Poor defendants on death row, immigrants in unfair deportation proceedings, torture victims, domestic violence survivors and victims of racial discrimination – all these groups are consistently being denied access to justice while those responsible for the abuses are protected, according to a new report by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Jamil Dakwar, director of the ACLU Human Rights Programme, told IPS, “Access to justice is a fundamental human right and bedrock tenet of American democratic system – it was even codified by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which the U.S. championed 62 years ago.”

“Unfortunately, access to the courts and effective remedy have been severely curtailed over the last decade, especially for those who need it most,” he said. “It is time for our government and judiciary to recommit to respecting and promoting this essential right.”

According to the report, “Slamming the Courthouse Doors”, the “actions of the executive, federal legislative, and judicial branches of the United States government have seriously restricted access to justice for victims of civil liberties and human rights violations, and have limited the availability of effective (or, in some cases, any) remedies for these violations.”

For example, the report details how individuals convicted of capital crimes who seek to present newly found evidence of their innocence or claims of serious constitutional violations are being denied recourse in the courts.

Federal legislation, most prominently the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA), and Supreme Court decisions, has greatly limited access to federal review of state court death penalty convictions, the report says. It also charges that victims of rape, assault, religious rights violations and other serious abuses in prison are having their claims thrown out of court because of a restrictive federal law.

Immigrants who may have legitimate claims to remain in the U.S. are unknowingly waiving their opportunity to pursue these claims and are being swiftly deported because of unfair procedures, the report charges.

It also notes that victims of domestic violence are being denied the opportunity to seek civil remedy under the Violence Against Women Act because of recent court decisions.

Similarly, victims of torture and “extraordinary rendition” have been denied their day in court.

The administration of President Barack Obama has sought to extinguish lawsuits brought by torture survivors through use of “judicially-created doctrines such as the so-called ‘state secrets’ privilege and qualified immunity to dismiss civil suits alleging torture, cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment, forced disappearance, and arbitrary detention, without consideration on the merits,” the report says.

It charges that by invoking the “state secrets” privilege, the Obama administration can not only restrict discovery but can quash an entire lawsuit – without demonstrating the validity of their claim to a judge. Immigrants also are systematically denied access to justice, as they face monumental obstacles to obtaining review of removal orders.

The U.S. government has claimed that there is no right to judicial review of diplomatic assurances when it has sought to transfer individuals to countries known to employ torture.

Federal immigration officials also have used a procedure known as stipulated removal to deport non-U.S. citizens without a hearing before an immigration judge. “There is a lack of meaningful safeguards to ensure people with mental disabilities facing possible deportation from the United States are afforded fair hearings. As a result, legal permanent residents and asylum seekers with a lawful basis for remaining in the United States may have been unfairly deported from the country because their mental disabilities made it impossible for them to effectively present their claims in court,” the report says. The ACLU’s recommends that Congress amend the habeas-related provisions of AEDPA so that federal courts are more accessible to prisoners asserting claims of constitutional violations. It also urges the creation of and adequate funding for state defender organisations that are independent of the judiciary and that have sufficient resources to provide quality representation to indigent capital defendants.

Congress should pass legislation that creates procedures to prevent the abuse of the state secrets privilege, and the Obama administration should prohibit the reliance on “diplomatic assurances” to deport or otherwise transfer persons from the United States.

The ACLU also urged Congress to enact the End Racial Profiling Act, which would ban racial profiling and provide for government monitoring and documentation of racial profiling.

Frances Boyle, a legal expert familiar with the report, told IPS, “Because of the deliberate U.S. federal court-packing scheme undertaken by the [Ronald] Reagan, [George] Bush Sr. and [George] Bush Jr. administrations, today about 60 percent of U.S. federal judges at all levels – up to and including the U.S. Supreme Court – have been members of the Federalist Society, and/or were vetted by the Federalist Society.”

Boyle, a law professor at the University of Illinois, described this organisation as “right wing, racist, bigoted, reactionary, elitist, sexist, warmongering and totalitarian”.

For example, he said, almost all of the lawyers involved in the Bush Jr. administration’s torture scandal were and still are members of the Federalist Society.

Nearly a year after advocacy groups sought documents to clarify the Department of Homeland Security’s “Secure Communities” programme, the government has largely failed to satisfy the requests for information, a federal judge has ruled.

“I think the government is dragging its feet,” Judge Shira A. Scheindlin declared last week.

As the government has delayed, the programme has dramatically expanded, prompting growing controversy about the secrecy and mixed signals sent by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and chain of command with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), of which ICE is part.

The principal issue is whether local law enforcement can opt out of the programme. ICE and other DHS officials have alternated between “yes” and “no”, sowing confusion among some police departments, and entire states and counties.

To find an answer, the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), represented by the Center for Constitutional Rights and the Kathryn O. Greenberg Immigration Justice Clinic of Cardozo Law school, filed a freedom of information act request for files relating to the rapidly expanding deportation programme that culls fingerprints from local law enforcement databases.

After the agency refused to hand over the documents, the groups took ICE to court.

Sunita Patel, a staff attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, told IPS, “As advocates across the country are pushing on the state and local levels to find a way to opt out of Secure Communities, we are going to court to obtain information that the public and advocates need to determine how and if it’s possible to opt out. Only the government has the information everyone needs.”

Judge Scheindlin set Jan. 17, 2011 as the new date for ICE to release the documents or explain why they must be withheld. She also set Feb. 25 as the deadline for ICE to release a second set of documents related to other topics in the records request.

The judge noted several times that if the defendants fail to produce documents in the two upcoming hearings they will face possible contempt sanctions.

Secure Communities is a programme that allows state and local police to check the fingerprints of an individual they are booking into a jail against DHS immigration databases.

If there is a “hit”, ICE is automatically notified, even if the person has not been convicted of any criminal act.

Advocates and community leaders across the country have called this programme “dangerous” and say it strains local law enforcement and resources while damaging already the already tenuous relationship between immigrant communities and the police.

“To keep our families together, we need to keep police and ICE separate. The Orwellian-named Secure Communities programme does the opposite of making us safer,” said Sarahí Uribe of NDLON. “We see innocent people swept up in a massive dragnet sending a chilling effect through migrant communities.”

Municipalities such as San Francisco and Santa Clara in California and Arlington, Virginia have voted to opt out and numerous others localities are deliberating their participation.

Advocacy groups say immigration authorities in charge of the programme have been “inconsistent and dishonest in representing the relationship between local governments and the federal programme”.

In an email to New York Governor David Patterson, the agency said “[W]e get it. No one will be forced.” In a press conference two months later, ICE said, “[The agency] does not see this as an opt-in opt-out programme.”

Secure Communities is one of several ICE programmes that rely on continuing cooperation from local law enforcement authorities. In the 287(g) programme, for example, local police and sheriffs have been recruited to help federal immigration authorities by arresting and detaining persons suspected of having committed immigration crimes.

While many local law enforcement authorities have become part of the programme, many others have refused to participate.

They say Secure Communities can lead to racial profiling. They also contend that enforcing federal immigration law is the job of the federal government; that local peace officers don’t have the training and experience to enforce complex immigration law; and that existing police manpower is needed for community policing.

In addition, it has been revealed that many of those who have been deported by the Barack Obama administration have committed only minor infractions such as broken taillights and driving without a license. ICE’s programmes are supposedly geared toward deporting dangerous criminal aliens.

With 13 states yet to join the programme, New York and numerous other activated jurisdictions still trying to opt out, and with its current spokespeople unwilling to set the record straight, advocates are asking a judge to counteract the misinformation by opening the files related to the “opt- out” policies immediately.

A prominent public interest law firm that has defended numerous Guantanamo Bay detainees charged Thursday that a recent government report on a high rate of recidivism among former inmates is loaded with “vague and unsubstantiated claims and misinformation”.

The Center for Constitutional Rights said in a statement that the report to Congress by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) was “the latest in a line of reports that have been repeatedly discredited for using dubious classifications to produce unreliable statistics.”

Leili Kashani, the centre’s Guantanamo Global Justice Initiative associate, told IPS, “The problem with the latest government recidivism report, as with the ones that have preceded it, is that it provides no substance that can be assessed, and from experience we know that we cannot just accept it at face value.”

The report said that 150 detainees, or 25 percent of those released, are confirmed or believed to have “reengaged” in the fight against U.S. interests. CCR questioned those figures and called on the DNI to provide more detailed information.

“If the government thinks individual men released from Guantanamo have ‘returned to the battlefield’, then it should tell us who they are and what they are alleged to have done,” Kashani said.

“These periodic reports that do not provide names or any concrete allegations are useless at best and fear mongering at worst. They function much like those color-coded terror warnings that the government has now had the sense to drop,” she added.

In the last two days, Congress has voted to block the use of any funds to pay for transporting Guantanamo detainees to the mainland U.S. This effectively ends the possibility of Guantanamo detainees being tried in civilian courts. Most members of Congress believe such trials should be before military tribunals.

CCR noted that Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, a senior State Department official who served as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell during the George W. Bush administration, recently stated in a federal court declaration in support of a former detainee’s claims of wrongful detention that “the Bush administration knew early on that the majority of the men at Guantanamo were wrongfully detained, but did not release them because of political concerns that doing so could harm the government’s push for war.”

CCR also notes that the latest DNI report does not name any actual recidivists or include “information that would enable meaningful scrutiny”.

Earlier reports that did identify individuals by name revealed, for example, that former detainee Moazzem Begg had been classified as a “recidivist” because he participated in a documentary about Guantanamo.

“As we now know from cables released by WikiLeaks, Mr. Begg has been privately championed by the State Department for his lack of animosity towards the United States since his release and for his valuable work assisting with the resettlement of other detainees,” CCR said.

The Wall Street Journal reported that intelligence officials claimed that five of the 69 detainees transferred to other countries from Guantanamo Bay by the Obama administration are believed to have rejoined terrorist groups.

The DNI report also said two former detainees were confirmed to be “re-engaging in terrorist or insurgent activities” and three others released in 2009 are suspected of doing so. The former detainees weren’t named.

Since the prison was opened in 2002, 598 detainees have been released, most of them during the Bush administration. They were sent home or to other countries that agreed to take them in.

Among the recent diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks are some describing the inducements and pressure U.S. officials proffered to secure host countries for detainees scheduled for release.

In the past, other organisations have also taken issue with recidivism statistics provided by the Department of Defence and other government agencies.

Students and faculty of Seton Hall law school have carried out extensive examinations of the claims made in prior reports as well as questioning the methodology used to arrive at those claims, and revealed numerous errors and anomalies.

On his first day in office, President Barack Obama signed an executive order closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay in one year. But the task has proved more challenging than the administration imagined.

In addition to the difficulty of finding host countries for prisoners scheduled for release, the issue became highly politicised by widespread rumours to the effect that former detainees “would be allowed to roam the Main Streets of American towns and cities with impunity.”

While this was never the government’s intention, members of Congress were placed under considerable pressure by their frightened constituencies.

When the government proposed to try the alleged mastermind of the 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks in a New York federal court, a public outcry forced the Obama administration to put the idea on a back burner – where it remains.

One Guantanamo inmate has been tried in federal civilian court in New York without incident. He was found guilty and faces a sentence of 20 years to life.

“Tragically, these [DNI] reports continue to obscure the fact that the vast majority of the men at Guantanamo should never have been detained in the first place and that a great injustice has been done to them,” Kashani told IPS.

“Hundreds of men have now been released and are peacefully rebuilding their lives. Rather than fueling fear, the government should be acknowledging these facts and making sure that the remaining men who have been wrongfully detained are quickly repatriated or resettled.”

As pro- and anti-Wikileaks forces draw their battle lines, and Wikileaks’ impresario Julian Assange marks time in storied, overcrowded and very Victorian Wandsworth Prison in southwest London, a group of his supporters are taking a different tack.

A poster in support of Julian Assange created for Wikileaks.org. Credit: creative commons license

No, they’re not hacking MasterCard or Sarah Palin. Instead they’re speaking out in no uncertain terms. Their message: On balance, the staggered release by Wikileaks of some 250,000 diplomatic cables from U.S. embassies around the world is providing a valuable public service for which some believe Assange is being persecuted with trumped up sex charges.

These champions of transparency and enemies of government secrecy are the small but vocal community known as the human rights and press freedom constituencies.

Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, told IPS, “Wikileaks has played a critical role in giving the American people the truth about the lies the U.S. government has told about its wars, especially those in the Middle East and Central Asia.”

Regarding Assange’s arrest, he added, “Yes, the charges for which he is being investigated need to be investigated. Yet the irregularities in the proceeding are glaring. Why was the case dropped originally? Why was he allowed to leave Sweden?”

“Why was bail denied when he surrendered and his lawyers had let the police know he would do so when the warrant was served? Finally, is the hand of the U.S. the answer to these questions?” Ratner asked.

On Tuesday, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley announced that the U.S. was considering criminally charging Assange for his role in releasing the diplomatic cables that have embarrassed Washington and many of its allies.

Two days later, Assange’s lawyer Jennifer Robinson told ABC News she believed an indictment was “imminent”.

However, Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU National Security Project, says she is deeply sceptical that prosecuting Wikileaks “would be constitutional, or a good idea”.

“If newspapers could be held criminally liable for publishing leaked information about government practices, we might never have found out about the CIA’s secret prisons or the government spying on innocent Americans,” she told IPS. “Prosecuting publishers of classified information threatens investigative journalism that is necessary to an informed public debate about government conduct, and that is an unthinkable outcome.”

Amnesty International staked out a similar position, noting that international human rights law permits states to invoke censorship only on narrow grounds such as national security or public order.

And even in cases where these criteria apply, “states do not have a blank cheque to keep information secret or to punish individuals for publishing it, simply by declaring the information to be ‘classified’ or declaring it necessary to restrict it as a matter of ‘national security’,” said the London-based group.

More substantively, it noted that one of the cables corroborates images Amnesty released earlier this year showing that the U.S. military carried out a missile strike in south Yemen in December 2009 that killed dozens of local civilians, including women and children.

“What we know, and what the Wikileaks cable confirms, is that Yemen clearly lied to its people and to the world, and the United States thereby avoided a response,” Tom Parker, Amnesty’s policy director for terrorism, counter-terrorism and human rights, told IPS.

Even some world leaders have weighed in on Assange’s case, with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin calling his arrest “undemocratic” and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva commenting that, “There is nothing, nothing for freedom of expression and against the imprisonment of this guy who was doing better work than many of the ambassadors.”

On Friday, Assange was moved to a segregation unit in Wandsworth Prison. He is due in court again on Tuesday.

Dinah PoKempner of Human Rights Watch says she “has no information regarding Mr. Assange’s personal actions in Sweden and thus no position on his arrest on charges of sexual assault other than that like any suspect in a criminal case, he should be accorded full rights of defence due under international and domestic law.”

However, she said that HRW is concerned about recent allegations from various political figures that the actions of Wikileaks somehow amount to either “terrorism” or “espionage” in the absence of evidence of any intent to attack civilians or endanger national security.

“Threats made against Mr. Assange’s life are particularly reprehensible,” she told IPS, adding that, “Although the quantity of the Wikileaks cable release is unprecedented, the nature of the material is not. Traditional media frequently reveal non-public government information of an embarrassing nature, and this can be in the public interest and in furtherance of the right to receive information in a democratic society.”

“We have expressed concern to Wikileaks that care be taken not to reveal information that endangers lives, and we continue to monitor the disclosures to that end,” PoKempner added.

Human Rights First supports the debate over U.S. diplomacy that has been sparked by the latest round of Wikileaks documents, but it shares the concerns of Human Rights Watch about the question of human rights activists who may be at danger if certain information is not redacted.

Wikileaks says it has been especially careful in removing those names.

John Kampfner, the chief executive of Index on Censorship, associated with IFEX (the International Freedom of Expression Exchange), says, “Good journalists and editors should be capable of separating the awkward from the damaging. Information that could endanger life, either in the short term or as part of a longer-term operation, should remain secret.”

In an editorial this week, he predicts: “Once this latest flurry is over, prepare for the backlash. Mr. Assange’s industrial-scale leaking may lead to legislation in a number of countries that makes whistle-blowing harder than it already is. Perhaps the most curious aspect of the Wikileaks revelations is not that they have happened, but it took someone as mercurial as Mr. Assange to be the conduit.”

“Rather than throwing stones, newspapers should be asking themselves why they did not have the wherewithal to hold truth to power,” he said.

Of course, many publications certainly did, if only after the fact. As noted by Reporters Without Borders, which strongly supports the right to publish, “Any restriction on the freedom to disseminate this body of documents will affect the entire press, which has given detailed coverage to the information made available by Wikileaks, with five leading international newspapers actively cooperating in preparing it for publication.”

As Assange’s supporters rally to his side, one thing is clear – the genie is out of the bottle and can’t be put back, regardless of the pressures exerted on the whistleblower organisation by corporations and government authorities.

Chip Pitts, past president and current member of the executive committee of the Bill of Rights Defence Committee, told IPS, “Assange’s arrest now further complicates and escalates the situation.”

“The ferocity with which the establishment has targeted Assange reveals its profound concern over the historic new trend toward global transparency Wikileaks exemplifies: if the big thieves can’t keep their thievery secret, what will they do?”

A federal judge Tuesday dismissed a court challenge to the policy of the administration of Barack Obama to target and execute U.S. citizens outside combat zones who do not pose an imminent threat.

Imam Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen, October 2008. A U.S. citizen, he is rumoured to be on the "capture or kill" list. Credit: Muhammad ud-Deen/creative commons

Judge John Bates found that the plaintiff, Nasser Al-Aulaqi, did not have “standing” before the court – the right to assert the interests of his son, Anwar Al-Aulaqi, who it is believed has been targeted for assassination. For this reason, the judge did not consider the merits of the case.

Judge Bates ruled that “there are circumstances in which the executive’s unilateral decision to kill a U.S. citizen overseas is ‘constitutionally committed to the political branches’ and judicially unreviewable.”

Regarding the latter “political question” issue, the judge acknowledged “the somewhat unsettling nature of its conclusion”.

Bates called the case “unique and extraordinary”, and said it presented “[s]tark, and perplexing, questions”, including “fundamental questions of separation of powers involving the proper role of the courts in our constitutional structure”.

Ultimately, however, he dismissed the case on procedural grounds and found that “the serious issues regarding the merits of the alleged authorization of the targeted killing of a U.S. citizen overseas must await another day…”

The suit had been brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in August.

Following the granting of the government’s motion to dismiss the case, Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the ACLU, said, “If the court’s ruling is correct, the government has unreviewable authority to carry out the targeted killing of any American, anywhere, whom the president deems to be a threat to the nation.”

He added, “It would be difficult to conceive of a proposition more inconsistent with the Constitution or more dangerous to American liberty.”

