[Onthebarricades] Guantanamo Bay, the US global gulag, and attacks around the world

[Andy]

*  US air strikes hit civilians in Sadr City
*  Judges deny medical care to detainee
*  Waterboarding and other torture more widespread than admitted
*  Psychological damage to Guantanamo inmate is extensive
*  Inside "extraordinary rendition":  Egyptian speaks out
*  Further Abu Ghraib abuse revealed - prisoners put in ice-filled cans
*  Guantanamo detainee traumatised, unfit for trial
*  Reports reveal religious abuse - detainees "baptised", wrapped in Israeli 
flag
*  Not the "worst of the worst" - fates of original Guantanamo inmates 
revealed
*  Family members of suspects detained, abused
*  Egyptian killed by American ship in Suez
*  Detainee held for two years at "black site", disappeared
*  US censors inmate's sketch of force-feeding
*  Bush attempts to limit detainee appeals
*  Immigration goons carry out home and work invasions, mass detentions, 
abuse human rights
*  Spain drops charges against Guantanamo detainees


Publicly Archived at Global Resistance: 
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/globalresistance


http://arablinks.blogspot.com/2008/04/media-silent-on-us-air-strikes-in.html

Thursday, April 03, 2008
Media silent on US air strikes in sealed-off Sadr City

Xinhuanet filed this on its Arabic-language website Wednesday evening (April 
2), along with reports of other Baghdad violence:
Sources said a fire broke out in a residential apartment building in Sadr 
City, eastern Baghdad, the result of an American bombing. The extent of 
damage is unknown, given the fact that Iraqi police barred entry to the 
aforementioned region, which has been under curfew for a number of days.

The Xinhua person apparently tried to get to the site, and reports that 
everyone was barred by Iraqi police. Compare McClatchy's one sentence (in 
its dispatch to its Washington office): "At dawn, the American planes bombed 
some targets in Sadr City, police said." And the "Multinational Force Iraq" 
website: Zero Other corporate media: Zero

Putting the reports and non-reports together: Sadr City targets, in the 
plural, were bombed by the Americans; Xinhua heard about one of these 
because of the fire; tried to get to the site and reports that everyone was 
barred. Naturally, US bombings of a residential area that is in effect 
quarantined are a major story, right? Not at all, not a word, not a whisper, 
in the US media.

It has been widely reported that the US authorities think at least some of 
the rocket/mortar attacks on the Green Zone have been coming from the 
vicinity of the Green Zone. Could yesterday's bombings in Sadr City have 
anything to do with that other big story about increasing accuracy in rocket 
and mortar attacks on the Green Zone, thought to be coming from Sadr City?

(People unavoidably think in terms of images and already-experienced 
patters. Would it not be a good idea for those thinking of the Green Zone 
attacks as leading to a helicopters-on-the-roof experience, to think instead 
about the Israel-Fatah-Hamas pattern in this GreenZone-Maliki-Sadr 
situation, resistance leading to quarantines, media blackouts, and the other 
accoutrements of collective punishment?)
posted by badger at 7:01 AM

http://freedetainees.org/366

NO MEDICAL CARE FOR AL-GHIZZAWI
By Dazeylin
Share This! Categories: Detainee, Guantanamo, Lies of the U.S. 
Administration, Pakistan, Politics of Fear, Sold for Bounty, USA, 
Withholding Medical Treatment and war crimes Tags: No Tags.
 From H. Candace Gorman
(Click Judge Bates Decision to read the judge's order. Many thanks to 
Charles Gittings and the Project to enforce the geneva conventions (www. 
pegc. us / )for posting this so I could link to it. btw one of the many 
arguments the judge ignored was my geneva convention argument. the judge 
even gave the government a chance to address the issue which I raised in my 
reply brief. coincidently giving the government the last word in my motion.. 
the government threw in one sentence on the subject and spent the other 14 
and 2/3rds pages presenting new facts that I was not allowed to rebut and 
the judge himself ignored the whole question of the geneva conventions issue 
in his Order.)
Judge Bates entered the order yesterday. I know I shouldn't be surprised 
that the judge continues to believe everything the government says and 
refuses to allow us to even see the medical records. but I am. In fact one 
would think that even if the judge was not going to allow Al-GHizzawi or his 
counsel to see his records. that he would ask to see the records himself 
just to be sure (in the off chance that Al-GHizzawi and I are not lying). 
sigh. The judge actually goes so far as to blame Al-Ghizzawi for his health 
problems and trivializes his condition. I thank everyone who submitted 
letters and signed petitions.. Judge Bates does not. In a footnote he stated 
that he found it "inappropriate" but hey, I say if a letter writing campaign 
was good enough for Scooter Libby in trying to stay out of jail it is 
certainly good enough for Mr. Al-Ghizzawi in trying to stay alive.
>From the editor:  Let's all send a huge "thanks a lot!" to the good judge. 
Fax, or mail.  Even though according to him it's inappropriate!
The Honourable John D. Bates
United States District Court Judge
U. S. District Court for the District of Columbia
E. Barrett Prettyman U. S. Courthouse
333 Constitution Avenue,
Northwest Washington, DC 20001
Fax: (202) 354-3433
Muslim prisoners held in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison were submerged in
water-filled garbage cans with ice or put naked under cold showers in
near-freezing rooms until they went into shock, Sgt. Javal Davis, who
served with the 372nd Military Police Company there, has told a
national magazine.

http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/?p=218

Waterboarding: two questions for Michael Hayden about three "high-value" 
detainees now in Guantánamo
As published on the Huffington Post, AlterNet, Anti-war.com and 
CounterPunch.
The media is buzzing with the news that Michael Hayden, the director of the 
CIA, admitted in an open session of Congress yesterday that waterboarding - 
a long-reviled torture technique, which produces the perception of 
drowning - was used on three "high-value" al-Qaeda suspects in CIA custody 
in 2002 and 2003. The three men - Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and 
Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri - are discussed in my book The Guantánamo Files: The 
Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison.

The three "high-value" detainees whom Michael Hayden admitted were 
waterboarded by the CIA. From L to R: Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 
and Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri.
My questions for Mr. Hayden are simple. Firstly, if it's true that only 
three detainees were subjected to waterboarding, then why did a number of 
"former and current intelligence officers and supervisors" tell ABC News in 
November 2005 that "a dozen top al-Qaeda targets incarcerated in isolation 
at secret locations on military bases in regions from Asia to Eastern 
 Europe" were subjected to six "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques," 
instituted in mid-March 2002?
According to the ABC News account, the six techniques used by the CIA on the 
"dozen top al-Qaeda targets" were "The Attention Grab," "Attention Slap," 
"The Belly Slap" and three other techniques that are particularly worrying: 
"Long Time Standing," "The Cold Cell," and, of course, "Waterboarding."
"Long Time Standing" was described as "among the most effective 
[techniques]," in which prisoners "are forced to stand, handcuffed and with 
their feet shackled to an eye bolt in the floor for more than 40 hours." The 
ABC News report added, "Exhaustion and sleep deprivation are effective in 
yielding confessions." In "The Cold Cell," the prisoner "is left to stand 
naked in a cell kept near 50 degrees. Throughout the time in the cell the 
prisoner is doused with cold water."
The description of "Waterboarding" was as follows: "The prisoner is bound to 
an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet. Cellophane 
is wrapped over the prisoner's face and water is poured over him. 
Unavoidably, the gag reflex kicks in and a terrifying fear of drowning leads 
to almost instant pleas to bring the treatment to a halt."
The article proceeded with recollections of the waterboarding of Khalid 
Sheikh Mohammed, who apparently "won the admiration of interrogators when he 
was able to last between two and two-and-a-half minutes before begging to 
confess" (the interrogators tried it on themselves, but "only lasted an 
average of 14 seconds before caving in").
According to the ABC News report, one other detainee who was waterboarded 
was Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the director of the Khaldan training camp in 
Afghanistan, who was captured in November 2001. His current whereabouts are 
unknown, although there are suspicions that he was finally delivered to the 
Libyan government. Having slipped off the radar, the government clearly does 
not want his case revived, not only because it may have to explain what has 
happened to him, but also because, as a result of the application of 
"Enhanced Interrogation Techniques," al-Libi claimed that Saddam Hussein had 
offered to train two al-Qaeda operatives in the use of chemical and 
biological weapons.
Al-Libi's "confession" led to President Bush declaring, in October 2002, 
"Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and gases," 
and his claims were, notoriously, included in Colin Powell's speech to the 
UN Security Council on February 5, 2003. The claims were of course, 
groundless, and were recanted by al-Libi in January 2004, but it took Dan 
Cloonan, a veteran FBI interrogator, who was resolutely opposed to the use 
of torture, to explain why they should never have been believed in the first 
place. Cloonan told Jane Mayer, "It was ridiculous for interrogators to 
think Libi would have known anything about Iraq . The reason they got bad 
information is that they beat it out of him. You never get good information 
from someone that way."
My second question for Mr. Hayden concerns an allegation made by Murat 
Kurnaz, the German detainee who was released from Guantánamo in August 2006. 
In an article in the Washington Spectator last July, focusing on Kurnaz's 
story, as described in his book Fünf Jahre Meines Lebens: Ein Bericht Aus 
Guantánamo (Five Years Of My Life: A Report From Guantánamo), the following 
passage came after Kurnaz's recollections of being hung by his wrists for 
"hours and days," interrupted only by a doctor who came to "check his vital 
signs to determine if he could withstand more enhanced interrogation," and 
his recollections of seeing, in the neighboring cell, another detainee who 
had died as a result of this ordeal:
"Kurnaz said he was also subjected to waterboarding and electric shock. And 
that beatings were routine and constant. He theorizes that much of the 
torture was a result of the failure of the American soldiers and agents to 
capture any real terrorists in the initial sweeps. (He was told that he was 
sold to the Americans for $3,000 by Pakistani police, who identified him as 
a terrorist). 'They didn't have any big fish. And they thought that by 
torture they could get one of us to say something. "I know Osama" or 
something like that. Then they could say they had a big fish.'"
In light of the comments made by CIA sources in November 2005, and by Murat 
Kurnaz in his book, I can only wonder how it's feasible for Mr. Hayden to 
assert that the use of waterboarding was restricted to three of the 14 
"high-value" detainees who were transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006, 
and, by extension, to claim that waterboarding was not used elsewhere in the 
"War on Terror" prisons; specifically, as Murat Kurnaz alleged, in one of 
the US prisons in Afghanistan, which, with Guantánamo, provided the template 
for the well-chronicled riot of torture and abuse that later migrated to Abu 
Ghraib prison in Iraq.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/22/AR2008022201124.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

