Human Rights News and Information
Human Rights News and InformationAn Iraqi man sued two U.S. military contractors, claiming he was repeatedly tortured while being held at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison for more than 10 months. Emad al-Janabi's federal lawsuit, filed Monday in Los Angeles, claims that employees of CACI International Inc. and L-3 Communications Holdings Inc. punched him, slammed him into walls, hung him from a bed frame and kept him naked and handcuffed in his cell beginning in September 2003. [...]
The firms provided interrogators or interpreters to assist U.S. military guards at Abu Ghraib, which became notorious when photos made public in early 2004 showing U.S. soldiers abusing and humiliating detainees. Military investigators later concluded that much of the abuse happened in late 2003 - when CACI and Titan's interrogators were at the prison. CACI and L-3 were accused of abusing Abu Ghraib prisoners in earlier lawsuits. In November a federal judge in the District of Columbia dismissed the suit against L-3 but allowed the one against CACI to proceed.
In an interview with The Associated Press on Monday in Istanbul, Turkey, al-Janabi said he hopes the lawsuit sheds light on what happened to him and other detainees. "God willing the righteousness will emerge and God willing the criminal will receive his punishment," al-Janabi said.
Al-Janabi, 43, said he was detained by U.S. troops during a late-night raid in which he and his family were beaten by their captors. He said he was taken to a military base where he was stripped naked, a hood was placed on his head and his hands and legs were chained. "They (U.S. troops) did not tell me what was the reason behind my arrest ... during the interrogation, the American soldier told me I was a terrorist ... and I was preparing for an attack against the U.S. forces," said al-Janabi, who denied the accusation and claims he was forced to give confessions under "savage" intimidation. The lawsuit also claims the contractors conspired in a cover-up by destroying documents and other information, hid prisoners during periodic checks by the International Red Cross and misled military and government officials about what was happening at Abu Ghraib.
Al-Janabi was released in July 2004 and wasn't charged with any crime
President Bush says he knew his top national security advisers discussed and approved specific details about how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, according to an exclusive interview with ABC News Friday.
"Well, we started to connect the dots in order to protect the American people." Bush told ABC News White House correspondent Martha Raddatz. "And yes, I'm aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved."
As first reported by ABC News Wednesday, the most senior Bush administration officials repeatedly discussed and approved specific details of exactly how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the CIA. The high-level discussions about these "enhanced interrogation techniques" were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed - down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic. These top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects - whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding, sources told ABC news.
The White House was directly implicated for the first time last night in the decision to torture Al Qaeda prisoners. Sources say that Vice President Dick Cheney and a handful of other top politicians met in secret and agreed to the mistreatment of prisoners, according to ABC TV News and the Associated Press.
As part of the decision-making process, they were given demonstrations of the techniques used. And as a direct result, the CIA was given the go-ahead to punch suspected terrorists, deprive them of sleep, and practise waterboarding - simulated drowning.
According to the sources, Mr Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, then Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, former Secretary of State Colin Powell and former Attorney General John Ashcroft met in the White House following the 9/11 attacks in 2001. They agreed to authorise what they call "enhanced interrogation techniques" as the Bush administration has defined "torture" only as actions which are designed to cause serious injury or death. [...]
The Pentagon on Tuesday made public a now-defunct legal memo that approved the use of harsh interrogation techniques against terror suspects, saying that President Bush's wartime authority trumps any international ban on torture.
The Justice Department memo, dated March 14, 2003, outlines legal justification for military interrogators to use harsh tactics against al-Qaida and Taliban detainees overseas - so long as they did not specifically intend to torture their captives. Even so, the memo noted, the president's wartime power as commander in chief would not be limited by the U.N. treaties against torture. "Our previous opinions make clear that customary international law is not federal law and that the president is free to override it at his discretion," said the memo written by John Yoo, who was then deputy assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel. [...] The memo was rescinded in December 2003, a mere nine months after Yoo sent it to the Pentagon's top lawyer, William J. Haynes. Though its existence has been known for years, its release Tuesday marked the first time its contents in full have been made public. [...]
Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU's national security project, said Yoo's legal reasoning puts "literally no limit at all to the kinds of interrogation methods that the president can authorize." "The whole point of the memo is obviously to nullify every possible legal restraint on the president's wartime authority," Jaffer said. "The memo was meant to allow torture, and that's exactly what it did." [...]
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy said the memo "reflects the expansive view of executive power that has been the hallmark of this administration." He called for its release four months ago. "It is no wonder that this memo ... could not withstand scrutiny and had to be withdrawn," said Leahy, D-Vt. "This memo seeks to find ways to avoid legal restrictions and accountability on torture and threatens our country's status as a beacon of human rights around the world."
A former translator for Osama bin Laden alleged to have helped the terrorist leader escape from Afghanistan's Tora Bora mountains in 2001 was recently transferred to the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, after lengthy interrogation by the CIA at a secret prison, U.S. officials said [...].
Muhammad Rahim, an Afghan national and bin Laden follower for nearly two decades, is the second CIA detainee to be transferred to military custody since the Bush administration confirmed 18 months ago that it had maintained a network of secret CIA prisons to interrogate key terrorism suspects. At the time, the president said 14 such detainees had been transferred to the military, emptying the prison system, but he left open the possibility that new prisoners could be added in the future. [...]
Rahim was captured in Pakistan last summer - apparently by local authorities - and turned over to the CIA in August, officials said. The agency declined to disclose details of his capture, or to reveal where and how he was interrogated. [...]
The CIA also has declined to say how many other captives, if any, remain in secret prison sites. Under international law, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) must be allowed to visit captured combatants, but the Bush administration has differed with the Red Cross over how quickly such visits are required and has refused to allow its delegations inside the CIA's secret prisons. Michael Khambatta, an ICRC spokesman, confirmed that his group had not been allowed to visit Rahim but plans to meet with him soon at Guantanamo Bay.
President Bush vetoed Saturday legislation meant to ban the CIA from using waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics, saying it "would take away one of the most valuable tools on the war on terror." [...]
Congress approved an intelligence authorization bill that contains the waterboarding provision on slim majorities, far short of the two-thirds needed to override a presidential veto. Bush's long-expected veto reignites the Washington debate over the proper limits of U.S. interrogation policies and whether the CIA has engaged in torture by subjecting prisoners to severe tactics, including waterboarding, a type of simulated drowning. [...]
Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said Bush has "compromised the moral leadership of our nation," and said the administration is ignoring the advice of military experts who oppose harsh techniques.
Retired Army Lt. Gen. Harry E. Soyster, a former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, suggested that those who support harsh methods simply lack experience and do not know what they are talking about. "If they think these methods work, they're woefully misinformed," Soyster said at a news briefing called in anticipation of the veto. "Torture is counterproductive on all fronts. It produces bad intelligence. It ruins the subject, makes them useless for further interrogation. And it damages our credibility around the world."
In two separate forums earlier this week, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and Navy Rear Adm. Mark H. Buzby, commander of the military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, defended the efficacy of less-coercive, "rapport-building" interrogation tactics. "We get so much dependable information from just sitting down and having a conversation and treating them like human beings in a businesslike manner," Buzby told reporters in a conference call Thursday.
It always happened at 1 a.m. In a secluded corner of this heavily guarded airfield, two snipers would creep across a rooftop and take their positions. Moments later, just below, a black minibus would arrive and wait. Three times in 2004, and twice more in 2005, a jet landed and the black bus drove out to meet it. Large, mysterious parcels were exchanged that, according to a Romanian official who says he witnessed it, looked like bundled-up terror suspects.
The official, a high-ranking veteran with inside knowledge of operations at the base, said the planes then left for North Africa with their cargo and two CIA handlers aboard.
His descriptions, told on condition of anonymity to The Associated Press, add to suspicions surrounding Romania's involvement in "extraordinary rendition" - the beyond-the-law transfer of U.S. terror suspects from country to country by the CIA. Human rights advocates say renditions were the agency's way to outsource torture of prisoners to countries where it is permitted practice.
