Even though Barack Obama, the candidate, pledged to end "the practice of shipping away prisoners in the dead of night to be tortured in far-off countries," his FBI has been rendering kidnap victims to the U.S. The practice is still kidnapping, however; and it's still illegal. Unlucky victim No. 1 was Raymond Azar, 45, flown from Afghanistan to Alexandria, Va., not to a foreign country. The construction manager for Sima International, a Lebanese outfit that did work for the U.S. military, Azar said he was tortured by his abductors. He might just as well have been flow to Egypt under the Bushies. Interestingly, Azar was never charged as a dangerous terrorist, only with conspiracy to commit bribery for wiring $106,000 in kickbacks to a U.S. employee's bank account in hopes of getting $13 million in unpaid bills okayed. For this comparatively trivial white collar crime, Azar's lawyers said when arrested he was stripped naked, hooded, and subjected to a body cavity search. What's more, according to an article by Scott Horton, writing on "Common Dreams," Azar claims a federal agent showed Azar a photo of his wife and four children and told him to confess or else he might "never see them again." Azar confessed, and pled guilty to conspiracy to commit bribery.

In an unprecedented move, Congress passed legislation Tuesday including an amendment which would maintain one of the most contentious hangovers of the Bush administration, allowing the Department of Defense to exempt torture photos of US detainees overseas from public access under Freedom of Information Act requests. - This amendment, passed as part of the Department of Homeland Security appropriations bill, would give Secretary of Defense Robert Gates the prerogative to suppress photos of prisoner abuse taken after September 11, 2001, which could result in the endangering of US citizens, troops or employees. - The availability of photos and records of detainee abuse has been at the center of a lawsuit between the American Civil Liberties Union and the Bush administration since 2003. The lawsuit is now continuing under the Obama administration and is aimed at photos that were ordered released by a federal appeals court as part of an ACLU FOIA lawsuit, though it would apply to other photos in government custody as well. - President Obama had initially indicated that he would not block the release of these photographs; however, in May, he reversed his decision and filed an appeal with the Supreme Court.

“In a ruling that could have widespread implications for government contractors overseas, a federal court has concluded that four former Abu Ghraib detainees, who were tortured and later released without charge, can sue the U.S. military contractor [CACI] who was involved in conducting prisoner interrogations for the Pentagon in Iraq…’This Court finds that the only potential for embarrassment would be if the Court declined to hear these claims on political questions grounds…The policy is clear: what happened at Abu Ghraib was wrong…The fact that CACI's business involves conducting interrogations on the government's behalf is incidental; courts can and do entertain civil suits against government contractors for the manner in which they carry out government business.’”

The CIA's secret prisons are being shuttered. Harsh interrogation techniques are off-limits. And Guantanamo Bay will eventually go back to being a wind-swept naval base on the southeastern corner of Cuba. But even while dismantling these discredited programs, President Barack Obama left an equally controversial counterterrorism tool intact. Under executive orders issued by Obama last week, the CIA still has authority to carry out what are known as renditions, or the secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the U.S. Current and former U.S. intelligence officials said the rendition program is poised to play an expanded role because it is the main remaining mechanism-aside from Predator missile strikes-for taking suspected terrorists off the street. The rendition program became a source of embarrassment for the CIA, and a target of international scorn, as details emerged in recent years of botched captures, mistaken identities and allegations that prisoners were turned over to countries where they were tortured. The European Parliament condemned renditions as an "illegal instrument used by the United States." Prisoners swept up in the program have sued the CIA as well as a subsidiary of Boeing Corp., which is accused of working with the agency on dozens of rendition flights. But the Obama administration appears to have determined that the rendition program was one component of the Bush administration's war on terrorism that it could not afford to discard.

Cheney’s admission during an interview with the Washington Times this week about his role in approving the waterboarding of three Guantanamo detainees and the so-called "enhanced interrogation" of 33 prisoners was, disturbingly, not covered at all by the mainstream media. Vice President Dick Cheney, in another stunning admission during his campaign to burnish the Bush administration’s legacy, said he personally authorized the “enhanced interrogations” of 33 suspected terrorist detainees and approved the waterboarding of three so-called “high-value” prisoners. “I signed off on it; others did, as well, too,” Cheney said. Cheney’s remarks to the Washington Times were part of a two-week media blitz that has sought to highlight the Bush administration’s “accomplishments.” The White House has published two lengthy reports, “Highlights of Accomplishments and Results of the Administration of George W. Bush,” and “100 Things Americans May Not Know About the Bush Administration Record” in an attempt to change the emerging historical consensus about a failed presidency. However, Cheney’s blasé responses to questions about torture have instead fed growing demands for a criminal investigation against Cheney and other Bush administration officials.

