MISCELLANEOUS NEWS REPORTS * 2004.07.01 to date 2004.07.31 misc_digest_2004_7.txt Aljazeera: http://english.aljazeera.net/HomePage Associated Press (AP): http://www.ap.org/ Inter Press Service (IPS): http://ipsnews.net/ Reuters: http://www.reuters.com/ ABC News (Aus): http://www.abc.net.au/news/ BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/ CBS: http://www.cbsnews.com/ CNN: http://www.cnn.com/ Baltimore Sun: http://www.sunspot.net/ Boston Globe: http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ Chicago Tribune: http://www.chicagotribune.com/ Dawn (Islamabad): http://www.dawn.com/ Hartford Courant: http://www.ctnow.com/news/ Los Angeles Times: http://www.latimes.com/ Newsweek: http://www.msnbc.com/news/NW-front_Front.asp San Francisco Chronicle: http://www.sfgate.com/news/ Sydney Morning Herald: http://www.smh.com.au/ The Age (Melbourne): http://www.theage.com.au/ The Guardian (UK): http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardian/ The Independent (UK): http://www.independent.co.uk/ The Mirror (UK): http://www.mirror.co.uk/ The Observer (UK): http://www.observer.co.uk/ The Scotsman (Edinburgh): http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/ The Telegraph (UK): http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ Toronto Globe and Mail: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/ ================================================================================ Boston Globe / AP: July 29, 2004 DETENTION OF US CITIZEN IN SAUDI ARABIA DECRIED Suit asserts man has right to trial in American court By Anne Gearan, Associated Press http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/07/29/detention_of_us_citizen_in _saudi_arabia_decried/ WASHINGTON -- An American jailed in Saudi Arabia for more than a year should have the same opportunity to contest his detention in US courts that the Supreme Court has given foreign-born terrorism suspects, his lawyers said today. A lawsuit filed in federal court contends the United States ordered Ahmed Abu Ali's arrest in Saudi Arabia to keep him beyond the reach of US courts and in the hands of jailers who could abuse or torture him for information. The lawsuit is a fallout from the Supreme Court's ruling last month that foreign men arrested abroad and held at a Navy prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, can contest their detention in American courts. Abu Ali's lawyers argued that the US government controls his fate even though he is in Saudi custody. In June, the Supreme Court rejected the government's argument that US courts are off-limits to the Guantanamo prisoners because the prison is in Cuba. That same reasoning should apply to Abu Ali, his lawyers argued. "Abu Ali in this case meets similar jurisdictional criteria, and, especially as a US citizen, should be afforded this fundamental right," lawyers from the World Organization for Human Rights USA wrote. Abu Ali, who was born in Houston, was arrested in June 2003 as he took a university exam in Saudi Arabia, his parents alleged in the lawsuit filed on his behalf. The FBI has questioned Abu Ali at least twice, but he has not been charged or allowed to see a lawyer, the lawsuit said. The Saudi government has no plan to charge him and would release him to US custody if asked, the lawsuit said. Federal prosecutors in Virginia tried to link Abu Ali this year to men who later were convicted of training for holy war against the United States by playing paintball in the woods of Virginia. A federal prosecutor said that one of the defendants had Abu Ali's telephone number on a handwritten address list and that Abu Ali joined an Al Qaeda cell in Saudi Arabia in 2001. Six men pleaded guilty and three were convicted in the paintball case. One received a life sentence. Abu Ali was not charged in the case. "From the very first day, we do not believe the allegations," Abu Ali's sister, Tasneem Abu Ali, said yesterday. A grand jury heard evidence in her brother's case but has not issued an indictment, she said. "We felt like the US government was avoiding the judicial process in the United States . . . and the reason they were keeping him there is that they weren't able to charge him" in US courts, Tasneem Abu Ali said. The lawsuit asks a US judge to order the 23-year-old returned to the United States, where he might face charges. It names Attorney General John D. Ashcroft and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, among others. Justice Department spokesman Mark Corallo refused to comment on the lawsuit yesterday. "The Supreme Court opened the door, and this kind of suit was expected," said Michael Greenberger, who specializes in constitutional law and counterterrorism at the University of Maryland's law school. The court's ruling in the Guantanamo case appeared to be limited to the some 650 prisoners held at the Cuban base. Dissenters in that case and outside lawyers, however, said the ruling might be applied more broadly. "It left some questions open, and this case raises some of those questions," Greenberger. Abu Ali's lawyers contend that his case is similar to others in which the United States has sent suspected terrorists to foreign countries that use harsher interrogation techniques than US law allows. The family's lawsuit calls Saudi Arabia "a country that the Department of State has cited on numerous occasions for its mistreatment and torture of prisoners, especially during interrogations." Abu Ali, who holds dual US-Jordanian citizenship, was valedictorian of his high school class in Falls Church, Va., and was studying at a Saudi university when he was arrested, the lawsuit said. His family lives in Falls Church, a suburb of Washington, D.C. * * * Charleston Post and Courier: July 29, 2004 JUSTICE TO LET AL-MARRI MEET WITH LAWYERS 'Enemy combatant' held at Navy brig by Tony Bartelme, Post and Courier Staff http://www.charleston.net/stories/072904/loc_29combat.shtml In a turnaround, the Justice Department has agreed to let Ali Seleh al-Marri, one of three so-called "enemy combatants" in the Navy brig in Hanahan, meet with his lawyers. Until this week, the Justice Department had denied al-Marri access to legal counsel, even though the Supreme Court ruled last month that enemy combatants should have access to lawyers and American courts. Tuesday night, Assistant Solicitor General David Salmons told al-Marri's attorneys that they finally would be permitted to visit their client, said Mark Berman, a lawyer based in Newark, N.J. "It was an inevitable reversal considering the Supreme Court's decision in the Hamdi case," Berman said. The meeting could take place within two weeks, after the lawyers receive the required security clearances, he said. Last month, in a landmark decision involving the limits of presidential power in the fight against terrorism, the Supreme Court ruled that Yaser Hamdi, another man held incommunicado in the brig, could not be detained indefinitely without access to courts and legal counsel. After the Hamdi decision, Berman and Charleston attorney Andy Savage filed a motion in U.S. District Court in Charleston demanding that they see their client. They also asked that al-Marri be released or charged with a crime. The FBI arrested al-Marri, a native of Qatar, three months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. He was indicted on federal charges that he committed credit card fraud and lied to banks to finance al-Qaida. Federal prosecutors dropped the charges in June 2003, shortly before al-Marri was scheduled to go to trial. President Bush then signed an order declaring al- Marri an enemy combatant. Al-Marri has been in the brig ever since. * * * Gulf Daily News: July 28, 2004 'FREE CAMP X-RAY DETAINEES' APPEAL by Robert Smith http://www.gulf-daily-news.com/Story.asp?Article=87866&Sn=BNEW&IssueID=27130 BAHRAIN was yesterday urged to step up pressure on the US to secure the release of six Bahraini detainees from Guantanamo Bay. The six could be granted access to lawyers within the next three weeks, according to US human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith. It will be the first time in over two years that the men will be offered legal counsel. The decision will apply to all 594 inmates now being held at the Camp X-ray US military base in Cuba, on suspicion of terrorism. "The US government is still trying to obstruct our ability to represent prisoners," Mr Stafford Smith said in Bahrain yesterday. "But the judge has made it perfectly clear that she will order that lawyers can have access to prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. "With any luck, within the next three weeks, lawyers will be able to visit them." Mr Stafford Smith, 45, was speaking at a Press conference yesterday at the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights (BCHR), in Adliya. He heads a team of lawyers acting on behalf of Guantanamo Bay detainees in the US. Relatives of 80 detainees from 11 countries have so far signed over power of attorney to the lawyers, who last week filed a petition on behalf of three Bahrainis. The six Bahraini detainees are Shaikh Salman bin Ebrahim Al Khalifa, Juma Mohammed Al Dossary, Essa Al Murbati, Salah Abdul Rasool Al Blooshi, Adel Kamel Hajee and Abdulla Majiod Al Nuaimi. The petition calls on judges to determine the legality of their detention and is among 53 lawsuits filed within the last two weeks on behalf of inmates. Mr Stafford Smith, who is here for one week, is hoping more families of detainees will come on board - whether they are from Bahrain or elsewhere. "For the next week we will be glad to meet family members from any country - Bahrain, Saudi Arabia or wherever - and explain to them what is happening," he said. "We will be glad to represent their children. We need to get word to all families of all prisoners that we are hear to help them - that we will represent them. "Our problem is that of the 594 prisoners, we only know the names of approximately 300. "Apart from the 80 prisoners we are already representing, we don't have contacts for the detainee's families." That means the lawyers have to wait for families to come forward to take up the offer of free legal representation. Meanwhile, in addition to meeting relatives of prisoners, Mr Stafford Smith is scheduled to meet representatives from the Foreign Affairs Ministry and the House of Representatives today. He said it was vital for the government to increase pressure on the US to grant the release of Bahraini inmates. "My other purpose in coming to Bahrain is to ask the Bahrain government - and other governments in the Middle East - to speak to the US," he said. "They don't have to do it publicly, they can do it quietly by putting political pressure on the US for the return of their citizens." Three countries - Kuwait, Australia and Sudan - have already agreed to pay for lawyers to represent their citizens in Guantanamo Bay. "The legal process may take a very long time, but it is not the legal process that will get most people out. "It is very important for countries like Saudi Arabia and Bahrain to move quickly. "Political pressure right now may result in the release of a large number of people through the Wolfowicz hearings, which are going on about the status of enemy combatants. "These are a sham designed to give the US a pretext to release detainees on the grounds that they are no longer a threat." Mr Stafford Smith is executive director of Justice in Exile, a non-profit organisation dedicated to providing legal assistance to Guantanamo Bay detainees. He is a prominent Death Row lawyer born in the UK, who claims to have evidence that many of the detainees are innocent. This is based on the grounds that many were turned over to US authorities in exchange for a reward, which was offered for former members of the deposed Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Mr Stafford Smith claimed to be able to prove that two of the detainees - arrested for alleged terrorist links - were picked up in Gambia, where they were setting up an innocent mobile peanut processing plant. "In Guantanamo Bay, we have evidence which we believe shows that an overwhelming majority are not terrorists," he said. "One of the prosecutors - on the other side in Guantanamo Bay - told us they think a large percentage of people there are innocent." Mr Stafford Smith is joined in Bahrain by head of the Kuwaiti Detainees Committee Khalid Al Odah. Mr Al Odah yesterday urged governments throughout the region to apply pressure on the US to free their citizens. Relatives of Guantanamo Bay detainees, or anyone interested in supporting their fight, should contact the BCHR on 17729500. * * * July 27, 2004 ANOTHER CHARGE AGAINST U.S.-SYRIAN AIRMAN DROPPED By Adam Tanner http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=5791332 SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Prosecutors dropped another charge on Tuesday against a Syrian-American airman accused of espionage at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and his lawyer said a key prosecutor in the case now facing unrelated charges had himself mishandled more sensitive documents. Maj. Jamie Key, attorney for Senior Airman Ahmad al-Halabi, said Air Force prosecutors withdrew a charge of bank fraud alleging that he had submitted false information on credit card applications. He still faces 16 of 30 charges originally filed against him including carrying jail maps, letters and other documents from U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay where terrorism suspects are held. Halabi is expected to go to trial in mid-September. In an interview, Key complained that Technical Sgt. Marc Palmosina, 37, who once oversaw the spy probe against Halabi, had himself committed serious violations. An official Air Force charge sheet from late May accused Palmosina with "failing to safeguard some number of classified documents and/or failing to store some number of classified documents only in authorized locations." Halabi spent ten months in pretrial confinement before he won release in May pending trial. Key said he found it troubling that his client appeared to face tougher pretrial standards than his investigator. "What is most troublesome about all of it though is that he (Palmosina) had a number of highly classified documents from duties he had out in Afghanistan which all pertained to counterintelligence, stuff that could really hurt the national interest," he said. "Yet he is charged with mishandling classified information which is a two-year offense whereas al-Halabi gets charged with attempted espionage which is a life- without-parole crime. "I'm stuck with the conclusion that the distinction here is al-Halabi was from Syria and was going back there to get married." INVESTIGATOR ALSO CHARGED WITH RAPING MINOR Palmosina was also charged with raping a girl under the age of 12 but continues to work at Travis Air Force Base. The investigator was taken off the case last year when he was charged with rape and sodomy. "He was not placed in pretrial confinement," his attorney, Capt. Brendon Tukey, said in an interview. "In the military the default is that there is not pretrial confinement unless there is a finding that the person is likely to commit further serious misconduct or is likely to not show up for trial." An official list of charges against Palmosina include rape of a person under the age of 12 in Japan in 1998 and 2000 and sodomy of a child under the age of 12 in Vacaville, California, near Travis. * * * CNN: July 27, 2004 LAWSUIT TARGETS ABU GHRAIB CONTRACTORS Plaintiffs allege killing, torture by civilians at Iraqi prison From Kathy Benz, CNN http://www.cnn.com/2004/LAW/07/27/abu.ghraib.lawsuit/ WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Lawyers representing allegedly abused Iraqi prisoners filed suit in U.S. federal court Tuesday alleging killing, torture and other abuses against the prisoners or their family members in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The lawsuit, filed by Iraqi Torture Victims Group (ITVG) on behalf of five Iraqis, names two U.S. companies, CACI International and the Titan Corporation, which were contracted by the U.S. government to provide interrogation services to coalition forces in Iraq. "One of our clients described how it was that interrogators put a gun to his head and basically pulled the trigger a couple of times and then threatened to cut off his head if, in fact, he didn't tell them what it is they wanted him to say," said attorney Rod Edmond, a member of ITVG. In addition, he said, "we have one of our clients who clearly describes an incident where he was abused, he had his hood off, and Gen. (Janis) Karpinski, who said she was not aware at all of any of the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, but he says she was actually there and smiling." Karpinski has not responded to repeated inquires from CNN. CACI International issued a statement blasting the lawsuit, saying it "rejects and denies the allegations of the suit as being a malicious and farcical recitation of false statements and intentional distortions." Tuesday's lawsuit was the latest development in the Abu Ghraib case, which surfaced in early May when photos were made public showing U.S. soldiers allegedly abusing Iraqis at the prison. Seven American soldiers have been accused of abusing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. One has pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a year in prison and given a bad conduct discharge. The remaining six await possible legal action. Six weeks ago, attorney Michael Hourigan went to Iraq and interviewed torture victims and their relatives, ITVG said. Torture victims give graphic details of the horrors of abuses and deaths in Abu Ghraib prison, the organization said. The lawsuit alleges that CACI International and Titan Corporation employees directed and participated in abuse and torture of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison. Edmond contends the allegations are supported by the report on the prison prepared by Maj. Gen. Antonia Taguba. Edmond said the suit seeks "no specific dollar value." "But these are serious allegations, and serious allegations clearly, clearly, entail serious damages," he said. The lawsuit is not related to another suit filed several weeks ago in federal court in San Diego, charging the Titan Corporation and CACI International with engaging in a pattern of racketeering in violation of U.S. and international laws. * * * Reuters: July 27, 2004 U.S. RELEASES FRENCH GUANTANAMO SUSPECTS By Jon Boyle http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsPackageArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID= 554398§ion=news PARIS (Reuters) - The United States has handed over to France several French nationals held without charge in the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba for more than two years, state-run France Info radio says. A lawyer for one of the detainees said he had been informed by the Foreign Ministry on Monday of the men's impending release but could not confirm all seven French detainees at Guantanamo would be sent back to France. The radio said the men were due back in France around midday aboard a special flight and would be interviewed later by a leading anti-terrorist investigator. "I was informed by the (Foreign Ministry) yesterday of their return and that a plane had been chartered," lawyer Jacques Debray said by telephone. He added that the plane had been chartered by the French government and had arrived in Guantanamo on Monday to pick up the men. Debray told RMC radio separately: "They will very likely be placed in detention as soon as they set foot in the plane. In terrorism cases, detention can last up to four days." Some of the men could be placed under formal investigation, he said, adding it was too early to say what the precise charges might be. The Foreign Ministry declined comment on the reports. "We have nothing to say at this stage except that we are continuing our contacts" with the United States over the men's release, said spokesman Herve Ladsous. Justice Minister Dominique Perben said during a visit to Washington in May that some or all of the Frenchmen held in Guantanamo could be released within weeks. But last month his ministry denied a local government official's claim that four men had been freed. The Justice Ministry was not immediately available for comment. RUSSIA ATTACK PLOT Among those detained is Mourad Benchellali, son of a Muslim prayer leader in the Lyon suburb of Venissieux, who is under official investigation by anti-terrorist magistrates along with another son, his wife and three others. They are investigating alleged plans to attack Russian interests in France, including Moscow's embassy in Paris, as a reprisal for Russian actions in its rebel Chechnya region. The Frenchmen are among about 600 suspected al Qaeda and Taliban members still held at Guantanamo after being captured during the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, which began weeks after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. Washington, criticised by human rights groups and many governments for holding the detainees without charging them, has already handed over some prisoners to Britain and Denmark. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last month that the detainees could challenge their confinement in the U.S. courts, a major setback for U.S. President George W. Bush. * * * July 24, 2004 DETAINED BRITON 'WAS TRAINED TERRORIST' Vikram Dodd, The Guardian The United States yesterday claimed that a Briton held as a terrorist at Guantanamo Bay had travelled to Afghanistan to train in holy war and pledged loyalty to Osama bin Laden months before the September 11 attacks. Feroz Abassi, 23, from Croydon, has been held without charge or trial in Guantanamo after being captured, allegedly on an Afghan battlefield. Details of his suspected training as a terrorist were revealed by the US at a London court hearing of Abu Hamza, whom Washington seeks to extradite to stand trial on nine counts of terrorism. The US alleges that Abu Hamza arranged for Mr Abassi, then 21, to be delivered to an al-Qaida training camp in Afghanistan. The US has officially given no details of why it originally held nine Britons and four British residents in Guantanamo. The four remaining detainees were yesterday designated as unlawful enemy combatants. A former disciple of Abu Hamza, James Ujaama, told investigators the cleric asked him to escort Mr Abassi from north London to Taliban-controlled Afganistan. Mr Ujaama, originally from Seattle, says Abu Hamza told him to deliver Abassi to "a frontline commander", with some of the funds for their travel being raised by Hamza's associates in Long Island, New York. On November 13 2000, the two men flew from Heathrow on a Qatar airlines flight to Doha and then on to Karachi, Pakistan, which borders Afghanistan. The two men travelled to Islamabad and Quetta, but Mr Ujaama claims he left Mr Abassi in Pakistan and travelled alone to Afghanistan. But when he phoned Abu Hamza, the cleric ordered him to go back and get the London man. The US alleges Hamza was able to introduce Mr Ujaama and Mr Abassi to a top Taliban leader. Mr Abassi, a former computer studies student, met the shoe-bomb suspect Richard Reid, another former worshipper at the Finsbury Park mosque, in an Afghan guesthouse. The court was told that Mr Abassi "idolised" Reid, who the US says was an explosives expert. The court heard that in March 2001 Mr Abassi rang Mr Ujaama, who by now was back in London, and asked if he could stay in the guesthouse instead of going to the training camp. Mr Ujaama relayed this to Abu Hamza, who reportedly became annoyed and told Mr Ujaama to order Mr Abassi to the camp. Mr Abassi is said to have trained at two camps, the al-Farooq and the Obeida, near Kandahar, run by al-Qaida. There recruits were trained in weapons, explosives, ambush skills and urban warfare. In summer 2001 the al-Farooq camp was reportedly visited by Osama bin Laden, who gave a pep talk to the trainees, telling them to be patient and they would be given a chance to fight. The recruits, including Mr Abassi, allegedly pledged loyalty to him. He is said to have volunteered for a suicide mission and vowed to attack Jewish and US targets. After the September 11 at tacks, when the US invaded Afghanistan, he was sent by al-Qaida to an area near Kandahar airport, to take part in an ambush of US troops. Mr Abassi was captured by Northern Alliance forces on December 19, 2001. On him were an AK47 rifle and two hand grenades. He also had a ticket for a Qatar airlines flight from Karachi to Doha. He was handed over to US forces and held at Bagram airbase before being taken to Guantanamo Bay, where for two years he has been held without charge. In February Mr Abassi's mother, Zumrati Juma, said she blamed Abu Hamza and believed her son was "brainwashed" into entering the war zone. "Abu Hamza should have been punished a long time ago. If it wasn't for him, Feroz would not be where he is now." Ms Juma told the Guardian she feared the US was torturing her son. "There's no way the detainees will not be tortured to give them the information they're after. I fear he'll say anything to get out or to stop someone inflicting pain on him," says Ms Juma. * * * Gulf Daily News: July 23, 2004 GUANTANAMO PLEA FILED IN US COURT By Abdulrahman Fakhri http://www.gulf-daily-news.com/Story.asp?Article=87461&Sn=BNEW&IssueID=27125 A PETITION on behalf of Bahraini Guantanamo Bay detainees has been filed by the US law firm Dorsey and Whitney in the Washington district court. The petition, filed on Wednesday by the firm's associate lawyer Bryan Colangelo, challenges the detention as part of an international legal action. Mr Colangelo now joins the team of human rights lawyers headed by US-based lawyer and Justice in Exile executive director Clive Stafford-Smith, who will arrive in Bahrain on Monday to discuss the legal action with the detainees' families. "A number of law firms have approached the team to join them in representing the cases of the detainees without charge," Bahrain Centre for Human Rights (BCHR) president Nabil Rajab told the GDN yesterday. "Dorsey and Whitney was chosen in view of its continued commitment to serve the legal needs of disadvantaged individuals and of organisations who cannot afford to pay for legal services." Some of the cases handled by the firm, which has more than 650 lawyers, cover political asylum, non-profit organisations, minority entrepreneurs, civil rights for the accused and incarcerated, children's rights and community issues. This latest move follows a legal challenge on behalf of the detainees that was launched at the US Federal Court by their team of lawyers on July 8. This has been possible following the US Supreme Court verdict on June 28, which granted detainees the right to dispute their detention in US courts. The human rights lawyers will meet relatives of five of the six Bahraini and other Gulf detainees on Tuesday to discuss the case. The detainees who will be represented are Shaikh Salman bin Ebrahim Al Khalifa, Juma Mohammed Al Dossary, Essa Al Murbati, Salah Abdul Rasool Al Blooshi and Adel Kamel Hajee. The only Bahraini detainee not currently aligned with the action is Abdulla Majid Al Nuaimi. Mr Rajab said that there was another family of a seventh detainee living in Bahrain,who might grant power of attorney to the lawyers during the meeting. He would not disclose the nationality of the seventh detainee. Mr Rajab said the lawyers, along with BCHR representatives, will also meet officials from the Foreign Ministry on Wednesday to co-ordinate efforts. The ministry announced on July 1 that the government delegated a lawyer to defend the Bahraini detainees. Mr Rajab said that similar meetings would be held with parliament and Shura Council members. He said that lawyers will also meet families of detainees from Saudi, the UAE, Kuwait and other countries in the region during their tour of the Gulf. There are more than 200 detainees, who are being represented free of charge by the lawyers, of whom 90 are from Saudi Arabia. Mr Stafford-Smith will be accompanied by the Kuwaiti Guantanamo Bay Detainees Committee head Khalid Al Ouda and a representative from Amnesty International. More than 600 men from over 40 countries are being held at Guantanamo Bay on suspicion of links to terrorism or the fallen Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Some of them have been imprisoned without charge for more than two-and-a-half years. * * * Charleston Post and Courier: July 22, 2004 NO ONE HURT IN SMALL FIRE AT NAVY BRIG Staff report http://www.charleston.net/stories/072204/loc_22firebrig.shtml A small fire broke out at the Charleston Naval Consolidated Brig on Wednesday evening, but was extinguished within minutes by the Charleston Naval Weapons Station Fire Department, according to weapons station officials. The fire occurred on the roof of the brig shortly before 7 p.m., but firefighters put out the blaze only a few minutes later, according to spokeswoman Susan Piedfort. No one was injured, and the brig maintained normal operations, Piedfort said. So far, the cause of the fire has not been established, Piedfort said. A crew was performing repairs on the roof, she said. The brig houses Jose Padilla, Yaser Hamdi and Ali Saleh al-Marri, who are being held as enemy combatants by the federal government. Piedfort did not know how close the fire was to the three detainees. * * * menafn.com / UPI-- July 22, 2004 SEPT. 11 PANEL SLATES GITMO POLICY http://www.menafn.com/qn_news_story.asp?StoryId= Cqp87WeidoteXy29TBwLZC2LVBI1NAxrTBW WASHINGTON, July 22 (UPI) -- The Sept. 11 commission will criticize the Bush administration's decision not to grant prisoner of war status to terror detainees. In a report published Thursday, "the commission appears to raise questions about the Bush administration's legal approach to al-Qaida detainees apprehended overseas," the Washington Post reports, "although the extent of the panel's critique is not clear because an excerpt obtained by The Post is incomplete." The excerpt suggests America's relationship with its allies in the war on terror has been jeopardized by its policy of defining those held at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere as "illegal combatants," calling for the development of "a common coalition approach toward the detention and humane treatment of captured terrorists." "New principles might endorse the application of Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions on the law of armed conflict," the report says, the Post said. "That article was specifically designed for those cases in which the usual laws of war did not apply. Its minimum standards are generally accepted throughout the world as customary international law." The recommendation echoes the long-held views of many military lawyers. -- Copyright 2004 by United Press International. All rights reserved. -- * * * BBC -- July 22, 2004 SADDAM LAWYERS APPEAL TO EUROPE http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3917481.stm Lawyers defending Saddam Hussein have filed a petition with the European Court of Human Rights to try to gain access to the former Iraqi ruler. Defence lawyer Emmanuel Ludot told French radio that his client was being deprived of his right to legal counsel under the Geneva Conventions. The petition asks France to put pressure on the US to remedy this. Mr Ludot said the court could force a convention signatory to intervene with another to demand compliance. The complaint is based on Article One of each Geneva Convention, which requires parties "to ensure respect for the present Convention in all circumstances". Mr Ludot said he had petitioned the US to gain access to Saddam Hussein - to no avail. He said he had chosen France to put pressure on Washington because it had a reputation for respecting human rights. Lawyers for the US Defence Department ruled earlier this year that Saddam Hussein was a prisoner of war, protected by Geneva Conventions. However, the US transferred the ousted leader to legal Iraqi custody when sovereignty was restored to Baghdad at the end of June. As a result, Saddam Hussein lost his PoW status. He remains detained at a facility run by the US. Second petition Mr Ludot said defence lawyers had been unable to see their client since the transfer. "The detaining power has acted in such a way as to paralyse the rights of the defence, pure and simple," he said. Last month, the European Court of Human Rights - based in Strasbourg - threw out another petition by Saddam Hussein's lawyers asking that Britain, as an occupying power, be barred from turning him over to Iraqi custody. Mr Ludot is a member of a 21-strong defence team based in Jordan. Saddam Hussein is facing trial in an Iraqi court for alleged crimes against humanity committed against Kurds, Shias, and opposition activists over three decades. * * * The Observer (UK) -- July 18, 2004 GERMANY TO DROP 9/11 PLOT CHARGES Evidence against only man jailed for terror attack 'weak' By David Rose http://www.guardian.co.uk/september11/story/0,11209,1263804,00.html German prosecutors are preparing to drop all the most serious charges against the only man convicted for the 11 September attacks, because they fear that crucial American evidence was obtained by torturing detainees. The case is set to deepen further the rift between Germany and the United States, which accused the Germans of failing to act against terror when it first emerged three of the hijacking pilots had lived in Hamburg. 'No doubt they will complain bitterly,' a German anti-terrorist official said yesterday. 