History > 2006 > USA > Military justice (I)

Harsher Abu Ghraib methods condoned:

witness

Thu May 25, 2006 9:19 PM ET
Reuters
By Stuart Grudgings

FORT MEADE, Maryland (Reuters) - Senior U.S. officials silently condoned harsher methods at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and one general urged guards to use dogs to the "maximum extent possible" to control detainees, witnesses said on Thursday.

The testimony came on the fourth day of the military trial of Army dog handler Sgt. Santos Cardona, 32, who is accused of taking part in abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib that the U.S. government blames on rogue low-ranking soldiers.

Defense attorneys are trying to show that Cardona, who faces 16 years in prison if convicted on all charges, and other soldiers were acting on orders from their superiors.

Prosecutors say he and an already convicted colleague were "corrupt cops" who used dogs to terrify detainees into urinating and defecating on themselves.

Steven Pescatore, a former Air Force officer who worked as a civilian interrogator at Abu Ghraib, said in written testimony that silence from superiors on the treatment of prisoners was widely seen as meaning consent.

"We still had to submit a memo requesting the harsher techniques, but we could go under the assumption that a technique was approved unless we heard back otherwise," he said.

"There was a lot of pressure and stress among the interrogators; we were constantly being told that we needed to get more information from the detainees."

Despite evidence of pressure from above to extract more information from prisoners, there are few signs that senior Army leaders or administration officials will be charged with condoning the abuse.

The U.S. government, which often justifies its foreign policy on the grounds of improving human rights, was severely embarrassed when photographs showing prisoners being abused and sexually humiliated were leaked in 2004.

"MAXIMUM EXTENT"

Another witness said that the former commander of the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay urged the use of dogs to control prisoners, but not in interrogations.

U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller was sent to Iraq from the Cuba base to try to improve information gathering as the insurgency intensified after the March 2003 invasion.

Ten low-ranking soldiers have so far been convicted of abusing prisoners, including the use of snarling, unmuzzled dogs in late 2003 and early 2004 after Miller arrived.

"All I can recall is him encouraging using them (dogs) to the maximum extent possible," retired Lt. Col. Jerry Phillabaum, who was in command of Abu Ghraib before September 2003, told the court in a military base in Maryland.

"I don't recall him saying anything about interrogations."

Miller, the highest-ranking officer to testify in the scandal, on Wednesday denied he suggested using military dogs in interrogations of Iraqi prisoners, undercutting Cardona's defense.

Prosecutors say there were clear rules on the treatment of prisoners that were flouted by Cardona and another dog handler, Sgt. Michael Smith, who was convicted in March and sentenced to 179 days in prison.

    Harsher Abu Ghraib methods condoned: witness, R, 25.5.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2006-05-26T011930Z_01_N25134570_RTRUKOC_0_US-IRAQ-ABUSE.xml

Court in Abuse Case Hears Testimony of General

May 25, 2006
The New York Times
By NEIL A. LEWIS

FORT MEADE, Md., May 24 — Testifying at the court-martial of a dog handler accused of abusing prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller said Wednesday that he never suggested that dogs be used to intimidate prisoners during interrogations in Iraq.

General Miller, who was the commander of the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, was sent to Iraq in August 2003 by senior Pentagon commanders to review the interrogation and detention system there and recommend ways to improve the collection of intelligence about the growing insurgency.

Within days of his visit, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the commander of the coalition forces in Iraq, issued guidance that seemed to allow for the use of dogs in interrogations.

Since the disclosures in April 2004 of extensive abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, sometimes involving dogs, the question of who was responsible for interrogation procedures has remained a subject of debate.

General Miller, the highest ranking officer to testify at any trial involving misconduct at Abu Ghraib, shed little light on Wednesday into questions of command responsibility for the prison abuses.

He was called as a witness in the trial of Sgt. Santos A. Cardona, 32, who is charged with using his dog, a Belgian Malinois, to abuse prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

In March, military jurors sentenced another dog handler, Sgt. Michael J. Smith, was sentenced to nearly six months in prison for abuse that included taking part with Sergeant Cardona in a competition to see who could be first to terrify prisoners enough to get them to soil themselves.

In nearly an hour on the witness stand, General Miller offered new details of his trip to Iraq, which has been depicted as importing harsh interrogation techniques from Guantánamo. He said he recommended that military dogs could be used to help with "custody and control" of detainees at the prison.

Harvey J. Volzer, Sergeant Cardona's civilian defense lawyer, asked whether General Miller had recommended "military working dogs as part of the interrogation situation."

His response: "No."

General Miller said he believed that the dogs "were very effective in assisting detention staff in maintaining custody and control."

Mr. Volzer has said that the dog handlers were following orders from superior officers. But it remained unclear how General Miller's testimony could help Sergeant Cardona.

