Terror suspect gets shelter in Sudan, but no trip home

The Harper government granted terrorist suspect Abousfian Abdelrazik, “temporary safe haven” Tuesday in Canada's Khartoum embassy and said it was “reviewing his case,” but stopped short of agreeing to help him return home.

Mr. Abdelrazik, who has been marooned in Sudan for years, spent nearly two years in prison there, was denied a new Canadian passport and was unable to return to his family in Montreal, walked into the Canadian embassy Tuesday morning and said he wanted to stay there.

A day earlier, The Globe and Mail published a detailed account of Mr. Abdelrazik's predicament, drawing on more than 1,000 pages of government documents that detailed his multi-year ordeal during which the government repeatedly assured him that there was nothing it could do to remove him from international blacklists fingering him as a terrorist.

The government abruptly changed tack on Tuesday.

Foreign Minister Maxime Bernier decided to grant Mr. Abdelrazik “temporary safe haven,” said the minister's spokesman, Neil Hrab.

“We are currently reviewing his case,” Mr. Hrab added.

And in a carefully worded response, the government acknowledged that it understood “Mr. Abdelrazik is unable to return to Canada of his own accord.”

The response also acknowledged that repatriating the Canadian citizen would require either a government aircraft to circumvent no-fly lists or a serious effort to have him removed from the United Nations list of alleged al-Qaeda suspects.

For the government to provide even “temporary safe haven” on what is Canadian territory, the embassy in Khartoum, to Mr. Abdelrazik while the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service continues to finger him as a terrorist suspect suggests that the designation may be under review.

“He doesn't want to live out his days in the embassy,” said Yavar Hameed, an Ottawa lawyer representing Mr. Abdelrazik. “That's just a stopgap measure. … What he wants is to come home.” Mr. Hameed said the government should send a plane “to fly him out of there within days.”

As the government fended off questions and CSIS refused to say why it originally labelled Mr. Abdelrazik a terrorism suspect and al-Qaeda member, Opposition Leader Stéphane Dion said Mr. Abdelrazik “should be authorized to return to Canada,” adding that if there are serious allegations against him he should be charged and tried “in Canada.”

The Harper government has failed to protect Canadians overseas, Mr. Dion said in Quebec City. “The government should be much more determined in protecting the rights of Canadians everywhere in the world,” he said.

CSIS spokeswoman Manon Berube said “on the matter of Mr. Abdelrazik's status as a terrorist suspect, CSIS cannot confirm or deny any specific operational investigation.”

Mr. Abdelrazik, walked into the Canadian embassy at about 10:40 a.m., Tuesday, local time. According to Mr. Hameed, one of the Canadian diplomats stationed in Khartoum, Eric O'Connor, warned him to be careful “on the streets” because of the attention now focused on his case by reports of his predicament.

“I don't intend to leave the embassy,” Mr. Abdelrazik told the consul.

Mr. O'Connor said he needed to seek advice from Ottawa and hours later confirmed to Mr. Abdelrazik that he would be allowed to stay temporarily. Embassy staff bought him a pizza. Security personnel guarding the embassy were told that Mr. Abdelrazik was remaining inside.

The government's carefully chosen phase, “temporary safe haven,” stops far short of “sanctuary” or “refuge,” both of which could be construed by Sudan as suggesting the Canadian government believed Mr. Abdelrazik needs protection. Sudan has already issued documents saying it believes the accusations that he is a terrorist and al-Qaeda member are groundless.

A senior Foreign Affairs official called Mr. Hameed Tuesday afternoon to say an “evolving risk assessment” was under way with respect to Mr. Abdelrazik.

Meanwhile, his former wife, Myriam St.-Hilaire, who divorced him while he was in prison in Sudan, made an impassioned plea at an Ottawa news conference for his return. She said she was speaking on behalf of their five-year-old son.

“I'm here to be his voice, since he's too young to do so right now. Time is passing by, years are passing by and things aren't changing,” she said.

Ms. St.-Hilaire, who has said CSIS harassed her and Mr. Abdelrazik for years before he went to Sudan, also rejected the unsubstantiated allegations by counterterrorism agencies from Canada, France and the United States linking him to senior al-Qaeda figures, including Abu Zubaydah.

“The question that comes up over and over again: Is he a terrorist? I'll just answer plain and simple. He is not a terrorist. He is a Muslim. He is a practising Muslim, but a peaceful Muslim. And we just wish him to reunite with his family, with his children,” she said.

Mr. Hameed said his client has been a victim of “duplicity and disinformation” by Canada's Foreign Affairs Department, which has refused to help repatriate Mr. Abdelrazik based on “nebulous security concerns.”

In Toronto, Aileen Carroll, former federal minister for CIDA in the Liberal government and now Ontario Culture Minister, said she had been advised during a 2004 visit to Khartoum that the Sudanese government might ask her to take Mr. Abdelrazik home on her government Challenger executive jet.

“It would have been denied for the reasons that the gentleman's name was on the no-fly list, which means he is prohibited from flying on commercial air[lines] and most air[lines]. In addition to that, he would most likely not be permitted entry to countries that I would be required, … to stop [for refuelling] on my return to Canada,” she said.

But nothing in the UN sanctions precludes the repatriation of terrorist suspects, nor do commercial no-fly lists apply to government or military aircraft.

Canadian embassies have been used as safe havens in the past, most recently in 2004 when 44 North Korean defectors stormed over the wall in the embassy in Beijing. They lived there for three months before a deal was struck allowing them to make their way to South Korea.

But the arrangement in Khartoum is different because Mr. Abdelrazik has been granted “temporary safe haven” in an embassy located in the country of his other nationality and isn't seeking to reach refuge in a third country but rather return to Montreal, an effort that has been thwarted for years by the refusal of the Canadian government to issue him a new passport or have him removed from no-fly lists.

In Ottawa on Tuesday, Liberal MP Dan McTeague said the first thing the government must do in Mr. Abdelrazik's case is find out how and why he got on the no-fly list in the first place.

“I have no information as to how or why Mr. Abdelrazik was placed on that, but I think that would be the first order of business if the government wishes to have him returned to Canada,” Mr. McTeague said. “It is well intentioned to give someone a travel document, but if you have to transit through another country which will not allow a Canadian on such a list to get onto their planes, it kind of makes it impossible to get him back.”

U.S. to televise Guantanamo trials to 9-11 families

GUANTANAMO BAY U.S. NAVAL BASE, Cuba (Reuters) - The U.S. military will televise the Guantanamo trial of accused September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and five other suspects so relatives of those killed in the attacks can watch on the U.S. mainland.

"We're going to broadcast in real time to several locations that will be available just to victim families," Army Col. Lawrence Morris, chief prosecutor for the controversial war crimes court, said at the naval base recently.

In February, military prosecutors charged Mohammed and five other captives with murder and conspiracy and asked that they be executed if convicted of plotting to crash hijacked planes into New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001.

No trial date has been set but they are the first Guantanamo prisoners charged with direct involvement in the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people.

Morris said several of the victims' relatives asked to watch the trials at the detention center set up in Guantanamo Bay naval base to try foreign terrorism suspects.

The base sits on a dusty patch of the island of Cuba and does not have many flights, beds or courtroom seats to accommodate spectators.

The trials will be beamed to closed-circuit television viewing sites on military bases at Fort Hamilton in New York, Fort Monmouth in New Jersey, Fort Meade in Maryland and Fort Devens in Massachusetts, Morris said.

The military is borrowing a page from the civilian court sentencing hearing of Zacarias Moussaoui, a flight school student who is the only person convicted in the United States in connection with the September 11 plot. He pleaded guilty to conspiring with al Qaeda and was sentenced to life in prison.

U.S. federal courts normally ban cameras. But through an act of Congress, Moussaoui's 2006 court hearing in Virginia was shown by closed-circuit television to victims' families at courthouses in Boston, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

"We got much more information from those hearings than we ever got from the 9-11 Commission," said Lorie Van Auken, whose husband Kenneth died in the World Trade Center, referring to the investigation the U.S. Congress launched into the attacks.

FAIR TRIALS OR SHOW TRIALS?

Some of the victims' relatives praised the U.S. military for ensuring they had access to the Guantanamo proceedings.

Hamilton Peterson, whose father and stepmother, Donald and Jean Peterson, died on the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, called the prosecutors "true patriots," and said he was grateful for "the ability to see justice being fulfilled in one of the most significant attacks on America's heartland."

Others urged the trials be televised nationwide without restriction because of the sweeping impact of the attacks.

The broadcasts will mark the first time a Guantanamo detainee's face has been shown publicly. The U.S. military prohibits journalists and other visitors from taking photographs or video that shows faces, citing a provision of the Geneva Conventions that aims to protect war captives from "insults and public curiosity."

The U.S. military lawyer assigned to defend Mohammed, Navy Capt. Prescott Prince, said if the trials are truly fair, then broadcasting them widely would prove that to the world. But he worried about setting a precedent by televising what he suspects will be show trials.

"I can just imagine American soldiers and sailors and airmen being subjected to similar show trials worldwide," he said.

He said he doubts the defendants can get a fair trial in the Guantanamo court because it accepts hearsay evidence that may have been obtained through cruel and dehumanizing means. The Geneva provision cited in shielding prisoners' faces also bans "acts of violence or intimidation," he noted.

The CIA held Mohammed in a secret prison for years and acknowledged interrogating him with methods that included the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding.

Some of the victims' relatives also said they thought the trials should be held in a regular court, open to the public and using only "evidence that's above reproach."

"This is not about revenge, it's about justice," said Valerie Lucznikowska, a New Yorker whose nephew Adam Arias died in the World Trade Center.

