Jail, prison popluation jumps in 2006
From the Houston Chronicle
Excerpt: Prisons and jails added more than 42,000 inmates last year, the largest increase since 2000.

The total number of people incarcerated by federal or state authorities in the year ending June 30, 2006, was roughly 1.6 million, the government said Wednesday. That translated to a 2.8 percent increase from the previous year, due to people being put in prison at a faster rate than those released.

Overall, the number of people behind bars — including those held in local jails — was more than 2.2 million, according to the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics.
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Labels: prisoner

Guantánamo defense lawyer forced out of Navy
From the Seattle Post Intelligencer
Excerpt: The Navy lawyer who took the Guantánamo case of Osama bin Laden's driver to the U.S. Supreme Court — and won — has been passed over for promotion by the Pentagon and must soon leave the military.

Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, 44, said last week he received word he had been denied a promotion to full-blown commander this summer, "about two weeks after" the Supreme Court sided against the White House and with his client, a Yemeni captive at the U.S. Navy base in southeast Cuba.

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Labels: guantanamo, law, military, pentagon, prisoner, supreme court

US Outraged as Pakistan Frees Taliban Fighters
From the Daily Telegraph (UK)
Excerpt: Pakistan's credibility as a leading ally in the war on terrorism was called into question last night when it emerged that President Pervez Musharraf's government had authorised the release from jail of thousands of Taliban fighters caught fighting coalition forces in Afghanistan.

Five years after American-led coalition forces overthrew the Taliban during Operation Enduring Freedom, United States officials have been horrified to discover that thousands of foreign fighters detained by Pakistan after fleeing the battleground in Afghanistan have been quietly released and allowed to return to their home countries.

Pakistani lawyers acting for the militants claim they have freed 2,500 foreigners who were originally held on suspicion of having links to al-Qa'eda or the Taliban over the past four years.

The mass release of the prisoners has provoked a stern rebuke to the Musharraf regime from the American government. "We have repeatedly warned Pakistan over arresting and then releasing suspects," said a US diplomat in Islamabad. "We are monitoring their response with great concern."

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Labels: pakistan, prisoner, taliban

U.S. accused of Kidnappings in Iraq
From Salon News
Excerpt: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has until 5 p.m. Friday to hand over a raft of documents to Congress that might shed new light on detainee abuse in Iraq. The documents could substantiate little-known allegations that U.S. forces have tried to break terror suspects by kidnapping and mistreating their family members.

It now appears that kidnapping, scarcely covered by the media, and absent in the major military investigations of detainee abuse, may have been systematically employed by U.S. troops. Salon has obtained Army documents that show several cases where U.S. forces abducted terror suspects’ families. After he was thrown in prison, Cpl. Charles Graner, the alleged ringleader at Abu Ghraib, told investigators the military routinely kidnapped family members to force suspects to turn themselves in.

A House subcommittee led by Connecticut Republican Christopher Shays took the unusual step last month of issuing Rumsfeld a subpoena for the documents after months of stonewalling by the Pentagon. Shays had requested the documents in a March 7 letter. "There was no response" to the letter, a frustrated Shays told Salon. "We are not going to back off this."

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Labels: iraq, prisoner, rumsfeld

Judge dismisses Masri torture case
From ABC News
Excerpt: A U.S. judge dismissed on Thursday a lawsuit against former CIA Director George Tenet and several CIA employees by a German of Lebanese origin who says he was abducted and tortured by the American spy agency.
U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis agreed with government arguments that moving forward with Khaled el-Masri's case would risk national security by exposing state secrets about CIA activities vital to the U.S. war on terrorism. ...

...Ellis said the government provided documents to him that showed "damage to the national security could result if the defendants in this case were required to admit or deny el-Masri's allegations."...

...Masri said Macedonian authorities abducted him on December 31, 2003, and he was held prisoner in a Skopje hotel room for 23 days and beaten, stripped and sodomized.
He said he was then taken by members of a CIA 'black renditions' team and flown by the CIA to Afghanistan, where he was held as a terrorism suspect. Masri said he was beaten in Afghanistan and went on a hunger strike to protest his confinement. On May 28, 2004, Masri was flown to Albania where he was dumped on the side of an abandoned road.
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Labels: CIA, prisoner, torture

Cheney Plan Exempts CIA From Bill Barring Abuse of Detainees
From the Washington Post
Excerpt: The Bush administration has proposed exempting employees of the Central Intelligence Agency from a legislative measure endorsed earlier this month by 90 members of the Senate that would bar cruel and degrading treatment of any prisoners in U.S. custody. The proposal, which two sources said Vice President Cheney handed last Thursday to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in the company of CIA Director Porter J. Goss, states that the measure barring inhumane treatment shall not apply to counterterrorism operations conducted abroad or to operations conducted by "an element of the United States government" other than the Defense Department. ...
... The provision in question ... essentially proscribes harsh treatment of any detainees in U.S. custody or control anywhere in the world. It was specifically drafted to close what its backers say is a loophole in the administration's policy of generally barring torture, namely its legal contention that these constraints do not apply to treatment of foreigners on foreign soil.
Cheney Plan Exempts CIA From Bill Barring Abuse of Detainees

Labels: cheney, CIA, prisoner, torture

U.S. to Seek Dismissal Of Terrorism Convictions
From the Washington Post
Excerpt: The Justice Department will ask a federal judge in Detroit to dismiss the convictions of three men in a high-profile terrorism case last year, saying it has uncovered serious prosecutorial misconduct in the case... More

Labels: law, national security, prisoner