Assassinating US President Barack Obama for refusing to wage war on Iran is an opinion Andrew Adler wishes he never published. But that’s exactly what the owner of the Atlanta Jewish Times did on January 13 and now he’s facing vocal opposition and a Secret Service investigation.

”Give the go-ahead for US-based Mossad agents to take out a president deemed unfriendly to Israel in order for the current vice-president to take his place and forcefully dictate that the United States’ policy includes its helping the Jewish state obliterate its enemies,” Adler wrote in a piece called ”What would you do?” Adler issued an apology, saying, ”I very much regret it. I wish I hadn’t made reference to it at all.”

However, the Secret Service is not taking the threat so lightly, CNN reported. ”We are aware of it,” Secret Service spokesman George Ogilvie told the news channel. ”We are taking the appropriate investigative steps.”

While the weekly Atlanta Jewish Times has a modest circulation, Gawker.com found the op-ed piece and brought it into the spotlight. Adler offered three options for dealing with an American president unwilling to defend Israel fighting a hypothetical war: First, strike Hezbollah and Hamas. Second, attack Iran’s nuclear facilities. Third, ”order a hit” against the president.’

Read More: Sydney Morning Herald

Wednesday, America’s detention camp at Guantánamo Bay will have been open for 10 years. For seven of them, I was held there without explanation or charge. During that time my daughters grew up without me. They were toddlers when I was imprisoned, and were never allowed to visit or speak to me by phone.

Some American politicians say that people at Guantánamo are terrorists, but I have never been a terrorist. Had I been brought before a court when I was seized, my children’s lives would not have been torn apart, and my family would not have been thrown into poverty. It was only after the United States Supreme Court ordered the government to defend its actions before a federal judge that I was finally able to clear my name and be with them again.

I left Algeria in 1990 to work abroad. In 1997 my family and I moved to Bosnia and Herzegovina at the request of my employer, the Red Crescent Society of the United Arab Emirates. I served in the Sarajevo office as director of humanitarian aid for children who had lost relatives to violence during the Balkan conflicts. In 1998, I became a Bosnian citizen. We had a good life, but all of that changed after 9/11.

When I arrived at work on the morning of Oct. 19, 2001, an intelligence officer was waiting for me. He asked me to accompany him to answer questions. I did so, voluntarily — but afterward I was told that I could not go home. The United States had demanded that local authorities arrest me and five other men. News reports at the time said the United States believed that I was plotting to blow up its embassy in Sarajevo. I had never — for a second — considered this.

The fact that the United States had made a mistake was clear from the beginning. Bosnia’s highest court investigated the American claim, found that there was no evidence against me and ordered my release. But instead, the moment I was released American agents seized me and the five others. We were tied up like animals and flown to Guantánamo, the American naval base in Cuba. I arrived on Jan. 20, 2002.

I still had faith in American justice. I believed my captors would quickly realize their mistake and let me go. But when I would not give the interrogators the answers they wanted — how could I, when I had done nothing wrong? — they became more and more brutal. I was kept awake for many days straight. I was forced to remain in painful positions for hours at a time. These are things I do not want to write about; I want only to forget.

I went on a hunger strike for two years because no one would tell me why I was being imprisoned. Twice each day my captors would shove a tube up my nose, down my throat and into my stomach so they could pour food into me. It was excruciating, but I was innocent and so I kept up my protest.

In 2008, my demand for a fair legal process went all the way to America’s highest court. In a decision that bears my name, the Supreme Court declared that “the laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times.” It ruled that prisoners like me, no matter how serious the accusations, have a right to a day in court. The Supreme Court recognized a basic truth: the government makes mistakes. And the court said that because “the consequence of error may be detention of persons for the duration of hostilities that may last a generation or more, this is a risk too significant to ignore.”

Five months later, Judge Richard J. Leon, of the Federal District Court in Washington, reviewed all of the reasons offered to justify my imprisonment, including secret information I never saw or heard. The government abandoned its claim of an embassy bomb plot just before the judge could hear it. After the hearing, he ordered the government to free me and four other men who had been arrested in Bosnia.

I will never forget sitting with the four other men in a squalid room at Guantánamo, listening over a fuzzy speaker as Judge Leon read his decision in a Washington courtroom. He implored the government not to appeal his ruling, because “seven years of waiting for our legal system to give them an answer to a question so important is, in my judgment, more than plenty.” I was freed, at last, on May 15, 2009.

Today, I live in Provence with my wife and children. France has given us a home, and a new start. I have experienced the pleasure of reacquainting myself with my daughters and, in August 2010, the joy of welcoming a new son, Yousef. I am learning to drive, attending vocational training and rebuilding my life. I hope to work again serving others, but so far the fact that I spent seven and a half years as a Guantánamo prisoner has meant that only a few human rights organizations have seriously considered hiring me. I do not like to think of Guantánamo. The memories are filled with pain. But I share my story because 171 men remain there. Among them is Belkacem Bensayah, who was seized in Bosnia and sent to Guantánamo with me.