"I don't want it to be a lynching. I'm concerned that people like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, we won't be able to find them guilty because of what we've done with them. It's a horrible conundrum."

Pentagon Records Detail Prisoner Abuse

WASHINGTON - Military interrogators assaulted Afghan detainees in 2003, using investigation methods they learned during self-defense training, Pentagon documents released April 16 show.

Detainees at the Gardez Detention Facility in southeastern Afghanistan reported being made to kneel outside in wet clothing and being kicked and punched in the kidneys, nose and knees if they moved, according to the documents.

A 2006 Army review concluded that the detainees were not abused but that the incident revealed "misconduct that warrants further action."

The documents, which were turned over April 16 to the American Civil Liberties Union, focus on the 2003 death of Afghan detainee Jamal Nasser, who died in U.S. custody at the Gardez facility.

The documents detail interrogation techniques used on eight detainees, including Nasser, who were suspected of weapons trafficking.

The Army review found that abuse did not cause Nasser's death. But the documents include interviews with some interrogators who acknowledged slapping the detainees - a technique they learned during survival training at the Army's SERE school. SERE stands for Survive, Evade, Resist and Escape.

"You say you gave permission for (redacted) to hit detainees during interrogations; did you have a memorandum or order from your higher headquarters authorizing that?" a military criminal investigator asked one of the interrogators, according to a November 2004 transcript among the more than 300 pages of documents.

"No, I did not have a memorandum and had not seen one," the interrogator answered, according to the transcript. "I used tactics that were used in SERE."

The investigator continued: "Did you see (redacted) hit detainees during the interviews?"

"Yes, open or closed slaps, not punches," the interrogator answered.

In another interview that day, according to the documents, the Army investigator asks whether "you ever heard of a tactic of pouring cold water or a water and snow mix on persons captured?"

"They do spray cold water on prisoners," the interrogator answered, referring to SERE lessons. That interrogator was unaware, however, of men in his unit pouring cold water over the detainees, as the Afghans later complained.

ACLU attorney Amrit Singh said such interrogation techniques are taught at SERE schools only to show Soldiers how to withstand them from enemy captors. She called the methods, when used together, a form of torture.

"They were intended to be defensive methods, not offensive methods," Singh said. "This raises serious questions about the interrogation methods that were being applied in Afghanistan."

SERE methods were also used on detainees by military interrogators in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Singh said.

The Pentagon and the Army did not immediately respond to requests for comment April 16.

The 2004 criminal inquiry of Nasser's death was among a string of probes into alleged abuse of prisoners in U.S. jails in Afghanistan.

Trying to deflect the kind of scandal that followed the abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan ordered a review of their secretive network of about 20 jails at bases across Afghanistan.

Nasser was among eight detainees who were held at Gardez for between 18 and 20 days. The Army concluded he died of a stomach ailment.

Idaho attorneys to assist alleged al Qaeda kingpin

WASHINGTON -- The Navy officer assigned to defend reputed al Qaeda kingpin Khalid Sheik Mohammed said Monday he is assembling a four-attorney team to stave off the alleged 9/11 mastermind's death-penalty charges -- two military JAG officers and two lawyers from Boise, Idaho, who have defended an alleged terrorist before.

Navy Capt. Prescott ''Scott'' Prince was detailed to the case last week. He has yet to see Mohammed, a U.S.-educated Pakistani citizen known in intelligence circles as ``KSM.''

On Feb. 11, the Pentagon prosecutor identified Mohammed as the lead defendant in a proposed prosecution to try six detainees at the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, on capital murder conspiracy charges in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

Prince said Boise law partners David Z. Nevin and Scott McKay have agreed to work as volunteer civilian defense counsel under a program sponsored by the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

In 2004, McKay and Nevin secured a federal court acquittal for a Saudi man, Sami al-Hussayen, 34, who was a doctoral candidate at the University of Idaho.

In U.S. anti-terror sweeps following the 9/11 attacks, Hussayen was accused of ''providing material support for terror,'' for allegedly serving as webmaster for a Muslim charity that the U.S. government called an al Qaeda front. He was cleared of all charges and returned to his native Saudi Arabia.

No stranger to unpopular cases, Nevin also won an acquittal for Kevin Harris, a friend of Randy Weaver's, accused of killing a U.S. marshall in the 1993 Ruby Ridge case.

In addition, the Pentagon's chief defense counsel for military commissions, Army Reserves Col. Steve David, was in the process of assigning another U.S. military lawyer or JAG, short for judge advocate general, to the KSM case.

Prince said in an interview that he would also add a paralegal, a translator and intelligence analyst to his team. Additionally, he was seeking Pentagon approval for a so-called ''mitigation expert'' on the case.

Prince said he anticipated ''a very complex documentary case,'' with lots of evidence to sift through in light of U.S. government disclosures that Mohammed had been held four years incommunicado, never seen a lawyer and was subjected to White House approved ``enhanced interrogation techniques.''

The CIA has confirmed that Mohammed was among three war-on-terror captives who was waterboarded in U.S. custody, a simulated drowning technique that Prince flatly labeled ``torture.''

Ultimately, under military commissions rules, it will be up to Mohammed to decide whether he will accept any of the attorneys.

In recent, non-capital cases brought before to the military commissions, three alleged al Qaeda foot soldiers have fired their Pentagon-paid defense lawyers, and said they would boycott their trials.

In those cases, conviction carries life in prison. Acquittal likewise means likely continued detention as the U.S. government argues that ''enemy combatants'' can be held at Guantánamo until the end of hostilities in the global war on terror.

In capital cases, conviction could carry execution although no system for carrying out the death penalty has been established at Guantánamo.

Prince said he hoped to introduce himself to Mohammed in coming weeks, after getting special security clearances governing former CIA held detainees at the remote U.S. Navy base.

Nevin and McKay need the same clearances and would meet him later, if Mohammed agrees to their volunteering to work on the case. It is believed that neither have ever visited the offshore detention center.

Both men declined through an assistant to comment on Monday.

An ACLU news release had earlier listed Nevin and McKay among leading national criminal defense lawyers whom the civil liberties group had enlisted for a nascent Guantánamo death-penalty defense program, to be called The John Adams project.

New roadblocks delay tribunals at Guantánamo

GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba: When military officials announced war crimes charges against six detainees for the Sept. 11 attacks two months ago, the move was part of an effort to accelerate the Bush administration's sluggish military commission system, which has yet to hold a single trial.

But the Sept. 11 case immediately hit a snag. Military defense lawyers were in short supply, and even now, two months later, not one of the six detainees has met his military lawyer.
The delay in getting lawyers to those detainees, which largely grew out of a struggle within the Pentagon over legal resources, is indicative of the confounding obstacles facing this latest effort to expedite the military tribunals.

Since fall, when charges had been lodged against just three detainees, military officials have charged 12 more terrorism suspects. Yet there is a growing consensus among lawyers inside and outside the military that few of those cases are likely to actually come to trial before the end of the Bush administration.

"Speed is going to be very, very difficult to accomplish here," said Stephen Saltzburg, a military law expert at George Washington University. "They may be overconfident that if they just push ahead, all the ducks will end up in a row. I don't think that's going to happen."

The road to a trial is difficult in some cases partly because they involve potential death penalties and claims of torture by interrogators, issues that raise thorny legal questions that could take months or longer to sort out. But even comparatively simple cases without capital penalty issues are proceeding slowly.

In addition, just as the Pentagon is pushing to try cases in part to show the viability of the tribunal system, some civil liberties groups and defense lawyers are working to slow the pace, partly to keep the system from gaining legitimacy by eliciting testimony against terrorism suspects that could inflame Americans. They say they plan a dizzying array of challenges to try to prevent any significant number of what they call political trials.

They are particularly focused on the Sept. 11 case, which for more than six years has been expected to be the centerpiece of the Bush administration's military commission system.
"The government can be assured that this will not be a quick show trial," said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. "Not if we can help it."

The ACLU and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers announced a plan last week to provide experienced defense lawyers for some detainees.

The standoff over the military lawyers for the Sept. 11 suspects grew out of a long-running dispute over legal resources at the Pentagon. The chief military defense lawyer for Guantánamo, Colonel Steven David, said in an interview that he lacked enough experienced lawyers and other staff members.

Guantánamo military defense lawyers have long said they are not given resources by the Pentagon to match the investigative capability of the military prosecution, which draws on the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Central Intelligence Agency and other agencies. Until a handful of new military lawyers were appointed this week to represent Sept. 11 defendants, the military defense office was sharply outnumbered, with 15 defense lawyers to battle 31 prosecutors.

But Brigadier General Thomas Hartmann, an official of the Office of Military Commissions at the Pentagon, argued that the defense office was staffed well enough to have begun to defend the Sept. 11 case the day it was announced.

In a recent interview, Hartmann, who has been pressing to move more quickly on the Guantánamo cases, made clear that he was impatient. "You have to get the train moving so you can get to a destination," he said. "And the train hadn't been moving."

But even with enough lawyers, David said, there were countless impediments to quick trials, including questions about how the tribunals are to deal with detainees' claims of torture. Lacking precedents and clear rules, he said, "there are issues within issues within issues."

At a news conference here on Wednesday, the deputy chief military prosecutor, Colonel Bruce Pagel, said that while the government wanted quick trials, the pace would largely be determined by military judges.

"There is just no predicting that," Pagel said. "There are just too many variables."
Each of the 14 cases now pending presents legal tangles. In one, the morass grew so thick that the judge scheduled pretrial proceedings after the date he had set for the trial, evidently realizing that there were too many unresolved issues to rush the case. In another, a detainee refused to leave his cell for an arraignment and had to be forcibly extracted.

