Lawyer: Gitmo interrogators told to trash notes

[Steve Gardner]

Two things that bug me about this.

The first is that no only are these thugs at Guantanamo and elsewhere clearly engaged in torture, they're also destroying evidence to cover their tracks. We had the revelation that the CIA had destroyed interrogation tapes back in January and now we have information from an operations manual that suggests interrogators keep 'the number of documents with interrogation information to a minimum can minimize certain legal issues' - or destory all evidence, for short.

Further, the particlular case quoted in the article below is quite disturbing and utterly perverse in my opinion.

It's about a boy arrested when he was 15 for throwing a grenade at and killing a member if the US Special Forces. This would be the Special Forces that were invading and occupying Afghanistan (the boy's country of residence), and toppling its leaders and murdering many innocent civilians.

Yet the boy is charged with war crimes! How does that work?

Source: Associated Press

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) -- The Pentagon urged interrogators at Guantanamo Bay to destroy handwritten notes in case they were called to testify about potentially harsh treatment of detainees, a military defense lawyer said Sunday.

The lawyer for Toronto-born Omar Khadr, Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler, said the instructions were included in an operations manual shown to him by prosecutors and suggest the U.S. deliberately thwarted evidence that could help terror suspects defend themselves at trial.

Kuebler said the apparent destruction of evidence prevents him from challenging the reliability of any alleged confessions. He said he will use the document to seek a dismissal of charges against Khadr.

[SNIP]

The case against Khadr, who was captured in Afghanistan when he was 15, is on track to be one of the first to trial. He faces war-crimes charges including murder for allegedly throwing a grenade that killed a U.S. Special Forces soldier during a 2002 firefight.

[Steve Gardner]

An interesting piece on the abuses committed by the US in places like Guantanamo.

No matter how much we read about this, there's never any expression of regret from these arseholes. Instead we get lots of buck-passing and justifications, such as the ludicrous notion that those captured on the battlefield are not prisoners of war and are therefore liable to be tortured whilst being detained in a legal no man's land.

Quite apart from whether or not someone who is not a prisoner of war should be allowed to be subjected to torture, on what basis are those captured in battle denied prisoner of war status?

There is a case at Guantanamo going on right now, of a 15-year old captured in afghanistan - his long term place of residence - who was fighting in support of the Taliban who, you might recall, were the government of the country at the time of the invasion.

He allegedly (though it seems unlikely) threw a grenade that killed a special forces soldier and is being tried as a war criminal. He is not considered a prisoner of war.

Why not?

How can the US and its coalition invaded a country and topple its government - ostensibly in pursuit of bin Laden - and then accuse those who defend their homeland of war crimes?

The real criminals here are the invaders, surely?

Source: Al Jazeera

US military officials actively sought ways to implement harsh interrogation techniques such as waterboarding used at Guantanamo Bay despite legal objections, a senior Democratic senator has said.

Carl Levin, the Senate Armed Services Committee chairman, told a hearing the US government had "twisted the law to create the appearance of legality".

"If we use those same techniques offensively against detainees, it says to the world that they have America's stamp of approval," he said in Washington DC on Tuesday.

The committee was also shown US military memos saying that the techniques should be curbed while international monitors were present.

The hearing is the committee's first attempt to discover the origins of the harsh interrogation methods used in Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba and Abu Ghraib in Iraq and how policy decisions on interrogations were agreed across the US department of defence.

US accused of encouraging the illegal use of torture

The CIA has admitted it used waterboarding, which simulates drowning, on several suspected al-Qaeda leaders, while US soldiers were photographed using dogs against prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

The interrogations have been widely condemned by international human rights groups.

Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator, said the Bush administration's legal analysis on detainees and interrogations following the September 11, 2001, attacks would "go down in history as some of the most irresponsible and shortsighted legal analysis ever provided to our nation's military and intelligence communities".

Interrogation techniques

The Pentagon's most senior civilian lawyer at the time, William Haynes, was expected to testify at the hearing.

Also present were Richard Shiffrin, Haynes' former deputy on intelligence issues, as well as the legal advisers at the time to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Guantanamo Bay prison.

According to the senate committee's findings, Haynes became interested in the use of harsher interrogation methods as early as July 2002 when his office inquired into a military programme that trained soldiers on how to resist enemy interrogations.

Haynes and other officials wanted to know if the programme - known as Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape (SERE) training - could be used used to develop more effective interrogation methods, the committee said.

Shiffrin said his interest in the programme was mainly to use military expertise in interrogations.

However, the head of the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, which ran the SERE programme, told the committee that the programme included resistance to sensory deprivation, sleep disruption, stress positions, waterboarding and slapping.

Official denials

The committee further released previously secret memos dating from 2002, when the programme of harsh interrogations began at Guantanamo Bay.

In one of them, the most senior military lawyer at Guantanamo, Lieutenant-Colonel Diane Beaver, says the US defence department had hidden prisoners who were being treated harshly, or abusively, from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which monitors the treatment of military prisoners.

Beaver also said the military was secretly using previously forbidden techniques, such as sleep deprivation, but hiding them so as not to draw "negative attention", according to minutes of the committee meeting.

"Officially it is not happening," Beaver said, according to minutes from the meeting.

"The ICRC is a serious concern. They will be in and out, scrutinising our operations, unless they are displeased and decide to protest and leave.

"This would draw a lot of negative attention."

Beaver said interrogators should "curb the harsher operations while ICRC is around".

Beaver was speaking at an October 2, 2002, meeting between CIA and military lawyers and military intelligence officials on how to break down the resistance of Guantanamo detainees to interrogations.

A senior CIA lawyer at the meeting, John Fredman, said that whether harsh interrogation amount to torture "is a matter of perception".

"If the detainee dies you're doing it wrong," Fredman said, according to a memo.

Waterboarding memo

Beaver also wrote in a memo dated October 11, 2002, that abusive methods could be used against detainees at Guantanamo Bay prison because they were not considered prisoners of war.

Her proposed methods included extended isolation, 20-hour interrogations, death threats and waterboarding.

On Tuesday, Beaver told the committee that she was surprised her memo justifying harsh interrogation techniques was the sole opinion relied on by the Pentagon.

"I did not expect that my opinion ... would become the final word," she said.

[/b][/blockquote]

[teddy]

The hypocrisy is sickening - a war criminal indeed. We know who the war criminals are. They say that the winners write our history. It's also true that the winners decide who war criminals are.