The Guantanamo 'Suicides': The Official Response Begins

When a cover-up is exposed, nothing is more telling than the first
reactions from those who are involved. Do they maintain their stories
and face potentially aggravated consequences? Or do they simply remain
silent? In making this choice, they often telegraph the depth of their
anxiety and concern.

Last night on MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann, I focused on the first responses to "The Guantanamo 'Suicides.'"
Colonel Michael Bumgarner, the former commander at Camp America, had
sent an email to the Associated Press, the text of which AP confirmed
to me, in which he said he would have to get clearance from the Defense
Department to speak, but then stated:

This blatant misrepresentation of the truth
infuriates me. I don't know who Sgt. Hickman is, but he is only trying
to be a spotlight ranger. He knows nothing about what transpired in
Camp 1, or our medical facility. I do, I was there.

This statement merits closer inspection. The first sentence is a
classic nondenial denial. It appears on the surface to deny part of the
account, but in fact denies nothing. Bumgarner needs to state
specifically what allegations he considers inaccurate. His failure to
do so is telling.

The second statement is an attempt to frame the conflict in terms of
a controversy between Sergeant Hickman and himself, which he leads into
by saying he doesn't even know who Hickman is. That statement is
demonstrably false. As we confirmed with Defense Department records,
Bumgarner recommended Hickman for a medal (shown below) based on his
cool-headed approach to defusing a prison riot on May 18, 2006.
Moreover, Hickman was selected as NCO of the Quarter at Guantanamo, a
fact the camp commander would certainly have known at the time. In any
case, the key points in which Bumgarner figures do not rest on
Hickman's accounts alone-they are corroborated by a series of
additional witnesses, as well as by published accounts in which
Bumgarner himself is extensively quoted.

The third statement presents Bumgarner with even more serious
problems. He denies that Hickman was present or has knowledge of what
transpired at Camp 1 and the detainee clinic on the night of June 9. "I
was there," he says. Let's be very clear about this: Either Bumgarner
lied in a formal statement to NCIS, or he lied to AP. In his formal
account, Bumgarner addressed this point directly. "On the night of
09JUN06, I was not in the camp," he writes, "I had spent the evening at
Admiral Harris's house." (This can be found on pp. 1059-60 of the NCIS
evidence file, and can be examined here
[PDF, 1.1M] on page 6 of the original document.) This account matches
the recollection of other witnesses cited in Admiral Harris's AR 15-6
statement, especially the statements beginning at p. 118. In all these
accounts, Colonel Bumgarner does not arrive at the camp until 12:48
a.m. on the morning of June 10. The operative events of the narrative
furnished by the guards occurred between 7:00 p.m. and midnight-long
before Bumgarner's arrival on the scene.

The Justice Department response is also informative. It was
confronted with several allegations: that the FBI had been involved in
a cover-up from the first days after the deaths, launching a raid
designed to intimidate witnesses from speaking openly; that the Justice
Department may have made repeated misleading statements to federal
judge James Robertson in furtherance of the cover-up; and that the
Department claimed to have concluded its investigation into Hickman's
story before contacting witnesses who would have, and did, corroborate it.

The Justice Department had no response to any of these serious
allegations. Instead, in a January 18 e-mail, department spokesman
Laura Sweeny claimed that two of the witnesses interviewed by the
department had misremembered the names of the lawyers present at those
meetings. She refused to address any of the other allegations in the
article. Instead, she insisted that I note that Justice had "conducted
a thorough inquiry into this matter, carefully examined the
allegations, found no evidence of wrongdoing and subsequently closed
the matter." And then she said, as she had when I contacted her in
reporting the story, that she would not arrange an interview with any
of the officials involved in the matter.

This is all classic misdirection, an attempt to make the story not
about the crimes at Guantanamo but the minutes of meetings in Baltimore
and Columbia. Still, the fact that the Justice Department is unwilling
to say who was at these brief interviews speaks volumes. It does not
deny that the interviews occurred, nor that the descriptions of the
meetings are otherwise accurate, nor even that the lawyers identified
were in fact involved in the investigation. It simply insists that the
team conducting these interviews not be identified.

Of course, this adamant insistence on official anonymity does
nothing to dispel the accusation of cover-up. Just the opposite: it
suggests that the lawyers and FBI agents involved quite urgently wish
not to have their names associated with it. And who could blame them?