US accused of holding terror suspects on prison ships

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guantanamo Judge Dismissed

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

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

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

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

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

9/11 trial sought during presidential campaign

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DEVELOPMENTS

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

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

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

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

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

DEFENSE CLAIMS

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

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

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

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

Amnesty: Time to call time on Guantánamo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guantanamo Critics Reiterate Protests as Their Trial Opens

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The trial is expected to last two to three days.

Censors put limits on Guantánamo photos

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

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

Or two whole tents and slivers of two others.

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

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

And numbers do count.

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

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

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

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

• Heard at the war court:

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

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

''Me?'' he sputtered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mukasey did not mention any specific lawyers by name.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Terror suspect phones Sudan to hire own lawyer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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