GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba - A military judge on Monday dismissed terrorism-related charges against a prisoner charged with killing an American soldier in Afghanistan, in a stunning reversal for the Bush administration’s attempts to try Guantanamo detainees in military court.

The chief of military defense attorneys at Guantanamo Bay, Marine Col. Dwight Sullivan, said the ruling in the case of Canadian detainee Omar Khadr could spell the end of the war-crimes trial system set up last year by Congress and President Bush after the Supreme Court threw out the previous system.

But Omar Khadr, who was 15 when he was captured after a deadly firefight in Afghanistan and who is now 20, will remain at the remote U.S. military base along with some 380 other men suspected of links to al-Qaida and the Taliban.

The judge, Army Col. Peter Brownback, said he had no choice but to throw the Khadr case out because he had been classified as an “enemy combatant” by a military panel years earlier - and not as an “alien unlawful enemy combatant.”

The Military Commissions Act, signed by Bush last year, specifically says that only those classified as “unlawful” enemy combatants can face war trials here, Brownback noted during the arraignment in a hilltop courtroom on this U.S. military base.

Sullivan said the dismissal of Khadr case has “huge” impact because none of the detainees held at this isolated military base in southeast Cuba has been found to be an “unlawful” enemy combatant.

“It is not just a technicality - it’s the latest demonstration that this newest system just does not work,” Sullivan told journalists. “It is a system of justice that does not comport with American values.”

Sullivan said the judge hearing the case of the only other Guantanamo detainee currently charged with crimes is not bound by Brownback’s ruling but that he expected the judge would make the same decision.

More at Yahoo News

Many of the controversial interrogation tactics used against terror suspects in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo were modeled on techniques the U.S. feared that the Communists themselves might use against captured American troops during the Cold War, according to a little-noticed, highly classified Pentagon report released several days ago. Originally developed as training for elite special forces at Fort Bragg under the “Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape” program, otherwise known as SERE, tactics such as sleep deprivation, isolation, sexual humiliation, nudity, exposure to extremes of cold and stress positions were part of a carefully monitored survival training program for personnel at risk of capture by Soviet or Chinese forces, all carried out under the supervision of military psychologists.

This troubling disclosure was made in the blandly titled report, “Review of DoD-Directed Investigations of Detainee Abuse”, which for the first time sets forth the origins as well as new details of many of the abusive interrogation techniques that led to scandals at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and elsewhere - techniques that some critics contend the Pentagon still has not gone far enough in explicitly banning. Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, called the findings “deeply troubling,” and signaled his intention to hold hearings later this year on the interrogation methods it describes.

continue reading at Time

And who would say any different?

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — A Saudi Arabian detainee died Wednesday at Guantanamo Bay prison and the U.S. military said he apparently committed suicide. Guards at the U.S. Naval Base in southeast Cuba found the detainee in his cell unresponsive and not breathing Wednesday afternoon, the U.S. military’s Southern Command said in a statement.

“They tried to save his life but he was pronounced dead,” said Mario Alvarez, a Miami-based spokesman for the command.

It would be the fourth suicide at Guantanamo since the prison camp opened in January 2002. On June 10, 2006, two Saudi detainees and one Yemeni hanged themselves with sheets. Details, including the prisoner’s name and manner of death, were not released.

A spokesman for detention operations, Navy Cmdr. Rick Haupt, declined to comment, referring questions to the Miami-based Southern Command, which oversees U.S. military operations in the Caribbean and Latin America.

More at AP

A couple words for Lindsay Graham. We’re not fighting a WAR. There is NO war.
A couple words to Levin: Don’t pussy out. Stick to your guns.

WASHINGTON –Senate Democrats are backing a bill that would grant new rights to terror suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, including access to a lawyer regardless of whether the prisoners are put on trial.
The proposal, approved this week by the Senate Armed Services Committee, also would narrow the definition of an enemy combatant and tighten restrictions on the types of evidence used to prosecute and keep a person detained.

The bill is aimed primarily at increasing legal protections for the hundreds of people captured by the United States and held for years on suspicion of terror ties without a trial. Only those selected for prosecution — typically the most high-profile suspected terrorists — are guaranteed legal counsel and other rights when they go to court.

The legislation has raised red flags at the White House as potential veto bait and among congressional Republicans, including Sen. Lindsey Graham, who said he was concerned that aspects of the bill may go too far.

