Preserving the evidence – and often not
Thursday, March 8, 2007
With both relish and distaste, the media have understandably fixated on how Lewis “Scooter” Libby’s conviction for perjury and obstruction of justice has flushed out evidence of governmental malfeasance and attempts at (can you believe it?) media manipulation. But comparatively little attention has been given to another federal case - one even more directly concerned with national security, allegedly – which reveals gross suppression of evidence about authorities’ behavior.
Remarkably telling documentation, like Dick Cheney’s scabrous scribbles to Libby, as on the New York Times Op-Ed piece (pictured above) that started the whole tacky episode, is being preserved - thankfully and exemplarily - in George Washington University’s National Security Archive. But on the other hand, the video-recording of accused Al Qaeda supporter Jose Padilla’s treatment at the hands of military interrogators has been … in a development that strains credulity … lost.
Yes, “lost”.
The Defense Intelligence Agency (which had custody of the video, because it had been recorded in March 2004 when Padilla, then classed as an “enemy combatant”, was being interrogated in the Navy brig in Charleston, SC) let the claimed loss come out during a hearing before Southern District of Florida US Judge Marcia Cooke. (Former Chicago gang-member Padilla is now of course being prosecuted on purely criminal charges.) A government lawyer representing the Agency told Judge Cooke “an exhaustive search was conducted but the [DVD] could not be located”.
For journalists and legal observers in this murky territory that claim did not come as any big shock or even surprise. It is now known (as THE MEDIA BEAT recently highlighted) that detainees are videotaped as a matter of course, be they interrogated at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Baghram, or South Carolina. But the military and the CIA continue to deny or obfuscate the existence of these recordings. “When the authorities say that a tape, especially in such a high profile case worldwide, cannot be produced,” as Scott Horton of the New York Bar Association said to me, “What are the odds this is an honest answer? Absolutely zero.”
Evidence that taping happens frequently has kept emerging despite never being (until the Padilla “loss”) officially confirmed. The UK citizen Moazzam Begg who was held for three years, two of them in Guantanamo, before being released without charge or even explanation, was interrogated more than three hundred times, and he reported in his 2006 book Enemy Combatant that many of the sessions were taped. A Charleston fellow-detainee along with Padilla, Ali al-Marri (still an “enemy combatant” and still in the brig) managed at one point to cover a camera-lens pointed at him with wet toilet-paper. Stephen Kenny, the Australian lawyer once representing Adelaide-born David Hicks (who has finally been charged, after more than six years’ detention, with providing material support for terrorism and attempted murder) claims that 500 hours of videotape of Guantanamo prisoners exist.
So-called “Combatant Status” hearings have been announced this week at Guantanamo for 14 detainees who were previously held in secret prisons overseas (some the result of “extraordinary renditions”, the intelligence community’s extraordinary euphemism for “kidnappings”). Evidence about – still less videotape of – their interrogations is extremely unlikely to appear in these military-run reviews, which are the first step toward the detainees being tried in the Administration’s special military courts.
Not that we’d know anyway. The press is being excluded, and although official transcripts of the proceedings will apparently be made available, these will be “redacted” or, to quote an experienced human rights attorney’s translation of that particular intelligence community euphemism, they will be “torn to shreds”.
I have already asked one possibly naïve question about the video records of detainee-interrogation … and I do so again, just as more media and legal truth-seekers across the world are similarly inquiring … will we ever see what yet another euphemism, “waterboarding” during interrogations, actually looks like?