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TechnoratiWASHINGTON -- Lawyers for a terrorism suspect from suburban Baltimore who's imprisoned at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba claim they have evidence that their client "was subjected to a program of state-sanctioned torture" while he was in CIA custody.
The lawyers for Majid Khan are asking a federal court to order the Bush administration to preserve evidence of how their client was treated during his three-plus years in CIA custody, saying they have ample evidence that he was tortured.
Their heavily censored court filing, which was delivered under seal Thursday to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia and obtained by The Miami Herald, comes as Congress and the Justice Department have opened preliminary investigations into the CIA's destruction of tapes of interrogations of two men who were held with Khan in a secret prison camp for "high-value" detainees at Guantanamo.
Defense lawyers Gitanjali Gutierrez and Wells Dixon met with Khan for two weeks in mid-October at Guantanamo, where he's held in Camp 7, a previously unknown part of the prison that's reserved for former "ghost detainees", according to declassified notes of their meetings.
In the notes, the two wrote that they found Khan with a scar on his arm from trying to gnaw through an artery, and that he still suffers psychological trauma. Their brief, which includes two still-secret appendices, was crafted from those interviews and speaks of Khan's treatment in captivity and that of other prisoners who, it alleges, "were similarly abducted, imprisoned and tortured by U.S. personnel at CIA black sites around the world."
CIA censors redacted, or blacked out, whom the lawyers allege ran what they call "The CIA Torture Program." Censors also blacked out two full pages in which the lawyers argue why, "There is no doubt that Khan was subjected to a program of state-sanctioned torture."
There was no way to test the lawyers' allegations independently, and the U.S. government denies that it engages in torture. Justice Department spokesman Erik Ablin Saturday said that the government was "reviewing the allegations" and preparing a response to the lawyers' motion.
No one but his lawyers and U.S. military and intelligence officials has seen Khan, and none of the other former CIA captives who've been detained at Guantanamo for more than a year has seen an attorney.
Still, the notes of the two attorneys from the New York Center for Constitutional Rights offer a glimpse inside the prison-within-a-prison at the detention center.
Camp 7 was opened when the alleged high-value detainees arrived at Guantanamo, around Labor Day 2006, to prevent their tales from spreading to the other 300 or so prisoners.
The lawyers' notes claim that Khan and another alleged al Qaida terrorist, Abu Zubaydeh, had contact with each other. The disclosure that the CIA destroyed tapes of interrogations of Abu Zubaydeh triggered the ongoing investigations.
Khan was born in Pakistan but grew up near Baltimore, where he graduated from a suburban high school, and got political asylum in the United States, where his father still lives. The son was visiting Pakistan in March 2003 when, he claims, CIA officers kidnapped him in Karachi. He then disappeared into a secret interrogation program shielded even from the International Committee of the Red Cross, which tracks prisoners around the globe.
President Bush ordered Khan and 13 other former CIA captives, among them alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, transferred to military custody in September 2006.
In October, granting the lawyers access to Khan, the Pentagon charged that he "reportedly had links to al Qaida operatives and facilitators, some who . . . involved him in a discussion of smuggling explosives into the United States."
Khan hasn't been charged with any crime, and his lawyers say in their brief that the alleged CIA torture "will be the central focus of any military commission proceedings involving Khan." They also allege that while he was in CIA custody, "Khan admitted anything his interrogators demanded of him, regardless of the truth."
Gutierrez was due back on the isolated naval base in southeast Cuba on Sunday night to meet with her client again and to brief him on the effort to preserve evidence in his case.
The information is being disclosed now because, under lawyer-access rights at Guantanamo, the attorneys had to turn all 500 pages of notes of their conversations with their client over to classification inspectors and only recently have had four pages of a summary cleared for public disclosure.
Rosenberg reports for The Miami Herald.
McClatchy Newspapers 2007
13 Comments so far
Show AllLambsie, you only see the extremists that take thing to far, you have all kinds of people just like you have all kinds of Christians. Yeah I agree that it's wrong to hate people that is not what Christianity is. If you take a religion by what only the news puts out than you can never know how far this religion actually goes not everyone hates Gays. Maybe I don't like what Gays do but I don't want to go and kill them and I don't hate them. I want to point out from what you say that a lot of Muslims (I don't hate them and I'm not against them just stating a fact) in Iraq hate and want to kill us (being anyone not Muslim) but does that mean they all do? No! it means just what I said some do and some don't!!!!