The UN Convention against Torture defines the practice as: "any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain and suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity...." The US and Israel are the only two modern states that legally sanction torture. An earlier article covered America. This one deals with the Jewish state.

The recent appearance of Dr Aafia Siddiqi in a New York court has brought another disturbing episode in the 'war on terror' of George W. Bush to light. According to a lawyer acting for Dr Siddiqui, her client was brought to New York after spending several years in US custody at an unknown place, thought to be the Bagram air base in Afghanistan. While in detention, she suffered 'horrendous physical and psychological torture'. American authorities claimed that they captured Dr Siddiqui only in July 2008, accusing her of attacking US military officers and being an Al-Qaeda operative. These charges have been dismissed by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. The case has drawn international attention and comes at a time when the Bush administration appears determined to put as many detainees captured during its 'war on terror' as possible on trial. According to Dr Siddiqi's lawyer, New York has been chosen as the venue for her trial because it is the city of Twin Towers, where the sentiment is likely to be most prejudicial and the November elections are close. Just before Dr Siddiqui was produced in court in New York, a US military commission in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp convicted and sentenced Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's driver, to five-and-a-half years in prison. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch Both Criticized the Guantanamo trial as Falling Below Any Acceptable Standards of Justice.

Canadian Omar Khadr is the one facing prosecution for war crimes but it was the actions of top Pentagon official U.S. Air Force Brig.-Gen. Thomas Hartmann that were probed during pre-trial hearings this week. Guantanamo’s former chief prosecutor, Air Force Col. Moe Davis, alleged Hartmann pushed prosecutors to lay charges in cases that weren’t ready in the hopes of getting the trials started before the U.S. presidential election this fall. “In his mind he was large and in charge,” Davis testified by video from the Pentagon about his former boss. “He became the de facto chief prosecutor.” Davis, once the Pentagon’s most ardent supporter of the military trials of Guantanamo detainees, resigned as chief prosecutor in October, saying he could no longer support prosecutions he believed were tainted by politics. The debate about the independence and fairness of the trials could prove important in Khadr’s case. His lawyers argue the charges should be thrown out due to Hartmann’s improper political influence. Failing that, they want Hartmann disqualified from any further involvement in the case.

That a civilization should decline is no surprise. All empires do. But somehow from the inside each step comes as a jolt. When our representatives in Congress allow a kangaroo court to hang its shingle on a Caribbean island where we have no business being, and when that tribunal, its six military members shrouded in anonymity, uses flimsy evidence to convict a man on a trumped-up charge, then we have thudded down another step. Salim Hamdan was a driver for Osama bin Laden. He was not charged with killing anyone or ordering anyone killed. Of the 800 prisoners at Guantanamo that Donald Rumsfeld declared the "worst of the worst," Hamdan is one of the 20 to be charged with a crime, which makes him one of the worst of the worst of the worst. The hue and cry on the left after Hamdan's conviction this week seemed to die down the next day after he was sentenced to only five and a half years. Suddenly it seemed that even a military court might be clear-eyed.

A Guantanamo detainee on Wednesday urged a human rights panel that investigates abuse cases in the Americas to review his accusations that he was tortured in the US “war on terror” prison. Djamel Ameziane, an Algerian who has been held at the US naval base in Cuba for six years as an “enemy combatant” without charge, became the first Guantanamo detainee to file a petition with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). The panel is an autonomous organ of the 35-nation Organization of American States (OAS), a multilateral forum of which the United States is a member. Two groups that represent Guantanamo detainees — the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL) — filed the petition on Ameziane’s behalf. “Guantanamo Bay has become a global symbol of impunity and inhumanity,” CEJIL attorney Michael Camilleri said in a statement.