About 90 prisoners have been cleared for transfer out of Guantánamo. Some of them are from countries like Syria or China — where they would face torture if sent home — or Yemen, which the United States considers unstable. And so they sit as captives, with no end in sight — not because they are dangerous, not because they attacked America, but because the stigma of Guantánamo means they have no place to go, and America will not give a home to even one of them.

I’m told that my Supreme Court case is now read in law schools. Perhaps one day that will give me satisfaction, but so long as Guantánamo stays open and innocent men remain there, my thoughts will be with those left behind in that place of suffering and injustice.

Kurnaz’s detainment occurred while he was visiting Pakistan with a pacifist anti-poverty organization. He suspects his name was randomly given to authorities by someone in order to receive the $3,000 reward for reporting terrorists. The whole ordeal recalls the Spanish Inquisition:

Although the prisoners can’t see the sea from the jail — which is located just a few meters away from the coast — nor the Caribbean vegetation that surrounds Guantanamo, many of their works depict islands with palm trees. Others recall their villages or meals reminiscent of home.

________________

It’s one of the oldest tricks in the spying book: Tempt a guy with sex; record him in a compromising position, and then blackmail him into working for you. According to a new file released by WikiLeaks, that’s exactly what happened to one inmate there. But be wary of this espionage tale. As with a lot of Gitmo detainee accounts, the detainee’s history of trying to please interrogators and his experience being tortured make it difficult to say for sure what really happened.

Abd Al Rahim Abdul Raza Janko told interrogators at Guantanamo Bay that his journey into an al-Qaida guest house began with blackmail while he was studying Islamic law and Arabic literature in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). He claimed Prince Fisal Sudid Qasmi invited him to hang out with his college friends at a local hotel. When he arrived, he said a raging sex party was already in progress and he promptly took part in it. Weeks later, Janko said Qasmi confronted him with a videotape of the party, threatening to send it to a television station or his family if he didn’t agree to spy for the UAE. The confrontation, according to Janko, kicked off an odyssey that began with him snooping on Filipino classmates’ plans to smuggle fighters back home and ended with him heading to Afghanistan in early 2000 to spy on al-Qaida.

Read More: WIRED’s Danger Room

It has been a persistent worry of civil libertarians that violations of the rights of non-citizens would eventually contaminate the ways citizens are treated, too; that a process of “enemy creep” would, in the end, result in the Guantanamo-ization of American terrorism suspects.

When rights were first denied to captives at Guantanamo Bay, the Bush administration argued that a prison in Cuba should not be considered subject to the constitutional principles that apply to Americans everywhere or to anyone within the territorial boundaries of the U.S. It is, however, quite another matter, as in the King hearings, to single out Muslims or others in our midst as potential terrorists and then to argue that when arrested—even if they are U.S. citizens or captured or tried on U.S. soil—they should be denied the protections of U.S. law.

At the moment, the most alarming example of “enemy creep” can be found in the case of Bradley Manning, the U.S. Army private who allegedly downloaded hundreds of thousands of classified documents from Army computer systems and turned them over to WikiLeaks. He is now being held on 24 charges in 23-hour-a-day solitary confinement in a brig at Quantico Marine Base in Virginia, while awaiting a court martial slated to begin later this spring.

There, among other punitive forms of treatment, he has reportedly been denied his clothes at night (though he is now apparently allowed to sleep in a coarse, tear-proof gown), supposedly as a form of self-protection. In captivity, nakedness, as the infamous abuses at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison demonstrated, is above all a form of humiliation, and often the first step towards physical and sexual abuse, including torture. Manning, neither Muslim nor accused of terrorism, is nonetheless clearly considered by his captors an enemy of the nation, a traitor. As a result, he is being kept under conditions which should make Americans take note of the blurring of, and crossing of, previously sacrosanct lines and the dismantling of long-established rights when it comes to defining and punishing “the enemy.” Though no jihadi terrorist, Manning, too, is being punished before being tried for the crime of threatening national security.

Thanks to Mukasey, Kaplan, King, those overseeing the treatment of Manning, and others, the embrace of cruel standards when it comes to alleged enemies of the state is gaining traction. These officials and former officials seem to be part of a process, remarkably uncommented upon, that is turning previously unthinkable rhetoric into normal discourse and intolerance into a rationale for challenging the rights of anyone accused of violating the country’s security.

1. Health care for all
Ultimately, the [health care] debate in Washington became so heated and rife with disinformation that the administration agreed to forgo the public option, using it as a bargaining chip to ensure other proposals were passed. They also gave in to Republican demands and extended the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, promising to take on the issue again in 2012. In spite of the modest legislative victory of actually getting health reform passed, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that even after all the elements take effect in 2014, over 22 million Americans will still lack access to basic health services.

2. Close Guantanamo
As a symbol of everything that liberals thought to be wrong with the Bush-era, closing the Guantanamo Bay military prison should have been an easy target for the new and popular president and his Democratic super-majority in Congress — and, in fact, then-candidate Obama promised to do just that. But as he soon found out, strategic and political calculations have made it almost impossible to shuck.