Romania's precise role is a little-reported part of the system that is being slowly revealed, often to the chagrin of U.S. allies. In an embarrassing reversal after years of denial, Britain admitted Thursday that its military outpost on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia had twice been used as a refueling stop for the secret transport of terrorism suspects.
The British government revealed Thursday that CIA rendition flights, which critics say are used to transfer prisoners to be tortured, landed in British territory in 2002, despite Britain's previous denials of aiding rendition operations.
The Independent of London reports that the British government admitted that the US failed to inform Britain of two CIA rendition flights carrying suspected terrorists that had landed in British territory in 2002. David Miliband, the British foreign secretary, said the government only recently learned of the rendition flights to its Indian Ocean base of Diego Garcia.
[Mr. Miliband] had to make a humiliating apology to the Commons after it emerged that the US failed to tell British officials that two CIA rendition flights carrying suspected terrorists landed on the island of Diego Garcia in 2002. Six years on, one of the suspects is still being held by the US at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. The other has been released.
Mr Miliband denied there was a deliberate cover-up and said he believed the US had acted "in good faith". However, Gordon Brown, attending an EU summit in Brussels, expressed his "disappointment" and said Washington's failure to disclose the flights earlier was "a very serious issue".
The Justice Department said Friday it is investigating whether its attorneys properly authorized and reviewed the use of waterboarding by CIA investigators.
The disclosure by the Office of Professional Responsibility - which reports to the attorney general - was made in a letter to two Democratic senators who last week had requested such an investigation. "Among other issues, we are examining whether the legal advice contained in those memoranda was consistent with the professional standards that apply to Department of Justice attorneys," said H. Marshall Jarrett, who heads the office. Jarrett was referring to legal memos that were written by the Office of Legal Counsel and provided to then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales on August 1, 2002, as well as to "subsequent memos." [...]
The review is not a new investigation, but has been ongoing for some time, Justice Department spokesman Brian Roherkasse stressed. Justice Department officials said Friday the investigation included a look at the the so-called "Bybee memo," which had defined torture narrowly, as "causing pain similar to that caused by death or organ failure." The 2002 memo was later retracted by former Attorney General John Ashcroft.
Last week, Steven Bradbury, the acting assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel, testified before a subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee that the current Justice Department definition of torture includes all acts that are intended to inflict "severe physical pain," "severe physical suffering" or "severe mental pain or suffering."
Nearly 6-1/2 years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the U.S. is preparing to prosecute six of the men it says are responsible. But the trial and verdicts remain a long way off in the death penalty cases.
Given the slow pace of the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay, verdicts on charges announced at the Pentagon on Monday are unlikely before President Bush leaves office in January 2009. The trials themselves may not even be underway by then — and the next president may be less keen on the military tribunal system. Throwing the process into further doubt, the Supreme Court is expected to rule in a few months on whether Guantanamo detainees can challenge their confinement in civilian courts. Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann, the legal adviser to the military commissions, told a Pentagon news conference that the trial for the six Guantanamo detainees is at least 120 days away, "and probably well beyond that."
Critics of the untested military commissions system say the high-profile trial will expose its flaws. In 2006, a previous system was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Months later, Congress and Bush resurrected the tribunals in an altered form under the Military Commissions Act. The cases are also complicated by recent revelations that alleged Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one of the six charged, was subjected to a harsh interrogation technique known as waterboarding - which critics say is a form of torture. Hartmann said it will be up to the military judge to determine what evidence is allowed.
But questions of due process could overshadow the proceedings, according to Jennifer Daskal, senior counterterrorism counsel for Human Rights Watch. "By trying these men before flawed military commissions in Guantanamo Bay, the United States makes the system the center of attention rather the defendants and their alleged crimes," Daskal told the Associated Press. Steven Shapiro, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a telephone interview that "the administration now has placed itself in terrible bind because it subjected at least some, if not all, the six men to harsh interrogation techniques that the world regards as torture." Under the Military Commissions Act, statements obtained through torture are not admissible. But some statements obtained through "coercion" may be admitted at the discretion of a military judge.
Any death sentences likely would be carried out at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas by lethal injection, although the law allows for those convicted by military commissions to be executed elsewhere, according to Eugene Fidell, a Washington, D.C. attorney and expert in military law. He said one possibility could be Guantanamo Bay. But he said the U.S. would face obstacles, including an international outcry. "It would be highly controversial because a lot of the world simply doesn't believe in the death penalty any more," Fidell said.
The White House said Wednesday that the widely condemned interrogation technique known as waterboarding is legal and that President Bush could authorize the CIA to resume using the simulated-drowning method under extraordinary circumstances.
The surprise assertion from the Bush administration reopened a debate that many in Washington had considered closed. Two laws passed by Congress in recent years -- as well as a Supreme Court ruling on the treatment of detainees - were widely interpreted to have banned the CIA's use of the extreme interrogation method.
But in remarks that were greeted with disbelief by some members of Congress and human rights groups, White House spokesman Tony Fratto said that waterboarding was a legal technique that could be employed again "under certain circumstances." Fratto said the nation's top intelligence officials "didn't rule anything out" during congressional testimony Tuesday on CIA interrogation methods, and he indicated that Bush might consider reauthorizing waterboarding or other harsh techniques in extreme cases, such as when there is "belief that an attack might be imminent."
For years, White House officials denied that the U.S. had engaged in torture but always stopped short of confirming whether waterboarding had been used. The administration's latest stance - described by Fratto during the daily White House briefing - was denounced Wednesday by key lawmakers. "This is a black mark on the United States," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. "The White House is trying to give themselves as much of an open field here as possible. It says to others that we are prepared to use the same kinds of tactics used by the most repressive regimes and the most heinous regimes."
The White House comments came one day after CIA Director Michael V. Hayden testified publicly for the first time that the agency had used waterboarding on Al Qaeda suspects in 2002 and 2003. He also identified three prisoners, including self-proclaimed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who he said were the only detainees subjected to the method.
Abdul Razzaq Hekmati was regarded here as a war hero, famous for his resistance to the Russian occupation in the 1980s and later for a daring prison break he organized for three opponents of the Taliban government in 1999.
But in 2003, Mr. Hekmati was arrested by American forces in southern Afghanistan when, senior Afghan officials here contend, he was falsely accused by his enemies of being a Taliban commander himself. For the next five years he was held at the American military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he died of cancer on Dec. 30.
The fate of Mr. Hekmati, the first detainee to die of natural causes at Guantanamo, who fruitlessly recounted his story several times to American officials, demonstrates the enduring problems of the tribunals at Guantanamo, say Afghan officials and others who knew him.
Afghan officials, and some Americans, complain that detainees are effectively thwarted from calling witnesses in their defense, and that the Afghan government is never consulted on the detention cases, even when it may be able to help. Mr. Hekmati's case, officials who knew him said, shows that sometimes the Americans do not seem to know whom they are holding. Meanwhile, detainees wait for years with no resolution to their cases.
In response to queries, a spokeswoman for the Pentagon, Cynthia O. Smith, said the military tribunals at Guantanamo contained "significant process and protections," including the right to call witnesses.
The Washington Post reports that In Canada, the United States has joined a notorious group of countries - Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Afghanistan and China, among others - as a place where foreigners risk torture and abuse, according to a training manual for Canadian diplomats that was accidentally given this week to Amnesty International lawyers.
The manual is intended to create "greater awareness among consular officials to the possibility of Canadians detained abroad being tortured." Part of the workshop is devoted to teaching diplomats how to identify people who have been tortured. It features a section on "U.S. interrogation techniques," including forced nudity, hooding and isolation.
On the same dateline, Reuters reported: Canada's foreign ministry, responding to pressure from close allies, said on Saturday it would remove the United States and Israel from a watch list of countries where prisoners risk being tortured. Both nations expressed unhappiness after it emerged that they had been listed in a document that formed part of a training course manual on torture awareness given to Canadian diplomats. Foreign Minister Maxime Bernier said he regretted the embarrassment caused by the public disclosure of the manual, which also classified some U.S. interrogation techniques as torture. "It contains a list that wrongly includes some of our closest allies. I have directed that the manual be reviewed and rewritten," Bernier said in a statement.
