Fed's decide not to oppose habeas petition for Sudan prisoner

Ibrahim Idris has been held for 11 years- he has severe physical and mental illnesses and the government has known this for 11 years. Finally the government has agreed to "not oppose" his habeas petition--Read more HERE.

And congrats to the lawyer team at Debevoise for their hard fought battle.

From My Friends Down Under At Justinian....

ROGER FITCH ESQ • MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 2013

Israel given unfiltered NSA data ... All phone calls in the US are "relevant to terrorism" ... Defence contractor successfully sues torture victims for costs ... NY designates city mosques as "terrorism enterprises" ... US Supremes in need of a code of conduct ... Nixon on judicial appointments ... Roger Fitch files from the town in the process of shutting down 

CONFLATING war with civilian terrorism in order to justify indefinite military detention is still a popular pastime of the US government.

A critical study of America's other Guantánamo - Bagram prison in Afghanistan, which holds non-Afghans - mainly Pakistanis - has been released by the human rights law firm Justice Project Pakistan.  

At the moment, non-Afghan Bagram prisoners have three habeas claims in court in the DC Circuit for the second time.  

There's more here on Maqaleh and other non-Afghans held in Afghanistan, some taken to a war zone for the express purpose of defeating their habeas claims. 

One of the petitioners, the Pakistani Amanatullah, was removed from occupied Iraq to Afghanistan.

According to British courts who heard the case of the similarly-situated Bagram prisonerRahmatullah that's a war crime.  

Scotusblog has more on the DC cases. 

Some prisoners of the US who remained in occupied Iraq - in accordance with the Geneva Conventions - were left to the tender mercy of mercenary interrogators at the Abu Ghraib prison.

A few brought civil suits in the US for their mistreatment. Recently, these plaintiffs unexpectedly lost their suit, based on the trial judge's contentious interpretation of the Supreme Court's recent Kiobel decision (see post of July 2013) on the scope of the Alien Tort Statute.

The triumphant defence contractor CACI International, who provided the contract "interrogation services" at Abu Ghraib, had the chutzpah to counter-sue the torture victims for costs, and they've been granted.

There's background here and here, plus earlier posts on the case here and here. 

READ THE ENTIRE JUSTINIAN POST HERE.

An Update...

Some things that went on last week while I was busy with other things....

Omar Khadr has been moved out of the prison where he was being kept in solitary confinement---now he is in a different prison in Alberta... read more here.

The full D.C. Circuit Court heard arguments yesterday on whether or not it is lawful in this here country to convict individuals of crimes that were not crimes at the time (we in the lawyer biz call those ex post facto laws and our constitution forbids them)...sigh.
Read more here.

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.