The Guantánamo case is nearing a decision on the lasting effects of torture

By the time the detainee accused of plotting the USS Cole bombing bragged about his role in the attack during interrogations at Guantánamo Bay, his memories and account were unreliable due to years of isolation and torture at the hands of the CIA, a former military interrogator Friday.

Prosecutors say the statements made by Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi prisoner, during interrogations in 2007 are crucial evidence against him. Defense lawyers consider them tainted by torture. Now it is expected that the judge, Colonel Lanny J. Acosta Jr., will decide whether officers can testify about the confession at Mr. Nashiri’s final trial.

The judge’s ruling is on track to become the court of war’s first major decision on the admissibility of interrogations by federal agents brought to Guantánamo Bay to build a new case against former CIA prisoners.

The latest expert on the matter testified Friday that as friendly as the so-called clean team of FBI and Navy intelligence agents was, the legacy of Mr. Nashiri’s torture and years of CIA detention made what the prisoner told them was unreliable.

“The weakness, dependence, and fear don’t go away when they walk into a cleanroom in suits,” said Steven M. Kleinman, who served in the CIA from 1983 to 2015, then the Air Force, and retired as a colonel with a specialty in human resources. intelligence.

Mr Kleinman said that prolonged isolation, sleep deprivation and brutality such as that experienced by the CIA prisoners affects memory and leads to false confessions. Such treatment even impairs a prisoner’s “ability to answer reliably” years later, he said, adding that a prisoner “might be willing but no longer able to correctly recall events.”

When asked by the judge, he said US law enforcement’s experience has shown that isolation and sleep deprivation have forced prisoners to confess, and that DNA evidence has discredited the confessions.

Mr. Kleinman covered months of expert and eyewitness testimony as to whether Mr. Nashiri freely described his role in the Al Qaeda suicide bombing off Yemen that killed 17 American sailors on Oct. 12, 2000. In April, a forensic psychiatrist testified for the government that Mr. Nashiri, based on his reading of prison records and other information, voluntarily confessed.

None of the experts ever met or observed the prisoner.

Military doctors have diagnosed Mr. Nashiri with post-traumatic stress disorder and depression.

To get him to talk about Al Qaeda after his capture in 2002, CIA operatives in overseas prisons waterboarded him, locked him naked in a refrigerated, stuffy box, and slammed his head against a wall. They also used solitary confinement and rectal abuse to keep him cooperative.

Then, in 2006, the CIA moved him to Guantánamo Bay on orders from President George W. Bush to try him. Four months later, the “clean squad” of federal agents interrogated him in what they previously testified to be non-threatening, friendly encounters.

An officer testified that Mr. Nashiri appeared fearless and proud of his work for Osama bin Laden in the Cole bombing. No recordings were made, but the officers wrote down a report as evidence.

The judge has said he wants to resolve the confession challenge before he retires on Sept. 30 and has scheduled final arguments on that matter later this month. As an added complication, Colonel Acosta is currently prohibited from issuing that and other important pretrial rulings.

The FBI and Navy agents and others who observed Mr. Nashiri’s 2007 interrogation said the atmosphere was friendly and the detainee self-incriminated. Mr Kleinman said that from the prisoner’s perspective, friendly government agents who had tortured him probably seemed “quite insensitive” by not asking about his past torture.

Defense attorneys chose Mr. Kleinman because he worked in an Air Force program known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape. It teaches American pilots, commandos and other troops at risk of enemy capture how to survive torture and other atrocities by using torture techniques that American prisoners of war were subjected to by Chinese, North Korean and North Vietnamese forces.

Simulated interrogations at the SERE program were “very intense,” Mr Kleinman said, but the US military knew their dummy interrogators were Americans who would not kill them on the waterboard. They were given a safeword to stop the interrogations, and there was multi-level oversight to prevent “offensive drift”.

Moreover, he said, the purpose was not to gather intelligence, but to strengthen a service member’s defenses.

“When you’re a prisoner, you don’t know when it’s over,” he said. “You don’t know how far they’ll go.”