just a little fact... missing

 Seems that one of the prisoners facing the death penalty reported that he was water boarded while being interrogated but that little detail was left out in official reports...Carol Rosenberg at the New York Times reports :

GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — A prisoner accused of plotting Al Qaeda’s bombing of the U.S.S. Cole warship in 2000 told federal interrogators years later that he was waterboarded by the C.I.A., an interpreter testified Thursday. But that detail was omitted from the official account of the interrogations that prosecutors want to use at his death-penalty trial as evidence that he confessed.

At issue in the hearings is whether the military judge will accept a 34-page memo written by agents who questioned the prisoner, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, at Guantánamo Bay for three days in early 2007. The account of the interrogation is considered critical trial evidence. Defense lawyers say it is tainted by torture and want it excluded.

“He talked about the waterboarding,” said John J. Elkaliouby, who worked for the F.B.I. as an Arabic linguist from 1994 to 2015. “He said, ‘I was waterboarded by the C.I.A.,’ and I reported that to the whole team.”

read the rest here.

Time for a musical interlude--

 and what could be better than Joni Mitchell -- after 20 years of no public singing...

From Roger Fitch and our friends down under at Justinian...

 

The Revolutionary Tribunal

ROGER FITCH ESQ • TUESDAY, JULY 5, 2022

The US Supreme Court has become a Republican law enforcement tribunal ... Abortions, guns, religion, environment ... Cherry-picked legal reasoning ... Historical inaccuracies ... Worse to come ... Same sex marriage in Texas ... Washington correspondent Roger Fitch files 

"[I]n future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court's substantive due process precedents, including Griswold [contraception], Lawrence [same-sex relationships], and Obergefell [gay marriage] ... Because any substantive due process decision is 'demonstrably erroneous' ... we have a duty to 'correct the error' established in those precedents".
Clarence Thomas, concurrence overruling Roe v Wade. 

"The majority has overruled Roe and Casey for one and only one reason: because it has always despised them, and now it has the votes to discard them. The majority thereby substitutes a rule by judges for the rule of law." 
Dobbs dissent. 

"They did it because they could. It was as simple as that."
Linda Greenhouse.

The supreme court's first full term with three Trumpistes ended with a week from hell.

No longer a court, it's become a revolutionary tribunal, a Comité de Salut Public of six instead of twelve. 

Six radical justices, led by Alito and Thomas, achieved a trifecta: public funding for religious schools (the First Amendment separation of church and state notwithstanding), unlimited guns on the streets of "blue" states (despite long-standing regulations in those states) and then, the greatest prize of all for dutiful evangelicals and right-wing Catholics, the end of legal abortions in Republican-ruled states, whether regulated, medically-required or any other reason, including rape and incest.

READ THE REST HERE.

more on the first plea deal for a "high value detainee"

 As we approach another grim milestone in Guantánamo’s history — 20 and a half years of its existence, on July 11 — there is, at least, some mildly positive news from the prison’s largely dysfunctional military commission trial system, where Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, a “high-value detainee,” and one of the last prisoners to arrive at Guantánamo, in April 2007, recently agreed to a plea deal that could see him leave the prison by 2024.

read the rest here.

July 4th... sigh.