U.S. judge orders release of 5 of the 6 'Bosnian Algerians' detained in Guantanamo

[Al-khiyal]

Report: U.S. base in Germany orchestrated illegal deportment

[Al-khiyal]

Insight into Guantanamo justice

[Al-khiyal]

Berlin, Dec 6, IRNA - - The Germany-based US European military headquarter (EUCOM) was the staging ground for CIA's worldwide kidnappings of terror suspects to the Guantanamo prisoner camp, the weekly Die Zeit newspaper quoted the UN special rapporteur on torture, Manfred Nowak in a report to be published on Thursday.

Confidential US documents clearly point out that the kidnappings of terror suspects to Guantanamo were prepared at the US EUCOM base in the south German city of Stuttgart, added Nowak who is an Austrian human rights lawyer.

The UN official referred to the case of six terror suspects who were kidnapped to Guantanamo after being acquitted by Bosnia's highest court on terrorist charges in January 2002.

Nowak who was one of five authors of a recent UN report on the detention of captives at the United States naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, said that Germany's judiciary was obligated to launch an investigation into the affair.

German opposition lawmakers called last month for an inquiry into the role of the Germany-based US European military (EUCOM) headquarters in the illegal transport of terror suspects to the notorious American Guantanamo Bay prison camp.

German television reported earlier that the EUCOM headquarters, located in the southern city of Stuttgart, played a major role in the in the 2002 transport of terror suspects.

Germany's ARD public television network said that the US European Command headquarter was used to organize the January 2002 transfer of six Algerian prisoners from Bosnia to the US air base in Incirlik, Turkey.

ARD quoted what it said was a secret EUCOM report.

German prosecutors announced earlier they were investigating a report that US officials used a military headquarter in Stuttgart to help coordinate the transfer of terror suspects.

The German government claimed earlier that it had "no knowledge of such flights."

Deputy government spokesman, Thomas Steg stressed that since EUCOM is a "facility of the US government", Berlin could not provide information about individual activities of EUCOM.

UN reveals role of US base in Germany to take suspects to Guantanamo

[Al-khiyal]

When I last saw my client, Saber Lahmar, in his cell at Guantanamo Bay, he told me a story. He said that a soldier entered his cell one day and inadvertently left the door ajar a few inches. An iguana darted in and went behind the door. The soldier left, leaving the iguana inside.

At first, Saber said, the iguana appeared relaxed. It tried to crawl through a hole under a partition, but it could not squeeze through. After realizing it was trapped, it panicked and flew to the narrow opaque window next to the door, banging its head against the glass. "This," Saber said, "is an animal after five minutes. I have been here five years."

No matter how hard one wishes, the bars of a steel cage do not stop time. No one is more aware of this fact than Lakhdar Boumediene, Mohammed Nechla, Mustafa Ait Idir, Hadj Boudella, Belkacem Bensayah, and Saber Lahmar - six Bosnian Algerian men imprisoned at Guantanamo whom my colleagues and I have represented since July 2004, in a habeas corpus case, Boumediene v. Bush, challenging their detention . Today marks the fifth anniversary of the date the United States first began to fly plane loads of prisoners to Guantanamo. Our clients arrived on Jan. 20, 2002.

This time last year, Hadj's 6 -year-old daughter, Saaima, died of congenital heart failure. He had not seen her since the fall of 2001, when he and the other five men were arrested by Bosnian authorities under pressure from the United States, which asserted that they were involved in planning terrorist activities in Bosnia. After a three-month investigation, the Bosnian federal prosecutor recommended to the Bosnian Supreme Court that all six be released. But again under heavy pressure from the United States, the Bosnians caved, and as the men were released from a jail in Sarajevo, the Bosnians turned them over to the United States. Hooded, shackled, and packed into waiting cars while their horrified families watched, they began the sickening odyssey that continues today.

Saber's wife was pregnant when he was taken to Guantanamo. He has never met his daughter Sara, whose shiny face framed in pink plastic sunglasses peers out from the photographs we send to him. Mustafa, a former karate champion who suffered months of facial paralysis from a brutal beating inflicted by Guantanamo camp soldiers, worries about his ailing mother in Algeria. With each passing day, it becomes more likely that he will never see her again.

Not one of these men has been charged with a crime. All they seek is a fair hearing before a judge in a court of law to prove they are not so-called "enemy combatants." Yet the Bush administration insists that they have no rights under any source of law and maintains that it may hold them indefinitely - a potential life sentence - without charge, until the war on terror ends. And no one in the administration has been able to answer the question of how and when we will know if the war on terror is over.

In the summer of 2004, 2 1/2 years after the administration repurposed Guantanamo as a prison beyond the law and after the Supreme Court held that Guantanamo prisoners are indeed able to challenge their detention in federal courts, the administration finally instituted a process - the Combatant Status Review Tribunal - with the stated goal of determining whether the men at Guantanamo it deemed enemy combatants were truly enemy combatants. Not surprisingly, the tribunal rubber-stamped nearly 100 percent of the Defense Department's prior enemy combatant status determinations, on the basis of secret evidence and evidence obtained by torture and while excluding evidence requested by the prisoners. Naturally, several of our clients asked the tribunal to consider the Bosnian Supreme Court's order releasing them. It refused.