'Let us say we have different views on how to handle this problem.' Mounir Motassadeq, 29, an alleged member of al-Qaeda's Hamburg cell based around hijack leader Mohamed Atta's apartment, admitted going to a training camp in Afghanistan, signing Atta's will and transferring thousands of dollars to accounts controlled by Ramzi Binalshibh, one of the plot's main planners. But an appeals court quashed his original conviction and 15-year sentence last April on the ground that he should have had access to statements Binalshibh made to US interrogators after his capture in Pakistan. Motassadeq claimed that Binalshibh's statements, which the Americans were refusing to make available, would have confirmed he knew nothing of the 9/11 conspiracy. The appeal judges said without testimony from Binalshibh or the plot's mastermind, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the case that Motassadeq was an active conspirator was weak. His retrial starts next month. A senior German intelligence official told The Observer that, although the US Justice Department has now supplied the interrogation records, they would be virtually useless in their present state. 'They contain no details as to where Binalshibh and Mohamed were questioned, nor whether torture or other forms of force were used to make them talk,' he said. 'Their contents may be information and they may be disinformation.' After the recent publication of photographs of Iraqi prisoners being tortured at Abu Ghraib, and the admission by the US administration that a range of coercive methods were authorised for inter rogators in the war on terror, a German court would need firm evidence that the statements were truly voluntary, the official went on. He said the German authorities were now resigned to dropping the charge that Motassadeq was involved in 9/11, and would have to settle for trying to convict him of membership of a terrorist organisation, for which he is unlikely to be jailed for more than the two and a half years he served between his arrest and appeal. Josef Graessle-Münscher, Motassadeq's lawyer, said that under German law techniques which have been authorised in Guantanamo Bay, such as sleep deprivation and psychological deception, would render any statements inadmissible. However, Binalshibh and Mohammed are prisoners not of the military but of the CIA, at an undisclosed location. It has been widely reported that their techniques have been harsher and have included 'waterboarding' - covering a prisoner's face with towels and pouring on water until he believes he is about to drown. 'In Germany, any use of force to produce a statement is unlawful,' said Graessle-Münscher. 'After Abu Ghraib, if the Americans want to see Motassadeq convicted for 9/11 they are going to have to prove both Binalshibh and Mohammed are in good health, and that they say Motassadeq was a conspirator.' * * * The Nation: July 15, 2004 LETTER FROM GROUND ZERO: HEALING THE LAW by Jonathan Schell http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040802&s=schell The Supreme Court of the United States has had two historic encounters with George W. Bush. The first was its decision to stop the recount of the presidential vote in Florida in December 2000 and, in effect, to put Bush in the White House. The second was the series of decisions rendered in June in the cases regarding the detainees in Guantanamo and the two American citizens being held as "enemy combatants." I was watching television coverage at the moment the Court stayed the Florida recount and witnessed a vote counter lift her hand to examine a ballot and then, when the news of the decision came, drop it, with evident sadness, back onto the uncounted pile. The law, usually seen as a support and foundation of democracy, had in this case visibly stopped it cold. The decision sent a shock wave through the legal community. Some 673 law professors from 173 law schools signed a statement asserting that "by stopping the vote count in Florida, the US Supreme Court used its power to act as political partisans, not as judges of a court of law." Professor Robert Post, then teaching constitutional law at UC Berkeley, wrote that the decision made him feel "shame" before his students. There rose up before his eyes "a searing and disorienting vision of a world without law." Even Post probably could not have imagined how quickly the vision would materialize. For if the policies of the Bush Administration have exhibited any one constant theme, it has been contempt, visceral as well as philosophical, in domestic as well as foreign affairs, for law. The Administration's distaste for international treaties and laws soon became evident. The President withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol on global warming and the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, pulled out of talks to create an inspection system for the Biological Weapons Convention and "unsigned" the Rome statute for the creation of an International Criminal Court. Since laws and legal opinions come into effect only upon signing, the act of "unsigning"--an invention of the White House, with no precedent in the annals of the presidency--seemed to symbolize a world of evaporating statutes. The deed was one aspect of a comprehensive onslaught, which quickly unfolded, on the very idea of law. Its chief elements were the claim by and for the United States, and the United States alone, of a right and duty to order the twenty- first-century world through the use of America's unchallengeable military force. The vision's essential corollaries were the right to wage preventive war and to overthrow other governments violently and unilaterally. Its goals were to stop the spread (but not reverse the existing possession) of weapons of mass destruction and to remake the world politically and economically in the image of the United States. The conflict between this vision--correctly called imperial by many of its supporters as well as its detractors--and international law is not incidental but systemic. The ideas of empire and of international law are both ordering principles: Both are means for organizing the world. They are in competition for the same turf. The world can no more be both an imperial world and a world of law than one car can be driven by two people to two places at the same time. Or, to be exact, to the extent that the imperial vision advances, the legal project must be thrown back and vice versa. The essence of law is the establishment of a single consistent standard, which is to be obeyed by ruled and ruler alike. The essence of empire is imposition of a double standard--with one standard for the imperial ruler, another for the ruled. The imperial principles of preventive wars and regime change cannot be principles of international law, because their universalization would bring chaos. The point, of course, is not that in the year 2000 the world was governed according to law (for it was not) only to be suddenly thrown into disorder by the imperial ambitions of President Bush. Rather a slow evolution, which had made surprisingly good progress since the end of the cold war, toward a more cooperative, lawful world was thrown into reverse by the rise of a rival imperial vision. The title of an article by Richard Perle, chairman of the Defense Policy Board, on the significant occasion of the launch of the Iraq war, summed up what was afoot: "Thank God for the death of the UN: Its abject failure gave us only anarchy. The world needs order." He went on to write, "As we sift the debris, it will be important to preserve, the better to understand, the intellectual wreckage of the liberal conceit of safety through international law administered by international institutions." The disclosure of the use of torture in America's offshore detention system revealed a subterranean dimension of the conflict between empire and law. Torture is a common product of imperial rule. It is especially likely to occur when imperial violence meets resistance, as it soon did in Iraq, giving rise to the torture at Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere. Even the refusal of Guantanamo detainees to give information under interrogation was interpreted, well before the Iraq war, as "resistance." Therefore "counterresistance" techniques, in the words of one Pentagon memo, were developed. They included death threats to detainees and feigned threats to their families and suffocation by water torture. On February 7, 2002, President Bush wrote in a secret memo later made public, "Our nation recognizes that this new paradigm--ushered in not by us, but by terrorists--requires new thinking in the law of war." The call for new thinking was soon answered in a stream of legal memos. The Justice Department advised the executive branch that neither international treaties, such as the Geneva Conventions, nor the laws passed by Congress--including, of course, the US Criminal Code--could in any way limit a President's right to order torture or otherwise abuse prisoners, while Pentagon lawyers stated: "Any effort by Congress to regulate the interrogation of unlawful combatants would violate the Constitution's sole vesting of the Commander-in-Chief authority in the President." These memos were produced in secret. In public, the Administration put forward a claim scarcely less breathtaking in its sweep: It asserted its power to designate any person, including any American citizen, as an enemy combatant and to imprison that person indefinitely without any right to legal representation, to receive visits or to file habeas corpus or any other petition before a court to establish innocence. No less than in the torture memos, the Administration was unilaterally asserting a profound change in the permanent structure of US law. Such was the legal landscape as the Supreme Court faced its second major encounter, in the detention cases, with the man it had made President almost four years before. A question even larger than the legal ones was on the table. The Administration had come to power through an abuse of the lawful authority of the Court. Would there now be any limit to that Administration's own legal abuses? In the period of the Iraq war, other checks and balances provided in the constitutional system had failed: Congress surrendered its war power to the President, and the press, taken as a whole, had become a cheering section for the war. In its decisions, the Court delivered a firm rebuke to the Administration's imperial conception of the law. It required detainees to have some chance to show their innocence in a judicial forum. Several sentences from the opinions jumped immediately from the legal documents into the newspapers and history, among them Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's declaration that "a state of war is not a blank check for the president when it comes to the rights of the nation's citizens." Especially notable was the opinion of Justice Antonin Scalia, thought by some to be the Court's most conservative member. In Scalia's opinion, the majority gave the executive too much leeway in the case of Yaser Hamdi, a US citizen captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan. The Court, he said, should not have ordered up some vague, yet-to-be determined habeas-like proceeding in lower courts for Hamdi. Instead, it should either have demanded that the Administration charge him with treason, as the Constitution provides, or let him go. But more important than the substance of the decisions and the opinions was the fact of a clear, strong, effective rebuff on the otherwise unconstrained growth of presidential power. That this came from the Court that had put Bush in office in the first place added great weight to the decision. The Justices seemed to be saying, "We meant to make you President, not king." Would it be too much to hope that in this decision, a signal has been given that the seeming tacit coordination among Republicans in all branches of government put on display in Bush v. Gore has weakened; that swelling executive power has reached its high tide and now will ebb; that the "conservative" drive to create imperial law, or lawlessness, has run up against a bedrock of republican principle that knows no party name and is honored by the conservatives themselves? Such a conclusion is no doubt premature. At least one more remedy is needed if the relationship between democracy and law, knocked askew by Bush v. Gore, is to be righted. The body that was silenced in that decision--the American electorate--must deliver its verdict on the vision of a lawless world proposed to it by George W. Bush. * * * Baltimore Sun -- July 15, 2004 GENERAL FACES ABU GHRAIB SCRUTINY By Tom Bowman, Sun National Staff http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bal-te.fast15jul15,0,7383515.story?coll=bal- home-headlines WASHINGTON - Among the handful of Army officers facing scrutiny in the investigation of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast is perhaps the least known, but among the most important. Fast, 50, the senior intelligence officer in Iraq, was the key conduit for orders and information that related to Abu Ghraib, which she visited frequently, including the infamous cellblocks 1A and 1B, where abuses took place. A civilian interrogator at the prison wrote that she was involved in CIA access, and Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who was the overall commander of military police at the facility, said Fast was aware of a Red Cross report revealing wrongdoing at the prison three months before the scandal broke. Fast approved the order putting Col. Thomas M. Pappas, commander of a military intelligence brigade at Abu Ghraib in overall command of the prison. She prodded him for fresh information from detainees so insistently that he remarked, "It's worse than a root canal," Karpinski said. Fast also installed Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, an aggressive interrogator who said that he "only reported to her," said Army officers and soldiers who served with Fast in Iraq. Pappas, Jordan and some of the civilian interrogators have since been singled out in an Army report by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba for being "either directly or indirectly responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib." The two officers have been reprimanded. Fast, whose career has ascended rapidly, has been given a plum assignment when she leaves Iraq next month: commander of the Army's intelligence center and school at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., where she served a brief tour as assistant commandant. "Major General Fast is not doing interviews related to Abu Ghraib while the [Army intelligence] investigation is ongoing," said Maj. Carolyn Dysart, a spokesman for U.S. forces in Iraq. "It would be inappropriate for her to comment." A clearer picture of Fast, one of the highest-ranking women in the Army, is likely to emerge in coming weeks through the report by Army intelligence investigators that Dysart referred to, Senate hearings and questions by attorneys representing the military police facing courts-martial. All seven who have been charged are low-level reservists attached to the 372nd Military Police Unit based in Cresaptown, Md. Their attorneys argue that military intelligence officers ordered the MPs to commit the abuses to gain information. Sen. John W. Warner, a Virginia Republican who chairs the Armed Services Committee, has listed Fast among those he wants the committee to question about Abu Ghraib. "It would seem that her new command is certainly premature, if not inappropriate," said Sen. Richard J. Durbin, an Illinois Democrat. "There are still so many unanswered questions." "It's very strange. [Fast] was never suspended. And she [will take] command of Fort Huachuca," said Karpinski, who was commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade until she received a letter of admonishment for her alleged leadership failures and was suspended from command. She is trying to get reinstated to her post. Fast was aware of at least some of the Abu Ghraib activities of CIA personnel, a number of whom are being questioned about the abuses and at least one death, according to the writings of a civilian interrogator at Abu Ghraib, Joe Ryan, who worked for the Virginia-based contractor CACI International. In a Web diary that is part of a court exhibit filed by Iraqis who claim they were abused at the prison, Ryan wrote: "The CIA has proven once again they are incompetent boobs. ... They have General Fast's ire. They cannot set foot on Abu Ghurayb without her expressed permission." Fast arrived in Baghdad late last summer to become intelligence chief for the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez. How she ran intelligence operations is among the questions of an Army investigation led by Lt. Gen. Anthony R. Jones, whose equivalent rank allows him to question Sanchez. Karpinski said Fast spoke of the difficulties of gathering intelligence in Iraq. "She said, 'It's like herding cats. I can't get my arms around it,'" Karpinski said. As the insurgency increased throughout the summer, Fast repeatedly pressed her staff for more information from the detainees, according to fellow officers. One intelligence officer who worked with Pappas said he seemed beaten down. "There was a lot of pressure for [intelligence]. Anything that could affect the safety of our soldiers," he said. After meetings with Fast, Karpinski said, Pappas would "hold his head and say, 'It's worse than a root canal.'" Pappas pressed his soldiers to conduct more interrogations and produce more reports. Harsher techniques were also being approved. Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, commander of the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, visited Abu Ghraib in September and said MPs should "set the conditions" for interrogations, a phrase that has been interpreted by some as meaning softening up the prisoners for questioning. Miller later told Congress he meant only that the MPs should monitor detainees, watch whom they talked with, study their demeanor and report such details to military interrogators. Karpinski said Pappas "got beat up pretty badly by General Miller, I mean in terms of his criticism," according to an appendix to the Taguba report posted yesterday on the Web site of U.S. News and World Report. Sanchez soon authorized as many as 30 interrogation tactics for detainees at Abu Ghraib, including sleep deprivation and crouching positions. Some were later rescinded. More interrogators were sent to Abu Ghraib in the fall. Fast told visiting Lt. Gen. William Boykin, the top Pentagon intelligence official that "they were going to be picking up the pace with some of the procedures that General Miller had recommended to them," said Karpinski, who said she was present at the meeting. Some of the intelligence officers and civilian contractors at the prison said they were on special assignments for Fast or worked directly for her. "They would play the 'General Fast card,' saying they only reported to her," said a military intelligence soldier who served at Abu Ghraib. Karpinski told Taguba that she complained that a former Iraqi prisoner had been put to work as a translator with "no background check," according to the appendix. "I talked to General Fast about it several times," she said. "Nobody seemed to care that this guy was out there and had full access to everywhere on the compound." Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, the Army's senior intelligence officer, told Congress in May that Army intelligence in Iraq had oversight of the civilian contractors and that Fast was responsible for making sure they understood the interrogation rules. Jordan, who was selected by Fast to run the interrogation center at the prison, also told Karpinski that he reported directly to Fast, Karpinski said. In October, investigators from the International Committee of the Red Cross made one of their periodic visits to Abu Ghraib and were troubled by what they saw. The investigators reported seeing detainees kept "completely naked in totally empty concrete cells and in total darkness." They complained to U.S. officials, and "the military intelligence officer in charge of the interrogation explained that this practice was 'part of the process,'" the report said. Karpinski said she was given earlier Red Cross reports but not the one from that October visit. The next month she learned of the report during a meeting attended by Maj. Gen. Walter Wojdakowski, Sanchez's deputy, Col. Marc Warren, Sanchez's legal officer and Pappas. The officers helped Karpinski prepare an official response. "I said, 'What does General Fast say about this? She saw the report. She's aware of it,'" Warren said. * * * July 15, 2004 4TH DETAINEE TO FACE TRIAL BY TRIBUNAL * Bin Laden's ex-driver is accused of murder and other counts. His lawyer and others have sued over the military panels. By Mark Mazzetti, Times Staff Writer http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na- gitmo15jul15,1,7641558.story?coll=la-headlines-nation WASHINGTON -- A Yemeni man who once served as Osama bin Laden's personal driver has been ordered to stand trial by a military commission on charges of murder, terrorism and conspiracy to attack civilians, the Pentagon said Wednesday. Salim Ahmed Salim Hamdan became the fourth detainee at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, named to go before a tribunal, which President Bush authorized for foreign nationals facing terrorism counts after the Sept. 11 attacks. No trial date has been set. According to the charge sheet released by the Pentagon, Hamdan served as Bin Laden's bodyguard and personal driver from the time the two met in 1996 until November 2001, when Hamdan was captured and sent to the detention center at Guantanamo Bay. During that time, according to U.S. officials, Hamdan delivered weapons and ammunition to Al Qaeda members, received handgun and machine gun training at an Al Qaeda training base in Afghanistan and shuttled Bin Laden around Afghanistan as the Al Qaeda chief planned the 1998 attacks against the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. "During these trips, Osama bin Laden would give speeches in which he would encourage others to conduct 'martyr missions' (meaning an attack wherein one would kill himself as well as the targets of the attack) against the Americans, to engage in war against the Americans, and to drive the 'infidels' out of the Arabian Peninsula," the charge sheet said. Navy Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, Hamdan's lawyer, and other attorneys have filed a federal lawsuit in U.S. district court in Seattle attacking the tribunals as an "unprecedented, unconstitutional, and dangerously unchecked expansion of executive authority." Swift is in Yemen investigating the case and could not be reached for comment. In previous interviews, Swift has acknowledged that his client was Bin Laden's driver, but says he never participated in any terrorist activities. The Pentagon charge sheet does not implicate Hamdan in the planning or execution of any terrorist attacks. The lead counsel in the Seattle case, however, said that charging Hamdan now, after 2 1/2 years in U.S. custody, is yet another instance of how the military tribunal process violates the tenets of U.S. military justice. "Military law requires charges to be brought within 90 days of confinement. We are well, well past that point," said Neal K. Katyal, a law professor at Georgetown University who is representing Swift and other military lawyers in the federal case. "This is a further example of the reckless disregard with which the Pentagon has treated the military justice system." Katyal also criticized that the Pentagon for deciding to officially charge Hamdan while his lawyer, Swift, was out of the country. In addition to the four detainees officially charged, the Pentagon has identified 11 other men as potential defendants for military tribunals. The three other Guantanamo Bay detainees currently facing tribunals are David Hicks of Australia, Ali Hamza Ahamad Sulayman al Bahlul of Yemen and Ibrahim Ahmed Mahmoud al Qosi of Sudan. * * * State College (PA) Centre Daily Times: July 14, 2004 ANGER SEETHES IN HYNDMAN OVER ABU GHRAIB SOLDIER By Charles Sheehan http://www.centredaily.com/mld/centredaily/news/politics/9153677.htm HYNDMAN, Pa. (AP) - Two months after he was sentenced to prison, Jeremy Sivits' neighbors will not accept that he was a "bad apple" for the role he played in the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. They say Sivits, described as an all-American boy who played semipro ball for the Hyndman Merchants, has been railroaded by the military command that they insist should bear most of the responsibility for abuses at the prison. "This is a shame on our country," said Tom Cunningham, Hyndman's mayor for 30 years. "There's been so many lies. ... This is not America." Anger is seething in Hyndman, a town of about 1,000 people along the Maryland border. On Wednesday, about 80 neighbors were gathering publicly once again to demand that Sivits be exonerated, that he be reinstated as a soldier, and that authorities issue a public apology to Sivits and his family. "We are damn angry," said Brandon Greise, who went to high school with Sivits. "Why is a Specialist E-4 the only one that's in jail? It's political. This is all political. We're looking at another Vietnam." Rhonda Sites, manager of Jumee's diner, said while people were angry, they weren't sure what more could be done other than wait for Sivits' return. "He'll be able to walk down the street with his head high in this town," Sites said. About 200 people gathered in May to hold a candlelight vigil for Sivits. Many waved small American flags and called their former neighbor a hero. Residents and family in Hyndman, as well as in some other communities where soldiers implicated in the abuse had lived, said they are doing their best to keep the story alive. They say it is the only way the truth will surface - that the soldiers were under intense pressure from above. Late last month, relatives of Staff Sgt. Ivan "Chip" Frederick II in Baltimore opened a T-shirt and bumper sticker campaign along the same lines, suggesting that high-ranking officials are shielding themselves from blame. Jonathan Davis, whose son Javal is charged criminally with abusing prisoners, said he is trying to keep the story alive in his hometown of Roselle, N.J. "I'm doing as many interviews as I can and I'm holding some fund-raisers for his defense," he said. "This administration would like for this story fade away, but we'll keep it alive here in Roselle. This is one of our own." Seven members of the 372nd Military Police Company, a reserve unit from Cresaptown, Md., have been charged in the scandal, which gained attention in April after CBS' "60 Minutes II" broadcast photos of abuse and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners. The Bush administration characterized the abuse as the failings of a few renegade soldiers and promised that those responsible will be quickly punished. Civilian defense attorneys have contended the MPs were acting on instructions from military intelligence officers and civilian contract interrogators. Sivits pleaded guilty in May to taking photos of the abuse and humiliation of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. A member of the Reserve, he was not trained as a prison guard, family members say. He received the maximum sentence of one year in prison, a reduction in rank and a bad conduct discharge. "The bad conduct discharge is the worst of it all," Cunningham said. "That's a man who wanted to be a professional soldier and loves his country. There's not a person here who doesn't think he's a sacrificial lamb." Daniel Sivits, a Vietnam vet, said his son was ordered to take the photos, but has largely remained out of view since his son was sentenced two months ago. In Hyndman, residents were holding a cookout Wednesday evening to talk as a community about what they could do to free Sivits. "We want to keep this in the mind of America," said Cunningham, the former mayor. "We see it every day because we are his neighbors. We want the rest of the world to know what's happened here." * * * Reuters: July 14, 2004 US CHARGES YEMENI DESCRIBED AS BIN LADEN BODYGUARD By Will Dunham http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=5672614 WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States has charged a Yemeni described as a bodyguard and driver for Osama bin Laden with conspiracy, making him the fourth Guantanamo prisoner to face trial before a military tribunal, the Pentagon said on Wednesday. Salim Ahmed Hamdan, one of 594 prisoners held at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was charged with a single count of conspiracy to commit murder, attacks on civilians and terrorism. The charge sheet does not refer to any killing or other specific act of violence committed by Hamdan. The U.S. government will not seek the death penalty against him, said Maj. Michael Shavers, a Pentagon spokesman. Hamdan's case was referred to a tribunal -- formally called a military commission -- of five U.S. officers, but no trial date was set, the Pentagon said. The U.S. military commissions, the first of their kind since World War II, have faced criticism from human rights groups who argue the rules are rigged to hamstring defense lawyers and produce convictions. Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, the military lawyer assigned by the Pentagon to defend Hamdan, filed a lawsuit in April in federal court in Seattle arguing the tribunals represent an unconstitutional expansion of executive branch powers. PERSONAL DRIVER The Pentagon described Hamdan, held for more than two years at Guantanamo, as a member of al Qaeda, which carried out the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, and said he first met with bin Laden in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in 1996. The charge sheet said Hamdan became a bodyguard and personal driver for the Saudi-born al Qaeda chief, serving in those roles until his capture in Afghanistan in November 2001 in military operations launched by the United States following the Sept. 11 attacks. It said Hamdan received weapons training at an al Qaeda training camp and drove or accompanied bin Laden to camps, news conferences and lectures. The charge sheet also accused Hamdan of delivering weapons, ammunition and other supplies to al Qaeda members, and picking up weapons from Taliban warehouses for use by the head of al Qaeda's security committee. The government says Hamdan is an "unprivileged belligerent" who, unlike a uniformed soldier in a nation's army, does not have the right to kill another person on the battlefield. THREE OTHERS CHARGED The same tribunal that will hear his case will handle the trials of the other three charged Guantanamo prisoners. Australian David Hicks was charged in June with three counts: conspiracy to commit war crimes, attempted murder and aiding the enemy. Ali Hamza Ahmed Sulayman al Bahlul of Yemen and Ibrahim Ahmed Mahmoud al Qosi of Sudan were charged in February with a single count each of conspiracy to commit war crimes. No trial dates have been set in those cases. Since January 2002, the United States has held prisoners captured in what President Bush calls the global war on terrorism at the remote Guantanamo base. Most were seized in Afghanistan. Bush has designated 15 prisoners as eligible for trials before military tribunals. The charge against Hamdan was brought 12 months after Bush first designated him as eligible for trial. * * * July 19, 2004 Issue US News & World Report: HELL ON EARTH Life in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, newly available documents show, would have made Satan quake By Edward T. Pound and Kit R. Roane http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/040719/usnews/19prison.htm In October last year, Army Capt. Donald Reese visited the Abu Ghraib prison complex near Baghdad for the first time. He had plenty of reason to be there. He had just been installed as the warden of part of the prison, and as he toured cellblock 1, he was stunned to see a bunch of naked prisoners. He would later tell Army investigators: "My first reaction was, 'Wow, there [are] a lot of nude people here.' " Army intelligence officers assured him, he testified, that "nothing was illegal or wrong about it"--that, in fact, stripping the prisoners was a tried-and-true intelligence tactic used to make the prisoners uncomfortable. By his own account, Reese, a reservist and window-blinds salesman in civilian life, was ill-prepared for the job. He had never before set foot in a prison, even as a visitor, and he knew nothing of the Geneva Conventions, which specify conditions for humane treatment of enemy prisoners of war and others. "I, myself, have never been in a prison," Reese told Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who was assigned to investigate the issue of abuses at Abu Ghraib. "So I had no experience at all as far as a warden or that type of thing." As things turned out, of course, there was plenty wrong with the treatment that some of Reese's soldiers inflicted on Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib. The Army admonished Reese for failing to supervise his subordinates, but he is not alone: Criminal charges have been brought against seven soldiers in Reese's 372nd Military Police Company, while other military police and intelligence officers have been reprimanded. Several Defense Department investigations are underway, and the Senate is planning a close look. These various inquiries may answer the most pressing questions: How did the mess at Abu Ghraib happen? Was it, as the Bush administration says, the work of just a few rogue soldiers, a few bad apples? Or did some senior military leaders, despite their denials, know what was going on inside the prison walls late at night? For now, the most compelling evidence of what happened is contained in a report completed in March by General Taguba. He found, the report says, "sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses." Chaos. Over the past two months, many of the classified documents supporting Taguba's findings have emerged in various news accounts, including in U.S. News. But the magazine now has obtained all 106 classified annexes to the report, and the several thousand pages of material provide the most comprehensive view yet of what went wrong at Abu Ghraib and in the Army's management of the teeming prison system in Iraq after Saddam Hussein's government was toppled. Taguba focused mostly on the MP s assigned to guard the inmates at Abu Ghraib, but the classified files in the annex to his report show that military intelligence officers--dispatched to Abu Ghraib by the top commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez--were intimately involved in some of the interrogation techniques widely viewed as abusive. The abuses took place, the files show, in a chaotic and dangerous environment made even more so by the constant pressure from Washington to squeeze intelligence from detainees. Riots, prisoner escapes, shootings, corrupt Iraqi guards, unsanitary conditions, rampant sexual misbehavior, bug-infested food, prisoner beatings and humiliations, and almost-daily mortar shellings from Iraqi insurgents--according to the annex to General Taguba's report, that pretty much sums up life at Abu Ghraib. It was an environment for which not just Reese's reservists but many regular Army troops were singularly unprepared. Col. Henry Nelson, an Air Force psychiatrist who prepared a report for Taguba on Abu Ghraib, described it as a "new psychological battlefield" and detailed the nature of the challenge faced by the Americans working in the overcrowded prison. "These detainees are male and female, young and old," Nelson wrote; "they may be innocent, may have high intelligence value, or may be terrorists or criminals. No matter who they are, if they are at Abu Ghraib, they are remanded in deplorable, dangerous living conditions, as are the soldiers." The documents provide new insight into how Abu Ghraib was spiraling out of control even as top military commanders battled behind closed doors over how best to run the facility and obtain more usable intelligence information from detainees. General Sanchez and Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, a reservist who commanded the 800th MP Brigade, to which Reese's unit was attached, were often at loggerheads over the management of Abu Ghraib. In her secret testimony, Karpinski, who was criticized for leadership failures in the Taguba report, said Sanchez refused to provide her with the necessary resources to run Abu Ghraib and other prisons. Sanchez, she said under oath, didn't "give a flip" about his soldiers, and added: "I think that his ego will not allow him to accept a Reserve brigade, a Reserve general officer, and certainly not a female succeeding in a combat environment. And I think he looked at the 800th MP Brigade as the opportunity to find a scapegoat . . . . " As the commanders battled it out, soldiers at Abu Ghraib were confused over who was in charge, the documents show. At one point, someone smuggled a handgun to one of the detainees, and Karpinski ordered a report on the incident but was told that Lt. Col. Steven Jordan, the senior military intelligence officer in the prison, had issued a gag order to her MP s. Karpinski blew up. "Bullcrap," she replied, according to her interview by General Taguba. " . . . They're still my MP's." Weak leadership in the prison meant soldiers couldn't accomplish basic tasks, like feeding their detainees. Without a clear chain of command, especially after Sanchez informed Karpinski that military intelligence authorities would assume responsibility for running a key area of Abu Ghraib where Iraqis were detained for interrogation, some soldiers just ran wild. "One of the tower guards was shooting prisoners with lead balls and a slingshot," a company commander testified. Karpinski, in her interview with Taguba, said some soldiers likened the place to "the wild, wild West." Soldiers ran around in civilian clothes and covered latrines with so much graffiti a commander had them painted black. An Army captain photographed female subordinates showering in outside stalls while private contractors smuggled beer into the prison. "A hodgepodge." The place, the documents suggest, was bedlam. Colonel Jordan, when questioned by General Taguba about how out of hand the camp had become, said: "I mean every time I turned left, sir, there was all this stuff coming up." The intelligence officer noted that in one 18-hour period he had had to deal with two soldiers abusing a prisoner, another soldier being sexually propositioned by an officer, and a third sick and vomiting in her room after drinking too much alcohol. He also worried, he testified, that "hookers" were living in some bunks. Abu Ghraib wasn't the only prison where abuses took place. The problems there, the newly available documents show, had their roots months earlier at another U.S.