The C.I.A. interrogated Ammar al-Baluchi 1,119 times over more than three years before he was ever charged in connection to the Sept. 11 attacks. At first, he was beaten, deprived of sleep, kept shackled and naked in a secret prison in Afghanistan.
Even after the brutality stopped, the questioning continued while he was kept in isolation and incommunicado during that time. Then, in 2006, he was transferred to Guantánamo Bay, and the F.B.I. took over the interrogations.
During those sessions, in 2007, Mr. Baluchi was fully clothed, with an ankle shackled to the floor. That is when he explained to agents building a criminal case against him how he sent money and provided other support to some of the hijackers who attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.
Now a military judge will decide whether that 2007 confession can be used against Mr. Baluchi at his death-penalty trial.
The central question is: Was his confession to the F.B.I. voluntary, or was it the result of a campaign of state-sponsored torture that spanned his time in C.I.A. custody?
The Sept. 11 case is once again at a crossroads at Guantánamo Bay. Three defendants, including Mr. Baluchi’s uncle, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, are awaiting resolution of a dispute over whether they can plead guilty in exchange for life sentences. A fourth defendant has been ruled not mentally fit to face trial.
Mr. Baluchi is the only prisoner currently on the path to trial for the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Pennsylvania and at the Pentagon.
So for three days last month, between sporadic power outages at Guantánamo’s court complex at Camp Justice, defense and prosecution lawyers offered starkly different portrayals of whether Mr. Baluchi was able to shed years of C.I.A. domination to voluntarily help F.B.I. agents who questioned him after his transfer to Guantánamo.
The agents described those three days of interrogations in January 2007 in a 45-page memo, which the prosecutors consider the most crucial evidence against him.
The question of whether that memo can be used has shadowed the case for nearly six years, taking up thousands of pages of pretrial pleadings and dozens of days of witness testimony that was interrupted by the coronavirus pandemic.
In the recent court session, a prosecutor, Jeffrey D. Groharing, pointed to two remarks attributed to Mr. Baluchi in the document as proof that the confession was voluntary. On his first day, when asked if he would answer their questions, Mr. Baluchi replied, “Let’s get down to business.” It was his 1,120th interrogation.
Mr. Groharing said that Mr. Baluchi later volunteered a motive for the Sept. 11 attacks. “He wanted Americans to feel the same pain that Palestinians felt” and stop supporting Israel.
In his first days of detention, in 2003, Mr. Baluchi was held in “undeniably uncomfortable, miserable conditions that would have an impact on anyone,” Mr. Groharing said.
“He was held by the C.I.A. as an enemy of the United States,” to gather intelligence and disrupt further plots, Mr. Groharing added.
He acknowledged that the statements Mr. Baluchi gave during his years in the agency’s secret black site program could not be used against him at his trial.
But Mr. Groharing said Mr. Baluchi knew he could refuse to cooperate with the F.B.I. agents at Guantánamo, adding that eavesdropping devices in the prison yard caught Mr. Baluchi discussing the issue with another prisoner.
Defense lawyers countered that even after Mr. Baluchi was transferred to Guantánamo, he still believed that if he did not cooperate with his interrogations, he would be once again tortured, perhaps killed.
In the first days he was questioned through a C.I.A. program called “enhanced interrogation” that authorized the brutality. Student interrogators took turns slamming his head against a wall. He was kept awake for 82 hours and made to fear he would be drowned in a mock waterboarding technique in which he was laid out on a tarp as cold water was poured onto a towel covering his face.
Psychologists have testified that interrogators stopped the violence but would signal, using certain cues like having a towel on a table while he was being questioned, that a noncooperative detainee could undergo more “enhanced interrogation.”
Alka Pradhan, a human rights lawyer, described Mr. Baluchi as a broken survivor of a U.S.-sanctioned program of “nonconsensual human experimentation.” She cited a C.I.A. investigation that quoted one agency employee as describing the prisoner’s first holding site as “a dungeon,” and another as like “a Nazi concentration camp.”
But the experiment continued, she said, as he was moved between five black sites.
It was an isolated world of white noise, sterile cells whose lights were never turned off, bolts where he could be shackled to a floor, bed or ceiling — just like the cell where F.B.I. agents questioned him at Guantánamo.
Ms. Pradhan showed the court photographs of Mr. Baluchi as he was prepared for transport between black sites: He is nude and appears malnourished. In one image, his shackled wrists are bandaged, she said, because his earlier shackles became so rusty in his dank detention that they had to be cut off him.
“The goal was to train Ammar’s brain to achieve permanent compliance,” Ms. Pradhan said. His statements in 2007 should be excluded for “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment at a minimum,” she said.
The prosecutor acknowledged that U.S. military medical staff had diagnosed Mr. Baluchi with anxiety and depression. An Army psychiatrist testified that he was prescribed medication and given a self-help book. Testing at Guantánamo also detected that he had suffered a traumatic brain injury, his lawyers said.
But the prosecutor argued that for those three days at Guantánamo in 2007, F.B.I. agents and an analyst detected no sign of distress in Mr. Baluchi, making his confession voluntary and reliable. He had calmly explained records showing how he had made online purchases and wire transfers at the behest of his uncle, Mr. Mohammed, according to the prosecutor.
James G. Connell III, Mr. Baluchi’s capital defense lawyer, offered a constitutional argument to suppress the confession. Three years of detention without access to counsel or basic human rights should be enough to disqualify the U.S. government from using the statement against him, he said.
By the time Mr. Baluchi was brought to Guantánamo, Mr. Connell said, C.I.A. interrogators had already shown him every document and piece of evidence that the F.B.I. agents had at his 2007 interrogation.
“It doesn’t matter whether people acted out of sadism or patriotism,” Mr. Connell said. “It doesn’t matter whether people acted to save lives or advance their careers. What matters is that it happened.”
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