CIA tapings continued after 2002, lawsuit says

WASHINGTON: Lawyers for Majid Khan, a detainee at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, have challenged the Central Intelligence Agency's assertion that videotaping of interrogations stopped in 2002, saying that Khan's interrogations after that time were recorded on videotape.

In papers filed Jan. 4, Khan's lawyers challenged a statement Dec. 6 by the CIA director, Gen. Michael Hayden. Addressing agency employees after being told that an article about the tapes was about to be published, he wrote that the taping stopped in 2002.

Intelligence officials have said the tapes showed the questioning of just two detainees suspected of being operatives for Al Qaeda, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. The tapes were destroyed in 2005, and Congress and the Justice Department are investigating their destruction.

The filing by Khan's lawyers was released Thursday, with heavy redactions by the government. A spokesman for the Justice Department, Erik Ablin, declined to comment because the case was in litigation. A CIA spokesman, Paul Gimigliano, said the agency stood by Hayden's statement from Dec. 6.

Khan, a Pakistani who moved to the United States with his family and attended high school outside Baltimore, was captured in 2003 and held at a secret CIA interrogation site overseas. He was one of 14 men suspected of being high-level members of Al Qaeda who were moved to Guantánamo in September 2006.

In a statement that year, the government said Khan was directed by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the chief organizer of the Sept. 11 plot, to conduct research on poisoning reservoirs and blowing up gas stations in the United States. The statement also said Khan had delivered money for terrorist attacks to another operative from Al Qaeda and discussed a plan to smuggle explosives into the United States.

In a petition in August to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Khan's lawyers challenged a finding by a military panel at Guantánamo that he was being properly held as an "enemy combatant." They have also said he was tortured, though details of the claims have been redacted by the government from the court papers. The CIA has denied torturing anyone.

Attached to Khan's new filing are handwritten letters he sent to the appeals court on Dec. 17 and Dec. 21, also with deletions by the government. The letters, in serviceable English, offer a rare direct statement from a so-called high-level detainee.

"Why would I ever want to harm U.S.A., who has never done anything but good to me and my family?" he asks in one letter.

In their motion, Khan's lawyers say that Bush administration officials who authorized "state-sanctioned torture" of Khan and others "have done far greater harm to our nation than any of the unproven allegations against Majid Khan."