Jane Mayer: The CIA and DOD Lied to the Red Cross

On Saturday, Alternet's Liliana Segura interviewed The New Yorker's Jane Mayer about the revelations of the ICRC report (PDF). Segura asked if the report contained any surprises for Mayer. It did:

One of the things that caught my eye last night was that it’s clear that the CIA — and I think you'd have to guess the Department of Defense — lied to the Red Cross. They told the Red Cross when it visited Guantánamo [in 2002] that it had seen all of the detainees. But what the report says is that some of the detainees — some of the high-value detainees — realized when they were finally sent to Guantánamo in 2006 that they’d been there before. They were there. And yet the Red Cross was not allowed to see them. The Red Cross was told they’d seen everybody.

So the CIA and DOD lied to the Red Cross. There were some hidden prisoners in Guantánamo. That's an overt act; lying to the Red Cross, hiding prisoners from them. So, that’s interesting to me.

These so-called “high-value” detainees, all former CIA prisoners, five of whom have been charged with crimes relating to 9/11, include Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Abd Al-Rahim Hussain Mohammed Al-Nashiri. Attorneys from the ACLU's John Adams Project worked with under-resourced military lawyers to provide legal counsel for several of the Guantánamo detainees including al-Nashiri during the military commissions process.