Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, who is being tried in New York for his alleged role in the 1998 bombings of American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, spent two years in CIA secret prisons after his capture in 2004. As a result, his lawyers are now seeking information about his imprisonment:
His lawyers also said they would ask the judge, Lewis A. Kaplan of Federal District Court, to order the government to preserve any sites where their client was held. They noted that the C.I.A. has said that it no longer operates detention facilities or black sites, and is planning to decommission them.
[...]
Another reason for their request, they wrote, involves the death penalty. If the government decides to seek it against Mr. Ghailani, the lawyers said, they want to be able to present “a detailed and accurate representation of the physical sites” where he was held and subjected to harsh treatment as mitigating evidence on his behalf.
It's possible that the decision to try terrorist suspects in federal court may have a similar effect to the proposed truth commission, in that information about the Bush administration's practices will come to light as a result of the legal rights of defense counsel to have access to exculpatory evidence. Surely the Obama administration was aware of whatever mistreatment Ghailani may have suffered while in CIA custody and decided to proceed to trial anyway -- likely due to the fact that the FBI was involved in investigating the bombings, which means the case against Ghailani doesn't rely on secret or protected information.
I'm not sure that this was the adminstration's intention, but it may be the ultimate outcome.
-- A. Serwer