Mr. Volzer told the military jury of four officers and three enlisted soldiers in his opening statement on Tuesday that soldiers at Abu Ghraib were operating under confusing orders and that the testimony might be aimed at bolstering that argument.

After General Miller's visit, General Sanchez issued an order saying that Arab men had a fear of dogs and that the fear could be exploited in using the animals "while maintaining security during interrogations."

Col. Thomas M. Pappas, the top military intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib, testified in the earlier trial of Sergeant Smith that General Miller had recommended the use of dogs during interrogations. But on Wednesday in the current trial, he testified that General Miller did not make any such specific recommendations.

General Miller did not appear in the earlier trial, invoking his right not to give testimony that might incriminate him. But he changed his position after the Senate Armed Services Committee delayed his retirement until he was more forthcoming.

    Court in Abuse Case Hears Testimony of General, NYT, 25.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/25/us/25abuse.html

Abuse trial opens for 2nd Army dog handler

Updated 5/23/2006 1:31 PM ET
USA Today

FORT MEADE, Md. (AP) — Prosecutors at the court martial of an Army dog handler said Tuesday he was part of a crew of corrupt soldiers who enjoyed tormenting detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Maj. Matthew Miller said in his opening statement that Sgt. Santos Cardona harassed prisoners for "nothing more than the entertainment of the accused and the enjoyment of the other corrupt cops serving on the night shift at Abu Ghraib."

But defense attorney Harvey Volver said Cardona, a 32-year-old military policeman from of Fullerton, Calif., followed the law and obeyed orders at a time when the Pentagon was pressing for intelligence and the chain of command at the prison was broken.

"No one had any earthly idea who controlled whom," Volver said in his opening statement.

Cardona is accused of letting his tan Belgian shepherd, Duco, bite detainee Mohammed Bollendia on the leg badly enough to require stitches, according to charge sheets and investigators' reports.

Cardona also is accused of using his dog to harass and threaten another detainee, Kamel Miza'l Nayil, in violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Cardona is charged with assault, dereliction of duty, maltreatment of detainees, conspiracy to maltreat detainees and lying to investigators in late 2003 and early 2004. If convicted on all counts, he faces up to 16.50 years in prison.

The soldier was assigned to the 42nd Military Police Detachment at Fort Bragg, N.C., and is the second Army dog-handler charged in the scandal.

Sgt. Michael Smith, of Fort Lauderdale, was convicted at a court-martial in March of maltreatment, conspiracy, dereliction and an indecent act. Smith was sentenced to six months in prison.

    Abuse trial opens for 2nd Army dog handler, UT, 23.5.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2006-05-23-dog-handler-trial_x.htm

Army colonel charged in Abu Ghraib scandal

Fri Apr 28, 2006 6:28 PM ET
Reuters
By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Army on Friday charged Lt. Col. Steven Jordan, who headed the interrogation center at Iraq's Abu Ghraib jail, with maltreatment of detainees, interfering with investigators and other counts, making him the highest-ranking person charged in the scandal.

The Army Military District of Washington said Jordan faced 12 criminal counts relating to seven different charges. Prosecutors said he subjected detainees to forced nudity and intimidation by military working dogs and later lied about it to investigators.

Ten low-ranking soldiers have been convicted in military courts in connection with the physical abuse and sexual humiliation of detainees at Abu Ghraib. Two officers senior to Jordan at Abu Ghraib have been disciplined by the Army, but neither faced criminal charges.

The charges against Jordan include cruelty and maltreatment of detainees, dereliction of duty, wrongful interference with an investigation, making false official statements, willfully disobeying a superior officer and others. Jordan is a reservist currently on active duty assigned to the Army Intelligence and Security Command, the Army said.

Images of the abuse, including naked detainees stacked in a pyramid and others cowering before snarling dogs, first became public on April 28, 2004 -- two years ago to the day before the charges were brought against Jordan.

Jordan was in charge of the military's Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center at Abu Ghraib in the fall and winter of 2003 at the height of the detainee abuse. It was a chaotic time when the jail's detainee population was ballooning and the insurgency was intensifying.

WIDER PROBE URGED

"It's gratifying that the military is beginning to focus on the role of more senior officers in the torture scandal. But this is but a step. The problems are just so clearly systemic that they need to be looked at more comprehensively," said Hina Shamsi, a lawyer with the rights group Human Rights First.

The Abu Ghraib scandal triggered international condemnation of the United States and undermined America's public image as it waged the war in Iraq. Abu Ghraib, located outside Baghdad, previously was a notorious torture center under deposed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

Prosecutors said Jordan disobeyed orders from generals during the investigation not to have contact with others involved in the scandal, failed to properly train and supervise subordinates and ensure that they acted lawfully, and used methods on prisoners without higher approval. They also accused him of filing fraudulent receipts for car repairs.

