For the first time, a confession obtained under torture has been rejected as evidence in the military court in Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay. Specifically, it concerns the case of a 58-year-old Saudi Arabian of Yemeni origin who is said to be responsible for the suicide attack on the warship USS Cole in 2000, which killed 17 sailors.
“Excluding such evidence is not without social costs. But admitting evidence obtained through or under torture by the same government that intends to prosecute and execute the accused could cost society even more,” Judge Lanny Acosta wrote in his statement Friday.
threatened with the death penalty
Judge Acosta stated that Abd al-Rahim al-Naschiri’s testimony was fraught with years of mistreatment by the US CIA and federal police. Al-Nashiri’s lawyer, Anthony Natale, said the judge threw out key evidence that military prosecutors had used to secure a conviction. This leaves the case, which could end in a death sentence, stuck in the pre-trial stage with no indication of when a real trial could begin.
For more than a decade, lawyers for al-Naschiri and the five suspects in the September 11, 2001 attacks by the al-Qaeda terrorist group have been fighting to exclude evidence obtained through torture from a court. The six suspected killers were arrested separately after the 2001 attacks and smuggled through secret CIA prisons to countries such as Thailand and Poland. Techniques like waterboarding were used there, or they were beaten. Even after arriving in Guantánamo, some suspects, such as Al-Naschiri, were again mistreated.
Lawyer Natale stressed that the verdict only pertains to Al-Naschiri’s case and is not binding on the judges responsible for the other cases in the military court in Guantanamo. Other defendants could use the judge’s decision as a template to proceed in a similar manner, the lawyer said.
Source: Krone
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