-run detention center in southern Iraq called Camp Bucca. Evidence showed that MP s viciously attacked prisoners there, including one who had his nose smashed in. Four soldiers were given less than honorable discharges but were not prosecuted. "I'm convinced that what happened [at Abu Ghraib] would never have happened if" the Camp Bucca cases had been prosecuted, Maj. Michael Sheridan, who worked at Abu Ghraib, told General Taguba. Abu Ghraib housed several thousand detainees of all kinds, in the "hard site" and in two tent encampments, Camp Vigilant and Camp Ganci. "We had juveniles, we had females, we had the crazy," Reese told Taguba. "I don't want to call them crazy, but the psych ward was also dumped on Wing One [of Abu Ghraib]. So we had quite a hodgepodge of people in there." Included in the hodgepodge were hardened criminals, plus security detainees who might be of "intelligence value" in terms of identifying those responsible for the Iraqi insurgency and attacks on American and allied forces. An intelligence officer who testified in the Taguba inquiry said he felt the pressure: "Sir, I was told a couple times . . . that some of the reporting was getting read by [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld, folks out of Langley [the Central Intelligence Agency], some very senior folks." But at the same time, soldiers complained in testimony, there seemed little interest from the top brass in providing the prison facility with what it needed to get the job done. None of the top commanders wanted to hear about the lack of prison guards, lack of guns for MP s or floodlights to bathe the compounds at night and prevent escapes, almost a constant threat at Abu Ghraib. Soldiers complained that there weren't enough of them to properly man guard towers or patrol perimeters. The detainees were often separated from freedom by little more than a few strands of wire and were always on edge because of the dismal living conditions and the shortage of edible food. Six prisoners, including the suspected murderer of an American soldier, escaped from Abu Ghraib during Ramadan. None was caught. Rioting was also a constant problem. In one instance, prisoners at Camp Vigilant tossed "baseball-size rocks" at MP s, complaining about the lack of "basic needs, such as showers, shampoos, blankets, and toilets," an Army review shows. The most serious riot, at Camp Vigilant, took place on the night of November 24, when guards shot and killed four detainees. "The prisoners were marching and yelling, 'Down with Bush" and 'Bush is bad,' " another Army review said. "They became violent and started throwing rocks at the guards, both in the towers and at the rovers along the wire. . . ." Guards feared for their lives--"the sky was black with rocks," the report said--and a mass breakout appeared imminent. The review of the November riot cited the failure of guard commanders to post rules of engagement for dealing with insurrections. Soldiers were hesitant to shoot, and when they did shoot, they often didn't know whether they were using lethal or nonlethal ammunition because they had mixed the ammo in their shotguns. "Simple fixes." The review, which also evaluated a shooting incident inside tier 1 of the "hard site" prison building, found that MP s there were confused over whom to report to--their own commanders or military intelligence officers who controlled the interrogation wing. "Clear-cut chain of command," the Army review found, "does not exist in the prison." Another classified annex reported that the prison complex was seriously overcrowded, with detainees often held for months without ever being interrogated. Detainees walked around in knee-deep mud, "defecating and urinating all over the compounds," said Capt. James Jones, commander of the 229th MP Company. "I don't know how there's not rioting every day," he testified. Among the more shocking exchanges revealed in the Taguba classified annexes are a series of E-mails sent by Maj. David Dinenna of the 320th MP Battalion. The E- mails, sent in October and November to Maj. William Green of the 800th MP Brigade and copied to the higher chain of command, show a frantic attempt to simply get the detainees at Abu Ghraib edible food. Dinenna pressed repeatedly for food that wouldn't make prisoners vomit. He criticized the private food contractor for shorting the facility on hundreds of meals a day and for providing food containing bugs, rats, and dirt. "As each day goes by, tension within the prison population increases," Dinenna wrote. " . . . Simple fixes, food, would help tremendously." Instead of getting help, Major Green scolded him. "Who is making the charges that there is dirt, bugs, or whatever in the food?" Major Green replied in an E-mail. "If it is the prisoners, I would take that with a grain of salt." Dinenna shot back: "Our MP s, medics, and field surgeon can easily identify bugs, rats, and dirt, and they did." Ultimately, the food contract was not renewed, an Army spokeswoman says, although the company holds other contracts with the military. The problems at Abu Ghraib were exacerbated by the friction between the intelligence and military police commanders--not surprising in light of General Sanchez's decision to have military intelligence officers assume control of the facility from Karpinski's MP s in November. Sanchez also gave the military intelligence officers more resources--something he didn't do for the 800th MP Brigade, according to Karpinski and others--in his drive to obtain more intelligence from detainees. Breaking tables. The Taguba report shows that the major abuses at Abu Ghraib occurred between October and December, almost all of them in the early hours of the morning, when senior officers were not present. Most of the abuses were committed by members of the 372nd MP Company, but others were committed by personnel under the control of Col. Thomas Pappas, the commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, and Colonel Jordan, one of his top aides, the annexes show. In a sworn statement, Torin Nelson, a civilian interrogator at Abu Ghraib, told investigators that they should look into two other interrogators who he believed were roughing up detainees. One of the men, he said, "has a reputation for breaking the tables in the room" while interrogating prisoners. He described an incident in which one of the men allegedly threw a prisoner from a vehicle, then "started dragging . . . the detainees by the cuffs." The annexes show that most detainees were questioned, many times naked, in interrogation booths near the hard-site prison, though some interrogations were conducted in tier 1. In some cases, military dogs were used to intimidate prisoners, the classified annexes show; sometimes they were muzzled, and sometimes they were not. Interrogators also used sleep deprivation--sometimes keeping prisoners awake for all but four hours in a 24-hour period, according to the testimony of Steven Stephanowicz, a civilian interrogator. In his report, Taguba said he suspected that Stephanowicz; another civilian interrogator, John Israel; Pappas; and Jordan "were either directly or indirectly responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib." In his 80-page interview with Taguba's investigators, Captain Reese, the warden, said he relied on Jordan for guidance that everything being done in the prison was permissible. He recounted this conversation with Jordan: "Why does everybody have their clothes off? And he just said, 'It's an interrogation method that we use,' and from that point on I said, 'OK.' " Pappas, interviewed three times last February by Taguba's staff, insisted that he sought to curtail abuses. "There once was an incident where the detainees . . . were naked," Pappas said. "I told them to have the detainees put their clothes back on and that it was inappropriate." He knew of only two instances of detainee abuse by his interrogators, he said, and disciplinary action was taken in each case. He also said General Sanchez had given him approval to use dogs in interrogations, as long as they were muzzled. As for the Geneva Conventions, Pappas said, they were "not specifically posted in any of the facilities where the detainees were being held." Pappas's role at Abu Ghraib did not sit well with Karpinski, who had originally taken control of the facility, along with 15 other Army prisons in Iraq, last summer. The classified annexes show that tensions ran high. Simply put, one hand did not know what the other was doing. Informed by another officer of Sanchez's decision to have Pappas assume control at Abu Ghraib, Karpinski said, according to her statement to General Taguba: "If Colonel Pappas is going to take charge of the MP Battalion . . . I still want them to send me information. I want to know what's going on with my MP s. Because I'm the one that's going to be asked the questions [about any problems]." The officer, Karpinski recounted, said, "Ma'am, I don't think so." Making matters worse, Karpinski said, was the fact that Sanchez and his deputy, Maj. Gen. Walter Wodjakowski, consistently ignored her pleas for more resources. "They did not want to be bothered by me," she testified. "And--were they blowing me off because I was a reservist? Yes. . . . We asked, and we got nothing." She laid out a litany of complaints: When she asked for force protection at Abu Ghraib to suppress incoming mortar fire, Sanchez gave her no troops. Worried about the safety of her soldiers, she complained loudly "up the line," including to Wodjakowski, about how military intelligence was using a former Iraqi soldier--who had been a prisoner--as a translator. "Nobody seemed to care that this guy was out there and had full access to everywhere on the compound," she testified. Karpinski said she had reason not to trust the Iraqi: He had fought against U.S. forces as a member of Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard. Bathrooms. At one point, Taguba asked Karpinski if she recalled a memo issued by General Sanchez requiring prisoners to be treated with "respect and dignity." Karpinski said she did. Known for her sharp tongue, she then described the lousy food, lack of showers, and violations of prisoner rights--all issues she had taken up with Sanchez. "Soldiers recognize that the person [Sanchez] who signed that policy letter about dignity and respect," she testified, "has about as much interest in dignity and respect for prisoners as he does about the cleanliness of bathrooms." Sanchez formally admonished Karpinski last January for leadership failures. A spokeswoman in Iraq says Sanchez and Wodjakowski both have been strong supporters of their troops and suggested that Karpinski wasn't all that worried about problems at Abu Ghraib. Karpinski, the spokeswoman said, "chose not to participate" in twice-weekly meetings with Wodjakowski where she could have discussed problems at Abu Ghraib. Wodjakowski, she says, was "very distressed by the conditions of the troops" at the prison and sent other general officers there to "assess and improve the living conditions." Whatever battles there were between the top generals, many soldiers felt abandoned by their chain of command. In testimony, they complained about the lack of toilet facilities, unsanitary conditions, and their unnecessary vulnerability to frequent mortar attacks when they slept out in the compounds. "If you are talking about soldier life support, it's been horrible," Capt. Mark Hale, an MP at Abu Ghraib, told Taguba's staff last February. He added: "The only guidance my guys got was the guidance I gave them. . . . When you tried to go up, you basically got blown off." * * * The New Standard: July 13, 2004 - DEFENSE OF GUANTANAMO PRISONERS PICKS UP STEAM; GOV'T ATTEMPTS END RUN by Ron Chepesiuk http://newstandardnews.net/content/?action=show_item&itemid=675 In response to the US Supreme Court’s ruling that suspects imprisoned during the so-called "war on terrorism" could use the American legal system to challenge their detention, lawyers for prisoners held at the Guantanamo Bay detention center are moving forward with challenges in US courts while the Department of Defense continues its efforts to further restrict detainees’ rights. The Center for Constitutional Rights has begun putting in place a framework that will apply the Supreme Court’s mandate for speedy justice for the detainees. On July 2, it filed five petitions in Washington, DC federal court on behalf of nine of the Guantanamo detainees it represents. "We are bringing the petitions to court to test the legality of the detentions," said Michael Ratner, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR). "We want access to our clients now." The CCR is a non-profit legal and educational organization dedicated to protecting and advancing the rights guaranteed by the US Constitution and the Universal Declaration Human Rights. In addition to petitioning for immediate access to the detainees, the CCR is asking the court to stop the US government from using coercive interrogation techniques on the Center’s clients and to award damages to those intimidated by Guantanamo personnel. The petitions further contend that the Bush administration has "exceeded the constitutional authority of the Executive and has violated and continues to violate the War Powers Clause by ordering the prolonged and indefinite detention of the Detained parties without congressional authorization." "Without access to a lawyer, the Supreme Court decision would be meaningless. The right to habeas corpus has also included the right to legal assistance." -- Jeff Fogel, CCR legal director The Center currently represents 53 individuals who have been held at Guantanamo Bay for more than two years. The five petitions filed this month on behalf of nine detainees are grouped generally by the detainees’ nationality. They include petitions for a Turkish citizen with German residency and two French citizens seized in Pakistan; two refugees, a Palestinian and an Iraqi, with residences in England who were seized in Gambia; a Canadian citizen who was fifteen years old when he was seized in Afghanistan; and two British citizens whose country of detention is unclear. CCR expects to submit more court petitions in the coming days, with the goal of eventually filing on behalf of all 53 clients. According to a CCR press release, the group faxed a letter on July 1 to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld demanding access to their clients. In the letter, the Center said it was ready to "organize a delegation of attorneys" to provide legal counsel for the detainees. As of July 10, the CCR had not received a response. "Without access to a lawyer," Jeff Fogel, the Center’s legal director, explained in the faxed letter, "the Supreme Court decision would be meaningless. The right to habeas corpus has also included the right to legal assistance." Habeas corpus refers to the right of the imprisoned to challenge the legality of their detention. Ratner revealed that a number of large law firms have now joined the Center’s legal battle with the Bush administration, including Haile and Dorr in Boston, Keller and Hechman in Washington, DC and the Clifford firm based in the UK. "We are a small organization and it would be difficult to handle all the cases by ourselves," Ratner said. "The fact that these big and prominent law firms are coming aboard shows that the tide has turned in favor of the Guantanamo detainees." Meanwhile, however, the US Department of Defense announced its intent to set up what it calls "Combatant Status Review Tribunals" to review the continued detention of individuals at Guantanamo Bay. Under the Defense Department plan, the detainees would not be allowed legal assistance. Instead, they would be provided with what the Bush administration refers to as a "personal representative," whose job it would be to explain the legal process to the detainees and to help them gather evidence. The CCR objects to the plan for a number of reasons: The review tribunals do not appear to bar the use of coerced confessions, and it does not appear that communication between the detainee and his "personal representative" will be protected by any kind of confidentiality protocol. "With all that we’ve learned in the past few months about the mistreatment and torture of prisoners in US custody, it’s now more important than ever to ensure that coerced statements are not relied upon to curtail an individual’s freedom," said Barbara Olshansky, deputy legal director for the CCR. The Center contends that coercive techniques, solitary confinement and three months of intense interrogations forced two of their clients, Shafiq Rasul and Asif Aqbal, to falsely confess that they had met Osama Bin Laden. "The interrogators at Guantanamo Bay showed Rasul and Iqbal a video, ostensibly of them with Osama," Ratner recalled. "Our clients denied again and again that they were in the video, but the interrogators kept persisting. Finally, after three months, our clients told them what they wanted to hear. Later, however, the British [Secret Intelligence Service] proved that the Rasul and Aqbal were in the United Kingdom at the time the video was made." The Center says that despite the US Supreme Court ruling, justice has been delayed for the Guantanamo detainees and their lawyers. "We don’t know when we will get access to our clients," Ratner conceded. "It could take a couple of weeks, maybe several weeks, or we might have to litigate through the rest of the summer." Still, he remains optimistic. "We have a lot of weight on our side -- a major Supreme Court ruling, big law firms that have joined us.... The government is really scrambling now. We feel it’s just a matter of time." * * * Seattle Post-Intelligencer: July 13, 2004 RED CROSS FEARS US IS HIDING DETAINEES By Naomi Koppel, Associated Press Writer http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/apeurope_story.asp?category=1103&slug= Red%20Cross%20US%20Detainees GENEVA -- The international Red Cross said Tuesday that it fears U.S. officials are holding terror suspects secretly in locations across the world. The Geneva Conventions on the conduct of warfare require the United States to give the Red Cross access to prisoners of war and other detainees. "We have access to people detained by the United States in Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan and Iraq, but in our understanding there are people that are detained outside these places for which we haven't received notification or access," said Antonella Notari, a spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross. The United States says it is cooperating with the organization and has allowed Red Cross delegates access to thousands of prisoners, including former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. But Notari told The Associated Press that some suspects reported as arrested by the FBI on its Web site, or identified in media reports, are unaccounted for. "Some of these people who have been reported to be arrested never showed up in any of the places of detention run by the U.S. where we visit," Notari said. She said she had read media reports that some people are being held at Diego Garcia, a British-held island in the Indian Ocean used as a strategic military base by the United States, but the ICRC has not been notified of any prisoners there. "We just simply have absolutely no confirmation of this in any formal way," she said. The U.S. government has not officially responded to a Red Cross demand for notification of all detainees, including those held in undisclosed locations, she said. That request was made by ICRC President Jakob Kellenberger in January during a visit to Washington that featured meetings with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. "So far we haven't had a satisfactory reply," Notari said. An Army report on the abuses at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison found that military police there "routinely held persons brought to them by Other Government Agencies without accounting for them, knowing their identities, or even the reason for their detention." On at least one occasion they moved these "ghost detainees" around the prison to hide them from a visiting Red Cross delegation, the report by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba said. He described the actions as "deceptive, contrary to Army Doctrine, and in violation of international law." In an interview in Tuesday's edition of the German business daily Handelsblatt, Kellenberger defended the Red Cross policy of refusing to comment publicly on the conditions that it finds in places of detention, preferring to negotiate directly with the authorities. The international Red Cross came under criticism for not speaking out about the abuse at Abu Ghraib until it was revealed in the media. "Certain people had the impression that our repeated, confidential approaches to the U.S. authorities were falling flat," Kellenberger said. "But impressions can be wrong. When we visited Abu Ghraib in January 2004, we found improvements compared with October 2003, and when we visited in March it was better than in January." The ICRC has, however, spoken out on its concerns over the continued detention without trial of prisoners at Guantanamo Naval Base in Cuba. "I made it clear in January that we were not happy with the improvements," Kellenberger said. "The most recent visit has just finished. We must now study the findings." * * * Chicago Tribune: July 12, 2004 GUANTANAMO BRACES FOR CHANGE The U.S. says secrecy has enabled it to collect vital intelligence from enemy combatants. Human-rights groups are skeptical. Military hearings begin this week. By E.A. Torriero, Tribune staff reporter http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-0407120147jul12,1,6705096.story?col l=chi-news-hed GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba -- For nearly two years, the prisoner refused to talk about terrorist connections. Then, a few days ago, an interrogator got him chatting. Puffing on a cigarette, sipping coffee, and eating chocolate cake, he sat for hours in an orange jumpsuit and shackles talking to U.S. operatives in the "Gold 12" room of a trailer at the Navy's Guantanamo Bay base in eastern Cuba. An intelligence analyst listened on headphones, watching from behind a two-way mirror while typing the prisoner's disclosures into a U.S. global database on terrorism. At one point, an interrogator rose and gave the detainee an all-American high- five. The prisoner laughed. "We get pieces of the puzzle," said Esteban Rodriguez, who leads the information-gathering teams. "Then we compare it to what others have said. We are getting successful intelligence." Military and civilian interrogators at the highest levels here say the government has collected thousands of pages of intelligence at Guantanamo about terrorist cells in the U.S. and around the world, the financing of operations and the planning of the Sept. 11 attacks. Such claims cannot be independently confirmed, and human-rights activists have doubts about the information. But in intelligence briefings given here to the Tribune last week, the Tribune learned that recent information from Guantanamo has derailed plans for attacks during the Athens Olympics next month and possibly forestalled at least a dozen attacks elsewhere. This detention facility has been cloaked in secrecy since the U.S. decided in early 2002 to bring prisoners from Afghanistan and elsewhere to Guantanamo. Now, the veil is lifting in the wake of a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision giving prisoners held as enemy combatants the right to challenge their detention. In gaining access to the detention facility, the Tribune agreed to allow military officials to escort its reporter and photographer, to choose the itinerary and to screen photographs and delete those that the Pentagon regarded as compromising intelligence. Under the agreement, no detainees could be photographed showing their faces and no pictures were allowed of interrogations and of some other venues at the base. CNN, which toured Guantanamo at the same time as the Tribune, operated under the same arrangements. Commanders here fear the Supreme Court ruling will cause the intelligence operation to be compromised because prisoners will have access to people outside the base. Under orders from President Bush, the nearly 600 detainees at Guantanamo have remained without hearings or counsel since 2002. In coming days, that will change as legal processes unfold. There is much skepticism, however, about the value and legitimacy of what's been learned at Guantanamo. Human-rights groups that have only incomplete lists of detainees' names reportedly have found that many were picked up in Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere after the U.S. offered bounties for the capture of Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters. In some cases, human-rights groups charge, detainees were wrongly apprehended because locals turned them in for the money. Lawyers contend the government is inflating the value of its intelligence from Guantanamo to bolster its case to detain people without due process. And there is no way to verify government claims about Guantanamo activities and humane treatment because interviews with prisoners are prohibited and documents classified. "We don't know what goes on in Guantanamo because we haven't been allowed there," said Jumana Musa of Amnesty International. Intelligence agents here acknowledge that up to half and possibly two-thirds of the detainees have little more of value to tell. More than 150 detainees' cases have been in a bureaucratic limbo in Washington for the last year, awaiting review by several federal agencies. Commanders at Guantanamo say they hope the Supreme Court decision will hasten the release of those prisoners. "We need to let go of those who have no purpose and who are no longer a threat," said one high-level commander. Silent 10 percent But senior officials say they are convinced that at least 10 percent of the prisoners have yet to talk. Most of that percentage are hard-core terrorists who intelligence officers know have crucial information about Al Qaeda and terrorism, officials say. While designed as a prison, Guantanamo's Camp Delta's primary mission now is not detention but intelligence gathering. The facilities are in a remote section of the naval base. Detainees are mostly kept in Camp Delta in barracks. Military guards keep watch through personal and high-tech surveillance so that no inmate is out of sight for more than 30 seconds. Detainees are taken several times a month to intelligence interrogations where U.S. operatives chat with them, mostly about their personal lives. Interrogators probe for ways to get detainees to divulge intelligence. Sometimes that comes while playing board games with the detainees. Other times it comes out of building a personal relationship, interrogators said. Detainees who cooperate are given incentives such as more time outdoors and additional toiletries. About 150 have been moved to a minimum-security area where they share communal meals, wear traditional white Arab clothing, are given reading lessons in their native languages and even get an occasional day of beach recreation. "They have been consistently getting very valuable intelligence at Guantanamo," said Bob Newman, a former military intelligence officer and interrogation expert. Newman, now a Denver talk show host, said he speaks regularly with those involved in gathering intelligence at Guantanamo. "If the American people only knew some of it, they would fight to keep Guantanamo as closed as possible," he said. Droves of civilian lawyers will soon descend on the island to do otherwise. The information they gather, along with descriptions of detention here from dozens of prisoners who may be freed soon, will give Guantanamo the public scrutiny that officials sought for years to avoid. Starting this week, the inmates will be formally informed about the recent Supreme Court decision. Over the next weeks, three military panels, each with three officers, will evaluate their cases. In the end, they will be charged, let go or transferred. The panels are to start early this week and work six days a week, conducting hearings for 12 prisoners a day and 72 per week, the Pentagon said Friday. Meanwhile, more than 60 lawsuits have been filed in U.S. courts challenging the way the military plans to handle detainee cases. Lawyers hope to get details from detainees to determine their treatment and the government's interrogation methods. From scant reports, lawyers fear detainees are suffering under the duress of being locked up, most of them in single cells, with no due process. Several lawsuits allege that the detainees have been subject to duress such as being forced to stand for hours or sit for prolong periods in uncomfortable positions. In interviews, guards, intelligence officers and senior leaders claim the kinds of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq did not occur here. A handful of guards have been disciplined for breaking regulations and dealing harshly with detainees. But human-rights groups say conditions need review and transparency. Tapes on way to Congress This week, a congressional committee will receive hundreds of videotapes showing the conduct of an elite squad here that responds to trouble in the cells. It will be the first public airing of footage taken in the closed cellblocks that shows guards dealing with detainees. Of the 500 tapes reviewed here by military commanders, at least three dozen are being analyzed further for possible violations, they said. Most are technical or procedural problems and do not constitute abuse, commanders say. As the government braces for details about Guantanamo to be made public, the Pentagon is considering moving the detainees it considers of highest value elsewhere. It's likely that Bagram air base in Afghanistan will soon become the hub of intelligence activities rather than Guantanamo, officials here predict. "Guantanamo as we have known it will never be again," said a senior commander here. "The nature of intelligence gathering is that it is done in secret. That can't fully happen anymore." * * * Chicago Tribune: July 12, 2004 PRISONER ABUSE POSES PERIL FOR BUSH By Mike Dorning, Washington Bureau http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0407120126jul12,1,5460135.sto ry?