Mission & Justice

Ramzy Baroud; 14/5/08

The various data provided in the US State Department’s annual terrorism report for 2007 points towards some interesting, if not puzzling, conclusions. The much-publicised document, made available on April 30 through the State Department’s website, makes no secret of the fact that Al Qaeda is back, strong as ever. It also suggests that violence worldwide is nowhere near subsiding, despite President George Bush’s repeated assurances regarding the success of his “war on terror”. But will the report inspire a serious reflection of the country’s detrimental foreign policy, and its role in the current situation? Let’s look at some of the data.

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2/5/08

Al Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Hajj has hit out at the US treatment of detainees at the Guantanamo Bay military prison where he was held for nearly six and a half years. Saying that “rats are treated with more humanity”, al-Hajj said inmates’ “human dignity was violated”. Al-Hajj, who arrived in Sudan early on Friday, was carried off the US air force jet on a stretcher and immediately taken to hospital. Later, he had an emotional reunion with his wife and son His brother, Asim al-Hajj, said he did not recognise the caeraman because he looked like a man in his 80s.

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John Wiseman; 30/4/08

David Hicks will not pursue action against the Australian or US governments despite startling admissions from the former chief prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay that the military commission process that convicted him was politically influenced and that evidence was obtained through prisoner abuse. Hicks’s lawyer David McLeod said last night that Hick’s instructions to him remained firm: he simply “wanted to get on with life”.  However, Mr McLeod added that if Hicks chose to challenge what had happened to him, there would be a number of paths he could pursue. “If the wheels start to fall off the validity of the military commission wagon, those circumstances may permit Hicks to agitate the fairness and lawfulness and validity of what happened to him in Australia,” Mr McLeod said.

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Rhodri Davies; 28/4/08

Wearing a pristine white *thobe, a dark skinned eight-year-old boy of Sudanese descent looks into a video camera. He says: “Ana bahibak baba” (I love you dad) - part of a message to be sent to his father. Mohammed al-Haj, the timid boy on Al Jazeera English’s studio lawn, is sending the message because he has not seen his father for six years. And his father is desperate for any scraps of communication and support from the outside world - he is Sami al-Haj, an inmate at Guantanamo Bay. Al-Haj is currently being force fed as he is on hunger strike and, according to Clive Stafford Smith, his British lawyer, he is also being subjected to psychological torture.

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Mark Mazzetti; 28/4/08
USA Intelligence operatives trying to thwart terrorist attacks can legally use interrogation methods prohibited under international law, the US Justice Department has told Congress. The legal interpretation, outlined in recent letters, sheds new light on the still secret rules for interrogations by the CIA. It shows that the Administration is arguing that the boundaries for interrogations should be subject to some latitude, even under an executive order that President George Bush said meant that the CIA would comply with international strictures against harsh treatment of detainees. The Geneva Convention prohibits “outrages upon personal dignity”, but a letter sent by the Justice Department to Congress on March 5 makes clear that the Administration has not drawn a precise line in deciding which interrogation methods would violate that standard and is reserving the right to make case-by-case judgements.

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23/4/08

Adel al-Nusairi remembers his first six months at Guantanamo Bay as this: hours and hours of questions, but first, a needle. “I’d fall asleep [after the shot],” Mr Nusairi, a former Saudi policeman captured by US forces in Afghanistan in 2002, recalled in an interview with his lawyer at the military prison in Cuba. After being roused, Mr Nusairi eventually did talk, giving US officials what he later described as a made-up confession to get some peace. “I was completely gone,” he remembered. “I said, ‘Let me go. I want to go to sleep. If it takes saying I’m a member of al-Qaeda, I will.’ ”

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David Rohde & Tim Golden;11/4/08

Dozens of Afghan men held by the United States at Bagram Air Base and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are being tried here in secretive Afghan criminal proceedings, based mainly on allegations forwarded by the US military. The prisoners are being convicted and sentenced to as much as 20 years in jail in trials that typically run between half an hour and an hour, said human rights investigators who have observed them. One early trial was reported to have lasted barely 10 minutes, an investigator said. Witnesses do not appear in court and cannot be cross-examined. There are no sworn statements of their testimony.

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