Inside the Mind of a Gitmo Detainee
By Joseph Margulies and George Brent Mickum
Saturday, February 23, 2008; 12:00 AM
As you read this, we expect to be in Guantanamo, meeting with the man 
President Bush mentions when he talks about the intelligence gained and the 
lives saved because of "enhanced" interrogation techniques. We represent 
Saudi-born Abu Zubaydah in a legal effort to force the administration to 
show why he is being detained. And this week, with our first meeting, we 
begin the laborious task of sifting fact from fantasy. Yet we worry it may 
already be too late.
The administration declares with certainty that Zubaydah is a "senior 
terrorist leader and a trusted associate of Osama bin Laden" who "helped 
smuggle al-Qaeda leaders out of Afghanistan." Dan Coleman, a former FBI 
analyst who was on the team that reviewed Zubaydah's background file, 
disagrees, describing him as "insane, certifiable" and saying he "knew very 
little about real operations, or strategy." We do not presume to know the 
truth. So far, we know only what has been publicly reported. But we hope to 
uncover the facts and present them to those with the power to act upon them.
Yet Zubaydah's mind may be beyond our reach. Regardless of whether he was 
"insane" to begin with, he has gone through quite an ordeal since his arrest 
in Pakistan in March 2002. Shuttled through CIA "black sites" around the 
world, he was subjected to a sustained course of interrogation designed to 
instill what a CIA training manual euphemistically calls "debility, 
dependence and dread." Zubaydah's world became freezing rooms alternating 
with sweltering cells. Screaming noise replaced by endless silence. Blinding 
light followed by dark, underground chambers. Hours confined in contorted 
positions. And, as we recently learned, Zubaydah was subjected to 
waterboarding. We do not know what remains of his mind, and we will probably 
never know what he experienced.
Of course, the challenge of reconstructing what took place was made 
infinitely more difficult when the CIA destroyed the recordings of 
Zubaydah's interrogation. But we already know something about what these 
techniques produce. It was the Cold War communists who perfected the dark 
art of touchless torture. And with it, they brought U.S. soldiers to the 
tipping point, where the adult psyche shatters, leaving behind a quavering 
child. At the end of their ordeal, these soldiers made fantastic admissions 
of American perfidity and spoke unreservedly about their supposed misdeeds.
The Bush administration says Zubaydah and other products of the CIA "black 
site" program repeated their confessions to FBI agents -- a "clean team" 
that used authorized interrogation techniques to scrub away the fetid stain 
of torture. But the communists didn't need to hold our soldiers at gunpoint 
as they recited their confessions. Continued cruelty becomes unnecessary 
when a prisoner has lost the will to resist.
What will we be able to learn, at this point, from Zubaydah? Will we be able 
to recreate the interrogations without the tapes? Will we get access to the 
material that led Coleman to a conclusion so different from the 
administration's?
Because we represent Zubaydah, some people will likely discount whatever we 
say. But do not misunderstand; this is not a plea for pity. Whether people 
approve or disapprove of what has happened to Zubaydah, that's a separate 
question.
The American system of justice is founded on the idea that truth emerges 
from vigorous and informed debate. And if that debate cannot take place, if 
we cannot learn the facts and share them with others, the truth is only what 
the administration reports it to be. We hope it has not come to that.
Joseph Margulies is assistant director of the MacArthur Justice Center at 
Northwestern University Law School. George Brent Mickum is an attorney in 
Washington, D.C.

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2008/03/exclusive-i-was-kidnapped-by-the-cia.html

Exclusive: I Was Kidnapped by the CIA

NEWS: Inside the CIA's extraordinary rendition program ­and the
bungled abduction of would-be terrorists

By Peter Bergen

For hours, the words come pouring out of Abu Omar as he describes
his years of torture at the hands of Egypt's security services.
Spreading his arms in a crucifixion position, he demonstrates how he
was tied to a metal door as shocks were administered to his nipples
and genitals. His legs tremble as he describes how he was twice
raped. He mentions, almost casually, the hearing loss in his left
ear from the beatings, and how he still wakes up at night screaming,
takes tranquilizers, finds it hard to concentrate, and has
unspecified "problems with my wife at home." He is, in short, a
broken man.

There is nothing particularly unusual about Abu Omar's story.
Torture is a standard investigative technique of Egypt's
intelligence services and police, as the State Department and human
rights organizations have documented myriad times over the years.
What is somewhat unusual is that Abu Omar ended up inside Egypt's
torture chambers courtesy of the United States, via
an "extraordinary rendition"-in this case, a spectacular daylight
kidnapping by the Central Intelligence Agency on the streets of
Milan, Italy.

First introduced during the Clinton administration, extraordinary
renditions-in which suspected terrorists are turned over to
countries known to use torture, usually for the purpose of
extracting information from them-have been one of the cia's most
controversial tools in the war on terror. According to legal
experts, the practice has no justification in United States law and
flagrantly violates the Convention Against Torture, an international
treaty that Congress ratified in 1994. Nonetheless, Congress and the
American courts have essentially ignored the practice, and the Bush
administration has insisted that it has never knowingly sent anyone
to a place where he will be tortured.

But Abu Omar's case is unique: Unlike any other rendition case, it
has prompted a massive criminal investigation-though not in the
United States. An Italian prosecutor has launched a probe of the
kidnapping, resulting in the indictment of 26 American officials,
almost all of them suspected cia agents. It has also generated a
treasure trove of documents on the secretive rendition program,
including thousands of pages of court filings that detail how it
actually works. Late last year, I traveled to Milan to review those
documents and to Egypt, where Abu Omar now lives. What I found was a
remarkable tale of cia overreach and its consequences-a tale that
could represent the beginning of a global legal backlash against the
war on terror.

An avuncular, portly man in his mid-40s clad in a turban and a floor-
length blue robe, Abu Omar met me at a corner store near his home,
the first time he had agreed to talk to an American magazine
reporter. He took me to his tidy, cramped apartment near
Alexandria's run-down Victorian rail station. The walls were bare
other than some religious calligraphy. The screen saver on his
computer was a picture of Mecca.

Abu Omar, whose full name is Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, served me
pungent coffee and sugary biscuits prepared by his unseen wife.
Then, leaning forward in a massive gilded chair, he told me how in
the weeks before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, he'd felt he was
being watched and followed as he walked the streets of Milan, where
he'd been granted political asylum in 2001 following an earlier
spell of imprisonment and torture in Egypt. A member of Egypt's
militant Islamic Group and a part-time cleric, he had been waging a
public campaign against the impending war; Italian authorities had
been investigating his circle of acquaintances since mid-2002 and
believed he might have been recruiting fighters to go to Iraq, a
charge he denies.

A little before noon on February 17, 2003, Abu Omar was headed to
his mosque, incongruously located inside a garage. He strolled down
Via Guerzoni, a quiet street mostly empty of businesses and lined
with high, view-blocking walls. A red Fiat pulled up beside him and
a man jumped out, shouting "Polizia! Polizia!" Abu Omar produced his
ID. "Suddenly I was lifted in the air," he recalled. He was dragged
into a white van and beaten, he said, by wordless men wearing
balaclavas. After trussing him with restraints and blindfolding him,
they sped away.

Hours later, when the van stopped, Abu Omar heard airplane noise.
His clothes were cut off and something was stuffed in his anus,
likely a tranquilizing suppository. His head was entirely covered in
tape with only small holes for his mouth and nose, and he was placed
on a plane. Hours later he was hustled off the jet. He heard someone
speaking Arabic in a familiar cadence; in the distance, a muezzin
was calling the dawn prayer. After more than a decade in exile, he
was back in Egypt.

Abu Omar was taken into a building, put in a blue prison suit,
freshly blindfolded, and presented to someone described as an
important pasha, or government official. The pasha said he'd be
released if he'd go back to Italy to spy on the militants at his
mosque. He said no.

And so began Abu Omar's descent into one of the 21st century's
nastier circles of hell. His cell had no lights or windows, and the
temperature alternated between freezing and baking. He was kept
blindfolded and handcuffed for seven months. Interrogations could
come at any time of the day or night. He was beaten with fists,
electric cables, and chairs, stripped naked, and given electric
shocks.