On Wednesday, proceedings were delayed when a detainee complained that the tribunal translation was flawed. After that was resolved, the detainee, Ahmed Mohammed Ahmed Haza al Darbi, declared the proceeding political and refused to participate, adding, "History will record these trials as a scandal against you."

Prosecutors planned this week to arraign two suspects, one who they say was a Qaeda paymaster and the other, they say, a propaganda chief. But that rudimentary step is not to go off as they had hoped. The case of the propaganda chief had to be postponed because his military lawyer had recently left the defense office, taking that case back to its starting point.

By chance, the alleged paymaster and the alleged propaganda chief were the first ones identified for war crimes trials by the Pentagon back in 2004. Yet all Guantánamo cases were derailed in 2006 when the Supreme Court struck down the Bush administration's first war crimes system.

The first trial of a detainee under the new system is now scheduled for May 28. But defense lawyers for that defendant, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, who was a driver for Osama bin Laden, have filed nearly 30 legal motions, raising questions that included procedural issues and basic challenges to the Guantánamo system itself.

Andrea Prasow, one of Hamdan's lawyers, said her experience in a comparatively simple Guantánamo case showed the extraordinary complexities that seem certain to entangle all of the battles here.

It may be possible, Prasow said, for one or two cases to be tried by the fall. But, she said, "I don't see how it is remotely possible for the others to get under way."

Some of the defense requests in Hamdan's case show the kinds of issues that are tying prosecutors in knots. His lawyers have accused Pentagon officials of improperly influencing the prosecution by directing that charges be filed for political reasons and, the lawyers said, demanding "sexy" cases to attract public attention. They also claim that Hamdan is so psychologically damaged by the conditions under which he has been held that he is incapable of assisting his lawyers.

The Hamdan defense has worried prosecutors by winning the right to submit written questions to four detainees who were formerly held in secret CIA prisons.

The request to question prisoners like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attack, brought strong objections from prosecutors who said it could be a national security threat.

When a military judge allowed very limited written questions, the prosecutors pleaded with him to reconsider. The judge stuck with his ruling.

But a major battle is expected if, as seems likely, Hamdan's defense follows that request with a demand that those former CIA detainees be called to testify in public.

J. Wells Dixon, a lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights, said the charges, which seek the death penalty against the six men charged with the 2001 attack, are so complex that defense teams in those cases will need months, if not years, to prepare. The center represented one of the six men in a case challenging his detention before the war crimes charges were filed.

"There is no possibility," Dixon said, "that these cases are going to proceed to trial any time soon."

Hartmann said trials in any system could be subject to delays. But he said he had told military prosecutors and court officials not to get distracted as problems cropped up.

"My guidance to people," he said, "is 'keep moving' and when the rocks start to fall on you, you move a little faster."

Military lawyers assigned to defend accused 9/11 ploitters

WASHINGTON -- The chief defense counsel for the war crimes court at Guantánamo Bay on Monday appointed four U.S. military officers to defend four alleged co-conspirators facing possible death-penalty charges in the 9/11 attacks.

But Army Reserves Col. Steve David said he had not yet formally assigned a lawyer to defend their alleged ringleader, reputed al Qaeda kingpin Khalid Sheik Mohammed.

The assignments had been seen as a key obstacle in the Pentagon's effort to move forward with its showcase Military Commissions prosecution -- a complex, six-captive capital case alleging they organized the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

CHARGES FILED

The Pentagon prosecutor swore out charges against the six on Feb. 11. Now a Bush administration appointee is deciding whether to go forward and whether to make execution the ultimate penalty -- if the men are convicted in the case that lists the names of 2,973 victims in the charges sheets.

''It's daunting,'' said Navy Reserves Cmdr. Suzanne Lachelier, a former San Diego federal public defender called to service and now assigned to defend Ramzi bin al Shibh.

She also, separately, had been assigned another commissions case -- to defend a Sudanese man who allegedly served as Osama bin Laden's bodyguard, driver and cook, Ibrahim al Qosi.

But the 9/11 case, she said, presented ``the ultimate challenge for a criminal defense attorney when a defendant is facing so much hatred from the general public -- and political backlash, to say the least.''

Bin al Shibh, who was captured on Sept. 11, 2002, is accused of organizing the German-based cell of the suicide squads that hijacked the commercial airplanes that struck the World Trade Center, Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field a year earlier.

KEY INTERMEDIARY

A citizen of Yemen, he has been described as a key intermediary between some of the hijackers and leaders of al Qaeda, in effect meaning he served as the 9/11 control officer. He also has been described as a key lieutenant to Mohammed.

Mohammed and the four other former CIA-held captives accused in the case have never seen attorneys -- military or civilian -- and are held in segregation as special ''high-value detainees'' at the remote prison camps in southeast Cuba.

They arrived there in September 2006 after years in secret U.S. custody overseas.

Now it will be up to the attorneys to get special intelligence clearances and meet with their clients to see whether they will cooperate with their U.S. military lawyers -- who are provided to them free of charge under the Military Commissions Act that created the war court in 2006.

David, in civilian life a judge in Boone County, Ind., near Indianapolis, made the appointments days after several civilian legal groups disclosed that they were organizing a defense fund and recruiting teams of top lawyers with death-penalty experience to help in the cases of Mohammed and the others accused at the war court.

The American Civil Liberties Union is spearheading the effort.

OTHER DEFENDANTS

Of the other former CIA-held detainees facing proposed capital charges:

• Walid bin Attash was assigned Navy Reserves Lt. Cmdr. James Hatcher, who has death penalty defense experience as a South Carolina federal public defender. Bin Attash, a Saudi-raised Yemeni, allegedly selected and trained some of the hijackers and allegedly scouted U.S. aircraft as early as 1999 in Malaysia as part of the plot.

• Ali Abd al Aziz Ali was assigned Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brian Mizer, who is already lead lawyer in the non-capital case against Osama bin Laden's former Afghanistan driver, Salim Hamdan -- whose trial is expected to start in June and last at most two weeks. Aziz Ali, known as Ammar al Baluchi, has been described as nephew of Khalid Sheik Mohammed who allegedly sent about $120,000 to the hijackers to cover, among other things, flight training at U.S. flight schools.

• Azzi Ali's assistant, Mustafa al Hawsawi, was assigned Army Reserves Maj. John Jackson as his defense counsel.

Only one of the six had already been assigned an attorney.

He is Mohammed al Qahtani, a Saudi who has been held by the military, not the CIA, but was subjected to a special course of interrogations approved by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

It was not known whether, as of Monday, his lawyer, Army Lt. Col. Bryan Broyles had yet to meet with him.

SPECIAL ACCESS

The others need special access from the military to see their clients because the CIA has declared as classified the details of their interrogation and detention at so-called ''black sites'' overseas.

Lachelier said that David had assured the 9/11 defense counsels that they would get a second uniformed military defense counsel -- known as ''a second chair'' -- as well as an investigator and paralegal to work on the case.

In addition, the ACLU was expected to offer each a civilian co-counsel with outside legal resources to assist in the defense.

Pentagon Releases DOJ Torture Memo

WASHINGTON - The Pentagon made public a now-defunct legal memo that approved the use of harsh interrogation techniques against terror suspects, saying that President Bush's wartime authority trumps any international ban on torture.

The Justice Department memo, dated March 14, 2003, outlines legal justification for military interrogators to use harsh tactics against al-Qaida and Taliban detainees overseas - so long as they did not specifically intend to torture their captives.

Even so, the memo noted, the president's wartime power as commander in chief would not be limited by the U.N. treaties against torture.

"Our previous opinions make clear that customary international law is not federal law and that the president is free to override it at his discretion," said the memo written by John Yoo, who was then deputy assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel.

The memo also offered a defense in case any interrogator was charged with violating U.S. or international laws.

"Finally, even if the criminal prohibitions outlined above applied, and an interrogation method might violate those prohibitions, necessity or self-defense could provide justifications for any criminal liability," the memo concluded.

The memo was rescinded in December 2003, a mere nine months after Yoo sent it to the Pentagon's top lawyer, William J. Haynes. Though its existence has been known for years, its release Tuesday marked the first time its contents in full have been made public.

Haynes, the Defense Department's longest-serving general counsel, resigned in late February to return to the private sector. He has been hotly criticized for his role in crafting Bush administration policies for detaining and trying suspected terrorists that some argue led to prisoner abuses at the detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Yoo's memo became part of a debate among the Pentagon's civilian and military leaders about what interrogation tactics to allow at overseas facilities and whether U.S. troops might face legal problems domestically or in international courts.

Also of concern was whether techniques used by U.S. interrogators might someday be used as justification for harsh treatment of Americans captured by opposing forces.

The Justice Department has opened an internal investigation into whether its top officials improperly authorized or reviewed the CIA's use of waterboarding, which simulates drowning, when interrogating terror suspects. It was unclear whether the Yoo memo, which focuses only on military interrogators, will be part of that inquiry.

The declassified memo was released as part of an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit to force the Bush administration to turn over documents about the government's war on terror. The document also was turned over to lawmakers.

Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said its release "represents an accommodation of Congress' oversight interest in the area of wartime interrogations."

Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU's national security project, said Yoo's legal reasoning puts "literally no limit at all to the kinds of interrogation methods that the president can authorize."

"The whole point of the memo is obviously to nullify every possible legal restraint on the president's wartime authority," Jaffer said. "The memo was meant to allow torture, and that's exactly what it did."

The 81-page legal analysis largely centers on whether interrogators can be held responsible for torture if torture is not the intent of the questioning. And it defines torture as the intended sum of a variety of acts, which could include acid scalding, severe mental pain and suffering, threat of imminent death and physical pain resulting in impaired body functions, organ failure or death.

