CIA photos of 'black sites' could complicate Guantanamo trials - The Washington Post - 0 views
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Military prosecutors this year learned about a massive cache of CIA photographs of its former overseas “black sites” while reviewing material collected for the Senate investigation of the agency’s interrogation program, U.S. officials said. The existence of the approximately 14,000 photographs will probably cause yet another delay in the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as attorneys for the defendants demand that all the images be turned over and the government wades through the material to decide what it thinks is relevant to the proceedings.
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The death penalty cases against the five men first began in 2008 under the Bush administration and was abandoned by the Obama administration for a planned trial in federal court in New York. That effort collapsed, and the prosecution was returned to the military in 2011.
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The electronic images depict external and internal shots of facilities where the CIA held al-Qaeda suspects after 9/11, but they do not show detainee interrogations, including the torture of some suspects who were subjected to waterboarding and other brutal techniques. They do include images of naked detainees during transport, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the material remains classified. The pictures also show CIA personnel and members of foreign intelligence services, as well as psychologists Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell, among the architects of the interrogation program.
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It’s unclear whether the military prosecutors have been able to review all the photographs and why they hadn’t unearthed them years earlier. Former U.S. officials said Martins’s team was supposed to have the same access as Senate investigators and federal prosecutors to shared electronic drives containing agency documents at a secret location in Virginia. “It raises the question whether the agency is being cooperative with the prosecutors,” said James Harrington, the civilian attorney for 9/11 defendant Ramzi Binalshibh. “It’s beyond preposterous.”
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mong the images are those of cells and bathrooms at the detention sites, including a facility in Afghanistan known as “Salt Pit,” where the waterboard was photographed.
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The bulk of the photographs depict black sites in Thailand, Afghanistan and Poland. There are fewer shots of prisons in Romania and Lithuania, which were among the last to be used before they were closed in 2006. A former intelligence official who reviewed some of the photographs of the prison in Thailand described them as nondescript.
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“Why is it we are still learning about this stuff?” said Joe Margulies, Zubaydah’s attorney. “Who knows what is still out there? What else is there? That’s what is appalling.” James Connell, defense attorney for Ammar al-Baluchi, one of the 9/11 defendants, filed a motion in January 2013 to compel production of “documents and information” relating to where the “accused or a potential witness have been confined.” Connell said the military judge overseeing the case hasn’t ruled on that motion. “If pictures from black sites exist, they are crime scene photographs,” Connell said. “The military commission rules require the prosecution to turn them over to the defense, but federal and international prosecutors should also get a copy — not to mention the public.”