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

[FourScore]

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...

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[madrchsod]

1. the fix is in

and the traitors have the vote. torture will soon be ratified by the democrats in the senate...