Jonathan Manes, a legal fellow with the National Security Project of the ACLU Foundation, told IPS, “The court has drastically limited who can come into court to challenge a targeted killing before the fact. That said, if a targeted person is killed, the targeted person’s estate could probably try to bring a wrongful death action after the fact.”

“The trouble is that Judge Bates’s ruling suggests that courts should have no role in determining the lawfulness of a targeted killing even after the fact – for example in a wrongful death lawsuit – even if the victim is a U.S. citizen,” he said.

“According to Judge Bates, the rules governing targeted killing of citizens can be written and applied in secret, with no independent checks at all. We reject the idea that the president has such a sweeping power over the lives and deaths of citizens abroad,” he said.

The ACLU and CCR were retained by Nasser Al-Aulaqi to bring a lawsuit in connection with the government’s decision to authorise the targeted killing of his son, U.S. citizen Anwar Al-Aulaqi.

The lawsuit asked the court to rule that, outside the context of armed conflict, the government can carry out the targeted killing of a U.S. citizen only as a last resort to address an imminent threat to life or physical safety. The lawsuit also asked the court to order the government to disclose the legal standard it uses to place U.S. citizens on government kill lists.

Judge Bates asked but did not answer the troubling question, “How is it that judicial approval is required when the United States decides to target a U.S. citizen overseas for electronic surveillance, but that, according to defendants, judicial scrutiny is prohibited when the United States decides to target a U.S. citizen overseas for death?”

Meanwhile, A Yemeni judge ordered police on Saturday to capture “dead or alive” Anwar al-Awlaki, whom the U.S. government portrays as a radical Muslim cleric who has been linked to several terror plots in the U.S. He has been tied to the cargo plane bomb plot last month, the Detroit underwear bomber, and may be connected to the attempted Times Square bombing.

Other human rights organisations are also weighing in on this controversial legal battle. Human Rights Watch (HRW) called on President Barack Obama to “immediately clarify [the government’s] legal rationale for targeted killings”.

In a letter to President Obama, HRW Executive Director Kenneth Roth said the government “should answer the fundamental questions of how his administration determines whether a person may be targeted”.

He added, “Such operations may be lawful under certain circumstances, but absent clear boundaries, they will inevitably violate international law and set a dangerous precedent for abusive regimes around the globe.”

The Obama administration dramatically expanded the use of targeted killings outside of traditional battlefields following the attacks of Sep. 11, 2001. Many of these killings are conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency through the use of unmanned combat aircraft systems, or drones.

The U.S. government asserts that it has authority under international law to use lethal force outside of clearly defined war zones because it is engaged in a global armed conflict with al Qaeda and associated forces.

Roth’s letter to Obama said the “U.S. government claims that the entire world is a battleground in which the laws of war are applicable undermine the protections of international law. This discredited notion invites the application of lethal force by other countries in situations where the U.S. would strongly object to its use.”

HRW called on Obama to “provide greater clarity on how the US government determines when a targeted killing in an armed conflict situation meets the requirements of distinction and proportionality under the laws of war and the measures it is taking to minimise civilian harm.”

Last week’s release of 900 pages of U.S. government documents dealing with the implementation of the nation’s primary surveillance law suggests that the government has been systematically violating the privacy rights of U.S. citizens.

How many citizens is unclear, since the documents were extensively redacted. The previously secret internal documents were obtained through a court battle by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

The government declined to disclose the number of citizens who had their telephone calls, e-mail, or other communications intercepted under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Amendments Act of 2008. They also declined to discuss any specific abuses, the ACLU said.

The 900 documents were delivered in keeping with a previously agreed schedule.

Alex Abdo, a senior attorney with the ACLU, told IPS, “For two years now, the government has had the authority to engage in the dragnet and unconstitutional surveillance of Americans’ communications with little to no oversight of its actual surveillance decisions.”

“This week’s disclosures confirm that the government repeatedly abused even the minimal, and unconstitutional, limits set out in this new surveillance authority,” he added. “Although we know that abuses occurred, the government has withheld all critical details about them.”

The lawsuit seeks to enforce a November 2009 Freedom of Information Act request for records related to the government’s interpretation and implementation of the FAA, including reports and assessments mandated by the law concerning how the FAA is being used, how many citizens are affected and what safeguards are in place to prevent abuse of privacy rights.

Prior to the government’s release of last week’s 900 pages, it had not released any of the records requested. The lawsuit alleges that the requested records are needed to enable informed public debate about whether the FAA – which expires in 2012 – should be repealed, amended or extended.

In July 2008, the ACLU and the NYCLU filed a landmark lawsuit to stop the government from conducting surveillance under the FAA on behalf of a broad coalition of attorneys and human rights, labour, legal and media organisations whose work requires them to engage in sensitive and sometimes privileged telephone and e-mail communications with colleagues, clients, journalistic sources, witnesses, experts, foreign government officials and victims of human rights abuses located outside the United States.

A district court dismissed the case, ruling that the plaintiffs could not challenge the secret surveillance law because they could not prove that their own communications had been monitored under it.

The ACLU and NYCLU appealed that ruling and have asked a federal appeals court to reinstate the case. The groups argued that, because of the secret nature of the FAA, the law may never be subject to judicial review at all if Americans are prohibited from challenging it unless they can show that their own communications have been collected.

“It is unfortunate that once again we have to sue over the secrecy that continues to shroud so much of our government’s work,” said NYCLU Associate Legal Director Christopher Dunn. “While we have seen recent improvements in transparency, much more remains to be done before we have a truly open government.”

Attorneys on the case are Alex Abdo and Jameel Jaffer of the ACLU and Dunn and Arthur Eisenberg of the New York Civil Liberties Union.

However, routine oversight reports carried out by the government itself acknowledge ongoing violations of legal parametres and civil rights that limit when citizens are targeted and minimise the amount of data collected.

As noted by the Washington Post, “The documents note that although oversight teams did not find evidence of ‘intentional or willful attempts to violate or circumvent the law…certain types of compliance incidents continue to occur’, as a March 2009 report stated.”

The Post goes on to assert that the unredacted portions of the reports refer only elliptically to what those actions were, but the March 2009 report stated that, “information collected as a result of these incidents has been or is being purged from data repositories.”

ACLU attorneys say violations of the FISA Amendments Act’s “targeting and minimisation procedures…likely means that citizens and residents’ communications were either being improperly collected or targeted or improperly retained and disseminated.”

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 is an Act of Congress which prescribes procedures for the physical and electronic surveillance and collection of “foreign intelligence information” between “foreign powers” and “agents of foreign powers” – which may include U.S. citizens and permanent residents suspected of being engaged in espionage and violating U.S. law on territory under United States control. The act was amended in 2001 by the USA PATRIOT Act, primarily to include terrorism on behalf of groups that are not specifically backed by a foreign government. Lawmakers amended the 1978 law again in 2008 to “broaden and clarify legal authorities” after the Sep. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and advances in internet communications prompted fresh concerns over expanded surveillance powers.

The ACLU, human rights activists and other parties sued, charging that the new law is unconstitutional, violating the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of unreasonable searches.

A U.S. district judge dismissed the case, but the ACLU appealed the verdict, which is still pending. Meantime, the ACLU has pursued the related Freedom of Information Act request.

On Monday, Dec. 6, a district court in Texas will be asked – for the first time in that U.S. state’s history – to decide whether the death penalty is unconstitutional based on the “disproportionately high risk of wrongful convictions” in Texas.

John Edward Green, Jr., the defendant in Texas v. Green, is charged in the fatal shooting of a 34-year-old Houston woman during a 2008 robbery. He has not yet been convicted, but prosecutors say they would seek the death penalty.

Green’s attorneys have filed a pretrial motion in Harris County District Court. Judge Kevin Fine will hear arguments that the death penalty is unconstitutional because it creates an unacceptable risk of executing innocent people

Green’s attorneys contend that a number of factors in Texas’s legal system increase the risk of innocent people being executed.

According to the defence, these include a lack of safeguards to protect against mistaken eyewitness identification, faulty forensic evidence, incompetent lawyers at the appellate level, failures to guard against false confessions, and a history of racial discrimination in jury selection.

Paul Cates, director of communications for the Innocence Project, told IPS, “The Innocence Project will be participating in the hearing specifically to put on evidence about the cases of Claude Jones and Cameron Todd Willingham. Both Jones and Willingham were executed in Texas.”

He said, “In the case of Claude Jones, DNA evidence has proven that critical physical evidence (a hair sample) used to place him at the scene of the crime did not belong to Jones. Cameron Todd Willingham was executed even though a prominent arson scientist notified the Governor and the appeals court prior to his execution that the critical testimony of the arson investigator was based on outdated arson science.”

Both Ernest Ray Willis and Cameron Todd Willingham were convicted of murder by arson and sentenced to death on the basis of junk fire science. Mr. Willingham is dead and Mr. Willis is alive — and free — because a pro bono law firm took his case.

The Innocence Project has been responsible for freeing numerous prisoners from death row, largely through its use of DNA evidence.

Maurie Levin, a law professor at the University of Texas and an expert on capital punishment, said she would not be surprised if Judge Kevin Fine ruled the death penalty to be unconstitutional in Texas.

“I would think that Judge Fine would have substantial basis in the evidence that I’m aware of that would lead to a conclusion that the Texas death penalty is unconstitutional as applied,” she told the Huffington Post.

Retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, writing in the New York Review of Books this week, said he now thinks the death penalty is unconstitutional.

Since 1976, 12 people have been exonerated from death row in Texas out of 139 nationwide, and four study commissions set up by the Texas government have formally recognised the serious risks of wrongful convictions there.

Out of the 464 people executed in Texas, about 70 percent have been minorities, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

The defence motion focuses on the factors they say increase the risk of wrongful convictions and executions in Texas, including: lack of safeguards to protect against mistaken eyewitness identification, which has been a factor in 75 percent of DNA exonerations nationwide; failures to guard against false confessions, which has been a factor in 25 percent of DNA exonerations nationwide; use of notoriously unreliable informant testimony, which has been a factor in nearly half of wrongful murder convictions nationwide, and racial discrimination in jury selection.

At next week’s hearing, expert witnesses will testify about “the numerous flaws that leave Texas’ system riddled with errors, inherently unreliable, and unconstitutional as applied,” Green’s lawyers say.

They add that the clemency process fails in its role as the last safeguard against executing the innocent. Claude Jones was executed in 2000 based on false evidence. During the clemency review, then-Governor Bush was not informed that Jones had requested DNA testing that might have exonerated him.

Ten years after Jones’s execution, a DNA test showed that the hair sample at the crime scene was not his.

Four study commissions set up by the three branches of Texas government have formally recognised the serious risks of wrongful convictions, but virtually nothing has been done to fix the problem.

Nationwide, since 1976, 139 people have been exonerated from death row. Twelve of them were in Texas.

The 35 U.S. states that practice the death penalty have executed 1,233 prisoners since 1976. In 2010, executions will number 47, down from 52 a year earlier. Some 3,261 prisoners are currently on death row.

States executing the most prisoners since 1976 were Texas (466) and Virginia (108). One hundred thirty-eight prisoners have been freed from death row, largely as a result of new DNA evidence.

Some of the United States’ leading human rights organisations are concerned for the safety of human rights advocates in countries with repressive regimes, where disclosure by Wikileaks could put them in deadly harm.

Groups including Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Human Rights First (HRF) believe it would be a mistake for Wikileaks to publish the names of foreign human rights activists and organisations that receive support from the U.S. government.

For that reason, HRF’s President and CEO Elisa Massimino wrote to Wikileaks head Julian Assange several days before last Sunday’s document release.

She said publishing the names of “individuals or organisations from repressive or authoritarian countries – such as Iran, China, Russia, Cuba etc. – is extremely reckless as it will increase their risk of persecution, imprisonment and violence.”

“Human rights advocates in repressive and authoritarian countries face many dangers, as governments in those countries regularly harass, mistreat and imprison them,” the letter said. “Not least among these dangers is being charged with receiving foreign support or ‘cooperating’ with foreign governments, as that can make them even more vulnerable to attack by governments and their agents.”

She said, “At the same time, many activists in repressive countries have very few options for financial support, as avenues of domestic support are effectively blocked. To protect themselves from the increased risk that comes with foreign support, many activists remain quiet about it.”

Massimino said, “We support freedom of expression and greater transparency in government. Yet, in releasing the information in the circumstances we describe above, the very real dangers to the health and well-being of human rights activists would outweigh the benefits.”

She urged Assange to remove any identifying information of human rights activists from the documents that Wikileaks will be releasing.

Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, confirms that “no names of human rights activists have been disclosed in any of the documents released by Wikileaks, nor have any such activists been put in danger.”

“In the recent disclosure, Wikileaks has only posted cables that were reviewed by the news organisations and in some cases redacted,” Ratner told IPS.

“The news organisations showed them to the Pentagon and agreed to some of the government’s suggested redactions. The U.S. claimed in the past that the release of the documents could endanger people, but now concedes that they have no knowledge that anyone was killed as a result of the prior releases,” he said.

In a related development, CNN is reporting that the U.S. State Department has offered to provide protection to human rights activists who may be in jeopardy after their identities were revealed in the latest publication of diplomatic cables by the website Wikileaks.

That protection may include the temporary relocation of some people, the department said.

Spokesman P.J. Crowley said the State Department has reached out to human rights advocates around the world to warn them of the potential fallout from the publication by Wikileaks of diplomatic cables that may contain their names or information about their organisations that could put them at risk.

“We have great concern,” Crowley said. “There are clearly sources identified in these documents, particularly in authoritarian states, that have talked to us and we believe the release of these cables definitely puts real lives at risk. We have taken steps, in anticipation of this release.”

Crowley said U.S. embassies have been in touch with both civil society and human rights activists.

“We have seen the negative, sometimes deadly ramifications for those Afghans identified as working for or sympathising with international forces,” they wrote to Assange, according to the Wall Street Journal, which cites an anonymous source.

“We strongly urge your volunteers and staff to analyse all documents to ensure that those containing identifying information are taken down or redacted.”

*Replaces the story “Rights Groups Divided over Wikileaks Revelations” moved on Nov 30, 2010.

A diplomatic cable published by Wikileaks corroborates images released earlier by Amnesty International (AI) showing that the U.S. military carried out a missile strike in south Yemen in December 2009 that killed dozens of local residents, including women and children, the rights group says.

In the secret cable, written in January 2010, Yemen’s President Ali Abdullah Saleh is reported to have assured U.S. General David Petraeus that his government would “continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours”.

According to the cable, this prompted Yemeni Deputy Prime Minister Rashad al-‘Alimi “to joke that he had just ‘lied’ by telling Parliament that the bombs in Arhab, Abyan, and Shebwa were American-made but deployed by the ROYG [Republic of Yemen Government]”.

Amnesty International is calling on the U.S. government to investigate the serious allegations of the use of drones by U.S. forces for targeted killings of individuals in Yemen and clarify the chain of command and rules governing the use of such drones.

Tom Parker, Amnesty’s policy director for terrorism, counter-terrorism and human rights, says that AI wrote to the Defence Department last May regarding the drone strike in Yemen. He said Amnesty raised a range of questions regarding that action, but never received a response.

“What we know, and what the Wikileaks cable confirms, is that Yemen clearly lied to its people and to the world, and the United States thereby avoided a response,” he told IPS.

An alleged al Qaeda training camp at al-Ma’jalah, Abyan, was hit by a cruise missile on Dec. 17, 2009. A Yemeni parliamentary inquiry found that 41 local residents, including 14 women and 21 children, and 14 alleged al Qaeda members were killed in the attack.

In the Jan. 4 cable, Petraeus is recorded as saying that the attack had caused the deaths of “only” three “civilians”.

Amnesty International provided the media with photographs of the aftermath of the Abyan strike in June this year, including remnants of U.S.-sourced cluster munitions and the Tomahawk cruise missiles used to deliver them.

The organisation had requested information from the Pentagon about the involvement of U.S. forces in the al-Ma’jalah attack, and what precautions may have been taken to minimise deaths and injuries.

The U.S. government did not respond to Amnesty International, but a press report the day after the images were released quoted a Pentagon spokesman as saying that the U.S. declined to comment on the strike and that questions on operations against al Qaeda should be posed to the Yemeni government.

“There must be an immediate investigation into the dozens of deaths of local residents in the Abyan air strike, including into the extent of U.S. involvement,” said Philip Luther, AI’s deputy director for the Middle East and North Africa. “Those responsible for unlawful killings must be brought to justice.”

The “Arhab” strike referred to in the secret cable was carried out on Dec. 17, 2009 and the “Shebwa” strike on Dec. 24, 2009. The Yemeni government insisted at the time that their forces had carried out all three attacks, which were meant to target al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

In the leaked cable, President Saleh is said to have suggested that targeted aerial attacks were preferable to those by cruise missiles, which were “not very accurate”, and to have expressed anxiety about the level of civilian casualties caused.

President Saleh agreed to have U.S. fixed-wing bombers circle outside Yemeni territory ready to engage targets “should actionable intelligence become available”, according to the cable, and also requested that Washington provide 12 armed helicopters and train and equip three new Republican Guard brigades, totaling 9,000 soldiers.

He complained that Yemeni forces had not yet received the necessary training to operate 17 “Iraqi” light armored vehicles provided by the U.S. government in 2008.

The leaked cable says that U.S. security assistance to Yemen would substantially increase from $67 million in 2009 to $150 million in 2010, including $45 million to equip and train an aviation regiment under the Yemeni Special Operations Forces.

U.S. officials told President Saleh that two fully equipped 87-foot patrol boats destined for the Yemeni coastguard were under construction and would arrive in Yemen within a year.

U.S. forces are also alleged to have used unmanned aerial drones in Yemen in efforts to kill suspected leading al Qaeda members. An attack in May 2010 which apparently killed in error a key mediator between the Yemeni government and al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula was said by some sources to have been carried out from an unmanned drone.

Yemen’s Foreign Affairs Minister later said the government would investigate whether drones were used in the attack and, if so, whether they were used by Yemeni security forces or others, such as the U.S.

Amnesty International is not aware that any outcome to the investigation has been disclosed.

As immigrant advocate groups held marches, demonstrations and hunger strikes across the U.S. and feverishly lobbied lawmakers in Washington, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, announced he would file a motion Wednesday to permit the Senate to take up the DREAM Act, thus setting up a showdown over the controversial immigration bill.

The DREAM Act would provide thousands of young people with a path to citizenship, which could be granted to those who were brought to the U.S. when they were children and graduated from U.S. high schools. The requirement for citizenship would be earning a college degree or volunteering to serve in the U.S. military for two years.

The faith community is among constituencies advocating for passage of the law during the current so-called “lame duck” session of Congress.

Protestant, Catholic, Muslim and Jewish leaders and organisations are ramping up the pressure on their senators and representatives to vote ‘yes’ on this legislation, which could come to the Senate floor as soon as this week.

