THE CIA has admitted it has videotapes of the September 11 plotter Ramzi Binalshibh under interrogation in Morocco.
The videotapes are the only surviving footage from inside the clandestine “black prison” system where suspects were tortured.
The two videotapes and one audiotape were discovered by a staffer under a desk at the CIA’s Counterterrorism Centre in 2007 long after the agency destroyed its cache of videotapes depicting the interrogations of terrorism suspects in clandestine prisons.
Intelligence officials said the tapes showed Binalshibh’s interrogation sessions at a Moroccan-run facility outside the capital, Rabat.
The tapes do not depict any treatment that could be described as torture, reports said, but they could offer a glimpse into the co-operation between foreign governments and the US as part of the extraordinary rendition program. Morocco has never publicly admitted its role but there are numerous records of CIA-chartered aircraft arriving at the military airport in Rabat as well as testimony from former detainees such as Binyam Mohammed, an Ethiopian national who lived in Britain for seven years. He was captured in Pakistan in 2002 and flown to Morocco, where he was held for 18 months before being taken to Bagram air base in Afghanistan and then Guantanamo Bay. He claims that while in Morocco he was tortured by interrogators who slashed his genitals with a scalpel.
US intelligence officials describe the Moroccan prison as a “way station” for terror suspects but deny harsh interrogation methods were used there.
The US Justice Department is investigating the 2005 destruction of 92 tapes showing the interrogation and torture of al-Qa’ida operatives, including two of the September 11 plotters, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Nashiri.
The office is investigating why the Binalshibh tapes were not disclosed, having learnt of their existence some time after their discovery. The government had previously told a federal judge that the tapes did not exist.
In 2007, the CIA admitted the tapes’ existence in a court letter, but Binalshibh’s name was blacked out from the public copy so the nature of the tape was not publicly known. At the time, the CIA played down the tapes’ significance, saying the videos were not taken as part of the CIA’s detention program and did not show CIA interrogations. That was technically true because the facility was financed by the CIA but run by Moroccans. That structure allowed the CIA to move its “ghost prisoners” in and out and even oversee interrogations, while denying any responsibility for the site.
Lawyers for Binalshibh said the tapes could also provide a glimpse into his mental state within the first few months of his capture. He is being treated for paranoid schizophrenia by doctors at Guantanamo Bay where he and the other September 11 conspirators are awaiting the decision of the Obama administration on how to try them.
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