Terror suspect freed from UK jail
A foreign terror suspect held in the UK without trial or charge since December 2001 has been freed from jail, Home Secretary Charles Clarke has confirmed.
The man, an Egyptian known only as C, was let out of Woodhill Prison near Milton Keynes at 1900 GMT on Monday.
In a statement, Mr Clarke said there was not enough evidence to maintain his certification as a terrorist suspect.
C's release, which his lawyer says has no conditions attached, came after three other detainees were given bail.
C had been held under the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act.
His case had been due to be reviewed at a Special Immigration Appeal Commission (Siac) hearing later this week but was released before it could be held.
In a statement to the House of Commons, Mr Clarke said C's certification under the act had been kept under constant review.
He said: "As part of this process, I concluded... that the weight of evidence in relation to C at the current time does not justify the continuance of the certificate.
"I therefore decided to revoke the certificate with immediate effect."
Asylum
At a previous appeal hearing against his detention, Home Office lawyers claimed C was a leading member of Egyptian Islamic Jihad.
They said he had been in contact with prominent extremists and had assisted in fraudulent fundraising.
C, who had applied for asylum in the UK claiming he had been persecuted in Egypt, denied the allegations.
C's lawyer, Natalia Garcia, said news of his release had come "completely out of the blue".
Just hours before freeing C without conditions, the Home Office had said it would only tolerate his release under house arrest, Ms Garcia said.
She told BBC News: "In effect the home secretary has now admitted that C is no danger to anyone at all, which is what we've said from the very beginning, but it has taken three years and his life has been decimated in the meantime."
She added: "He was delighted to be released but very perplexed and confused about the whole situation and couldn't understand why he had been interned for three years on the basis of nothing at all and suddenly released."
'Draconian'
Civil liberties campaigners also questioned the logic behind C's detention and release.
Liberty director Shami Chakrabarti said: "The public has no idea why yesterday he was dangerous and today he is safe.
"This is a glimpse of the terrifying future where everyone may be subjected to detention on the basis of secret intelligence and a politician's whim."
Amnesty International's Stephen Bowen said: "This man's release only underscores the arbitrariness and secretive nature of the Draconian measures currently being used to detain people without charge in this country."
On Monday, Palestinian detainee Mahmoud Abu Rideh was granted bail at another Siac hearing in London.
He had been detained at Broadmoor hospital after being moved from Belmarsh prison and is still being held, pending a decision on bail conditions and his future mental health care.
Two other men, Algerians known only as A and P, were also granted bail. A decision on their bail conditions is still awaited.
The Home Office said they should be placed under house arrest but lawyers representing the two men said this would not be acceptable.
The measures which allowed 12 foreign terror suspects to be detained indefinitely without trial were ruled unlawful by the Law Lords in December.
To take their place, the home secretary has introduced "control orders" for terror suspects, which include the power to place them under house arrest.
Alberto Gonzales grew up poor and Hispanic, just like millions of other Americans we normally wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole. But through hard work, intellect, and by attaching himself remora-like to a wealthy and intellectually lazy man, he has been lifted to the highest positions of trust in our nation, and is now living every Republican's dream: helping to execute people whose lawyers slept through their trials; reinterpreting the Constitution to allow monarchist powers; and helping to set up offshore prison camps for the torture of foreign nationals.
France, US agree to repatriate French prisoners from Guantanamo
The United States and France have agreed to repatriate the last three French citizens being held prisoner in the US military base of Guantanamo in Cuba, various sources told AFP.
The agreement in principle was given before US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was to meet French President Jacques Chirac in Paris later Tuesday.
"The United States has given its agreement" but no date was fixed for the hand over, an official close to the case who requested anonymity told AFP.
A lawyer for Mustaq Ali Patel, one of the three Frenchmen being held at Guantanamo, said details were still being worked out for the repatriation.
"The discussions are going in the right direction and are currently looking at how they will be returned," said the lawyer, William Bourdon.
Patel, an Indian-born man in his 40s who acquired French nationality through marriage, was arrested at the end of 2001 in Afghanistan, where he had been living for several years.
The other two French citizens held at Guantanamo are Ridouane Khalid, 36, the brother of two men arrested in France last year on suspicion of hiding terrorist funds and recruiting for Chechen militants; and Khaled Ben Mustafa, 33, who was arrested in Afghanistan where his family said he was learning Arabic in an Islamic school.
Four other Frenchmen who had been held at Guantanamo after being arrested in Afghanistan in 2001 were transferred to France in July last year, where they remain in custody while being investigated on suspicion for associating with criminals "in relation to a terrorist enterprise".
A US federal judge on January 31 ruled that military trials US President George W. Bush's government intended to mount against the estimated 550 prisoners from 20 countries remaining at Guantanamo were unconstitutional because they did not provide due process.
