Attorney General Michael Mukasey was in London speaking to a group at the London School of Economics. After his speech, and speaking for himself only, he said he he personally opposed the death penalty for the 9/11 detainees at Guantanamo. He gave an analogy.

"I kind of hope they don't get it," Mukasey said after a speech at the London School of Economics. "Because many of them want to be martyrs, and it's kind of like the conversation … between the sadist and the masochist."

"The masochist says hit me and the sadist says no, so I am kind of hoping they don't get it," he said.

Mukasey noted that the military commission trials at Gitmo are being conducted by the Defense Department, not the Justice Department, although DOJ is cooperating with them.

Law professor Doug Berman at Sentencing Law and Policy is outraged at Mukasey's comments. I'm not. [More...]

The Defense Department is instituting a new policy for the Guantanamo detainees. They will be allowed to phone home -- once every six months for an hour.

The Bush Administration thinks this demonstrates "commitment to maintaining the health and well-being of Guantanamo detainees." More likely, it is intended to boost the image of the gulag before the Supreme Court decides the next case on the detainees' rights.

Reactions from some of their defense lawyers: [More...]

I've been writing about Canadian Omar Khadr, the 15 year old seized on the battlefield in Afghanistan (gruesome picture here) and held at Bagram and Guantanamo ever since. He's now 21 and facing trial by a Pentagon military tribunal. Another hearing in his case is set for next week. He's the only Westerner still at Guantanamo.

The U.S. charges he threw a grenade at an American medic in an alleged al-Qaida compound, killing him. Omar was shot three times by U.S. soldiers and blinded in one eye.

The Toronto Star today has a long excerpt from a new book about him by Toronto Star journalist Michelle Shephard, Guantanamo's Child. It chronicles his first days in U.S. custody. Part 2, detailing how he was used as a human mop, is here.

More....

Via McJoan at Daily Kos, I see that the Pentagon announced today that William J. Haynes, II has resigned as the chief counsel of the Department of Defense.

As we noted last week, Haynes is the guy who told Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor at Guantanamo, that the Administration couldn't handle any acquittals in the military commission trials. Haynes was responsible for oversight of the tribunal process.

Haynes was also a Bush judicial nominee for the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals. He was widely opposed, in no small part for his hand in the Bush Adminsitration's much-criticized military interrogation policies. Democrats refused to confirm him. Here's more on his failed confirmation hearing.

One more: People for the American Way: Keep Haynes Off the Federal Bench. The Pentagon announcement says he's going back to private life. That's a relief.

The Bush Administration has admitted for the first time using a British territory in its transporting of Ghost Air prisoners as part of its secret rendition program.

The Bush administration is bracing for a diplomatic backlash after conceding it used British territory to transport suspected terrorists on secret rendition flights despite repeated earlier assurances the U.S. had not.

U.S. officials have sought to quell the fallout by apologizing to Britain for what they said was an "administrative error." The admission, however, may reopen a bitter debate between the United States and its allies over how the fight against terrorism should be conducted and compromise future cooperation.

The territory at issue: Diego Garcia.[More...]

A new report (pdf) by the Seton Hall Law Center for Policy and Research finds:

• More than 24,000 interrogations have been conducted at Guantánamo since 2002.

• All interrogations conducted at Guantánamo were videotaped. Thus, many videotapes documenting Guantánamo interrogations do or did exist.

• The Central Intelligence Agency is just one of many entities that interrogated detainees at Guantánamo.

The press release on the report is here. [More...]

By a vote of 51 to 45 today, the Senate voted to ban waterboarding.

The prohibition was contained in a bill authorizing intelligence activities for the current year, which the Senate approved on a 51-45 vote. It would restrict the CIA to the 19 interrogation techniques outlined in the Army field manual. That manual prohibits waterboarding, a method that makes an interrogation subject feel he is drowning.

The House adopted the provision back in December. Bush has threatened to veto the bill.

As I wrote yesterday, Hillary Clinton wrote Bush Monday and urged him to withdraw his veto threat.

Today Assistant Majority Leader Dick Durbin and other senior Democratic Senators wrote to Bush and called on him to revise his Executive Order on CIA interrogation to comply with our treaty obligations and to prohibit explicitly a number of torture techniques that the Administration has used. The Senators wrote: [More...]

A federal judge in California dismissed a lawsuit filed against a San Jose flight company that alleged the company aided the CIA in transporting detainees to secret overseas prisons. The Court agreed with the Bush Administration that the suit could jeopardize state secrets. The opinion is here (pdf).

U.S. District Judge James Ware in San Jose said he had no authority to decide whether, as three current prisoners and two freed inmates alleged, Jeppesen International Trip Planning colluded with the CIA to violate their rights. The suit instead must be dismissed at the outset because its subject is a secret program that cannot be examined in a public proceeding, Ware said.

Public and confidential declarations filed by CIA Director Michael Hayden show that "proceeding with this case would jeopardize national security and foreign relations," Ware said.

This is the third suit by Ghost Air detainees that has been dismissed.

The D.C. Court of Appeals today upheld the dismissal of a lawsuit for damages filed by four Britons who had been detained at Guantanamo. Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal, Rhuhel Ahmed and Jamal Al-Harith had sued Donald Rumsfeld and other top military officers for ordering torture and religious abuse during the two years they spent at Guantanamo before being sent back to Britain. The trial court dismissed all of the claims except the one over religious discrimination. The appeals court dismissed that as well.

The Center for Constitutional Rights, which brought the suit on behalf of the men, reports:

More....

Bump and Update: The blogs are joining in the opening of the ACLU's "Close Guantanamo" campaign.

• Daily Kos
• AmericaBlog
• Second Life
• West Virginia Blue

****

On the eve of the 6th anniversary of detainees arriving at Guantanamo Bay, the ACLU has commenced its "Close Guantanamo" campaign.

Guantanamo will forever be a stain on our national legacy. It must close. Please, join the ACLU in this historic and important campaign. Wear orange on Friday. [More...]

The ACLU reports:

In the first decision of its kind, a federal judge today ordered the government to stop the deportation of Egyptian national Sameh Khouzam based on a secret and unreliable “assurance” from the Egyptian government that it will not torture him upon his return. The judge called for Khouzam’s immediate release from jail under reasonable conditions of supervision and granted his habeas corpus petition. The American Civil Liberties Union, which filed a lawsuit on Khouzam’s behalf, applauded the judge’s ruling.[More....]

A federal judge in Washington has refused to order an investigation into the destruction of CIA interrogation tapes showing coercive techniques.

A federal judge yesterday declined to order a special review of the CIA's destruction of interrogation videotapes, saying that there is no evidence the Bush administration defied court orders and that Justice Department prosecutors should be allowed to proceed with their own investigation into the matter.

U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. said in a three-page ruling in Washington that a group of inmates held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, "offer nothing to support their assertion that a judicial inquiry" is necessary into the tape destruction. He said neither of the detainees whose interrogations were taped and later destroyed has an apparent connection to the prisoners who were demanding the review.

The Justice Department says it's investigating the destruction of the tapes of interrogations of two detainees, as has the House Intelligence Committee. But, the star witness for the House investigation is refusing to testify without immunity.

More...