On Wednesday, the faith community plans to bury Capitol Hill in telephone calls in support of the act and hold vigils and other public events in numerous states across the U.S.

In a telephone news conference, Rabbi Jack Moline, director of public policy for the Rabbinical Assembly and rabbi of Agudas Achim Congregation in Alexandria, said, “Every faith community in this country includes young men and women who are thoroughly American in everything but name, and every one of those communities understands the need to affirm in law what is true in fact.”

He added that DREAM “can make that happen and is an important step.” He asked for the active support of Virginia Senators James Webb and Mark Warner.

But passage promises to be an uphill fight. For example, Democratic Sens. Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Mark Pryor of Arkansas said they will not vote for cloture on the bill.

But Republican Sens. Dick Lugar of Indiana and Bob Bennett, who was defeated in his Utah primary race, have signaled they will vote for the act. The bill’s supporters are counting on a handful of other moderate Republicans.

Sen. Maria Cantwell, a Washington Democrat who is up for reelection in 2012, also predicted that Republicans “could take a hit at the polls if they continue to oppose immigration reform.”

Passage is still considered a long shot, but more likely now than next year when Republicans will have a majority in the House and increased strength in the Senate.

The measure’s supporters have also been kept busy attempting to refute what they call the “lies and misinformation” being circulated by anti-immigration advocates.

For example, the measure’s critics contend that defeating the act must be, in the words of Iowa Republican U.S. Rep. Steve King, “a top priority before it provides an uncontrollable citizenship path to thousands of illegal immigrants.”

“This is an out-of-control immigration path,” King said. “We need to fence that in and limit it to direct family members.”

A rebuttal came from Margaret Stock, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and an adjunct professor at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

“These are bizarre statements by Rep. King. He is apparently unfamiliar with Title 8 of the U.S. Code,” she told IPS.

“DREAM Act beneficiaries get conditional green cards, not U.S. citizenship,” she noted. “By law, a person with a conditional green card can only sponsor his/her unmarried children and his/her spouse. That’s been the law for decades.”

She also de-bunked another myth surrounding the act. “There are no immigrant visas at all for ‘extended family’ members, whatever that means,” she said.

To provide additional ammunition for the bill’s supporters, the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) released a new study, “Ineffective and Unjust: Our Broken Immigration System.”

The study says, “As Muslim Americans presenting a faith- based perspective to one of our nation’s biggest public policy challenges, we look to the Qur’an for moral guidance. In order to best satisfy the public interest, referred as maslaha in Islamic thought, we believe there are four values guiding our comprehensive immigration reform strategy. They are: Human Dignity, The Rule of Law, Enforcement, and Fiscal Responsibility.” The study says, “Those who argue against earned legalisation believe it rewards undocumented individuals at the expense of those waiting to come legally, and argue it may become a magnet for future flows of unauthorised migrants. Others still, argue immigration harms native-born American workers’ wages and job prospects.”

The study says this perspective “reflects legitimate concerns” but fails to take into account several important points. “First, it misidentifies the root causes for unauthorised immigration. As noted earlier, the current legal immigration system is characterised by unrealistic quotas and bureaucratic inefficiencies. This creates perverse incentives for undocumented immigration. Additionally, legal enforcement has been insufficient and ineffective.” “Second, it ignores the existing reality of 11 million undocumented immigrants living and working in the United States. Mass deportation is extremely costly.”

The study was carried out by Alejandro J. Beutel, MPAC’s government liaison, Aziza Hasan, southern California government relations director, and Maher Hathout, an MPAC senior advisor.

After first resisting the efforts of human rights and legal advocates, the British government has now backed down and placed an immediate ban on the export of lethal injection drugs to be used in U.S. executions.

The well-known legal charity, Reprieve, has been campaigning to secure a ban on the export of sodium thiopental to the U.S. for execution purposes for the past month. On Monday, the British government’s secretary of state of business innovation and skills agreed to impose such an order.

The U.S. has run short of the drug, which is used in the execution protocol.

Reprieve said, “Originally, Secretary Vince Cable refused to act for two reasons – the suggestion that if Britain did not provide the drugs someone else would, and the notion that sodium thiopental was exported to the U.S. for medical purposes.”

“The first reason was unworthy of a response – if something is immoral, it does not matter that someone else will commit the offence,” it said in a statement.

The legal charity and one of the UK’s leading law firms, Leigh Day, say they “proved that no sodium thiopental was imported from Europe to the U.S. for any medicinal use, and that it would be illegal to do so under the regulations promulgated by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA).”

The charity added, “To their credit, Archimedes Pharma, which may unwittingly have been the source of the drugs used to execute prisoners, did not oppose the ban. Furthermore, the pharmaceutical company actively supported the effort to prove that the drugs were not legitimately imported into the US. ”

Reprieve Director Clive Stafford Smith said, “There is urgent work to do. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation – so named, notwithstanding their plan to execute a number of prisoners – expects to receive enough drugs to kill 86 people this week, perhaps as early as today, probably again from Britain. The British government must take active and urgent steps to prevent this from happening, and to make up for the delay in imposing a ban.”

But Stafford Smith had kind words for the manufacturer. “Let me congratulate Archimedes Pharma for doing the right thing as well. This should be a lesson to other companies that purport to be ethical – words are not enough. You have to take action.”

Despite the shortage of one of the drugs in the execution protocol, death sentences continue in the U.S.

On Oct. 25, Jeffery Landrigan was executed in Arizona using drugs supplied by a British company, despite a plea for clemency from the judge who sentenced him to death.

Reprieve said, “The Arizona consignment was sufficient for four executions, so the drugs sourced in Britain will contribute to three more deaths.”

The following week the U.S. lawyers for Edmund Zagorski contacted Reprieve with a plea for help: Tennessee was seeking to purchase the drugs to kill Zagorski, apparently from the same British company.

On Oct. 28, Reprieve and Leigh Day contacted the government and asked for emergency measures to be taken to avoid British complicity in Zagorski’s execution.

On Nov. 1, Cable responded that the British government would take no such step, arguing that sodium thiopental had medicinal uses in the U.S. The following day, Leigh Day filed a judicial review.

The British government opposed an immediate and temporary export ban although the main pharmaceutical company involved, Archimedes Pharma, did not. No such order was issued, in part because the Tennessee authorities had said that they would secure the drugs on Nov. 25 at the earliest.

Reprieve said, “It transpired that the Tennessee authorities had deceived everyone, and had already received the drugs on Oct. 26. The source remains secret to date, but may well have been the UK,” Reprieve said.

Ed Zagorski is scheduled to die on Jan. 11, 2011. He has been on death row in Tennessee for almost 27 years, and Reprieve says he has been a model prisoner.

He protests his innocence, and an independent assessment from Physicians for Human Rights concluded that he had been “tortured” into implicating himself. The original trial prosecutor offered a life sentence, with eligibility for parole – evincing a clear view that the death penalty was not a necessary punishment.

Meanwhile, other desperate states sought sodium thiopental from abroad. California expects to receive enough to kill 86 prisoners this week. Oklahoma is trying to use phenobarbital, the drug used to kill animals, as an alternative.

The 35 U.S. states that practice the death penalty have executed 1,233 prisoners since 1976. In 2010, executions will number 47, down from 52 a year earlier.

Some 3,261 prisoners are currently on death row. States executing the most prisoners since 1976 were Texas (466) and Virginia (108). One hundred thirty-eight prisoners have been freed from death row, largely as a result of new DNA evidence.

Wikileaks’ spectacular paper dump of U.S. diplomatic cables may not yet have produced any blockbusters, but many of the restricted or secret documents released to the world on Sunday have served to peel back the scabs of serious injuries inflicted by the administration of George W. Bush.

For example, the documents reveal that U.S. officials, including the U.S. ambassador, William R. Timken Jr., sharply warned Germany in 2007 not to enforce arrest warrants for Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officers involved in a bungled operation in which an innocent German citizen with the same name as a suspected militant was mistakenly kidnapped and held for months in Afghanistan.

A senior U.S. diplomat tells a German official “that our intention was not to threaten Germany, but rather to urge that the German government weigh carefully at every step of the way the implications for relations with the U.S.”

Observers are characterising that as the thinnest of veiled threats.

The German victim of mistaken identity is Khalid El-Masri, a German citizen. In a lawsuit brought by El-Masry, he alleged that he was kidnapped in 2004, “rendered” to Albania and then to Afghanistan, where he was falsely held by the CIA for several months – which the CIA acknowledges – and was beaten, drugged, and subjected to various other inhumane activity while in captivity.

In 2005, the American Civil Liberties Union sued former CIA Director George Tenet and three U.S.-based aviation corporations that owned or operated the aircraft used by the CIA to render El-Masri to Afghanistan. The lawsuit charged Tenet and others with violating the U.S. constitution and universal human rights laws.

In May 2006, El-Masri’s court case was dismissed based on invocation of the “state secrets privilege” by the CIA. The U.S. District Court dismissed his case because, according to the court, the simple fact of holding proceedings would jeopardise state secrets, as claimed by the CIA.

On Mar. 2, 2007, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit upheld the lower court’s decision. On Oct. 9, 2007, the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of the Fourth Circuit’s decision, letting the doctrine of state secrets privilege stand.

Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy of the Federation of American Scientists, told IPS, “There are innocent individuals who have been swept up in U.S. government counterterrorism operations, wrongly detained, ‘rendered’ surreptitiously to foreign countries, subjected to extreme physical and mental stress, or otherwise wronged.”

“In some cases, like those of persons such as Maher Arar and Khaled el-Masri, efforts to seek legal remedies have been blocked by the government’s invocation of the state secrets privilege,” he added. “As a result, the alleged abuses committed in such cases remain unresolved, and there is no way for the affected individuals to be made whole.”

Thwarted by U.S. Courts, El-Masri took his case to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). The IACHR accepted a petition filed by the American Civil Liberties Union.

It asks the IACHR to declare that the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” programme violates the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man, to find the U.S. responsible for violating El-Masri’s rights under that declaration, and to recommend that the U.S. publicly acknowledge and apologise for its role in El-Masri’s forcible disappearance, detention and torture.

At that time, Steven Watt, senior staff attorney with the ACLU Human Rights Programme, told IPS, “This petition gives the U.S. yet another opportunity to account for one of the most heinous practices of the George W. Bush administration.”

“Our government kidnapped an innocent man, tortured him and then, adding insult to injury, denied him his day in court through bogus claims of harm to national security. President Obama has often stated that he wants to look forward, not backward. Engagement in this commission process will be a means of putting those words into action and revealing the truth to El-Masri and the American people,” he said.

The Wikileaks dump revealed a 2007 State Department document showing that the U.S. “warned” the German government against making any moves to secure the arrests of the CIA agents responsible for the kidnapping, saying any such move would have “repercussions” to the relationship between the two nations.

German officials, according to the document, conceded that they understood the possible diplomatic consequences but also warned that given the outcry from the German media, their options were limited. The U.S. admonished them to consider the “political context” of the kidnapping of the innocent man.

Despite the warnings, the German government did issue Interpol arrest warrants for CIA officials involved in the kidnapping, though they dropped them a few months later.

Democratic lawmakers will attempt to summon up their waning power by using the so-called “lame duck” session of Congress to pass what will likely be the closest they will get to comprehensive immigration reform.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid will shepherd remaining members of their dwindling flock to pass the DREAM Act, which provides a six- year conditional path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. by their parents before they were 16 years of age.

In order to qualify, an undocumented immigrant has either to obtain a college degree or serve two years in the military.

Despite heavy support from immigration, civil rights, business and labour groups, some conservative Republican legislators – including some who were original co-sponsors of the legislation – are continuing to brand the measure as an “amnesty”.

Supporters of the bill say this is merely an attempt to scare the public.

The measure’s critics contend that defeating the act must be, in the words of Iowa Republican U.S. Rep. Steve King, “a top priority before it provides an uncontrollable citizenship path to thousands of illegal immigrants.”

The right-wing publication Newsmax writes, “On the surface, the act would provide a road to citizenship for students who are illegal immigrants.” But it quotes the conservative Rep. King as saying “it would allow students to sponsor their extended families on that path.”

“We calculated that a single individual could bring in 357 people on a family reunification plan before we ran out of room on our spreadsheet,” King claimed.

Outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi may be able to push the act through the lame-duck session of Congress, King told Newsmax. But Republicans should be able to use the filibuster to kill it in the Senate, he says.

A “lame duck” session of Congress in the U.S. occurs whenever one Congress meets after its successor is elected, but before the successor’s term begins. The old Congress returned to work Nov. 15 for a week, then recessed for the Thanksgiving holiday.

Legislators returned to work on Monday. Representatives and senators elected or reelected in the mid-term elections just concluded will not take office until January 2011.

Meanwhile, efforts to shore up support for the legislation continue to strengthen.

The measure now has the support of the Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, and a wide range of organisations and individuals concerned with the political, economic and social implications of immigration reform.

“I supported the DREAM Act when I was governor. I support it now…It seems to me that that DREAM Act is a good piece of legislation and a good idea,” Napolitano told Illinois Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin in congressional testimony.

Travis Packer, a policy research assistant with the American Immigration Council, says the “tired effort to pit immigrants against native born is not only destructive, but has no basis in fact.”

“It also ignores the economic benefits that come from legalising a group of talented, hardworking individuals who want nothing more than to contribute to America and repay the country for the opportunities they’ve been given,” he said in a statement.

Alejandro J. Beutel, government liaison for the Muslim Public Affairs Council, told IPS, “Passing the DREAM Act is in our nation’s best moral and economic interests. Doing so will ensure America remains the world’s shining beacon of individual liberty and prosperity.”

And, according to the Economist, “The DREAM Act sends the message that although American immigration law in effect tries to make water run uphill, we are not monsters. It says that we will not hobble the prospects of young people raised and schooled in America just because we were so perverse to demand that their parents wait in a line before a door that never opens.”

The Act “signals that we were once a nation of immigrants, and even if we have become too fearful and small to properly honor that noble legacy, America in some small way remains a land of opportunity,” the magazine wrote.

In a related development, the California Supreme Court unanimously ruled last week that students who attend at least three years of high school in California and graduate are eligible for in-state tuition rates at California public colleges and universities, regardless of their immigration status.

The court found that federal law did not bar California from offering tuition equality to students. California is one of 10 states with similar laws on the books.

DREAM Act supporters say the legislation would clarify what the California Supreme Court recognised: that federal law does not bar states from making the policy choice to afford students equal access to education.

Egypt’s authoritarian government ramped up its crackdown on journalists and opposition politicians ahead of the Nov. 28 parliamentary elections and rebuffed a U.S. call for international observers to monitor “free and fair” balloting.

At the same time, the U.S. and its principal Middle East ally appeared to be headed for a rhetorical brawl over Egypt’s alleged religious discrimination.

“Egypt is capable of monitoring the upcoming polls to prove to the entire world we are able to manage completely impartial elections,” Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif told journalists.

According to press reports, he said, “It is as if the United States has turned into a caretaker of how Egyptian society should conduct its own politics.”

Some 600 candidates from the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) party have been arrested and 250 remain in custody. The MB, whose candidates must run as “independents” because it is not recognised as a political party, controls about 20 percent of the seats in Parliament. It claims that some political parties have done deals with the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) to exclude Brotherhood candidates from the elections.

The NDP electoral platform includes such objectives as combating poverty and corruption, raising the standard of living, working towards social justice and strengthening national security. Critics charge that President Hosni Mubarak, 82, has announced similar goals each time there is an election, but little has actually changed.

The NDP is expected to maintain majority control in the 518- seat People’s Assembly for the new, five-year term. Mubarak is expected to run again for the presidency next year.

The U.S. has been seen by some observers as slow to speak out forcefully regarding the election. But last week State Department spokesman Philip Crowley told reporters, “The United States remains committed to supporting free and impartial elections in Egypt,” holding the Egyptian government to its own commitment to “fair and transparent elections”.

Crowley called on Egypt to ensure peaceful political gatherings, unhindered voter education and participation campaigns, as well as balanced media coverage for all candidates.

But some election observers found it significant that these announcements came from relatively mid-level officials rather than U.S. President Barack Obama.

Michele Dunne, a former State Department Middle East specialist and analyst with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the elections pose major challenges.

“The signs are not very positive for having free elections,” she said. “There have been a lot of steps that the Egyptian government has taken recently to cut down the size of opposition, to diminish the number of opposition candidates who can run, to encumber their freedom to campaign, to control media coverage of the elections and prevent the opposition from using technological means like text messages and so forth to mobilise for the elections.”

Meanwhile, government security apparatus continued its political persecution of journalists.

An Egyptian criminal court began the trial of an opposition reporter accused of libeling Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit. The minister had filed a complaint alleging that he was insulted in an article in the independent daily Shorouk last May.

And Reporters Without Borders condemned blogger Ahmed Hassan Basiouny’s trial by court martial, and called for the immediate withdrawal of the charges against him. He is the second blogger to face a court martial in Egypt.

Basiouny is being prosecuted for creating a Facebook page in 2009 that offered advice and information to young people thinking of enlisting in the Egyptian army. He is charged with disseminating defence secrets online and “disclosing information about the Egyptian armed forces”.

In a new report, ‘Shouting slogans into the wind’, Amnesty International says, “The rise in the number of voices calling for reform has been met with increasing repression by the authorities, using the very emergency powers that many Egyptians have been urging them to abolish. Many such critics, in fact, have faced arrest, detention, prosecution on trumped-up criminal charges and unfair trials.”

In developments relating to alleged religious discrimination in Egypt, the State Department released its annual report on religious freedom in the world and outlined several problematic areas in Egypt. The report described ways in which religious minorities like Coptic Christians, Shia, and Baha’i face unfair institutional and legal difficulties in addition to individual discrimination.

“The status of respect for religious freedom by the government remained poor, unchanged from the previous year,” the 2010 report said.

Meanwhile, 10 houses owned by Copts in the village of Al- Nawahid in Qena province, some 465 kilometers south of Cairo, were burned down when rumours circulated that a Coptic resident was having an affair with a Muslim woman.

Last year in Qena, a Coptic man was accused of kidnapping and raping a 12-year-old Muslim girl. The alleged assault led to widespread protests by the Muslim community and increased tensions between the two religious groups, which culminated in the murder of six Copts and one Muslim security guard at a church on Jan. 6.

Coptic Christians make up about 10 percent of Egypt’s population of 80 million. Copts and Muslims generally live in peace, though tension and violence occasionally flare up.

Human rights groups say attacks on Copts are on the rise, underscoring the government’s failure to address chronic sectarian strains in a society where religious radicalism is gaining ground.

On Saturday, the government dismissed the complaints from the United States. It said Washington has no right to hand down judgments.