The "definition of torture must be read as a sum of these component parts," the memo said.

The memo also includes past legal defenses of interrogations that Yoo wrote are not considered torture, such as sleep deprivation, hooding detainees and "frog crouching," which forces prisoners to crouch while standing on the tips of their toes.

"This standard permits some physical contact," the memo said. "Employing a shove or slap as part of an interrogation would not run afoul of this standard."

The memo concludes that foreign enemy combatants held overseas do not have defendants' rights or protections from cruel and unusual punishment that U.S. citizens have under the Constitution. It also says that Congress "cannot interfere with the president's exercise of his authority as commander in chief to control the conduct of operations during a war."

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy said the memo "reflects the expansive view of executive power that has been the hallmark of this administration." He called for its release four months ago.

"It is no wonder that this memo ... could not withstand scrutiny and had to be withdrawn," said Leahy, D-Vt. "This memo seeks to find ways to avoid legal restrictions and accountability on torture and threatens our country's status as a beacon of human rights around the world."

Gitmo Prisoner Charged in ’98 Embassy Attack

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - A Guantanamo detainee who allegedly helped plan the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Tanzania that killed 11 people was charged Monday with war crimes that carry a possible death penalty.

Ahmed Kalfan Ghailani - who was held in secret CIA custody before being transferred in 2006 to the U.S. military prison in Cuba - also allegedly purchased and transported the explosives used in the attack and scouted the embassy with a suicide bomber.

Al-Qaida's twin suicide truck-bomb attacks on the U.S. Embassies in Tanzania and Kenya on Aug. 7, 1998, killed some 236 people, including 12 Americans, and injured more than 4,000. No Americans died in the attack in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania.

U.S. Air Force Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann told a Washington news conference that Ghailani, a Tanzanian, faces charges that include murder, attacking civilians and terrorism. The attack on the embassy in Tanzania was not as devastating as the one in Kenya because an embassy water tanker apparently prevented the suicide bomber from penetrating the perimeter.

Ghailani, who was captured after a gunbattle in Gujrat in eastern Pakistan in July 2004, told a military panel at Guantanamo in March 2007 that he unwittingly delivered the explosives for the attack, didn't know about it beforehand and was sorry.

"It was without my knowledge what they were doing, but I helped them," he told the panel, according to a transcript released by the Pentagon. "So I apologize to the United States government for what I did. And I'm sorry for what happened to those families who lost, who lost their friends and their beloved ones."

A senior Pentagon legal official, Susan Crawford, must review and approve the filed charges before any legal proceedings can begin against Ghailani.

The U.S. has so far filed charges against 15 prisoners at Guantanamo and convicted one, Australian David Hicks, in a March 2007 plea bargain. Several detainees have appeared before the tribunal for arraignments or pretrial hearings. The first actual trials are expected to begin in late spring or early summer.

The U.S. now holds about 275 men at Guantanamo and military officials say they expect to file war crimes charges against about 80.

Omar Khadr: A most peculiar young offender

He should be dealt with here in Canada, as a juvenile who was involved in terrorism

The civilized world condemns the recruitment of child soldiers. Yet Canada sits quietly by as one of its citizens, Omar Khadr, is prosecuted by the United States for war crimes he allegedly committed at age 15 as a member of al-Qaeda.

It is impossible to square. Al-Qaeda's recruitment of child soldiers is immoral and abusive; consequently, it is immoral and abusive to prosecute as a war criminal a child recruited by al-Qaeda, and punish him accordingly. We can't have it both ways.

Lately, it has dawned on Canadians that the United States may well have lied about its evidence against Mr. Khadr. Far from having proof that only he could have thrown the grenade that killed their soldier, the U.S. appears to have hidden the truth: that the teenage Canadian was in the company of an adult al-Qaeda fighter and was himself unarmed, on his knees and facing away from battle when a U.S. soldier shot him twice — in the back.

But the falsehoods are only part of the reasons why Canadians let the 15-year-old disappear six years ago into the legal black hole of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in which he had no access to a lawyer for the first 27 months and no way to contest his detention. Canadians accepted that Mr. Khadr be held fully responsible for his actions. As if he were an adult.

The irony has never really penetrated Canadians' consciousness. Canada, the country of the liberal Youth Criminal Justice Act, is the only Western nation to give the United States carte blanche with one of its nationals at Guantanamo. Britain, Australia, Sweden and Germany fought to repatriate their nationals — adults, all of them. And Canada let a juvenile languish.

The reply from our government is but a single, vapid refrain: "Let the process work." But this is a process that, even apart from its other flaws, aims at punishing Omar Khadr for the accident of his birth in an al-Qaeda family.

A VICTIM OF HIS OWN HOME

When a young person raised in a terrorist family becomes a terrorist at 15, does he join voluntarily? Can he give free and informed consent? To say yes is to let al-Qaeda and Toronto's Khadr family off the hook for grooming children for terrorism. It puts the onus on the children to resist.

Most Canadian children grow up in circles within circles of benign, positive influences — family, school, neighbourhood, the larger culture. Omar's circles of influence were pro-terror. His late father, Ahmed Said Khadr, was a senior financier with al-Qaeda who prodded Abdurahman, Omar's elder brother, to become a suicide bomber. Even his mother and sister boasted on national television of the glories of terrorism.

From age 11, Omar was inculcated in terror, according to the U.S. charge sheets. "From 1996 to 2001, the Khadr family travelled throughout Afghanistan and Pakistan, including yearly trips to Usama bin Laden's compound in Jalalabad for the Eid celebration at the end of Ramadan. While travelling with his father, Omar Khadr saw or personally met senior al-Qaeda leaders, including Usama bin Laden, Doctor Ayman Al-Zawahiri, Muhammad Atef (aka Abu Hafs al Masri), and Saif al Adel. Khadr also visited various al Qaeda training camps and guest houses."

Only an extraordinary 15-year-old could have withstood that grooming process. The Khadr son who did resist, Abdurahman, did not do so until he was in his 20s. A younger brother, Abdul Karim, was paralyzed in battle in Pakistan in 2004 at 14. (His father was killed in the same battle.) The oldest brother, Abdullah, faces extradition from Toronto to the United States on terrorism charges from Afghanistan.

Yet many Canadians insist he acted of his free will. "Real child soldiers are forcibly taken from their parents (who are often killed)," one Globe reader wrote in an unpublished letter to the editor. "These children are drugged, brainwashed, and abused so they become killers. Khadr became a soldier/terrorist because his family encouraged it. He was a willing participant. Where was the coercion?"

This is a narrow view of coercion. Could there be a worse form of coercion than that in a father's wish that his son become a suicide bomber? "Blow yourself up or lose your father's esteem." Omar's family culture promoted dying for the cause. That was what it meant to be a good boy in that family.

CHILD SOLDIERS ELSEWHERE

The world is rife with child soldiers. Peter Singer of the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., estimates that as many as 300,000 child soldiers are in combat around the world. Yet none of today's international war-crimes tribunals prosecute child soldiers or terrorists.

No one under 18 has been charged before the tribunals for Rwanda or the former Yugoslavia. No one has been charged in East Timor, in Cambodia, in Bosnia and Herzegovina. "To date, there is no precedent in history for the prosecution of a child soldier before an international criminal tribunal, and similarly there is no precedent in the Western world for prosecution of a child soldier before any state tribunal," says Sarah Paoletti, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law, in a friend-of-the-court brief to the military commission that is to try Mr. Khadr. (Among those whose names are on that brief are former Canadian justice ministers Irwin Cotler and Allan Rock.) The U.S. says there are in fact precedents, but its examples predate the Nuremberg Tribunals. For instance, a British Military Court in northwestern Germany convicted and jailed a 15-year-old Hitler Youth member for his role in killing a British serviceman.

More recently, at the Special Court for Sierra Leone in 2004, the U.S. prosecutor, David Crane, was given the option of putting on trial, in a court without punishment, those age 15 to 17 who committed war crimes. Memorably, Mr. Crane rejected that idea. "The children of Sierra Leone have suffered enough both as victims and perpetrators. I want to prosecute the people who forced thousands of children to commit unspeakable crimes."

If international practice is clear, the law as written is less so.

The relevant text is the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict. Both Canada and the U.S. are among the 150 signatories. "The Protocol prohibits the United States from using child soldiers, not from prosecuting them," says the U.S. brief to the military commission.

It's right. The protocol is silent on its face. Emboldened by that silence, the U.S. stretches the point: "If anything, the Protocol obligates the United States to prosecute Khadr" because not punishing Mr. Khadr would "further incentivize" al-Qaeda in recruiting young people.

If the U.S. is right, where is the outcry that all the world's child soldiers are going unpunished at all the world's tribunals except this one?

Omar Khadr was a war crime waiting to happen. Anyone in al-Qaeda or the Taliban is an unlawful enemy combatant under U.S. law. Anything such a combatant does to fight, even in battle, is a war crime.

"In a normal war," explained John Bellinger, a legal adviser to the U.S. state department, "where both sides have a right to engage in combat with one another, if a soldier kills a soldier on the other side, it's not murder unless it is done somehow contrary to the laws of war perfidiously, or killing someone when they have already surrendered.

"In this case, though, the members of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, while they may have thought they were defending themselves, they had no legal right under the laws of war to be engaging in combat." There's a legitimate expectation that young people know and abide by the criminal law of their countries; the minimum age of criminal responsibility is usually 12 (as it is in Canada). But how could a 15-year-old of Mr. Khadr's experience and background have been aware of the laws of war, especially laws that hadn't been invented yet?

