Excellent summary

Andy Worthington provides an excellent post summarizing some of the main points of the McClatchy investigative series, as well as this week’s Senate hearings:

http://tinyurl.com/59fnox

If it was good enough for the Indians…

We now know that five lawyers, calling themselves the “War Council,” in compliance with orders from the President and Vice President,

drafted legal opinions that circumvented the military’s code of justice, the federal court system and America’s international treaties in order to prevent anyone — from soldiers on the ground to the president — from being held accountable for activities that at other times have been considered war crimes.

The idea for military commissions was actually resurrected by John Yoo from procedures used during the Indian wars:

The military commissions that the U.S. used against Native Americans during the mid-19th century were often ad hoc and frequently resulted in natives being hanged or shot.

Read the rest of this report at:
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/detainees/story/38886.html

The report is part of a series by McClatchy journalist Tom Lasseter, who carried out an eight-month investigation on the detention and abuse of detainees in Afghanistan and Guantánamo:
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/detainees/story/38773.html

From black sites to floating sites

“The United States is operating “floating prisons” to house those arrested in its war on terror, according to human rights lawyers, who claim there has been an attempt to conceal the numbers and whereabouts of detainees….

Information about the operation of prison ships has emerged through a number of sources, including statements from the US military, the Council of Europe and related parliamentary bodies, and the testimonies of prisoners.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jun/02/usa.humanrights

Pentagon Drops Charges Against al-Qahtani

The Pentagon has dropped charges against a Saudi man held at Guantanamo who was was at the center of the military’s controversial torture program. Mohammed al-Qahtani was accused of being the so-called twentieth hijacker in the September 11 attacks. In 2006, al-Qahtani recanted a confession he said he made after he was tortured and humiliated at Guantanamo. Al-Qahtani was the subject of a harsh interrogation plan authorized by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The alleged torture included being beaten, restrained for long periods in uncomfortable positions, threatened with dogs, exposed to loud music and freezing temperatures and stripped nude in front of female personnel. On Friday, the convening authority for military commissions, Susan Crawford, dismissed the charges against al-Qahtani. She dismissed the charges without prejudice, meaning they can be filed again later.

from Democracy Now!
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/5/13/headlines

According to Andy Worthington, al-Qahtani “also subjected to extreme sexual humiliation (including being smeared with fake menstrual blood by a female interrogator).”

http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2008/02/12/six-in-guantanamo-charged-with-911-murders-why-now-and-what-about-the-torture/

or
http://tinyurl.com/5taq4u

…Actually, according to Candace Gorman (attorney for two Guantánamo detainees) several prisoners are suspected of being the “20th hijacker.”

Not solitary confinement…detainees have “single-occupancy cells”

Conditions are more isolating than many death rows and maximum-security prisons in the United States, said Jules Lobel, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh who is an expert on U.S. prison conditions….

Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni who was once a driver for Osama bin Laden…is suicidal, hears voices, has flashbacks, talks to himself and says the restrictions of Guantánamo “boil his mind.”

Pentagon officials say that Guantánamo holds dangerous men humanely and that there is no unusual quantity of mental illness there. Guantánamo, a military spokeswoman said, does not have solitary confinement, only “single-occupancy cells.”

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/04/27/8555/