Shamsi called for close scrutiny of the roles of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other senior Pentagon civilian leaders in crafting policies that may have led to torture and abuse, as well as on Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top U.S. commander in Iraq at the time whom last year the Army cleared of wrongdoing in the Abu Ghraib scandal.

"One of the critical remaining questions is the doctrine of command responsibility that says that commanders are responsible for the acts of their subordinates if they knew or should have known that wrong was occurring and didn't do anything to prevent it," Shamsi said.

The Army last year removed from command, fined and reprimanded Col. Thomas Pappas, former military intelligence chief at Abu Ghraib. Also last year, it demoted to colonel and relieved of her command former Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the former top officer at the prison.

The next step in the military justice system for Jordan is a hearing to decide whether the case should proceed to a court-martial.

    Army colonel charged in Abu Ghraib scandal, NYT, 28.4.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=topNews&storyid=2006-04-28T222807Z_01_N28245660_RTRUKOC_0_US-IRAQ-USA-ABUSE.xml

Judge Orders a Top Officer to Attend Abuse Trial

April 19, 2006
The New York Times
By ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON, April 18 — A military judge on Tuesday ordered the general who headed the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to appear at the court-martial next month of an Army dog handler in the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal.

It was unclear, however, whether the officer, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, would testify in the trial of the handler, Sgt. Santos A. Cardona, who is accused of using his working dogs to abuse detainees at Abu Ghraib. If General Miller testified, he would be the highest ranking officer to do so at any trial stemming from the misconduct at the prison.

In January, General Miller invoked his right not to give testimony that might incriminate him and said through his lawyer that he would not answer any questions in court-martial proceedings involving two dog handlers. General Miller's refusal to testify prompted the Senate Armed Services Committee to delay his scheduled retirement until he appeared before the panel to explain himself.

A military lawyer representing General Miller, Maj. Michelle Crawford, did not respond to e-mail messages sent to her on Tuesday. A civilian lawyer for Sergeant Cardona, Harvey J. Volzer, did not respond to e-mail and telephone messages, although Mr. Volzer said in an interview last month that he expected General Miller to testify.

The military judge, Lt. Col. Paul H. McConnell, rejected a request from Sergeant Cardona's lawyers to compel Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to appear at the trial.

Lawyers for Sergeant Cardona have said that General Miller could shed new light on the origins of the interrogation practices at Abu Ghraib. General Miller, while commander at Guantánamo Bay, was sent to Abu Ghraib, near Baghdad, in August 2003 to help improve the intelligence-gathering operations at the prison.

At General Miller's recommendation, military dogs were taken to Iraq in the fall of 2003. General Miller has said the dogs were to be used to help maintain order. The former chief military intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib, Col. Thomas M. Pappas, said last month at the trial of another dog handler that he had discussed with General Miller the "Arab fear of dogs" as a reason to "set the conditions" for interrogations.

But Colonel Pappas, testifying under a grant of immunity, said the Army lacked clear rules for using dogs in interrogations at Abu Ghraib, and he took the blame for mistakenly authorizing the use of muzzled dogs inside interrogation booths when only the top commander in Iraq could have approved that step.

General Miller was never summoned to testify in the first trial, in which Sgt. Michael J. Smith was sentenced to six years in jail for tormenting detainees at Abu Ghraib with his snarling Belgian shepherd for his own amusement.

General Miller's lawyer said in January that the general did not intend to answer any more questions because he had already given statements to Congressional committees, Army investigators and other military court proceedings, and that he stood by those statements.

Mr. Volzer, Sergeant Cardona's lawyer, said in an interview last month after the completion of the first dog-handler trial that he would reveal new information at his client's court-martial, which is to begin May 17 at Fort Meade, Md. Mr. Volzer has said that the dog handlers were following the orders of their superiors.

Several investigations have cleared General Miller of any wrongdoing. The most recent inquiry, an Army inspector general's report on Dec. 20, 2005, also concluded that General Miller should not be punished for his role in overseeing detainee operations.

In sworn statements to the inspector general, Lt. Gen. Randall M. Schmidt of the Air Force, an investigator who interviewed Mr. Rumsfeld twice in 2005, said the secretary closely monitored the interrogation of a high-level detainee at Guantánamo Bay and was "talking weekly" with General Miller. The statements from the inspector general's report were first reported last week by Salon.com.

At the request of military commanders, Mr. Rumsfeld in December 2002 approved 16 harsher interrogation techniques for use against the detainee, Mohamed al-Kahtani, believed to have been the planned 20th hijacker on Sept. 11. A month later, Mr. Rumsfeld temporarily rescinded the techniques after military lawyers complained.

    Judge Orders a Top Officer to Attend Abuse Trial, NYT, 19.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/19/washington/19abuse.html

G.I. Is Guilty of Abusing Afghan Prisoners

January 29, 2006
By REUTERS
The New York Times

KABUL, Afghanistan, Jan. 28 (Reuters) — An American soldier has been found guilty of mistreating Afghan detainees and a court-martial demoted him and sentenced him to four months in detention without pay, the United States military said on Saturday.

