Judge rules that regardless of evidence that 3 Guantánamo detainees were TORTURED TO DEATH and later declared ‘suicides’ by the Pentagon in a cover-up, their families should be denied a hearing in court due to ‘national security concerns’.

AFP: US judge dismisses hearing into Guantanamo ‘suicides’

WASHINGTON — A US federal judge dismissed Wednesday a complaint by the families of two Guantanamo detainees who alleged the men’s deaths in 2006 had been covered up when the Pentagon ruled them as suicides.

In her ruling, US District Judge Ellen Huvelle said “the highly disturbing nature of allegations in a complaint cannot be a sufficient basis in law” for the case to be heard.

The families of Saudi prisoner Yasser al-Zahrani and Salah al-Salami of Yemen had asked the judge to reexamine the case in March after adding new testimony from military officials, including an officer who served at the US prison camp in southern Cuba the night of the events.

At the time of their deaths, Al-Zahrani, 22, and Al-Salami, 33, had been detained without charge and held incommunicado for about four years at the US naval base.

The Pentagon maintains the two men, along with a third detainee, Mani al-Utaybi of Saudi Arabia, committed suicide by hanging themselves in their cells. Utaybi’s family did not file a complaint.

But first-hand accounts provided by soldiers raised questions about the circumstances surrounding the deaths, and suggested the men may have died as the result of torture at a site off base known as “Camp No,” according to the petition.

One of the soldiers — Joe Hickman, an army officer on duty at a watch tower with a view of the cells where the men were held overnight June 9-10, 2006 — said he witnessed them being transported by van to Camp No — so called because when asked if the camp existed soldiers would say “no”.

Later, rather than returning the men to their cells, the van pulled up to an infirmary.

Hickman was told by a medical soldier that three dead prisoners had been brought to the infirmary “because they had rags stuffed down their throats, and that one of them was severely bruised,” the petition said.

But he was later told that the official cause of the men’s deaths was that they had been found hanged in their cells.

In her ruling on Wednesday, Huvelle pointed to a decision by a federal appeals court in Washington stating that matters relating to the conditions of detention in Guantanamo remain the purview of Congress alone — not the courts — due to national security concerns.

“The question before the court is not whether homicide ‘exceeds the bounds of permissible official conduct in the treatment of detainees in US custody and demands accountability’ or whether the families of Al-Zahrani and Al-Salami deserve a remedy,” Huvelle said.

“Rather, the question is ‘who should decide whether such a remedy should be provided.’”

Al-Zahrani’s father Talal denounced the ruling, saying “the courts should be investigating my son’s death and holding those responsible accountable.”

“President Obama should be defending human rights and the democratic values the US preaches to the world, rather than going to court to defend the lies and gruesome crimes of the Bush administration,” he added.

President Barack Obama has acknowledged his administration has “fallen short” of his campaign promise to shutter the controversial facility within a year of taking office.

\\AFP

Where Is the Outrage?

By Robert Scheer

Are we Americans truly savages or merely tone-deaf in matters of morality, and therefore more guilty of terminal indifference than venality? It’s a question demanding an answer in response to the publication of the detailed 370-page report on U.S. complicity in torture, issued last week by the Justice Department’s inspector general.

Because the report was widely cited in the media and easily accessed as a pdf file on the Internet, it is fair to assume that those of our citizens who remain ignorant of the extent of their government’s commitment to torture as an official policy have made a choice not to be informed. A less appealing conclusion would be that they are aware of the heinous acts fully authorized by our president but conclude that such barbarism is not inconsistent with that American way of life that we celebrate.

But that troubling assessment of moral indifference is contradicted by the scores of law enforcement officers, mostly from the FBI, who were so appalled by what they observed as routine official practice in the treatment of prisoners by the United States in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo that they risked their careers to officially complain. A few brave souls from the FBI even compiled a “war crimes file,” suggesting the unthinkable—that we might come to be judged as guilty by the standard we have imposed on others. Superiors in the Justice Department soon put a stop to such FBI efforts to hold CIA agents and other U.S. officials accountable for the crimes they committed.

That this systematic torture was carried out not by a few conveniently described “bad apples” but rather represented official policy condoned at the highest level of government was captured in one of those rare media reports that remind us why the Founding Fathers signed off on the First Amendment.

