Inmate set to lift lid on Guantanamo Mishap puts off military exercises
UNITED STATES: The alleged terrorist known as Abu Zubaydah, the CIA’s first guinea pig in its since-outlawed secret interrogation programme, is waiving immunity from potential prosecution to testify about conditions at Guantanamo’s most clandestine prison, his lawyer says.
Zubaydah, whose real name is Zayn al Abdeen Mohammed al Hussein, ‘‘is prepared to testify to all issues, including the sights, smells, sounds and other conditions within Camp 7’’, according to the waiver letter by attorney Mark Denbeaux, who plans to travel to Guantanamo’s Camp Justice next week for the possible May 19 testimony.
‘‘The underlying issue appears to be how closely the at-issue conditions parallel some of the other torture techniques used in the CIA dark sites,’’ Denbeaux wrote. ‘‘My client can draw upon his personal experience to address this issue.’’
The 46-year-old Palestinian was critically wounded in a gunfight when captured in Pakistan in March 2002. He became the first person subjected to the CIA’s ‘‘enhanced interrogation techniques,’’ including waterboarding, forced nudity and sleep deprivation, being stuffed in a coffinsized box and slammed against walls in an effort to get him to spill more al Qaeda secrets than he gave FBI agents using more traditional interrogation methods.
Lawyers for alleged 9/11 plotter Ramzi Bin al Shibh have for a year sought the Palestinian’s testimony about life inside Guantanamo’s most clandestine prison in their bid to demonstrate Bin al Shibh’s claim that somebody is intentionally harassing him with noises and vibrations to disrupt his sleep.
The September 11 trial judge, Army Colonel James Pohl, is hearing the Yemeni’s claim in pretrial proceedings because Bin al Shibh argues that the circumstances prevent him from helping craft his legal defence in the five-man death-penalty case.
Last year, in fact, prison guards brought him to the court compound for what was to be public testimony before his military lawyer, Navy Commander Patrick Flor, objected. He sought time to seek testimonial immunity – meaning anything he said in court could not be used against him in a future prosecution. The effort failed. Both the Pentagon overseer of the war court and the judge have declined the request.
So now, says Denbeaux in the waiver letter, Zubaydah wants to testify anyway ‘‘to celebrate his survival and to let the world hear his voice and to see him’’.
A Senate intelligence committee investigation known as the Torture Report quotes CIA cables from a secret overseas prison that sought assurances that the Palestinian would be cremated if he died during the brutal interrogation – and kept incommunicado for the rest of his life if he survived it.
In his recent memoirs, Enhanced Interrogation, the psychologist who interrogated Zubaydah wrote that he and a colleague designed the techniques they thought ‘‘would lend themselves to a Pavlovian process to condition compliance’’.
Former CIA contractor James Mitchell described the Palestinian as a former American resident who ‘‘spoke excellent English’’. Before interrogation, he wrote, Zubaydah’s ‘‘highest level of apprehension occurred when he was hooded and stood against the walling wall’’, ostensibly a CIAdesigned pliable wall where agents would slam a captive’s head to gain his co-operation.
‘‘We would do one interrogation session in the morning using EITS without the waterboard and one session in the afternoon with the waterboard,’’ Mitchell wrote, describing how Black Site workers asked to stop using the abusive tactic and were overruled by headquarters.
Members of the public have, in fact, seen him once before, in a grainy, 15-minute video link to a parole hearing shown at the Pentagon last summer. A transcript shows that the captive sat silent, not allowed to speak to the board until the Pentagon cut the feed for a classified session.
Denbeaux released the letter and two cleared photos of his client at Guantanamo in an increasingly public campaign to try to pressure the Pentagon to put Zubaydah on trial, rather than hold him as a ‘‘forever prisoner’’ in the war on terror. The law does not require that Guantanamo captives be tried, and of the 41 held there, only 10 have been charged with war crimes.
Zubaydah has for years maintained that he was not a member of al Qaeda but knew about the terror movement’s inner workings before the September 11, 2001, attacks as a fellow jihadist in Afghanistan and Pakistan. A February intelligence assessment, however, described him as probably one of Osama bin Laden’s ‘‘most trusted facilitators’’, a jihadist who helped move fighters to and from Afghanistan.
In a February 5, 2016, letter to chief prosecutor Army Brigadier General Mark Martins, Denbeaux accuses Martins of being in cahoots with the CIA to deny the captive a trial that might pit sincedeclassified accounts of his torture in agency custody against allegations that he was a terrorist dating to the President George W Bush era.
Martins has consistently refused to discuss who he might charge. But a prosecution target list included in court papers did not include the Palestinian.
The military has described the Palestinian as a well-behaved block leader who mediates disputes between staff and the longheld, former CIA captives who are kept mostly incommunicado in the Pentagon’s most secretive prison.
The first FBI agent to interrogate him, before the CIA decided to waterboard him, said last year that the case of Zubaydah represents ‘‘the A to Z of where we went wrong as a nation’’. He is one of 15 captives kept in Camp 7, a prison building so secretive that the public cannot know who built it or at what cost. – Miami Herald GUAM: Multinational military drills on Guam designed to show support for the free passage of vessels in international waters amid concerns China may restrict access to the South China Sea have been indefinitely postponed after a French landing craft ran aground yesterday.
United States Navy Captain Jeff Grimes, chief of staff for Joint Region Marianas, said he didn’t know when the drills would resume.
‘‘We are working with our partners to include the Coast Guard, the Guam Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and other federal and local agencies and stakeholders to further assess the situation,’’ Grimes said.
‘‘I have directed that we stop all operations associated with this exercise until we conduct a further assessment of the situation as we gather all the facts.’’
A French catamaran landing craft ran aground just offshore, said Jeff Landis, a spokesman for Naval Base Guam. The vessel didn’t hit coral or spill any fuel, and no-one was injured.
Yesterday’s landing was meant to be a rehearsal for a drill at Tinian island today, Landis said.
The exercises involving the US, Britain, France and Japan were expected to begin yesterday and last a week.
The drills around Guam and Tinian islands were scheduled to include amphibious landings, delivering forces by helicopter and urban patrols.
Two French ships on a fourmonth deployment to the Indian and Pacific oceans were to be featured in the drills. Joining were Japanese forces, UK helicopters and 70 UK troops deployed with the French amphibious assault ship FS Mistral. Parts of the exercise were to feature British helicopters taking US Marines ashore from a French vessel.
‘‘The message we want to send is that we’re always ready to train and we’re always ready for the next crisis and humanitarian disaster wherever that may be,’’ US Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel Kemper Jones, the commander of the 3rd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment, said before the exercises were to begin. About 100 Marines from Jones’ unit were expected to be part of the drills.
China claims virtually the entire South China Sea and has aggressively tried to fortify its foothold in recent years by transforming seven mostly submerged reefs into island outposts, some with runways and radars and – more recently – weapons systems.
The work is opposed by the other claimants to the atolls and the US, which insists on freedom of navigation in international waters.
Critics fear China’s actions could restrict movement in a key waterway for world trade and rich fishing grounds. –AP