Detainees not given access to witnesses

[Eugene]

(The Boston Globe)

Detainees not given access to witnesses
But in one case, 3 quickly found

By Farah Stockman and Declan Walsh, Globe Staff and Globe Correspondent | June 18, 2006

GARDEZ, Afghanistan -- The US government routinely failed to give detainees
at Guantanamo Bay access to witnesses who might have helped them prove their
assertions of innocence, saying it could not locate the vast majority
of the witnesses the terror suspects requested at special military hearings.

But within a three-day span, a Globe reporter was able to locate three of those
witnesses in the case of one detainee. The Globe found two of them in Afghanistan,
and located a third in Washington, D.C., where he is teaching at the National
Defense University.

In 2004, after a Supreme Court ruling, the US military was forced to give hearings
to more than 500 prisoners being held without charge at the US detention facility
in Cuba. At the time, the military pledged to try to locate defense witnesses
to give testimony for those hearings, but later routinely reported that they could
not be found.

<snip>

But in all 34 cases, detainees were told at their hearings that their witnesses could
not be found. Nearly all of those 64 approved witnesses were deemed "unavailable"
because the governments of the country where the witnesses lived did not respond
to a State Department request for help in locating them.

<snip>

Full article: http://www.boston.com/news/world/middleeast/articles/2006/06/18/detainees_not_given_access_to_witnesses
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