As originally posted in the reader-diary section of Firedoglake.com; the post’s 2011 comment thread is available at that link.

David Cornwell (British author John le Carré) speaking in a March, 2002 interview:

The Cold War was fought under a constant mystery: How much can we do in defense of a free and decent society and remain a free and decent society that is worth defending? So there was always a very great unease, particularly in the secret world, about the methods with which we protected our virtue, as we saw it.

[…]

When you’ve got a preconception, you can always decorate it with slightly bent intelligence.

On this ninth anniversary of the opening of the notorious American prison camp built on a U.S. Navy Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba to hold, and, above all, to interrogate, foreigners claimed to be law of war combatants, I’ve transcribed below part of a recent interview of an English-speaking detainee – a citizen of Britain – who was transported by cargo plane from Afghanistan to Guantanamo’s Camp X-Ray in February, 2002. [His two British companions, Shafiq Rasul and Asif Iqbal – they’re collectively known as the “Tipton Three” – were flown to Cuba a month earlier, on January 13, 2002, two days after the prison camp opened nine years ago today, 1/11/11.]

That former detainee is Ruhal Ahmed, and the transcribed portion of his joint interview with Shafiq Rasul (made especially poignant and compelling by the presence of Ahmed’s young daughter), which was conducted in East London by British writer Andy Worthington last September 18th – nine years to the day after President Bush signed the never-rescinded Congressional Authorization for Use of Military Force (war) against the perpetrators of 9/11/2001 – may be viewed here (starting about five minutes in; don’t miss Shafiq Rasul’s account in the first two minutes of the clip).

Ruhal Ahmed and daughter in London on September 18, 2010

Interspersed with my transcript of Ahmed’s account of his pre-April, 2004 Guantanamo experiences, is my transcription of an exchange that took place in open court in the United States Supreme Court, on April 28, 2004, as two of the justices questioned the appointed representative of the U.S. government at the time, Deputy Solicitor General Paul Clement of the Executive Branch’s Department of Justice. Clement was resisting, in the name of the President and Congress and the American people, the efforts of another wartime detainee – U.S./Saudi citizen Yaser Hamdi – to have his claim, of being unlawfully detained as an armed-conflict combatant, heard and adjudicated by a neutral decision-maker in our independent Judicial Branch of government, or elsewhere.

Ruhal Ahmed and his two companions were seized by Northern Alliance forces in northern Afghanistan (where they’d been touring the area prior to attending the wedding of Iqbal in Pakistan, apparently partly in search of “dope,” but without even a tangential connection to any armed conflict, if one can prove a negative) in late November, 2001, were soon transferred to the custody of American Special Forces troops in Afghanistan, and then forcibly flown in January and February, 2002 to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where they were held, abused, and interrogated, until released to British custody – without explanation, apology, or reparations from the United States President or Congress then or since – in March, 2004.

Ahmed’s appallingly-abusive treatment and torture, while in American military custody in Afghanistan and Guantanamo, were detailed at length in a joint public account by the three British friends on July 26, 2004, as part of The Guantánamo Testimonials Project of the University of California at Davis’s Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas (CSHRA). That laudable academic project has been voluntarily compiling, during the abdication of Congressional oversight and DOJ enforcement of the law against powerful government actors, the evidence of crimes committed by agents of our federal government, that other members of our government should have been compiling and using to impeach and prosecute, years ago.

Some excerpts from that Guantánamo Testimonials Project written account:

80. During the first several weeks [in Guantanamo] the American interrogations with all three [men] consisted of pressing them to ‘just say you’re a fighter’. Asif [Iqbal] was told ‘if you just say you’re a fighter, because of the Geneva Convention when the war is over you’ll get sent back to England’. [Ruhal Ahmed] was told ‘just say you’re a fighter and you’ll go home’. He was told ‘you’ve come to kill American and British soldiers, coalition forces’. They talked about ‘allied forces’. They referred to the Northern Alliance as being the same as ‘allied forces’.

[…]

98. The interrogators very rarely introduced themselves. Occasionally they lied about the organizations they worked for and all three men believe the names they gave were almost always false. This misinformation was quite common. As an example, on one occasion [Ruhal Ahmed] told an investigator that one of her colleagues from the FBI had kept him in the interrogation room for 18 hours (this was in Camp Delta). He described the interrogator. The person to whom he was complaining told him that he knew the woman and that she was not from the FBI but from Military Intelligence.

