All The President's Tapes

By Cernig

The Washington Post's Josh White today has an important article outlining the way in which the US video-taped interrogations by foreign intelligence agents of Gitmo detainees. The tapes have never been publicly acknowledged to exist by Bush administration officials - just like all the other thousands of hours of Gitmo tapes they made.

Numerous State Department cables to foreign government delegations in 2002 and 2003 show that each country was subject to rules and regulations "to protect the interests and ensure the safety of all concerned." Condition No. 1 stated that U.S. authorities would closely monitor the interrogations, a practice that the Defense Department confirmed last week was also carried out to gather intelligence.

"The United States will video tape and sound record the interviews between representatives of your government and the detainee(s) named above," read several of the nearly identical cables, obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request.

Should such videotapes exist, they would reveal how representatives from countries such as China, Egypt, Jordan, Libya, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Tunisia treated detainees in small interrogation booths at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba -- sessions that some detainees have said were abusive and at times contained threats of torture or even death. Though attorneys for the detainees have long sought to obtain such evidence, the administration has thus far denied the requests and has not indicated that such tapes exist.

The administration has refused to officially acknowledge any tapes made at Gitmo unless they were forced to, for instance by the Canadian Supreme Court's decision to release tapes from interrogations of Omar Khadr. However, official Pentagon statements buried in the records say that there were over 24,000 tapes made - a number they've tried to roll back and downplay since Seton Hall Law revealed it with numerous misdirections.

Those are the actions of people with something to hide - and that something is most certainly torture which was approved and directed at the highest level of the Bush administration with malice aforethought.