Category Archives: rendition

Grave injustice: Maher Arar and unaccountable America

At Middle East Report Online, Lisa Hajjar writes:

On June 14, the Supreme Court buried the prospect of justice for Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen of Syrian origin who was “extraordinarily rendered” by the United States (via Jordan) to Syria in 2002. Arar was suing the US officials who authorized his secret transfer, without charge, to a country infamous for torture. With the justices’ 22-word statement, the case of Arar v. Ashcroft exited the American legal system and entered the annals of American legal history under the category “grave injustice.” Alphabetically, Arar precedes Dred Scott v. Sanford, which upheld slavery, and Korematsu v. United States, which upheld the internment of Japanese Americans. In this case, however, the grave is literal: Arar spent ten months of his year in Syrian custody confined in what he describes as “an underground grave.”

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Whatever happened to the CIA’s black sites?

Whatever happened to the CIA’s black sites?
By David Corn, Mother Jones, November 24, 2009

Whatever happened to the so-called “black sites,” where suspected terrorists were held overseas by the CIA and submitted to harsh interrogations that included torture? On April 9, CIA chief Leon Panetta issued a statement notifying CIA employees that the agency “no longer operates detention facilities or black sites”—which were effectively shut down in the fall of 2006—”and has proposed a plan to decommission the remaining sites.” In the months since then, lawyers for several terrorism suspects have been trying to determine the status of these sites, as they seek evidence for their cases. But the US government has refused to disclose anything about what it has done with these facilities.

In his statement, Panetta noted, “I have directed our Agency personnel to take charge of the decommissioning process and have further directed that the contracts for site security be promptly terminated.” (He added that the suspension of these private security contracts would save the agency up to $4 million.) Though Panetta’s order might have seemed like good news to civil libertarians and critics of the Bush-Cheney administration’s detention policies, lawyers for several detainees who had been held in such sites immediately worried about one thing: “We thought they would be destroying further evidence,” says George Brent Mickum IV, a lawyer for Abu Zubaydah, a captured terrorism suspect whom President George W. Bush described (probably errantly) as “one of the top three leaders” of al Qaeda. (In 2007, the CIA disclosed that it had destroyed videotapes of interrogations of Zubaydah, who was waterboarded 83 times.) [continued…]

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CIA detainees again an issue in Lithuania

CIA detainees again an issue in Lithuania
By Craig Whitlock, Washington Post, November 20, 2009

Twice in the past three years, the Lithuanian Parliament investigated reports that the CIA secretly imprisoned al-Qaeda leaders in this Baltic country. Both times, legislators concluded that there was no evidence.

Now the Parliament is investigating a third time, and it is looking a little harder. Fresh reports of covert CIA flights carrying prisoners from Afghanistan to Lithuania, as well as the revelation that U.S. contractors built a high-security complex at the edge of a forest near Vilnius, have added to the suspicions.

Many Lithuanian officials said they remain unconvinced that their country’s secret services allowed the CIA to detain international terrorists. A few legislators blame Russia and other outside interests for inventing the allegations in an attempt to besmirch Lithuania’s reputation.

But increasingly, after years of issuing denials, Lithuania’s leaders are no longer ruling out the possibility that the CIA operated a secret prison in this northern European country of 3.5 million people, and that its government will have to deal with the fallout. [continued…]

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CIA secret ‘torture’ prison found at fancy horseback riding academy

CIA secret ‘torture’ prison found at fancy horseback riding academy
By Brian Ross and Matthew Cole, ABC News, November 18, 2009

The CIA built one of its secret European prisons inside an exclusive riding academy outside Vilnius, Lithuania, a current Lithuanian government official and a former U.S. intelligence official told ABC News this week.

Where affluent Lithuanians once rode show horses and sipped coffee at a café, the CIA installed a concrete structure where it could use harsh tactics to interrogate up to eight suspected al-Qaeda terrorists at a time.

“The activities in that prison were illegal,” said human rights researcher John Sifton. “They included various forms of torture, including sleep deprivation, forced standing, painful stress positions.”

Lithuanian officials provided ABC News with the documents of what they called a CIA front company, Elite, LLC, which purchased the property and built the “black site” in 2004. [continued…]

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Italy convicts 23 Americans for CIA renditions

Italy convicts 23 Americans for CIA renditions
By Rachel Donadio, New York Times, November 5, 2009

In a landmark ruling, an Italian judge on Wednesday convicted a base chief for the Central Intelligence Agency and 22 other Americans, almost all C.I.A. operatives, of kidnapping a Muslim cleric from the streets of Milan in 2003.

The case was a huge symbolic victory for Italian prosecutors, who drew the first convictions involving the American practice of rendition, in which terrorism suspects are captured in one country and taken for questioning in another, often one more open to coercive interrogation techniques.

Critics of the Bush administration have long hailed the case as a repudiation of the tactics it used to fight terrorism. And the fact that Italy would actually convict intelligence agents of an allied country was seen as a bold move that could set a precedent in other cases. [continued…]

Convicted CIA spy says “we broke the law”
By Matthew Cole Avni Patel and Brian Ross, ABC News, November 4, 2009

One of the 23 Americans convicted today by an Italian court says the United States “broke the law” in the CIA kidnapping of a Muslim cleric Abu Omar in Milan in 2003.

“And we are paying for the mistakes right now, whoever authorized and approved this,” said former CIA officer Sabrina deSousa in an interview to be broadcast tonight on ABC’s World News with Charles Gibson.

DeSousa says the U.S. “abandoned and betrayed” her and the others who were put on trial for the kidnapping. She was sentenced in absentia to five years in prison. [continued…]

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Is Bagram Obama’s new secret prison?

Is Bagram Obama’s new secret prison?
By Andy Worthington, Antiwar.com, September 16, 2009

On Monday, one day after the New York Times and the Washington Post reported that the Obama administration was planning to introduce tribunals for the prisoners held in the U.S. prison at Bagram airbase, Afghanistan, the reason for the specifically timed leaks that led to the publication of the stories became clear.

The government was hoping that offering tribunals to evaluate the prisoners’ status would perform a useful PR function, making the administration appear to be granting important rights to the 600 or so prisoners held in Bagram, and distracting attention from the real reason for its purported generosity: a 76-page brief to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia [.pdf], submitted yesterday, in which the government attempted to claim that “Habeas rights under the United States Constitution do not extend to enemy aliens detained in the active war zone at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan.”