99. In relation to the interrogators, they generally changed. It was very rare to have the same interrogator on a regular basis. Shafiq [Rasul] says ‘I only ever saw the same interrogator on three occasions at the most’.

100. The organizations that were involved in the interrogations included the CIA, FBI, DOD, MI5, NCI (Navy Crime Investigators), NSA, Army CID.
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As originally posted in the reader-diary section of Firedoglake.com; the post’s 2010 comment thread is available at that link. A January 4, 2010 U.S. State Department cable, sent from the American embassy in Sanaa, Yemen to multiple Executive Branch recipients – entitled “SUBJECT: GENERAL PETRAEUS’ [1/2/2010] MEETING WITH [PRESIDENT] SALEH ON SECURITY ASSISTANCE, AQAP STRIKES” – was leaked to WikiLeaks.org, which released it to the public domain on August 30, 2011 (with similar versions apparently previously released in November/December 2010); that cable confirms the CNN & AFP/Amnesty International reporting below about Yemeni/U.S. cooperation in the “successful” 12/17/2009 & 12/24/2009 U.S. missile-strike “operations” in Yemen. Subsequently, on September 30, 2011, the Executive Branch of the United States government deployed a CIA-operated, missile-armed drone (and one or more military-operated, missile-armed jets) inside the sovereign territory of Yemen, and deliberately killed American-born Anwar Al-Awlaki and three companions (one of whom was also a U.S. citizen), as they traveled together on a public road. Ten months earlier, on December 7, 2010, federal district Judge John Bates had thrown the plea of Al-Awlaki’s father (quoted below), for due process for his hit-listed American citizen son, out of court as non-justiciable by the American judiciary, without bothering to rule on the merits of Mr. Al-Awlaki’s life-and-death case. [Specifically, wrote Judge Bates: “Because these questions of justiciability require dismissal of this case at the outset, the serious issues regarding the merits of the alleged authorization of the targeted killing of a U.S. citizen overseas must await another day or another (non-judicial) forum.” It was a typical perversion of his solemn judicial role by Judge Bates, to avoid his duty to mete out justice, even, and especially, for the powerless and demonized, and even when it would displease the powerful – which he cloaked behind 83 pages of spurious claims about lack of jurisdictional authority. The reasons for that supposed lack of authority were chillingly described (by an Executive Branch eager to continue its abuse of power, obligingly parroted by Bates) as the justice-foreclosing – and, as it predictably turned out for Anwar Al-Awlaki and his companions, life-foreclosing – “threshold” hurdles of “standing, the [judiciary-concocted, so-called] political question doctrine, the Court’s exercise of its ‘equitable discretion,’ the absence of a cause of action under the Alien Tort Statute (‘ATS’), and the [judiciary-concocted, so-called] state secrets privilege.”]

Yemen’s “neutral” territory, that is, given the explicit target(s) that the United States Congress (alone among nations in this regard, as far as I know) selected and authorized the President to attack with armed force under the law of war, by passing the never-revisited 9/18/2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF):

That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.

In what way did Yemen, or Anwar Al-Aulaqi (aka Anwar Al-Awlaki), “plan, authorize, commit, or aid the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbor such organizations or persons”??

Especially given that Anwar Al-Awlaki was a resident of the United States at the time of the 9/11 attacks, and for the decade that preceded them:

Plaintiff’s son, Anwar Al-Aulaqi, was born in New Mexico in 1971. Plaintiff remained in the United States with his family for the next seven years, until 1978, when they moved back to Yemen.

[…]

In 1991, Plaintiff’s son Anwar Al-Aulaqi returned to the United States to attend college at Colorado State University. Anwar Al-Aulaqi went on to obtain his master’s degree at San Diego State University and later enrolled in a Ph.D. program at George Washington University, which he attended through December 2001. He married and had three children while living in the United States. He moved to the United Kingdom in 2003, and to Yemen in 2004.

At this point, given the public information that’s available, Yemen seems very much within its neutral-state rights to question any characterization of Al-Awlaki as an “enemy belligerent” fighting us under the 2001 AUMF-authorized armed conflict (as defined by the law of war), or as any “part of” the enemy forces against which Congress in 2001 authorized hostilities (and related detention, under the law of war) by our military. Neutral-state law of nation rights of Yemen that conflict, no doubt, with the asserted, but fraudulent, interpretations of the law of nations, and its subsidiary law of war, with which the Executive Branch (and the media, in the absence of judicial or congressional checks) is now thoroughly contaminated.

