Tag: Detainees (page 10)

Omar Khadr turned 21 in Guantanamo this week. He's been detained there since he was 15.

A military judge threw out the charges against him on jurisdictional grounds in June. Another judge later upheld that decision.

Today, the U.S. Court of Military Commission Review issued its first opinion. It reinstated the charges against Omar.

The ruling reverses a military judge's June 4 ruling that the tribunal system created by Congress did not have authority to try detainees unless they were first determined to be unlawful enemy combatants.

The New York Times has this more in-depth report on the ruling.

My all-time favorite quote on Omar Khadr is by Jeanne D'Arc at her now defunct Body and Soul blog:

He's eighteen years old. When he was captured in Afghanistan, he was fifteen -- a child turned into a soldier by parents from hell. And our government's response to this victim of child abuse was to abuse him further.

His lawyers have alleged he was tortured.

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In the ridiculous item of the day category, who smuggled underpants to two detainees at Guantanamo? The military wants to know. They accused the detainees' defense lawyers who adamently deny being involved.

Both prisoners were caught wearing Under Armour briefs and one also had on a Speedo bathing suit, items the military said were not issued by Guantanamo personnel or sent through the regular mail, according to a Defense Department letter obtained Friday by The Associated Press.

A spokesman at Gitmo, Army Lt. Col. Ed Bush says this is a very big deal.

"There is no room for error when working in a dangerous environment, and constant vigilance is of the utmost importance," Bush said.

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The Center for Constitutional Rights has filed what it says is a "groundbreaking brief" (available here) on behalf of Guantanamo detainees.

On August 24, 2007, Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) attorneys and co-counsel submitted a ground-breaking brief to the Supreme Court in the case that will determine whether detainees at Guantánamo possess the fundamental constitutional rights to due process and habeas corpus.

The brief was filed on behalf of men from the first habeas corpus petitions submitted immediately after the landmark 2004 Supreme Court decision in CCR's case Rasul v. Bush. Al Odah v. United States, as the case is now called, has been consolidated with a related case, Boumediene v. Bush; both challenge the Military Commissions Act (MCA), which attempted to strip away the statutory right to habeas corpus the Supreme Court recognized in 2004 and replace it with a far more limited review process set up by the Detainee Treatment Act (DTA).

Kelly Anne Moore was the chief of the Violent Crimes and Terrorism Section in the Brooklyn United States Attorney’s Office from 2002 to 2006. One of the cases she prosecuted was that of two Yemenis,including Sheik Mohammed Ali Hassan al-Moayad,who were charged and convicted of conspiring to send money from Brooklyn, NY to members of al Qaeda and Hamas to support terrorist activities. One was sentenced to 75 years and the other to 45 years. Both are now serving their sentences at Florence's Supermax in Colorado.

Ms. Moore is now in private practice. As she (and others who have tried terrorism cases) know, the U.S. courts are just fine for the job. We don't need special National Security Courts or military tribunals.

In an op-ed in today's New York Times, Ms. Moore writes:

Besides terrorists, the Justice Department has successfully prosecuted Ku Klux Klan bombers, members of violent groups like the Weathermen in the 1960s and ’70s, and members of Italian organized crime in the ’80s and ’90s. The same system has been used repeatedly against complex drug trafficking and human trafficking syndicates, many of which operate primarily overseas.

I'd add to that list those charged and convicted in the Oklahoma City Bombings.

Here are some of the points she makes:

Jane Mayer in The New Yorker Magazine today exposes the torturous interrogation practices the C.I.A. used on its prize detainee, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, during his not-so secret stay in an overseas prison.

Author Jane Mayer, on the CBS Evening News, said:

"The Red Cross went in and got to interview these people for the first time," said Mayer on the CBS Evening News. "What these people described was hanging from the ceilings by their arms and being water-boarded, partially drowned, put on leashes and knocked into walls and basically deprived of all kinds of sensory imagery for years."

The article also puts the lie to President Bush's continuous insistence that the U.S. does not engage in torture.

Mayer's article further described the CIA program of physical and psychological abuse as completely regimented and deliberate.

"There have always been mistakes made in the past when prisoners have been abused in wars," Mayer told Mitchell. "But this is the first time it's been done on purpose."

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Washington Post columnist Jackson Diehl has returned from a trip to Guantanamo where he was allowed to sit in on interrogations.

Diehl reports the Pentagon has shifted from harsh interrogation techniques to ones that stress "the milk of human kindness."

He writes that 360 detainees remain at Guantanamo and 100 interrogation sessions occur each week.

Detainees being worked by the staff of 21 interrogators are invited to leave their small cells for private rooms typically equipped with televisions and comfortable chairs. About five times out of seven, one official told me, the prisoners are asked no questions; instead, pistachios, Subway and McDonald's sandwiches, and other food treats are served, and the session consists of light conversation or the watching of a movie.