The main reason for this brazen attempt to secure a PR victory before the appeal was filed is blindingly obvious to anyone who has been studying the Bagram litigation over the last five months. In April, Judge John D. Bates ruled that three foreign prisoners seized in other countries and “rendered” to Bagram, where they have been held for up to six years, had the right to challenge the basis of their detention in U.S. courts. [continued…]

Obama supports extending Patriot Act provisions
AP, September 15, 2009

The Obama administration supports extending three key provisions of the Patriot Act that are due to expire at the end of the year, the Justice Department told Congress in a letter made public Tuesday.

Lawmakers and civil rights groups had been pressing the Democratic administration to say whether it wants to preserve the post-Sept. 11 law’s authority to access business records, as well as monitor so-called “lone wolf” terrorists and conduct roving wiretaps.

The provision on business records was long criticized by rights groups as giving the government access to citizens’ library records, and a coalition of liberal and conservative groups complained that the Patriot Act gives the government too much authority to snoop into Americans’ private lives. [continued…]

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U.S. tried to soften treaty on detainees

U.S. tried to soften treaty on detainees
By R. Jeffrey Smith, Washington Post, September 8, 2009

From 2003 to 2006, the Bush administration quietly tried to relax the draft language of a treaty meant to bar and punish “enforced disappearances” so that those overseeing the CIA’s secret prison system would not be criminally prosecuted under its provisions, according to former officials and hundreds of pages of documents recently declassified by the State Department.

The aim of the global treaty, long supported by the United States, was to end official kidnappings, detentions and killings like those that plagued Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, and that allegedly still occur in Russia, China, Iran, Colombia, Sri Lanka and elsewhere. But the documents suggest that initial U.S. support for the negotiations collided head-on with the then-undisclosed goal of seizing suspected terrorists anywhere in the world for questioning by CIA interrogators or indefinite detention by the U.S. military at foreign sites.

Instead of embracing a far-reaching ban on arrests, detentions and abductions of people without disclosing their fate or whereabouts or ensuring “the protection of the law,” the United States pressed in 2004 for a more limited prohibition on intentionally placing detainees outside legal protections for “a prolonged period of time.” At the time, the CIA was secretly holding about a dozen prisoners. [continued…]

The complicit general
By Philippe Sands, New York Review of Books, September 24, 2009

With regard to the interrogation of detainees after September 11, it is well established that the path to torture was based on three key decisions. First, on February 7, 2002, President Bush decided that none of the detainees held at Guantánamo would have any legal rights under the Geneva Conventions. Second, starting in July 2002 the administration decided to authorize the use of waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” against certain detainees held by the CIA, and obtained legal approval from the Department of Justice, in the form of two now notorious memos signed by Jay Bybee and largely written by John Yoo, with input from Dick Cheney’s legal counsel, David Addington.[1] Third, on December 2, 2002, came Secretary Rumsfeld’s memo approving the use of fifteen techniques on prisoners held by the military at Guantánamo, causing the military to adopt some of the interrogation practices used by the CIA. Each decision was significant. The cumulative effect was devastating, opening the path to the abuses at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. [continued…]

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New CIA docs detail brutal “extraordinary rendition” process

New CIA docs detail brutal “extraordinary rendition” process
By Scott Horton, Huffington Post, August 28, 2009

Deep among the documents released to the ACLU on Monday afternoon was a curious memo dated 30 December 2004 and directed to Dan Levin, then acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. The fax cover sheet has a brief note, “Dan, a generic description of the process.” The name of the sender, based at the CIA, has been obliterated. You can view the document here.

The document provides a step-by-step manual for extraordinary renditions.

The process starts with “capture shock.” The detainee is subject to a medical examination prior to his flight. During the flight, the detainee is securely shackled, and is deprived of sight and sound through the use of blindfolds, earmuffs and hoods. [continued…]

ACLU lawyers mine documents for truth
By Scott Shane, New York Times, August 30, 2009

In the spring of 2003, long before Abu Ghraib or secret prisons became part of the American vocabulary, a pair of recently hired lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union noticed a handful of news reports about allegations of abuse of prisoners in American custody.

The lawyers, Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh, wondered: Was there a broader pattern of abuse, and could a Freedom of Information Act request uncover it? Some of their colleagues, more experienced with the frustrations of such document demands, were skeptical. One made a tongue-in-cheek offer of $1 for every page they turned up.

Six years later, the detention document request and subsequent lawsuit are among the most successful in the history of public disclosure, with 130,000 pages of previously secret documents released to date and the prospect of more. [continued…]

Blackwater founder accused in court of intent to kill
By Jerry Markon, Washington Post, August 29, 2009

The founder of Blackwater USA deliberately caused the deaths of innocent civilians in a series of shootings in Iraq, attorneys for Iraqis suing the security contractor told a federal judge Friday.

The attorneys singled out Erik Prince, a former Navy SEAL who is the company’s owner, for blame in the deaths of more than 20 Iraqis between 2005 and 2007. Six former Blackwater guards were criminally charged in 14 of the shootings, and family members and victims’ estates sued Prince, Blackwater (now called Xe Services LLC) and a group of related companies.

“The person responsible for these deaths is Mr. Prince,” Susan L. Burke, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said in U.S. District Court in Alexandria. “He had the intent, he provided the weapons, he provided the instructions, and they were done by his agents and they were war crimes.” [continued…]

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Baghram isn’t the new Guantanamo, it’s the old Guantanamo

Baghram isn’t the new Guantanamo, it’s the old Guantanamo
By Andy Worthington, Huffington Post, August 15, 2009

Back in September 2005, when I first began researching Guantánamo for my book The Guantánamo Files, the prison was still shrouded in mystery, even though attorneys had been visiting prisoners for nearly a year, following the Supreme Court’s ruling, in June 2004, that they had habeas corpus rights. Researchers at the Washington Post and at Cageprisoners, a human rights organization in the U.K., had compiled tentative lists of who was being held, but, although these efforts were commendable, much of it was little more than groping in the dark — a broken jigsaw puzzle based on media reports and interviews with released prisoners — because the Bush administration refused to provide details of the names and nationalities of those it was holding.

