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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings, Torture and Big Money |
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July 21st,
2007 - Court Tells U.S. to Reveal Data on Detainees at Guantánamo 1st news article by
the New York Times |
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Court Tells U.S. to Reveal
Data on Detainees at Guantánamo By William Glaberson New York Times July 21, 2007 A federal appeals court
ordered the government yesterday to turn over virtually all its information
on Guantánamo detainees who are challenging their detention, rejecting an
effort by the Justice Department to limit disclosures and setting the stage
for new legal battles over the government’s reasons for holding the men
indefinitely. The ruling, which came in
one of the main court cases dealing with the fate of the detainees,
effectively set the ground rules for scores of cases by detainees challenging
the actions of Pentagon tribunals that decide whether terror suspects should
be held as enemy combatants. It was the latest of a
series of stinging legal challenges to the administration’s detention
policies that have amplified pressure on the Bush administration to find some
alternative to Guantánamo, where about 360 men are now being held. A three-judge panel of the
federal appeals court in Washington unanimously rejected a government effort
to limit the information it must turn over to the court and lawyers for the
detainees. The court said meaningful
review of the military tribunals would not be possible “without seeing all
the evidence, any more than one can tell whether a fraction is more or less
than half by looking only at the numerator and not the denominator.” Advocates for detainees have
criticized the tribunals since they were instituted in 2004 because the
terror suspects held at Guantánamo have not been permitted lawyers during the
proceedings and have not been allowed to see much of the evidence against
them. P. Sabin Willett, a Boston
lawyer who argued the case for detainees, called the ruling “a resounding
rejection of the government’s effort to hide the truth.” A department spokesman, Erik
Ablin, declined to comment on the decision, saying the department was
“reviewing the decision’s implications and evaluating our options.” The ruling came in the first
case under a 2005 law that provides for limited appeals court review of the
military’s Guantánamo hearings, known as combatant status review tribunals. One of the legal challenges
facing the administration is that the Pentagon efforts to try a small number
of detainees for war crimes have been stalled since early June, when two
military judges ruled there were defects in the procedures that had been
followed in declaring the men to be enemy combatants. Then, later last month, the
Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal from detainees claiming a right to
challenge their detentions in federal courts through habeas corpus cases, a
contention the administration has fought with some success in the courts and
Congress. The cases in the appeals
court and the Supreme Court are both efforts by lawyers for the detainees to
challenge the military’s decisions to hold the men. The lawyers are pursuing habeas
corpus rights because such cases would give federal judges far more power to
review Pentagon decisions than the appeals court has to review the military
tribunal actions. The lawyers have argued that in a 2005 law, Congress so
limited the review permitted by the federal appeals court that the detainees
need access to federal courts through habeas cases to get a fair review of
their detentions. When the Supreme Court said
it would hear the Guantánamo case last month, its order made clear the
justices would be carefully watching the appeals court decision as they
consider broader Guantánamo issues. In an unusual comment, the Supreme
Court’s order in June said, “it would be of material assistance” for the
justices to receive arguments from the lawyers that take into account the
appeals court ruling setting the rules for the review process. The case in which the
decision came yesterday involved requests by eight detainees for review of
decisions by military tribunals. The ruling also included
significant victories for the government, including a decision allowing the
Pentagon to limit the subjects that the lawyers can discuss with detainees
and authorizing special Pentagon teams to read the lawyers’ mail and remove
unauthorized comments. The decision noted that
Congress said the appeals court’s review of the combatant status hearings was
limited to determining whether the Pentagon followed its own procedures, and
whether an enemy-combatant finding was supported by a preponderance of the
evidence. But it rejected the Justice
Department assertion that the court should be able to examine only the
information included in the combatant status hearing, not the more expansive
information the government might have collected on a detainee. The ruling was written by
Douglas H. Ginsburg, the chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals
for the District of Columbia Circuit.. “In order to review
compliance with those procedures,” Judge Ginsburg wrote, “the court must be
able to view the government information.” Detainees’ lawyers have
argued that the military officials running the hearings may not have
collected information that might support the detainees’ cases. But detainees’
lawyers also said the ruling created the likelihood of fresh legal battles
over what information in the government’s vast intelligence files was
covered, and whether the government in fact produces all its information
dealing with specific detainees. The decision allowed the
government to file its information with the court for review if the
government argues the contents are too sensitive to be released. It also
defined government information as including only that which is “reasonably
available.” Throughout the legal battles
over Guantánamo, detainees’ lawyers have argued that the government has used
such rules to limit their effectiveness by maintaining control over
information. Wells Dixon, a lawyer at the
Center for Constitutional Rights in New York who represents detainees, said
that pattern was likely to be repeated. “Once again,” Mr. Dixon said, “we are
left to rely on the government to produce all of the information that it says
exists.” External link: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/21/us/21gitmo.html Rules Lay Out C.I.A.’s
Tactics in Questioning By Mark Mazzetti New York Times July 21, 2007 Washington, July 20 - The
