GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — A prisoner accused of plotting Al Qaeda’s bombing of the united statesS. Cole warship in 2000 advised 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 subject within the hearings is whether or not the army decide 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 essential 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, mentioned in court docket on Thursday. “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 ambiance 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 supplied that he had been tortured.
The linguist solid 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 circumstances towards males who have 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 regulation enforcement brokers, together with accumulating the notes from interrogations, Mr. Elkaliouby mentioned. The C.I.A. required that the interrogators write their accounts of what they discovered on company computer systems, which have been labeled.
Earlier than the interrogations began in early 2007, the federal brokers have 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 attorneys have mentioned they acquired copies of these separate accounts amongst labeled paperwork prosecutors turned over to them on this pretrial section. However it’s unattainable to know the way the defendants raised the accusations as a result of there aren’t any recordings or transcripts of these interrogations.
Seventeen U.S. sailors have 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.
Additionally they have argued that Mr. Nashiri, who’s now 57 and has been recognized by U.S. army medical doctors as struggling post-traumatic stress dysfunction, emerged from C.I.A. detention in a state of “discovered helplessness,” primarily educated 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 attorneys and the Worldwide Purple Cross.
That website 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 decide 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.
Choose DeLury presided on the two-hour Combatant Standing Assessment Tribunal, or C.S.R.T., throughout which, he mentioned, he had “little doubt in my thoughts” that the prisoner’s participation was realizing 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 army mentioned have been ample to detain him as, primarily, a prisoner of the battle towards terrorism.
A protection lawyer, Capt. Brian L. Mizer of the Navy, requested Choose DeLury whether or not he knew that Mr. Nashiri had advised 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.”
Choose DeLury replied: “If he had advised me that, I actually would have explored that with him.”