In April 2006 — four years and three months after Guantánamo opened — the government finally conceded defeat, after the Associated Press took the Pentagon to court, and won. That month, the first ever list of prisoners (PDF) — containing the names and nationalities of the 558 prisoners who had been subjected to the administration’s Combatant Status Review Tribunals (one-sided reviews, designed to rubberstamp their prior designation as “enemy combatants”) — was released, and was followed in May by a list of the 759 prisoners held up to that point (including the 201 who had been released before the tribunals began), which included names, nationalities, and, where known, dates of birth and places of birth (PDF).

The government also released 8,000 pages of tribunal transcripts and allegations against the prisoners, which pierced the veil of secrecy still further, allowing outside observers, as well as lawyers, the opportunity to examine whether the government’s claims that the prison was full of terrorists were true, and to conclude that, actually, the prison was largely populated by innocent men or low-level Taliban foot soldiers, recruited to fight an inter-Muslim civil war that began long before the 9/11 attacks, and had nothing to do with al-Qaeda or international terrorism. [continued…]

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A window into CIA’s embrace of secret jails

A window into CIA’s embrace of secret jails
By David Johnston and Mark Mazzetti, New York Times, August 13, 2009

In March 2003, two C.I.A. officials surprised Kyle D. Foggo, then the chief of the agency’s main European supply base, with an unusual request. They wanted his help building secret prisons to hold some of the world’s most threatening terrorists.

Mr. Foggo, nicknamed Dusty, was known inside the agency as a cigar-waving, bourbon-drinking operator, someone who could get a cargo plane flying anywhere in the world or quickly obtain weapons, food, money — whatever the C.I.A. needed. His unit in Frankfurt, Germany, was strained by the spy agency’s operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, but Mr. Foggo agreed to the assignment.

“It was too sensitive to be handled by headquarters,” he said in an interview. “I was proud to help my nation.”

With that, Mr. Foggo went on to oversee construction of three detention centers, each built to house about a half-dozen detainees, according to former intelligence officials and others briefed on the matter. One jail was a renovated building on a busy street in Bucharest, Romania, the officials disclosed. Another was a steel-beam structure at a remote site in Morocco that was apparently never used. The third, another remodeling project, was outside another former Eastern bloc city. They were designed to appear identical, so prisoners would be disoriented and not know where they were if they were shuttled back and forth. They were kept in isolated cells. [continued…]

Interrogator: ‘intolerance’ led to torture
By Jeff Stein, CQ, August 11, 2009

Former Air Force Maj. Matthew Alexander, whose questioning of a captured terrorist led to the elimination al Qaeda’s top man in Iraq, said a pervasive “intolerance” of Arabs and Muslims among American interrogators led to abuses at Abu Ghraib and other prisons.

“Soldiers referred to them as rag heads and so on,” Alexander said during a Monday talk at the International Spy Museum, in Washington, D.C. to promote his book, “How To Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq.”

“They had read things like ‘The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam,’ which characterizes its practitioners as potential terrorists, he added.

An Air Force criminal investigator for over a decade before being assigned to Iraq in March 2006, Alexander was careful not to characterize all, or even most, interrogators as bigots, although he said, “it was not just a few bad apples” who tortured prisoners.

“It was not a majority of interrogators. If I had to guess, maybe 20 per cent,” he told a packed room at the International Spy Museum, which opened its doors in July 2002.

“A small minority with a lot of power” at the top of the chain of command was responsible for fostering at atmosphere in which abuses could flourish, he said. [continued…]

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Target of Obama-era rendition alleges torture

Target of Obama-era rendition alleges torture
By Scott Horton, Huffington Post, August 11, 2009

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama sharply criticized the Bush Administration’s extraordinary renditions program. “To build a better, freer world, we must first behave in ways that reflect the decency and aspirations of the American people,” he wrote in Foreign Affairs. “This means ending the practice of shipping away prisoners in the dead of night to be tortured in far-off countries, of detaining thousands without charge or trial, of maintaining a network of secret prisons to jail people beyond the reach of law.” But Obama was consistently careful never to commit to ending the practice of rendition entirely. When the issue flared shortly after his inauguration, senior administration officials were quick to say that abuses including torture would end, but that “ordinary” renditions – the spiriting away of suspects from other countries without going through the formal process of extradition — would be continued in a cleaned-up form. Now in a federal court in suburban Washington, a case is unfolding that gives us a practical sense of what an Obama-era rendition looks like.

Raymond Azar, a 45-year-old Lebanese construction manager with a grade school education, is employed by Sima International, a Lebanon-based contractor that does work for the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also has the unlikely distinction of being the first target of a rendition carried out on the Obama watch.

According to court papers, on April 7, 2009, Azar and a Lebanese-American colleague, Dinorah Cobos, were seized by “at least eight” heavily armed FBI agents in Kabul, Afghanistan, where they had traveled for a meeting to discuss the status of one of his company’s U.S. government contracts. The trip ended with Azar alighting in manacles from a Gulfstream V executive jet in Manassas, Virginia, where he was formally arrested and charged in a federal antitrust probe.

This rendition involved no black sites and was clearly driven by a desire to get the target quickly before a court. Also unlike renditions of the Bush-era, the target wasn’t even a terror suspect; rather, he was suspected of fraud. But in a troubling intimation of the last administration, accusations of torture hover menacingly over the case. According to papers filed by his lawyers, Azar was threatened, subjected to coercive interrogation techniques and induced to sign a confession. Azar claims he was hooded, stripped naked (while being photographed) and subjected to a “body cavity search.”

On a ride to the infamous Bagram air base in Afghanistan — site of the torture-homicides involving U.S. interrogators exposed in the Oscar-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side — Azar contends that a federal agent pulled a photograph of Azar’s wife and four children from his wallet. Confess that you were bribing the contract officer, the agent allegedly said, or you may “never see them again.” Azar told his lawyers he interpreted that as a threat to do physical harm to his family. [continued…]

2 U.S. architects of harsh tactics in 9/11’s wake
By Scott Shane, New York Times, August 12, 2009

Col. Steven M. Kleinman, an Air Force interrogator and intelligence officer who knows Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen, said he thought loyalty to their country in the panicky wake of the Sept. 11 attacks prompted their excursion into interrogation. He said the result was a tragedy for the country, and for them.

