Jenifer Fenton, in Al Jazeera, is calling attention to the case of Redha al-Najar of Tunisia. In 2002, al-Najar was the first prisoner at the CIA black site in Afghanistan known as the Salt Pit.
The Salt Pit, from what we know of it, comes across as an unimaginable dungeon. Men chained hanging in dark cages, where spooky music and howling voices were played. Men shackled and groping in the dark for their latrine bucket, daring only occasionally to whisper between cage.
CIA detainees at the COBALT detention facility were kept in complete darkness and constantly shackled in isolated cells with loud noise or music and only a bucket to use for human waste. Lack of heat at the facility likely contribute to the death of a detainee. The chief of interrogations described COBALT as a "dungeon."
Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency's Detention and Interrogation Program, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
Many CIA prisoners passed through the Salt Pit. Redha al-Najar was the first. His treatment became a model for using on the others.
He had been, from the CIA torture, from very early on, a broken man.
After nearly two months of untrained interrogators using “enhanced interrogation techniques” on Najar, they described him as being reduced to “clearly a broken man” who was “on the verge of a complete breakdown.”
My client, a torture victim, Tina M. Foster, Washington Post
After being clearly broken by the CIA torture, very early on,
“willing to do whatever the CIA officer asked.”
How Obama handed Afghanistan a prisoner dilemma, Jenifer Fenton, Al Jazeera
Redha al-Najar continued to be tortured.
He was imprisoned by the CIA for 690 days. He has seen, since 2002, the Salt Pit, and the Panjshir prison, and Rissat prison, and Rissat prison #2, and Bagram.
On the day the Senate Intelligence Committee released the summary of its report on CIA torture, Redha al-Najar, after 12 years of imprisonment by the United States, was handed over by the United States to be imprisoned by Afghanistan.
He has never been charged or had the chance to prove his innocence in court, and does not have prisoner of war status.
Redha al-Najar, Detainee in Torture Report, Released to Afghan Government, Reuters
But all the while, he has barely been allowed any contact with the outside world. His American lawyers have never met him.
U.S. Gives Up a CIA Torture Victim, Eli Lake, Bloomberg
The Bush administration, long ago, had written the memos, that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to prisoners from the war in Afghanistan, and such. It was intended that the system of imprisonment and the crime of torture be placed outside the effective reach of U.S. law. This intention was explicitly stated.
Redha Al-Najar, currently in an Afghan prison more than a decade after having been entirely broken by CIA torture, has at all times been placed outside the effective reach of U.S. law, and still is.
Thus, the government successfully created a “legal black hole” at Bagram where it could detain Najar and others without having to justify that detention and his treatment in a court of law.
My client, a torture victim, Tina M. Foster, Washington Post
The same day that the Senate report revealed details of Najar’s torture under U.S. supervision, Barack Obama’s administration handed him over to the Afghan government, according to the International Justice Network (IJN), which represents Najar. The group characterized that as “an attempt to wipe the U.S. government’s hands of any responsibility for this victim of U.S.-sanctioned torture.”
Transferring responsibility for Najar and the other five men makes it difficult for his lawyer, IJN Executive Director Tina Foster, to fight his case. “We can’t argue anymore that they are in U.S. custody,” she said. “We still are representing them, but there isn’t a legal case at this point that we can pursue against the U.S. government.”
It’s unclear, she added, whether the Afghans are going to charge the men, indefinitely detain them or release them.
How Obama handed Afghanistan a prisoner dilemma, Jenifer Fenton, Al Jazeera
Jenifer Fenton's article in Al Jazeera, calling attention to the case of Redha al-Najar, also calls attention to the case of five others: Lofti al-Ghrissi, Said Jamaluddin, Abdul Fatah, Muso Akhmadjanov, and Abu Ikhlas al-Masri.
Conditions and torture at the dark dungeon of the Salt Pit, a decade ago, are beyond imagining. Conditions and torture at the dark dungeon of the U.S.-run Black Jail near Bagram, much more recently, and under joint operation still, are also difficult to imagine.
The plight of men broken by torture long ago, then held for long years in American military prisons, always outside the reach of the law, and now in some Afghan prison, is hard to conceive.
The large scale of the current U.S.-backed system of imprisonment by Afghan security forces, where torture is rampant, the number of men caught up in it and the torture methods used, is impossible to fully understand.
She [Laura Pitter at Human Rights Watch] raised concern that the men could be subjected to torture, which has been widespread in Afghanistan’s prisons, and urged that they be speedily released, absent any evidence that could serve as a basis for prosecution.
How Obama handed Afghanistan a prisoner dilemma, Jenifer Fenton, Al Jazeera
We have read so much about it. There are so many cases.
As we have read the revelations in the newspapers over the years, men broken by torture, long ago, are shuffled among the prisons, beyond the reach of the law.