GITMO JUDGE NEARS DECISION ON TORTURE’S AFTEREFFECTS

By the time the prisoner accused of plotting the USS Cole bombing boasted about his role in the attack during interrogations at Guantánamo Bay, his memories and account were unreliable because of years of isolation and torture by the CIA, a former military interrogator testified Friday.

Prosecutors say the statements that Abd al-rahim al-nashiri, a Saudi prisoner, gave during interrogations in 2007 are crucial evidence against him. Defense lawyers consider them tainted by torture. Now the judge, Col. Lanny J. Acosta Jr., is expected to decide whether agents can testify about the confession at Nashiri’s eventual trial.

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

The final expert on the topic testified Friday that, no matter how friendly the so-called clean team of FBI and Navy intelligence agents were, the legacy of Nashiri’s torture and years of CIA detention made what the prisoner told them untrustworthy.

“The debility, dependency and dread doesn’t disappear when they walk into a clean room in suits,” said Steven M. Kleinman, who served in the CIA and then the Air Force from 1983 to 2015 and retired as a colonel with a specialty in human intelligence.

Kleinman said prolonged isolation, sleep deprivation and brutality like that experienced by CIA prisoners degrade memory and lead to false confessions. Such treatment impairs a prisoner’s “ability to answer reliably” even years later, he said, adding that a prisoner “may be willing but is no longer able to correctly recall events.”

Kleinman capped months of expert and eyewitness testimony on whether Nashiri freely described his role in the suicide attack by al-qaeda off Yemen that killed 17 U.S. sailors on Oct. 12, 2000. The judge has said he wants to resolve the challenge to the confession before he retires from the military Sept. 30 and scheduled final arguments on that question for later this month.