“I feel their primary motivation was they thought they had skills and insights that would make the nation safer,” Colonel Kleinman said. “But good persons in extreme circumstances can do horrific things.”

For the C.I.A., as well as for the gray-goateed Dr. Mitchell, 58, and the trim, dark-haired Dr. Jessen, 60, the change in administrations has been neck-snapping. For years, President George W. Bush declared the interrogation program lawful and praised it for stopping attacks. Mr. Obama, by contrast, asserted that its brutality rallied recruits for Al Qaeda; called one of the methods, waterboarding, torture; and, in his first visit to the C.I.A., suggested that the interrogation program was among the agency’s “mistakes.”

The psychologists’ subsequent fall from official grace has been as swift as their rise in 2002. Today the offices of Mitchell Jessen and Associates, the lucrative business they operated from a handsome century-old building in downtown Spokane, Wash., sit empty, its C.I.A. contracts abruptly terminated last spring. [continued…]

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Obama faces court test over detainee

Obama faces court test over detainee
By William Glaberson, New York Times, July 29, 2009

The fate of one of the youngest detainees at the Guantánamo Bay prison is emerging as a major test of whether the courts or the president has the final authority over when prisoners there are released.

After a federal judge said earlier this month that the government’s case for holding the detainee, Mohammed Jawad, was “riddled with holes,” the Obama administration conceded defeat and agreed that Mr. Jawad would no longer be considered a military detainee. But the administration said it would still hold him at the prison in Cuba for possible prosecution in the United States.

On Tuesday, Mr. Jawad’s lawyers attacked that position, arguing that the government had given up any authority to hold him. “Enough is enough,” the lawyers said in legal papers that urged the judge, Ellen Segal Huvelle, to send him back to Afghanistan, which has requested his return. [continued…]

Arrests in terror case bewilder associates
By Campbell Robertson, New York Times, July 29, 2009

Daniel Boyd was a man of rare conviction for these parts.

Rare because he and his family were Muslims in this quiet rural subdivision where the denominations generally run from Baptist to Presbyterian. But also rare for his intensity.

“How many Christians you see standing in the yard praying five times a day?” asked Jeremy Kuhn, 20, who lives across the street. “They just believed more than anyone else.”

But to the disbelief of Mr. Kuhn, the federal authorities say Mr. Boyd and two of his sons took their convictions beyond religious faith and into terrorism. They were among seven men charged on Monday with supporting violent jihad movements in countries including Israel, Jordan, Kosovo and Pakistan. An eighth man was still being sought, said a spokeswoman for federal prosecutors in Raleigh, about 20 miles north of here.

The men are charged with stockpiling automatic weapons and traveling abroad numerous times to participate in jihadist movements. There is no indication in the indictment that they were planning attacks in the United States, though prosecutors said they had practiced military tactics this summer in a rural county close to Virginia. [continued…]

Britain’s own Guantánamo
By David Vine, The Guardian, July 28, 2009

Piece by piece, the truth is finally coming out about Britain’s own Guantánamo Bay – Diego Garcia. Today the human rights lawyers group Reprieve began a legal case on behalf of Saad Iqbal Madni, who they say was transited through the UK-controlled Indian Ocean island as part of the CIA’s secret rendition programme.

Madni, whom Reprieve says was tortured in Egypt, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay after his stopover in Diego Garcia, has been released in Pakistan where – according to Clive Stafford Smith, the Reprieve director – he is “effectively crippled by his torture”.

For more than six years following the declaration of a war on terror in 2001, British and US officials adamantly rejected the existence of a rendition facility or secret CIA prison on the island, the site of a major British-American military base since the 1970s and long off-limits to civilians, reporters, and investigators. Dismissing reports about detainees on the atoll as “totally without foundation”, Britain’s then foreign secretary, Jack Straw, asserted: “United States authorities have repeatedly assured us that no detainees have at any time passed in transit through Diego Garcia or its territorial waters or have disembarked there.”

However, allegations kept accumulating. [continued…]

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NEWS & VIEWS ROUNDUP & EDITOR’S COMMENTS: May 15

The truth about Richard Bruce Cheney
By Col. Lawrence B. Wilkerson, The Washington Note, May 13, 2009

My investigations have revealed to me — vividly and clearly — that once the Abu Ghraib photographs were made public in the Spring of 2004, the CIA, its contractors, and everyone else involved in administering “the Cheney methods of interrogation”, simply shut down. Nada. Nothing. No torture or harsh techniques were employed by any U.S. interrogator. Period. People were too frightened by what might happen to them if they continued.

What I am saying is that no torture or harsh interrogation techniques were employed by any U.S. interrogator for the entire second term of Cheney-Bush, 2005-2009. So, if we are to believe the protestations of Dick Cheney, that Obama’s having shut down the “Cheney interrogation methods” will endanger the nation, what are we to say to Dick Cheney for having endangered the nation for the last four years of his vice presidency?

Likewise, what I have learned is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002–well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion–its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa’ida.

So furious was this effort that on one particular detainee, even when the interrogation team had reported to Cheney’s office that their detainee “was compliant” (meaning the team recommended no more torture), the VP’s office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods. The detainee had not revealed any al-Qa’ida-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, “revealed” such contacts. Of course later we learned that al-Libi revealed these contacts only to get the torture to stop.

There in fact were no such contacts. (Incidentally, al-Libi just “committed suicide” in Libya. Interestingly, several U.S. lawyers working with tortured detainees were attempting to get the Libyan government to allow them to interview al-Libi….) [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — Conspiracy is notoriously difficult to prove, but can we go at least this far: Dick Cheney, the CIA and Libya all had a mutual interest in Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi’s death. Might a mutual interest have gone as far as a mutual understanding? Might the former vice president have ever so discreetly let it be known that Libi’s sudden demise could send out a useful message to anyone else with a loose tongue?

