Friday, August 15, 2008

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Gitmo Detainee’s Lawyer ‘Not Allowed To Tell Him’ He’s No Longer An ‘Enemy Combatant’»

Nearly two weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that detainees held at Guantánamo Bay have the right to habeas corpus and can thus challenge their detention in civilian courts, a U.S. Court of Appeals dealt another blow to the Bush administration’s detention policy.

The appeals court ruled that the Pentagon improperly designated Huzaifa Parhat, an ethnic Uighur Chinese national, an “enemy combatant” after being swept up by the U.S. military in Afghanistan in 2001 and then sent to Guantánamo Bay, where he has been held since.

Despite the ruling, Parhat has yet to see any of its benefits. In fact, he doesn’t even know about it. Parhat’s lawyer told CBC radio’s As It Happens last night that Parhat is currently being held in solitary confinement and “has no idea” the appeals court ruled in his favor because, he added, “I’m not allowed to tell him”:

DEREK STOFFEL, CBC HOST: Mr. Willett, what’s your client’s reaction to this ruling?

SABIN WILLETT (PARHAT’S LAWYER): Boy what a great question that is because my client doesn’t know about this ruling because I’m not allowed to tell him. […] He’s sitting in solitary confinement today. He has no idea what’s happened as far as I know.

Indeed, it is unclear what the appeals court’s ruling actually means for Parhat. The New York Times noted that the U.S. “said it will not return Uighur detainees to China because of concerns about their treatment at the hands of the Chinese government, which views them as terrorists.” Thus, as another one of Parhat’s lawyers noted, the “court victory may not mean freedom for him.”

For now, Willett said that “we’re going to file a motion with a judge to order them to let us call him on the phone and take him out of solitary confinement.” He added, “We’ve got a man in solitary confinement that they’ve got no authority to hold at all. Its unbelievable.”

Transcript:

DEREK STOFFEL, CBC HOST: Mr. Willett, what’s your client’s reaction to this ruling?

SABIN WILLETT (Parhat’s Lawyer): Boy what a great question that is because my client doesn’t know about this ruling because I’m not allowed to tell him.

STOFFEL: He doesn’t know?

WILLETT: We’ve asked — the first thing we did was ask the government for permission to make a phone call and they haven’t given it to us. Now we have a way to send him a letter that goes through clearence and we’ve sent it and maybe in three weeks he’ll get it.

He’s sitting in solitary confinement today. He has no idea what’s happened as far as I know.

STOFFEL: Well let me ask you then, what’s your reaction to this ruling?

WILLETT: Well I’m thrilled except for the constant vexation of the inablitiy to bring this thing to a real and human close. Huzaifa Parhat
has now been determined by about as conservative a court as there is not to be an enemy combatant — this is what we’ve been saying for years — and yet I can’t get him out of solitary confinement in the hands of my own government. So it is a frustrating but somewhat thrilling moment for us. […]

STOFFEL: I suppose the next thing you need to do is to let your client know what’s happened.

WILLETT: Thats what we’re trying to do. I mean, we’ve sent him a letter. We’re going to file a motion with a judge to order them to let us call him on the phone and take him out of solitary confinement. I mean we’ve got a man in solitary confinement that they’ve got no authority to hold at all. Its unbelievable. So we’ll be in court pretty soon, trying to get some more relief but it was a good day to get that notice.

Saturday, June 21, 2008

Report: Scalia’s Claim That Released Gitmo Prisoners Have Killed Americans Is An ‘Urban Legend’»

A new report from the Seton Hall University School of Law explodes the myth that some 30 detainees released from Guantanamo Bay prison have “returned to the battlefield” against American forces.

This conservative urban legend was recently parroted by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in his dissent from the Court’s Boumediene decision. Scalia wrote that granting habeas corpus rights to Gitmo detainees “will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed,” and supported this view by asserting that “at least 30 of those prisoners hitherto released from Guantanamo Bay have returned to the battlefield.”

The new Seton Hall report (pdf) states that “Justice Scalia’s claim of 30 recidivist detainees is belied by all reliable data” :

Despite being repeatedly debunked, this statement has been reflexively accepted as true by Members of Congress and much of the American public. Justice Scalia is only the most recent disseminator of an urban legend that refuses to die. […]

[Scalia’s] source was a year-old Senate Minority Report, which in turn was based on misinformation provided by the Department of Defense.

Justice Scalia’s reliance on these sources would have been more justifiable had the urban legend he perpetuated not been (one would have thought) permanently interred by later developments, including a 2007 Department of Defense Press Release and hearings before the House Foreign Relations Committee less than two weeks before Justice Scalia’s dissent was released.

Among the report’s conclusions:

– According to the Department of Defense’s published and unpublished data and reports, not a single released Guantánamo detainee has ever attacked any Americans.

– Despite national security concerns, the Department of Defense does not have a system for tracking the conduct or even the whereabouts of released detainees.

While there is little evidence that fighters interred at Guantanamo Bay — that is, those who were fighters before they got there — have attacked Americans, there is quite a bit of evidence that, for those falsely imprisoned there and for many young Muslims watching around the world, Guantanamo has a politically radicalizing effect. Maintaining Guantanamo and other illegal detention sites hurts America’s image abroad, and calls into question America’s support for human rights and the rule of law. There is no good argument against closing it down.

Friday, June 20, 2008

October trial set for Canadian at Guantanamo

GUANTANAMO BAY U.S. NAVAL BASE, Cuba (Reuters) - A young Canadian prisoner will go on trial before the Guantanamo prison camp's war crimes court on Oct. 8 on charges of murdering a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan, a judge said Thursday.

But Omar Khadr's trial date is "not set in stone" and is dependent on prosecutors turning over evidence as ordered, said the judge, Army Col. Patrick Parrish.

The trial date was set during a brief hearing at the U.S. naval base, marking the first time the Guantanamo court has convened since last week's U.S. Supreme Court ruling that the 270 Guantanamo prisoners have the right to contest their detention in the U.S. federal courts.

Khadr, 21, is charged with murdering U.S. Army Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Speer with a grenade during a firefight at a suspected al Qaeda compound in Afghanistan in 2002.

He was 15 when captured and is one of two Guantanamo detainees captured as juveniles and charged with crimes that carry a maximum penalty of life in prison.

The other, Afghan captive Mohammed Jawad, is accused of throwing a grenade into a U.S. military jeep at a bazaar in Kabul in December 2002, shortly after the United States invaded Afghanistan to oust al Qaeda and its Taliban protectors following the Sept. 11 attacks.

The explosion injured Army Sgt. 1st Class Michael Lyons, Army Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Martin and their Afghan interpreter, Assadullah Khan Omerk, the military charges said.

Jawad, now 23, is charged with attempted murder and causing great bodily harm, and appeared in another Guantanamo courtroom on Thursday.

Military defense lawyers have alleged that both Khadr and Jawad were abused at Guantanamo and have repeatedly complained that the government has refused to turn over evidence they need to prepare their cases.

Thursday, June 19, 2008

Taguba: ‘The current administration has committed war crimes’ and needs to ‘be held to account.’»

In the preface to a report by Physicians for Human Rights on the “medical evidence of torture by the U.S.,” former Abu Ghraib investigator ret. Army Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba writes that President Bush “authorized a systematic regime of torture” that has stained “our national honor.” Taguba, who first spoke out publicly in June 2007, bluntly accuses the Bush administration of committing war crimes:

After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.

The report found that medical examinations of 11 former detainees revealed “scars and other injuries consistent with their accounts of beatings, electric shocks, shackling and, in at least one case, sodomy.”

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Documents confirm U.S. hid detainees from Red Cross

WASHINGTON — The U.S. military hid the locations of suspected terrorist detainees and concealed harsh treatment to avoid the scrutiny of the International Committee of the Red Cross, according to documents that a Senate committee released Tuesday.

"We may need to curb the harsher operations while ICRC is around. It is better not to expose them to any controversial techniques," Lt. Col. Diane Beaver, a military lawyer who's since retired, said during an October 2002 meeting at the Guantanamo Bay prison to discuss employing interrogation techniques that some have equated with torture. Her comments were recorded in minutes of the meeting that were made public Tuesday. At that same meeting, Beaver also appeared to confirm that U.S. officials at another detention facility — Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan — were using sleep deprivation to "break" detainees well before then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld approved that technique. "True, but officially it is not happening," she is quoted as having said.

A third person at the meeting, Jonathan Fredman, the chief counsel for the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, disclosed that detainees were moved routinely to avoid the scrutiny of the ICRC, which keeps tabs on prisoners in conflicts around the world.

"In the past when the ICRC has made a big deal about certain detainees, the DOD (Defense Department) has 'moved' them away from the attention of the ICRC," Fredman said, according to the minutes.

The document, along with two dozen others, shows that top administration officials pushed relentlessly for tougher interrogation methods in the belief that terrorism suspects were resisting interrogation.

It's unclear from the documents whether the Pentagon moved the detainees from one place to another or merely told the ICRC they were no longer present at a facility.

Fredman of the CIA also appeared to be advocating the use of techniques harsher than those authorized by military field guides "If the detainee dies, you're doing it wrong," the minutes report Fredman saying at one point.

Beaver testified that she didn't recall making the comment about avoiding "harsher operations" while ICRC representatives were around, but she said she probably was referring to the need to conduct extended periods of interrogations of detainees without disruption.

The minutes of the Guantanamo meeting were among 25 documents released Tuesday by Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee and is leading a probe of the origins of cruel treatment of detainees in President Bush's "war on terrorism."

The administration overrode or ignored objections from all four military services and from criminal investigators, who warned that the practices would imperil their ability to prosecute the suspects. In one prophetic e-mail on Oct. 28, 2002, Mark Fallon, then the deputy commander of the Pentagon's Criminal Investigation Task Force, wrote a colleague: "This looks like the kind of stuff Congressional hearings are made of. ... Someone needs to be considering how history will look back at this." The objections from the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines prompted Navy Capt. Jane Dalton, legal adviser to the then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers, to begin a review of the proposed techniques.

But Dalton, who's now retired, told the hearing Tuesday that the review was aborted quickly. Myers, she said, took her aside and told her that then-Defense Department general counsel William Haynes "does not want this ... to proceed." Haynes testified that he didn't recall the objections of the four uniformed services.

Officials in Rumsfeld's office and at Guantanamo developed the techniques they sought by reverse-engineering a long-standing military program designed to train U.S. soldiers and aviators to resist interrogation if they're captured.

The program, known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, was never meant to guide U.S. interrogation of foreign detainees.

An official in Haynes' office sought information about SERE as early as July 2002, the documents show. Two months later, a delegation from Guantanamo attended SERE training at Fort Bragg, N.C. Levin said, "The truth is that senior officials in the United States government sought information on aggressive techniques, twisted the law to create the appearance of their legality and authorized their use against detainees." The documents confirm that a delegation of senior administration lawyers visited Guantanamo in September 2002 for briefings on intelligence-gathering there. The delegation included David Addington, a top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney; Haynes; acting CIA counsel John Rizzo; and Michael Chertoff, then the head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division and now the homeland security secretary. Few of the Republicans at Tuesday's hearing defended the Bush administration’s detainee programs. Guidance provided by administration lawyers "will go down in history as some of the most irresponsible and shortsighted legal analysis ever provided to our nation's military intelligence communities," said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C..

Regarding the ICRC, the United States long has complained that other countries such as China or the old Soviet Union prevented independent access to prisoners or made their conditions look better when outsiders were inspecting. The Bush administration appears to have engaged in similar practices, however.

Bernard Barrett, the ICRC’s Washington spokesman, said, "We knew that we did not always have full access to all detainees. It was a fairly serious issue." “It’s been addressed,” he said. “We are confident we now have access to all detainees at Guantanamo.”

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

US official on interrogation: 'If the detainee dies, you're doing it wrong.'

Military officials tasked with training U.S. troops to evade enemy interrogations provided Pentagon lawyers a list of abusive tactics that could be used in prisons like Guantanamo Bay, a top Senate Democrat disclosed Tuesday.

Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said the harsh techniques were then pursued despite strong objections in November 2002 by the military's uniformed lawyers.

"If we use those same techniques offensively against detainees, it says to the world that they have America's stamp of approval," said Levin, D-Mich., at the onset of a committee hearing.

"That puts our troops at greater risk of being abused if they're captured. It also weakens our moral authority and harms our efforts to attract allies to our side in the fight against terrorism."

The hearing is the committee's first look at the origins of the harsher methods used in Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba and Abu Ghraib in Iraq and how policy decisions on interrogations were vetted across the Defense Department. Its review fits into a broader picture of the government's handling of detainees, which includes FBI and CIA interrogations in secret prisons.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said the administration's legal analysis on detainees and interrogations following the the Sept. 11 attacks will "go down in history as some of the most irresponsible and shortsighted legal analysis ever provided to our nation's military and intelligence communities."

The Pentagon's top civilian lawyer at the time, chief counsel William "Jim" Haynes, was expected to testify. Also present were Richard Shiffrin, Haynes' former deputy on intelligence matters, as well as legal advisers at the time to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Guantanamo Bay prison.

According to the Senate committee's findings, Haynes became interested in using harsher interrogation methods as early as July 2002 when his office inquired into a military program that trained Army soldiers on how to survive enemy interrogations and deny foes valuable intelligence.

Haynes and other officials wanted to know if the program — known as "Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape" training — could be used used to develop more effective interrogation methods.

Shiffrin said his interest was not so much in trying reverse engineer the tactics to be used against the enemy but rather tapping military expertise in interrogations.

In response, the head of the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, which ran the SERE program, offered that resistance training included sensory deprivation, sleep disruption, stress positions, waterboarding and slapping.

Several of those techniques, including stress positions, were later approved by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in a December 2002 memo.

Levin said these techniques were approved despite fierce objections a month earlier by the military services' lawyers. In separate memos, the lawyers told the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the techniques warranted further study and could be illegal.

The committee also released previously secret and privately held memos dating from the 2002 inception of the harsh interrogation program at Guantanamo.

In one of them, the top military lawyer at Guantanamo, Lt. Col. Diane Beaver, explains that the Defense Department had made a practice of hiding prisoners who were being treated harshly, even abusively, from the International Committee of the Red Cross, a non-governmental body empowered to monitor compliance with Geneva Convention rules for the treatment of military prisoners.

Beaver also confirmed that the military was secretly using previously forbidden techniques, such as sleep deprivation, but hiding them so as not to draw "negative attention," according to minutes of the meeting.

"Officially it is not happening," Beaver said, according to minutes from the meeting. "It is not being reported officially. The ICRC is a serious concern. They will be in and out, scrutinizing our operations, unless they are displeased and decide to protest and leave. This would draw a lot of negative attention."

Beaver said interrogators should "curb the harsher operations while ICRC is around."

Beaver was speaking at an Oct. 2, 2002 meeting between CIA and military lawyers and military intelligence officials on how to counter the resistance of Guantanamo detainees to military interrogation.

Beaver's comments suggest that the CIA's practice of hiding unregistered "ghost detainees" from the ICRC at military jails may have been as much in service to the Pentagon's interrogation program as it was to the CIA's.

A senior CIA lawyer at the meeting, John Fredman, explained that whether harsh interrogation amount to torture "is a matter of perception." The only sure test for torture is if the detainee died.

"If the detainees dies you're doing it wrong," Fredman said.

Monday, June 16, 2008

Bush: Critics Of Gitmo, Abu Ghraib And Rendition Are ‘Slandering America’»

During an interview with President Bush on Britain’s Sky News yesterday, Sky political editor Adam Boulton noted that while Bush talks “a lot about freedom,” there are many who say that some of the Bush administration’s torture and detention policies represent “the complete opposite of freedom.” But Bush quickly snapped back, saying those criticizing his policies are slandering America:

BOULTON: There are those who would say look, lets take Guantanamo Bay, and Abu Ghraib, and rendition and all those things and to them that is the complete opposite of freedom.

BUSH: Of course, if you want to slander America.

So, according to Bush, below is a short — but by no means exhaustive — list of those who have suggested that Bush’s terrorism policies represent “the opposite of freedom” and thus have slandered America:

– The United States Supreme Court: The Court ruled last week that “terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay have a right to seek their release in federal court” saying that Bush’s policy compromised “the Constitution’s guarantee of liberty.”

– The Federal Bureau of Investigation: An FBI report issued last month said that according to its agents, “[m]ilitary officials at Guantanamo Bay used some aggressive techniques before they were approved, possibly in violation of Defense Department policy and U.S. law.”

– McClatchy Newspapers: An eight month McClatchy investigation found that after the Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. has wrongfully imprisoned “perhaps hundreds” of men “in Afghanistan, Cuba and elsewhere on the basis of flimsy or fabricated evidence, old personal scores or bounty payments.”

Boulton told Bush that the Supreme Court “ruled against what you have been doing” at Guantanamo but Bush wouldn’t budge, arguing that the district court, appellate court and Congress agreed that Gitmo detainees do not have to right to challenge their detention.

Boulton, a Briton, then had to remind Bush of America’s checks and balances system: “But the Supreme Court is supreme isn’t it?”

Sunday, June 15, 2008

McCain And Graham Plan To Introduce Legislation Undermining Supreme Court Decision On Guantanamo

Last week, the Supreme Court ruled that Guantanamo Bay detainees have the right to challenge their detention in civilian courts. Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) wasted no time in publicly blasting the decision, saying they were “disappointed” in “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country.”

This ruling will inevitably lead to a “flood of new litigation” challenging the Bush administration’s right to hold these detainees, only one of whom has received a verdict. Detainees will then finally get a decision as to their status.

Today on Fox News Sunday, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol revealed that “very soon” — likely as early as next week — McCain and Graham will be introducing legislation to undermine the Supreme Court decision by setting up a “national security court”:

And I think you will see Senator Graham, accompanied by Senator McCain, come to the floor of the Senate very soon, like next week, and say, We cannot let chaos obtain here. We can’t let 200 different federal district judges on their own whim call this CIA agent here, say, ‘I don’t believe this soldier here who said this guy was doing this,’ you have to release someone,’ or, ‘Let’s build up — let’s compromise sources and methods with a bunch of trials. I mean, it’s ridiculous.



A national security court would envision a scenario “in which sitting federal judges would preside over proceedings in which prosecutors would make the case that a person should be detained.” But as Michael Hoffman and Ken Gude note in a paper for the Center for American Progress, this scenario is problematic and underestimates the U.S. criminal justice system:

Adopting a national security court system would send the United States down another unproven path prone to repeat the same mistakes. It would not further justice or American legitimacy. Rather, it would risk creating American courts that more resemble the tribunals of dictators than those of democracies. And that would be a strategic victory for Al Qaeda, not for Americans. […]

The criminal justice system, coupled with standard military trials when necessary, has and can further law enforcement, intelligence, and prevention efforts without undermining our fundamental liberties or our long-term efforts to combat terrorism. It is time to let it fully do that crucial work.

As ThinkProgress reported on Friday, at one time, McCain and Graham advocated a solution similar to the Supreme Court ruling. In 2003, they called on then-Defense Secretary Rumsfeld to “formally treat and process the detainees as war criminals or to return them to their countries for appropriate judicial action.” Clearly, things change when you’re running for a third Bush term.

Saturday, June 14, 2008

Some detainees can't go home

Whatever orders civilian judges might issue under the latest U.S. Supreme Court ruling, the United States is struggling with how to send away some of the detainees at Guantánamo who the Defense Department has already decided to let go.

By some measures, Mammar Ameur seems an unlikely candidate to be among the 270 war-on-terror detainees held at the U.S. detention center at Guantánamo Bay..

He has a white beard and bad feet. He has a wife and four kids. And 2 ½ years ago, the Pentagon decided he could go home. Yet he passes his days in Camp 4, a communal Hogan's Heroes-style compound for the most cooperative of captives.

That's because Ameur has the misfortune of being Algerian.

Despite years of talks, the North African nation has so far refused to take home a single one of its citizens held in war-on-terror custody at the U.S. base in southeast Cuba.

Meantime, Ameur is an example of the men for whom Thursday's Supreme Court ruling -- that they can take their cases to U.S. courts -- is likely a hollow victory.

NOWHERE TO GO

Even if a civilian court were to order Ameur's release, he has no place to go. The Pentagon says there are about 70 detainees in a similar predicament.

''[The Algerians] simply decided that they do not want to accept back any of the detainees from the United States,'' said Sandra L. Hodgkinson, the Defense Department deputy in charge of detainee affairs. She called it ``discouraging.''

Last summer, she said, Washington and Algiers agreed on repatriation of a number of Algerians she would not quantify. Then the North African nation reversed course. Its diplomats say that perhaps the men should go back to the countries where they were taken into custody -- locations from South Asia to Sarajevo, but none inside their home countries.

Ameur's may be a typical tale. He says he was a charity worker in Pakistan, a good Muslim who fled a bloody Islamic insurgency in Algeria in the 1990s and ultimately got U.N. refugee status in Pakistan.

In Pakistan, he said, U.S. intelligence officers mistook the home where he and his family lived for an al Qaeda safe house -- and labeled him a terrorist because he had once been trained by al Ittihad al Islami, a Kuwaiti aid group that President Bush listed as a terror organization after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

FATHERLESS FAMILY

After that, his wife and kids moved back to Algeria, and the children have grown up without him, says his attorney, Ramzi Kassem, a teaching fellow at the Yale Law School.

''He wants to be back home with his family. That's what he's always wanted. It's really not much more complicated than that,'' said Kassem.

But where to go? Back to Pakistan, whose security forces helped the United States round up the Guantánamo-bound suspects in the first place? To a third country?

The military has gradually thinned the ranks of prisoners at Guantánamo by getting their home governments to take them. Nearly 100 Saudi Arabians have been sent home to state-run rehabilitation programs designed to rid them of any vestiges of radical Islam.

The U.S. is likewise negotiating the return of many of the 100 or so detained Yemenis.

''I think the brutally frank answer is that we're stuck,'' Defense Secretary Robert Gates told a Senate committee May 20, when asked how the various agencies of the Bush administration were handling the task of moving toward closure of the prison camps at Guantánamo Bay.

OPPOSITION

There are also 25 detainees whose opposition to their home governments makes them likely subjects of political retribution.

Chief among them are the 17 Uighurs -- Chinese citizens from an ethnic Islamic minority who fled their homeland for Afghanistan long before the 9/11 attacks. The U.S. government now agrees that they would suffer religious oppression as devout Muslims if returned to China, a communist country.

Thursday, June 12, 2008

Supreme Court rules Gitmo detainees can challenge their detention.»


The Supreme Court ruled today that “foreign terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay have rights under the Constitution to challenge their detention in U.S. civilian courts.” The AP reports:

The justices, in a 5-4 ruling Thursday, handed the Bush administration its third setback at the high court since 2004 over its treatment of prisoners who are being held indefinitely and without charges at the U.S. naval base in Cuba.

It was not immediately clear whether this ruling, unlike the first two, would lead to prompt hearings for the detainees, some of whom have been held more than 6 years. Roughly 270 men remain at the island prison, classified as enemy combatants and held on suspicion of terrorism or links to al-Qaida and the Taliban.

Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy said, “The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times.”

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Families sue over Guantánamo Bay suicides

The US department of defence is being sued over the suicide deaths of two Guantánamo Bay prisoners.

The New York-based Centre for Constitutional Rights, which represents dozens of Guantánamo detainees, said it was seeking unspecified damages on behalf of the families of Salah al-Salami and Yasser al-Zahrani, both Saudis.

The claim was announced yesterday, on the second anniversary of their deaths with another detainee from Yemen. All three hanged themselves inside their cells with bed sheets.

"After two years, there has still been no public accounting for what happened to these men," Pardiss Kebriaei, a lawyer at the centre, said in a statement.

The centre said it could not find the family of the Yemeni man.