“Any changes have to meet the test for me that they will not compromise our ability to wage war,” said Graham, R-S.C., in a telephone interview Friday.

Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the Armed Services Committee, tucked the new detainee measure into a $649 billion defense policy bill for budget year 2008, which begins Oct. 1.

Read more at Boston.com

From the Washington Times:

NEW YORK, May 18 (UPI) — Lawyers who once represented Guantanamo Bay detainees have taken legal action against U.S. officials in an attempt to gain undisclosed documents.

Based on allegations that they were under surveillance while meeting with their Guantanamo Bay clients, 16 lawyers have asked a New York judge to force federal officials to hand over records of those recordings, the New York Post said Friday.

The attorneys allege that to date, officials from the Department of Justice and the National Security Administration have only shared half of those documents with them.

Papers filed in court Thursday by the Center for Constitutional Rights said the federal judge has been asked to deem the information withholding illegal and order the data’s release.

The alleged practice of eavesdropping on the nearly 380 terror suspects at the U.S. Navy base without proper warrants was first brought to light by media reports in 2005, the Post said.

We were debating what exactly we should say about why we were saying no,” she said, citing an e-mail discussion and various drafts of rejection letters that moved between Navy General Counsel Alberto Mora’s office and the U.S. Department of Justice.
This line says it all. Say no and then make up an excuse as to why you said no.

NORFOLK, Va. — A Pentagon lawyer testified Wednesday at the court-martial of a Navy lawyer accused of spilling state secrets that the Bush administration never planned to provide U.S. defense attorneys with the names of Guantnamo detainees – for policy, not national security, reasons.

”We do not publish lists of people captured in armed conflict,” Defense Department attorney Karen Hecker told a jury of seven naval officers deciding the national security case of Lt. Cmdr. Matt Diaz, 41.

The Kansas native and career JAG officer is accused of mailing a list of war-on-terror captives to the Center for Constitutional Rights, tucked inside a Valentine, in January 2005 as he finished a six-month tour at Guantnamo Bay as the deputy running the detention center’s legal department.

He is accused of divulging classified information to hurt the United States or help its enemies as well as conduct unbecoming an officer, a constellation of five charges that could be punishable by 24 years in prison.

Hecker, an Air Force reserves major and attorney, testified as the first defense witness in what is expected to be a weeklong trial — as an expert on Guantnamo-related lawsuits. She has coordinated the government response to litigation for four years from the Pentagon’s Office of General Counsel.

Hecker said the Pentagon had decided in late 2004 to reject a request from the New York law firm seeking names and nationalities, next of kin and countries of residence of the war-on-terror captives. The U.S. Supreme Court had earlier ruled that Guantnamo detainees could challenge their detention, and the law center wanted to line up family members to authorize them to file suits on their behalf.

More at the Miami Herald

This poor guy…….

From the Miami Herald

NORFOLK, Va. — A Navy lawyer accused of giving classified information about Guantnamo Bay detainees to an unauthorized person will go on trial Monday in a military court, the Navy announced Thursday.

Lt. Cmdr. Matthew M. Diaz, who was stationed at the U.S. base in Cuba for six months, could face more than 36 years in prison if convicted during his general court-martial at Norfolk Naval Station.

Diaz, 41, of Topeka, Kan., is charged with failing to obey a lawful general regulation, engaging in conduct unbecoming an officer by wrongfully transmitting classified documents to an unauthorized person and turning over to an unauthorized person secret information related to national defense.

Diaz allegedly mailed a list containing names and other identifying information about Guantnamo detainees to a civil liberties law firm in late 2004 or early 2005, while working as a staff judge advocate at Guantnamo Bay.

Since 2002, when the U.S. military opened its detention center at the base and airlifted in captives from Afghanistan, civilian lawyers have pressed for access to the detainees and information about them.

The U.S. Supreme Court has twice ruled for detainee rights.

Diaz has remained free and is stationed in Jacksonville.

About 30 detainees who were released from Guantnamo have re-joined the fight against the United States, according to Benkert.

Do these people just spew out whatever they think sounds good? So what…no other prisoners should ever be released? I’ll tell ya what, if I was held in the hell hole that is Guantanamo for years with no charges ever brought against me and then released, and I was innocent, I might take up a fight against the U.S. when released. George Bush has created more terrorists than any person on the face of the earth.

WASHINGTON — It will take several years to complete military commission trials for 60 to 80 Guantnamo Bay detainees if the Bush administration decides to conduct that many, a House subcommittee was told Wednesday.

