Excerpt:  "Until now, this administration has shown only contempt for the Geneva Conventions, and it has built its policies dismissing the application of international humanitarian law," said Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of the ACLU. "It's simply astounding that the Defense Department has now invoked the Geneva Conventions to suppress evidence that prisoners have been abused. The government cannot cloak its attempts to protect itself from public embarrassment in a newfound concern for the Geneva Conventions."

Excerpt:  A detainee at a U.S. military prison alleges that U.S. military guards jumped on his head until he had a stroke that paralyzed his face, nearly drowned him in a toilet and later broke several of his fingers, according to a lawsuit filed yesterday in federal court....

His account of the beatings is very similar to written military summaries of the incidents, according to the lawsuit....

Idr was accused of plotting with five others to blow up the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo in November 2001. All were acquitted by a Bosnian court in January 2002, but U.S. agents arrested them as they left the courthouse and eventually took them to Guantanamo Bay.

# (The italics ares mine.) This is your constitution on neoconservatism. Any questions?   =Sir J=

Excerpt:  One of the US soldiers had a gun to his head and he was told if he moved they would shoot him," the report says. The SAS officer pressed him to admit he had gone to Afghanistan to fight a holy war. Last night the Ministry of Defence said it would investigate the allegation.

A spokesman said: "The British army follows the rules laid out in the Geneva convention and soldiers are told to follow that. It is not permissible to point guns at people's heads during interrogation. We would investigate if any allegation of that nature is made."

The dossier, based on two months of interviews by the men's lawyers, provides the first full account by the three Britons of their ordeal as terror suspects.

Excerpt:  A Pentagon Fact Sheet explains that the Supreme Court ruled that due process requires a hearing, and indicated that this might take place before a military tribunal. It does not mention that the hearing must be “meaningful” and the decision-makers “neutral.”

The Rumsfeld tribunals are neither. The Order establishing them helpfully informs military officers who will sit on these tribunals that, “Each detainee subject to this Order has been determined to be an enemy combatant through multiple levels of review by officers of the Department of Defense.”

Get it, guys? Your superiors in the chain of command have found ‘em guilty -- now give ‘em a fair trial. What military officer who receives these marching orders can be called “neutral”?

Excerpt:  In the almost two years since the Guantanamo prison camp opened to hold people seized by the US in what the Bush administration has designated "the war on terror", it has settled from a rough and ready, occasionally brutal place of confinement into a full-grown mongrel of international law, where all the harshness of the punitive US prison system is visited on foreigners, unmitigated by any of the legal rights US prisoners enjoy. To this is added the mentally corrosive threat, alien to the US constitution, of infinite confinement, without court or appeal, on the whim of a single man -- the president of the US.

The question, "What is Guantanamo really like?", has all the appeal of the unknown. But inside it lurks a darker question, with all the implications for freedom in America and beyond that its answer contains: "What is Guantanamo?"

# Jonestown for the Law & Order lobby?

=John C.=

# The whole thing is now beyond bizarre: Paul Wolfowitz is responsible for appointing the judge, prosecutors and defense attorneys that will handle cases held in the Bush Regime's kangaroo court at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

=Liberez L'Ours=

Excerpt:  A team of military lawyers recruited to defend alleged terrorists held by the U.S. at Guantánamo Bay was dismissed by the Pentagon after some of its members rebelled against the unfair way the trials have been designed, the Guardian has learned.

As the situation now stands, it is not Guantanamo's security features that make it a tempting place to hold detainees. In Illinois, Colorado, and elsewhere, there are high-tech super-maximum security prisons that are far more secure than the makeshift facilities on Guantanamo. What makes Guantanamo unique is that, if the Supreme Court accepts the Administration's views, the courts will have no role in monitoring and protecting the right of the detainees held there.

Excerpt:  It took the U.S. over two years to figure out that up to 20% of these detainees were total innocents? During which time they were kept in cages without access to families or lawyers?

And this isn't much better:

"Slated for release were "the easiest 20 percent" of detainees, a military official told the magazine. It did not identify its source, who said the military was waiting for "a politically propitious time to release them." (our emphasis)

They should have been let go the minute it was determined they were not connected to Al Qaeda or terrorism. Maybe these officials should stand in their shoes -- and cages -- for a while.

# The military's current position is that they are above both U.S. and International law and that they do not have to follow the Geneva Convention guidelines on treatment of POWs. The military claims that this complete disregard for the notion that we are a society based on laws is necessary in this instance because ... ummm, because ... well, I think that part's classified.

=Madeline Zane=

Excerpt:  In the first case of its kind, Mr Sagheer described his arrest by American authorities as illegal and his treatment at the prison camp in Guantanamo Bay as extremely inhuman.