3. Defend labor rights
“Understand this,” Obama said during a campaign rally in 2007. “If American workers are being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain when I’m in the White House, I’ll will walk on that picket line with you as President of the United States of America.” Despite efforts by state-level Republicans in Wisconsin, Tennessee, Michigan, Ohio, Maine, Florida and Indiana to curtail collective bargaining rights, the President has yet to appear at a single protest or picket line.

4. Reform the Patriot Act
Contrary to popular belief, Obama has never actually argued for a repeal of the Bush administration’s sweeping, post-9/11 security initiatives, which were passed with a mandatory “sunset” clause to overrule the concerns of civil libertarians at the time. But every time the emergency laws have been due to expire, President Obama has pushed to extend them without any reforms. Most recently, the administration sought an extension of the Patriot Act that was even longer than the one Republicans wanted.

5. End the wars
Even though the president promised his Afghan occupation would conclude in July 2011, military officials have admitted that sometime in 2014 is more likely. Elsewhere, American forces are dropping more bombs on more countries today than at any point during the Bush administration, with continued occupation forces in two massive countries even as they stage aerial bombardments of Pakistan, Libya and Yemen.

The Washington Post

President Barack Obama approved Monday the resumption of military trials for detainees at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, ending a two-year ban.

It was the latest acknowledgement that the detention facility Obama had vowed to shut down within a year of taking office will remain open for some time to come. But even while announcing a resumption of military commission trials, Obama reaffirmed his support for trying terror suspects in U.S. federal courts – something that’s met vehement resistance on Capitol Hill.

“I strongly believe that the American system of justice is a key part of our arsenal in the war against al-Qaida and its affiliates, and we will continue to draw on all aspects of our justice system – including Article III courts – to ensure that our security and our values are strengthened,” the president said in a statement.

[Continues at The Washington Post]

The 660 or so people being held at the naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have never been tried or even charged with crimes. They can be held for the rest of their lives at the whim of the government, and the military has floated the possibility of executing some of them. In an effort to remedy this disgraceful destruction of rights and the law, the Center for Constitutional Rights filed a petition seeking habeas corpus, which would force the government to Constitutionally process the prisoners (i.e., quick and speedy trials, jury of peers, right to confront accusers, etc.).

A district court refused, buying the feds’ ridiculous argument that because the US military base is located on the island of Cuba, it isn’t subject to US law, though it also is most definitely not subject to Cuban law. Following this line of argument, no law applies there, making it an autonomous zone, as devised by Hakim Bey, or an interzone, from the works of William Burroughs. I’m sure that the men and women stationed at Guantanamo Bay would be surprised to know that they can apparently steal, rape, and kill with impunity. Go ahead, snort coke off your commanding officer’s desk. It’s all right, because US law doesn’t apply.

Seriously, it’s hard to see how any court bought such a transparently stupid, self-serving argument. The Center for Constitutional Rights has appealed this boneheaded decision to the Supreme Court, which triggered a flood of amicus curiae (friend of the court) briefs from some powerful individuals and groups who used the chance to lambaste the concentration camp 90 miles off the coast of Florida.

1. Former US Diplomats

Who: 23 former US diplomats, many of whom also served as Assistant Secretaries of State or in other high-level positions.

Excerpts: “This undermines what has long been one of our proudest diplomatic advantages—the nation’s Constitutional guaranty, enforced by an independent judiciary, against arbitrary government.”

“The world has taken due note of the fact that the United States has incarcerated these petitioners in Guantanamo and that there has been no effort to charge, try or judge them under law. This has generated international concern. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has undertaken precautionary measures. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has spoken out. The International Committee of the Red Cross has gone on record. The British Court of Appeal in the Abbasi case has expressed its displeasure. The Human Rights Chamber of Bosnia-Herzegovina, a court that the United States helped create, has issued its own protest. And Shirin Ebadi, the recipient of the most recent Nobel Peace Prize, referred specifically to Guantanamo in her acceptance remarks as an affront to universal human rights.

“Citizens of foreign countries cannot assume that what happened to the Guantanamo prisoners cannot happen to them. It will not be evident why, if the Executive Branch can detain prisoners in Guantanamo free of judicial inquiry, it cannot expand the practice to establish a global criminal justice system with other prison camps like Guantanamo, similarly subject to no legal oversight and in which any foreigner deemed a danger by some official might be detained indefinitely. Nor will it be evident why such a practice could not reach out to persons within the United States or even to American citizens.”

2. Former US Government Officials

Who: “[F]ormer US government officials who have exercised legal responsibility over matters concerning the US Naval Base at Guantanamo, the Panama Canal, or other US bases on foreign soil and those whose responsibilities substantially involved the scope of U.S. jurisdiction and activities abroad.”

Excerpts: “Although Guantanamo is unusual, it is not sui generis. History records at least three other examples of territory outside US territorial borders and sovereignty, but still under the complete jurisdiction and control of the United States: the Canal Zone, the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, and the former American sector in Berlin. In each of these instances, US courts have, by extrapolation from the Insular Cases, found fundamental constitutional rights to be applicable to citizens and aliens within these territories. As in Guantanamo, the United States for strategic reasons gained full powers of jurisdiction and control over these territories, without ever possessing actual sovereignty.”

