On September 22, in the District Court in Washington D.C., Judge Reggie B. Walton denied the habeas corpus petition of Tawfiq al-Bihani, consigning him to indefinite detention in Guantánamo, on an apparently legal basis, despite the fact that there is no evidence that he ever took up arms against anyone, or had any contact with anyone involved in preparing, facilitating or supporting acts of international terrorism. Judge Walton also ignored that despite being, at most, a lowly foot soldier, al-Bihani was held in a variety of secret CIA prisons in Afghanistan before his transfer to Guantánamo, where he was subjected to torture.

The Obama administration had been cleared to effect the deportation of cleared Guantanamo prisoner Abdul Aziz Naji by no less than the Supreme Court, who rejected a lower court order blocking the action. What hasn’t been reported thus far is the role of Congress, who was mandated to have advance notice of the transfer. Meanwhile, in Algeria, Naji told the press about torture and the drugging of prisoners at Guantanamo.

The full text of Omar Khadr’s letter to his attorney from Guantanamo, with commentary. “Dennis you always say that I have an obligation to show the world what is going on down here and it seems that we’ve done every thing but the world doesn’t get it….”

Andy Worthington is posting portions of the United Nations’ “Joint Study on Global Practices in Relation to Secret Detention in the Context of Counter-Terrorism,” a detailed, 186-page report issued last February. The UN report was hardly reported by either the U.S. press or the blogosphere, and deserves wide dissemination.

Lt. Col. Frakt, who was the lead defense counsel in the Guantanamo military commissions trials of Mohammed Jawad and Ali al Bahlul, has written an important analysis of the President Obama’s new military commission rules. These rules, released without public comment and only a day before the trial was to start in the case of former child soldier, Omar Khadr, rewrite law in order to prosecute “war crimes”, even where none exist.

The same judge who denied the habeas petition for Yasin Ismail last week, Judge Henry H. Kennedy, Jr. of the U.S. District Court, Washington, DC, approved the petition for a different prisoner, Uthman Abdul Rahim Mohammed Uthman, primarily because the evidence against him had been produced by torture. The two tortured “witnesses” against Uthman were presumed al-Qaida members, also held at Guantanamo, Sharqwi Abdu Ali Al-Hajj and Sanad Yislam Ali Al Kazimi. This brings the scorecard to 35 of 48 habeas cases from Guantanamo decided against the government. I don’t know how many of them were due to tortured evidence.

Andy Worthington, who has conscientiously and effectively documented the fates of hundreds of prisoners held at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo has posted a “Habeas Corpus Scorecard” at his website. His first entry in the series considers the case of Yasin Qasem Muhammad Ismail, a Yemeni who was captured (or sold to U.S. forces) in Afghanistan in 2001.

A new UN report notes secret detentions “might reach the threshold of a crime against humanity.” Obama’s OLC braintrusts the Detention Task Force’s recommendation of indefinite detention of some Guantanamo prisoners. These actions make sense in the light of a 55 year old report on CIA covert actions.

There they go again, jacking American public opinion with carefully crafted myths. As Seminal diarists powwow and Bill Egnor have noted, Attorney Scott Horton’s recent article in Harpers.org busts the cover story for three apparent murders of detainees at Camp No, a Gitmo within Gitmo: namely, the myth of “asymmetrical warfare by suicide.” He gets a whole lot of help from a slip of the lips by the principal myth-maker, Army Colonel Michael Bumgarner. After a strict definition of the sense in which I use “myth,” by Alan Watts, I list a few responses.