“These were not random acts,” The New York Times editorialized. “It is clear from the inspector general’s report that this was organized behavior by both civilian and military interrogators following the specific orders of top officials. The report shows what happens when an American president, his secretary of defense, his Justice Department and other top officials corrupt American law to rationalize and authorize the abuse, humiliation and torture of prisoners.”

One of those top officials, who stands revealed in the inspector general’s report as approving the torture policy, is Condoleezza Rice, who in her capacity as White House national security adviser turned away the concerns of then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft as to the severe interrogation measures being employed. Rice, as ABC-TV reported in April, chaired the top-level meetings in 2002 in the White House Situation Room that signed off on the CIA treatment of prisoners—“whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called water boarding. …” According to the report, the former academic provost of Stanford University came down on the side of simulated drowning.

As further proof that women are not necessarily more squeamish than men in condoning such practices, the report offers examples of sexual and religious denigration of the mostly Muslim prisoners by female interrogators carrying out an official policy of “invasion of space by a female.” In one recorded instance observed by startled FBI agents, a female interrogator was seen with a prisoner “bending his thumbs back and grabbing his genitals … to cause him pain.” One of the agents testified that this was not “a case of a rogue interrogator acting on her own.” He said he witnessed a “pep rally” meeting conducted by a top Defense Department official “in which the interrogators were encouraged to get as close to the torture statute line as possible.”

(Continue reading: Truthdig)

U.S. Releases Journalist After 6 Years

Sami Al-Haj, a cameraman for Al-Jazeera, was released Thursday evening after spending almost seven years in U.S. custody, six of those as an inmate at Guantanamo Bay. Al-Haj was never charged with any crime, nor was any evidence against him ever revealed.

An al-Jazeera cameraman detained by American forces in Afghanistan was last night released after spending nearly six years imprisoned without charge at Guantánamo Bay.

Sami al-Haj, 39, was arrested on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan on December 15 2001, while on assignment to cover the war against the Taliban. Although he had a valid visa to work in Afghanistan, US intelligence alleged that he was an al-Qaida operative, and he was transferred to Guantánamo in June 2002.

Last night, his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, said Haj was en route to his home in Sudan to be reunited with his wife and son. He said: “I’m very glad Sami has finally been released, but the question is why he wasn’t freed many years ago.”

(Continue reading: The Guardian)

Behind Analysts, the Pentagon’s Hidden Hand

In the

summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantánamo Bay. The detention center had just been branded “the gulag of our times” by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from United Nations human rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure.

The administration’s communications experts responded swiftly. Early one Friday morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantánamo.

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

(Continue reading: New York Times)

Pentagon General Counsel Resigns

by ROSS TUTTLE

William J. Haynes, the Pentagon’s chief legal officer and overseer of Guantanamo’s Military Commissions, is stepping down, amid mounting controversy over the tribunal process, so he can “return to private life,” the Department of Defense announced late on Monday. Haynes’ resignation comes exactly two weeks after landmark charges were brought against six “high-value” Guantanamo detainees.

Haynes “has served the Department of Defense and the nation with distinction,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates said in a statement. But Haynes will leave behind a commissions process that is embattled and discredited–and he bears much of the blame.

Haynes, who is legal counsel for the Pentagon–having served both Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates–has long been criticized for his role in crafting the Bush Administration’s policies regarding the interrogation and detention of prisoners captured in the “war on terror.”

His infamous memos and public statements advocated torture and the denial of habeas corpus for detainees. In a 2002 memo, he recommended techniques such as “twenty-hour interrogations, isolation for up to thirty days, deprivation of light and auditory stimuli…and stress positions such as the proposed standing for four hours.” In response to this last technique, Haynes’s boss at the time, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, wrote in the memo’s margins, “I stand 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours.” Haynes also wanted to keep death threats, waterboarding and exposure to extreme temperatures on the table as interrogation methods. He stated, “Fact: The detainees currently held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are not protected by the Geneva Conventions.”

These positions and actions have led to international condemnation and a stalemate in the prosecution of Guantánamo detainees. Only one case–that of Australian David Hicks–has been adjudicated in six years.