The soldier, Spec. James Hayes, was accused of punching detainees in the chest, arms and shoulders at a base in Uruzgan Province in July. On Friday, a court-martial convicted him of one count of conspiracy to maltreat and two counts of maltreatment, demoted him to private and ordered him to serve his sentence in a military facility in Kuwait.

"The command takes this matter very seriously," the chief of criminal justice for the American-led forces in Afghanistan, Lt. Col. Bob Fifer, said. A second soldier accused in the incident faces a court-martial on Jan. 30.

In Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan, Taliban insurgents set fire to three schools, in the latest attacks against the American-backed government and its efforts to promote education for all Afghan youths, Afghan officials said.

The three new schools, where 1,000 boys and girls studied, were gutted late Friday, the provincial education chief, Mohammad Qasim, said. No one was reported injured in the fires. Efforts to reach Taliban spokesmen for comment were not successful.

The Taliban banned girls from schools during their rule, which ended when they were ousted by American-led forces in late 2001. Since then, insurgents have staged numerous attacks on schools and teachers, including deadly attacks in recent weeks in Helmand, where British troops will soon be based.

In December, Taliban gunmen dragged a teacher from his classroom and shot him at the gates of his school after he had ignored warnings to stop teaching boys and girls, Afghan officials said. The same month, gunmen shot and killed an 18-year-old male student and a guard at another school in Helmand. The gunmen also opened fire on teachers and said they would be killed unless the schools were shut down.

In Zabul Province, also in the south, a teacher was dragged from his home and beheaded last month.

    G.I. Is Guilty of Abusing Afghan Prisoners, NYT, 29.1.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/international/asia/29afghan.html

US officer guilty in Iraqi general abuse case

Sun Jan 22, 2006 2:02 AM ET
Reuters
By Steven Saint

FORT CARSON, Colo. (Reuters) - The highest-ranking U.S. Army officer charged with killing a detainee in Iraq was found guilty on Saturday of negligent homicide but not guilty on the more serious charge of murder of an Iraqi general during an interrogation.

A jury of six Army officers convicted Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshofer Jr. in charges resulting from the suffocation death of Iraqi Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush.

The general was placed head-first in a sleeping bag as Welshofer covered his mouth and sat on his chest during a fatal interrogation in November 2003. Prosecutors accused Welshofer of using harsh techniques to try to get information from Mowhoush, describing them as "torture."

After 6-1/2 hours of deliberation until late on Saturday night, the military jury found Welshofer not guilty of first-degree murder or manslaughter, but guilty of negligent homicide, a lesser charge that carries a maximum penalty of three years in prison.

"The verdict reflects the context in which these events took place," defense attorney Frank Spinner said. "The jury recognized confusion about the rules that govern interrogation."

The military panel also found Welshofer guilty of negligent dereliction of duty, a conviction that could bring another three months in prison. He also faces dishonorable discharge.

Welshofer stood at attention to hear the verdict but gave little visible reaction.

David Danzig, manager of a campaign to end torture for Human Rights First, a New York-based group, said the trial showed there is great confusion about what soldiers should be doing in Iraq.

"It's shocking what Chief Welshofer did but it's also shocking to see what the Army authorized," he said. "The Army said it was OK to put a man in a sleeping bag and wrap an electrical cord around him. Things like that need to stop."

In closing arguments trial prosecutor Maj. Tiernan Dolan told the jury of Army officers that Welshofer knew his interrogation techniques were dangerous and described them as "torture."

"If we don't hold the high ground in a country like Iraq, we don't hold it anywhere," Dolan said. "Chief Welshofer failed in his duty to uphold the Geneva Convention."

Spinner said Welshofer believed he was doing the right thing to extract information from the Iraqi general, who was thought to have valuable intelligence information about the insurgency.

"His ultimate mission was to save lives by getting information from people like Mowhoush," Spinner said.

Welshofer testified during the court-martial that the use of the sleeping bag did not cross the line from interrogation to torture.

    US officer guilty in Iraqi general abuse case, R, 22.1.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2006-01-22T070219Z_01_N21227771_RTRUKOC_0_US-IRAQ-ABUSE.xml

General in Prisoner Abuse Case Declines to Testify Further

January 13, 2006
The New York Times
By ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON, Jan. 12 - Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, the former commander at the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, who also helped set up the interrogation operation at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, is declining to testify further about harsh interrogation practices and will retire from the service, Army officials said Thursday.

General Miller, 56, decided this week to invoke his right not to give testimony that might incriminate him and will not answer questions in court-martial proceedings against two soldiers who are accused of using dogs to terrify detainees at Abu Ghraib, Maj. Michelle Crawford, a military lawyer representing the general, said Thursday by e-mail.