His tormentors' questions largely revolved around his circle of
Islamists in Italy, though every now and again they'd indicate that
they knew he wasn't a big-time terrorist. They were detaining him
only because "the Americans imposed you on us." When he asked, "Why,
then, do you abuse me so much?" they replied, "This is our family
tradition."

In the fall of 2003, Abu Omar was taken to another prison; it was
here that he was crucified and raped by the guards. After seven more
months of torture, a Cairo court found there was no evidence that
Abu Omar was involved in terrorism and ordered him freed. He was
told not to contact anyone in Italy-including his wife-and not to
speak to the press or human rights groups. Above all, he was not to
tell anyone what had happened.

After agreeing to the conditions, he was deposited at his mother's
home in Alexandria. He promptly called his wife in Italy. It was the
first time she'd heard from him in 14 months. Italian investigators,
who'd been monitoring Abu Omar's phone in Milan for years, recorded
the call. His wife asked him how he had been treated. He told her
sarcastically, "They brought me food from the fanciest restaurant,"
though nearly three weeks later, he admitted to her, "I was very
close to dying." He also spoke with a friend in Milan, Mohamed Reda
El Badry, whose phone was also being tapped by Italian
investigators. "I was freed on health grounds," he told El Badry in
one of the recorded calls. "I was almost paralyzed; still today I
cannot walk more than 200 yards.... I was incontinent, suffered from
kidney trouble."

And then, just as suddenly as Abu Omar had reappeared, he vanished
again. Egyptian authorities had gotten wind of his calls to Italy.
This time he was imprisoned for three years. He smuggled out a
letter describing his ordeal, which found its way to the Arab and
Italian press and international human rights organizations.
Inevitably, that led to more torture.

Was it illegal for American officials to send Abu Omar to Egypt?
Yes, according to the United Nations Convention Against Torture,
which prohibits delivering someone to a country where there
are "substantial grounds" to assume that he might be tortured. Were
there substantial grounds to believe that transferring Abu Omar to
Egypt would result in his being tortured? Plenty, according to a
State Department report that detailed the methods used by Egypt's
security services during the year that Abu Omar was abducted and
confined, including stripping and blindfolding prisoners; dousing
them with cold water; beatings with fists, whips, metal rods, and
other objects; administering electric shocks; suspending prisoners
by their arms; and sexual assault and threats of rape.

The White House has routinely claimed that when the United States
renders individuals to other countries it receives assurances that,
as President Bush stated at a press conference in March 2005, "they
won't be tortured...This country does not believe in torture."
Several months later, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
reiterated, "The United States has not transported anyone, and will
not transport anyone, to a country when we believe he will be
tortured."

But in the case of Abu Omar, Rice's assertions are demonstrably
false. According to a previously unpublished study conducted by
Katherine Tiedemann of The New America Foundation and myself, the
same is true of many of the extraordinary renditions going back to
the program's beginnings in 1995. (See "Rendition by the Numbers,"
above.) Fourteen documented extraordinary renditions took place
under the Clinton administration. Almost all of those prisoners were
rendered to Egypt, where at least three were executed. After 9/11
the pace of renditions sped up and the program expanded
dramatically. Prisoners were now also transferred to Jordan, Yemen,
Morocco, Algeria, and even Libya, Sudan, and Syria. In all, we found
53 documented cases of extraordinary rendition since September 2001;
only one prisoner specifically said he had not been tortured. Of the
sixteen men who have been released, eight claimed they were tortured
and/or mistreated while in foreign custody; one died within weeks of
being released. Nineteen of the rendered men have not been heard
from since they disappeared.

Brad Garrett is a former fbi special agent who obtained uncoerced
confessions from two of the most high-profile terrorists in recent
American history: Ramzi Yousef, who bombed the World Trade Center in
1993, and Mir Aimal Kasi, who shot and killed two cia employees
outside the Agency's headquarters the same year. "The whole idea
that you would send anyone to some other country to obtain the intel
you want is ludicrous," he told me in an email. "If we want the
intel, there are approaches that will render the information without
torture. The problem is that someone in the U.S. government is
convinced that torture is the way to go, and so if we are not
allowed to do it, then send them to someplace where torture is
sanctioned."

The extraordinary rendition program was not primarily intended to
yield information, according to Michael Scheuer, the cia official
whom the Clinton White House tasked with implementing it. "It came
from an improvisation to dismantle these terrorist cells overseas.
We wanted to get suspects off the streets and grab their papers,"
Scheuer explains. "The interrogation part wasn't important." He also
claims that the program was overseen by congressional committees
and "was lawyered to death." After 9/11, "The White House was
desperate," Scheuer says. The rendition program quickly expanded
because holding any but the most important Al Qaeda prisoners was
a "burdensome proposition" for the Agency.

"Before 9/11 we never asked for some guarantee that prisoners would
not be tortured or coerced," says Scheuer. The Bush administration
says it has since sought such assurances, but Garrett, the
interrogator, thinks those promises are worthless in any case. "In
my view it is a shell game and a legal cya to say that the other
country (Egypt-give me a break) will not use torture," he wrote. "We
are unfortunately promoting terrorism by using these abhorrent
approaches. Shame on us."

Milan's slate-grey skies glower over the city in both summer and
winter, and charmless skyscrapers dominate the skyline of the
financial, media, and fashion capital of Italy. It's an unlikely
setting for the operatic tale of Abu Omar's cia kidnappers and their
nemesis, Deputy Chief Prosecutor Armando Spataro.

Spataro may have launched the first-ever criminal case against
American officials over an extraordinary rendition, but he's hardly
a bleeding-heart Euro-liberal. A prosecutor for more than three
decades, the affable 59-year-old has put droves of drug traffickers,
mafia dons, and terrorists behind bars. When I asked him if he was
anti-American, he laughed and asked, "What do you think?" gesturing
around his massive office inside the gloomy, Mussolini-era Palace of
Justice. The walls were festooned with photographs of marathons he
has run in the United States, certificates of appreciation from the
Drug Enforcement Administration, and reproductions of paintings by
Warhol, Rockwell, and Hopper.

Spataro had been building a potential terrorism case against Abu
Omar for months before his kidnapping; as a result of his
investigation, a number of Abu Omar's acquaintances were convicted
of terrorism offenses and in 2005 Abu Omar himself was indicted in
absentia on charges that he had been recruiting fighters to go to
Iraq. But his sudden disappearance into the bowels of Egypt's
prisons had set back Spataro's probe dramatically.

I asked Spataro why he'd pushed so hard to investigate the snatching
of a militant he himself was about to indict. In measured tones, he
explained, "Kidnapping is a serious crime. It is important for
European democracy that all people are submitted to the law. It is
possible to combat terrorism without extraordinary means."

The prosecutor also didn't appreciate being lied to-American
officials had let it be known around Milan that Abu Omar had likely
fled to the Balkans. It didn't take Spataro long to get past the
smoke screen and even track down an eyewitness to the abduction. But
the bulk of his case would revolve around a rookie mistake made by
the kidnappers: using cell phones, and unencrypted ones at that.
Spataro's investigators reviewed the records from three Italian cell
phone companies with relay towers in the vicinity of where the
Egyptian militant disappeared and ran them through a commercial data-
crunching program. Of the more than 10,000 cell phones in use during
a three-hour window around the kidnapping, 17 were in constant
communication with each other. The investigators also determined
that soon after the abduction, some of the cell phones' users
traveled to Aviano Air Base, a major American installation several
hours east of Milan. And virtually all of the phone numbers stopped
working two or three days after the abduction.

The suspicious cell phones had made calls to the American consulate
in Milan and to numbers in Virginia (where the cia is
headquartered). The phones, most registered under bogus names, also
made many calls to prominent hotels in Milan-hotels where, the
Italian investigators found, a dozen Americans had stayed in the
weeks before the kidnapping. They registered under addresses in the
Washington, D.C., area, and Spataro believes they used their real
passports. Their movements matched those of the suspicious cell
phones. Over the course of several weeks the Americans had blown
more than $100,000 on easily traceable credit cards at hotels such
as the Principe di Savoia, where rates start at $345 a night and
which offers a special room-service menu for dogs. Others took side
trips to Venice, where they stayed at the five-star Danieli and
Sofitel hotels.

If the Americans had only used encrypted satellite phones and paid
in cash-standard tradecraft, according to cia veteran Robert Baer,
the former operative who was the model for George Clooney's
character in Syriana-Spataro would have had fewer leads to follow.
Why the sloppiness? Very probably, say law enforcement sources in
Milan, because the Americans had clued in senior Italian
intelligence officials about their plans and thus felt safe.

Next, Spataro's investigators began reviewing records from Italian
air-traffic control, nato, and the main European air-traffic
facility in Brussels. They discovered that a 10-seat jet departed
from Aviano a few hours after Abu Omar was abducted and flew to
Ramstein Air Base in Germany. An hour after it landed, an Executive
Gulfstream with the tail number N85VM departed Ramstein for Cairo.
In March 2005, the Chicago Tribune reported that this jet was owned
by Phillip Morse, a partner in the Boston Red Sox and one of a
number of individuals whose planes are occasionally rented by the
cia.

