Rough treatment by the courts

“You have a right to a speedy trial – unless they need to torture you first” ... The media’s characterisation of waterboarding – it used to be called torture, now it’s nothing special … Americans stripped of their citizenship by transport safety bureaucrats … Our Man in Washington reports

Long-established legal principles are falling left and right, all in the name of … National Security.

In New York, in a shocking but not unexpected decision on the 6th amendment right to speedy trial, federal district judge Lewis Kaplan has ruled Ahmed Ghailani should stand trial in 2010 for the terrorism charges on which he was first indicted 12 years ago, in 1998.

This was so even though he has been in continuous government custody since 2004.

The New York Times has more.

Ghailani was indicted by the Clinton administration for the bombing of US embassies in Africa.

When he was apprehended, the Bush administration withheld him from the New York court for five years, two of them in the CIA torture program.

Judge Kaplan has already ruled, however, that any torture Ghailani suffered is irrelevant, and accepted the government’s dubious claims that it acted in good faith.

Despite the fact Ghailani was charged for acts that occurred outside a time and place of war, Judge Kaplan took it for granted that the government had a right to hold him in military detention as an “enemy combatant” and that a military commission (where Ghailani was also charged) would have been valid.

He accepted detention for interrogation alone, and the (previously unknown) right to lock people up as “intelligence assets”.

The Supreme Court has said that an “enemy combatant” – the ostensible basis for Ghailani’s CIA and Gitmo detention – is someone seized in the Afghanistan war for events related to 9/11, and also has said that such prisoners cannot be held indefinitely just for interrogation.

If one accepts the legality of the previous detention, however, speedy trial problems magically disappear.

Perversely, the prior detention is legitimated for purposes of tolling speedy trial requirements, while any torture that occurred during that detention is considered irrelevant to the trial now set to begin.

Emptywheel summed up the decision:

“You have a right to speedy trial – unless they need to torture you first.”

So far the only conviction of an American (or anyone else) under the US Torture Act has been the US-born son of the African dictator Charles Taylor, a conviction just upheld by the 11th Circuit.

There’s also a Torture Victim Protection Act, but it’s been roughly treated by US courts.

One such court – prudently left under Republican control by Mr Obama – is the DC Circuit, which just did its bit for national security by suggesting that “some evidence” should be the standard for Guantánamo detentions rather than the onerous “preponderance of evidence” adopted by the DC district courts.

National security demands no less.

* * *

Peripheral Guantánamo issues are still playing out in the courts.

The Center for Constitutional Rights will take the snooping-on-lawyers case Wilner v NSA to the Supreme Court.

The cert petition is here.

Mother Jones, meanwhile, has more on the case of the Guantánamo lawyers who snooped on the CIA, and the trouble it brought them.

Mother Jones also has a report on the professional strife former CIA and Guantánamo psychologists are in.

These include the now-dean of a college psychology department, Larry James, the notorious CIA contractor James Mitchell (pic), and a third psychologist.

* * *

The House Judiciary Committee testimony of torture lawyer (now federal appeals judge) Jay Bybee, has just been released, and it confirms that some of the gruesome interrogation techniques used by the Bush Gang went beyond what DoJ authorised.

Jason Leopold has more.

Emptywheel noticed Bybee may have inadvertently confirmed that CIA detainee Abu Zubaydah was subjected to a torture experiment in sleep deprivation before the opinion justifying the procedure was requested.

As for Abu Zubaydah’s 83 episodes of waterboarding, was it really torture?

That depends on who’s drowning whom. A new Harvard study on the US media’s characterisation of water torture found that:

“From the early 1930s until the modern story broke in 2004, the newspapers that covered waterboarding almost uniformly called the practice torture or implied it was torture: The New York Times characterized it thus in 81.5 percent … of articles on the subject and The Los Angeles Times did so in 96.3 percent of articles… By contrast, from 2002‐2008, the studied newspapers almost never referred to waterboarding as torture. The New York Times called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture in just 2 of 143 articles (1.4 percent)... In addition, the newspapers are much more likely to call waterboarding torture if a country other than the United States is the perpetrator.”

Emptywheel comments.

* * *

Cameron: torture investigationAt least Britain’s new conservative PM David Cameron is willing to do what a “liberal” US president won’t – investigate the previous government’s involvement in torture.

The Al Rawi civil torture case in Britain continues, however, and is producing bombshells such as MI6’s advice for dealing with detainees held by lawless intelligence services such as the CIA.

British disclosures already show involvement with the US in torture and rendition missions, e.g. Tony Blair personally intervened to send UK citizens and residents to Guantánamo rather than bring them home for uncertain prosecution.

* * *

Mr Obama recently had his first loss in an appeal against denial of habeas in a Guantánamo case.

Belkacem Bensayeh, the last man detained in the Boumediene case, will get a new habeas hearing, thanks to the DC Court of Appeals.

Scott Horton comments.

In Bensayeh the Court of Appeals had to explain to the Obama lawyers that possessing a false passport doesn’t make someone a member of al-Qaeda.

Perhaps we shouldn’t blame people for wanting false passports, when the real ones don’t work.

A number of Americans and permanent US residents are presently stranded overseas, unable to return to the US (or even fly over it) because the dreaded No-Fly List now trumps a passport.

It seems the Transport Security Administration and airlines flying to the US are colluding to effectively strip Americans of their citizenship.

The Washington Post reports that converting to Islam, visiting Yemen or studying Arabic will do the trick, not to mention the careless adoption of a Muslim name.

CAIR (the Council on American Islamic Relations) has issued a travel advisory warning of “forced exile” for US Muslims who go abroad.

The ACLU has filed a lawsuit to stop the practice.

Jurist has more.