“The report is rejected on principle because it has been issued by a party which has no right to make such an evaluation,” the foreign ministry spokesman said in a statement in reaction to the State Department’s report. The government insists Christians enjoy the same rights as Muslims.

While U.S. immigration authorities are “understandably eager to trumpet the overall number” of people they deport, close to one in three deportations recommended by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is being rejected by immigration courts, according to an analysis of case-by-case government data.

During the last three months of FY 2010, the rejection rate of ICE requests for deportation was 31 percent. This turndown rate is up from what it was – one out of every four – 12 months earlier.

For all of FY 2010, some courts turned down ICE removal requests more than half of the time. Among them were the immigration courts in New York City (70 percent turned down), Oregon (63 percent turned down), Los Angeles (63 percent turned down), Miami (59 percent turned down) and Philadelphia (55 percent turned down).

In criminal prosecutions, the typical conviction rate in recent years for immigration cases is 96 percent.

These findings are based on analysis of recent information obtained by the Transactional Records Access Clearing House at Syracuse University (TRAC) under the Freedom of Information Act.

Attorney Alison Parker, who directs the U.S. domestic civil rights programme for Human Rights Watch, told IPS, “ICE is under huge pressure to show that it is deporting the undocumented. As a result it is casting its net far too wide.”

“Secondly, the current law allows ICE to go after everyone – from turnstile-jumpers to serial killers. There are far too many turnstile-jumpers being deported,” she said. “ICE should concentrate its resources on people who have committed serious crimes.”

The analysis shows that in the fiscal year 2006-2010 period, unsuccessful ICE filings affected almost a quarter of a million individuals (246,721) who were not subject to deportation because they were entitled to reside in the United States. The count is even higher (313,244), however, if all other reasons given by the judges for not granting ICE removals and deportation are counted.

Lena Graber of the National Immigration Forum agrees that the TRAC analysis shows that ICE “pursues targets indiscriminately”.

“The growth in cases dismissed for having ‘no grounds for removal’ – from under five percent a few years ago to nearly 12 percent in 2010 – demonstrates that ICE is pursuing removal against people who should not be forced to go through proceedings at all,” she told IPS.

Graber pointed out that most dismissals occur in urban areas with large immigrant populations. “This is likely because the vast majority of people in removal proceedings are not represented by an attorney, but those in urban areas with large immigrant populations are the most likely to have access to immigration attorneys and particularly immigrant defense organisations and pro bono networks,” she said.

“This underscores the injustice of having most of our immigration detention centers in remote rural areas in the south, far from access to legal representation,” she added.

ICE has refused to release more detailed data to better explain the growing rejection rates and the possible reasons behind these shifts.

But TRAC suggests that one reason may be the “growing pressures to increase the volume of illegal immigrants the agency catches and removes from the country.” The Barack Obama administration has announced new priorities targeting aliens with particularly serious criminal records.

Other studies have shown that a large proportion of those deported to not have such criminal records, and in fact have been arrested for petty crimes and traffic violations. ICE has also focused increasing resources on new initiatives such as Secure Communities while de-emphasising large scale raids on businesses.

According to HRW’s Parker, ICE’s new priorities “have yet to be transformed into action”. She suggested that reform at ICE “requires a cultural change” from ICE’s predecessor, the Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS).

TRAC’s findings are based upon a detailed analysis of 3.4 million records covering each proceeding filed in the immigration courts for fiscal years 1998 through 2010.

During this past year, there has been little change in the makeup of judges serving on the court.

TRAC found that larger immigration courts regardless of the region of the country were seeing an increase in the rejection rates on ICE removal actions. The three courts that disposed of the largest number of cases during FY 2010 were in Los Angeles, New York and Miami.

TRAC concludes that “poor targeting that weakens the government is inefficient. In addition, however, poor targeting imposes real personal and financial burdens on the individuals who have been wrongfully selected for removal. It is unfair.”

The conviction of the first Guantanamo Bay detainee brought to New York for trial is triggering a wide range of reactions from politicians and legal experts.

That trial ended dramatically at the federal courthouse in Manhattan this week, with Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, 36, convicted of one count of conspiracy for his role in the 1998 terrorist bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, that killed 224 people, including 11 U.S. citizens. He was found not guilty on 284 other counts.

The verdict appeared to surprise everyone in the courtroom. The lone guilty verdict was declared on a conspiracy to destroy buildings and property of the United States by means of an explosive. However, Ghailani was found not guilty of conspiring to kill the people inside those buildings.

Despite the lopsided guilty-not guilty ratio, Ghailani nonetheless faces a mandatory 20-year prison term and, if the prosecutor prevails, a sentence of life imprisonment without parole.

Jonathan Hafetz, formerly with the American Civil Liberties Union and now a law professor at Seton Hall law school, told IPS he believes the Justice Department’s overall assessment was proven correct – that the government could win a conviction with a potentially heavy sentence even after the judge excluded evidence that might have linked Ghailani more directly to the embassy bombings because it was the product of torture.

Scott Horton, a constitutional scholar and a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine, told IPS, “No doubt some critics will argue that this is a reason for kangaroo courts which automatically convict anyone who is brought before them and which, in the eyes of the world will have no credibility.”

The prosecution “used torture to develop their case. The court applied the rule that has been in place since the mid- seventeenth century – it excluded the evidence they gained through torture,” he said.

“But in the end, Ghailani was convicted of the crimes as to which the government put forward good, untainted evidence, and acquitted on the balance. And that’s exactly the way the system is supposed to work.”

Holding terrorist trials in New York triggered major blowback after initial enthusiasm from New York Mayor Bloomberg and many members of Congress. It was argued that such “high profile” trials would tie up traffic in the City and make New York a target for terrorist attacks.

But the Ghailani trial went virtually unnoticed by New Yorkers, who went about their daily lives, largely unaware that such a trial was being held.

The Obama administration thought the Ghailani trial would demonstrate to critics that free and fair judicial proceedings could be held in federal civilian courts, as opposed to the military commissions convened at Guantanamo. That was to lay the groundwork for the trial of alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohamed, who was slated to be tried in federal civilian court.

But Obama’s critics now feel even more determined to keep these trials out of federal courts. And shortly they will be in a Republican majority in the House of Representatives, where newly appointed chairmen of key committees will attempt to scuttle Obama’s policy and make military commissions the default venue for trials of suspected terrorists.

That thrust will likely gain momentum with extreme right- winger Representative Peter King, Republican of New York, who is slated to become chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee in January. King said the Obama administration “should immediately abandon its ill-advised plan to try Guantánamo terrorists” in federal civilian courts.

“We must treat them as wartime enemies and try them in military commissions at Guantánamo,” he said.

Lamar Smith, Republican of Texas, will be the incoming Judiciary Committee chairman, and fellow Republican Pete Hoekstra of Michigan, the incoming chairman of the Intelligence Committee. Both men, like King, have denounced the use of civil courts to prosecute alleged terrorists.

But many legal experts say that convicting Ghailani on one count and exonerating him on so many others is a classic demonstration of the ability of federal civilian courts to follow the evidence and conduct fair trials.

Kevin R. Johnson, dean of the University of California at Davis law school, told IPS, “I think the verdict shows that the ordinary criminal justice system can effectively hear and decide terror cases like the Ghailiani case. Steps were taken to ensure safety of all involved and, by all counts, the jury took its job most seriously.”

“Importantly, that the case was tried in an ordinary federal court offers the result more legitimacy than if it were decided in a military tribunal. There is no claim that this was a ‘kangaroo court’ and all are left with more confidence in the jury’s verdict than a tribunal’s decision,” he said.

Bruce Fein, a political conservative who held top posts in the Justice Department former president Ronald Reagan, told IPS, “The Ghailani trial and verdict underscores the Kafkaesque nature of the legal architecture that has been erected to combat international terrorism. Even if he had been acquitted on all charges, Ghailani could be imprisoned for life at Guantanamo Bay as an enemy combatant without accusation or trial.”

“Critics of the verdict believe that international terrorist trials should be prosecuted like Stalinist show trials in which the guilty verdicts are as guaranteed as the rising and setting of the sun. They believe in justice resembling the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland: sentence first, verdict afterwards,” he added.

Dixon Osburn, director of the Law and Security programme at Human Rights First (HRF), noted that while federal courts have convicted more than 400 terrorists since 9-11, military commissions have convicted just four.

“The conviction of Ghailani in federal court should give impetus to the administration to try other detainees from Guantanamo in federal court,” he said. “The conviction means that another terrorist will likely spend the rest of his life in prison. The world will also see the verdict as fair and just, unlike the commissions at GITMO.”

Other human rights organisations, including the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has litigated extensively on behalf of Guantanamo prisoners, expressed similar sentiments.

“Undoubtedly, the Ghailani verdict will be used by President Obama’s political opponents to argue the inappropriateness of trying Guantanamo detainees in civilian court,” Peter Shane, a professor at Ohio State University’s law school, told IPS. “That argument assumes, however, that a military commission would have admitted the evidence that the civilian court excluded – which is by no means clear.”

David Frakt of the Barry University School of Law has more than a passing acquaintance with Guantanamo Bay and its prisoners. A lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force Reserves JAG Corps, he was the first defence counsel to win the pretrial dismissal of all charges against his client, Mohammed Jawad, a juvenile from Afghanistan, and also won Jawad’s release through a habeas corpus petition in federal court.

“This is certainly not the end of terrorist trials in federal court, but it may be the end of transfers of Guantanamo detainees to be tried on terrorism charges in federal court, and it may very well be the death knell for the possibility of trying the alleged 9-11 co-conspirators in federal court,” he told IPS. “If so, it is a great tragedy, because this trial highlights the fairness of the federal system.”

Privacy advocates called on the U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) Tuesday to end its controversial new initiative of whole-body scans and enhanced pat-downs of airline passengers, calling the programme “dangerous to health, ineffective and unconstitutional”.

Led by consumer advocate Ralph Nader, a group of organisations held a telephone news conference to insist that the “strip-search” programme be suspended and turned over the Congress to investigate.

“The machines are ineffective, the pat-downs are too invasive, and the use of radioactive technology poses health risks,” Nader said, citing testimony from a number of physicians who agreed that radioactivity “could cause skin problems” and might pose a public health threat to passengers.

Nader said there is also the issue of how protective these TSA initiatives are. He pointed out that “passengers and crew of 17,000 business jets are not screened at all.”

“The TSA has no strategy. This new programme is a commercially driven, knee jerk reaction to the shoe bomber and the underpants bomber,” he said. “The programme should be ended and turned over to Congress.”

Two months after 19 jihadists hijacked airplanes and flew them into the World Trade Centre, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field in 2001, Richard Reid attempted to detonate explosives hidden in his sneakers on an American Airlines flight from Paris, France, to Miami, Florida. Passengers thwarted his plan, and the plane landed safely in Boston, Massachusetts.

And on Christmas Day 2009, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a young Nigerian, tried to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, using explosives hidden in his underwear. He was thwarted by passengers and arrested when the plane landed safely in Detroit.

“What concerns us is the TSA’s secrecy – their obscurantist approach to government…not responding to members of congress, the press or the public,” Nader said.

In San Diego Monday, an airline ticket-holder declined to use the electronic body scanner and opted for a pat-down instead. The TSA inspector then explained the intimate anatomic details of the pat-down, at which point the would- be passenger threatened to sue if the TSA official touched his private parts. He was denied access to the aircraft and threatened with arrest and a civil fine.

Another press conference participant, Chip Pitts, a lecturer in law at Stanford University law school, talked about the ineffectiveness of the body scanning technology.

“Despite the secret, corrupt, and deceptive claims under which these machines have been sold by DHS, TSA, and their contract manufacturers, the body scanners don’t detect the sorts of plastic explosives that were their main justification,” he said. “They’re easily evaded by real terrorists even as they render everyone else a suspect, increasingly relegating the innocent to an unacceptable choice of a radiation scan, or a groping pat-down, or not flying at all.”

Other groups participating in the conference included the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), Flyers’ Rights.org, We Won’t Fly.org, and the Libertarian Party.

Kate Hanni of Flyers’ Rights.org, which claims to have 30,000 members, asked, “Are we getting ahead of terrorists or merely reacting to recent events?”

We won’t fly.org is promoting a national opt-out day, Nov. 24, to encourage people to protest the TSA programme by not flying. Nov. 24 comes at the start of busiest travel season of the year.

EPIC has filed a lawsuit to suspend the body scanner programme, calling it “unlawful, invasive, and ineffective”. Opposition to the programme is growing. The Libertarian Party, the American Pilots Association, Airline CEOs, flyers rights organizations, religious groups, and others are calling for an end to invasive searches at airports.

Libertarian Party Chair Mark Hinkle said today, “The TSA should end the strip-search machine programme immediately. We’ve reached a point where our government has no qualms about humiliating us.”

The EPIC lawsuit challenges the unilateral decision of the TSA to make body scanners the primary screening technique in U.S. airports. Three frequent air travelers are joining EPIC in the lawsuit: security expert Bruce Schneier, human rights activist Chip Pitts, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations legal counsel Nadhira Al-Khalili.

The petitioners have brought claims under the Administrative Procedure Act, the Privacy Act, the Video Voyeurism Prevention Act, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and the Fourth Amendment. They are seeking the suspension of the body scanner programme.

In its brief, EPIC argues that the Department of Homeland Security “has initiated the most sweeping, the most invasive, and the most unaccountable suspicionless search of American travelers in history.”

EPIC further argues that the Transportation Security Administration “must comply with relevant law, and it must not be permitted to engage in such a fundamental change in agency practice without providing the public the opportunity to express its views.”

The British government will reportedly pay millions in compensation to seven British nationals who were unlawfully “rendered” to U.S.-run prisons and tortured with the cooperation of British intelligence.

The British press is reporting that ministers and the security services appear to have decided that exposure of thousands of documents in open court was a risk they could not take. The documents presumably would confirm British complicity with the U.S. in the so-called “extraordinary rendition” of terrorist suspects.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) represents two of those slated to receive reparations in a lawsuit against Boeing subsidiary Jeppesen DataPlan for its role in the U.S. extraordinary rendition programme.

The organisation said in a statement it was “deeply troubling that while the U.K. and many other countries are now acknowledging and addressing their official complicity in the Bush administration’s human rights abuses, here in the United States the [Barack] Obama administration continues to shield the architects of the torture program from civil liability while Bush-era officials, including former President Bush and former Vice President Cheney, boast of their crimes on national television.”

The ACLU added, “To date, not a single victim of the Bush administration’s torture program has had his day in a U.S. court. The U.S. can no longer stand silently by as other nations reckon with their own agents’ complicity in the torture programme. Reckoning with the legacy of torture would restore our standing in the world, reassert the rule of law and strengthen our democracy.”

“If other democracies can compensate survivors and hold officials accountable for their endorsement of torture, surely we can do the same,” the group said.

Last week, during television interviews to promote his new memoir, “Decision Points”, former U.S. president George W. Bush claimed that techniques such as waterboarding were legal and had protected the U.K. from terrorist attacks.

British Prime Minister David Cameron disagreed with Bush. In fact, it was Cameron’s agreement that lawyers for the former prisoners should begin negotiations with the government that led to the settlement expected to be announced imminently.

The detainees understood to be in line for settlements include Binyam Mohamed, Bisher al-Rawi, Jamil el-Banna, Richard Belmar, Omar Deghayes, Moazzam Begg and Martin Mubanga. Mohamed and Al Rawi, plaintiffs in the Jeppesen case, claim they were kidnapped, forcibly rendered to U.S.- run prisons overseas, and tortured.

The Obama administration invoked the so-called state secrets privilege to have the Jeppesen case thrown out, and a federal appeals court dismissed the case in September. The ACLU has asked the Supreme Court to review that decision.

Britain is one of several nations that have taken responsibility for their role in the illegal torture programme run by the Bush administration by initiating investigations or public inquiries.

A forthcoming British inquiry will investigate the role U.K. officials played in the programme. It was Cameron’s agreement that the government should negotiate with the former prisoners that opened the way for a broad inquiry into what British intelligence officials knew about the U.S. rendition and torture programmes, and what they did about it. The inquiry is scheduled to report by the end 2011.

The British high court had ruled that confidential documents would have to be released during court hearings. This would take inordinate amounts of time and the documents would likely be highly embarrassing to U.K. officials.

When Guantanamo prisoner Binyam Mohamed sued the British government last year for being complicit in his imprisonment and torture, it caused a major furor in the U.K. foreign office establishment.

The former foreign secretary, David Miliband, fought in the high court to have the suit dismissed, on grounds that U.S. officials had threatened to stop exchanging intelligence with their British allies if the case went ahead. The high court ruled in favour of Mohamed.

The ruling said that Mohamed was subjected to “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment” by U.S. authorities and ordered the release of a previously secret seven-paragraph summary of CIA documents on his treatment.

Paying reparations to Mohamed will inevitably further diminish Miliband’s reputation.

It appears that the payment to former Guantanamo prisoners would represent the first time a group of former prisoners has successfully sought financial restitution.

The only other known instance of a prisoner receiving a money award is the case of Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian citizen. He was stopped by U.S. authorities at Kennedy Airport in New York while en route from North Africa to his home in Canada, shipped off first to Jordan, and finally to Syria, where he was imprisoned, held incommunicado without charge, and tortured for almost a year. The Syrian authorities then released him without charge.

The U.S. had acted on information supplied by the Canadian Government. After a two-year investigation of the incident, Canada made a formal apology to Arar and awarded him close to $10 million.

However, he remains on a U.S. “no fly” list and cannot enter the United States.

A clear majority of U.S. voters – 61 percent – would choose a punishment other than death for murder if given a choice, the Death Penalty Information Centre said Tuesday as it released the results of “one of the most comprehensive studies ever conducted” of U.S. citizens’ views on capital punishment.

In a national poll of 1,500 registered voters conducted by Lake Research Partners, alternative punishments to execution included life with no possibility of parole and with restitution to the victim’s family (39 percent), life with no possibility of parole (13 percent), or life with the possibility of parole (nine percent).

The researchers said the survey “shows growing support for alternatives to the death penalty compared with previous polls.”

The research shows that in states with the death penalty, a plurality of voters said it would make no difference in their vote if a representative supported repeal of the death penalty; and a majority (62 percent) said either it would make no difference (38 percent) or they would be more likely to vote for such a representative (24 percent).

“For decades, politicians have equated being tough on crime with support for the death penalty, but this research suggests voters want their elected officials to be smart on crime, use tax dollars wisely, and fund the services they care about the most,” Richard Dieter, executive director of Death Penalty Information Centre, told IPS during a telephone news conference.

“We see a real openness to considering life with no possibility for parole as a punishment for murder and a real awareness among Americans of the many problems with the death penalty,” said pollster Celinda Lake. “It is likely we will see Americans moving away from support for the death penalty as states and local governments grapple with tight budgets and as today’s younger voters and Latinos move into the core of the electorate,”

Since the start of 2009, many states, such as Maryland, Colorado, Connecticut, Montana, Kansas, and New Mexico considered legislation to repeal the death penalty, and it is expected that trend will continue in 2011.