Osama bin Laden’s driver Salim Hamdan was convicted at Guantánamo Bay yesterday - in his second trial at the hands of the Bush administration. Had his first in 2004 not been interrupted by a successful appeal to the Supreme Court, he would have been acquitted. For what he has been found guilty of — providing material support to terrorism — was not then under the jurisdiction of the military tribunal that has sentenced him. Such is justice under George W. Bush. Such is the justice that awaits Omar Khadr and 80 others to be tried by the special military tribunals at Guantánamo. More than the detainees, though, it is the Bush administration that’s on trial. Thus the United States is on trial. There, the verdict is already in: Guilty.

After 7 years, the Bush administration got its first war crimes conviction but not of anyone who plotted the 9/11 attacks, but that of Osama bin Laden’s driver. Yemeni national Salim Ahmed Hamdan’s crime was to chauffeur bin Laden in Afghanistan, which the government argued allowed bin Laden to plot attacks against the United States. Hamdan was convicted for material support for terrorism and could spend the rest of his life in prison. In fact, whatever sentence a court may determine, the Bush administration claims that it has the authority to hold him indefinitely as an “enemy combatant” until the cessation of hostilities in the so-called “war on terror.” Hamdan, who has a fourth-grade education and was earning $200 a month as one of Osama bin Laden’s drivers, has been detained for almost seven years now. It was Hamdan’s case in 2006 that led the Supreme Court to rule that President Bush lacked the authority to constitute military tribunals, but Congress subsequently enacted the Military Commissions Act (MCA) to re-constitute those tribunals, rendering Hamdan’s victory worthless to him. I observed Hamdan’s trial in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba for Human Rights First.

Military jurors cleared Osama bin Laden’s driver of conspiracy charges but found him guilty of helping Al-Qaeda, a split decision that failed to end the controversy over the fairness of the US “war on terror” tribunals. In the first full trial before the special tribunals in Guantanamo, the jury Wednesday concluded Salim Hamdan, a Yemeni national, provided “material support” to the terror network by driving bin Laden and ferrying weapons. For critics of the special tribunals, the trial offered further proof that the system set up to try terror suspects was fatally flawed. But for Bush’s administration, the result showed the process had been fair and rigorous. The White House praised the verdict after it was announced and the Defense Department vowed to press ahead with trials of at least 20 more detainees held at the prison in Guantanamo.

That the U.S. can torture its prisoners should not surprise anyone; the nation has long hidden behind a façade of morality that only masked injustice and inequality since the its founding. What is shocking is that the Canadian government could sink to the same level; why it wants to emulate an imperial nation with elections as legitimate as any banana republic; that tortures its political prisoners (that it even has political prisoners is shocking enough); that sends its soldiers to die in wars waged only to control the world’s oil supply, that listens in on the private conversations of its citizens; that erodes what precious few rights its citizens have in the false name of ‘fighting terrorism’ is a question that simply defies any answer. There is little evidence that anything will ever change significantly in the U.S.; the current candidate of ‘change,’ Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, basically represents business as usual, although the last eight years were extreme. But Canada does not have the same bloody history as its neighbor to the south. The current blemish, horrifying as it is, could be an anomaly. For U.S. soldiers who recognize the crimes the U.S. commits daily in Iraq, and for Canadians who may find themselves on the wrong side of U.S. reactionary politics, a return to reason in Canada would be a great benefit. It cannot happen soon enough.

Red Cross investigators concluded last year in a secret report that the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation methods for high-level Qaeda prisoners constituted torture and could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes, according to a new book on counterterrorism efforts since 2001. The book says that the International Committee of the Red Cross declared in the report, given to the C.I.A. last year, that the methods used on Abu Zubaydah, the first major Qaeda figure the United States captured, were “categorically” torture, which is illegal under both American and international law. The book says Abu Zubaydah was confined in a box “so small he said he had to double up his limbs in the fetal position” and was one of several prisoners to be “slammed against the walls,” according to the Red Cross report. The C.I.A. has admitted that Abu Zubaydah and two other prisoners were waterboarded, a practice in which water is poured on the nose and mouth to create the sensation of suffocation and drowning.