He says he was kept for more than a year in a prison cell that was like a cage meant for animals.

Excerpt:  How did a security program net so many of the wrong people? The answer may sound familiar: slipshod intelligence work, reliance on local denunciations, and lack of regional and linguistic expertise, coupled with a reckless abandonment of legal norms that ultimately proved counterproductive.

Excerpt:  Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says he doesn't see the need to rush to put terror suspects being held at Guantanamo Bay on trial. He says America's interest isn't in trying them and letting them out -- but keeping them off the streets -- and he says that's what's taking place.

Rumsfeld expects some trials, but says most of the detainees will probably be held at the naval base in Cuba for the course of the global war on terror.

Excerpt:  The heads of 10 leading law bodies around the world call on the US today to give a "fair and lawful trial" to prisoners detained at Guantanamo Bay and be a "beacon of justice in an unjust world".

In a letter to the Guardian, law society chairmen and presidents, including those from Britain, France, Sweden, Australia and Canada, express misgivings about the US plan to put foreign prisoners held at Camp Delta in Cuba before partially secret military tribunals without juries.

Excerpt:  Alexandra Arriaga, director of government relations for Amnesty International USA, said: "These interviews with former prisoners are damning. The record is shameful: hooding, blindfolding and shackling of prisoners, together with arbitrary arrests, prolonged incommunicado detention, ill treatment and interrogations without legal counsel."

Excerpt:  An Amnesty spokesman said:

"The USA is on a slippery slope to promoting a world in which arbitrary unchallengeable detention becomes acceptable. All too often where the US leads others follow. Increasingly, by using the language of 'war', governments have disregarded human rights obligations. By using the term 'terror' they have endeavoured to avoid international human rights law. And by using the phrase 'war on terror' they have challenged the very framework of human rights and international humanitarian law."

Excerpt:  Whisking some 660 terror suspects to be held incommunicado for months in cages on an island prison has already aroused legitimate questions around the world about the nature of American justice.

Failure to live up to our standards of fair trial in these cases would only provide more ammunition to those who say that Americans believe in liberty for themselves -- but not for others.

# As often happens in mainstream newspapers' editorials, the Herald has completely missed the obvious.

America doesn't need to "rewrite the rules" for these trials of Guantánamo 'detainees.' America already has rules for trials, and for all their imperfections, they're fairly fair rules -- but those are exactly the rules that have been tossed out the window for Guantánamo trials.

You want thinking people to think there's justice in these trials? Then run these trials under U.S. rules of justice, not under some freshly-written half-assed "military trial" rules.

=H&HH=

Excerpt:  Afghans released after nearly two years in a U.S. military jail in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, described conditions Saturday as cramped and recounted months of repeated U.S. interrogations and physical discomfort.

The men, mostly between 20 and 30 years old, all looked outwardly healthy, but some prisoners said they were beaten -- an allegation the U.S. military disputed.

"Physical coercion is simply not an option. We don't do it. There's no beating," said Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, a U.S. military spokesman at Guantanamo Bay.

# Lt-Col Johnson is the same officer who's clearly been lying about the number of suicide attempts at Guantanamo.

=H&HH=

Excerpt:  Denied prisoner of war status by US authorities, none of the detainees have been officially charged and they have been prevented from meeting lawyers or even receiving visitors.

Most have spent the majority of their detention in complete isolation, punctuated only by routine interrogations. "Jehan Wali has not talked to anyone for the past eight months," Mr Shah said of his fellow former detainee.

The U.S. authorities had promised him some money but at the end gave him a black bag containing just a pair of jeans, a shirt and a pack of tissues.

Also: "The majority of prisoners in Camp X-Ray are not even familiar with the name Al Qaeda," Shah Muhammad, 23, said. ... "Most of them are in a critical condition mentally and have become mentally deranged."

Excerpt:  Donald Rumsfeld uses the term "unlawful combatants" to describe the detainees at Guantanamo: "As I understand it, technically unlawful combatants do not have any rights under the Geneva Conventions."

This means that the prisoners do not need to be released at the end of hostilities -- as prisoners of war are. Under this classification, the prisoners are not charged, nor are they allowed access to any legal process. ...

Excerpt:  "Initially they told us it would take one month for the investigation and we would be released immediately if we were proven innocent.

"We spent two months in Sherberghan, five months in Kandahar, and more than one year in Guantanamo and finally now they release us because we are innocent."

# The hypocrisy is staggering. The U.S. holds hundreds of prisoners it won't call prisoners at Guantánamo, where authorities aren't even able to count the number of suicide attempts, U.S. prisoners of war are 'interrogated' to death, and the U.S. calls for the "rules" to be followed?

=H&HH=