Ma Liberte

I don't hear freedom ring anymore

Abdul Rahman Shalabi cleared for release....

Last week I reported on this detainee- who has been on a hunger strike for 9 years. He now weighs 75 pounds. On friday the period review board has cleared Mr. Shalabi for release.

Read more here.

I will just note that the article mentions that Mr. Shalabi was accused of being a body guard for Osama Bin Laden.... many of the men at the base faced that same accusation and almost all of those men were accused of being a body guard by the same handful of men who were also prisoners and who were tortured into making the accusations.

Meanwhile back at the military commission....

More delays as the military tries to figure out how to stack the court in a way that will pass constitutional questions.... while also trying to keep the defendants from gaining information that will help with their defense.....

Read more here.

More on Majid Kahn's torture....

Jeff Kaye has a new article on Firedoglake about the torture of Kahn...

Quite recently, U.S. authorities allowed the declassification of notes from Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) attorney Wells Dixon that described what his client, high-value detainee Majid Khan, told him about his torture at the hands of the CIA. Khan, a Pakistan citizen, is currently at Guantanamo, and awaits trial by military commission.

Dixon has described the hideous torture of his client, which comes on the heels of revelations in the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence executive summary of their report on the CIA’s torture program.

According to a June 2 Reuters report, Dixon described from interview notes with Khan, CIA use of solitary confinement; sexual abuse, including frequent touching of “private parts”; threats of physical harm; being hung naked from a pole for days; so-called “rectal feeding” (a form of anal rape); denial of food; water immersion and waterboarding, among other atrocities.

According to a CCR press release on Khan’s torture, CIA doctors onsite were among the “worst torturers.” Both Reuters and CCR have noted how doctors would check Khan’s condition, ignore his appeals for help, and send him back into extreme forms of torture.

In a June 10 phone interview with Wells Dixon, Khan’s attorney revealed there was more unreported material left out of the Reuters and CCR reports. In particular, Dixon revealed that Khan told him he was “also injected with a needle to the bone, and screamed in pain, then lost consciousness.”

READ THE REST HERE.

Brazil Please Say YES- to men from Guantanamo....

Reprieve and other advocates for men at Guantanamo have asked President Obama to officially request the resettlement of detainees in Brazil when he meets with President Rousseff tomorrow. Those of you from Brazil that check in on this blog--- can you please encourage your government to help resettle some of these men?

Read Reprieve's letter here:

www.reprieve.org.uk/press/obama-must-ask-brazil-for-guantanamo-help-say-rights-groups/

There is also an op-ed in Folha de Sao Paulo by Eric Lewis and Larua Waisbich of Conectas (in Portuguese):

http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/mundo/2015/06/1648736-por-que-o-brasil-deve-ajudar-a-fechar-guantanamo.shtml

Thank you.....

Speaking of International Torture Survivors Day.....

There is one particular detainee at Guantanamo who might not be a survivor for very much longer:

Yesterday, the Center for Constitutional Rights (led by Omar Farah) filed a motion for release on behalf of it's client Tariq Ba Odah, a long-term hunger striker whose weight has dropped to an alarming and precarious 75 pounds, signifying a crisis medical situation.   Per prior cases, the motion argues that the law of war principles embedded in the humanitarian provisions of Army Reg 190-8 (which authorize release of severely ill prisoners) constrain the government’s detention authority under the AUMF.  Along with their Motion they presented three expert opinions which paints a very worrying picture about Tariq’s physical and mental health.  Can a human being endure being forcibly fed commercial nutritional supplement for 8+ years?  As Omar Farah remarked "Only Gtmo knows, because no ethical doctor has attempted it before."

Read more about this humanitarian disaster and about the continuing torture of this man- here.

  The filings are linked below.

• Memo in Support of Motion for Judgment on the Record
• Farah Declaration in Support of Motion
• Ghannam Declaration in Support of Motion
• Bailony Declaration in Support of Motion
• Crosby Declaration in Support of Motion

Another Detainee Cleared for Release....

Saudi detainee Abdul Shalabi- ISN 42. Given his number I would guess he was one of the first to arrive-- so he has been there more than 13 years..... 

Based on  Shalabi’s PRB clearance the current breakdown of detainees is as follows:

The prison population remains at 116: 52 are cleared, 54 are awaiting clearance, and 10 are in the military commission system.

Of the 52 cleared, 43 (83%) are Yemenis and 9 are non-Yemenis.

Of the 54 still awaiting clearance, 24 are Yemenis and 30 are non-Yemenis.

Torture Survivors....

