Maher Arar, the Canadian who was kidnapped by U.S. authorities at JFK and flown to Rome, Italy and then Syria and Jordan via extraordinary rendition where he alleges he was tortured during his nine months of captivity, testified today at a hearing of the European Parliament, held by the Temporary Committee on the alleged use of European countries by the CIA for the transport and illegal detention of prisoners.

Mr. Arar told the EU committee that FBI agents took his passport, put him in chains on both his wrists and ankles and asked him to voluntarily to go to Syria. He refused. After several days of interrogation in New York, he said he was driven to New Jersey and put on a private jet that stopped over in Rome before landing in Amman. "I overheard them saying they belonged to a special removal unit," he said.

Mr. Arar said he could see on the airport's in-flight screen showing the trajectory of the flight that it landed in Rome. He said he overheard officials discussing the plane's next stop in Athens. He said the plane refuelled in Rome and tall person in a civilian suit guarded it on the tarmac. Once in Syria, Mr. Arar said, he was detained in a small cell with no light and was beaten and tortured. He said he also heard other people being tortured.

A U.S. court dismissed his civil lawsuit last month, but Arar says he will appeal and not be silenced. A summary of his testimony appears on the E.U.'s website here.

We've written several times about the danger of the Carl Levin - Lindsay Graham Amendment to John McCain's anti-torture Amendment and how it would strip Guantanamo detainees of their right to bring habeas actions challenging the conditions of their confinement, including claims of torture and inhumane treatment in federal courts. (More here. Also see these Boston Globe , New Jersey Herald and San Francisco Chronicle editorials.)

Sure thing, Bush Administration prosecutors Wednesday argued to dismiss more than 200 of the lawsuits saying the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 retroactively stripped the court of jurisdiction.

Last month Seton Hall law professor Mark Denbeaux, who along with his son Joshua, represents two detainees at Guantanamo, released a ground-breaking report (pdf) that used data supplied by the Defense Department to determine how the DOD decided which detainees should be designated as enemy-combatants. It found:

One third of the detainees were found to be enemy combatants based upon their nexus to an organization allegedly linked to al Qaeda and/or the Taliban. The Department of Defense, for the purpose of the Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRT) proceedings, concluded that these organizations were terrorist organizations and concluded that detainees' nexus to those organizations, no matter how slight, was sufficient to hold the detainees indefinitely as "enemy combatants."

Today, Professor Denbaux and Joshua Denbeaux release a second, equally revealing report (pdf), again using the Government's own data, showing major discrepancies between the State Department, Homeland Security and Department of Defense lists of designated terrorist organizations. They say the discrepancies should make us wonder whether these agencies are capable of ensuring our safety.

More than 250 doctors around the world have joined a harshly worded criticism of the U.S. over the force-feeding of Guantanamo prisoners. Their letter has been published in the medical journal, The Lancet.

The open letter in the Lancet was signed by more than 250 top doctors from seven countries - the UK, the US, Ireland, Germany, Australia, Italy and the Netherlands. "We urge the US government to ensure that detainees are assessed by independent physicians and that techniques such as force-feeding and restraint chairs are abandoned," the letter said.

The doctors said the World Medical Association - a world body representing physicians, including those in the US - specifically prohibited force-feeding. They also recommended that those participating in the Guantanamo force-feedings be disciplined by their professional organizations.

by TChris

Apart from the legal and moral objections to detainee abuse, the need to maintain credibility should have deterred the administration from mistreating prisoners. China announced today that it isn't interested in lectures on human rights from a government that wiretaps its citizens and detains uncharged prisoners indefinitely.

The Chinese government's report, issued a day after the State Department slammed China for "numerous and serious" human rights abuses, attacked the United States for failing its citizens.

And China isn't alone.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales spoke in London on Tuesday. Here are his prepared remarks. Undoubtedly, every word was vetted and chosen with care. Here's what he had to say about the U.S. sending detainees to other countries that practice torture:

We do not transport anyone to a country if we believe it more likely than not that the individual will be tortured.

