Judge Tosses Torture-marred Confession

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - A U.S. military judge has blocked Pentagon prosecutors from using a Guantanamo prisoner's statements to U.S. authorities as trial evidence, saying they were tainted by an earlier confession tortured out of the suspect by Afghan officials.

Mohammed Jawad's confession to U.S. authorities in Afghanistan following his capture in 2002 was the last incriminating statement available to prosecutors for the Afghan's war-crimes trial at Guantanamo Bay, his military defense attorney, Air Force Maj. David Frakt, said Nov. 20.

The Nov. 19 dismissal of Jawad's confession in U.S. custody decimates the government's case against the Afghan prisoner at Guantanamo Bay, according to the former prosecutor, who quit several weeks ago in a dispute over the handling of the case.

"It's not the death knell of the case - it buries the case," said Darrel Vandeveld, a lieutenant colonel in the Army reserves. "The commissions at this point are utterly lifeless."

Jawad, now about 23, is scheduled to face trial Jan. 5 on charges that he threw a grenade that wounded two American Soldiers and their Afghan interpreter. He was 16 or 17 at the time of the 2002 attack in Kabul.

The Army judge, Col. Stephen Henley, ruled last month that Jawad's confession to Afghan police commanders and high-ranking government officials on Dec. 17, 2002 was only achieved after they threatened to kill him and his family - a strategy that he said was intended to inflict severe pain and constituted torture.

In Wednesday's ruling, Henley disqualified Jawad's second confession while in U.S. custody on Dec. 17 and 18, in part because the U.S. interrogator used techniques to maintain "the shock and fearful state" associated with his arrest by Afghan police, including blindfolding him and placing a hood over his head.

"The military commission concludes the effect of the death threats which produced the accused's first confession to the Afghan police had not dissipated by the second confession to the U.S.," Henley wrote. "In other words, the subsequent confession was itself the product of the preceding death threats."

Under the Military Commissions Act, which governs America's first war-crimes trials since the World War II era, statements obtained through torture are not admissible. But some statements obtained through "coercion" may be admitted at the discretion of a military judge.

A spokesman for the Pentagon's Office of Military Commissions, Joseph DellaVedova, said prosecution authorities could not immediately comment on Henley's ruling.

Hina Shamsi, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement that it would be a "tragic legacy" for the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush if Jawad's case proceeds at Guantanamo.