TRUTHOUT ORIGINAL
Judge Confirms Detainee Tortured to Make False Confessions
Wednesday 14 October 2009
by: Andy Worthington, t r u t h o u t | Report
A declassified ruling by a federal court judge reveals that Fouad al-Rabiah, an innocent Kuwaiti prisoner who was ordered released from Guantanamo last week, was brutally tortured into making false confessions by US interrogators and repeatedly threatened until he confessed to terrorist activities he was not involved.
In the summer of 2002, a CIA analyst interviewed al-Rabiah at Guantánamo and concluded that he was an innocent man caught at the wrong time and in the wrong place. Although al-Rabiah had said that he had met bin Laden and had been present in the Tora Bora mountains, he had provided an acceptable explanation.
He had, he said, been introduced to bin Laden on a trip to Afghanistan to investigate proposals for a humanitarian aid mission, and he had been at Tora Bora - and compelled to man a supply depot - because he was one of numerous civilians caught up with soldiers of al-Qaeda and the Taliban as he tried to flee the chaos of Afghanistan for Pakistan, and had been compelled to run the depot by a senior figure in al-Qaeda.
These appeared to be valid explanations, especially as al-Rabiah, a 42-year-old father of four children, had no history of any involvement with militancy or terrorism, and had, instead, spent 20 years at a management desk job at Kuwait Airways, and had an ownership interest in some health clubs. Moreover, he had a history of legitimate refugee relief work, having taken a six-month approved leave of absence from work in 1994 to 1995 to do relief work in Bosnia, having visited Kosovo with the Kuwaiti Red Crescent in 1998, and having made a trip to Bangladesh in 2000 to delivery kidney dialysis fluid to a hospital in the capital, Dhaka.
As a result, Judge Kollar-Kotelly granted al-Rabiah's habeas petition because neither his meeting with bin Laden nor his presence in Tora Bora indicated that he was either a member of or had supported al-Qaeda or the Taliban.
However, now that Judge Kollar-Kotelly's ruling has been issued, I realize that the account given by al-Rabiah during his Combatant Status Review Tribunal at Guantánamo in 2004 - on which I based my account of his activities - was a tissue of lies, and that the truth, hidden for over six years, is that, like torture victims groomed for show trials throughout the centuries, he made up false stories under torture, and repeated them obediently, fearing further punishment and having been convinced that he would never leave Guantánamo by any other means.
An Introduction to the Torture Revelations, and an Endorsement of Al-Rabiah's Explanations About His Time in Afghanistan
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten