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Torture and Secret C.I.A. Prisons Haunt 9/11 Case in Judge’s Ruling

Published

1 year ago

April 29, 2025

Torture and Secret C.I.A. Prisons Haunt 9/11 Case in Judge’s Ruling

When a military judge threw out a defendant’s confession in the Sept. 11 case this month, he gave two main reasons.

The prisoner’s statements, the judge ruled, were obtained through the C.I.A.’s use of torture, including beatings and sleep deprivation.

But equally troubling to the judge was what happened to the prisoner in the years after his physical torture ended, when the agency held him in isolation and kept questioning him from 2003 to 2006.

The defendant, Ammar al-Baluchi, is accused of sending money and providing other support to some of the hijackers who carried out the terrorist attack, which killed 3,000 people. In court, Mr. Baluchi is charged as Ali Abdul Aziz Ali.

He is the nephew of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the man accused of masterminding the plot.

The judge, Col. Matthew N. McCall, wrote that it was easy to focus on the torture because it was “so absurdly far outside the norms of what is expected of U.S. custody preceding law enforcement questioning.”

“However,” he added, “the three and a half years of uncharged, incommunicado detention and essentially solitary confinement — all while being continually questioned and conditioned — is just as egregious” as the physical torture.

Prosecutors are preparing to appeal.

But the 111-page ruling was the latest blow to the government’s two-decade-old effort to hold death penalty trials at Guantánamo Bay by sweeping aside a legacy of state-sponsored torture.

Military judges in the two capital cases at Guantánamo have rejected the use of confessions taken from prisoners after they were in C.I.A. detention, illustrating the enduring stain of a Bush administration decision after Sept. 11, 2001, to interrogate and hide suspected members of Al Qaeda in black sites rather than use the court-monitored law enforcement system.

From his capture in Pakistan in early 2003 to his transfer to Guantánamo in 2006, Mr. Baluchi was kept out of the reach of lawyers, a court and the International Red Cross, according to evidence presented at years of pretrial hearings.

In his first days in custody, Mr. Baluchi was deprived of sleep for 82 straight hours. He was shackled at the ankles and the wrists in a way that forced him to stand, naked, with a hood on his head. He was made to fear he would be drowned in a mock waterboarding technique while he was in a dungeonlike setting in Afghanistan.

In time, he was shuttled between five overseas prisons, including in Eastern Europe. Food and clothing were used as rewards for his cooperation with C.I.A. debriefers in a program described in court by two psychologists who carried out some of the interrogations for the agency.

The judge referred to classified C.I.A. accounts showing that Mr. Baluchi was questioned about Al Qaeda and his role in the Sept. 11 attacks more than 1,000 times before he was transferred to Guantánamo. Then, in January 2007, the Bush administration adopted a concept called clean teams.

The idea was to have agents who had not been involved in previous interrogations question a suspect anew to try to obtain admissible evidence for a court case. In the case of Mr. Baluchi, three F.B.I. agents questioned him over four days at Guantánamo in January 2007, four months after he was transferred there from a black site.

The F.B.I. agents wrote a memo containing his confessions, which Judge McCall rejected on April 11 as illegally derived from torture.

Prosecutors had argued that Mr. Baluchi’s brutal interrogations lasted only a few days. For the next three years, they said, he gradually became less afraid of his captors and in time voluntarily answered questions from the C.I.A. debriefers and, later, from the F.B.I. questioners at Guantánamo.

The judge disagreed. “The goal of the program was to condition him through torture and other inhumane and coercive methods to become compliant during any government questioning,” he wrote. “The program worked.”

Uncertainty over whether the statements would be admissible was one reason the prosecutors sought to settle the case with guilty pleas in exchange for life sentences rather than through a death-penalty trial.

Mr. Baluchi and his lawyers never reached a plea agreement. But Mr. Mohammed and two other defendants did in a settlement that the Justice Department is now trying to overturn. If the courts uphold the deal and the plea goes forward, Mr. Mohammed has agreed to let prosecutors use portions of his 2007 interrogations at Guantánamo at a sentencing hearing.

Government lawyers have to meet a high bar in appealing to reinstate Mr. Baluchi’s 2007 statements. In January, the military commissions appeals court upheld a judge’s decision to throw out the same type of evidence in the U.S.S. Cole case, the longest-running capital case at Guantánamo Bay.

In it, the appellate panel endorsed the analysis of the judge in that case that the C.I.A. had “conditioned” its captives “to answer questions from United States government officials — be they debriefers, interrogators or interviewers.”

In his third month at Guantánamo, Mr. Baluchi reported to a medical staff member that guards had withheld water from him “for 48 hours because he wrote his name in his shower with steam,” the judge noted.

Court testimony showed that each former C.I.A. prisoner’s cell was equipped with an intercom and individual shower that required little contact with guards. So Mr. Baluchi was punished for writing his name in a place where only he, the guards and the prison’s surveillance system could see it.

Moves between black sites started with a cavity search, the judge said in a section that explained the process in detail. Mr. Baluchi was blindfolded, and his ears and mouth were covered to prevent him from hearing or communicating with others.

“He was diapered and then strapped into a seat or strapped to the floor like cargo for however long the flight lasted,” the judge recounted. The prisoner “did not know where he was going or how long he would have to remain in a soiled diaper.”

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Trump fires last members of election commission, inciting fears of midterm ‘chaos’

Published

4 hours ago

July 9, 2026

Press Room

Trump fires last members of election commission, inciting fears of midterm ‘chaos’

Donald Trump has terminated the remaining members of the independent, federal commission that assists election administration officials nationwide just a few months before the midterm elections, multiple outlets reported Thursday.

