WASHINGTON — Although Bush administration officials have denied that they transfer terrorism suspects to countries where they are likely to be abused, a classified memorandum described in a court case indicates that the Pentagon has considered sending a captured militant abroad to be interrogated under threat of torture.
The classified memo is summarized — its actual contents are blacked out — in a petition filed by attorneys for Majid Mahmud Abdu Ahmad, a detainee held by the Pentagon at its Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, facility.
The March 17, 2004, Defense Department memo indicated that American officials were frustrated in trying to obtain information from Ahmad, according to the description of the classified memo in the court petition. The officials suggested sending Ahmad to an unspecified foreign country that employed torture in order to increase chances of extracting information from him, according to the petition's description of the memo.
The precise contents of the Pentagon memo on Ahmad were not revealed, but the memo was described in the petition by New York attorney Marc D. Falkoff, who contested the transfer of Ahmad and 12 other Yemenis in U.S. District Court in Washington this year.
Falkoff's description was not disputed by U.S. government lawyers or by U.S. District Judge Rosemary M. Collyer, who read the actual Pentagon document.
Bonus evidence: Here's an FBI memo describing one of the "techniques" discussed to extract info from a prisoner:
Detainee will be sent off GTMO,
either temporarily or permanently, to Jordan, Egypt, or another third
country to allow those countries to employ interrogation techniques
that will enable them to obtain the requisite information.
The FBI agent pointed out that this would be illegal. Or as he put it is a "per se violation of the U.S. Torture Statute." We don't know what happened to the detainee in question. But we do know happened to Maher Arar, Abu Omar, etc.
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