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Manmohan’s
daughter asks White House, FBI to produce
videotape destruction records
 WASHINGTON:
The American Civil Liberties Union ( AC LU ), of which the Indian
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s daughter Amrit Singh is a key staff
attorney, filed papers on Tuesday, asking a federal judge to order
the White House, the FBI, and other government agencies to produce
all records in their possession relating to the destruction of two
videotapes by CIA operatives in 2005.
The ACLU also asked
for transcripts and summaries of the tapes. Its filing comes in the
wake of revelations that administration officials took part in
discussions with the CIA about whether to destroy the tapes, which
show the harsh interrogations of two prisoners in US custody, Abu
Zubaida and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. Today’s filing is an addendum
to a motion to hold the CIA in contempt of court filed by the ACLU
last week. Amrit Singh has kept a low-profile in the case so far,
although she handles ACLU's Immigrant Rights Project. But on
Tuesday, she was very much the ACLU's public voice.
“Serious questions
remain about the extent to which the White House and other
government agencies were complicit in the CIAs destruction of the
tapes,’’ she said in an ACLU statement. “The public is entitled to
know who authorized such a flagrant disregard for the rule of law
and why nothing was done to stop it.’’ The Indian officialdom has
kept a discreet silence on the matter in which the PM’s daughter is
giving such a torrid time to an administration with which New Delhi
has had such warm ties. The Bush administration too has not made an
issue of it. But privately, both sides express a degree of pride in
the situation, saying such a thing could happen only in two liberal
democracies with strong institutions and solid system of justice.
One official who did
not want to be named said it was ‘‘extraordinary courageous’’ of the
Prime Minister’s daughter to take up cudgels so publicly against the
administration given her situation, and that both sides were
treating the matter with the circumspection.
Amrit Singh, who has
a law degree from Yale University, has been front and center of the
torture case for several months even as it becomes more complicated.
It was in response to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests
filed by the ACLU and other organizations in October 2003 and
May 2004, that the
US District Court for the Southern District of New York ordered the
CIA to produce or identify all records pertaining to the treatment
of detainees in its custody. Despite the courts ruling, the CIA
never produced the tapes or even acknowledged their existence.
Earlier this month,
ahead of a rumors of a media scoop, CIA director Michael Hayden
publicly acknowledged that the agency had made the tapes in 2002 but
destroyed them in 2005.
26
December 2007
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