Today is international Torture Survivors day. Every man at Guantanamo (still alive) is a torture survivor.
What can you do? Speak out against torture- write to politicians and newspapers to express your disgust with torture- and demand that those that inflicted- and continue to inflict- torture are held accountable.

Another example of the "worst of the worst...."

On tuesday the "periodic review board" looked at the case of Libyan Omar Khalif Baker. Like my client Razak Ali Baker has not been cleared because he was in the same guesthouse at Abu Zubaydah- the man my government thought was an al-Qaida leader but after water boarding him about 100 times- determined he was nothing.....
As you can see from the short story here -- the stay in the guesthouse is the only "evidence" the government has on this man.
Sigh.

From Roger Fitch and our Friends Down Under

At Justinian.....

Federal death sentence for the Boston bomber - rarely used

The US has performed badly again in the UN's annual review of its human rights record, more here.

Al Jazeera has more.

The US imposition of the death penalty has been highlighted by the conviction of the "Boston bomber", who received the federal death sentence in Massachusetts, a state strongly opposed to the penalty, and one where it has not been imposed since 1947.  

The federal death penalty has been imposed just three times in 30 years, and there is some talk that capital punishment could finally be abolished in the US.

The UN has also issued its guidelines on habeas corpus, just in time for the 800^th anniversary of Magna Carta.

It's a timely issue in the US, where the habeas action of Abu Zubaydah, the CIA's first (post-9/11) torture victim, has seen an extraordinary delay of nearly seven years in DC district court. 

*   *   *

Years after his plea bargain (Fitch of October 2012), and following 13 years of gratuitous torment by successive American and Canadian governments, Omar Khadr has finally been bailed by an Alberta court, pending his appeal of fake war crime convictions at the Pentagon's dodgy Court of Military Commission Review.  

More here and here. 

Khadr's chances look good, as the DC Circuit has just issued its long-awaited decision in Al Bahlul, striking down "conspiracy" and other US-invented "war crimes" as offences triable by military commission. Steve Vladeck comments.  

*   *   *

Government declassifications have led to more damaging revelations by Gitmo internees of their abuse, e.g. that of Majid Khan, the "High Value Detainee" presently awaiting a military commission sentence pursuant to a plea deal, and Shaker Aamer, the last British resident still held. 

Marty Lederman explains the significance of ending the gag orders against Gitmo internees talking about their mistreatment, now that the US Senate's Feinstein Report on the same torture has been released. 

*   *   *

In the same week that the author of Boumediene, retired justice John Paul Stevens, called for reparations to some Guantanameros, the City of Chicago set-up a fund to pay the victims of past torture by the Chicago police.

US cities and towns pay out millions in civil damages and settlements every year for police negligence and misconduct, but Chicago's program will be the first systematic fund.

READ THE REST HERE. 

The Periodic Review Board

Little did we know that the title would truely describe this review process for the men at Guantanamo who are awaiting clearance. Every once in a while (i.e. periodically) a random detainee is reviewed-- most who are reviewed are then cleared-- My remaining client has been waiting for his name to show up in this random process for more than four years.
Read more about this review process here.

More on the Torture of Majid Khan

Wells Dixon discusses the torture of his client as recently disclosed in newly unclassified documents. Wells is one of the attorneys at the Center for Constitutional Rights who has long been representing men at Guantanamo.
Read his account here.

Senate votes to make illegal torture even more illegal.....

Or something like that. I mean WTF-- are they trying to claim that they didn't know torture was illegal so they are passing something now? Or are they claiming the law wasn't clear enough--so let's start over?
And what about all those war criminals in this country that engaged in torture- does this somehow give them an out--because the law was not clear enough.
Jeez-- how stupid can we get as a country?

Read more about this shenanigans here. and here.

And what about the clowns who refused to say torture is illegal....? More here.

THE CIA IS GIVING SOME DETAINEES THEIR MEMORIES BACK.....

One of the more frustrating aspects of representing detainees is not being able to tell them all of the details that we (the lawyers) are privy too- some of the information that we cannot share with our clients actually came from our clients in the first place. It is complicated and stupid but these are some of the rules that we had to agree to in representing our clients because the pentagon has classified everything that comes out of our client's mouth and it is a secret until it is unclassified.

Now it seems that CIA is allowing some of the men to actually talk about what happened to them-- not everything mind you....(as shown by all of the redactions in the Guantanamo Diary)  but some things that happened to detainees are coming to light -- whether this is an actual change in the rules needs to be further explored.

With this in mind take a look at this article in the Atlantic.