Appeals Panel Overturns Army Judge’s Ruling on Torture
Cathy Biank
GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — A Pentagon appeals panel on Monday threw out a ruling by an Army judge who found that evidence obtained during the torture of a defendant could be considered in determining pretrial matters in a death-penalty case at Guantánamo Bay.
“The issue of admissibility of such evidence is not ripe or ready for judicial review,” the Court of Military Commission Review ruled in a six-page decision that essentially left to another day the overarching issue of whether prosecutors can in some instances use evidence obtained through the torture of a prisoner.
Lawyers brought the appeal on behalf of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi man accused of plotting Al Qaeda’s bombing of the U.S. Navy destroyer Cole off Yemen in 2000, which killed 17 U.S. sailors. Mr. Nashiri was waterboarded by psychologists working for the C.I.A., and his trial has been mired in pretrial proceedings for a decade as the court that was set up after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, tries to deal with the legacy of the torture.
The Pentagon appeals panel issued the decision on Monday, the eve of the first pretrial hearings in the case since January 2020 following a lengthy closure of the court caused by the coronavirus pandemic. A military commission at Guantánamo is essentially a commuter court, with nearly everybody who takes part in the proceedings, aside from the prisoner, arriving on a charter flight from the Washington, D.C., area.
https://worldnewsera.com/news/politics/appeals-panel-overturns-army-judges-ruling-on-torture/
