The high court today flatly rejected claims by
David Miliband, the foreign secretary, that releasing evidence of the
CIA's inhuman and unlawful treatment of UK resident
Binyam Mohamed would harm Britain's relations with the US by giving away intelligence secrets.
Evidence that the foreign secretary also wants to suppress is believed to reveal what British intelligence officers knew about Mohamed's treatment.
All detainees transferred by Canadians to Afghan prisons were likely tortured by Afghan officials and many of the prisoners were innocent, says a former senior diplomat with Canada's mission in Afghanistan.
Appearing before a House of Commons committee Wednesday, Richard Colvin blasted the detainees policies of Canada and compared them with the policies of the British and the Netherlands.
The detainees were captured by Canadian soldiers then handed over to the Afghan intelligence service, called the NDS.
Dozens of prisoners held at a secret British army interrogation centre in Iraq claim they suffered unlawful physical and mental abuse similar to that carried out by the US on detainees at Guantánamo Bay.
Inmates at the high-security compound within the Shaibah base say they were held in solitary confinement and forced to wear dark goggles and earmuffs when taken from their cells for questioning.
Pursuant to new powers delegated to him by Congress, Secretary of
Defense Robert Gates has executed an order blocking the release of
photos depicting the torture of detainees. In doing so, it becomes
highly unlikely that the Supreme Court will further consider making the
photos public, as a lower court had ordered.
NEW YORK - On the heels of a
federal appeals court ruling that only the U.S. Congress and the
executive branch of government - not the courts - can interfere with
government-sponsored "extraordinary rendition", a U.S. citizen from New
Jersey is asking another court to tell the government it wasn't okay to
secretly imprison and abuse him in three different African countries
over a period of four months.
SAN FRANCISCO -- A ruling that allowed a prisoner to sue former Bush administration attorney John Yoo for devising the legal theories that justified his alleged torture threatens to "open the floodgates to politically motivated lawsuits" against government officials, Yoo's lawyers say.
In papers filed late Monday with the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, Yoo's new team of private lawyers argued that a judge's refusal to dismiss a suit by inmate Jose Padilla injected the courts into the political arena.
On the night that Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election,
21-year-old Mohammed el Gharani was sitting in a segregation cell in
Guantanamo Bay's high security Echo Block.
He remembers the excitement among his fellow prisoners at the
prospect of an Obama presidency. "Everyone was very hopeful; people
were saying he was going to change things, that he would close the
prison," Gharani, who was released in June, says.
"Even the guards were telling us that if he won, things would improve for us."
"Extraordinary rendition" is White
House-speak for kidnapping. Just ask Maher Arar. He's a Canadian
citizen who was "rendered" by the U.S. to Syria, where he was tortured
for almost a year.
NEW YORK - The long road to the proverbial day in court just got longer for five men who claim they were "disappeared" and tortured by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.
The men, who say they were victims of the extraordinary rendition programme conducted during the administration of President George W. Bush, have been trying since 2007 to get their cases heard on the merits.