“If the Government denies that foreign nationals have rights, then by confining them at Guantanamo, it is engaged not in legal detention, but in a lawless exercise of naked force.”

“The Due Process Clause [of the Fourth Amendment] is phrased in universal terms, protecting any ‘person’ rather than ‘citizens’ or members of ‘the people.’ Nor does its wording suggest limitations as to place.”

“Maintaining involuntary captives of the United States as rightless outlaws because of their captive status would revive the logic of slavery, a constitutional practice that this country has long abandoned.

“In any event, the Constitution undeniably protects involuntary subjects, such as children who may be too young to form voluntary connections.”

“If the Due Process Clause does not apply to detainees at Guantanamo, the Government would have effective discretion to starve them, to beat them, and to kill them, with or without hearings and with or without evidence of any wrongdoing.”

3. Former American POWs

Who: “Leslie H. Jackson, Edward Jackfert, and Neal Harrington, former American prisoners of war detained by the German and Japanese governments during World War II.”

Excerpt: “As these examples [occupied Germany, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Haiti, and the Persian Gulf] show, the use of tribunals traditionally has been an integral component of the United States’ treatment of persons captured on enemy soil. The Government’s current practice of imprisoning foreign citizens indefinitely without providing them with an individualized determination of their status represents a sharp break with this historical commitment. Allowing access to the courts is the only means for these detainees to achieve the narrow redress they seek— individualized determinations of their status as required by the Geneva Conventions and US military regulations.”

4. Retired US Military Officers

Who: “[T]hree retired military officers. Each one formerly served as the Judge Advocate General or the senior legal advisor for a branch of the United States military, and has extensive experience with US military regulations and the Laws of War.”

Excerpts: “The United States has also demanded application of the principles codified in the Geneva Conventions to captured US service personnel, even when they were taken prisoner under circumstances when the Conventions, technically, did not apply. For example, following the capture of US Warrant Officer Michael Durant by forces under the control of Somali warlord Mohamed Farah Aideed in 1993, the United States demanded assurances that Durant’s treatment would be consistent with thebroad protections afforded under the Conventions, even though, ‘[u]nder a strict interpretation of the Third Geneva Convention’s applicability, Durant’s captors would not be bound to follow the convention because they were not a ‘state.’”

“Invoking international human rights standards, the United States also has condemned foreign governments that have held detainees incommunicado, depriving them of the ability to seek judicial review of their confinements. The United States, for example, objected recently when the Liberian government arrested journalist Hassan Bility and held him incommunicado on the purported ground that he was an ‘illegal combatant’ involved in terrorist activity.”

“Yet even as American officials condemn other nations for detaining people indefinitely without access to a court or tribunal, authoritarian regimes elsewhere are pointing to US treatment of the Guantanamo prisoners as justification for such actions. Eritrea’s Ambassador to the United States defended his own government’s roundup of journalists by claiming that their detention without charge was consistent with the United States’ detention of material witnesses and aliens suspected by the United States of terrorist activities.”

5. Fred Korematsu

Who: “More than sixty years ago, as a young man, Fred Korematsu challenged the constitutionality of President Franklin Roosevelt’s 1942 Executive Order that authorized the internment of all persons of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast of the United States. He was convicted and sent to prison. In Korematsu v. United States, this Court upheld his conviction, explaining that because the United States was at war, the government could constitutionally intern Mr. Korematsu, without a hearing, and without any adjudicative determination that he had done anything wrong.”

Excerpts: “Although certain aspects of the ‘war against terrorism’ may be unprecedened, the challenges to constitutional liberties these cases present are similar to those the nation has encountered throughout its history. The extreme nature of the Government’s position here is all too familiar as well. When viewed in its historical context, the Government’s position is part of a pattern whereby the executive branch curtails civil liberties much more than necessary during wartime and seeks to insulate the basis for its actions from any judicial scrutiny.”

“In Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, this Court invalidated President Truman’s nationalization of the steel mills during the Korean Conflict, despite the Commander-in-Chief’s insistence that his actions were necessary to maintain production of essential war material. During the Vietnam War, this Court rejected a Government request to enjoin publication of the Pentagon Papers, refusing to defer to executive branch claims that publication of this top-secret document would endanger our troops in the field and undermine ongoing military operations. New York Times Co. v. United States.”

“During World War I, John Lord O’Brian served as Special Assistant Attorney General in charge of the War Emergency Division of the Department of Justice. In this capacity, he played a central role in enforcing the Espionage Act of 1917. Four decades later, reflecting on his own experience, O’Brian cautioned against the ‘emotional excitement engendered…during a war,’ and warned that ‘the greatest danger to our institutions’ may rest, not in the threat of subversion, but ‘in our own weaknesses in yielding’ to wartime anxiety and our ‘readiness to…disregard the fundamental rights of the individual.’ He expressed the hope that ‘our judges will in the end establish principles reaffirming’ our nation’s commitment to civil liberties.

“As Chief Justice Rehnquist has written, ‘[i]t is all too easy to slide from a case of genuine military necessity…to one where the threat is not critical and the power [sought to be exercised is] either dubious or nonexistent.’ It is, he added, ‘both desirable and likely that more careful attention will be paid by the courts to the…government’s claims of necessity as a basis for curtailing civil liberty.’”