One of the suspicious cell phones had made hundreds of calls in the
vicinity of both the Milan residence and the country house of the
cia's station chief in Milan, Robert Lady. Armed with a warrant,
Spataro's investigators searched Lady's country house in June 2005
and found that he'd gone on a 10-day trip to Cairo a week after Abu
Omar's abduction. The investigators also found surveillance photos
of Abu Omar taken on the street where he was picked up, as well as
printed directions to Aviano Air Base. And they discovered a telling
email sent to Lady from a former colleague in the Milan consulate:
On Christmas Eve, 2004, as Spataro's inquiry was gathering momentum,
she told Lady she'd received an email "through work" titled "Italy,
don't go there"-an apparent reference to the investigation. She'd
also heard that Lady, who has since retired, had relocated to
Geneva "until this all blew over."

Even Arianna Barbazza, the court-appointed public defender for 13 of
the 26 American officials indicted in the Abu Omar case, conceded
that the case against Lady and his colleagues is substantial. Lady
could receive a sentence of up to 15 years. (The trial is scheduled
to start in March, although none of the indicted Americans is
expected to show up. The cia has refused to comment on the case or
its rendition program.)

Another important break came when Luciano Pironi, the mysterious
Italian police officer who had first "arrested" Abu Omar on the
street, began to cooperate with Spataro. Prior to Abu Omar's arrest,
Pironi was found to have been "frequently and intensely" in contact
with Lady. Pironi said that Lady had told him that the operation was
approved by the Italian military-intelligence agency, sismi, and
that Lady had received a tip that Abu Omar was planning to hijack a
school bus operated by the American school in Milan-a claim Italian
law enforcement officials say is false.

Lady, who speaks fluent Italian and had good relations with his
local counterparts, emerges from this tale as something of a tragic
figure. He had opposed the snatch of Abu Omar on the grounds that it
was counterproductive; he knew that Italy's counterterrorism police
had been trying to build a case against the Egyptian militant and
had even warned a top Italian counterterrorism official, Stefano
D'Ambrosio, that the cia was planning the Abu Omar operation.
D'Ambrosio told Italian investigators that Lady considered the whole
scheme "stupid." But Lady was forced to lead the operation by his
bosses in Rome and Langley, who were under intense pressure from the
White House to produce results in the war on terrorism. Lady told
Pironi that he'd never have spent all his savings to buy a
retirement house in the Italian countryside "unless he had been sure
that no inquiry against him was under way."

Today, that house has been seized by Italian authorities and Lady,
who fled to the States, is the subject of a Europe-wide arrest
warrant. In a final twist of irony, Lady told a friend in the
Italian police that in his retirement he'd hoped to work for a firm
made up of former cia officers who specialize in negotiating
releases for people abducted in South America.

In february 2007, Abu Omar was finally released-this time, it seems,
for good. "Without the human rights and media campaign, I would
still be in prison," he told me. The conditions of his release were
that he stay in Egypt and keep quiet about his treatment. But
realizing that notoriety might be his best protection, Abu Omar
attended the trial of a 22-year-old blogger whom the Egyptian
government accused of insulting President Hosni Mubarak. (He was
sentenced to four years.) In the Alexandria courtroom, he paraded
his scars before the cameras and talked about his years of
torture. "Now I am a public figure," he told me. "It protects me."

Jobless and still monitored by Egypt's security services, Abu Omar
now spends most of his time cruising the Internet and posting
occasional comments on Arabic-language newspaper sites. Toward the
end of our interview he pulled out a plastic bag stuffed full of
Christmas cards with pictures of windmills and little red robins
sent by people in the United Kingdom who'd learned about his case
through a letter-writing campaign organized by Amnesty
International. He told me he is happy that these kind people write,
sending the message that someone out there knows he hasn't
disappeared.

New Report:
Abu Ghraib Prisoners Packed In Ice Water- Filled Garbage Cans
By Sherwood Ross
Mon, 2008-03-17
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/31874

Muslim prisoners held in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison were submerged in
water-filled garbage cans with ice or put naked under cold showers in
near-freezing rooms until they went into shock, Sgt. Javal Davis, who
served with the 372nd Military Police Company there, has told a
national magazine.

Davis, from the Roselle, N.J., area, said while stationed at the
prison he also saw an incinerator with "bones in it" that he believed
to be a crematorium and said some prisoners were starved prior to
their interrogation.

Another soldier that had been stationed at Abu Ghraib, M.P. Sabrina
Harman---who gained dubious fame for making a thumbs-up sign posing
over the body of a prisoner she believed tortured to death---said the
U.S. had imprisoned "women and children" on Tier 1B, including one
child was as young as ten.

"Like a number of the other kids and of the women there, he was being
held as a pawn in the military's effort to capture or break his
father," write co-authors Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris in the
March 24th issue of The New Yorker magazine, which describes Abu
Ghraib in a 14-page article titled "Exposure."

They assert "the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib was de facto United
States policy. The authorization of torture and the decriminalization
of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of captives in wartime have
been among the defining legacies of the current Administration."
They add that the rules of interrogation that produced the abuses
documented in the prison "were the direct expression of the hostility
toward international law and military doctrine that was found in the
White House, the Vice-President's office, and at the highest levels of
the Justice and Defense Departments." (President Bush has insisted "We
do not torture," The Associated Press reported on November 7, 2005.)

Imprisoning suspects in a war zone, torturing and/or murdering them,
and holding their wives and children as hostages, are all banned
practices under international law. Some prisoners died from rocket
attacks on the compound.

Harman said she didn't like taking away naked prisoners' blankets when
it was really cold. "Because if I'm freezing and I'm wearing a jacket
and a hat and gloves, and these people don't have anything on and no
blanket, no mattress, that's kind of hard to see and do to
somebody---even if they are a terrorist." (Note: the prisoners were
suspects, not terrorists, being held without due process on charges of
which they were often ignorant and without legal representation.)

Harman said the corpse she posed with likely was murdered during
interrogation although a platoon commander said he had died of a heart
attack. Harman and another soldier, Corporal Charles Graner unzipped
his body bag and took photos of him and "kind of realized right away
that there was no way he died of a heart attack because of all the
cuts and blood coming out of his nose." Harman added, "His knees were
bruised, his thighs were bruised by his genitals. He had restraint
marks on his wrists. "

Asked why she posed making a "thumbs up" gesture over the corpse,
Harman said she thought, "Hey, it's a dead guy, it'd be cool to get a
photo next to a dead person. I know it looks bad. I mean, even when I
look at them (the photos) I go, `Oh Jesus, that does look pretty bad.'"

The corpse, said to have died under interrogation by a CIA agent, was
identified as that of Manadel al-Jamadi. An autopsy found he had
succumbed to "blunt force injuries" and "compromised respiration" and
his death was classified as a homicide, The New Yorker article said.
The dead man was removed from the tier disguised as a sick prisoner,
his arm taped to an IV, and rolled away on a gurney, apparently as
authorities "didn't want any of the prisoners thinking we were in
there killing folks," Sergeant Hydrue Joyner, Harman's team leader,
told the magazine.

Harman said she saw one naked prisoner with his hands bound behind his
back raised higher than his shoulders. This forced him to bend forward
with his head bowed and his weight suspended from his wrists and is
known as a "Palestinian hanging" as it is said to be used in Israeli
prisons, Gourevitch and Morris write.

In a letter to a friend Harman described "sleep deprivation" used on
the prisoners: "They sleep one hour then we yell and wake them---make
them stay up for one hour, then sleep one hour---then up etc. This
goes on for 72 hours while we fuck with them. Most have been so scared
they piss on themselves. Its sad." On one occasion, she wrote,
sandbags soaked in hot sauce were put over the prisoners' heads.

The CIA agent that interrogated al-Jamadi at the time of his "heart
attack" was never charged with a crime but Harman was convicted by
court-martial in May, 2005, of conspiracy to maltreat prisoners,
dereliction of duty and sentenced to six months in prison, reduced in
rank, and given a bad-conduct discharge.

Five other soldiers involved in taking pictures were sentenced to
terms of up to ten years in prison. Gourevitch and Morris write, "The
only person ranked above staff sergeant to face a court-martial was
cleared of criminal wrongdoing."

Sergeant Javal Davis, describing Abu Ghraib generally, said the prison
reminded him of something out of a "Mad Max" movie, explaining, "The
encampment they were in when we saw it at first looked like one of
those Hitler things, like a concentration camp, almost." The inside,
he said, is "nothing but rubble, blown-up buildings, dogs running all
over the place, rabid dogs, burnt remains. The stench was unbearable:
urine, feces, body rot. Their (prisoners') rest rooms was running
over. It was just disgusting. You didn't want to touch anything.
Whatever the worst thing that comes to your mind, that was it --- the
place you would never ever, ever, ever send your worst enemy."

When a delegation of the International Committee of the Red Cross
visited the prison in October, 2003, they were denied full access
(contrary to international law) and, The New Yorker said, "what they
were permitted to see and hear did not please them: men held naked in
bare, lightless cells, paraded naked down the hallways, verbally and
physically threatened, and so forth."

The ICRC reported the prison was plagued by gross and systematic
violations of the Geneva Conventions, including physical abuses that
left prisoners suffering from "incoherent speech, acute anxiety
reactions.suicidal ideas."

(Sherwood Ross is a Miami, Florida-based journalist and veteran public
relations consultant who suspects the Bush regime may be bad for the
image of the United States. He is founder of the Anti-War News
Service. Reach him at sherwoodr1 @ yahoo.com)

http://anonym.to/?http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation/story/404334.html

Brief: Guantánamo detainee `traumatized'
The jailed driver for Osama bin Laden is suffering from post- traumatic 
stress disorder, a psychiatrist says.

