US Torture goes to Supreme Court
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/guantanamo/artic... In a first, former CIA captive appeals Guantánamo trial to Supreme Court GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba Lawyers for the man accused of orchestrating the USS Cole bombing are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene in the military tribunal here using accounts of the captive’s CIA torture drawn from declassified documents and an interrogator’s recent memoirs. The 38-page petition with hundreds of pages of supporting documents describes Abd al Rahim al Nashiri’s being sodomized, kept naked and kenneled like a dog, crammed into a box the size of an office safe and being threatened with a revved power drill while hanging shackled and nude from a cell ceiling. And that’s from the portion that isn’t blacked out. New documents include an Army sanity board report and a prosecution chronology of the captive’s time in the Black Sites. Both are heavily redacted. In the petition, the Pentagon-paid lawyers ask the justices to let them challenge Nashiri’s U.S. military detention in federal court — now, before his Guantánamo death-penalty tribunal — because the CIA subjected him to years of “physical, psychological and sexual torture.” They also asked the justices to resolve the open legal question of when the “War on Terror” began. A lower court ruled that civilian courts should stay out of the Nashiri case until the Saudi’s capital war crimes trial is over. His is the first case of a former CIA captive appealing to the Supreme Court. At the war court last Wednesday, defense attorney Rick Kammen notified the tribunal judge, Air Force Col. Vance Spath, of the once-classified filing. Lawyers for the Saudi submitted the document to the Supreme Court on Jan. 17. It took the court’s “Classified Information Security Officer” two months to decide which parts the public could see. ‘CIA agents subjected petitioner to the most extreme forms of torture and abuse in which our country has ever engaged.’ Large portions of the supporting documents are completely blacked out, and perhaps 20 percent of the petition. More...
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