British Arab Lawyers’ Association

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Lieutenant-Colonel Darrel Vandeveld had been a prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay for one year when he went to seek advice from a priest. He wondered whether he should resign from a legal system he had come to believe was a sham, but he expected to hear he should stick with it and work within the system.

The priest offered no such advice. Instead he told the lawyer: “Quit. Do not co-operate with evil.”

Britain faces fresh accusations that it colluded in the rendering and alleged torture of a second UK resident now being held at Guantanamo Bay. The new claims bring further pressure on ministers to come clean about the scale of the Government’s complicity in the rendition and torture of dozens of terror suspects captured by the Americans after 9/11.

PARIS — A United Nations human rights official, investigating practices at Guantánamo Bay, has concluded that evidence obtained from the interrogations there is tainted and that foreign law enforcement and intelligence officials who took part in those interrogations violated their legal obligation to reject the use of torture and arbitrary detention.

The official, Martin Scheinin, is the special rapporteur on human rights and counterterrorism, an unpaid position created in 2005 by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.

“When evidence is obtained through cruel and inhumane treatment, we will be faced with situations where the courts decide they don’t have proper evidence,” Mr. Scheinin said in a telephone interview. “There may be suspicions of terrorism, but evidence is tainted, so courts have only one option, to drop the case. They should have thought about that from the beginning, but didn’t.”

GAZA LIES in ruins. After 22 days of ruthless Israeli aerial bombardment and ground assault, a survey of the carnage is as enraging as it is numbing: at least 1,285 Palestinians have been killed; 895 were civilians, including 280 children and 111 women. Another 167 of the dead were civil police officers, mostly killed on the first day of the bombing as they were graduating from a training course. Twenty-four hundred houses were completely destroyed, and 20,000 partially. Other infrastructure destroyed includes 28 public civilian facilities (ministries, municipalities, governorates, fishing harbors, and Palestinian Legislative Council buildings), 29 educational institutions (including Gaza’s Islamic University and American High School), 30 mosques, 10 charitable societies, 60 police stations and 121 industrial, and commercial workshops. There are reliable reports that Israel used the banned chemical weapon white phosphorus, which on contact with skin burns all the way to the bone.

The British government, after years of denying it had any role in the U.S. policy of “extraordinary rendition,” acknowledged yesterday that two prisoners its military forces turned over to U.S. custody in Iraq five years ago were subsequently sent to a U.S. prison in Afghanistan.

…I asked a representative of the ICC’s Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) what the status was of the PA’s (not a signatory to the Statute of Rome) request that Israel (also not a member of the ICC) be investigated for crimes. The response was that the OTP first had to determine whether or not the PA was a “State”, which is what the Palestinian Justice Minister was claiming. After all, it was argued, the PA had “diplomatic” relations with approximately 60 countries, it was increasingly recognized as a State by the UN and its organs, and the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbou, was described and treated as a President and Head of State whenever he visited other countries….

Brussels: Sherif el-Mashad, a 32-year-old Egyptian with a knack for carpentry, moved to Italy in 1997 in search of a better life. Having obtained the necessary permits, he began working in a restaurant before setting up a small business near Lake Como.

In July 2001, two months before the September 11 terrorist attacks against the US, he bought a round-trip ticket to Afghanistan, where he said he intended to spend some time doing charity work.

Photos and reports on Gaza on TV, in newspapers and Internet websites, remind one of German cities, such as Hamburg and Dresden, following the Allied bombing during World War II. Scenes of destruction in Gaza streets and neighborhoods in 2009 resemble those of Beirut’s southern suburbs in 2006. In both events, totally or partially destroyed buildings and infrastructure, and slaughtered civilians were standard outcomes of Israeli attacks.

Many late-night TV documentaries of World War II battles show German cities, flattened by Allied bombings in 1942-45, shell-shocked civilians, wandering among the ruins, looking for family members if they are still alive, and searching for morsels of food and shreds of clothing to stay alive in the bitter cold winter.

A Pentagon review ordered by President Barack Obama into conditions at Guantánamo Bay has concluded that prisoners are being treated in line with international standards demanded under the Geneva conventions, according to US officials.

Admiral Patrick Walsh, the vice-chief of naval operations who carried out the inquiry, is to hand over the 85-page report to Obama this weekend. Human rights groups said they feared the review ordered by Obama could turn out to be a whitewash.