And yet, the United States military has apparently already killed at least 41 innocent civilians in Yemen, with the permission of the government of Yemen, in an attempt to kill native-born U.S. citizen Anwar Al-Awlaki, who left this nation more than a year after 9/11, and has been charged with no crimes:

In January 2010, the Washington Post reported that Anwar Al-Aulaqi had been added to “a shortlist of U.S. citizens” that JSOC was specifically authorized to kill. The same article reported that Anwar Al-Aulaqi had survived a JSOC-assisted strike in Yemen in late December 2009. That strike reportedly killed 41 civilians, mostly children and women.

This is how the Agence France-Presse, in June, 2010, reported that December, 2009 “strike” in Yemen, drawing on the investigative work of Amnesty International:

(AFP) – Jun 6, 2010

LONDON — A US cruise missile carrying cluster bombs was behind a December attack in Yemen that killed 55 people, most of them civilians, Amnesty International (AI) said on Monday.

The London-based rights group released photographs that it said showed the remains of a US-made Tomahawk missile and unexploded cluster bombs that were apparently used in the December 17, 2009 attack on the rural community of Al-Maajala in Yemen’s southern Abyan province.

[…]

A military strike of this kind against alleged militants without an attempt to detain them is at the very least unlawful,” said Philip Luther, deputy director of AI’s Middle East and North Africa Programme.

Yemen’s defence ministry had claimed responsibility for the attack without mentioning a US role, saying between 24 and 30 militants had been killed at an alleged Al-Qaeda training camp.

[…]

“The fact that so many of the victims were actually women and children indicates that the attack was in fact grossly irresponsible, particularly given the likely use of cluster munitions,” Luther said.

[…]

[Amnesty International] said photographs it had obtained showed damaged remains of the BGM-109D Tomahawk land-attack cruise missile.

As of yesterday, September 30th, thanks to reporting by CNN’s Mohammed Jamjoom, we now appear to have official, on-the-record confirmation from the government of Yemen of the evidence unearthed by Amnesty International:

Sanaa, Yemen (CNN) — The United States has carried out airstrikes in Yemen, Yemen’s foreign minister told a pan-Arab newspaper in an interview published Thursday, marking that government’s first official confirmation of a U.S. military role in its fight against terrorism.

Foreign Minister Abu Bakr al-Qirbi told the Saudi-owned Al-Hayat newspaper that the air strikes ended in December because the “Yemeni government ascertained they weren’t achieving results.”

Al-Qirbi also told the newspaper that combating al Qaeda “is the responsibility of the security and counterterrorism forces in Yemen.”

Yes, combating international criminals is “the responsibility” of a nation’s government, when that nation is sovereign, governed, and not in a state of external war…

Just as it is that government’s responsibility to cease and desist “unlawful” attacks against its own citizens – euphemistically “because they weren’t achieving results,” or otherwise – by withdrawing the permission to bomb its territory that had been granted to a more powerful, heavily-militarized nation with which Yemen is at peace.

CNN’s Jamjoom on September 23rd further documented the evidence of a state of peace between Yemen and the U.S., as well as active efforts by Yemen to apprehend international and domestic outlaws residing in Yemen:

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As originally posted in the reader-diary section of Firedoglake.com; the post’s 2010 comment thread is available at that link.

Here’s the pitiless, anodyne legal formalism behind which a man’s life or liberty likely hangs in the balance:

FRIDAY, JULY 16, 2010

ORDER IN PENDING CASE

10A52 MOHAMMED, FARHI V. OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF U.S., ET AL.

The application for stay presented to The Chief Justice and by him referred to the Court is denied.

Justice Ginsburg, with whom Justice Breyer and Justice Sotomayor join, dissenting.

I would grant the stay to afford the Court time to consider, in the ordinary course, important questions raised in this case and not resolved in Munaf v. Geren, 553 U. S. 674 (2008).