6. UK Members of Parliament

Who: “175 Members of both Houses of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.”

Excerpt: “There is no mechanism in place or being followed to ensure that the circumstances of these detentions meet even the most basic standards of due process or human rights. The rule of law requires reasonable due process to ascertain the bases asserted in support of prolonged detention as well as the veracity of the facts that suppor t those bases. Indefinite detention without charge represents a violent departure from principles underlying our common legal heritage.

“The detention center at Guantanamo was designed, according to the US Administration, to house ‘the worst of the worst’ and ‘hardest of the hardcore.’ Yet, other statements by the administration suggest that Guantanamo holds no high ranking terrorist of any significance.”

7. International Law and Jurisdiction Professors

Who: Four law professors from the US. “All are academic international law experts who have devoted significant attention to the jurisdictional aspects of national and international law in areas such as international criminal law, international economic law, and human rights. Professors Barton and Carter are members of the bar of this Court.”

Excerpts: “The prisoners held at the United States Naval Base at Guantanamo are not the only persons who will be affected by the Court’s jurisdictional decision in this case. In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, it appears possible that the United States executive will establish its own special criminal court process, seeking to avoid the use of Article III judges and to use instead an executive form of review rather than an independent judicial review, such as that provided by this Court, Military Order of Nov. 13, 2001: Detention, Treatment, and Trial of Certain Non-Citizens in the War Against Terrorism. This new process may be applied far beyond those captured in connection with the Afghanistan or Iraq actions, for the war on terrorism is likely to last indefinitely.”

“Moreover, precedents set in this terrorism conflict may end up being applied as well to international narcotics or money-laundering offenses.”

8. Legal Historians

Who: A group of two-dozen legal historians from Harvard, Boston College, Columbia, Oxford, Stanford, Yale, Amherst, Princeton, Georgetown, and other universities.

Excerpt: “In sum, the historical evidence is not consistent with the government’s claim that the writ of habeas corpus guaranteed by the Constitution is unavailable to test even the classification as ‘alien enemies’ of those detained at Guantánamo. Guantánamo lies a mere 90 miles from the United States and has been subject to the exclusive control and jurisdiction of the United States for the past century. No other law but US law operates there. The historical evidence suggests instead that the denial of all habeas corpus review in such a situation would contravene the fundamental principles that have governed the availability and operation of the Great Writ since well before the United States Constitution was adopted.”

9. Bipartisan Coalition of National and International Non-Governmental Organizations

Who: Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, American Civil Liberties Union, Anti-Defamation League, Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, Association of the Bar of the City of New York, National Association of Social Workers (Legal Defense Fund), People For the American Way Foundation, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA, and seven other legal and religious groups.

Excerpts: “Were the Due Process Clause inapplicable to US actions in Guantanamo Bay, then the Constitution would allow the summary execution or torture of prisoners detained there. Indeed, the government has conceded this in open court. See Gherebi v. Bush, 2003. (‘[A]t oral argument, the government advised us that its position would be the same even if the claims were that it was engaging in acts of torture or that it was summarily executing the detainees. To our knowledge, prior to the current detention of prisoners at Guantanamo, the US government has never before asserted such a grave and startling proposition.’)”

“The US Department of Defense has asserted that the Guantanamo prisoners, nearly all of whose identities have not been officially disclosed, are ‘battlefield’ detainees who were engaged in combat when arrested. But in addition to Petitioners’ claims of non-combatancy,it is clear that some detainees were apprehended far from battlefields. For instance, Guantanamo holds six Bosnians and Algerians who were arrested by Bosnian police in Bosnia and then handed over to US troops at the request of the United States. They were quickly transported to Guantanamo, despite a Bosnian court order that four of the men remain in Bosnia for further proceedings.”

10. International Commission of Jurists

Who: “The ICJ is comprised of 60 jurists [judges, prosecutors, and attorneys] of high standing in their own country or at the international level.”

Excerpts: “If the Court’s interpretation of Johnson v. Eisentrager were correct, US officials could arrest foreign nationals and, by the simple device of transferring such prisoners to a place of detention outside the sovereign territory of the United States, defeat the jurisdiction of the United States Courts to review the legality of their detention. The US Executive could arbitrarily hold such individuals in detention with no accountability to any court of law.”

“There are already disturbing signs that other nations have begun to use the example of the United States to justify arbitrary detention of their citizens. For example, Malaysia’s Law Minister has justified the detention of militants without trial stating that its practice was ‘just like the process at Guantanamo Bay.’ The minister further indicated that he ‘put the equation with Guantanamo Bay just to make it graphic to you that this is not simply a Malaysian style of doing things.’”

11. Human Rights Institute of the International Bar Association

Who: “The Human Rights Institute of the International Bar Association (the ‘Institute’) is an international body headquartered in London, England, that helps promote, protect and enforce human rights under a just rule of law, and works to preserve the independence of the judiciary and legal profession worldwide. Founded in 1995 under the Honorary Presidency of Nelson Mandela, the Institute now has more than 7,000 members worldwide.”