As the Bush administration struggles for a way to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a similar effort to scale down a larger and more secretive American detention center in Afghanistan has been beset by political, legal and security problems, officials say.
The American detention center, established at the Bagram military base as a temporary screening site after the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, is now teeming with some 630 prisoners - more than twice the 275 being held at Guantanamo.
The administration has spent nearly three years and more than $30 million on a plan to transfer Afghan prisoners held by the United States to a refurbished high-security detention center run by the Afghan military outside Kabul. But almost a year after the Afghan detention center opened, American officials say it can accommodate only about half the prisoners they once planned to put there. As a result, the makeshift American site at Bagram will probably continue to operate with hundreds of detainees for the foreseeable future, the officials said.
Meanwhile, the treatment of some prisoners on the Bagram base has prompted a strong complaint to the Pentagon from the International Committee of the Red Cross, the only outside group allowed in the detention center. In a confidential memorandum last summer, the Red Cross said dozens of prisoners had been held incommunicado for weeks or even months in a previously undisclosed warren of isolation cells at Bagram, two American officials said. The Red Cross said the prisoners were kept from its inspectors and sometimes subjected to cruel treatment in violation of the Geneva Conventions, one of the officials said.
A man who was held in isolation for more than three years before being tried and convicted of aiding terrorists filed suit Friday against the UC Berkeley law professor and former Justice Department official whose memos justified inflicting physical and mental pain during interrogations.
Military officials relied on John Yoo's writings in subjecting Jose Padilla to prolonged sensory deprivation, sleep interruption, stress positions and other techniques designed to break his will, Padilla's lawyers said in a lawsuit filed in San Francisco. Padilla faces sentencing Monday in Miami.
The same lawyers filed a similar suit in South Carolina last year against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other Pentagon officials who they said authorized Padilla's detention and harsh treatment. One new element in Friday's suit against Yoo is that it seeks to hold a former government lawyer responsible for allegedly unconstitutional acts by officials who followed his legal advice.
"John Yoo was central to the justification and creation of the torture system," Jonathan Freiman, an attorney at a Yale Law School human rights clinic who represents Padilla, said in a statement. "What Yoo seems to have forgotten is that lawyers are not above the law."
The House approved legislation yesterday that would bar the CIA from using waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics, drawing an immediate veto threat from the White House and setting up another political showdown over what constitutes torture.
The measure, approved by a largely party-line vote of 222 to 199, would require U.S. intelligence agencies to follow Army rules adopted last year that explicitly forbid waterboarding. It also would require interrogators to adhere to a strict interpretation of the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war. The rules, required by Congress for all Defense Department personnel, also ban sexual humiliation, "mock" executions and the use of attack dogs, and prohibit the withholding of food and medical care.
The passage of the bill, which must still win Senate approval, fulfills a promise by House Democratic leaders to seek a ban on interrogation practices that have prompted the condemnation of human rights groups and many governments around the world. It comes amid a furor over the CIA's announcement a week ago that it destroyed in 2005 videotapes showing the use of harsh interrogation tactics on two terrorism suspects.
The White House vowed to veto the measure. Limiting the CIA to interrogation techniques authorized by the Army Field Manual "would prevent the United States from conducting lawful interrogations of senior al Qaeda terrorists to obtain intelligence needed to protect Americans from attack," the Office of Management and Budget said in a statement.
The CIA acknowledged making videotapes to document interrogations of terrorism suspects that used techniques critics have denounced as torture, and said on Thursday it had destroyed the recordings.
Central Intelligence Agency Director Michael Hayden told employees in a letter that the videotapes were made in 2002 as part of a secret detention and interrogation program that began with the arrest of suspected al Qaeda lieutenant Abu Zubaydah.
The taping was discontinued later that year and the tapes were destroyed in 2005, Hayden said. "The tapes posed a serious security risk. Were they ever to leak, they would permit identification of your CIA colleagues who had served in the program, exposing them and their families to retaliation from al Qaeda and its sympathizers," Hayden said in the letter, a copy of which was obtained by Reuters. He said he was discussing the program because of pending news reports on it. The New York Times published a story on the tapes on its Web site on Thursday.
The disclosure follows a separate instance last month involving a belated CIA acknowledgment that it possessed interrogation tapes sought in the trial of accused Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui. [...]
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, said the tapes' destruction was another troubling aspect of the interrogation program. "The damage is compounded when such actions are hidden away from accountability," he said in a statement. [...] "The destruction of these tapes suggests an utter disregard for the rule of law. It was plainly a deliberate attempt to destroy evidence that could have been used to hold CIA agents accountable for the torture of prisoners," ACLU National Security Project Director Jameel Jaffer said in a statement.
Imprisoned without trial for years at Guantanamo Bay with no end in sight, a group of detainees yesterday begged the Supreme Court to grant them hearings before a federal judge so they can challenge the Bush administration's accusation that each is a terrorist.
"All have been confined at Guantanamo for almost six years, yet not one has ever had meaningful notice of the factual grounds of detention or a fair opportunity to dispute those grounds," said the prisoners' lawyer, Seth Waxman, who was the Clinton administration's solicitor general from 1997 to 2001. "Each maintains . . . that he is innocent of all wrongdoing."
But Paul Clement, the Bush administration's solicitor general, urged the justices to rule that the Constitution gives detainees no such right to a day in court. He said the justices should instead uphold laws enacted in 2005 and 2006 that limit detainees to a hearing before a panel of military officers, without a lawyer or a right to see the government's evidence against them. Clement said the military hearings represented the "best efforts" of both Congress and the White House "to try to balance the interest in providing the detainees" with hearings while still meeting "the imperative to successfully prosecute the global war on terror."
A United Nations committee said Friday that use of Taser weapons can be a form of torture, in violation of the U.N. Convention Against Torture. Use of the electronic stun devices by police has been marked with a sudden rise in deaths - including four men in the United States and two in Canada within the last week. Canadian authorities are taking a second look at them, and in the United States, there is a wave of demands to ban them. [...]
Tasers have become increasingly controversial in the United States, particularly after several notorious cases where their use by police to disable suspects was questioned as being excessive. Especially disturbing is the fact that six adults died after being tased by police in the span of a week.
Last Sunday, in Frederick, Md., a sheriff's deputy trying to break up a late-night brawl tased 20-year-old Jarrel Grey. He died on the spot. "I want to know what he did that was so bad," the victim's mother, Tanya James, said. "Did the deputy think that their life was in danger? Did he have a weapon?"
The death came just weeks after Frederick police used a Taser to subdue a high school student.
The chief executioner and torturer of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge regime has become the first man to appear in court over the deaths of at least 1.7 million Cambodians in the 1970s. Kaing Guek Eav, 65, better known as "Duch", a frail-looking, born-again Christian, sat alone in the dock and addressed the judges respectfully. With palms held together in a gesture of deference, Duch told the judges "I have been detained for more than eight years without trial."
Duch was tracked down by the Irish photojournalist Nic Dunlop in a refugee camp in 1999 and was held in a government jail before being transferred to the UN assisted tribunal in July. Tuesday's session was a bail hearing. He was remanded in custody.
While commandant of the S-21 prison, in a converted Phnom Penh high school called Toul Sleng, Duch is accused of torturing and then killing at least 14,000 men, women and children.
The US military says it will recommend criminal charges against an Associated Press photographer detained in 2006 on suspicion of helping Iraqi insurgents. The Pentagon says additional evidence has come to light proving Bilal Hussein is a "terrorist media operative" who infiltrated the news agency. The case will be passed to Iraqi judges who will decide if he should be tried.
AP says its own investigation has found no evidence that he was anything but an Iraqi journalist working in a war zone. The agency's lawyers say they have been denied access to Mr Hussein and the evidence against him, making it impossible to build a defence. AP's president and chief executive officer Tom Curley told the BBC he believed the US military simply wished to keep Mr Hussein in jail as long as possible.[...]
Mr Hussein was part of an AP photo team that won a Pulitzer prize in 2005.
