October 23, 2007
Meet the case of Abdallah Higazy.
Egyptian national. Confessed under FBI questioning to being involved with the 9/11 plot - they found a device used to communicate with pilots in his hotel room after all. Then a pilot turns up and asks for his radio back.
Higazy is now suing the FBI and the hotel and the Court of Appeals has found that he has grounds for doing so. The interesting bit is that the court published their opinion on the web, then tried to unpublish the bit where Higazy describes the FBI using coercion to get his confession. I'm going to go have a drink now.
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I'm going to go have a puke now. "We're at war! We can't just sit around and WAIT for false confessions; we have to use whatever techniques we can to obtain false confessions!"
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Great article, and hopefully the internet "revolution" or whatever can help bring more examples of this track covering to light. I just listened to an NPR interview with a CIA representative regarding the movie "Rendition". His claim was that the CIA asks the destination countries really, really nicely not to torture the prisoners, which, of course, means that they couldn't possibly be doing so, naturally. Not that they had any oversight on the matter or anything.
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Oh my god. Poor guy just stays in an unlucky hotel room, and his life is over. I don't even dare click the How Appealing link at work. (I will read at home, though.) And I never thought I'd live in a world where I'd even think that. But thank god for people who are keeping truth out there.
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Thanks for posting, polychrome. I can't help but to wonder how many other individuals were coerced in similar fashion. Of course, we will probably never know...
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I'm sure there have been [redacted] for instance, [redacted] and of course [redacted].