Musical interlude --for our friends in Ukraine....

 

TO SAEED'S MOTHER AND THE MOTHER OF ALL THE DISAPPEARED

 I am not sure if my client's mother is still alive. I hope she is and I hope she will welcome Saeed with open arms.

From Roger Fitch and Our Friends Down Under at Justinian

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When tiring of Trump's unpunished crimes, we can reflect upon those of George Bush, and one of Mr Bush's greatest crimes, official government torture, is back in the news. 

In March, the supreme court decided Zubaydah, accepting the government's "state secrets" claim which blocked the testimony of CIA contractors accused of torture.

Captured by the FBI and CIA, Abu Zubaydah was the first to endure the CIA's "Enhanced Interrogation" (Gestapo "verschärfte Vernehmung"), a program for the systematic torture of "war of terror" prisoners. 

 Zubaydah spent four-and-a-half years in CIA torture camps operated at sundry sites including Thailand, Poland and Lithuania (both paid damages), and Guantánamo. He's been held now for 20 years.

The FBI agents John Kiriakou, who led the capture of Zubaydah, and Ali Soufan, who first interviewed him, opposed the takeover of the case by the CIA, who sent Zubaydah to Thailand for "interrogation" by  James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. 

Water-boarding began, Zubaydah nearly died, and no productive intelligence was derived. Nevertheless, water-board torture continued under the new camp director, Gina Haspel. 

Later, when Zubaydah was held in Poland, the morbidly-curious CIA agent Alfreda Bikowsky made an unauthorised visit just to see him being tortured. 

Where are they all now? John Kiriakou is out of prison (another story) and blogging on Zubaydah. Ali Soufan heads the Soufan Group security consultancy, and sponsors Fordham Law's Center on National Security, and Mitchell and Jessen aren't testifying in Poland's investigation, thanks to the supreme court.

Gina Haspel, since rewarded as Trump's CIA director, advises King & Spalding clients on cybersecurity.

Scheuer: torture team

And Alfreda Bikowsky? Since retiring, the Agency's "Queen of Torture" has been hawking beauty products and life advice for a living. The fabled red-haired member of the Agency's torture team, now married to the equally-odious torture team member Michael Scheuer, recently gave an unrepentant interview to Reuters. 

Is this a great country, or what? 

READ THE REST OF FITCH HERE

Andy Worthington discusses my client

 Historian Andy Worthington has long chronicled the lives of the men that have been held at Guantanamo. In fact, his book The Guantanamo files- was a must read for all of the Guantanamo attorneys as we worked through our cases and tried to learn as much as we could about our clients. We all had our own copies and a couple extra copies could always be found at the "secure facility" - the place where we worked on the classified aspects of our clients' court cases. Today, Andy again focuses on my client, Saeed Bakhouch. Andy, with his vast resources was the one to let me know a week or so ago that Saeed had finally been cleared for release. It is only appropriate that he be the one to tell this story. Read it here.

Finally the beginning of the end

 Probably by the time Mr. Bakhouch is actually released he will have passed the 20th anniversary of his arrival at Guantanamo. I will have a lot more to say about this travesty in the weeks and months to come but for now I will just celebrate this small step.

You can look at the barebones release notice here.

h/o to Andy Worthington for getting word to me

It is my client now!

 

NOT MY CLIENT!

 Congrats to Mr. Barhoumi- an Algerian held without charge at Guantanomo for 20 years. My Algerian client continues to languish at Guantanamo-without charge and also for 20 years.

I hope my client will be next-- as Studs Terkel was fond of saying "hope dies last."

Read more about the release of Mr. Barhoumi here.

From Roger Fitch and our friends down under. 4.1.2022

 

The Ginni and Clarence Show

ROGER FITCH ESQ • THURSDAY, MARCH 31, 2022

Wife of Supreme Court justice actively involved in political issues before the court ... Mrs Thomas - a conspiracy theorist and extremist who wants to overthrow the 2020 election results ... Clarence Thomas a poor quality court appointment ... The race issue ... Anita Hill ... Conflicts ... Failure to recuse ... Further blight on an already damaged US Supreme Court ... Roger Fitch reports 

"Do not concede. It takes time for the army who is gathering for his back". 

"Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators (elected officials, bureaucrats, social media censorship mongers, fake stream media reporters,etc) are being arrested & detained for ballot fraud right now & over coming days, & will be living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition" - emails of Ginni Thomas (Mrs Clarence), to Mark Meadows, White House Chief of Staff. 

READ THE REST HERE.

Torture 101 with live students...