Criticism of Haynes has sharpened in the wake of the October resignation of the Chief Prosecutor of Guantánamo’s military commissions, Col. Morris Davis, who charged that Haynes and other political appointees were interfering unlawfully in the process. Davis resigned when Haynes was inserted above him in the chain of command, saying, “Everyone has opinions, but when he was put above me, his opinions become orders.” In a Washington Post op-ed last year, Davis wrote that he had felt pressure to prosecute cases deemed “sexy” in the run-up to the 2008 elections.

And just last week, Col. Davis made the startling claim, in an exclusive interview with The Nation, that Haynes, who oversees both the prosecution and defense, said to him, “We can’t have acquittals, we have to have convictions.” According to Davis, Haynes said, “if we’ve been holding these people for so long, how can we explain letting them get off?”

Reached for comment about Haynes resignation, Col. Davis, who believes that given proper supervision the commissions can be successful, says he’s not celebrating yet. “It’s a positive step, but there are still several people who share his [Haynes's] views that are still standing in the way of the process,” he said, referring to convening authority Susan Crawford and her legal adviser Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann.

Davis has been troubled by the extent of Hartmann’s interference in the prosecution, believing that the prosecutor’s office needs to be independent in order to perform its duties and that the convening authority should be neutral. However, Hartmann, who reports to Haynes, interpreted his duties more broadly, and according to an internal report he “sees the Legal Adviser’s role as being the supervisor of the Chief Prosecutor.”

Lt. Brian Mizer, defense counsel for Salim Hamdan, alleged driver of Osama bin Laden, had a similar reaction to Haynes’s resignation. “It’s an important step in the process in bringing credibility to the military commissions, but it’s going to be insufficient to remove the unlawful influence that Col. Davis has talked about,” said Mizer from his Virginia-based office.

But Mizer is less optimistic about the prospects for a just process in general: “It will never make this system of justice acceptable. We’ve removed fundamental rights that our country was based upon–the right to confront accusers, the right to remain silent, and no amount of resignations are going to cure those aspects of the Military Commissions Act,” he said–referring to the controversial 2006 act of Congress that created the framework for the current commissions system.

The Pentagon’s brief statement left open room for speculation about the reasons for Haynes’s departure.

Col. Davis, who was surprised that such an announcement would come so late in the Administration’s second term, suggested that “there may have been some opportunity that was just too good to pass up.” After the circulation of the press release, it was reported that Haynes will be going to an in-house position at a major corporation.)

As far as Haynes’s future is concerned, there is a possibility that he could be pursued as a perpetrator of war crimes in a foreign country. Indeed, Haynes, along with Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzales and other Bush Administration appointees, were charged in Germany in 2006 with war crimes, but the charges were withdrawn due to insufficient evidence.

As the tribunals march on, Col. Davis has recently agreed to testify at a pretrial hearing in April for Lt. Commander Mizer’s client Salim Hamdan. Mizer will raise a motion to dismiss charges based on unlawful interference by political appointees, and Davis will be one of his witnesses. He will reiterate claims he made publicly about Crawford’s and Hartmann’s roles in the prosecution.

As Davis puts it, “the house isn’t clean yet.”

via//The Nation

Gitmo Trials Rigged from the Start

A damning new interview reveals that the Gitmo trials are only for show.

Secret evidence. Denial of habeas corpus. Evidence obtained by waterboarding. Indefinite detention. The litany of complaints about the legal treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay is long, disturbing and by now familiar. Nonetheless, a new wave of shock and criticism greeted the Pentagon’s announcement on February 11 that it was charging six Guantánamo detainees, including alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, with war crimes — and seeking the death penalty for all of them.

As the murky, quasi-legal staging of the Bush Administration’s military commissions unfolds, a key official has told The Nation that the trials are rigged from the start. According to Col. Morris Davis, former chief prosecutor for Guantánamo’s military commissions, the process has been manipulated by Administration appointees in an attempt to foreclose the possibility of acquittal.

Colonel Davis’s criticism of the commissions has been escalating since he resigned this past October, telling the

Washington Post that he had been pressured by politically appointed senior defense officials to pursue cases deemed “sexy” and of “high-interest” (such as the 9/11 cases now being pursued) in the run-up to the 2008 elections. Davis, once a staunch defender of the commissions process, elaborated on his reasons in a December 10, 2007, Los Angeles Times op-ed. “I concluded that full, fair and open trials were not possible under the current system,” he wrote. “I felt that the system had become deeply politicized and that I could no longer do my job effectively.”

