Dispatches On The War On Torture

Some hits and misses from the courts yesterday. First, Maher Arar, who was stopped at JFK Airprort, rendered to Syria and tortured, had his case dismissed yesterday on the grounds that he technically never set foot on US soil and thus his claims cannot be heard in federal court.

That's a little unbelievable.

On a somewhat brighter side, a court took a look at the evidence in a habeas suit for a prisoner at Guantanamo, and found it so wanting that he quoted Lewis Carroll:

With some derision for the Bush administration’s arguments, a three-judge panel said the government contended that its accusations against the detainee should be accepted as true because they had been repeated in at least three secret documents.

The court compared that to the absurd declaration of a character in the Lewis Carroll poem “The Hunting of the Snark”: “I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.”

“This comes perilously close to suggesting that whatever the government says must be treated as true,” said the panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Well, yes, that's worked for them so far, so why wouldn't they continue. We're going to see this over and over in these habeas suits. The government doesn't have the goods to charge these people, and if they did, they would have done so by now.

Sensing this problem, yesterday the government charged a prisoner at Gitmo with the USS Cole bombing, almost completely out of the blue. And this was a prisoner who was subject to waterboarding.

Pentagon officials announced eight charges against Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi citizen of Yemeni descent. He has been in U.S. custody since late 2002, and is one of three detainees the government has acknowledged subjecting to an interrogation technique that simulates drowning.

Nashiri's "waterboarding" at the hands of CIA interrogators -- a technique that human rights groups around the world have condemned as torture -- figures to be a central element of his case. Defense attorneys immediately vowed to challenge any evidence obtained by coercion and criticized the Pentagon for moving forward with the military trial despite officials' awareness of how Nashiri was treated [...]

Nashiri contended at a military hearing last year that he confessed to masterminding the Cole attack only because he had been tortured, according to a transcript of that hearing.

As Marcy Wheeler notes, this should be an interesting trial because Nashiri is the only one of the three waterboarded prisoners who will challenge his captors in court.

And other former prisoners are challenging their captors in court - only this time, it's their corporate contractors.

Four Iraqi men say they are suing US military contractors for torturing them while they were detained at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.

The men, who were all released without charge, have brought separate lawsuits in four US courts.

One of the men said he was beaten, threatened with dogs and given electric shocks during four years at the prison.

I wonder if this will be thrown out too, because they never "set foot" on US soil.