Judge: U.S. used mentally ill witness in Guantanamo cases

[Snazzy]

Source: McClatchy

* Posted on Monday, April 6, 2009

Judge: U.S. used mentally ill witness in Guantanamo cases

Recommend (5)
By Marisa Taylor | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department improperly withheld important psychiatric records of a government witness who was used in a "significant" number of Guantanamo cases, a federal judge has concluded.

The government censored parts of the records, but enough has been made public that it's clear that the witness, a fellow detainee, was being treated weekly for a serious psychological problem and was questioned about whether he had any suicidal thoughts. The witness provided information in the government's case for detaining Aymen Saeed Batarfi, a Yemeni doctor who the government announced last week it would no longer seek to detain.

In a little-noticed ruling last week, Judge Emmet Sullivan found that the witness's testimony in other cases could be challenged as unreliable.

During a hearing last week, Sullivan castigated the government for not turning over the medical records and ordered department lawyers to explain why he shouldn't cite them for contempt of court.

"To hide relevant and exculpatory evidence from counsel and from the court under any circumstances, particularly here where there is no other means to discover this information and where the stakes are so very high . . . is fundamentally unjust, outrageous and will not be tolerated," Sullivan said, according to a transcript of the hearing.

Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/251/story/65608.html

[elleng]

1. SERIOUS, very interesting, AND furthermore:

'Coincidently, Sullivan presided over the corruption trial of former Alaska Republican Sen. Ted Stevens and was similarly critical of the Justice Department's handling of evidence in that case.'

Furthermore, 'Sullivan ordered the Justice Department to notify other judges of the psychiatric records so they could assess whether the government's failure to reveal the extent of the witness's mental problems have bearing on other detainee cases.'

Angering Judge Sullivan in this way could have far reaching effects on many pending matters and on the way DOJ does its business, imo.

[Snazzy]

3. yeah saw that

they pulled the same crap--lie to the judge. Hope he does lock someone up and this spurs some house cleaning at DOJ, not on illegal partisan grounds like last time, but instead because the guys they hired on illegal partisan grounds are predictably a bunch of crooks. Certainly if the Obama folks needed a way to get rid of these guys, they have one.

"Sullivan, however, was skeptical of the government's explanation and warned that "someone's going to pay a price" for not disclosing the information.

"The sanction is going to be high," he said. "I'll tell you quite frankly if I have to start incarcerating people to get my point across I'm going to start at the top.""

[Demeter]

5. Oh, Please, Please, Please!

"The sanction is going to be high," he said. "I'll tell you quite frankly if I have to start incarcerating people to get my point across I'm going to start at the top."

That's exactly what the country has been waiting and praying for. And marching, and petitioning, and screaming, and...

[tishaLA]

2. Between this and the story about the CIA using medical personnel

to supervise torture, it just gets worse and worse. I sometimes think, oh, the last administration can't surprise me anymore; I've run out of shock. And then stories like these come along and...

[EFerrari]

4. Remember being completely creeped out by how Nazi doctors

experimented on Jewish detainees? CIA was doing about the same thing.

Frankly, I'm surprised we survived that administration -- or, some of us did, anyway.