U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, on a visit to Australia, agreed to arrange the release of a Guantanamo Bay detainee.

The claim is made by Harper's Magazine, which says Australian Prime Minister John Howard was under pressure in an election year as the continued detention of Hicks without charge was unpopular with the public, and he persuaded Cheney to organise an early release.

A plea deal was allegedly entered into soon after Cheney's return to the United States.

Howard denied the report, saying no deal was entered into and the military commission at Guantanamo Bay decided Hicks's fate. He elaborated saying he made no representations to Cheney in relation to Hicks.

However the U.S. official in charge of the Hicks prosecution in an interview with The Australian newspaper has admitted to claims of political interference in the case.

Speaking to The Australian, former chief prosecutor Colonel Morris Davis said he was subject to continuing high-level political interference in his handling of the Hicks case.

'In my opinion, as things stand right now, I think it's a disgrace to call it a military commission, it's a political commission,' he said.

Harper's quoted an unnamed military official saying 'one of our staffers was present when Vice-President Cheney interfered directly to get Hicks's plea bargain deal'.

'He did it, apparently, as part of a deal cut with Howard,' the official was quoted as saying.

On Tuesday, it was also revealed Australian Federal Police might apply for a control order for Hicks upon his release from Adelaide's Yatala prison at the end of the year, The Australian reported.

Hicks was transferred from Guantanamo Bay in Cuba to Yatala in May to serve a seven-month sentence, which was secured as part of a plea bargain that involved a guilty plea on a single terror offence.

Colonel Davis said the Harper's story 'made as much sense as any other reason I can think of.'

'The deal was significantly more lenient than anything I would have agreed to,' he told The Australian.

Colonel Davis resigned as chief prosecutor in October following a dispute with the legal adviser to the Convening Authority, which runs the U.S. military commissions.

He said on January 9 this year he received a phone call from the General Counsel for the U.S. Department of Defence, Jim Haynes, asking when he could charge Hicks.

Colonel Davis said he told Mr Haynes the charges could be ready two weeks after the Manual for the Military Commissions, which defined the offences, had been produced. He was told that was too long.

Immediately after the phone call, Colonel Davis said he received a second phone call from Mr Haynes's deputy telling him to disregard what he had just been told.

'The deputy said, 'I went in and took a wire brush to (Mr Haynes) and explained he cannot have those kind of conversations with you, so disregard everything he just said',' Colonel Davis said.

However, on January 31, Mr Haynes called again, demanding to know why no charges had been laid. 'He said, 'You told me you'd have charges two weeks after the manual came out. You promised me you'd have charges and I promised other people we'd have charges. Where are the charges?'' Colonel Davis said. He said Mr Haynes wanted others tried with Hicks, presumably to prevent the impression the charges were 'a political solution to the Hicks case.'

He was acting on pressure from higher up, although he told The Australian he did not know from whom.

News of a possible deal has caused a furore in Australia. The country goes to the polls next month, and Howard's Liberal-National Party coalition is faciung defeat. Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd on Wednesday called on the government to come clean over the Hicks affair. "I'm very interested to see what further Mr Howard may have to say on that matter," he told reporters in Melbourne.

"Remember, Mr Howard has said there was no deal. We now have senior American officials saying there was a deal," he added.

Hicks is barred from talking to the media as part of his plea bargain.

Hicks was captured by a 'Northern Alliance warlord' in December 2001, in Afghanistan, and 'sold' to U.S. Special Forces for $1,000.

Original Malaysia Sun article

Subjects: Guantanamo | Military Commissions

The FBI is quietly reconstructing the cases against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and 14 other accused Al Qaeda leaders being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, spurred in part by U.S. concerns that years of CIA interrogation have yielded evidence that is inadmissible or too controversial to present at their upcoming war crimes tribunals, government officials familiar with the probes said.

The process is an embarrassment for the Bush administration, which for years held the men incommunicado overseas and allowed the CIA to use coercive means to extract information from them that would not be admissible in a U.S. court of law -- and might not be allowed in their military commissions, some former officials and legal experts said. Even if the information from the CIA interrogations is allowed, they said, it would probably risk focusing the trials on the actions of the agency and not the accused.

The FBI investigations, involving as many as 300 agents and analysts in a "Guantanamo task force," have been underway for as long as two years. They were requested by the Defense Department shortly after legal rulings indicated that Mohammed -- the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks -- and the other Al Qaeda suspects probably would win some form of trial in which evidence would have to be presented, according to senior federal law enforcement officials.

The task force has reviewed intelligence, interviewed the 15 accused Al Qaeda leaders and traveled to several nations to talk to witnesses and gather evidence for use in the tribunals, the federal law enforcement officials said. Like most others interviewed for this article, they spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the investigations, which are being coordinated with the Pentagon.

A Pakistan-based U.S. official who has participated in the hunt for Al Qaeda leaders since 2001 said he was interviewed by FBI agents four months ago in Washington. They were "very aggressively pursuing KSM and all of the things he's been involved in," he said, referring to the accused terrorist by his initials.

