Records Missing on "High-value" CIA Defendants at Guantanamo Military Commissions Trials
The CIA transferred "high-value detainees" from its secret torture prisons to Guantanamo in Sept. 2006. Now computer records from that period are missing, latest in long-string of Gitmo "lost" records
For some time now I have been trying to stir up interest in the fact that a computer program meant to track all Guantanamo detainee movements and activities was manipulated repeatedly, or some of its records or logs outright destroyed, in order to hide U.S. crimes. New evidence has surfaced showing that similar computer records, which could be crucial in the trial of the 9/11 defendants at the Department of Defense's Military Commissions, have disappeared.
The Military Commissions are held at the Orwellian-named “Camp Justice,” at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo.
The computer records in question exist within Guantanamo’s Detainee Information Management System, also known as DIMS. DIMS is a facility-wide computer system used to track day-to-day information about detainees, via electronic entries regarding each detainee logged at the beginning of each guard shift, and at a minimum hourly thereafter.
This primary tracking system has had some notable and suspicious breakdowns. (I still seem to be the only person reporting on this!) I wrote about this back in October 2017:
An examination of documents related to a number of presumed suicides at Guantanamo over a six-year period reveals repeated tampering with the computer system that is supposed to monitor detainees at the Cuba-based U.S. military prison….
Between 2006 and 2012, in almost every instance when a detainee was found dead at Guantanamo, computer logs that would have documented guard, medical official or detainee activities or locations either went missing, presented evidence that contradicted witness statements, or standard operating procedures (SOP) pertaining to their use were not followed….
The documentation of repeated problems with Guantanamo’s computer system was drawn from various Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests involving inquiries into the deaths of six different detainees, including documents from both the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) and official Army investigations.
These various requests were made at different times by the ACLU, reporter Jason Leopold, and myself.
As an example of how DIMS computer logs went missing, consider the FOIA document reproduced above. The document memorializes how after I made a FOIA request to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service on its investigation into the death of Mohammed Al Hanashi at Gitmo’s Behavioral Health Unit (BHU) in June 2009, all the DIMS records for the BHU went suddenly missing for the entire day he died, and the day afterwards as well.
If you go back and read my old article on this, you’ll see there were other instances of such shenanigans surrounding the deaths of most of the other detainees who died of supposed suicide at Guantanamo.
Another instance of missing DIMS records also has appeared in testimony at the 9/11 Military Commissions (MC) trials at Guantanamo. I should note that when I say “has appeared,” I mean I was only recently made aware of it as I perused old testimony from the MC proceedings. (Yeah, I’m a kind of geek that way, reading old documents, often many times over, so I don't miss anything.) Except for occasional articles by Carol Rosenberg at The New York Times, the MC hearings almost never get covered by mainstream or even alternative news sites.
The MC testimony that caught my eye took place on May 19, 2017, around the same time I was gathering data on the missing DIMS records at Guantanamo. However, I was unaware of this testimony at that time.
Despite the current seeming widespread citizenry indifference to the crimes of the U.S. at Guantanamo and the exposure of the CIA rendition to torture program, I think it’s important to document these crimes, and to point out matters for further investigation.
Shuttering the CIA Black Site Program
In September 2006, the George W. Bush administration famously announced an end to the CIA black site program, and the transfer of its remaining “high-value” prisoners to Guantanamo’s Camp VII. The program wasn’t totally shuttered, as it added two more prisoners post-2006. As the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported as far back as 2015:
After September 6, 2006 the programme was dormant. It revived sporadically for the detention of the last two CIA prisoners: Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi (held November 2006 to April 2007) and Muhammad Rahim (July 2007 to March 2008).
Still, the CIA’s so-called “high-value detainees” were transferred to Guantanamo in September 2006. The exact terms of that transfer, and who really was in control of the transferred torture victims, and for how long, including former alleged top members of Al Qaida and 9/11 plotters, is still not exactly known, though it was established that CIA had operational control over Camp VII and the prisoners there for some time. We know this thanks to MC defense attorneys who have fought to get information via discovery in order to provide the best defense for their clients.
The battle to find out exactly what went on still continues in Federal Court. Last April, “the U.S. Court of Apeals for the D.C. Circuit heard arguments in ‘Connell v. Central Intelligence Agency, a lawsuit challenging the CIA’s refusal to confirm or deny whether it has records related to its ‘operational control’ of Camp VII at Guantánamo Bay — despite evidence that these records exist. The American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of D.C. represent James G. Connell III, an attorney for one of the men subjected to the CIA torture program and sent to Camp VII.”
We will hear more from Mr. Connell later in this article. (Personal disclosure: James Connell represented me in a FOIA lawsuit in DC Federal Court a few years ago.)
Getting back to the meat of this article, Guantanamo’s military prosecutors claim that the 9/11 defendants were debriefed and made confessions to FBI “clean team” interrogators after being transferred to Guantanamo. The defense attorneys maintain these confessions were tainted by their previous severe torture at the hands of the CIA. It is their contention that the FBI “confessions” should be tossed out of court. The reasons given included the fact that the FBI worked with the CIA, and that from a psychological point of view, the traumatized prisoners could not legitimately distinguish between government interrogators, fearing a repeat of torture while held incommunicado by government agents, whether they were CIA, FBI or DoD.
