Clinton meets families of American hikers held in Iran

WASHINGTON: US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met Wednesday for a second time with families of three American hikers being held in Iran since July 2009 and discussed ongoing effort to win their release, officials said.

State Department spokesman Philip Crowley said the meeting took place as officials sought to explain to the families “steps that we are taking to do everything possible to gain their release.”

Washington, which has no diplomatic relations with Tehran, has asked Austria to help in the matter, Crowley noted.

The meeting came less than a week after the families expressed concern over the health of the detainees, who have not been formally charged by Iran.

Relatives of Shane Bauer, 27, Sarah Shourd, 31, and Josh Fattal, 27, said last week that Swiss diplomats that visited the detainees for the first time in nearly five months found them weak and demoralized.

Rights group: Torture routine in secret Iraq jail

BAGHDAD: Iraqi men held for months at a secret prison outside Baghdad were systematically tortured and forced to sign confession statements that in at least some cases they were forbidden to read, according to a new report by a leading human rights group released early Wednesday.

Some of the detainees were beaten by Iraqi guards so badly they lost teeth and urinated blood for days afterward, said the report by New York-based Human Rights Watch.

Others were raped, given electric shocks applied to their penises and deprived of air, the report also said. The Iraqi government quickly shut down the prison after the torture was revealed last week, and either released or transferred its 431 detainees to another facility.

US Releases List of 645 Detainees Held at Bagram Air Base

US Releases List of 645 Detainees Held at Bagram Air Base, The United States has released a long-secret list of 645 detainees held at a military base in Afghanistan.
The identities and descriptions of the detainees at Bagram Air Base had been sought by the American Civil Liberties Union. In response to the lawsuit, the government released roughly 2,000 pages of documents yesterday evening. The list could help the non-Afghan detainees at the base challenge their detention in US courts, although it contains only their names, not nationalities or the circumstances of their capture. The Afghan government has agreed on a plan to take over responsibility for the prison at Bagram, where there have been allegations of human rights abuses. US and Afghan officials said the hand-over could occur by the end of the year.

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US Releases List of 645 Detainees Held at Bagram Air Base was first posted on January 16, 2010 at 4:31 pm.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, President Barack Obama said the September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other Guantanamo Bay detainees will be put on trial in New York City

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Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was first posted on November 13, 2009 at 6:46 pm.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed shifted from Gitmo

WASHINGTON: Latest news about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, President Barack Obama said the September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other Guantanamo Bay detainees will be put on trial in New York City.

Speaking in Tokyo, Mr. Obama said Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed organiser of the al-Qaeda terrorist plot that killed almost 3,000 people in 2001, would face “exacting” US justice.

Bringing such notorious suspects to US soil to face trial would be a key step in Mr. Obama’s plan to close the US detention centre at Guantanamo Bay.

Mr. Obama initially planned to close the centre at the US naval base on Cuba by Jan 22 next year, but his administration is no longer expected to meet that deadline.

It is also a major legal and political test of Mr. Obama’s overall approach to terrorism. If the case suffers legal setbacks, the administration will face second-guessing from those who never wanted it in a civilian courtroom.

The New York case may force the court system to confront a host of difficult legal issues surrounding counter-terrorism programmes begun after the 2001 attacks, including the harsh interrogation techniques once used on some of the suspects while in CIA custody. The most severe method – waterboarding, or simulated drowning – was used on Mohammed 183 times in 2003, before the practice was banned.

The US attorney general Eric Holder is due to annonce that a major suspect in the bombing of the USS Cole, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, will face justice before a military commission, as will a handful of other detainees to be identified at the same announcement, an official said.

The transfer of the detainees from Guantanamo to New York is not expected to happen for many more weeks because formal charges have not been filed against most of them.

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Khalid Sheikh Mohammed shifted from Gitmo was first posted on November 13, 2009 at 8:11 pm.

Shutting Guantanamo On Time, US Deligation Confident

LONDON: The US official in charge of closing Guantanamo Bay voiced confidence on Thursday of meeting a deadline set by US President Barack Obama for shuttering the controversial detention centre.

Daniel Fried said resettling the detainees to countries worldwide was “a huge problem and a complicated one,” but he was confident of meeting the January 2010 deadline announced by Obama when he took office.

“I’m confident that we’re going to make the right decisions and we’re going to close the place,” said Fried, the special envoy to Guantanamo, in an interview with the BBC.

Fried also said some of the detainees, captured during the “war on terror”, should never have been held at the US camp in Cuba in the first place, describing them as “relatively benign.”

Fried said he was asking European countries to look at accepting detainees who were not hardened terrorists nor organised fighters.

“Some (detainees) really are awful. Some qualify as the worst of the worst as we’re going to put those on trial,” he said.

“Some frankly should not have been in Guantanamo for the past seven years.”

Asked if they were innocent, he said: “I look at their files and some of them seem relatively benign and I have in mind the Uighurs, in particular, but others.” “There is such a thing as the average Guantanamo detainee, it’s someone who was a volunteer, a low level trainee, or very low level fighter in a very bad cause, but not a hardened terrorist, not an organised fighter.”

“And it is those people who we are asking Europeans to take a look at, and each government has to evaluate the background of each individual and make a decision.” Britain was angered in June when Bermuda agreed to take four Uighur, or ethnic Chinese Muslim, detainees onto the British overseas territory without consulting London first.

The envoy said he had since been “admonished” by Britain over the move, but defended the resettlement as successful.

“I will say that I have been admonished by the British government in very clear terms,” he said. “I have been told, to use my words not theirs, that it was a process foul. But it has been a successful resettlement.”

Fried said more detainees could be settled worldwide if the United States had been willing take some, a move blocked by the US Congress.

“The United States could resettle more detainees had we been willing to take in some. That I think is a fair analytic statement.”

The US administration has made closing Guantanamo a key priority, but has faced difficulty deciding how to deal with about 226 detainees still held at the base. Since Obama took office, 14 detainees have been repatriated or given asylum by third countries.

But the administration has yet to announce how many of those left over will be prosecuted before military courts, how many will be tried in civilian courts, and how many will be held indefinitely without a trial.

Fried acknowledged the difficulty of his job. “It’s miserable because you are cleaning up a problem and the most we can do is close Guantanamo, that is solve a problem and do so in a way that is the best possible.”

“It’s not like we’re advancing liberty or making peace. But cleaning up a problem is important too.”

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Shutting Guantanamo On Time, US Deligation Confident was first posted on September 17, 2009 at 12:38 pm.
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