Lambsie Divy
The Christian beliefs in the US does not allow people like the first lady to see the evil in others, (all is forgiven when they profess to be saved), except of course, when they are either left of center politically, gay, or muslim.
Just look at all the embezzelers that steal from the churches. The christian response is; "they seemed so nice, I could not understand how they did that"
Or look at the TV preachers like robertson who wanted to "take out"(kill) Chavez because he wasn't a capitalist. Robertson is still on the air and people still send him money.
Or the westboro baptist church (fred phelps pastor) that hates gays to the point of blaming death and destruction on them.
Or the false rumors being spread about Barak Obama being muslim to sway the christian voters.
I'm not sure what you would expect from the bush family (all of them) They made their feelings known from the begining.
All of us?
Why bother going after old Nazi's, Serbians, Croatians or anyone else for War Crimes, when today the USA is the biggest State War Crimianl of them all?
The USA disgusts me.
I've often wondered where Laura the FLOTUS is, mentally. I'm pretty sure she isn't criminally insane like POTUS is, although she may still be snorting coke or blowing grass to keep from throwing up when she looks at him. She seems to be engaged in nothing positive, and I wonder why. There must be something good in her somewhere -- how can she stand it? How can she not do anything to stop him? We haven't had such a lame First Lady in generations. Shame on her! Is she just his beard? Anyone who loves torturing living things like her husband does can't be normal "behind closed doors," as they say. I just wonder what it's like being her.
When presidential candidate Bush mocked Betty Lou Beets for asking for mercy, I knew he was a sadist. I didn't know at that time or even have to about him shoving lit firecrackers into frogs' orifices or branding pledges with red hot coathangers. I already knew he enjoyed torturing. By keeping silent on this, the press is complicit in his crimes against humanity. And the Democratic Party, starting with Nancy impeachment-off-the-table Pelosi is also complicit.
There are many dirty hands in the leadership of this country. The American people didn't know and didn't want to know what we do to others. I learned that during the Vietnam War. When I was handing out pictures of an infant charred by napalm, people turned their heads away. We are a country built on war crimes and genocide. We're not the only one, but we're not even trying to become civilized.
So in a way, Bush personifies the US.
You Bush, ___ YOU allow torture, and the entire world's population knows it. You allow people to be held in deplorable dungeon type prisons and don't allow them the rights of a human being, no chages are ever filed and the person is not afforded the right of a fair and speedy trial. Even the infamous French, Devils Island prison was better and fairer.
We treated the German prisoners of war with fairness, even those accused of war crimes and murder. Now YOU Bush allow prisoners to be treated like picked up stray pit bulls. No, not even that decently, we don't torture picked up dogs. ___ You are an evil man Bush an yo will ever be known as such. And you profess to be a Christian. What God do you talk to?
You hold people in jail for years, torture them, don't allow them a fair an speedy trial and you profess to be a man of god. What God Bush? __God forbid !
This is a friggin disgrace and the entire world is aware of what we are doing. How we can even look a person in the eye who is from another country, and say, "I'm an American", and expect them to not spit on us, is beyond me. That is what you have done Bush, you insane ratfaced shithead. You have ruined America Bush.
The US doesn't torture. These are merely enhanced techniques used only on terrorists. Certainly who CLAIM to serve the Prince of Peace are above being accused by terrorists.
Institute a class system in America-- usually not a good idea. But having two classes now does make sense. The hopefully much larger class of Americans against torture should be authorized, and encouraged, to make life for the pro-torturers and lookers the other way as miserable as possible short of torture. Prosecute them, denigrate them, dump bushel baskets of fish entrails upon their heads.
How much he must have suffered that he would try to kill himself by biting into an artery in his arm, so as to not have to face his torturers any more.
So many people like Majid Khan were just rounded up and turned over to American authorities, just for the bounty. Any excuse offered for his capture was accepted as truth; any denial by the captive was rejected as the lying of an obviously guilty man.
Anyone involved with torture needs to go to jail! It's just that simple!