Levin OKs Use of Evidence Coerced From Detainees
WASHINGTON, Dec. 16 - House and Senate negotiators agreed Friday to a measure that would enable the government to keep prisoners at Guantánamo Bay indefinitely on the basis of evidence obtained by coercive interrogations.
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Human rights advocates criticized Mr. Levin, the chief Senate Democratic negotiator, for agreeing to restrict further the legal rights of Guantánamo detainees. Mr. Levin suggested that he had settled for the less damaging of two bad outcomes, saying he had deflected more onerous provisions that House Republicans wanted, including a demand that interrogators who abused prisoners be granted immunity from prosecution. Mr. Levin added in a telephone interview, "I don't think courts will allow coerced evidence in any proceeding."
[emphasis added]
Right, a military court would never allow that. More below.
The juxtaposition of the seemingly contradictory measures immediately led lawyers for Guantánamo prisoners to assert that Congressional Republicans were helping to preserve the utility of coercive interrogations that senior White House officials have argued are vital to the fight against war against terror.
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Thomas B. Wilner, a lawyer who represents a group of Kuwaiti detainees at Guantánamo Bay, said in an interview that the new language would render the McCain restrictions unenforceable at the Cuban prison. "If McCain is one small step forward, enactment of this language would be two giant steps backwards," Mr. Wilner said.
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Several officials familiar with the internal discussions said State Department officials and some senior Defense Department aides had strongly advocated an explicit ban on the use of evidence obtained by torture in a series of interagency discussions that began last December.
At one point in that process, the Pentagon official in charge of the tribunals, Maj. Gen. John D. Altenburg Jr., who is now retired, proposed barring any "confession or admission that was procured from the accused by torture," according to parts of a draft document read to a reporter. The rule defined torture as any act "specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain and suffering."
The ban was also championed by the counselor of the State Department, Philip D. Zelikow, two officials said. The deputy defense secretary, Gordon R. England, also supported the ban in meetings on the revised commission rules, as did some senior military officers, said a spokesman for Mr. England, Capt. Kevin Wensing.
But such a prohibition was opposed by other officials involved in the debate, including David S. Addington, who was then Vice President Dick Cheney's counsel and is now his chief of staff. A spokesman for the vice president said Mr. Addington would have no comment on his reported role in the policy debates.
Sen. Levin is a good man and a good Senator. But couldn't stand firm against Lindsey Graham. He wasn't strong enough.
Levin is against torture, but if we obtain information through the use of torture, he is willing to let us use it to hold the person tortured. A built-in incentive to torture.
Sen Levin is a good man. But he buckled. And, they didn't even have to torture him.