The US military said the suicides prompted a complete review of operations at the detention centre in Cuba.

"As we value life, the deaths two years ago were deeply saddening," Jeffrey Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman and navy commander, said yesterday.

The military would release the results of its investigation of the deaths when the findings were ready, he said.

Washington is forging ahead with the prosecution of about 80 of the roughly 270 men being held at Guantánamo on suspicion of terrorism or links to the Taliban or al-Qaida.

They include the UK resident Binyam Ahmed Mohamed, who is accused of an al-Qaida dirty bomb plot to attack apartment buildings in the US.

His lawyers have condemned the charges against him as part of a US "rush to charge as many people as possible at Guantánamo Bay prior to President Bush leaving office".

About this articleClose This article was first published on guardian.co.uk on Wednesday June 11 2008. It was last updated at 12:03 on June 11 2008.

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Ex-official Says DoD Nixed Iran Attack

WASHINGTON - Pentagon officials firmly opposed Vice President Dick Cheney's proposal to strike Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps bases last summer by insisting that the administration make clear decisions about how far the United States would go in escalating the conflict with Iran, according to a former Bush administration official.

J. Scott Carpenter, who was then deputy assistant secretary of state in the State Department's Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, recalled in an interview that senior Defense Department officials and the Joint Chiefs used the escalation issue as the main argument against the Cheney proposal.

McClatchy newspapers reported last August that Cheney had proposed several weeks earlier "launching airstrikes at suspected training camps in Iran," citing two officials involved in Iran policy.

According to Carpenter, who is now at the Washington Institute on Near East Policy, a strongly pro-Israel think tank, Pentagon officials argued that no decision should be made about the limited airstrike on Iran without a thorough discussion of the sequence of events that would follow an Iranian retaliation against such an attack. Carpenter said the Defense Department officials insisted that the Bush administration had to make "a policy decision about how far the administration would go -- what would happen after the Iranians would go after our folks."

The question of escalation posed by Defense Department officials involved not only the potential of the Mahdi Army in Iraq to attack, Carpenter said, but also possible responses across the Middle East by Hezbollah and by Iran.

Carpenter suggested that Defense Department officials were shifting the debate on a limited strike from the Iraq-based rationale, which they were not contesting, to the much bigger issue of the threat of escalation to full-scale war with Iran, knowing that it would be politically easier to thwart the proposal on that basis.

The former State Department official said the Defense Department "knew that it would be difficult to get interagency consensus on that question."

The Joint Chiefs were fully supportive of the position taken by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on the Cheney proposal, according to Carpenter. "It's clear that the military leadership was being very conservative on this issue," he said.

At least some Defense Department and military officials suggested that Iran had more and better options for hitting back at the United States than the United States had for hitting Iran, according to one former Bush administration insider.

Former Bush speechwriter and senior policy adviser Michael Gerson, who had left the administration in 2006, wrote a column in the Washington Post on July 20, 2007, in which he gave no hint of Cheney's proposal but referred to "options" for striking Iranian targets based on the Cheney line that Iran "smuggles in the advanced explosive devices that kill and maim American soldiers."

Gerson cited two possibilities: "Engaging in hot pursuit against weapon supply lines over the Iranian border or striking explosives factories and staging areas within Iran." But the Pentagon and the military leadership were opposing such options, he reported, because of the fear that Iran has "escalation dominance" in its conflict with the United States.

That meant, according to Gerson, that "in a broadened conflict, the Iranians could complicate our lives in Iraq and the region more than we complicate theirs."

Carpenter's account of the Pentagon's position on the Cheney proposal suggests, however, that civilian and military opponents were saying that Iran's ability to escalate posed the question of whether the United States was going to go to a full-scale air war against Iran.

Pentagon civilian and military opposition to such a strategic attack on Iran had become well-known during 2007. But this is the first evidence from an insider that Cheney's proposal was perceived as a ploy to provoke Iranian retaliation that could used to justify a strategic attack on Iran.

The option of attacking nuclear sites had been raised by President Bush with the Joint Chiefs at a meeting in "the tank" at the Pentagon on Dec. 13, 2006, and had been opposed by the Joint Chiefs, according a report by Time magazine's Joe Klein last June. After he become head of the Central Command in March 2007, Adm. William Fallon also made his opposition to such a massive attack on Iran known to the White House, according to Middle East specialist Hillary Mann, who had developed close working relationships with Pentagon officials when she worked on the National Security Council staff.

It appeared in early 2007, therefore, that a strike against Iran's nuclear program and military power had been blocked by opposition from the Pentagon. Cheney's proposal for an attack on Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps bases in June 2007, tied to the alleged Iranian role in providing both weapons -- especially the highly lethal explosively formed projectiles -- and training to Shiite militias appears to have been a strategy for getting around the firm resistance of military leaders to such an unprovoked attack.

Although the Pentagon bottled up the Cheney proposal in inter-agency discussions, Cheney had a strategic asset that he could use to try to overcome that obstacle: his alliance with Gen. David Petraeus.

And Cheney had already used Gen. David Petraeus' takeover as the top commander of U.S. forces in Iraq in early February 2007 to do an end run about the Washington national security bureaucracy to establish the propaganda line that Iran was manufacturing explosively formed projectiles and shipping them to the Mahdi Army militiamen.

Petraeus was also a supporter of Cheney's proposal for striking Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps targets in Iran, going so far as to hint in an interview with Fox News last September that he had passed on to the White House his desire to do something about alleged Iranian assistance to Shiites that would require U.S. forces beyond his control.

At that point, Adm. Fallon was in a position to deter any effort to go around Defense Department and military opposition to such a strike because he controlled all military access to the region as a whole. But Fallon's forced resignation in March and the subsequent promotion of Petraeus to become CENTCOM chief later this year gives Cheney a possible option to ignore the position of his opponents in Washington once more in the final months of the administration.

Thursday, June 5, 2008

Court backs Guantánamo man on torture

A British resident facing a life sentence at Guantánamo Bay has won a battle in a British court to force the government to hand over documents showing he was tortured into confessing he was a terrorist.

Binyam Mohamed, once a cleaner in Kensington, west London, is accused by the US of being an al-Qaida terrorist intent on the mass murder of civilians.

Yesterday it emerged that the high court had rejected a British government attempt to avoid a court hearing which would decide whether it should reveal evidence showing Mohamed was tortured by the US.

Mohamed, through his lawyers, who have visited him in Guantánamo, alleges he was "rendered" to Morocco, where his torture included his genitals being slashed.

The high court found the UK government supplied America with information to interrogate Mohamed and said the hearing should be held as soon as possible.

Mohamed's lawyer, Clive Stafford-Smith, said: "I have seen not one shred of evidence against him that was not tortured out of him. We know the British talked to Binyam in Pakistan, told him he was to be rendered and gave information to the US that was used in his torture in Morocco."

Wednesday, June 4, 2008

British resident at Guantánamo faces bombing charge


A UK resident imprisoned in Guantánamo Bay is to be charged by the Pentagon over an alleged al-Qaida dirty bomb plot.

Binyam Ahmed Mohamed, an Ethiopian educated in the UK, is accused of planning to blow up apartment buildings in the US.

The Pentagon's chargesheet for the 30-year-old, who had training as an electrical engineer, states he was selected for "a specialised terrorist mission".

Mohamed allegedly plotted with other operatives in building remote-controlled explosive devices in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The alleged aim was to unleash a radioactive dirty bomb against an unspecified US location.

Yesterday, his lawyers condemned the charges as part of a US "rush to charge as many people as possible at Guantánamo Bay prior to President Bush leaving office".

Mohamed faces a maximum sentence of life in prison if convicted on charges of conspiracy and supporting terrorism.

The director of British legal rights group Reprieve, Clive Stafford Smith, said: "The least the British government can do is insist that no British resident be charged in a kangaroo court on evidence tortured out of him with a razor blade."

Mohamed, one of two British residents still held at Guantánamo was arrested in Pakistan in April 2002 and taken to Morocco by the CIA.

Once there, it is alleged he was beaten and handcuffed during prolonged interrogations as well as being tortured with a scalpel. His mental state has deteriorated as a result, his lawyers say.

Mohamed is said by the Pentagon to have conspired with Jose Padilla, the US citizen and former Chicago gang member who was convicted by a federal court in Florida last year of conspiracy and material support for terrorism. Padilla, 37, was sentenced to 17 years in prison in January.

Mohamed's chargesheet also states that he and Padilla were instructed by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a confessed mastermind of 9/11, to rent apartments in large US cities, fill the corridors and air ducts with natural gas and then blow them up.

In August last year, Britain's Foreign Secretary David Miliband formally asked the Bush administration to release Mohamed, along with four other UK residents at Guantanamo.

Three of the men were sent home but the US refused to release Mohamed and Saudi-born Shaker Aamer, citing security concerns.

The Guantánamo Bay detention centre, situated on a US base in southern Cuba, currently holds around 270 men.

Prosecutors have indicated they intend to try around 80 of the prisoners in the first US war crimes tribunal since the second world war.

Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Omar Khadr labelled 'good kid' by U.S. captors


Prison stay could radicalize him, officials told

OTTAWA — The U.S. soldiers holding Omar Khadr believe the detained Canadian is a "good kid" who is not only "salvageable" but actually runs the risk of becoming a radical if he stays in Guantanamo Bay, according to Foreign Affairs reports.

The documents - likely the most significant ever made public in the case - will almost certainly put pressure on Ottawa to finally attempt to bring Mr. Khadr home.

Two reports written by Department of Foreign Affairs officials who visited Mr. Khadr in Guantanamo Bay in March and April of this year describe a "likeable, funny and intelligent young man." Those aren't just the sentiments of the Canadian officials, but also the U.S. soldiers charged with guarding Mr. Khadr, and whose fellow soldier the Canadian is alleged to have killed.

"Omar is 'salvageable,' 'non-radicalized' and 'a good kid' who is well-liked both within the Camp and by [Joint Task Force] staff," a Foreign Affairs official notes in March. "JTF staff seems to look out for him by stopping by to chat on occasion, convincing him to meet with his lawyers and encouraging him to 'keep his nose clean.' "

But perhaps the most significant observation comes a report dated a month later.

"... our U.S. military contact repeated what he had said during the welfare visit conducted in March," a Foreign Affairs official writes. "He said that extended detention in Guantanamo would however run the risk of turning [Mr. Khadr] into a radical."

The reports have not yet been made public, but were obtained by The Globe and Mail. At least one of the reports is expected to be presented to members of a House of Commons subcommittee studying the Khadr case in Ottawa as early as today.

Virtually every prevailing opinion about Mr. Khadr over the years is contradicted by the reports. Canadian officials describe a hopeful young man who is nonetheless aware of how serious his situation is.

"The overarching theme of much of our discussions focused on his desire to get out of Guantanamo, to return to Canada, to fix his health, to educate himself, to have a family and to eventually find a job satisfying his personal commitment to help those in need," a Foreign Affairs official writes. "By contrast, he also expressed a hyper-awareness of the challenges that he would face, but demonstrated no bitterness or anger, emphasizing instead a desire to move forward in life."

In another report, an official says Mr. Khadr tells him he is in Guantanamo Bay because of his family, and wants another chance.

"He wonders however why Canada is so quiet on his case and commented that, while Canada was the best country in the world to live in, it was not as strong as the UK to defend its citizens abroad, although both countries have the same Queen.

"He hopes that Canada will intervene to get him out of Guantanamo [he said he hoped PM Harper will do something]."

Mr. Khadr's relationship with his much-loathed family - widely believed to be one of the reasons the government has refused to try to bring him home - is also described in one of the reports. An official notes that Mr. Khadr barely talks about his family and doesn't seem overly keen to call them.

"The [U.S. official] told me later that one of his last phone calls had initially been cancelled by his mother, because she couldn't make herself available."

Officials also list Mr. Khadr's myriad health problems: He has no vision in his left eye and his right eye is deteriorating because of shrapnel embedded in the eye's membrane. He still has shrapnel in his right shoulder, and it causes the metal detectors at the prison camp to go off.

