The case, U.S. v. Jawad (CMCR docket 08-4), involves an Afghan national, Mohammed Jawad, who faces war crimes charges before a military commission for allegedly throwing a hand grenade into a military vehicle driving near a crowded marketplace in Kabul, Afghanistan, in December 2002.
At the time, Jawad was somewhere between 15 and 17 years old (his birth date is uncertain). After being interrogated by Afghan police, he was turned over to U.S. military personnel, who continued the interrogation. Both periods of questioning produced confessions about the grenade-throwing incident, which seriously injured two U.S. soldiers and their Afghan interpreter.
Jawad's lawyers contend that both confessions were the result of torture — direct threats of death for him and his family by the Afghan police if he did not confess, with those threats causing both rounds of confessions.
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Although the judge did not find that U.S. interrogators had themselves used torture on Jawad, Henley concluded that "the effect of the death threats which produced the…first confession to the Afghan police had not dissipated by the second confession to the U.S. government interrogator." It was up to prosecutors to show that the taint had been removed, and they did not do so, the judge said.
Now, in this case, Jawad could easily feel there was a credible threat against his family, and I don't see any way, short of rounding up all family members and shipping them to a safe house in the U.S., of abating that threat. One implication of this is that the U.S. military can treat prisoners perfectly properly, and they'll still be tortured, and anything they confess to, again, no matter how "proper" the interrogation techniques used, is tainted.
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