US officials say he had previously aroused suspicion because he was often at the scene of insurgent attacks as they occurred. [...] AP says Mr Hussein, who is now 36, was taken into custody in April 2006 after sheltering strangers in his home following an explosion near his home in Falluja. US marines later arrived and used his flat as an observation post, where they detained him and his guests as suspected insurgents and confiscated his laptop computer and telephone.
Through 17 debates this year, roughly 1,500 questions have been asked of the two parties' presidential candidates. But only a small handful of questions have touched on the candidates' views on executive power, the Constitution, torture, wiretapping, or other civil liberties concerns. [...]
Not one question about renditions. The words "habeas corpus" have not once been spoken by a debate moderator. Candidates have not been asked about telecom liability. [...] No moderator has asked a single question of a single candidate about whether the president should be able to order the indefinite detention of an American citizen, without charging the prisoner with any crime.
[The full text of this article includes description of questions about executive power, the Constitution, torture, etc., that have been asked of the candidates.]
Saudi authorities received a group of 14 Saudis Saturday from the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the state-run-news agency reported. This latest transfer of detainees brings the number of Saudi nationals remaining in Guantanamo to 22, the Saudi Press Agency said. It quoted Interior Minister Prince Nayef bin Abdul Aziz as saying that those returned will be referred to Saudi courts. There were no details given about what charges the men may face in court and up until now no one released into Saudi custody has yet been tried, said officials. [...]
The Pentagon confirmed the transfer in a statement released late Friday, saying that 305 detainees remained in Guantanamo, including more than 70 who have been deemed eligible for transfer or release. [...]
Of the 759 people who have been held at Guantanamo, 136 have been Saudis, the second-largest group after Afghan nationals, according to U.S. Defense Department documents released to The Associated Press. The detention of Saudis at the U.S. naval base in Cuba has been a source of tension with Riyadh, a close U.S. ally. Three Saudis have committed suicide inside the detention camp since it opened in 2002, according to the U.S. military.
Defense attorneys for accused illegal combatant Omar Khadr, a Canadian national, say they have only just been told by US prosecutors of a potentially exculpatory witness, more than five years after US forces captured Mr. Khadr in Afghanistan.
The revelation casts further doubt on the fairness of the military commissions established to try "unlawful enemy combatants" being held at the US Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Canadian broadcaster CTV reports that Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler, Khadr's trial attorney, only learned of the witness this week as the judge began to hear arguments as to whether Khadr could be tried by military commission. Commander Kuebler accused the US government of trying to hide the witness, described as a US government employee. [...] Kuebler's concerns about the previously unmentioned witness were echoed by Michael Berrigan, the deputy chief military defense lawyer for the Guantanamo cases [...].
Administration officials are considering granting Guantanamo detainees substantially greater rights as part of an effort to close the detention center and possibly move much of its population to the United States, according to officials involved in the discussions.
One proposal that is being widely discussed in the administration would overhaul the procedure for determining whether detainees are properly held by granting them legal representation at detention hearings and by giving federal judges, not military officers, the power to decide whether suspects should be held. [...] The administration has insisted for more than five years that a legal pillar of the war on terror is that the military alone has the power to decide which foreign terrorism suspects should be held and for how long, and backing away from that would be a sharp change of course. [...]
Even so, some officials are arguing against major policy shifts, and similar proposals have failed to gain steam within the administration in the past. In addition, any administration proposal would probably face intense scrutiny in Congress. Before any detainees can be moved, officials have said that they would need to find or build a secure site in the United States and that they would need legislation allowing detainees deemed to be a threat to be held “until the end of hostilities” in the war on terror, even if they were not charged with war crimes. Under current proposals, scores of detainees might continue to be held indefinitely without facing criminal charges.
An American military lawyer and veteran of dozens of secret Guantanamo tribunals has made a devastating attack on the legal process for determining whether Guantanamo prisoners are "enemy combatants". The whistleblower, an army major inside the military court system which the United States has established at Guantanamo Bay, has described the detention of one prisoner, a hospital administrator from Sudan, as "unconscionable". [...]
The whistleblower's testimony is the most serious attack to date on the military panels, which were meant to give a fig- leaf of legitimacy to the interrogation and detention policies at Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay. The major has taken part in 49 status review panels. "It's a kangaroo court system and completely corrupt," said Michael Ratner, the president of the Centre for Constitutional Rights, which is co-ordinating investigations and appeals lawsuits against the government by some 1,000 lawyers. "Stalin had show trials, but at Guantanamo they are not even show trials because it all takes place in secret." [...]
The army major has said that in the rare circumstances in which it was decided that the detainees were no longer enemy combatants, senior commanders ordered another panel to reverse the decision. The major also described "acrimony" during a "heated conference" call from Admiral McGarragh, who reports to the Secretary of the US Navy, when a the panel refused to describe several Uighur detainees as enemy combatants. Senior military commanders wanted to know why some panels considering the same evidence would come to different findings on the Uighurs, members of a Muslim minority in China.
In the sixth year of detention for many of the 330 men held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Justice Department lawyers have raised the possibility that the government may hold new hearings for some detainees to decide whether they are being properly held. The statement came in a filing made public late Friday in the federal appeals court in Washington. Detainees' lawyers said officials appeared to be considering what several of the lawyers called a "massive" repeat of the military's combatant-status hearings originally held in 2004 and 2005. The hearings are held to decide whether detainees were "enemy combatants" who should be held at Guantanamo.
[...] Detainees are not permitted lawyers at the hearings, cannot see much of the evidence against them and are seldom permitted to call witnesses.
The consideration of whether to hold a new round of hearings does not appear to reflect a change in the government’s view about their propriety. Instead, it would be a way for the government to fight off a recent court ruling in a case in which detainees have challenged their detention based on the first round of status review hearings. Detainees' lawyers said a decision to redo the hearings could delay those court challenges brought on behalf of the detainees, almost all of whom have been held for years without criminal charges.
A complex of canvas Quonset huts arrayed like dominoes has risen on an abandoned airfield here, where just a year ago the Pentagon envisioned a $125 million permanent judicial center in which terrorism suspects would be brought to trial. The battlefield-style Expeditionary Legal Complex, which can be quickly dismantled once the war-crimes tribunals of the Guantanamo detainees are over, reflects the shrinking mission of the controversial procedures created by the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Authorities plan to prosecute a few dozen of the more than 300 men detained here, and the first trial is scheduled to begin next month.
[...] some commissions officials grumble about crude conditions that will confront attorneys and court personnel expected to live and work in tents for the duration of the trials, which could last weeks or months. "These guys are going to be in trials for 10, 11, 12 hours a day, and they won't have the relaxation they need sleeping on a cot," said McDonald, noting that showers and toilets are in separate tents. "I'm a taxpayer, but I personally think we should have gone with the other idea."
The $125 million complex the Pentagon tried to slip into a supplemental spending bill in December would have provided three courtrooms, an office building and enough hotel rooms, restaurants and parking for as many as 800 people.
A German citizen who says he was kidnapped, imprisoned and tortured overseas by the CIA lost his appeal on Tuesday when the Supreme Court refused to review a decision dismissing the case because it would expose state secrets. [...]
His case, in which Masri said he was abducted in Macedonia, flown to Afghanistan and tortured, has drawn worldwide attention to the CIA's extraordinary rendition program, in which terrorism suspects are sent from one foreign country to another for interrogation. Human rights groups have strongly criticized the program. Masri's case sparked outrage in Germany and prompted a parliamentary inquiry to find out what authorities might have known about U.S. renditions.
Masri's attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union challenged what they called the Bush administration's increased invoking of national security secrets to prevent any judicial inquiry into serious allegations of misconduct.
When the Justice Department publicly declared torture "abhorrent" in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations. But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.
The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures. Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on "combined effects" over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion’s overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be "ashamed" when the world eventually learned of it.
Later that year, as Congress moved toward outlawing "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion, one most lawmakers did not know existed, current and former officials said. The Justice Department document declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard. [...]
