UN condemns torture of Guantánamo detainee
GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — A United Nations human rights panel has issued a damning report that blames the United States and seven other nations for the CIA’s “torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” of a Saudi prisoner who now awaits a death penalty trial at Guantánamo Bay.
The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention also named as responsible the United Arab Emirates, where the prisoner, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, was captured in 2002, as well as Afghanistan, Lithuania, Morocco, Poland, Romania, and Thailand, where he was held as part of a rendition and interrogation program run by the George W. Bush administration.
The working group, which has no enforcement authority, adopted the 18-page report Nov. 15 but did not release it until this weekend.
The group called for the immediate release of and compensation for Nashiri, who is accused of orchestrating the bombing of the US Navy destroyer Cole off Yemen nearly 23 years ago. It said the Guantánamo war crimes court, which was devised to prosecute only non-US citizens, deprives Nashiri of “the fair trial guarantees that would ordinarily apply within the judicial system of the United States.”
The finding is the latest in a series of UN investigations condemning the previous and current treatment of detainees being held at Guantánamo Bay at a time when lawyers and the International Committee of the Red Cross have protested inadequate health care for the last detainees there.
The UN bodies are also refocusing attention on the Pentagon prison, which holds 30 prisoners of the war on terrorism, including 17 men for whom the Biden administration is seeking countries to offer them resettlement.
The report could be presented to a sentencing jury of US military officers in Nashiri’s case. In October 2021, a military jury in the case of another Guantánamo prisoner who was tortured by the CIA urged clemency and called that prisoner’s abuse “a stain on the moral fiber of America.”
Torture has been at the heart of the Cole case.
US investigations and testimony in Nashiri’s case show he was waterboarded by psychologists working as contractors for the CIA, confined naked to a claustrophobic wooden box, and subjected to threats and violence, including rectal abuse, by agency staff members.His military commissions case has been in pretrial proceedings since 2011.
Seventeen US sailors were killed in the suicide bombing of the Cole in Aden Harbor, and prosecutors argue the case can be tried in the court that was created in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Nashiri’s lawyers describe him as a torture survivor who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and other conditions attributed to untreated physical, psychological, and sexual abuse.