The remaining three commissioners of the four-member bipartisan commission ⁠were forced out on Thursday in different ways. The one Republican appointee resigned and the other ⁠two, Democratic appointees were notified of their terminations via email from the White House presidential personnel office.

“On ‌behalf of President ‌Donald J Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position ‌as Commissioner of the Election Assistance Commission is terminated, effective immediately. Thank you for your service,” the email, seen by Reuters, said.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Election Assistance Commission serves as a “national clearinghouse of information on election ‌administration”, accredits testing laboratories and certifies voting systems, and maintains the national mail-voter registration form developed by the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, according to the commission’s website. The terminations follow Trump and top administration officials’ advocacy to change vote-by-mail requirements and investigations into the 2020 election outcome, which Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden.

“It is ⁠irresponsible and dangerous that this Administration remains dead set on causing chaos for our election officials across this country,” Arizona secretary of state Adrian Fontes said in a Thursday statement. “This ‌move undermines the integrity of nonpartisan election administration.”

The 2002 law that established the commission, the Help America Vote Act, states the president can appoint replacements to the commission.

It is unclear how Trump will move ahead with the commission.

Reuters contributed reporting

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Former Olympian pleads not guilty in reflecting pool vandalism charges

Published

14 hours ago

July 9, 2026

Press Room

Former Olympian pleads not guilty in reflecting pool vandalism charges

Former U.S. Olympian David Hearn (left) walks with his attorney Norman Eisen to speak to reporters and protesters gathered after his arraignment at the Superior Court of the District of Columbia in Washington, D.C. on Thursday.

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Finn Gomez/Getty Images

Former U.S. Olympic canoeist David Hearn pleaded not guilty to damaging the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in D.C. Superior Court Thursday morning.

Federal prosecutors charged Hearn with a single count of destruction of property causing more than $1,000 in damage to the pool.

Visitors watch as National Park Service employees use vacuums to clean the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, Saturday, June 20, 2026, in Washington.

Hearn has previously claimed, which his attorneys repeated during a short press conference outside the court, that he simply touched the water in the pool out of curiosity.

The Trump administration had just completed a $14 million renovation of the pool.

But shortly after the work finished, peeling paint and algae gathered in the water. The remodel has been largely criticized as a massive failure and waste of taxpayer dollars.

Workers are shown with long poles dipping into the water of the Reflecting Pool. The water is in the foreground of the photo, and it is a deep green color. The Lincoln Memorial is seen in the distance.

Superior Court Judge Carmen McLean released Hearn on his own recognizance. His next hearing is scheduled for Aug. 5.

Norm Eisen, one of Hearn’s attorneys, spoke to reporters outside of court following the hearing. He said the administration is using Hearn as a “scapegoat … for their own failures.”

“It is not a crime to touch the reflecting pool, to touch water in the United States of America,” he said.

Prosecutors say there is a host of evidence against Hearn.

This is a developing story.

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Three more people charged with damaging Reflecting Pool after Trump’s multimillion-dollar restoration | CNN Politics

Published

1 day ago

July 9, 2026

Press Room

Three more people charged with damaging Reflecting Pool after Trump’s multimillion-dollar restoration | CNN Politics

Three more people have been criminally charged with destruction of property at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

Officers say they detained Cameron Thiers, Sophie Dennison-Gibby and Justin Carreno one Saturday afternoon in June and described in court documents witnessing them peeling and removing pieces of blue paint from the Reflecting Pool.

One officer “witnessed Carreno reach down into the reflecting pool and pull up a piece of the blue paint,” according to the court documents.

The officer who detained Dennison-Gibby “found 1 additional piece of the reflecting pool liner” in her purse, the documents said.

All three incidents were recorded on the officers’ body worn cameras, they said in the court documents.

Several “partnering law enforcement agencies assigned to the Reflecting Pool” working with US Park Police were involved in detaining the two men and one woman — including officers from Texas, Oklahoma, Montana and California.

One of the officers said in court documents that Thiers “admitted to removing a piece of blue sealant from the Reflecting Pool and still had it in his hand when I made contact with him.”

The three defendants were arraigned in court Wednesday and pleaded not guilty to the misdemeanor charges of destruction of property with a value less than $1,000. The judge ordered them to stay away from the Reflecting Pool.

Lawyers for Thiers and Dennison-Gibby declined to comment. CNN has reached out to Carreno’s attorney.

If found guilty of destruction of property, the defendants could be fined up to $1,000 and face a maximum of 180 days behind bars.

The New York Times first reported that three additional people had been charged with damaging the Reflecting Pool.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that vandals caused major damage to the pool by gashing the lining after his administration spent more than $14 million on renovations, though he has not provided evidence to support that claim. The officers who charged Carreno, Thiers and Dennison-Gibby did not accuse them of gashing the lining.

Former Olympic canoeist David Hearn was indicted by a grand jury in Washington, DC, last week for allegedly damaging the Reflecting Pool. Hearn — unlike Carreno, Thiers and Dennison-Gibby – was charged with destruction of property with a value of more than $1,000 which carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison, if convicted. He is set to be arraigned in court Thursday.

Crews began draining the Reflecting Pool over the weekend to make repairs, according to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, for the second time in three months.

The move comes after weeks of problems – algae blooms, green-hued water, a chipping bottom and the administration’s allegations of vandalism – that have plagued the iconic landmark, making its woes the subject of national interest.