HUMAN RIGHTS -- TORTURE VICTIM'S RECORDS AT GUANTANAMO MYSTERIOUSLY LOST: In Torture Team, a new book by one of Britain's top human rights lawyers, Philippe Sands, reveals that a Guantanamo detainee's records that detailed how he was tortured by his American captors were mysteriously lost. According to the former head of interrogations at the camp, Michael Dunlavey, the records on Mohammed al-Qahtani, who was accused of plotting the 9/11 attacks, "were backed up ... after I left, there was a snafu and all was lost." "Saudi-born al-Qahtani was sexually taunted, forced to perform dog tricks and given enemas at Guantanamo." Sands's book also reveals that senior Bush administration figures "pushed through previously outlawed measures with the aid of inexperienced military officials at Guantanamo," and lawyers "charged with devising interrogation techniques were inspired by the exploits of Jack Bauer in the American TV series 24." This month, ABC News reported that top White House officials specifically authorized the torture of many detainees -- with President Bush's approval.

 

On December 2, 2002 the U.S. Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, signed his name at the bottom of a document that listed eighteen techniques of interrogation--techniques that defied international definitions of torture. The Rumsfeld Memo authorized the controversial interrogation practices that later migrated to Guantanamo, Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, as part of the policy of extraordinary rendition. From a behind-the-scenes vantage point, Phillipe Sands investigates how the Rumsfeld Memo set the stage for a divergence from the Geneva Convention and the Torture Convention and holds the individual gatekeepers in the Bush administration accountable for their failure to safeguard international law.

EVIL Government, America has become over time........IMOesp with the CIA Darth vader in office.

 

 

Cameras that run 24 hours a day at the prison were set to automatically record over their contents, the US military admitted in court papers. It is unclear how much, if any, prisoner mistreatment was on the taped-over video, but the military admitted that the automatic erasure "likely destroyed" potential evidence in at least one prisoner's case.

The erased tapes may have violated a 2005 court order to preserve "all evidence [of] the torture, mistreatment and abuse of detainees" at Guantánamo. The order was retroactive, so it also applies to the 2003 loss of al-Qahtani's records.

Lawyers representing other Guantánamo detainees are asking whether tapes of their clients' treatment may also be erased. "You can't just destroy relevant evidence," said Jonathan Hafetz, of the Brennan Centre for Justice in New York.

David H Remes, a lawyer for 16 Guantánamo prisoners, said the CIA's destruction of interrogation videos shows the US government is capable of getting rid of potentially incriminating evidence.

"[In Guantánamo] the government had a system that automatically overwrote records," Remes told the Guardian. "That is a passive form of evidence destruction. If a party has destroyed evidence in one place, there's no reason to assume it has preserved evidence in another place."

More than 24,000 interrogations were videotaped at Guantánamo, according to a US army report unearthed by researchers at Seton Hall University in New Jersey.