The general's plans to retire after 34 years of service have not been announced, Army officials said, and it was unclear how the plans related to his decision to invoke his rights under military Article 31, the rough equivalent of invoking the Fifth Amendment in a civilian court. Invoking that right does not constitute an admission of guilt or wrongdoing.

Asked at a Pentagon news conference about General Miller's decision not to testify, which was first reported Thursday by The Washington Post, Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, defended General Miller's decision to invoke his rights against self-incrimination. "I will simply tell you that we expect our leaders to lead by example, but we do not expect them to give up their individual rights as people," General Pace said.

Eugene Fidell, a Washington specialist in military law, said it was highly unusual for General Miller to take such an action, particularly since he had previously given statements to lawyers and investigators on the same issues.

Several investigations have cleared General Miller of wrongdoing involving Abu Ghraib. A military inquiry last July into accusations of abuses at Guantánamo Bay recommended that he be reprimanded for failing to oversee the interrogation of a so-called high-value prisoner who was subjected to abuse. But his commander instead referred the matter to the Army inspector general. That review is complete, but its results remain confidential, said Col. Joseph Curtin, an Army spokesman.

General Miller had been scheduled to answer questions this week from Harvey Volzer, a lawyer for a dog handler at Abu Ghraib. Mr. Volzer has contended that the dog handlers were following orders in using the animals against the prisoners.

Major Crawford, General Miller's military lawyer, said Thursday in an e-mail message that the general did not intend to answer any more questions because he had already "fully answered all questions posed to him." Major Crawford said that General Miller stood by all his previous statements to Congressional committees, Army investigators and other military court proceedings.

General Miller's decision to invoke his right not to incriminate himself came shortly after Col. Thomas M. Pappas, whose military intelligence unit was in charge of interrogations at the Abu Ghraib, was granted immunity from prosecution and ordered to testify in the dog handlers' coming courts-martial.

Major Crawford said she and General Miller were not aware that Colonel Pappas had immunity protection when General Miller invoked his military Article 31 rights.

Military dogs were brought to Iraq in fall 2003 on the recommendation of General Miller, who said they could help maintain order. An inquiry by three Army generals found that Colonel Pappas believed, incorrectly, that the dogs could be used in interrogations without the approval of Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, then the top American commander in Iraq.

Military lawyers said Colonel Pappas's testimony could offer new insights into the origins of the abusive techniques and what, if any, role General Miller had played. "It will help to open up the completely closed nature of the decision-making process at the higher levels," said Elisa C. Massimino, Washington director of the advocacy group Human Rights First.

When asked Thursday whether General Miller's decision suggested culpability by senior military officers in the Abu Ghraib scandal, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said there had been a dozen major inquiries into the matter, adding, "I'm certainly not going to inject myself into the middle of any one of those particular activities."

On Sept. 9, 2003, General Miller completed a review of operations in Iraq and recommended a detainee interrogation policy that borrowed heavily from procedures approved for Guantánamo. He proposed establishing an interrogation and debriefing center and ensuring that military police officers were assigned to help set the conditions for questioning.

Five days later, General Sanchez authorized variations of what General Miller had recommended. Classified parts of a report by the three Army generals on the abuses at Abu Ghraib said some of the interrogation practices General Sanchez approved for use in Iraq exceeded those advocated in a standard Army field manual and were intended to be limited to captives held in Guantánamo Bay and Afghanistan.

"Interrogators at Abu Ghraib used both dogs and isolation as interrogation practices," said the classified part of the report by Maj. Gen. George R. Fay. "The manner in which they were used on some occasions clearly violated the Geneva Conventions."

    General in Prisoner Abuse Case Declines to Testify Further, NYT, 13.1.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/13/politics/13detain.html

US asks top court to dismiss Guantanamo case

Thu Jan 12, 2006 10:13 PM ET
Reuters
By James Vicini

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Bush administration urged the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday to dismiss a challenge to President George W. Bush's power to create military tribunals to put Guantanamo prisoners on trial for war crimes.

The administration's argument was based on a law signed by Bush on December 30 that limits the ability of Guantanamo prisoners caught in the president's war on terrorism to challenge their detentions in federal courts.

Administration lawyers said the new law applied to the Supreme Court case of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni accused of being Osama bin Laden's bodyguard and driver.

He had challenged the military tribunals before his actual trial, but administration lawyers said that under the new law he could bring a court appeal only after the commission proceedings against him had been completed.

The Hamdan case is considered an important test of the administration's policy in the war on terrorism. The tribunals, formally called military commissions, were authorized by Bush after the September 11 attacks and have been criticized by human rights groups as being fundamentally unfair.

There are about 500 suspected al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Charges have been brought against nine people, including Hamdan. Pretrial hearings were held in two cases this week.

The administration cited the same new law in moving last week to dismiss more than 180 cases in U.S. district court in Washington involving Guantanamo inmates who have challenged their detention.