Death in Libya, betrayal in the west
By Andy Worthington, The Guardian, May 15, 2009

News of the death, in a Libyan jail, of Ibn al-Shaikh al-Libi, a US terror suspect who was the subject of an extraordinary rendition, then tortured in Egypt and Jordan as well as CIA prisons in Afghanistan and Poland has, understandably, raised questions about whether he committed suicide – as the Libyan authorities claimed – or whether he was murdered. Just two weeks ago, representatives of Human Rights Watch saw him in Tripoli’s Abu Salim prison, and although he refused to speak to them, they reported that he “looked well.”

Al-Libi’s death should also raise uncomfortable questions for former US vice-president Dick Cheney, who is still turning up with alarming regularity on US television, peddling his claims that the use of torture saved America from further terrorist attacks. The focus on al-Libi should be a stark reminder that, when he was rendered to Egypt in early 2002, the CIA’s proxy torturers extracted a false confession from him – that al-Qaida operatives had received training from Saddam Hussein in the use of chemical and biological weapons – which was used not to protect the US from attack, but to justify the invasion of Iraq. The claim featured prominently in secretary of state Colin Powell’s presentation to the UN, just a month before the invasion began.

However, beyond the story of al-Libi’s mysterious death and of Dick Cheney’s role in torturing him to launch an illegal war – as documented by Moazzam Begg earlier this week – another disturbing aspect of America’s cosy relationship with Colonel Gaddafi, in the war on terror emerged in Human Rights Watch’s press release about al-Libi’s death. The organisation noted that its researchers had interviewed four other prisoners also rendered to Libya by the CIA, who reported that they had been tortured – by or on behalf of US forces – in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Thailand. [continued…]

Graham: CIA gave me false information about interrogation briefings
By Sam Stein, Huffington Post, May 14, 2009

In testimony that could bolster Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s claim that the CIA misled her during briefings on detainee interrogations, former Senator Bob Graham insisted on Thursday that he too was kept in the dark about the use of waterboarding, and called the agency’s records on these briefings “suspect.”

In an interview with the Huffington Post, the former Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman said that approximately a month ago, the CIA provided him with false information about how many times and when he was briefed on enhanced interrogations. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — The CIA is immensely concerned about its image. It doesn’t want to appear to be a den of rogues. It wants to be seen as a bastion of upright patriots, but please, let’s get real.

What’s the appeal of joining an intelligence agency? Does the CIA find its recruits among those who believe in transparency in government; in full accountability and strict compliance with the law? Or is it looking for those drawn by the adventure of crossing boundaries, taking risks and avoiding getting caught? To be blunt, does intelligence work not actually appeal to a certain kind of grandiose criminality?

Soufan: CIA torture actually hindered our intelligence gathering
By Mark Benjamin, Salon, May 14, 2009

“Within the first hour of interrogation,” Soufan said, “we gained actionable intelligence.” Soufan could not say what that information was because it remains classified. Zubaydah had been injured during his capture, and Soufan’s team arranged for medical care and continued talking to the prisoner. Within the next few days, Soufan made one of the most significant intelligence breakthroughs of the so-called war on terror. He learned from Zubaydah that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the mastermind behind the attacks on 9/11.

Then, however, a CIA interrogation team from Washington led by a contractor arrived at the secret location. Zubaydah was stripped naked and the contractor began a series of coercive, abusive interrogations, based on Cold War-era communist techniques designed to elicit false confessions. During the Korean War, for example, Chinese interrogators employed the measures to get captured American pilots to make false confessions. “The new techniques did not produce results, as Abu Zubaydah shut down and stopped talking,” Soufan explained. “After a few days of getting no information, and after repeated inquiries from D.C. asking why all of a sudden no information was being transmitted … we again were given control of the interrogation.”

As Soufan and his team resumed their interrogation, Zubaydah revealed information about Jose Padilla, the alleged “dirty bomber.”

But after that, the CIA and the contractor again took over, using what Soufan called an “untested theory” that the Cold War techniques might work for getting good information. “Again, however, the technique wasn’t working,” Soufan recalled.

Soufan’s team was brought back yet again. “We found it harder to reengage him this time, because of how the techniques had affected him,” Soufan noted. “But eventually, we succeeded.”

A third time the CIA and the contractor team took over, using increasingly brutal methods. Soufan reported what he called “borderline torture” to his superiors in Washington. In protest of the abuse, former FBI Director Robert Mueller pulled Soufan out of the location. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — As Dick Cheney pursues his campaign to avoid criminal prosecution, it’s natural that he would want to frame the issue of so-called “enhanced interrogations” in terms of necessity and national security. At the same time, for Cheney and Bush the use of torture fits very comfortably into their general approach to politics. These are men who have neither an aptitude in the art of persuasion nor skill in outwitting their opponents. The way you win is through dominance and when necessary, crushing your opponent. The idea that interrogation might involve building a rapport with a terrorist suspect is something that would simply seem objectionable.

Cheney’s role deepens
By Robert Windrem, The Daily Beast, May 13, 2009

At the end of April 2003, not long after the fall of Baghdad, U.S. forces captured an Iraqi who Bush White House officials suspected might provide information of a relationship between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s regime. Muhammed Khudayr al-Dulaymi was the head of the M-14 section of Mukhabarat, one of Saddam’s secret police organizations. His responsibilities included chemical weapons and contacts with terrorist groups.

“To those who wanted or suspected a relationship, he would have been a guy who would know, so [White House officials] had particular interest,” Charles Duelfer, head of the Iraqi Survey Group and the man in charge of interrogations of Iraqi officials, told me. So much so that the officials, according to Duelfer, inquired how the interrogation was proceeding.

In his new book, Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq, and in an interview with The Daily Beast, Duelfer says he heard from “some in Washington at very senior levels (not in the CIA),” who thought Khudayr’s interrogation had been “too gentle” and suggested another route, one that they believed has proven effective elsewhere. “They asked if enhanced measures, such as waterboarding, should be used,” Duelfer writes. “The executive authorities addressing those measures made clear that such techniques could legally be applied only to terrorism cases, and our debriefings were not as yet terrorism-related. The debriefings were just debriefings, even for this creature.” [continued…]

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Obama is sounding like Bush

On state secrets, Obama is sounding like Bush
By John Schwartz, New York Times, February 10, 2009

In a closely watched case involving rendition and torture, a lawyer for the Obama administration seemed to surprise a panel of federal appeals judges on Monday by pressing ahead with an argument for preserving state secrets originally developed by the Bush administration.

