Well, ain’t this spiffy?
Lawyer: Gitmo interrogators told to trash notes – washingtonpost.com
The Pentagon urged interrogators at Guantanamo Bay to destroy handwritten notes in case they were called to testify about potentially harsh treatment of detainees, a military defense lawyer said Sunday.
The lawyer for Toronto-born Omar Khadr, Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler, said the instructions were included in an operations manual shown to him by prosecutors and suggest the U.S. deliberately thwarted evidence that could help terror suspects defend themselves at trial.
“Down here in these parts, we got this little something we like to call, ‘Obstruction of Justice.'”
Kuebler said the apparent destruction of evidence prevents him from challenging the reliability of any alleged confessions. He said he will use the document to seek a dismissal of charges against Khadr.
Way to fight the War on Terror, Pentagon!
Of course, they weren’t quite that blatant about the whole thing … were they?
The “standard operating procedures” manual that contained the purported instructions was made available to Kuebler last week as part of a pretrial review of potential evidence, the Navy lawyer said.
“The mission has legal and political issues that may lead to interrogators being called to testify, keeping the number of documents with interrogation information to a minimum can minimize certain legal issues,” the document is quoted as saying in an affidavit signed by Kuebler.
[…] The operations manual, which dates to January 2003, was attached to a 2005 report on an investigation into detainee abuse allegations at Guantanamo, Kuebler said. A summary of the findings was released at the time, but the defense lawyer said the section including the manual has not been made available publicly.
Well, I suppose someone could argue that they were simply suggesting that interrogation documentation be kept in a single folder so just that one folder could be destroyed subpoenaed. But, yeah, it sure sounds like a suggestion to be sure and burn everything but the confession …
Let me just note that, as someone in private industry, if one of our managers or executives put out a memo (how dumb is that?) suggesting that we minimize the documents that might be requested by legal means, it’d be considered a huge red flag to auditors and regulators (and lawyers), and would probably warrant fines in and of itself as well as summary decisions under the presumption that we destroyed critical evidence.
Of course, if that SOP should suddenly be “minimized” — or declared Top Secret — then it would just be his word against theirs, right? Hmmmmm. Any bets?
The ironic thing to me is that the people buying the jesus license plates are probably all for the military doing ‘what they need to do’ to thwart terrorism!!…whats this quote from? we have become what we sought to destroy? Or something along those lines…
A listened to an NPR report on Gitmo about a year ago and it just about made me puke. The whole situation is complete BS!
But it’s okay because they’re all terrorists…
Jim, numerous quotes along those lines, though the most famous is Walt Kelly’s from Pogo — “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
Another classic along those lines is Nietzsche’s “He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”
And, of course, there’s Jeffrey Sinclair in the B5 episode “Infection”: “You forgot the first rule of the fanatic: when you become obsessed with the enemy, you become the enemy!”