Medieval investigation methods were used against the victim of Bush administration spy mania

Quite innocent people have fallen victim to the Bush administration's spy mania. A former cipher clerk of the National Security Agency (NSA), Petty Officer Daniel King, who was charged with espionage in favour of Russia, has been released from the military prison at the Quantico naval base (Virginia state), and the case launched against him has been dropped. The investigation of the King case was started after he failed at the regular check at a detector of lie which the NSA staffers are duty-bound to regularly undergo. On October 29, 1999 he was arrested, and in November of that same year a charge with espionage and divulgence of secret information was filed against him, RIA Novosti reports. According to the investigation, during the inquest King confessed that he had allegedly sent a computer disc containing absolutely secret information to the Embassy of Russia in Washington. But the investigators of the US Navy had to close the case after Captain 1st rank James Winthrop who headed the investigation issued a corresponding recommendation on Friday. He pointed, in particular, to the shortage of proofs of King's guilt, as well as to the inability of the Navy to ensure testifying by the witnesses and to the errors made during the investigation. For its part, the indictee's defence noted the utterly medieval actions of the investigators of the Navy, and stressed that there were no proofs of espionage. As for the confession, King was compelled to make it after the many-week interrogations some of which lasted more than 19 hours. The cipher clerk's lawyer Jonathan Turly also said that the investigators had denied the existence of tape records of King's confession but they were found later. According to the lawyer, his defendant told the interrogators that his confession was false but he was telling them what they wanted to hear. Now King only has to wait for seven days for the end of his 20-year service after which he intends to retire from naval service with a full pension. The lawyer also said that King intends to take all possible actions for telling about the abuses in the Navy, and is considering a possibility of beginning an inquest into the actions of the Navy either in a civil court or in the US Congress.