Boumediene was argued before the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 2005. No decision has been issued. Congress attempted to strip the courts of jurisdiction to hear the habeas cases in the fall of 2005, and last summer, the Supreme Court rejected that effort. Congress again passed legislation to strip jurisdiction in the fall of 2006 - more briefs have been filed, more months have passed.

So they wait. When we last saw Saber in November, he was in his sixth month of solitary confinement. Since August, he has seen us, his legal team, twice and a psychiatrist on three brief occasions. For a few minutes each day, he sees the camp guards who bring his meals. He has had no other human contact. The glaring lights in his cell are on 24 hours a day, seven days a week. When we left the cell, we could hear Saber shouting - brief, truncated cries. We could not understand what he was saying.

Five years of freedom can never be reclaimed. Congress should right the Guantanamo wrong now.

Trapped at Guantanamo

[FORTUNATO]

Three British citizens who had been detained in Guantanamo, the "Tipton Three", wrote a 131 page account of their time Guantanamo.[6] They wrote about the Bosnians:

"By Bosnians we mean six Algerians who were unlawfully taken from Bosnia to Guantanamo Bay. They told us how they had won their Court case in Bosnia. As they walked out of Court, Americans were there and grabbed them and took them to Camp X-Ray, January 20, 2002. They arrived five days after us. They were treated particularly badly. They were moved every two hours. They were kept naked in their cells. They were taken to interrogation for hours on end. They were short shackled for sometimes days on end. They were deprived of their sleep. They never got letters, nor books, nor reading materials. The Bosnians had the same interrogators for a while as we did and so we knew the names which were the same as ours and they were given a very hard time by those. They told us that the interrogators said if they didn't cooperate that they could ensure that something would happen to their families in Algeria and in Bosnia. They had dual nationality. They had families in Bosnia as well as in Algeria."

Algerian Six - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Al-khiyal]

March 5, 2007, New York, NY - The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) joins co-counsel today in petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari, asking it to review a lower court decision dismissing the cases Al Odah v. United States and Boumediene v. Bush filed on behalf of detainees at Guantãnamo Bay. The Supreme Court is expected to grant review and is being asked to hear the cases in May.

CCR, which represents many of the detainees at Guantãnamo and coordinates the work of nearly 500 pro bono attorneys, is seeking Supreme Court review on behalf of many of the same men who were part of its landmark case Rasul v. Bush. The Supreme Court held in Rasul in 2004 that Guantãnamo is not beyond the reach of U.S. law and that the detainees there have the right to challenge their detention in U.S. courts, and directed the lower courts to consider the merits of those challenges. It reaffirmed that ruling in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld in 2006. This would be the third time the Court takes up the issue.

These would be the first cases argued before the Supreme Court challenging the constitutionality of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (MCA). The MCA, which was signed into law by President Bush on October 17, 2006, is the second attempt by the Bush administration to strip detainees of their statutory right to challenge their detention in the courts, a right that the Supreme Court affirmed both in CCR's landmark case Rasul v. Bush in 2004 and in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld in 2006. Attorneys for Hamdan filed papers last week seeking review by the Court again as well. Despite the Court's two previous rulings, nearly 400 detainees still remain imprisoned at Guantãnamo Bay without charge or trial, never having had any meaningful chance to show that they deserve to be released.

On February 20, 2007, a divided panel of three judges of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that the Guantãnamo detainees have no constitutional right to habeas corpus review of their detentions in federal court. Because the court also found the MCA eliminated any statutory right of access to the courts under habeas corpus, it dismissed their cases. The Center for Constitutional Rights is challenging the majority's decision.

"We look forward to being heard by the Supreme Court as soon as possible," said Shayana Kadidal, supervising attorney of CCR's Guantãnamo Global Justice Initiative. "The Supreme Court has twice ruled in favor of the detainees. Yet hundreds of men have been imprisoned for more than five years without ever having a fair hearing because the administration, the lower courts and Congress have effectively ignored those rulings. The Court needs to make plain for the third time that it meant what it said."

Attorneys submitted an accelerated briefing schedule to ensure that the cases will be heard before the Supreme Court goes on summer recess; otherwise, the question of whether Guantãnamo detainees still have the right to challenge their indefinite detention through habeas corpus might go unanswered until 2008. The Solicitor General's Office has agreed to expedited briefing of CCR's request that the Supreme Court hear the case, and will file its response on March 21, 2007. The parties have asked the Court to consider the detainees' request for review at its next conference on March 30, 2007. Attorneys for the detainees have also proposed that briefing on the merits of the cases be completed by May 1, and that the Supreme Court hear oral argument on May 7. Under this schedule, the Court would likely hand down a decision in June or July 2007.