Judge Joyce Green said some of the prisoners had had their Geneva Conventions rights violated, no legal access to evidence used against them and that the US government had tended to rely on statements obtained by torture.
The US Justice Department has lodged an appeal against the ruling.
Human rights groups have expressed strong concern about the legal limbo the prisoners at Guantanamo were living in because of Washington's insistence that they were "illegal combattants" -- a vaguely defined term -- and that the Guantanamo base was not technically US territory because it was leased from Cuba.
Red Cross head raises Guantanamo inmates with Bush
15 Feb 2005
Source: Reuters
GENEVA, Feb 15 (Reuters) - Jakob Kellenberger, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, has raised concerns with U.S. President George Bush about detainees at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere, an ICRC spokesman said on Tuesday.
Kellenberger, who held talks with Bush and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in Washington on Monday, was due to meet U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Tuesday, he added.
Asked whether Kellenberger had discussed prisoners held at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, with Bush, ICRC spokesman Florian Westphal in Geneva told Reuters: "Concerns relating to detainees were one issue discussed".
He declined to comment further, adding: "We feel bilateral talks are the best way generally to obtain results."
ICRC officials regularly visit prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, which holds hundreds of terror suspects detained during the 2001 U.S. war to oust al Qaeda and the ruling Taliban from Afghanistan and in other operations.
A leaked ICRC memorandum last November accused the U.S. military of using tactics "tantamount to torture" on inmates there, but the Pentagon strongly denied allegations of abuse.
In a brief overnight statement, the Swiss-based humanitarian agency said Kellenberger and Bush had discussed "ICRC concerns regarding U.S. detention" as well as armed conflicts worldwide and ICRC relief operations. It gave no details.
The agency said it welcomed the opportunity to "raise these issues at the highest level and looks forward to strengthening its confidential dialogue with U.S. authorities".
Kellenberger had also raised three "priority contexts" with Bush and Rice -- the troubled Darfur region of Sudan, Iraq and Afghanistan, according to spokesman Westphal.
In the feverish atmosphere of America in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Stephens's advice was reversed. In mutterings from the US secret service and op-ed pieces in the US media, it was suggested that moral courage demanded support for torture. "Nobody is talking. Frustration has begun to appear," a senior FBI official told the Washington Post a month after the attacks. A few days later, a CIA veteran was quoted in the LA Times: "A lot of people are saying we need someone at the agency who can pull fingernails out." Alan Dershowitz, a professor of law at Harvard, wrote that judges should be able to issue warrants licensing the torture of suspects where the authorities somehow knew that the suspects were concealing information about "an imminent large-scale threat".
In a recent paper for the New England Journal of Public Policy, Alfred McCoy, a history professor at Wisconsin-Madison University, surveys the CIA's use of torture over half a century in Vietnam, Central America and Iran, and marvels at the recklessness of the commentators of 2001. "In weighing personal liberty versus public safety," he writes, "all those pro-pain pundits were ignorant of torture's complexly perverse psychopathology, that leads to both uncontrolled proliferation of the practice and long-term damage to the perpetrator society."
In the new collections of memos and reports, the American will to inflict pain on captives and the conviction that the 9/11 killing of civilians was unique in history is spelled out. In January 2002 the senior White House lawyer, Alberto Gonzales - now attorney general - writes to Bush claiming that there have never been wars before in which civilians are "wantonly" killed, or where it has been necessary to "quickly obtain information" from prisoners. The Geneva Convention, he argues, is a quaint relic. "In my judgement," he tells the president, "this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners."
"If the Home Office do in fact apply the convention, the protected person (which would include all the inmates of the camp) has so many rights, and the protecting power so many obligations, that any intelligence officer stationed at the camp would find his work difficult.
"He would be hampered not only by the Home Office but by the activities of the protecting power and the International Committee of the Red Cross.
"It would in fact be quite impossible to carry out serious interrogation under these circumstances."
koeselitz writes: There are a lot of disturbing news links here about a torture incident, and then some other countries condemning the United States on their human rights record. I don't know how to connect these; can you tell me? Are you saying you're afraid that the United States is going the way of Germany in the 1930s? I've already said before that I think this is sort of crazy; you, I think (I don't know) disagree with me. You should have a chance to speak for yourself, so go ahead."
This isn't about me, it's about the links. And I'll try very hard to not read "[y]ou should have a chance to speak for yourself, so go ahead" as condescending.
That said, I have always been a patriot, I have always fervently loved my country, and -- I'll be honest -- I thought there was something special about being an American.
I was never a lefty. In fact, I remember back in the 1980s arguing with lefties, some of whom in addition to bashing America, told me how wonderful the USSR was.