Mr. Khadr says he doesn't like the 14-day rotation of meals, which he describes as heavy and covered in "red sauce." However, he makes sure to keep within a specific weight range so he isn't force-fed.

Some of the items Mr. Khadr requests from the Canadian officials are surprising. He asks for, among other things, a book on French for beginners, a first-aid book and a stress ball.

The U.S. military's responsiveness to those requests is mixed: Mr. Khadr is allowed an origami book brought for him by a Canadian official, but not the paper accompanying the book.

When a Canadian representative asks why Mr. Khadr did not get a pillow brought for him, a U.S. official notes that "pillows were only handed out as incentives for detainees being interrogated and that since Mr. Khadr had lawyers and was no longer subject to interrogation, he was not eligible for one."

Mr. Khadr, who was 15 when he was captured in Afghanistan in 2002, is due back in a Guantanamo Bay courtroom later this month. He faces multiple charges - including the murder of a U.S. soldier during an Afghan firefight - before a military commission. If convicted, he could spend the rest of his life in prison.

Monday, June 2, 2008

US accused of holding terror suspects on prison ships


The United States is operating "floating prisons" to house those arrested in its war on terror, according to human rights lawyers, who claim there has been an attempt to conceal the numbers and whereabouts of detainees.

Details of ships where detainees have been held and sites allegedly being used in countries across the world have been compiled as the debate over detention without trial intensifies on both sides of the Atlantic. The US government was yesterday urged to list the names and whereabouts of all those detained.

Information about the operation of prison ships has emerged through a number of sources, including statements from the US military, the Council of Europe and related parliamentary bodies, and the testimonies of prisoners.

The analysis, due to be published this year by the human rights organisation Reprieve, also claims there have been more than 200 new cases of rendition since 2006, when President George Bush declared that the practice had stopped.

It is the use of ships to detain prisoners, however, that is raising fresh concern and demands for inquiries in Britain and the US.

According to research carried out by Reprieve, the US may have used as many as 17 ships as "floating prisons" since 2001. Detainees are interrogated aboard the vessels and then rendered to other, often undisclosed, locations, it is claimed.

Ships that are understood to have held prisoners include the USS Bataan and USS Peleliu. A further 15 ships are suspected of having operated around the British territory of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, which has been used as a military base by the UK and the Americans.

Reprieve will raise particular concerns over the activities of the USS Ashland and the time it spent off Somalia in early 2007 conducting maritime security operations in an effort to capture al-Qaida terrorists.

At this time many people were abducted by Somali, Kenyan and Ethiopian forces in a systematic operation involving regular interrogations by individuals believed to be members of the FBI and CIA. Ultimately more than 100 individuals were "disappeared" to prisons in locations including Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Guantánamo Bay.

Reprieve believes prisoners may have also been held for interrogation on the USS Ashland and other ships in the Gulf of Aden during this time.

The Reprieve study includes the account of a prisoner released from Guantánamo Bay, who described a fellow inmate's story of detention on an amphibious assault ship. "One of my fellow prisoners in Guantánamo was at sea on an American ship with about 50 others before coming to Guantánamo ... he was in the cage next to me. He told me that there were about 50 other people on the ship. They were all closed off in the bottom of the ship. The prisoner commented to me that it was like something you see on TV. The people held on the ship were beaten even more severely than in Guantánamo."

Clive Stafford Smith, Reprieve's legal director, said: "They choose ships to try to keep their misconduct as far as possible from the prying eyes of the media and lawyers. We will eventually reunite these ghost prisoners with their legal rights.

"By its own admission, the US government is currently detaining at least 26,000 people without trial in secret prisons, and information suggests up to 80,000 have been 'through the system' since 2001. The US government must show a commitment to rights and basic humanity by immediately revealing who these people are, where they are, and what has been done to them."

Andrew Tyrie, the Conservative MP who chairs the all-party parliamentary group on extraordinary rendition, called for the US and UK governments to come clean over the holding of detainees.

"Little by little, the truth is coming out on extraordinary rendition. The rest will come, in time. Better for governments to be candid now, rather than later. Greater transparency will provide increased confidence that President Bush's departure from justice and the rule of law in the aftermath of September 11 is being reversed, and can help to win back the confidence of moderate Muslim communities, whose support is crucial in tackling dangerous extremism."

The Liberal Democrat's foreign affairs spokesman, Edward Davey, said: "If the Bush administration is using British territories to aid and abet illegal state abduction, it would amount to a huge breach of trust with the British government. Ministers must make absolutely clear that they would not support such illegal activity, either directly or indirectly."

A US navy spokesman, Commander Jeffrey Gordon, told the Guardian: "There are no detention facilities on US navy ships." However, he added that it was a matter of public record that some individuals had been put on ships "for a few days" during what he called the initial days of detention. He declined to comment on reports that US naval vessels stationed in or near Diego Garcia had been used as "prison ships".

The Foreign Office referred to David Miliband's statement last February admitting to MPs that, despite previous assurances to the contrary, US rendition flights had twice landed on Diego Garcia. He said he had asked his officials to compile a list of all flights on which rendition had been alleged.

CIA "black sites" are also believed to have operated in Thailand, Afghanistan, Poland and Romania.

In addition, numerous prisoners have been "extraordinarily rendered" to US allies and are alleged to have been tortured in secret prisons in countries such as Syria, Jordan, Morocco and Egypt.

Saturday, May 31, 2008

Guantanamo Judge Dismissed

Top military officials provided no explanation for why they dismissed the judge presiding over a key case at Guantanamo Bay.

The Miami Herald reports that the colonel presiding over the case had issued some rulings in favor of the defendant, Canadian national Omar Khadr.

Khadr's case has been on track to be one of the first to trial at the U.S. Navy base in southeast Cuba. Khadr, the son of an alleged al Qaeda financier, is accused of throwing a grenade that fatally wounded a U.S. Special Forces soldier.
Military prosecutors had been pressing Brownback to set a trial date, but he has repeatedly directed them first to satisfy defense requests for access to potential evidence. At a hearing earlier this month, he threatened to suspend the proceedings altogether unless the detention center provided records of Khadr's confinement.

Kuebler said he believed the U.S. military is anxious for the trial to start before political pressure leads Canada to demand Khadr's repatriation.

Friday, the American Civil Liberties Union issued a statement describing the abrupt change without explanation as evidence that the war court, created by Congress in 2006, is ``fundamentally flawed.''

Friday, May 30, 2008

9/11 trial sought during presidential campaign

Defense lawyers for the alleged 9/11 conspirators on Thursday accused the Pentagon prosecutor of rushing to begin the complex Sept. 11, 2001, mass-murder trial in the height of the presidential campaign season.

The U.S. military attorneys included the claim in a 20-page brief asking the military judge to dismiss the capital charges against alleged al Qaeda kingpin Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four other Guantánamo detainees.

The document includes an e-mail from a civilian member of the prosecution team proposing to set the trial date for Sept. 15, the Monday after the seventh anniversary of the suicide attacks.

''Not coincidentally,'' the defense attorneys say, ``that would force the trial of this case in mid-September, some seven weeks before the general elections.''

The date, in fact, is 10 days after Sen. John McCain, an architect of Military Commissions law, is expected to be officially nominated as the Republican presidential candidate at the GOP national convention in St. Paul, Minn.

''Three months and 18 days is not enough time to prepare a defense in this death penalty case even if the government had provided the defense with the attorneys, resources, and facilities necessary to do so,'' said Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brian Mizer, attorney for Ammar al Baluchi, who is also known as Ali Abdul Aziz Ali.

A Pentagon spokesman denied the trial schedule was linked to the national political campaign season. ''We're moving forward with the trials,'' said Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon. ``And we're going to continue with the process.''

DEVELOPMENTS

In other signs of the drive to get more cases to trial this year:

• The Defense Department on Thursday issued preliminary conspiracy charges against three alleged al Qaeda bomb-makers -- two Saudis and an Algerian -- raising the total number of currently active prosecutions to 17. Sufiyan Barhoumi, Jibran Qahtani and Ghassan Sharbi, long-held Guantánamo detainees, face maximum life sentences, if convicted.

• The military replaced an Army judge who had threatened to suspend the commission trial of Canadian captive Omar Khadr, until the prison camps at Guantánamo release Khadr's health records to defense attorneys. Military commissions sources had earlier indicated that the judge, Col. Peter E. Brownback III, was weighing his retirement.

By law, U.S.-held detainees charged at the war court must be tried within 120 days of finalization of charges -- unless the defense team is granted a delay.

All five men in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror-attack case face possible execution, if convicted. Civilian and military criminal defense lawyers have predicted it will take a year to prepare, in part because it's a death-penalty case and classified information is being used.

DEFENSE CLAIMS

Defense lawyers have claimed for some time that the Pentagon is rushing to trial before President Bush leaves the White House in January, or cited alleged internal debates by appointees about whether charges could be brought for political gain or to capture the imagination of the American people.

The latest brief raises the allegations a notch a week before the five men go before a military judge for their arraignment, or official reading of charges.

The Pentagon is organizing for large-scale coverage of the first-ever appearances of the former CIA-held captives.

It has invited 60 national and international journalists to be airlifted to Guantánamo from Andrews Air Force Base a day ahead of the trial date and then taken back to the Washington Beltway the next day.

Thursday, May 29, 2008

Amnesty: Time to call time on Guantánamo


Amnesty International today called for Guantánamo Bay to be shut by the end of the year.

The human rights organisation's secretary general, Irene Khan, said she hoped the next US president would announce its closure on December 10 - the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

"It would be a great occasion for the new US president to announce the closure of Guantánamo on that day," she said.

As the charity published its annual report, Khan said all three presidential candidates had pledged to shut down Guantánamo Bay.

She also accused western governments of failing to do enough to tackle human rights abuses.

The organisation's annual checklist of human rights outrages showed people were still tortured or ill-treated in at least 81 countries.

Men and women also faced unfair trials in at least 54 countries and were denied free speech in at least 77, the report said.

"The reason why the Amnesty International report highlights the role of the United States is because the US is the world's superpower and as such its performance sets the standard for other governments around the world," Khan said.

"That's why we have high expectations that the new US president will set a new direction that the US will engage positively with human rights and will begin first by setting its own house in order."

Amnesty challenged world leaders to "apologise for six decades of human rights failure" and to make a new commitment to work for improvements.

The report renewed criticism of the UK for its policy of deportations to unstable countries, secret terror hearings and failing to fully investigate alleged state collusion in killings in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.

"We would like the British government to correct its own approaches on control orders on pre-charge detention - which could all send a clear message - but also we would like the British government to play a very active role, as it has indeed done in Burma and other places, but make sure that human rights are in the centre of many of those political processes," Khan said.

Speaking on Sky News, she called on Britain to "clean up its act" and said world leaders "cannot be seen to be leaders unless they do so by example".

The EU should investigate the "complicity of its member states" in renditions of terrorist suspects, she added.

"But there is an opportunity in the coming year for world leaders to set a new direction. There are new leaders coming to power, in the US for instance, there are new countries emerging on the world stage, and the United Kingdom could certainly lead together with them."

The organisation also called on China to adhere to its human rights pledges and on Russia to show greater tolerance for political dissent

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Guantanamo Critics Reiterate Protests as Their Trial Opens

Thirty-five people accused of staging an illegal demonstration at the Supreme Court went on trial yesterday and used the proceedings to renew their complaints about conditions at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Many of the 22 men and 13 women wore orange jumpsuits to show solidarity with detainees. They were arrested Jan. 11, accused of illegally protesting on the grounds of the Supreme Court, a misdemeanor that carries up to 60 days in jail.

The demonstration occurred on the sixth anniversary of the opening of the detention facility, which was set up to house terrorism suspects. Yesterday, the defendants continued to make political statements about the treatment of detainees as their trial began in D.C. Superior Court.

As a clerk for Judge Wendell P. Gardner Jr. took attendance, each defendant stood up, gave his or her name and spoke the name of someone they described as a Guantanamo detainee. Some of the prisoners mentioned died at the prison. The gesture was meant to give the detainees a voice in court.