Detainee Salim Ahmed Hamdan, who worked in Afghanistan as a driver for Osama 
bin Laden, is seen in this undated file photo.

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- Osama bin Laden's driver is so traumatized 
from long-standing solitary confinement that he may be unable to assist in 
his war court defense, his lawyers argued in a brief obtained by The Miami 
Herald on Saturday.

The brief described Salim Hamdan, 36, of Yemen, as held in ''a regime of 
isolation with no access to natural light or air, for 22-23 hours a day.'' 
For a month after Christmas, it said, he was only permitted outdoor exercise 
only twice.

The brief, written Friday, also included an affidavit from a California 
psychiatrist who works with U.S. war veterans at the Veterans Administration 
and describes Hamdan as suffering post- traumatic stress disorder.

U.S.-allied Afghan troops captured him not in battle but after he drove up 
to a checkpoint in Afghanistan in 2001. He has been at Guantánamo for more 
than five years, long periods in segregation.

At issue is whether he is mentally sound enough to participate in his own 
defense at his trial by military commission in April. A Navy judge is 
holding pre-trial hearings on defense challenges to his war crimes charges 
alleging he was an al Qaeda co-conspirator.

Hamdan, a wiry father of two with a fourth-grade education, has consistently 
argued that he never joined al Qaeda, never fought anyone and was working as 
a $200-a-month driver for an income, not ideology.

Prosecutors say he was an insider, a bin Laden bodyguard who was aware of 
ongoing operations and repeatedly helped the arch-terrorist elude capture.

Now, Hamdan suffers nightmares, amnesia, anxiety, irritability, insomnia and 
a sense of ''hopelessness and helplessness,'' wrote Dr. Emily Keram, a 
psychiatrist chosen to evaluate the enemy combatant by his lawyers.

Continued isolation puts him at risk of ''suicidal thoughts and behavior,'' 
she said in an affidavit based on 70 hours of meetings with him.

Prison camp spokesmen had no immediate comment. They have long maintained 
that there is no such thing as solitary confinement at this remote U.S. Navy 
base, which today holds 277 men on suspicion of ties to al Qaeda and the 
Taliban.

Most detainees are kept in single-occupancy cells, but commanders say the 
captives are able to shout through the walls to communicate and can see 
their guards through their steel door's peep hole when meals are delivered.

But Pentagon defense lawyer Andrea Prasow, a civilian, wrote in an 
accompanying affidavit that Hamdan's mental health is ''precarious.'' So 
desperate is he, she said, that he sought meetings with military 
interrogators ``in the hopes that they might improve his conditions of 
confinement.''

The Hamdan motion also provides a window into the different conditions 
across the various prison camps.

Also due at a commission hearing this week is Canadian captive Omar Khadr, 
22, facing a charge of murder as a war crime in the July 2002 grenade 
killing of a 28-year-old U.S. Army medic in a firefight in Afghanistan.

Prasow wrote that Hamdan's misery is compounded by the fact that he has 
learned that both Khadr and a Sudanese captive who allegedly managed the al 
Qaeda payroll live with other detainees in POW-style collective bunkhouses 
called Camp 4.

Captives there play soccer, eat and pray together and watch special video 
screenings.

----------------------------------------------------

Guantanamo Detainee "Baptized"

IslamOnline.net & Newspapers

The documents also showed that US jailers wrapped a Muslim prisoner in an 
Israeli flag during interrogation sessions to "incense" him.
CAIRO - In a new embarrassment to the Bush administration, an FBI probe 
indicated that detainees at the notorious Guantanamo detention camp were 
"baptized" and wrapped in Israeli flags, the Washington Post reported on 
Wednesday, January 3.
A US interrogator bragged to an FBI agent that he forced a Muslim detainee 
to listen to "Satanic black metal music" for hours, according to documents 
turned over as part of an ongoing lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties 
Union.
Then, the US interrogator dressed as a Catholic priest before "baptizing" 
the detainee, it added.
The FBI internal probe into abuse accusations at Guantanamo revealed 26 
cases of mistreatments of the Muslim detainees.
The documents also showed that US jailers wrapped a Muslim prisoner in an 
Israeli flag during interrogation sessions to "incense" him.
Other aggressive questioning techniques used included subjecting detainees 
to extreme heat and cold and using strobe lights.
The tactics were allowed under aggressive Pentagon detention policy place at 
the time, according to the probe.
The US has been holding hundreds of detainees at the notorious detention 
facility, mostly arrested in Afghanistan after the toppling of Taliban 
following the 9/11 attacks.
Guantanamo buildings hide behind multiple rows of 12-foot chain-link fences 
covered in green tarpaulins and topped with tight spirals of barbed wire.
Old wooden and newer steel watchtowers dot the perimeter.
Religiously-oriented
FBI agents also reported mistreatment of the Noble Qur'an by Guantanamo 
jailers.
An agent said that a Marine captain squatted over a copy of the Muslim holy 
book in October 2002, while questioning a detainee who was enraged by the 
abuse.
A second FBI agent described similar events, but it was unclear from the 
documents whether it was a separate case.
The desecration of the Qur'an was first reported in 2005, prompting deadly 
protests in the Muslim world.
At the time, the US military conducted an investigation that confirmed five 
cases of "mishandling" the Muslim holy book.
It acknowledged that soldiers and interrogators had kicked the Qur'an, had 
stood on it and, in one case, had sprayed urine on it.
The new documents also unveiled repeated desecration of the Noble Qur'an, in 
a "religiously oriented tactic" against the Muslim detainees.
An FBI agent said he was asked female interrogators to wet their hands and 
touch detainees' faces, prompting them to consider themselves unclean and 
unable to continue praying.
US interrogators also wrapped a bearded inmate's head in duct tape "because 
he would not stop quoting the Qur'an," according to an FBI agent.
The agent, whose account was corroborated by a colleague, said that a 
civilian contractor laughed about the treatment and was eager to show it 
off.
Root Causes

"More comprehensive investigation is needed. into the root causes and 
policies that led to those incidents," said Jaffer
The new abuse revelation sparked calls for comprehensive investigations into 
the practices used at Guantanamo.
"More comprehensive investigation is needed, not only into the scope of 
abuses but into the root causes and policies that led to those incidents," 
said Jameel Jaffer, deputy director of the ACLU's National Security Program.
Jaffer questioned how aggressively the FBI pursued accusations by its 
agents, because authorities conducted follow-up interviews in only nine of 
the 26 cases.
An FBI memorandum that accompanied the new documents said that none of the 
incidents involved FBI or Justice Department employees.
The memo said that the reports concerned personnel from other government 
agencies or outside contractors.
The Pentagon said the issues and facts raised in the documents "are not 
new".
Amnesty International has called Guantanamo the "gulag of our time" and said 
it has become a "symbol of abuse and represents a system of detention that 
is betraying the best US values and undermines international standards."
A growing chorus of world dignitaries and politicians, including former US 
presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, and incumbent British Foreign 
Secretary Margaret Beckett have pressed for the closure of Guantanamo.

----------------------------------------------------------------

Newly released documents reveal fate of original Guantanamo detainees
By: Carol Rosenberg - McClatchy Newspapers
Posted: 1/17/08
One former Guantanamo captive is studying liberal arts in England. Another 
is famously free, released from an Australian jail after a U.S. military 
mandated nine-month prison sentence.

A third is in Kuwait, with his wife and five children, still traumatized, 
his lawyers says, by his U.S. captivity.

On Jan. 11, 2002, the Pentagon transferred its first 20 men from Afghanistan 
to its detention center in southeast Cuba, calling them "the worst of the 
worst" of U.S.-held prisoners in the war-on-terror.

Now, a Miami Herald study has found that seven of those men have since gone 
home, some with little fanfare, others after well-publicized campaigns for 
their freedom.

Meantime, a dozen of those first detainees remain there _ none currently 
charged with crimes _ six years after Pentagon photographs stirred 
international outrage by showing the men shackled on their knees at Camp 
X-Ray.

The names came from Defense Department documents, notably prison camps 
weight charts, detainee accounts and contacts with lawyers and home nations. 
The name of the 20th captive that day remains a mystery.

The documents show that, with the exception of Australian David Hicks, there 
would be little to distinguish the men on their knees from those who would 
come in the months and years later.

"There was a sort of randomness to it," said Marine Maj. Dan Mori, whose 
client David Hicks, now free, is kneeling somewhere in that first 
worst-of-the-worst photo. "It was probably far too early for them to know 
what anybody had really done."

Hicks is today the only man ever convicted at President Bush's Military 
Commissions set up at Guantanamo. Amid electioneering protests in his native 
Australia, the self-confessed al-Qaida foot soldier settled with the U.S. 
government for a nine-month sentence, most in his homeland.

He was set free last month and has a midnight-to-6 a.m. curfew under a court 
order that requires he check in with Adelaide police three times weekly.

What can he say about that flight, that first day, whether he can even spot 
himself in the photos?

Nothing.

As part of his March guilty plea, which netted him nine months in prison on 
a terror crime that could carry a maximum life in prison, he agreed to a 
one-year ban on talking to the media and pledged never to accuse the United 
States of mistreating him.

In fact, none of the men the Herald tracked down in the photo agreed to an 
interview.

Feroz Abassi, 28, is now living back in England working toward a liberal 
arts degree at an undisclosed university, said several attorneys who 
declined on his behalf to specify the location.

