GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — A prisoner accused of plotting Al Qaeda’s bombing of the usS. Cole warship in 2000 instructed federal interrogators years later that he was waterboarded by the C.I.A., an interpreter testified Thursday. 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 concern within the hearings is whether or not the army 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 crucial trial proof. Protection legal professionals say it’s tainted by torture and need it excluded.
“He talked in regards to the waterboarding,” mentioned John J. Elkaliouby, who labored for the F.B.I. as an Arabic linguist from 1994 to 2015. “He mentioned, ‘I used to be waterboarded by the C.I.A.,’ and I reported that to the entire workforce.”
Mr. Elkaliouby was known as as a prosecution witness to explain the temper and environment through the interrogation, which he mentioned 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 anticipate that, to be sincere.”
Testimony this week expanded on accounts which have emerged within the Sept. 11 case of how army prosecutors constructed death-penalty instances towards 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 function at Guantánamo within the detention and interrogations of the lads by F.B.I. and Navy regulation enforcement brokers, together with amassing the notes from interrogations, Mr. Elkaliouby mentioned. The C.I.A. required that the interrogators write their accounts of what they realized 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 workforce memos” — and as an alternative write a separate account.
Protection legal professionals have mentioned they acquired copies of these separate accounts amongst categorised paperwork prosecutors turned over to them on this pretrial section. However it’s unattainable 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 legal professionals have struggled to acquire and use details about his torture to disqualify proof.
Additionally they have argued that Mr. Nashiri, who’s now 57 and has been identified by U.S. army medical doctors as struggling post-traumatic stress dysfunction, emerged from C.I.A. detention in a state of “realized helplessness,” basically skilled to inform his U.S. captors what he believed they wished 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 performed 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 website close to the jail services however out of attain of legal professionals and the Worldwide Pink Cross.
That website is named 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 underneath misery throughout a listening to to assessment 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 mentioned, he had “little doubt in my thoughts” that the prisoner’s participation was understanding and voluntary.
The method prohibited prisoners from having a lawyer, however Mr. Nashiri was assigned a Navy officer to behave as a “private consultant,” converse on his behalf and assist him reply to the allegations that the army mentioned had been ample to detain him as, basically, a prisoner of the battle towards terrorism.
A protection lawyer, Capt. Brian L. Mizer of the Navy, requested Decide DeLury whether or not he knew that Mr. Nashiri had instructed his consultant, who was known as Lieutenant Commander X in court docket, that he was “afraid that he could be executed and dismembered at his C.S.R.T.”
Decide DeLury replied: “If he had instructed me that, I definitely would have explored that with him.”
