by smintheus
Mon Jun 09, 2008 at 01:37:41 PM PDT
The White House likes to pretend that it has not created a kafkaesque spiderweb of prisons and military tribunals, despite all the evidence to the contrary: kidnapping, the purchase of prisoners for "bounties", torture and abuse, coerced confessions, locking up known innocents for years at a time, secrecy and lies, destruction of evidence, poor access for lawyers and human rights watchdogs, prolonged imprisonment without trial, a series of kangaroo-court procedures, reprisals against military lawyers who uphold standards of justice, and the flagrant politicization of trials. Well, add another stone to the mountain of evidence against this "administration".
A Gitmo defense lawyer stumbled upon a Pentagon manual that advises interrogators to destroy their hand-written notes in order to thwart any inquiries at trial into wrong-doing by officials.
Interrogators at Guantánamo Bay were told to destroy their notes to stop them potentially being used to highlight the mistreatment of detainees, according to a US military lawyer.
William Kuebler, a lieutenant commander who is defending Omar Khadr, a Canadian national facing trial for alleged war crimes in Afghanistan, said the classified instructions were included in an operations manual that prosecutors allowed him to see last week...
He told reporters the instruction was contained in a US military manual of standard operating procedures, or SOPs, for interrogators that was shown to him during a pre-trial review of possible evidence.
The mission has legal and political issues that may lead to interrogators being called to testify ... Keeping the number of documents with interrogation information to a minimum can minimize certain legal issues," the document was cited as saying in an affidavit signed by Kuebler...
Kuebler said the operations manual, from January 2003, was attached to a 2005 report into alleged detainee abuse at Guantánamo, but that the section covering the manual was not made public at the time.
Omar Khadr was 15 years old when the military imprisoned him. His defense alleges that interrogators coerced a false confession from Khadr partly through abuse and threats to rape him:
Mr. Khadr's defense team at Guantanamo Bay had asked the prosecution to provide handwritten notes relating to Mr. Khadr's interrogations in both Guantanamo Bay and Afghanistan.
"Counsel for the government claim that, after a diligent search, they have been unable to locate and unable to provide responsive materials," LCdr. Kuebler writes in his affidavit.
It looks like Kuebler is right that the Pentagon insured that interrogators "routinely destroyed evidence" that might have been used to defend the Khadr and other detainees.
For its part, the Pentagon didn't even try to defend the destruction of evidence when the SOP was exposed.
A Pentagon spokesman, Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, said he was reviewing the matter Sunday evening.
Destruction of evidence is in fact routine at Guantanamo. Last December we learned that in 2005 the CIA ordered the destruction of videotapes of interrogations, apparently at the behest of the White House.
If the Guantanamo tribunals really are legitimate courts of law, as the WH insists, then the destruction of videotapes and interrogators' notes ought to count as obstruction of justice. This report from March remains relevant:
“They thought they were saving themselves from legal scrutiny, as well as possible danger from Al Qaeda if the tapes became public,” said Frederick P. Hitz, a former C.I.A. officer and the agency’s inspector general from 1990 to 1998, speaking of agency officials who favored eliminating the tapes. “Unknowingly, perhaps, they may have created even more problems for themselves.”
In a suit brought by Hani Abdullah, a Yemeni prisoner at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a federal judge has raised the possibility that, by destroying the tapes, the C.I.A. violated a court order to preserve all evidence relevant to the prisoner. In at least 12 other lawsuits, lawyers for prisoners at Guantánamo and elsewhere have filed legal challenges citing the C.I.A. tapes’ destruction, said David H. Remes, a Washington lawyer representing 16 prisoners.
“This is like any other cover-up,” Mr. Remes said. “We’ve only scratched the surface.”
Indeed, as the new revelation about the Pentagon manual demonstrates. Kuebler's find has been reported widely outside the US. Shame that there's only a single, brief report in the American news media.
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