Guantanamo trials up in the air over judge's ruling

The US government's prosecution of high-ranking al-Qaeda terrorists detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba has suffered a dramatic setback, after a ruling by a military judge. A "voluntary" confession made to federal agents by Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, accused of masterminding the suicide bomb attack on the USS Cole which killed 17 American sailors in 2000 has been thrown out as inadmissable. The judge, Colonel Lanny Acosta, had heard that the federal agents had interrogated the accused in a courteous and friendly manner when they questioned him at the Guantanamo detention centre in 2007. However, after his arrest in 2002 for the bombing of the US warship outside the port of Aden, al-Nashiri spent four years in secret CIA "black" prisons where he was tortured in a programme officially called "enhanced interrogation. The judge ruled that the years of violent treatment which included the simulated drowning technique of waterboarding would have been in his mind when he volunteered to be questioned again at Guantanamo. "Any resistance the accused might have been inclined to put up when asked to incriminate himself was intentionally and literally beaten out of him years before," Acosta wrote in his ruling posted on the US Military Commission's website. The ruling could have profound implications for all future trials at Guantanamo where detainees charged with capital offences have suffered similar harsh treatment at the hands of CIA interrogators. The biggest case, long delayed by pre-trial legal arguments about the CIA's use of torture, involves five accused co-conspirators behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged architect of the hijacked planes plot. Mr Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times. US military prosecutors at Guantanamo have based their cases on the pledge that none of the evidence brought to trial would include confessions made under duress by CIA interrogators. Court evidence would be based mainly on FBI and New York police investigations. However, the judge's 50-page ruling means that "it is actually not possible to sanitise cases against people who were in the [CIA's] extraordinary rendition programme [when terrorist suspects were flown from one country to another without any judicial process]", Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas told the New York Times. It's not as if this decision conclusively settles this question for every case. But both in its reasoning and in its symbolism I think it's going to be a de facto precedent," he said. The US government is expected to appeal against the judge's ruling.