At least a score of high Bush Administration officials authorized, and hundreds of U.S. military and other government employees committed, crimes involving the torture of prisoners captured in the Middle East, published reports and legal documents indicate. Indeed, any impartial probe of the widespread abuse of prisoners in U.S. custody could go well beyond the handful of prison guards who have been arrested and tried to date. The list would include top White House officials who designed the torture policies and Pentagon flag officers who executed them. It would include CIA officials and their contract pilots and immigration personnel involved in abducting suspects to be tortured as well as foreign officials who turned suspects over to U.S. authorities for torture. It would include doctors, nurses, and paramedics who abetted interrogators in torture and the civilian contractors of the Department of Defense(DOD) who tortured inmates.

The Bush-Cheney administration is engaged in secret talks with their Iraqi counterparts to craft a binding executive agreement renewing current US military and detention policies when the United Nations authorization expires this December. The “status of forces” proposal is bogged down in disputes between the Pentagon and key Iraqi factions, and faces potential sharp questions in the US Congress in the coming weeks. -- Assuming the administration has its way, which is by no means certain, the agreement between the two executive branches will preserve the right of US forces to initiate unilateral military action and continue rounding up tens of thousands of Iraqis in abusive preventive detention facilities where human rights are violated routinely. -- Senators including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama oppose any such bilateral executive agreement without Senate hearings and concurrence. House critics like Rep. Bill Delahunt and Jim McGovern already are engaged in hearings on the proposed agreement. House Judiciary Chair John Conyers also has questioned the constitutionality of the measure. -- At stake for the anti-war movement and the progressive blogosphere is whether the current administration can bind the next president to its current Iraq policies.

This has been a bad week for the British government, in relation to two of the running sores of its foreign policy, both centered on the Overseas Territory of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. Diego Garcia and the surrounding islands -- known collectively as the Chagos Islands -- were shamefully cleared of their existing population in the late 1960s, to make way for a US airbase on Diego Garcia itself. This was a manifestation of the “special relationship” between the UK and the US, which involved the old empire facilitating its successor’s global reach, in exchange for a significant discount on the UK’s nuclear missile programme. Ever since, the exiled Chagossians have been attempting to regain access to their ancestral lands, but with limited success. Although the islanders won a stunning victory in the High Court in 2000, which ruled that their expulsion had been illegal, the government fought back in 2003, when Prime Minster Tony Blair invoked an ancient and archaic “royal prerogative” to strike down their claims once more. Although the court of appeal reversed this decision in May 2006, ruling that the islanders’ right to return was “one of the most fundamental liberties known to human beings,” it was clear that, in the struggle between a group of cruelly disposed islanders on the one hand, and the US Military-Industrial Complex on the other, the Chagossians’ fight was far from over.

Two weeks ago, I presented a young Palestinian, Mohammed Omer, with the 2008 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism. Awarded in memory of the great US war correspondent, the prize goes to journalists who expose establishment propaganda, or “official drivel”, as Gellhorn called it. Mohammed shares the prize of £5,000 with Dahr Jamail. At 24, he is the youngest winner. His citation reads: “Every day, he reports from a war zone, where he is also a prisoner. His homeland, Gaza, is surrounded, starved, attacked, forgotten. He is a profoundly humane witness to one of the great injustices of our time. He is the voice of the voiceless.” The eldest of eight, Mohammed has seen most of his siblings killed or wounded or maimed. An Israeli bulldozer crushed his home while the family were inside, seriously injuring his mother. And yet, says a former Dutch ambassador, Jan Wijenberg, “he is a moderating voice, urging Palestinian youth not to court hatred but seek peace with Israel”.

A United States appeals court decision upholding the dismissal of a lawsuit from Canadian Maher Arar essentially enables the U.S. government to send foreigners to be tortured, a lawyer with a human rights group representing Arar said Monday “It means that the U.S. can do to anyone what they did to Maher,” said Maria LaHood, a senior attorney with the U.S.-based Center for Constitutional Rights. “They can do it to anyone, to any foreign citizen, and use the immigration process as a guise, basically, to send someone to be tortured.” Arar, a Canadian citizen of Syrian birth, was stopped by U.S. officials at JFK Airport in New York City as he returned to Canada from a holiday abroad in 2002. Arar was labelled a member of al-Qaida and deported to his native Syria even though he was travelling on a Canadian passport and had insisted he wanted to go home to Canada. He was eventually released without charges and he returned to Canada, where a judicial inquiry cleared him of any terrorist links and Ottawa awarded him compensation of $10.5 million.