Mr. Ghailani's legal team's motivation may very well have been to keep the CIA prisons open for mitigation purposes. The lawyers who were selected to represent him are clueless and were selected for that reason. However, the motion was not the team's idea. It was the idea of the military counsel assigned by the CIA to assist in Mr. Ghailani's defense. Much of the team's motion was cut, word-for-word, from a draft motion Mr. Ghailani's military counsel (CIA Agent Jeffrey Colwell) tried to get me to file prior to my removal. After I recovered from my initial shock at his request, I refused. After my refusal to file the CIA prisons' motion, Colonel Colwell secured my removal with, among other things, an off-the-record letter he wrote to Judge Duffy, who oversaw Mr. Ghailani's case before it was reassigned to Judge Kaplan. Once I was removed as Mr. Ghailani's counsel, compliant CJA counsel were assigned to Mr. Ghailani. Those counsel did Colonel Colwell's bidding for him. The rest is history.
Mr. Ghailani did not need the prisons open to gather evidence of his mistreatment. The CIA has voluminous files on his mistreatment, and probably has videotape to corroborate its written evidence. Any evidence of the actual facilities themselves could be gathered without the necessity of keeping them open through diagrams, architectural records, photographs, etc. In short, the articulated need to keep the prisons open to gather mitigation evidence was merely a ruse. President Obama created a problem when he ordered the prisons closed. The CIA had no intention of following that order, so it manufactured a "defendant-friendly" reason for keeping them open. Mr. Ghailani's case was a convenient vehicle for doing so. It worked, like a charm. The government acquiesced to appointed counsel's CIA prisons' motion without forcing a court ruling because there was always the chance, however remote, that Judge Kaplan would deny the motion and allow the government to proceed with obeying President Obama's order. Had Judge Kaplan denied appointed counsel's motion, the CIA would have been left with having to overtly disobey President Obama's closure order.
TP: You said: "The lawyers who were selected to represent him are clueless and were selected for that reason." Earlier you stated that "the military will not allow any civilian defense attorney with experience with either the CIA or the military to serve on one of these defense teams, unless he or she is buried below layers of protective measures". Even I have referred to them as stooges during these interviews.
To what extent are these government appointed legal defenders a part of this plot, and how much is a result of their incompetence?
Let's be clear. You are saying that the CIA manipulated Mr. Ghailani's counsel into filing a motion that will keep the CIA's covert prisons operating. The reason stated in the motion is that the prisons must be operating in order to gather "mitigation evidence", which is to say evidence of mistreatment and torture.
Could you give us more details about this mitigation evidence? And is the CIA actually producing this evidence? That is to say are they providing the proof of the mistreatment of Mr. Ghailani, and presumably the other detainees?
What do you think the CIA would have done if the motion had not passed? What other legal machinations were available to the CIA to keep the prisons operating had this motion failed?
Finally, there are internet rumors concerning tension between the Obama administration and the CIA. How much control does the elected government have over the CIA and the other covert elements of this security apparatus? What would the Obama administration have done, or been able to do, if this legal maneuvering had failed, and the CIA still refused to close these prisons?
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