Bridgeview used car salesman Muhammad Salah recalls being beaten, housed in a “refrigerator cell” and threatened with rape by Israeli soldiers until he admitted to bankrolling overseas terrorists, according to a new filing in U.S. District Court.
In an odd twist, the interrogation was witnessed by embattled New York Times reporter Judith Miller, and defense attorneys suggested Monday the best way for the U.S. government to prove its case — and prove Salah wasn’t abused — is to call the controversial journalist to the witness stand.
“We think the government is going to call her,” said Chicago defense attorney Michael E. Deutsch.
A message left for Miller — author of the book God Has Ninety-Nine Names: Reporting From a Militant Middle East — at the New York Times on Monday was not returned. A spokesman for U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, who subpoenaed Miller to testify in the leak of a CIA agent’s name and whose office is prosecuting Salah, declined to comment on whether Miller might be called to testify in the case.
In the filing Monday, Salah wants to keep any alleged confessions from being aired at trial, arguing he was coerced into implicating himself at the hands of Israeli soldiers who beat him and threatened to kill him and his family.
“When I was not being actively interrogated, I was still forced to remain awake. I was either handcuffed behind my back to a forward slanted child-size chair in a position that caused excruciating pain between my shoulder blades and in my back since I had to balance myself and the chair so I wouldn’t slide off,” Salah said, according to court records.
“If I was not shackled to the small chair, I was put in a dark, freezing, closet-sized cell in which I could not stand upright, sit or lie down. … Most of the time, my head was covered with a filthy, foul-smelling hood reeking of urine, vomit and other unpleasant substances.”
nerdified link
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Read some of her excellent biographies, very telling.
Many journalists have warned, perhaps because she has won a Pulitzer prize, she has become protected for editor’s criticism. I always wonder how the beheading of WSJ reporter Daniel Pearle in Pakistan effected the American journalists working in the Mideast. Judith Miller is politically active in Aspen Institute and Middle East Forum, a right-wing organization.
From her first day at the Times, Miller’s life and work have been hard to separate, which for a reporter is both a strength and a weakness. “She’s a passionate person–she gets caught up in her sources passionately,” one of her Times colleagues told me. Friends from her earliest days in Washington noted that she didn’t surround herself with people her own age. She sought out the best and brightest at the city’s highest levels, dating Larry Sterne, the Washington Post‘s foreign editor, and hanging out with the defense gurus Richard Perle and Walter Slocum. “These people were powerful. But they were also interesting, and Judy liked talking to them. She is curious and enthusiastic,” says one friend from this period.
And she got caught up in her coverage of the Middle East. It was a passion she acknowledged in the introduction to her 1996 book on Islam, God Has Ninety-Nine Names: “While I have tried to keep an open mind about traditions and cultures that differ from my own, I make no apology for the fact that as a Western woman and an American, I believe firmly in the inherent dignity of the individual and the value of human rights and legal equality for all. In this commitment, I, too, am unapologetically militant.”
New comments to my diary ::
▼ ▼ ▼ A MUST READ
Judith can be the new Supreme Court nominee. Or they could promote the Torturer General and let her have Gonzales’ job.
No, not the Supreme Court, Judith has too much of a paper trail.
Speaking of Pearl/Miller, this an excellent article by Bernstein in 1977.
http://www.unknownnews.net/hh030102.html
As to the biography you cite, I found it to be too sympathetic. The author seems to apologize for her willful disinformation peddling by arguing that she was a passionate competitor that just got “caught up” in the scene.
One telling pass is the clipped title the author puts forth for her earlier work, which was fully titled “GOD HAS NINETY NINE NAMES : Reporting from a Militant Middle East.” “God has 99 names” is rather innocuous; the full title is more suggestive of an agenda…again.
Just a little extra add on for your diary here courtesy of C&L:
OOPS!
And a little bonus from a different diary at the same Blog:
HMMM? Verry interesting!
I’m sure Sweet Judy stood there and droolingly said, “Please, please…let me try the cattle prod on him!!!