War court judge: Threats to family
is torture
A war court judge tossed a confession extracted in
Afghanistan by threatening a teen captive and his
family, declaring it torture
Miami Herald, October 28, 2008
go to original
See Article I.5 Promoting
Illegal Torture
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Camp X-Ray, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba
Source: Shane T.
McCoy, US Navy / AP
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GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- In a first, a military
judge ruled on Tuesday that a Guantánamo detainee's
confession was extracted through torture, and excluded
it from the trial of a young Afghan detainee at the
war court.
Afghan police threatened the family of teenager Mohammed
Jawad while he was undergoing interrogation at a Kabul
police station, said Army Col. Stephen Henley, the
judge, in a three-page ruling.
Jawad, now facing trial by military commission, is
accused of throwing a grenade inside an Afghan bazaar
in DecemberCamp X-Ray, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba002, which
wounded two U.S. soldiers and their Afghan interpreter.
None were killed.
Henley found in the ruling that there was reason
to believe Jawad was under the influence of drugs
at the time of his capture and forced confession.
He also accepted the accused's account of how he
was threatened, while armed senior Afghan officials
allied with U.S. forces watched his interrogation.
''You will be killed if you do not confess to the
grenade attack,'' the detainee quoted an interrogator
as saying. ``We will arrest your family and kill them
if you do not confess.''
Jawad confessed, was turned over to U.S. forces and
was transferred to Guantánamo two months later.
The judge said he was accepting Jawad's account of
what happened to him because the government had been
unable to provide timely disclosure of evidence for
the coming war crimes trial, scheduled for Jan. 5.
A Jawad case prosecutor recently quit the war court
to protest over his inability to provide potentially
exculpatory evidence.
Tuesday's ruling was the first at the war court to
exclude a confession on grounds of torture using the
international standard, noted attorney Jamil Dakwar,
a military commissions observer with the American
Civil Liberties Union.
In doing so, Dakwar said, the military judge was
rejecting a legal opinion by Bush administration lawyers
that early on sought to soften the definition of torture
by sanctioning threats to family members.
' `Torture' includes statements obtained by use of
death threats to the speaker or his family,'' wrote
Henley, the military judge. ``The actual infliction
of physical or mental injury is not required.''
Said Maj. David J.R. Frakt, Jawad's defense attorney,
who is seeking dismissal of the case and his client's
return to his family: ``He [the judge] is adopting
a traditional legal definition of torture, rather
than making one up.''
Another judge excluded some statements from the summertime
trial of Osama bin Laden's driver, Salim Hamdan. In
that ruling a Navy judge found that Hamdan was subjected
to a potentially coercive environment in Bagram, Afghanistan,
but did not define it as torture.