Just recently, in a May 2024 Military Commissions hearing, a former CIA psychiatrist, Charles Morgan III, testified that the “conditioned fear memories” instilled in [former CIA prisoner and torture victim, Amman] al Baluchi by the CIA [torture] would have been triggered by the subsequent FBI sessions, which took place in a location that resembled former CIA black sites.”
Indeed, some of the confessions of U.S. prisoners accused of war crimes have already been thrown out due to the fact they constituted evidence produced under torture.
Hence, many of the MC hearings concern legal arguments surrounding the admissibility of evidence, and whether or not the prosecution is producing via discovery the materials defense attorneys should be receiving. The May 19, 2017 hearing was not extraordinary in any way, but was a continuation of these deliberations.
“…records either exist or at some point did exist”
In the portion of the MC testimony I want to concentrate upon here, the discussion we will reading about below concerns whether or not defense attorneys had received all the DIMS records from the first weeks the CIA prisoners were transferred to Guantanamo. In this particular hearing, the prosecution wrongly stated that no one had signed any memorandum of understanding regarding the DIMS records. Defense attorney James Connell corrected the record, as defense attorneys had indeed signed such a memorandum. And that’s about where we are in the hearings when the selection I’ve extracted below takes place.
It’s worth mentioning first how the DIMS records were described earlier in the hearing. The government attorney stated there were “about 4,000 pages” of such records on each of the former CIA detainees held at Guantanamo.
“These DIMS records cover everything. They cover what time they got breakfast, all the way through the day, when they go to rec, when they go watch television, and their daily activities, when they go off to their various meetings or to the hospital,” the Pentagon’s trial counsel stated (MC transcript, PDF pg. 18).
For the sake of clarity, readers should note, in the MC transcript, “MJ” means Military Judge. “TC” means Trial Counsel, the prosecutor in a military hearing. “MoU” refers to a Memorandum of Understanding. In this case, the MoU referred to a supposed agreement between the parties regarding the supply of documents from Guantanamo, especially DIMS records, to the defense. These records contained redactions, and all the unsent records and redactions were, of course, matters for litigation.
The part I want to highlight concerns the disappearance of approximately a week of DIMS records in September 2006, the very month the CIA black site prisoners were transferred to Guantanamo.
During the discussion over the disputed DIMS records, Defense Counsel Connell described the situation from the defense’s standpoint:
“The government has produced a great deal of DIMS records, we appreciate their diligence on it. It is clear and at previous hearings it has been agreed that the government has not produced — has not yet found, I suppose, a number of records which were produced only just to us in redacted form from September 2006. So there are DIMS records themselves that remain to be turned over.
“The second issue is, in the redacted executive summary of the SSCI report, the SSCI wrote that after the transfer of Mr. al Baluchi and others to Guantanamo Bay, that the men were kept in a special facility and remained under CIA operational control for some period of time. The CIA itself has released an unclassified, redacted version of a memorandum of understanding with the Department of Defense regarding the detainees at Guantanamo Bay. So it seems clear that CIA records either exist or at some point did exist and have not been turned over to the defense.” [italics added for emphasis, PDF, pg. 22]
Connell appeared to be hinting at the idea that there are records that have possibly gone missing. In the key portion of the transcript, the Military Commissions’ prosecuting trial counsel, Lt. Col. Robert Swann, revealed that, indeed, certain DIMS records have gone missing!
MJ [COL POHL]: …Mr. Swann, last word if you have one.
TC [MR. SWANN]: I apologize to [defense attorney] Mr. Connell, he did sign the MoU before the remainder of the teams.
With respect to — he talked about September of 2006.
I thought we had told counsel this. There are about seven to eight days during that month that they have redacted DIMS. We have gone back to the camp, there are no other versions of those redacted DIMS in existence. I understand that there might have been a crash on a system or something so they can't find those. But they have gotten everything else.
If there was anything like what they are asking from the camp, I would be more than happy to provide it to them. I am not playing games. I am not playing a shell game. [italics added for emphasis — JK]
While I’ve long assumed that it was the Department of Defense that destroyed or manipulated the DIMS records around the Guantanamo suicides, particularly from 2006-2009, perhaps it was “another government agency.” As a high-up source in a leading human rights agency told me long ago (unnamed here because I did not get permission to quote him), the CIA was running all over the place at Guantanamo. Indeed, it was difficult to know who was and who wasn’t CIA.
But my main point is that there is an indisputable record of document destruction and manipulation at Guantanamo, and this should long ago have been a matter of authoritative investigation, by both the press and appropriate government agencies. But nothing of the sort has taken place.
What we have here is a failure of political will and ethics, the result of a political system that above all strives to protect its military and intelligence agencies and alliances. In other words, and bringing here the Guantanamo case into the awful rush of current atrocities, the reason the U.S. government protects Israel’s genocide is the same reason it protects its own CIA and DoD torturers — to cover up crimes.
Readers who are interested in the history of the missing records, and other outrageous evidence otherwise unreported on the suspicious deaths in custody of a number of Guantanamo prisoners, should check out my Amazon book, Cover-up at Guantanamo: The NCIS Investigation into the “Suicides” of Mohammed Al Hanashi and Abdul Rahman Al Amri.
This is good and important work that you do. Thank you .