LANDMINE TREATIES

Washington Post 2/14/09, p. B6

Groups Want Obama’s Support

Leaders from 67 religious and humanitarian organizations have asked President Obama to reconsider U.S. opposition to global treaties that prohibit the use and transfer of landmines and cluster munitions.

“Reconsidering these two treaties — and eliminating the threat that U.S. forces might use weapons that most of the world has condemned — would greatly aid efforts to reassert our nation’s moral leadership,” the letter from the leaders said.

The Mine Ban Treaty was signed by 122 governments in December 1997, and there are currently 156 member states, according to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. The Convention on Cluster Munitions was signed by 94 states last December. The United States has not signed either.

“The use of weapons that disproportionately take the lives and limbs of civilians is wholly counterproductive in today’s conflicts, where winning over the local population is essential to mission success,” the letter said.

Episcopal Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori; Ronald Sider, president of Evangelicals for Social Action; Ken Hackett, president of Catholic Relief Services; and the Rev. John H. Thomas, president of the United Church of Christ, were among those who signed the letter.

New Torture Memos Outline Black Sites, Ghost Prisoners

— By Steve Aquino | Thu February 12, 2009 in MotherJones [download pdfs there]

Three human rights groups released more than a thousand pages of Department of Defense and CIA documents Thursday that outline how closely the two agencies worked in rendering terrorism suspects to black sites, keeping detainees’ identities secret, and tempering bad publicity for inmate treatment at Guántanamo Bay.

Most of the documents—obtained after Amnesty International, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice sued under the Freedom of Information Act—simply contain news articles, but the Center for Constitutional Rights scoured the files and found three significant disclosures from the DoD.

Indefinite Detention Case Will Test Obama's Pledges

By Willam Fisher, IPS News,February 4, 2009. Alternet

The Supreme Court is poised to hear what could be one of the most consequential cases in U.S. history.

NEW YORK, Feb 4 (IPS) — In what promises to be the first major test of the Barack Obama administration’s new approach to the rule of law, the Supreme Court will soon hear what could be one of the most consequential cases in U.S. history.

It will be asked to answer the question: Can a U.S. president declare a legal resident an “enemy combatant” and hold him or her indefinitely without charge or trial?

The legal U.S. resident in question is Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, who has been detained in solitary confinement at a Navy brig in South Carolina since June 2003. Al-Marri is the only remaining person held in the United States as an “enemy combatant.” He is being represented by lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

The case, Al-Marri v. Spagone, is a habeas corpus action, challenging al-Marri’s indefinite detention.

Guantanamo on the Brink: Death Looms for Inmates Amid Hunger Strikes and Beatings

By Mark Townsend and Paul Harris, Independent UK. Posted Alternet, February 9, 2009.

Dozens of hunger strikes, beatings, instances of forced feeding and other atrocities have reportedly reduced Guantanamo to near chaos.

Lieutenant-Colonel Yvonne Bradley, an American military lawyer, will step through the grand entrance of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London today and demand the release of her client — a British resident who claims he was repeatedly tortured at the behest of US intelligence officials — from Guantanamo Bay. Bradley will also request the disclosure of 42 secret documents that allegedly chronicle not only how Binyam Mohamed was tortured, but may also corroborate claims that Britain was complicit in his treatment.

But first, Bradley, a US military attorney for 20 years, will reveal that Mohamed, 31, is dying in his Guantanamo cell and that conditions inside the Cuban prison camp have deteriorated badly since Barack Obama took office. Fifty of its 260 detainees are on hunger strike and, say witnesses, are being strapped to chairs and force-fed, with those who resist being beaten. At least 20 are described as being so unhealthy they are on a “critical list”, according to Bradley.