Excerpt: “Even where the presumption of prisoner of war status is displaced, the [Geneva] Conventions afford due process protection to all detainees, ensuring that they are not held without justification and that any prosecution brought against them accords with fundamental justice. Combatants who are not members of any armed forces or volunteer corps belonging to a party to a conflict have been described as ‘unlawful combatants,’ although no such status is recognized in the Geneva Conventions. If they are not members of the armed forces, they fall within the scope of the Civilian Convention. Accordingly, while unlawful combatants (unlike prisoners of war) may be prosecuted for taking part in the conflict and for any crimes committed in that regard, they are entitled to the judicial guarantees set out within the Civilian Convention should they be prosecuted for their actions.”

12. National Institute of Military Justice

Who: “[A] District of Columbia nonprofit corporation organized in 1991 to advance the fair administration of military justice and to foster improved public understanding of the military justice system.”

Excerpts: “A well-developed body of law regarding individuals seized during hostilities has been enforced regularly by impartial tribunals in past conflicts, and is being applied today by United States armed forces in combat. The application of the rule of law to individuals seized during hostilities is not inconsistent with the Executive Branch’s exercise of its war powers, either in theory or in the practice of the United States over the past fifty years. Nor is there anything novel about issuing a writ of habeas corpus on the application of an individual confined by the military at Guantanamo Bay, something the highest court of the military did in Burtt v. Schick, 23 M.J. 140 (1986).”

“Domestic law and practice thus make it clear that Guantanamo Bay has never been regarded by the United States as a ‘law-free’ zone. United States courts exercise criminal jurisdiction over both citizens and aliens at Guantanamo Bay. In connection with the detainees currently interned at Guantanamo Bay, the United States has already asserted jurisdiction over an Army chaplain, two translators, and an intelligence officer. Judicial resolution of charges against those individuals has not troubled the Government, which is according rights to everyone except the detainees themselves.

“While the Government devotes much attention to the supposed unavailability of habeas corpus in Guantanamo Bay, no such jurisdictional difficulty was found by the court with responsibility for the military justice system. In Burtt v. Schick, a Navy enlisted man confined at Guantanamo Bay sought a writ of habeas corpus after the prosecution had obtained a mistrial over his objection. Holding that the mistrial had been obtained without either ‘manifest necessity,’ or the consent of the accused, the Court of Military Appeals unanimously granted the writ against the officer-in-charge of the Guantanamo Bay brig. In doing so, it found no obstacle to asserting habeas corpus jurisdiction over individuals at Guantanamo Bay.”

Detainees at Camp X-Ray, Guantanamo Bay.

Rachel Slajda writes at TPMMuckraker:

The Obama administration has loudly opposed a provision of the omnibus spending bill, passed last week by the House, that would ban the transfer of Guantanamo Bay detainees to U.S. soil, even for trial.

“This provision goes well beyond existing law and would unwisely restrict the ability of the Executive branch to prosecute alleged terrorists in Federal courts or military commissions in the United States,” Attorney General Eric Holder wrote in a letter to Senate leadership, calling the provision “dangerous” and asking that it be stripped before the Senate votes on the bill this week.

“We strongly oppose this provision. Congress should not limit the tools available to the executive branch in bringing terrorists to justice and advancing our national security interests,” White House spokesman Reid Cherlin said just before the bill passed.

So you would think, then, that this was perhaps a provision snuck into the must-pass government funding bill by Republicans intent on derailing Holder’s plan to try self-proclaimed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in civilian criminal court.

You’d be wrong.

According to sources on both sides of the House Appropriations Committee, which had purview over the legislation, the bill was written entirely by the Democratic side. It was revealed to Republicans only hours before the vote. No amendments were allowed on the House floor. No Republicans voted for it.

Read more here.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has circulated across the internet an encrypted “poison pill” cache of uncensored documents suspected to include files on BP and Guantanamo Bay. One of the files identified this weekend by The (London) Sunday Times — called the “insurance” file — has been downloaded from the WikiLeaks website by tens of thousands of supporters, from America to Australia.

Assange warns that any government that tries to curtail his activities risks triggering a new deluge of state and commercial secrets.

The military papers on Guantanamo Bay, yet to be published, believed to have been supplied by Bradley Manning, who was arrested in May. Other documents that Assange is confirmed to possess include an aerial video of a US airstrike in Afghanistan that killed civilians, BP files and Bank of America documents.

One of the key files available for download — named insurance.aes256 — appears to be encrypted with a 256-digit key. Experts said last week it was virtually unbreakable.

Assange has warned he can divulge the classified documents in the insurance file and similar backups if he is detained or the WikiLeaks website is permanently removed from the internet. He has suggested the contents are unredacted, posing a possible security risk for coalition partners around the world.

Assange warned: “We have over a long period of time distributed encrypted backups of material we have yet to release. All we have to do is release the password to that material, and it is instantly available.”

The “doomsday files” are part of a contingency plan drawn up by Assange and his supporters as they face a legal threat. He is wanted in Sweden over sexual assault allegations, and the US is reviewing the possibility of legal action after the release of 250,000 diplomatic cables.