Matthew Daloisio, 31, of New York said he was speaking on behalf of Yasser al-Zahrani, who died in 2006 in what the Defense Department called a coordinated suicide with two other detainees. As Daloisio spoke, several co-defendants said, "God forgive us."

Because the charges are misdemeanors punishable by less than six months in jail, the case is being heard by a judge instead of a jury.

In opening statements, prosecutors said that the case was not about freedom of speech but about disobeying police orders regarding assembly. Assistant U.S. Attorney Magdalena Acevedo said the group left the sidewalk, where demonstrations are legal, and, despite warnings, moved to the plaza of the Supreme Court, where such activities are barred by law.

"If they had stayed in the permissible area, they could have spoken as much as they wanted to," she said.

About 150 people gathered on the sidewalk during the demonstration, but only about 35 or so went to the plaza. They carried signs that said "Shut down Guantanamo" and knelt on the steps of the Supreme Court.

The protesters are a part of a group called Witness Against Torture, which has held demonstrations across the country condemning the prison. They range in age from their 20s to 70s. The group's leaders said the defendants include a hog farmer from Grinnell, Iowa, a social worker from Saratoga Springs, New York, and a legal secretary from Baltimore.

Before the trial, the group's members -- wearing the orange jumpsuits and black hoods -- marched from the Supreme Court to D.C. Superior Court.

In court, the defendants filled the jury box and the left side of the room. Their supporters filled the other side, and some in the crowd had to wait in the hallway.

The demonstrators are representing themselves, with help from lawyer Mark Goldstone, a First Amendment specialist who is acting as an adviser.

They scored a first-day victory when the judge dismissed the case against protester David Barrows of the District. Gardner said that a police officer who testified failed to identify Barrows while reviewing a police videotape of the protest. The dismissal drew cheers from the audience and a call for quiet from the judge.

The trial is expected to last two to three days.

Monday, May 26, 2008

Censors put limits on Guantánamo photos

Guards put on a mock war court conviction to test the $12 million expeditionary legal compound; censors put a three-tent limit on photos; a Sudanese detainee cracked wise.

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- Pity the photographer who takes a picture of five tents in a row at ``Camp Justice.''

Or two whole tents and slivers of two others.

Under the latest rules for ''operational security,'' there's now a three-tent rule for photos the public can see of the tents that house journalists and support staff at the expeditionary legal compound, where reputed al Qaeda kingpin Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four other alleged 9/11 co-conspirators are due to get their first taste of military commission justice June 5.

Censorship of news photos has evolved to show, well, less and less across the 6 ½-year Defense Department venture in detaining and at times interrogating war-on-terrorism suspects here.

And numbers do count.

At Camp Delta, the prison camps, photographers are forbidden from showing two guard towers -- or, for that matter, any one detainee's face, except in shadows that make him look like nobody in particular.

Broadly, the military explains the need for operational security, or OP-SEC, two different ways.

First, they seek to shield from public view any details of this remote base that might help al Qaeda or other enemies of the United States stage an attack.

Second, they want to shield from public view the faces of detainees because the Geneva Conventions prohibit the parade or humiliation of prisoners of war.

• Heard at the war court:

An Air Force judge, Lt. Col. Nancy Paul, at one point told defendant Ibrahim al Qosi, 47, that if he wanted to arrange a phone call home to Sudan through the International Committee of the Red Cross, ``This is up to you.''

The slight, dark man with a salt-and-pepper beard looked stunned.

''Me?'' he sputtered.

``What can I do? I'm a detainee. I cannot do anything about anything.''

The one thing he could do Thursday, for hours, was refuse an effort by his Pentagon-appointed defense attorney, Navy Cmdr. Suzanne Lachelier, to help orchestrate the call.

• Mindful that the audio broke, the video froze and the power went off earlier this month, military commissions staff spent much of Tuesday testing the technology at their two courtrooms at Camp Justice.

Guards played judge, lawyers and, sometimes detainees, while a technician posed as a witness and an Arabic language translator hired by the war court at one point sat in an alleged terrorist's seat.

The goal is glitch-free simultaneous hearings at the old retrofitted courtroom as well as the $12 million state-of-the-art expeditionary legal compound, once the war crimes trials get rolling sometime after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in late June.

So Tuesday morning, U.S. forces were reading from a fake script of a trial of a fictional war on terror detainee named Abdul Khadr of Yemen during a daylong equipment check.

Declared one guard playing a presiding officer: ''Mr. Khadr, this commission has convicted you of conspiracy.'' Next Khadr's jury of military officers, called commissioners, were going into secret session to see the evidence against him.

So the presiding officer ordered the feed cut to the media's press room.

But the feed kept going, and reporters at an adjacent media center got to watch the guard playing a detainee get convicted twice before lunch.

No one could explain who exactly wrote the fake script and why.

But by afternoon the war court script was gone and guards were back in their places, reciting lines from the 1988 Hollywood hit Big -- the Tom Hanks tale of a boy who makes a wish and suddenly finds himself living the life of a man.

Saturday, May 24, 2008

Attorney general tells law grads that attorneys shouldn't be punished for protecting country

Attorney General Michael Mukasey is defending former government lawyers who drew up the legal basis of the Bush administration's use of harsh interrogation methods against terror suspects.

Mukasey told Boston College Law School graduates Friday that lawyers doing their part to protect the country in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks should not now be held liable or face criminal charges for doing so.

Mukasey did not mention any specific lawyers by name.

Former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo is facing at least one civil lawsuit and demands for his firing from Berkeley Law School. Yoo worked in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel from 2001 to 2003.

While there, he wrote several memos legally defending the use of harsh interrogation tactics which are now under criticism by human rights groups and members of Congress. Yoo's memos concluded that President Bush has broad, unfettered wartime authority that cannot be limited by domestic law or international bans on torture.

One memo defined torture, as recognized by U.S. law, as covering "only extreme acts" causing pain similar in intensity to that caused by organ failure or accompanying death.

An internal Justice Department investigation is now considering whether such advice was improper.

At the Friday ceremony, Mukasey lambasted critics seeking to bring lawsuits or charges against the lawyers. "The rhetoric of these discussions is hostile and unforgiving," Mukasey said in his prepared remarks.

Mukasey's confirmation as attorney general briefly stalled over the issue of waterboarding, an interrogation method simulating drowning that critics call torture. He has since refused to say whether waterboarding is illegal since it is no longer used by the CIA or military interrogators.

Friday, May 23, 2008

Terror suspect phones Sudan to hire own lawyer


GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- Within hours of a judge's order, an accused al Qaeda conspirator from Sudan got a call from home Thursday to consult with his family on how they might hire him a lawyer, at their own expense.

Ibrahim al Qosi, 47, had earlier fired his U.S. military lawyer and threatened to boycott his war crimes trial. He said he wanted to talk by telephone with his brother, presumably in Khartoum, to get the Sudanese Bar Association to line him up a defense lawyer instead.

In response, Air Force Lt. Col. Nancy Paul, a military judge, ordered lawyers to arrange the call through the International Committee of the Red Cross. She gave them until July 1.

But commanders at the prison camp, ringed by barbed wire and overlooking the Caribbean, accomplished the assignment soon after the judge gaveled the court to a closure.

''It's done,'' said Navy Cmdr. Pauline Storum, spokeswoman for the detention center.

The call lasted about one hour, Storum said, unaware of what was discussed or who was on the other end.

Just hours earlier, Qosi had sat placidly at the war court, miles from the prison camp, wearing the crisp white tunic and trousers of a cooperative captive -- and politely insisted that he would not accept the services of his Pentagon-appointed defense attorney.

''I would like you to allow me to contact my family in Sudan so I can get a legal advisor through the bar in my country,'' Qosi told the judge.

It was a stark contrast to a tense hearing a day earlier for an alleged al Qaeda foot soldier from Afghanistan, who bit and spat on guards ordered by another judge to force him into his arraignment.

Qosi is accused of conspiracy and providing material support for terrorism for allegedly working as Osama bin Laden's bodyguard and driver and as a member of an al Qaeda mortar crew. Conviction carries a maximum sentence of life in prison.

Earlier allegations that he worked as an al Qaeda payroll clerk in Khartoum, Sudan, and ran bin Laden's kitchen in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, are omitted from his current charge sheet.

At his arraignment in April, Qosi threatened to boycott his trial. He said he would not accept any U.S.-appointed lawyer, military or civilian, and called the war crimes court illegitimate.

Thursday, his Air Force judge spent a chunk of the morning session trying to get Qosi to let Navy Cmdr. Suzanne Lachelier help him hire his own lawyer. He refused.

''I've been imprisoned here for 6 ½ years. I have no contact with the outside world,'' he said. ``If you allow me to call my family, I will ask them to do that.''

The prison camps launched the Red Cross telephone call program two months ago. It lets cooperative captives get a once-a-year hour-long phone call from home.

So far, approximately 35 of the 270 detainees have received calls, Storum said.

Next will come the more delicate issue of what role a lawyer lined up by Sudan's Bar Association might play at Qosi's trial.

War court rules largely require that U.S military attorneys act as defense counsel, in part because of national security concerns at Guantánamo itself and involving evidence at trial.

A clause in the war court manual lets a detainee defend himself or hire his own attorney, so long as there is no U.S. government expense. But the lawyer must be a U.S. citizen and get a Defense Department security clearance that lets the lawyer travel to this remote base.

The war court rules also permit an alleged terrorist to have a foreign attorney consultant on his defense team. But they say the detainee's U.S. military-appointed defense counsel -- whom Qosi rejects -- must apply to have the foreign lawyer join the team.

After that, it is up to a Bush administration political appointee, or the trial judge, to approve that foreigner's role.

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Report details military tactics FBI agents found abusive

WASHINGTON — FBI agents repeatedly complained that harsh interrogation techniques used on detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo might violate the law and jeopardize future criminal trials, but administration officials did little to address the concerns, a government watchdog concluded in a report released Tuesday.

At one point in 2003, several top Justice Department officials took the concerns about interrogation practices used by the military at Guantanamo to the National Security Council, Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine said in his report. However, Fine said the complaints did not appear to trigger any response from the National Security Council, which includes President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney and was chaired at the time by then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.

Although the FBI's concerns about harsh interrogation techniques were previously known, Fine's report provides the most detailed narrative yet of how top law enforcement and military officials were slow to respond to the agents' complaints and how, in some instances, administration officials appear to have disregarded them.

Several witnesses told Fine's investigators then-Attorney General John Ashcroft also brought the matter to the attention of the National Security Council or the Pentagon, but Fine couldn't verify the accounts because Ashcroft refused to be interviewed.

The 370-page report took four years to complete, with its release delayed by the Pentagon's attempt to keep a larger portion of the report classified, according to Fine. His investigators interviewed more than 230 witnesses and surveyed 1,000 FBI agents.

The report describes how agents beginning in 2002 became deeply troubled by some of the interrogations they witnessed and details frequent clashes between agents and their military counterparts over the military's and CIA's use of harsh techniques that one agent described as "borderline torture."

In late 2002, the military adopted broad interrogation policies that clashed with those permitted by the FBI. Among the permitted techniques were hooding, putting prisoners in stress positions for as long as four hours, 20-hour interrogations and removal of clothing.

While FBI agents took part in interrogations in a few isolated cases "that would not normally be permitted in the United States," Fine said the situations "in no way resembled" the treatment of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where graphic photos later exposed abuses. A vast majority of the FBI agents followed FBI policies and did not participate when other agencies used techniques that violated the bureau's policies, Fine said.

"In sum, we believe that while the FBI could have provided clearer guidance earlier, and while the FBI could have pressed harder for resolution of concerns about detainee treatment by other agencies, the FBI should be credited for its conduct and professionalism in detainee interrogations," said Fine, who has no jurisdiction over the CIA or the Pentagon.

Tuesday, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said the Pentagon found no evidence that interrogators tortured detainees during a 2005 review of techniques used at Guantanamo. Whitman also said he did not know of any Pentagon efforts that had delayed the inspector general's report.