The FBI is especially interested in Mohammed, who during the more than three years he spent in CIA custody boasted that he had killed Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl and orchestrated more than two dozen other terrorist plots. Several senior counter-terrorism officials said they believed that Mohammed falsely confessed to some things, including the Pearl slaying, under duress or to obscure the roles played by operatives who might still be on the loose.

Mohammed's prosecution is expected to be the centerpiece of the military commissions, which could occur as early as next year. However, some U.S. officials familiar with them said the tribunals could be delayed for years by legal challenges.

The FBI's efforts appear in part to be a hedge in case the commissions are ruled unconstitutional or never occur, or the U.S. military detention center at Guantanamo Bay is closed. Under those scenarios, authorities would have to free the detainees, transfer them to military custody elsewhere, send them to another country or have enough evidence gathered by law enforcement officials to charge them with terrorism in U.S. federal courts, some current and former counter-terrorism officials and legal experts said.

"I think there's no surprise that they have to call in the FBI to clean up the mess left by the CIA secret detention program," said Jumana Musa, advocacy director for Amnesty International. "They would be smart to use evidence that did not come out of years of secret detentions, interrogations and torture."

Special Agent Richard Kolko, an FBI spokesman, said the investigations were a natural outgrowth of a long-standing interagency effort. "The FBI will support the prosecution of KSM and other high-value detainees by making its investigative and evidentiary expertise available to the prosecution team," he said. He referred all other questions to the Defense Department.

Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey D. Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman, said the Defense Department was working closely with its interagency counterparts in "building a case against KSM and scores of other men at Guantanamo alleged to have committed law of war violations -- including the attacks of 9/11, USS Cole bombing [in 2000] and East Africa embassy bombings [in 1998]."

Neither those two men nor CIA spokesman George E. Little would comment on whether the FBI investigations were being conducted to bolster shortcomings in the cases against Mohammed and the others that are, at least in part, the result of CIA interrogations.

FBI officials interviewed for this article emphasized that the bureau's probes should not be viewed as a repudiation of the CIA's efforts, noting that the spy agency's primary responsibility has been to gather intelligence to prevent further attacks, not collect evidence for trial.

But some former and current U.S. officials said concerns about the potential inadmissibility of the CIA interrogations, and the controversy surrounding them, were the primary reasons the FBI agents were sent to gather more evidence, in some cases reinterviewing suspects and witnesses.

The FBI and CIA have appeared to be headed for a collision on the issue of detainee interrogations since shortly after the September 2001 attacks.

From the outset, the FBI has played a central role in the hunt for Al Qaeda leaders, helping the CIA, the military and foreign governments track them and process evidence against them. FBI agents initially helped interview some of the suspects, with an eye toward gathering evidence for a criminal trial.

After Mohammed's March 2003 capture in Pakistan, some FBI agents and federal prosecutors made clear they wanted him tried before a jury. The Al Qaeda leader had been indicted by a federal grand jury in New York in 1996 for his role in an alleged Philippines-based plot to blow up U.S. airliners in mid-flight over the Pacific Ocean.

But the CIA moved aggressively to take over the interrogations of Mohammed and other senior Al Qaeda detainees, beginning with suspected training camp coordinator Abu Zubeida, who was captured in Pakistan in 2002. Some current and former FBI officials said the spy agency began using coercive techniques such as waterboarding, or simulated drowning, in an effort to get the detainees to talk immediately about the terrorist network's plans.

CIA officials told The Times that the FBI wasn't getting crucial information about pending attacks out of Zubeida that they knew he possessed, and that their "enhanced" techniques ultimately worked better and faster. Current and former FBI officials said those CIA techniques resulted in false confessions that were obtained illegally.

By mid-2002, several former agents and senior bureau officials said, they had begun complaining that the CIA-run interrogation program amounted to torture and was going to create significant problems down the road -- particularly if the Bush administration was ever forced to allow the Al Qaeda suspects to face their accusers in court.

Some went to FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, according to the former bureau officials. They said Mueller pulled many of the agents back from playing even a supporting role in the interrogations to avoid exposing them to legal jeopardy, in the belief that White House and Justice Department opinions authorizing the coercive techniques might be overturned.

"Those guys were using techniques that we didn't even want to be in the room for," one senior federal law enforcement official said. "The CIA determined they were going to torture people, and we made the decision not to be involved."

A senior FBI official who since has retired said he also complained about the lack of usable evidence and admissible statements being gathered. "We knew there were going to be problems back then. But nobody was listening," he said. "Now they have to live with the policy that they have adopted. I don't know if anyone thought of the consequences."

Another retired FBI agent who helped lead the bureau's Al Qaeda investigations said one fundamental flaw in the tribunal process was that the accused terrorists might be granted the right to confront their accusers in court -- even a military one. And the CIA is likely to prohibit its officers from taking the stand to face cross-examination about their interrogation techniques and other highly classified aspects of the spy agency's detainee program.

