Another detainee at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba has attempted suicide.

Total number of reported suicide attempts to date at Camp X-Ray: 30.

Some of the prisoners have been held for more than a year and a half without charges, access to lawyers or indications of whether or when they may be freed.

U.S. authorities are holding some 660 prisoners from 42 countries at Guantanamo on suspicion of links to the al-Qaida terrorist network or Afghanistan's fallen Taliban regime.

Greg Sargent of The New York Observer reports on the most recent brief filed on behalf of Jose Padilla in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals:

A bipartisan group of prominent New York lawyers, former federal judges and former government officials has launched a fierce attack on the Bush administration’s conduct in the war on terror, charging that the detention of suspected terrorist Jose Padilla is unconstitutional.

The group, which includes a number of former high-ranking officials in Republican and Democratic Presidential administrations, made the accusation in an amicus brief filed in federal court in New York on July 30. The brief concerns the legal plight of Mr. Padilla, whose case has attracted international attention since he was arrested in Chicago for his alleged role in an Al Qaeda plot to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb" on U.S. soil.

This is an extraordinary case," Harold R. Tyler Jr., a former federal judge and longtime Republican who was brought in by President Gerald Ford to clean up the Justice Department after Watergate, told The Observer. "We have in this country something called habeas corpus, which guarantees that a person who is held incommunicado has to be produced in a court. The people in the government seem to have forgotten that. They should charge this man if they’ve got something against him. And they should give him right to counsel. These are all constitutional rights."

Mr. Tyler, who as deputy attorney general under Mr. Ford was also an important mentor to a young prosecutor named Rudolph Giuliani in the mid-1970’s, continued: "I have been a longtime Republican, but I’m a disenchanted Republican in this case."

The brief assails the Bush administration’s handling of the Padilla case in blunt terms, describing it as "one of the gravest threats to the rule of law, and to the liberty our Constitution enshrines, that this nation has ever faced." A copy of the brief, which was filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, was obtained by The Observer.

The brief is unusual in that it includes many prominent Republicans among its authors:

The case of Turkman v. Ashcroft should be getting more attention. It involves a class action lawsuit against many federal officials, including Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller, over the mistreatment of post-9/11 detainees in Brooklyn. The suit was filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights , a group promoting "creative lawyering for social justice." Here are the basics:

CCR filed a class-action lawsuit in United States District Court in Brooklyn against a wide range of defendants including Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI director Robert Mueller, over the imprisonment and harsh treatment of the non-citizen immigrants jailed after the Sept. 11 attacks. The lawsuit alleges violations of the U.S. Constitution and international human rights and treaty law. The suit charges that the U.S. government used ethnic and religious profiling with respect to the round-up and detention of hundreds of people.

Plaintiffs are muslim from Pakistan and Turkey. Although the government never asserted that there was evidence that any of the plaintiffs had links to terrorist groups and never charged them with commission of any crime, they were detained for over six months in tiny, windowless cells and were beaten and abused, solely because of their country of origin and their faith. Despite the fact that the plaintiffs were neither accused nor convicted of any criminal offense, they have nonetheless been subject to the severest degrading conditions, including being subjected to body cavity strip-searches and manacled and shackled whenever they were taken from their cells. The suit alleges that the government made efforts to keep the plaintiffs from being able to practice their religion during their detention.

After the suit was filed, the Inspector General released its 198 page report on the treatment and mistreatment of the detainees in area prisons. The CCR has amended it's complaint, and the Justice Department is putting up a fight.

Chisum Lee, of the Village Voice, has the latest details and thinks this this case could bring Ashcroft's day of reckoning.

27 detainees were released from Guantanamo this week, 16 of them to Afganistan. Three were interviewed by the media upon arrival in Afganistan. Two of them alleged substantial abuse by their captors. One said the abuse included beatings.

"Who says we were not punished? It's not true," said Abdul Rehman, 29, from Faryab province in northeastern Afghanistan. "They pushed us all over, treated us very badly. They put 24 of us in a small congested room. They also put us into cold rooms."

Rehman said he had been "badly punished 107 times," speaking in an interview with Associated Press Television News at Kabul Central Jail shortly before he and the others were released to the international Red Cross in preparation for their return home.

He alleged that during his 20 months at Guantanamo, his captors chained his hands and feet and beat him with a metal rod on his legs and back, but he refused to show scars that may have resulted from any abuse.

Zabet Ullah, 32, of Kandahar, told The Associated Press while walking to the Red Cross bus, "There was very bad treatment of the prisoners in Guantanamo. It was against the human rights of the Geneva Conventions."

The third interviewed detainee had no complaints about his treatment. There are still 660 detainees at Guantanamo, eight of whom just arrived this week from Afganistan.

Two dozen more detainees have arrived at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba from Afganistan.

They join the 625 prisoners currently being held there, some for more than a year. The Government says all are suspected of helping the Taliban in the war against Afganistan.

Amnesty [International] says the U.S. government has arbitrarily imprisoned the detainees and has denied them "the right to humane treatment, to be informed of reasons for detention, to have prompt access to a lawyer, to be able to challenge the lawfulness of the detention, and to be presumed innocent until proven otherwise." Other violations the group has listed include prolonged solitary confinement, heavy shackling, and lack of adequate exercise.

Not to mention there have been 15 suicide attempts, including four in the past three weeks.

A sharply divided Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld the President's power to detain an American citizen indefinitely upon designating him an "enemy combatent."

A sharply divided federal appeals court today upheld President Bush's authority to detain indefinitely as an enemy combatant a United States citizen captured on the battlefield and to deny him access to a lawyer.

