THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

If you are in open court and the government has actually allowed you to testify, you do so very carefully. One false step and they get you for revealing "secrets".

The Saudi prisoner awaiting death-penalty trial for the USS Cole bombing was tortured physically, mentally and sexually, an expert in treating torture victims testified Thursday at the war court.

Dr. Sondra Crosby offered the diagnosis in open court during carefully choreographed testimony that never once mentioned that the accused al-Qaida terrorist, Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, 49, got to Guantánamo from four years of CIA captivity during which he was interrogated with waterboarding, a revving power drill and threats to his mother.

“I believe that Mr. al Nashiri has suffered torture — physical, psychological and sexual torture,” Crosby said...

Crosby chose her words carefully in court because, in order to make her diagnosis, she was allowed to review Top Secret records and discuss with Nashiri what happened to him. So while she was not allowed to say in open court what she saw in a medical exam of him or what he told her, she was allowed to refer to unclassified government records to support her diagnosis.

“He suffers from chronic pain. He suffers from anal-rectal complaints,” she said. Also, “difficulty defecating, hemorrhoids, pain in sitting for a long time,” which she said are typical of “survivors of sexual assault.”

Nashiri has scars on his wrists, legs, ankles “consistent with the allegations and history that he gave me.” And he suffers from wide mood swings — from “irritability, anger, extreme emotional intensity to silence” — that are “red flags” of trauma and torture.

But, she said, military medical staff treating him had failed to ask the right questions, if any.

“There was no trauma history in the records I read,” said Crosby who was provided access to the medical history since Nashiri got to Guantánamo by judicial order. “They treated the symptoms without treating the cause.”

No one at Guantanamo is interested in helping him learn to live with his torture. But they do want to keep him physically healthy in case they want to torture him again.