In yesterday's pre-trial hearings at Omar Khadr's kangaroo-court trial military commission, we heard from Agent 99 11. Today the Cone of Silence descended. Can the shoe phone be far behind?
Just before I get to Barbie Agent 99 11, I have a legal question about U.S. pre-trial hearings. Paul Koring at the Globe and Mail reports today that the Cone of Silence descended (the commission went into secret session) while at least one of the videotapes showing Omar's conversations with CSIS agents at GTMO in 2003 was played for the court.
Does the use of that videotape or any other evidence derived from the direct participation of CSIS or DFAIT or other agents or representatives of Canada signify any of the following: Obama is thumbing his nose at Steve? AG Holder is thumbing his nose at Rob Nicholson? Hillary Clinton is thumbing her nose at Lawrence Cannon? Or the GTMO convening authority is thumbing its nose at all of the above (entirely possible, given the history of the convening authority, which is technically in the U.S. Department of Defense)?
People might recall that the Harper government (in a most minimal response to a decision of the Supreme Court in January of this year) formally requested that the U.S. government not use as evidence in legal proceedings there any evidence collected at GTMO by Canadian agents and representatives, which the SCC has said (2008) was collected in violation of Omar Khadr's rights.
I know that everyone who can YouTube has been able to see at least some of the CSIS agents' floundering with a distressed Khadr in 2003, ever since Judge Mosley released that video and a number of interesting memos in 2008. I don't know whether that's exactly what Col Parrish had the commission watching this morning after the Cone descended -- in theory, that video is still classified in the U.S.
But does its use even in a pre-trial hearing signify that a formal request from Minister Nicholson has fallen on deaf ears in Washington? Does it signify only that we can't be sure who is running this show in Washington at the moment? (That would actually be my guess.) All legal advice welcome.
And Barbie Agent 99 11 on the turn.
Imagine that you are Omar Khadr in October 2002. You have just spent three months at the U.S. base at Bagram barely recovering from serious wounds to your chest and your eyes, during which time you also turned sixteen. Your interrogators there included FBI agent Robert Fuller, who nudged you into telling lies about Maher Arar that have been disproved by CSIS and the RCMP, and then the infamous Joshua Claus.
You are transported from Bagram to Guantanamo (and we've all seen photographs of how that was done), and there, all of a sudden, at a time when you can hardly be expected to have recovered from your very serious wounds, you are confronted by the "twenty-something" neophyte interrogator (one month's training) called Agent 11 described in Koring's report and by veteran GTMO reporter Carol Rosenberg of the Miami Herald.
Agent 11 gives you fig newtons and M&Ms. She's a perky girl (we can tell that from her current mindless testimony), although she's insisting now that she was meant to be a "mother-figure" for Omar. And Lordy, but she just could not see that this sick and scared kid had any problems at all, eh?
We have to put her testimony together in bits and pieces from various reports, but really: do you believe a word of it? Forgive me -- I'm a feminist, but I'm not afraid to call featherhead on any woman who plays the role that Agent 11 did and then testifies for the prosecution as she has. Either she's an airhead or she's an amoral liar -- neither would surprise me, and maybe they're the same thing in the mad mad world that is the U.S. justice system at the moment.
Memo to Barack Obama and Eric Holder: Much of the rest of the world has long wondered whether Hollywood and Disneyworld have taken over American culture so totally and thoroughly that many Americans are no longer capable of any kind of thought -- legal, political, financial, economic, social, ecological, aesthetic, ethical -- that is not Disneythink.
Your utterly cowardly retreat in the face of the paranoid xenophobes, your failure to face the facts about the historic shame of GTMO and all the overseas sites, acknowledged or "black," your dogged pursuit of many who were entirely innocent and anyone who did nothing more than defend himself against attack, especially anyone who was still a child, and your criminal attempts to bury the truth about individuals like Abu Zubaydah and al Qahtani who have been destroyed in body and mind by the torture regime of the past decade -- that entire monstrous history leads to the quacking duck called Agent 11 who teased a desperate sixteen-year-old seven years ago and is still apparently proud of herself for having done so.
And none of that bothers you. Well, at least you have some Canadian company. It doesn't bother Steve either. He's pretty deeply dipped in the banality of evil Disneythink too.
Can any reasonable person truly believe that Omar all of fifteen, having just survived intense shelling and a firefight,bleeding from the head , permanatly blinded in one eye by shrapnel and surely expecting to die would have the presence of mind to check his watch before tossing a grenade.
As for Lt. Col. W's explaination for later doctoring his original report, well what can one say but BULLSHIT!!!
To answer the legal question: The use of the videotapes of the CSIS/DFAIT interrogations signifies nothing more than the fact that the prosecutors have no real evidence of Khadr's guilt, and they are prepared, in their desperation, to offer evidence that was obtained with the assistance of torture (which would be excluded in any real court) in order to get a conviction.
The Yanks know perfectly well that Harper, Nicholson, and Cannon are not sincere in their 11th-hour "formal" request not to use the video evidence. They made the request with a wink in their eye and their arm twisted behind their back by the Supreme Court of Canada, and they didn't fool anyone, either here or in the US.
Nobody wants Khadr to be convicted more than the Harpocrats.
"Nobody wants Khadr to be convicted more than the Harpocrats."