Voters ranked the death penalty the lowest on a list of budget priorities and expressed strong support for replacing the death penalty with life without parole, if the money saved was used to fund crime prevention programmes.

In states with the death penalty, a plurality of voters said it would make no difference in their vote if a representative supported repeal of the death penalty, and a majority said either it would make no difference or they would be more likely to vote for such a representative. In 2011, about five states are expected to consider repeal legislation.

The poll dug deeply into citizens’ thinking about the death penalty and the problems they see in this punishment. For decades, elected officials have equated being tough on crime with support for the death penalty, but this research shows that capital punishment may no longer be a “third rail” of politics.

Additional key findings from the polling research include:

Cost emerged as an important concern for a strong majority of respondents. Sixty-eight percent said cost was a very or somewhat convincing argument against the death penalty. Voters ranked emergency services, creating jobs, police and crime prevention, schools and libraries, public health care services, and roads and transportation as more important budget priorities than the death penalty. Hispanic voters were among those most willing to replace the death penalty with an alternative punishment. They responded most strongly to moral objections to the death penalty rooted in faith, as well as the argument that the death penalty is particularly unfair along racial lines.

The poll explored the information that the public uses to make up its mind about the death penalty and the problems they see with this punishment.

Some of the public’s top concerns about the death penalty were that it is applied unevenly and unfairly; it subjects victims’ families to lengthy trials and years of appeals that interfere with the healing process; and it risks executing the innocent.

Spending millions of dollars on the death penalty, at a time when states are cutting back on services such as police forces, schools, and public health, and when life in prison would cost less, was also of concern to voters.

Moral and religious objections to the death penalty were strong among Latino and Catholic voters.

The nationwide poll was conducted in May 2010 with a margin of error of +/- 2.5 percent.

The Death Penalty Information Centre, founded in 1990, is a non-profit organisation serving the media and the public with analysis and information on issues concerning capital punishment.

The Egyptian government’s crackdown on political opponents continues unabated in advance of parliamentary elections Nov. 28, even as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last week hailed the “partnership” between the two countries as “a cornerstone of stability and security in the Middle East and beyond”.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with Egyptian Foreign Minister Aboul Gheit in the State Department's Treaty Room Nov. 10. Credit: State Department photo by Michael Gross

In the latest example of a widespread campaign of media repression, Kareem Nabil, an Egyptian blogger who completed a four-year prison term, was still being detained and beaten at the State Security Intelligence (SSI) headquarters in Alexandria by security officers, according to the New York- based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information.

Nabil had been released from Burj al-Arab Prison on Nov. 6. He was subsequently re-arrested by security officers in Alexandria without charges.

A student at Cairo’s state-run religious university, Al- Azhar, Nabil was convicted in 2006 by an Alexandria court of insulting Islam and President Hosni Mubarak, who he called a dictator.

Nabil’s re-arrest was seen by human rights activists as, in the words of an unnamed opposition figure, “another nail in the coffin of Egyptian democracy”.

The government’s efforts to stifle opposition to the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) have included firing an influential newspaper editor, revoking the licenses of TV channels, arresting bloggers, changing the rules governing political slogans, and fabricating infractions to disqualify opposition candidates from running.

As the government’s campaign continued, Clinton hosted a Nov. 10 visit by Egypt’s foreign minister, Aboul Gheit, and Egypt’s intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman. Gheit confirmed that he and Clinton did not discuss the forthcoming election.

The administration of U.S. President Barack Obama has come under increasing criticism from both conservatives and liberals for not being forceful enough in speaking out publicly regarding the parliamentary election and the presidential election, which is to follow.

Conservatives – and neoconservatives – are urging Obama to reinstate the “democracy-building” programmes implemented by the George W. Bush administration, Obama’s predecessor. But they appear to be far more concerned about Egypt’s continuing role as “mediator” in the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations.

Liberals are pushing for more unequivocal rhetoric from the White House comdemning the renewal of Egypt’s 30-year-old “emergency” laws and the widely-reported harrassment of opposition political institutions and individuals.

The country’s 82-year-old leader since 1981, Hosni Mubarak, promised the U.S. he would repeal the emergency laws, which give Egypt’s security services the unfettered right to arrest and detain people without due process or judicial review.

The Obama administration has been most outspoken regarding the emergency laws, whose renewal it regards as a broken promise. It has also publicly condemned the June murder of blogger Khaled Saeed, who was dragged out of an Internet café and beaten to death on the street. He had recently posted a video online exposing police corruption.

Human rights advocates charge that the government has kidnapped bloggers and Internet activists, tortured them, and then imprisoned them until the bruises on their bodies have disappeared so there is no evidence of abuse.

One of those advocates, Hossam Bahgat, told IPS that democracy-building programmes can only be effective if they are “inside-out” – adopted by indigenous people who live and work in a country or a community, and not superimposed on them.

Bahgat, who heads a not-for-profit organisation known as the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), was in New York to receive an award from Human Rights Watch (HRW) celebrating the “valor of individuals who put their lives on the line to protect the dignity and rights of others”.

His group recently won a case against the Interior Ministry on behalf of Egypt’s Baha’i citizens, a minority facing frequent violence and discrimination. Egyptians may now obtain official documents without revealing their religious convictions, or being forced to identify themselves as Muslims, Christians, or Jews.

The EIPR recently launched an advocacy campaign to combat sectarianism in Egypt and “strengthen the values of equal citizenship and shared existence in our common nation without religious or faith-based discrimination”.

“While the movement is being launched by the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights as part of our ongoing efforts to defend equality and freedom of religion and belief, we realise that it cannot be successful if it remains ours alone,” Bahgat said.

“We firmly believe that this campaign will not meet with success unless it becomes a voice for Egyptians who believe that we are all in this together and those united by a common fear for our future due to rising social divisions, sectarian tension and a mindset that divides the country into an ‘us’ and a ‘them,’ he said.

The Mubarak regime has been criticised for many years for what opponents call a nationwide campaign of persecution and discrimination against the Egyptian Coptic church. Copts are Christians who make up about five percent of the Egyptian population.

From a U.S. perspective, despite the “cumbaya” diplomacy on display during the Egyptian foreign minister’s visit to the U.S. State Department, Egypt is likely to continue to be the target of both liberal and conservative scorn.

But neither end of the political spectrum believes Washington has the clout to influence the upcoming elections. And Egyptian voters are both powerless and uninformed.

As one prominent activist, Bahey el-din Hassan, director of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, wrote recently, “The outcome of the elections has already been determined – all that remains is the official announcement of the results after 28 November, in favour of the ruling National Democratic Party.”

Human rights groups say time is running out for the federal government to make good on a pledge to shift the country’s immigration detention system to one that emphasises a civil rather than criminal approach.

One such group, Human Rights First (HRF), is taking aim at a particularly sensitive aspect of the detention debacle: the plight of refugees seeking asylum.

Annie Sovcik, advocacy counsel for HRF’s Refugee Protection Programme, told IPS, “Of the approximately 400,000 immigrants held in U.S. immigration detention annually, a few thousand are refugees – individuals who have fled persecution for political, religious and other reasons and are seeking protection in the United States.”

“Upon arrival, these refugees are shackled and transported to immigration detention centres where they are held in jail-like conditions and where they may remain isolated for months without adequate due process safeguards as their claims for asylum protection are adjudicated,” she charged.

Sovcik says this practice “undermines commitments the United States has made to protect refugees, violates obligations the United States has assumed under international law, and creates a barrier for refugees to access a fair asylum adjudication process.”

The Department of Homeland Security has pledged to reform the immigration detention system and move away from a jail- like system to one that is more civil in nature. HRF and other organisations welcomed this announcement in 2009 and also encouraged DHS to commit to reform its practices related to how decisions of who to detain or release are made.

But, Sovcik asserts, “Since the August 2009 announcement, while DHS has slowly worked on fulfilling its promise, 33,400 immigrants are held every day in facilities that officials at the highest levels recognise is chronically flawed but have remained essentially unchanged.”

Sovcik called on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to implement changes at existing facilities by the end of this year.

The U.S. immigration detention system holds up to 33,400 detainees – including asylum seekers – every day. These detainees are currently held in a sprawling network of approximately 250 facilities – down from 341 a year ago – across the country.

Some of these facilities are operated by ICE, the enforcement arm of DHS, while others are run by private corrections companies or county jail systems.

Last year, DHS acknowledged that its detention beds were located in facilities “largely designed for penal, not civil, detention.” Key among its 2009 reform plans was a commitment to shift to a non-penal, or “civil”, model of immigration detention.

DHS’s announcement in 2009 came on the heels of two government reports that had concluded that the U.S. immigration system was inappropriately modeled on correctional systems.

One was from Dr. Dora Schriro, former director of the Arizona and Missouri state corrections systems and currently commissioner of correction for New York City, and the other from the bipartisan U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.

HRF’s recommendations for new civil standards and changes to existing facilities include allowing asylum seekers and other immigrant detainees to wear civilian clothing rather than prison jumpsuits; to have contact visits with family and friends in all facilities, true outdoor recreation space, and expanded access throughout the day; and to enjoy increased freedom of movement within secure facilities.

More broadly, the group urges the government to stop detaining asylum seekers and other immigrants in penal facilities, and create nationwide alternatives to detention.

DHS should work with the Justice Department to provide all detained asylum seekers with access to custody hearings so that the need for their continued detention can be assessed by an immigration court, HRF says.

Another serious glitch in the asylum-seeking process is the application deadline imposed by Congress. A new study has revealed that one in five refugees seeking protection in the United States is denied asylum because they do not apply within one year of their arrival and thus miss the 12-month deadline imposed by Congress, according to a study of the Board of Immigration Appeals’ (BIA) asylum decisions.

“The one-year deadline results in the denial of asylum, a basic human rights protection, because of a technicality,” said Mary Meg McCarthy, executive director of the Heartland Alliance’s National Immigrant Justice Centre.

“The BIA is making a bad law worse by arbitrarily denying exceptions to the deadline and putting the lives of men, women, and children at risk,” she added.

The study’s conclusions are detailed in a new report, “The One-Year Asylum Deadline and the BIA: No Protection, No Process”, prepared by the Heartland Alliance, HRF and others. It is the first to examine how the asylum deadline is handled by the BIA, the highest level of administrative appeal available to asylum seekers.

In addition to the 20 percent of asylum cases denied because of filing after the deadline, in 46 percent of the 662 filing deadline denials, the BIA did not provide any reason for the denial of the asylum application other than that it was submitted after the filing deadline.

And of the 662 filing deadline denials, the BIA did not recognise any exceptions to the filing deadline. When an immigration judge granted an exception to the one-year deadline, the BIA affirmed that decision 75 percent of the time.

By contrast, when an immigration judge denied asylum based on the one-year deadline, the BIA affirmed the decision 96 percent of the time.

After a three-year investigation, President Barack Obama’s mantra – “look forward and not backwards” – appears to have trumped the rule of law as a special prosecutor declined to pursue criminal charges against the Central Intelligence Agency operatives involved in the destruction of video recordings of interrogations of “war on terror” suspects.

The human rights community and many legal scholars from both ends of the political spectrum are up in arms about the decision. And they were further angered by the remarks made by former president George W. Bush during recent television and radio interviews promoting his new memoir, “Decision Points”.

For example, Bush admitted to Matt Lauer of NBC’s “Today” programme that he authorised the use of waterboarding on two CIA prisoners. He said further that the technique was legal and that he would make the same decision again.

Lauer then asked him, “Why is waterboarding legal, in your opinion?”

Bush responded: “Because the lawyer said it was legal. He said it did not fall within the anti-torture act. I’m not a lawyer. But you gotta trust the judgment of the people around you, and I do.”

Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, spoke to IPS with a hint of despair. “The failure of DOJ [the Justice Department] to bring criminal charges against the CIA officials who destroyed the tapes of the waterboarding of detainees is another awful decision insuring that the torture conspirators including President Bush will not be held accountable for their crimes – at least not by the Obama administration,” he said.

“One hope remains,” Ratner added. “International justice against the torture conspirators that is currently being pursued in the Spanish courts by the Center for Constitutional Rights and others. If I were former President Bush, my next vacation would not be a visit to the Prado.”

Chris Anders, a senior attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), said, “I find Bush’s remarks about waterboarding [in the Lauer interview] more important than the narrow issue of the destroyed CIA tapes. That’s because he confessed to war crimes.”

“Everything in our legal history makes waterboarding a crime,” Anders said. “Bush said he authorised it. What he should know about the rule of law is that no one is above it. Yet Bush doesn’t seem in the least concerned about the consequences of what he is confessing to.”

Criticism of both the special prosecutor’s decision and of Bush’s remarks appeared to come from both the left and the right of the political spectrum.

A well-known conservative lawyer, Bruce Fein, who was a senior attorney in the Department of Justice under President Ronald Reagan, told IPS, “Obama decided against prosecution for the same reason he has desisted from prosecuting former President Bush and former VP Cheney despite confessing to authorising waterboarding: political inconvenience or popular opinion.”

Professor Jordan J. Paust of the Law Center at the University of Houston, author of “Beyond the Law The Bush Administration’s Unlawful Responses in the ‘War’ on Terror,” charges that Bush’s remarks were “in apparent violation of a court order and does not bode well for the rule of law or the need to end impunity for international crimes.”

“Clearly, former President Bush has admitted that he had a ‘programme’ of secret detention, which is forced disappearance of persons, a war crime, and a crime against humanity over which there is universal jurisdiction and a universal responsibility to either initiate prosecution or to extradite,” he said.

Paust noted that 29 U.S. legal cases and seven U.S. Department of State Country Reports on Human Rights criticising the records of other nations affirm that waterboarding is “torture”, or at very least “cruel” and “inhumane”.

Jonathan Hafetz, a professor at Seton Hall University law school, believes that “The U.S. government’s failure to hold accountable those responsible for the torture and other gross human rights constitutes one of the darkest legacies of our era.”

“The problem with President Obama’s approach is that it is not enough only to ‘look forward and not backward’. Non- action can itself serve as tacit approval for past abuses – or at least that is how it can be interpreted,” he told IPS.

“The recent comments by Mr. Bush about his knowledge and approval of waterboarding, makes the need for accountability more, not less, important,” he said.

Chip Pitts, a Lecturer in Law at Stanford University Law School, is focused on what he calls the “complicity” between the Bush and Obama administrations.

“The crisis of accountability in America is starkly highlighted by the former president’s public confession of recourse to torture and war crimes,” he told IPS. “But that should not detract attention from the complicity of the current administration, which has resorted to secrecy and backroom deals that blatantly ignore laws – like the Convention Against Torture, in this case – and the administration’s duty to ‘faithfully execute the laws’.”

Robert S. Bennett, attorney for the former C.I.A. agent who ordered the tapes destroyed, said in an interview with the New York Times that the Justice Department “did the right thing”.

Leon E. Panetta, the C.I.A. director, said in a statement that the C.I.A. was “pleased with the decision” not to bring charges against agency officers involved in destroying the tapes, and that the agency would continue to cooperate with other aspects of the Justice Department’s investigation.

Putting local police on the “front lines” of immigration enforcement is distracting federal agencies from their objectives by turning over people with no criminal history, or those who have committed minor or non-violent crimes, and setting them on a course toward unnecessary deportation.

This is one of main findings in a study by the Immigration Policy Center, the policy arm of the American Immigration Council, presented in a new report, “ICE’s Enforcement Priorities and the Factors that Undermine Them”, by Dr. Michele Waslin, IPC senior policy analyst.

She told IPS, “As long as ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] continues to outsource the identification and arrest of immigrants to LEAs [law enforcement agencies] and communities intent on ridding their jurisdiction of undocumented immigrants, ICE will find it extremely difficult to truly focus on serious criminals.”

The report notes that ICE will always be limited in terms of the authority it can express over its state and local partners, and says “it is very likely that non-priority immigrants will continue to be subject to immigration enforcement actions”.

Other advocacy groups are equally critical of the Department of Homeland Security, of which ICE is a major unit.

Human Rights First says that “one year after the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced plans for a wide-reaching overhaul of the long-mismanaged immigration detention system”, the government “has yet to make significant progress toward the underlying goal of detention reform – a true shift from a penal to a civil approach to immigration detention.”

The IPC report notes that, “In recent years, ICE has grown more and more dependent on the 287(g) programme and the expanding Secure Communities programme, which are partnerships with state and local police agencies to identify immigrants for deportation.”

“ICE has, in effect, outsourced the identification of immigrants for enforcement actions to local police agencies and jails,” it says.

At an Oct. 6 press conference, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano announced that DHS had removed more than 392,000 individuals in Fiscal Year (FY) 2010, and presented other “record-breaking immigration enforcement statistics achieved under the Obama administration”.

In addition to record-breaking overall numbers, Napolitano also announced the “unprecedented numbers of convicted criminal alien removals” in FY 2010. Of the 392,000 removals in FY 2010, more than 195,000 were classified as “convicted criminal aliens”, which was 81,000 more criminal removals than in FY 2008.

But the issue raised in this report goes to the question of whether deportees are the people originally envisaged – people whose violent behaviour poses a danger to their fellow deportees as well as society in general – or others guilty of minor offences such as driving and parking violations.

ICE says budget realities make it impossible to remove everyone who is in the country illegally or who is otherwise deportable, and has released a series of memos designed to prioritise the “worst of the worst”. Overall, this prioritisation represents an effort to bring order to the increasingly complex world of immigration enforcement.

Even though partnerships between ICE and state and local law-enforcement agencies are not necessarily helping ICE to reach its strategic objectives, over the past several years, these partnerships have been greatly expanded, and ever greater numbers of local police are serving as “force multipliers” for DHS.

The two programmes most closely associated with immigration enforcement are the 287(g) program and the Secure Communities program. The stated objective of both of these programmes is to target dangerous criminals and persons who pose a threat to the community.

ICE credits these programmes with the increase in deportations of “criminal aliens” over the past year.

Programs such as 287(g) and Secure Communities merge the federal immigration enforcement system with state criminal justice systems. But in many cases, local police arrest noncitizens who pose no threat to public safety for relatively minor crimes, such as driving without a license or shoplifting.

In other cases, immigrants are merely charged with crimes for which they are never convicted.

Through the partnerships between ICE and local police, immigrants are channeled into the immigration enforcement system, regardless of their guilt or innocence or the severity of the crime with which they are charged. These immigrants then face lengthy detention, few due-process protections, and deportation.

The data from ICE does in fact show an increase in the percentage of deportations of “criminal aliens” or “convicted criminal aliens”. However, a closer look at the numbers reveals that many of those “criminals” have committed low-level offences or misdemeanors, and many noncriminals continue to be deported.

