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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
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April 20th,
2009 - Torture Case Lawyers May Face Jail for Letter |
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Torture Case Lawyers
May Face Jail for Letter By Bob Egelko San Francisco Chronicle April 20, 2009 A former Guantanamo Bay
prisoner who accused a Bay Area company of flying him to foreign torture
chambers for the CIA is at the center of a bizarre new case, in which his
lawyers face possible jail sentences for writing a letter that asked
President Obama to disclose how brutally he was treated. The government says the
letter falsely accused a Pentagon review team of censoring details of the
alleged torture of Binyam Mohamed from a document the attorneys wanted to
send to Obama. The lawyers stand by their accusations but have been summoned
to Washington, D.C., by a federal judge for a hearing next month on whether
they should be held in contempt of court, punishable by up to six months in
jail. Mohamed, meanwhile, awaits a
ruling from the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco on
whether he and four other men can sue a Boeing Co. subsidiary in San Jose for
allegedly colluding with the CIA to violate their rights. The suit accuses the
company, Jeppesen Dataplan, of taking part in "extraordinary
rendition," the practice of abducting suspects without extradition or
legal proceedings and taking them to foreign countries or CIA prisons for
interrogation. The plaintiffs' evidence includes a statement attributed to a
Jeppesen director in 2006 that the company handled torture flights. Jeppesen
has denied wrongdoing. At an appeals court hearing
Feb. 9, an Obama administration lawyer endorsed the Bush administration's
previous argument that the suit should be dismissed because it could expose
state secrets about the rendition program and U.S. foreign relations. Mohamed, a native of
Ethiopia who lives in Britain, was freed two weeks after the hearing from
nearly seven years in captivity, the last four at the U.S. naval base at
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He was arrested in Pakistan
in 2002 and turned over to U.S. authorities as a suspected terrorist and
Taliban fighter. Mohamed said he had been beaten, hung from a pole and held
in darkness and isolation at a CIA prison in Afghanistan and that his genitals
were slashed with a razor blade by guards in Morocco before he was sent to
Guantanamo. He said the charges against
him were based on confessions extracted by torture. Those charges were
dropped before he was released. The charges against his
attorneys stem from their effort to make the details of Mohamed's treatment
public after a British court ruled last year that there was evidence he had
been tortured, but deleted that evidence from its ruling at the insistence of
the Bush administration. Seeking to release evidence The attorneys, Clive
Stafford Smith and Ahmad Ghappour of the British human-rights group Reprieve,
drafted a letter to Obama on Feb. 9 urging him to release the evidence or to
authorize Britain to do so. They wrote that they were
first presenting the letter and a document summarizing the classified
evidence to the Defense Department's Privilege Review Team, which monitors
lawyer-client correspondence at Guantanamo, to clear it for forwarding to the
president. If the Pentagon refused to
pass the evidence on to Obama, the lawyers said in the letter, they would
send him a blacked-out document and advise him that he was being "denied
access to material that would help prove that crimes have been committed by
U.S. personnel." What happened next is
disputed. According to the lawyers, Ghappour submitted the classified memo to
the Privilege Review Team four times, removing more material each time, but
the team ultimately refused to clear any of the material to be sent to Obama.
Shortly afterward, Smith and Ghappour sent the letter and a blacked-out sheet
to the president and released them to the media. But the government, in court
papers, said Ghappour approached a member of the review team with the
classified document Feb. 10 and was told that the team had no authority to
declassify such information, and that he should submit it to a security
officer or a Justice Department lawyer. Ghappour returned with the
blacked-out document, asked for clearance, and got it approved after assuring
the team member that he would send it only to Mohamed and not to Obama,
government lawyers said. Letter called deceptive They said the letter that
Mohamed's lawyers sent to Obama the next day falsely accused the review team
of concealing information from the president and was used to "deceive
the press and the public" about the review team's role. Citing the government's
allegations, U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan ordered the two attorneys to
appear before him May 11 and face charges that they violated terms of the
agreement they signed to gain access to the Guantanamo prisoners they
represented. He did not specify the violations. Smith and Ghappour filed
their reply under seal but have denied breaching the agreement. ‘Deeply troubling’ David Cole, a Georgetown
University law professor and legal commentator who is not involved in the
case, said it was "deeply troubling" that lawyers could be punished
for writing a letter to Obama about a secrecy decision that is ultimately the
president's responsibility. But he said the bigger problem was the Bush
administration's decision to classify all information about its treatment of
Mohamed. "This was
classification to hide its own criminal wrongdoing, and the people Judge
Hogan really ought to be calling in are those who decided to classify this
stuff in the first place," Cole said. Smith, the director of
Reprieve and attorney for more than 50 prisoners who have been held at
Guantanamo, told The Chronicle he was unable to discuss his case publicly.
But in an interview April 7 on Pacific Radio's Democracy Now, he called the
contempt charges "frivolous" and said he would come to the United
States for the hearing. "I want the real issue
to be why the government continues to cover up the evidence of Binyam's
torture," Smith said. External link: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/04/19/BA68172JDM.DTL |