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Col. Matthew McCall visited the Guantanamo Bay component where, in 2007, federal agents extracted now-controversial confessions from terrorism suspects.
By Carol Rosenberg
Reporting from Guantanamo Bay
For the first time, an army at Guantanamo Bay entered the security zone containing the war criminal on Friday and inspected a former CIA agent. The installation of the “black site” is at the center of a dispute over the connotation of torture in the September 11, 2001 case.
This is a remarkable moment in the history of the two decades of the Guantanamo trials. No court-martial had in the past made the eight-mile adventure to review detention operations, where the military maintains the only known and still intact remnant of the CIA’s prison network operated from 2002 to 2009.
But the judge, Col. Matthew N. McCall, is about to make a decision on whether the mastermind of the bombings, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and the three co-defendants voluntarily confessed to plotting the attacks in their fourth year in custody under questioning. FBI Agents at the Guantanamo Bay Prison.
And the crime site he visited, called Camp Echo, played a central but secretive role in the case. From 2003 to 2004, the CIA kept five valuable criminals near criminal facilities but beyond the reach of the International Red Cross. It was part of his secret network that hid some 120 “high-value detainees” as far away as Afghanistan, Thailand and Poland.
In April 2004, the firm shut down the black site at Guantanamo Bay and transferred the five prisoners to other secret sites, on the recommendation of the Justice Department, in the face of an impending U. S. Supreme Court ruling that same year granting the detainees U. S. -controlled Guantanamo Bay. Access to lawyers.
After President George W. Bush ordered Mr. Mohammed and thirteen other CIA employees to flee. When the prisoners were transferred to Guantanamo Bay in September 2006 for trial, federal agents used the same component of Camp Echo to extract likely legal confessions from what prosecutors called “clean teams. “
The question is whether the statements made by these men in 2007 are admissible in the eventual trial of Mr. Mohammed and the three men accused of being his accomplices in aiding the 19 hijackers who participated in the September 11 attacks.
Prosecutors see cross-examination as the most important piece of evidence in the death penalty case, which has been stalled in pretrial hearings since 2012. They argue that the statements were voluntary and would be admissible.
Defense attorneys argue that in 2007, Mohammed and the others were conditioned through years of torture, solitary confinement and constant surveillance by the CIA that they could not ask questions on demand.
Military judges have stayed out of the detention operation, which has recently seen 30 prisoners. The judges summoned the commanders to the court to answer questions, and the lawyers provided photographs of the detention situations as evidence to the court.
Lawyers for one of the defendants, Ammar al-Baluchi, presented the case to the judge, who spent less than 20 minutes examining the complex of wooden huts containing metal cells divided in two.
Half have a steel platform for mattress, shower, sink and toilet, also made of steel, said Alka Pradhan, Mr. Pradhan’s lawyer. Baluchi was in court on Friday to consult the sentence before his visit. It has been set up as an interrogation room and has linoleum and a padlock on the floor, where a detainee’s ankle is chained for the legal meetings that are still taking place there.
“In terms of data and beliefs,” he said, there’s also “a bump in the roof” for a while, but he didn’t say when.
In one part of Camp Echo, where the hounds visited, wooden shacks have windows. But the cabins in the part where the CIA detains and interrogates prisoners don’t need natural light unless the outside door is left open.
Ms. Pradhan said the excursion was aimed at the defense team’s argument that Baluchi saw the 2007 interrogation as another step in his odyssey of torture through black sites. Interrogators said they shared McDonald’s food and chatted with him.
But Ms. Pradhan said that simply being there, in a place similar to previous black sites where he was beaten, shackled naked and deprived of sleep, “triggered an intense fear in him” that left him with no option yet to tell his interrogators what they had said. had done. I wanted to listen.
Colonel McCall left his black robe at the courthouse and drove himself and an aide to the checkpoint that controls access to the prison complex, a 15-minute ride past an Irish pub, McDonald’s and a bowling alley that serves the base of about 5,000 residents — most of whom have never been allowed inside the prison zone.
In 2019, the U.S. government declassified the fact that a portion of Camp Echo had been a black site at Guantánamo, but defense lawyers had been aware of that national security secret for years. Three defendants in the capital cases told their counsel that they had been there before.
One of them, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, is accused of orchestrating al-Qaida’s suicide bombing of the U. S. destroyer Cole off the coast of Yemen on Oct. 12, 2000, in the longest-serving Guantanamo Bay case.
Last year, the Army, in charge of the case, Colonel Lanny J. Acosta Jr. , rejected statements made during federal interrogations of Mr. Nashiri at Echo in 2007, as stemming from his years of torture through the CIA.
“The FBI interview in 2007 took place in the same compound, and in all likelihood even in the same cell,” he wrote.
Carol Rosenberg reports on the court-martial at Guantanamo Bay. He has been covering the issue since the first detainees arrived at the U. S. base in 2002. Learn more about Carol Rosenberg
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