WASHINGTON (Middle East Eye) – A lawyer for Guantanamo detainee, Ammar al-Baluchi, who for years has been suffering from severe brain damage as a result of his treatment at CIA black sites, on Friday filed a new report in court saying that Baluchi has been discovered to have a tumor located on his spine.
The status report, filed in federal court in Washington, was submitted by attorney Alka Pradhan after she travelled to the detention center at Guantanamo Bay earlier this month and met with Baluchi.
While speaking to Baluchi, the detainee informed Pradhan that he was told of the tumor by a neurosurgeon at the prison facility.
Last week, Pradhan obtained copies of the most recent MRI images, which were conducted in November 2022, and the data was sent to independent medical experts who said the tumor was likely spinal meningioma, usually a benign tumor.
“This is incredibly concerning. It’s the kind of diagnosis that, if one of your family members received a diagnosis like this, we would be getting second and third and fourth opinions immediately from the best doctors we could find,” Pradhan said.
Previous MRIs of Baluchi’s head in 2018 and 2020 found “abnormalities indicating moderate to severe brain damage” in the parts of his brain affecting memory formation, retrieval, and behavioural regulation.
The brain scans also found that the Guantanamo detainee’s psychological functioning had “seriously diminished” as a result of the torture, leaving him with a host of issues including traumatic brain injury, anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Baluchi, a 44-year-old Kuwaiti national also known as Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, spent more than three years in CIA custody and was moved between a total of six “black sites” before being transferred in 2006 to Guantanamo Bay.
His case has been in pre-trial hearings for a decade, with delays over the legal admissibility of testimony obtained after his torture.
Last year, newly declassified documents revealed that during his time at a black site in Afghanistan, Baluchi was used as a “prop” and training tool for trainee interrogators to practice torture techniques.
The documents revealed that interrogators-in-training lined up to take turns experimenting on him, including one CIA-approved technique called “walling”, in which the detainee’s heels are placed against a plywood wall “which had flexibility to it”, and a rolled-up towel is put around the neck. The detainee is then repeatedly slammed into the wall by their collar. Baluchi was naked during the interrogation.
Rights groups and civil society organizations have for years criticized the U.S. government for the lack of medical facilities provided to properly treat many of the detainees at Guantanamo.