The Washington Post reported Friday night that lawyers for the Justice Department and the CIA have told a federal court that the terror suspects recently transferred from secret foreign prisons to Guantánamo should not be allowed to discuss the interrogation techniques to which they were subject, even with their lawyers.
"The government says in new court filings that those interrogation methods are now among the nation's most sensitive national security secrets," the Post reported, "and that their release -- even to the detainees' own attorneys -- 'could reasonably be expected to cause extremely grave damage.'"
Apparently no one told Fox News. The network -- which normally attacks its journalistic brethren for revealing that which the administration would prefer remain secret -- has one of its reporters undergoing waterboarding today.
That reporter, Steve Harrigan, is keeping a blog of his experiences. That blog's more than a little flippant, but to his credit (and Fox's), in his first appearance today to discuss the experience of the early stages of the torture method, Harrigan seemed chastened, and deadly serious. He'll be making another appearance to discuss the full procedure tonight at 10 p.m. ET.
Quote:Evidence Of Innocence Rejected at Guantanamo
By Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 5, 2007; Page A01
Just months after U.S. Army troops whisked a German man from Pakistan to the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 2002, his American captors concluded that he was not a terrorist.
"USA considers Murat Kurnaz's innocence to be proven," a German intelligence officer wrote that year in a memo to his colleagues. "He is to be released in approximately six to eight weeks."
But the 19-year-old student was not freed. Instead, over the next four years, two U.S. military tribunals that were responsible for determining whether Guantanamo Bay detainees were enemy fighters declared him a dangerous al-Qaeda ally who should remain in prison.
The disparity between the tribunal's judgments and the intelligence community's consensus view that Kurnaz is innocent is detailed in newly released military and court documents that track his fate. His attorneys, who sued the Pentagon to gain access to the documents, say that they reflect policies that result in mistreatment of the hundreds of foreigners who have been locked up for years at the controversial prison.
The Supreme Court intends to weigh the legitimacy of the military tribunals at a hearing this morning. Lawyers for Kurnaz and other detainees plan to argue that the panels violate the U.S. Constitution and international law. They say that the proceedings have not provided Guantanamo Bay detainees with a fair and impartial hearing.
Lawyers for the Bush administration will argue that the tribunals have afforded suspected enemies all the rights to which they are entitled. The administration maintains that detainees need not know all of the evidence against them. The tribunals were established in 2004 after the Supreme Court ruled that such panels are needed when holding prisoners indefinitely, and Congress endorsed them in 2005.
U.S. District Judge Joyce Hens Green, who was privy to the classified record of the tribunal's decision-making about Kurnaz in 2004, concluded in January 2005 that his treatment provided powerful evidence of bias against prisoners, and she deemed the proceedings illegal under U.S. and international law. But her ruling, which depicted the allegations against Kurnaz as unsubstantiated and as an inappropriate basis for keeping him locked up, was mostly classified at the time.
In newly released passages, however, Green's ruling reveals that the tribunal members relied heavily on a memo written by a U.S. brigadier general who noted that Kurnaz had prayed while the U.S. national anthem was sung in the prison and that he expressed an unusual interest in detainee transfers and the guard schedule. Other documents make clear that U.S. intelligence officials had earlier concluded that Kurnaz, who went to Pakistan shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to visit religious sites, had simply chosen a bad time to travel.
The process is "fundamentally corrupted," said Baher Azmy, a professor at Seton Hall Law School who represents Kurnaz. "All of this just reveals that they had the wrong person and they knew it."
He added: "His entire file reveals he has no connection with terrorism. None. Confronted with this uncomfortable fact, the military panel makes up evidence" to justify its claim that only real terrorists are incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay.
Cmdr. Jeffrey D. Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman, declined to comment on whether the military now believes that it erred in imprisoning Kurnaz, or to discuss the release of new records. He stressed that a substantial amount of information about Kurnaz remains classified.
In a written statement, Gordon said that the military's determinations about detainees are "necessarily impacted by a variety of factors which can include the passage of time. Also, such decisions are based on the entirety of the information before DoD, and it is misguided to draw conclusions based on only parts of some documents." [...]
Quote:[...]After a public uproar in Germany over the German government's role in Kurnaz's continuing imprisonment, Merkel pressed Bush at a private meeting that January to release him. In July 2006, an unusual second review board convened.
The FBI's counterterrorism division, new records show, wrote in a memo dated May 31, 2006, for that board that "the FBI has no investigative interest in this detainee" and that "there is no information that Kurnaz received any military training or is associated with the Taliban or al-Qa'ida." The wording of its brief conclusion about whether Kurnaz posed any threat was redacted.
The second review board ruled that Kurnaz was no longer an enemy combatant and that he could be released, but the reasons remain redacted.
Not until August 2006, nearly five years after his imprisonment began, was Kurnaz flown home, goggled, masked and bound, as he had been when he was flown to Guantanamo Bay. As U.S. military officials led him out of Ramstein Air Base, and as he was about to take his first steps onto German soil, the Americans offered to leave plastic wrist cuffs on their former prisoner. German federal police declined.
He was escorted as a free man to the back seat of a Mercedes-Benz sedan for the short ride to his reunion with his parents and two younger brothers.
Full report