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed WASHINGTON -- Of all the pressing questions about the abuses of detainees in Afghanistan and at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, perhaps none is more important than who will bear responsibility. With at least a half-dozen investigations under way, and against the backdrop of a presidential campaign, the issue of culpability is fraught with political peril for the White House. Much of what has been disclosed about the abuse scandal has emerged piecemeal. But when public statements, policy decisions and internal documents are examined in total, there is strong suggestion of an atmosphere set at the highest levels of government that contributed to mistreatment of detainees, critics of the Bush administration say. "The tone that this is off-limits was not set," said Kurt Goering, deputy executive director of Amnesty International USA. "The tone was the opposite." The White House and administration contend that the abuse was the work of a small group that acted entirely on its own. They say the administration in the post Sept. 11-era grappled with a historic transformation in the threat facing the United States. Officials' deliberations were spirited and imaginative, they say, but ultimately led to a response that scrupulously adhered to international and U.S. laws forbidding torture. "All interrogation techniques actually authorized have been carefully vetted, are lawful and do not constitute torture," White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales said recently. Election Day will tell Whether voters ultimately conclude that President Bush is responsible--and how that plays into their judgment about a second term--will probably not be entirely clear until Election Day. But there are signs that voters have at least some doubts about what they hear from the White House on the scandal--misgivings that may be diminishing one of the president's most powerful assets, his credibility. Only 15 percent of Americans believe the administration has told the entire truth about the abuses at Abu Ghraib, according to a CBS-New York Times poll conducted in late June. The public appears not to have reached a firm judgment on how high responsibility for such abuses goes. But the startling images from Abu Ghraib have struck a chord, said John Pitney, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College in California. "It's related to issues of credibility and competence," Pitney said. "People see the reaction in the Arab world and are concerned about the impact on foreign policy." Congress plans more hearings on the prison abuses, and documents are still emerging. But those who argue that Bush bears a measure of responsibility are building their case. They say, for example, that some of Bush's most senior officials expressed public disdain for concerns raised about treatment of detainees, such as a comment Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made to radio reporters in January 2002 as prisoners captured in Afghanistan were being moved to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. "I do not feel even the slightest concern about their treatment. They are being treated vastly better than they treated anybody else over the last several years," Rumsfeld said then. These critics also argue that the U.S. decision to waive protections under the Geneva Conventions for individuals captured in Afghanistan in late 2001 has contributed to a climate of extra-legal behavior. At the time, Gonzales warned Bush in a memo that the move "could undermine U.S. military culture" that establishes high standards for treatment of adversaries captured in combat. White House tone crucial And the White House seemingly showed little public reaction to warning signs of a scandal over abuses. Early signals included the widely publicized beating deaths of prisoners held in U.S. custody at Bagram air base in Afghanistan, reports from human rights advocates about abuses and comments from government officials indicating that harsh treatment was normal. The International Committee of the Red Cross also issued a report on systemic abuse of detainees in Iraq. The tone set by the White House is crucial, analysts say, since presidents often exert authority by communicating broad directives. Some critics are focusing on an August 2002 Justice Department opinion delivered to the White House counsel that interpreted anti-torture laws to permit all but the most extreme treatment of detainees. Others point to statements and internal deliberations that offer a portrait of a government which, at a minimum, did not make humanitarian concerns a priority in handling prisoners. "There was a before-9/11 and an after-9/11," Cofer Black, the CIA's former counterterrorism chief, told Congress in testimony in early 2002. "After 9/11, the gloves came off." Soon afterward, newspaper articles began to appear quoting government officials describing harsh treatment of prisoners. The New York Times quoted a Western intelligence official in March 2003 describing the treatment of an Al Qaeda suspect as "not quite torture, but about as close as you can get." The Washington Post earlier quoted an official described as having supervised the capture and transfer of accused terrorists, saying, "If you don't violate someone's human rights some of the time, you aren't doing your job." Harold Koh, dean of Yale Law School and a former assistant secretary of state for human rights, argued that this should have brought a forceful response from the administration to stop any abusive behavior. "If a CEO of a major multinational company reads in a paper a statement from a manager that `If we're not discriminating against employees on the basis of race, we're not doing our job,' then he would have a pretty clear duty to investigate and send word down the line that such a culture of disrespect for rights would not be tolerated," Koh said. By December 2002, two detainees died at Bagram under circumstances that the military ruled homicides. Death certificates showed the cause of death in both cases was blunt force trauma to the legs, raising the possibility of a pattern of similar abuse. No one has yet been prosecuted for the deaths, which are under investigation. At least 37 detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan had died in U.S. custody by May of this year. In a number of cases, death certificates list the cause as blunt force trauma or suffocation, sometimes in combination, an indication of possible abuse. Charges confirmed The Army recently confirmed it had charged three soldiers in connection with an incident in January in which they allegedly forced two Iraqi detainees into the Tigris River from a bridge north of Baghdad, causing one of the prisoners to drown. In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, much of the public might have applauded aggressive tactics against suspected terrorists to obtain information about Al Qaeda. But with regard to Iraqi detainees, the administration publicly had adopted a different policy, including an explicit acknowledgement that the Geneva Conventions cover the Iraq war. Still, some of the rhetoric was similar. Bush frequently called the insurgents "thugs and assassins." Civilian and military spokesmen regularly refer to the enemy as "terrorists"--and indeed, some of the insurgents use terrorist tactics, such as car bombs. Soldiers and officers in the field pick up on the terrorist label and frequently use it to describe the unseen enemy attacking them with sniper fire and roadside explosives. Yet operating in the midst of a violent insurgency and on unfamiliar terrain, U.S. forces in Iraq often detain people without clear evidence that the prisoners are involved in guerrilla activity. A Red Cross report quoted U.S. military intelligence officers as estimating that 70 percent to 90 percent of detainees had been arrested by mistake. The taint of association with terrorists can influence the way soldiers treat these prisoners, said John Hutson, dean of Franklin Pierce Law Center in Concord, N.H. and former judge advocate general of the Navy, the service's top legal officer. "It's pretty clear what the intention is, what the atmosphere is," Hutson said. "It goes from the administration to the generals to the colonels to the majors to the captains and lieutenants. And pretty soon, that's the message all around: These are terrorists and different rules apply." * * * SpaceWar / AFP -- Jul 11, 2004 PENTAGON SEEKS WAY AROUND HIGH COURT ON GUANTANAMO DETAINEES http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040711072526.2uz6ls53.html WASHINGTON (AFP) -- The Pentagon wants to circumvent a US Supreme Court ruling allowing inmates at a US base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to challenge their detention in US courts by creating military tribunals, analysts said. The Pentagon on Wednesday responded to the June 28 Supreme Court ruling by ordering the creation of Combatant Review Tribunals to determine whether each of the 594 detainees at Guantanamo is being lawfully held as an "enemy combatant." Under the process, the detainees will be assisted by US military officers but not represented by their own lawyers. The US government of President George W. Bush is "anxious clearly to get the process in place before things started to heat up in the federal court litigation," said Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute for Military Justice, a Washington-based group. "It comes very late," he said. Most of the detainees were picked up during military operations in Afghanistan in the fall of 2001, and are said to be linked to the Taliban militia or al- Qaeda's terrorist network. However US officials have not released names, nor have they charged the detainees with any crimes, nor allowed them access to lawyers. Because the detainees are considered enemy combatants and not prisoners of war, US officials said, they are not protected by the Geneva Convention. "The Pentagon clearly does not want to give up control," said Jonathan Turley, a professor at the George Washington University Law School. "They are clearly unwilling to allow federal judges to decide these cases. The only reason they would not want federal judges to make these decisions is that they believe the federal judges would rule against them," he said. Turley said that lawyers for the detainees "will challenge the use of these military commissions in a federal court and demand that these detainees be brought before a federal judge." The special military tribunals will be made up of three officers. Detainees will be able to count on a "personal representative" -- an officer who will have access to the detainee's information. Fidell describes it as "an odd arrangement," and worries that it the "personal representative" is merely "a charade." "In what sense these people are 'personal representatives'? To show them the rules, to explain the rules or to advise them and provide the kind of assistance that ordinary a lawyer would provide?" he wonders. Wendy Patten, an official with Human Rights Watch, sees the move as "another attempt by the Bush administration to create an ad-hoc procedure that does not comply with international human rights and humanitarian law." "Here they have said all the detainees have already been determined to be enemy combatants," she said. "So a detainee who goes before this tribunal must somehow disprove that." But after nearly three years of repeated statements by Bush and senior Pentagon officials to that effect, "it raises some questions about whether a panel of members of the military will have the ability to contradict their superiors," she said. Part of the problem is that the Supreme Court's ruling "was incredibly vague," said Turley. "There will be a fight over what the Supreme Court meant when it called for due process," he said. "The most obvious meaning of the opinion would be hearings in a federal court, not a rigged military court." * * * Richmond Times-Dispatch: Jul 11, 2004 HOW TWO SENATORS MOLDED A COURT Thurmond and Helms left a conservative mark on 4th Circuit By Peter Hardin, Times-Dispatch Washington Correspondent http://www.timesdispatch.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename= RTD%2FMGArticle%2FRTD_BasicArticle&c=MGArticle&cid=1031776608768&path=!news&s= 1045855934842 When mourners gathered to bury Strom Thurmond, William W. Wilkins was one of five people invited to eulogize the South Carolina Republican and longest- serving U.S. senator in history. Billy Wilkins, a former Thurmond aide, is chief judge of the Richmond-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. He enjoyed a long friendship with the 100-year- old senator and said he felt closer to Thurmond than anyone after his own parents. The court's three other full-time judges from South Carolina attended the funeral last year. They included Karen J. Williams, the court's first female judge, whose father-in-law, a state senator, was close friends with Thurmond. These judges reflect part of the huge personal stamp Thurmond applied to the 4th Circuit, in part because of his powerful role as Senate Judiciary Committee chairman between 1981 and 1987. Another Southerner who recently left the Senate exerted strong influence in the opposite way: by obstructing nominees. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., teamed with GOP allies to block President Bill Clinton's four nominees from Helms' home state. The two senators took great interest in the appeals court, which is one step below the U.S. Supreme Court, and helped shape its predominantly conservative lineup, scholars say. With 13 full-time judges and two vacancies, the court hears appeals from Virginia, the Carolinas, West Virginia and Maryland, and it is effectively the court of last resort for all but a fraction of the cases it handles. In the forefront of cases involving terrorism and enemy combatants, the court is considered perhaps the most conservative of 12 regional appeals courts nationwide. Two of its leaders have made a short list of potential Republican nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court. Thurmond was a former segregationist whose long life, including more than 47 years in the Senate, left controversial legacies. Eighteen months ago, Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi had to step down as Senate Republican leader amid a firestorm over his favorable remarks about Thurmond's segregationist campaign for president in 1948. More recently, Thurmond's illegitimate mixed-race daughter told the world the secret of her patrimony. Largely overlooked, however, is Thurmond's giant impact on the 4th Circuit, despite his representing a small state. Between 1981, when Thurmond became Judiciary chairman, and his retirement in 2003, he championed to the White House seven - or fully half - of the 14 judges seated on the court in that period, according to interviews by The Times- Dispatch and a review of Senate records and local news reports. He helped increase the number of South Carolina judges from two to four as Congress expanded the court's size. The Palmetto State today has 31 percent of the court's active judges, compared with 15 percent of the circuit's population. "His singular influence on the court was simply extraordinary for any one senator," said Elaine R. Jones, former director-counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and a Norfolk native. Helms, too, retired in 2003. To some, the five-term senator was a conservative hero; to others, he was a race-baiting bigot. His impact also endures. The 4th Circuit probably would be more moderate and would have had its first black judge well before 2001 had Clinton's nominees been approved, according to court watchers. And the blocking of Clinton's choices left openings for Republican President Bush to fill. Presidents have the primary power to appoint federal judges. Yet the influence of Thurmond and Helms shows the interplay of personal politics and power in Washington's shaping a court affecting millions of people. . . . Because of its decisions in high-profile cases, the 4th Circuit has been grabbing headlines: It allowed the government to seek the death penalty for terror suspect Zacarias Moussaoui while saying he may introduce evidence from captured al-Qaida leaders. Wilkins wrote the opinion for a three-judge panel. Another panel ruled that alleged Taliban fighter Yaser Esam Hamdi, who was born in the United States, can be held as an enemy combatant without access to U.S. courts. Wilkins and William B. Traxler Jr. of South Carolina were on the panel. But the Supreme Court disagreed last month, saying Hamdi was entitled to contest his detention "before a neutral decisionmaker." In an opinion written by Williams, the 4th Circuit undercut the Miranda rights warning to a criminal suspect. However, the Supreme Court later affirmed the Miranda warning. The appeals court ruled in 1998 that the Food and Drug Administration did not have authority to regulate nicotine in tobacco products as a drug. The Supreme Court later agreed, in a defeat for the Clinton administration. While the judges writing these decisions are not well-known, they hold lifetime appointments and are part of a lasting legacy of presidents and senators. "People tend to look at politicians for the roads they built or the dams they got. The longer legacy may be the kind of people who were sympathetic with their positions [that] they got into power," said political scientist J. David Woodard of Clemson University in South Carolina. Because the last judge championed by Thurmond was seated in 2002, Woodard said, the late senator's impact on the 4th Circuit could last for 15 to 20 more years. Thurmond took the helm of the Judiciary Committee from Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., when factors converged to bring Thurmond extra clout. Ronald Reagan won the White House in 1980 after pledging to name conservative federal judges. The Republican Party platform had supported selection of judges who believed in "decentralization of the federal government." And the Senate, which confirms judges, was in Republican hands for the first time in 25 years. With federal courts resembling "a ship listing to the left," Thurmond "was trying to rebalance the court from an ideological direction he didn't agree with," said Mark Goodin, a former Thurmond senior aide. Thurmond always looked out for his state. A story circulated in Washington that he often would come up with a name of a possible nominee from South Carolina even before a newly deceased judge was buried. And the White House needed him. Because of the array of bills before Thurmond's committee, it helped Reagan's White House to help the South Carolina senator, Goodin said. When Reagan took office, the 4th Circuit had six judges appointed by Democratic presidents and four by Republicans. By late 1984, the majority had shifted. Today, Republicans' appointees hold a 10-4 majority. Thurmond was a former judge. He recommended to Reagan and to his successors judicial candidates whom he knew and had sized up for ideology and character, not always heeding party lines. Wilkins had worked as an aide to Thurmond in 1970-71 and directed his re- election campaign in 1972. A Republican and state court prosecutor, Wilkins was Reagan's first nominee for a judgeship to the U.S. District Court, a step below the appeals court. Thurmond had "almost paternal affection" for Wilkins, according to Goodin. The senator supported him successfully for the chairmanship of the U.S. Sentencing Commission. He also backed Wilkins for nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, without success. Judge William B. Traxler Jr., 56, belonged to a family that was close to Thurmond, and he did campaign work for the senator in 1972 and 1978. He campaigned as a Democrat for a prosecutor's job and later rose to a state judgeship. Thurmond first recommended Traxler for the U.S. District Court. He championed him to Clinton for the 4th Circuit when Ernest F. Hollings, South Carolina's Democratic senator, formally recommended Traxler. Another judge with Democratic ties is Williams, 52. She was a schoolteacher and a trial lawyer before Thurmond recommended her in 1991. Williams also was the daughter-in-law of Marshall B. Williams, a Democrat and close Thurmond friend who was then the president pro tempore of the South Carolina Senate. The two men had double-dated when they were younger. "I always had to drive because Strom needed both hands in the back seat," Marshall Williams, now deceased, was quoted as saying in "Ol' Strom," an unauthorized biography of Thurmond by Jack Bass and Marilyn Thompson. Karen Williams won bipartisan support. "Be prepared for the Supreme Court," Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., D-Del., told the cum laude graduate of the University of South Carolina Law School at her confirmation hearing. A more controversial nominee was Dennis W. Shedd, 51, another former Thurmond aide. Shedd's appointment drew fire from civil-rights, labor and faith groups because of some of his decisions as a district judge. But he was supported by Hollings and was confirmed in 2002. Going back the longest with Thurmond is Senior Judge Clyde H. Hamilton, 70. He recalls dancing at then-Governor Thurmond's 1947 inaugural ball and regarding Thurmond as a "striking and accomplished horseman" in their hometown of Edgefield. Hamilton, who is semi-retired, worked for Thurmond in 1955 and helped raise money for three re-election campaigns. He was grateful to Thurmond. "In my legal career, no one has done more for me and is more directly responsible for my being here today than Senator Thurmond," Hamilton said at his swearing-in as a district judge. Thurmond's judicial appointments clearly fit both the senator and South Carolina's "friends-and-neighbors" political culture, said political scientist Charles W. Dunn of Regent University in Virginia Beach. "He's picked local people with whom he is very comfortable, and the politics of the state are very comfortable," said Dunn, who once taught at Clemson University. "They're not extremists. They're not Helms extremists or Maddox extremists," he said, referring to former Georgia Gov. Lester Maddox. . . . Clinton takes a swing at Helms over 4th Circuit judgeship politics in his new autobiography. Helms "refused for years to allow the Senate to vote on a black judge for the 4th Circuit . . . even though there had never been an African-American on the court. And the Republicans wondered why African-Americans wouldn't vote for them," the former president wrote. Years earlier, the senator had denied a similar charge by Clinton after Helms had exercised powers given to home-state senators to block or stall action on a series of Clinton nominees of both races. A TV commentator in Raleigh, N.C., before he won election in 1972, Helms rose to international prominence. He collaborated in the Senate with Thurmond and became godfather of a Thurmond daughter. Helms didn't shy from a battle, and his 4th Circuit fight was no exception. He was angry that a protege tapped by President George H.W. Bush in 1991, U.S. District Judge Terrence W. Boyle, never got a hearing from the Democrat- controlled Judiciary Committee. Playing payback politics, he stood up for Boyle when Republicans ran the Senate later in the Clinton years. Helms also sided with then-Chief Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of Virginia in advocating a 4th Circuit smaller than its 15 authorized seats. He sponsored a bill to eliminate two vacant seats; observers had expected both to be filled by North Carolinians. Responding to critics, the senator denied that race played a part in his opposition to Clinton's black nominees from North Carolina. He had backed one of them, Judge James A. Beaty Jr., for a lower-court post, Helms pointed out. Nor was Helms alone in the fight. Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, R-Utah and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, attacked Beaty as soft on crime. Sherrilyn A. Ifill, who teaches at the University of Maryland Law School, said Helms' stance and other events during the Clinton years helped shape a perception of the court as a kind of icon of conservatism with a less-than- flattering image related to race. It was during the same period that U.S. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist led guests in singing "Dixie" at a sing-along of the 4th Circuit Judicial Conference in 1999. "That added to the perception of the [court] as being something of a throwback," Ifill said. Helms didn't yield when Clinton administration officials floated a possible nomination deal including Boyle, or when the only judge from North Carolina died in 1999. From then until last year, the Tarheel State had no judge on the court, although it has the biggest population in the circuit. To skirt Helms' opposition, the Clinton White House chose to shift what many had considered a North Carolina seat to Virginia. Clinton nominated Roger L. Gregory, a black Richmonder and one-time partner of former Gov. L. Douglas Wilder. The GOP-controlled Senate balked. To end a long impasse, Clinton made a rare recess, or temporary, appointment for Gregory. The president emphasized that the area covered by the court had the highest percentage of black residents of any circuit. President Bush ultimately gave Gregory a lifetime judgeship and nominated Boyle, as Bush's father had done. The younger Bush also appointed a second black judge, Allyson K. Duncan of North Carolina, in 2003. She had bipartisan support from her state's senators. The nominations of Boyle and another former Helms aide, Claude A. Allen of Virginia, have gotten bogged down in the Senate. Maryland's two Democratic senators have attacked the nomination of Allen, a conservative African-American, on the grounds that the seat should go to a Marylander. Allen, deputy secretary for the Department of Health and Human Services, also has drawn criticism from liberal social groups and the NAACP for what they label as his extremist record. Boyle, too, has compiled a controversial record. Democratic Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina has exercised his home-state prerogative to bottle up Boyle's nomination. Now Helms' legacy is surfacing on the presidential campaign trail. Bush, in North Carolina last week, called Boyle an exceptional nominee. Bush portrayed him as among several being obstructed by Senate Democrats and took Edwards to task. Sen. John Kerry had announced a day earlier his choice of Edwards as his vice presidential running mate on the presumed Democratic ticket. A Kerry spokesman retorted that Bush "is playing politics and stumping for judicial nominees who would roll back the rights and freedoms that make America great." There is a personal link between Boyle and Helms besides the judge having worked for the senator. Boyle married a daughter of Thomas F. Ellis, a Raleigh lawyer and political strategist who, with Helms, formed the Congressional Club to fund his Senate campaigns. That is not why Helms continued to support Boyle over 13 years for elevation, according to a former Helms aide. Boyle is "exceedingly qualified to sit" on the court, said Jimmy Broughton, a former Helms chief of staff. He also noted that Helms "is very loyal to those who work for him." Helms, who was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, did not respond to a request for an interview. The 82-year-old recently was ill and hospitalized for a month. . . . President Bush has not sought to shrink the 4th Circuit. And the current chief judge, Wilkins, doesn't embrace the smaller-is-better approach. He would welcome two additional judges to fill the court's authorized strength of 15, he said in an interview. Wilkins said, however, he did not think the court should be expanded beyond 15 judges. Just last week, and well after Wilkins was interviewed, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Hatch floated the idea of adding a Maryland seat to the court to resolve the impasse over Allen's nomination. The nominations of Boyle, Allen and Pentagon General Counsel William J. Haynes II are in trouble, so the existing vacancies may not be filled this year. Haynes was chosen to fill the seat of Judge H. Emory Widener Jr. of Virginia, a Nixon appointee who intends to retire. But the Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal has brought fierce questioning about Haynes' possible role. Senate Democrats want to grill Haynes about the part he played in drafting guidelines for interrogating detainees in Iraq. Meanwhile, the court's character and reputation are not likely to change soon. Its leading intellectual heavyweights, Wilkinson and J. Michael Luttig of Virginia, were widely mentioned last year as potential Supreme Court nominees, but no justice retired. The 4th Circuit has become a "hard, ideological right" court and the "conservative gold standard," said Sheldon Goldman, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst who has written about judicial selection. At the same time, the court's conservatism "parallels in many ways, especially in federalism cases, trends in recent years in the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Rehnquist," said constitutional-law scholar A.E. Dick Howard of the University of Virginia. Wilkins was unprepared to accept any kind of ideological typecasting of the court: If a close study were made of its rulings, he said, "I don't think you'll find there's any type of ideology driving those decisions." As for those who label it the most conservative of the appeals courts, "it's come from a few decisions that have gotten national attention. That label has become stuck," Wilkins said. "Everybody has to draw their own conclusion from the opinions they read." [ Contact Peter Hardin at (202) 662-7669 or phardin@mediageneral.com The Times-Dispatch research staff contributed to this report. ] * * * New York Times Magazine -- July 11, 2004 MEMOIR: INTERROGATION UNBOUND By Hyder Akbar, as told to SUSAN BURTON http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/11/magazine/11MEMOIR.html Ask him this," the American said to me. "Are you in contact with anyone in al Qaeda?" I translated the question into Pashto to the man beside me, an Afghan with flowing hair named Abdul Wali. "No," he said. It was a Wednesday afternoon in June 2003, and Wali was being interrogated by three Americans at their base near Asadabad, Afghanistan. I was interpreting. Three days later, Abdul Wali was dead. On June 17 of this year, a federal grand jury indicted a C.I.A. contractor named David A. Passaro in connection with his assault. Passaro, the first civilian to be charged in the investigation of prisoner abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan, is accused of beating Wali using his hands, his feet and a large flashlight. At the time of his death, Wali's family guessed his age to be 28; he was 10 years older than I was. I'm 19 now. I grew up mostly in the Bay Area suburbs, but since the fall of the Taliban, I've been spending summers in Afghanistan, working alongside my father, Said Fazel Akbar, the governor of Kunar, a rural province in the eastern part of the country. It's a strange double life. I sometimes stumble into situations in which I'm called upon to act as a kind of cultural translator. It's a role that can leave me tense and frustrated, or far worse: I came away from Wali's interrogation feeling something close to despair. On June 18, 2003, Abdul Wali visited my father's office. He knew that the Americans wanted to question him about some recent rocket attacks. He told us he was innocent, and he said he was terrified of going to the U.S. base, because there were pervasive rumors that prisoners were tortured there. My father told him that he needed to go, and he sent me along to reassure him. A half-hour later, Wali and I were sitting across from three men I then knew only by their first names: Steve, Brian and Dave, who proved to be David A. Passaro, the C.I.A. contractor now facing trial. It was more than 100 degrees in the small room, and above us, a fan whirred wildly. The interrogation started casually enough. In his friendly Southern accent, Brian dispensed with the nuts and bolts: have you been in contact with Taliban? Were you Taliban? Then the subject turned to Wali's recent visit to Pakistan. "How long ago were you in Pakistan?" Brian asked. Wali looked confused, and I doubted he'd be able to answer. People in Kunar don't have calendars; most of them don't even know how old they are. "You don't have to give a specific date," Brian said. "Was it two, three days ago? Two, three weeks ago? Two, three months ago?" "I don't know," Wali responded. "It's really hard for me to say." The Americans exchanged glances. I prodded him: "Can you at least say a week or two weeks or a month or two months, or something?" But