"Feroz is studying and doing remarkably well adjusting to his life now after 
years of abuse and uncertainty about his fate while imprisoned at 
Guantanamo," said Gitanjali Gutierrez, attorney for the New York Center for 
Constitutional Rights.

She was the first attorney ever allowed to meet Guantanamo captives, in 
August 2004, and Abassi was among two men she met there her first day _ 
after 2 ½ years of confinement.

The Bush administration at one point designated him for trial by military 
commission. Instead, he was freed in early January after intervention by the 
Tony Blair government.

Gutierrez, staff attorney at the New York Center for Constitutional Rights, 
said Abassi's case illustrates just how wrong the U.S. military was in 
characterizing that first airlift of prisoners _ ferried 8,000 miles from 
Afghanistan _ as "the worst of the worst."

"At one point, they described him as an al-Qaida leader!" she said. "He gets 
out and what's the first thing he does? He goes off to school. He's gotten 
on with his life and has gone on to mentor younger students."

Omar Amin, 40, home in Kuwait since September 2006, likewise declined 
through his attorney and a family friend to speak with The Herald.

"Omar Amin was deeply traumatized by the ordeal. He's back home with his 
wife and five children, trying to put his life back together and move on," 
said lawyer David Cynamon.

Less is known about the fate of a Pakistani man, Shabidzada Usman, who was 
the first on that first flight set free, 15 months after he got there _ or 
two Saudi men who were sent to their homeland in 2006 and 2007.

A Taliban member from the first flight, Ghulam Ruhani, has just gone home _ 
to a U.S-sponsored lockup near Kabul. In the earliest days of the 
American-led coalition assault on Afghanistan, he was held on a U.S. Navy 
ship at sea, along with Hicks and American captive John Walker now serving 
in a federal penitentiary in California for being a Taliban foot soldier.

Earlier this month, The Miami Herald inquired about the men on that first 
flight since freed and got this reply from a spokesman, Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey 
Gordon: The Pentagon had no "information to share" on those men.

Since the camps opened, the Pentagon says about 500 men have been released. 
It says it has a list of "more than 30" who have returned to the 
battlefield, but it refuses to identify most of them.

The U.S. military has also steadfastly cited privacy reasons in declining to 
identify the first 20 men to be held captive at Camp X-Ray in Cuba.

The Herald investigation turned up one striking finding: Six years after 
their arrival, four of the original detainees have never seen lawyers. Bush 
administration policy prohibited civilian attorneys from the prison in the 
first 30 months. But slowly advocates for the captives succeeded in 
providing civilian legal counsel. War court defendants automatically get 
military lawyers.

Few people would have imagined the Pentagon paying to defend the men when 
they landed at the camp in January 2002.

"These represent the worst elements of al-Qaida and the Taliban. We asked 
for the bad guys first," Marine Brig. Gen. Michael Lehnert told reporters 
hours before their arrival on an 8,000-mile air-bridge from Bagram, 
Afghanistan.

It was early in the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan to topple the Taliban and 
hunt down Osama bin Laden, and the Pentagon opened Camp X-Ray at the U.S. 
Navy base in the Caribbean as an interrogation and detention center far from 
then freezing cold Afghanistan.

Guantanamo was chosen for both its isolation and to argue that it was beyond 
the reach of U.S. courts. None of the original detainees are currently 
charged at military commissions, but two from the first flight may face the 
war court _ Ali Hamza Bahlul, 39, and Abdl Malak al-Rahabi, 29, both 
Yemenis,

Bahlul and al-Rahabi have never been invited to argue for their freedom 
before the annual U.S. military parole boards, a key indicator that they are 
war court candidates.

The first 20 men were a mixed group of alleged al-Qaida foot soldiers and 
Taliban functionaries, all Muslim and about half of them Arabs.

The Miami Herald has discovered the identities of 19 of the first prisoners. 
Who is the 20th man?

No clear answer emerges from the thousands of pages of detainee documents 
the Defense Department has released, much of it under Freedom of Information 
lawsuits by the Associated Press and the American Civil Liberties Union.

But a 2006 affidavit from a two-star general who supervised interrogations 
provides a possible explanation: In the earliest days of the prison project, 
when detainees were kept at Camp X-Ray, military intelligence planted 
informants among them.

Southcom in Miami would not confirm whether such a program existed; nor 
would it provide its own list of the first 20 captives in a rolling detainee 
population that would number nearly 800.
--------------------------------------------------------------------

Detention of family members of detainees, including children

In some cases family members-including children-of detainees who have been 
held in
the U.S. Secret Detention Program, have been apprehended, detained and/or 
subjected to
coercive treatment. Family members may be apprehended separately or at the 
same time as the
individual sought. One apparent object of such treatment has been to obtain 
information about
the detainee. Some of these family members have been subsequently released, 
but in other cases
their fate and whereabouts remain unknown.

In September 2002, Yusuf al-Khalid (then nine years old) and Abed al-Khalid 
(then
seven years old) were reportedly apprehended by Pakistani security forces 
during an attempted
capture of their father, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was 
successfully
apprehended several months later, and the U.S. government has acknowledged 
that he was in the

U.S. Secret Detention Program. He is presently held at Guantánamo Bay.
In an April 16, 2007 statement, Ali Khan (father of Majid Khan, a detainee 
who the U.S.
government has acknowledged was in the U.S. Secret Detention Program and is 
presently held at
Guantánamo Bay) indicated that Yusef and Abed al-Khalid had been held in the 
same location in
which Majid Khan and Majid's brother Mohammed were detained in March/April 
2003.
Mohammed was detained by Pakistani officials for approximately one month 
after his
apprehension on March 5, 2003 (see below). Ali Khan's statement indicates 
that:

Also according to Mohammed, he and Majid were detained in the same place 
where two
of Khalid Sheik Mohammed's young children, ages about 6 and 8, were held. 
The
Pakistani guards told my son that the boys were kept in a separate area 
upstairs, and were
denied food and water by other guards. They were also mentally tortured by 
having ants
or other creatures put on their legs to scare them and get them to say where 
their father
was hiding.11

After Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's arrest in March 2003, Yusuf and Abed Al 
Khalid were
reportedly transferred out of Pakistan in U.S. custody. The children were 
allegedly being sent
for questioning about their father's activities and to be used by the United 
States as leverage to
force their father to co-operate with the United States. A press report on 
March 10, 2003
confirmed that CIA interrogators had detained the children and that one 
official explained that:

"We are handling them with kid gloves. After all, they are only little 
children...but we
need to know as much about their father's recent activities as possible. We 
have child
psychologists on hand at all times and they are given the best of care."12

11 See Statement of Ali Khan, Apr. 16, 2007, available at
www.ccr-ny.org/v2/legal/september_11th/docs/Ali_Khan_statement.pdf
12 See Olga Craig, CIA Holds Young Sons of Captured al-Qaeda Chief, SUNDAY 
TELEGRAPH (U.K.), Mar. 9, 2003,
available at 
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=%2Fnews%2F2003%2F03%2F09%2Fwalqa09.xml.

In the transcript of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's Combatant Status Review 
Tribunal, he
indicates knowledge that his children were apprehended and abused: "They 
arrested my kids
intentionally. They are kids. They been arrested for four months they had 
been abused."13

On March 5, 2003, Majid Khan, was apprehended in Karachi, Pakistan, along 
with his
brother Mohammed, his brother's wife and their one month-old daughter. They 
were all taken to
an unknown location. Majid Khan's sister-in-law and her daughter were 
detained for one week,
and as mentioned above, Mohammed Khan was detained by Pakistani officials 
for approximately
one month.

On March 28, 2003, Aafia Siddiqui (see page 16) was reportedly apprehended 
in Karachi,
Pakistan along with her three children (then aged seven years, five years 
and six months).

On August 11, 2003, Hambali, a detainee who the U.S. government has 
acknowledged
was in the U.S. Secret Detention Program and is presently held at Guantánamo 
Bay, was
reportedly apprehended in Thailand along with his wife Noralwizah Lee 
Abdullah, a national of
Malaysia, in a joint operation of which the U.S. was a part.

On July 24, 2004, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a detainee who the U.S. government 
has
acknowledged was in the U.S. Secret Detention Program and is presently held 
at Guantánamo
Bay, was reportedly apprehended in Gujarat, Pakistan, along with two women 
(his wife, an
Uzbek national and the Pakistani wife of South African national Zubair 
Ismail) and five children.
His apprehension was reportedly a joint Pakistani-U.S. operation, 
coordinated with CIA and FBI
officials.

13 U.S. Department of Defense, Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, Transcript of CSRT 
(KSM) Hearing, available at,
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Combatant_Tribunals.html.

http://www.turkishpress.com/news.asp?id=222060

Egyptian killed by US military ship: security source
03-24-2008, 22h44
ISMAILIYA, Egypt (AFP)

An airial view taken in 2007 shows the southern entrance of Egypt's Suez 
Canal. One Egyptian was killed and two wounded when a US military ship about 
to cross the Suez Canal opened fire on barges of hawkers that approached 
their boat on Monday, a security source told AFP.
(AFP/File)

A US military ship about to cross the Suez Canal opened fire Monday on 
barges of hawkers that approached their boat, killing one Egyptian and 
wounding two others, a security source said.
The ship, Global Patriot, had arrived from the Red Sea and was waiting in 
the Gulf of Suez to sail to the Mediterranean when a group of Egyptians 
seeking to sell merchandise approached the boat on small barges, the source 
said.
Americans on board told the barges to stop and opened fire when they 
continued to approach.
Several of the small barges that usually ply their trade in small goods on 
the canal gathered in protest immediately after the shooting but then 
dispersed, leaving the Suez waterway clear for traffic.
According to the website of the US Navy's Military Sealift Command, the MV 
Global Patriot is a roll-on roll-off transport ship chartered from Global 
Container Lines.
The security source said that the ship was expected to cross the Suez Canal 
as planned at 6:00 am (0300 GMT) on Tuesday.


