So if Zubaydah had already yielded all the information he had, why was there a need to turn to torture? The answer: There was a ticking clock, but not one attached to a bomb. The Bush administration wanted its war against Iraq and thought that the perfect justification would be a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq--a link that the Bush and Cheney White House had asserted, but couldn't prove because no such link existed.

Since 9/11, sadly, justice in the US has moved so slowly that on occasion it has appeared to be dead, but Thursday's verdict is a resounding triumph for the importance of the law as a check on unfettered executive power and the caprice of politicians. As Justice Kennedy stated in his opinion, "The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times." He added, "To hold that the political branches may switch the Constitution on or off at will would lead to a regime in which they, not this court, say ‘what the law is,'" a quote from an 1803 ruling, in which the Supreme Court explained its right to review acts of Congress, which, of course, reinforces the supremacy of the separation of powers that lies at the heart of the United States Constitution.

hrw report on history and present of guantanamo bay

mental health of inmates at guantanamo bay:
"I feel like I'm being buried alive," said Ahmed Belbacha, a 39-year-old Algerian who has been in Guantánamo since March 2002. He has been cleared to leave the prison camp for over a year, but he can't. Algeria isn't accepting detainees back home, but even it were, Belbacha is so fearful of being tortured there that he has asked the U.S. federal courts to block his return. But there is no other country willing to take him, and he remains stuck in Guantánamo -- locked in his windowless cell 22 hours a day, with little more than a Koran and single other book to occupy his time.
(...) More than half of the 270 detainees currently at Guantánamo -- including many who are slated for release or transfer -- are housed in high-security facilities akin to U.S. "supermax" prisons. They spend all but two hours a day in small cells with no natural light or fresh air. Their meals are slipped through a slot in the door, and they are given little more than a single book and the Koran to occupy their time. Even their limited "recreation" time -- which is sometimes provided in the middle of the night -- generally takes place in single cell cages so that detainees can't physically interact with one another. None of these detainees have been allowed visits by family members, and very few have been able to make phone calls home.
(...) Gharani's lawyers say he has tried to commit suicide at least seven times. He has slit his wrist, run repeatedly headfirst into the sides of his cell, and tried to hang himself. On several occasions, he has been put on suicide watch in the mental health unit, given the green suicide smock, and placed in a single cell with no other items other than toilet paper. Each time, he has been moved out of the suicide unit and back into high-security detention.
(...) He has never been provided any educational or additional recreation opportunities in accordance with his juvenile status at the time of capture. He has never been allowed to speak with -- let alone see -- any of his family members during his more than six years in U.S. custody. Like the majority of detainees at Guantánamo, he has not been charged with any crime.
(...) Most of these men have been cleared for release since 2003, yet remain in Guantánamo because they can't return to China, and neither the United States nor any other country has been willing to take them in. While five of the Uighurs were resettled in Albania in 2005, 16 others remain housed in one of the most draconian facilities in Guantánamo, reportedly because they threw feces and urine at prison guards following a dispute about the Koran in May 2007. But instead of receiving a 30- or 90-day punishment, as is common in U.S. prisons for disruptive behavior, the Uighurs were moved into one of the highest-security, most restrictive parts of the facility -- indefinitely. As of April 2008 -- almost a year later -- these men were moved to their own wing of the camp, where they are reportedly allowed to keep the meal slots in the door open most of the day, so that they can more easily speak to each other without shouting. Military officials also claim that they are now being granted additional recreation time, including the chance to go into a single recreation pen with another detainee, and that ultimately they will be able to leave their cells during the day and mingle in the common space in the pods. For now, however, they still spend the majority of their days locked in their totally enclosed, windowless cells, unable to congregate for meals or prayer time, and unable to see each other as they talk through the meal slots.
(...) Another Uighur, named Abdusemet, described days on end of doing nothing other than eating, praying, pacing and sitting on his bed. "I am starting to hear voices, sometimes," Abdusemet told his attorney, worriedly. "There is no one to talk to all day in my cell and I hear these voices." He continued: "What did we do? Why do they hate us so much?"
(...) Indeed, it was after a riot in May 2006 -- when detainees attacked guards with improvised weapons, including broken pieces of light bulbs -- followed by three suicides the following month, that the military significantly increased security to prevent further disturbances. Detainees' repeated hunger strikes and suicide attempts, which many outside observers perceive as cries for help, are seen by the military as challenges to its authority. Still, while security concerns may explain some of the controls at Guantánamo, it's hard to justify the extent of such extreme isolation. Although officials try to rationalize harsh conditions, it may be that the regime of prolonged, extreme isolation is contributing to the despair and insubordination among even the innocent or unlucky.
(...) Continuing to house detainees in single-cell units 22 hours a day with virtually nothing to do all day long and no access to natural light or fresh air is not just cruel but may also be counterproductive. None of the detainees at Guantánamo has yet been convicted of a crime, and many are ultimately likely to be released. Warehousing them in such conditions may have a long-term damaging psychological impact. It could further compound legal problems with attempting to repatriate or bring detainees to justice. (Efforts to put some detainees on trial, as we've covered in Salon over the last several weeks, are buckling under the U.S. government's policies at Guantánamo.) And the ongoing treatment of these detainees over the long term is very likely to breed hatred and resentment of the United States.

