Tag: Detainees (page 11)

Australian detainee David Hicks was flown back to Australia yesterday on a chartered jet.

He will serve 7 months in an Australian prison and then be freed.

The Australian Government says it will not enforce the ban on Hicks telling his story when his sentence ends in December -- he just won't be allowed to profit from it.

Australia was being mum on the details of the flight, no John Mark Karr moments disclosed of champagne and gourmet food -- but it did leak that the movie he watched was "The Departed."

The New York Times reports that many Guantanamo detainees are refusing to meet with or even accept mail from their own lawyers. They no longer trust them.

The detainees’ resistance appears to have been fueled by frustration over their long detention and suspicion about whether their lawyers are working for the government, as well as anti-American sentiment, some of the documents and interviews show. “Your role is to polish Bush’s shoes and make the picture look good,” a Yemeni detainee, Adnan Farhan Abdullatif, 31, wrote his lawyer in February.

Is the Government behind this? Many of the lawyers think so.

More...

Not content to seek to deprive the Guantanamo detainees of habeas corpus and access to the federal courts to challenge the conditions of their confinement, the Bush Administration is taking it one step further. Now, it wants to limit the detainees' access to their lawyers.

Saying that visits by civilian lawyers and attorney-client mail have caused “intractable problems and threats to security at Guantánamo,” a Justice Department filing proposes new limits on the lawyers’ contact with their clients and access to evidence in their cases that would replace more expansive rules that have governed them since they began visiting Guantánamo detainees in large numbers in 2004.

What limits does the Administration want to impose? Read on...

Rocker Patti Smith has a new song about Guantanamo, "Without Chains." She says it will be available soon for download on her website.

"I feel responsible as an American citizen," Smith told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from New York. "It’s a terrible injustice and I think it will be a stain upon us when history examines this period."

Smith’s "Without Chains" focuses on Murat Kurnaz, a German-born Turkish citizen who said he was kept under fluorescent lights for 24 hours at a time and complained of being beaten at the U.S. military detention center in southeast Cuba. Detainees are held there on suspicion of links to al-Qaida or the Taliban, many without the opportunity to face trial.

More like Patti, please.

Hearings began today for 14 Gitmo detainees to determine if they are enemy combatants. If so, they can be held indefinitely or tried in military tribunals.

Were any bloggers allowed in? Doubtful. Even the Associated Press was excluded.

The military allowed the media to cover previous hearings but this time has adopted more stringent rules, barring anyone without a special security clearance.

How will we know what transpired?

Edited transcripts of the hearings at the U.S. Navy base in southeast Cuba will be released later, Peppler said.

Democracy dies behind closed doors.

It has long been speculated that Poland is one of the countries that housed CIA secret prisoners in the war on terror. A report by the European Commission over a year ago found evidence the U.S. outsourced torture, but none that facilities were located in Poland.

Larisa Alexandrovna and David Dastych, writing for Raw Story today, confirm it, based upon interviews with British and Polish intelligence officials.

More....

Yesterday I wrote about the new Human Rights Watch report on the missing CIA prisoners who were whisked off to secret prisons on Ghost Air.

Today, the Washington Post publishes its series of interviews with Marwan Jabour, a prisoner seized in 2004 who was released in 2006.

First note: Jabour, HRW and intelligence officials say the number of secret prisoners far exceed the 14 President Bush said were transferred to Guantanamo. HRW has 38 unaccounted for, an intelligence official says more than 60 were held.

On to Jabour's account of his detention and torture. First, there's the "villa at Islamabad."

Northern light:

Canada’s highest court on Friday unanimously struck down a law that allows the Canadian government to detain foreign-born terrorism suspects indefinitely using secret evidence and without charges while their deportations are being reviewed.

....“The overarching principle of fundamental justice that applies here is this: before the state can detain people for significant periods of time, it must accord them a fair judicial process,” Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin wrote in the ruling.

Charles "Cully" Stimson has resigned. Stimson, deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, is the guy who made the offensive comments about the law firms representing Guantanamo detainees.

Stimson said he was leaving because of the controversy over a radio interview in which he said he found it shocking that lawyers at many of the nation's top law firms represent detainees held at the U.S. military prison in Cuba.

"He believed it hampered his ability to be effective in this position," Whitman said of the backlash to Stimson's comments.

Resignation was his only course of action after his disturbing and contemptible comments. And, Stimson's troubles might not be over.

The Bar Association of San Francisco last week asked the California State Bar to investigate whether Stimson violated legal ethics by suggesting a boycott of law firms that represent Guantanamo Bay detainees.

Notwithstanding the long hours spent in the Scooter Libby trial this week, Judge Reggie Walton had time yesterday to make a ruling in the 16 cases involving Guantanamo detainees.

Shorter version: he put the cases in the freezer until the DC Circuit Court of Appeals rules on whether there's been an ouster of habeas jurisdiction.

In a Daily Kos diary defense attorney David Seth has more on how the decision in practical terms means that there won't be an inquiry into the justification for detaining Gitmo prisoners, some for more than 5 years in our civilian courts.

Justice delayed is justice denied.

Military law expert Donald G. Rehkoff, for whom I have the utmost respect, being familiar with his work, had this to say on a message board today about Charles "Cully" Stimson, the Bush deputy for detainee affairs who made reprehensible comments about lawyers who represent the detainees. (He has graciously given me permission to reprint it.)

First, he reminds us of President John Adams, quoting from Key Figures in Public Trials:

John Adams, in his old age, called his defense of British soldiers in 1770 "one of the most gallant, generous, manly, and disinterested actions of my whole life, and one of the best pieces of service I ever rendered my country." That's quite a statement, coming as it does from perhaps the most underappreciated great man in American history.

The day after British soldiers mortally wounded five Americans on a cobbled square in Boston, thirty-four-year-old Adams was visited in his office near the stairs of the Town Office by a Boston merchant , James Forest. "With tears streaming from his eyes" (according to the recollection of Adams), Forest asked Adams to defend the soldiers and their captain, Thomas
Preston.

The Boston Globe reports today that House Democrats may try to force a closure of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and other secret prisons by cutting off funding for them.

Representative John P. Murtha, the chairman of the powerful Defense Appropriations subcommittee and a close ally of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, said he wants to close both prisons by cutting their funding, "to restore our credibility worldwide." If he succeeds, it would force the administration to find a new location for high-value terrorism suspects.

Murtha said Nancy Pelosi supports the closure move.