"It Was a Sunny Day"

"It Was a Sunny Day"
by Jason Leopold
11 January 2012

.....The bus rolled in to the side of Camp X-Ray and the doors opened. The MP canine unit was present and their dogs were snarling. The first detainee to exit, a man Neely recalls was in his 30s and overweight, was missing a leg. A Marine inside the bus threw the man's prosthetic leg onto the gravel. The MPs nicknamed him "Stumpy."

That was Neely's first exposure to the "worst of the worst."

"I was shocked," Neely said. "I will never forget that."

The one-legged detainee hopped toward the holding area flanked by a couple of MPs who were screaming at him to "walk faster," Neely said. The detainee was wearing a hood; an orange jumpsuit; goggles, which were designed to disorient his senses during the flight to Guantanamo from Afghanistan; a surgical mask; earmuffs; and gloves that looked like oven mitts. His leg, at least the one he still had, was shackled. His hands were attached to a chain wrapped around his torso. more

US Army: If You Wannabe in Our Gang Keep It Shut

Is Guantanamo still open, I thought Obama promised to close it? Shurely shome mishtake?

Army Reservist Told He's Barred From Re-Enlistment for Speaking to Truthout About Guantanamo
by Jason Leopold
25 August 2011

The US Army has told a reservist who has spent half his life in the military that he is barred from re-enlisting, asserting he "leaked" classified information to this reporter during an interview in which he spoke candidly about his experiences working as a guard at Guantanamo Bay eight years ago. more

And here's another broken promise, not that it comes as a surprise to anyone.

A pair of vitally important news reports were lost recently amid a blizzard of stories about the gyrating stock market and a rogue East Coast earthquake. The first came from Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who announced that a deal had been struck to keep US forces in Iraq beyond the oft-publicized December 31st withdrawal deadline and into 2012, contrary to Mr. Obama's promises. Not long after, a spokesman for Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki came forward to say hold on, wait a minute, nothing along these lines has been agreed upon as yet, and negotiations are still ongoing.

War: Too Big to Fail

Guantanamo Bay Just Another Prison - Wikileaks - Press TV Video

Press TV presents a twenty five minute in depth report on the recent publication of the Guantanamo/Wikileaks documents. Talking heads from London, New York and Washington include Sara Flounders from New York, where, among other things, she had this to say.

'US prisons, crime against humanity'

An estimated 3,000 people are held and tortured in secret rendition prisons around the world by the US war apparatus of which 95% are reportedly innocent.

Press TV talks with Sara Flounders, Co-Director of the International Action Center from New York who provides insight on the relationship between these prisons and the US-imposed wars in the Middle East.

Press TV: Donald Rumsfeld in a public announcement some years ago said, “Until the conflict is over, even if they're innocent, we're going to keep them in Guantanamo Bay.” Looking at the question of the rights of the detained and the courts, there are some serious differences. Maybe you can share some light between the military court and the normal US law? Should the ones detained wrongfully be tried in a civilian court?

Sara Flounders: It's important to recognize that Guantanamo is just the tip of the iceberg. There are thousands of secretly held prisons; secret rendition; extraordinary rendition -- what are described as black sites all over the world: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kosovo, Bosnia, Poland, and Romania. You could go on and on over the number of people that the US has held and has tortured in secret prisons.

Guantanamo is the only prison where there has been an accounting, at least numerically, where we know of the terrible torture, the conditions under which were held and the overwhelming number of them for whom there was no evidence -- as a matter of fact there is every evidence of their total innocence -- people who were picked up who were shepherds, who were herders; there were young teenagers even who were held in Guantanamo. It's just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what the US describes as its war on terror.

It's also the tip of the iceberg in terms of the US prison system where more than two million people are held in prison and by the US' own accounting, 30,000 of them are held in total complete isolation -- that's torture -- solitary confinement, they don't hear a human voice. These controlled management units, largely Muslim prisoners, are held in these units.

When there was a world outcry on the conditions and the torture of Bradley Manning the US response was 'it wasn't out of the ordinary'. That was usual prison conditions in the US. So it's important what's exposed in Guantanamo, but we should know that Guantanamo is just an example of the secret prisons and prisons within the US. And all of them are a crime against humanity.

Press TV: What can be done? There is evidence piled on top of evidence and it keeps coming. There are two documents from Guantanamo officials that say they were aware that they had innocent men in captivity and they even put that in writing in the prison files. Isn't it time that some of these officials be questioned or prosecuted? How can these be put forward in the US to make them accountable?