In the case, Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian native, and four other detainees filed suit against a subsidiary of Boeing for arranging flights for the Bush administration’s “extraordinary rendition” program, in which terrorism suspects were secretly taken to other countries, where they say they were tortured. The Bush administration argued that the case should be dismissed because even discussing it in court could threaten national security and relations with other nations.

During the campaign, Mr. Obama harshly criticized the Bush administration’s treatment of detainees, and he has broken with that administration on questions like whether to keep open the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. But a government lawyer, Douglas N. Letter, made the same state-secrets argument on Monday, startling several judges on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

“Is there anything material that has happened” that might have caused the Justice Department to shift its views, asked Judge Mary M. Schroeder, an appointee of President Jimmy Carter, coyly referring to the recent election.

“No, your honor,” Mr. Letter replied.

Judge Schroeder asked, “The change in administration has no bearing?”

Once more, he said, “No, Your Honor.” The position he was taking in court on behalf of the government had been “thoroughly vetted with the appropriate officials within the new administration,” and “these are the authorized positions,” he said.

That produced an angry response from Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing the plaintiffs.

“This is not change,” he said in a statement. “This is definitely more of the same. Candidate Obama ran on a platform that would reform the abuse of state secrets, but President Obama’s Justice Department has disappointingly reneged on that important civil liberties issue. If this is a harbinger of things to come, it will be a long and arduous road to give us back an America we can be proud of again.”

A Justice Department spokesman, Matt Miller, said the government did not comment on pending litigation, but he seemed to suggest that Mr. Obama would invoke the privilege more sparingly than its predecessor.

“It is the policy of this administration to invoke the state secrets privilege only when necessary and in the most appropriate cases,” he said, adding that Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. had asked for a review of pending cases in which the government had previously asserted a state secret privilege.

“The attorney general has directed that senior Justice Department officials review all assertions of the state secrets privilege to ensure that the privilege is being invoked only in legally appropriate situations,” he said. “It is vital that we protect information that, if released, could jeopardize national security.”

The court papers describe horrific treatment in secret prisons. Mr. Mohamed claimed that during his detention in Morocco, “he was routinely beaten, suffering broken bones and, on occasion, loss of consciousness. His clothes were cut off with a scalpel and the same scalpel was then used to make incisions on his body, including his penis. A hot stinging liquid was then poured into open wounds on his penis where he had been cut. He was frequently threatened with rape, electrocution and death.”

Ben Wizner, a lawyer for the A.C.L.U., told the judges that many of the facts that the government is trying to keep secret are scarcely secret at all, since the administration’s rendition program and the particulars of many of the cases have been revealed in news reports and in the work of government investigations from around the world. “The only place in the world where these claims can’t be discussed,” Mr. Wizner said, “is in this courtroom.”

What the A.C.L.U. is asking, he said, is that the case be allowed to go forward, giving the courts a chance to decide, based on classified information revealed solely to the judge, what should be allowed to be discussed.

But Mr. Letter said that the lower court judge, James Ware, did receive classified information and came to the correct conclusion in dismissing the case last year. He urged the judges to pore over the same material, and predicted “you will understand precisely, as Judge Ware did, why this case can’t be litigated.”

In a related matter, Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, on Monday proposed the establishment of a “truth commission” to investigate the Bush administration’s treatment of detainees and other issues, like the firings of United States attorneys by the Justice Department. The commission, he said, could grant immunity to witnesses to explore the facts without the threat of criminal prosecution.

Obama fails his first test on civil liberties and accountability — resoundingly and disgracefully
By Glenn Greenwald, Salon, February 9, 2009

What this is clearly about is shielding the U.S. Government and Bush officials from any accountability. Worse, by keeping Bush’s secrecy architecture in place, it ensures that any future President — Obama or any other — can continue to operate behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy, with no transparency or accountability even for blatantly criminal acts. [continued…]

Leahy seeks ‘truth commission’ to investigate Bush administration
By Ariane de Vogue, ABC News, February 9, 2009

The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said the government should look into creating a “truth commission” to investigate the Bush administration’s Department of Justice.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said that such a commission, which would answer to both Congress and the executive branch, could probe Bush administration policies on torture, interrogation and surveillance and “get to the bottom of what happened” during the eight years the Bush administration grappled with the legal war on terror.

Leahy called his proposal a “middle ground” between those critics of the Bush administration seeking to prosecute officials, and others wishing to concentrate on the future as opposed to investigating the past. “We need to be able to read the page before we turn it,” said Leahy. [continued…]

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Torturing Democracy


Torturing Democracy, a major documentary film more than 18 months in the making, has been airing on individual public television stations around the US since October — although PBS has been reluctant to air it nationally.

The 90-minute film, from Emmy and DuPont awarding-winning producer Sherry Jones, relies on the documentary record to connect the dots in an investigation of interrogations of prisoners in U.S. custody that became “at a minimum, cruel and inhuman treatment and, at worst, torture,” in the words of the former general counsel of the United States Navy.

Up to date with the latest revelations, Torturing Democracy details how the government set aside the rule of law in its pursuit of harsh interrogations of suspected terrorists. It features in-depth interviews with numerous senior military and government officials.

Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage describes – for the first time on-camera – being waterboarded during military training before he was sent to Vietnam. When producer Jones asked Mr. Armitage if he considered waterboarding to be torture, he answered, “Absolutely. No question.” He added: “There is no question in my mind – there’s no question in any reasonable human being, that this is torture. I’m ashamed that we’re even having this discussion.”

Torturing Democracy can be viewed in three parts (part one, part two, part three).

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REVIEW: The Dark Side

Answering terror with terror
By Louis Bayard, Salon, July 15, 2008

We can’t say we weren’t warned.

The very first Sunday after the 9/11 attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney descended like a cloud on “Meet the Press” to outline the Bush administration’s response. “We’ll have to work sort of the dark side, if you will. We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies — if we are going to be successful. That’s the world these folks operate in. And, uh, so it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal basically, to achieve our objectives.”