Amnesty International Reveals New CIA 'Disappearance' Case That Began in Abu 
Ghraib     <
http://www.breitbart.com/partner.php?source=prnw
>

Mar 13 04:01 PM US/Eastern

Former Detainee Was Held More Than 2 Years in "Black Site," Human Rights 
Organization Reports

WASHINGTON, March 13 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ --Amnesty International today 
exposed in a new report, "From Abu Ghraib to secret CIA custody: The case of 
Khaled al-Maqtari," further details of the cruelty and illegality of the CIA 
program of secret detentions and enforced disappearances -- a program 
re-authorized by President Bush in June 2007.

In an exclusive to Amnesty International, 31-year-old Yemeni national Khaled 
Abdu Ahmed Saleh al-Maqtari recounted his ordeal as one of the men most 
recently released from secret detention in May 2007. Initially a "ghost 
detainee" at Abu Ghraib, he was transferred to CIA custody in Afghanistan, 
then held in unknown locations and in complete isolation for more than two 
and a half years, without charge or trial or access to any form of due 
process. His statements include numerous allegations of torture and other 
ill-treatment.

"Khaled al-Maqtari's account is one more shameful chapter in the Bush 
administration's war on terror playbook," said Larry Cox, Amnesty 
International USA executive director. "Mr. al-Maqtari's descriptions of 
being subjected to international crimes including enforced disappearance and 
torture are terrible and disgraceful for the United States government. 
Equally reprehensible is that none of these allegations are known to have 
ever been investigated, nor has anyone been held accountable."

Khaled al-Maqtari was detained when U.S. army soldiers raided a suspected 
arms market in Fallujah, Iraq, in January 2004, arresting at least 60 
people. He was transferred to the infamous Abu Ghraib prison as an 
unregistered "ghost detainee." He has recounted a regime of beatings, sleep 
deprivation, suspension upside-down in painful positions, intimidation by 
dogs, induced hypothermia and other forms of torture.

He said that on one occasion, after being beaten by three men in a small 
room, he was forced to stand naked on a chair in front of a powerful air 
conditioner, holding up a full case of bottled water. He was periodically 
drenched in cold water, which made him shiver so hard he could barely remain 
standing. Khaled al-Maqtari said he was also suspended by his feet, with his 
arms still cuffed behind his back, while a pulley was used to lower him up 
and down over a water crate.

After nine days of interrogation in Abu Ghraib, Khaled al-Maqtari was taken 
by plane to a secret CIA detention facility in Afghanistan, were he was held 
for an additional three months. Flight records obtained by Amnesty 
International corroborated that a jet operated by a CIA front company left 
Baghdad International Airport nine days after al-Maqtari's arrest, heading 
for Khwaja Rawash airport in Kabul.

While in Afghanistan, Khaled al-Maqtari said, he was subjected to further 
torture and ill-treatment, including prolonged solitary confinement, the use 
of stress positions, sleep deprivation, exposure to extremes of hot and 
cold, prolonged shackling, sensory deprivation and disruption with bright 
lighting and loud music or sound effects constantly channeled into his cell.

As he told Amnesty International: "It was not really music but noise to 
scare you, like from one of those scary movies...I was scared, there were no 
dogs but there was noise there. Whenever you try to sleep, they bang on the 
door loudly and violently."

Khaled al-Maqtari also told Amnesty International that during the lapses in 
the music or sound effects he began to speak to other detainees, and he 
figured out there were about 20 others being held in the cells around him, 
including Majid Khan, one of the "high value" detainees transferred from 
secret CIA custody to military detention in Guantanamo Bay in September 
2006.

In late April 2004, Khaled al-Maqtari and a number of his fellow detainees 
were transferred to another CIA "black site," possibly in Eastern Europe. He 
was held there for 28 more months, before being sent to Yemen where he was 
detained by Yemeni officials until May 2007.

"At no point during his 32-month confinement was Khaled al-Maqtari told 
where he was or why," said Anne FitzGerald, senior advisor at Amnesty 
International, who interviewed Khaled al-Maqtari. "According to Mr. 
al-Maqtari, he did not have access to lawyers, relatives, the International 
Committee of the Red Cross or any person other than his interrogators and 
the personnel involved in his detention and transfer. This clearly violates 
the United States' international obligations. The U.S. government has a case 
to answer."

Khaled al-Maqtari is in his native Yemen, living with the effects of 
prolonged psychological and physical torture. He has not received any 
reparation from U.S. authorities, who have yet to acknowledge his detention. 
The abuses that have affected him most, he said, were the years of endless 
isolation, his total uncertainty about his future, the constant monitoring 
by cameras, and his segregation from the outside world, particularly the 
lack of contact with his family.

Amnesty International urges the U.S. authorities to end the use of secret 
detention; hold accountable those responsible for abuses carried out under 
the program; make known the names, fate and whereabouts of all individuals 
held in the context of the so-called "war on terror;" and charge any 
detainees who are still held with recognizable criminal offenses and bring 
them to trial in independent courts or release them immediately.

The report will also be available online starting March 14 at 
http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/AMR51/013/2008/en

SOURCE Amnesty International

http://canadianpress.google.com/article/ALeqM5jVwGqYWMiTBxH46PsF9gQVEg-JzQ

United States censors Guantanamo prisoner's sketch of force-feeding
1 day ago
GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba - The United States has censored a gruesome 
drawing by a Guantanamo Bay detainee depicting him as a skeleton being 
force-fed at the military prison, the man's lawyers said Monday as they 
released a recreation of the sketch.
The detainee, Sami al-Haj, a Sudanese cameramen for the Al-Jazeera TV 
network, marked his 431st day on hunger strike Monday at Guantanamo, the 
U.S. base in Cuba where some 275 men suspected of terrorism or links with 
al-Qaida or the Taliban are being held.
"My picture reflects my nightmares of what I must look like, with my head 
double-strapped down, a tube in my nose, a black mask over my mouth, with no 
eyes and only giant cheekbones," al-Haj said in a statement released by the 
British legal rights group Reprieve.
The lawyers said they commissioned a political cartoonist, Lewis Peake, to 
recreate four of al-Haj's drawings, based on descriptions of the censored 
originals, to reveal "aspects of the prisoners' suffering in U.S. custody."
U.S. navy Cmdr. Rick Haupt, a spokesman for the prison camp, denied 
detainees are mistreated and said al-Qaida trains its operatives to allege 
inhumane treatment.
"We continue to treat all detainees safely and humanely," Haupt said.
Seven detainees remained on hunger strike Monday to protest against 
conditions and their indefinite confinement at Guantanamo. All were being 
fed liquid nutrients through a tube inserted into their nostril.
Clive Stafford Smith, one of al Haj's lawyers, said the censorship of the 
drawings was motivated by public-relations concerns.
"The motivation is not national security but trying to avoid embarrassment 
for the illegal acts of the military," Stafford Smith said.
Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman, said the drawings were censored 
because they were beyond the scope of material, such as legal documents or 
discussion of evidence, that is allowed.
"The documents in question did not meet those parameters," Gordon said.
Titled "Scream for Freedom," the drawing released Monday depicts a skeleton 
strapped into a "restraint chair," which the military uses when 
force-feeding detainees. A second detainee is strapped into another chair. 
Between them, the insignia of the Joint Task Force-Guantanamo has been 
altered to show a skull and crossbones in lieu of a star and outline of 
Cuba. Al-Haj said detainees call the chairs "torture chairs."
Lawyer Cori Crider said al-Haj showed her the four sketches Feb. 1. She said 
she suspected the military might prevent their release, so she also 
submitted for review al-Haj's detailed descriptions of the drawings, which 
the military did not censor, allowing the images to be recreated. 
Recreations of three other sketches will be released in coming days.
Al-Haj was captured by Pakistani authorities on the Afghan border and turned 
over to the United States. He is believed to be the only journalist from a 
major international news organization held at Guantanamo. Authorities 
accused him of transporting money in the 1990s for a charity that allegedly 
funded military groups.

Bush Administration Asks Supreme Court to
Limit Judges' Access to Detainee Evidence
AP News
Feb 14, 2008
http://www.rawstory.com/news/mochila/Bush_wants_limits_on_access_to_evid_02142008.html

The Bush administration asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to limit
judges' authority to scrutinize evidence against detainees at
Guantanamo Bay.

The administration said the court could still add the issue to its
calendar this year and hear arguments in a rare May session, then
render a decision by late June.

The case is linked to another dispute already at the high court in
which detainees are asking the justices to rule that they can use the
U.S. civilian courts to challenge their indefinite imprisonment.
Another option for the court is to take no action on the new case
until it decides on the extent of the detainees' legal rights.
In the new case, the administration is asking the court to undo a
federal appeals court ruling that broadens its authority to look at
evidence about whether detainees have been properly characterized as
enemy combatants.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of
Columbia Circuit initially ruled on the case in July. The full court
refused in early February, in a 5-5 split, to reconsider that ruling.
It takes a majority of the court to reconsider a panel decision.
The ruling held that, when Guantanamo Bay detainees challenge their
status as "enemy combatants," judges must review all the evidence, not
just the evidence the military chooses.

