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Guantanamo Visit Roils French Terrorism Trial

Craig S. Smith
International Herald Tribune
July 6, 2006

PARIS - A French terrorism trial was thrown into turmoil Wednesday by a leaked report that French intelligence agents had secretly interviewed the six defendants during their detention at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The revelation by the daily newspaper Libération is an embarrassment for the French government, which has long expressed official disdain for the U.S. policy of detaining terrorism suspects beyond the reach of law.

According to a copy of a diplomatic cable published by the newspaper, French agents visited the detention center shortly after it was created in January 2002 and again in March of that year.

European intelligence services have recently come under attack in several countries for cooperating with the United States in clandestine activities that breach European laws. An investigation in Germany is trying to determine whether that country's intelligence service played a role in the U.S. abduction of a German citizen, Khaled el-Masri, from Macedonia in 2003.

On Wednesday, two Italian intelligence agents were arrested in connection with the U.S. abduction of another man, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, in Milan in 2003.

A spokesman for France's Foreign Ministry, Jean-Baptiste Mattei, defended the Guantanamo interrogations, saying that they were normal consular visits during which it is routine to "gather any useful information." How that information was used in this case "is a matter for the judicial authority," he said.

"I would remind you also that from the outset we've publicly demanded all along that the people detained at Guantanamo be treated in accordance with the norms of international law and have all procedural guarantees," Mattei said in response to reporters' questions at the Foreign Ministry on Wednesday.

French courts have previously declared the Guantanamo detentions illegal. Attorneys for the six men did not ask that the trial be dismissed, however, saying they feared that such a move would only prolong the case. They asked instead that their clients be found not guilty based on the irregularities.

"We think that even if they are found guilty, the sentences will be very short because of all of these problems," said Jacques Debray, one of the defense attorneys in the case. The six former detainees, seized by the U.S. in Afghanistan and Pakistan after the Afghan war, are accused of "associating with terrorist groups," a charge that could bring them each as much as 20 years in jail.

Their defense attorneys argue that the accusations are invalid because they are based on the illegal American detentions. Two of the attorneys, Debray and William Bourdon, have maintained for four years that the French secret services interrogated their clients while at Guantanamo. In 2004, they asked that the case be dismissed because it was based on interrogations that were "outside of any legal framework."

Their request was rejected last year for lack of evidence, and that rejection was upheld by France's highest court in January of this year.

A spokesperson for the prosecutor's office denied Wednesday that the secret interrogations played any role in their case, saying that prosecutors were equally unaware of the interrogations until the article published Wednesday.

"The accusations aren't founded on these elements, but on information uncovered since the defendants were released from Guantanamo," the spokesperson said.

But defense attorneys argue that information in a document from the domestic intelligence service and included in the case file comes from the Guantanamo interrogations because the document includes information that only the defendants knew but which was written before the men were released from Guantanamo.

One of the defendants, Khaled Ben Mustapha, said in court Tuesday that the document contained names that he gave French officials during his first interrogation in Guantanamo in early 2002. He said the officials told him they were from the Foreign Ministry and were trying to resolve his case.

"I'm here because of trickery," he told the court, according to the Libération article.

According to the article, the presiding judge, Jean-Claude Kross, replied to Ben Mustapha that "there is no proof that those interrogations took place."

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