CCR Executive Director Vincent Warren said, "It has been almost three years since the Supreme Court's Rasul decision and not a single detainee has had a meaningful chance to argue in federal court that he deserves to be released. Every significant legal issue here was resolved by the Supreme Court in 2004. Now it should restore the right to habeas corpus and give our clients their day in court."

Al Odah v. United States, filed jointly by CCR, co-counsel Shearman & Sterling LLP, and a number of other law firms, consists of eleven habeas petitions, including many of the first ones filed after the Supreme Court's Rasul decision. The Boumediene appeal, filed by Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP and heard with a case brought by Clifford Chance LLP, is on behalf of six Bosnian-Algerian humanitarian workers seized by the U.S. military in Sarajevo after Bosnian courts determined that a three-month investigation had unearthed no evidence to support their continued detention and ordered local authorities to release them. In Al Odah, Senior U.S. District Court Judge Joyce Hens Green held that detainees possess "the fundamental right to due process of law under the Fifth Amendment" and that certain detainees are protected by the Geneva Conventions. U.S. District Judge Richard Leon reached the opposite conclusion in Boumediene, ruling that the detainees possess no substantive rights to vindicate through habeas corpus. The two cases were argued together on appeal. The Court of Appeals took nearly two years to decide the cases.

Guantãnamo detainees return to Supreme Court

[Al-khiyal]

April 2 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Supreme Court turned away two appeals from Guantanamo Bay inmates who sought to challenge their detentions in federal court, declining to question a law that scales back judicial wartime powers.

The justices, without comment, today left intact a lower court decision that said the 2006 law validly bars federal judges from considering so-called habeas corpus petitions filed by prisoners at the U.S. naval base in Cuba.

The rejection leaves President George W. Bush, at least for now, with broad authority to control the fate of the 380 Guantanamo inmates, many now in their sixth year of captivity without charges. The rebuff doesn't preclude the court from taking up the issue down the road.

"The government claims an immense power unprecedented in our history: to imprison foreign nationals, without bringing criminal charges or providing fair process, for an indefinite period,'' former U.S. Solicitor General Seth Waxman argued in one of the two detainee appeals.

In three previous cases since the September 11 attacks, the court put limits on the president's power to determine the fate of Guantanamo detainees without more involvement of the other two branches of government.

The administration said the latest dispute is different because Congress explicitly stripped federal trial judges of their power to hear habeas corpus petitions from detainees. Such petitions are a centuries-old legal device used by inmates to claim they are being wrongfully held.

A different system

Lawmakers put in place a different system that requires the military to review each inmate's status as an "enemy combatant'' on a regular basis and gives detainees limited rights to appeal those conclusions.

"No other captured enemy combatants in the history of this country, or any other, have enjoyed such privileges,'' the administration's top courtroom lawyer, Solicitor General Paul Clement, argued in court papers.

Clement urged the court not to get involved until the ramifications of the 2006 Military Commissions Act are clearer. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld the law on a 2-1 vote.

Clement also argued that the inmates can't claim a constitutional right to file habeas petitions because they aren't U.S. citizens and have never set foot on U.S. soil. Guantanamo, though under U.S. control because of a 1903 lease agreement, is on Cuban sovereign territory.

German soldiers

The administration pointed to a 1950 Supreme Court ruling that barred habeas petitions by 21 German soldiers who were captured by U.S. forces in China, convicted of war crimes there and then incarcerated in occupied Germany.

In 2004 the Supreme Court, voting 6-3, said the 1950 decision didn't bar the Guantanamo detainees from filing habeas petitions. One issue in today's case was whether that ruling interpreted a federal law, as the administration contends, or established a constitutional right, as the detainees argue.

Two groups of detainees asked the Supreme Court to intervene. One, represented by Waxman, consisted of six Algerian natives seized in Bosnia in 2002 and held ever since at Guantanamo without charges.

The other appeal was filed by 39 prisoners, most taken into custody in Afghanistan or the bordering areas of Pakistan. Most aren't facing criminal charges. Of the 380 prisoners at Guantanamo, only 10 have ever faced charges.

Tribunal review

Under a 2005 law, panels known as Combat Status Review Tribunals consider the "enemy combatant'' status of each prisoner on a regular basis. Inmates can challenge those decisions in the D.C. Circuit.

The inmates said that process is an inadequate substitute for the habeas process. The status review tribunals sharply limit the evidence inmates can gather and present and bar them from being represented by lawyers. The rules also put the burden on detainees to prove that they shouldn't be detained.

In addition, the 2005 law limits the issues the D.C. Circuit can consider on appeal and, according to Waxman, doesn't give that court the right to release someone who has been wrongfully imprisoned.

Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David Souter voted to hear the appeal challenging the law.

The cases are Boumediene v. Bush, 06-1195, and Al Odah v. United States, 06-1196.

Guantanamo Bay inmate appeals rejected by U.S. Supreme Court