White House said Friday that it had given the Central Intelligence Agency
approval to resume its use of some severe interrogation methods for
questioning terrorism suspects in secret prisons overseas. With the new authority,
administration officials said the C.I.A. could proceed with an interrogation
program that had been in limbo since the Supreme Court ruled last year that
all prisoners in American captivity be treated in accordance with Geneva
Convention prohibitions against humiliating and degrading treatment. A new executive order signed
by President Bush does not authorize the full set of harsh interrogation
methods used by the C.I.A. since the program began in 2002. But government
officials said the rules would still allow some techniques more severe than
those used in interrogations by military personnel in places like the
detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Several officials said the
permitted techniques did not include some of the most controversial past
techniques, among them “waterboarding,” which induces a feeling of drowning,
and exposure to extremes of heat and cold. The basic outcome had been
expected, but it was preceded by months of intense disagreement within the
administration about where to draw the line on C.I.A. interrogations. The new
list of techniques has been approved by the Justice Department as not
violating the Geneva strictures, a step that Congress insisted on last
October when it passed the Military Commissions Act, which formally
authorized the C.I.A. program. The White House order
brought condemnation on Friday from human rights groups, which argued that it
helped systematize a program of indefinite, incommunicado detention and used
methods that violated international law. But in a message to agency employees
on Friday, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the C.I.A. director, defended the program
as having been “irreplaceable,” though he said extraordinary techniques had
been used on fewer than half of about 100 terrorism suspects. General Hayden said the
White House order would allow the agency to “focus on our vital work,
confident that our mission and authorities are clearly defined.” The C.I.A.
said it had suspended its use of harsh interrogation procedures during the
debate over the new rules, even as the White House argued that the agency
should be given extra latitude to carry out effective interrogations of
terrorism suspects. Senator John D. Rockefeller
IV of West Virginia, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Intelligence
Committee, said he would wait to review the Justice Department’s legal
reasoning before he passed judgment. General Hayden briefed the intelligence
committees earlier in the year about the agency’s own review. The specific interrogation
methods now approved for C.I.A. use remain classified, but several officials
said they did not include waterboarding, which human rights organizations and
some members of Congress have said are equal to torture. The C.I.A. acted on
its own beginning in 2004 to prohibit some of these measures after their use
became publicly known. In a conference call with
reporters on Friday, a senior administration official indicated that another
technique now forbidden would be exposure to temperature extremes, and the
executive order itself states that detainees must be protected “from extremes
of heat and cold.” It is unclear whether sleep deprivation, another technique
used in past C.I.A. interrogations, is authorized. The order uses a definition
of “humiliating and degrading treatment” that conforms to standards set by
international case law, a victory for State Department officials. According to the senior
administration official, the C.I.A. will bar the International Committee of
the Red Cross from visiting detainees in agency hands, a prohibition it has
enforced in the past. Earlier this year, State
Department officials rejected a draft of the executive order because they
believed that the language was too permissive and could open the Bush
administration to challenges from American allies that the White House was
legalizing methods that approach torture. Some Bush administration officials,
including members of Vice President Dick Cheney’s staff, pushed for a more
expansive interpretation of Geneva Convention language and for interrogation
methods that the C.I.A. had not even requested. According to one senior
intelligence official, nearly half of the source material used in the recent
National Intelligence Estimate on the terrorism threat to the United States
came from C.I.A. interrogations of detainees. Some human rights groups
said they feared that the Bush administration was using creative legal
reasoning to justify practices that close American allies have banned. “This is an administration
that won’t even publicly denounce waterboarding,” said John Sifton, a lawyer
at Human Rights Watch. “It’s hard to believe that they will be interpreting
these standards in a way that is true to the spirit of the Military
Commissions Act.” But other critics of the
harsh C.I.A. interrogation practices of the past, including former top Bush
administration officials, said that the executive order was a step in the
right direction. “The U.S. government is continuing to move toward an
approach to this vital area of human intelligence collection that is more
sustainable - morally, politically, and legally,” said Philip D. Zelikow, who
served as counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice until last year
and who delivered a blistering lecture earlier this year denouncing the
C.I.A.’s interrogation program as it was used in the past. The executive order applies
only to detainees in C.I.A. hands, not to those in military custody. Last
September, all 14 prisoners in C.I.A. custody were transferred to the island
prison and put under Pentagon control, including two senior operatives of Al
Qaeda, Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who has confessed to being
the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks. It is unclear how many suspects have
passed through the program since then, or if the C.I.A has anyone in its
prisons. The only prisoner that the C.I.A. has acknowledged holding since
last fall is Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, an Iraqi Kurd who is believed to have been
one of Osama bin Laden’s closest advisers. C.I.A. officials said that
Mr. Iraqi produced valuable intelligence, despite the fact that C.I.A.
interrogators at the time were only authorized to use the techniques approved
for Pentagon interrogators. External link: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/21/washington/21intel.html |