Ben Laurie, a London-based computer security expert who has advised WikiLeaks, said: “Julian’s a smart guy and this is an interesting tactic. He will hope it deters anyone from acting against him.”

Nigel Smart, professor of cryptology at Bristol University, said even powerful military computers would be unable to crack the encryption. He said: “This isn’t something that can be broken with a modern computer. You need the key to open it.”

The file is 1.4 gigabytes in size, which would be big enough for a compressed version of all the files released this year and additional data.

The US military administered the drug despite Pentagon knowledge that mefloquine caused severe neuropsychiatric side effects, including suicidal thoughts, hallucinations and anxiety. The drug was used on the prisoners whether they had malaria or not.

The revelation, which has not been previously reported, was buried in documents publicly released by the Defense Department (DoD) two years ago as part of the government’s investigation into the June 2006 deaths of three Guantanamo detainees.

Army Staff Sgt. Joe Hickman, who was stationed at Guantanamo at the time of the suicides in 2006, and has presented evidence that demonstrates the three detainees could not have died by hanging themselves, noticed in the detainees’ medical files that they were given mefloquine. Hickman has been investigating the circumstances behind the detainees’ deaths for nearly four years.

Interviews conducted over the past two months with tropical disease experts and a review of Defense Department documents and peer-reviewed journals show there were no preexisting cases where mefloquine was ever prescribed for mass presumptive treatment of malaria.

Moazzam Begg. Photo: JK the Unwise (CC)

From the Irish Times:

US President Barack Obama’s attempts to reach out to Muslims have been an “utter failure” given his broken promises on several issues including closing Guantánamo Bay detention facility, former inmate Moazzam Begg has said.

Begg, a British national who spent two years in Guantánamo before being released in 2005, fears the detention centre may become permanent.

“People who were released from Guantánamo after Obama came to power told me that conditions had improved slightly but nobody there was under the illusion that [it] was going to close,” Begg said during a visit to Dublin.

“It is like a town now and every thing around it has continued to expand. It seems that this is a permanent facility and they intend to keep it as such.”

Begg, whose organisation, Cageprisoners, recently expanded its work to include the highlighting of extra-judicial killings, particularly the use of drone strikes, argued little had changed despite Obama’s promises. “We say that Bush was the president of torture, but Obama is the president of extra-judicial killing. The difference between the two is that while one used to extra-judicially detain people, the other has gone a step further and extra-judicially kills them.”

Begg singled out Obama’s decision to authorise the targeting of Yemen-based cleric Anwar al-Awlaki for assassination earlier this year. Cageprisoners took on Awlaki’s case when he was detained in Yemen in 2006.

Read more here.

Judge Kennedy. Photo: Beverly Rezneck

No, not during the Bush administration.  ProPublica reports:

When Judge Henry Kennedy Jr. ordered the release of a Guantánamo Bay detainee last spring, the case appeared to be a routine setback for an Obama administration that has lost a string of such cases.

But there turns out to be nothing ordinary about the habeas case brought by Uthman Abdul Rahim Mohammed Uthman , a Yemeni held without charges for nearly eight years. Uthman, accused by two U.S. administrations of being an al-Qaida fighter and bodyguard for Osama bin Laden, is among 48 detainees the Obama administration has deemed too dangerous to release but “not feasible for prosecution.”

A day after his March 16 order was filed on the court’s electronic docket, Kennedy’s opinion vanished. Weeks later, a new ruling appeared in its place. While it reached the same conclusion, eight pages of material had been removed, including key passages in which Kennedy dismantled the government’s case against Uthman.

In his first opinion, Kennedy wrote that one government witness against Uthman had been diagnosed by military doctors as “psychotic” with a mental condition that made his allegations against other detainees “unreliable.” But the opinion the public sees makes no mention of the man’s health and discounts his testimony only because of its inconsistencies.

The alterations are extensive. Sentences were rewritten. Footnotes that described disputes and discrepancies in the government’s case were deleted. Even the date and circumstances of Uthman’s arrest were changed. In the first version, the judge said Uthman was detained on Dec. 15, 2001, in Pakistan by Pakistani authorities. Rewritten, Kennedy said in the public opinion that Uthman admitted being captured “in late 2001 in the general vicinity of Tora Bora,” the cave complex where bin Laden was thought to be hiding at that time.

The creation of the additional opinion stemmed from a mishap inside the Justice Department: Kennedy’s first opinion was accidentally cleared for public release before government agencies had blacked out all the classified information it cited.

While the government privately took responsibility for the error, it initially refused to correct it. Two people familiar with the discussions said prosecutors in the Justice Department’s Civil Division gave Kennedy a choice: his entire decision would remain classified or he could write a new version that did not reference classified evidence.

Justice Department sources offered a different account. They said the department later relented and gave Kennedy a properly redacted version of the opinion, in which classified material had been blacked out. The sources said this opinion was meant to be published. But for reasons that remain unclear, the edited opinion became the starting point for the creation of an entirely new version.

Matthew Miller, a spokesman with the Justice Department, said “the department’s practice in all of these cases is to propose release of a properly redacted opinion.”