And speaking of inventions: "According to the reports of the action we have available, the last surviving enemy in that compound … as his last act at the firefight rose up with a pistol and hand grenade, and engaged the coalition forces, threw the grenade," Col. Roger King, a U.S. spokesman based in Afghanistan, told the Associated Press in September, 2002. We now know that the U.S. had an eyewitness report that painted a very different picture.

A CASE FOR CANADIAN PROCESSES

And what has Canada done to help Mr. Khadr? It sent intelligence officers to interrogate him without counsel, and passed summaries of the interrogations to the Americans. Some help. (The Supreme Court of Canada is hearing Mr. Khadr's request next week for access to Canada's files from those visits.)

"The recruitment and use of child soldiers is one of the most flagrant violations of international norms," says Mr. Singer. Why? Because children are not to be made a mere instrument of the state or terror group. Because children are manipulable. Because children cannot assess risk as adults can. To prosecute children as if they were fully responsible for war crimes is to legitimize their recruitment.

As other Western countries have repatriated adult suspected terrorists — several, in Britain's case — it seems strange that Canada would not bring a lone 21-year-old home to face fair processes that would take into account his age and background, and his long incarceration at Guantanamo. Omar Khadr, child soldier, has been dehumanized enough. Bring him home.

Trial on CIA Rendition Resumes in Italy

ROME - The trial of 26 Americans charged with kidnapping a terror suspect during an alleged CIA operation resumed Wednesday in Italy, despite a pending ruling by the country's highest court on a government challenge that could scuttle the case.

Hearings reopened in Milan after Judge Oscar Magi ruled the trial should continue, even though the Constitutional Court is still debating a request by the Italian government to throw out the indictments against the Americans, who are being tried in absentia.

Alessia Sorgato, a lawyer for several American defendants, said the judge had ordered the resumption of the proceedings to "guarantee a reasonable length of the trial."

"The judge made a very clear reasoning," she said in a telephone interview. Shortly after it opened in June, the trial was suspended pending the Constitutional Court ruling, and Magi had already extended the suspension.

Wednesday's hearing was largely devoted to technicalities, Sorgato said during a break.

She said a hearing at the Constitutional Court on the government challenge is scheduled for July 8, but that a decision is expected much later.

The suspects in the case- all but one identified by prosecutors as CIA agents - are accused of kidnapping an Egyptian terror suspect from a Milan street on Feb. 17, 2003, in an operation coordinated by the CIA and Italian intelligence.

Italian prosecutors say Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, was transferred to U.S. bases in Italy and Germany before being moved to Egypt, where he was imprisoned for four years. Nasr, who was released last year, said he was tortured.

Seven Italians also were indicted in the case, including Nicolo Pollari, the former chief of military intelligence. Pollari has denied any involvement by Italian intelligence in the abduction.

The Constitutional Court must rule on whether the kidnapping trial will be permitted to publicly air details of the U.S. extraordinary rendition program, which involved moving terrorism suspects from country to country without public legal proceedings.

In its challenge, the Italian government contends the prosecution unlawfully relied on state secrets to justify the charges. The high court also plans to hear a challenge charging that prosecutors went too far by wiretapping Italian intelligence agents indicted in the case.

The 26 Americans have left Italy, and a senior U.S. official has said they would not be turned over for prosecution, even if Rome requests it.

The Italian government has not responded to prosecutors' requests to seek the extradition of the Americans, and the Justice Ministry has indicated the Constitutional Court's ruling would be a key factor.

Canada's high court takes Gitmo case

OTTAWA -- (AP) -- Canada's Supreme Court ruled Thursday it will hear arguments about whether classified Canadian documents about a Canadian detainee at Guantánamo Bay should be released.

Lawyers for Omar Khadr, charged with killing a U.S. soldier with a grenade in a 2002 firefight in Afghanistan when he was 15 years old, will argue next week that the government should release details about meetings Canadian foreign affairs officials and members of Canada's spy agency had with Khadr in 2002 and 2003.

Khadr was interviewed by foreign affairs officials and members of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, and at least some of the results of the interviews were passed to American authorities.

Khadr's lawyers have obtained censored summaries of the material but are seeking more documents, including additional intelligence material and correspondence between Canadian and U.S. officials. They say Khadr has a constitutional right to the information to defend himself against the American charges.

Khadr is expected to be among the first detainees to face a U.S. war-crimes trial since the World War II era.

Khadr says he was mistreated by his U.S. captors and coerced into making self-incriminating statements after the 2002 firefight in Afghanistan that led to the charges against him.

''The Canadian government went to Guantánamo Bay in 2002 and 2003 and interrogated Omar Khadr absent all international legal rights,'' said Dennis Edney, Khadr's lawyer.

``They then shared that information with the Americans, but they refused to provide that same information to us, his defense counsel, to assist Omar in making a full answer in defense to the charges he's facing.''

Edney claims the Canadian interviews at Guantánamo violated Canada's bill of rights -- a contention that raises the wider legal issue of whether the bill can be applied in a foreign jurisdiction.

Canada's Supreme Court has ruled in the past that, as a general rule, Canadian officials overseas need only follow the laws of the host country. But there is a major exception to that rule -- if the foreign practices are at odds with international human rights law.

That prompted Khadr's legal team to argue that the Guantánamo detention conditions, as well as the special military tribunal preparing to try him for murder, don't measure up to accepted norms.

They cite violations of juvenile justice rules set out by the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, noting that Khadr was 15 when he was captured. They also point to international agreements on civil and political rights and the treatment of prisoners.

Canada's Justice Department, in its brief to the court, dismissed the efforts by Khadr's lawyers as a ``fishing expedition in relation to the most sensitive of government-held information.''

Khadr was sent to the prison camps in Cuba in October 2002, after his 16th birthday.

He faces a maximum sentence of life in prison if convicted on military commissions charges that include murder as a war crime, conspiracy and providing material support forterrorism.

The military says it plans to charge about 80 detainees at Guantánamo, but so far none of the cases has gone to trial.

Military judge rules for driver's defense

For a third time, a military judge has authorized lawyers for Osama bin Laden's driver to send questions to alleged al Qaeda kingpins in segregation at Guantánamo.

The ruling by Navy Capt. Keith Allred rejected national security arguments raised by Pentagon prosecutors. The military judge also sounded dismissive of a government argument that the driver could have conspired in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks without knowing about the suicide plot.

Specifically, Allred authorized the lawyers to ask reputed mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed whether the driver was a part of the 9/11 suicide plot and other al Qaeda attacks.

'The issue of whether the accused was `merely a driver,' or knew the unlawful purpose and was actively engaged in the unlawful work of al Qaeda seems to be very much at issue,'' Allred wrote in the four-page ruling, dated Friday.

The Pentagon made it public on Wednesday, intact, with no portions blacked out. Earlier judges' rulings have been censored.

It was the latest setback to Pentagon prosecution efforts to limit the discovery phase before the separate military trials of the driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan of Yemen, and Canadian captive Omar Khadr. Both are slated to face military commissions this summer.

Pentagon prosecutors had three times resisted the judge's plan to let Hamdan's lawyers ask questions of seven former CIA captives. They have been at Guantánamo since September 2006 and are now held as ''Task Force Platinum'' prisoners,at a segregated site set up secretly by the military, called Camp 7.

Under the scheme, devised by Allred, defense lawyers submit questions for Mohammed and the others to an independent security officer who works for the judge, not the prosecution.

The judge limited the substance to the time before Hamdan's capture in November 2001 in Afghanistan, and before the men were held and interrogated secretly by the CIA overseas -- meaning they cannot divulge U.S. interrogation techniques.

The security officer will have the questions translated, as well as the answers -- and then black out any responses that don't cover that time period.

Allred said in his ruling that national security could be safeguarded by the special security review.

Even before the Pentagon made the ruling public, defense lawyers had on Tuesday already submitted written questions for four of the men, chief among them the man known in CIA circles as KSM, Mohammed.

Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brian Mizer, Hamdan's Pentagon appointed defense counsel, called Allred's ruling ``a real rebuke of the government's dragnet theory of conspiracy as well as granting us access to these detainees.''

The questions for Mohammed specifically ask, ''What was Hamdan's involvement in Sept. 11,'' said Mizer.

Based on their research, he said, the answer should be, ``nothing.''

Hamdan, 36, is accused of being a driver and sometime bodyguard for Bin Laden prior to the 9/11 attacks in Afghanistan. He is broadly charged as a co-conspirator in the terror plot and other al Qaeda attacks. Conviction carries life in prison.

Hamdan has admitted that he worked for bin Laden, and earned $200 a month as a driver. But he says he never joined al Qaeda and did not plot any attacks.

Allred wrote: ``It is not unfair to permit the Defense to seek to show that while he may have been a bodyguard and driver, he knew little or nothing about the inner workings of this conspiracy, or that was not a party to it, if they can.''

The Pentagon has yet to release the prosecutor's brief opposing access.

But Allred seemed to hint at government concerns in fashioning the question-and-answer format. If the security officer detects one captive trying to send a message to another ''colleague or a confederate,'' the judge wrote, the security officer can delete the answer, or summarize it.

Last week, an Army judge in the Khadr case also ruled five times for the defense on discovery issues.

In one instance, Army Col. Peter Brownback ordered the Pentagon to let defense attorneys take a deposition from the battalion commander at Khadr's July 2002 capture in Afghanistan.

Prosecutors had argued that Khadr's lawyers should only be allowed to question the officer at the trial. He has been identified in court only as ``Lt. Col. W.''

One issue is why ''Lt. Col. W'' rewrote a portion of a battlefield account of Khadr's capture, two months after the fact, which could help convict him.