In a brief statement, Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the department was "pleased" that the report "credited the FBI for its conduct and professionalism during interrogations."

Justice and Pentagon officials, however, did not address the questions raised by the report's description of interrogation techniques that disturbed FBI agents. Agents at Guantanamo, for example, witnessed and complained about the use of sleep deprivation, prolonged short-shackling, in which a detainee's hands were shackled close to his feet, and the holding of detainees in rooms at extremely cold or hot temperatures.

At times, agents witnessed detainees' thumbs twisted, female interrogators touching detainees sexually and the wrapping of detainees' heads in duct tape.

In 2002, FBI agents objected to the treatment of top al Qaida member Abu Zubaydah, whom they first questioned but later handed over to the CIA. The CIA has since acknowledged waterboarding him, but Fine said FBI agents did not appear to have witnessed waterboarding, which simulates drowning by pouring water over a restrained detainee's face.

Tensions between agents and interrogators heightened between 2002 and 2003 during the military's interrogation of Mohammed al Qahtani, the alleged 20th hijacker who was prevented from participating in the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Fine said.

After his capture, al Qahtani resisted FBI attempts to interview him and the military took over his questioning. FBI agents complained interrogators relied on questionable techniques, including keeping him awake during 20-hour intervals and threatening him with a dog.

"The informal response that some of these agents received from FBI Headquarters was that agents could continue to witness (military) interrogations ... so long as they did not participate," Fine said.

"No formal responses were ever received by the agents."

Although agents witnessed interrogation techniques that appeared to violate their own policies, the FBI was slow to clarify the bureau's stance on the methods, Fine said.

In 2002, the FBI decided it would not participate in joint interrogations with other agencies when techniques violated the bureau's policies. However, the FBI did not formalize the guidance until May 2004, after abuse surfaced at Abu Ghraib.

Meanwhile, agents continued to remain concerned about whether they could be criminally liable for merely witnessing the interrogations and questioned whether the interrogations jeopardized future trials, Fine said.

Their concerns appear to be justified. This month, military officials dropped charges against al Qahtani, citing concerns about questionable information obtained during the interrogations.

"We believe that the FBI should have recognized earlier the issues raised by the FBI's participating with the military in detainee interrogations ... and should have moved more quickly to provide clearer guidance to its agents on these issues," Fine said.

Officials with the CIA and the Pentagon have said they later revised their rules to limit interrogation methods, including banning the use of waterboarding, which the CIA has acknowledged was used on three high-level terrorism suspects.

The Pentagon and CIA knew of the FBI's ongoing concerns, but did not appear to have weighed them when coming up with their own interrogation policies, Fine said.

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

The survivors' stories leave no doubt: Guantánamo makes us all less safe

When we learned last week that Abdallah Salih al-Ajmi had blown himself up in Mosul in northern Iraq, the US government presented this as a vindication of its policies. Al-Ajmi was a former inmate of the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay. The Pentagon says his attack on Iraqi soldiers shows both that it was right to have detained him and that it is dangerous ever to release the camp's prisoners. On the contrary, it shows how dangerous it was to put them there in the first place.

Al-Ajmi, according to the Pentagon, was one of at least 30 former Guantánamo detainees who have "taken part in anti-coalition militant activities after leaving US detention". Given that the majority of the inmates appear to have been innocent of such crimes before they were detained, that's one hell of a recidivism rate. In reality, it turns out that "anti-coalition militant activities" include talking to the media about their captivity. The Pentagon lists the Tipton Three in its catalogue of recidivists, on the grounds that they collaborated with Michael Winterbottom's film The Road to Guantánamo. But it also names seven former prisoners, aside from al-Ajmi, who have fought with the Taliban or Chechen rebels, kidnapped foreigners or planted bombs after their release. One of two conclusions can be drawn from this evidence, and neither reflects well on the US government.

The first is that, as the Pentagon claims, these men "successfully lied to US officials, sometimes for over three years". The US government's intelligence gathering and questioning were ineffective, and people who would otherwise have been identified as terrorists or resistance fighters were allowed to walk free, despite years of intense and often brutal interrogation. Should this be surprising? Without a presumption of innocence, without charges, representation, trials, or due process of any kind, there is no reliable means of determining whether or not a man is guilty. The abuses at Guantánamo not only deny justice to the inmates, they also deny justice to the world.

Al-Ajmi, the authorities say, initially confessed in the prison camp to deserting the Kuwaiti army to join the jihad in Afghanistan. He admitted that he fought with Taliban forces against the Northern Alliance. He later retracted this confession, which had been made "under pressure and threats". When the Americans released him from Guantánamo, they handed him over to the Kuwaiti government for trial, but without the admissible evidence required to convict him. Among his defences was that neither he nor his interrogators had signed his supposed testimony. The Kuwaiti courts, without reliable evidence to the contrary, found him innocent.

All evidence obtained in Guantánamo, and in the CIA's other detention centres and secret prisons, is by definition unreliable, because it is extracted with the help of coercion and torture. Torture is notorious for producing false confessions, as people will say anything to make it stop. Both official accounts and the testimonies of former detainees show that a wide range of coercive techniques - devised or approved at the highest levels in Washington - have been used to make inmates tell the questioners what they want to hear.

In his book Torture Team, Philippe Sands describes the treatment of Mohammed al-Qahtani, held in Guantánamo and described by the authorities (like half a dozen other suspects) as "the 20th hijacker". By the time his interrogators started using "enhanced techniques" to extract information from him, al-Qahtani had been kept in isolation for three months in a cell permanently flooded with light. An official memo shows that he "was talking to nonexistent people, reporting hearing voices, [and] crouching in a corner of the cell covered with a sheet for hours on end". He was abused, exposed to extreme cold and deprived of sleep for a further 54 days of torture and questioning. What useful testimony could be extracted from a man in this state?

The other possibility is that the men who became involved in armed conflict after their release had not in fact been involved in any prior fighting, but were radicalised by their detention. In the video he made before blowing himself up, al-Ajmi maintained that he was motivated by his ill-treatment in Guantánamo. "Twelve thousand kilometres away from Mecca, I realised the reality of the Americans and what those infidels want," he said. He claimed he was beaten, drugged and "used for experiments" and that "the Americans delighted in insulting our prayer and Islam and they insulted the Qur'an and threw it in dirty places." Al-Ajmi's lawyer revealed that his arm had been broken by guards at the camp, who beat him up to stop him from praying.

The accounts of people released from Guantánamo describe treatment that would radicalise almost anyone. In his book Five Years of My Life, published a fortnight ago, Murat Kurnaz maintains that one of the guards greeted him on his arrival with these words. "Do you know what the Germans did to the Jews? That's exactly what we're going to do with you." There were certain similarities. "I knew a man from Morocco," Kurnaz writes, "who used to be a ship captain. He couldn't move one of his little fingers because of frostbite. The rest of his fingers were all right. They told him they would amputate the little finger. They brought him to the doctor, and when he came back, he had no fingers left. They had amputated everything but his thumbs." The young man - scarcely more than a boy - in the cage next to Kurnaz's had just had his legs amputated by American doctors after getting frostbite in a coalition prison in Afghanistan. The stumps were still bleeding and covered in pus. He received no further treatment or new dressings. Every time he tried to hoist himself up to sit on his pot by clinging to the wire, a guard would come and hit his hands with a billy-club. Like every other prisoner, he was routinely beaten by the camp's Immediate Reaction Force, and taken away to interrogation cells to be beaten up some more.

Fathers were clubbed in front of their sons, sons in front of their fathers. The prisoners were repeatedly forced into stress positions, deprived of sleep and threatened with execution. As a senior official at the US Defense Intelligence Agency says, "maybe the guy who goes into Guantánamo was a farmer who got swept along and did very little. He's going to come out a fully fledged jihadist."

In reading the histories of Guantánamo, and of the kidnappings, extrajudicial detention and torture the US government (helped by the United Kingdom) has pursued around the world, two things become clear. The first is that these practices do not supplement effective investigation and prosecution; they replace them. Instead of a process which generates evidence, assesses it and uses it to prosecute, the US has deployed a process that generates nonsense and is incapable of separating the guilty from the innocent. The second is that far from protecting innocent lives, this process is likely to deliver further atrocities. Even if you put the ethics of such treatment to one side, it is surely evident that it makes the world more dangerous.

Saturday, May 17, 2008

Bin Laden's driver wins another trial delay

A military commission judge Friday delayed the scheduled trial of Osama bin Laden's driver until after the U.S. Supreme Court has decided another key detainee case.

Navy Capt. Keith Allred said delaying the start of Salim Hamdan's trial until July 21 "avoids the potential embarrassment, waste of resources and prejudice

to the accused that would" result were the Bush administration to lose the Supreme Court case.

"Moreover, the accused has been in confinement for six years and another month wait will not prejudice any party to the case,'' Allred wrote.

The decision also provided a window for Hamdan to undergo a mental health evaluation. Prosecutors had argued against such an evaluation, but Allred ordered it in response to defense lawyers' claims that that Hamdan has descended into a deep depression because of the conditions of his six-year detention. That depression makes it impossible for him to assist in his defense, his lawyers say.

A California psychiatrist, who treats U.S. veterans, evaluated the driver for about 100 hours and found he suffers post traumatic stress and is at risk of suicide because of his conditions of confinement.

Allred ordered that an independent panel of mental health experts examine Hamdan. If they find he is not competent, Allred said they should decide whether "more recreation and transfer to a less isolative facility'' might improve his mental health.

In contrast to years of neat grooming and attentiveness, Hamdan turned up disheveled at proceedings in April and said he would boycott his trial. He and Allred then chatted in court for about 40 minutes, and Allred found him "witty, thoughtful, apologetic.''

Still the judge wrote that he was "uncertain about the actual state of the accused's mental health.''

Prison camp commanders have unwaveringly maintained that suspected terrorists confined at the camps are treated humanely and that Hamdan is sane and hasn't suffered unduly in captivity.

Hamdan is held alone in a steel and concrete cell. His meals are delivered through a slot in the door. He can see other captives only through the open slot if they happen to be passing by on their way to recreation cells or showers.

Hamdan has been victorious in challenging the conditions of his captivity before. At one point, a federal court judge suspended his earlier war crimes trial and ordered him moved to the prison camp's general population, resulting in a Supreme Court showdown that overturned the Bush administration's original plans for war-crimes tribunal. Congress established the current system of military tribunals in response to that ruling.

But Hamdan's lawyers say his emotional health has deteriorated with each supposed victory, and that what look like victories from the outside feel like losses to him.

For example, his lawyers said, guards take away many items when there is a suggestion he might be suicidal and his tan prison camp uniform is replaced by a rough "suicide smock'' made of thick, tear-proof polyester.

Meanwhile, military lawyers for five Guantanamo captives accused of conspiring in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks filed a motion to have the charges dismissed, claiming Pentagon meddling in the decision to prosecute them.

The motion on behalf of Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four other captives who'd been held by the CIA argues that the Air Force general who oversees the military commissions process, Thomas Hartmann, had pressured prosecutors to bring the charges, a grave ethical violation under military law.

Last week, Allred barred Hartmann from participating in Hamdan's trial because of similar claims against him.

The decision in the 9/11 cases will be made by a different military judge, Marine Col. Ralph Kohlmann, who is chief of the military commissions.

Thursday, May 15, 2008

Gitmo Adviser Says He Won't Resign

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - A Pentagon official said May 14 he will not resign as legal adviser to war-crimes tribunals at Guantanamo, despite his removal from the trial of Osama bin Laden's driver because of a lack of impartiality.

But Air Force Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann left open the possibility that he could step aside if questions about his neutrality bog down other cases.

"I am the legal adviser today. We take it one day at a time," Hartmann said in an interview with The Associated Press.

Last week, a military judge barred Hartmann from participating in the case against Salim Hamdan - the Guantanamo inmate expected to be the first to go to trial - because he aligned himself too closely with prosecutors. Hartmann said he will abide by the judge's ruling and noted that he did not testify in the Hamdan case.

