Sorry I’ve been AWOL for the last several days. I’ve been traveling and speaking and traveling. Thanks to Jim and bmaz for holding down the fort.
While I’ve been gone, there has been fairly shocking testimony from Gitmo (thanks, as always, to Carol Rosenberg for her persistence in covering this thankless story). In Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri’s trial, a doctor called to testify to his untreated PTSD described the trauma evidence she found on him.
It includes symptoms of sexual assault.
[Dr. Sondra] Crosby chose her words carefully in court because, in order to make her diagnosis, she was allowed to review Top Secret records and discuss with Nashiri what happened to him. So while she was not allowed to say in open court what she saw in a medical exam of him or what he told her, she was allowed to refer to unclassified government records to support her diagnosis.
“He suffers from chronic pain. He suffers from anal-rectal complaints,” she said. Also, “difficulty defecating, hemorrhoids, pain in sitting for a long time,” which she said are typical of “survivors of sexual assault.”
None of the evidence of this trauma was noted in Nashiri’s medical record.
Anal rape, of course, was never approved in any of the OLC memos. Which is presumably why evidence it happened is not in the documentation.
(Though remember Nashiri was in custody in UAE before we moved him to Thailand, so it’s quite possible our surrogates did it).
It seems we still have a lot to learn about our torture program.
Meanwhile, the doctor Gitmo intended to rebut Crosby’s testimony was permitted to watch her testimony by live feed, a feed Judge Pohl didn’t know existed, yet another episode in Kangaroo justice.