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.”
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