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Vol. 76/No. 22      June 4, 2012

 
US gov’t demands secrecy
in Guantánamo trial
 
BY BRIAN WILLIAMS  
The Barack Obama administration is seeking to keep testimony secret in the trial before a military tribunal of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, 47, who is accused by Washington of helping to organize the attack by al-Qaeda on the U.S. destroyer Cole in 2000 that killed 17 U.S. sailors.

Al-Nashiri was arrested in 2002 in Dubai. Over the next four years he was tortured in CIA secret prisons in Thailand, Afghanistan and Poland. Since 2006 he has been incarcerated at the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

According to a 2004 CIA report, of which a censored version was made public five years later, al-Nashiri was subjected to the suffocation technique known as waterboarding, and forced into painful stress positions, including being lifted off the floor by his arms as they were shackled behind his back.

He was hooded, shackled and stripped naked during interrogation sessions. Interrogators threatened him with execution. They put a gun to his head, revved up a power drill, and faked the execution of another prisoner.

A number of newspapers and other media are requesting Judge Col. James Pohl allow them to cover the military tribunal, scheduled to begin Nov. 9. They include the New York Times, Fox News, Miami Herald, National Public Radio, the New Yorker, Reuters, the Tribune Company and Washington Post.

Upon being inaugurated in January 2009, Obama issued an executive order pledging to close the Guantánamo prison in a year. Yet three and a half years later it’s still in operation.

“There are 169 individuals still being held there,” Andy Worthington, a freelance investigative journalist in London who has written extensively about the Guantánamo prisoners, told the Militant in a phone interview. “Of these, 46 are in indefinite detention with no intention of putting them on trial.”

Eighty-seven have been “cleared for release” since at least 2009, said Worthington, but remain behind bars because the White House will neither release them to their home country nor let them come to the U.S.

The U.S. military prison at Guantánamo has been in existence since 2002. Out of the total of 779 persons who have been incarcerated there only seven have been convicted of any crime—five of these through plea-bargaining deals, Worthington pointed out.
 
 
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