he couldn't. For him, as for many of his countrymen, time unfolded forward -- there was no way to go back later and try to fix it in a structure. "I just, I go to sleep, I wake up and there's a next day," he explained. "I feed myself, I go to sleep and there's a next day." The Americans weren't buying it. Dave took over the questioning. He asked Wali where he had been 14 days earlier, on a night when three rockets were fired at the American base. "How could you not know where you were on the night three rockets were fired?" he said. Wali explained that his nights were often punctuated by explosions. Even seated, Dave seemed enlarged by anger. His demeanor felt put on, as if he were acting the role of a fearsome interrogator (especially in comparison to Brian, whose Southern hospitality softened even his grilling of this suspected terrorist). Dave fixed Wali with an unrelenting stare. Wali returned a nervous smile. "Translate this to him!" Dave exploded: "This is not a joking matter! Don't smile!" "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to offend him," Wali replied anxiously. "It's very hard for me. I can't understand anything he's saying. He was staring at me, and I didn't know what to do. What should I do?" he asked me. I wasn't sure how to react. Dave's behavior was unpredictable. Only days earlier, he and I had a friendly conversation about his little son, who could say his ABC's and count from 1 to 20 and back down again. But now he was acting as if he was full of rage. "If you're lying, your whole family, your kids, they'll all get hurt from this," he threatened. As I translated, I started to feel as if Dave's words to Wali were my own, and all I wanted to do was stop saying these things to him. "Your situation's getting worse," Dave warned. How was I supposed to tell that to Wali, when my father had assured him that coming to the base would make everything better? Nobody was behaving the way they would with a regular translator; both sides added comments meant only for me. In one ear, I had Wali pleading: "I'm innocent, I'm innocent." In the other, I had Brian dismissing his account: "That is impossible." What was I supposed to do, argue or agree? At some point, I announced that Wali was making personal, emotional appeals to me, and that the other translator in the room -- a local Afghan employed at the base -- should take over. Then I quietly tried to share my largest concern with Brian. "I'm not going to translate for this guy," I whispered. "Look how he's acting." "What do you mean?" Brian replied, perhaps misunderstanding. "I'm totally calm." "You're calm, but look at Dave," I said. Brian shrugged his shoulders. As the interrogation continued, I was relieved to be on the sidelines, but still, it wasn't easy to watch Dave browbeat Wali. Finally the questions stopped, and Wali stood facing the wall as the Americans patted him down in preparation for detention. "Is there anything you want to give to your family?" Dave asked him. The question terrified Wali. "No, no," he stuttered. I approached Wali and, to calm him, put my hand on his shoulder. "Just say the truth," I told him, trying to sound normal. "Nothing is going to happen if you just say the truth." Then I walked out of the room, promising myself that I'd come back and check up on him. He died before I got the chance. This June, I met with federal investigators in Washington, and they showed me pictures of Wali. "You won't be disturbed by this?" one said before pulling them out of a folder. Among the injuries shown in the photographs were a discolored hand, a bruised back and cuts -- one like a thick dash above his eyebrow. But the only picture that bothered me was the one on the top of the pile, of him standing against the wall, staring straight into the camera, before anything had happened. Hyder Akbar and Susan Burton are at work on a book about Akbar's experiences in Afghanistan. Akbar first reported on Abdul Wali in a radio documentary for "This American Life." * * * July 9, 2004 PENTAGON REPORTEDLY AIMED TO HOLD DETAINEES IN SECRET * Proposal to keep some prisoners 'off the books' went against promises for yearly case reviews. By John Hendren and Mark Mazzetti, Times Staff Writers http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na- prison9jul09,1,7225418.story?coll=la-home-headlines WASHINGTON -- Despite pledging yearly reviews for all prisoners held by the U.S. military at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Pentagon officials tentatively agreed during a high-level meeting last month to deny that process to some detainees and to keep their existence secret "for intelligence reasons," senior defense officials said Thursday. Under the proposal, some prisoners would in effect be kept off public records and away from the scrutiny of lawyers and judges. The meeting on the Guantanamo reviews occurred months after U.S. officials came under harsh criticism by investigators and human rights observers for practices involving "ghost" detainees in Iraq who were kept hidden from inspectors for intelligence purposes. It was unclear Thursday whether the Pentagon had followed through with the proposal, or how it would be affected by last month's Supreme Court ruling that granted detainees access to American courts. It also was not clear how many detainees the proposal would apply to. The Pentagon said there currently were 594 detainees at the camp, nicknamed "Gitmo." A Swedish detainee was released Thursday. But at the Pentagon meeting called to discuss the annual detainee reviews -- which are to be overseen by Navy Secretary Gordon R. England -- senior officials said they wanted to keep a small number of prisoners' names out of public records to allow intelligence officials to continue interrogations, a senior defense official said on condition of anonymity. Such a move would create an exception to the Pentagon promise to review the case of every detainee annually to determine whether he continued to pose a threat to the United States. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld first disclosed plans to provide annual reviews to detainees in February, in response to human rights concerns expressed over open-ended imprisonment. Two senior defense officials said they believed that the prisoners who would be denied the reviews might be held by the CIA, rather than the Defense Department. A U.S. intelligence official said Thursday that the CIA was not holding any detainees at Guantanamo, but added that the annual reviews would not apply to CIA prisoners elsewhere. But another source, a former senior defense official with knowledge of detainee issues, said the Pentagon did not control the interrogations of all Guantanamo detainees. "There are some individuals down there where DOD doesn't have the lead on their interrogation and intelligence exploitation," the former senior defense official said on condition of anonymity. Another senior defense official said that the wording in a June 23 statement on the promised annual reviews led him to believe that the detainees exempted from the review were being held by the CIA. In that memo, England described mandatory annual reviews of "Department of Defense" detainees -- a designation that would exclude any detainee held by the CIA. One of the senior defense officials said Wednesday that that designation had been inserted deliberately. "People very, very carefully crafted those words," the official said. "When the draft language was sent around, they were very adamant about keeping the words 'under DOD control' in. It led me to believe that there were non-DOD detainees down there." When Pentagon officials this week announced a separate, one-time review into whether each prisoner had been properly labeled an "enemy combatant," the order again specified that it applied to "all detainees under the control of the Department of Defense." The proposal to deny some detainees' annual reviews rankled some in the Pentagon, which is trying to recover from international criticism of the abuse scandal at the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. In light of the Supreme Court decision granting Guantanamo detainees access to American courts, some internal Pentagon critics said it would be unlikely that detainees held secretly would be allowed to appear in federal courts. A Pentagon spokesman said he knew of no detainee at Guantanamo who would not receive annual reviews, and did not know of an agreement to deny detainees reviews. "It's my understanding that everybody under DOD custody will be subject … to the annual review process that has been outlined previously," said the spokesman, a senior defense official. Asked if any detainees were not under the Defense Department's control, he said, "Not that I'm aware of." One of the senior defense officials was skeptical as to whether denying such a review would conform with the Supreme Court ruling giving detainees access to federal courts. "I don't know how any of this squares with anything. That's been my problem with this thing from the beginning," he said. "Any time you get the dark side involved, human rights tend to be less of an issue." One critic said he spoke out about the proposal because he felt that holding detainees "off the books" was unnecessary and potentially illegal. He discounted arguments that the secrecy would withhold news of the captures from other terrorists. "These Al Qaeda guys are smart," one of the senior defense officials who was critical of the policy said on condition of anonymity. "If Mohamed is no longer on the other end of the phone, they're going to know we've got him." * * * Newshour -- July 8, 2004 WAR AND LIBERTIES Transcript: Margaret Warner talks with Eugene Fidell David Rivkin http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/law/july-dec04/war-liberties_7-8.html JIM LEHRER: Margaret Warner has the Guantanamo story. MARGARET WARNER: Most of the nearly 600 foreign prisoners being held at Guantanamo naval base in Cuba were captured during the Afghanistan War. Late yesterday, for the first time, the Pentagon announced an internal military review process that will let every one of them challenge his detention as an enemy combatant. The move comes on the heels of last week's Supreme Court ruling that the prisoners had the right to challenge their detention in federal court. To explain the Pentagon's move, we turn to Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice; and David Rivkin, a lawyer in private practice who served in the first Bush and Reagan administrations. He's advised the current administration on terrorism- related legal matters. All right. First, just give us, a "by the numbers" picture here of what this process is going to be, Gene Fidell. How will the situation change for these nearly 600 detainees? The court's decision and its effect EUGENE FIDELL: For the first time there's going to be an organized format for deciding whether these detainees are enemy combatants. The administration has created something called a combatant status review tribunal; yet another institution that we're seeing evolve in this panoply. And the purpose of it will be to decide whether people do or do not qualify for that label, enemy combatant, and these will be little boards of three military officers, people who haven't had prior involvement in the decision to label people enemy combatant, their interrogation, their apprehension, anything like that. Of the three people there will be a lawyer, there will also be a second lawyer as a legal advisor, recorder to these panels and there will be an opportunity for the individual detainee to present his case. MARGARET WARNER: But Mr. Rivkin, the Pentagon is saying they're not going to actually have their own lawyers, they're going to have something called personal representatives -- how is that going to work and why not get them military lawyers? DAVID RIVKIN: The reason they're not going to get military lawyers is you have to remember the context for this particular hearing. This is being done by military tribunal, very similar to that provided under the Geneva Convention Article 5. They really function as informal fact and truth finding bodies. The typical military tribunal performing this function will be three officers meeting in a tent somewhere in the desert, and it is not a fanciful scenario; that's what happened during the Gulf War One, without anybody being present but the detainee, in essence saying look we've captured you, you know, out of the uniform but your hands still smell of cordite, or we saw you bail out of a tank, we think you're an enemy combatant. What say you? Here the person is going get a lot more process, a lot more due process rights, if you will, than in a typical tribunal. A lawyer would be really out of place here. It's very much common sense process. And remember, under the laws of war you're only entitled to it in the case of doubt. Here we're going to do it for everybody, with a lot more due process. And without a lawyer being present, that's not, in my opinion, any kind of a defect. MARGARET WARNER: And what is the standard, Gene Fidell, by which this three- judge or three-person panel decides if this person is truly an enemy combatant? EUGENE FIDELL: The standard is preponderance of the evidence so, that 51 percent of the evidence, the balance has to tip, however slightly, in favor of the determination that the individual is an enemy combatant and there's a presumption under this regulation in favor of the government's evidence. How multiple cases satisfy requirements MARGARET WARNER: So before I ask you what you think of this process, let me just read you what Larry DiRita, the Pentagon spokesman, said today. He said: "The intent is clear; it's to be utterly faithful to the Supreme Court decision." Explain the Pentagon's strategy here. What do they think they're doing by setting this up vis-à-vis the Supreme Court? DAVID RIVKIN: Well, they are clearly taking up on the notation that the plurality opinion - really majority because I would count Thomas in that and Hamdi -- MARGARET WARNER: Now, that's a different case, that involves a U.S. Citizen. DAVID RIVKIN: You have to read all those cases together. In that case involving a U.S. Citizen, Mr. Hamdi, the court said that the level of due process that we're going to a court, that is due to you as an alleged enemy combatant may be satisfied in a duly constituted military tribunal, this is for a U.S. citizen. In the Guantanamo case they basically said non-U.S. citizens detained in Guantanamo have at least as much of a right as a U.S. citizen. So in a way we are putting together a process that takes up on the notation, often in the case involving a U.S. Citizen, extending the same level of due process to a non U.S. citizen, which I don't think anybody would object to. MARGARET WARNER: But didn't the Guantanamo case, the majority opinion in that, Mr. Fidell, say that these detainees had a right to go into federal court, federal civilian courts? EUGENE FIDELL: Yes, that's exactly right, Margaret. Really the only issue that was presented in the Guantanamo detainees case, Razul is the name of the case, was whether the doors of the federal court were open, and that's the only thing that the Supreme Court squarely addressed. So as David points out, you have to read these cases and sort of tease out from the case involving Mr. Hamdi who was a U.S. citizen detained in Charleston in the naval brig, tease out from that case what the Supreme Court may have had in mind with respect to the non-citizen detainees. MARGARET WARNER: So what do you think the Pentagon's strategy is here -- that they will somehow supplant the whole federal review process? EUGENE FIDELL: No, it doesn't such plant it, I believe. I think that the goal was to try to put something in place that would meet the Supreme Court's concern expressed in the Hamdi case, that there had been no process to date. And one of the bones of contention really from the beginning of this set of controversies was that the Article 5 tribunal as called for by the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war had not been conducted. MARGARET WARNER: Even though the administration says these aren't prisoners of war. EUGENE FIDELL: That's exactly right. Whether or not that was legally -- I don't want to argue, that but there was a choice that had to be made and I think many people feel that in retrospect the administration would have been better advised even as a matter of discretion to afford those kinds of hearings, because then it wouldn't be sort of playing catch up ball and inventing basically a new process, and the important thing I think to bear in mind is what's going on here is a replica of the Article 5 tribunal that is ordinarily conducted, as David said, on the battlefield, at the time of or very close to the time of apprehension. Now we're talking several years later. MARGARET WARNER: So do you, David Rivkin, think that this procedure will satisfy, does it meet the Supreme Court standard? DAVID RIVKIN: I think it meets the Supreme Court standard. But again, I don't want to portray it as administration trying to meet the bare requirement. Remember, there are several things going on. The detainees still have an annual review process; the detainees now have the enhanced Article 5 tribunal. I think if the administration looked carefully at those decisions, which at least in my opinion, substantially contrary of a common opinion - substantially won for the administration and validating the basic legal paradigm that they've chosen and basically would like to do the following, as Eugene is correct -- this does not supplant the district court action, but they want to develop a record in those tribunals so you would have something the courts can defer to. And the way I read Hamdi Padilla in the Guantanamo case the court would very much like to defer to the executive, they just want something -- something a little structured. How will this decision be received? MARGARET WARNER: So, in other words the Pentagon is hoping and you think also that once - I mean -- some of these detainees have already filed their habeas corpus petitions in federal courts, that the government will be able to go in and say, you know, Mr. X here had a hearing, and here's what we determined, and here's the factual record and he's been afforded due process and the judge would just decide yes or nay whether that would stand -- DAVID RIVKIN: Well, look at the record. But let me say this - this is not at all unusual. Remember, it is very rare in the habeas process - even though the term literally means to produce a body - it's very rare to have a body in the court. The typical habeas petition is you have somebody sitting in a federal penitentiary, you know, 18 years later, writing a missive as to why he was unjustly convicted -- and the district court or maybe the clerk for a district court judge would look at and it say, look, this is ridiculous, of course that's not the case. So having a good record would go a long way towards helping the district courts, and I think the government is going to tell various district courts, give us time. And they are doing it very quickly. A very important point: This is going to get off the ground by July 17; by July 17 every person will be told you have a right to this type of hearing. MARGARET WARNER: Do you think this will satisfy federal judges that, okay, that process, that's enough? EUGENE FIDELL: I don't think there's anyone that can make a prediction as to how this is going to come out. There's going to be a lot of lawyering between now and the time this case gets back to the Supreme Court. What I would say is the federal judges have been watching the evolution of the legal doctrines in this case with the same interest or greater interest as or than the rest of us in this country and overseas. And one thing about federal judges, they can be real independent and real ornery. And as deferential as they may have to be for doctrinal reasons to the executive branch, they don't go to sleep on the bench; they are pretty attentive, and I think if they feel that the process that the administration has put in place basically isn't fair, they're going to say so and take things into their answer hands. MARGARET WARNER: Gene Fidell, David Rivkin, thank you both. * * * Los Angeles Times: July 9, 2004 GUANTANAMO SUSPECTS TO BE TOLD OF RIGHTS By Robert Burns, AP Military Writer http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/politics/wire/sns-ap-guantanamo-bay- tribunals,1,4022233.story?coll=sns-ap-politics-headlines WASHINGTON -- All 594 terrorist suspects held at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, will be notified next week of their right to contest their detention in U.S. federal court and of their option to appear before a military panel to challenge their status as an "enemy combatant." Gordon England, the Navy secretary who is overseeing the process at Guantanamo Bay, told a Pentagon news conference Friday that he chose James McGarrah, a rear admiral in the Navy Reserve, to be the "convening authority" who will select the panel members, whom he called a "neutral party." The Pentagon had announced Wednesday that Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz had ordered that all Guantanamo Bay detainees be notified within 10 days of their opportunity to appear before the panels. The purpose of the panels is limited to determining whether a detainee is properly classified as an "enemy combatant." If not, then the detainee would be released to his home country, England said. This is separate from a more elaborate military tribunal, which the Pentagon calls a military commission, which was established by President Bush in 2002 and is designed to conduct trials of non-American terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay. No such trials have been held yet, although the U.S. government has designated 15 people at Guantanamo Bay as eligible for trial. The Pentagon, which has held most of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay without charges for more than two years on grounds that they are "enemy combatants" with no right to contest their detention in U.S. courts, hastily added the panel process this week in response to last week's Supreme Court decisions that said all such detainees have a right to contest their case in a civilian court. The Pentagon has yet to work out many details about providing detainees access to civilian courts and lawyers. England, who visited Guantanamo Bay on Thursday, said he assumes that some detainees will choose not to appear before the military panel to challenge their "enemy combatant" status, and that the entire process can be completed within four months. England also is overseeing a separate process at Guantanamo Bay that the Pentagon describes as annual reviews of each detainee's case. The first of those reviews is to begin after the newly established tribunal process gets under way within a couple of weeks, England said. The Pentagon defines an "enemy combatant" as "an individual who was part of or supporting Taliban or al-Qaida forces, or associated forces engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners" during the 2001 war in Afghanistan or elsewhere. Most of the people held at Guantanamo Bay were picked up on the battlefields in Afghanistan and have been held for questioning aimed mainly at gathering intelligence that could prevent another terrorist attack against the United States. Human rights groups have challenged the Bush administration's position that the detainees can be held indefinitely without being charged. The 594 people held there are from 40 countries and speak 17 different languages, England said. He said the names of those who chose to go before a military panel to challenge their status as "enemy combatants" probably will not be made public. Each panel will be comprised of three "neutral" military officers, of which one must be a military lawyer. They will be chosen by McGarrah beginning next week. He also will chose a "personal representative" to assist each detainees in preparing for the panel, England said. The personal representative will not be a lawyer, England said. It will be a military officer of the rank of major or higher (lieutenant commander or higher in the case of a Navy officer). None of the three is to have been involved in the detention or interrogation of the detainee. England said the detainees who chose to appear before a panel will be allowed to call witnesses, if that is deemed a reasonable request. England said he doubted that many such requests would be deemed reasonable and that detainees instead would present written statements from witnesses. * * * July 9, 2004 ANALYSIS: INVESTIGATIONS PLAGUE BUSHIES By Michael Kirkland, UPI Legal Affairs Correspondent http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20040708-023814-1626r WASHINGTON, July 9 (UPI) -- The Bush administration is facing a cascade of investigations as the months dwindle before the November elections. Some of those investigations may culminate before November. None appears fatal, and the public seems to be paying little attention so far. Only one -- the continuing inquiry into why Iraqi detainees were abused -- generated the beefy headlines or large-scale media investigations evoked by the many accusations of scandal during the Clinton administration. It's as if the media and the public have been worn out by the 1990s and the scores of Clinton "scandals" that turned out to have little basis in fact. In June 25 Democratic members of Congress tried to gin up a little excitement by demanding in a letter that Attorney General John Ashcroft appoint a special counsel to investigate Vice President Dick Cheney's alleged actions on behalf of his old firm, Halliburton. The Texas energy company, which is still paying off a hefty $23 million severance package paid to Cheney when he left to join the Bush campaign in 2000, has won several no-bid contracts in the reconstruction of Iraq. The Democrats point to a March 5, 2003, Pentagon e-mail message from an Army Corps of Engineers official. The message said Douglas Feith, the No. 3 official at the Defense Department, had approved one massive Halliburton contract "contingent on informing WH (the White House) tomorrow. We anticipate no issues since action has been coordinated w (with) VP's office." The message was part of the material recovered by Judicial Watch, the conservative public-interest legal group, in a Freedom of Information Act request. The White House and Cheney's office have responded angrily to the Democratic charges, saying neither took action to steer the contract Halliburton's way and that the message is just a "heads up" notification common in government. So far there is no word from the Justice Department that any preliminary inquiry is under way to determine whether a special counsel is necessary or whether an innocent e-mail message has been grossly misinterpreted. In fact, it's hard to find a department official who will touch the subject with a long stick. Officials this week will not even say whether Ashcroft has seen the letter from the congressional Democrats, only that the letter will be answered in due time. The allegation is separate from Defense Department investigations into alleged Halliburton overcharges for fuel and meals in Iraq. Meanwhile, the influence dispute has gotten personal. The ranking minority member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., has been one of the leaders in calling for a Cheney investigation. Cheney responded in June on the Senate floor by suggesting in crude language that Leahy do the physically impossible. Feith's name has surfaced in another troubling area for the administration: Whether top Pentagon or White House officials approved the abuse of Iraqi detainees or terror-suspect detainees held elsewhere in the world. Media reports say Feith first proposed that al-Qaida and other suspects in custody were not protected by the Geneva Convention. Most troubling, a 2002 Justice Department memo from the Office of Legal Counsel to the White House and Pentagon counsels reinforced that position, particularly in regard to prisoners in Afghanistan. White House counsel Alberto Gonzales was one of the recipients of the memo, so it stretches credulity to suggest that President Bush was not aware of at least a summary of its contents. The memo was buttressed by a subsequent letter from Ashcroft repudiating a State Department position that said the Geneva Conventions applied to the Taliban in Afghanistan. Bush later signed a memo saying he believed the Justice Department had established a legal position but that for the time being the conventions would apply. Still, even after Bush's declaration the memos continued to flow from the Pentagon, one saying aggressive interrogation techniques should not be considered torture and that torture of terror suspects could be legally defended. Top-level White House and Justice Department officials vociferously disavowed the Defense Department memos when they became public last month. Still, civilian and military lawyers defending soldiers accused of abusing prisoners in Baghdad are expected to try to show that superiors knew of and approved the harsh techniques. Some members of Congress on both sides of the aisle are still promising an investigation, though it's unlikely they can or want to do so before the election. Another investigation that on the surface appears to harbor more peril for the administration involves the "outing" of a CIA covert official. Former Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV charges that administration officials leaked the name of his wife, a CIA official, to conservative columnist Robert Novak and tried to leak the information to a variety of other reporters because Wilson disputed Bush's claims on Iraq. Wilson served as a special CIA envoy to investigate allegations Iraq was trying to acquire "yellow cake" uranium from Niger for the production of nuclear weapons. Wilson returned from his mission saying there was no evidence for the allegations. When Bush used the allegations in a State of the Union address as one of the justifications for the invasion of Iraq, Wilson went public disputing the truth of the president's statement. At least two administration officials then approached Novak, dismissing the Wilson assignment as a favor to his wife, identifying her as a CIA official by name. Novak published that argument and the CIA official's name in his column. The problem for the administration is that making public the name of a covert CIA official is a felony under federal law. The law applies to federal employees, not to journalists. Wilson said the "outing" of his wife accomplished what the law was designed to prevent -- it reduced her effectiveness and placed her foreign contacts in jeopardy. Bowing to public pressure, Ashcroft did what he initially said he would not do. He appointed a special counsel to conduct an independent investigation of what has become known as the "White House" leaks. Ashcroft chose a Bush appointee, U.S. attorney for Chicago Patrick Fitzgerald, as special counsel. With FBI agents at his beck and call, Fitzgerald has been aggressively investigating the case. Bush and Cheney have both retained lawyers and have been questioned by the special counsel's investigators. Media speculation on who leaked the CIA official's name centers on Cheney's office. However, Fitzgerald has been forced to subpoena reporters who may have been contacted by the administration officials, and their news organizations are aggressively fighting that action, citing the protections of the First Amendment. So while a grand jury has been hearing testimony for most of the spring, ticking away like a political time bomb in the heart of Washington, the investigation may be put on hold while side issues are fought out in the courts. Whether any charges are brought before the November elections is still very much up in the air. When and if they come, they would come like a thunderbolt in the Washington community. But they may come too late for members of the voting public to take them into account, even assuming the public holds the president responsible for the alleged actions of his subordinates. [ Please send comments to nationaldesk@upi.com ] * * * July 8, 2004 PENTAGON RELEASES SWEDISH MAN HELD AT GUANTANAMO By Will Dunham http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N08263096.htm WASHINGTON, July 8 (Reuters) - The Pentagon said on Thursday it released a Swedish man held for more than two years at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to Sweden, which criticized the United States for holding prisoners with "no legal basis." Sweden had pressed the United States to resolve the case of Mehdi-Muhammed Ghezali, who was held by the United States as a terrorism suspect without criminal charges or access to a lawyer. A total of 147 Guantanamo prisoners have been released or sent to their home countries for further imprisonment, while about 594 prisoners remain at Guantanamo, the Pentagon said. "It is highly gratifying that the Swedish citizen at Guantanamo has finally been released," Minister for Foreign Affairs Laila Freivalds said in a statement from Stockholm. "Sweden is an active participant in the fight against international terrorism. To be conducted as effectively as possible, this fight is dependent on extensive international cooperation, not least in police matters," Freivalds said. "But it must not be conducted with means that lie outside the limits defined in the international legal system. That is why we in Sweden have been unable to accept individuals being held at Guantanamo with no legal basis. This has been the principle upon which we have acted," Freivalds added. Human rights groups have called Guantanamo a "legal black hole" where the United States holds prisoners indefinitely and with no access to lawyers. Rights activists also have accused the United States of using interrogation methods that amount to torture. 