Detainee says he confessed to stop torture

A detainee accused of being al-Qaida's Persian Gulf operations chief said in court that his US captors tortured him for years and forced him to falsely confess to the bombing of the US destroyer Cole and to many other terrorist plots, according to a Pentagon transcript released on Mar. 30. Abd al Rahim al Nashiri , a Saudi of Yemeni descent, told a military board at the US detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, that he had nothing to do with the bombing of the warship in Yemen in 2000–or with any other terrorist activity. Speaking under oath, he said he made up a long list of al-Qaida plots and attacks so his captors would stop torturing him, even telling interrogators that al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden had a nuclear bomb. "I just said those things to make the people happy. But when they freed me, I told them all, 'I only told you these things to make you happy,'" Nashiri said at a Mar. 14 hearing held by military officials to determine if he should be designated as an enemy combatant and tried before a military commission. Nashiri, 42, said his US captors began torturing him as soon as he was arrested in November 2002 in the United Arab Emirates; the torture stopped, he said, when he was transferred from secret CIA custody to Guantánamo last September. Such allegations could call into question the veracity of Nashiri's interrogations and those of other detainees previously held at secret CIA prisons, and could make trying the men at military commissions difficult if the alleged coercion elicited misleading information. "From the time I was arrested... they have been torturing me," he said through an interpreter in answers to the tribunal officers' questions. It has long been publicly known that the CIA has used interrogation torture techniques, including waterboarding (which simulates the sensation of drowning), exposure to extreme temperatures and prolonged forced standing. Detainees who think they have been in secret CIA detention facilities have reported serious abuse there. John Sifton, a senior terrorism researcher at Human Rights Watch, decried the secrecy and said there is ample evidence that the CIA has used illegal tactics on detainees and is trying to hide it. "It's a bit disingenuous for the CIA to refer allegations to the inspector general" after the agency itself approved questionable techniques, he said. In an unclassified summary of the evidence against him, military officials said Nashiri was an experienced terrorist operative with significant military and explosives training. They said he played an important role in the Cole bombing, which killed 17 US sailors as the ship refueled in the port of Aden. The summary also linked Nashiri to the bombings of two US embassies in East Africa in 1998 that killed at least 224 people, and said he is suspected of masterminding the October 2002 attack on the French oil tanker Limburg. Curt Goering, Amnesty International USA's senior deputy executive director, said that a thorough and credible investigation of Nashiri's allegations must be done before any al-Qaida operatives are tried. "One of the most elementary precepts of the rule of law is the absolute inadmissibility in any legitimate legal proceeding of any shred of evidence obtained by torture," Goering said. "Although the Pentagon has said they will investigate, given the Bush administration record so far on these matters, it strains credulity that any such investigation would be anything other than substandard, or [that] those responsible would be held accountable." Specific details of Nashiri's alleged torture were not included in the 36-page transcript of his hearing before a Combatant Status Review Tribunal; there was also a classified hearing for which a transcript has not been released. Some of his claims appeared to be redacted by US government censors, who had delayed the release of the transcript for a week, saying they were still reviewing it. In several often-rambling comments and answers, he also made many potentially incriminating statements. Nashiri said he knew virtually all of the players known to be involved in the Cole bombing and other al-Qaida plots. He said he visited Bin Laden often, and that the al-Qaida leader gave him as much as $500,000 over the years for personal expenses and business deals. In turn, Nashiri said, he gave much of that to other known militants who probably used the funds to carry out al-Qaida attacks. "But I'm not responsible if they take the money and they go and fight or do something else" related to terrorism, Nashiri told the military hearing officers. Asked if he had ever trained in an al-Qaida camp or swore allegiance to Bin Laden, Nashiri said he had not. Nashiri denied being a member of al-Qaida and said he is not an enemy of the United States, though he criticized US foreign policy. "If you think that anybody who wants the Americans to get out of the Gulf is your enemy, then you will catch about 10 million people in Saudi Arabia that have the same opinion," Nashiri said, according to the transcript.