Lawyers Want Senate To Hear About Ex-Ghost Detainee Before Mukasey Vote

Lawyers Want Senate To Hear About Ex-Ghost Detainee Before Mukasey Vote
By Spencer Ackerman - November 5, 2007, 3:42PM


There isn't much time before tomorrow's vote on attorney general-designee and torture agnostic Michael Mukasey. But lawyers from the only former CIA "ghost detainee" still in U.S. custody and with access to legal counsel want the Senate to know what the consequences of a torture regimen are before they give Mukasey their stamp of approval. In a letter written November 1st, they requested a meeting with key Senators, but the letter was only cleared today for release by U.S. authorities.

Two lawyers for the Center for Constitutional Rights, Gita Gutierrez and J. Wells Dixon, recently returned from a two-week meeting with their client, Majid Khan, at Guantanamo Bay, where he's been detained since last September. Before he was taken to Guantanamo, Khan spent three years in an off-the-books detention facility run by or in cooperation with the CIA. Neither the Red Cross nor anyone outside a select few U.S. national security officials knew Khan's whereabouts. Since President Bush's 2006 decision to transfer 14 so-called "black site" detainees to Guantanamo, Khan is the first ghost detainee to meet with an attorney.

Gutierrez and Dixon, however, are subject to tight restriction over what they can say publicly about their client. They want to call attention to Khan's treatment from 2003 to 2006 when, for at least some portion of that time, he and other detainees in CIA custody were -- according to the president -- subject to the "enhanced interrogation procedures" that the Bush administration approved in mid-March 2002. While it's not clear what interrogation methods Khan endured, among those "enhanced" techniques was waterboarding -- the inducement or simulation of drowning that Mukasey won't say is torture.

But all of the notes that Gutierrez and Dixon took from their conversations with Khan are under scrutiny by Justice Department and CIA officials to ensure that classified information isn't revealed. Any information related to Khan that might be released in court filings or anywhere else by CCR goes to a CIA information officer for review. Gutierrez and Dixon experienced difficulty even letting Senators know that they had information about Khan that they wanted to share with the Senate.

A letter drafted by the two attorneys on November 1st -- containing absolutely no information about interrogation techniques -- to six U.S. Senators was just cleared for release today by Justice Department and CIA officials. In it, Gutierrez and Dixon plea for a closed-door meeting with Pat Leahy (D-VT), Arlen Specter (R-PA), John McCain (R-AZ), Jim Webb (D-VA) and Khan's home-state senators, Democrats Barbara Mikulski and Ben Cardin. The letter -- which you can read here --
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/docs/ccr-khan/
implores the Senators to meet with the attorneys and "consider our client's experiences in CIA secret detention while exercising your own constitutionally mandated oversight responsibilities."

Those responsibilities take on a new salience with Mukasey's nomination. While CCR isn't getting its hopes up that Senators will pencil in a last-minute meeting with Gutierrez -- who's still in Washington reviewing her notes at a secure facility in town -- it does want to make sure that lawmakers hear what's been done to Khan, even if they can't describe the interrogation regimen to their constituents. "We want to meet with them no matter what, but we do want to meet before the Mukasey vote, because it applies to that issue," says a CCR spokesperson. "But it also applies to issues of secret detentions and interrogations" that go beyond Mukasey.

Dixon will be in Washington tomorrow morning in preparation for a possible meeting.

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How can our representatives make the correct decision when they are denied the facts relevant to the decision due to "state secret" obfuscation?

Congress is part of the "state" and need to know. Unless, of course, the Bush Junta is hiding their crimes!

"...even if they can't describe the interrogation regimen to their constituents"



Sigh

"Pakistan attempts to crush protests by lawyers."

On 6 September 2006, US President George W. Bush announced that 14 men, previously held in secret custody by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), had been transferred to military detention in Guantánamo. Majid Khan, a Pakistani national who had become a victim of enforced disappearance at the hands of the Pakistani and US authorities for more than three and a half years, was one of the 14. Majid Khan migrated to the USA with his family in 1996 where he lived and worked in Baltimore in the US state of Maryland. He was granted asylum in the USA in 1998. In February 2002 Majid Khan returned to Pakistan with his brother to get married. After his wedding he returned to Baltimore in March 2002 where he remained until his return to Pakistan later that year.

Enforced disappearance

During the night of 5 March 2003, Pakistan security officials raided his brother’s house in Karachi and arrested Majid Khan, his brother Muhammad Khan, sister-in-law and their baby. They bound and blindfolded them and took them to an unknown location. At the time, Majid Khan’s wife was with her family in Hyderabad, Pakistan.

Majid Khan’s sister-in-law and her baby were released one week later, and his brother approximately one month later, apparently after he was warned not to make any public statements or enquiries about Majid Khan. Pakistani officials refused to tell his family where he was being held, or the reasons for his detention. Majid Khan’s relatives in the USA were also denied any news about his whereabouts and did not know if he was alive or dead until President Bush’s 6 September 2006 announcement.

Transfer to Guantánamo

“If I come back, it will be a miracle of God”

On or around 4 September 2006, Majid Khan was reportedly hooded, shackled, sedated and flown to Guantánamo along with 13 other “high value” detainees. All have been designated as “enemy combatants”. Little is known about their current conditions of detention, although they are believed to be held in isolation with little or no contact with other detainees or each other. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) visited them shortly after their transfer. Apart from this they have continued to be held incommunicado, without access to legal counsel. Amnesty International is seriously concerned for their physical and psychological welfare, due to their prolonged secret detention and possible exposure to torture or ill-treatment, and their continuing isolation and indefinite detention.

Majid Khan has sent a letter to his wife from Guantánamo in which he is reported to have told her that she should not dwell on the thought of his return. The letter was heavily censored by the US military, but he reportedly wrote that he is held in solitary confinement and only allowed to leave his cell for one hour a day and can occasionally talk to other detainees through cell walls.

http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/engamr510422007