US:The Pentagon urged interrogators at Guantánamo Bay to destroy handwritten notes in case they were called to testify about potentially harsh treatment of detainees, a military defence lawyer has said.
The lawyer for Toronto-born Omar Khadr, Lieut Com William Kuebler, said the instructions were included in an operations manual shown to him by prosecutors and suggest the US deliberately thwarted evidence that could help suspects' defence cases.
Lieut Com Kuebler said the apparent destruction of evidence prevented him from challenging the reliability of any alleged confessions.
He said he would use the document to seek a dismissal of charges against Mr Khadr.
A Pentagon spokesman, navy commander Jeffrey Gordon, said he was reviewing the matter.
The "standard operating procedures" manual that contained the purported instruction was made available to Lieut Cdr Kuebler last week as part of a pretrial review of potential evidence, the navy lawyer said.
"The mission has legal and political issues that may lead to interrogators being called to testify, keeping the number of documents with interrogation information to a minimum can minimise certain legal issues," the document is quoted as saying in an affidavit signed by Lieut Cdr Kuebler.
The document could support challenges by other detainees to suppress confessions at Guantánamo, where the US military says it plans to prosecute as many as 80 of roughly 270 detainees before the first US war-crimes tribunals since the second world War.
The case against Mr Khadr, who was captured in Afghanistan when he was 15, is on track to be one of the first to trial.
He faces war-crimes charges including murder for allegedly throwing a grenade that killed a US soldier in 2002.
Lieut Cdr Kuebler said the nature of the interrogations was particularly relevant in Mr Khadr's case because prosecutors were relying on evidence "extracted" from him at Bagram air base in Afghanistan and at Guantánamo.
"If handwritten notes were destroyed in accordance with the SOP, the government intentionally deprived Omar's lawyers of key evidence with which to challenge the reliability of his statements," Lieut Cdr Kuebler said in an e-mail.
The operations manual, which dates to January 2003, was attached to a 2005 report on an investigation into detainee abuse allegations at Guantánamo, Lieut Cdr Kuebler said.
The so-called Schmidt-Furlow report documented degrading treatment, including one instance of a top terror suspect forced to dance with another man and behave like a dog, but investigators stopped short of saying torture occurred.
The Pentagon has declared the Guantánamo war crimes trials a national priority and will more than double the number of military lawyers assigned to them. - ( AP)