In a significant development, the government has decided not to oppose a motion from Mohamed Jawad's defense attorneys to suppress evidence -- namely, a confession the defense says was obtained through torture. Jawad, a minor, was accused of throwing a grenade at an American convoy in 2002. He has been in American custody since shortly afterward.
When I spoke to Major Eric Montalvo, Jawad's counsel in his military commissions trial, he said that the confession written by Afghan authorities had been written in a language Jawad didn't understand -- and that Jawad was illiterate in any case. Montalvo said that Jawad's thumbprint had been placed on a blank second page -- not even at the bottom of the document.
After Jawad had been handed over to American authorities, and been informed of the charges against him in his own language, Montalvo said that "he was responsive and he was denying everything ... If you are in the classified version of the thing, it's very doubtful -- the reliability of anything said that's incriminating. Our position is that he's never really incriminated himself at any point and that a lot of these summaries are inaccurate." The judge in Jawad's military commissions case had suppressed the confessions on the grounds they were obtained through torture, so the fact that the Obama administration had been detaining him on the basis of that evidence was startling.
As to why Jawad was still being held despite the unreliability of the evidence against him, Montalvo said that "notwithstanding the child issue, which I think is problematic in itself, there's blood on somebody's hands. You have actual victims in this particular case. You have an incident. And if the government believes what they have, they have a guilty guy who tried to hurt Americans. And that proposition is understandable."
In reaction to the government's decision, Major David Frakt, a member of Jawad's defense team in his civilian trial, said in a statement that "I am hopeful that today's announcement reflects a broader commitment to return to the rule of law and cease reliance on the fruits of torture and abuse as a justification for indefinite detention." The ACLU now maintains that there is no credible reason to continue holding him.
-- A. Serwer
