Reply #34: We also know that "evidence" used against others came from statements [View All]

[Solly Mack]

made by people who were being tortured.

http://www.slate.com/id/2179607/

"One of the two men tortured on the CIA tapes is Abu Zubaydah, whose confession supplied the main evidence supporting the warrant issued for Jose Padilla's arrest in May 2002 at O'Hare Airport. Padilla was promptly labeled a "dirty bomber" and an enemy combatant and tossed in a brig for 43 months. When he was finally prosecuted on a conspiracy theory, in a Florida federal court in 2007, Padilla's lawyers claimed Zubaydah had implicated him under torture. The Justice Department dismissed these allegations as "meritless," since there was no proof Zubaydah had been tortured. It's bad enough that the DoJ just "lost" the tapes of Padilla himself being interrogated. It now also seems clear he was first grabbed on the say-so of a crazy person who was willing to say anything to stop the abuse he experienced. One of Padilla's lawyers tells us that if these tapes had been disclosed, it would have been far more likely that the Supreme Court would have taken up the case for a second time, when Padilla tried to go back to the high court in April 2006.

Next: Moussaoui, who, let's not forget, faced the death penalty. The same fall that the CIA tapes were destroyed, according to the Post's timeline, federal district court Judge Leonie Brinkema ordered the government to turn over evidence of specific interrogations relating to the allegations against Moussaoui. His lawyers reportedly wanted to know whether the al-Qaida trio of Zubaydah, Ramzi Binalshibh, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had inculpated Moussaoui, or failed to name him. According to the New York Times, CIA lawyers told federal prosecutors that the CIA did not possess any such evidence.

That means the two biggest terror trials we've had since Sept. 11 were predicated on torture evidence that was then destroyed. The government has argued that al-Qaida operatives cannot be tried because the evidence against them is secret and threatens national security. But the real rationale is much worse: The evidence against them is wholly unreliable."

And then CIA didn't tell the 911 Commission about the existence of the tapes

http://thinkprogress.org/2007/12/24/kean-cia-tapes/


"In its attempts to uncover all materials related to the 9/11 attacks, the 9/11 Commission specifically requested material about the interrogations of Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. The New York Times has revealed that the CIA destroyed tapes of the two men’s interrogation without informing the 9/11 Commission about their existence."




And there was a "new" round of "interrogations" in 2004, even though the CIA claims they stopped 5 years ago...

http://deepbackground.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/01/30/624314.aspx


"The 9/11 Commission suspected that critical information it used in its landmark report was the product of harsh interrogations of al-Qaida operatives - interrogations that many critics have labeled torture. Yet, commission staffers never questioned the agency about the interrogation techniques and in fact ordered a second round of interrogations specifically to ask additional questions of the same operatives, NBC News has learned.

The analysis also shows - and agency and commission staffers concur - there was a separate, second round of interrogations in early 2004, done specifically to answer new questions from the Commission."