One of the report’s main recommendation is for legalisation, which it says would be an enormous step” toward true prioritisation.

“A pool of more than 11 million persons subject to deportation is not a good starting place. Legalising undocumented immigrants who do not pose a threat to public safety or national security would allow DHS to focus its limited enforcement resources on unauthorised and legal immigrants with serious criminal convictions,” it says.

Lawyers for the Barack Obama administration told a federal judge Monday that the U.S. government has authority to kill U.S. citizens whom the executive branch has unilaterally determined pose a threat to national security.

That claim came in federal court in Washington, D.C. in response to a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR). The two human rights legal advocacy organisations contend that the administration’s so-called “targeted killing authority” violates the constitution and international law.

“The full contours of the government’s position would allow the executive unreviewable authority to target and kill any U.S. citizen it deems a suspect of terrorism anywhere,” CCR attorney Pardiss Kebriae told IPS.

“As the government would have it, while non-citizens detained at Guantanamo Bay can challenge the deprivation of their liberty by the United States, a U.S. citizen could not challenge an impending deprivation of his life by his own government.”

“The Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected the government’s claim to an unchecked system of global detention, and the district court should similarly reject the administration’s claim here to an unchecked system of global targeted killing,” she said.

The ACLU and the CCR were retained by Nasser Al-Aulaqi to bring a lawsuit in connection with the government’s decision to authorise the targeted killing of his son, Anwar Al- Aulaqi. The lawsuit asks the court to rule that, “outside the context of armed conflict, the government can carry out the targeted killing of an American citizen only as a last resort to address an imminent threat to life or physical safety.”

Anwar Al-Aulaqi was born in Las Cruces, New Mexico and has dual U.S. and Yemeni citizenship. He is a firebrand extremist imam who has been accused by government officials and in the press of using his sermons and the Internet to recruit jihadists. He is thought to be in hiding in Yemen.

The lawsuit also asks the court to “order the government to disclose the legal standard it uses to place U.S. citizens on government kill lists.” “If the constitution means anything, it surely means that the president does not have unreviewable authority to summarily execute any American whom he concludes is an enemy of the state,” said Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the ACLU, who presented arguments in the case.

“It’s the government’s responsibility to protect the nation from terrorist attacks, but the courts have a crucial role to play in ensuring that counterterrorism policies are consistent with the constitution.”

The government filed a brief in the case in September, claiming that the executive’s targeted killing authority is a “political question” that should not be subject to judicial review. The government also asserted the “state secrets” privilege, contending that the case should be dismissed to avoid the disclosure of sensitive information.

On Aug, 30, 2010, the CCR and the ACLU filed suit on behalf of Nasser Al-Aulaqi against President Obama, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director Leon Panetta and Defence Secretary Robert Gates, challenging their decision to authorise the targeted killing of his son as a violation of the U.S. constitution and international law.

“Targeting individuals for killing who are suspected of crimes but have not been convicted – without oversight, due process or disclosed standards for being placed on the kill list – also poses the risk that the government will erroneously target the wrong people,” the groups noted.

“Since 9/11, the U.S. government has detained thousands men as terrorists, only for courts or the government itself to discover later that the evidence was wrong or unreliable and release them.”

The Justice Department declined to comment on the case, which is one of two related lawsuits brought by the ACLU and the CCR.

The second is against the U.S. Treasury Department and its Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) challenging the legality and constitutionality of the scheme that requires them to obtain a license in order to file a lawsuit concerning the government’s asserted authority to carry out targeted killings of individuals, including U.S. citizens, far from any battlefield.

On Jul. 16, however, the Secretary of the Treasury labeled Anwar al-Aulaqi a “specially designated global terrorist”, which makes it a crime for lawyers to provide representation for his benefit without first seeking a license from OFAC.

The CCR and the ACLU sought a license, but after the government’s failure to grant one despite the urgency created by an outstanding authorisation for Al-Aulaqi’s death, the two groups brought suit challenging the licensing scheme as applied to the representation they seek to provide.

CCR and the ACLU have not had contact with Anwar Al-Aulaqi.

The OFAC requirements generally make it illegal to provide any service, including legal representation, to or for the benefit of an individual designated as a terrorist. A lawyer who provides legal representation for the benefit of such a person without getting special permission is subject to criminal and civil penalties.

In their lawsuit, CCR and the ACLU charge that OFAC has exceeded its authority by subjecting uncompensated legal services to a licensing requirement, and that OFAC’s regulations violate the First Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, and the principle of separation of powers.

The lawsuit asks the court to invalidate the regulations and to make clear that lawyers can provide representation for the benefit of designated individuals without first seeking the government’s consent.

The OFAC case is currently pending in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

A new report on violent extremists in the United States finds that terrorism plots by non-Muslims greatly outnumber those attempted by Muslims, and that Muslim-American communities helped foil close to a third of al Qaeda-related terror plots threatening the country since Sep. 11, 2001.

The report comes from the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), a not-for-profit organisation advocating for the civil rights of American Muslims. It consists largely of MPAC’s “Post-9/11 Terrorism Incident Database”.

Reportedly the first of its kind by a Muslim-American organisation, the database tracks plots by Muslim and non- Muslim violent extremists against the United States.

The author of the report, Alejandro J. Beutel, MPAC researcher and government liaison, told IPS, “This report demonstrates the validity of two of our guiding principles.”

“The first of these is that the choice between our rights and liberties and national security is a false choice; we can have both,” he said. “The second is that law enforcement will be much more successful if it treats the American Muslim community as partners, not as adversaries.”

It declares that al Qaeda does not appear to be making new ideological gains into the American Muslim community. Instead, the data is pointing toward greater numbers of longstanding ideological extremists turning to violence.

The report asserts that Muslim communities have helped foil almost one out of every three al Qaeda-related terror plots threatening the U.S. since 9/11/01. It says this highlights the importance of law enforcement partnering with citizens through community-oriented policing.

The report recommended that the government expand community- oriented policing initiatives; increase support for research on combating biased policing; expand investments in better human capital acquisitions; highlight citizen contributions to national security; and reform the fusion center process to increase coordination among law enforcement communities.

The report examined the challenges posed by violent extremists in two ways. The first was by examining the quantitative and qualitative nature of terrorism trials. Second, it looked at the number of actual and attempted attacks within the United States, including a comparative analysis of incidents involving Muslim and non-Muslim perpetrators.

The report appears amidst a resurgence of anti-Muslim sentiment in the U.S. Some of this has been triggered by the proposed building of an Islamic community centre two blocks from “Ground Zero”, the site where the World Trade Centre once stood.

A number of individual and community groups, including some families of 9/11 victims, have blasted the project as “a celebration of Islam”. Supporters see it as a vehicle for bringing diverse faiths closer together.

In communities throughout the U.S., there have been “copycat” campaigns to thwart mosque planning or construction.

The recent midterm elections here have also provided some candidates with platforms from which to verbally attack Muslims, including Muslim-Americans. These candidates have largely been Republicans and members of the Tea Party, on the extreme right wing of the political spectrum. While a few Democrats attempted to debunk the “all Muslims are terrorists” mantra, most remained silent.

Several recent unsuccessful terrorist plots have also contributed to heightened public anxiety – and the search for scapegoats. The so-called Times Square bomber was a home-grown terrorist who admitted attending training school in Pakistan; the “underwear bomber” who attempted to bring a passenger plane down over Detriot last Christmas day was a Nigerian believed to have been trained in Yemen. Both men are Muslims.

And the successful interception of two parcel bombs shipped as cargo from Yemen further raised the public’s level of apprehension that another terrorist attack was in the making.

The backlash takes a number of forms. For example, ordinary Muslims are experiencing renewed discrimination in the workplace. The New York Times reports that Muslim workers filed a record 803 such claims in the year ended Sep. 30, 2009. That was up 20 percent from the previous year and up nearly 60 percent from 2005, according to federal data.

The Times says the number of complaints filed since then will not be announced until January, “but Islamic groups say they have received a surge in complaints recently, suggesting that 2010’s figure will set another record.”

The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has filed several lawsuits connected with anti-Muslim discrimination. It sued JBS Swift, a meatpacking company, on behalf of 160 Somali immigrants; it filed a case against Abercrombie & Fitch, the clothing retailer, for refusing to hire a Muslim who wore a head scarf; and it sued a Four Points by Sheraton hotel in Phoenix, charging that an Iraqi immigrant was called a “camel jockey”.

Finally, MPAC and similar groups are angry and disappointed at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which has acknowledged placing “agent provocateurs” inside mosques in attempts to root out terrorists, terrorist plots, and terrorist cells.

“We feel betrayed,” says Alejandro Beutel.

In the face of police brutality, crackdowns on political parties and media, and a host of other violations ahead of Egypt’s Nov. 28 parliamentary election, human rights advocates are calling on President Barack Obama to use U.S. leverage to persuade Egypt to reform its electoral process, allow international monitors to assess the election, and conduct transparent and accountable balloting.

The Egyptian parliamentary election – and the presidential election to follow in September 2011 – is playing out against a background of years of police brutality and political corruption, buttressed by a so-called Emergency Law. That law, which has been in effect for three decades, gives police and security services sweeping powers to arrest and detain with little or no due process.

But administration critics say President Obama and his advisors have become too dependent on Egypt for its help to Israel regarding illegal smuggling from the Egyptian desert into Gaza, and helping maintain Arab neutrality vis a vis the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

While they acknowledge the value of this help, they contend that Egypt is acting in its own self-interest and would provide such help regardless of what the U.S. says about its electoral process.

One of the most vocal critics of President Hosni Mubarak’s regime is Human Rights First, a New York City-based legal advocacy organisation. It is urging President Obama to publicly call on Egyptian authorities stop harassing ruling opposition party figures and open the parliamentary elections to international monitors.

“You need a license in Egypt to send a political text message,” he added.

“The last round of elections in Egypt found policemen beating voters and officials grabbing ballot boxes,” Hicks told IPS. “We cannot let that happen again.”

The Egyptian government appears to be doing what it can to disrupt opposition plans to contest the Parliamentary election.

For example, the Associated Press reports that Egyptian security detained 65 members of the opposition Muslim Brotherhood while they were hanging election posters. Authorities said the posters violated a new ban on religious expressions. The government has arrested some 250 members of the Brotherhood and 30 remain in jails.

Media suppression has also been ratcheted up in the pre- election period.

For example, Egypt’s National Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (NTRA), imposed new restrictions on text-message news services and mobile phone companies, in an apparent attempt to preempt possible anti-government activism during the polls.

And the Egyptian Ministry of Information now compels satellite channels to obtain licenses before broadcasting an event live or distributing news reports to other television channels.

The anti-media campaign has also included the firing of one of the country’s better-known veteran journalists, who was editor of the main opposition newspaper. He had recently also been fired from his television talk show.

In another media move, authorities closed the religious conservative satellite television network, Al-Badr, for inciting sectarian hatred, and shut down the studios that produced the political talk show “Al-Qahira il-Youm” (“Cairo Today”).

These actions have triggered calls from some for international monitors to supervise the election, and from others for a campaign to boycott the balloting altogether.

Washington has had little to say of current developments. Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, had taken an increasing interest in the need for political reform and human rights improvements inside Egypt, a position associated with his neoconservative vision of Washington spreading democracy around the world.

But the Bush position caused considerable friction between the two governments, and Obama returned to seeing Egypt as a peace process partner.

The Mubarak regime, however, has made the U.S. position difficult to maintain. For example, President Mubarak had promised to lift the state of emergency, which has been in effect since 1981 and significantly curbs civil liberties inside Egypt. But it chose to renew it instead. That drew a stiff protest from the Obama administration.

President Obama has also dramatically cut funds to promote democracy in Egypt. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports that these cuts over the past year – amounting to around 50 percent – have drawn accusations that the Obama administration is easing off reform pressure to ensure Egypt’s support on Mideast policy, including the peace process with Israel.

Egypt has been one of the top recipients of U.S. foreign aid ever since it became the first Arab country to sign a peace accord with Israel, in 1979.

Since the Bush administration, Washington has been reducing the nonmilitary part of the package. This year’s aid is $1.55 billion, including $250 million in nonmilitary aid. In 2008, the Bush administration dedicated around $45 million of that to programmes for “governing justly and democratically”.

The Obama administration’s slash in these pro-democracy programmes has drawn a mixed response. Some contend they are ineffective and merely plant seeds of discord between the U.S. and Cairo. Others think they have a place.

Samer Shehata, a professor of Arab politics at Georgetown University, minimises the importance of the U.S. pro- democracy programmes.

“The real issue is what – or what not – the White House and State Department are saying publicly, and privately to the Egyptian government, about the upcoming elections,” he told IPS.

“The Obama administration is unfortunately not interested in pushing the sclerotic Mubarak regime (Mubarak is 82, in declining health and without a vice president) to display even mild respect for political freedoms, including free and fair elections,” he said.

A military jury at Guantanamo Bay sentenced a “child soldier” to 40 years in prison – unaware that Omar Khadr’s defence and prosecution lawyers had already agreed on an eight-year sentence and further agreed that the United States would send the Canadian home next year.

Under a plea bargain with a Pentagon official, Khadr would receive an eight-year sentence, in addition to the eight years he has been a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay.

But according to the plea arrangement reportedly reached between prosecution and defence, he would serve only one additional year at GITMO and the remaining seven in Canada, his home country. That means he could be released from prison at age 32, and perhaps sooner according to Canadian parole regulations.

While Canada has denied the repatriation idea publicly, it is known that the U.S. and Canadian government exchanged diplomatic notes on Oct. 23 declaring that “The Government of Canada is inclined to favourably consider Mr. Khadr’s application to be transferred to Canada to serve the remainder of his sentence,” or whichever portion Canada’s National Parole Board decides is required.

But the Guantanamo jury, officially, didn’t know any of that. Its decision would apply only if it decided on a lighter sentence.

According to eyewitness Carol Rosenberg of The Miami Herald, “Jurors were told only that Guantánamo’s youngest captive had pleaded guilty to five war crimes, including hurling the grenade that mortally wounded Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Speer, 28, during a July 2002 assault on an al Qaeda compound.” Khadr was 15 at the time of the attack.

The prosecution argued for a sentence of 25 years; defence lawyers urged repatriation to Canada. The jury disagreed with both, finding that Khadr should remain in prison until age 64.

The sentence of 25 years would have been far less than the sentence possible for all the crimes Khadr admitted to. Observers have said he pled guilty to so many crimes to avoid receiving a life sentence from the jury.

Moreover, some experts contacted by IPS were certain that the plea deal was known to the jurors.

David Frakt, who gained fame when he resigned as a Guantanamo Bay defence attorney because he believed military commissions were not designed to produce fair trials, told IPS, “I am not sure that we can safely assume that the jury was unaware of the eight-year plea deal, because it was plastered all over the news even before the trial started.”

“Although the jurors were instructed by the court not to read news accounts related to the trial, it wouldn’t surprise me if one of them knew about it,” he said.

What was the purpose of convening a jury to deliberate after a plea agreement had been reached? IPS reached out to constitutional scholars for answers.

“It is quite unusual for a military jury to give substantially in excess of what the prosecution requests,” Frakt said. “In fact, I’ve never seen it happen before.”

“So they clearly were trying to send a message. Presumably, the message was intended to be a deterrent to other would-be terrorists and insurgents. In essence, they jurors were saying, ‘don’t mess with the U.S. military’,” he said, adding, “Given that the true extreme jihadists are quite willing to die for the cause, I doubt that the sentence will have the desired deterrent effect.”

Daphne Eviatar, a senior attorney with the advocacy group Human Rights First and an eyewitness to the Khadr proceedings at GITMO, agreed. “As the prosecutors said over and over to the jury, the government wanted them to ‘send a message’ – to the American people, to al Qaeda, and to all the victims of this deadly war that the lives of U.S. service members are valued,” she told IPS.

“One has to question, though, the choice of a 15-year-old child soldier forced into war by his father as the messenger,” Eviatar said.

Scott Horton, a constitutional lawyer and Contributing Editor at Harper’s Magazine, told IPS, “It can be argued that from the outset a prime function of the military commissions has been not to inform, but rather to deceive the public.”

“A plea bargain was struck, but the details of it were suppressed,” he said.

“What the prosecution got out of the deal was a guilty plea to everything charged – indeed, Khadr would have pleaded to kidnapping the Lindbergh baby had they asked him to,” Horton said. “This was then paraded before the public and the commission as a genuine guilty plea, with attendant melodrama, and the thrust behind it was suppressed.”

“But the whole exercise we have seen is theatrics designed to cover the case that the prosecution case was weak and that the government severely mistreated this prisoner. The guilty plea and the courtroom drama will grab headlines, and the rest will be forgotten.”

Bruce Fein, a conservative former senior justice department official in the administration of President Ronald Reagan, told IPS the jury verdict was “a community expression of fear of international terrorism”, while Professor Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois law school believes the purpose was “to put the blame on a child soldier instead of themselves”.

IPS posed another question to legal experts. How unusual is it for a judge to send a jury out to deliberate on a verdict without telling them that the prosecution and the defence had already agreed on a plea arrangement?

Scott Horton’s view is that “It’s impossible to speak of established practice in military commissions, because they’re new, but this is the practice that has been established, starting with the al-Qosi case. Evidently this process is part of the agreed bargain.”

Bruce Fein commented, “To permit the jury to render a sentence for show only is more an act of war than of law, i.e., frightening defendants into pleading guilty for fear of a draconian sentence if a trial yields a guilty verdict.”

And Prof. Boyle responded: “These are kangaroo court proceedings. Of course they knew [of the plea deal]. As Groucho Marx said, ‘Military justice is to justice as military music is to music.’ And The Marx Brothers are in charge of the GITMO kangaroo court proceedings.”

Will U.S. local law enforcement be forced to participate in a programme that critics say will put city police in the position of enforcing federal immigration law and, in the process, divert scarce resources from essential community policing, discourage immigrants from working with police to solve crimes and increase racial profiling?

Or is it a voluntary programme?

Those are the questions being raised by civil rights advocacy groups in a federal court filing seeking an injunction requiring the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency to turn over critical documents concerning the ability of communities to opt out of what they label “the massive deportation dragnet”, the Secure Communities – S- Comm – programme.

The groups seek to clarify ICE’s statements, which they say have been “inconsistent and confusing”. In August, ICE released a memo entitled “Setting the Record Straight” setting forth an opt-out policy, which involves submitting a request in writing and meeting with ICE officials.

Janet Napolitano, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, later confirmed that process to be accurate.

But subsequent communications to and from ICE have muddied the waters, making it less clear that there is any opt-out policy at all.

The Washington Post claims that opting out of Secure Communities “is not a realistic possibility, and never was”. This question takes on significance because a number of municipal and country law enforcement agencies have made it clear that they do not wish to participate in S-Comm.