Then, in an interview with The Nation in February after the six Guantánamo detainees were charged, Davis offered the most damning evidence of the military commissions’ bias — a revelation that speaks to fundamental flaws in the Bush Administration’s conduct of statecraft: its contempt for the rule of law and its pursuit of political objectives above all else.

When asked if he thought the men at Guantánamo could receive a fair trial, Davis provided the following account of an August 2005 meeting he had with Pentagon general counsel William Haynes — the man who now oversees the tribunal process for the Defense Department. “[Haynes] said these trials will be the Nuremberg of our time,” recalled Davis, referring to the Nazi tribunals in 1945, considered the model of procedural rights in the prosecution of war crimes. In response, Davis said he noted that at Nuremberg there had been some acquittals, something that had lent great credibility to the proceedings.

“I said to him that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process,” Davis continued. “At which point, [Haynes's] eyes got wide and he said, ‘Wait a minute, we can’t have acquittals. If we’ve been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can’t have acquittals, we’ve got to have convictions.’”

Davis submitted his resignation on October 4, 2007, just hours after he was informed that Haynes had been put above him in the commissions’ chain of command. “Everyone has opinions,” Davis says. “But when he was put above me, his opinions became orders.”

(Reached for comment, Defense Department spokesperson Cynthia Smith said, “The Department of Defense disputes the assertions made by Colonel Davis in this statement regarding acquittals.”)

“That he said there can be no acquittals will stain the entire [tribunal] process,” says Scott Horton, who teaches law at Columbia University Law School and who has written extensively about Haynes’s conflicts with the Judge Advocate General’s (JAG) corps, the judicial arm of the Armed Forces, which is charged with implementing the military commissions. According to Horton, Haynes tried to cut the JAG corps out of internal debates over the detention and prosecution of detainees, knowing it was critical of the Administration’s views. In private memos and in public Senate testimony, high-ranking officers of the corps have repeatedly expressed concerns about the Administration’s advocacy of “extreme interrogation techniques.”

“The JAG corps consists of a group of rigorous professionals, but Haynes never trusted them to do their job,” says Horton. “His clashes have always had the same subtext — they want to be independent, he wants them to do political dirty-work.”

Haynes, a political appointee and chief legal adviser to Defense secretaries Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates, was nominated in 2006 by the Bush Administration for a lifetime seat as a judge in the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. But his nomination never got out of committee, primarily because of the opposition of Republican Senator (and former military lawyer) Lindsey Graham and other members alarmed over Haynes’s role in writing or supervising the writing of Pentagon memos advocating the use of harsh interrogation techniques the Geneva Conventions classify as torture.

Currently, in his capacity as Pentagon general counsel, Haynes oversees both the prosecution and the defense for the commissions. “You would think a person in that position wouldn’t be favoring one side,” says Colonel Davis.

Told of Davis’s story about Haynes, Clive Stafford Smith, a defense attorney who has represented more than seventy Guantánamo clients, said, “Hearing it makes me think I’m back in Mississippi representing a black man in front of an all-white jury.”

He adds, “It confirms what people close to the system have always said,” noting that when three prosecutors — Maj. Robert Preston, Capt. John Carr and Capt. Carrie Wolf — requested to be transferred out of the Office of Military Commissions in 2004, they claimed they’d been told the process was rigged. In an e-mail to his supervisors, Preston had said that there was thin evidence against the accused. “But they were told by the chief prosecutor at the time that they didn’t need evidence to get convictions,” says Stafford Smith.

At the time, the military wrote it off as “miscommunication” and “personality conflicts.” And then there were changes in personnel. “They told us that the system had been cleaned up … but I guess the more things change, the more they stay the same,” says Stafford Smith.

The terrible irony is that even if acquittals were possible, the government has declared that it can continue to detain anyone deemed an “enemy combatant” for the duration of hostilities–no matter the outcome of a trial. And most of the 275 men held at Guantánamo are classified as “enemy combatants” while the hostilities in the “war on terror” could be never-ending.

Says ACLU staff attorney Ben Wizner, “The trial doesn’t make a difference. They can hold you there forever until they decide to let you out.” The one person to be released from Guantánamo through the judicial process, Australian David Hicks, pleaded guilty. As Wizner wrote in the Los Angeles Times in April 2007, “In an ordinary justice system, the accused must be acquitted to be released. In Guantánamo, the accused must plead guilty to be released.”