Congress and the Supreme Court have intervened repeatedly in the last two years to impose limits on interrogations, and the administration has responded as a policy matter by dropping the most extreme techniques. But the 2005 Justice Department opinions remain in effect, and their legal conclusions have been confirmed by several more recent memorandums, officials said. They show how the White House has succeeded in preserving the broadest possible legal latitude for harsh tactics.
The U.S. Supreme Court formally opens its new term Monday, and as always, some of the most pressing national controversies are on the docket, from the rights of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to a major constitutional test of gun owners' rights. [...] This year, again, [Justice Anthony Kennedy's] vote is expected to be decisive in the court's biggest case, a test of the rights of Guantanamo detainees.
Among the prisoners before the court is a group of Bosnians who were arrested in their homes by Bosnian police shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The police acted at the behest of U.S. officials who said they had evidence that the six men were involved in a plot to blow up the U.S. Embassy. Bosnian authorities then joined with Interpol and U.S. Embassy officials to conduct a three-month investigation, at the end of which the Bosnian supreme court ruled that the charge was not supported by evidence and ordered the men released. On the same day, an international tribunal staffed by several European countries issued an order forbidding the removal of the men from Bosnian territory. Nonetheless, the men were turned over to U.S. authorities and shipped to Guantanamo, where they have remained ever since, despite repeated statements from the Bosnian government that it is willing to take them back.
The detainees claim that they have the right to challenge their imprisonment in the U.S. courts, using the constitutionally guaranteed procedure called a writ of habeas corpus. Historically, the writ has been an important mechanism in safeguarding individuals from arbitrary state action. It guarantees a complete review by a neutral fact finder to ascertain whether the government has justifiably jailed someone. The Guantanamo prisoners contend there is no neutral fact finder at Guantanamo hearings, no way for the prisoners to rebut secret evidence, no lawyer to help them to secure evidence of their innocence, and that the legal standard presumes them guilty.
Congress, they contend, violated the Constitution, when it stripped them of the right to challenge their detentions in court after an earlier Supreme Court ruling that permitted them to do so. The Constitution, they note, provides for suspension of the writ of habeas corpus only in cases of invasion and rebellion, and even then requires an alternative system of basic due process rights. The Bush administration, backed by a federal appeals court, counters that since the men are being held outside the United States, they have no constitutional rights. The detainees have adequate rights to appeal under the law passed by Congress when it stripped the detainees of the right of habeas corpus, the administration contends.
A Republican filibuster in the Senate Wednesday shot down a bipartisan effort to restore the right of terrorism suspects to contest in federal courts their detention and treatment, underscoring the Democratic-led Congress's difficulty with terrorism issues. The 56-43 vote fell short of the 60 needed to cut off debate and move to a final vote on the amendment to the Senate's annual military policy bill. But the measure did garner the support of six Republicans, a small victory for its supporters. A similar vote garnered 48 votes last September. [...]
The prisoners' rights amendment was an effort to reverse a provision in last year's Military Commissions Act that suspended the writ of habeas corpus for terrorism suspects at the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and other offshore prisons. The Supreme Court previously ruled that such prisoners did have the right to appeal their detention in federal court, but the court invited Congress to weigh in on the issue. [...]
The authors of last year's bill said that advocates of such rights would open the federal courts to endless lawsuits from the nation's worst enemies. [...] But advocates of the rights, led by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and the panel's ranking Republican, Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, argued that Congress should right last year's historic wrong.
The Senate's action "calls into question the United States' historic role of defender of human rights in the world," Leahy said. "It accomplishes what opponents could never accomplish on the battlefield, whittling away our own liberties."
[...] Israeli lawyers and military law experts filed a brief supporting Guantanamo detainees suing the Bush administration over one of its most controversial war-on-terrorism policies. They argue that the United States can safeguard national security while giving presumed dangerous captives access to U.S. courts.
Says Haifa Law Professor Emanuel Gross, a retired Israeli Army colonel and military judge who contributed to the brief: "The issue here is, having been engulfed with terrorist activities from the beginning, from 1948, we learned a good lesson - if you want to remain a democracy you must be willing to let them have their day in court."
The Israelis' brief was among 19 amicus curiae petitions in the case of Boumediene v. Bush - which will become the third Guantanamo case in four years to go before the Supreme Court. In a stunning reversal in June, the justices agreed to hear a challenge to the indefinite-detention policy designed by the Bush administration and adopted by Congress. Detainees won their two earlier cases.
Commanders at the US naval base in Cuba have written to lawyers for two of the inmates accusing their clients of wearing contraband underpants and Speedo swimming trunks which they claim have been illegally smuggled into the high-security compound. In a bizarre development that would be laughable if it did not have such serious implications, the US prison's staff judge advocate has now launched an official inquiry to discover who is behind the smuggling operation. The judge has named the prisoners' lawyers as the two prime suspects.
These allegations are the latest in a series of increasingly desperate attempts by the Guantanamo authorities to undermine the relationship between human rights lawyers and their clients. Muslim prisoners have also been told that their legal representatives are practising Jews or confirmed homosexuals. Clive Stafford Smith, legal director of human rights group Reprieve, and another Reprieve lawyer, are both accused of threatening the personal safety of the prison guards by smuggling in the unauthorised clothing. Under US law it is a criminal offence to bring any illicit item into a prison.
Mr Stafford Smith has [dismissed] the allegations as ridiculous, saying that the case smacks of the growing sense of desperation inside the camp. He says the letter he received is the "most extraordinary" he has ever received in his career as a human rights lawyer. Mr Stafford Smith tells the judge: "I hope you understand my frustration at yet another unfounded accusation against lawyers who are simply trying to do their job – a job that involves legal briefs, not the other sort." On the allegation regarding Speedo swimming trunks Mr Stafford Smith writes: "I cannot imagine who would want to give my client Speedos or why. Mr Aamer is hardly in a position to go swimming, since the only available water is the toilet in his cell."
[One] detainee accused of wearing the contraband underwear is a juvenile named Mohammed El Gharani, a Chad national, who was just 14 years old when he was seized by the Pakistani authorities and sold to the US military. Reprieve say there is no evidence that Mohammed ever travelled to Afghanistan, nor that he intended to do so. Nevertheless, he is now one of 20 juveniles Reprieve has identified as being held in Guantanamo Bay. In interviews with his lawyers he claims he has been terribly abused, including having a cigarette stubbed out on his arm by an interrogator. He states that much of the abuse stems from his vocal objection to being called a "nigger" by US military personnel.
The only military officer to face trial for the abuses at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison was acquitted Tuesday of all charges of mistreatment of detainees. But after a weeklong trial, a military jury in Fort Meade, Md., found Army Lt. Col. Steven Jordan guilty of disobeying an order not to discuss a 2004 investigation into the allegations.
[...] Jordan's acquittal on three charges related to abuse exonerates him of any connection to the infamous photographs of naked detainees that emerged from the prison in early 2004. Defense attorneys argued that Jordan was not in charge of interrogations and had no connection to controversial interrogation policies that allowed the use of dogs and other harsh methods. Rather, they said, he served more as a "mayor" in charge of improving conditions for service members at the austere military base.
Jordan's exoneration on charges of mistreatment means that no officer will serve prison time in connection with the mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib, leaving the harshest punishment for low-ranking soldiers who committed the abuse. [...]
Jordan's case also wraps up the numerous inquiries and investigations that began after photographs taken by military police at the prison became public.
Renowned psychologist and New York Times bestselling author Mary Pipher decided last week to return her Presidential Citation award from the APA in protest. In a letter to the group's president, she wrote, "I have struggled for many months with this decision and I make it with pain and sorrow...I do not want an award from an organization that sanctions its members' participation in the enhanced interrogations at CIA 'black sites' and at Guantanamo."
The American Psychological Association has come under public criticism once again over its endorsement of professional involvement in CIA and military interrogations.
At its annual convention just over a week ago, the APA's policymaking council voted overwhelmingly to reject a measure that would have banned its members from participating in interrogations at Guantanamo Bay and other US detention centers. In the days since the convention ended, the Houston Chronicle - one of the nation's most-widely read newspapers - criticized the move in an editorial, writing "Psychologists have no place assisting interrogations at places such as Guantanamo Bay."