'INTENSIVE CONTACTS' The Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs said Ghezali's release followed "intensive contacts between Sweden and the United States during the spring and summer." It said Ghezali was being flown to Sweden. Ghezali's father, a Muslim of Algerian origin, has said his son was studying in Pakistan in 2001 but had nothing to do with al Qaeda, blamed for the September 2001 attacks on the United States. Most of the prisoners held at Guantanamo were picked up in the ensuing U.S.-led operation in Afghanistan. The Ministry for Foreign Affairs said Swedish officials raised the issue with U.S. President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell. The statement referred to "measures that Swedish law enforcement authorities may take when the man has returned to Sweden," but provided no details. The Pentagon did not give specific reasons for the first such release of a Guantanamo prisoner since April. "The decision to transfer or release a detainee is based on many factors, including whether the detainee is of further intelligence value to the United States and whether he is believed to pose a threat to the United States or whether the individual has committed offenses triable by military commission," the Pentagon said in a statement. The United States has returned 135 prisoners from Guantanamo to their home countries for release and sent another 12 for continued detention in Saudi Arabia, Spain and Russia, the Pentagon said. "A determination about the detention and release of a detainee is based on the best information and evidence available at the time. The circumstances in which detainees are apprehended can be ambiguous, and many of them are highly skilled in concealing the truth," the Pentagon said. * * * CNN -- July 8, 2004 ENEMY COMBATANT'S ATTORNEY WANTS DAY IN COURT From Bill Mears and Phil Hirschkorn http://www.cnn.com/2004/LAW/07/08/enemy.combatant/ WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Attorneys for a Qatari man being held in the United States by the military as an "enemy combatant" filed a new appeal Thursday, demanding a federal court hear his claims of unlawful detention. The move came days after the Supreme Court ruled another enemy combatant had the right to go before U.S. courts to challenge his status and the allegations against him. Ali Saleh al-Marri has been in a U.S. Navy brig in Charleston, South Carolina, for 14 months and has not been allowed to see his attorneys, they said. The legal appeal was filed in U.S. District Court in Charleston. Al-Marri is among three enemy combatants being held in the United States, all at the Charleston brig. In their appeal, al-Marri's lawyers wrote, "Neither the Constitution nor the laws of the United States allow the president or the military to detain an individual seized within the United States, and not on an active field of battle, without access to counsel, simply by designating such individual an enemy combatant." Attorneys Mark Berman and Lawrence Lustberg said their client is being held "without basis, without charge, without access to counsel, and without being afforded any process by which he might challenge his designation and detention." The attorneys last week wrote a letter to U.S. officials to "request that the government immediately arrange for us to meet with our client." Yaser Hamdi, one of the other two designated enemy combatants, on June 28 won a Supreme Court ruling saying he should be allowed to petition federal courts over his incarceration. Hamdi, a U.S. citizen, was captured on an Afghan battlefield in late 2001. The government won a procedural victory in a separate appeal by lawyers for Jose Padilla, a Brooklyn-born man accused of plotting to detonate a crude radiological device in the United States. The Supreme Court said his lawyers filed their appeal in the wrong court. Neither Padilla nor Hamdi have been charged with any crime. Held for months without access to attorneys, they have been allowed to meet with lawyers in recent weeks. Al-Marri, 38, was arrested in late 2001 and later indicted on charges of conducting credit card fraud and making false statements to FBI agents in Illinois, where he was enrolled as a graduate student in computer science at Bradley University. Two weeks before al-Marri's trial was to begin in June 2003, President Bush declared him an enemy combatant who "represents a continuing, present and grave danger to the national security of the United States." Prosecutors never filed terror-related charges against al-Marri during his first 19 months in captivity but alleged in open court that he had ties to al Qaeda, the terrorist group responsible for the September 11, 2001, attacks. According to government sources, information from al Qaeda leaders in U.S. custody identified al-Marri as someone who helped the group's operatives entering the United States. His lawyers deny the allegations and say al-Marri "is in fact a civilian, not a combatant." They say that makes his detention by U.S. military authorities illegal. * * * San Francisco Chronicle / AP -- July 8, 2004 Appeals court picks District of Columbia venue for Guantanamo Bay detainee By David Kravets, AP Legal Affairs Writer http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi ?file=/news/archive/2004/07/08/state1932EDT0137.DTL SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- A captive held by the United States in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, must challenge his detention in the District of Columbia, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday. The Supreme Court said last month that the 595 detainees held by the U.S. military in Cuba may challenge their detention in American federal courts, but the decision did not spell out where. Thursday's decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was the first time an appeals court had determined where the challenges should be lodged. The Bush administration had maintained that because the men were picked up overseas on suspicion of terrorism, they could be detained in open-ended military custody, without charges or trial. In overruling the administration, the Supreme Court ordered the San Francisco- based 9th Circuit to determine the proper venue for a Libyan captured in Afghanistan to challenge his two-year detention. The appeals court said in an earlier ruling that the prisoner had a right to go to court to seek his freedom. The San Francisco appeals court said the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia was the appropriate venue for the detainees given that the prisoners are overseas and are suing the federal government. Lawyers representing other detainees have said they planned to sue in the nation's capital. The case concerns Faren Gherebi, who sued President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. The Libyan national who was captured in Afghanistan filed his case in California well before the Supreme Court concluded last month that the detainees could have access to the federal courts. Thursday's decision, meanwhile, came a day after the government announced the military would review the individual cases of the Guantanamo Bay prisoners to determine whether they are being legally held. Officials said the move was in preparation for the flood of litigation from Guantanamo Bay detainees following the Supreme Court's ruling. The case is Gherebi v. Bush, 03-55785. [ David Kravets has been covering state and federal courts for a decade. ] * * * Sacramento Bee -- July 8, 2004 CalSTRS WEIGHS ANTI-TORTURE POLICY The big pension plan considers efforts to limit executive pay and support the Geneva Conventions. By Gilbert Chan, Bee Staff Writer http://www.sacbee.com/content/politics/story/9921973p-10843990c.html Looking to become a leading voice for shareholders, the California State Teachers' Retirement System moved Wednesday to ramp up its campaign against hefty executive pay and to ban investments in companies engaged in torture. Trustees of the $114 billion fund voted unanimously to start mapping out a game plan to corral huge compensation packages for high-level executives at the nation's largest corporations. The trustees' goal is to get companies to enact standards that keep executive pay in check. "This is the corporate governance issue that our members understand and (it) resonates with them," said trustee Carolyn Widener. CalSTRS manages retirement benefits for 735,000 retired and active teachers across the state. The governing board also agreed to consider an anti-torture investment proposal introduced by trustee and state Controller Steve Westly. A vote is expected in September. "We want to send a proactive message that any company that is even close to being involved in products or services involved in torture is something we should not be profiting from," Westly said. "We will not invest in companies that did not adhere to the Geneva protocols on torture." The issue was raised after allegations that private contractors at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq may have abused Iraqi prisoners. Increasingly, CalSTRS - the nation's No. 3 public pension fund - has raised its profile in corporate governance, joining the larger California Public Employees' Retirement System as a major advocate of shareholders' rights. However, corporate groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, have questioned heightened activism by pension funds, arguing their campaigns are motivated by politics rather than an interest in protecting investments. Nevertheless, corporate executives and directors listen to CalSTRS and CalPERS because of their financial muscle, experts say. It is common for top executives, such as embattled Walt Disney Co. chief executive Michael Eisner, to travel to Sacramento for meetings with pension fund officials. Executives from defense contractor CACI International Inc. plan to huddle with CalSTRS and CalPERS next month to explain the company's role providing interrogators to Iraq prisons. The torture allegations could cause financial risk for the funds, which own a combined 286,982 shares in the company based in Arlington, Va. State Treasurer Phil Angelides, a trustee of both CalSTRS and CalPERS, has urged the funds to look into the CACI issue. The federal government is investigating accusations that a CACI interrogator was involved in prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib. CACI has denied it conspired with the U.S. military to torture and abuse prisoners. CACI spokeswoman Jody Brown said plans for an August meeting in Sacramento are being finalized. "We're a little baffled by the amount of confusion and erroneous information going around," she said. "We want to make sure that they have all their questions answered. It's very important that they have the facts." Brown pointed out that the General Services Administration on Wednesday cleared CACI to continue doing business with the federal government. More than 66 percent of the company's revenues are generated by defense and federal contracts, according to CalSTRS. The CACI probe spurred Westly to introduce his anti-torture investment proposal for CalSTRS, something that he says would be a first for a major pension fund in the country. His measure would bar investments in any company involved in "the sale of technologies or services designed for use in the torture of human beings or the treatment of people that does not meet the minimum standards of the Geneva Conventions." CACI officials lashed out at Westly, accusing him of "chasing headlines for his own political benefit." Westly denied political motives. "Rather than attacking one company here and there, CalSTRS needs to set a clear and consistent policy," he said. Corporate governance expert Paul Lapides said the Westly proposal falls in line with other socially responsible investment principles. "It's like people don't like to invest in tobacco (companies)," he said. But, he said, CalSTRS could have a tough time screening companies. "I don't think we have torture equipment manufacturers in the United States," said Lapides, director of the Corporate Governance Center at Kennesaw State University in Kennesaw, Ga. [ The Bee's Gilbert Chan can be reached at (916) 321-1045 or gchan@sacbee.com ] * * * USA Today -- July 8, 2004 US SETS UP TRIBUNAL SYSTEM FOR CUBA DETAINEES By Toni Locy, USA TODAY http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2004-07-07-detainee-tribunals_x.htm WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration is racing to review the status of each of the nearly 600 detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, before it is hit with waves of lawsuits challenging the detentions. To comply with a Supreme Court ruling last week, the Pentagon said Wednesday that detainees will be notified by July 17 that a military tribunal will review their status as "enemy combatants" and that they may challenge their detentions in U.S. courts. The high court rejected the centerpiece of the administration's legal strategy in the war on terrorism by ruling that the president cannot lock up foreigners and U.S. citizens indefinitely without allowing them to contest their detentions. U.S. officials had maintained that suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban captives were not entitled to hearings because they were "enemy combatants" who had violated the laws of war. The "Combatant Status Review Tribunal" announced Wednesday is nearly identical to a system that the Pentagon created in May to do annual reviews of each detainee's status. At a background briefing for reporters, the review tribunal was described as the "layer on top" of the annual assessments, which also have not begun. Details of both review systems are being worked out as the administration braces for hundreds of claims that are likely to be filed by detainees against the government. Lawyers for the Defense and Justice departments are scrambling to set up a formal process to justify the detentions -- or risk having it done for them by federal judges. "Without that review, the government comes into court with an empty folder," says Douglas Kmiec, a law professor at Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif. "With nothing from the government as evidence for continuing to hold the detainees, the court will find its own evidence ... on its own terms." Kmiec says federal judges could insist on hearing testimony from detainees in U.S. courtrooms, creating a range of security and political problems for the administration. The first legal actions stemming from the Supreme Court's rulings were filed Friday in Washington by a civil liberties group that is challenging the detentions of nine detainees at Guantanamo. They include Moazzam Begg and Feroz Abbasi, British citizens who were among the first six Guantanamo captives whom President Bush designated as eligible for trials by military tribunal. Neither has been charged. On Wednesday, the Pentagon announced that Bush had designated nine more detainees as tribunal candidates. The Pentagon says the detainees captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere have been screened to determine whether they are terrorists or innocent men caught in the chaos of war. But the detainees have not had hearings before neutral panels to determine whether they should remain in custody. Wednesday's announcement is aimed at filling that void. Under the new system, detainees will be assigned a "personal representative," a military officer who is not a lawyer. The officer will be allowed to examine the military's files on the detainee and to meet with the captive. Once that happens, a tribunal must be held within 30 days. The detainee, through the officer, may call witnesses if they are available. The detainee also may testify, but he cannot be forced to do so. Advocates for the detainees were quick to criticize the Pentagon's review plan Wednesday. "The review procedures for the detainees set up by the Department of Defense are inadequate and illegal, and they fail to satisfy the court's ruling," said Rachel Meeropol, a lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, the civil liberties group that represented Guantanamo detainees before the Supreme Court. Scott Silliman, a law professor at Duke University, says federal judges are likely to reject the Pentagon's review system as flawed because it will not provide detainees with lawyers or representatives with whom they can have a confidential relationship. "It's too little, too late," says Silliman, a former Air Force lawyer. Military officials also are grappling with how to give lawyers, who are filing cases on behalf of detainees, access to their clients at the Navy base in Cuba. The Supreme Court's key rulings last week stemmed from two cases: one that involved claims by 14 Guantanamo detainees from Kuwait and Australia; another filed on behalf of Yaser Esam Hamdi, a U.S. citizen captured with the Taliban in Afghanistan. After the rulings, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly talked by phone with government and detainees' attorneys in the Guantanamo case, the first step toward hearings on the detentions. Hamdi's case is likely to resume soon before U.S. District Judge Robert Doumar in Norfolk. In a third case, the high court ruled that a claim brought on behalf of Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen arrested in Chicago and held incommunicado as an enemy combatant, was filed in the wrong court. On Friday, Padilla's lawyers filed a challenge to his detention in federal court in South Carolina, where he is being held in a Navy brig. Will the Pentagon reviews be enough? The Pentagon's proposed reviews of detainees are important because they could give federal judges a written record that describes evidence of the alleged danger posed by a detainee, says Michael Nardotti, a former Army judge advocate general. But will the Pentagon's reviews be enough? "I'll bet some (judges) will say it is and some will say it isn't," Nardotti says. Because judges could find that the Pentagon has had ample opportunity to review the status of detainees, the government does not have "a lot of time to play with" in establishing its new system, he says. In perhaps the administration's most fateful decision in its legal strategy against terrorism, Bush decided that the detainees did not deserve prisoner-of- war status under the Geneva Convention of 1949 because they did not wear insignia or uniforms while fighting in Afghanistan. Under the Geneva rules adopted by nearly all nations, including the USA, prisoners should receive a hearing by a military tribunal if there is doubt about whether they should be POWs. Administration officials refused to hold such hearings because they said they had no doubts that the detainees pose a danger to the United States and could be held as long as the war on terrorism lasts -- in essence, indefinitely. Once detainee cases are filed, judges will have to figure out how far they can delve into the circumstances surrounding a detainee's capture to evaluate the legality of the detentions. An in-depth examination won't be easy in many cases because government lawyers likely will claim that revealing evidence would compromise national security. Justice John Paul Stevens' opinion in the Guantanamo ruling did not offer guidance on how the detainees' claims should be handled by U.S. courts. The ruling simply said that courts can hear detainees' challenges to their detentions. Supporters of the administration are interpreting Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's opinion in the Hamdi case as setting different standards for detained U.S. citizens and foreign nationals. O'Connor said Hamdi's case could be handled by a military tribunal. She also said federal judges could address national security concerns by accepting hearsay testimony and affidavits from government or military officers. Former Justice official Viet Dinh, a law professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., says that any rights given to foreign nationals "cannot be broader than what O'Connor says Hamdi gets." Steven Watt of the Center for Constitutional Rights says the foreign detainees deserve full hearings. He says several were picked up in Bosnia, Algeria and Gambia, and not on battlefields in Afghanistan as the Pentagon has led the public to believe. "That is, pure and simple, state-sponsored abduction," he says. "That should be assessed by the laws of this country." * * * The Guardian (UK) -- July 8, 2004 PENTAGON ACCUSED OF EVADING GUANTANAMO RULING By Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington and Vikram Dodd http://www.guardian.co.uk/guantanamo/story/0,13743,1256578,00.html The Pentagon said last night it would create military review panels to weigh the legality of detentions at Guantanamo, in a measure that critics said falls far short of a supreme court ruling that entitles prisoners to challenge their detentions in US courts. In the Bush administration's first response to last week's sweeping court verdict, senior military and justice department officials told reporters yesterday that the Pentagon would establish military pan els to review the detention of each of the 595 prisoners. The four Britons in Guantanamo Bay have not been told of a ruling, the Guardian has learned. They are among prisoners held at the prison camp without charge, trial or access to lawyers for up to 2 years. The revelation will also put pressure on the British government to tell its citizens of the ruling when officials visit the prison camp. The Blair government risks another clash with its closest ally over the Guantanamo issue if the US refuses to allow UK officials to tell the Britons of their new rights. "Essentially, what we did today was we announced how the department of defence is going to comply with the supreme court ruling," a Pentagon official said. He said the Combat Status Review Tribunals would go into immediate effect. Detainees will be allowed to testify at their own hearing and - in theory - to call witnesses. However, the prisoners will not be represented by lawyers, and hearings will not be open to the public, a Pentagon official said. "It will not necessarily be anyone with legal knowledge. The person is not serving as a legal representative," he said. Instead, each prisoner will be assigned a military officer - of lesser rank than the three officers on the review panel - to advise them on the proceedings. Prisoners, who have been held without access to lawyers at Guantanamo for more than two years will be notified of the outcome within 10 days. In further fallout from the supreme court verdict, the Pentagon also announced yesterday that President George Bush had designated nine more Guantanamo prisoners for trial by military tribunal. Early reaction to the review panels from Guantanamo lawyers was scathing. "That is not a hearing of any sort," said Clive Stafford Smith. "The supreme court ruling is very clear. "They have a right to an independent tribunal. This is just a total smokescreen." Steve Watt, a senior fellow at the Centre for Constitutional Rights, which filed the lawsuits at the supreme court, said the review panels were unlikely to result in fair hearings. It was unclear whether prosecutors would allow findings obtained through coerced confession, or how much latitude would be provided to detainees in introducing witnesses and gathering evidence to present their case. "It doesn't provide fundamental guarantees of due process," he said. "I think its laughable that this personal representative that will be provided at court to explain the process and assist with gathering evidence which will then be presented to military officers. Are they really going to have a neutral adjudication? I think not." Two of the Britons released this year from Guantanamo said the US tactics included instilling a sense of hopelessness in prisoners by telling them they had no rights. The aim was to make them more willing to cooperate * * * The Guardian (UK) -- July 8, 2004 GUANTANAMO BRITONS KEPT IN DARK OVER RIGHTS DETAINEES UNAWARE OF DECISION TO ALLOW LEGAL ACCESS By Vikram Dodd http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1256338,00.html The American captors of the four Britons in Guantanamo Bay have not told them of a ruling by the US supreme court, made 10 days ago, giving them access to a lawyer, the Guardian has learned. The Britons are among the more than 600 men held at the prison camp without charge, trial or access to lawyers for up to two-and-a-half years. In a rebuke to President George Bush's tactics in his war on terror, last week's ruling gave the prisoners the right to challenge their incarceration as suspected terrorists in the US courts. But the Britons are unaware of their newly won rights, the Guardian understands, a decision which lawyers acting for the men say threatens to render the supreme court's ruling worthless. The revelation will also put pressure on the British government to tell its citizens of the ruling when officials visit the prison camp. The Blair government risks another clash with its closest ally over the Guantanamo issue if the US refuses to allow UK officials to tell the Britons of their new rights. The Foreign Office said: "We agree it's important that the detainees are informed about the recent decision of the supreme court and we're discussing with the US authorities how the information will be conveyed to the detainees." Steven Watt of the Centre for Constitutional Rights, the group which won the supreme court ruling, said: "If they don't know that the courthouse doors are open to them, how can they bring a challenge to their detention? Advertiser links We Are The Future - Child Charities Raising funds to benefit boys and girls in war-torn cities.... wearethefuture.com Compassion - Sponsor a Child Online Sponsor a child online through Compassion's Christian child... compassion.com Children International - Sponsor a Child For only $18 a month, you can make a difference in the life... children.org "The decision would be an empty vessel if they are not told of what the decision says." Two of the Britons released this year from Guantanamo said the US tactics included instilling a sense of hopelessness in prisoners by telling them they had no rights. The aim was to make them more willing to cooperate. "It gives them hope," said Louise Christian, the lawyer for two of the British prisoners, of the ruling, "and the people who have got them there don't want them to have hope." She added: "The risk of mental illness increases if they are in Guantanamo without any hope at all or the idea of people fighting and campaigning for them." Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrats' foreign affairs spokesman, condemned the US decision to keep secret from the prisoners their new rights: "That's outrageous, that's terrible. It is astonishing that the detainees have not been told about a significant legal development which effects their fundamental rights." He said Foreign Office officials due to visit the prison should tell the Britons of their rights if the Americans failed to do so. "No matter how serious the allegations, every British citizen is entitled to consular protection. "Officials who see British citizens have an obligation to tell them of their rights in view of the supreme court's landmark decision." Major Michael Shavers, a spokesman for the Pentagon, said: "We don't inform detainees of events in the world outside Guantanamo." Five Britons were released from Guantanamo Bay in March and alleged they had been beaten and humiliated by their captors. They said, they had been so desperate that they had signed false confessions. The four British detainees at the camp are Feroz Abbasi, Moazzam Begg, Richard Belmar and Martin Mubanga. Two of the four, Mr Begg and Mr Abbasi, have been designated by President Bush to face commissions in which the military sits as judge and jury. Both men are feared to have suffered mental health problems during their detention. Lawyers have started legal action on their behalf in the US, challenging their continued detention. There are also four people with rights of permanent residence in Britain held at Guantanamo whom the British government refuses to help, saying the governments of the countries they were born in should make representations on their behalf. * * * Financial Times: July 6, 2004 DOUBT CAST ON REPATRIATION OF DETAINED BRITONS By Jean Eaglesham, Political Correspondent http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory &c=StoryFT&cid=1087373532800 Tony Blair has cast doubt on the government's willingness to accept the repatriation of the four Britons still held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, saying there is not yet adequate "infrastructure and machinery" to protect national security if they are released. The admission marks the first time the government has spelt out the dilemma it faces over the fate of the four terrorist suspects, who have been held in the US military camp for more then two years. Mr Blair said on Tuesday that he had asked President George W. Bush for the four to be returned to the UK a few weeks ago. The intervention came in the wake of legal proceedings in the UK designed to force the government formally to request the return of the detainees. But the prime minister stressed that the US would agree to the men's release only if it was satisfied they would not pose a threat. "I do not think the United States is being unreasonable in saying 'we need to make sure that there is proper security in place for these people'," Mr Blair told the liaison committee of select committee chairmen. Asked if the UK could not simply offer such an assurance, Mr Blair said: "We have to make sure that we can actually do it and that is not altogether easy." Without commenting on the individual cases of the four men, he suggested that the government regarded them as a higher risk than five Britons who had been detained in the camp and were returned to the UK earlier this year. "There is a reason why we got the five back and we are still debating the four," Mr Blair said. "All of these [four] people were picked up in circumstances where we believe, at the very least, there are issues that need to be resolved, let us say, in respect of those individuals. Certainly, from what I have seen about those individual cases, I would need to be very, very clear that there was in place in this country a sufficient infrastructure and machinery to be able to protect our own security." Lawyers acting for the men - who have been held without charge - reacted angrily to the prime minister's comments. Louise Christian, the solicitor representing the families of two of the detainees, Feroz Abbasi and Martin Mubanga, said Mr Blair should be pursuing claims that prisoners were abused and tortured at the camp, rather than appearing to back the US rationale for the detention. "It sounds like he is agreeing with the US that they ought to be locked up, even though they haven't been prosecuted and they haven't committed a crime," Ms Christian said. * * * Seattle Post-Intelligencer / AP -- July 5, 2004 AP OBSERVES GUANTANAMO DETENTION CENTER By Paisley Dodds, Associated Press Writer http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/aplatin_story.asp?category=1102&slug= Inside%20Guantanamo GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba (AP) -- A two-day tour of Guantanamo Bay afforded The Associated Press the most extensive access ever allowed independent journalists, giving them views of some 50 detainees, including some in a new maximum-security prison. One detainee said he, too, was a reporter. Watching through mirrored glass, and with the sound turned off, the AP also witnessed three interrogations, including one in the part of the camp reserved for problem detainees and prisoners believed to hold information important to the fight against international terrorist groups. No armed guards were present at the interrogations, and officers said armed guards were never used during these sessions. They said each detainee is generally questioned twice a week, with sessions usually lasting two to four hours, with a maximum of 15 hours a day. The scenes shown to an AP writer and photographer were a far cry from those at Abu Ghraib, the U.S.