secret military tribunals that was subsequently instituted, the government brought in a supposed “clean team” to extract all of al-Nashiri’s alleged confessions a second time, purportedly without the taint of torture.
In his ruling, Acosta flatly rejected the admissibility of the “clean team” evidence, finding that it was still categorically tainted by torture because “any resistance the accused might have been inclined to put up when asked to incriminate himself was intentionally and literally beaten out of him years before.