The Pentagon estimate came as the appropriations panel chaired by Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., questioned how long the Bush administration will keep the prison open and whether to move the 380 detainees.

A week ago, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., introduced a measure to close the prison camps and move commission trials to the United States.

At the hearing, Rep. C.W. Bill Young, R-Fla., suggested that California should take the detainees.

Some serious thought should be given to reopening Alcatraz, Young said during the three-hour session.

”I certainly wouldn’t want to send them to any place else except San Francisco,” joked Rep. Jerry Lewis, a Republican from southern California.

After the hearing, Young said he was being serious about Alcatraz as a place to take the detainees in the event that Guantnamo Bay is closed. Young opposes closing Guantnamo.

The prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., has 70 open beds, said Marine Col. Dwight Sullivan, chief defense counsel for the Office of Military Commissions. The brig in Charleston, S.C., has space for an additional 100 prisoners, Sullivan told the congressional panel.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said Congress and the administration should work together to allow the United States to permanently imprison some of the more dangerous Guantnamo Bay detainees elsewhere so the facility can be closed.

It would take three years or so to complete a process of conducting 60 to 80 military commission trials, said Daniel J. Dell’Orto, principal deputy general counsel at the Defense Department.

In the months after Sept. 11, the military considered locations in the United States and elsewhere for the detention facility that ended up at Guantnamo Bay, said Joseph Benkert, principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for global security affairs.

One factor in favor of Guantnamo was that its isolated Navy base would make it a difficult target for terrorists. About 30 detainees who were released from Guantnamo have re-joined the fight against the United States, according to Benkert.

More at The Miami Herald

The headline reads: Guantanamo Camp’s Chief Gets Promoted. Ahhhhhh I got news for the reporter who wrote that…..it’s not a camp. It’s a prison. Where people are abused. Where people are held for years without being charged. Where human rights are violated. So it figures they promoted the guy running the show.

From the Miami Herald:

The Pentagon is promoting the Navy admiral now running the prison camps at Guantnamo Bay, Cuba.

President Bush has formally nominated Rear Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr. to receive a second star, according to a Defense Department statement Friday.

In U.S. Navy terms, that means he goes from being rear admiral — lower half, to rear admiral — upper half, and has two stars.

Harris, who has run the offshore detention center through a turbulent era of suicides and the arrivals of CIA held captive Khalid Sheik Mohammed, is moving to Miami by summer.

He becomes operations chief of the U.S. Southern Command — the Pentagon division responsible for most military operations in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The Pentagon has already assigned another one’star admiral to replace Harris. He is Rear Adm. Mark H. Buzby, who is now deputy director at the Navy’s expeditionary warfare division in Washington.

Buzby has served extensively in the Mediterranean and is a graduate of the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy.

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration is trying to evade responsibility for problems at the Guantanamo Bay prison by falsely blaming defense lawyers for the trouble, the New York City Bar says.

The group’s president leveled the criticism in asking Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to abandon a Justice Department proposal to limit lawyers’ access to the nearly 400 detainees.

In a court filing this month, the department said attorney access via the mail system has “enabled detainees’ counsel to cause unrest on the base by informing detainees about terrorist attacks.”

The mail system was “misused” to inform detainees about military operations in Iraq, activities of terrorist leaders, efforts in the war on terror, the Hezbollah attack on Israel and abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, the department said in this month’s court filing.

“This is an astonishing and disingenuous assertion,” the association president, Barry M. Kamins, wrote Gonzales.

More at YahooNews

This is so sad. These men did nothing, and they’ve lost everything… friends, family AND country. Why oh why can’t the people that brought this about, from Bush right on down to the lowly idiot that voted for and still believes in Bush,.. why can’t they be renditioned? I’m not talking long. Just a couple of years or so.

It all falls back on something I posted once before regarding sympathy (democrats consider everyone while republicans consider only themselves). Many republicans just do not have the capacity to feel true sympathy towards anyone except the closest of friends and family. To hell with anyone else! The few republicans that do have the capacity to care for others, are speaking out against this administration today.

MSNBC/Washingtonpost:

82 inmates cleared but still held at Guantanamo

U.S. cites difficulty deporting detainees

LONDON - More than a fifth of the approximately 385 prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have been cleared for release but may have to wait months or years for their freedom because U.S. officials are finding it increasingly difficult to line up places to send them, according to Bush administration officials and defense lawyers.