The legislation signed by Bush on December 30 bans cruel and inhumane treatment of prisoners. The anti-torture law also curbs the ability of prisoners being held at the U.S. Naval Base in Cuba to challenge their detention in federal court.

HAMDAN LAWYERS SAY CASE CAN GO AHEAD

One of Hamdan's attorneys, Neal Katyal, had no immediate comment on the Justice Department's motion to dismiss the case.

Hamdan's lawyers previously told the high court the new law did not prevent the justices from considering the merits of his claims.

They also filed a request for habeas corpus relief directly with the Supreme Court in a bid to get around the jurisdictional problems and make sure the case can go forward.

It was not known when the court would decide whether to dismiss the case.

Justice Department lawyers told the Supreme Court that Hamdan's appeal should be dismissed without reaching the merits of the issue because of a lack of jurisdiction.

"Under well-settled principles, Congress's decision to remove jurisdiction over this action and others must be given immediate effect," Solicitor General Paul Clement said in 23-page motion filed with the Supreme Court.

"By establishing an exclusive review procedure for military commission challenges, Congress has made plain its judgment that judicial review of military commission proceedings should occur only after those proceedings have been completed," he said.

Department lawyers said Hamdan under the new law may seek review in the U.S. appeals court in Washington of any final decision rendered against him by a military commission.

(Additional reporting by Deborah Charles)

    US asks top court to dismiss Guantanamo case, R, 12.1.2006, http://today.reuters.com/News/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2006-01-13T031312Z_01_DIT275081_RTRUKOC_0_US-SECURITY-COURT.xml

Guantanamo tribunal ordered to call teen Mr. Khadr

Thu Jan 12, 2006 10:49 PM ET
Reuters
By Jane Sutton

GUANTANAMO BAY U.S. NAVAL BASE, Cuba (Reuters) - The presiding officer in the closely watched case of a Canadian teenager facing a murder charge before a U.S. war crimes tribunal ordered lawyers on Thursday to show greater respect to the defendant by calling him "Mister Khadr" rather than "Omar."

Toronto-born Omar Khadr, who is accused of killing a U.S. Army medic in Afghanistan when he was still 15, is one of two Guantanamo prisoners attending pre-trial hearings before a military tribunal this week at the remote, and controversial, Guantanamo base in Cuba.

The Pentagon went ahead with the hearings even though courts have halted the trials of other Guantanamo detainees pending a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on whether President George W. Bush had authority to establish the tribunals to try foreign terrorism suspects after the September 11 attacks. The court will hear arguments in the case in March.

Khadr, now 19, is accused of killing Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Speer with a grenade during a firefight at a suspected al Qaeda compound in Afghanistan in 2002.

His attorneys said Khadr would wait to enter a plea until a more experienced military lawyer is appointed to represent him. The one he is currently assigned has never defended anyone in court before.

Thursday's hearing addressed how Khadr should be dressed and addressed. The tribunal's presiding officer, Marine Col. Robert Chester, ordered prosecution and defense attorneys to stop calling him "Omar" because it seemed too casual for someone facing trial on murder charges.

"Mister Khadr is an adult," Chester said. "I think it's appropriate that he be addressed as Mister Khadr."

Khadr sported a full, short beard and a blue-checked dress shirt that won Chester's approval.

"I think that is a more appropriate attire for the nature of these proceedings," Chester said.

On Wednesday, Khadr had worn a blue and red T-shirt with a huge sports company logo across the chest. Chester said that violated court rules and urged the lawyers to find him an appropriate shirt before his hearing resumed on Thursday.

Most Guantanamo prisoners wear the now infamous orange jumpsuits, but are allowed civilian clothing in court.

Khadr is one of only nine Guantanamo prisoners charged with crimes. Most of the 500 or so detainees have been held without charges for up to four years.

TRIED AS AN ADULT

Khadr's civilian lawyer, Muneer Ahmad, said earlier that trying Khadr before a military tribunal for war crimes alleged to have been committed at age 15 violated international law and would be the first such trial "certainly in the modern era of international criminal justice beginning with the Nuremberg trials following World War Two."

Khadr is being tried as an adult and tribunal officials said they took his age into account when they decided not to seek his execution. He would face life in prison if convicted.

The hearing ended after Chester ruled that the chief prosecutor had not committed misconduct by telling a news conference that he believed Khadr was guilty and a terrorist.

Ahmad had argued that the statement was prejudicial and inflammatory and violated Khadr's right to a fair trial.

The United States has faced criticism at home and abroad over the treatment of Guantanamo prisoners since the first group of war captives arrived from Afghanistan in January 2002.

Human rights groups and military lawyers appointed to represent the defendants have called the tribunals unfair and illegitimate, in part because rules allow the use of secret evidence.