taliban profile:
He is a Pakistani but fought in Afghanistan, "both against the Russian occupying forces (between 1979-89) and alongside the Taliban, against their enemies," he says. He is coy about whether these included NATO and the Pakistan army. But he sees no contradiction between the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban.
(...) "We are active in Pakistan. The Afghan Taliban is active in Afghanistan. But we have the same world-view. We support the Taliban's cause in Afghanistan and its struggle against foreign occupation. We also see the United States as the enemy of Muslims. But in Pakistan we are a peaceful Taliban. We were sent here [to Hawed] because we are needed here. Things were happening here that were un- Islamic."
(...) In nearby towns, stores have been firebombed for selling Western DVDs and other "immoral" material. Three Pakistanis were killed in a neighbouring village because of "vice". And the Taliban has banned music throughout the district, including at weddings, in the teeth of tribal tradition. For a movement that prides itself on having local support, aren't such decrees counterproductive? "Yes the ban on the music has annoyed some people," says Safraz. "But the important thing is not to annoy Allah. Allah tells us to stop un-Islamic things. And music is un-Islamic".
(...) But should this not be the job of Pakistan to decide, a self-proclaimed Islamic state? Safraz sighs: "We have waited 55 years for the introduction of Islamic law in Pakistan. But the state and the police have done nothing. You see, being a Muslim doesn't just mean reading the Quran. It means preventing things that are visibly un-Islamic. That is what we are trying to do. We may not be able to do it throughout the whole country, to bring a Taliban regime or Islamic government in Pakistan. But we are conveying a message -- that there must be an end to un-Islamic activities in an Islamic state".
(...) Isfan Khan agrees that the task of the Taliban in Pakistan is not so much to overthrow the regime as implement Islamic laws in a state that has failed to do so. Isfan is a Taliban commander in Bannu, a market town close to Hawed.
(...) "When I returned to Bannu, crime was everywhere and the police were sleeping. If criminals were caught, they paid bribes and got released. Our way, the Taliban's way, is different. We punish all wrongdoers -- no matter how high or powerful -- according to the Quran. I do not judge. I leave that to our muftis on the basis of the Quran and hadith [sayings of the Prophet Mohamed]. But I implement their verdicts. Now 80 per cent of Bannu is clean."
(...) Isfan pulls more threads from the sofa. "I was a doctor in Mazer Sharif in Afghanistan. I worked for the Taliban government but I treated everybody, including the Northern Alliance (NA), the enemies of the Taliban. When Afghanistan was occupied in 2001, the NA sold me to the US for $20,000. I spent three years in Guantanamo Bay and one year in a Pakistani prison. Last year I returned to Kabul, in search of my wife and son, who are Afghans. I was re-arrested by the police. I had to bribe them $2,250 to get out of the country".
(...) "You ask me whether my leader is (Pakistan President Pervez) Musharraf or (Afghan Taliban leader) Mullah Omar. I will tell you: if Musharraf kills my Taliban brothers in Afghanistan and Pakistan, then I, personally, am ready to kill him."
(...) We decline and return to our car, hounded by a gang of boys awestruck by their local mujahideen and the lengths that Western journalists will go to, in order to interview them. Safraz clears our way with a martial wave of the arm. The boys obey, of course. "We think they're great," says one. "We support everything they do."