-run prison in Iraq where some troops are accused of abusing detainees. But interrogation techniques used here were recommended for Abu Ghraib by the Guantanamo center's former commander, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, and critics have questioned whether that is an indication abuses happened here, too. Miller and other officials have denied that any Guantanamo detainee has been mistreated. "This is a wholly different environment," said Brig. Gen. Jay Hood, who succeeded Miller. "We are not being shot at every day." Two of the interrogations sessions watched by AP were at Camp Delta's normal detention center. The sessions were viewed from behind mirrored glass, and officers turned off the audio feed, which is used for analysts to crosscheck information. The other session viewed was at Camp 5, where alleged leaders, problem detainees and prisoners believed to have high intelligence value are held. It was the first time a journalist was allowed to witness an interrogation there since that jail opened in May. A problem detainee - a young man held since the beginning of the mission - had asked to see his interrogator, having clammed up in their last session. Although the detainee appeared silent much of the time, the interrogator viewed the session as a success, saying the man finally talked. After the interrogator and linguist left the room, the bearded detainee began smiling, laughing and talking to what could have been another detainee, next door in the shower. "Sometimes this detainee is very funny; other times he is not funny at all," said a female interrogator who often brings the prisoners mint tea and Fig Newton cookies. "Sometimes they are very pleasant at one moment, and then they tell you calmly and proudly about how they killed someone." Officers said the primary focus of the prison always has been intelligence gathering. "We've learned about recruiting, how terror cells are financed, their capabilities and plans that have been sitting on the table for attacks," said the senior interrogator, who along with other interrogators spoke on condition of anonymity. Sliding a knight into attack mode with a meaty hand, a terrorism suspect taught his unarmed interrogator chess, grinning at his opponent and pausing briefly to look at a manual that U.S. officials believe holds key intelligence. Next door, another prisoner in an orange jumpsuit poured tea from a thermos, fingered a Snickers candy wrapper and took a drag on a cigarette as he laughed with a female interrogator and squinted at a mug shot she handed him of a man with piercing ebony eyes. In late June, one prisoner who had been unwilling to talk for more than a year opened up, the senior interrogator said. Another, the burly chess player, has been steadily cooperative. "He often tells his chess opponents, 'Attack, attack, attack!' You learn an awful lot about some of these people from very simple methods," said the interrogator, who has brought the prisoner McDonald's hot fudge sundaes on occasion. The first detainees arrived strapped into a cargo plane 2 1/2 years ago, shackled, bound and blindfolded. Most were captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan, accused of links to the fallen Taliban regime or al-Qaida. Ringed by turquoise waters where American troops snorkel, fish and lounge on pontoon boats on days off, this arid outpost on Cuba's eastern tip has been leased as a U.S. Navy base since 1903. Officials thought its remote location on foreign soil would put prisoners outside the reach of U.S. constitutional protections, but the Supreme Court ruled last week that the 595 prisoners from 42 countries - all but three held without charge and denied lawyers - have the right to challenge their detentions in U.S. courts. Most detainees have not yet been told of their newly won right. Nor were they told about the Abu Ghraib scandal, officials said. Military lawyers are struggling to determine just how the ruling could affect operations here as well as a panel reviewing individual detentions and future tribunals. Three prisoners - an Australian, a Sudanese and a Yemeni - have been charged with crimes ranging from conspiracy to commit war crimes to aiding the enemy, and have been selected to be tried by military tribunals that officials hope will begin in Guantanamo before the end of the year. But the Supreme Court ruling could create delays and lawyers plan a flurry of challenges. Questions about the fairness of tribunals and the treatment of detainees have multiplied since photographs were published of U.S. troops taunting hooded, naked prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Hood said nothing like that has occurred in Guantanamo. Two guards, however, were disciplined after one hit a detainee with a radio and another sprayed one with a hose. A third was investigated and cleared of wrongdoing. "The photos that came out of Abu Ghraib were so terrible that I think it causes people to stop and wonder," said Hood, who assumed command in March. "It's a challenge every day ... the only way to overcome it is to invite people here and to have them look for themselves." Criticism of the Guantanamo camp started when it opened, with the first pictures of shackled prisoners being locked into hastily constructed metal enclosures that rights activists compared to animal cages. Twenty-one detainees have tried to kill themselves 34 times, the most recent attempt coming last January. The International Committee of the Red Cross, the only independent group allowed to visit the detainees, issued a rare public rebuke of conditions in October. It and other groups contend the prolonged detention has harmed detainees' mental health. Some critics, however, charge that is the result of harsh interrogation techniques. No detainees are currently on suicide watch and most are in good health, said Cmdr. Tom Delaney, in charge of the detainees' hospital. Disputing reports that few detainees here still retain any value as sources of intelligence about terrorist activities, two interrogators said most prisoners have either killed someone or helped in an operational capacity. They said about 20 percent are college educated and most know some counter- interrogation techniques, making it more tedious to extract information. Despite that, they don't mistreat the detainees, said the interrogators. "It's counterproductive," said the senior interrogator, who has worked at the camp for nearly two years. "You don't end up getting what you want that way." Before moving to the Abu Ghraib prison this spring, Miller instituted a system of rewards to encourage more cooperation from detainees. One is a field trip for cooperative prisoners held in medium-security Camp 4, where detainees wear white uniforms, are allowed to exercise every day and get to keep more items such as letters and books in their cells. Four or five of the 100 prisoners at Camp 4 are taken out about twice a week. Interrogators say the trips build trust with the men and prompt them to divulge more information. In an unprecedented opportunity, the AP journalists were allowed inside a room with four of the prisoners during a four-hour field trip to a part of the detention center known as Camp Iguana. The big lizards it's named for amble around a complex of trailers and buildings that housed a handful of juvenile prisoners before their release last year. The area is screened from view by green netting, and the detainees are allowed to sit on a hilltop and look at the Caribbean or play soccer. Most opt for air conditioning against the 100-degree (37-degree Celsius) heat and watch movies in a trailer that also has a pingpong table. This day the movie was "The Color of Paradise," an Iranian film about a father learning to accept his blind son. One prisoner asked a commander in perfect English if the visitors were journalists and if he could speak to them. When told the visitors were journalists but he could not talk to them, he smiled and said that he and his friend were journalists. The Arab satellite TV station al-Jazeera has said that one of its cameramen is wrongfully detained at Guantanamo. Detainees are allowed to sit in the trailer unshackled. Guards stand outside. The mood was less relaxed in the other camps, where open-air cell blocks made of chain-link fences allow detainees to see each other and chat. Most prisoners turned their backs to avoid being photographed. Some looked curious or nodded in greeting. When a prisoner began criticizing American journalism, an officer hurried the visitors away from the cells, where angry detainees have been known to throw feces at guards. Detainees in Camp 5 - which holds about 50 of 100 detainees considered uncooperative or high-intelligence value - stay in an air-conditioned concrete building in cells closed with metal doors and a strip covering an internal window. A commander peeled back the tape to give a glimpse. In one cell, a man was curled up asleep, a prosthetic leg lying below his mattress. The commander said the men - many with unkempt black beards - have developed their own cell routines. Some clean their cells and wash their jumpsuits each day. Many read and reread letters from home or study the Quran, Islam's holy book. Most observe the call to prayer that crackles over the loudspeaker the ritual five times daily. A few look at the sunlight shining into cell windows, reaching their arms up and looping their fingers around the metal mesh. One such photograph was censored by military officers who reviewed the AP's portfolio. They also would not allow publication of others they said might reveal the identities of detainees. "The mission is, of course, more sensitive because we are under a microscope," said Army 1st Lt. Romel Santos, a 25-year-old guard from San Jose, California. "But as long as we keep doing the right thing, we're good to go. I think we're doing that already." * * * Newsday -- July 5, 2004 A QUESTION OF PRINCIPLE Lawyer Michael Ratner took Guantanamo cases, despite his feelings on terrorism By Fred Bruning, Staff Writer http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/ny-etlede3881804jul06,0,277133.story Michael Ratner, the civil liberties lawyer, was running along the Hudson River on Sept. 11, 2001, when planes hit the World Trade Center towers. He was pretty sure he knew what was happening. "Someone is trying to kill all of us," Ratner thought. The attorney hustled north toward his home in Greenwich Village. Like other New Yorkers, he was stunned by the attacks and furious at the attackers - emotions that briefly led to a personal and professional quandary. Retaliating for assaults on the trade center and Pentagon and the hijacking of a fourth airliner, the United States routed the Taliban government of Afghanistan and began sending foreign terrorism suspects to Guantanamo Naval Base in Cuba for interrogation. Geographically, and legally, the detainees were in no-man's land - stuck in a system, Ratner said, based more on "executive fiat" (the executive in this case being President George W. Bush) than rule of law. From the outset, Ratner viewed the Guantanamo situation as problematic - a snub of the U.S. Constitution and a retreat from legal principles established centuries ago in the Magna Carta. 'Totalitarian' situation In his new question-and- answer book, "Guantanamo: What the World Should Know" (Chelsea Green Publishing, $15), Ratner tells interviewer Ellen Ray that the arrangement is nothing less than "totalitarian." He adds: "The president can do what he wants, acting as a dictator." So there was plenty to make a guy like Ratner - who has been committed to human rights work since he was a law student at Columbia University in the 1960s - feel motivated and ready to tangle with the power structure again. But he was a New Yorker who lived through Sept. 11. When he contemplated aiding Guantanamo suspects, Ratner had doubts. If prisoners at "Camp Delta" (a high- security prison at Guantanamo) had anything remotely to do with the terrorist attacks - forget about it, he thought. "The idea that I would actually represent someone who bombed the World Trade Center didn't sit so well with me," Ratner said during a conversation in his living room on a recent afternoon. "It didn't seem what I wanted to do." A human rights case Michael Ratner might not want to take? For years, he had tackled some of the toughest. Ratner, 61, president of the nonprofit Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in Manhattan, filed suit on behalf of prisoners after the 1971 uprising at the Attica Correctional Facility. He investigated the 1973 killing of freelance journalist Charles Horman in Chile - an episode that prompted the movie "Missing." With fellow CCR attorneys, Ratner challenged Reagan-era foreign policy in Central America and, a decade later, the right of President George H.W. Bush to go to war with Iraq without congressional authorization. He has represented Black Panthers, Puerto Rican independence activists and Haitian boat people. And, predictably, before long, he signed on for Guantanamo, too. In their limbo state, Ratner said, Guantanamo inmates faced indefinite detention (U.S. officials say prisoners will not be kept longer than necessary) and had no access to the legal process. That was especially troubling, Ratner said. Even for foreign detainees, he said, "the American courthouse has to be open." Supreme Court ruling Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Guantanamo Bay prisoners and U.S. citizens held by the military as "enemy combatants" are entitled to individual hearings in federal courts to contest their imprisonment. And Defense Department officials recently promised a periodic review of each of the approximately 600 detainees at Camp Delta. Meanwhile, more than 100 prisoners have been released - including two British citizens represented by Ratner and the Center for Constitutional Rights. The men, Shafiq Rasul and Asif Iqbal, complained of harsh treatment, Ratner said: solitary confinement, lengthy interrogations while squatting with hands chained between their legs, doses of loud music and strobe lights, menacing dogs, a phony video that purported to show them with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. "What are you doing to human dignity?" Ratner asked. He rejects the use of torture under any circumstances. Coercive tactics - like those allegedly used at Guantanamo and in Iraq - generally don't work, he said. Also a worry, he said, is that torture corrupts the tormenters - and the moral climate. "It's not so easy to put the genie back in the bottle." Helping the 'little guy' His own moral compass was calibrated long ago by his father, owner of a concrete and building supply company in Cleveland. Harry Ratner taught his three children - Michael has a brother, Bruce, the developer who wants to bring the New Jersey Nets to Brooklyn, and a sister, Ellen, a Fox News Channel commentator and founder of the Talk Radio News Service - to respect everyone, regardless of station, and lend a hand to those who didn't get the breaks in life. Often, Ratner said, his father would spend time with workers. "He was very close to the little guy. He'd always put on his boots and go into the trenches where they were pouring concrete." Stay close to the little guy - the advice stuck. After law school, Ratner considered a corporate job. But making a difference proved more appealing than making a bundle. Ratner hasn't changed his mind - even if his efforts are not always cheered. When CCR took the Guantanamo cases, Ratner said, hate mail poured in - "real bad hate mail." People were angry after Sept. 11. So was he. Still, Ratner said, rage could not trump the nation's values. Basic rights had to be protected or the peril to America would be greater than any posed by terrorists. "This is a moment to stand tall," he said. * * * Newsday -- July 5, 2004 'DIRTY BOMB' SUSPECT PADILLA ODD MAN OUT IN RULING 'Enemy combatant' case still unresolved as Supreme Court cites procedural grounds for passing on judgment By John Riley, Staff Writer http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/ny- uspadi053881963jul05,0,7547127.story In mathematical calculations, four plus one equals five. But in the U.S. Supreme Court, as alleged al-Qaida "dirty bomber" Jose Padilla learned last week, the same numbers sometimes add up to zero. Until last Monday, Padilla's controversial two-year-long incommunicado military detention as an "enemy combatant" was the best-known of the three landmark war- on-terror cases the court had agreed to review. Among legal insiders, it also was viewed as the most compelling challenge to the Bush administration's aggressive tactics - a U.S. citizen arrested in May 2002 on U.S. soil at Chicago's O'Hare Airport and held without charges solely on the president's say- so. Instead, Padilla ended up the odd man out. The court extended judicial protection to foreign combatants held in Cuba, and to an American captured in Afghanistan. But the justices ducked Padilla's case on procedural grounds - thwarting a majority that, legal experts say, appeared poised to hand the Bush administration an even more stinging rebuke by holding that Padilla was not only entitled to access to the courts, but that his detention was outside the legal system from the start. It was, in a sense, the most important decision the court didn't make. "The court was troubled by the Padilla case," said Douglas Kmiec, a constitutional scholar at Pepperdine University. "They didn't have a ready order for what to do with him. And one of the things courts do in that situation is rely on procedural formalities to buy time for them to think it through." But Padilla's lawyers didn't miss the signals. They say the court's ruling dramatically strengthened their hand to push the Justice Department to release him or charge him with something. They intend to demand just that when they refile their case in South Carolina, where Padilla is held in a naval brig, rather than New York, which the Supreme Court said was the wrong jurisdiction. Attorney's confident "We're confident that a majority of the court would find that American citizens seized in civilian settings in the U.S. cannot be treated as enemy combatants," said Jonathan Freiman, one of Padilla's attorneys. "They must be charged with a crime or released. We hope that the Justice Department will read the handwriting on the wall." That handwriting, experts say, emerges from a careful analysis of the court's opinions in Padilla's case and the related case of Yaser Hamdi, the U.S. citizen allegedly captured with the Taliban in Afghanistan. In Hamdi's case, four justices - John Paul Stevens, Antonin Scalia, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David Souter - argued the president had no authority to detain a citizen without charges. Five others, including Justice Stephen Breyer, concluded he could detain a person captured fighting in a battle zone - but Hamdi, a majority said, deserved a court hearing to try to show he was just a relief worker. In Padilla's case, Scalia - famously one of the court's sticklers for procedural technicalities - joined the majority in holding that Padilla's case had been filed in the wrong court. But Breyer appeared to switch sides - joining Ginsburg, Souter and Stevens in a dissent that argued the court should rule on the substance of Padilla's case, and said in a footnote that the laws relied on to detain Hamdi did "not authorize the protracted, incommunicado detention of American citizens arrested in the United States." "At stake in this case," the dissent also noted, "is nothing less than the essence of a free society." Since Scalia, on the substance, didn't think even Hamdi could be detained without charges, his vote would make five. Instead, his vote allowed the court to avoid the substance, and leave Padilla sitting in a brig, in a constitutional limbo. "It does bother you," said Donna Newman, another lawyer for Padilla. "But really, it's just Scalia. He's a strict constructionist. If you don't get to first base, you can't get to second base, even if you're entitled to second base. That's what makes sense for him. What can you say?" Along party lines? Some legal experts noted that, in the end, the court's conservative wing averted a politically damaging rebuke of Bush by the same 5-4 lineup that resolved the Florida election battle and made Bush president in 2000. "My noncynical answer is that five justices believed you couldn't avoid the jurisdictional issue," said Deborah Pearlstein, who heads the U.S. Law and Security Program at Human Rights First. "The cynical answer is we're heading into an election season. By ruling on jurisdiction the court avoided a more scathing repudiation of the administration." Others pointed out that, while Hamdi's case was unusual, Padilla's involved a scenario - an American suspected of involvement in domestic terrorism - that is more likely to come up again, and lamented the court's failure to decide what powers the president has. "There probably will be more Padillas," said Neal Sonnett, head of an American Bar Association task force on the treatment of enemy combatants. "The impact of their ruling will be more far reaching, and that may be one of the reasons they have deferred ruling on it." For now, Padilla's future is up in the air. The Justice Department could charge him with the "dirty bomb" plot it has publicized, but some lawyers are skeptical about their ability to successfully prosecute a case relying on their interrogations of Padilla without a lawyer and questioning of high-value al- Qaida operatives held overseas. The Miami Herald reported last week that federal prosecutors were considering indicting Padilla in an unrelated terror-financing case involving an individual he knew when he lived in Florida, and that might be easier. And a third option, some noted, would be simply to keep him on ice while his lawyers work their way up to the Supreme Court again. "I have no idea what they'll do," said Steven Shapiro, general counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. "But their practice has been to push their legal authority to its limit - if not beyond." * * * July 4, 2004 THE SUPREME COURT AND THE WAR ON TERROR By Neal Richardson and Spencer Crona http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36~75~2249909,00.html Contrary to the widely reported perception that last week’s U.S. Supreme Court opinions dealt a severe legal setback to the war on terror, a careful reading of them reveals a markedly split decision. While the court did allow detainees access to U.S. courts, it also held that the legal process available to them would be substantially condensed by comparison to a civilian criminal trial, regardless of whether the accused terrorist happened to be an American citizen. The celebratory cheers of defense attorneys should be muted by the realization that none of their clients has been turned loose yet, and their journey toward release may be detoured through a military court. In reaching the decisions, the court validated the theoretical basis and precedents in the law for the use of military tribunals to handle the crimes and claims of terrorists. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote: "There remains the possibility that the standards we have articulated could be met by an appropriately authorized and properly constituted military tribunal. Indeed, it is notable that military regulations already provide for such process in related instances, dictating that tribunals be made available to determine the status of enemy detainees who assert prisoner-of-war status under the Geneva Convention." O’Connor announced her pragmatic opinion in the case of Yaser Hamdi, a former resident of Saudi Arabia who spent much of his life abroad but was an American citizen by virtue of being born in Louisiana. According to a Defense Department affidavit describing Hamdi’s capture, Northern Alliance soldiers seized him, armed with a Kalishnikov assault rifle, on the battlefield in Afghanistan, defending the Taliban regime. Hamdi’s family contended he had gone there as a humanitarian relief worker and was detained by mistake. To resolve those competing claims, the court was presented with two visions of the "process due" for Hamdi under the Constitution. Government lawyers wanted the process to turn upon the single affidavit of the Pentagon official; i.e., "Take our word for it, he’s an enemy combatant." The defenders of Hamdi, and the strange-bedfellow dissenting justices Antonin Scalia and John Paul Stevens, argued that Hamdi should receive a full-blown criminal trial in civilian court, with all conceivable constitutional safeguards, or something approaching it. Relying on classic law school textbook cases about what process is due in the circumstances, O’Connor rejected both views. She instead opted for steering between them, but tacking closer to the government’s side. In her view, the government could present evidence by affidavit, and other hearsay evidence which would be inadmissible in a traditional criminal trial, as long as the accused terrorist was notified of the grounds for his detention and afforded an opportunity to present his side of the story, with assistance of counsel. In such a proceeding, "the Constitution would not be offended by a presumption in favor of the government’s evidence." This procedure could be played out in front of a military judge, or, in the absence of a tribunal, a federal judge. In reaching her rulings, O’Connor repeatedly cited the World War II case of Ex parte Quirin, in which the Supreme Court affirmed the government’s authority to detain and try accused enemy war criminals -- Nazi saboteurs in that case, including an American citizen -- by military tribunal. Ever since President Bush issued an order for tryingtrial of terrorists by military tribunals, we have heard the tiresome refrain that the 1942 Quirin case was a bad precedent because it involved a traditional declared war, and a Supreme Court "cowed by a popular wartime president," in the same era as the notorious Japanese-American detention camps. As of last Monday, we have Supreme Court opinions in which a majority of justices regard Quirin as strong and settled precedent that guides the courts on these issues. (Justice Clarence Thomas sided completely with the government.) The timing of the opinions was fortuitous, as the Defense Department last Tuesday announced formation of the first such tribunal since World War II, for trial of three Guantanamo detainees. Indeed, had the administration resorted at the outset to military tribunals and provided for a preliminary determination of combatant status for both aliens and citizens, the government would have been better positioned in the Supreme Court cases against detainees’ complaints of denial of due process (and to confront the scores of lawsuits ahead). Tribunal rules already comport with O’Connor’s standards of evidence for combatant-status determinations, by, for example, permitting hearsay. Using tribunals and having military judges making the ultimate decision on who to detain also would have allayed exaggerated fears of arbitrary use of power. Hamdi was arguably the most significant of the three war-on-terror opinions that the court announced Monday. In Rasul vs. Bush, the court merely ruled that detainees in Guantanamo may seek relief from their detention in the federal courts (but Rasul should be viewed in the context of the court’s ruling in Hamdi as to the limited process due to them). In Padilla vs. Rumsfeld, the court ruled Jose Padilla, the accused "dirty-bomb" plotter and al-Qaeda operative who was captured in Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, sought release from detention in the wrong court and must re-apply in the federal court for South Carolina. When he does, he might find his opportunity for redress significantly curtailed, such that he might be detained indefinitely based on the limited process mandated by O’Connor’s opinion in Hamdi. This result contrasts with the decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals that ordered Padilla either be held on criminal charges or set free within 30 days. Now, the only apparent ways Padilla can escape detention are if he is denied the due process O’Connor would afford, or if the next court to hear his case distinguishes between his situation and Hamdi’s, based on Padilla’s capture in Chicago rather than on a foreign battlefield. Such a false distinction should be rejected. The courts need only look at the immense spaces where the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center once stood to remind themselves that American soil is within the zone of combat, in this war. Indeed, America has suffered more than three times as many fatalities at home in this war than on all its foreign battlefields combined. American soil certainly was to be the killing ground on which Padilla allegedly intended to detonate his radioactive "dirty bomb." Evidence released in June showed Padilla purportedly had downsized to the more modest scheme of blowing up apartment houses by renting individual apartments that would be hermetically sealed and filled with natural gas. Yet the commentators failed to recognize that, at the very least, the Supreme Court’s ruling had derailed the Padilla rapid-release program envisioned by the Court of Appeals. However both sides of the debate might be spun -- as they surely will as the political season progresses -- the essential determination emerging from Monday’s opinions was that although the Constitution requires due process be afforded to alleged enemy combatants before their detention may continue, the process due must be circumscribed to accommodate the interests of national security. The court’s views likely were informed, at least to some extent, by the realization that here on American soil, there were those who plotted commandeering 10 planes instead of four on Sept. 11, detonating "dirty bombs" in our cities or bringing down apartment buildings with natural-gas explosions. The threat of al-Qaeda’s cells and their comrades around the world, a majority of the court surely realized, has not yet receded into America’s past. [ Neal Richardson, a deputy district attorney in Denver, and Spencer Crona, a Denver lawyer, have written extensively on the legal issues of issue of prosecuting terrorists. ] * * * BuzzFlash / Der Spiegel: July 4, 2004 MORE THAN 100 CHILDREN IMPRISONED; REPORT OF ABUSE BY U.S. SOLDIERS http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/04/07/con04280.html DER SPIEGEL -- According to information from the International Red Cross, more than a 100 children are imprisoned in Iraq, including in the infamous prison Abu Ghraib. The German TV magazine "Report" revealed that there has been abuse of children and youth by the coalition forces. Mainz - "Between January and May of this year we've registered 107 children, during 19 visits in 6 different detention locations" the representative of the International Red Cross, Florian Westphal, told the TV station SWR's Magazine "Report Mainz". He noted that these were places of detention controlled by coalition troops. According to Westphal the number of children held captive could be even higher. The TV Magazine also reported of evidence and eye witness reports according to which U.S. soldiers also abused children and youthful detainees. Samuel Provance, a staff sergeant stationed in the now infamous Abu Ghraib prison said that interrogating officers had pressured a 15 or 16 year old girl. Military police had only intervened when the girl was already half undressed. On another occasion, a 16 year old was soaked with water, driven through the cold, and then smeared with mud. UNICEF, the United Nations Children's Fund, confirmed the detention of Iraqi children by foreign military according to "Report" which cited an interim memorandum by the organization, The as yet unreleased report, which is dated June 2004, is quoted as follows: "Children who were detained in the cities of Kerbala and Basra because of alleged activities against the occupying forces were reportedly routinely sent to a detention camp at Umm Kasr. The classification of these children as detainees is worrisome because it includes unspecified length of detention without contact to their families pending further proceedings or legal actions". The German section of the human rights organization Amnesty International is demanding a clarification of the allegations and a response from the US government. A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION [ A BuzzFlash Reader translated this article from the respected German publication, "Der Spiegel." Original Article in German (Trans. by SAB, NY): http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,307200,00.html ] * * * Newsweek: July 3, 2004 HOMESICK FOR TEXAS Alberto Gonzales left a good life to become White House counsel. Amid a series of legal setbacks, he's wondering why. By Daniel Klaidman http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5360079/site/newsweek/ July 12 issue - White House counsel Alberto Gonzales loved his old life in Texas. He had a coveted appointment to the state Supreme Court and a nice house in a pretty Austin neighborhood. When George W. Bush went to Washington, Gonzales traded in his robes to be the new president's top lawyer. But now, people close to Gonzales say he wishes he were back home. "He's down, very down," says a close confidant. "He's tired, and longs for his life in Texas." It's easy to see why. Nearly three and a half years after 9/11, Gonzales is at the center of the legal and political fallout over the administration's handling of the war on terrorism. As the president's legal gatekeeper, Gonzales was responsible for vetting some of the most controversial decisions: the treatment of prisoners, the line between aggressive but legal interrogation and torture, and the rights of "enemy combatants." The White House, and Gonzales in particular, are now left to explain those decisions in the wake of Abu Ghraib and the steady drip of leaked memos. Last week the Supreme Court delivered another blow. In cases that dealt with prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and suspected terrorists held as enemy combatants, the justices rejected the administration's argument that the president has virtually unlimited power to hold people indefinitely without access to the courts. It was an unwelcome moment for a man who had once been on Bush's shortlist for the high court (a post Gonzales's intimates say he never wanted). Friends say the White House counsel is "beating himself up" over the mess. Gonzales, they say, fears he may not have served the president as well as he would have liked. Though he stands by the legal reasoning, he wishes he had been more attuned to the possible political consequences and had reined in some of the administration's more extreme voices. Friends say he was particularly stung by press accounts of a draft memo signed by Gonzales that called some of the requirements of the Geneva Conventions "quaint." The memo, first reported in NEWSWEEK, caused an uproar among the administration's critics. Gonzales, who declined a request for an interview, has told aides he thought the stories were taken out of context -- he says the memo didn't say the Geneva Conventions themselves were outdated, just a few old provisions requiring commissary privileges and athletic uniforms for prisoners. What's more, the memo was actually penned not by Gonzales but by Dick Cheney's top lawyer, David Addington, a hard-charging hawk. Bush hired Gonzales -- who was once his legal adviser in Texas -- in part because he isn't a grandstander. Courtly and low-key, he passed the president's all-important "good man" test. But after 9/11, Gonzales's soft-spoken approach sometimes put him at a disadvantage. In heated