News

NEW YORK, NY February 19, 2008 —

REPORTER: Students and faculty at Seton Hall Law School in New Jersey are asking why a military spokesman says there are no videotapes of interrogations at Guantanamo when documents they've uncovered suggest there should be. WNYC's Marianne McCune reports.

For a couple years now, Professor Mark Denbeaux has had his students pouring over more than a hundred thousand pages of government documents - just wading in to see what they find.

DENBEAUX: One of the things that legal education has not done enough of is to work with data that's not predigested and not printed out.

REPORTER: The group has issued a series of reports on what they've found -- and the latest focuses on a document written by the Army's surgeon general saying all interrogations of detainees are videotaped. Attorneys representing the detainees say such tapes could be critical to their cases - but it's unclear whether they exist.

A military spokesman told the Associated Press last week that it did not routinely videotape interrogations. Guantanamo's commander filed court papers stating that some of the prison's surveillance recordings have been automatically overwritten and no longer exist. A federal court order forbids the destruction of such records. Seton Hall laws students are continuing their investigation.