And this from the country forever preaching about democratic values and the necessity for other countries to follow the Rule of Law....
"Anyone who had the time to read the summary of the 6,700-page report by Senate investigators on the federal government’s program of torturing detainees captured after the Sept. 11 attacks knew, or at least suspected, that there was more to the sickening story.
This week, a Reuters report added to those suspicions with newly declassified statements from Majid Khan, a high-value prisoner who had been affiliated with Al Qaeda, was captured in 2003 and has been held at Guantánamo Bay since 2006.
Over more than seven years of conversations at Guantánamo with his lawyers from the Center for Constitutional Rights, Mr. Khan described even more torture and abuse than is contained in the Senate report. Although the details of his account, as documented in notes by his lawyers, could not be independently confirmed, they corroborate many of the findings of the report.
Soon after his capture, Mr. Khan said, interrogators waterboarded him twice, a contention that contradicts the Central Intelligence Agency’s claim that it had already named all detainees who were subjected to that practice. (The C.I.A. has denied that Mr. Khan was waterboarded.) As he was moved among a series of C.I.A.-operated “black sites” over the following months, Mr. Khan told his lawyers, the torture continued. He was beaten repeatedly. He was hung naked from a wooden beam for three days, shackled and starved. He was taken down once during that time to be submerged in an ice bath. Interrogators pushed his head under the water until he thought he would drown. He received what he called “violent enemas,” and was anally assaulted in a process the interrogators called “rectal feeding.”
“I wished they had killed me,” Mr. Khan said.
Mr. Khan confessed to delivering $50,000 to Qaeda operatives who used it to carry out a truck bombing in Indonesia, and to plotting with Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind of Sept. 11, on various planned attacks. In 2012, Mr. Khan pleaded guilty to conspiracy, spying, murder and material support of terrorism in a deal that required him to testify against Mr. Mohammed. He faces a sentence of up to 19 years, which is set to be imposed by the military commission at Guantánamo Bay in February.
But his culpability does not justify the depraved treatment he and other detainees suffered at the hands of the United States, in violation of both federal law and the international Convention Against Torture.
If the fully unredacted story of that treatment ever has a hope of coming out, it won’t be through the American government, which continues to hide key details of torture and abuse from the public. Rather, it will be through men like Mr. Khan and Mohamedou Ould Slahi, another Guantánamo detainee, who was recently allowed to publish a diary recounting his experiences at the camp.
An even fuller accounting of what went on at black sites and Guantánamo could come from transferring cases like Mr. Khan’s out of the wholly inadequate military commission system and into the federal courts, which have shown they can successfully prosecute terrorism cases and abide by the Constitution at the same time. Consider the trial of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, another Guantánamo detainee who was charged in the 1998 bombings of two American embassies in East Africa. A federal judge threw out key evidence against Mr. Ghailani because it was derived from torture, but the jury still convicted him, and the judge sentenced him to life in prison."
"Anyone who had the time to read the summary of the 6,700-page report by Senate investigators on the federal government’s program of torturing detainees captured after the Sept. 11 attacks knew, or at least suspected, that there was more to the sickening story.
This week, a Reuters report added to those suspicions with newly declassified statements from Majid Khan, a high-value prisoner who had been affiliated with Al Qaeda, was captured in 2003 and has been held at Guantánamo Bay since 2006.
Over more than seven years of conversations at Guantánamo with his lawyers from the Center for Constitutional Rights, Mr. Khan described even more torture and abuse than is contained in the Senate report. Although the details of his account, as documented in notes by his lawyers, could not be independently confirmed, they corroborate many of the findings of the report.
Soon after his capture, Mr. Khan said, interrogators waterboarded him twice, a contention that contradicts the Central Intelligence Agency’s claim that it had already named all detainees who were subjected to that practice. (The C.I.A. has denied that Mr. Khan was waterboarded.) As he was moved among a series of C.I.A.-operated “black sites” over the following months, Mr. Khan told his lawyers, the torture continued. He was beaten repeatedly. He was hung naked from a wooden beam for three days, shackled and starved. He was taken down once during that time to be submerged in an ice bath. Interrogators pushed his head under the water until he thought he would drown. He received what he called “violent enemas,” and was anally assaulted in a process the interrogators called “rectal feeding.”
“I wished they had killed me,” Mr. Khan said.
Mr. Khan confessed to delivering $50,000 to Qaeda operatives who used it to carry out a truck bombing in Indonesia, and to plotting with Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind of Sept. 11, on various planned attacks. In 2012, Mr. Khan pleaded guilty to conspiracy, spying, murder and material support of terrorism in a deal that required him to testify against Mr. Mohammed. He faces a sentence of up to 19 years, which is set to be imposed by the military commission at Guantánamo Bay in February.
But his culpability does not justify the depraved treatment he and other detainees suffered at the hands of the United States, in violation of both federal law and the international Convention Against Torture.
If the fully unredacted story of that treatment ever has a hope of coming out, it won’t be through the American government, which continues to hide key details of torture and abuse from the public. Rather, it will be through men like Mr. Khan and Mohamedou Ould Slahi, another Guantánamo detainee, who was recently allowed to publish a diary recounting his experiences at the camp.
An even fuller accounting of what went on at black sites and Guantánamo could come from transferring cases like Mr. Khan’s out of the wholly inadequate military commission system and into the federal courts, which have shown they can successfully prosecute terrorism cases and abide by the Constitution at the same time. Consider the trial of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, another Guantánamo detainee who was charged in the 1998 bombings of two American embassies in East Africa. A federal judge threw out key evidence against Mr. Ghailani because it was derived from torture, but the jury still convicted him, and the judge sentenced him to life in prison."
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