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GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — A prisoner accused of plotting Al Qaeda’s bombing of the usS. Cole warship in 2000 informed federal interrogators years later that he was waterboarded by the C.I.A., an interpreter testified this week. However that element was omitted from the official account of the interrogations that prosecutors need to use at his death-penalty trial as proof that he confessed.
At challenge within the hearings is whether or not the navy choose will settle for a 34-page memo written by brokers who questioned the prisoner, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, at Guantánamo Bay for 3 days in early 2007. The account of the interrogation is taken into account important trial proof. Protection attorneys say it’s tainted by torture and wish it excluded.
“He talked concerning the waterboarding,” John J. Elkaliouby, who labored for the F.B.I. as an Arabic linguist from 1994 to 2015, stated in court docket on Thursday. “He stated, ‘I used to be waterboarded by the C.I.A.,’ and I reported that to the entire group.”
Mr. Elkaliouby was known as as a prosecution witness to explain the temper and environment in the course of the interrogation, which he stated was pleasant, calm and “on the pleasure of Mr. Nashiri,” who was shackled on the ankles. The brokers served tea and pastry, and the prisoner provided that he had been tortured.
The linguist forged the revelation as a shock. “I didn’t count on that, to be sincere.”
Testimony this week expanded on accounts which have emerged within the Sept. 11 case of how navy prosecutors constructed death-penalty circumstances in opposition to males who had been tortured throughout secret detention in abroad prisons run by the C.I.A., after which transferred to Guantánamo Bay in 2006 for trial by order of President George W. Bush.
The C.I.A. had a secret position at Guantánamo within the detention and interrogations of the boys by F.B.I. and Navy legislation enforcement brokers, together with amassing the notes from interrogations, Mr. Elkaliouby stated. The C.I.A. required that the interrogators write their accounts of what they discovered on company computer systems, which had been categorised.
Earlier than the interrogations began in early 2007, the federal brokers had been instructed to omit allegations of torture and abuse from what was colloquially known as “clear group memos” — and as a substitute write a separate account.
Protection attorneys have stated they acquired copies of these separate accounts amongst categorised paperwork prosecutors turned over to them on this pretrial part. However it’s not possible to understand how the defendants raised the accusations as a result of there are not any recordings or transcripts of these interrogations.
Seventeen U.S. sailors had been killed within the suicide assault on the Cole throughout a refueling cease in Aden, Yemen, on Oct. 12, 2000. Though Mr. Nashiri was captured two years later and turned over to U.S. custody, he was not charged till 2011. The case has been mired in pretrial hearings for greater than a decade as protection attorneys have struggled to acquire and use details about his torture to disqualify proof.
In addition they have argued that Mr. Nashiri, who’s now 57 and has been recognized by U.S. navy medical doctors as struggling post-traumatic stress dysfunction, emerged from C.I.A. detention in a state of “discovered helplessness,” basically educated to inform his U.S. captors what he believed they needed to listen to.
He was waterboarded in Thailand in 2002 by psychologists who labored as C.I.A. contractors and was subjected to rectal abuse and threatened with an influence drill and a gun throughout interrogations carried out by C.I.A. brokers. For a time in late 2003 and early 2004, he was hidden at Guantánamo Bay in a C.I.A. black web site close to the jail amenities however out of attain of attorneys and the Worldwide Purple Cross.
That web site is called Camp Echo 2, and it was the place Mr. Nashiri was held in 2004 after which in 2007 for the interrogations that prosecutors take into account central to their case.
Earlier Thursday, Bernard E. DeLury Jr., a retired Navy Reserve captain who’s now a superior court docket choose in New Jersey, testified for prosecutors that on March 14, 2007, Mr. Nashiri was “alert,” “current” and never below misery throughout a listening to to evaluation his standing as an enemy combatant.
Decide DeLury presided on the two-hour Combatant Standing Evaluation Tribunal, or C.S.R.T., throughout which, he stated, he had “little doubt in my thoughts” that the prisoner’s participation was figuring out and voluntary.
The method prohibited prisoners from having a lawyer, however Mr. Nashiri was assigned a Navy officer to behave as a “private consultant,” communicate on his behalf and assist him reply to the allegations that the navy stated had been enough to detain him as, basically, a prisoner of the battle in opposition to terrorism.
A protection lawyer, Capt. Brian L. Mizer of the Navy, requested Decide DeLury whether or not he knew that Mr. Nashiri had informed his consultant, who was known as Lieutenant Commander X in court docket, that he was “afraid that he can be executed and dismembered at his C.S.R.T.”
Decide DeLury replied: “If he had informed me that, I actually would have explored that with him.”
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