"Rectal Feeding" Back in the News

A story published in the national print edition of the Saturday New York Times describes the ongoing U.S. military commission trials of Al Qaeda detainees apprehended post-9/11. As Carol Rosenberg reports in "Guantánamo Trials Grapple With How Much Evidence to Allow About Torture," admission of torture by the United States Government at the black sites it operated overseas remains a sticking point:

Seventeen-and-a-half years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, and a decade after President Barack Obama ordered the C.I.A. to dismantle any remnants of its global prison network, the military commission system is still wrestling with how to handle evidence of what the United States did to the Qaeda suspects it held at C.I.A. black sites. While the topic of torture can now be discussed in open court, there is still a dispute about how evidence of it can be gathered and used in the proceedings at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

By law, prosecutors cannot use evidence gained through torture — or any other involuntary statements — at the war court, where eight of Guantánamo’s 40 prisoners are accused of being complicit in terrorist attacks. Prosecutors have made clear that nothing the defendants said at the black sites will be used as evidence.

But defense lawyers have continued to press for details of what happened to their clients and to be able to use the information either to fight the charges or to win more lenient sentencing. And they have been aided by changing circumstances, not least the government’s declassification of some details of how the prisoners were interrogated by the C.I.A.

Rosenberg describes the torture of one Qaeda foot soldier, Majid Khan:

The topic of his torture was strictly taboo on Feb. 29, 2012, when he made his first court appearance since disappearing from his native Pakistan in 2003 at age 23. At that first hearing, Mr. Khan, who lived in suburban Baltimore for seven years and graduated from high school there in 1999, admitted to volunteering to work for Al Qaeda after Sept. 11 and plotting with Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the accused architect of the attacks.

But in the intervening years, the Obama administration declassified details of what Mr. Khan said the C.I.A. did to him. By his account, he was beaten, hung naked from a wooden beam for three days with no food, kept for months in darkness, and submerged, shackled and hooded, into a tub of ice and water.

Additional details of his treatment were revealed in the partly declassified introduction to a Senate study of the George W. Bush administration’s black site program. In his second year of C.I.A. detention, according to a cable cited in the study, the agency “infused” a purée of pasta, sauce, nuts, raisins and hummus up Mr. Khan’s rectum, because he went on a hunger strike.

The C.I.A. calls this “rectal feeding.” Defense lawyers call it rape.

Mr. Khan’s lawyers now want to call witnesses and gather evidence to show his sentencing jury what happened to him.

Prosecutors are resisting divulging any information on how the black sites were operated, probably because they are still in existence, just not at the same locations.