Defense lawyers have signaled they will allege improper influence in other cases as well, meaning there could be a spate of setbacks for the already delayed war crimes tribunals.

Nonetheless, Hartmann said he remains focused on making progress in moving the tribunals forward, pointing to formal charges announced this week against confessed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four alleged co-conspirators. Their arraignment has been scheduled for June 5 at the U.S. naval base in southeast Cuba.

"The focus should not go away from the fact that these five cases are going ahead jointly," he said.

Hartmann supervises the chief prosecutor at Guantanamo and has extensive powers over the tribunal system in his role as adviser.

At an April 28 hearing at Guantanamo, former chief prosecutor Air Force Col. Morris Davis testified that Hartmann meddled in his office and pushed for certain cases to be pursued over others based on political considerations. Davis resigned in October.

But Hartmann said in the interview that he operated within his mandate by ensuring that prosecutors were properly trained and motivated in an office "that was not functioning at its peak."

The U.S. says it plans to prosecute about 80 of the roughly 270 men held at Guantanamo on suspicion of links to terrorism, al-Qaida or the Taliban.

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Some Detainees Are Drugged For Deportation

The U.S. government has injected hundreds of foreigners it has deported with dangerous psychotropic drugs against their will to keep them sedated during the trip back to their home country, according to medical records, internal documents and interviews with people who have been drugged.

The government's forced use of antipsychotic drugs, in people who have no history of mental illness, includes dozens of cases in which the "pre-flight cocktail," as a document calls it, had such a potent effect that federal guards needed a wheelchair to move the slumped deportee onto an airplane.

"Unsteady gait. Fell onto tarmac," says a medical note on the deportation of a 38-year-old woman to Costa Rica in late spring 2005. Another detainee was "dragged down the aisle in handcuffs, semi-comatose," according to an airline crew member's written account. Repeatedly, documents describe immigration guards "taking down" a reluctant deportee to be tranquilized before heading to an airport.

In a Chicago holding cell early one evening in February 2006, five guards piled on top of a 49-year-old man who was angry he was going back to Ecuador, according to a nurse's account in his deportation file. As they pinned him down so the nurse could punch a needle through his coveralls into his right buttock, one officer stood over him menacingly and taunted, "Nighty-night."
Such episodes are among more than 250 cases The Washington Post has identified in which the government has, without medical reason, given drugs meant to treat serious psychiatric disorders to people it has shipped out of the United States since 2003 -- the year the Bush administration handed the job of deportation to the Department of Homeland Security's new Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, known as ICE.

Involuntary chemical restraint of detainees, unless there is a medical justification, is a violation of some international human rights codes. The practice is banned by several countries where, confidential documents make clear, U.S. escorts have been unable to inject deportees with extra doses of drugs during layovers en route to faraway places.

Federal officials have seldom acknowledged publicly that they sedate people for deportation. The few times officials have spoken of the practice, they have understated it, portraying sedation as rare and "an act of last resort." Neither is true, records and interviews indicate.

Records show that the government has routinely ignored its own rules, which allow deportees to be sedated only if they have a mental illness requiring the drugs, or if they are so aggressive that they imperil themselves or people around them.

Stung by lawsuits over two sedation cases, the agency changed its policy in June to require a court order before drugging any deportee for behavioral rather than psychiatric reasons. In at least one instance identified by The Post, the agency appears not to have followed those rules.

In the five years since its creation, ICE has stepped up arrests and removals of foreigners who are in the country illegally, have been turned down for asylum or have been convicted of a crime in the past.

If the government wants a detainee to be sedated, a deportation officer asks for permission for a medical escort from the aviation medicine branch of the Division of Immigration Health Services (DIHS), the agency responsible for medical care for people in immigration custody. A mental health official in aviation medicine is supposed to assess the detainee's medical records, although some deportees' records contain no evidence of that happening. If the sedatives are approved, a U.S. public health nurse is assigned as the medical escort and given prescriptions for the drugs.

After injecting the sedatives, the nurse travels with the deportee and immigration guards to their destination, usually giving more doses along the way. To recruit medical escorts, the government has sought to glamorize this work. "Do you ever dream of escaping to exotic, exciting locations?" said an item in an agency newsletter. "Want to get away from the office but are strapped for cash? Make your dreams come true by signing up as a Medical Escort for DIHS!"

The nurses are required to fill out step-by-step medical logs for each trip. Hundreds of logs for the past five years, obtained by The Post, chronicle in vivid detail deviations from the government's sedation rules.

An analysis by The Post of the known sedations during fiscal 2007, ending last October, found that 67 people who got medical escorts had no documented psychiatric reason. Of the 67, psychiatric drugs were given to 53, 48 of whom had no documented history of violence, though some had managed to thwart an earlier attempt to deport them. These figures do not include two detainees who immigration officials said were given sedatives for behavioral rather than psychiatric reasons before being deported on group charter flights, which are often used to return people to Mexico and Central America.

Even some people who had been violent in the past proved peaceful the day they were sent home. "Dt calm at this time," says the first entry, using shorthand for "detainee," in the log for the January 2007 deportation of Yousif Nageib to his native Sudan. In requesting drugs for his deportation, an immigration officer had noted that Nageib, 40, had once fled to Canada to avoid an assault charge and had helped instigate a detainee uprising while in custody. But on the morning of his departure, the log says, he "is handcuffed and states he will do what we say." Still, he was injected in his right buttock with a three-drug cocktail.

In one printout of Nageib's medical log, next to the entry saying he was calm, is a handwritten asterisk. It was put there by Timothy T. Shack, then medical director of the immigration health division, as he reviewed last year's sedation cases. Next to the asterisk, in his neat, looping handwriting, Shack placed a single word: "Problem."

When he landed in Lagos, Nigeria, Afolabi Ade was unable to talk.

"Every time I tried to force myself to speak, I couldn't, because my tongue was . . . twisted. . . . I thought I was going to swallow it," Ade, 33, recalled in an interview. "I was nauseous. I was dizzy."

As he was being flown back to Africa, his American wife alerted his parents there that he was on his way. His father was waiting at the Lagos airport. It was the first time in three years that they had seen one another. Shocked by how woozy the young man was, his father decided not to take him home and frighten the rest of the family. Instead, he checked his son into a hotel.

Ade was in the hotel for four days before the effects of the drugs began to abate.

Part of a prominent Nigerian family, Ade asked The Post to identify him by only a portion of his name to protect their reputation. He had come to the United States as a college student in the mid-1990s. Five years later, he was in a car belonging to cousins when police found fraudulent checks in the trunk. He pleaded guilty.

After finishing his sentence, Ade was living in Atlanta, and was two semesters away from a telecommunications degree at DeVry University, when immigration officers came looking for him one day in January 2003. They wanted to deport him for the old crime. He called his probation officer to ask whether he could wait to surrender until he took his upcoming final exams. But when he went to the probation office, immigration officers were there to arrest him.

His records offer little explanation of why he was sedated. The one-page medical record in his file mentions one condition: chronic nasal allergy. The log of his trip does not mention mental illness; in the space to list current medical problems, a nurse wrote merely that Ade was anxious.

His drugging, however, fits a pattern that emerges from the cases analyzed by The Post: The largest group of people who were sedated had resisted attempts to deport them at least once before.

One summer day in 2003, deportation officers arrived at the rural Alabama jail where Ade was being held. Pack your bags, they told him. When they reached an immigration office in Atlanta, Ade recalled, half a dozen "big guys came to meet me and said I was there to be deported."

"I can't be deported," he replied. "I have a wife I love very much." Besides, he told them, he was still appealing his immigration case. He shouldn't have to leave, he protested, until the judge had ruled. That day, he was returned to Alabama. But he said that immigration officers warned him, "We'll find a way to get you on a plane."

A few weeks later, the officers came back and again took him to a holding cell in Atlanta. He was, the medical log says, becoming "increasingly anxious and non-cooperative per flt. to Nigeria." At 1:30 p.m., the log says, "Dt taken down by four" guards.

Ade was being held down, he recalled, when he noticed a nurse "with a needle and a bottle with some kind of substance in it." He said he told the guards: "Okay, fine, fine. If it's going to be like this, don't inject me. I will go on my own free will."

The nurse went ahead, the log shows, injecting him in the left shoulder with two milligrams of a powerful drug, Haldol, used to treat psychosis, and one milligram of an anti-anxiety drug, Ativan. He was injected with two more rounds, as well as a third drug, in progressively larger doses, during the trip.

The effects of those injections are what alarmed Ade's father after the plane landed in Lagos. Yet the medical log says Ade arrived "alert and oriented."

His family's doctor, who visited him on each of the four days his father hid him in the hotel, had a different view. "He was groggy -- somebody under the influence of drugs or drunkenness," recalled Olakunle Adigun, a general practitioner. He couldn't figure out what sedatives his patient had been given, so he tried to detoxify him with saline infusions.

Ade's pulse was dangerously low, and when he tried to walk around the hotel room, "he leaned on the wall," Adigun said. "He was talking, but a slurred kind of speech."

* * *

Internal government records show that most sedated deportees, such as Ade, received a cocktail of three drugs that included Haldol, also known as haloperidol, a medication normally used to treat schizophrenia and other acute psychotic states. Of the 53 deportees without a mental illness who were drugged in 2007, The Post's analysis found, 50 were injected with Haldol, sometimes in large amounts.

They were also given Ativan, used to control anxiety, and all but three were given Cogentin, a medication that is supposed to lessen Haldol's side effects of muscle spasms and rigidity. Two of the 53 deportees received Ativan alone. One person's medications were not specified.

Haldol gained notoriety in the Soviet Union, where it was often given to political dissidents imprisoned in psychiatric hospitals. "In the history of oppression, using haloperidol is kind of like detaining people in Abu Ghraib," the infamous prison in Iraq, said Nigel Rodley, who teaches international human rights law at the University of Essex in Britain and is a former United Nations special investigator on torture.

For people who are not psychotic, said Philip Seeman, a University of Toronto specialist in psychiatry and pharmacology, "prescribing Haldol . . . is medically and ethically wrong." Seeman studied the drug in the 1960s and later discovered the brain receptors on which several antipsychotic drugs work.

The only circumstances in which small amounts of Haldol are appropriate for non-psychotic people, Seeman said, are when a person comes into a hospital emergency room violent and agitated from an overdose of a drug such as PCP, or when someone with severe dementia is delusional or combative. "You or I wouldn't get it if we were emotionally upset," he said.

In addition, Seeman said, typical doses to help psychotic patients accustomed to the drug are perhaps five to 15 milligrams a day. Several deportees were given a total of 30 milligrams, which Seeman characterized as "really high," especially for people who have never taken the drug before.

Even when used for its intended patients, people with psychosis, Haldol has drawn warnings from the U.S. government. In September, the Food and Drug Administration issued an alert citing "a number of case reports of sudden death" and other reports of dangerous changes in heart rhythm. It is, important, the FDA warned, to inject Haldol only into muscles, not veins, and to avoid doses that are too high.

"Pharma non grata" is the way Emergency Medicine News magazine described the drug after the FDA alert.

Beyond the specific drugs used, Rodley said, is a deeper question: "What is the least intrusive means of restraint consistent with the human dignity of the person? . . . I'd be very surprised if the injection of disabling chemicals against somebody's will that affect one's psychological well-being . . . is likely to be the least intrusive means."

Asked to explain the reason for using Haldol and other psychotropic drugs with people who are not mentally ill, ICE responded, "The medications used by Aviation Medicine are widely used in psychiatry." Agency officials said that medical escorts administer "the lowest dose possible." Combining Haldol and Ativan "allows you [to] use less of each," they said, and produces a quicker and longer sedative effect.

In the years before Ade was drugged, there had been an internal debate within the U.S. government over whether sedating deportees against their will is legal, according to confidential legal memos obtained by The Post. There was agreement that mentally ill people could be forced to take psychotropic medicine on their way out of the country. At dispute were cases in which the detainees were not mentally ill but combative -- known as "behavioral cases."