My response (having read The Gulag Archipelago) was always that whatever the United States did wrong, we didn't arrest people at midnight, hold them without charges in Lubyankas, or have a policy of torturing prisoners -- but that Stalin's and Brezhnev's and even Andropov's Russian did.
And when I met people from Kuwait or Saudi Arabia or the Soviet Union or Iraq or Iran, I was always polite, but I would wonder silently to myself "How can these people be proud of being Kuwaiti or Saudi or Russian or Iraqi or Iranian, when they know that they're well-off enough to be tourists or students in America because of their regime back home, a regime that is ultimately based on suppressing political dissent by arbitrary arrest, torture and execution. I always wondered what mental gymnastics were required to see oneself as "civilized" when one's prosperity and access to the amenities of civilization were built on the bloodied backs of beaten prisoners.
Well, now I know. Because I'm as much a "good German" (or Kuwaiti or Russian or Iraqi) as any of them were.
It's not just that torture -- whoops! -- happened. We had an official policy not only authorizing torture but also claiming that the President of the United States can set aside laws he prefers not to obey! And according to the U.S. Attorney General, while the torture policy is currently in abeyance, he, the highest law-enforcement officer in the land, still believes the President can arbitrarily set aside laws. And teh President, says the Attorney General, can even bring back torture if it's his whim to do so.
(Conservatives rail about "activist judges"; don't Presidents unconstrained by law worry you too?)
And after knowing about this torture, and these polices, a majority of Americans reelected the President responsible, and a majority of the United States Senators consented to the elevation of a man who at best looked the other at an official US policy of torture.
In the past, you're right, we could afford to ignore hypocritical Chinese or Russian criticism of our human rights record. But now that we have consented to make an admitted and unrepentant torturer US Attorney General, we can't. We're not upholding the American values that made America a little better than the rest. We're all "good Germans" now, and any idea of "American exceptionalism" is consigned to the dustbin of history.
And I am angry, and I am ashamed, that my America has been turned into a country that can't unequivocally say: "we are not like Communist China, we are not like Russia, we have morals and values and we do not do those things totalitarian regimes do."
posted by orthogonality at 11:03 AM PST on March 3
Hunger strikers pledge to die in Guantánamo
Audrey Gillan
Friday September 9, 2005
The Guardian
More than 200 detainees in Guantánamo Bay are in their fifth week of a hunger strike, the Guardian has been told.
Statements from prisoners in the camp which were declassified by the US government on Wednesday reveal that the men are starving themselves in protest at the conditions in the camp and at their alleged maltreatment - including desecration of the Qur'an - by American guards.
The statements, written on August 11, have just been given to the British human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith. They show that prisoners are determined to starve them selves to death. In one, Binyam Mohammed, a former London schoolboy, said: "I do not plan to stop until I either die or we are respected.
"People will definitely die. Bobby Sands petitioned the British government to stop the illegitimate internment of Irishmen without trial. He had the courage of his convictions and he starved himself to death. Nobody should believe for one moment that my brothers here have less courage."
Yesterday, Mr Stafford Smith, who represents 40 detainees at Guantánamo Bay, eight of whom are British residents, said many men had been starving themselves for more than four weeks and the situation was becoming desperate.
He said: "I am worried about the lives of my guys because they are a pretty obstinate lot and they are going to go through with this and I think they are going to end up killing themselves. The American military doesn't want anyone to know about this."
He pointed to an American army claim that only 76 prisoners at the base were refusing food, saying that they were attempting to play down what could be a political scandal if a prisoner were to die.
The hunger strike is the second since late June. The first ended after the authorities made a number of promises, including better access to books, and bottled drinking water.
The men claim that they were tricked into eating again.
In his statement, Mr Mohammed described how during the first strike men were placed on intravenous drips after refusing food for 20 days.
He said: "The administration promised that if we gave them 10 days, they would bring the prison into compliance with the Geneva conventions. They said this had been approved by Donald Rumsfeld himself in Washington DC. As a result of these promises, we agreed to end the strike on July 28.
"It is now August 11. They have betrayed our trust (again). Hisham from Tunisia was savagely beaten in his interrogation and they publicly desecrated the Qur'an (again). Saad from Kuwait was ERF'd [visited by the Extreme Reaction Force] for refusing to go (again) to interrogation because the female interrogator had sexually humiliated him (again) for 5 hours _ Therefore, the strike must begin again."
In another declassified statement, Omar Deghayes, from Brighton, said: "In July, some people took no water for many days. I was part of the strike and I am again this time. Some people were taken to hospital, and put on drip feeds, but they pulled the needles out, as they preferred to die. There were two doctors. One wanted to force feed the men, but they got legal advice saying that they could not if the men refused.
