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News ID: 47291
Publish Date : 09 December 2017 - 20:34

Group Seeks U.S. Accountability for CIA Renditions



RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) -- Efforts to prosecute the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and four co-defendants are stalled in part over a lingering issue U.S. citizens haven’t yet resolved: torture.
Interrogators at secret CIA prisons repeatedly slammed Ammar al Baluchi’s head against walls, leaving the 9/11 planner and nephew of attack mastermind Khalid Sheikh Muhammad with brain injuries and memory loss, one of Baluchi’s attorneys, Air Force Lt. Col. Sterling Thomas, said before court proceedings this week at the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Thomas’ allegations are resonating with The North Carolina Commission of Inquiry on Torture, a private, 11-member group of citizens whose mission is to highlight and denounce the practice. Just last week, the organization featured Thomas as one of its speakers at an anti-torture teach-in attended by about 100 people in Raleigh.
"The science, the facts and the law all cut against the pro-torture argument, but they’re not being heard very well,” Thomas said.
"So some of the discussion has to be taken on by those who are disturbed” by it. "Those people are often citizens who speak up.”
The academics, lawyers, retired military officers and clergy who make up the commission are planning public talks in North Carolina and Washington, D.C., and aim to issue a report next summer with recommendations for county, state and federal officials.
"We don’t have the power to lock anybody up. We don’t have the power to order people to pay” compensation, commission co-chair and former Guantanamo defense lawyer Frank Goldsmith noted at last week’s meeting. "But we can make findings. ... We can call for action.”
Such non-governmental inquiry commissions are rare, though others succeeded in bringing attention to U.S. military atrocities in Vietnam and war crimes in Bangladesh during the 1971 civil war. Nonetheless, one of the legal experts who helped set the limits of harsh interrogation tactics under President George W. Bush dismissed the North Carolina group’s hearings as little more than a publicity stunt.
Some tactics employed by CIA interrogators are now widely viewed as torture. A 2014 report from the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded the agency understated the brutality of the techniques, while overstating the value of information obtained by using them.