Sad times for this country…….

The use of torture to extract evidence from detainees held at the US military jail in Guantanamo Bay has tarnished the image of the US legal system and alienated allies in the war on terror, a human rights group said Monday.

“The use of evidence tainted by torture and other inhuman treatment is pervasive and systematic in the cases of prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, and has already infected legal judgments made there,” Human Rights First said in a report entitled “Tortured Justice“.

By hearing testimony extracted under torture when trying Guantanamo detainees, the United States is “tainting the legitimacy of the proceedings, both at home and in the eyes of the international community; alienating US allies and empowering terrorists”, it said.

“Tortured Justice” was released two days after US President George W. Bush vetoed legislation on intelligence funding because it called for interrogation methods to be limited to techniques outlined in a US military manual.

More at AFP

Fucking shameful, unprincipled, criminal, immoral, scandalous, disgraceful, unethical rotten war criminals. That congress wouldn’t even TRY to impeach the bastards makes them accessories to the crime. That they continue to allow these pricks to get away with every imaginable criminal behavior you can think of makes me SICK SICK SICK!!!!

A Spanish judge dropped terror charges Thursday against two former [tag]Guantánamo Bay detainees [/tag]who recently returned home to Britain, saying their mental health had deteriorated so badly they were suicidal and it would be cruel to prosecute them.

In a 10-page order, Judge Baltasar Garzon said he was abandoning an extradition request and the original indictment he issued in 2003 against Palestinian-Jordanian Jamil el Banna, 45, and Libyan-born Omar Deghayes, who is 38.

More at the Miami Herald

In other news, ANOTHER Bin Laden driver arrested.

All cruelty springs from weakness.

- Seneca

One of the Bush administration’s chief defenses, besides a mostly gutless and complicit Congress and press, is that the harm they’ve done is so deep and widespread it’s hard to keep track of it all. That said, the Guantanamo show trials and the use of torture are as fundamental a betrayal of American ideals as there can be, and even if the American press isn’t watching, the world is. All of these pieces should be read or listened to in their entirety, but I’ll provide some excerpts.
(more…)

There’s no question these men deserve a trial. As long as the U.S. is doing the detaining and the prosecuting, then we are bound by our rules. And in that vein, these men deserve a timely trial also.

Even in a military environment, there should be the presumption of innocence. If not, why even hold a trial? If the prosecution wants to withhold evidence, then the prosecution doesn’t have a case. To continue holding these men in this fashion makes us no better than that which we condemn them of.

Secret Evidence Bogs Down Gitmo Hearings

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba (AP) — The secrecy shrouding government files on terror suspects is bogging down the Pentagon’s effort to hold trials at Guantanamo Bay, with defense attorneys accusing the government of withholding potential evidence.

At pretrial hearings this week, attorneys for two al-Qaida suspects captured in Afghanistan said they need more access to interrogators, witnesses and records. Prosecutors objected, citing a need to protect the identities of U.S. service members and other security concerns.
[...]

“We’re going to have to see how willing the judges are to interpret the rules so as to give defense counsel some kind of chance to actually defend their clients,” said Navy Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler, a defense attorney for detainee Omar Khadr. “That means litigating these discovery issues and that takes time.”

Hang in there… the week is nearly over!

Gloria Gaynor - I will survive
(Check out the category. I’m such a scream!)

Three years ago, The Sunday Times published flight logs of CIA civilian jets in Europe, setting off a controversy over the whether countries across the continent have been secretly involved in America’s rendition of terrorist suspects to countries that carry out torture.

The row is now set to be reignited. Inquiries by Ana Gomes, a Portuguese member of the European parliament, have uncovered not only more CIA flight logs but also more sensitive military flight plans, which until now have remained a closely guarded secret.

The logs show how most prisoners changed planes at a Turkish military airbase and flew across Greek, Italian and Portuguese airspace. Others reached Cuba after touching down in Spain, whose governing socialist party once expressed indignation at conditions in Guantanamo.

The flight logs show that three Britons - Shafiq Rasul, Jamal Udeen and Asif Iqbal - were flown across Europe to Cuba on January 14, 2002. Moazzam Begg, another Briton, was taken by the same route to Guantanamo on February 2, 2003; and Binyam Mohamed, a British resident whose release the British government is now trying to negotiate, arrived in Cuba after crossing Europe in a special flight in September 2004.

According to the flight plans, the first 23 prisoners to arrive at Guantanamo - including another British citizen, Feroz Abbasi, then 21, and an Australian, David Hicks - had arrived at the American naval base in Cuba after flying from the Moron airbase in Spain.

Abbasi has claimed in a statement that prisoners were abused within hours of arriving. “We were made to sit on our heels, one foot over the other, supported by one foot’s toes alone, for hours. Some of us were old, weak, fatigued, and injured - they were the ones to drop first in the searing Caribbean heat.”