The Supreme Court, of course, is on vacation until October, having left crucial questions unaddressed and unresolved in its last term, and left unreviewed crucial panel decisions of the lower D.C. Circuit, which directly impact the fate of Guantanamo prisoners. [Chief Justice Roberts, for example, who was responsible for hearing bin Mohammed’s plea to reinstate Judge Kessler’s injunction this week, will be lecturing about the American Bill of Rights – the Fifth Amendment, the Sixth Amendment, etc. – in Australia later this month…]

Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed, however, like every other Guantanamo inmate, is not on vacation. He won his habeas corpus appeal last November. [Translation: Independent federal District Judge Gladys Kessler, after hearing all the evidence the government could muster about his pre-capture activities, while detaining this man for seven years, using its many Pentagon and DOJ resources and outsourced torture-state contractors, determined in an adversarial proceeding with a pro bono civilian attorney acting on bin Mohammed’s behalf, that it was not “more likely than not” that bin Mohammed was a participant in the conflict authorized by the 2001 AUMF (against forces responsible for the 9/11 attacks), and therefore that he has been unlawfully detained by the American military under the law of armed conflict since February, 2002.]

As of yesterday, however, bin Mohammed was still a prisoner at Guantanamo, despite having made an emergency motion in May to effect his release to a nation other than Algeria, where he fears for his life at the hands of both the government and terrorist gangs in that nation.

Lyle Denniston at scotusblog.com, who has been all over this story (as has Josh Gerstein of Politico), puts the recent events that culminated in Friday evening’s ruling by a Supreme Court majority – consisting of Justices John Roberts, Jr., Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito, Jr. – into plain English:

Lyle Denniston | Friday, July 16th, 2010 7:44 pm

UPDATE Saturday 5:50 a.m. Late Friday night, the Court, without noted dissent, refused to delay the transfer of a second Algerian, Abdul Aziz Naji. The order is here.

——————–

In the first indication that the Supreme Court will not allow federal judges to interfere with government controls on who leaves or stays at Guantanamo Bay, the Court Friday evening cleared the way for the transfer of an Algerian detainee to his home country over his protest. The action divided the Court 5-3; the dissenters noted that the case involved “important questions” the Court has yet to answer. The Court’s action was not a final ruling on those questions; rather, it was a refusal to block a lower [D.C. Circuit panel] court order letting the government, not a judge, decide the transfer issue.

While the order would not prevent lawyers for the Algerian, Farhi Saeed Bin Mohammed, from going ahead with an appeal seeking to challenge his transfer, such an appeal very likely would lose all of its significance if the government opts to send him to Algeria promptly. Nothing in the order prevents that result, which probably would moot the controversy.

Mohammed is one of six Algerians now at Guantanamo, each of whom is trying to head off being sent to their homeland because each fears that he faces torture or death, either from the Algerian government or from a terrorist group operating in that country — a fear the U.S. government says is not well-founded.

[…]

But, since the Munaf decision was issued by the Court on June 12 two years ago, the D.C. Circuit Court has given it a wide interpretation, ruling that it bars any federal judge from “second-guessing” a decision by the Pentagon and State Departments that controls the ultimate fate of detainees who have been cleared by judges for release. In Mohammed’s case, for example, the Circuit Court relied upon only one Supreme Court precedent — Munaf – as it overturned a federal judge’s order barring his transfer to Algeria.

[…]

The Court has not taken any action on the merits of a detainee case since its Boumediene ruling.

[…]

District judges handling habeas cases from Guantanamo prisoners are left, for the time being, with only one option if they decide that a detainee is not being held legally: they can urge the government to use its best efforts to try to find a place to relocate that prisoner. That, in fact, is the way most release orders have been worded in the wake of the Circuit Court’s interpretation of the Munaf precedent.

[…]

The ruling that the Supreme Court refused to stay [Friday], pending its challenge on appeal, accepted the government’s word that it was more likely than not that a transferred detainee would not be subjected to torture, or worse. Different panels of the Circuit Court have made it clear that the government’s word on that issue is not to be subjected to rigorous testing by District judges in habeas cases.

This is probably a good place to point out that the autocratic-presidency-enamored D.C. Circuit Court, and many of its three-member panels, is an outlier of increasingly-obvious proportions on this and similar Constitutional questions. For example, just one week before the Supreme Court summarily dismissed bin Mohammed’s plea to temporarily prevent (pending appeal) his U.S. military captors from shipping him to Algeria, for fear of torture or worse, a Third Circuit Court of Appeals panel strongly repudiated the Obama DOJ’s similar effort to deport a foreign citizen living in New York to China, for fear of torture, citing the Convention against Torture:

By NINA BERNSTEIN
Published: July 15, 2010

Saying that government lawyers let their zeal for victory in a deportation case outweigh their responsibility to be fair, a federal appeals court last week ordered the United States to provide a haven for a woman facing the likelihood of torture in China.