Chief prosecutor Col. Moe Davis said the tribunals were designed to provide a fair trial while addressing an al Qaeda enemy whose actions had not been anticipated under existing law.

    Guantanamo tribunal ordered to call teen Mr. Khadr, R, 12.1.2006, http://today.reuters.com/News/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2006-01-13T034905Z_01_ROB061553_RTRUKOC_0_US-SECURITY-GUANTANAMO.xml

Guantanamo prisoner rejects US war tribunal

Wed Jan 11, 2006 8:50 PM ET
Reuters
By Jane Sutton

GUANTANAMO BAY U.S. NAVAL BASE, Cuba (Reuters) - A Yemeni accused of being a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden went before a U.S. military tribunal on Wednesday and said he would boycott his war crimes trial because he did not recognize the tribunal's authority.

Yemeni Ali Hamza al Bahlul, who has acknowledged that he is "from al Qaeda," is one of only nine Guantanamo prisoners charged with crimes.

A separate tribunal also began on Wednesday for Canadian Omar Khadr, who is accused of killing a U.S. Army medic in Afghanistan when he was still 15.

Most of the 500 or so detainees at Guantanamo have been held without charges for years. The pretrial hearings at the remote military base in Cuba began on the fourth anniversary of the opening of Guantanamo as a prison for terrorism suspects.

Bahlul is accused of conspiring to commit war crimes by acting as a bin Laden bodyguard and making recruiting videos for al Qaeda. He said he did not recognize the authority of what he called an illegal tribunal set up by enemies of the Muslim nations.

"There's going to be a tribunal of God on the day of judgment," Bahlul told the court in Arabic. "Do what you have to do and rule however you have to rule ... God will rule based on justice."

Bahlul ended his participation in the proceedings with one word in English "Boycott," and the presiding officer, Army Col. Peter Brownback, set his trial tentatively for May 15.

The tribunal for Canadian prisoner Khadr, accused of killing the medic with a grenade during a firefight at a suspected al Qaeda compound in Afghanistan, was less colorful.

Khadr looked burly and grown up and sported a crew cut and full, short beard. Now 19, he quietly answered "Yes sir," when the presiding officer, Marine Col. Robert Chester, asked him if he understood his rights. He reserved the right to enter a plea later.

Khadr wore khaki pants and a blue and red T-shirt with the huge logo of the Canadian sportswear firm Roots. Chester said the attire violated court rules and urged the lawyers to find Khadr an appropriate shirt before his hearing resumed on Thursday at 1 p.m.

Through his military lawyer, Capt. John Merriam, Khadr asked that a more experienced military attorney be appointed to represent him. The hearing was the first time that Merriam has defended anybody in a courtroom, and Chester said he thought the request could be granted.

The Pentagon is proceeding with the two cases even though courts have halted the trials of other Guantanamo prisoners pending a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on whether President George W. Bush had authority to establish the tribunals to try foreign terrorism suspects after the September 11 attacks. The high court will hear arguments in the case in March.

NO SHACKLES

Neither defendant was shackled or handcuffed in the courtroom. Both face life in prison if convicted.

Bahlul, also bearded and wearing khaki pants and a dark blue button-down shirt, read a list of nine reasons why he refused to be represented by a military lawyer or to participate further, including the treatment of Palestinians by U.S. ally Israel -- "your allies, the Jews," he said.

Bahlul also said Guantanamo prisoners had been tortured and that the Britons there had been released without being subjected to military tribunals. He objected to the potential use of secret evidence and to the U.S. characterization of prisoners as illegal belligerents.

"We are prisoners of war and legal combatants based on our religion and our religious law," he said.

Brownback rejected Bahlul's request to represent himself and Bahlul refused to meet with Army Reserve Maj. Tom Fleener, the lawyer appointed by the military to defend him.

Smiling and thanking Brownback, Bahlul held up a sheet of paper scrawled with the word 'Boycott' in English and Arabic. He removed translation earphones, and refused to enter a plea or to stand when the charges were read.

Bahlul's hearing ended on Wednesday. Khadr's will resume on Thursday to address defense complaints that the chief prosecutor made prejudicial statements by telling journalists that Khadr was a terrorist whose family spent holidays with bin Laden and trained to make bombs to kill Americans.

The United States has faced criticism at home and abroad over Guantanamo since the first group arrived from Afghanistan, shackled and wearing black-out goggles and surgical masks, on January 11, 2002.

Human rights groups have criticized rules allowing the use of evidence that may have been obtained through torture.

Chief prosecutor Col. Moe Davis said the tribunals were designed to provide a fair trial while addressing an enemy whose actions had not been anticipated under existing law.

