[AnNahar] Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-confessed criminal mastermind behind the September 11 attacks, should not have to face the death penalty, his lawyer said Tuesday, following revelations of torture in a scathing U.S. Senate report.
| Generally, getting your own lawyer to agree that the state should go light on you isn't that far a stretch... |
"It's not legal, humane, or fair to execute a person after torturing him," David Nevin told Agence La Belle France Presse.
Mohammed is known to have been waterboarded 183 times in secret CIA prisons and in March 2003 he was subjected to five waterboard sessions over 25 hours.
"Holding a real execution of Mr. Mohammad, after 183 mock executions, is cruel and unusual punishment," prohibited under the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, Nevin said.
"The brutality revealed in the details of the torture is quite shocking," he said, and "produced absolutely no useful information."
| So you and the Democrats in the Senate say. Now... |
Tuesday's report revealed that sleep deprivation for over a week, beatings, shackling and waterboarding were among the cruel methods used by the George W. Bush-era CIA to interrogate Al-Qaeda terror suspects. The document found that the techniques employed by the Central Intelligence Agency were "far more brutal" than the spy agency had previously admitted to.
| And the Dems knew all along... |
The lawyer for Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who allegedly led Al-Qaeda operations in the Gulf, said it was "stunning" that the prosecutors knew of the torture "for years and hid it from the court in violation of their professional obligations."
Al-Nashiri, who was tortured in CIA prisons, is accused of criminal masterminding a suicide kaboom of the USS Cole which killed 17 American sailors in 2000 off the coast of Yemen.
"The fact that military and civilian prosecutors are protecting torturers who were acting in violation of American and international law is disappointing, although regrettably not unexpected," Richard Kammen told AFP.
Rights advocates hailed the exposure following the report's release, but criticized a Justice Department announcement that it will not prosecute any U.S. officials implicated.
It was regrettable that "the government has excluded from the report the identities of the torturers, the locations of the torture, and many other facts," said James Connell, the civilian lawyer for Mohammad's nephew and accused co-conspirator Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali. He called for the publication of "the remaining 6,125 pages" of the redacted report.
Lieutenant Colonel Sterling Thomas, Ali's military lawyer, said that "torture violates American military values."
"The military commission should order access to the full torture report and its underlying documents as part of that accounting for torture," he said.
According to the Senate report, Mohammed was the detainee who was tortured the most of the 39 prisoners who underwent the interrogation techniques. |
