In a primary, a army decide at Guantánamo Bay on Friday crossed into the safety zone containing the wartime jail and inspected a former C.I.A. “black site” facility on the heart of a dispute over the taint of torture in the Sept. 11, 2001, case.
It was a noteworthy second in the arc of the two-decade historical past of the Guantánamo trials. No struggle courtroom decide had earlier than made the five-mile journey to take a look at the detention operations, the place the army maintains the one recognized, still-intact remnant of the community of abroad prisons that the C.I.A. operated from 2002 to 2009.
But Col. Matthew N. McCall, the decide, is edging towards a call on whether or not the accused mastermind of the assaults, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and three co-defendants voluntarily confessed to conspiring in the assaults in their fourth 12 months of detention, underneath questioning by F.B.I. brokers at Guantánamo jail.
And the jail web site he visited, referred to as Camp Echo, has performed a central however covert function in the case. From 2003 to 2004, the C.I.A. stored 5 prized prisoners there, close to the jail services however out of attain of the International Red Cross. It was a part of its secret abroad community that hid about 120 “high-value detainees” in such far-flung websites as Afghanistan, Thailand and Poland.
In April 2004, the company closed the black web site at Guantánamo and moved these 5 prisoners to different secret websites, on the recommendation of the Justice Department, to keep away from a looming U.S. Supreme Court choice later that 12 months that granted detainees at U.S.-controlled Guantánamo Bay entry to legal professionals.
After President George W. Bush ordered Mr. Mohammed and 13 different C.I.A. prisoners be moved to Guantánamo in September 2006 to face trial, federal brokers used the identical portion of Camp Echo to acquire ostensibly lawful confessions by what the prosecutors referred to as “clean teams.”
At subject now could be whether or not statements the lads made in 2007 are admissible on the eventual trial of Mr. Mohammed and the three males who’re accused of being his accomplices in serving to the 19 hijackers who took half in the Sept. 11 assaults.
Prosecutors think about these interrogations probably the most essential proof in the capital case that has been mired in preliminary hearings since 2012. They argue that the statements had been voluntary, and so could be admissible.
Defense legal professionals argue that, by 2007, Mr. Mohammed and the others had been conditioned by years of torture, solitary confinement and fixed C.I.A. debriefings that they had been helpless however to reply questions on demand.
Military judges have usually stayed away from the detainee operation, which at the moment holds 30 prisoners. Judges have summoned commanders to courtroom to reply questions and legal professionals have offered pictures of jail circumstances as courtroom proof.
Lawyers for one of many defendants, Ammar al Baluchi, proposed the sector journey to the decide, who spent lower than 20 minutes inspecting the compound of picket huts containing metal cells which might be break up in two.
One half has a steel pallet for a sleeping mat, bathe, sink and bathroom, additionally made from steel, Alka Pradhan, Mr. Baluchi’s lawyer, stated in courtroom Friday to orient the decide earlier than his go to. The different half was arrange as an interrogation room and has linoleum and a bolt in the ground, the place a detainee’s ankle is shackled throughout authorized conferences nonetheless held there.
“On information and belief,” she stated, there additionally was “a shackle point on the ceiling” for a time. But she didn’t say when.
In one portion of Camp Echo, the place reporters have visited, the picket huts have home windows. But huts in the portion the place the C.I.A. prisoners had been held and interrogated don’t have any pure mild — until the outer door is left open.
Ms. Pradhan stated the tour was meant to assist the protection workforce’s argument that Mr. Baluchi thought of the interrogation in 2007 to be one other cease in his odyssey of torture by the black websites. Interrogators testified that they shared meals from McDonald’s and chatted with him.
But Ms. Pradhan stated that merely being there, in a web site just like earlier black websites the place he was crushed, shackled nude and disadvantaged of sleep, “triggered an intense fear in him” that left him no selection however to inform his interrogators what they wished to listen to.
Colonel McCall left his black gown on the courthouse and drove himself and an aide to the checkpoint that controls entry to the jail advanced, a 15-minute trip previous an Irish pub, McDonald’s and a bowling alley that serves the bottom of about 5,000 residents — most of whom have by no means been allowed contained in the jail zone.
In 2019, the U.S. authorities declassified the truth that a portion of Camp Echo had been a black web site at Guantánamo, however protection legal professionals had been conscious of that nationwide safety secret for years. Three defendants in the capital circumstances informed their counsel that they’d been there earlier than.
One of them, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, is accused of orchestrating Al Qaeda’s suicide bombing of the usS. Cole destroyer off Yemen on Oct. 12, 2000, in the longest-running death-penalty case at Guantánamo Bay.
Last 12 months, the army decide in that case, Col. Lanny J. Acosta Jr., threw out the statements Mr. Nashiri made to federal interrogations at Echo in 2007, as derived from his years of torture by the C.I.A.
“The F.B.I. interview in 2007 actually occurred in the same complex — and perhaps even the same cell,” he wrote.