a book on guantanamo:
Leading human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith believes the hunger strikers at Guantanamo Bay, the United States prison camp in Cuba, are treated worse than the Irish hunger strikers during the conflict in Northern Ireland. The Guantanamo hunger strikes began in June 2005. They have now lasted nine times longer than the hunger strikes in Northern Ireland of the early 1980s.
(...) "In 1981, the British recognised that it was unethical to force feed a hunger striker. Twice a day my client, Shaker Aamer, is strapped into a torture chair and a 110 centimetre tube is forced up his nose. Occasionally, it goes into his lungs - which is excruciatingly painful and quite deliberate."
(...) However, some 42 men remain on hunger strike. The longest surviving has lasted 620 days with forced feeding. Stafford Smith's clients, Shaker Aamer and Al Jazeera journalist Sami al Haj, have been on hunger strike for 115 and 106 days respectively.
(...) The strikers are demanding a fair trial, for abuse of the Koran to cease and that juvenile prisoners should not be kept in solitary confinement. They want an end to violations of the Geneva Convention, such as the provision of yellow unsanitary water and inedible food. They also want different sorts of treatment - which depend upon how compliant prisoners are, to stop. Compliant prisoners wear white uniforms while others wear orange and brown uniforms.
(...) He admits to encountering some suspicion from prisoners who think those lawyers who do come into the camp are there to provide a veneer of respectability for the whole inhumane process of detention. But Stafford Smith stresses: "Some of the guys are crazy now, losing their minds. They are being horribly abused. Probably the worst abuse is the daily torture the hunger strikers undergo."
(...) Stafford Smith is keen to point out that Guantanamo is just one of an increasing number of US detention centres all over the world. "There are almost 14,000 people being held in secret prisons from Iraq to Afghanistan and Diego Garcia, to name but a few."
(...) "I think it was Sinn Fein's Martin McGuinness who said that the internment process created the greatest recruiting sergeant the IRA ever had. A CIA agent admitted as much in the present context in 2004, when he said that, for every person you put in Guantanamo, it would create 10 who want to blow up the US. Now that figure is more likely to be 1,000 for every new prisoner."
(...) A new threat had to be found to replace the Russians and it is Muslim fundamentalism. But Stafford Smith says: "The idea that the world today faces a greater threat than when the Germans were bombing London to oblivion or when the Russians held massive amounts of nuclear weapons just does not stand up to analysis. The suggestion international laws now need to be torn up because of the threat is foolish and amounts to incredible populism."

