Great Britain has decided to pay millions to 16 detainees at Guantanamo (one of whom, Shaker Aamer, is still there) to settle lawsuits alleging British intelligence officers were complicit in their torture, rather than battle them in court.

"The alternative to any payments made would have been protracted and extremely expensive litigation in an uncertain legal environment in which the government could not be certain that it would be able to defend Departments and the Security and Intelligence Agencies without compromising national security.

"This cost was estimated at approximately £30-50m over 3-5 years and in our view there could have been no inquiry until that litigation had been resolved."

The amount is secret but reported by several sources to be in the millions. Here's a list of the detainees, which includes Binyam Mohammed, Moazzam Begg and Omar Deghayes. [More...]

Disheartening news, to say the least. The Washington Post reports:

• Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the four other 9/11 detainees are unlikely to get a trial in federal court or by military commission before the end of President Obama's first term. Instead, they will remain in indefinite detention at Guantanamo.
• Guantanamo will not close in the forseeable future.

The explanation:

The administration has concluded that it cannot put Mohammed on trial in federal court because of the opposition of lawmakers in Congress and in New York. There is also little internal support for resurrecting a military prosecution at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The latter option would alienate liberal supporters.

Like indefinite detention won't alienate us? [More...]

Coming to a theater near you, Four Days Inside Guantanamo: You Don't Like the Truth. It's the story of the interrogation of child soldier Omar Khadr, based on the You Tube videos of his interrogation by Canadian officials at Guantanamo (See here and here. The tapes were released in 2008.)

Two filmmakers [Luc Cote and Patricio Henriquez] take footage of Omar Khadr interrogation to create YouTube videos and carry on to a feature documentary

...The core of this extraordinary feature documentary is the much-discussed video footage of interrogations of Omar Khadr by Canadian Security Intelligence Service agents that was made public following a Supreme Court of Canada ruling two years ago.

The movie premiered at a film festival Thursday and opens in Montreal and Toronto on October 29.

The filmmakers' point -and I think it's tough to disagree with them -is that whether or not Khadr is guilty, it's an outrage that Canadian security agents would interrogate him under these circumstances, in a prison that has no international legal legitimacy. The Supreme Court of Canada ruled this year that this interrogation was indeed a violation of Khadr's rights.

The Open Society Foundation has released a new report on detainee abuse by the U.S. military at a detention facility in Afghanistan:

The accounts by Afghans—who refer to the site as “Tor Jail” or “Black Jail”—are not in accordance with U.S. detention rules. The report, Confinement Conditions at a U.S. Screening Facility on Bagram Air Base, provides the first detailed account of detainee treatment at this classified site, which is different than the well-know Bagram detention facility.

Detainees state that they were held in excessively cold isolation cells; supplied inappropriate or inadequate food, bedding, and blanketing; denied exposure to natural light; unable to carry out their religious duties; restricted from exercise; and kept from meeting with the International Committee of the Red Cross.

[More...]

Sixteen months ago, a three judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a trial court's order dismissing the ACLU's lawsuit in Mohamed et al. v Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc. The ACLU sued the Boeing subsidiary in May, 2007 for its role in the Bush administration's unlawful extraordinary rendition program. Once Bush was gone, Obama stepped in and maintained the Bush position. The three judge panel rejected the Bush and Obama Administrations' "state secrets" claim, holding that the government must invoke the state secrets privilege with respect to specific evidence, not by moving to dismiss the entire suit.

The lawsuit was brought on behalf of five men, Binyam Mohamed, Al-Rawi, Abou Elkassim Britel, Ahmed Agiza and Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah, who were kidnapped and secretly transferred to U.S.-run prisons or foreign intelligence agencies overseas where they were interrogated and tortured.

Today the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, en banc, changed course and dismissed the lawsuit, based on the state secrets claim. In other words, the court denied the detainees, victims of the extraordinary rendition program, their day in court. Today's opinion is here. [More...]