Sara Flounders: In all honesty there won't be any justice on any of this until those US politicians who initiated these wars; that have laid waste to Afghanistan and to Iraq and imprisoned and destroyed so many lives -- these are the ones who should be on trial as war criminals and that is really the truth of it.

Those who are held who are known to be innocent, and the numbers are in the thousands. If you look at the figures they feel they have evidence of some charges of about 157 people and that's out of more than 3,000 that they acknowledge that they have held in secret prisons and in Guantanamo. So 95% of these people they had almost no evidence on.

That is a crime. The entire imprisonment of people as an outgrowth of the wars that the US is engaging in Afghanistan into Pakistan, in Iraq, now into Libya throughout the region and it's not only prisons, it's the use of secret drone attacks that swoop down on unsuspecting civilians in Somalia, in Sudan, in Yemen, country after country.

So those who are held without any evidence whatsoever of course should be released, but the entire prison network should be shut down along with the wars that gave lives to this. Without shutting down the wars themselves, which is a crime against the people of a whole region, there is no end to the prisons.

And this is something that President Obama found. He promised in campaign after campaign during his election run that he would close Guantanamo. He issued an executive order announcing that he would close Guantanamo and just like the wars that he promised he would end, it has continued. It's all broken promises because it's part of a system of war. watch

Obama Hamstringing Gitmo Lawyers?

I might not have run with this story, though must be said it's a worthy read in its own right, had I not previously featured this, this, I don't know how best to describe really, perhaps it's suffice to say that the setting is Louisiana. (Again)

....The mayor was quickly convicted of both charges but lawyers have raised challenges to the convictions, bringing a number of legal complaints. For example: in a town that is 60% African-American, Mayor Higginbotham had only one Black juror. Higginbotham’s counsel was disqualified by the DA, and the public defender had a conflict of interest, leaving the mayor with no lawyer. Two days before trial began, the DA gave Higginbotham 10 boxes of files related to his case. Higginbotham’s request for an extension to get an attorney and to examine the files was denied.

There’s more: during jury selection, when Higginbotham – forced to act as his own lawyer – tried to strike one juror who had relationships with several of the witnesses, he was told he could not, even though he had challenges remaining. There was also a problem with a sound recorder that the court reporter was using, and as a result there is no transcript at all for at least two witness’ testimony. Finally, during deliberation, the judge gave the jury polling slips that had “guilty” pre-selected, and then later hid the slips. I Don't Know What Justice Looks Like But I'm Sure It Doesn't Look Like This: Waterproof Louisiana

But don't you think in the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and the rest of these ''high value'' detainees, it's past time for America to end the charades, put away the hypocrisy for once, and just put these guys against the wall and shoot the fuckers, innocent or guilty. Because let's face it, there is only ever going to be one verdict for those that might one day see a ''trial.'' I know there's not a bit of shame to be found anywhere in America, its Presidents past, or its President present, Bush lite, Barack Obama. Because for shame, how on earth do you put a fellow in the dock that you have waterboarded a hundred and eighty three times and still call it a trial?

Hypocrisy, it's the American way, not arf!

Did Obama Kneecap the 9/11 Suspects' Defense Lawyers?

What an investigation into Gitmo attorneys means for the pending trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-defendants.
By Nick Baumann

Last week, on the same day President Barack Obama launched his re-election campaign, his administration announced that it had officially reversed its decision to try the accused 9/11 plotters—including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed "mastermind" of the attacks—in federal court and would instead prosecute them via the military commissions system.

But, as the military commissions gear up for what could be their first cases to end in death sentences, a shadow hangs over the lawyers representing these most unsympathetic of defendants. For well over a year, civilian and military defense lawyers representing so-called "high-value detainees" at Guantanamo Bay were caught up in a secret Justice Department investigation. (The agency won't say whether the investigation is still ongoing.) Can Guantanamo lawyers mount full and fair defenses of the 9/11 conspirators while under the pressures of a past or present DOJ investigation—and the threat of a future probe by the Pentagon itself, as some congressional Republicans have called for? We're about to find out.




The genesis of the DOJ probe dates back at least to the summer of 2009, when guards at Guantanamo found a series of photos in the cell of Mustafa Ahmad al Hawsawi, an accused Al Qaeda financier and one of KSM's four co-defendants. The photos, according to multiple reports, showed CIA employees suspected of involvement in the interrogation of high-value detainees, including al Hawsawi himself.

