U.S. seeks silence on CIA prisons: report

The U.S. government has been seeking to keep the secret prisons operated by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the dark by telling a federal judge that terrorism suspects held in the jails should not be allowed to reveal the interrogation methods used on them, The Washington Post reported Saturday.

The government said in new court filings that those interrogation methods, which were used to get the suspect to talk, were now among the nation's most sensitive national security secrets and that their release -- even to the detainees' own attorneys - "could reasonably be expected to cause extremely grave damage," the report said.

Terrorists could use the information to train in counter- interrogation techniques and foil government efforts to elicit information about their methods and plots, according to government documents submitted to U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton on Oct. 26.

The battle over legal rights for terrorism suspects detained for years in CIA prisons centered on Majid Khan, 26, who was one of 14 high-value detainees transferred in September from the "black" sites to the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. A lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represented many detainees at Guantanamo, was seeking emergency access to Khan, who had been held for more than three years in a secret CIA prison.

The government, in trying to block lawyers' access to the 14 detainees, effectively asserted that the detainees' experiences were a secret that should never be shared with the public, the Post report said.

Because Khan "was detained by CIA in this program, he may have come into possession of information, including locations of detention, conditions of detention, and alternative interrogation techniques that is classified at the TOP SECRET//SCI level," the report said, citing an affidavit from CIA Information Review Officer Marilyn A. Dorn, using the acronym for "sensitive compartmented information."

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit was considering whether Guantanamo detainees had the right to challenge their imprisonment in U.S. courts. The government urged Walton to defer any decision on access to lawyers until the higher court rules.

U.S. officials say Khan, a Pakistani national who lived in the United States for seven years, took orders from Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the man accused of orchestrating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Mohammed allegedly asked Khan to research poisoning U.S. reservoirs and considered him for an operation to assassinate the Pakistani president.

Khan's family did not learn of his whereabouts until Bush announced his transfer in September, more than three years after he was seized in Pakistan, the report said.

Source: Xinhua