Gitmo Surveillance Tapes Overwritten; Lawyers Fear Evidence Lost
The commander of the military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay said in a court filing on Friday that he recently learned surveillance tapes of detainees were automatically overwritten.
The admission by Rear Adm. Mark Buzby has defense lawyers worried that important evidence on the legality of detainee treatment could be lost, the Washington Post reports. They say the failure to preserve the recordings could violate a 2005 court order to preserve evidence.
Buzby said he learned in January 2008 that recording systems “may have been automatically overwriting video data contained on recording devices, at predetermined intervals.” He said the tapes were of mostly mundane operations.
The revelation came just days before a report expected to be released today that says more than 20,000 detainee interrogations were recorded at Guantanamo Bay, the Post story says. The report by Seton Hall University says the taping of interrogations was disclosed in a report by the Army Surgeon General.
A lawyer for some of the detainees, David Remes of Washington, D.C., told the Post that the failure to preserve the tapes is distressing. “We’ll simply never know whether these videotapes recorded torture or other abuse of our clients, because the tapes no longer exist,” he said.
