Judge questions Dirty Bomb Plot Orders US to yield papers.

This is from the NY Times. There is ample evidence against the CIA claims it does not conduct or condone torture or render anyone for torture. In fact this is just standard denial in the face of plenty of contrary evidence in cases such as Maher Arar , Almalki, Nurredin, El-Maati etc. etc. etc. etc. Of course it is true that they do not condone the torture in public and make sure that when they render someone for torture they get assurances that there will be no torture. But the CIA does know that countries such as Morocco and Syria and Egypt use torture in interrogation.
This is what is called willful ignorance.

October 31, 2008
Questioning ‘Dirty Bomb’ Plot, Judge Orders U.S. to Yield Papers on Detainee
By WILLIAM GLABERSON
WASHINGTON — Saying he questioned the government’s claim that a Guantánamo Bay detainee had planned a radioactive-bomb attack in the United States, a federal district judge ordered the Justice Department on Thursday to give the detainee’s lawyers documents on his treatment.
The documents are central to the claim of the prisoner, Binyam Mohamed, that he falsely confessed to the dirty-bomb plot and other offenses only after being tortured in Morocco at the direction of the United States.
“My concern is getting to the truth,” the judge, Emmet G. Sullivan, said at a hearing.
The case of Mr. Mohamed, an Ethiopian-born former British resident, has drawn international attention and been at the center of diplomatic tensions between the United States and Britain. This week, British officials said they had referred questions about his treatment for possible criminal investigation by their law enforcement authorities.
The tension between the governments has intensified in recent weeks after the Pentagon dropped war crimes charges against Mr. Mohamed and the Justice Department said it would no longer rely on its dirty-bomb claims as a justification for holding him.
At the Thursday hearing, Judge Sullivan asked why, after more than six years, the government had stepped away from its claims about a dirty-bomb plot. “That raises a question as to whether or not the allegations were ever true,” the judge said.
In 2002, John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, announced that a plot to detonate a radioactive bomb in the United States had been foiled and an American citizen, Jose Padilla, detained. The Pentagon has claimed that Mr. Mohamed assisted Mr. Padilla.
After Mr. Padilla was held for three and a half years in a naval brig, the Justice Department abandoned its dirty-bomb claims against him. He was convicted of other charges in 2007.
Pressed by Judge Sullivan on Thursday as to whether the government stood behind its assertion of a dirty-bomb plot, a Justice Department lawyer, Andrew I. Warden, said, “The short answer is yes.”
But Mr. Warden said the government could prove that Mr. Mohamed was being properly held without evidence of that plot. Military prosecutors have said they will file new charges against Mr. Mohamed with the Guantánamo war crimes tribunal, but they have not said whether the bomb plot will be among those charges.
The government claims Mr. Mohamed confessed to the plot and to attending Qaeda training camps.
But Zachary Katznelson, a lawyer for Mr. Mohamed, said in court Thursday that all his confessions were made after “he was tortured again and again and again until he just parroted what his torturers wanted him to say.” In Morocco, Mr. Katznelson said, Mr. Mohamed was beaten and repeatedly cut with razor blades on his genitals and elsewhere.
Mr. Mohamed’s lawyers have laid out a detailed argument that he was subjected to the government’s program of rendition to other countries. They say evidence shows that American intelligence agents transferred him to Morocco.
The documents Judge Sullivan directed the government to turn over concern Mr. Mohamed’s treatment during the two years he was held in Pakistan, Morocco and Afghanistan after he was first detained at the airport in Karachi, Pakistan, in 2002. Mr. Katznelson said evidence of torture would prove that Mr. Mohamed had never voluntarily admitted to the dirty-bomb plot or any other involvement with Al Qaeda.
The government has said Mr. Mohamed’s claims of torture are not credible. A Moroccan consular official, Karim el-Mansouri, said in an interview that he had no details on Mr. Mohamed’s case but that Morocco protected human rights. Paul Gimigliano, a spokesman for the Central Intelligence Agency, said: “The C.I.A. does not conduct or condone torture. Nor does it transport individuals anywhere for the purpose of torture.”
Last week, a British court ruled that 35 documents in British intelligence files concerning Mr. Mohamed’s treatment should be turned over to his lawyers. The court said the documentation “lends some support to his claim that the confession was obtained after a period of two years incommunicado detention during which he was tortured.”
The material Judge Sullivan has now ordered the government to turn over would be any additional information about Mr. Mohamed’s treatment.
The British court had said it would wait to order the actual release of the 35 documents, to give Judge Sullivan an opportunity to rule on the issue first. By the time they arrived in court Thursday, however, Justice Department lawyers had turned over those documents. That followed a letter Tuesday from a British government lawyer to the British court’s judges that said the home secretary had referred to law enforcement officials in Britain “the question of possible criminal wrongdoing” in the treatment of Mr. Mohamed.