And Today's WTF moment

(Reuters) - Using the Wi-Fi connection at Starbucks was a better bet than risking putting confidential defense documents on a glitch-prone Pentagon computer network, a senior Defense Department official testified on Thursday at the Guantanamo trial of five prisoners charged with plotting the September 11 hijacked plane attacks. Read the rest here.

Omar Khadr--another birthday behind bars...

As Andy Worthington reports life has not been good for Mr. Khadr- imprisoned at Guantanamo at age 15 and finally released to Canadian authorities after more than ten years at Guantanamo only to continue being imprisoned north of the boarder in maximum security conditions. Instead of being treated-at most- as a child soldier he was forced to plead guilty to trumped up charges just to get the hell out of Guantanamo. Unfortunately Canada has a right wing government that has tried to emulate GW Bush....sigh. Poor Mr. Harper- he thinks by treating Mr. Khadr as a demon it makes him look tough--I await the day when Canada again becomes the progreesive and caring country of my youth....but I am not holding my breath.

New Filing in the Supreme Court

From Lyle Denniston at SCOTUS:

GTMO and war’s end in Afghanistan

A Kuwaiti national held by the U.S. military at Guantanamo Bay for more than eleven-and-a-half years, who figured in an important Supreme Court ruling nine years ago, is making a new plea for his release — just as soon as the U.S. completes its withdrawal from the war in Afghanistan.  At that point, lawyers for Fawzi Khalid Abdullah Fahad al Odah argued in a new filing Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Washington, the U.S. government will no longer have a legal basis for holding him.

The habeas petition contended that the Supreme Court has allowed detention of prisoners captured in Afghanistan or Pakistan only as long as “armed hostilities” continue for U.S. forces in that region.   With the Obama administration’s planned end of those operations by the end of December 2014, the document contended, al Odah must be sent home to Kuwait.

The document illustrated once more that the American lawyers who provide legal aid to the Guantanamo prisoners — often working without fees — will continue to work out new pleas to challenge the years-long confinement of their clients.   The al Odah filing is the first to be based on the plea that the Afghan war will change the entire legal framework for detention of individuals suspected of terrorist roles.  The government has never faced that claim before.

READ THE REST HERE....

Kudos to Jason Leopold.... (misspelling fixed....)

Jason Leopold- now writing for al-Jazeera news has long been fighting to report on Guantanamo and unveil the secrecy that permeates the proceedings by filing FOIA claims and intervening in cases. Yesterday Judge Lamberth agreed that the procedures the military is using right now to interfere with attorney representation should not remain "protected" and out of the public eye after the government publicly released part of those procedures back in august. Read more here....

The only pictures from the military "hearings"...

Are from sketch artist Janet Hamlin....you can see some of them here.

No one reads Kafka at Gitmo....

More from artist Molly Crabapple regarding the surreal existence at Guantanamo

LEST WE FORGET....

BIKO WAS MURDERED 36 YEARS AGO TODAY....
you can blow out a candle but you can't blow out a fire....

Oh....and cheers from the dog...

My friend at the talking dog is the only person I know personally who was around to actually witness the events of the U.S.  9/11 in NYC---so I always find his comments pertinent...and lest I forget that the dog's college roommate is now the figure head for this formally great country (making his comments perhaps more pertinent....)  I leave you with this from the dog.....

A song to commemorate another 9/11 ....

Seems my country managed to screw with Chili on this same date (although a few years earlier)....the land of Allende and my favorite poet Pablo Neruda...

this from Firedoglake.....

"The band who performed it, Inti Illimani, from Chile, was out of the country touring in Europe when the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende was overthrown in a military coup supported by the U.S. on …. and get this … 9 11 1973. Their friend and fellow performer Victor Jara was arrested and tortured along with over two thousand of his countrymen in the National Stadium.

Victor, hands broken, a guitar thrown at him and mockingly told to try playing now, actually began to sing with many of the other victims before he was shot through with machine gun fire and his body thrown in the street in Santiago.

After fifteen years in exile Inti Illimani returned from exile. This song was written to commemorate their return to their homeland.

Two 911s, one of which when considered against the background of the other perfectly illustrates the horror of American exceptionalism . The puppet dictator installed by the US in Chile on 911 1973 ran concentration camps for political dissidents for decades and ruled the country with an iron fist . This event was far worse than our own 911 in the US. This short film does a remarkable job of documenting this and I highly recommend the few minutes it takes to watch."

secret ruling on secret motion in secret proceeding....

From Der Prozeß, by Franz Kafka:

K. must remember that the trial would not be public; certainly if the court deemed it necessary it could be made public, but there is no law that says it has to be.  Naturally, therefore, the accused and his defense counsel do not have access even to the court records, and especially not to the indictment, and that means one does not know - or at least not precisely - what charges to meet in the first plea. . . . Conditions like this, of course, place the defense in a very unfavorable and difficult position.  But that is what they intend. In fact, defense is not really allowed under the law, it's only tolerated, and there is even some dispute about whether the relevant parts of the law imply even that. 

(hats off to F.G.) 

Oh wait.... this is justice American style...... more here.

And pass the word.....another WTF issue with Obama

So now the president wants to appoint an attorney to be a federal judge for a lifetime appointment who believes that our constitution is only for the powers to be...... the vote on her nomination came up rather quickly and is set for tomorrow.
Can we defeat her????
Please do your part if you can.

And Thank You Sweden....

I was pleased to see that artists in Stockholm put orange masks on many of that beautiful cities sculptures...ahead of Obama's visit to the city.
Obama can run but he can't hide.
View some of those sculptures here and here.

The secrecy at Guantanamo....

Truthout has an excellent article on the "secrecy" that surrounds everything Guantanamo- including the secret camp 7.

Update on the two released Algerians...

The men have been released on "parole" by the Algerian government. More here.

Meanwhile Nabil Hadjarab's attorney is working to get his client back  client back to France where his entire family resides. There are alot of you from France who visit this blog--please help Mr. Hadjarab return home.

Artist views of Guantanamo

Click on the slides on the right hand side for the full array of drawings.

Question of the Day.....

Who knows more about detainee Ammar al Baluchi Hollywood or his Gitmo defense attorneys...??

Defense lawyers at the Guantánamo war court are turning the adage that art imitates life on its head with a legal motion that argues the makers of Zero Dark Thirty know more about what the CIA did to an accused Sept. 11 conspirator than the defendant’s lawyers do.

In a 418-page legal filing, lawyers for Ammar al Baluchi seek government documents on how CIA interrogators and other U.S. officials helped director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal prepare the first 20 minutes of the film. In it, interrogators waterboard, strip naked and string up on a rope a man named “Ammar” who is described as the nephew of the 9/11 mastermind who helped finance the Sept. 11 hijackers.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/08/30/3596920/who-has-more-info-guantanamo-lawyers.html#storylink=cpy

not surprisingly it is Hollywood.....read the rest here....

My Governments "secret" plan to close Guantanamo....

This so-called plan is probably the best explanation as to why Guantanamo has stayed open all these years under Obama- this is not a plan, it is a summary of the problems with very little thought being put on the actual closing of the gulag...typical Obama....
Anyway--Jason Leopold has more on the "secret plan" here.