Open thread for night owls: Evidence of torture'preserving CIA black sites

Spencer Ackerman at Wired's Danger Room writes 9/11 Defendants Seek to Preserve CIA Sites Where They Were Tortured:

The last people you might expect to want to see the CIA's secret torture prisons kept intact are the people who were tortured there. But the defense lawyers for the 9/11 co-conspirators are arguing that the CIA's so-called 'black sites' need to remain open, untouched and exactly as they were when top al-Qaida operatives were abused. The CIA torture program isn't on trial at Guantanamo Bay. The five accused 9/11 conspirators are, and they face the death penalty. But the legal maneuver brings to light an irony of post-9/11 justice: The military tribunals that remain the bane of civil libertarians might be one of the last venues to investigate torture. On Monday at Guantanamo, Army Col. James Pohl, the judge in the 9/11 tribunal, will hear a longstanding motion filed by the defense team to 'preserve any existing evidence of any overseas detention facility used to imprison any witness in this case.' The gambit, explains James Connell, a Defense Department civilian who represents defendant Ammar al-Baluchi, seeks to treat the black sites like crime scenes ' something the Justice Department has been reluctant to do. It's not that the defendants want others taken to the black sites. It's that, as Connell tells Danger Room, 'If a site is still open, it's evidence.' Some of the treatment experienced at the black sites by the five defendants, which include the confessed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, include being doused with water for the simulated drowning known as waterboarding; being kept in contorted 'stress positions'; and being deprived of sleep for extended periods, sometimes as a result of the stress positions. But the defense hasn't been able to review any official material about what went on inside the black sites ' something crucial to its legal strategy, since the military commissions are supposed to exclude evidence obtained through 'the use of torture, or by cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.' [pdf] Emphasis on supposed to. 'The government has not yet provided any discovery or information about our clients' treatment at the black sites,' Connell says. 'If the trial were tomorrow, I would have no way of introducing it.' [...]

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