"Canadian loses case on terrorism arrest
NEW YORK - A Canadian who accused US authorities of violating his rights and illegally deporting him to Syria, where he was tortured, lost an appeal yesterday. Maher Arar, a software engineer born in Syria, sued top government officials in 2004 after he was arrested during a stopover to New York in 2002 and deported to Syria because of suspected links to Al Qaeda. The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, affirming a lower court decision, ruled that Arar failed to establish that the federal court had jurisdiction to hear his complaint. (Reuters)."
"Pentagon announces charges in USS Cole bombing"
"Nashiri told a hearing at Guantanamo Bay last year that he confessed to helping plot the Cole bombing only because he was tortured by U.S. interrogators.
CIA Director Michael Hayden said early this year that al-Nashiri was among terrorist suspects subjected to waterboarding in 2002 and 2003 while being interrogated in secret CIA prisons.
Asked at a Pentagon press conference if evidence obtained from the waterboarding is tainted, Hartmann said that would be considered at any trial.
"We will look at the evidence, all of the evidence that is associated with the case," Hartmann said. "While there has been an admission that there was waterboarding, there may well be other evidence in the case. That's not ... necessarily the only part of evidence in the case."
How about looking at "THIS EVIDENCE?
Or how about this: Look at these post-attack photos of the USS Liberty and Cole and ask yourself this:
Also see: U.S.S. Liberty Sailors Speak Up
Wouldn't have been the FIRST TIME ISRAEL attacked a U.S. ship, would it?
But the NYT has to keep pumping the front-page prop!
Oh, and about that torture?
"Abu Ghraib detainees sue defense contractors" by David Dishneau, Associated Press | July 1, 2008
HAGERSTOWN, Md. - Three Iraqis and a Jordanian filed federal lawsuits yesterday alleging they were tortured by US defense contractors while detained at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2003 and 2004.
The lawsuits allege that those arrested and taken to the prison were subjected to forced nudity, electrical shocks, mock executions, and other inhumane treatment.
They seek payments high enough to compensate the detainees for their injuries, and to deter contractors from such conduct in the future.
"These innocent men were senselessly tortured by US companies that profited from their misery," said lead attorney Susan L. Burke, of the Philadelphia law firm Burke O'Neil. "These men came to US courts because our laws, as they have for generations, allow their claims to be heard here."
Allegations of abuse at the Baghdad prison first erupted in 2004 with the release of pictures of grinning US soldiers posing with detainees, some naked, being held on leashes or in painful and sexually humiliating positions. Eleven US soldiers were convicted and five others disciplined in the scandal.
The contractors named as defendants in the lawsuit are
Three of the complaints were filed in US district courts in Seattle, Greenbelt, Md., and Columbus, Ohio, where three of the defendants reside. The fourth was filed in Detroit, where L-3 recruited heavily for translators, according to that complaint.
The lawsuits repeat "baseless allegations" made more than four years ago in another case brought by the same lawyers, CACI spokeswoman Jody Brown said in a statement.
"In the years that have passed since these claims first surfaced, nothing has changed to give any merit to unfounded and unsubstantiated claims," the statement read. "These generic allegations of abuse, coupled with imaginary claims of conspiracy, remain unconnected to any CACI personnel."
L-3 didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
Three of the lawsuits also name individual employees of those companies as defendants. They are Adel L. Nakhla, a former L-3 translator, of Montgomery Village; Daniel "DJ" Johnson of Renton, Wash., who worked as a CACI interrogator, and Timothy L. Dugan of Pataskala, Ohio, who also worked as a CACI interrogator, according to the complaints."Here is more Orwell (or Carroll) for you:
"
"Evidence Faulted in Detainee Case
In the first case to review the government’s secret evidence for holding a detainee at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a federal appeals court found that accusations against a Muslim from western China held for more than six years were based on bare and unverifiable claims. The unclassified parts of the decision were released on Monday.
With some derision for the Bush administration’s arguments, a three-judge panel said the government contended that its accusations against the detainee should be accepted as true because they had been repeated in at least three secret documents.
The court compared that to the absurd declaration of a character in the Lewis Carroll poem “The Hunting of the Snark”: “I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.”
“This comes perilously close to suggesting that whatever the government says must be treated as true,” said the panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
Although the decision was a defeat for the Bush administration, it was unclear what it might mean immediately for Mr. Parhat, a former fruit peddler who in recent years sent a message to his wife that she should remarry because his imprisonment at Guantánamo was like already being dead.
American officials have said that they cannot return Mr. Parhat and 16 other Uighur detainees at Guantánamo to China for fear of mistreatment and that some 100 other countries have refused to accept them.
Yeah, right: U.S. Tortures for China
Pentagon officials have claimed that the Uighurs at Guantánamo were “affiliated” with a Uighur resistance group, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, and that it, in turn, was “associated” with Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
The court said the classified evidence supporting the Pentagon’s claims included assertions that events had “reportedly” occurred and that the connections were “said to” exist, without providing information about the source of such information.
The Uighur Muslims, who come from an area of far western China they call East Turkestan, claim oppression at the hands of the Chinese government, including forced abortions and relocations of educated people to remote areas.
The Chinese government has described the East Turkestan Islamic Movement as a terrorist organization. American officials agreed in 2002, when they were pressing for Chinese support for military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
--MORE--"
For the record, I am APPALLED by the TORTURE of "terrorists" because 9/11 was a CIA/MOSSAD BLACK-BAG INSIDE JOB!!!
As an AMERICAN, I am DEEPLY ASHAMED of MY COUNTRY and its LYING LEADERS!!!
Thank God the WORLD KNOWS!!!
