Last week, at a pretrial hearing at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba for Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi who is charged with being the mastermind of an attack on the USS Cole in 2000 at which 17 American sailors were killed, the psychologist in charge of interrogating Nashiri described in vivid detail both the modern and the medieval techniques of torture used upon him.
The psychologist was called as a defense witness in order to demonstrate to the court that a good deal of the evidence that prosecutors plan to introduce against Nashiri was obtained directly or indirectly through, or was tainted by, his torture and thus cannot lawfully be used at his trial.
Torture committed by government officials and their collaborators upon a person restrained by the government is a felony punishable by up to 20 years in a federal prison, and its fruits are inadmissible in all courts. For many years, the CIA documented torture through video tapes of its disguised agents and contractors torturing its captives so it would have a record of the events without the need for revealing a participant’s identity.
But the tapes of Nashiri’s torture were destroyed by either the chief CIA official in the United States in charge of all torture or his then-chief of staff. Hence the live testimony last week. That chief of staff would go on to become the director of the CIA, Gina Haspel, nicknamed by her colleagues “Bloody Gina.”
This column will spare the reader the gruesome and stomach-churning details of Nashiri’s torture, but for the one medieval procedure. What caught the eyes of those of us who monitor these events was the mention of the name of the CIA official under whose watch the torture occurred and who wrote detailed, graphic descriptions of it to her bosses in Langley, Virginia. That official is the same Gina Haspel. She was the head of the CIA station at Thailand in 2002, at which Nashiri was tortured, and she was the senior member of the torture team.
Nashiri’s torture went on for four months, at the end of which the interrogation team concluded that Nashiri was being truthful and essentially said the same things under torture as he told interrogators prior to torture. But Bloody Gina does not trust testimony unless it comes with great fear and pain.
In 2006, Nashiri was shipped from Thailand to Gitmo, where he was charged with capital murder. His trial has not yet commenced. The testimony last week was one of many pretrial hearings ordered by military trial judges.
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