Around the nation, one presumes, numbed heads were nodding in approval. Whatever it takes to get those bastards. The true nature of our Faustian bargain would not become clear until later, and maybe it needed a journalist as steely and tenacious as Jane Mayer to give us the full picture. “The Dark Side” is about how the war on terror became “a war on American ideals,” and Mayer gives this story all the weight and sorrow it deserves. Many books get tagged with the word “essential”; hers actually is.

Above all, it underscores one of the least remarked aspects of our nation’s counterterrorist policy: the degree to which it has been driven not by spies or generals but by pasty men in ties. “The first thing we do,” goes that crowd-pleasing line from Shakespeare’s “Henry VI,” “let’s kill all the lawyers.” Readers of “The Dark Side” might be moved to add: “Before they kill you.” Almost from the moment America was attacked, Mayer writes, Cheney “saw to it that some of the sharpest and best-trained lawyers in the country, working in secret in the White House and the United States Department of Justice, came up with legal justifications for a vast expansion of the government’s power in waging war on terror. As part of that process, for the first time in history, the United States sanctioned government officials to physically and psychologically torment U.S.-held captives, making torture the official law of the land in all but name.” This “extralegal counterterrorism program,” contends Mayer, “presented the most dramatic, sustained, and radical challenge to the rule of law in American history.” [complete article]

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NEWS & OPINION: The administration of torture

Picture of secret detentions emerges in Pakistan
By Carlotta Gall, New York Times, December 19, 2007

The director of the human rights commission, I. A. Rehman, said the government had set up a nearly invisible detention system. “There are safe houses in Islamabad where people are kept,” he said, citing accounts from the police and freed detainees. “Police have admitted this. Flats are taken on rent; property is seized; people are tortured there.”

In some cases, detainees recounted that they had been interrogated in the presence of English-speaking foreigners, who human rights officials and lawyers suspect are Americans.

A United States Embassy spokeswoman said she could not comment on the allegations and referred all questions to Washington. A spokesman for the Central Intelligence Agency, Mark Mansfield, declined to comment on Mr. Rehman’s accusations, or on any specific detainees.

One detainee, a Jordanian named Marwan Ibrahim, who was arrested in a raid in the city of Lahore, where he had been living for 10 years, said he was sent to a detention center in Afghanistan run by Americans, then to Jordan and Israel, and was finally released in Gaza, according to an account Mr. Ibrahim gave to Human Rights Watch, another independent group.

Another detainee, Majid Khan, 27, a Pakistani computer engineer who disappeared from Karachi four years ago, surfaced April 15 this year before a military tribunal in Guantánamo Bay. His American lawyers say he was subjected to torture in C.I.A. detention in a secret location. Mr. Mansfield, the C.I.A. spokesman, declined to comment, except to say that the “C.I.A.’s terrorist interrogation effort has always been small, carefully run, lawful, and highly productive.” [complete article]

FBI, CIA debate significance of terror suspect
By Dan Eggen and Walter Pincus, Washington Post, December 18, 2007

According to Kiriakou’s account, which he said is based on detailed descriptions by fellow team members, Abu Zubaida broke after just 35 seconds of waterboarding, which involved stretching cellophane over his mouth and nose and pouring water on his face to create the sensation of drowning.

But other former and current officials disagreed that Abu Zubaida’s cooperation came quickly under harsh interrogation or that it was the result of a single waterboarding session. Instead, these officials said, harsh tactics used on him at a secret detention facility in Thailand went on for weeks or, depending on the account, even months.

The videotaping of Abu Zubaida in 2002 went on day and night throughout his interrogation, including waterboarding, and while he was sleeping in his cell, intelligence officials said. “Several hundred hours” of videotapes were destroyed in November 2005, a senior intelligence officer said. The CIA has said it ceased waterboarding in 2003. [complete article]

Former U.S. interrogator recounts torture cases in Afghanistan and Iraq
El Mundo (via Informed Comment), December 10, 2007

But Bagram has an underworld in which the CIA tortures the leaders of Al-Qa’idah. “One day I went to an interrogation session and as soon as I arrived I knew that it was not a normal case. There were civilians, among them a doctor and a psychiatrist. The prisoner was called Omar al-Faruq, an Al-Qa’idah leader in Asia who had been brought to the prison by one of those agencies”, recalls Corsetti. “I don’t want to go into details because it could be very negative for my country, but he was brutally beaten – daily. And tortured by other methods. He was a bad man, but he didn’t deserve that”. Al-Faruq escaped from Bagram in action which, according to some, was tolerated by the USA and was killed in April 2006 by the British in the Iraqi city of Basra.

Corsetti says that he never took part in the torture. “My sole job was to sit there and make sure the prisoner didn’t die. But there were several times when I thought they were about to die, when they were interrogated by those people who have no name and who work for no-one in particular. It’s incredible what a human being can take”. A resistance similar to that of the memory of those torture sessions. Because Corsetti, a veteran of two wars, says: “I have seen people die in combat. I shot at people. That is not as bad as seeing someone tortured. Al-Faruq looked at me while they tortured him and I have that look in my head. And the cries, the smells, the sounds, they are with me all the time. It is something I can’t take in. The cries of the prisoners calling for their relatives, their mother. I remember one who called for God, for Allah, all the time. I have those cries here, inside my head”.

“In Abu-Ghurayb and Bagram they were tortured to make them suffer, not to get information out of them”. And the fact is that at times the torture had no other goal that “to punish them for being terrorists. They tortured them and didn’t ask them anything”. That is the case of the practice known as “the submarine”: to simulate the drowning of the prisoner. “They have them hooded and they pour water on them. That makes it very difficult to breath. I think you can’t die with the submarine. I certainly never saw anyone die. However, they do cough like crazy because they are totally submerged in water and that gets on their lungs. Perhaps what it can give you is serious pneumonia”. The civilians who took part in the interrogations used the submarine whenever they wanted. They gave it to them for five or 10 minutes and didn’t ask anything”. [complete article]

The president’s coming-out party
By Scott Horton, Harper’s, December 15, 2007

The Justice Department has announced an “initial probe” into the destruction of the CIA torture tapes. There is no credible basis upon which this can be viewed as anything other than a conscious crime. The tapes were destroyed, even according to sources within the CIA, because of imminent fear that they would constitute evidence in a criminal prosecution of persons involved in the acts of torture. And even beyond this more general concern, they were destroyed so they would not be turned over to a federal judge who was demanding them. They were destroyed to protect a series of false official statements about the way individual prisoners, whose statements would be used in evidence, were in fact being treated.