Sunita Patel, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), told IPS, “The misnamed Secure Communities programme is the Department of Homeland Security’s current scheme to rope local cops into immigration enforcement. Though branded as a race-blind way to arrest certain people, the numbers show it’s actually a trap.”

And Francis Boyle, a law professor at the University of Illinois, told IPS, “This is simply an exercise in racial profiling against Latinos.”

On Aug. 10, the groups filing the new freedom of information suit – CCR, the National Day Laborer Organising Network and the Kathryn O. Greenberg Immigration Justice Clinic of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law – released internal government documents newly obtained through a lawsuit filed in a New York federal court in April.

According to advocates who have reviewed the documents, they reveal a pattern of dishonesty regarding the S-Comm programme.

S-Comm, which currently operates in approximately 600 jurisdictions across the country, functions like the controversial 287(g) programme and Arizona’s SB1070, making state and local police central to the enforcement of federal immigration law.

The programme automatically runs fingerprints through immigration databases for all people arrested and targets them for detention and deportation even if their criminal charges are minor, eventually dismissed, or the result of an unlawful arrest. The programme links FBI criminal databases with civil immigration databases.

Several local jurisdictions have already asked to opt out, and were given a variety of responses. In May 2010, Sheriff Michael Hennessey of San Francisco requested an opt-out from ICE, but ICE directed him to California state officials. The California attorney general denied the sheriff’s request and claimed that there was no opt-out option.

Arlington County, Virginia held a community forum in July to discuss opting out of the programme, at which the chief of police stated that ICE had told him that there was no opt- out – Secure Communities was federally mandated.

Others, including Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat from California, the Santa Clara Board, and the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors, all contacted ICE asking for information about the opt-out policies. None received an immediate response.

In the meantime, in response to legislation before the Council of the District of Columbia to terminate Secure Communities, the Washington DC chief of police terminated the city’s Secure Communities programme with ICE.

So now at least two counties, plus Washington, DC have decided not to participate in the programme. Why?

The groups bringing the lawsuit claim that “People are concerned that, similar to the 287(g) programme, there is no oversight of Secure Communities. The data provided by ICE thus far has shown that contrary to ICE’s intention to focus on immigrants with serious criminal convictions, the majority of people identified by Secure Communities have minor criminal convictions or have no criminal convictions.”

They add that, in some cases, “U.S. citizens have been wrongly identified by the programme. There are also concerns that the programme leads to racial profiling and pretextual arrests. Furthermore, local law enforcement agencies that suspect that persons in their jails may be deportable immigrants already have the ability to contact ICE directly.”

The Secure Communities programme, launched in 2008, is currently active in 658 jurisdictions in 32 states, according to ICE, which plans to activate the programme in every jurisdiction in every state by 2013.

Secure Communities, 287(g), and the Criminal Alien Programme – the Barack Obama administration’s signature immigration enforcement programmes – all rely on heavy involvement from and cooperation with local law enforcement to siphon immigrants into the immigration enforcement and detention system and, ultimately, through deportation proceedings.

Meanwhile, in a related development, the Department of Justice will be in federal appellate court in San Francisco on Monday, Nov. 1, urging the court to keep in place an injunction blocking the core provisions of SB 1070, Arizona’s racial profiling law.

The American Civil Liberties Union and a coalition of civil rights groups will also be present. They filed a friend-of- the-court brief in the case in September, supporting the injunction and illustrating the serious harm that SB 1070 would cause.

Iraq and Afghanistan rank near rock-bottom in an index of corruption in 178 countries that found that nearly three- quarters of the countries surveyed showed serious corruption problems.

Iraq ranked 175 and Afghanistan 176 in the global index, just above Burma (Myanmar) and Somalia. These were the same ranks they achieved in 2009.

The United States, while still in the top 20 percent of the world index, fell from 19th in 2009 to 22nd this year, again failing to score in the top 20. That put it behind Canada, Barbados and Chile in the Americas.

The survey was carried out by watchdog group Transparency International (TI) in Berlin. To form its index, TI compiles surveys that ask businessmen and analysts, both in and outside the countries they are analysing, their perceptions of how corrupt a country is.

Relying on the number of actual corruption cases would not work since laws and enforcement of laws differ significantly from country to country.

Scott Horton, a constitutional lawyer who is a contributing editor to Harper’s Magazine, raised a delicate question in today’s column: “Is being occupied by the United States or receiving massive U.S. government contracts somehow correlated to corruption?”

Chip Pitts, a lecturer in law at Stanford University, at least partly answered Horton’s question. He told IPS, “The association between corruption and authoritarianism and war continues, but we shouldn’t forget that this is a ‘perceptions’ index.”

“More subtle and masked corruption persists in nations like the U.S., where the role of the military-industrial- surveillance complex in fostering creeping authoritarianism at home and war abroad – in more overtly corrupt countries like Afghanistan and Iraq – is joined by massive, if under- appreciated theft like that in the recent financial bailout,” he noted.

“The publish-what-you-pay provisions in the latest financial reform legislation were a step ahead, but only a small step and still focused mainly on countries abroad,” he continued.

“The ‘supply’ side of corruption here in the U.S. – or in the EU nations and Japan – is also important and should be the subject of dramatically greater investigation, enforcement, and accountability,” Pitts said.

In his latest column in Harper’s, Horton wrote, “America is no longer seen as being in the top tier of least-corrupt countries, which includes Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. Instead it belongs to the second tier, which includes Eastern and Southern Europe.”

“The index has consistently shown the perception of corruption in the United States as steadily rising. My hunch is that this focuses on government contracting, but the notes released by TI point only to ‘widespread concern over a lack of government oversight’.”

In the index, Somalia, Afghanistan and Myanmar were found to be perceived as the most corrupt – the same rank as they had in the 2009 survey. And New Zealand, Denmark and Singapore were again seen as having the cleanest governments. Finland, Sweden, Canada, the Netherlands, Australia, Switzerland and Norway completed the top 10.

Huguette Labelle, the former Canadian civil servant who serves as chair of Transparency International, told The New York Times that “the financial crisis and its aftermath had weighed on the United States’ ranking”.

“Bernard L. Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, while not itself attributable to the government, reveals some of the problems that made the crisis possible,” Labelle said, adding, “People rely on government for early warning signals.”

Sometimes the problem is “a lack of regulation or a lack of enforcement”, she said. “There was a vacuum of enforcement that allowed people to do bad things. The problem is widespread as many countries have regulations on the books but don’t enforce them, either because the state is captured by interests that don’t want them enforced or because regulatory bodies don’t have the resources to do their work.”

As many as 20 countries in the 36-nation Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) convention that bans the bribery of foreign officials show little or no enforcement of the rules, the survey found.

TI said this sent “the wrong signal about their commitment to curb corrupt practices”.

The TI index is the most commonly used measure for corruption in countries worldwide, though it has received criticisms over the years. The principal criticism stems from the difficulty in measuring corruption, which by definition happens behind the scenes. The index therefore needs to rely on third-party surveys that have been criticised as potentially unreliable.

Data can vary widely depending on the public perception of a country, the completeness of the surveys and the methodology used. The second issue is that data cannot be compared from year to year because TI uses different methodologies and samples every year. This makes it difficult to evaluate the result of new policies.

The authors reply to these criticisms by reminding that the index is meant to measure perception and not “reality”. They argue that “perceptions matter in their own right, since… firms and individuals take actions based on perceptions.”

With tongue in cheek, constitutional experts congratulated the U.S. government Tuesday for negotiating a plea deal with Guantanamo prisoner Omar Khadr, thus avoiding a trial in the military commission “puppet theatre” of a defendant who was just 15 at the time of his offences.

Omar Khadr Credit: Public domain

Details of the plea deal are not yet fully known, but it appears that Khadr will serve an eight-year sentence, the last seven years of which will be in Canada, his home country. Most of those contacted by IPS believe the Canadian government will free him since he was a minor and should not have been tried before a military commission in the first place.

Constitutional lawyer Scott Horton, who writes for Harper’s Magazine, called the plea deal “a meaningless charade”.

“My best guess is this: before the end of 2012, Khadr will be home in Canada, and in very short order, he will be a free man,” Horton told IPS. “This is because, as the Canadian courts have already recognised, the entire process at Guantánamo is illegitimate and it furnishes no basis upon which a person can be imprisoned, not even on a ludicrous and highly coerced guilty plea.”

The benefit to the U.S., he said, is that “The U.S. is saved the spectacle of a trial which would have been a publicity nightmare of the highest order. Khadr gets to go home and probably to go free before too long. And the prosecutors get just one thing: a number of gullible reporters who misunderstand what is going on, and report it as a complete victory for them.”

On Monday, Khadr pled guilty to five charges, including murder, for throwing a grenade that killed a U.S. soldier in during a fierce firefight at an al Qaeda compound in Afghanistan in 2002. He was 15 years old at the time of the incident.

Khadr’s defence team says he was pushed into fighting the U.S. by his father, said to be a close associate of Osama bin Laden.

Khadr, now 24, also admitted planting improvised explosive devices and receiving weapons training from al Qaeda. His defence lawyers say that because Khadr was a child when the offences occurred, he should not be tried for war crimes.

David Frakt, who is widely known for his 2008 defense of Guantanamo detainee Mohammed Jawad, who, like Khadr, was facing charges for events alleged to have taken place when he was a minor, agrees.

He told IPS, “The conviction of this child soldier for non- existent war crimes is a disgraceful travesty and a stain on America’s reputation. Although the plea bargain has saved the administration from the unseemly spectacle of a trial, the United States will still go down in history as the first civilised nation to prosecute a child soldier as a war criminal.”

He added, “That this happened on President [Barack] Obama’s watch is beyond disappointing, and exposes the extreme hypocrisy of the administration’s claims of devotion to the rule of law and adherence to the laws of armed conflict.”

Frakt, now a professor at Barry University law school, told IPS he believes that the officers on the military commission jury are capable of rendering a fair verdict and sentence.

But, he added, “The way that the Military Commissions Act is written, and the way it has been interpreted by the Department of Defense and by Khadr’s trial judge, would have virtually guaranteed conviction on most, if not all, of the charges, potentially subjecting Khadr to a very lengthy sentence.”

“Given the unreasonableness of both the U.S. and Canadian governments’ posture toward Mr. Khadr, his lawyers are probably wise to advise him to take this deal. At least he now has a chance to get out of confinement while he is still relatively young and lead some semblance of a normal life.”

Chip Pitts, a lecturer at Stanford Law School, told IPS, “This plea bargain shouldn’t be taken as indication of the legitimacy of the irredeemably tainted military commissions; it was precisely their illegitimacy and one-sidedness that led Canadian citizen Omar Khadr, a juvenile at the time of arrest who was brought into the horror of war by his father and had maintained his innocence of the murder charges until the last minute, to finally succumb to the pressure of a potential life sentence and agree to a plea bargain (including to novel “war crimes” not recognized as such at the time).”

Pitts said the plea deal “will return him to Canada and freedom much earlier.”

But, he added, “The precedent set – of extracting a plea by threatening a child soldier with harsh charges and an unfair trial, instead of undertaking the rehabilitation contemplated by international treaties – is a notable setback for international human rights law.”

“How is this different from Uganda’s bringing treason charges in 2002 against child soldiers from the Lord’s Resistance Army, or the DRC’s military court prosecutions against child soldiers? The implications, especially for child victims of war and legal treatment of children with still-developing brains, are disturbing.”

Jonathan Hafetz, a professor at the Seton Hall Law School, joined others in questioning the legitimacy of the military commissions.

He told IPS, “Khadr’s case, which underscored the gross mistreatment of prisoners in U.S. custody and the extent the U.S. government would go to hide it, reminds us that military commissions will continue to spark controversy and lack legitimacy as long as they continue. Khadr’s plea may help bring the debacle to an end in his case, but it provides another example of how military commissions are designed to deny justice, not to deliver it.”

Human rights groups were also unanimous in condemning the Khadr proceedings.

Rob Freer, Amnesty International’s USA researcher, said, “While military trial proceedings may be coming to an end in Khadr’s case, the obligation on the U.S. authorities to address serious concerns about human rights violations suffered by him does not end.”

He added, “The U.S. authorities have ignored their international duties in the treatment of children, which was the case when Khadr was arrested eight years ago.”

And Jameel Jaffer, Deputy Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), declared, “Khadr’s plea deal means that the United States will be spared the embarrassment of trying a child soldier in a tribunal that most of the world sees as illegitimate. Khadr’s case, however, is emblematic of a set of larger problems with the military commissions that won’t be resolved by a plea deal. These tribunals are simply incapable of providing fair trials, and they ought to be shut down altogether.”

Two revelations await the reader of the Wikileaks section dealing with civilian deaths in the Iraq War: Iraqis are responsible for most of these deaths, and the number of total civilian casualties is substantially higher than has been previously reported.

There were numerous gruesome but seemingly isolated events that caught the interest and attention of the press and the public. For example, on Aug. 31, 2005, more than 950 people were killed in a stampede on a bridge in Baghdad, after the crowd had been panicked by a number of earlier attacks. And on Aug. 14, 2007, in a rural area near the Syrian border, truck bombs murdered more than 500 Iraqis.

But, even more than these horrendous incidents, the action that catapulted the mass killings off the charts was a carefully planned, systematic strategy of religious and tribal cleansing. That campaign, Wikileaks says, reached its zenith in December 2006, which it calls the worst month of the war.

That month saw the deaths of some 3,800 civilians, along with the killings of about 1,300 police officers, insurgents and coalition soldiers.

U.S. soldiers, too, share responsibility for civilian killings, Wikileaks says. It reports many instances of U.S. soldiers killing Iraqi civilians at checkpoints, from helicopters, and in operations.

Wikileaks says these killings were a central reason Iraqis turned against the U.S. presence in their country.

Detailed analyses of the 391,832 documents disclosed by Wikileaks Friday were published by The New York Times and several other invited media organisations, based on tens of thousands of secret field reports from the battlegrounds of Iraq. In July, Wikileaks released a smaller number of reports dealing with the war in Afghanistan.

According to the New York Times account, the current archive “contains reports on at least four cases of lethal shootings from helicopters. In the bloodiest, on July 16, 2007, as many as 26 Iraqis were killed, about half of them civilians. However, the tally was called in by two different people, and it is possible that the deaths were counted twice.”

Later, in February 2007, two Iraqi men believed to have been firing mortars, even though they made surrendering motions, were shot and killed by an Apache helicopter. The action was taken because, according to a military lawyer cited in the report, “they cannot surrender to aircraft, and are still valid targets.”

However, in three other instances, Iraqis surrendered to helicopter crews without being shot.

The Times writes that, “The pace of civilian deaths served as a kind of pulse, whose steady beat told of the success, or failure, of America’s war effort. Americans on both sides of the war debate argued bitterly over facts that grew hazier as the war deepened.”

While no one really has an exact tally of Iraqi deaths, the Wikileaks numbers appear to be in line with those of several sources, including Iraq Body Count. That organisation used press reports to track civilian deaths, a method frequently criticised by the George W. Bush administration as unreliable and producing inflated numbers.

In all, the five-year archive lists more than 100,000 dead from 2004 to 2009, though some deaths are reported more than once, and some reports have inconsistent casualty figures. A 2008 Congressional report warned that record keeping in the war had been so problematic that such statistics should be looked at only as “guideposts”.

In a statement on Friday, Iraq Body Count, which did a preliminary analysis of the archive, estimated that it listed 15,000 deaths that had not been previously disclosed anywhere.

There are thousands of painful anecdotes of loss about individuals and their families in the Wikileaks archive.

There were multiple “misunderstandings” at checkpoints and these were often lethal. In one, sunlight reflecting off the windshield of a car that did not slow down led to the shooting death of a mother and the wounding of three of her daughters and her husband.

The Times writes that, “according to one particularly painful entry from 2006, an Iraqi wearing a tracksuit was killed by an American sniper who later discovered that the victim was the platoon’s interpreter.”

The Wikileaks documents provide context for one of the most heinous crimes committed by U.S. soldiers, the shootings of at least 15 Iraqi civilians, including women and children in the western city of Haditha. This action, says The New York Times, “is misrepresented in the archives. The report stated that the civilians were killed by militants in a bomb attack, the same false version of the episode that was given to the news media.”

The Wikileaks documents do not detail the main causes of Iraqi deaths caused by U.S. soldiers. And, since these reports cover the period starting in 2004, they do not report on civilian deaths caused by the 2003 “Shock and Awe” bombardment preceding the U.S.-led invasion.

But research by the International Committee of the Red Cross confirms that 10 civilians die for every soldier killed in today’s wars.

Wikileaks is an international organisation that publishes anonymous submissions and leaks of otherwise unavailable documents while preserving the anonymity of sources. Its website was launched in 2006.

A member of the U.S. military, Pfc. Bradley Manning, has been accused of providing Wikileaks with the documents released in July. Numerous support groups throughout the U.S. have called on the U.S. government to release him and have decried the evidence of war crimes perpetrated by U.S. armed soldiers depicted in the logs and videos released by Wikileaks.

Protesters affirmed that if Bradley Manning is the source of the leaks, he deserves the gratitude of the entire world and should be heralded as a hero for his sacrifice.

He also has the support of Daniel Ellsberg, the Defence Department official who in 1967 leaked the so-called “Pentagon Papers” to the New York Times. The top-secret documents revealed some of the untruths and deceptions that senior government officials foisted on the U.S. public to win approval for the Vietnam War.

The publication of a motherlode of secret field reports from the Iraq War are shining a bright light on heretofore unknown or underreported suspicions about the power of private security contractors and the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by their fellow Iraqis, often with their U.S. military counterparts “turning a blind eye”.

The release of the 392,832 documents by Wikileaks – the same website responsible for the recent release of 77,000 secret reports covering six years of the Afghanistan War – drew an immediate response from the Pentagon, as well as efforts by unfriendly nations to paint the U.S. military in the most gruesome possible light.

Geoff Morrell, the U.S. Defence Department press secretary, strongly condemned both WikiLeaks and the release of the Iraq documents.

“We deplore WikiLeaks for inducing individuals to break the law, leak classified documents and then cavalierly share that secret information with the world, including our enemies,” he said.

Iran’s Press TV declared, “Whistleblower website Wikileaks has released documents suggesting that the Pentagon instructed U.S.-led forces to ‘secretly’ torture detainees in Iraq.”

The document release also unleashed a flood of bickering among competing Iraqi politicians. For example, a senior member of the Iraqiya bloc led by former Iraqi prime minister Iyad Allawi called for an investigation into possible connections between torture operations in Iraqi prisons and Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

The Mar. 7 parliamentary elections produced a stalemate between Allawi and al-Maliki, and both are still chasing the prime minister’s job long after the election.