[…]

“It is disappointing, even shocking, that the government fails to acknowledge that the evidence is not only strongly in Kang’s favor, but, indeed, compels the conclusion that she will likely be tortured,” said the decision, issued by a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, which covers Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and the United States Virgin Islands.

[…]

The Third Circuit judges called the government’s position “inexplicable” and said both the board [the Board of Immigration Appeals which had overturned an immigration judge who granted Kang protection] and the government lawyers ignored overwhelming evidence.

[…]

“Instead, the government sought to characterize the facts in such a way so as to distract the court from the dire nature of Kang’s plight,” Judge Marjorie O. Rendell wrote. “While our adversarial system may permit such advocacy by private parties, when the United States appears before us, it is duty-bound to ‘cut square corners’ and seek justice rather than victory. We are distressed that it failed to do so.“

[Tellingly, that proceeding and ruling was in the context of immigration law, to which the D.C. Circuit has been trying to reduce the fundamental, bedrock, Constitutionally-protected right of habeas corpus (the actual judicially-mandated release it encompasses, at least) for Guantanamo detainees, via Kiyemba I, II, & III (the Chinese Uighur cases forbidding their release into the U.S.), in order to try to write our independent Judicial Branch out of an “exclusive” province of the Executive and Congress.]

A similar “zeal for victory” has been in evidence in the Guantanamo case at issue here, the instant that Judge Gladys Kessler requested the presence of a State Department representative (Daniel Fried) in her court so that she could test the strength of the government’s assurances that Algeria will not harm bin Mohammed. Her order for Fried to appear was immediately appealed to the D.C. Circuit, a D.C. Circuit panel in turn immediately acted to prevent the hearing Kessler ordered, and then proceeded to order her to issue a final judgement without recourse to State Department witnesses. All, as Lyle Denniston noted, without benefit of full briefing or oral argument:

The case of Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed, proceeding largely in secret in lower courts, poses a major test of federal judges’ power to assert control over the legal fate of Guantanamo prisoners.

At its core, the case could test how the Supreme Court reconciles two opinions on detainee rights that it issued on the same day, June 12, 2008 — Boumediene v. Bush, and Munaf v. Geren.

[…]

The government pursued an emergency appeal of that order, as it did an earlier temporary order by Kessler. Each time, the Circuit Court summarily reversed the judge — that is, it acted without full briefing and oral argument.

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As originally posted in the reader-diary section of Firedoglake.com; the post’s 2010 comment thread is available at that link.

An invaluable summary and incisive account of the Maher Arar case was published Tuesday by Arar Attorney David Cole on the blog of the New York Review of Books, in response to the United States Supreme Court’s refusal to even hear the Arar appeal. Arar’s appeal was an ultimately-unsuccessful six-year-long effort to simply be heard in an American courtroom on the merits of his rendition-to-torture allegations against high public officials in our nation’s Executive Branch of government.

The Supreme Court’s refusal to even hear Arar’s case may have resulted from Justice Sotomayor’s recusal from the debate and vote on hearing his appeal – a recusal apparently made just because Sotomayor, while sitting on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals (whose decision Arar was appealing to the Supreme Court), publicly did no more than to participate in the court’s en banc Arar appeal oral argument (having left the court months before the 2nd Circuit’s November, 2009 Arar decision was rendered). [The December, 2008 en banc Arar oral argument in the Second Circuit, which lasted for more than two hours, in which Sotomayor participated by video feed, may be viewed in its entirety here.]

The short version, from Cole’s account, of how the incumbent American President acts to "faithfully execute the Office of President" and "to the best of [his] ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution" – under the Presidential oath of office Article II, Section One, Clause Eight of our Constitution demands:

In President Obama’s May 2009 speech on national security and American values, he opposed a commission to investigate torture by arguing that there were proceedings in the courts that could provide accountability. Yet in the Arar case—as in every other civil case that has sought accountability for torture—the Obama administration argued that the courts were not an appropriate forum. To the Obama administration, defending government officials from suit, regardless of the gravity of the allegations, is evidently more important than holding individuals responsible for complicity in torture.