In the case of access to the so-called high-value detainees, Allred had agreed to the defense request in early February at a hearing at Guantánamo.

Then, the prosecutor, Army Lt. Col. Will Britt, objected in court -- and told the judge that military commission guidelines forbid him from ruling wholesale on the question of access. Rather, Britt told the judge, he needed to consider access piecemeal, on a case-by-case basis.

Allred then issued a written ruling in mid February, laying out the terms of access and ordering the government to establish an independent Security Officer who does not work for the prosecution.

The prosecution immediately filed for reconsideration.

It was not immediately clear Wednesday whether the prosecution would be appealing Allred's latest decision.

Spy chiefs warn of al-Qaeda 'bombs and computers' plot

Counter-terrorism experts call it a 'force multiplier': an attack combining slaughter and electronic chaos. Now Britain's security services want total access to commuters' travel records to help them meet the threat

Millions of commuters could have their private movements around cities secretly monitored under new counter-terrorism powers being sought by the security services.

Records of journeys made by people using smart cards that allow 17 million Britons to travel by underground, bus and train with a single swipe at the ticket barrier are among a welter of private information held by the state to which MI5 and police counter-terrorism officers want access in order to help identify patterns of suspicious behaviour.

The request by the security services, described by shadow Home Secretary David Davis last night as 'extraordinary', forms part of a fierce Whitehall debate over how much access the state should have to people's private lives in its efforts to combat terrorism.

It comes as the Cabinet Office finalises Gordon Brown's new national security strategy, expected to identify a string of new threats to Britain - ranging from future 'water wars' between countries left drought-ridden by climate change to cyber-attacks using computer hacking technology to disrupt vital elements of national infrastructure.

The fear of cyber-warfare has climbed Whitehall's agenda since last year's attack on the Baltic nation of Estonia, in which Russian hackers swamped state servers with millions of electronic messages until they collapsed. The Estonian defence and foreign ministries and major banks were paralysed, while even its emergency services call system was temporarily knocked out: the attack was seen as a warning that battles once fought by invading armies or aerial bombardment could soon be replaced by virtual, but equally deadly, wars in cyberspace.

While such new threats may grab headlines, the critical question for the new security agenda is how far Britain is prepared to go in tackling them. What are the limits of what we want our security services to know? And could they do more to identify suspects before they strike?

One solution being debated in Whitehall is an unprecedented unlocking of data held by public bodies, such as the Oyster card records maintained by Transport for London and smart cards soon to be introduced in other cities in the UK, for use in the war against terror. The Office of the Information Commissioner, the watchdog governing data privacy, confirmed last night that it had discussed the issue with government but declined to give details, citing issues of national security.

Currently the security services can demand the Oyster records of specific individuals under investigation to establish where they have been, but cannot trawl the whole database. But supporters of calls for more sharing of data argue that apparently trivial snippets - like the journeys an individual makes around the capital - could become important pieces of the jigsaw when fitted into a pattern of other publicly held information on an individual's movements, habits, education and other personal details. That could lead, they argue, to the unmasking of otherwise undetected suspects.

Critics, however, fear a shift towards US-style 'data mining', a controversial technique using powerful computers to sift and scan millions of pieces of data, seeking patterns of behaviour which match the known profiles of terrorist suspects. They argue that it is unfair for millions of innocent people to have their privacy invaded on the off-chance of finding a handful of bad apples.

'It's looking for a needle in a haystack, and we all make up the haystack,' said former Labour minister Michael Meacher, who has a close interest in data sharing. 'Whether all our details have to be reviewed because there is one needle among us - I don't think the case is made.'

Jago Russell, policy officer at the campaign group Liberty, said technological advances had made 'mass computerised fishing expeditions' easier to undertake, but they offered no easy answers. 'The problem is what do you do once you identify somebody who has a profile that suggests suspicions,' he said. 'Once the security services have identified somebody who fits a pattern, it creates an inevitable pressure to impose restrictions.'

Individuals wrongly identified as suspicious might lose high-security jobs, or have their immigration status brought into doubt, he said. Ministers are also understood to share concerns over civil liberties, following public opposition to ID cards, and the debate is so sensitive that it may not even form part of Brown's published strategy.

But if there is no consensus yet on the defence, there is an emerging agreement on the mode of attack. The security strategy will argue that in the coming decades Britain faces threats of a new and different order. And its critics argue the government is far from ready.

The cyber-assault on Estonia confirmed that the West now faces a relatively cheap, low-risk means of warfare that can be conducted from anywhere in the world, with the power to plunge developed nations temporarily into the stone age, disabling everything from payroll systems that ensure millions of employees get paid to the sewage treatment processes that make our water safe to drink or the air traffic control systems keeping planes stacked safely above Heathrow.

And it is one of the few weapons which is most effective against more sophisticated western societies, precisely because of their reliance on computers. 'As we become more advanced, we become more vulnerable,' says Alex Neill, head of the Asia Security programme at the defence think-tank RUSI, who is an expert on cyber-attack.

The nightmare scenario now emerging is its use by terrorists as a so-called 'force multiplier' - combining a cyber-attack to paralyse the emergency services with a simultaneous atrocity such as the London Tube bombings.

Victims would literally have nowhere to turn for help, raising the death toll and sowing immeasurable panic. 'Instead of using three or four aircraft as in 9/11, you could do one major event and then screw up the communications network behind the emergency services, or attack the Underground control network so you have one bomb but you lock up the whole network,' says Davis. 'You take the ramifications of the attack further. The other thing to bear in mind is that we are ultimately vulnerable because London is a financial centre.'

In other words, cyber-warfare does not have to kill to bring a state to its knees: hackers could, for example, wipe electronic records detailing our bank accounts, turning millionaires into apparent paupers overnight.

So how easy would it be? Estonia suffered a relatively crude form of attack known as 'denial of service', while paralysing a secure British server would be likely to require more sophisticated 'spy' software which embeds itself quietly in a computer network and scans for secret passwords or useful information - activating itself later to wreak havoc.

Neill said that would require specialist knowledge to target the weakest link in any system: its human user. 'You will get an email, say, that looks like it's from a trusted colleague, but in fact that email has been cloned. There will be an attachment that looks relevant to your work: it's an interesting document, but embedded in it invisibly is "malware" rogue software which implants itself in the operating systems. From that point, the computer is compromised and can be used as a platform to exploit other networks.'

Only governments and highly sophisticated criminal organisations have such a capability now, he argues, but there are strong signs that al-Qaeda is acquiring it: 'It is a hallmark of al-Qaeda anyway that they do simultaneous bombings to try to herd victims into another area of attack.'

The West, of course, may not simply be the victim of cyber-wars: the United States is widely believed to be developing an attack capability, with suspicions that Baghdad's infrastructure was electronically disrupted during the 2003 invasion.

So given its ability to cause as much damage as a traditional bomb, should cyber-attack be treated as an act of war? And what rights under international law does a country have to respond, with military force if necessary? Next month Nato will tackle such questions in a strategy detailing how it would handle a cyber-attack on an alliance member. Suleyman Anil, Nato's leading expert on cyber-attack, hinted at its contents when he told an e-security conference in London last week that cyber-attacks should be taken as seriously as a missile strike - and warned that a determined attack on western infrastructure would be 'practically impossible to stop'.

Tensions are likely to increase in a globalised economy, where no country can afford to shut its borders to foreign labour - an issue graphically highlighted for Gordon Brown weeks into his premiership by the alleged terrorist attack on Glasgow airport, when it emerged that the suspects included overseas doctors who entered Britain to work in the NHS.

A review led by Homeland Security Minister Admiral Sir Alan West into issues raised by the Glasgow attack has been grappling with one key question: could more be done to identify rogue elements who are apparently well integrated with their local communities?

Which is where, some within the intelligence community insist, access to personal data already held by public bodies - from the Oyster register to public sector employment records - could come in. The debate is not over yet.

Spain drops extradition attempt against Guantánamo torture pair

Spain yesterday dropped its attempt to extradite two British residents who had been freed from Guantánamo Bay, after accepting that torture they suffered during five years of American custody had left them too weak to stand trial.

Jamil el-Banna, 45, and Omar Deghayes, 38, who were accused of being members of an al-Qaida cell in Madrid, were detained on their return to Britain in December on a European arrest warrant issued by Spain.The Madrid judge who issued the warrant, Baltasar Garzon, accepted British medical reports which found the men were suffering from post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other serious medical conditions.

Banna is said to be severely depressed, suffering from PTSD, and to have diabetes, hypertension and back pain, as well as damage to the back of his left knee. Deghayes is also suffering from PTSD, and depression, is blind in his right eye, and has fractures in his nasal bone and his right index finger. Both men are said to be at high risk of suicide.

The report on Deghayes concludes: "Given all these factors, I don't see how Mr Deghayes would be able to give instructions to his lawyers, listen to evidence and give his own accurate testimony". A similar conclusion was drawn in the case of Banna, adding that were he to be separated from his wife and children again, he risked a deterioration of his fragile mental health.

Deghayes, a Libyan national whose family fled the Gadafy regime, said from his home in Brighton: "It's good - it's happy news. I always knew they would realise their mistake and give up the case. I still have problems with immigration as the authorities have taken away my resident status, but this is a relief."

The Home Office refused to guarantee to let the pair stay with their families in Britain and said: "Their immigration status is under review."

Deghayes and Banna arrived back in Britain with a third British resident, Abdennour Samuer. Banna, from north-west London, was arrested in the Gambia in 2002 after he did not accept an MI5 request to become an informant.

Irene Nembhard, a lawyer for the men, said it was time for them to be allowed to rebuild their lives.

