Silencing Terror Suspects
I started this blog again after a long absence. I was prompted by the efforts of the Bush administation to silence a suspect in a terror case who has spent years in a secret CIA prison. The administration is trying to prevent this defendant from speaking to his civilian attorney because they claimed he could reveal CIA's interrogation techniques. The Justice Department claims that these tactics, and the information about the location of the CIA secret prisons, are a matter of national security.
Stripping away the First Amendment and access to attorneys in the name of national security is tyranny in action. This could happen to any of us. The administration passed a bill last month that authorized the use of harsh but undefined interrogation techniques. We've become a nation that tacticly supports torture and the silencing of defendants.
First reported in the Washington Post, this latest effort to dismantle civil liberties was sparked by a request that terror ruspect Majid Khan be given access to an attorney. According to documents filed on his behalf by the Center for Constutional Rights, Khan, 26, immigrated from Pakistan and went to high school in Maryland, He was arrested in Pakistan in 2003 and during his three years in CIA custody, endured interrogation techniques that his attorney say amounted to torture.
Khan, and 13 other prisoners who were determined to be "terrorist leaders," were transferred to Guantanemo Bay, Cuba in September when President Bush acknowledge CIA secret prisons. A law passed last month mandates that they be tried before special military commissions. The defendants do not have access to civilian courts. The Center For Constitutional Rights points out that under the Constitution, prisoners have a right to challenge their detention. But the Justice Department claims that civilian courts no longer have jurisdiction to intervene in the case.
"Information obtained through the program has provided the United States with one of the most useful tools in combating terrorist threats to the national security," the government argued in court documents. Somene should tell these people that information gained through torture is not reliable intelligence. Efforts to deny these prisoners due process under the claim of national security appears to be an attempt to conceal the U.S. government sanctioned torture and abuse of people who have never been tried, let alone convicted.
In court documents Gitanjali S. Gutierrez, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, said there is no evidence Khan has classified information. Gutierrez accused the administration of using national secrecy concerns to "conceal illegal or embarrassing executive conduct."