The judges today did not issue a majority opinion, just an order upholding the January decision. Four of them, however, on either side of the issue, wrote separate, sometimes harshly worded opinions, demonstrating the deep divisions in a case that essentially presents a stark and fundamental clash between the nation's security interests and its citizens' civil liberties.

A dissenting judge, Diana Gribbon Motz said:

The January ruling "marks the first time in our history that a federal court has approved the elimination of protections afforded a citizen by the Constitution solely on the basis of the executive's designation of that citizen as an enemy combatant, without testing the accuracy of the designation."

Our prior coverage of the Hamdi case and the lower court decision is here.

President Bush has designated six prisoners for possible trial by military tribunal.

Unlike traditional criminal trials, the proceedings of military tribunals can be kept much more secret. The United States has not convened such a tribunal since World War II. The prospect of secret trials drew criticism from the chairman of the American Bar Association's task force on the treatment of detainees in the war on terrorism.

"The State Department issues a report every year in which it criticizes those nations that conduct trials before secret military tribunals," said Neal Sonnett, also a former president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. "What I'm hearing sounds alarmingly like something similar."

"If they're going to be charged by military tribunals then they have a right to full due process and the public has a right to know who's being tried and what the charges are and the government has an obligation to run these tribunals in a fair and transparent way."

Bush won't identify the six. It's possible they could go to trial and be convicted without anyone knowing who they are. The Defense Department will only say they are all in U.S. custody.

"It's a Draconian system of justice that is almost guaranteed to get convictions, including a possible death penalty," Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights said Thursday.

Update: Don't miss Patrick Nielsen Hayden of Electrolite on the decison.

Amnesty International is calling on the U.S. to provide fair treatment to the Iraqi detainees at the Baghdad airport facility, including ending the ban on visits by lawyers and families:

Amnesty International called on the United States today to give hundreds of Iraqis detained since the beginning of the occupation the right to meet families and lawyers and to have a judicial review of their detention. The organization also called on the US to investigate allegations of ill-treatment, torture and death into custody.

"The conditions of detention Iraqis are held under at the Camp Cropper Center at Baghdad International Airport - now a US base - and at Abu Ghraib Prison may amount to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, banned by international law," Amnesty International said.

Detainees arrested by US forces after the conflict have included both criminal and political suspects. Detainees held in Baghdad have invariably reported that they suffered cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment immediately after arrest, being tightly bound with plastic handcuffs and sometimes denied water and access to a toilet in the first night of arrest. Delegates saw numerous ex-detainees with wrists still scarred by the cuffs a month later.

Update: Warblogging has more.

Jacob Sullem of Reason has written " Know Thy Enemy Combatant." Nat Hentoff's new Village Voice column is up, Is the Attorney General Fit for Office?

We recommend both.

Inspector General Glenn Fine announced that his office will conduct an internal affairs-disciplinary type investigation into the treatment of detained immigrants in Brooklyn after 9/11.

The inspector general, Glenn A. Fine, briefed lawmakers on a highly critical report delivered by his office earlier this month on the treatment of Sept. 11 detainees, and said that investigators had "serious concerns" about a pattern of verbal and physical abuse faced by 84 illegal immigrants at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.

Investigators found that some guards slammed inmates against walls, dragged them by their arms, stepped on the chains between their ankle cuffs and made slurs and threats like "you will feel pain" and "you're going to die here," Mr. Fine told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Ashcroft and the Justice Department refused to bring criminal charges against the guards. Bureau of Prison officials are still trying to justify the treatment of the detainees, saying any instances of misconduct were isolated. Even Orrin Hatch was upset at the treatment:

"Neither the fact that the department was operating under unprecedented trying conditions nor the fact that the 9/11 detainees were in our country illegally justifies entirely the way in which some of the detainees were treated," said Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah and chairman of the Judiciary Committee. (Clue for Mr. Hatch: Drop the word "entirely"--there is no justification period.)

On the other side, was Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) "who warned against exaggerating the inspector general's findings and placing overly burdensome restrictions on law enforcement." (Schumer recently suggested Arlen Specter be considered for the Supreme Court. Schumer is one of the most law and order Democrats out there.)

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI)had the correct analysis--he labeled the conduct disclosed by the Inspector General's report an "abuse of power" by the Justice Department.

George Paine at Warblogging.com minces no words about the Administration's announcement yesterday that Qatari native Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri has become the third person to be declared an enemy combatant: Paine calls it a perversion of justice and explains the case in detail.

Our post yesterday criticizing the designation is here.

A man from Qatar who has been held since 2001, first on a material witness warrant, and then under a criminal indictment charging him with making false statements to the FBI, has been designated by the Administration as an enemy combatant, joining the ranks of Jose Padilla and Yaser Hamdi.

Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri is now in the custody of the Defense Department where presumably he will await a trial by military tribunal.

The Government concedes they have no evidence linking al-Marri to 9/11. It believes he was planning later harm to the U.S., which belief is based on his having met Osama bin Laden at a training camp, and offering his services to him.

Why not charge him in U.S. District Court with conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists? A secret military proceeding hardly seems necessary --is the Government hiding something? The secrecy with which this Administration is running its war on terror is unprecedented. We hope Congress demands to take a look at this case.

[thanks for the tip goes to our former reader Cliff, who won't post here anymore because we are not tolerant enough of his differing viewpoint. He says he finds this case beyond the pale. That's quite a statement coming from Cliff. We've previously extended our appreciation to Cliff for the time he spent reading TalkLeft and invited him back to the comment section, but so far, he's not interested. The offer stays open.]