While the Armed Services Committee in Congress has been working hard to draft a bill that would end some of the worst abuses of the Bush Administration such as torture and hiding detainees from the Red Cross, Dick Cheney made a personal visit this week to committee members to kill the planned bill.

The legislation, which is still being drafted, includes provisions to bar the military from hiding prisoners from the Red Cross; prohibit cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of detainees; and use only interrogation techniques authorized in a new Army field manual.

...In an unusual, 30-minute private meeting on Capitol Hill on Thursday night, Mr. Cheney warned three senior Republicans on the Armed Services Committee that their legislation would interfere with the president's authority and his ability to protect Americans against terrorist attacks.

.......The three Republicans are John McCain of Arizona, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John W. Warner of Virginia, the committee chairman. They have complained that the Pentagon has failed to hold senior officials and military officers responsible for the abuses that took place at the Abu Ghraib prison outside of Baghdad, and at other detention centers in Cuba, Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Amendment could be tacked on to the $442 billion Pentagon spending bill scheduled to be debated next week in the Senate. Bush's advisors are threatening a veto if the Senate approves the Amendment.

Bump and Update: Khalid Jarrar has been released and is on his way to Jordan. [Via Crooks and Liars.]

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Original Post 7/19/05

Raed of Raed in the Middle reports his brother Khalid Jarrar, the blogger who writes Tell Me A Secret , who had been missing, has turned up...in an Iraqi jail - jailed by the new Iraqi mukhabarat..

On another note, my brother is spending his 6th night in jail. He's just one of the thousands of people in Iraq who disappeared and ended up in one of the many jails and prisons around the country without a clear reason.

by TChris

The Bush administration didn't want you to see a parade of flag-draped coffins -- more than 1770 of them, at this point -- returning from Iraq. The administration wants to control the message, and the tragic reality of this war isn't the message it wants to convey. Nor does it want you to see images of torture at Abu Ghraib, but it seemed to be losing its struggle to withhold those pictures and videos from the Center for Constitutional Rights. As TalkLeft reported, the government was ordered to release them by today. Didn't happen:

They were given until today to produce the images, but at the eleventh hour filed a motion to oppose the release of the photos and videos, based on an entirely new argument: they are now requesting a 7(F) exemption from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act to withhold law enforcement-related information in order to protect the physical safety of individuals. Today’s move is the latest in a series of attempts by the government to keep the images from being made public and to cover up the torture of detainees in U.S. custody around the world.

As Daily Kos remarks: "The coverup continues."

Via Up Against the Law:

As part of the ongoing FOIA litigation on behalf of the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights, a whole slew of the unreleased photographs and videos from Abu Ghraib are set to be released on Friday. These are the photographs and videos that were shown to the closed session of Congress, which reportedly include videos and photographs of the rape of detainees, including the rape of a male minor being held at the facility.

[Note: This is unverified but seems likely.]

by TChris

Providing a happy distraction for the Bush administration (which always needs one, this time because of Karl Rove), the Iraqi Special Tribunal announced that Saddam Hussein will be prosecuted for "the killings of about 150 Shiites in the Iraqi town of Dujail in 1982." No trial date has been announced, but the trial may occur before the end of the year.

No word yet on whether Iraq will seek the death penalty. At one point, the UK indicated that it will boycott the trial if death is sought. In April, Jalal Talabani said he opposed the possibility of a death sentence, but as TalkLeft recently reported, Iraq decided to resume its use of death as punishment, perhaps with a view to executing Hussein.

The BBC reports that a manhunt is on as four Arab prisoners in U.S. custody at the Baghram Air Force Base prison in Afhanistan have escaped.

The US military said the men who escaped were militants from Syria, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Libya.

by TChris

Update: Kar discusses his confinement:

"I don't hold anything against them for holding us," he said. "What I hold against them is they put us in a cell and forgot us."

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Cyrus Kar, the filmmaker who has been detained in a military prison in Bahgdad for seven weeks, was released Sunday. (TalkLeft background here.) Justifying the detention, military officials claim that Kar represented "an imperative security threat to Iraq" which had been resolved "appropriately." In other words, there was no evidence that Kar was a threat at all, and unfavorable publicity forced the military to release him.