After a raucous debate about what role - if any - psychologists should play in U.S. government interrogations of terror suspects, the American Psychological Association voted overwhelmingly on Sunday to reject a measure that would have in effect banned its members from those interrogations.
Instead, the association passed a competing measure that reaffirms the organization's position against torture "and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment" of terror suspects. For the first time on record, the resolution lists specific treatment that the association opposes, including mock executions, water-boarding, sexual humiliation, induced hypothermia, hooding, using dogs to threaten and intimidate suspects, and sleep deprivation. In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, these techniques have been used by U.S. authorities against terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and other U.S. prisons to extract information, according to military officials and human rights activists.
Psychologists have overseen past U.S. interrogation of terror suspects, and are currently in Guantanamo Bay working with military authorities, said APA member Bill Strickland, a former U.S. Air Force research director and one of many speakers on Sunday who urged voting against the measure that would have banned participation in those interrogations. The presence of psychologists at Guantanamo Bay and other military-detention centers helps guarantee the well-being of the terror suspects because it adds a layer of official oversight, said Strickland and Army Col. Larry James, who was the chief military psychologist at the Cuba prison in 2003. "If we removed psychologists from these facilities, people are going to die," James told the convention. Supporters of the failed measure, which called for members not to cooperate with interrogations connected to prescribed practices, argued that psychologists' presence at these interrogations rubber-stamps various practices that are tantamount to torture. "We're talking about places where people being interrogated don't have human rights!" said Neil Altman, a supporter of the moratorium.
Steven Reisner, a New York City psychologist, said [...] the APA's listing of torture measures it opposes was an important first step, but that "this fight is going to continue as long as it has to." "The APA named the abuses that are most widely used at CIA 'black sites' to torture detainees, and said they are unacceptable," said Reisner. "That is the positive thing I see here, and that will help the U.S. government to understand that this is unacceptable." [...] Sunday's passed resolution includes "an absolute prohibition against psychologists' knowingly planning, designing, and assisting in the use of torture and any form of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment."
When military interrogators devised new methods to extract information from prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, starting in 2002, psychologists and psychiatrists assisted them, according to a recently declassified Defense Department report. The American Psychiatric Association quickly adopted new ethical standards that said psychiatrists should not take part in the interrogations after an early version of the report surfaced last year. But the American Psychological Association, which represents most of the nation's psychologists, left its rules unchanged and merely reiterated its previous condemnation of torture and abuse. The Pentagon then began using only psychologists to train its interrogators.
As the 150,000-member psychologists' organization holds its annual meeting in San Francisco this weekend, a dissident faction is pushing to prohibit members from playing any role in the military interrogations, which it views as tantamount to torture. "Our first ethical principle is that psychologists should do no harm," said Ruth Fallenbaum, a Berkeley clinical psychologist who works with torture victims. "We should not contribute our expertise, our training to breaking down people in these environments where there's no respect for human rights." [...]
The issue comes to a head Sunday when competing resolutions are scheduled for votes in the association's Council of Representatives [...]. One proposal, by APA leaders, would prohibit any involvement in interrogations that use any of 14 specified methods that might be associated with torture, including mock executions, the use of dogs to threaten or intimidate a prisoner, sexual humiliation, and the simulated drowning technique called waterboarding. The rival resolution backed by a group called Coalition for an Ethical APA would forbid all participation by psychologists in interrogations at Guantanamo and similar military facilities.
Disavowing specific interrogation techniques would be "a major step forward," said New York psychologist Steven Reisner, an outspoken member of the dissident group. But he said the APA leaders' resolution is full of loopholes - for example, it applies only to interrogations and not to the use of some of the same methods used during confinement to "soften up" a prisoner before questioning. "Participating in that environment is (the equivalent of) giving your approval" to what goes on there, Reisner said. With psychiatrists and other health professionals shunning the interrogations, he said, psychologists provide the remaining veneer of legitimacy to the Bush administration's claim that the United States does not torture or abuse prisoners.
Faced with rising international pressure to close the military prison in Cuba, the U.S. has identified dozens of detainees who can be released or transferred to other countries. However, that was only the first step in a process so difficult it has slowed releases to a trickle. Before it puts detainees on a plane, the U.S. must find a country to accept them. [...] Britain's new Prime Minister Gordon Brown asked Tuesday for the transfer of five British residents held at Guantanamo [...]. A senior U.S. defense o fficial warned that officials will have to discuss appropriate security measures before the five sought by Britain can be transferred.
"These are extremely dangerous individuals and if they are sent back to the United Kingdom they could pose a risk if they are out on the street," said Sandra Hodgkinson, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs in an interview with The Associated Press. However, for nearly all of the 80 Guantanamo detainees now cleared for release, the U.S. has either not been able to get the necessary assurances or their native countries refused to accept them, Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman, said Wednesday. "Repatriation has been extraordinarily challenging," Gordon said. It is a challenge that will not end soon.
The U.S. holds about 360 men at Guantanamo on suspicion of terrorism or links to al-Qaida or the Taliban. Of that group, military officials say they expect to identify about another 70 who can be transferred or released. But they are likely to face the same hurdles. The U.S. says it cannot release the rest: About 80 are expected to be tried for war crimes before military tribunals. Some 130 others are considered Islamic extremists who are too dangerous to release. However, there are no plans to prosecute them. Because of the diplomatic challenges in transferring detainees, some men have been cleared to leave Guantanamo for more than a year but remain in limbo.
"The U.S. has created a mess and it's very hard to get out of this mess," said Jennifer Daskal, a Washington-based lawyer for Human Rights Watch, which believes there are at least 50 detainees who have expressed fears of being sent back to their home countries. [...] Barbara Olshansky, a Stanford University law professor who has represented Guantanamo detainees, said she believes more Western European countries and others with good human rights records would take detainees, but balk at the U.S. demand for guarantees that they be prevented from carrying out attacks on America and its allies. "Who the United States is approaching and what they are asking is making it difficult to find places," Olshansky said.
The Government called on America yesterday to release five foreign nationals from Guantanamo Bay detention centre who were formerly British residents.
The request by David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, to Condoleezza Rice, the Secretary of State, represented a U-turn by the Government, which had previously resisted moves to force it to take responsibility for the men. [...]
Sources said the Government was keen to encourage President George W Bush to close the controversial prison camp in Cuba. Officials said they wanted to "embolden" the US in its approach.
An AP article published in the SF Chronicle excerpted the following from a Human Rights Watch statement responding to this news: "The UK's decision to accept its legal residents is an important step forward," New York-based Human Rights Watch said in a statement. "At the same time, Human Rights Watch continues to urge the UK and other EU member states to help resettle other detainees who may not have a legal claim to residency, but who cannot return to their home countries."
An executive order governing treatment of prisoners in a formerly secret CIA detention program still denies Red Cross access to captives:
US President George W. Bush on Friday forbade the CIA from torturing suspected terrorists in its once-secret detention and interrogation program but was criticized for his vague, "trust us" approach. Human rights groups said the executive order left out critical details, such as controversial tactics that administration officials often describe as "enhanced interrogation techniques."
The order says that the detention program, whose existence was confirmed last September, must abide by Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions on wartime detainees and requires the CIA director to enforce that standard. It lists no specific practices that are affected, or punishments for violations, and does not describe in any further detail a secret CIA prison network that has drawn outrage from US allies in Europe.
New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) slammed the order as "contrary to the Geneva Conventions" because it essentially affirmed CIA secret detentions, a program that is "illegal to its core," it said in a statement. "The key aspect of this is all the parts that aren't said," said Jennifer Daskal, HRW senior counterterrorism counsel, who charged that the order allowed "a system of incommunicado detention to continue, with the blessing of the president. What we have here is an administration basically reciting a number of legal principles and saying `trust us.' And that's hard to take from an administration that refuses to renounce waterboarding," she said.
On a White House-organized conference call - organized on the condition that the briefer not be named - one senior Bush aide refused to discuss whether any detention or interrogation practices, or how many detainees, were affected. He refused to discuss specifically the order's impact on "waterboarding," in which a prisoner is tied down and water is poured over the face or over a cloth stretched over the face, producing the sensation of drowning.