As to the torture claims of Syrian-born Canadian resident and citizen, Maher Arar, Cole elaborates:

[…] When they finally permitted him to see a lawyer, on a Saturday ten days into his detention, the government hastily scheduled an extraordinary hearing for the next night—Sunday evening—and only "notified" Arar’s lawyer by leaving a voicemail on her office answering machine that Sunday afternoon. They then falsely told Arar that the lawyer had declined to participate, and questioned him for six hours, until 3 a.m. Monday.

When Arar’s lawyer retrieved the voicemail message later that Monday morning, she immediately called the Immigration and Naturalization Service. They told her falsely that Arar was being moved to New Jersey, and that she could contact him there the next day. In fact, he remained in New York until late that night, when he was put on a federally chartered jet and spirited out of the country. US officials never informed Arar’s lawyer that he had been deported, much less that he had been delivered to Syrian security forces.

Arar was beaten and tortured while Syrian officials asked him questions virtually identical to those US officials had asked him in New York. He was locked up for a year without charges and in complete isolation, most of the time in a cell the size of a grave. After a year, Syria released him, finding no evidence that he had done anything wrong.

[…]

In addition, the United States did not dispute that if, as was his legal right, Arar had been able to get his claim before a court while he was being detained in the United States—before he was sent to Syria—the federal courts would have entertained his case and could have stopped his rendition. Congress has expressly authorized the courts to review immigration decisions and to bar removal of foreign nationals to any country where they face a risk of torture. Knowing that, US officials made sure Arar could not get to court—denying his initial requests for a lawyer, lying to him and his lawyer, and then flying him out of the country in the dead of night before he or his lawyer could file anything. Arar therefore sought the only remedy left—damages for his injuries. The Second Circuit never explained why Arar’s case, which indisputably could have been adjudicated had he been able to seek review before he was removed, suddenly became too "sensitive" once Arar sought damages for injuries incurred as a result of that removal.

Absent enforcement, "the law" is a cruel joke…

Bush administration officials sent Arar to be tortured, and Bush administration lawyers initially sought to have his damages suit dismissed. But nothing changed when President Obama took office. The Obama administration [through its Deputy Solicitor General] aggressively defended the Second Circuit’s decision to throw Arar’s case out of court. It opened its brief to the Supreme Court with a paragraph reiterating that torture is never permissible, but then went on to argue at length that federal officials accused of torture should not be held accountable.

– Attorney David Cole, June 15, 2010

Be sure to read the whole thing.

Yet even while powerful abusers on the public payroll egregiously skate from the consequences of their actions, the powerless among us continue to be persecuted by government actors, on multiple fronts.

ACORN Persecution

From the latest in a series of at least four independent investigations undertaken and concluded on the same subject since the middle of last year, none of which have unearthed any wrongdoing:

When a duo of right-wing provocateurs posing as a pimp and prostitute released selectively-edited videos trying to impugn the community activist group ACORN, both Democrats and Republicans condemned the organization. Congress then voted to cut off federal funding for the group (a decision that was later ruled unconstitutional [as a Bill of Attainder]). Following negative press and Congress’ vote, ACORN effectively disbanded Apr. 1 and reorganized under new names.

But a just-issued report by the Government Accountability Office that reviewed ACORN’s federal funding at the behest of Congress found little grist for the mill for politicians or right-wing bloggers looking to bash the now-defunct advocacy group for the poor.

The 38-page report surveyed over 31 federal agencies, probing how ACORN used federal funds and whether adequate controls on spending existed.

The report found no evidence of fraud, lax oversight or misuse of federal funds.

By at least March 12th of this year, after Federal District Judge Nina Gershon had issued her permanent injunction striking down the unConstitutional Congressional ban on consideration of federal funding applications from ACORN – a ruling now under appeal by the Obama administration in the Second Circuit – that was already quite clear:

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As originally posted in the reader-diary section of Firedoglake.com; the post’s 2010 comment thread is available at that link.

In a clear and thoughtful decision issued March 22, 2010, that was declassified with redactions this Friday, April 9, Federal District Judge James Robertson granted the habeas corpus appeal of Guantanamo detainee Mohamedou Ould Slahi (referred to in the decision as Mohammedou Ould Salahi), a Mauritanian who has been imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base since 2002.

