by TChris

Charges ranging from manslaughter to conspiracy may be brought against 28 soldiers implicated in the deaths of two detainees at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. Both prisoners died from blunt force injuries. Military medical examiners ruled each death a homicide.

"Many of the 28 soldiers may have lesser culpability," the Army said, adding that "Commanders, with the advice of their lawyers, will consider the full range of appropriate administrative and disciplinary measures from taking no action to recommending trial by court-martial."

One soldier, Sgt. James Boland, has already been charged.

It's been three months since the Supreme Court ruled that the detainees at Guantanamo have a right to a hearing to determine their enemy combatant status. Lawyers for the detainees say the Government is dragging its feet:

Of the 68 alleged al Qaeda and Taliban fighters who have so far petitioned for access to federal court in Washington, only a handful have even spoken to their lawyers. With some held for nearly three years on the U.S. Navy base, the detainees remain largely precluded from receiving legal help because of protracted negotiations with the Justice Department over lawyers' security clearances, the government's insistence on monitoring attorney-client conversations and the number of visits lawyers will be allowed, defense attorneys told a U.S. District Court judge yesterday.

Haaretz reports that the overseas place of detention for senior al Qaida operatives being held by the U.S., including Khalid Sheik Mohammed,is in Jordan.

Background here.

by TChris

The Center for Public Integrity compiles here a vital set of documents for those who want to research events at Abu Ghraib -- from the investigation of a "riot" in 2003 to the Taguba report in 2004.

Bumping this up from this morning:

Human Rights Watch has released a new report about at least 11 suspected terrorists who have been grabbed overseas by the U.S. and held in countries allowing torture. More is available in today's Guardian. While this report is new, many of the underlying details, including the names of these suspects, is not. [This is a very long post, so you may want to bookmark it for when you have time to read it and follow the links.]

In November, 2003, Human Rights Watch official and Findlaw Columnist Joanne Mariner wrote this article about "the hidden detainees" and their connection to Zacarias Moussaoui:

The most important aspect of Zacarias Moussaoui's prosecution may have little to do with Moussaoui himself.....The larger significance of Moussaoui's case lies elsewhere. It is, at present, the only legal peephole by which to glimpse the circumstances of a much more important group of terrorist suspects: those, like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah, who are held by the U.S. military for interrogation in "undisclosed locations."

....Right now, the detainees are missing, "disappeared," vanished with hardly a trace. No one knows where they are, and little is known about how they have been treated, although disturbing reports are occasionally leaked. These hidden detainees are in a frightening legal limbo. It is time for the judiciary -- and the Supreme Court, eventually -- to step in.

Human Rights Watch also raised allegations of torture of al Qaeda detainees in December, 2002. It detailed the practice in April, 2003. The Washington Post expounded on the practice on December 26, 2003.

After three long years in confinement as an alleged enemy combatant, Yaser Hamdi, an American citizen at the time of his capture in Afghanistan, has arrived home to Saudi Arabia.

The U.S. citizen was kept in solitary confinement and had no access to the legal system until the Supreme Court ruling in June, which was one of a series this year that limited President Bush's war on terrorism. Instead of Hamdi having his day in court, the U.S. government negotiated a deal in which he also gave up American citizenship and agreed not to travel to the United States for 10 years and to tell the U.S. embassy of plans to travel outside Saudi Arabia for 15 years.

The State Department spent two weeks seeking to assure Saudi Arabia it was not responsible for enforcing the deal. Still, the length of the delay may indicate Saudi Arabia wanted to signal its irritation over being excluded from negotiations.

Three years of being held in captivity, without charges or lawyers, and now, it's going to be "never mind, you can go now"? This should go down in history as one of the biggest abuses of human rights the U.S. has ever engaged in. According to Brig Gen Martin Lucenti, deputy commander of the joint task force that controls Guantanamo:

"Of the 550 [prisoners]that we have, I would say most of them, the majority of them, will either be released or transferred to their own countries," he told the Financial Times. "Most of these guys weren't fighting. They were running.

"Even if somebody has been found to be an enemy combatant, many of them will be released because they will be of low intelligence value and low threat status. We don't have a level of evidence to feel that we can be confident to prosecute them [all]. We have guys here who have never told us anything, except to say that they want to cut off the heads of the infidels if they get a chance," Gen Lucenti added.

How would you feel if you were running from the enemy you knew, only to be caught by the enemy you didn't know...and then transported across the world to be interrogated and caged for three years?

