CIA destroys tapes in prisoner torture case

When it comes to “human rights,” the U.S. government has become infamous for two brutal military occupations and for mistreatment of prisoners that includes abuse and torture at Baghram, Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo prisons.

Now not only has current CIA head Michael Hayden admitted that the agency destroyed tapes showing interrogations of at least two “high-level” prisoners, but in a Dec. 10 statement the agency said that its lawyers had given written approval for destroying the tapes, even though it was known they might be needed for legal proceedings later.

The tapes destroyed include hundreds of hours of interrogation of Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. Both were captured in 2002 and are now being held at Guantánamo Bay, a territory in Cuba occupied and administered by the U.S. Navy despite the Cuban government’s objections.

Hayden said the agency was right to destroy two videotapes of interrogations, and claimed that the tapes posed a “serious security risk.” He said that if they had become public, they could have exposed CIA officials and their families to “retaliation from al-Qaeda and its sympathizers.”

Others say the tapes were destroyed for a different reason: they would make the Abu Ghraib scandal look like child’s play and expose Washington as the world’s home office of torture.

The Bush administration, which had promoted abuse and torture, failed to order the CIA to refrain from destroying the tapes. It has also come out that leading Democrats, including current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, were informed as early as 2002 about CIA interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, and approved them.

Zubaydah had been captured in a firefight in Pakistan in March of 2002 and was interrogated at a CIA safe house in Thailand. Al-Nashiri was captured in the United Arab Emirates.

According to their confessions, Zubaydah is a high-ranking al-Qaeda official and Al-Nashiri planned the 2000 attack against the USS Cole in Yemeni waters. Both have challenged the confessions, saying they were obtained under torture.

The U.S. authorities labeled the two “high-level detainees,” of whom there are 14 at Guantánamo, and classified them as “enemy combatants.” Since U.S. interrogators used extreme sensory and sleep deprivation, along with blatant torture like waterboarding, it is possible the two prisoners told their interrogators anything they thought their captors wanted to hear.

Most of the other 800 prisoners who have been held at the U.S. concentration camp in Guantánamo since 2002, of whom about 305 remain, were picked up in Afghanistan or Pakistan by Pakistani mercenaries. In some cases they were rank-and-file Taliban soldiers, who under pre-9/11 conditions would be considered prisoners of war.

Others were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, like the al-Jazeera reporter Sami al-Hajj, captured in 2001 and still held after six years. According to al-Hajj, who was beaten and tortured at Baghram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, for three years interrogators tried to get him to say there was a relationship between al-Jazeera and al-Qaeda.

The group that has organized legal representation for the Guantánamo prisoners, most held since 2002, is the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR). After winning a case for the detainees in 2004—Rasul v. Bush—the CCR coordinated a large coalition of pro-bono lawyers, including many from corporate law firms, to represent the prisoners there and try to get them a hearing.

In 2006, CCR won another case before the Supreme Court, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, which was supposed to guarantee the detainees a hearing. However, Congress passed a new repressive law, the Military Commissions Act, which placed the cases before special military courts and in reality denied them hearings.

“We have been back and forth in the courts as the government has tried one maneuver after another to avoid the Supreme Court’s past rulings—that the detainees are entitled to challenge their detention in U.S. courts,” said Vincent Warren, executive director of CCR.

Warren spoke at a luncheon meeting of CCR supporters and friends Dec. 10 in the group’s Manhattan offices. He gave an update on CCR’s third Supreme Court Guantánamo case. He recounted how a military lawyer had told him that the U.S. military had purposely chosen Guantánamo to build the prison in the hope of avoiding being subject to U.S. or any other law.

Before the Supreme Court on Dec. 5, CCR cooperating attorney Seth Waxman argued that Guantánamo is U.S.-controlled territory and that U.S. laws should hold there. Thus the prisoners should be entitled to challenge their detention in civilian courts under habeas corpus. “The U.S. government has complete jurisdiction and control over this place. No other law applies. If the U.S. law doesn’t apply, it is a law-free zone,” Waxman said.

Warren called Waxman’s argument defending the prisoners’ rights before the Supreme Court “brilliant” and was cautiously optimistic that there would be a favorable ruling. He added, however, that “even with a favorable decision it may still take another two years in the courts” before the detainees are heard.