But not just “imprisoned,” as Andy Worthington points out, helpfully filling in some of the censored and undetailed portions of the record, beside a rare photograph of Slahi:

Noticeably, however, Slahi was subjected to several years of torture, which began soon after he was taken in by the Mauritanian authorities on November 20, 2001, at the request of the Bush administration. “My country turned me over, shortcutting all kinds of due process of law, like a candy bar to the United States,” he said in his Combatant Status Review Tribunal at Guantánamo in 2004.

After he was seized, he was transferred by the US to Jordan — one of at least 15 prisoners rendered to Jordan by the CIA between 2001 and 2004 — where he was held for eight months, and where, he said, what happened to him was “beyond description” and he was tortured “maybe twice a week, a couple times, sometimes more.” He was then transferred to the US prison at Bagram in Afghanistan for two weeks, and arrived in Guantánamo on August 4, 2002.

As the “highest-value detainee” at Guantánamo — in the days before Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and 13 other “high-value detainees” were flown in from secret CIA prisons in September 2006 — Slahi was again subjected to torture, which included prolonged isolation, prolonged sleep deprivation, beatings, death threats, and threats that his mother would be brought to Guantánamo and gang-raped. This program, which was implemented in May 2003, and augmented with further “enhanced interrogation techniques” authorized by defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, culminated, in August 2003, in an incident when Slahi was taken out on a boat, wearing isolation goggles, while agents whispered, within earshot, that he was “about to be executed and made to disappear.” As Der Spiegel explained in an article in 2008, “He was so terrified that he urinated in his pants.”

After this, as Slahi himself described it (in a letter to his lawyers dated November 9, 2006), “I yes-sed every accusation my interrogators made. I even wrote the infamous confession about me was planning to hit the CN Tower in Toronto based on SSG [redacted] advise. I just wanted to get the monkeys off my back.”

However, his treatment was so severe that, in May 2004, Lt. Col. Stuart Couch of the Marine Corps, who had been assigned his case as a prosecutor the year before, resigned rather than pursuing the case. In a meeting with the chief prosecutor, Army Col. Bob Swann, Lt. Col. Couch “told Col. Swann that in addition to legal reasons, he was ‘morally opposed’ to the interrogation techniques ‘and for that reason alone refused to participate in [the Slahi] prosecution in any manner.'”

In the process of ordering Slahi’s release from American military custody, D.C. District Judge Robertson exposed the twisted logic and misinformed reasoning of a key, but clearly erroneous as to the laws of war, political agenda-driven January 5, 2010 holding of the majority on a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, in the Al Bihani Guantanamo habeas corpus appeal. [That’s the appellate decision where a panel majority of Janice Rogers Brown and Brett M. Kavanaugh brazenly asserted that the presidential war powers authorized and invoked by Congress, via the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, are not limited or governed by the international laws of war, and that went so far as to claim that “the international laws of war as a whole have not been implemented domestically by Congress and are therefore not a source of authority for U.S. courts. . .therefore while the international laws of war are helpful to courts, [they] lack controlling legal force.”]

Justice atop the Old Bailey in London

Judge Robertson deftly exposed the mendacity of the Al Bihani decision’s reasoning, even as he himself was forced to adher to that flawed higher court precedent. A flawed appellate court precedent that – unless and until overturned – now governs all habeas corpus appeals brought by Guantanamo prisoners, who may only be heard in the district court in Washington, D.C. that’s governed by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals – and thus by the specious reasoning of such unsound and unjust opinions as that of the Brown/Kavanaugh Al Bihani panel majority. Their decision to uphold as lawful the detention of Al Bihani (a citizen of Yemen, likewise detained since 2002 at Guantanamo Bay) was concurred in as to the result, but challenged as to its dismissive interpretation and understanding of the law of war, by Senior Circuit Judge Stephen F. Williams.

Robertson’s carefully-balanced decision, while acknowledging that Slahi himself admits to having been a sworn member of Al Qaeda in the early 1990s, found – more than six months after the first merits hearing on Slahi’s appeal, which itself took place years after Slahi first officially challenged the basis of his detention in federal court – that the Executive Branch failed to prove that it was simply more likely than not that Slahi is and was legally detained by the United States government, resulting in an order for the release of Slahi, which the Obama administration immediately moved to appeal in the D.C. Circuit.

Some of the important logic and reasoning of Robertson’s decision: Read the rest of this entry »