Described by the Pentagon as the “worst of the worst” from Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, the images of prisoners such as Abbasi dressed in orange jumpsuits, their heads shaved and shackled by their wrists and ankles, shocked the world. Within a day, Donald Rumsfeld, then US defence secretary, announced that the Geneva conventions would not apply to what were now called “enemy combatants”.

Full article at Times Online

We can’t give our kids health insurance, but we can spend $55 million on a tent city for Cubans….. just IN CASE Castro should die. Here’s a question for ya…..they can already bring their boats to the U.S. shore, and if they get caught with dry feet, they’re in like Flint…..so why bother with a tent city. If they have to weigh the two….tent city….. Miami…..tent city…..Miami…..which do you think they’ll go for? And the Dept. of Homeland Security is going to check for criminals? Who they gonna check with? Raul? I don’t think so…….. Notice in this article it states that in the 90’s when they did this, the Haitians were sent home. They still are. Funny how we pick and choose who we’re going to save and who we aren’t. Of course, Haiti has nothing we want.

The U.S. military has expanded plans for a pop-up tent city to shelter migrants in case of a Caribbean boat crisis, spending more than $55 million to prepare a safe haven for up to 45,000 boat people.

Since Fidel Castro took ill and ceded power of Cuba to his brother Raúl, the Bush administration has been preparing for a 10,000-person tent city.

In May, the Navy hired a Jacksonville contractor to build cement block buildings with 525 toilets and 248 showers on an empty slice of the base. The military could rapidly erect tents around the site. The buildings should be completed next summer at a cost of $16.5 million.

Now, under the expansion, the military has invited military contractors to bid on a $40 million project that would build a second tent city on the base for 35,000 migrants in need of humanitarian relief.

The Navy put out the bid in recent months, said Marine Capt. Manuel Carpio, the officer here assigned to plan for the crisis and coordinate with various U.S. and international agencies.

Full article at the Miami Herald

from The Independent, UK
cross posted at The Democratic Underground

An al-Jazeera journalist captured in Afghanistan six years ago and sent to Guantanamo Bay is close to becoming the fifth detainee at the US naval base to take his own life, according to a medical report written by a team of British and American psychiatrists

Sami al-Haj, a Sudanese national, is 250 days into a hunger strike which he began in protest over his detention without charge or trial in January 2002. But British and American doctors, who have been given exclusive access to his interview notes, say there is very strong evidence that he has given up his fight for life, experiencing what doctors recognise as “passive suicide”, a condition suffered by female victims of Darfur.

Dr Dan Creson, a US psychiatrist who has worked with the United Nations in Darfur, said Mr Haj was suffering from severe depression and may be deteriorating to the point of imminent death.

He said the detainee’s condition was similar to that of Darfuri women in Sudan whose mind suddenly experiences an irreversible decline after enduring months of starvation and abuse. He said: “In the midst of rape, slow starvation, and abject humiliation, they did whatever they could to survive and save their children; then, suddenly, something happened in their psyche, and, without warning, they would just sit down with their small children beneath the first small area of available shade and with no apparent emotion wait for death.”

read more HERE

By ANDREW O. SELSKY and BEN FOX
The Associated Press

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - After years of indefinite confinement, many detainees at Guantanamo Bay say they feel they may never receive justice, according to transcripts of hearings obtained by The Associated Press. Fewer than one in five of detainees allowed a hearing last year even bothered to show up for it.

The frustrated words of men, some of whom admit to fighting with the Taliban but swear they would go peacefully home if released, illustrate the seething tension at a prison where hundreds are held without charges. The transcripts also underscore that the U.S. allegations against the men are often as difficult to substantiate as they are for the detainees to refute.

Sometimes the allegations alarmed even the panels of military officers charged with determining whether a detainee should be freed.

Rahmatullah Sangaryar stood accused of “planning biological and poison attacks on United States and coalition forces in Kandahar, Afghanistan” and of possessing anthrax powder and a liquid poison.

The Afghan detainee said he was captured only with muddy clothes, possessed no anthrax and never planned such an attack. The officer in charge of the panel seemed to grope for a response.

read more HERE

The legal battle over the rights of the hundreds of men held as enemy combatants at Guantánamo Bay has lasted more than five years, including two rounds in the Supreme Court. Now, as the parties prepare for their next Supreme Court confrontation this fall, the arguments have come full circle to where they began: over the role of the federal courts.

The Military Commissions Act of 2006, which Congress passed in its final weeks under Republican control in order to negate the Supreme Court’s most recent ruling on behalf of a Guantánamo detainee, stripped all courts of jurisdiction “to hear or consider” challenges to any alien detainee’s continued detention. In a surprising about-face the day after it concluded its term in June, the Supreme Court accepted renewed appeals on behalf of two groups of detainees and agreed to decide whether the measure is constitutional.

Lawyers for the detainees and for dozens of organizations and individuals supporting them filed their briefs late last month. Two dozen briefs poured into the court. The government’s brief and those of any supporting groups are due by Oct. 9, with the argument likely to be scheduled less than two months later.

More at the International Herald Tribune