Special treats are offered to those who cooperate: One prisoner, I was told, has become an avid reader of the Harry Potter books and was offered access to the latest installment in exchange for responsiveness.

The Good news is Gitmo seems to be winding down.

Fifteen Saudi prisoners were sent home last week; 80 other detainees have been cleared for transfer. One senior official said that he believed only 50 to 75 prisoners here cannot be either sent home or put on trial.

This means of the 360 prisoners still there, most for more than five years, 300 of them have been found not to be a threat or to warrant criminal charges. What a black stain for the U.S. All the pistachios and Harry Potter books in the world can't erase that.

Omar Khadr, the young Canadian Gitmo detainee whose charges were dismissed in early June because the judge ruled he had not been properly designated an enemy combatant, will not have his charges reinstated.

A military panel had declared Khadr an "enemy combatant" but Brownback said that did not meet the strict definition of the law that authorized the tribunals.

He said the distinction was critical because international law requires other types of trial for captives who are considered "lawful enemy combatants."

"The term 'unlawful' is not excess baggage, and it is not mere semantics, it is a critical predicate to jurisdiction," Brownback wrote in the ruling.

Canadian news has this in depth profile of the Khadr family. In 2005, the Toronto Star reported Omar's alleged torture while at Guantanamo.

The government is obliged to treat the life-threatening medical conditions of its prisoners, including illegal immigrants who are held by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Yet Homeland Security "has resisted efforts by the American Bar Association to turn [detention] standards into regulations, saying that rulemaking would reduce the agency's flexibility." This is the same agency that wanted the "flexibility" to fire, demote, and transfer its employees at will, without the civil service protections that safeguard against arbitrary employment decisions.

"Flexibility" is a code word for "freedom from oversight." In the detainee context, here's what the department's trumpeted flexibility brings:

The inspector general in the Department of Homeland Security recently announced a “special review” of two deaths, including that of a Korean woman at a privately run detention center in Albuquerque. Fellow detainees told a lawyer that the woman, Young Sook Kim, had pleaded for medical care for weeks, but received scant attention until her eyes yellowed and she stopped eating. Ms. Kim died of pancreatic cancer in federal custody on Sept. 11, 2005, a day after she was taken to a hospital.

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Last month, I wrote about Sen. Tom Harkin's bill to close Guantanamo within 120 days of passage. The ACLU has more on the bill, the Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility Closure Act - S. 1469.

I will be interviewing Sen. Harkin today by telephone at 4:45 ET. (Update: Sen. Harkin has to reschedule for later this week due to negotiations on the immigration bill.) If you have some questions or thoughts about the bill, please put them in the comments.

It may take me a day or two to write up the interview, so please check back.

The text of the bill is here.

As to the bill's specifics:

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Despite reports to the contrary, the Bush Administration is not planning to close Guantanamo any time soon. Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for the National Security Council, issued a statement last night:

“The President has long expressed a desire to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and to do so in a responsible way,” Mr. Johndroe said. “A number of steps need to take place before that can happen such as setting up military commissions and the repatriation to their home countries of detainees who have been cleared for release. These and other steps have not been completed. No decisions on the future of Guantanamo Bay are imminent and there will not be a White House meeting tomorrow.”

Gitmo got a new prisoner this week.

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The ACLU announced today it is suing Jeppesen, a Boeing subsidiary for its participation in secret renditions.

The lawsuit, which the ACLU said it would file Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, charges that Jeppesen knowingly provided direct flight services to the CIA that enabled the clandestine transportation of the men to secret overseas locations, where they were tortured and subjected to other "forms of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment" under the agency's "extraordinary rendition" program.

"American corporations should not be profiting from a CIA rendition program that is unlawful and contrary to core American values," said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the ACLU. "Corporations that choose to participate in such activity can and should be held legally accountable."

More information about the lawsuit is available at the ACLU website here.

Salon today has an article about another CIA ghost detainee, Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, kept in a secret overseas prisons for months, undisclosed to the Red Cross and finally transferred to Guantanamo.

The C.I.A. (read White House) takes the position that these detainees are unlawful combatents and not entitled to protections of the Geneva conventions.

While the U.S. military recently adopted new rules for interrogation in the wake of the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, legal and human rights experts say the CIA may be continuing to flout the law -- potentially using abusive interrogation tactics at secret prisons known as "black sites" -- at the direction of the Bush White House.

Red Cross officials confirmed to Salon that the CIA did not alert them during the months that al-Hadi was a prisoner with the agency. "We have repeatedly asked U.S. authorities to be notified and have access to all detainees, including those held by the CIA," said Simon Schorno, a spokesman for the Red Cross in Washington. "But we did not have access to Mr. al-Hadi before his transfer [to military custody]. For us, that is problematic."

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