Wow. Just, wow. We torture the guy to get info, but any mention of torture by the torture-ee is verboten in court. The military judge in the 9/11 trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others granted a government request to make all mention of alleged torture in the court classified. I can understand the gov't would like to keep talk of torture by the victim out of the public's hearing.
Off limits at the military commission trial at the US Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay are any details surrounding the defendants’ capture, detention, and alleged torture by the CIA. It includes “the enhanced interrogation techniques that were applied to an accused … including descriptions of the techniques as applied, the duration, frequency, sequencing, and limitations of those techniques.”
So the guy on trial can't say how long they tortured him, how they tortured him, or how often they tortured him.
This is disappointing; America should be different than Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia.
http://news.yahoo.com/9-11-trial-mention-torture-classified-military-judge-003521708.html“We are profoundly disappointed by the military judge’s decision, which doesn’t even address the serious First Amendment issues at stake here,” said Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU’s national security project.
“The government wanted to ensure that the American public would never hear the defendants’ accounts of illegal CIA torture, rendition, and detention,” she said in a statement. “The military judge has gone along with that shameful plan.”
Ms. Shamsi said the ACLU would attempt to appeal the ruling.
“For now, the most important terrorism trial of our time will be organized around judicially approved censorship of the defendants’ own thoughts, experiences, and memories of CIA torture,” she said. “The decision undermines the government’s claim that the military commission system is transparent.”
Although some details of their treatment have been made public, there has never been a full public accounting of what was done to certain terror suspects, including Mohammed, in the name of protecting US national security.
Officials have acknowledged that Mohammed was subjected to a particularly brutal interrogation technique known as waterboarding. Reports are that he was subjected to the technique 183 times.
particularly brutal? But some in gov't say it wasn't torture!!Human rights advocates say waterboarding is torture. The US government says it did not and does not engage in torture.
