WASHNINGTON
\nA US military judge ruled for the first time Friday that an Al-Qaeda bombing suspect\u2019s confession cannot be used as evidence because it was derived from torture, potentially setting a new hurdle for September 11 prosecutions.
\nThe judge in the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba US military tribunals said that a confession by Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the alleged mastermind of the 2000 attack against the USS Cole in Yemen that left 17 dead, was tainted by years of abuse at the hands of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
\n\u201cExclusion of such evidence is not without societal costs,\u201d wrote the judge, Col. Lanny Acosta.
\n\u201cHowever, permitting the admission of evidence obtained by or derived from torture by the same government that seeks to prosecute and execute the accused may have even greater societal costs.\u201d
\nNashiri\u2019s attorney Anthony Natale said the judge threw out the key evidence military prosecutors hoped to use to convict Nashiri.
\nThe ruling left the long-running death penalty case mired in the pretrial phase, with no sign of when a full trial could begin.
\nAttorneys for both Nashiri and the five men accused of the September 11, 2001 Al-Qaeda attack on the United States have battled for more than a decade in the Guantanamo military court to exclude evidence against them derived from torture.
\nThe six were captured separately after the 2001 attacks and shutted through CIA-run \u201cblack sites\u201d in countries such as Thailand and Poland where they were put through extreme interrogation techniques including waterboarding and physical beatings.
\nAfter they arrived at Guantanamo \u2014 an isolated US naval base \u2014 some like Nashiri were again mistreated, including in early 2007, when the FBI interrogated him.
\nWhile prosecutors had argued that Nashiri was no longer affected by the impact of earlier torture sessions, the judge ruled that continued rough treatment up to that interrogation simply extended \u201cyears of physical and psychological torment\u201d.
\n\u201cThe evidence supports a conclusion that the accused did what he was trained to do: comply,\u201d the ruling said.
\nNashiri, 58, is charged with engineering the deadly attack on the USS Cole on October 12, 2000. He is also accused of the bombing of the crude carrier Limburg two years later in the same area, which left one person dead.
\nNatale stressed that the ruling only applies to Nashiri\u2019s case, and is not binding on any of the other judges overseeing cases in the Guantanamo military court. But he said it creates \u201ca template that others could try to replicate\u201d.
\nAlka Pradhan, an attorney for one of the five accused in the September 11 case, said it would impact the entire military court.
\n\u201cThe Nashiri ruling today is fundamentally destabilising to the whole military commission system,\u201d she said in a social media post.
\nIn both the 9\/11 and Nashiri cases, she said, the bulk of prosecutors\u2019 evidence \u201cwas derived from torture at the CIA black sites whose effects were deliberately maintained through FBI interrogations at Guantanamo\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
WASHNINGTON A US military judge ruled for the first time Friday that an Al-Qaeda bombing suspect\u2019s confession cannot be used as evidence because it was derived from torture, potentially setting a new hurdle for September 11 prosecutions. The judge in the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba US military tribunals said that a confession by Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":350456,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-350442","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"yoast_head":"\n