AMY GOODMAN: Have we ever seen this kind of standing up mass, standing up before in—among military lawyers?

SCOTT HORTON: Absolutely unprecedented. In fact, I’d say, most recently, when the Bush administration put forward the Military Commissions Act, which the JAG lawyers didn’t even get to see until forty-eight hours before it was put forward on Congress, the Judge Advocates General of the four service branches went to Capitol Hill and testified against the legislation put forward by Gonzales and Jim Haynes. That’s never happened before in history.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to read a quote of Colonel Morris Davis. He wrote a February 17th op-ed piece in the New York Times called “Unforgivable Behavior, Inadmissible Evidence.” He said, “Why a few others in positions of power still find it so difficult to admit the obvious about waterboarding is astounding. We can never retake the moral high ground when we claim the right to do unto others that which we would vehemently condemn if done to us. Once we condemn and stop all waterboarding, what do we do in cases where it was conducted? An obvious step is to prohibit the use of evidence derived by waterboarding in criminal proceedings against detainees.”

SCOTT HORTON: Well, he’s stating essentially the prosecutor’s dilemma. You know, he was charged with prosecuting these cases. He knew that waterboarding and other highly coercive techniques have been used on the people he was prosecuting. He was presented with their confessions to use as evidence. And he knew ethically and legally he couldn’t do that.

I think there’s another very important thing that’s latent in that statement and was also charged very recently by Lieutenant Commander Charlie Swift. He pointed to the fact that these proceedings are going forward within a week of the time that we see official after official of this administration, including President Bush and the head of the Office of Legal Counsel and Attorney General Mukasey, coming forward before Congress and other international fora to justify waterboarding. Why are they doing that? They’re doing that because they know that this hangs in the background of these proceedings in Guantanamo, and they want to press forward for the use of this coerced evidence, which is really going to taint the proceedings and make a mockery of them and embarrass the United States in the eyes of the world.

AMY GOODMAN: Ross Tuttle, you’re also working on a piece on Benyam Mohammed, another prisoner at Guantanamo.

ROSS TUTTLE: Correct. That’s how I started on the story. It was a documentary I had been working on for an ACLU documentary series that covered rendition, extraordinary rendition, torture and habeas corpus.

Benyam Mohammed had, according to his own account, been a victim—well, had fallen in all three of those categories. He has now been in Guantanamo for about four years. Prior to that, according to a lengthy diary that he transcribed to or that he told to his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, he had spent eighteen months in a Moroccan prison as a victim of extraordinary rendition, being grievously tortured. The account that he provided to Smith then got out. It was declassified. And it’s really horrifying when you read it. And there are a lot of details that corroborate the claims that he makes. A lot of people have researched it, looked into it, and there are some—there is a lot of corroborating evidence. But, I mean, if even a fraction of what he says is true, it’s really—I mean, it’s a really horrific thing that he’s endured.

And so, I just felt like that his story needed to be told. I mean, I felt like a lot of people who are still in Guantanamo, who are languishing, who are awaiting trial, I mean, they just—you know, according to their lawyers, I mean, they’re just hoping—they just want a fair trial. They just want something to be able to—you know, they want to be able to face their accusers. And I felt like that was a story that had been not necessarily forgotten, but it just had kind of fallen out of the headlines. Not many people were paying that much attention to it. It felt like in Europe a lot of people were really focusing on this issue. And this story really disturbed me and was—yeah, it was troubling. And that was the story that I initially sought to tell when I contacted Davis.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Ross Tuttle, I want to thank you for joining us, LA-based freelance documentary filmmaker and journalist. His piece is on The Nation website at thenation.com. It’s called “Gitmo Trials Rigged.” And Scott Horton, New York attorney specializing in international law and human rights, legal affairs contributor to Harper’s magazine, where he writes the blog “No Comment.”

SOURCE: http://www.democracynow.org/

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