The judge in the Sept. 11 case on Wednesday excluded the last disputed confessions of a prisoner accused of conspiring in the attacks, once again denying prosecutors evidence they had defended for years as crucial to the case.
The statements were obtained through a program designed by Bush administration lawyers in 2007 because the defendants’ previous statements to the C.I.A. were considered coerced and could not be used against them.
But for the fifth time, a military judge found that confessions obtained by federal agents on so-called clean teams were not admissible.
Lt. Col. Michael Schrama, the judge, ruled that the agents failed to notify Walid bin Attash that what the C.I.A. extracted from him from 2003 to 2006 in forced interrogations could not be used against him. The judge also found that when F.B.I. agents brought treats to their interrogation room to gain his cooperation they were copying a technique sometimes used by the C.I.A. to keep a prisoner confessing.
The 63-page ruling was not immediately released. But unclassified passages read by The New York Times showed that the judge suppressed all of the statements made by Mr. bin Attash to federal agents in 2007 and 2008 as involuntary.
Agents had testified that he bragged about his role in the attacks on Jan. 24, 2007, the first day of his interrogations. “Tell the judge that I am very proud for my part in the Planes Operation,” the agents quoted Mr. bin Attash as saying, using the Qaeda code name for the hijacking plot that killed nearly 3,000 people on Sept. 11, 2001.
Mr. bin Attash is accused of helping to train two of the hijackers and traveling on U.S. passenger planes in Southeast Asia to detect security vulnerabilities at the behest of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is charged as the mastermind of the attacks.
Mr. bin Attash was questioned by the F.B.I. in his fourth year of U.S. detention, and he had not yet been charged with a crime or been allowed to meet with a lawyer.
Defense lawyers argued that the C.I.A. had questioned the defendants hundreds of times, from their capture in Pakistan in 2003 to their transfer to Guantánamo in September 2006.
The defense described a system of violence and rewards that conditioned the prisoners to tell federal agents what they expected to hear.
Prosecutors are so far appealing just one excluded confession in the four-man case. They chose not to try to reinstate the statements of Mr. Mohammed, the lead defendant, to try to preserve a trial date of June 5, 2028.
A fifth defendant, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, was dropped from the case after a military medical board found him mentally fit for trial, a condition his lawyer blames on his torture in U.S. custody.
Now the confessions of all four defendants in the Sept. 11 case have been suppressed, as well as those by the defendant in the case of the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in 2000, which killed 17 U.S. sailors.
Mr. bin Attash’s lawyer had presented the judge with gruesome descriptions of the prisoner’s time in C.I.A. custody — being kept in chains, in diapers or nude. And he showed medical records illustrating how the prisoner was starved into submission in his second year in secret U.S. prisons, called black sites.
Colonel Schrama ruled that Mr. bin Attash’s confessions were involuntary, noting that the federal agents questioned him at Guantánamo in a compound previously used by the C.I.A.
“Mr. bin Attash faced a specialized guard force, a team of government interrogators, and questioning in a former C.I.A. black site on topics he had previously been forced to discuss under coercion,” the judge ruled.
Unlike the other defendants, who underwent a single round of questioning, Mr. bin Attash was interrogated in three separate sessions by agents from the F.B.I. and Navy intelligence in January and October of 2007 and in February of 2008. Colonel Schrama excluded accounts of all of them.
Colonel Schrama pointedly avoided using the term torture. He wrote that the question he was asked to decide was whether Mr. bin Attash made his statements voluntarily.
Testimony showed that Mr. bin Attash’s lead interrogator, an F.B.I. agent named Stephen Gaudin, wore a suit made in Yemen and offered him tea and dates and other snacks to build rapport during the so-called “clean team interrogations.”
But the judge found fault with the agents for not specifically telling the prisoners that anything they had previously told C.I.A. interrogators could not be used against them — a technique used to obtain a lawful confession after inadmissible interrogations.
The judge noted that while Mr. bin Attash was in C.I.A. custody, on occasion, C.I.A. personnel “plied Mr. bin Attash with tea, soda, fresh kebab, bread and figs to secure his cooperation during interrogations.”
The judge found that the conditions of the F.B.I. interrogations “effectively maintained the coercive psychological pressure established by the C.I.A.”
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