The Guardian reported last week that a recently-declassified CIA Inspector General’s report from 2008 found that CIA officers at a covert detention site in Afghanistan used a prisoner, Ammar al-Baluch, as a “training prop,” taking turns smashing his head against a plywood wall and leaving him with permanent brain damage. Baluch is currently one of five defendants before a military tribunal at the US military prison at Guantanamo charged with participating in the planning for the September 11 attacks. The case has been stuck in the pre-trial phase for 10 years, in part because much of the information that the government wants to use against the defendants was collected using torture.
The article comes amid reporting from the New York Times that lawyers for the five are in talks with military prosecutors on a plea deal that would have them plead guilty to terrorism in exchange for taking the death penalty off the table, agreeing to sentences of either 30 years to life or to life without parole, and promising to keep them in Guantanamo, rather than to transfer them to the federal supermax prison in Florence, Colorado.
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