The administration said the decision jeopardizes national security.
At the Guantanamo hearings, detainees are not allowed to have lawyers
present and the Pentagon decides what evidence to present. And unlike
in criminal trials, the government is not obligated to turn over
evidence that the defendant might be innocent.

If the military reviewers designate a prisoner as an enemy combatant,
the prisoner can challenge that decision before the appeals court in
Washington. The administration wants the appeals court to look at only
the evidence considered by the Pentagon panel that decided the
detainee is an enemy combatant.

A decision to hear the new case could come as early as Tuesday.
The case is Gates v. Bismullah, 07-1054.

Foreign Policy in Focus, February 26, 2007
Title: "Migrants: Globalization's Junk Mail?"
Author: Laura Carlsen
http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4022

Student Researcher: Fernanda Borras
Faculty Evaluator: Diana Grant, Ph.D.

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) flooded Mexico with
cheap subsidized US agricultural products that displaced millions of
Mexican farmers. Between 2000 and 2005, Mexico lost 900,000 rural jobs
and 700,000 industrial jobs, resulting in deep unemployment throughout
the country. Desperate poverty has forced millions of Mexican workers
north in order to feed their families.

The National Campesino Front estimates that two million farmers have
been displaced by NAFTA, in many cases related to the increase in US
imports. In 1994, the first year of the agreement, the United States
exported $4.59 billion of agricultural products to Mexico, according
to the Department of Agriculture. By 2006 the figure had risen to
$9.85 billion-an increase of 114 percent. US exports of corn, Mexico's
staple crop and largest source of rural employment, alone doubled to
over $2.5 billion in 2006.

This combination of unemployment in Mexico, the huge gap between
salaries in the United States and Mexico, and US demand for cheap
labor to compete on global markets has created the current situation.
The demand for undocumented labor in the US economy is structural. It
is not just a few companies seeking to cut corners. These are not just
jobs that "US workers won't take." Migrants work in nearly all
low-paying occupations and have become essential to the US economy in
the age of global competition.

The meatpacking industry provides a good example. The US meat industry
as it went global shows a fast slide in working conditions over the
past decades as a result of de-unionization, erosion of wages and
benefits, and increasing safety and health hazards. Part and parcel of
that slide has been the replacement of unionized US workers with migrants.

Aside from traditional employment in agriculture, another major use of
migrant labor has been through the advent of subcontracting. This
practice, well in place since the early 1980s, has contributed to the
de-unionization of the workforce. It conveniently releases employees
from direct responsibility for the legal status and treatment of
workers in their employment.

In the wake of 9/11, Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) has
conducted workplace and home invasions across the country in an
attempt to round up "illegal" immigrants. ICE justifies these raids
under the rubric of keeping our homeland safe and preventing
terrorism. However the real goal of these actions is to disrupt the
immigrant work force in the US and replace it with a tightly regulated
non-union guest-worker program. This policy is endorsed by companies
seeking permanent low-wage workers through a lobby group called
Essential Worker Immigrations Coalition (EWIC). EWIC's fifty-two
members include the US Chamber of Commerce, Wal-Mart, Marriott, Tyson
Foods, American Meat Institute, California Landscape Contractors
Association, and the Association of Builders and Contractors.
ICE now has Operation Return to Sender, a program, supposedly designed
to target fugitive aliens. The program has resulted in the
indiscriminate roundup of over 13,000 undocumented immigrants in
cities throughout the United States.

Immigrant rights organizations have noted that the crackdown has led
to serious human rights violations. Families are separated. Hearings
are slow, and often families do not know for long periods of time
where their loved ones are being held. A January 16 report from the
Homeland Security Department's Inspector General of conditions at five
detention centers identified frequent violation of federal standards,
overcrowding, and health and safety violations.

The firings and raids highlight the vulnerability of immigrant workers
under current US law. In 1986 Congress passed the Immigration Reform
and Control Act, making it a federal crime for an employer to hire a
worker without valid immigration documents. While few employers have
ever faced penalties, in reality the law made it a crime for
undocumented workers to hold a job. No current law requires employers
to fire workers whose Social Security numbers don't jibe. But
President Bush proposed a new administrative rule, which would tell
employers to fire anyone with a no-match. The regulation has never
been officially issued, but many companies claim they're already
complying with it.

Both the enforcement and the agenda behind this crackdown are alarming
many unions. In 1999 the AFL-CIO called for the repeal of employer
sanctions, as well as for a generous legalization program, greater
chances for family reunification, and enforcement of workplace rights.
The federation was already on record opposing new guest worker
programs. The Service Employees, and the two garment unions were among
the first to push for this position. "We still call for the repeal of
employer sanctions, as we have from the time it was passed," says
Bruce Raynor, UNITE HERE president. "There are 12 million undocumented
people living here, who are important to the economy," he fumes. "They
have a right to seek employment, and employers have a right to hire
them. The only way to deal with this is to give workers rights and a
path to citizenship."

UPDATE BY DAVID BACON

"Which Side are you On?" and "Workers, not Guests" expose the way US
immigration law is being transformed into a mechanism for supplying
labor to some of the country's largest corporations. Immigration law
is creating a two-tier society, in which millions of people are denied
fundamental rights and social benefits, because they are recruited to
come to the US by those corporations on visas that condemn them to a
second-class status. Those guest workers face increased poverty and
exploitation, and their status is being used to put pressure on wages,
benefits and workplace rights for all workers.

"Workers, not Guests" describes the way that the Bush administration
uses immigration raids to attack union organizing campaigns and
efforts by immigrant workers to enforce basic workplace rights and
protections. Further, the administration uses the raids to pressure
Congress into adopting new, vastly expanded guest worker programs.
Both articles describe the way some groups have abandoned their
historic opposition to contract labor programs. Instead, the National
Council of La Raza, the National Immigration Forum, and other labor
and religious organizations have developed a political alliance with
some of the country's largest corporations, with the objective of
passing new guest worker legislation. This legislation also includes
provisions that will make future immigration raids much harsher and
more widespread.

Since publication, the Bush administration and both Democratic and
Republican senators have announced new proposals that go even further.
They would end the ability of immigrant families to reunite in the US,
and instead institute a corporate-driven point system intended to
supply skilled labor to big companies. Raids and enforcement would
become even harsher, with huge detention centers built on the border.
The proposals would allow corporations to recruit as many as 600,000
contract guest workers a year.

The use of immigration policy to funnel labor to corporate employers
is growing at the same time that Congress is debating new corporate
trade legislation, including the renewal of fast track negotiating
authority for the administration, and four new trade agreements-with
South Korea, Peru, Panama, and Colombia. These bills would all
increase the displacement of workers and farmers in other countries,
sending many of them into the migrant stream to the US. This
displacement is being coordinated with Congress's immigration
proposals, which would then channel displaced workers into industries
where their labor can be used profitably, and ensure that they can
only remain in the US in a status vulnerable to exploitation.
The mainstream press has carried many articles about the proposals and
raids. There has been very little coverage of the corporate backing
for the immigration bills in Congress, however. Many reporters refer
to the guest worker bills as "pro-immigrant" and "left." This has not
only been inaccurate reporting, but has actually covered up the
corporate domination of the immigration agenda in Congress. There has
been virtually no coverage of the connection between US trade policy
and immigration policy.

For more accurate information, readers can contact the National
Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, www.nnirr.org. Global
Exchange organized a national speaking tour on trade and immigration
policy by David Bacon and Juan Manuel Sandoval, a leading Mexican
critic of NAFTA and US immigration policy. The presentations made
during that tour are available on the Global Exchange website,
www.globalexchange.org.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

TO everyone who took the actions - THANK YOU!  It WORKS!  Next:  Shaker 
Aamer (see below, go to the link and take action for him, too!)
Spain drops charges against Omar Deghayes and Jamil el-Banna
Campaigners for British Guantanamo Bay detainees Omar Deghayes and Jamil 
el-Banna were celebrating today at the news that authorities have dropped 
attempts to extradite the two men to Spain.
Omar and Jamil were released from Guantanamo Bay back to Britain in December 
last year - but were immediately placed back in legal limbo with the 
extradition requests against them.
Now Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon has ruled that the two men are not fit to 
stand trial in Spain because of mental and physical problems arising from 
their time in Guantanamo-and has consequently dropped proceedings against 
them.
Omar was blinded in one eye by his US captors. Both men were subject to 
torture and ill-treatment during their five year detention in the prison 
camp.
Jackie Chase from the Save Omar campaign told Socialist Worker, "We're 
delighted to hear that the Spanish authorities have seen sense and decided 
not to pursue this extradition request any further.
"Everybody should now be satisfied these men pose no threat whatsoever. Omar 
and Jamil should be left in peace to get on with their lives-although they 
will always bear the scars of the crimes committed against them.
"This whole case has highlighted how wrong it is to depart from a system of 
law by allowing people to be detained without charge and subjected to 
torture and other appalling practices."
Jackie added that the Save Omar campaigners would be coming to the Stop the 
War march in London on 15 March to demand the release of the two remaining 
British residents in Guantanamo, Shaker Abdur-Raheem Aamer and Binyam 
Mohammed al-Habashi.
"We need to stand up and demand they shut down Guantanamo Bay, Belmarsh and 
the whole network of secret CIA torture camps around the world," she said.