Guantanamo judge rejects torture-derived confession

AFP :
A US military judge ruled for the first time Friday that an Al-Qaeda bombing suspect’s confession cannot be used as evidence because it was derived from torture, potentially setting a new hurdle for September 11 prosecutions.

The judge in the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba US military tribunals said that a confession by Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the alleged mastermind of 2000 attack against the USS Cole in Yemen that left 17 dead, was tainted by years of abuse at the hands of the CIA and FBI.

“Exclusion of such evidence is not without societal costs,” wrote the judge, Col. Lanny Acosta.

“However, permitting the admission of evidence obtained by or derived from torture by the same government that seeks to prosecute and execute the accused may have even greater societal costs.”

Nashiri’s attorney Anthony Natale said the judge threw out the key evidence military prosecutors hoped to use to convict Nashiri.

The ruling left the long-running death penalty case mired in the pretrial phase, with no sign of when a full trial could begin.

Attorneys for both Nashiri and the five men accused of the September 11, 2001 Al-Qaeda attack on the United States have battled for more than a decade in the Guantanamo military court to exclude evidence against them derived from torture.

The six were captured separately after the 2001 attacks and shuttled through CIA-run “black sites” in countries such as Thailand and Poland where they were put through extreme interrogation techniques including waterboarding and physical beatings.