GUANTANAMO/LEGAL: “Two lawyers who have represented a high-profile Guantánamo Bay detainee are contesting the government’s portrayal of the events surrounding their team’s discovery of a hidden microphone in the room where they regularly met with their client — an event that has led to a meltdown of the military tribunal case.
In a newly declassified account formally disclosed on Monday [3-12-18], the government acknowledged that the defense team for the detainee — Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi facing death penalty charges over Al Qaeda’s bombing of the American destroyer Cole in 2000 — found a microphone in the room in August.
But the government statement also played down the discovery, saying that the microphone was only a ‘legacy’ device left over from when that room had been used for interrogations, and was ‘not in use and not connected to any audio listening/recording device’ when the lawyers met with their client there.
The two defense lawyers, however, said that account was missing several key details. There was no sign, they said, that the microphone was no longer connected to a listening or recording device somewhere else in the facility. And, they said, the government had never previously put forward that explanation in the five-month fight.”
-Charlie Savage, “Guantánamo Lawyers Challenge Government’s Explanation for Hidden Microphone,” The New York Times online, Mar. 12, 2018