The CIA, unsurprisingly, was deeply alarmed. John Rizzo, then the agency's top lawyer, demanded an investigation. He later described the incident as "far more serious than Valerie Plame," referring to the Bush-era leak of an operative's covert status. He wasn't alone in his concerns. "This is an agency that has reasons to be concerned as to whether or not somebody's got their back," another high-ranking former intelligence official told Mother Jones last year. "It's always operating out there on the edge, not unlawfully, but generally at the farthest reaches of executive prerogative."

The Justice Department launched an investigation, headed by Donald Vieira, a former Democratic Hill staffer. Vieira soon found that the photos had been taken for a reason. Since any successful defense of a high-value detainee would likely require proving torture—and calling the alleged torturers, if they existed, to the stand—members of the Gitmo defense bar felt they needed to identify whom, exactly, had interrogated their clients.

In any other criminal case, this would normally be a breeze—defense lawyers generally know which cops or FBI agents questioned their clients and can call them as witnesses if necessary. But when you're dealing with the CIA, it's a whole different story. more

American Gulag

American Gulag

Evidence Is Not Necessary to Hold Guantánamo Prisoners for the Rest of Their Lives

By Andy Worthington

April 01, 2011 "Information Clearing House" -- ---- If I was an American lawyer who had fought for many years to secure habeas corpus rights for the prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — in other words, the right to ask an impartial judge to rule on my captors’ reasons for slinging me in a legal black hole and leaving me to rot there forever — the latest news from the Court of Appeals in Washington D.C. (also known as the D.C. Circuit Court) would make me sick in a bucket rather than believing any longer that the law — the revered law on which the United States was founded — can bring any meaningful remedy for the prisoners at Guantánamo.

Treated as punchbags without rights when first picked up, mostly in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, the 172 men still held at Guantánamo are still treated with scorn by the administration of Barack Obama, the standard bearer of “hope” and “change,” who promised to close Guantánamo and to do away with “the dark halls of Abu Ghraib and the detention cells of Guantánamo, [where] we have compromised our most precious values.” Instead, however, Obama has revealed himself to be nothing more than a hollow man whose ability to read from an autocue made him look caring, clever and capable when that was exactly the antidote we needed to eight years of Bush and Cheney.

Today, the reason for despair is that on Tuesday the D.C. Circuit Court reversed a ruling made last February by Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. of the District Court, in the case of Uthman Abdul Rahim Mohammed Uthman, a Yemeni held at Guantánamo without charge or trial since the prison opened in January 2002. Last February, after examining all the government’s supposed evidence against Uthman, Judge Kennedy ruled that, although the government had presented what appeared to be a coherent timeline of events that was typical for young men from the Gulf, recruited to visit a training camp in Afghanistan to learn to fight for the Taliban against the Northern Alliance, none of the government’s supposed evidence proving Uthman’s presence in guest houses, at a training camp, and in the Tora Bora mountains (where a showdown took place in December 2001 between remnants of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and Afghan forces recruited to fight for the Americans) was reliable.

The reason for this, Judge Kennedy concluded, was because the government’s supposed evidence consisted of statements produced by other prisoners who had been tortured, and whose testimony was therefore unreliable, as well as other witnesses whose statements were also considered to be untrustworthy.

This could have been the end of the story, and Uthman could have been released, ..... more

Obama Changes His Mind: Gitmo Tribunals to Resume

Obama Changes His Mind: Gitmo Tribunals to Resume
By Elspeth Reeve Mar 07, 2011

Military tribunals will resume for detainees in Guantanamo, despite President Obama's campaign promise to close the facility. The trials were suspended on Obama's first day in office, but after 16 months of review, the president has done little to change the policy instated by President Bush. The announcement was expected, but many on the left are still outraged by it.

Obama's hands are somewhat tied by a law recently passed by Congress that prohibits detainees being brought stateside for trial, NBC News' Pete Williams reports. The decision to restart the tribunals gives the administration a way to try high-value detainees like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, even though the White House would prefer he be tried in the U.S.




* Gitmo Is Effective, Thomas Joscelyn writes at The Weekly Standard. "The press and many commentators treat Guantanamo like a law enforcement problem. The claim that detainees are 'held without charge,' as if they were arrested as mere criminals, has been repeated time and again. The truth is that Guantanamo was never a prison or some sort of criminal justice facility. The U.S. government never intended to try most of the detainees in any court. Guantanamo always has been, and continues to be, a military detention facility. As such, its chief purposes were to remove jihadists from the battlefield or any environment where they may pose a threat, and to collect intelligence from them." Judged by those goals, the detention facility has been a success, Jocelyn says.