Near the end of the Clinton administration, Health and Human Services lawyers sent around a memo that warned, "[U]sing chemical restraints in cases in which medication is not clinically indicated . . . may put the government at risk of potential liability."

Another memo went further, concluding that it could be done only if a federal judge gave permission in advance. "[R]egarding detainees who are not mentally ill," the November 2000 document said, "involuntary medication of such persons for the sole purpose of subduing them during deportation, without a court order, is not supported by any legal authority and raises ethical issues, as well.

"After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and after the Bush administration assumed a tough new stance on immigration in its campaign against terrorism, the Justice Department still sounded wary about drugging deportees. In March 2002, a Justice lawyer laid out two options. One choice, he wrote, was to "seek a court order . . . in every case where the alien's medication is not therapeutically justified." The other choice was to create a regulation to grant immigration officials explicit permission to sedate deportees, perhaps including safeguards that would give people a warning that they might be medicated -- and a chance to object.

Top immigration officials chose neither. Instead, in May 2003, just after ICE was created, they internally circulated a new policy: "[A]n ICE detainee with or without a diagnosed psychiatric condition who displays overt or threatening aggressive behavior . . . may be considered a combative detainee and can be sedated if appropriate under the circumstances."

Under that policy, scores of people have been sedated every year since then, usually with heavy psychotropic drugs.

Some countries forbid the practice. The medical files for several deportees recount disputes between U.S. officials, who wanted to inject a subject, and foreign officials, who would not allow it.

Immigration guards and a public health nurse ran into trouble in May 2004, during a stopover on a trip from Colorado to Guinea. The deportee had been given the three-drug cocktail at the airport gate before leaving Denver, the nurse wrote in the log. Three "booster doses" followed.

The last booster was given shortly before the plane landed in Belgium. "[N]o problem initially with Belgium security," the log says. "[T]hen approached and informed illegal to medicate detainee against their will in Belgium. Informed them pt wasn't medicated in Belgium airspace for which they replied that he is medicated in Belgium." In the end, the security officers let the deportation go ahead.

Immigration guards and a nurse had more trouble during another deportation to Guinea in April 2006, as they escorted a 34-year-old man from Atlanta, with a stop in France.

He had been given 15 milligrams of Haldol, as well as the two other drugs, by the time the flight reached Paris at 9:45 a.m. According to a nurse's report on the incident, the guards, nurse and deportee were met at the plane by French national police, who accompanied them to an airport police station to await the connecting flight to Africa later in the day.

Once at the station, one of the guards asked a French officer "where we could inject the detainee when needed." First, they were shown into a private area. But five minutes later, the nurse's report says, "a superior French police officer approached and informed me that any type of involuntary injection was strictly forbidden in France, and that we would have to wait until we were in the aircraft if we were to inject our detainee."

Six hours later, the entourage returned to the boarding area for the flight to Guinea. "When we arrived at the plane, the detainee became very argumentative, refusing to enter plane until [the guards] produced paperwork showing a final deportation order," the nurse wrote. The immigration officers tried to coax him onto the plane. He refused.

"I asked the French police if the ramp on the gate would be an appropriate place to medicate," the nurse wrote. "The French police's reply was that it was strictly forbidden." The plane's captain came over to say that he would not allow the deportee onto the flight. The guards and the nurse flew him back to Atlanta.

Five weeks later they tried again, and this time, they reached Guinea. By the time they arrived, a nurse had given the deportee nine injections of Haldol totaling 55 milligrams -- nearly four times as much as before.

One deportee who was sedated last year had convictions for armed robbery and assault. Another kept telling immigration officers, "I am God." But many of those injected with psychotropic drugs, records show, are neither violent nor mentally ill. They simply do not want to go home.

"[M]ild anxiety and agitation" is how a deportation log describes Remmy Semakula's state on the afternoon he was taken from his cell in the Middlesex County jail in New Jersey to be deported to Uganda in early April 2007. According to a memo from his deportation officer, he had said earlier that he would "fight with the officers and obstruct the operation of the airline" if guards tried to force him to go home. Semakula, 42, said that he had not tried to thwart his deportation and had not known it was imminent because his immigration case still was before a federal judge. "I never fought violently or physically," he said. "They just grabbed me and injected me with a sleeping drug."

The first time immigration agents tried to deport Michel Shango, he slammed his head, hard, against the outside of the van that had come to pick him up at Atlanta's city jail. Instead of being driven to the airport, then flown to the Democratic Republic of Congo, he was brought back to the jail so his wound could be tended to.

"I asked him why he feared being returned back to his country," an immigration officer wrote of the incident. Shango, now 42, replied that he had been a journalist and had written articles critical of the Congolese government. "Detainee stated . . . that he might as well die trying to avoid deportation," a second officer wrote, "because they will kill him as soon as he gets to the D.R. of the Congo."

Until early 1996, Shango worked in Congo, ghostwriting articles and supplying information to foreign correspondents about the repressive administration of President Mobutu Sese Seko, he said in telephone interviews from locations in Congo, Gabon and Equatorial Guinea, where friends are now helping him hide. Eventually Shango was arrested, he and two of his lawyers said, but he escaped to Canada, then settled in North Carolina, where he started a limousine business with a cousin in Charlotte. He married an American, who at first offered to help him become a citizen. The marriage dissolved. He applied for political asylum. He was turned down.

He was remarried to a Congolese woman by the time immigration officers came to his house at 4:30 one morning in May 2006. As his wife and their three American-born children cried at the frightening scene, the officers led him away at gunpoint.

On Feb. 28, 2007, three months after the first deportation attempt was aborted because of the head-banging incident, seven guards arrived at the Atlanta jail to make a second attempt. Shango glanced at his watch and noted that it was 1:45 p.m. "They pushed me against the wall," he recalled. "They pulled my pants down." His medical log shows that he was given seven shots in his right buttock and right shoulder before he boarded the airplane.

The log says his only psychological problem was "anxiety disorder."

By the time Shango reached Congo, records show, he had been injected with 32.5 milligrams of Haldol and 7.5 milligrams of Ativan. As he was thrown into a prison after he got off the plane, and even as friends helped him escape, he was so disoriented, he said, that he did not fully know where he was. For two weeks, Shango said, "It was like I was dreaming. . . . I started crying, crying, crying all day long. . . . I was like crazy, because [of] the drugs, knocking me down."

* * *

Of all the detainees who have been forcibly drugged, only two have drawn much public attention. Neither, in the end, was deported. And compared with other deportees, neither got large doses of sedatives. But publicity about their cases sent shock waves through the immigration bureaucracy. Raymond Soeoth, a Christian minister from Indonesia, had tried and failed to win asylum in the United States. While in custody at an immigration compound near Los Angeles, his medical log notes, Soeoth, now 39, he said he would kill himself if deported -- a statement his lawyers say he never made.

On Dec. 7, 2004, he was injected in the left buttock with five milligrams of Haldol and four milligrams of Cogentin before being taken to the airport. As it turned out, his deportation was canceled before takeoff because immigration officials had not alerted airline security in Singapore, a stopover point.

Amadou Diouf came to the United States from Senegal as a student in 1996 and got a degree in information systems from California State University at Northridge. He married a U.S. citizen and was trying to change his immigration status when, in March 2005, he was arrested and brought to the same compound as Soeoth.

Eleven months later, as he was still appealing his case and, according to his lawyers, had a court order blocking his deportation, immigration officers came for him and took him to the airport for the trip back to Senegal.

At first, records show, Diouf, now 32, was calm. He was already sitting in a window seat, 4A, when he demanded to speak to the plane's captain. He "became more agitated, anxious and loud in his dialogue," according to the medical log. A nurse said he would be given "some calming medicine," but when Diouf saw the needle, he lunged. Guards "proceeded to take down the detainee to the ground" in the plane's galley, and the nurse injected him with five milligrams of Haldol, two milligrams of Ativan and two milligrams of Cogentin.

At that point, the guards and nurse called off the trip. Diouf was returned to his cell. In early May 2007, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California was drafting a lawsuit on behalf of Soeoth and Diouf and told a local newspaper, the Los Angeles Daily Journal, about their sedations. Across the continent, inside the immigration health division's headquarters in downtown Washington, the publicity's effect was electric.

The next day, the chief of psychiatry for the division's aviation medicine branch dispatched a memo. "I have stopped all planned non-psychiatric behavioral escorts, of which 10 are currently planned," he wrote, until government lawyers "have formalized policy in regards to this type of escort activity."

A month and a half later, the medical escort rules were changed. Except in psychiatric cases, according to a confidential June 21 memo from ICE, the health division "must have a court order to assist. . . . [ICE in] removal of problematic detainees." In January, the language was made even stronger: "DIHS may only involuntarily sedate an alien to facilitate removal where the government has obtained a court order. There are no exceptions to this policy."

The newest rules were issued less than three weeks before the government tentatively settled the lawsuit with Soeoth and Diouf, who are now out of custody. The government is no longer trying to deport Soeoth; Diouf is still fighting to remain in the country.

How well the government is following its new rules is unclear. Asked how many court orders the government has sought, immigration officials said that none "have been issued to involuntarily sedate an alien for removal purposes," but they declined to discuss whether any requests are pending.

In one known case in which government lawyers sought a court order, they withdrew the request after a congressman intervened. On Oct. 1, a federal judge in Texas was asked for permission to sedate Rrustem Neza. Immigration officers had canceled their first attempt to deport him to Albania because he created a scene at the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, screaming, "I am not a terrorist."

One week after the government filed its motion, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.), a former judge, wrote to the court, saying he had "grave concerns" about the government's desire to medicate his constituent to deport him. "Mr. Neza fled Albania after telling a crowd in Tropoje the names of the men who were seen killing Azem Hajdari, who organized a student movement against the Communist Party. Mr. Neza's cousins were fatally shot while fleeing with him," the congressman wrote. "[S]edating Mr. Neza amounts to a death sentence for an innocent man."

Last March, after Gohmert had spoken about Neza's case with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and after he had introduced legislation to block Neza's deportation, the issue was dropped.

* * *

In at least one instance since the rules were changed, the government apparently drugged a deportee without permission from a judge. Maher Ayoub, now 44, was sent back to Egypt last August. A month later, immigration officials told Congress that they had not yet asked for a court order in any case.

Ayoub had thwarted the first attempt to deport him, a few months earlier, by sitting in a van and demanding all the paperwork in his immigration file. He said he spent the next three months in segregation in an Elizabeth, N.J., detention center. The next time they tried to send him home, immigration officers were determined to make sure he would go quietly.

His record offers contradictory evidence about whether there was psychiatric justification for the drugs he got, though it seems to suggest that there was not. A one-page "patient summary" for Ayoub says "Med/Psych Alert Documents: None." His medical escort log labels him a mental health case and says he had a "depressed mood" and an "anxiety state."

A handwritten note in his escort file, from a psychiatrist who saw him at the Elizabeth center, first says Ayoub was not likely to endanger himself or anyone else -- then, lower on the same page, says he might. On the next page of the file is another note, this one written two days before his flight, from the psychiatrist in charge of aviation medicine. It says that Ayoub's case is a "behavioral escort," not a psychiatric one, and that the nurse "is only to give medications to the patient if he agrees to take them. He will only use involuntary treatment if the patient is at imminent risk of hurting himself or others."

That is not what happened.

"Detainee tearful and wringing hands," his medical log begins. An hour later, it says: "Detainee increasingly agitated and resisting clothing change. Detainee is now crying and screaming" at two guards. A nurse at the Elizabeth detention center slid two milligrams of the anti-anxiety drug, Ativan, into his left shoulder.

Immigration officials said his deportation was "consistent" with the June policy that allows medication only when a detainee "may be a risk to himself or others."

"I was feeling my head was leaving my body," Ayoub remembers. "I was losing control over my body." He was groggy but awake when he arrived with guards and the nurse at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport and boarded the nonstop flight to Egypt.

Before the plane took off, he remembers, he called over a flight attendant and "asked them to tell the pilot I didn't want to leave." The nurse stuck a needle into his right arm this time. That injection put him to sleep.