US Torture goes to Supreme Court

[grarpamp]

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/guantanamo/article139424468.html

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.
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