 Seems my country's CIA wanted to teach its students how to torture people in real time. We now know about at least one of those men- still held at Guantanamo-

A man detained by the CIA in Afghanistan was used by US interrogators teaching torture techniques, leaving him with brain damage, a declassified document has revealed.

The 2008 report, by the agency’s inspector general, stated that Ammar Al Baluchi, one of five men charged over 9/11, was repeatedly slammed into a plywood wall so trainees could receive “certification”.

All “the interrogation students lined up to ’wall’ Ammar” so the lead interrogator, identified only as “NX2”, could assess their techniques, the report said.

Read the rest here. 

From Roger Fitch and our friends down under.3.23.22

 Bad news from SCOTUS ... Vaccines, climate and discrimination ... State secrets privilege applied in torture cases ... Partisan courts ... Forum shopping for flexible federal judges ... Political control of the state courts ... From Roger Fitch in Washington 

Bad decisions are flowing from the newly-stacked supreme court: notably, a decision overturning Occupational Health and Safety Administration regulations requiring employers to vaccinate employees. These unexceptional workplace regulations were blocked on grounds not found in the OSHA statute. American Prospect has more.

A case implicating climate change is now on the court's radar, threatening not only the EPA's authority to regulate, but the ability of Congress to delegate regulatory power to executive agencies. There's now a speculative Phantom Docket that reflexively questions administrative expertise. 

While undermining benign health regulations, the court may be contemplating new legal loopholes, e.g, a "homophobia exemption" from anti-discrimination law.

Sadly, the court backed the government in appeals supporting the "state secrets" privilege: CIA torture (Zubaydah's) and FBI surveillance (Muslim).  

An import from English law, the privilege was unknown in US law until 1953, when it was fabricated by the government and accepted by the supreme court. In US v Reynolds, the court found state secrets were an implied extension of executive privilege, another modern invention.

The Reynolds privilege afterwards proved to be falsely-claimed to conceal military negligence, yet the precedent remains, an absolute, unqualified rule of evidence. 

In Zubaydah, the government pleaded "state secrets" to block testimony by the psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, in the Poles' investigation of the CIA facility in their country. The men were employed by the CIA to devise the torture program used against Zubaydah.

The CIA's Polish torture camp is no secret, and was described in the Senate Torture Report.  

Justices Sotomayor and Gorsuch vigorously dissented, with Gorsuch rightly characterising the state secret claim as seeking a judicial "rubber stamp" to avoid "further embarrassment for past misdeeds" of the government. 

Poland has already been forced to pay Zubaydah damages for collusion in his CIA detention and torture,  (so has Lithuania) and it's now following up with an investigation ordered by the European Court of Human Rights. The US signed the Hague Evidence Convention requiring cooperation.

President Obama also zealously pursued state secrets claims, even - to the surprise of many, including federal judges and the Times - those of George Bush. Curiously, the one legal proceeding where Obama did not plead state secrets was the one the ACLU brought against the very same psychologists whose evidence is sought by Zubaydah for the Polish inquiry.  

Absent a state secrets defence, the ACLU case proceeded to trial and was settled by Mitchell and Jessen, who had CIA indemnities. It's the only litigation where the CIA was forced to pay damages (indirectly) to victims.

READ THE REST HERE.

feelin' lucky?

 

LOTS OF PARALLELS BETWEEN IRELAND AND UKRAINE.

BUT WITH DUE RESPECT TO JOHN-  I WOULD NEVER WISH TO BE ENGLISH INSTEAD....

musical interlude

 

For some reason this one seems appropriate, again.

The most popular song in Ukraine right now...

 Ukrainians have made a song about the Turkish-made killer drones that are decimating Russian convoys.'

Repatriation of Guantanamo Prisoner- the tortured al-Qahtani

As my friend the talking dog noted: Trump released 1 prisoner over his 4 years in office "so now Biden has doubled the number of releases Trump did. To two." 

sigh.

The Department of Defense announced today the repatriation of Mohammad Mani Ahmad al-Qahtani from the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

On June 9, 2021, the Periodic Review Board process determined that law of war detention of Mohammad Mani Ahmad al-Qahtani was no longer necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the national security of the United States. Therefore, the PRB recommended that al-Qahtani be repatriated to his native country of Saudi Arabia, subject to security and humane treatment assurances.  

On Feb. 4, 2022, Secretary of Defense Austin notified Congress of his intent to repatriate al-Qahtani to Saudi Arabia. In consultation with our Saudi partners, we completed the requirements for responsible transfers. 

Democracy is so fragile