Torture victim's records lost at Guantánamo, admits camp general
Surprise, surprise, the US have managed to lose the records of yet another man tortured at Guantanamo Bay.
It says a lot about the mindset that the current administration have fostered that the "losing" of potential evidence is becoming so commonplace. It also implies that, despite their claims that they believe what they have been doing is perfectly legal, that they are very anxious that no court of law should ever have an opportunity to review that claim.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.
Somewhere, and not even very deep down, they know that a court would call what they are doing what it is: torture. Which is why they are so very keen to "lose" all evidence of their conduct. After all, this is evidence taken during interrogations which might contain vital evidence to help prevent another 9-11. This isn't the kind of stuff that one can imagine a competent army easily losing. This is kept under lock and key and only reviewed by people of sufficient rank.
So, they are literally destroying evidence as they go along. It certainly leads one to the conclusion that they are well aware that what they are doing is criminal. Why else would one destroy evidence?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."
One can imagine most police forces preserving evidence in case a prisoner ever brings a false charge regarding what took place whilst he was in custody or being interrogated. In the case of the Bush regime, the very opposite is true.
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