Another embarassing revelation is headed to Team Bush this week as a former Guantanamo guard, who took his 20 year retirement a few months ago, prepares to release a report showing that the detentions and interrogations at Guantanamo failed to prevent a single terror attack:

Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Christino, who retired last June after 20 years in military intelligence, says that President George W Bush and US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have 'wildly exaggerated' their intelligence value.

Christino's revelations, to be published this week in Guantánamo: America's War on Human Rights, by British journalist David Rose, are supported by three further intelligence officials. Christino also disclosed that the 'screening' process in Afghanistan which determined whether detainees were sent to Guantánamo was 'hopelessly flawed from the get-go'.

It was performed by new recruits who had almost no training, and were forced to rely on incompetent interpreters. They were 'far too poorly trained to identify real terrorists from the ordinary Taliban militia'.

The Guardian refers to the Guantanamo military proceedings against Britons held prisoner there as 'backdoor trials':

...documents reveal the Britons will be presumed to be enemy combatants by the handpicked US military officers hearing their cases before they start, have limited rights to call witnesses, have no lawyer, and that hearsay evidence can be used against them.

The documents reveal that prisoners have no right to a lawyer, only to a US military representative, who can inform his superiors of what the prisoner tells him. Furthermore the tribunal will start with the assumption that the US government case against the Britons is correct, the documents reveal: "There is a rebuttable presumption that the government evidence ... is genuine and accurate."

This is the land of the free and home of the brave?

The New York Times reports on new criticisms against the military commission trials at Guantanamo. A lot of the criticism is coming from military lawyers and judges. The predominant view: The commissions should be scrapped and courts-martial proceedings instituted in their place. Three of the main criticisms:

The military commission members serve as both judge and jury, and as the presiding officer is the only lawyer, the other members could defer to him on questions of law, giving him an unequal influence.

...there is no appeal to an independent judiciary as there is in courts-martial. Commission decisions may be appealed only within the military and not to federal courts.

Both the defense and, more recently, the prosecution have argued that most of the military officers serving on the five-member panel have personal conflicts and are unsuitable to sit in judgment.

What would Kerry-Edwards do?

Senator John Edwards, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, in a speech after the August hearings, said that if Senator John Kerry and he were elected, they would see that any future trials were done along the lines of courts-martial.

Some international reaction:

The Washington Post weighs in on the release of Yaser Hamdi:

What remains objectionable -- what looms as more objectionable than ever, now that the government has acknowledged Mr. Hamdi's unimportance -- is the unnecessary assault on civil liberties that the administration led in his case. For three years the administration insisted that Mr. Hamdi be held incommunicado and without any semblance of normal legal process or rights despite his citizenship. For most of his detention he was prevented from meeting with his lawyer. In 2002 the government contended in court that merely allowing him to meet with counsel "jeopardizes compelling national security interests" and would "interfere with if not irreparably harm the military's ongoing efforts to gather intelligence." Mr. Hamdi, it warned, might even "pass concealed messages through unwitting intermediaries."

Had the military allowed Mr. Hamdi to meet with his lawyer in a timely fashion and not acted so aggressively to prevent him from presenting his own account of his behavior, it might have had credibility to reserve the right to act otherwise in a truly exceptional situation. But its behavior toward Mr. Hamdi -- even assuming he is an enemy combatant, which he denies -- makes it difficult to give the benefit of the doubt to such claims of necessity. Apocalyptic justifications for needlessly aggressive positions that have gross consequences for liberty cannot be wiped away with a blithe "never mind."

Bump and Update: It's official. Yaser Hamdi will be released and deported to Saudi Arabia.

After weeks of negotiations over his release, lawyers for the Justice Department and Mr. Hamdi announced an agreement requiring him to renounce his American citizenship. The agreement also bars him from leaving Saudi Arabia for a time and requires him to report possible terrorist activity, his lawyer said, although legal analysts said the arrangement would be difficult for the United States to enforce.

Although Mr. Hamdi was born in 1980 in Louisiana, where his father worked for an oil company, the family left the United States when he was a toddler and returned to Saudi Arabia. He lived there most of his life, and most of his family remains there.

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Original Post: 9/16/04

Detained "enemy combant" Yaser Hamdi, an American citizen captured in Afghanistan and held over three years without charges, will be freed and allowed to return to Saudi Arabia, where he grew up, according to his lawyer and others familiar with the case. One small detail: He has to give up his American citizenship to avail himelf of the deal--even though he has never been charged with a crime.