Still, the trials serve a purpose for the government, in providing the semblance of a legitimate judicial process. According to defense attorneys involved — and many of the former prosecutors, like Davis — the process is political, not legal.

“If someone was acquitted, then it would suggest we did the wrong thing in the first place. That can’t happen,” says Horton sardonically. “When the government decides to clear someone, it calls the person ‘no-longer an enemy combatant’ instead of just saying they made a mistake.”

He adds, “For people like Haynes, justice is meant to serve the party.”

Ross Tuttle is a documentary filmmaker and freelance journalist based in Los Angeles.

via//AlterNet

Bush lays a Guantanamo trap for the next president

If the 2008 presidential election is truly about “change,” there is surely one change that seemed guaranteed on the long-awaited 1/20/09, and that was a new policy toward the American gulag erected at Guantanamo, and the detainees now imprisoned there.

That’s because the three people all but assured — barring the Huckabee Hail Mary — of replacing George W. Bush have said they will close Guantanamo, undoing the Bush policy that perhaps more than anything else has left a nearly indelible scar on America’s sagging image in the world.

Even the Republican John McCain — who knows a bit more about torture than the collective chickenhawk-fried Bush braintrust combined — says he will close Gitmo on the first day of his administration.

So it was a little interesting when, within days of McCain assuming a commanding lead in the race, and with the Democrats deciding between anti-Gitmo candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, that word was leaked of a secret site within Guantanamo for hard core al-Qaeda detainees, called Camp 7.

That was just the prelude — today comes this leaked story:

Military prosecutors have decided to seek the death penalty for six Guantánamo detainees who are to be charged with central roles in the Sept. 11 terror attacks, government officials who have been briefed on the charges said Sunday. The officials said the charges would be announced at the Pentagon as soon as Monday and were likely to include numerous war-crimes charges against the six men, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the former Qaeda operations chief who has described himself as the mastermind of the attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people.

A Defense Department official said prosecutors were seeking the death penalty because “if any case warrants it, it would be for individuals who were parties to a crime of that scale.” The officials spoke anonymously because no one in the government was authorized to speak about the case.

A decision to seek the death penalty would increase the international focus on the case and present new challenges to the troubled military commission system that has yet to begin a single trial.

Clearly, most Americans (myself included) do want to see the perpetrators of 9/11 and other real or planned acts of terrorism againt the United States brought to justice, even as we are seriously divided over the best way to achieve that. And, if you are one of those Americans who believe that death penalty is a moral and valid option (myself not included) then it’s also valid for you to argue that a 9/11 perp is more deserving of lethal injection than your garden-variety murder suspect.

But the timing of this strikes me as just a little bit too much of a coincidence here. The likely unraveling of Guantanamo is Bush’s worst nightmare. A legitimate criminal trial under American laws of jurisprudence would expose the worst of the Bush-Cheney torture regime, including waterboarding techniques, and have a result that nobody in this debate wants: Making it impossible to gain real justice against the 9/11 planners, because of inadmissable evidence.

A quick trial under military rules, and a speedy execution, is the only long-shot hope for Bush and Cheney for making the worst of the torture nightmare that they’ve created go away. That said, this new push for an execution is likely to rally more opinion around the world — the death penalty has been abolished or is not used in most civilized nations — against the United States; at the risk of appearing cynical, I doubt this decision would be announced if Mitt Romney and his famed “double Guantanamo” move or if Rudy Giuliani were still viable candidates.

But as today’s articles note, it is unlikely, with appeals and the like, that any conviction and death penalty could be carried out as quickly as January. That lays the problem on the lap of the next president — regardless of whether it’s McCain, Clinton or Obama — who would have to either affirm the military tribunals, or else declare on the first day of their presidency that one of their first officials acts will be to overturn a death sentence for a 9/11 mastermind.

That’s a classic Rovian political trap if I ever saw one. And it’s more proof that undoing the nightmare eight years of Bush and Cheney is going to be a lot more work than simply placing a right hand on the Bible.

via//Attytood

related//ACLU: Military Prosecutors Plan To Use Flawed Commissions System To Seek Death Penalty For Guantánamo Detainees