Last Minute Mukasey Info

Lawyers for the only former "ghost detainee" still in US custody want the Senate to hear what has happened to their client while in the hands of the CIA before the vote on whether Michael Mukasey will become our next Attorney General. This seems most relevant since Mukasey won't admit that the technique known as "waterboarding" is torture (see previous blog entries, including 2 November 2007). You can find an entire article on this by Spencer Ackerman over at TPM. Here are excerpts.

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 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.

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A letter drafted by the two attorneys on November 1st -- containing absolutely no information about interrogation techniques -- to six U.S. Senators was just cleared for release today by Justice Department and CIA officials. In it, Gutierrez and Dixon plea for a closed-door meeting with Pat Leahy (D-VT), Arlen Specter (R-PA), John McCain (R-AZ), Jim Webb (D-VA) and Khan's home-state senators, Democrats Barbara Mikulski and Ben Cardin. The letter -- which you can read here -- implores the Senators to meet with the attorneys and "consider our client's experiences in CIA secret detention while exercising your own constitutionally mandated oversight responsibilities."

Those responsibilities take on a new salience with Mukasey's nomination. While CCR isn't getting its hopes up that Senators will pencil in a last-minute meeting with Gutierrez -- who's still in Washington reviewing her notes at a secure facility in town -- it does want to make sure that lawmakers hear what's been done to Khan, even if they can't describe the interrogation regimen to their constituents. "We want to meet with them no matter what, but we do want to meet before the Mukasey vote, because it applies to that issue," says a CCR attorney. "But it also applies to issues of secret detentions and interrogations" that go beyond Mukasey.

Dixon will be in Washington tomorrow morning in preparation for a possible meeting.

5 November 2007