On Ammar al-Baluchi
Over 20 years ago, Ammar al-Baluchi was snatched from the streets of Karachi, and then delivered to the CIA several days later. He was tortured, shuttled to 6 different black sites, and taken to Guantánamo Bay, where he’s been since 2006. His military commission (trial) as one of 5 men facing the death penalty for 9/11 is widely seen as a failure. I wrote a deep dive on him and his case for The Guardian. It’s long, but I hope you’ll take the time to read it and share it.
On 29 April 2003, 25-year-old Ammar al-Baluchi was snatched off the streets of Karachi by Pakistani authorities and handed over to the CIA.
While in CIA custody, he endured extreme forms of cruelty. He was denied sleep for days and became a human experiment for interrogators who practiced brutal methods on him to gain “official” certification in using “enhanced interrogation techniques”. Over the next three years, he was secretly shuttled between six different black sites around the world. Then, in September 2006, he was transferred to Guantánamo Bay, where he still sits in a cell. Though never convicted of a crime, he hasn’t seen a day of freedom since he was first disappeared.
According to the US government, Baluchi is one of five co-conspirators responsible for the 9/11 attacks, which killed close to 3,000 people, and he is facing charges that carry the death penalty.
Though his name and horrific experiences of torture provided the basis for a character in the 2012 film Zero Dark Thirty, no journalist has been able to talk directly to Baluchi for the last 20 years. The US government imposes strict rules on communications between him and the outside world. Journalists may not ask him questions via his lawyers, for example. But by talking to his defense team and legal experts, digging deep into the trial record, examining legions of declassified documents and partially redacted transcripts, and comparing his own written accounts of his ordeal with recently declassified CIA documents of his treatment, it is possible to assemble what might be the fullest picture yet of who Ammar al-Baluchi is, how his captors saw him, and what he has endured.
Understanding Baluchi and his torture is crucial beyond mere human interest or political curiosity. The torture he and his co-defendants endured and the long-term consequences of that abuse, including the possibility of post-torture therapy treatments, have all become part of plea negotiations, which began after the prosecution approached the defense teams in March 2022.
These talks could fail and, if they do, the 9/11 case will probably continue without any resolution for many years to come. But if the talks succeed and a plea agreement is reached, a judgment will finally be entered in one of the biggest legal cases in American history. And the United States will also be one step closer to closing the most infamous site of indefinite detention amid the “war on terror”.
But why has the prosecution even proposed a plea deal? And how likely is it to happen?
Twenty years of detention
Baluchi, who also goes by the name Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, is facing capital charges but, after 20 years of detention, the United States has yet to bring him to trial. Charges against him and his four co-defendants were filed for the second time in 2012, but since then the case has been stuck in endless pre-trial hearings.
Over a decade of hearings with no sign of a trial doesn’t seem like normal jurisprudence, but nothing is normal at Guantánamo. The case is being heard by military commission, a new and separate legal system established by the Military Commissions Act of 2006 and modified in 2009. It’s taking place in a courtroom far from the US mainland, behind soundproof glass, and on a 40-second audio delay for those – press, family and NGO observers – allowed to watch its “public” proceedings.
Most of the charges Baluchi faces in his military tribunal concern conspiracy, but conspiracy is generally not recognized by international law as a war crime and its status as such under US law remains unsettled.
The specter of torture, a crime under both international law and US statute, has haunted these proceedings from the beginning. That this torture was state policy is a dangerous fact for the US government, and from the beginning prosecutors have tried to suppress any mention of it (hence the 40-second delay) while seeking to admit statements made under torture into the record. It hasn’t been that simple.
“Administration after administration has assumed the 9/11 case is open and shut, that a jury will convict these guys, give them death sentences, and we’ll be good,” explained Lisa Hajjar, author of The War in Court: Inside the Long Fight Against Torture, a book about torture and the American judicial system in the “war on terror”. “But you cannot have anything that passes the sniff test for justice when people were tortured and disappeared for years.”
From the 2014 Senate select committee on intelligence’s “Torture Report” (which references Baluchi over 100 times) to years of litigation from lawyers, journalists and activists, the gruesome details of torture have been emerging, sometimes in drips, other times in waves. Also emerging has been the degree of coordination between the CIA and FBI in holding and questioning men…
Read the rest here.