So "more likely than not" is the standard. This makes it clear that the U.S. is sending prisoners to countries that practice torture except when they believe a particular individual will be tortured. We should not be sending any prisoners to countries that practice torture, period.

Investigative journalist Dahr Jamail, who spent eight months in Iraq, has a long article today in Mother Jones on how the Bush Administration has embedded torture as policy in Iraq and Guantanamo.

Testimony from Afghan prisons and Guantanamo, the photos and video from Abu Ghraib, evidence of extraordinary renditions to the far corners of the planet -- all of this doesn't even encompass the full reach of Bush administration torture policies or the degree to which they have been set in motion at the highest levels of the American government. But what simply can't be clearer is this: horrific methods of torture have been used regularly against detainees in U.S. custody in countries around the globe, while an American President, Vice President and Secretary of Defense, among others, openly advocated policies that, until recently, would have been considered torture in any democratic country.

In the meantime, the Bush Administration has twisted the law just enough to allow authorities to potentially pick up more or less anyone they desire at any time they want to be held wherever the government decides for as long as its officials desire with no access to lawyer or trial -- and now, for the first time, the possibility has arisen, at least in the military trials in Guantanamo, that testimony obtained by torture will be admissible.

Amnesty International issued a new report today, Beyond Abu Ghraib: detention and torture in Iraq.

US and UK forces in Iraq have detained thousands of people without charge or trial for long periods and there is growing evidence of Iraqi security forces torturing detainees, Amnesty International said today.

From the report's introduction:

As review of Friday's 5,000 pages of DOD released documents on Guantanamo detainees are analyzed, pictures begin to emerge. Many are in despair, fearful they will never leave.

Others are baffled.

Abdur Sayed Rahman, a self-described Pakistani villager ... says he was arrested at his modest home in January 2002, flown off to Afghanistan and later accused of being the deputy foreign minister of that country's deposed Taliban regime.

"I am only a chicken farmer in Pakistan," he protested to American military officers at Guantánamo. "My name is Abdur Sayed Rahman. Abdur Zahid Rahman was the deputy foreign minister of the Taliban."

How flimsy is the evidence against some of them? Consider this:

The Department of Defense has put all of the released documents on the Guantanamo detainees online here. The list includes Testimony of Detainees Before the Combatant Status Review Tribunal, Testimony of Detainees Before the Administrative Review Board and Administrative Review Board Summaries of Detention/Release Factors.

DOD says:

This is only a portion of the combatant status review tribunals and administrative review boards that have been held to date. There have been 558 tribunals and 463 administrative boards, officials said.

Additional DOD documents are here. The LA Times has a good summary here and the AP has more here .

Mohammad al-Qahtani was touted by the U.S. as being a top-notch informant. Imprisoned at Guantanamo, the U.S. said he was the planned 20th hijacker (of course, the U.S. also believed at one time that Zacarias Moussaoui was the planned 20th...and at another time that Ramzi Binalshibh was the 20th hijacker.)

Now, al-Qhatani is retracting his former statements. He says they were obtained through torture. Time Magazine has published the full 83 pages (pdf) of his interrogation.

After spending more than 30 hours talking with him through an interpreter, [his lawyer] told TIME that al-Qahtani today appears to be a broken man, fearful and at times disoriented -- someone who has "painfully described how he could not endure the months of isolation, torture and abuse, during which he was nearly killed, before making false statements to please his interrogators."

Will the detainees who claim they were tortured ever have their claims heard in a court of law? Perhaps not, thanks to Sen. Lindsay Graham and Carl Levin's amendment to McCain's torture amendment...which I warned about here and here.

Here are some of the things they did to al-Qahtani--according to reports by interrogators and others:

Faced with a court order, the U.S. has finally released the names of hundreds of detainees held at Guantanamo.

Human rights activists say this new information should make it easier to piece together the personal histories of the detainees - and for the first time to build a big picture of who is held at the camps, and why they are there.

What the documents do not do is shed light on speculation that there are other prisoners, known as "ghost" detainees, at the camp. If a prisoner at the camp has not had a CSRT they will not feature in the transcripts.

For more news on the detainees and some personal profiles, visit Caged Prisoners.