While the military claims that Kar was given a meaningful hearing, and that his release shows how well detention review panels work, Kar's lawyers cut through the spin:

"He was never told what if any charges were being made against him," said one of the lawyers, Mark D. Rosenbaum. "He never had access to a lawyer. He was never told that he passed a lie-detector test. He was virtually incommunicado. That's not a model detention policy. And that was for 50 days - for a guy who got into the wrong cab."

Kar's ordeal is not quite over.

The Taliban today claimed it beheaded a missing U.S. commando this morning.

The Taliban said they beheaded a missing U.S. commando in eastern Afghanistan on Saturday, but the Pentagon said it had no information to support the claim.... Taliban spokesman Abdul Latif Hakimi said the U.S. commando was killed at 11 a.m. and his body dumped on a mountain in the eastern province of Kunar, where a four-man Navy SEAL team went missing during a clash with militants June 28.

"We killed him using a knife and chopped off his head," he said by satellite telephone from an undisclosed location.

The U.S. military has said two of the missing commandos were found dead on Monday, having been killed in action, while another had been rescued and one was missing.

by TChris

Lynndie England, the accused prisoner abuser, accomplished what is usually a herculean task: she persuaded a judge that she did not knowingly and voluntarily surrender her right to remain silent.

After testimony from psychologists that England may not have understood her legal rights and may have given inaccurate answers because of a learning disability, Pohl said statements she gave in January 2004 could not be permitted as evidence. "The court finds that under the totality of circumstances in this case, the accused did not understand her rights," he said.

England's lawyer recently asked the military judge to recuse himself, arguing that Judge Pohl would not give England a fair trial. While it's tempting to wonder whether the recusal request induced Pohl to prove how fair he could be (human nature, after all), it's more reassuring to believe that Pohl gave the suppression motion careful thought and came to a conclusion that should be obvious to other judges in many other cases: the accused didn't really understand that she had the right to keep her mouth shut. In any event, it's a nice win for England (please note: that observation is not an endorsement of her behavior), who faces (but probably won't receive) a sentence similar to the ten years imposed on "Abu Ghraib abuse ringleader Charles Graner."

Saddam's top lawyer has quit, charging that the American lawyers on the team, inluding Ramsey Clark, want to control the defense and "soft-pedal" America's role in the occupation of Iraq. [via Huffington Post.]

Saddam's legal team includes 1,500 volunteers and at least 22 lead lawyers who come from several countries, including the United States, France, Jordan, Iraq and Libya. No date has been set for the trial of Saddam, captured by U.S. troops in December 2003.

Dr. Steven Miles has published a comprehensive analysis of medical investigations of prisoner homicides in Iraq and Afghanistan in Medscape MedGenMed e-journal. The article is available here, free registration required.

This article reviews another human rights issue -- the medical evaluation of cases of which prisoners potentially died of because of mistreatment or under suspicious circumstances.

Sources for the article include:

... government documents, including reports of US Army and US Navy criminal investigations, death certificates, autopsy reports, sworn statements, official correspondence between military personnel, and US Department of Defense policies. To a lesser degree, it cites reports by human rights organizations and well-sourced media reports.

Some of Dr. Miles' findings:

This is kind of interesting....Four U.S. soldiers serving in Iraq have converted to Islam while there. George Douglas is the latest.

Dr. Ziad Al-Fahdawi, a witness to the event, said that the soldier, George Douglas, recited the two creeds [“There is no god but God, and Mohammad is His prophet”] in The Mosque of Mohammad’s Presence after asking the mosque’s imam to witness his conversion to Islam. Douglas was reported as saying that he is certain that Islam is the best religion that a person could espouse, for its teachings of forgiveness, nobleness, love, righteousness and courage. When Douglas was finished with his declaration, the mosque attendants shouted “Allahou-Akbar” [God is Greater] and embraced and congratulated him.

The American soldier then changed his name, as of May 30th, from George Douglas to Mujahed Mohammad. He also explained that he was very moved by the courage of the people of Fallujah, their stance as Arabs and Muslims, and their readiness to defend their country and to die for the liberation of their land, no matter what pretexts the invaders give for their aggression.