I would contend that they need him to be convicted in order to justify their complicity in the torture and illegal confinement of a Canadian child.
Further how the SOC can sit by while Harper and his merry band of accomplices thumb their noses at them is beyond me. The Cons should all be hauled up on contempt charges if the court had any cajones
Then again maybe it was rhe SOC that was doing the winking and nudging know what I mean
"Testifying by video from the U.S. Army War College in Pennsylvania, Lt.-Col. W. said when he realized his first report was incorrect he changed it for “history’s sake.” When visited by military investigators years later he realized his mistake and corrected the error on his laptop where he had stored the report, he testified."
Years later?
Yeah -- and classified information on a personal laptop, too. We did know about this before (maybe only in outline from Lt-Cmdr Kuebler); we also knew about the conflicting testimony of a commando called OC-1, who says he shot two fighters, one (the one who was reaching for a rifle) fatally, the other Khadr -- see Michelle Shephard in the Star today.
Maybe the video evidence was considered admissable because it was introduced by the defence lawyers :
"The video was introduced by Khadr's attorneys so that they could ask an agent of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, Jocelyn Dillard, about it. Dillard had testified that Khadr was cooperative while she and an FBI agent interrogated him at the prison camps hospital in 2003."
~ McClatchy
The following appeared in an article written by Paul Koring for the G&M, if true it is yet another hit to Lt.Col. W's credibility and thus the case against Omar.
"Lt.-Col. W. also knew, within days of the original firefight that Mr. Khadr had survived, that the military medevac flight to a hospital at Bagram where emergency operations saved his lift."
Alison: Aha. That makes sense.
I actually thought at the time Nicholson made his request, as majikthise says above, that it was a peculiarly perverse way to interpret the court's decision, not just minimal but perverse. The CSIS/DFAIT material that Mosley made public, at least, tended to raise sympathy for Omar -- especially the video did. So asking to have it suppressed probably gave Steve and Rob a good chuckle.
Kev, Lt-Col W is about as credible as Agent 11, eh? I am NAL, but I'm pretty sure that in any real court of law, his testimony would have been thoroughly impeached by now.
It sounds to me as though FBI special agent Fuller did not repeat (on Thursday, I believe) the testimony he gave last year (19 January -- note the date) about Omar's ID'ing of Arar. Interesting that Fuller has learned not to repeat that story, which makes him look bad, not Khadr -- it's exculpatory for Khadr, since it suggests coercion.
PS -- Oh, and then there's that whole part that makes the FBI look even worse: Fuller extracted a hesitant ID from Khadr on 7 October 2002. The next day, Maher Arar was "extraordinarily rendered" to Syria via Jordan to be tortured.
PPS, to Alison: God: "man-jammies." That's Lt-Col W. describing the local costume in Afghanistan.
Here is an interesting interview of Daphne Eviatar of Human Rights Watch on her observations of day 1
http://backofthebook.ca/2010/05/02/day-one-in-khadrs-kangaroo-court/2867/
"Army Lt. Col. W, an assistant police chief in civilian life" Yeah.
Skdadl, I left a note at BnR about this a couple of days ago but did you get a chance to hear Daphne Eviatar of Human Rights Watch as she left the courtroom ?
Not enough has been said about "clean team" evidence.
Kev : SNAP!
I did watch the vid from BnR, Alison, but I just went back to refresh my memory, and I have a couple of thoughts.
Fuller, btw, is FBI, not CIA, as Eviatar says in the report you link to at Creekside.
I might be prepared to think of Fuller as part of a "clean team" if -- IF -- that coinkydink with Arar's rendition hadn't happened. Fuller himself must have been working under some pressure -- he was obviously directly in touch with the people figuring out what to do with Arar -- they made their decision the very night of Fuller's "interview" with Khadr. Soooo, I mean, "clean" is like an odd word to use for that, eh?
It's true that Director Mueller pulled the FBI out of these processes -- finally -- but that wasn't until 2004 or 2005. The DoJ IG's report on FBI experience at overseas sites (but mainly GTMO), which is a very interesting report, indeed demonstrates that most FBI agents were bothered from early on by what they were seeing in interrogations -- by the CIA and by various forms of military investigators. With very few exceptions, FBI agents did not take part in abusive interrogations at all, but even so, they knew from the start (because they've been trained to get evidence that can be taken to court) that their own interviews would still be considered suspect if they were just slotted into a process that included abuse before and after they were there.
It took the director a while, though, to respond effectively to the questions and alarms he was getting from agents. A lot of what we knew before the Senate Armed Services Committee got going on its (incredibly good) investigation of GTMO came from journalist-scholars like Philippe Sands and Jane Mayer who'd got hold of leaked FBI memos that described what was going on.
When I read the DoJ IG's report on the FBI, I was thinking all the way through of our guys, CSIS and DFAIT, and whether it had ever occurred to them to protest the way some FBI agents did, from early 2002 on. I can't believe that our guys raised any questions or alarms at all -- if they had, that would have been exculpatory for them, and we would have heard about it.
Thanks for the correction on Fuller, Skdadl.
"Clean" I take to really mean "cleaned"
Back later on the rest.
re Khadar and Arar--the Liberal government saw nothing wrong with allowing Arar to be tortured but they are so concerned about the Afghan detainee? The games being played by all governments is despicable.
Our governments, no matter the stripe are evil and unless we clean them up this is our future.