British Arab Lawyers’ Association

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.”

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.

A Marine sergeant charged with murdering an Iraqi prisoner told investigators that he is tormented by the 2004 shooting in Fallujah and wants to forget the incident, according to a tape recording played Wednesday at the serviceman’s court martial.

Six years to the day after his family watched a barrage of American bombs fall near his home in Baghdad, Saad Al Shamary is a world away in Minneapolis. The Iraqi lawyer is learning how the U.S. judicial system works so he can incorporate those lessons into reforms for Iraq’s courts.

“I’m learning a lot,” Al Shamary, 41, told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS Friday.

He left his wife and three children behind to spend 10 months in the Twin Cities. While here, he’s serving as a judicial extern in the chambers of Hennepin County District Court Judge Lloyd Zimmerman.

The war in Iraq will not be won on dusty roads or in bustling market places. The real battle is being fought on the moral high ground.

That’s the message U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham shared Monday at The Citadel with cadets and a panel of military and law experts. The seminar on military legitimacy and leadership focused on U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Rights group Amnesty International said on Friday Iraq should halt the imminent execution of 128 prisoners because their trials may not have met international standards, a charge the Iraqi judiciary denies.

Amnesty called on Iraq to make public the names and charges against those to be executed, and said the death penalty was a poor deterrent in a country plagued by suicide bombers.

…A commentator on Al Jazeera demanded that the precedent be extended to former U.S. President George W. Bush, “who authorized torture in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, thereby giving his approval of American crimes against humanity.” …

Two Iraqis who are accused of murdering two British soldiers in 2003 will be tried in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad in mid-April.

According to Iraq’s court president Aref al-Shahin, the 56-yrar-old Faisal Al-Saadoon and Khalaf Mufdhi, 58, are to go on trial for committing war crimes.

“The investigation is now over and the case has been referred to the high criminal court. The two are accused of committing war crimes,” al-Shahin told AFP on Saturday.

A 28-year-old US Army medic has been sentenced by a US military court in Germany to life in prison with the possibility of parole for his role in murdering four Iraqi prisoners in 2007.

The US military court in Vilseck, Germany, on Friday evening, Feb. 20, found Sgt. Michael Leahy guilty of murder for his role in the execution-style killings of four Iraqi detainees.