Hearing for England adjourns indefinitely

The fifth day of military hearings for Pfc. Lynndie England on charges connected to the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad included a defense request for Vice President Dick Cheney to appear as a witness.

The defense is known to be seeking to compel testimony by a former Army reservist who has told investigators and reporters that military intelligence agents helped instigate the abuses. Defense lawyers have contended that England and the other guards facing charges were following orders from military intelligence.

Cheney was among a long wish-list of potential witnesses, which included many of the generals involved with the prison. Defense lawyers did not explain in open court Saturday why they want Cheney's testimony. The hearing officer, Col. Denise Arn, said she will study the request but gave no indication when or how she might rule. The hearing was adjourned, and Arn set no date for when it might resume. England's lawyers speculated that the hearing might reconvene in a month.

http://www.cnn.com/2004/LAW/08/07/lynndie.england.hearing/


Source: Aftermath News Service
Top Stories - August 9th, 2004

Sitting with his hands cuffed and ankles chained to the floor, an Afghan prisoner told a US military panel that he joined the Taliban and was forced to carry a rifle but "wasn't going to fight anyone". The slightly built and thickly bearded 31-year-old was among 10 Guantanamo prisoners so far granted hearings to determine if they are enemy combatants not protected by the Geneva Conventions, or whether they should be sent home.

The hearings, which began yesterday, were the first chance in two-and-a-half years for 585 Guantanamo prisoners to challenge their indefinite detention at the US naval base in Cuba, a situation human rights groups deplore as a violation of international law.

The Pentagon set up the military review hearings after the US Supreme Court ruled in June that the prisoners had the right to contest their detention in US courts.

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/08/06/1091732085326.html?oneclick=true


Source: Aftermath News Service
Top Stories - August 9th, 2004

A Tunisian recanted a confession that he had been a fighter against US forces when he appeared before a US military tribunal on Saturday, a military official said. Though the 35-year-old man also told US interrogators he had been to a military training camp in Afghanistan and had weapons training, this was withdrawn during the hearing at the Guantanamo Bay US Naval Base in Cuba, the official said. It was the 12th case to be handled by the tribunals, which are deciding if the 585 detainees at the detention center were correctly designated as "enemy combatants."

Six of the detainees whose cases have been heard so far have refused to attend.

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=2&article_id=7076


Source: Aftermath News Service
Top Stories - August 9th, 2004

NEW IRAQ TORTURE SCANDAL!

Oregon Army National Guard soldiers witnessed Iraqi Police abusing and torturing their prisoners, June 29 at the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior.

The Oregon Army National Guard soldiers responded by disarming the Iraqi policemen and giving first aid to the detainees. Many of the prisoners had fresh welts and bruises. A boy of 14 was among those abused. US Soldiers also found metal rods, rubber hoses, unknown chemicals and exposed electrical wires that appeared to have been used in the torturing of the prisoners.

The US soldiers were later ordered to STAND DOWN and HAND THE TORTURED PRISONERS BACK to their Iraqi tormentors!

OregonLive.com has published 23 photographs taken by the US Army that documents Iraqi civilians being tortured by the police of the "new democratic Iraq." The entire photo series can be seen at:
http://www.oregonlive.com/galleries/news/index.ssf?iraq

Photos also appear on the Indymedia network:
http://la.indymedia.org/news/2004/08/115260.php


Informant: Mark Vallen

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Oregon Soldier Steps Forward to Document Iraqi Abuse of Civilians

Update: Another Oregon Soldier Steps Forward to Document Iraqi Abuse of Civilians

The article below describes one of the most serious uninvestigated scandals of the Iraq War. Unfortunately, the national media and Congress refuse to interview military leaders and determine why U.S. soldiers who observed acts of torture by the new Iraqi government were ordered to return the civilians back to their captors and remain silent. The public, press, and Congress have a right to know who made the decisions described by these soldiers.

http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/NewsArticle.cfm?ID=2186

PRISONER ABUSE UPDATE - Abu Ghraib Whitewash; Children among Detainees

A new report by the Army inspector-general contradicts Gen. Antonio Taguba’s report and reports by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Describing the report as a whitewash, the editors of the New York Times write: “The authors of this 300-page whitewash say they found no "systemic" problem - even though there were 94 documented cases of prisoner abuse, including some 40 deaths, 20 of them homicides; even though only four prisons of the 16 they visited had copies of the Geneva conventions; even though Abu Ghraib was a cesspool with one shower for every 50 inmates; even though the military police were improperly involved in interrogations; even though young people plucked from civilian life were sent to guard prisoners - 50,000 of them in all - with no training…Never mind any of that. The report pins most of the blame on those depressingly familiar culprits, a few soldiers who behaved badly (NY Times editorial, 7/24/04).”

One of those “soldiers,” Pfc. Lynndie England, was in court this week for a week-long preliminary hearing. Senior Army criminal investigators testified Tuesday that the inmates who were abused last year at Abu Ghraib prison were of little or no intelligence value to the United States (LA Times 8/4/04). Special Agent Paul Arthur stated that the detainees were “of no military intelligence significance for us,” and that only two out of the entire group had been interrogated (Washington Post 8/5/04).

IRIN news, compiled by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, reported that more than 150 children ranging in age from nine to 18 are held on any given day at one just of the U.S. run detention centers in Iraq (IRIN News 7/15/04). Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker told an ACLU audience that there is videotape showing US troops sodomizing young Iraqi men at Abu Ghraib. Hersh stated, "The boys were sodomised with the cameras rolling, and the worst part is the soundtrack, of the boys shrieking" (the Independent 7/16/04).

The LA Times reports that CACI International has been awarded a $23 million no-bid contract to continue providing private interrogators to gather intelligence in Iraq. The contract came just as the Interior Department was preparing to cancel the existing contract with Virginia-based CACI, which came under intense scrutiny earlier this year after one of its interrogators was cited for involvement in the abuse of Iraqi captives at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison (LA Times 8/5/04). An Army official stated that CACI was awarded the contract without competitive bidding to avoid any lapse in providing interrogators to question prisoners held at U.S.-run facilities in Iraq (LA Times 8/5/04).

Read more on Child Detainees at:
http://epicalert.c.topica.com/maacwJ8aa80CxbdrwCwe/

I wrote the letter because I, as a human being, cannot accept anyone treating others badly, especially under the cover of Danish values. What I saw was not in any way representative of our values as Danes...

http://cphpost.sites.itera.dk/get/80650.html


From Information Clearing House

The position taken by the government lawyers in these legal memoranda amount to counseling a client as to how to get away with violating the law...

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article6637.htm