The second opinion, drafted after a contentious exchange between Kennedy and the prosecutors, did not refer to the earlier version and gave no indication material had been removed.

Legal scholars and classification experts said the drafting of a second opinion was a deception. All previous opinions in Guantánamo habeas cases have noted when material has been blacked out or removed to protect security.

Stephen Gillers, who teaches legal ethics at New York University School of Law, said Kennedy may well have had a legitimate concern about “national security issues.”

“But that concern then inspired him to participate in the creation of a parallel universe that fools everyone except a small circle of judges. We don’t allow the justice system to create false impressions,” Gillers said.

ProPublica obtained the original version of Kennedy’s opinion when it appeared briefly in the court record and conducted a line-by-line comparison with what was published five weeks later. That comparison, highlighting information that was removed, can be found here.

Reporting for this story was complicated by the fact that much of the evidence is classified, and judges, lawyers and prosecutors are barred from discussing most aspects of the litigation. But an examination of the opinions and additional documents, as well as interviews with government and intelligence officials, former military prosecutors and key players in the habeas cases, makes it possible for the first time to publicly examine the evidence against a detainee designated for indefinite detention.

To justify Uthman’s incarceration, the government relied on statements from five current or former detainees who were previously discredited by judges in other cases, questioned by internal Obama administration assessments or found unreliable by military psychiatrists because they were mendacious, mentally ill or subjected to torture.

Kennedy’s first opinion reveals that some of the government’s evidence came from a detainee who committed suicide at Guantánamo three years ago after months of hunger strikes. In the second opinion, the detainee’s name is concealed, making it impossible for the public to know he is dead.

Further on they report:

Although President Obama inherited many aspects of U.S. detention policy from his predecessor, Guantánamo detainees have been fighting their detentions in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia almost entirely on his watch.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June 2008, as Obama was campaigning for president, that detainees could challenge their detentions in federal court under the constitutional doctrine of habeas corpus, which protects individuals from unlawful imprisonment by the government.

Obama, still a senator then, issued a statement calling the ruling “an important step toward re-establishing our credibility as a nation committed to the rule of law, and rejecting a false choice between fighting terrorism and respecting habeas corpus. Our courts have employed habeas corpus with rigor and fairness for more than two centuries, and we must continue to do so as we defend the freedom that violent extremists seek to destroy.” The first challenges were decided on Nov. 20, just three weeks after Obama’s election.

Lawyers from the Justice Department’s Civil Division handle the Guantánamo litigation in coordination with intelligence agencies and the Department of Defense, which acts as warden of Guantánamo. The litigation process was built around the government’s assertion that the bulk of the evidence is classified, a claim that has enabled the government to operate under a cloak of near total secrecy, with judges and defense attorneys barred from publicly discussing most aspects of the litigation. Court filings that reveal details about the cases undergo classification review before they are made public.

Intelligence and military officials take the lead in determining what can be released. As this story was going to publication, the Justice Department released an unclassified version of its appeal brief in the Uthman case. A number of details that were excised from Kennedy’s final opinion appear in the appeals brief.

Justice Department spokesman Miller said, “as a general matter, Justice Department litigators are not responsible for classification or declassification decisions in habeas cases.”

Officials at other agencies said they had a fairly free hand in removing information supplied for the government’s case. “Whenever a court security officer identifies a document slated for posting on the court’s public docket as potentially containing classified information, the officer refers that document to appropriate agencies for classification review,” Maj. Tanya Bradsher, a spokeswoman for the Pentagon, said.

One government official who spoke on the condition of anonymity acknowledged that the classification process has been plagued with inconsistencies and that no one is coordinating the effort. In most declassified habeas filings, the names of all detainee-witnesses are removed; in others, a name or two slips past the redaction process.

Some government-ordered deletions clearly appear designed to conceal names of confidential informants, associations with foreign intelligence services and the identities of certain federal agents. But the Uthman case shows that many of the deletions go further.

“This censorship has nothing to do with protecting ‘national security’ and everything to do with covering up government mistakes and malfeasance,” said Jonathan Hafetz, a professor at Seton Hall University School of Law who has represented a number of detainees in habeas litigation. The practice, he said, allows the government to “mislead the American public on issues of profound importance to the country by skewing the perception of who really is at Guantánamo.

Read more, including both versions of Judge Kennedy’s ruling and the government’s appeals brief, here.  See also Scott Horton’s overview at Harper’s, including links to analyses by Democracy Now! and Andrew Sullivan.

The BBC has the story a bizarre reunion between a former Guantanamo Bay guard, Brandon Neely of Texas, and two of his former prisoners, Shafiq Rasul and Ruhal Ahmed of England, who were held there for two years.

Against all odds, Neely and Ahmed had become friends chatting through the bars Guantanamo, cracking jokes and discussing Eminem and Dr. Dre. Several years later:

“I was pretty new to Facebook and decided to type in their names to see if their profiles popped up and I came across Shafiq’s Facebook page,” says Mr Neely.

To Mr Neely’s astonishment he received a reply and the pair began an exchange of e-mails. BBC asked if both sides would be prepared to meet in person…