"They have put themselves in a very bad situation here," the former agent said. "They have to redo everything because they have to come up with clean statements from these [detainees], if they can get them, obtained by law enforcement people who can actually testify. The CIA agents are not going to testify, nor should they."

Pentagon spokesman Gordon and CIA spokesman Little said no decision had been made on how much information gathered by the CIA, including the interrogations, would be allowed into evidence at the commissions. They also said it was too early to tell whether the CIA agents would testify, although the courtrooms for the military commissions, Gordon said, would be designed with partitions to protect the witnesses' identities and with mute buttons to allow for classified testimony.

"When it comes to the high-value detainees," Little said, "it was, most of all, the efforts of the CIA -- following a lawful, effective and safe process -- that led these terrorists to share concrete, actionable intelligence that our government used to identify other terrorist figures and disrupt their activities."

Some former FBI officials and legal analysts said that even if evidence gathered through the CIA interrogations were admissible, it had lost significant credibility because of the allegations of coercion and torture.

CIA officials have said that they never tortured the detainees and that they operated within the law.

Ultimately, some of the terrorism suspects confessed. But the coercive techniques made even some CIA officials skeptical of whether their confessions were believable, much less sustainable in any court, one former CIA counter-terrorism covert officer said.

The decision to minimize the FBI's role in interrogating the suspects "was regarded by many as really being in error, in part because [CIA officers] don't have the expertise as to what is evidentiary and what isn't," the official said. "And now there are all of these consequences."

Musa of Amnesty International said: "People like KSM should be held accountable. And the real tragedy would be that the focus of the commissions won't be on scrutinizing the conduct of Mohammed and the others, but on the conduct of the CIA."

Federal law enforcement officials believe they have gathered enough admissible evidence to try the high-value detainees. "We've redone everything, and everything is fine," one official said. "So what's the harm?"

LA Times article

Subjects: Guantanamo | Military Commissions | Tortured Evidence

Politically motivated officials at the Pentagon have pushed for convictions of high-profile detainees ahead of the 2008 elections, the former lead prosecutor for terrorism trials at Guantanamo Bay said last night, adding that the pressure played a part in his decision to resign earlier this month.

Senior defense officials discussed in a September 2006 meeting the "strategic political value" of putting some prominent detainees on trial, said Air Force Col. Morris Davis. He said that he felt pressure to pursue cases that were deemed "sexy" over those that prosecutors believed were the most solid or were ready to go.

Davis said his resignation was also prompted by newly appointed senior officials seeking to use classified evidence in what would be closed sessions of court, and by almost all elements of the military commissions process being put under the Defense Department general counsel's command, something he believes could present serious conflicts of interest.

"There was a big concern that the election of 2008 is coming up," Davis said. "People wanted to get the cases going. There was a rush to get high-interest cases into court at the expense of openness."

Davis said he thought the military commissions could go forward as a legitimate way to try alleged terrorists in U.S. custody, but he said he had serious concerns about how the new officials were approaching the commissions. He said he felt a sense of expediency over thoroughness was taking hold and that efforts to use classified evidence -- a controversial idea that has drawn congressional concern -- could taint the trials in the eyes of international observers.

Davis abruptly resigned after complaining that his authority in prosecutions was being usurped. He argued that Air Force Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann, a new legal adviser to the convening authority for military commissions, should remain a neutral and independent party and should leave prosecuting cases to prosecutors.

In his complaint, Davis alleged that Hartmann inappropriately requested detailed information on pending cases, defined the sequence in which cases would be brought forward and expressed an intent to personally conduct pretrial negotiations with defendants' attorneys.

A Pentagon review found that Hartmann did not attempt to coerce Davis's team but advised that he should "diligently avoid aligning himself with the prosecutorial function so that he can objectively and independently provide cogent legal advice" to the convening authority -- the official in charge of supervising the commissions.

J.D. Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday that Hartmann was not available for comment. Gordon said the military commissions will provide detainees with fair trials.

"We are working closely with our interagency counterparts to ensure that prosecutions by military commission result in fair and open trials while at the same time protecting sensitive information that, if revealed, could be damaging to U.S. and allied forces still conducting combat operations against al-Qaeda and their supporters," Gordon said.

Hartmann arrived as legal adviser to the convening authority last summer, and suddenly, Davis said during a lengthy interview, his office was inundated with what he called "nano-management," including requests to oversee cases that had previously been left solely to prosecutors.

Part of the new focus, Davis said, was to speed up cases that would show the public the system was working. Davis said he wanted to focus on cases that had declassified evidence, so the public could see the entire trial through news coverage. That would defuse possible allegations that the trials were stacked against defendants.

But Hartmann said he was satisfied with putting on cases that included closed sessions, because the law allows it.

"He said, the way we were going to validate the system was by getting convictions and good sentences," Davis said. "I felt I was being pressured to do something less than full, fair and open."

Washington Post article

Subjects: Guantanamo | Military Commissions