Since February, the Pentagon has notified about 85 inmates or their attorneys that they are eligible to leave after being cleared by military review panels. But only a handful have gone home, including a Moroccan and an Afghan who were released Tuesday. Eighty-two remain at Guantanamo and face indefinite waits as U.S. officials struggle to figure out when and where to deport them, and under what conditions.
[...]

‘Not their problem’
Compounding the problem are persistent refusals by the United States, its European allies and other countries to grant asylum to prisoners who are stateless or have no place to go.

“In general, most countries simply do not want to help,” said John B. Bellinger III, legal adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. “Countries believe this is not their problem. They think they didn’t contribute to Guantanamo, and therefore they don’t have to be part of the solution.”

Crossposted from The Atlantic Online:

Alex Gibney’s new documentary on the legalization and authorization of torture by the Bush administration debuts this weekend at the Tribeca Film Festival. See the trailer here. It’s a well-crafted piece of work and a devastating exposure of the denial that still runs rampant in some quarters about what has actually been done in the name of the American people these past few years. Longtime readers of this blog know all too well many of the details - but this film does what a parasitic blog cannot, and what even all the innovative reporting on the subject has not yet been able to do. It puts it all together. It represents a moment in this war when we can actually stop and look back from rising ground, and see how far we have come from the civilized norms of warfare that the United States represented in the last century. Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld tore off that civilized veneer and repudiated that long and honorable history. From the details of approved interrogation techniques replicated by scapegoats at Abu Ghraib to the self-conscious attempts to dissemble and deceive about the Rubicon we’ve crossed to the simple facts of the percentage of captives at Gitmo who were actually seized by U.S. forces - a small fraction of the total - you see conscious, orchestrated sadism at work. It’s a film that enrages and shocks. But it has all been in front of our noses.

I watched the whole thing intently and quietly to the end. But its final coda contains a small clip of Gibney’s late father, a longtime military interrogator, and his views on what has been done to his honorable profession by the Bush White House. Alone, it made me weep. It struck a chord that still resonates: of one thing mainly, and one thing still unavoidably. Shame. Almost unspeakable shame.

(Full disclosure: Alex Gibney’s brother, James, is my colleague at the Atlantic and was once a colleague at The New Republic. Photo: a detainee cell at Abu Ghraib under president George W. Bush, commander-in-chief.)

A video from Project Hamad

Adel Hamad’s lawyers and Martin Sheen collaborated on this new video about Adel Hamad’s detention in Guantanamo.

He’s already been held 5 years……… term served.

Australian David Hicks has made a plea bargain limiting his jail term for aiding al-Qaeda to seven years, a US tribunal at Guantanamo Bay has heard.
Hicks will serve his term in Australia. It is not clear if it includes the five years already spent at the prison camp.

Hicks pleaded guilty on Monday to providing material support for terrorism, in the first case to be heard by the special tribunals.

The 31-year-old Muslim convert appeared with short hair and in a suit.

A military judge announced the terms of the deal at a hearing on whether to accept Hicks’ guilty plea.

The Australian, who has been held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba for five years, was accused of attending al-Qaeda training camps and fighting with the Taleban.

The US and Australia have agreed that he can serve out his sentence in his homeland.

More at BBCNews

Berkeley has become the first public entity in the United States to endorse the possibility of prosecuting former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in Germany for war crimes, but the liberal city balked at joining the case as a co-plaintiff.

The City Council early Wednesday unanimously passed a resolution supporting a criminal prosecution being sought in Germany against Rumsfeld and his associates in connection with torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay prisons.

After some debate, the council — on the advice of the city manager and city attorney — modified the original resolution from the Peace and Justice Commission, which called for Berkeley to join about three dozen international nonprofits as co-plaintiffs.

The council was advised that city staff did not have the time or expertise to take on a German legal matter and that Berkeley might expose itself to financial or legal liability by joining the suit, which was filed under Germany’s universal human rights jurisdiction.

The compromise resolution refrains from making Berkeley a co-plaintiff, but expands the city’s support for the German suit to “any tribunal with jurisdiction over the matter, whether such legal proceedings are pursued in this country or abroad.”

“We sent a very strong progressive message that at least one American city is willing to stand up to the Bush administration,” said Councilman Kriss Worthington. “And we did not risk taxpayers’ money by becoming a co-plaintiff. So it was progressive and prudent.”

Continue reading at SFGate

More about the case here