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| Reporters find Afghan witnesses US couldn't
This story was highlighted at the Daily Kos. I hadn't heard about it but seriously - is this our pathetic intelligence gathering is? Quote:
GARDEZ, Afghanistan -- The US government routinely failed to give detainees at Guantanamo Bay access to witnesses who might have helped them prove their assertions of innocence, saying it could not locate the vast majority of the witnesses the terror suspects requested at special military hearings.
But within a three-day span, a Globe reporter was able to locate three of those witnesses in the case of one detainee. The Globe found two of them in Afghanistan, and located a third in Washington, D.C., where he is teaching at the National Defense University.
In 2004, after a Supreme Court ruling, the US military was forced to give hearings to more than 500 prisoners being held without charge at the US detention facility in Cuba. At the time, the military pledged to try to locate defense witnesses to give testimony for those hearings, but later routinely reported that they could not be found.
A Globe review of the transcripts of the hearings, which were released to the public in March, identified 34 detainees who convinced tribunal officials that their overseas witnesses would provide relevant testimony.
But in all 34 cases, detainees were told at their hearings that their witnesses could not be found. Nearly all of those 64 approved witnesses were deemed ``unavailable" because the governments of the country where the witnesses lived did not respond to a State Department request for help in locating them.
Military investigators and State Department officials did not even contact witnesses who were well known to US authorities.
In one case, the State Department said that it could not locate Ismail Khan , the well-known minister of energy in Afghan president Hamid Karzai's cabinet, who meets frequently with American diplomats.
In another case, tribunal officials said they could not contact a prisoner in US custody in Bagram, Afghanistan, because the US officials holding him failed to respond to their inquiries. The tribunal records also show that the time period allowed by the tribunals to find the witnesses was often brief. In some cases, tribunal officials declared witnesses unavailable after two weeks.
In the vast majority of cases, detainees had to rely on the jailhouse testimony of fellow prisoners at Guantanamo, whose credibility is deeply in question, or on letters from family members.
Defense lawyers say the absence of witnesses at the hearings made it harder for any innocent detainee to prove that he was the victim of a mistake. Out of nearly 380 detainees who participated in the process, only 38 managed to win their release.
| http://www.boston.com/news/world/art..._to_witnesses/
These trials should be a good thing but if the authorities are making less effort to find witnesses than a couple of reporters, what good are they? Quote:
The witnesses largely corroborated Mr Mujahid's story, with some qualifications. Mr Jalali, the former interior minister, said Mr Mujahid had been fired over allegations of corruption and bullying - not for attacking the government. Mr Haider, the former defence official, said Mr Mujahid had contributed 30 soldiers to a major operation against al-Qaida in March 2002. "He is completely innocent," he said.
Other Afghans agreed. General Ali Shah Paktiawal, Interpol director of the Afghan national police, said: "Some people have given false information about him and that's why this problem has come up."
Their testimonies do not necessarily exonerate Mr Mujahid but at the very least raise serious questions about the case against him. An Afghan government delegation that recently visited Guantánamo estimated that half of the 94 Afghan detainees were not guilty of serious crimes and should be released. They did not release any names.
In Gardez, Haji Muhammad Hasan, 65, keeps a stack of Red Cross letters as the only proof of his son's whereabouts. "I feel completely helpless," he said in despair. Beside him the detainee's shy sons - aged three, four and five - waited for news of a father they could hardly recall.
Lies and old rivalries had sent many innocent Afghans to Guantánamo, said Taj Muhammad Wardak, a former governor of Paktiya. "You can investigate these people here. There is no need to send them to Guantánamo," he said. "It is a great sadness between our countries that will last for many years."
| http://www.guardian.co.uk/guantanamo...html?gusrc=rss |