arguments, Gonzales would often keep his counsel rather than contradict forceful officials like John Ashcroft and Donald Rumsfeld. "He's not passive, but when he is in an area where he hasn't mastered the subject matter, he'll be quiet," says a close associate. In predictable Washington fashion, everyone in the administration is looking for someone to blame. There is especially bad blood between the White House and the Justice Department about which bears most responsibility for a now infamous August 2002 memo that condoned the use of torture on suspected Qaeda detainees. The memo was drafted by a Justice lawyer who consulted White House lawyers extensively. "The White House got exactly what it wanted," says a Justice official. But the White House insists that the memo was approved at the highest levels of the Justice Department. "The attorney general and his staff were in the intestines of this memo," says a source close to Gonzales. Some of Gonzales's aides pressed him to fight back and say that top Justice officials had signed off on the memo. But he refused. He didn't think it would serve the president, he told them. And besides, the genteel Gonzales told them, it isn't his style. [ With Tamara Lipper. ] * * * Los Angeles Times: July 3, 2004 GUANTANAMO DEFENSE TEAM TAKING ON SYSTEM * Military lawyers for six prisoners in the war on terrorism are in the unusual position of having to attack their leaders over tribunals. By John Hendren, Times Staff Writer http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na- lawyers3jul03,1,2833367.story WASHINGTON -- What bothered Navy defense lawyer Charles Swift as he sat down with his new client, Salim Ahmed Salim Hamdan, was not the waist chains and leg cuffs criss-crossing Hamdan's orange prison jumpsuit. Nor that Hamdan, who served as Osama bin Laden's personal driver in Afghanistan, faced terrorism charges. What bothered Lt. Cmdr. Swift was that his client -- along with five other prisoners in the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba -- had been selected to have his case heard before a special military tribunal that would operate outside the framework of American and international law. Instead of facing regular criminal courts or the U.S. military's own criminal justice system, each with its well-established rules and safeguards, these defendants were to face something new: a hastily revived military commission that had not been used for more than 50 years. For Swift and the other military lawyers assigned to the six cases, the heart of their defense has become an all-out attack on the legitimacy of the tribunal, or commission, system itself. "The system will not guarantee a fair trial," Swift said in an interview. "What you seek is an independent and impartial hearing -- and this ain't it." As they challenge the basic fairness of the tribunals, Swift and his colleagues are writing a new chapter in the relationship between the armed forces and lawyers in uniform. Their clients are accused of taking part in a conspiracy to destroy the nation whose uniform the lawyers wear. And while Swift and the others are appointed by the Pentagon and still subject to the military chain of command that culminates with the president, they are in the unusual position of having to attack both their employer and their commander in chief. They understand that they are making history. "When else are you going to get to the chance to be involved in a process that's as monumental as this?" asked Army Maj. Mark Bridges, another member of the defense team. "What happens here will affect the future of war crimes prosecutions." So unusual is the lawyers' position that a few months ago, Swift violated an explicit order from the president. When Bush revived the commissions following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon, he prohibited military defense attorneys from going into regular federal courts on behalf of their clients. Following Bush's directive, Swift decided, would have prevented him from meeting his ethical obligation to give Hamdan the best possible defense. So Swift ignored the order and filed a lawsuit in U.S. district court in Seattle that attacked the tribunals as an "unprecedented, unconstitutional and dangerously unchecked expansion of executive authority." The outcome of Swift's suit remains to be determined, but he and others on his team were buoyed last week when the Supreme Court ruled in other detainee cases that the war on terrorism did not give the president unlimited power to set aside normal legal rights and procedures. The court has long made it clear, said Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, that "a state of war is not a blank check for the president." The administration argues that the special commissions are necessary, given the unique realities of the war on terrorism. "Different doesn't mean unfair," said Air Force Maj. John Smith, a lawyer and spokesman for the Office of Military Commissions. "The rules were designed to look at violations of the laws of war." Known collectively as the "Guantanamo Five," Swift and his colleagues are led by Air Force Col. Will Gunn, 45, an imposing figure with many years of experience in military justice. Under commission rules, Gunn is the Guantanamo defenders' supervisor and may not take on cases himself. But he guides overall strategy and offers a layer of insulation between the case lawyers and Pentagon brass. Even though the Pentagon picked both the prosecutors and the defense lawyers, critics said, the defense team is considered the best the military has to offer. "All of these people are the pick of the litter," said Eugene Fidell, head of the National Institute of Military Justice, an umbrella organization of lawyers who work in the military justice system. "They really are highly regarded." Reporting to Gunn are: * Air Force Lt. Col. Sharon Shaffer, 40, who represents Ibrahim Ahmed Mahmoud al Qosi of Sudan, an alleged Al Qaeda financial manager, Bin Laden bodyguard and weapons smuggler. Shaffer has argued more than 200 cases in court and ruled in more than 160 cases as a military judge. * Navy Lt. Cmdr. Philip Sundel, 40, an experienced prosecutor who helped set up the Rwanda war crimes tribunals. He represents Ali Hamza Ahamad Sulayman al Bahlul of Yemen, who is said to have been a Bin Laden bodyguard and a producer of Al Qaeda recruiting videos that encouraged the killing of Americans. * Bridges, 37, assisting Sundel in Al Bahlul's defense. He is the youngest of the defense attorneys. * Marine Maj. Michael Mori, 38, often referred to within the team as simply "the Marine." His colleagues suggest that the fiery and determined Mori is attacking the tribunal system much the way other Marines attack enemy beachheads. His client, Australian David Hicks, is accused of attempted murder, aiding the enemy and conspiracy to commit war crimes. He allegedly attended Al Qaeda terror camps in Afghanistan and fought against coalition troops. * Swift, 42, representing Hamdan. A Naval Academy graduate and perhaps the boldest of the defense lawyers, Swift earlier this month named Bush, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the head of the Office of Military Commissions, John D. Altenburg Jr., in the Seattle lawsuit. Swift's challenge to some of the most powerful figures in the government may be in part because as he sees it, Hamdan is among the lowliest of the defendants. When Swift interviewed him at Guantanamo, Hamdan had been in custody for more than two years -- most of the time with no charges filed against him -- and had been in isolation for several months. His client had trouble talking, Swift said; he was out of practice. Although dubbed "Osama bin Laden's chauffeur" by the government, Hamdan told Swift, "I never joined Al Qaeda. I am not in the military. I was just a civilian doing my job. What am I doing here?" Prosecuting Hamdan, Swift said, was like indicting Martha Stewart's chauffeur for insider trading. The last time the American government resorted to military commissions was in 1942, when eight Nazi saboteurs were caught on the East Coast during the early months of U.S. entry into World War II. Brought before military tribunals, six were sentenced to death and executed within days of conviction, while the other two received long prison terms. To Swift and his team, Bush's revival of commissions by executive order in November 2001 looks like another wartime rush to justice. "We're going back and trying to use a standard of justice that was created at a time when society recognized the appropriateness of segregation," Mori said. "We've evolved too far" to go back to that, he said. Defense lawyers note that when the 1942 tribunals were convened, the Geneva Convention did not exist and the Defense Department had not developed the Uniform Code of Military Justice that was created to address shortcomings in the old system. Bush asserted the right to establish the commissions and to choose which defendants would be tried before them, as well as the right to pick prosecutors, defense attorneys and judges for such trials. Moreover, administration officials said, no court outside of the military would be allowed to review a military commission's decisions -- a position the Supreme Court struck down last week. In challenging the tribunals, defense lawyers are expected to focus on a broad array of rules and decisions that could deny their clients protections normally available to defendants. Among them are the detainees' lack of prisoner-of-war status, which cuts them off from the protections of the Geneva Convention. The lawyers may also challenge rules of evidence that allow a majority of the commission to overrule the presiding officer (there is no judge), secrecy regulations that can deny defendants access to the evidence against them, and a rule forbidding plea bargains and the dropping of charges without permission from the authority that approved the charges in the first place -- "like letting the pitcher call balls and strikes," Mori said. Said the defense team's Gunn: "I always had this notion and this belief that it is entirely possible that there are people at Guantanamo that shouldn't be there. They're people that are caught up that were at the wrong place at the wrong time. "Even though we have a nation that's hurting." he said, "if they are in fact not the terrorists that they are claimed to be, then let that come out." * * * Los Angeles Times: July 2, 2004 US DETAINEES IN CUBA PRESS LEGAL CASE * Cases filed after Supreme Court struck down Bush administration's policy of indefinitely holding foreign nationals without trial By John Hendren, Times Staff Writer http://www.latimes.com/la-na-gitmo3jul03,1,1272356.story WASHINGTON -- Lawyers for nine detainees at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, filed lawsuits Friday demanding that their clients be tried or released. The suits were the first of as many as 600 actions likely to be filed following a Supreme Court ruling this week that granted the prisoners access to American courts. A group of attorneys filed the lawsuits in a federal court in Washington, saying they intend to consolidate the cases in one court rather than go "venue shopping" by filing in various districts throughout the United States. With 595 detainees currently being held, Pentagon officials had feared a scenario in which cases were filed across the United States. "We want to get out of this what the U.S. Supreme Court says we should get out of it, which is immediate access to counsel," attorney Clive Stafford-Smith said. "In due course, when we can, we intend to try to help everybody." The filings for writs of habeas corpus were made possible after the Supreme Court struck down the Bush administration's policy of indefinitely holding foreign nationals captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere at the Cuban brig without providing for trials. The attorneys intend to file the cases in groups, but know fewer than half of the names of the Guantanamo detainees. So far, detainees have been identified only by their families, Stafford-Smith said. The Pentagon has offered few official identifications. "I think there's going to come a point where someone's going to have to decide how do we help people who are not identified," Stafford-Smith said. The lawsuits filed Friday were on behalf of British citizens Moazzem Begg, seized in Pakistan, and Feroz Abbasi, designated for a trial by a military commission but not yet charged. Also filing were lawyers for Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish citizen who lives in Germany, and for Mourad Benchallali, Nizar Sassi and Ridouane Khalid, all French citizens seized in Pakistan. In addition, cases were filed on behalf of two British citizens seized at a peanut processing plant in Gambia, Jamil El-Banna, who is a Jordanian Palestinian refugee, and Bisher Al-Rawi, an Iraqi refugee. The ninth detainee is Omar Khadr, a 17-year-old Canadian captured in Afghanistan in 2002. * * * The Telegraph (UK): July 3, 2004 US COURT TO HEAR GUANTANAMO BAY BRITONS' CHALLENGE By David Rennie in Washington http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml= /news/2004/07/03/nguan03.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/07/03/ixhome.html Two British terrorist suspects yesterday became the first Guantanamo Bay detainees to challenge their detention in an American court, following a ruling by the United States Supreme Court. Lawyers for Moazzem Begg, from Birmingham, and Feroz Abbasi, from Croydon, filed suit at the federal district court in Washington. Monday's surprise ruling by the court granted almost 600 Guantanamo detainees the right to challenge their detentions in court, under the principle of habeas corpus. The same consortium of US and British human rights lawyers working on the Begg and Abbasi case was also expected to file four similar suits. One was on behalf of Jamil el-Banna, and Bisher al Rawi, two British residents of Palestinian and Iraqi nationality respectively who were picked up in The Gambia. Other suits were on behalf of three French nationals, a Canadian and a Turk with German residency. The Begg and Abbasi petition challenged the Pentagon and US authorities to justify the indefinite detention of the two Britons. The pair have not been charged, but are among six Guantanamo detainees designated as suitable for trial by military tribunals to be run by the Pentagon. The Bush administration had argued that Guantanamo's unique location - at a US naval base on the far south-eastern tip of Cuba - placed it beyond the reach of American courts. Since the Supreme Court rejected that argument, the Bush administration has been braced for a tidal wave of lawsuits. The lawsuit demanded immediate access to the two men for their lawyers, both to advise them of their legal rights, and "to assess their mental state", after what their legal team asserted was more than two years in solitary confinement. The judge receiving the petition, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, has the power to grant immediate access for lawyers, a ruling that would transform the isolation of detainees in Guantanamo Bay. The US authorities at Guantanamo have argued against allowing detainees to know of the legal moves being made on their behalf. Clive Stafford Smith, a British lawyer acting for Begg and Abbasi, said: "We are demanding that they learn that we are representing them. These are the only litigants in the history of America not allowed to know that they are being represented." The Begg and Abbasi suit also asserted that the planned military tribunals would violate international and US law, and demanded that the federal court rule on that question. In an attempt to increase diplomatic pressure on Britain, the suit quoted a speech by Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney General, that implicitly condemned the planned military tribunals. In those tribunals, Pentagon chiefs would act both as prosecutors and court of final appeal, secret evidence would be permitted, and courts would be allowed to consider hearsay and rumour as evidence. Lord Goldsmith said Britain could not compromise on principles of justice and liberty, including: "the right to a fair trial by an independent and impartial tribunal established by law". Two other British terrorist suspects at Guantanamo, Martin Mubanga and Richard Belmar, have not been designated for trial. Lawyers and relatives of all four Britons protest their innocence, saying that they were charity workers, tourists and travellers who were picked up in error, or abducted by American authorities. Senior Bush administration officials have challenged that view, alleging that all four are dangerous militants, trained at al-Qa'eda camps. * * * Newsday: July 2, 2004 SUPREME COURT'S COMBATANT RULINGS SEEN AS CONFUSING By Timothy M. Phelps, Washington Bureau Chief http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/ny- uscort023877880jul02,0,647466.story WASHINGTON -- While the U.S. Supreme Court's enemy combatant decisions this week were a clear rebuke to the president, some lawyers say they are also a confusing, conflicting mishmash not likely to help anyone involved win their freedom any time soon. The one clear result of the three decisions is that eight justices told the Bush administration it does not have unlimited power to hold someone as an enemy combatant without judicial review. But the court ducked on a technicality what many consider to be the most important case - that of Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen who was arrested in the United States and who remains in military custody without trial. The court also refused to decide whether the president on his own has the constitutional power to declare a U.S. citizen an enemy combatant. Instead, the court held, without a majority being able to agree on a rationale, that a vote of Congress authorizing the use of force against those responsible for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks gave him that authority, even though the resolution passed by Congress does not mention detention. And even though enemy combatants must now have access to the courts, the rules prescribed for some, and probably most of them, make winning their freedom close to impossible, lawyers say. For one thing, judges must presume that anything the government says is accurate unless the detainee can prove otherwise. Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University here, said that while the decisions are highly significant, their impact "may be less than meets the eye." Turley said the decisions are important because they reject the Bush administration's "extreme interpretation of presidential power." However, "What the court did not do is create bright lines for the future and answer some basic questions. These decisions are not just fractured but so ambiguous as to be unintelligible." The Justice Department, in a statement, said it was pleased with the decisions because they upheld the president's authority to detain enemy combatants and limited the rights of detainees to proceed in court. "The military detains enemy combatants to prevent them from continuing to wage terror and war, as well as to gather intelligence to thwart further terrorist assaults," public affairs director Mark Corallo said in the statement. "They are not letting anybody go, there's no doubt about that," said Elliot Mincberg of People for the American Way, a group that lobbies for liberal causes. But Mincberg said that since the government position in the cases would have allowed it to take detainees and lock them up forever without any rights, the decisions "are pretty basic and pretty formidable." "Whether the glass is two-thirds full or a third empty, we were concerned it would be completely empty," said Michael Millemann of the University of Maryland School of Law. "The fact that it is a third full, given the president and the times and the court, is relatively good news." The fact that the main rationale for giving the president the right to declare U.S. citizens like Yaser Hamdi, detained in Afghanistan for allegedly fighting for the Taliban, as enemy combatants only attracted four votes was seen as an embarrassment for the court in such an important case. Justice Clarence Thomas agreed with that result, but dissented and refused to provide a fifth vote because he thought the decision did not go far enough in supporting the president's powers. The fact that there was any decision in the case at all was due to two other justices, David Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who agreed to concur in the judgment even though they disagreed with nearly every part of it. Turley described that move as "bizarre." He was particularly critical of the Padilla decision. Even though a majority of the court clearly agreed that Padilla was being held illegally, the court said it could not decide the case because it was brought in the wrong legal district and the suit had improperly named Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as the defendant. Turley and other lawyers interviewed said the conservative justices who ruled for the government in the Padilla case may have been trying to delay a politically embarrassing defeat for the Bush administration just before the presidential election. * * * Charleston Post and Courier: July 2, 2004 POSSIBLE ROLE FOR BRIG WORRIES SOME Neighbors say they don't want more terrorist suspects housed in the Navy Consolidated Brig in Hanahan. By James Scott of The Post and Courier Staff http://www.charleston.net/stories/070204/loc_02hanahan.shtml HANAHAN--Michelle Donnelly has her own idea on where the U.S. government can put the 600 detainees at Guantanamo Bay. "Bush started this," Donnelly said of the president as she shopped with her teenage son Chris. "Take them up and put them in the White House." Donnelly's comments were echoed by others in this small town tucked away between North Charleston and the Cooper River, where residents reacted to the possibility that suspected terrorists could be relocated from a holding facility in Cuba to stateside prisons. The Navy Consolidated Brig at the Charleston Naval Weapons Station in Hanahan, already home to a handful of terror suspects, is among the few facilities that would seem to fit the government's needs. The move comes as a result of a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this week granting some prisoners access to the court system. If the government opts to set up a federal court in Guantanamo Bay, the need to relocate might be moot. If not, however, some are saying the brig might be a spot to hold some of the prisoners since it already houses three wartime detainees, among them suspected "dirty bomber" Jose Padilla. U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, who visited the Force Protection Inc. plant Thursday in Ladson, said he doesn't think having suspected terrorists in Hanahan's back yard is cause for alarm. Graham, who serves on the Senate Armed Services Committee and has been vocal on American prisoner abuse issues in Iraq, said if bringing prisoners to South Carolina would speed up their trip to jail permanently, then it might be worth it. "This brig is the best in the nation," said Graham, R-S.C. "This is the place to send them if they've got to leave Cuba." Graham's confidence in security was shared by Hanahan Mayor Minnie Blackwell, who said she has not heard anything from the federal government. "I will have to have faith in our military," Blackwell said. "Hopefully everything will be fine." Many residents interviewed Thursday afternoon around town, however, said they were opposed to the idea. Most said they feared it would raise the area's image on terrorists' radar, a move that could put them and the bedroom community of about 13,000 in the crosshairs of future attacks. "Bring them here -- that's a crazy idea," said Lawrence Schwager, of North Charleston who was shopping at Yeamans Hall Shopping Plaza. "Let the lawyers go to 'Gitmo.'" Monique Lane was shopping at the Dollar General on Remount Road. "No. No. No," she said. "That puts us in more danger." The brig, built in 1989, is a medium-security facility designed to hold up to about 400 prisoners, with one person to a cell. In its 15-year history, only one inmate has managed to escape -- a slaying suspect who made it to Texas before being recaptured. Despite that escape 11 years ago, most experts agree the prison is safe. About a year ago, the last time Navy officials would discuss details, the brig had roughly 250 prisoners. While the Supreme Court's decision might cause changes for the brig, it's already had implications for at least one of the inmates there. Yaser Hamdi, a U.S. citizen seized on an Afghanistan battlefield in 2001, now will be able to go before a judge. One of his attorneys, Geremy Kamens of Alexandria, Va., said Thursday that no date has been set, though his client is pleased. "He is extraordinarily happy that he can have his day in court." Hanahan resident Mariana Wilson said she often thinks about terrorists sleeping in cells not far from her home, where she is raising her two children. "We don't really need it," said Wilson, who manages the Dollar General. Nearby in North Charleston, Mayor Keith Summey said he wasn't concerned. The Lowcountry, which also is home to the Charleston Air Force Base and the State Ports Authority, is coping with national issues, he said. This would be one more. Even before the possibility arose this week, Summey said North Charleston dedicated a deputy police chief to staying tuned to homeland security issues ranging from attending ports authority meetings to keeping in touch with federal authorities. "The community is trying to be prepared for anything," Summey said. "The best thing is don't take anything for granted." Terry Joyce of The Post and Courier staff contributed to this report. * * * The Scotsman (UK): July 1, 2004 NIGHTMARE GOES ON AFTER GUANTANAMO RELEASE, MPs TOLD By Vivienne Morgan, Political Staff, PA News http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=3151937 The "Kafkaesque" nightmare of a British citizen released from Guantanamo Bay has continued on his return to the UK, the Commons was told tonight. Labour’s Oona King (Bethnal Green and Bow) used a debate to urge the Government to end the "legal and moral black hole" that had "wrecked" his life. Tarek Dergoul was one of five Britons released from the Camp Delta detention centre on Cuba in March. The 26-year-old from Mile End, east London, spent 22 months in the camp before his release. He has since alleged attacks by US guards on Guantanamo Bay prisoners were videotaped. Outlining his account of torture and human rights abuses at the base, Ms King accused the US administration of "tolerating or actively promoting" prisoner abuse. She backed Amnesty International’s call for a fully independent, impartial and public investigation into the torture allegations. Ms King claimed the five released British detainees had not received adequate support on their return to the UK. The so-called Tipton Three had alerted police to more than 30 death threats against them but no action had yet been taken, she claimed. Mr Dergoul had encountered serious housing problems as he was considered to have made himself intentionally homeless, she protested. "It was not his intention to be detained and abused and tortured for two years." His disability living allowance had also been refused because he had not resided in the UK for the requisite number of weeks this year. "The Kafkaesque nightmare for Tariq and the Tipton Three continues even though they are now in theory free from all this," Ms King told the Commons. * * * Daily Telegraph (New South Wales) -- July 1, 2004 HICKS ORDERED TO TRIAL By Phillip Coorey in New York http://dailytelegraph.news.com.au/story.jsp?sectionid=1258&storyid=1556938 THE US Government moved against Australian terror suspect David Hicks yesterday by ordering him to stand trial before a military commission of five American colonels. The move came only a day after the US Supreme Court ruled Hicks and his fellow inmates could challenge their long detention and treatment at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, before US civilian courts. Lawyers for Hicks saw the Supreme Court decision as an opportunity to challenge the legitimacy of the military commission process, which they say is unjust and unfair, and possibly avoid such a trial. But the Pentagon yesterday referred the three terror-related offences with which Hicks has been charged to a military commission. It is the last step before a trial date is set and the hearing at Guantanamo Bay starts. The Pentagon said five officers would act as Hicks' judge and jury at the military commission. Retired Army Colonel Peter Brownback, who is the presiding officer, or chief judge, is the only member of the commission panel with legal qualifications. He spent 22 years as a military lawyer and 10 years as a military judge. He will set the trial date when he is satisfied the prosecution and defence are ready to go. The other four commissioners, whom the Pentagon would not name, are two Marine Corps Colonels, an Air Force Colonel and an Air Force Lieutenant Colonel. Two other inmates, a Yemeni and Sudanese, also charged with terror offences, will also go to trial. Pentagon spokesman Major Michael Shavers said the announcement was not timed to undermine planned legal challenges to the military commissions made possible by the Supreme Court decision. "The case just reached this point where it was time to make the announcement," he said. Military Commission spokesman Major John Smith said if a legal challenge to the commissions is mounted, "we'll deal with that when it happens". He maintained the commissions were fair and upheld international standards of justice, despite claims to the contrary by Hicks' lawyers and the British Government, which is refusing America permission to try British terror suspects. Hicks' military lawyer, Major Michael Mori, said there was now a legal battle "that will be fought on two fronts" because he would push for a speedy hearing in a US federal court to challenge the military commissions. "Just because the Government's trying to rush it now doesn't mean that we're going to give in," he said. The military commission referral did not change the fact "David is still facing an unfair system," he said. * * * The Age (Melbourne) -- July 1, 2004 WORRIED PENTAGON RUSHES TO TRY HICKS By Marian Wilkinson, Washington, and Mark Forbes, Canberra http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/06/30/1088488025912.html The Pentagon has rushed to establish a military commission to try David Hicks - despite a landmark US Supreme Court ruling that lawyers predict will lead to the overturning of the military process as unfair. The Pentagon announced the establishment of a five-member military commission, headed by a retired US Army colonel, to try Hicks and two other detainees. The announcement came on Tuesday, a day after the historic decision by the US Supreme Court to grant the detainees the right to challenge their detention in an American court for the first time. Lawyers acting for the Guantanamo Bay detainees say the commission may never hear the case against Hicks. They said the Supreme Court decision almost certainly means the rules governing the military commissions will have to be rewritten to satisfy US civilian courts that they can guarantee minimal rights for detainees who are to be tried. "The military commission structure as presently constituted is unlawful and a violation of the federal constitution as well as treaties to which the American Government is a party. I do not expect the commission, as it presently stands, to be in a position to review any cases," said Professor Neal Katyal, who is advising the military defence lawyers acting for the detainees. The Pentagon is insisting that the military commissions can still go ahead despite the Supreme Court's decision. It announced that Hicks, along with one Yemeni and one Sudanese national, would be tried by a military commission headed by retired army colonel Peter Brownback, a former military judge. Pentagon lawyer Major John Smith said he hoped the case would be heard by the end of the year, but asked whether the military commissions would survive a legal challenge, said: "We'll have to wait and see." As one US defence lawyer put it, by announcing that the military commission for Hicks would go ahead, Pentagon officials "are trying to create the perception that they have everything under control at Guantanamo - when they have just gotten a huge black eye". Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said yesterday Australia was satisfied with the structure of the military commission Hicks will face but the US had taken too long to put him and other detainees on trial. "I'm sorry that it's taken the Americans so long to set up the military commission," he said. Hicks' Australian lawyer, Stephen Kenny, said the US was rushing the military process due to its concern about the Supreme Court decision. "Its decision clearly indicates the court is uneasy about the entire process," he said. Professor Katyal said many things about the military commission will have to change to make them acceptable. This includes excluding the use of confessions from witnesses obtained under torture or coercion. The military commission process was set up by President George Bush last November to prevent detainees having access to US civilian courts. * The Los Angeles Times reported that senior Bush Administration officials are considering moving hundreds of the Guantanamo detainees from Cuba to prisons in the US. Pentagon and Justice Department officials said that to avoid ferrying prisoners and government lawyers to federal courts across the country, as might be required, they have discussed moving all detainees to a military prison in a conservative judicial district within the US to enable the consolidation of all the proceedings in one court. * * * * * * * * *