At Gitmo 9/11 trial, prosecutor gives lurid details of CIA prisons

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba — A Sept. 11 trial prosecutor on Thursday read aloud ghastly descriptions of what the CIA did to its prisoners: An alleged plot mastermind was taken nude from interrogation to a medical officer, who put fluids up his rectum then returned him nude to interrogation. Some captives were kept like “cowering dogs,” subjected to standing sleep deprivation, abdominal and facial slaps, in what one CIA agent called a “nightmare.”

Prosecutor Jeffrey Groharing read the descriptions from various material his team had provided defense attorneys in a bid to get a new 9/11 trial judge, Marine Col. Keith Parrella, to restore the FBI interrogations of the alleged plotters that Parrella’s predecessor had excluded from the trial.

In August, the original trial judge, Army Col. James L. Pohl, suppressed the information about the interrogations by FBI agents because prosecutors had blocked defense lawyers from speaking to CIA witnesses. Defense lawyers wanted a graphic description of black-site abuse to argue that the 2007 FBI interrogations at Guantanamo were tainted by torture.

Without independent defense-team investigation, Pohl found, the defense lawyers would not have enough evidence to argue exclusion of the interrogations of alleged mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four other defendants at Guantanamo in 2007. So he suppressed them. Then Pohl handed off the case to Parrella and retired from 38 years in the military.

“The CIA is not on trial,” Groharing told Parrella on Thursday. This is the trial, he said, of the five men accused of plotting the mass murder by hijacking of nearly 3,000 people in New York, Pennsylvania and at the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001. The CIA held them incommunicado and subjected them to cruel treatment from 2002 and 2003 to their transfer to Guantanamo in September 2006.

They were arraigned May 5, 2012 under an Obama-era format for military commissions that forbids the use of tortured or coerced interrogations from the military commissions. The case has been in pretrial hearings, often arguing over access to evidence, ever since. No trial date has been set.