Ex-Sailor Convicted in Terror Case

NEW HAVEN, Conn. - A former Navy sailor was convicted Wednesday of leaking details about ship movements to suspected terrorism supporters, an act that could have endangered his own crewmates.

Jurors convicted Hassan Abu-Jihaad, 32, of Phoenix of providing material support to terrorists and disclosing classified national defense information on the second day of deliberations.

The American-born Muslim convert formerly known as Paul R. Hall faces up to 25 years in federal prison when he is sentenced May 23. His attorneys said they were disappointed, and that an appeal was likely.

The leak came amid increased wariness on the part of U.S. Navy commanders whose ships headed to the Persian Gulf in the months after a terrorist ambush in 2000 killed 17 sailors aboard the USS Cole.

Abu-Jihaad, who was a signalman aboard the USS Benfold, was accused of passing along details that included the makeup of his Navy battle group, its planned movements and a drawing of the group's formation when it was to pass through the dangerous Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf on April 29, 2001.

Abu-Jihaad's attorney said a four-year investigation that spanned two continents failed to turn up proof that Abu-Jihaad leaked details of ship movements and their vulnerability to attack.

Federal prosecutors said he sympathized with the enemy and admitted disclosing military intelligence. But they acknowledged they did not have direct proof that he leaked the ship details.

Authorities said the details of ship movements had to have been leaked by an insider, saying they were not publicly known and contained military jargon. The leaked documents closely matched what Abu-Jihaad would have had access to as a signalman, authorities said.

Dan LaBelle, Abu-Jihaad's attorney, tried to show that many details of ship movements he was accused of leaking to suspected terrorism supporters were publicly available through news reports, press releases and Web sites. He also noted that Navy officials testified that the details were full of errors.

Prosecutors say investigators discovered files on a computer disk recovered from a suspected terrorism supporter's home in London that included the ship movements, as well as the number and type of personnel on each ship and the ships' capabilities. The file ended with instructions to destroy the message, according to testimony.

Abu-Jihaad was charged in the same case that led to the 2004 arrest of Babar Ahmad, a British computer specialist accused of running Web sites to raise money, appeal for fighters and provide equipment such as gas masks and night vision goggles for terrorists. Ahmad, who lived with his parents where the computer file was allegedly found, is to be extradited to the U.S.

Abu-Jihaad, who was honorably discharged in 2002, was prosecuted in New Haven because the investigation first focused on a Connecticut-based Internet service provider.

Tape Inquiry: Ex-Spymaster in the Middle

WASHINGTON — It would become known inside the Central Intelligence Agency as “the Italian job,” a snide movie reference to the bungling performance of an agency team that snatched a radical Muslim cleric from the streets of Milan in 2003 and flew him to Egypt — a case that led to criminal charges in Italy against 26 Americans.

Porter J. Goss, the C.I.A. director in 2005 when embarrassing news reports about the operation broke, asked the agency’s independent inspector general to start a review of amateurish tradecraft in the case, like operatives staying in five-star hotels and using traceable credit cards and cellphones.

But Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., now the central figure in a controversy over destroyed C.I.A. interrogation tapes, fought back. A blunt-spoken Puerto Rico native and former head of the agency’s Latin America division, he had been selected by Mr. Goss months earlier to head the agency’s troubled clandestine branch. Mr. Rodriguez told his boss that no inspector general review would be necessary — his service would investigate itself.

It was a protective instinct that ran deep inside the C.I.A.’s fabled Directorate of Operations, the agency’s most powerful branch. The same instinct would resurface months later, when Mr. Rodriguez dispatched a cable to the agency’s Bangkok station ordering the destruction of videotapes that showed C.I.A. officers carrying out harsh interrogations of operatives of Al Qaeda.

“He would always say, ‘I’m not going to let my people get nailed for something they were ordered to do,’ ” said Robert Richer, Mr. Rodriguez’s deputy in the clandestine branch until late 2005, who recalls many conversations with his boss about the tapes.
No Record of Punishment

With the tapes’ destruction now the subject of overlapping Congressional and criminal inquiries, investigators are trying to determine whether Mr. Rodriguez, 59, acted on his own or with at least tacit approval from superiors at the C.I.A. or the White House. Officials now say a recent review by the C.I.A. of Mr. Rodriguez’s personnel file found no record of any reprimand or punishment for his action.

The destruction of the tapes is hardly the first time that the C.I.A.’s mission to take risks and to counter threats abroad has come into conflict with American notions of justice, legality and human rights. From assassination plots in the 1960s to the Iran-contra scandal of the 1980s, American spymasters have found themselves in legal jeopardy for acts they said were lawful and necessary.

The tapes episode and Mr. Rodriguez’s role reflect the intensity of the particular tensions that have played out since the Sept. 11 attacks, a period in which the C.I.A. has been asked to play a new role in capturing, questioning and imprisoning terror suspects, and is now facing questions about whether its conduct crossed the line into illegality.

The events surrounding the tapes unfolded during one of the most tumultuous periods in the C.I.A.’s 60-year history, when the insular and proud clandestine service clashed with the strong-willed team that Mr. Goss, a former Florida congressman, brought with him to the agency. Mr. Rodriguez was “the man in the middle,” Mr. Richer said.

Mr. Rodriguez and Mr. Goss declined to be interviewed for this article.
Mr. Goss was not the first C.I.A. director to discover that operatives who were trained to destabilize foreign governments could sometimes put those same skills to work inside the agency.

In a striking metaphor for Mr. Goss’s powerlessness, as officers of the Directorate of Operations, or D.O., ignored his instructions and shunned his staff, he later told a colleague that “when he pulled a lever to make something happen in the D.O., it wasn’t just that nothing happened,” the colleague recalled. “It was that the lever came off in his hands.”

Mr. Rodriguez joined the C.I.A. in 1976, at a time when the agency was still reeling from Congressional investigations into assassination plots, coup attempts and domestic wiretapping.
With his thick accent and undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Florida, he stood out in the clandestine service, which even in the 1970s was a preserve of the Anglo-Saxon, Ivy League establishment.

But over the next two decades in a series of overseas postings, Mr. Rodriguez ascended the ranks of the directorate’s Latin America division, serving from Peru to Belize and heading the C.I.A. stations in Panama, the Dominican Republic and Mexico.

He ran the kind of espionage missions and covert operations that defined the agency, overshadowing its other task of analyzing intelligence from all sources. Clandestine officers fashioned themselves as the “fighter jocks” of the C.I.A., the swashbuckling spies who risked their lives for their country.

Dominating the Culture

The Directorate of Operations “is a really small part of C.I.A., in terms of budget and people,” said Mark M. Lowenthal, a former assistant agency director. “But in terms of culture, the D.O. dominates the place.” In mid-2005, the directorate was renamed the National Clandestine Service.

A popular boss, Mr. Rodriguez occasionally flashed the maverick spirit prized by clandestine officers. One former colleague recalls that while in Mexico he named his horse Business, instructing subordinates to tell the ambassador or the C.I.A. brass that he was “out on Business.”

By the mid-1990s, Mr. Rodriguez was head of the Latin America division. But his career was nearly cut short when the C.I.A. inspector general reprimanded him in 1997 for a “remarkable lack of judgment” after he intervened to stop jailhouse beatings by guards of a childhood friend arrested on drug charges in the Dominican Republic.

A C.I.A. officer stationed in the Dominican Republic complained to the inspector general that the intervention was improper, according to a former agency official. Mr. Rodriguez was removed as chief of the Latin America division, and later returned to run the station in Mexico.

Shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, he was tapped to become chief operating officer of the agency’s Counterterrorism Center, based at the C.I.A. headquarters, which was ballooning to nearly 1,500 officers from 300. There was grumbling that Mr. Rodriguez, with no experience in the Muslim world, was given the job. But seven months later, he was promoted to head the center, placing him in charge of the hunt for Qaeda operatives and the interrogation of terrorist suspects in a chain of secret C.I.A. prisons.

By the time Mr. Goss was sworn in as director of central intelligence in late September 2004, the agency’s clandestine service was already embittered by finger-pointing over the Iraq war.
The arrival of the new leader and his outspoken aides, dubbed the “Gosslings” by some within the agency, made matters worse.

Many agency veterans suspected that Mr. Goss and his team were on a White House mission to clean house at the C.I.A. The two top officers of the clandestine service, Stephen R. Kappes and Michael J. Sulick, soon quit.

When Mr. Goss looked for replacements, two agency officers turned him down, fearing that accepting the job would be seen as a betrayal of the clandestine branch. In the end, Mr. Goss offered the job to Mr. Rodriguez.

According to Mary Margaret Graham, a career clandestine officer who recently retired as head of intelligence collection for the director of national intelligence, Mr. Rodriguez had similar concerns about “betraying” fellow undercover officers. He assured her that he had accepted the position “on his terms.”

“I think in hindsight they expected a much more pliable person than they got,” she said.
Mr. Rodriguez traveled to overseas stations more than many predecessors, to build morale and get a firsthand account of operations. One result was that the clandestine branch’s daily operations were often left to his chief of staff, who had worked with Mr. Rodriguez in the Counterterrorism Center. Because she is still under cover, The New York Times is not publishing her name.

Several former C.I.A. officials recall repeated clashes between Mr. Rodriguez’s chief of staff and aides to Mr. Goss on matters from the trivial to the serious.

One serious concern, in the view of Mr. Goss’s staff, was the resistance of Mr. Rodriguez and his chief of staff to outside reviews of such missteps by the clandestine service as the Italian operation. In the matter of the tapes, there was also concern that Mr. Rodriguez and others who were involved in creating them were now pushing to destroy them. “It was just that they weren’t very impartial judges,” said a former C.I.A. official.

