A French judge on Thursday ordered a retired US General to appear in a Guantanamo Bay torture case brought by two French citizens and former detainees.
Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the commander of the notorious prison from 2002 until 2004, was summoned by an appeals court judge in litigation brought by Nizar Sassi and Mourad Benchellali.
The two men have alleged that Miller systemically carried out “torture and ill-treatment on persons deprived of their freedom without any charge and without the basic rights of any detainee,” according to Agence France Presse.
The two men were detained in 2001 by US forces in Afghanistan and shipped to the now-infamous US facility. Sassi was released and returned to France in 2004; Benchellali, in 2005.
Their lawyer, William Bourdon, said that with the decision, “the door has opened for civilian and military officials to be prosecuted over international crimes committed in Guantanamo,” AFP noted.
In late 2002, President George W. Bush approved of some torture methods employed by interrogators at Guantanamo. Such techniques included the use stress positions, exposure to extreme temperatures, and isolation.
But Miller’s responsibility is unique, a report on the pair’s treatment has argued, because he continued to use so-called “enhanced interrogation” techniques in some instances after January 2003, when then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ordered the cessation of most torture.
When Miller retired from the military in 2006, however, a civilian defense lawyer named Harvey Volzer told The Washington Post that the ex-Gitmo chief “has become a scapegoat for abusive policies developed at a higher level.”
Last year, Sassi and Benchellali first filed their complaint, but Parisian judges had refused then to compel Miller to appear in court, according to the French-language Swiss daily, Le Matin.
Bourdon also said that Gen. Miller “is identified in all international and American investigations as being at the heart of the torture system,” according to the Lausanne-based newspaper.
“It’s unthinkable that explanations have not been demanded of him. If he refuses to come, there will be consequences,” he added.
Miller has previously been named in European legal proceedings about Guantanamo. In 2006, he was listed as a defendant in a criminal complaint filed with the German Federal Prosecutor’s office by a number of non-profit organizations “on behalf of 12 torture victims.”
Mohammed al Qahtani, a Saudi man alleged by US officials to be the “20th Hijacker” of the 9/11 plot and a Guantanamo detainee since January 2002, claimed to have been exposed to “fifty days of severe sleep deprivation and 20-hour interrogations, forced nudity, sexual humiliation, religious humiliation, physical force, prolonged stress positions and prolonged sensory over-stimulation.”
One military official who oversaw Guantanamo under the Bush administration said that Qahtani’s treatment “met the legal definition of torture,” left him with a “life-threatening condition,” and that both facts rendered him unfit to stand trial.
The case, which was dismissed in April 2009, was filed in Germany because the country is party to treaties that grant “universal jurisdiction” over war crimes.
Late last year, after the Senate Intelligence Committee report on torture was released under then-committee chair Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the State Department could not definitively say if the US was in compliance with its international obligations.
The UN Special Rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights Ben Emmerson also said after the report’s release that the US will be violating international law if it grants “immunities to public officials who have engaged in acts of torture.”
Emmerson noted that the Attorney General of the United States has the “primary responsibility” for ensuring this isn’t the case, but warned “perpetrators may be prosecuted by any other country they may travel to.”
In the wake of the Torture Report, the Justice Department confirmed it would not be launching a criminal inquiry into Bush administration activities documented by Feinstein’s committee.
The judicial branch of the United States government, too, seems uninterested in ruling on the rights of Guantanamo detainees. Former detainee and Syrian national Abdul Rahim Abdul Razak al-Janko, imprisoned at Guantanamo from 2002 until 2009, had his appeal turned down last month by the Supreme Court, AFP pointed out.
Janko also had claimed to have been victimized by sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, threats, sexually explicit epithets, deprivation of medical care, “severe beatings” and “continuous” humiliation and harassment at the hands of US forces.
The State Department did not respond to The Sentinel’s request for comment by time of publication.