Twice a day at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo, Abdul Rahman Shalabi and Zaid Salim Zuhair Ahmed are strapped down in padded restraint chairs, and flexible yellow tubes are inserted through their noses and throats. Milky nutritional supplements, mixed with water and olive oil to add calories and ease constipation, pour into their stomachs. Shalabi, 32, an accused al Qaeda militant who was among the first detainees taken to Guantanamo, and Ahmed, about 34, have refused to eat for almost two years to protest their conditions and open-ended confinement. In recent months, the number of hunger strikers has grown to two dozen, and the military is using force-feeding to keep them from starving.
An Associated Press investigation reveals the most complete picture yet of a test of wills that's taking place out of public view and shows no sign of ending. The restraint chair was a practice borrowed from U.S. civilian prisons in January 2006. Prisoners are strapped down and monitored to prevent vomiting until the supplements are digested. The British human rights group Reprieve labeled the process "intentionally brutal," and Shalabi, according to his lawyer's notes, said it is painful, "something you can't imagine. For two years, me and Ahmed have been treated like animals."
When Guantanamo Bay detainees challenge their status as "enemy combatants," judges must review all the evidence, not just what the military chooses, a U.S. federal appeals court ruled Friday. The court rejected the Bush administration's plan to limit what judges and the detainees' attorneys can review when considering whether the Combatant Status Review Tribunals acted appropriately. "Counsel for a detainee has a 'need to know' the classified information relating to his client's case," the appeals court ruled. "The government may withhold from counsel, but not from the court, certain highly sensitive information."
Washington attorney David Remes, who represents 17 Guantanamo Bay detainees, noted "The court said that its review goes beyond the information presented to the Combatant Status Review Tribunals, but the court never explains how it can determine what that information might be." [...] Remes also said that "it's clear from the decision that the review under the Detainee Treatment Act falls short of constitutionally required habeas corpus review." The Supreme Court will soon consider whether detainees have the right to challenge their detention in federal courts. That right was stripped away by the most recent terrorism law [the Military Commissions Act of 2006].
Jonathan Hafetz, an attorney involved in other detainee cases, said Friday's court ruling is only a minor improvement in a seriously flawed process. "It's definitely better than what the government had proposed but it still doesn't provide for a meaningful process," Hafetz said.
The Supreme Court said on Friday it would hear appeals by Guantanamo prisoners on their right to challenge their confinement before federal judges, a test of President George W. Bush's powers in the war on terrorism. The court in April had denied the same appeals by the prisoners, but the justices in a brief order changed their minds and said they would hear and decide the two cases during the court's term that starts in October. [...]
The decision by the court to hear the two cases was a setback for the Bush administration which had urged the justices to turn down the appeals. [...]
The Supreme Court's action in the Guantanamo cases was announced the day after the justices had ended their 2006-2007 term.
President Bush was presented with a letter Monday signed by 50 high school seniors in the Presidential Scholars program urging a halt to "violations of the human rights" of terror suspects held by the United States. [...] The handwritten letter said the students "believe we have a responsibility to voice our convictions."
"We do not want America to represent torture. We urge you to do all in your power to stop violations of the human rights of detainees, to cease illegal renditions, and to apply the Geneva Convention to all detainees, including those designated enemy combatants," the letter said.
[...] "The president enjoyed a visit with the students, accepted the letter and upon reading it let the student know that the United States does not torture and that we value human rights," deputy press secretary Dana Perino said. [...] The designation as a Presidential Scholar is one of the nation's highest honors for graduating high school students. Each year the program selects one male and one female student from each state, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Americans living abroad, 15 at-large students, and up to 20 students in the arts on the basis of outstanding scholarship, service, leadership and creativity.
The U.S. is helping expand a prison in Afghanistan to take some detainees from Guantanamo Bay, while administration officials argue about whether to bring the most dangerous to the U.S. when the Cuban facility shuts down.
Officials say the administration is split, with Vice President Dick Cheney's office and the Justice Department vehemently opposed to any proposal that would bring detainees to U.S. soil, where they would be afforded more legal rights and might pose a threat.
"America does not have any intention of being the world's jailer," [Deputy press secretary Dana Perino] said, noting that the United States has announced plans to release about 80 of the some 375 detainees remaining in Guantanamo and hopes to transfer several dozen Afghans back to Afghanistan in the near future.
Washington is helping the Afghan government build a high-security wing at Pul-e-Charki prison complex just outside Kabul. The wing has 330 cells and can hold up to 660 people, including 65 Afghans held at Guantanamo Bay, according to Afghan officials. But Gen. Mohammad Zahir Azimi, the chief spokesman for Afghanistan's Defense Ministry, said none of those held at Guantanamo had been transferred to Afghanistan so far despite statements by U.S. officials that they would be sent back by the end of April 2007.
A proposal gaining traction among Bush's top national security advisers would have some of the most dangerous suspects at Guantanamo transferred to one or more Defense Department facilities, including the maximum-security prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., and a Navy brig in South Carolina. Perino declined to comment on the Fort Leavenworth option, which has been raised by lawmakers.
Senior Bush administration officials are engaged in active discussions about closing the U.S. military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, but deep divisions remain regarding the fate of the approximately 375 foreign detainees currently held there should the prison close, according to numerous officials familiar with the dialogue. [...]
Key discussions have centered on how to repatriate roughly 75 remaining detainees who have been cleared for release or transfer, how to put roughly 80 detainees on trial following major failures in the Military Commissions Act, and where to indefinitely hold an additional 220 detainees the government deems too dangerous for release.
While there have been preliminary talks of bringing them to military detention centers in the United States, there has been significant pushback from Vice President Dick Cheney as well as from the Justice and Homeland Security departments, and officials said Thursday that they are not on the brink of a decision.
[...] officials said the discussions are not yet at a decision point because too many issues remain unresolved. Justice officials have argued against moving Guantanamo detainees to the United States because it would immediately grant the alleged terrorists habeas corpus rights, which would launch another round of legal battles in U.S. federal courts. Homeland Security officials have opposed such a move because it would mean bringing some of the people on the nation's terror watch list - including the highest-value detainees the United States has in its custody, such as Khalid Shaikh Mohammed - inside U.S. borders. Cheney's office also has vehemently opposed bringing the detainees into this country.
A White House meeting planned for Friday about the future of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility has been canceled after The Associated Press reported the Bush administration was "nearing a decision" to close the center. [...]
Officials from the White House, the Pentagon and the Justice and State departments denied the AP report. "The administration is not 'nearing a decision' on changing our long-held policy to shut down Gitmo in a responsible way," said White House spokeswoman Dana Perino. "There is no meeting tomorrow."
Officials said there have been numerous discussions on the issue involving Cabinet-level officials but none yet involving President Bush. One item being worked on is reaching agreement with Afghanistan to build a prison, where several dozen detainees could be transferred, officials said. "There are 375 detainees," one official said. "If we transferred the Afghan prisoners, that would put us at less than 100 at the camp. This would be a reasonable number. It would allow us to then figure out who to try and get the military commissions up and running. [...] "But we still need to build the prison, train the guards and transfer people. All of this takes time" [...].
There is growing evidence of high-level coordination between the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. military in developing abusive interrogation techniques used on terrorist suspects. After the Sept. 11 attacks, both turned to a small cadre of psychologists linked to the military's secretive Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape program to "reverse-engineer" techniques originally designed to train U.S. soldiers to resist torture if captured, by exposing them to brutal treatment. The military's use of SERE training for interrogations in the war on terror was revealed in detail in a recently declassified report. But the CIA's use of such tactics - working in close coordination with the military - until now has remained largely unknown.
According to congressional sources and mental healthcare professionals knowledgeable about the secret program who spoke with Salon, two CIA-employed psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, were at the center of the program, which likely violated the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners. The two are currently under investigation: Salon has learned that Daniel Dell'Orto, the principal deputy general counsel at the Department of Defense, sent a "document preservation" order on May 15 to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other top Pentagon officials forbidding the destruction of any document mentioning Mitchell and Jessen or their psychological consulting firm, Mitchell, Jessen and Associates, based in Spokane, Wash. Dell'Orto's order was in response to a May 1 request from Sen. Carl Levin, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who is investigating the abuse of prisoners in U.S. custody. [...]