* Not All Detainees Are Dangerous, researchers at Seton Hall's law school argue. Pentagon officials routinely referred to the detainees as the "worst of the worst," but a newly-unearthed memo written in 2003 by then-Secretary of Defense Donald contradicts that. It reads, "We need to stop populating Guantanamo Bay (GTMO) with low-level enemy combatants. ... GTMO needs to serve as an [redacted] not a prison for Afghanistan." Professor Mark Denbeaux commented, “First they lied about who was in Guantanamo, now they lie about those who left."

* This Will Mean Lifelong Detention, Fire Dog Lake's David Dayen writes. "First things first, this means that Barack Obama will not be the President who closes Guantanamo. ... Second, this is not just a way to 'bring terrorists to justice.' It’s a way to hold onto detainees without charges.... Those deemed 'too dangerous' to release, but where the government doesn’t have the evidence to convict, will simply be held in a cage for the rest of their lives, I guess. ... They will ensure that nobody they don’t want leaving the island leaves – it amounts to kangaroo courts."




* Obama Ignored Reality, Commentary's Alana Goodman adds. Two years ago, Obama "dismissed the opposition to closing the prison as partisan politics designed to create a 'climate of fear' ... In reality, there were serious roadblocks to closing Guantanamo, ones that the administration still hasn’t been able to overcome. It wasn’t Obama’s critics who 'refuse[d] to deal with these issues' back in 2009, as he claimed. It was Obama himself who ignored the legitimate problems with his proposal and is now being forced to eat his words two years later."

In Monday's announcment, the White House noted that the government will continue to detain suspected terrorists even though they cannot be charged because they "remain at war with the United States."

Three men are first in line for the trials: Abd al-Rahim al Nashiri, accused of plotting the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000; Ahmed al Darbi, accused of planning to drive a bomb-packed boat into a ship in the Strait of Hormuz; and Obaidullah, accused of keeping explosives in his home and possessing notes on how to blow stuff up. theatlanticwire

Guantanamo, Is There To Be No End To The Shame

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.
Talk Left

The Pentagon’s Power to Jail Americans Indefinitely

A lawyer I ain't, but... more

Do As I Say Not As.......

Australian detainee David Hicks has pleaded guilty at a military court at Guantanamo Bay to a charge of providing material support for terrorism.

a former US state department counter-terrorism agent, who said: "The latest attacks inside Iran fall in line with US efforts to supply and train Iran's ethnic minorities to destabilise the Iranian regime."

Fast Tracked Laws (subtitled)

Fast Tracked Laws.

Fast Tacked To Where. (Guantanamo Bay, Secret Prisons, or just Good Ol' US Ones?)
Fast Tracked To What. (American Justice?)
Fast Tracked To Whom. (A trusted partner?)

Or is that the new euphemism for riding rough shod over due process?

White collar criminals have been the main targets of draconian of new British "fast tracked" laws designed to speed up the extradition of terrorists to the US.
No alleged terrorists have yet to face US courts using the new rules which allow suspects to be sped through British courts without American prosecutors having to show a reasonable case against them.

The legislation brought in as a response to the September 11 attacks has seen the time taken from the arrest of a suspect to their removal for trial in America drop from nearly three years to just over eleven months.
But the home office admits that none of the twenty nine suspects so far sent to the US are alleged terrorists.

The new statistics are set to reignite the row over over the extradition of the so called Nat West Three were sent to the Us last July and charged with fraud relating to the collapsed energy giant Enron.
The row flared after British authorities investigating the alleged offences found their was no case to answer. snip.

Also included was Jeremy Crook, an IT executive who was flown shackled to to US agents to America in September last year. He is due to stand trial in August next year.

Last October the government defended the treaty because it was "dealing with a trusted partner." But Tory MPs said the law was weighted against UK citizens. They said British authorities had to produce prima facia evidence showing "probable cause" to extradite an American, but the US had only to show that allegations had been made. snip

Five terror suspects are currently fighting extradition to the US, but of the fifty five "fast track" cases cases in the past three years, nine out of ten suspects are facing non-terror charges in the US. During the same period Britain has asked for just fourteen people from America.

To borrow a phrase, "Mister Blair, why do you hate Britain?" Just go, you shabby little man.

From a print article, Mail on Sunday, Feb 18 2007. "White Collar criminals sent to US by terror extradition law." by Jason Lewis.
Emphasis mine.

Update.
the sole reason for his detention was a US extradition request.