After years of negotiating with human rights groups and the Red Cross, the U.S. this week allowed five detainees at Bagram AFB in Afghanistan to receive a family visit. There are 600 detainees in Bagram, some of whom have been held for years.

The decision to allow the visits followed years of discussions between American officers and the Red Cross, which says face-to-face visits between prisoners and relatives are a guaranteed right under international humanitarian law.

...The U.S. military in Iraq already allows visits to detainees by family members. Two detention centers, one in Baghdad and one on the Kuwait border, receive an average of 13,000 visitors a month, said Maj. Neal V. Fisher II, a U.S. spokesman in Iraq. Video conference visits are also available, he said.

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The LA Times has an excellent report on the thousands of Iraqis detainees languishing in Iraqi prisons.

A new U.S.-funded legal clinic in Baghdad attempts to review the cases of those who have been held without charge or trial, but the task is daunting and hurdles numerous.

Many of the detainees are Sunnis. [More...]

The ACLU scored a victory today in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.

A federal court today ordered the Department of Defense to release photographs depicting the abuse of detainees by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit rejected the government's appeal of a 2006 order directing the Defense Department to release the photos. Today's decision comes as part of an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit seeking information on the abuse of prisoners held in U.S. custody overseas.

The ACLU says these photos demonstrate that the abuse was not limited to Abu Ghraib and not an occasional aberration. [More...]

We know that in a recent speech Attorney General Mukasey "demanded that Congress swiftly pass measures that would sharply reduce the possibility that any Guantánamo prisoner could have a fair hearing." Could it be that Mukasey is worried that a full and fair hearing would expose the administration's detention of individuals on flimsy -- or perhaps nonexistent -- evidence?

That might explain why the administration quietly released Jaralla Saleh Kahla al-Marri, a Quatari citizen who had been detained without charges or trial since 2001. If the Guantanamo detainees are really "the worst of the worst," as the administration has assured us, why was Jaralla al-Marri detained for seven years only to be released with no showing of wrongdoing whatsoever?

The ACLU announced today it has obtained three key memos concerning the CIA's abusive interrogation techniques. You can view them here.

Among other things, they establish that the CIA was told to document the use of enhanced interrogation techniques, including who was present. The first memo shows waterboarding was an approved technique.

One of the documents obtained by the ACLU today is a redacted version of a previously undisclosed Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinion from August 2002 that authorizes the CIA to use specific interrogation methods, including waterboarding.

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In a speech today (text here), Attorney General Michael Mukasey called on Congress, rather than federal judges, to make the rules for detainees filing habeas challenges.

The Center for Constitutional Rights responds:

“What Mukasey is doing is a shocking attempt to drag us into years of further legal challenges and delays. The Supreme Court has definitively spoken, and there is no need for congressional intervention. The Supreme Court explicitly said in Boumediene that the two prior attempts by Congress to intervene to prevent detainees from having access to the courts were unconstitutional.

“For six and a half years, Congress and the Bush Administration have done their level best to prevent the courts from reviewing the legality of the detention of the men in Guantanamo. Congress should be a part of the solution this time by letting the courts do their job.

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Bump and Update: The ACLU weighs in:

"Hamdan's trial, like those of other Guantánamo detainees accused of war crimes, should take place in an ordinary federal court or in a traditional military court. The Guantánamo military commissions allow the government to rely on evidence that the defendant never sees, on hearsay, and on evidence obtained through torture. The commissions are completely inconsistent with the Constitution and should be shut down."

A U.S. District Court judge today denied a continuance request for Salim Hamdan, former driver to Osama bin Laden.

His trial, the first military tribunal trial of a Guantanamo detainee, will begin as scheduled Monday. The judge in that proceeding also has rejected continuance requests.[More...]

In a 216 page opinion (pdf) written by seven judges, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals today affirmed President Bush's ability to indefinitely hold someone captured on American soil as an enemy combatant, but said his executive power is not unlimited and those held must have the right to challenge their confinement.

President Bush has the legal power to order the indefinite military detentions of civilians captured in the United States, the federal appeals court in Richmond, Va., ruled on Tuesday in a fractured 5-to-4 decision.

But a different 5-to-4 majority of the court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, ruled that Ali al-Marri, a citizen of Qatar now in military custody in Charleston, S.C., must be given an additional opportunity to challenge his detention in federal court there. An earlier court proceeding, in which the government had presented only a sworn statement from a defense intelligence official, was inadequate, the second, overlapping majority ruled.

Facts:[More...]

Lawyers for Canadian Guantanamo detainee Omar Khadr, 15 when captured in Afghanistan and brought to Guantanamo Bay, have released this video of his questioning. From the accompanying BBC news article:

During the 10-minute video - filmed secretly through a ventilation shaft - Mr Khadr can be seen crying, his face buried in his hands, and pulling at his hair. He can be heard repeatedly chanting: "Help me."

At one point he tells the foreign ministry official and agents from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) that he was tortured while being held at the US military detention centre at Bagram air base in Afghanistan. He raises his orange shirt to show wounds and tells them: "You don't care about me."

His lawyer says: [More...]

Jane Mayer, who has done such great writing on CIA secret prisons for the New Yorker, has written a book, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals. It goes on sale this week.

Mayer writes of a Red Cross report warning that the interrogation methods used on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and others are war crimes. [More...]

Original Post: 7/2/08

Bush to Consider Closing Guantanamo

ABC News reports that President Bush is holding talks about the future of Guantanamo and may decide to close it.

The Center for Constitutional Rights has filed four lawsuits against military contractors on behalf of four detainees who were subjected to torture at Abu Ghraib.

The defendants are CACI International Inc. (NYSE: CAI) and CACI Premier Technology, Inc., of Arlington, Va.; L-3 Services Inc., an Alexandria, Va.-based division of L-3 Communications Corp. (NYSE: LLL), of New York; and three individual contractors, Adel Nakhla, of Montgomery Village, Md., Timothy Dugan, of Pataskala, Ohio, and Daniel E. Johnson, of Seattle, Wash.

The allegations:

The lawsuits allege that the defendants committed multiple violations of U.S. law, including torture, war crimes, and civil conspiracy. CACI, which provided interrogators at Abu Ghraib, and L-3, which provided translators at the prison, were linked to abuses there in military court martial proceedings which resulted in convictions for U.S. military personnel but no civil or criminal penalties for contractors implicated in abuses. According to the lawsuits, the individual contractor defendants allegedly “tortured, and conspired with others to torture.”

The lawsuits were filed in the federal district courts where the contractor defendants reside: Maryland, Ohio, Michigan, and Washington state.