"The irony - and ultimately the tragedy - in the migration of SERE techniques is that the program was specifically designed to protect our soldiers from countries that violated the Geneva Conventions," says Brad Olson, president of the Divisions for Social Justice within the American Psychological Association. "The result of the reverse-engineering, however, was that by making foreign detainees the target, it made us the country that violated the Geneva Conventions," he says.
The words of the celebrated Pakistani poet were scratched on the sides of a Styrofoam cup with a pebble. Then, under the eyes of Guantanamo Bay's prison guards, they were secretly passed from cell to cell. When the guards discovered what was going on, they smashed the containers and threw them away, fearing that it was a way of passing coded messages. Fragments of these "cup poems" survived, however, and are included in an 84-page anthology entitled Poems from Guantanamo: the Detainees Speak, to be published later this year by the University of Iowa Press.
The verses provide a harrowing insight into the torments and fading hopes of the prisoners. Only two Guantanamo inmates have been charged with a crime.
They were brought to light by Marc Falkoff, a US professor of law with a doctorate in American literature. He represents 17 Yemeni inmates and has made 10 visits to Guantanamo. He dedicates the book to "my friends inside the wire". In the summer of 2005 Professor Falkoff was sent two poems from his clients. Written in Arabic, they were included in letters they could legally send. Because all communication with the detainees is deemed a potential threat to national security, everything - letters, interview notes, legal documents - must be sealed and sent to a US intelligence facility for review. The two poems were deemed a potential risk and remain classified to this day.
Censorship remains absolute at the camp however. As far as the US military is concerned: "poetry ... presents a special risk, and DoD [Department of Defence] standards are not to approve the release of any poetry in its original form or language". The fear, officers say, is that allegorical imagery in poetry may be used to convey coded messages to militants outside.
The thoughts of the inmates are considered so potentially dangerous by the US military that they are not even trusted with pen and paper. The only exception is an occasional 10-minute period when they are allowed to write to their families via the International Red Cross. Even then the words they write are heavily censored.
[Several poems written by Guantanamo detainees are included in the article]
Former Secretary of State Colin Powell said Sunday he favors immediately closing the Guantanamo Bay military prison and moving its detainees to U.S. facilities. The prison, which now holds about 380 suspected terrorists, has tarnished the world's perception of the United States, Powell said.
"If it was up to me, I would close Guantanamo. Not tomorrow, but this afternoon. I'd close it," he said.
And I would not let any of those people go," he said. "I would simply move them to the United States and put them into our federal legal system. The concern was, well then they'll have access to lawyers, then they'll have access to writs of habeas corpus. So what? Let them. Isn't that what our system is all about?
Powell, who was secretary of state under President Bush, said the U.S. should do away with the military c ommission system in favor of procedures already established in federal law or the manual for courts-martial. "I would also do it because every morning, I pick up a paper and some authoritarian figure, some person somewhere, is using Guantanamo to hide their own misdeeds," Powell said. "And so essentially, we have shaken the belief that the world had in America's justice system by keeping a place like Guantanamo open and creating things like the military commission."
The CIA held suspected al-Qaida militants in secret prisons in Poland and Romania, enlisting top officials in those countries to create and conceal the facilities, a European intergovernmental agency alleged yesterday.
Current and former intelligence officials in Europe and the United States told the Council of Europe that the interrogation facilities were hubs of a global anti-terror campaign that used torture, clandestine flights and extrajudicial abductions known as extraordinary rendition, according to a report by the council, which is based in Strasbourg, France. [...]
"Poland and Romania agreed to provide the premises in which these facilities were established, the highest degrees of physical security and secrecy and steadfast guarantees of noninterference," said Dick Marty, a Swiss senator leading the probe.
The Council of Europe's press release and the report itself were made available on 8 June 2007.
A bill that would allow terrorism suspects access to federal courts to challenge their imprisonment at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday. The committee, on an 11-8 vote, advanced a bill that would allow those prisoners, as well as millions of legal non-citizens inside the United States, to protest detentions through a writ of habeas corpus. All of the committee's Democrats and Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter, the committee's top Republican, voted for the legislation. The rest of the GOP senators voted against it.
Congress, while under GOP control last year, stripped federal courts of jurisdiction over Guantanamo cases. As a result, detainees only had recourse to challenge their imprisonment through special military tribunals that omitted rights common in civil courts.
"The great history of our nation is built on having judicial review, on having openness, and we should not out of fear or indifference or whatever turn our back on that great history," said Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. The legislation is expected to be offered later this month as an amendment to the Senate's $649 billion defense authorization bill for 2008. The defense policy bill already includes several provisions aimed at expanding the legal protections of detainees.
Six human rights groups released a list Wednesday of 39 people they believe have been secretly imprisoned by the United States and whose whereabouts are unknown, calling on the Bush administration to abandon such detentions. The list, compiled from news media reports, interviews and government documents, includes terrorism suspects and those thought to have ties to militant groups. In some suspects' cases, officials acknowledge that they were at one time in U.S. custody. In others, the rights groups say, there is other evidence, sometimes sketchy, that they had at least once been in American hands.
Meg Satterthwaite of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University, one of the six groups, said the recent American practice mimics "disappearances" of political opponents under Latin American dictators. "Enforced disappearances are illegal, regardless of who carries them out," she said.
The other groups that compiled the list were Amnesty International, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Human Rights Watch and two British groups, Reprieve and Cageprisoners. Three of the groups are suing under the Freedom of Information Act to learn what became of the prisoners. [...]
Even before the secret detentions were officially confirmed, the practice drew widespread objections, including from within the Bush administration. William H. Taft IV, legal adviser at the State Department from 2001 to 2005, opposed it while in office, and on Wednesday he said he had not changed his view. "I believe the United States should always account for people in its custody," said Taft, who had not reviewed the human rights groups' report. "When our own people are missing, we want to be able to insist on an accounting from their captors," Taft said. He added that keeping prisoners secret can tempt their jailers to abuse them and to cover up their deaths in custody.
The White House suffered an embarrassing setback in its effort to try detainees at Guantanamo Bay on Monday when military judges threw out all charges against the first two prisoners to come before the newly-constituted commission.
Two judges, ruling in two separate cases, dismissed all charges against Omar Khadr, a 20-year-old Canadian who has been held at Guantanamo for five years, because the court did not have jurisdiction to try "enemy combatants." A judge also threw out the case against Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a former driver for Osama bin Laden.
The Bush administration had hoped the military commissions’ proceedings for Mr Hamdan and Mr Khadr would put an end to the years of legal wrangling that have plagued the system created after the US invasion of Afghanistan. Congress in 2006 approved the commissions to try prisoners after the Supreme Court ruled that the initial military tribunals created by the Bush administration breached US law and the Geneva Conventions. [Military Commissions Act of 2006]
Colonel Peter Brownback, the military judge presiding over the Khadr case, ruled that Congress intended that the commissions could only consider the cases of "unlawful enemy combatants". [...] ”The dismissal of charges against Khadr is further evidence that this jury-rigged system is incapable of delivering justice,” said Priti Patel, a Human Rights First lawyer who observed the proceedings at Guantanamo. "If the US has evidence that Khadr or any other detainee committed war crimes, it should prosecute them either in the tried and true military justice system or, where appropriate, the criminal justice system," she said. [...]
The decisions do not mean that the two detainees will be released. The Pentagon argues that it can hold them indefinitely as ”enemy combatants" in the so-called ”war on terror”.
The American Civil Liberties Union sued a San Jose company Wednesday for allegedly providing Central Intelligence Agency transportation services for three terrorism suspects who were tortured under the U.S. government's "extraordinary rendition program." CBS 5 first reported Tuesday on the anticipated lawsuit againt Jeppesen International Trip Planning involving claims that the company organized secret flights, on behalf of the CIA, to countries that practice torture.
The ACLU lawsuit involves the alleged m