The Wikileaks disclosures fall into five categories: reliance on private contractors; the so-called “surge”, the addition of 30,000 additional U.S. troops to work with willing Iraqis; the deaths of Iraqi civilians – killed mostly by other Iraqis, but also by the U.S. military; a litany of prisoner abuse by Iraqis – from which U.S. officials sometimes turned a blind eye – even more lurid than the infamous photographs of torture from Abu Ghraib prison in 2004; and the “aggressive” intervention of Iran’s military providing “weapons, training and sanctuary” to Shiite combatants.

The Wikileaks documents are sparse on information about mistreatment of prisoners in U.S.-run detention facilities, but heavy on the chilling details of abuse of Iraqis by Iraq’s own army and police.

During the period covered by the Wikileaks documents, at least six prisoners died in Iraqi custody, most of them in recent years. Hundreds of reports referenced beatings, burnings and lashings. Such treatment appeared to be considered normal by the Iraqis.

According to The New York Times, “In one case, Americans suspected Iraqi Army officers of cutting off a detainee’s fingers and burning him with acid. Two other cases produced accounts of the executions of bound detainees. And while some abuse cases were investigated by the Americans, most noted in the archive seemed to have been ignored, with the equivalent of an institutional shrug: soldiers told their officers and asked the Iraqis to investigate.”

U.S. military orders said that if U.S. personnel were not directly involved in prisoner abuse, U.S. soldiers need not take any action. This order caused U.S. forces to look the other way in cases of the abuse of Iraqis by Iraqis.

When U.S. forces discovered and reported abuse, Iraqis frequently failed to act. One report said a police chief refused to file charges “as long as the abuse produced no marks”. Another police chief told military inspectors that his officers engaged in abuse “and supported it as a method of conducting investigations”.

The Wikileak documents also show that U.S. forces sometimes used the threat of Iraqi brutality to persuade prisoners to cooperate with interrogators.

It was not until later in the war that some of the worst examples of Iraqi abuse came to light. For example, in August 2009, an Iraqi police commando unit reported that a detainee committed suicide in its custody, but an autopsy conducted in the presence of a U.S. official “found bruises and burns on the detainee’s body as well as visible injuries to the head, arm, torso, legs, and neck”. The report stated that the police “have reportedly begun an investigation”.

And in December, 12 Iraqi soldiers, including an intelligence officer, were caught on video in Tal Afar shooting to death a prisoner whose hands were tied, The Times reports.

Wikileaks reports that, while the U.S. forces told the local Iraqi Army commander, no inquiry was begun because U.S. soldiers were not involved.

It was not unusual, however, for U.S. soldiers to intervene. One U.S. soldier heard screams in a prison cell and found two badly dehydrated detainees with bruises on their bodies. He ordered them out of Iraqi custody.

In August 2006, Wikileaks documents show, a U.S. sergeant in Ramadi walked into an Iraqi military police station and found an Iraqi lieutenant using an electrical cable to slash the bottom of a detainee’s feet. The sergeant stopped him, but later he found the same Iraqi officer whipping a detainee’s back.

One beaten detainee said in 2005 that “when the Marines finally took him, he was treated very well, and he was thankful and happy to see them.”

The Wikileaks documents may increase the scrutiny of the role of private contractors, whose travails have been widely publicised since Blackwater (now known as Xe Services) was accused of opening fire on unarmed civilians in a crowded main square in Baghdad in 2007 and killing 17 of them.

But the Wikileaks disclosures, while reporting little that was unknown, paint a far more detailed picture of the military sea-change that defined the United States’ involvement in Iraq. The New York Times says, “The early days of the Iraq war, with all its Wild West chaos, ushered in the era of the private contractor, wearing no uniform but fighting and dying in battle, gathering and disseminating intelligence and killing presumed insurgents.”

The behaviour of private security contractors in Iraq is already having serious effects on use of these same assets in Afghanistan. Abuses, including civilian deaths, have driven the Afghan government to attempt to ban most outside contractors entirely.

Numerous reports have forecast a substantial growth in the use of security contractors in Iraq as U.S. forces shrink. A July report by the Commission on Wartime Contracting, a panel established by Congress, estimated that the State Department alone would need more than double the number of contractors it had protecting the American Embassy and consulates in Iraq.

There are still more contractors than members of the military serving in Afghanistan.

WikiLeaks is an international organisation that publishes anonymous submissions and leaks of otherwise unavailable documents while preserving the anonymity of sources. Its website was launched in 2006.

The organisation has described itself as having been founded by Chinese dissidents, as well as journalists, mathematicians, and start-up company technologists from the U.S., Taiwan, Europe, Australia, and South Africa. Julian Assange, an Australian journalist and Internet activist, is its director.

Asserting that “the majority of Tea Party supporters are sincere, principled people of good will”, the head of the National Association of Colored People (NAACP) and other U.S. civil rights leaders are calling on the populist political grouping to purge itself of known racists lest they influence the direction of the movement.

The Tea Party is a loose association of independent groups or chapters that emerged in 2009. It lacks a single leader or spokesperson, and in general, focuses on lower taxes, illegal immigration, and less government involvement in the lives of ordinary citizens.

The groups that comprise the Tea Party have not put forward any policy proposals for achieving these goals. Its supporters are overwhelmingly white. In the upcoming Nov. 2 congressional elections, the Tea Party has backed some 138 candidates – every single one a Republican.

In a conference call with journalists, NAACP President and CEO Benjamin T. Jealous applauded some Tea Party factions for taking the first steps to ensure that racists and bigots do not corrupt the movement’s credibility.

“These are welcome first steps,” he said. “They promote diversity and acknowledge the inherent perception problem that plagues the Tea Party: that while many of its leaders are motivated by common conservative budget and governance concerns, for too long they have tolerated others who espouse racism and xenophobia and, in some instances, are formally associated with organiSations like the Council of Conservative Citizens – the direct lineal descendant of the White Citizens Council.”

However, he said, this work is incomplete.

“These groups and individuals are out there, and we ignore them at our own peril. They are speaking at Tea Party events, recruiting at rallies and in some cases remain in the Tea Party leadership itself,” he said.

“The danger is not that the majority of Tea Party members share their views, but that left unchecked, these extremists might indirectly influence the direction of the Tea Party and therefore the direction of our country: moving it backward and not forward.”

In a telephone news conference Wednesday, the NAACP endorsed a report by the Kansas City-based Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, an independent civil rights advocacy organisation. The report, “Tea Party Nationalism”, details various associations between Tea Party organisations and acknowledged hate groups in the United States.

“The Tea Party movement has unleashed a still inchoate political movement who are, in their numerical majority, angry middle-class white people who believe their country, their nation, has been taken from them,” the report says.

While many Tea Partiers joined the movement out of genuine concern for the well-being of the country, there is a substantial body of evidence suggesting that professional lobbying firms, mostly in Washington, D.C., have provided many of the Tea Party’s organising and publicity skills, and that wealthy individuals and corporations have made substantial money contributions to the movement.

In an addendum, the report provides details of local Tea Party leaders who the report’s authors say have “direct ties to white supremacist groups”.

The report says: “The TeaParty.org faction is led by the executive director of the Minuteman Project, a nativist organization that has in the past been associated with the murder of migrant Mexican workers as part of its vigilante ‘border operations.’ Roan Garcia-Quintana, ‘advisor and media spokesman’ for the 2010 Tax Day Tea Party and member of ResistNet, also serves on the National Board of Directors of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CofCC), the lineal descendent of the Council of White Citizens. In Texas, Wood County Tea Party leader Karen Pack was once listed as an ‘official supporter’ of Thom Robb’s Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, a modern-day white supremacist organization.”

The report examines the six national organisational networks the authors conclude are at the core of the Tea Party movement: FreedomWorks Tea Party, 1776 Tea Party, Tea Party Nation, Tea Party Patriots, ResistNet, and Tea Party Express.

It says that leaders of all but one – FreedomWorks, a lobbying group in Washington headed by Dick Armey, a former Republican House majority leader – have raised questions about President Barack Obama’s birth certificate or have ties to white supremacist groups.

Jealous said that, in backing the report: “We’re not attacking the Tea Party. We’re not calling the Tea Party racist. We are asking them to repudiate the racists in their midst. We have challenged Democratic Party in the same way. We challenged Republicans when they embraced the old Dixiecrats.”

But not everyone agrees. One who doesn’t is Bruce Fein, a well-known conservative lawyer who served as an associate deputy attorney general in the Department of Justice under President Ronald Reagan. He told IPS, “The British had their Papal Plots, Joe McCarthy had his Communists, and now the NAACP has its ostensible racists as scapegoats to distract attention from serious issues.”

He added, “The glorious civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s was chronically maligned by ad hominem attacks on its leadership and their associations based on flimsy or concocted evidence. It is disturbing to see the NAACP parrot the demagoguery that was employed against it.”

The national attention sparked by the NAACP call this summer for the Tea Party to repudiate racist elements within the group inspired the Tea Party leadership to purge some outspoken racist elements, including Tea Party Express chairman Mark Williams.

The report concludes that members of groups such as the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) – once known as the segregationist White Citizens Councils – have infiltrated tea party chapters. The CCC is opposed to actions designed to “mix the races of mankind”. It also notes that contributors to Stormfront.org,” a white nationalist Web site, have written of “infiltrating” Tea Party events.

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear former Attorney General John Ashcroft’s appeal of a lower court decision, which ruled that he could be held responsible for the wrongful detention of a U.S. citizen.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) brought the case against Ashcroft in 2005 on behalf of Abdullah al-Kidd, who they say was improperly arrested in 2003 as a material witness in the terrorism trial of Same Omar al-Hussein and detained for 16 days under prison-like conditions.

Al-Kidd was eventually released under restrictions that included confining his travel to four states, surrendering his passport and reporting to probation officers. He was subjected to these conditions for more than a year and, despite having been arrested as a material witness, was never asked to testify, or charged with a crime.

A material witness in U.S. law is a person with information alleged to be material concerning a criminal proceeding. Prior to 9/11, the material witness law was used sparingly to ensure witnesses would be available to testify in criminal cases.

After 9/11, the ACLU charges that Ashcroft “retooled the law into an investigative detention statute, allowing the government to arrest and detain individuals for whom it lacked probable cause to charge with a crime.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled in September 2009 that the federal material witness law couldn’t be used to detain or investigate people when there is no probable cause to bring criminal charges. The ruling also held that Ashcroft does not have immunity in the case and can be held personally liable for the wrongful detention of al-Kidd.

Ashcroft appealed that ruling to the Supreme Court, which Monday decided to review the case.

Jonathan Hafetz, a law professor at Seton Hall Law School, told IPS, “The Bush administration clearly misused the material witness statute as a pretext to detain people without charging them with a crime, rather as the law was intended – as a necessary means to obtain witness testimony. This violated the Constitution’s prohibition on imprisonment without probable cause and helped lead to the prolonged detention of individuals who had no connection to terrorism or other criminal activity.”

He added, “Thus far, the [Barack] Obama administration has sought to derail every attempt at accountability, arguing in one case after another against judicial involvement in cases of illegal detention, torture, and other mistreatment. The fact that the human rights abuses and constitutional violations did not occur on its watch does not excuse their effort to deny victims their day in court.”

His view was echoed by Joanne Mariner, head of Human Rights Watch’s Terrorism and Counterterrorism Programme. She told IPS, “We’re very disappointed that the Obama administration urged the Supreme Court to hear Ashcroft’s appeal of the Al- Kidd decision. In our view, the decision of the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit was absolutely correct. The ruling reaffirmed basic constitutional protections against detention without charge.”

The government has “attempted to get around bedrock requirements of the criminal justice system by relying on the material witness statute. Without any evidence that men like al-Kidd had committed a crime, the government held them in indefinite detention by claiming, pretextually, that they may have had information about other cases,” she said.

And Col. Morris Davis, former chief prosecutor for Guantánamo’s military commissions, told IPS, “The material witness statute got used and abused by the Bush administration and their ‘anything goes’ approach to things that could be connected to national security by way of some fanciful argument.”

Civil liberties advocates note that since the terrorist attacks of Sep. 11, 2001, the U.S. has used the material witness statute to detain at least 70 men living in the United States – all but one of them Muslim and 64 of Middle Eastern or South Asian descent – without charge for indefinite periods of time, often under the rubric of securing grand-jury testimony.

After at least a year of joint research, the ACLU and Human Rights Watch reported that the Ashcroft Justice Department “claimed each of the post-September 11 material witnesses had information relevant to grand jury terrorism investigations or to the trials of defendants alleged to support terrorist organisations. Yet at least 30 witnesses we know about were never brought before a grand jury or court to testify.”

Only seven were ever arrested on terrorism-related charges.

Many of the 70 material witnesses identified by the ACLU and HRW suffered imprisonment because federal investigators and attorneys relied on false, flimsy, or irrelevant information and jumped to the wrong conclusions, the groups say.

Consistent with the Justice Department’s suspicions that the witnesses were dangerous men linked to terrorists, the witnesses were often arrested at gunpoint in front of families and neighbours and transported to jail in handcuffs.

They typically were held around-the-clock in solitary confinement and subjected to the harsh and degrading high- security conditions typically reserved for prisoners accused or convicted of the most dangerous crimes. They were taken to court in shackles and chains. In at least one case, a material witness was made to testify in shackles.

In some cases, the harsh treatment of material witnesses included verbal and even physical abuse by prison staff. The Department of Justice’s Inspector General issued a report detailing the abuse of material witnesses as well as other detainees in federal detention facilities.

Abdullah al-Kidd, born in the U.S. state of Kansas and once a star running back at the University of Idaho, spent 16 days in federal detention in three states in 2003, sometimes naked and sometimes shackled hand and foot, but was never charged with a crime.

Once known as Lavoni T. Kidd, in 1995 when he led the University of Idaho football team, the Vandals, in rushing, Kidd was on his way to Saudi Arabia to work on a doctorate in Islamic studies in March 2003 when he was arrested and handcuffed at Dulles Airport in Washington.

Kidd, who described himself in a 2004 interview as “anti-bin Laden, anti-Taliban, anti-suicide bombing, anti-terrorism,” was never called to testify as a witness.

Justice Elena Kagan will recuse herself from this case because, as Obama’s Solicitor General, she took a position on it. Should her absence result in a 4-4- tie among the other Justices, the opinion of the Appeals Court would prevail.

A U.S. citizen of Puerto Rican descent with mental disabilities is suing the U.S. government for wrongfully deporting him to Mexico and forcing him to endure over four months of living on the streets and in the shelters and prisons of Mexico, Honduras, Nicaragua and Guatemala.

Advocates say that the case, while extreme, is just one of many produced by the country’s dysfunctional immigration system.

The suits were filed last week on behalf of U.S. citizen Mark Lyttle by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the ACLU of Georgia and the ACLU of North Carolina, in federal courts in those states.

Azadeh Shahshahani, director of the National Security/Immigrants’ Rights Project of the ACLU of Georgia, told IPS, “Mark’s case is a tragedy that serves to underscore the deep systemic injustices that continue to plague our government’s system of detention and deportation.”

“Mark is just one of thousands of people in this country who have been victimised by a single-minded focus on detention and deportation without the kind of individualised determinations that are the essence of due process,” she said.

According to the ACLU, Mark Lyttle’s story is not unique. A report by the ACLU and Human Rights Watch (HRW) issued in July claims that people with mental disabilities, including U.S .citizens, face an even greater risk of erroneous deportation by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement because courts do not ensure fair hearings for those not able to represent themselves.

“Few areas of U.S. law are as complicated as deportation, and yet every day people with mental disabilities must go to court without lawyers or any safeguards that make the hearings fair,” said Sarah Mehta, Aryeh Neier fellow at HRW and the ACLU. “Some have disabilities so severe that they don’t know their own names or what a judge is.”

The groups urged Congress to pass legislation requiring the appointment of lawyers for all people with mental disabilities in immigration courts.

Their 98-page report, “Deportation by Default: Mental Disability, Unfair Hearings, and Indefinite Detention in the U.S. Immigration System,” says that immigrants with mental disabilities are often unjustifiably detained for years on end, sometimes with no legal limits.

The report documents numerous cases in which people with mental disabilities were prevented from making claims against deportation – including claims of U.S. citizenship – because they were unable to represent themselves. Some of the people interviewed for the report did not know their own names, were delusional, could not tell time, or did not know that deportation meant removal from the United States.

Of the 57,000 detained immigrants facing deportation in 2008, 15 percent had mental disabilities. Under current immigration law and practice, immigration detainees have no right to court-appointed lawyers or to other safeguards, such as evaluations of their ability to receive a fair hearing, when they go through deportation hearings, HRW and the ACLU said.

Their report also shows that people with mental disabilities not only face arrest and deportation without safeguards, but are also routinely detained during the course of their hearings.

The ACLU says Mark Lyttle’s entanglement with immigration authorities began when he was about to be released from a North Carolina jail where he was serving a short sentence for inappropriately touching a worker’s backside in a halfway house that serves individuals with mental disorders.

“Despite having ample evidence that Lyttle was a U.S. citizen – including his social security number, the names of his parents, his sworn statements that he was born in the United States and criminal record checks – officials from the North Carolina Department of Correction referred him to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as an undocumented immigrant whose country of birth was Mexico,” the civil liberties group said.

Lyttle had never been to Mexico, shared no Mexican heritage, spoke no Spanish and did not claim to be from Mexico.

The state of North Carolina has an agreement with ICE requiring state officials to report all incarcerated individuals who they believe were born in other countries. ICE began investigating Lyttle and sent him to the Stewart Detention Facility, an immigration detention centre in Lumpkin, Georgia where he spent six weeks.

Although ICE knew of Lyttle’s long and documented history of mental illness and noted that he did not comprehend the investigation of his status, he was not offered legal assistance and was deported to Mexico.

The ACLU contends that Lyttle was left alone and penniless in Mexico and unable to communicate in Spanish. Mexican authorities sent him to Honduras, where he was imprisoned and faced with guards who threatened to shoot him. Honduran officials sent him to Guatemala and, eventually, he made his way to the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala City.

Within a day, the ACLU says, embassy officials contacted one of Lyttle’s three brothers at the military base where he was serving, leading to Lyttle being issued a U.S. passport. His brother wired him money and Lyttle was soon on a flight to Atlanta. Upon Lyttle’s arrival, border officials, seeing his history of ICE investigations, held and questioned him for several hours before letting him go.

During this four-month ordeal, Lyttle was unable to take his medications to treat his mental illnesses and was subject to cycles of manic activity and depression. He is now living in Griffin, Georgia, where he is recovering and receiving medication for his mental health problems.

The lawsuits seek damages and injunctive relief for violations of Lyttle’s constitutional rights to due process and equal protection.

The Barack Obama administration recently announced that in the past year it deported more than 392,000 unauthorised immigrants – a record number.