A former CIA contractor was found guilty on Thursday of assaulting an Afghan prisoner who later died in a case that raised new questions about the treatment of detainees by US interrogators.
David Passaro, a 40-year-old former Special Forces medic, was the first civilian to be charged with abusing a detainee in the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Prosecutors said on Thursday that the verdict against Passaro sets a precedent for bringing others accused of such wrongdoing overseas back to the US to stand trial.
PHOTO: AP
Human-rights advocates, however, noted that no other US civilian has been charged publicly with abusing detainees in the two years since Passaro's arrest.
Prosecutors said Passaro beat the prisoner, Abdul Wali, so badly that he pleaded to be shot to end his pain. Wali died of his injuries two days after the interrogation in June 2003.
"Passaro's actions were unlawful, reprehensible and neither authorized nor condoned by the agency," CIA Director Michael Hayden said in Washington after a federal jury in Raleigh, North Carolina, convicted Passaro.
Passaro was found guilty on a felony charge of assault causing serious injury and three misdemeanor counts of simple assault. He faces a maximum of 10 years for the felony and six months on each of the three misdemeanors.
Passaro was tried under a provision of the USA Patriot Act that allows charges against US citizens for crimes committed on land or facilities designated for use by the US government.
Should there be other US civilians accused of similar crimes, they can be tried in the same way, acting US Attorney George Holding said.
However, Duke University law professor Scott Silliman and others said the secretive nature of the CIA's work overseas makes it hard to tell whether similar cases will follow.
In Passaro's case, much of the court record was placed under seal for security reasons and several agents testified in disguise using fictitious names.
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
VIOLENCE: The teacher had depression and took a leave of absence, but returned to the school last year, South Korean media reported A teacher stabbed an eight-year-old student to death at an elementary school in South Korea on Monday, local media reported, citing authorities. The teacher, a woman in her 40s, confessed to the crime after police officers found her and the young girl with stab wounds at the elementary school in the central city of Daejeon on Monday evening, the Yonhap news agency reported. The girl was brought to hospital “in an unconscious state, but she later died,” the report read. The teacher had stab wounds on her neck and arm, which officials determined might have been self-inflicted, the news agency
ISSUE: Some foreigners seek women to give birth to their children in Cambodia, and the 13 women were charged with contravening a law banning commercial surrogacy Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr yesterday thanked Cambodian King Norodom Sihamoni for granting a royal pardon last year to 13 Filipino women who were convicted of illegally serving as surrogate mothers in the Southeast Asian kingdom. Marcos expressed his gratitude in a meeting with Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet, who was visiting Manila for talks on expanding trade, agricultural, tourism, cultural and security relations. The Philippines and Cambodia belong to the 10-nation ASEAN, a regional bloc that promotes economic integration but is divided on other issues, including countries whose security alignments is with the US or China. Marcos has strengthened
RSS