British Arab Lawyers’ Association

A federal judge rejected on Monday a U.S. government request to keep secret the unclassified evidence that it says justifies the continued imprisonment of more than 100 Guantanamo Bay prisoners.

U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan ruled the government cannot keep the documents known as factual returns from public disclosure and must seek court approval to keep specific information secret.

“Public interest in Guantanamo Bay generally and these proceedings specifically has been unwavering,” Hogan wrote. “Publicly disclosing the factual returns would enlighten the citizenry and improve perceptions of the proceedings’ fairness.”

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — The U.S. military is planning a tribunal session at Guantanamo Bay next week to resolve an internal dispute involving the attorney for a Canadian detainee, the lawyer said Tuesday.

Navy Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler, who was recently fired and then reinstated, said a military judge scheduled the hearing for Monday to address his status as the lead attorney for Omar Khadr, the last Western prisoner held at Guantanamo.

President Obama’s decisions this week to retain important elements of the Bush-era system for trying terrorism suspects and to block the release of pictures showing abuse of American-held prisoners abroad are the most graphic examples yet of how he has backtracked, in substantial if often nuanced ways, from the approach to national security that he preached as a candidate, and even from his first days in the Oval Office.

Shi’ites in Egypt and Iraq are planning to take Saudi clerics to an international court for incitement to violence against the Shi’ite minority.

The Al Al-Beit institution in Cairo and Baghdad are joining efforts to press charges against 22 Saudi clerics, accusing them of issuing fatwas, religious decrees, that label the Shi’ites as infidels and incite to violence against them.

PADUCAH, Ky. (AP) — A prosecutor on Wednesday told jurors the slaying of an Iraqi civilian family, incuding a teen daughter who was raped, was a “planned, premeditated crime,” and asked the panel to convict an ex-soldier of crimes that could bring him the death penalty.

“This was a crime that was committed in cold blood,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Marisa Ford said in closing arguments in the federal trial of former Pfc. Steven Dale Green, 24, of Midland, Texas.

Defense attorneys argued for a conviction on lesser charges, which would eliminate the possibility of the death penalty.

An army intelligence officer in a regiment whose soldiers are accused of torturing and killing Iraqi civilians threw laptop computers containing official documents over the side of cross-Channel ferries, the high court heard yesterday.

Captain James Rands, of 1st Battalion the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment, described how he felt it was “crucial” to destroy a computer which had broken. “I did this by throwing it over the side of a cross-Channel ferry in 2006,” he said.

Rands had taken pictures of the dead for identification purposes, then downloaded the images on to his personal computer. He transferred the photographs to a second laptop and then deleted them. He then bought a third computer. “I destroyed the second laptop by the same means at a later date,” he said, adding that he had “a lot of work documents” on the computer. “It made sense to ditch it in the same way.”

When Bush administration lawyers wrote their memos authorizing extreme interrogation tactics at Guantanamo, they had to conjure up horrible images: Prisoners gagging and sputtering as their interrogators reproduced the sensation of drowning. Human heads slammed repeatedly into walls. Insect-phobic prisoners cowering in fear in 8-by-10-foot cages.

The world is watching as America attempts to come to terms with the abuse it unleashed in the aftermath of 9/11 and trying to digest the full implications of last week’s extraordinary events. With a wide-ranging Spanish criminal investigation into torture at Guantánamo threatening to embarrass the US, Barack Obama decided to declassify legal memos sent under the Bush administration in the hope the country would move on. The opposite has happened. Ever more documents set out in meticulous detail the full extent of the cruelty: who was abused by whom, how they did it and what was done. The truth has been revealed in stark detail, from the number of times waterboarding was used to the legal deliberations that led to it. By Tuesday, President Obama had raised the possibility of US war crimes trials and far-reaching inquiries, developments that were unthinkable a month ago.

It is Day 6, between 10.00 and 11.00 in the hectic schedule of the television series 24, and a normal day at work for Jack Bauer of the Counter Terrorism Unit. “People in this country are dying, and I need some information. Now are you are going to give it to me, or do I have to start hurting you?” Inevitably, he does. A few lurid torture scenes later and the terrorist confesses, the civilised world is saved for another hour or so, and Jack, played by Kiefer Sutherland, is hurtling towards his next violent confrontation with the forces of evil.

This is the central plot of 24, in many respects the only plot of 24, a brilliantly constructed, wildly popular, strikingly timely series based on a single premise that also happens to be untrue. 24 is fiction, and so is the notion that torture produces results.

As the torture debate rages in the US, the only defenders of extreme interrogation methods are those who have been involved in authorising them, and they rely exclusively on the Bauer defence: pain and fear are effective tools for extracting information, and therefore necessary.

April 22 (Bloomberg) — Forced nudity, stress positions and police dogs were commonly used by military interrogators to intimidate prisoners at the Abu Ghraib military prison in Iraq, a Senate panel has concluded.

The newly declassified Senate Armed Services Committee report said coercive techniques, later described by military investigators as abuse, were authorized for military interrogations in Afghanistan and at Abu Ghraib, the prison made infamous by photos of naked prisoners standing near barking German shepherd dogs that first appeared in April 2004.