"In the end the military agreed to negotiate. We came off the strike [on July 28 2005], but we gave them two weeks, and if the changes were not implemented we would go back on strike."
Yesterday, Mr Deghayes's brother, Abubaker, pleaded with the British government to intervene on his brother's behalf. "I'm really worried. Something really needs to be done. We can't just allow people to be oppressed and tortured," he said.
Another prisoner, Jamal Kiyemba, from Battersea, south London, said in an account of the July hunger strike: "Many of the prisoners collapsed, as they would not drink water. More than 30 were hospitalised. I am in Camp IV and we joined in."
He added: "Eventually, because people were near death, the military caved and let us set up a prisoner welfare council of six prisoners."
Jamil el Banna, another British resident, described how the guards were again searching the Qur'an by hand, which they had agreed to stop.
Yesterday, representatives of George Bush's government appeared before the US court of appeal to stop legal bids on behalf of dozens of Guantánamo Bay detainees, who say they are not being afforded an opportunity to challenge their status as enemy combatants.
The Pentagon says it is holding 505 prisoners at Guantánamo Bay.
Most were captured in Afghanistan following the US invasion in October 2001 and many have been there since January 2002.
Last night a Pentagon spokesman denied that there were more than 200 hunger strikers: "There are 76 detainees doing a voluntary fast at present. There are nine detainees in hospital as a result of their hunger strike.
"They are listed as being in a stable condition and they are recieving nutrition."
Asked if they were being force fed, he said: "They are being held in the same standards as US prison standards... they don't allow people to kill themselves via starvation."
White House Defends Course on Detainees
By PETE YOST
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A federal appeals court on Thursday questioned the Bush administration's operations at Guantanamo Bay, where almost all detainees were categorized by military tribunals as enemy combatants.
The two hours of arguments were in sharp contrast to those of nearly three years ago when the appeals court suggested that the detainees at Guantanamo Bay were not entitled to have access to the U.S. courts, and subsequently ruled against them. The U.S. Supreme Court reversed that decision a year ago.
On Thursday, the court suggested the judiciary might have the legal authority to become involved in reviewing the tribunal procedures.
"There is nothing in the habeas statute that requires us to defer to a military tribunal," said Appeals Judge A. Raymond Randolph, an appointee of President Bush's father.
Randolph was on the panel in 2003 that rejected the detainees' plea for access to U.S. courts. The other judges on the current panel are David Sentelle, an appointee of President Reagan, and Judith Rogers, an appointee of President Clinton.
Deputy Assistant Attorney General Gregory Katsas outlined the Bush administration's position that the detainees have no Fifth Amendment right to due process because they are aliens held outside the sovereign territory of the United States.
But "there's still the question of whether they are lawfully detained," said Randolph. Randolph pointed out that detainees are asserting that they have no connection to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks or to al-Qaida.
Katsas said the detainees are afforded many rights by the tribunals, which ruled that all but 38 of 596 detainees were enemy combatants and were not entitled to prisoner-of-war protections under the Geneva Conventions.
The detainees are not allowed to have legal representation before the tribunals and cannot see classified information being used to categorize them as enemy combatants.
While questioning the government closely, the court seemed skeptical of arguments by the detainees' lawyers that U.S. courts have authority to become deeply enmeshed in reviewing the tribunal process.
The judges said that last year's Supreme Court ruling was on the question of jurisdiction, meaning that it was opening the U.S. courts to the detainees without specifying the extent to which courts could involve themselves in detainee issues.
Jurisdiction was "the beginning, the middle and the end" of the Supreme Court's decision, said Rogers.
The detainees' lawyers pointed to a footnote in last year's Supreme Court opinion that said their complaints "unquestionably describe custody in violation of the Constitution or laws or treaties of the United States."
Evidence of detainee abuse at Guantanamo Bay has put the administration on the defensive and the government is trying to deal with the problem by downsizing the prison camp, returning many of the detainees to their home countries.
In the meantime, the government has dug in for a protracted legal battle, defending the course it set in late 2001 with President Bush's declaration that all suspected terrorists are enemy combatants rather than POWs.
After last year's Supreme Court ruling, the Pentagon hurriedly set up the tribunals of U.S. military officers who reviewed the detainees' status.
Lower court judges are divided on the detainee procedures at Guantanamo Bay. U.S. District Judge Joyce Hens Green ruled that the tribunal hearings are unconstitutional. U.S. District Judge Richard Leon threw out a lawsuit by some of the detainees, saying the place for them to challenge the procedures is before the U.S. military, not in civilian courts.
The Pentagon says it is holding 505 prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay prison compound. Many were captured in Afghanistan in the months following the U.S. invasion in October 2001, and some have been there since the detention compound was opened in January 2002.
© 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