Remember, in these trials, a defendant can seek to exclude evidence if it was secured through torture. But the defendant has an obligation to prove this contention. The tapes would have provided such proof. Destroying them would therefore help make the evidence admissible.

Note also, no one has ever even raised the possibility that the destruction was inadvertent or accidental.

All that being said, we should ask: why do we need an “initial assessment”? Things couldn’t possibly be more clear. It is as if Julius Caesar was stabbed to death on the floor of the senate with a hundred onlookers, and now the Justice Department wants to weigh carefully whether there is evidence sufficient to justify a homicide investigation. [complete article]

Congress defies Bush on CIA tape probe
By John Cochran, ABC News, December 17, 2007

House Intelligence Committee chairman Silvestre Reyes told ABC News today that he will ignore the Bush administration’s request to drop its investigation of why CIA interrogation tapes were destroyed.

“This is an administration that frankly does not have a good track record of policing itself,” Reyes said. “We intend to go forward and issue subpoenas next week because we are a whole equal branch of government.”

After telling Congress to get out of the way, the Justice Department took the highly unusual step of telling the same thing to a federal judge.

In 2005, Judge Henry Kennedy ordered the government not to destroy any evidence of mistreatment or torture at the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The Administration says that because the destroyed tapes were interrogations of two suspects in secret CIA prisons, not at Guantanamo, the judge should not interfere.

“This is becoming increasingly bizarre,” said Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington University Law School. “The Justice Department insists it will essentially investigate itself and then tells the court that because it is investigating itself it won’t turn over evidence of its possible criminal misconduct. It’s so circular, it’s maddening.” [complete article]

See also, Yemeni man imprisoned at CIA “black sites” tells his story of kidnapping and torture (Democracy Now) and Negroponte warned CIA against destroying the torture tapes (TPM).

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NEWS, OPINION & EDITOR’S COMMENT: America has abandoned the rule of law

Jordan’s spy agency: holding cell for the CIA
By Craig Whitlock, Washington Post, December 1, 2007

Over the past seven years, an imposing building on the outskirts of this city has served as a secret holding cell for the CIA.

The building is the headquarters of the General Intelligence Department, Jordan’s powerful spy and security agency. Since 2000, at the CIA’s behest, at least 12 non-Jordanian terrorism suspects have been detained and interrogated here, according to documents and former prisoners, human rights advocates, defense lawyers and former U.S. officials.
[…]
Bush administration officials have said they do not hand over terrorism suspects to countries that are likely to abuse them. For several years, however, the State Department has cited widespread allegations of torture by Jordan’s security agencies in its annual report cards on human rights.

Independent monitors have become increasingly critical of Jordan’s record. Since 2006, the United Nations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have issued reports on abuses in Jordan, often singling out the General Intelligence Department.

Former prisoners have reported that their captors were expert in two practices in particular: falaqa, or beating suspects on the soles of their feet with a truncheon and then, often, forcing them to walk barefoot and bloodied across a salt-covered floor; and farruj, or the “grilled chicken,” in which prisoners are handcuffed behind their legs, hung upside down by a rod placed behind their knees, and beaten. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — The White House has a page on its web site devoted to “Tales of Saddam’s Brutality.” There it refers to falaqa as Uday Hussein’s “favourite punishment.”

U.S. says it has right to kidnap British citizens
By David Leppard, The Sunday Times, December 2, 2007

America has told Britain that it can “kidnap” British citizens if they are wanted for crimes in the United States.

A senior lawyer for the American government has told the Court of Appeal in London that kidnapping foreign citizens is permissible under American law because the US Supreme Court has sanctioned it.

The admission will alarm the British business community after the case of the so-called NatWest Three, bankers who were extradited to America on fraud charges. More than a dozen other British executives, including senior managers at British Airways and BAE Systems, are under investigation by the US authorities and could face criminal charges in America. [complete article]

The torture compromise of 2007
By David Bromwich, Huffington Post, November 29, 2007

A friend at a dinner party on the East coast found herself in an argument in which she was the only person opposed to torture. The other invitees, all graduates of favored preparatory schools and Ivy League colleges, worked in the law, investment banking, urban planning and the arts. They agreed that President Bush was incompetent and untrustworthy; but his fundamental mistake about torture had been to go after the law. Torture, they said, cannot be a policy, and a law that permits torture cannot be on the books. What is wanted is a leader who will break the law selectively, in a way we can trust. Torture should be allowable, but only by the right people and for the right reason. To a man and woman, the guests who held this view were supporters of Hillary Clinton. [complete article]

The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act
By Philip Giraldi, Huffington Post, November 26, 2007

There has been a long tradition of fear-mongering legislation in the United States directed against groups and individuals believed to threaten the established order. The first such measures were the Alien and Sedition Acts passed by Congress in 1798 during the administration of the second president of the United States John Adams. The Acts, consisting of four separate laws, made it more difficult to become a citizen, sought to control real or imagined foreign agents operating in the United States, and also gave the government broad powers to control “sedition.” Sedition was defined as “resisting any law of the United States or any act of the President” punishable by a prison sentence of up to two years. It also made illegal “false, scandalous or malicious writing” directed against either the government or government officials. The next President, Thomas Jefferson declared that three out of the four laws were unconstitutional and pardoned everyone who had been convicted under them. [complete article]

Witness names to be withheld from detainee
By William Glaberson, New York Times, December 1, 2007

Defense lawyers preparing for the war crimes trial of a 21-year-old Guantánamo detainee have been ordered by a military judge not to tell their client — or anyone else — the identity of witnesses against him, newly released documents show.

The case of the detainee, Omar Ahmed Khadr, is being closely watched because it may be the first Guantánamo prosecution to go to trial, perhaps as soon as May.

Defense lawyers say military prosecutors have sought similar orders to keep the names of witnesses secret in other military commission cases, which have been a centerpiece of the Bush administration’s policies for detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Some legal experts and defense lawyers said the judge’s order, issued on Oct. 15 without public disclosure, underscored the gap between military commission procedures and traditional American rules that the accused has a right to a public trial and to confront the witnesses against him. [complete article]

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