Mr. Rodriguez, who was nearing retirement, saw the tapes as a sort of time bomb that, if leaked, threatened irreparable damage to the United States’ image in the Muslim world, his friends say, and posed physical and legal risks to C.I.A. officers on them.

People close to Mr. Goss, who knew from his Congressional years how explosive accusations of cover-up could be, insist he told Mr. Rodriguez the tapes should be preserved.

But if Mr. Goss believed Mr. Rodriguez had disobeyed him, why did he not punish the clandestine service chief? One former C.I.A. official said White House officials had complained about the news media firestorm that accompanied the departure of Mr. Kappes and Mr. Sulick a year earlier, and Mr. Goss felt he could not risk another blowup.

‘Loyal and Dedicated’

Robert S. Bennett, Mr. Rodriguez’s lawyer, said his client was never instructed to preserve the tapes and recalls no discussion of conflict of interest on his part.
“Guys like Jose are loyal and dedicated and take risks to keep the country safe from terrorism,” Mr. Bennett said. “Now, his own government is investigating him, and I think it’s shameful.”

Not long after the tapes were destroyed, Mr. Goss held a management retreat for top agency officials meant in part to soothe tensions among the agency’s dueling branches. There the deputy director for intelligence — the head of analysis — complained openly about the arrogance of the clandestine branch and said undercover officers thought they could get away with anything.

That was too much for Mr. Rodriguez. He stood up in the room, according to one participant in the meeting, and shouted in coarse language that the analysis chief should “wake up and smell the coffee,” because undercover officers were at the “pointy end of the spear.”
The clandestine branch, Mr. Rodriguez was making it clear, would do what it wanted.

Pentagon to challenge interview of 9/11 suspect

Pentagon prosecutors are challenging a military court's decision to let Osama bin Laden's driver send written questions to alleged senior al Qaeda members held incommunicado at Guantánamo.

Defense lawyers for Salim Hamdan, 36, want to ask reputed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed, known in CIA circles as ''KSM,'' and six other ''high-value detainees'' what they know about Hamdan's role in al Qaeda's organization.

Based on their answers, they will decide whether to call as defense witnesses any of the seven men, who are fellow detainees now but were held and interrogated for years by the CIA.

Last week, Navy Capt. Keith Allred, Hamdan's military commission judge, ruled that defense lawyers could submit questions to an independent security officer to give to Mohammed and the others held in a restricted prison camp on the base called Camp 7.

The judge ordered that the questions and answers be strictly limited to the time before Hamdan's capture in November 2001 in Afghanistan. Censors will black out any responses that don't cover that time period.

Navy Lt. Catheryne Pully, a military commissions spokeswoman, said on Monday that the prosecution would seek ''reconsideration'' of the judge's decision, which the prosecutors believed raised ``a lot of complicated issues.''

Intelligence officials have described as national security secrets the CIA sites where Mohammed and 14 other detainees were held before their September 2006 transfer to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Now they are held in Camp 7, segregated from other detainees at an undisclosed site on the remote U.S. Navy base. The prison camps' spokesman, Navy Cmdr. Rick Haupt, has not been able to say whether the location of the camp itself is a national security secret.

Allred gave the prosecution until Tuesday to find an independent security officer -- who does not work for the prosecution -- to handle the defense lawyers' questions and detainees' answers, if they choose to reply.

Hamdan attorney Andrea Prasow, a civilian on the Defense Department team, said the Pentagon prosecutors agreed to identify the security officer but notified the team on Saturday that they would ask for reconsideration of the question.

Hamdan's lawyers wanted to meet the men in person to assess their credibility as potential witnesses at Hamdan's summertime trial.

The lead defense lawyer, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brad Mizer, said the attorneys also sought face-to-face meetings with the detainees because, after years in CIA custody, the captives might suspect written questions as an interrogation trick.

Allred's remedy to the defense lawyers mirrors a 2003 formula proposed by a federal judge at the civilian trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, who eventually pleaded guilty to providing material support for al Qaeda and is now serving a life sentence.

In that case, the Justice Department refused to let the defense send questions to Mohammed, the reputed 9/11 mastermind. At the time, he was under CIA interrogation, and the government argued his testimony would harm the war effort.

In this instance, the men Hamdan's lawyers seek to question are now among 15 former CIA detainees in military custody at Guantánamo.

• Mohammed, who according to Pentagon transcripts confessed to plotting the 9/11 attacks along with a long string of other al Qaeda suicide bombings, as well as beheading Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl in Pakistan.

• Ramzi bin al Shib, a Yemeni and Mohammed's alleged go-between with some of the 9/11 attackers.

• Walid bin Attash, another Yemeni who supposedly trained some of the hijackers.

• Mustafa al Hawsawi, who supposedly helped get funds to the Sept. 11 suicide squads.

Those four men were identified as candidates for execution at Guantánamo as part of a complex, six-detainee prosecution the Pentagon unveiled last week. Their charge sheets await approval from a Bush administration appointee. None of them yet have lawyers.

In addition, Hamdan's lawyers asked to interview Abu Faraj al Libi, Abdul Rahim al Nashiri and Abdul Hadi al Iraqi because of their knowledge of other al Qaeda operations in Afghanistan not tied to the Sept. 11 strikes.

Camp 7 and the Torturer's Shrink

"I am proud to be a member of the American Psychological Association, proud for what APA has stood for in these troubling times, and deeply grateful to the Association for supporting me and my colleagues in our quest to ensure that all in our custody are treated with human decency and respect."
— Larry C. James,
Colonel, United States Army, June 23, 2007

"This is my second tour at Gitmo, Cuba. I was also the first psychologist at Abu Ghraib. I'm going to repeat what I said earlier. If we remove psychologists from these facilities, people are going to die. If we remove psychologists from these facilities, people are going to get hurt."
— Larry C. James,
Colonel, United States Army, June 23, 2007
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Sounds good Colonel James. Great sound bytes. Good enough to convince thousands of psychologists that you're the real thing, as American as Stealth bombers and pre-emptive war. Who would possibly think that psychologists in the military would engage in torture after listening to you? Good enough that you became the poster child for the American Psychological Association as they pulled out all stops in their attempts to defeat those few psychologists opposed to torture, inhuman conditions and the disappearance of habeas corpus. They brought you all the way from Guantanamo for their song and dance show. Not even most psychologists, those who are supposed to understand human behavior, saw through your charade, as you convinced them that their professional association really IS on the side of truth and goodness.

The APA used you to introduce a different resolution against torture for the second year in a row, in an attempt to deflect the dissenters and detractors. APA's use of resolutions as a means to stop torture have proven to be simply a sleight of hand to appease the multitudes and the media, but actually signifies nothing.

Perhaps you'll repeat history, Colonel James. In 2006, Surgeon General Kevin Kiley was used by APA leaders to offer the 2006 "Resolution on Torture." Remember him? He lost his job a few months after presenting THAT resolution, another military officer who was willing to overlook the inhumane treatment of people that were considered to have no value.

But you blew it this week, Colonel. One might say you fell out of role, and the truth became evident. Though you are in charge of the team of psychologists that assists interrogators at Guantanamo, when the Associated Press reported last week on the just-revealed Camp 7 at Guantanamo where detainees from CIA secret detention facilities are kept, including the detainees who HAVE been water-boarded, including Abu Zubaydah who endured water-boarding with two psychologists present, you stated you just don't want to know about it.

"I learned a long, long time ago, if I'm going to be successful in the intel community, I'm meticulously -- in a very, very dedicated way -- going to stay in my lane," he said. "So if I don't have a specific need to know about something, I don't want to know about it. I don't ask about it."

You, the military psychologist, who spoke so piously of how much you cared to protect detainees at Gitmo, who so scrupulously defended your character as patriotically humane - didn't you just sell out the fate of those detainees for the advancement of your career?

You commanded the Guantanamo Behavioral Science Consultation Teams from January 2003 to mid-May 2003, during a time when the International Committee of the Red Cross stated that the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo amounted to torture.

Under your command and supervision, psychologists from the military's Survival, Evasion Resistance, and Escape (SERE) program were instructed to apply their expertise in abusive interrogation techniques to the interrogations of detainees in Guantanamo, according to a report from the Office of the Inspector General.

According to the Standard Operating Procedure manual at the time that you were the Chief Psychologist at Guantanamo, all incoming detainees were to be held in isolation for the first 30 days "to enhance and exploit the disorientation and disorganization felt by a newly arrived detainee in the interrogation process" and were not entitled to the protections afforded by the Geneva Conventions.

So while you and the American Psychological Association continue to assert that military psychologists are necessary at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram and other detention sites - to build rapport, to "protect" the detainees, to stop other military personnel from harming and killing the detainees - you're telling reporters that the secret to your success is to look the other way. What else could it mean when you say, "if I'm going to be successful in the intel community . . . I'm meticulously . . . going to stay in my lane . . . I don't want to know?"

The fact is, for you and our professional organization, it's all about keeping your job. You toe the military line for your paycheck. And the APA toes the military line to curry the favor of the Department of Defense and the current administration for contracts. All the rest is window dressing, such as the APA's gratuitous letter to Attorney General Mukasey this week. The letter is a lobbyist's masterpiece, suggesting that waterboarding is legal torture in one paragraph and then asking the AG to please hurry up and render a legal ruling in the next.

But as you seem not to be motivated by considerations of ethics, Colonel James, perhaps the potential for life in prison might have more impact. At the Nuremberg Trials, it was held that merely following orders will not absolve you from criminal liability. In that rare moment of truthiness, you told us that your guilty knowledge may pose inconveniences for you: "[I]f I don't have a specific need to know about something, I don't want to know about it. I don't ask about it."