guantanamo bay:
The real problem -- the conundrum wrapped in an enigma -- comes with another group. At present, there are in Gitmo perhaps 160 detainees (as the public affairs staff at the facility told me), who will most likely never be charged, never be tried, and may nonetheless never be sent home. It's a category without a name, or really any precedent -- a category that all too conveniently defies solution and so keeps Guantanamo in operation.
(...) How could a new president extricate us from this mess? The next occupant of the White House should start by accepting the following very American principle: Those who are not going to be charged with a crime should be returned to their home country, a third country, or the country where they were initially captured .
(...) The current Guantanamo debacle has little to do with the rule of law, the Geneva Conventions, or even, for that matter, a realistic assessment of the more pressing terrorist threats to the United States. At its heart of hearts lies a simple fear of political embarrassment.
(...) Privately, even Bush administration officials will acknowledge that the detainees were captured and sent to Gitmo capriciously. Rather than housing the "worst of the worst" (as the administration has regularly bragged), Gitmo penned up the easiest to grab, especially in Afghanistan. Often these were simply the individuals that local bounty hunters could provide or who were found on or near the battlefield. Many were put on planes to Guantanamo based on nothing but an American unwillingness to assert with confidence that they would never be a threat to the United States. Instead of masterminds, what the Bush administration netted were cooks, chauffeurs, wanderers, the mentally deranged, and -- sometimes -- children.
(...) The Bush administration is already releasing the wrongly detained. Detainee by detainee, it has been quietly whittling away at its mistakes, sending home 385 detainees who look no more or less guilty than those remaining in custody.
(...) Those at Gitmo convicted of crimes should serve their sentences in U.S. military prisons on U.S. soil. Opponents insist that this would "endanger" Americans. According to Senator Jim DeMint, "To bring known terrorists, many of whom have killed Americans, to our shores risks the lives of additional Americans and encourages more attacks on our soil." Does Senator DeMint actually believe this? Does he truly consider the U.S. military incapable of keeping convicted prisoners under lock and key? How would a future president weigh such doubts against the giant sigh of relief the world at large would heave when the last door opened on the last cell in Guantanamo.
(...) I assured them that, outside of the 14 high-value detainees, the Bush administration hasn't sent a single new prisoner to Guantanamo since late 2004. But, as it turned out, they knew something I didn't. Last month, a little story appeared in the back pages of some American newspapers. The United States had indeed moved its first new captive to Guantanamo in over two years -- and, according to the Washington buzz, more such detainees can be expected sooner or later, either from a war in Iran or some other "front" in the administration's global counterterrorism offensive.

inhumanity reigns at guantanamo bay:
According to "Cruel and Inhuman: Conditions of Isolation for Detainees at Guantánamo Bay," a report released earlier this month by Amnesty International, the situation inside Guantánamo is actually becoming worse for detainees--particularly the approximately 160 (out of a total of 385) detainees who are thought to be housed at Camp 6. According to the report, Camp 6 "has created even harsher and apparently more permanent conditions of extreme isolation and sensory deprivation in which detainees are confined to almost completely sealed, individual cells, with minimal contact with any other human being."
(...) Prisoners in Camp 6 are confined to 8-by-10-foot cells for at least 22 hours a day, and are allowed out only infrequently to shower or to exercise in enclosed areas surrounded by high concrete-and-wire walls. They are not able to speak to each other except by shouting through a narrow gap at the bottom of their steel cell doors. There are no outside windows, and detainees have reported that air conditioning is left on high--making the metal cells intolerably cold.
(...) As 27-year-old Yemeni hunger striker Adnan Farhan Abdullatif reportedly told his lawyer in late February, "My wish is to die. We are living in a dying situation."
(...) Naval Cmdr. Robert Durand, a Guantánamo spokesman, dismissed the hunger strike and prisoners' complaints as "propaganda," telling reporters that hunger strikes are a tactic taught in the al-Qaeda training manual--and that the number of strikers has dropped in the past when the media stopped covering them. But Durand left out the main reason the U.S. was able to break down hunger strikers previously--brutal force feedings.
(...) There have been several hunger strikes at Guantánamo since the camp opened in 2001. The largest occurred in 2005, when at least 130 detainees were classified as hunger strikers--defined as having missed nine consecutive meals. Most detainees were eventually broken from their strike through force-feeding techniques--in which they were strapped into restraint chairs, had feeding tubes inserted and then were left strapped down for lengthy periods of time.
(...) Lawyers for some detainees described U.S. military personnel violently inserting feeding tubes to the point of drawing blood, and Physicians for Human Rights called the force feedings of inmates a "brutal and inhumane" tactic that violates international medical codes of ethics.
(...) Sudanese detainee Sami al-Hajj, a former cameraman for al-Jazeera, had been on hunger strike for more than 95 days as Socialist Worker went to press--and was being routinely force-fed. "At nine o'clock in the morning, they force feed him, and he is strapped to a chair," his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, recently told Reuters. "They force a tube up his nose. It is excruciatingly painful. That lasts about an hour...Three times so far, according to what Sami has told me, they have put the tube in his lung...and that is effectively drowning him."
(...) Additionally, though CSRTs are supposed to determine whether a detainee should be declared an "enemy combatant"--which means they then can be held indefinitely--the process is a kangaroo court. Defense lawyers and the media are barred from the proceedings, and prisoners aren't allowed to see "classified" evidence against them.
(...) Last month, after being held at Guantánamo for more than five years, David Hicks pleaded guilty to a single, relatively minor count in exchange for a plea bargain that will allow him to return to Australia to serve out the remaining nine months of a 7-year sentence. To get his plea deal, however, Hicks--who has grown his hair to waist length in order to block out the bright lights that shine 24 hours a day in his cell--had to agree to withdraw allegations that he had been abused during his detention, to a one-year ban on speaking to the media, and never to sue the U.S.
(...) Since the Bush administration doesn't allow prisoners to detail allegations of torture publicly, however, the following appears in the "transcript" of al-Nashiri's tribunal:

PRESIDENT [of the tribunal]: Please describe the methods that were used.

DETAINEE: [CENSORED] What else do I want to say? [CENSORED] There were doing so many things. What else did they do? [CENSORED] After that, another method of torture began. [CENSORED] They used to ask me questions, and the investigator after that used to laugh. And I used to answer the answer that I knew. And if I didn't replay what I heard, he used to [CENSORED].

congressional hearings on extraordinary rendition:
"I HOPE IT'S YOUR FAMILY MEMBERS THAT DIE" said US Representative Dana Rohrabacker to American citizens who questioned the Bush Administration’s unlawful extraordinary rendition policies.
(...) The European Parliamentary human rights committee had issued a report in January, 2007 sharply critical of the Bush administration’s extraordinary rendition program in which persons from all over the world were detained by either CIA or local police and then flown by CIA jet (torture taxi) to other countries where they were imprisoned (Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Libya, Djibouti, Morocco, Yemen. The report was equally critical of European governments for allowing the unlawful flights to take place.
(...) From 2001 through 2005, the governments of fourteen countries in Europe allowed at least 1,245 CIA flights with illegally abducted terrorist suspects to be flown through their airspace or to land on their territory. Germany, Britain, Ireland and Portugal allowed the highest numbers of covert flights. As well as at least 1,245 flights operated by the CIA, there were an unspecified number of US military flights for the same purpose.
(...) [guantanamo facts] Some who were kidnapped ended up in Guantanamo. Others were flown to prisons in other countries for interrogation and torture. Many of those who were subjected to extraordinary rendition are still in Guantanano. Many have been there for over 5 years. Over 400 of the 770 persons who have been imprisoned in Guantanamo over the 5 years it has been opened, have been released. Only 380 are left imprisoned in Guantanamo. Only 3 have been charged by the Military Commission and only one tried in Guantanamo. After five years of being held prisoner, Australian citizen David Hicks was convicted in March, 2007 of material support to terrorism and sentenced to only seven months further imprisonment which he is serving in Australia. The Bush administration has said it will try only 50-70 of the 380 remaining in Guantanamo. That means that of 770 who have been in Guantanamo, on 50-70 will be tried. The others eventually will be freed due to lack of evidence of a crime. Many will have spent five years or more in imprisonment.
(...) [!] Rohrabacher then attacked and belittled the European Community for outlawing the death penalty saying that “You in the European community won’t stand up to evil people, you won’t execute them. Eichmann deserved to be executed, just like these terrorists must be executed.”