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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings, Torture and Big Money |
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April 21st,
2008 - Torture Victim’s Records Lost at Guantánamo, Admits Camp General |
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Torture
Victim’s Records Lost at Guantánamo, Admits Camp General No evidence of al-Qaida suspect's interrogation By Elana Schor The Guardian April 21, 2008 The former head of
interrogations at Guantánamo Bay found that records of an al-Qaida suspect tortured
at the prison camp were mysteriously lost by the US military, according to a
new book by one of Britain's top human rights lawyers. Retired general Michael
Dunlavey, who supervised Guantánamo for eight months in 2002, tried to locate
records on Mohammed al-Qahtani, accused by the US of plotting the 9/11
attacks, but found they had disappeared. The records on al-Qahtani,
who was interrogated for 48 days - "were backed up ... after I left,
there was a snafu and all was lost", Dunlavey told Philippe Sands QC,
who reports the conversation in his book Torture Team, previewed last week by
the Guardian. Snafu stands for Situation Normal: All Fucked Up. Saudi-born al-Qahtani was
sexually taunted, forced to perform dog tricks and given enemas at Guantánamo. The CIA admitted last year
that it destroyed videotapes of al-Qaida suspects being interrogated at a
secret "black site" in Thailand. No proof has so far emerged that
tapes of interrogations at Guantánamo were destroyed, but Sands' report suggests
the US may have also buried politically sensitive proof relating to abuse by
interrogators at the prison camp. Other new evidence has also
emerged in the last month that raises questions about destroyed tapes at
Guantánamo. Cameras that run 24 hours a
day at the prison were set to automatically record over their contents, the
US military admitted in court papers. It is unclear how much, if any,
prisoner mistreatment was on the taped-over video, but the military admitted
that the automatic erasure "likely destroyed" potential evidence in
at least one prisoner's case. The erased tapes may have
violated a 2005 court order to preserve "all evidence [of] the torture,
mistreatment and abuse of detainees" at Guantánamo. The order was
retroactive, so it also applies to the 2003 loss of al-Qahtani's records. Lawyers representing other
Guantánamo detainees are asking whether tapes of their clients' treatment may
also be erased. "You can't just destroy relevant evidence," said
Jonathan Hafetz, of the Brennan Centre for Justice in New York. David H Remes, a lawyer for
16 Guantánamo prisoners, said the CIA's destruction of interrogation videos
shows the US government is capable of getting rid of potentially
incriminating evidence. "[In Guantánamo] the
government had a system that automatically overwrote records," Remes
told the Guardian. "That is a passive form of evidence destruction. If a
party has destroyed evidence in one place, there's no reason to assume it has
preserved evidence in another place." More than 24,000
interrogations were videotaped at Guantánamo, according to a US army report
unearthed by researchers at Seton Hall University in New Jersey. The US military office at
Guantánamo did not return a request for comment from the Guardian about its
taping policies. External link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/apr/21/guantanamo.humanrights |