Pro Publica Reporter Chisun Lee has the results of a Pro Publica study into the decisions of federal judges in habeas cases filed by Guantanamo Detainees involving the admission of evidence obtained through enhanced interrogation techniques. The results: Out of the 31 cases with published decisions, the Government lost 8 of the 15 cases in which there were claimed forcible interrogations.

The 15 decisions offer the most detailed accounting to date of how information obtained from the Guantanamo inmates through controversial tactics is standing up in court. They come in cases initiated by detainees seeking release via a writ of habeas corpus, not cherry-picked by prosecutors. Criminal law experts say the judges' opinions help explain why the government has decided not to pursue criminal convictions against some detainees. Such evidence would pose even greater problems in criminal trials, for which requirements of proof are more demanding.

Here's a chart of the cases and rulings. More than 50 prisoner cases are still pending. [More...]

Through an examination of flight records and interviews with U.S. officials and others, the AP has learned the Bush Administration used "Ghost Air," the secret airline that flew detainees to overseas "black hole" prisons for harsh interrogation, to whisk four high-level detainees out of Gitmo and back to a black hole overseas prison -- right before the Supreme Court was to rule on whether detainees can have access to the courts.

Who were they? None other than Abu Zubaydah, Abd al-Nashiri, Ramzi Binalshibh and Mustafa al-Hawsawi. [More...]

The House Judiciary Committee has released the deposition transcript of former Bush legal counsel Jay Bybee, author of two infamous memos on enhanced interrogation techniques, aka torture. Chairman John Conyers writes:

"This testimony reveals that many brutal techniques reportedly used in CIA interrogations were not authorized by the Justice Department – the author of these legal memos has now admitted this on the record," Conyers said. "These statements are highly relevant to the pending criminal investigation of detainee abuse and I have provided the Committee’s interview to the Justice Department and directed my staff to cooperate with any further requests for information."

The fact sheet is here. The full transcripts are here. The ACLU's reaction is here. [More....]

The UK today announced a formal investigation into whether British security forces were complicit in the torture of Ethiopian-born UK resident Binyam Mohamed and others. Mohamed was tortured by foreign interrogators, who were allegedly fed questions via the CIA.

Mohamed was initially held in Pakistan in 2002, and then moved to Morocco and Afghanistan, where he alleges he was tortured. He was transferred to Guantanamo in 2004 and released in 2009. Our prior coverage of his case is assembled here. [More...]

The New York Times reports President Obama has put closing Guantanamo on the back burner due to opposition, and may not make any real effort to close it before his term ends in 2012.

Another example of "change you can believe in"?

Whatever happened to the decision on where to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other four detainees the Administration decided to try in federal court until conservatives and New Yorkers objected? Months ago, Attorney General Eric Holder said it was "weeks away." Is that going on the back burner too? Why give them a trial anywhere when you can hold them indefinitely at Gitmo? It's not like anyone cares, right?

U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth has recused himself from the habeas case of Guantanamo detainee Abdal Razik Ali.

In a nutshell, Judge Lamberth, in an interview with Pro Publica, discussed how judges were weighing the risks of releasing detainees. He was quoted as saying, not with respect to any particular detainee:

"How confident can I be that if I make the wrong choice that he won’t be the one that blows up the Washington Monument or the Capitol?"

Ali's lawyer filed a motion to recuse him. [More...]

Today, the Supreme Court denied cert in Maher Arar's civil suit against U.S. officials for damages resulting from his seizure at JFK airport while changing planes and subsequent delivery to Syria where he was held for a year and tortured.

This afternoon, the Center for Constitutional Rights advised that following the Supreme Court's refusal, attorneys for Maher Arar disclosed for the first time that the RMCP (Royal Mounted Canadian Police) have been investigating the actions of both Syrian and U.S. officials for the past year. (Canada long ago apologized to Mr. Arar and paid him $ 9 million for having provided the U.S. with inaccurate information about him. The Obama Administration sided with the Bush Administration in Arar's lawsuit and refused to pay him anything or to conduct an investigation into the conduct of U.S. officials.) [More...]