Wednesday, November 22, 2006

Detainee blues

My growing frustration with the news division at NPR not withstanding, this piece they did the other day on Gitmo and detainees was remarkable. They interviewed one of the lawyers for the detainees and it is just amazing how much leeway the government has. Here is one of the snippets:

"Ninety-six percent of the time, [the government] produced no evidence of any sort," Seton Hall law professor Mark Denbeaux told NPR's Robert Siegel. Denbeaux represents two detainees and co-authored the report.

"They relied instead on secret evidence that was classified," Denbeaux says. "And the government's procedure was, anything in that secret evidence was presumed to be valuable and valid. And then the detainee was given the opportunity to rebut the secret evidence. But he was never told what the secret evidence was."


If you have the time, listen to the whole interview it is really hard to stomach.

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