Description
On 29th October 2021, eight out of nine jury panel members of the Guantanamo Bay Military Commission against Majid Khan issued a letter recommending clemency. The damning two-page document authored by senior serving military personnel described the CIA’s torture of Khan as ‘a stain on the moral fibre of America’ and likened his torture to the practices of ‘the most abusive regimes in modern history’. The commissions, established by George W Bush on 13 November 2001 fall far short of any normal legal standards that liberal democratic states claim to uphold, with state authorities seeking to suppress all evidence of the extent of the torture of terror suspects, while at the same time depending on ‘evidence’ supposedly secured through torture to secure convictions. This paper is aimed at exploring how the very protracted and tainted ‘justice’ processes have compounded the traumatic impacts of months and years of torture on victims, while at the same time inflicting severe blows to due process, the rule of law, and the legitimacy of the international human rights regime.
