Lawyers Want Senate To Hear About Ex-Ghost Detainee Before Mukasey Vote

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 and with access to legal counsel 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.

Gutierrez and Dixon, however, are subject to tight restriction over what they can say publicly about their client. They want to call attention to Khan’s treatment from 2003 to 2006 when, for at least some portion of that time, he and other detainees in CIA custody were — according to the president — subject to the “enhanced interrogation procedures” that the Bush administration approved in mid-March 2002. While it’s not clear what interrogation methods Khan endured, among those “enhanced” techniques was waterboarding — the inducement or simulation of drowning that Mukasey won’t say is torture.

But all of the notes that Gutierrez and Dixon took from their conversations with Khan are under scrutiny by Justice Department and CIA officials to ensure that classified information isn’t revealed. Any information related to Khan that might be released in court filings or anywhere else by CCR goes to a CIA information officer for review. Gutierrez and Dixon experienced difficulty even letting Senators know that they had information about Khan that they wanted to share with the Senate.

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 spokesperson. “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.

Even by war-on-terrorism standards, Majid Khan’s case is unique. As a teenager, Khan moved with his family from Pakistan to a Baltimore suburb in 1996, where the Khans operated a gas station. (He never became a U.S. citizen.) He returned to Pakistan to get married in 2002, but his family suddenly lost contact with him in March 2003, and didn’t hear anything about him until September 2006. Only then did they learn, via a release by the Director of National Intelligence, that Majid Khan was believed to have ties through his Pakistani uncle and cousin to 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. Khan allegedly worked with KSM, as he’s known, to plot a bombing of U.S. gas stations; moved money to al-Qaeda associates in southeast Asia; and allowed another al-Qaeda affiliate in the U.S. to use his identity.

Gutierrez, Dixon and CCR filed a habeas corpus petition on behalf of Khan in late 2006. In court filings and elsewhere, his relatives have stated that Khan told them he was tortured.

Update: This post has been modified for clarity.