    Guantanamo prisoner rejects US war tribunal, R, 11.1.2006, http://today.reuters.com/News/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2006-01-12T015002Z_01_ROB061553_RTRUKOC_0_US-SECURITY-GUANTANAMO.xml

The Bush Administration vs. Salim Hamdan

January 8, 2006
The New York Times
By JONATHAN MAHLER

In 1996, Salim Hamdan, a 26-year-old Yemeni with a thick mustache and kinky black hair, was working part time as a taxi driver, dividing his modest income between the mattress he rented in a crowded boardinghouse in the dirty, bustling city of Sana and his daily supply of khat leaves, the stimulant that most Yemeni men chew by the fistful. Then one day the low-hanging horizon of his life lifted: he was recruited for jihad. He joined about 35 other Muslims, mostly Yemenis, who were preparing to leave for Tajikistan to fight alongside that country's small Islamic insurgency against its Russian-backed government.

One of the group's leaders was a self-assured young man named Nasser al-Bahri. Hamdan, an orphaned only child from a rural tribal village in southern Yemen, was naturally drawn to strong personalities. Although two years his junior, al-Bahri, who grew up in an upper-middle-class family in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, was far more worldly and sophisticated than Hamdan and was without question the most educated person he had ever met. Al-Bahri had studied business in college, but he was also deeply steeped in the Koran, having become a devout Muslim as a teenager in rebellion against his bourgeois upbringing. He spoke comfortably and forcefully about the plight of Muslims all over the world, and he had traveled extensively, to places as far as Bosnia and Somalia, to defend his oppressed Islamic brethren.

Hamdan, who had the rough equivalent of a fourth-grade education, wasn't especially religious and had no grand plans for his life other than the hope that he might someday be married, but he nevertheless embraced the idea of becoming a holy warrior. It didn't hurt that the trip was to be paid for - al-Bahri told him that the group had raised money from a handful of Saudi-based Muslim charities - and that Hamdan would also receive a salary.

The jihadis convened in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, and started working their way north toward Tajikistan, first by jeep and then, when the roads were impassable, on foot. After six months traversing Afghanistan's mountainous, often snow-covered terrain, they were turned back at the Tajik border.

At loose ends, one of the jihadis suggested that they go see a man named Osama bin Laden, a well-known sheik among radical Islamists who led a militant group of itinerant Muslim holy warriors called Al Qaeda. Having only recently been expelled from Sudan, bin Laden had relocated to Afghanistan, where he planned to rebuild Al Qaeda with the help of his new hosts, the Taliban. Bin Laden earned his reputation during the anti-Soviet campaign in Afghanistan in the 1980's, but he was now enlisting soldiers for his new crusade to drive the United States from the Arabian Peninsula.

Al-Bahri, Hamdan and the rest of the group made their way back through Afghanistan to bin Laden's home in Farm Hada, a village outside Jalalabad, not far from the Khyber Pass. They arrived in late 1996 shortly before Ramadan, the holiest time of year. For three days, bin Laden preached to his prospective recruits about the religious imperative of reversing America's corrosive presence in the gulf. Seventeen of the original 35 jihadis decided to stay; Hamdan and al-Bahri were among them.

For the next several years, both men worked for bin Laden, first in Farm Hada, then, when he relocated for security reasons in 1997, to a better-fortified compound in the desert outside Kandahar. In 1999, al-Bahri and Hamdan's lives became further entwined. At bin Laden's urging and with his financial help, they married Yemeni sisters in Sana and returned to Afghanistan with their new wives.

By Sept. 11, 2001, however, al-Bahri and Hamdan's paths had diverged. Al-Bahri was in prison in Yemen for his suspected links to Al Qaeda's bombing of an American Naval destroyer, the U.S.S. Cole, in 2000. Hamdan was still with bin Laden, though not for long. In late November 2001, with America's military campaign in Afghanistan well under way, he was picked up near the border of Pakistan by a group of Afghan warlords. They hogtied him with electrical wire and within a matter of days turned him over to the Americans for a $5,000 bounty. The interrogations started, and Hamdan was soon identified as Saqr al-Jedawi, his alias during his years with bin Laden. He spent the next six months in U.S. prison camps in Bagram and Kandahar, before being flown to Guantánamo Bay in May 2002.

Today, Salim Hamdan lives in a 6-by-9-foot cell in Guantánamo, awaiting trial by a special military tribunal established by presidential order in the aftermath of 9/11. If everything goes according to the government's plans, the Bush administration will prosecute Hamdan for violating the laws of war by conspiring to commit acts of terrorism against the United States. The government has revealed little about its case against Hamdan - my portrait is drawn principally from his lawyers, family members and al-Bahri - but it has charged him with serious offenses, including transporting weapons and serving as a bodyguard to bin Laden. If convicted on all charges, Hamdan could receive a life sentence.

Hamdan's attorneys, a government-appointed Navy lawyer and a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, don't deny that their client worked directly for bin Laden, but they play down his importance to Al Qaeda, portraying him as an employee, an uneducated and far-from-devout driver and mechanic who was grateful for a paycheck but generally ignorant of the terrorist enterprise for which he worked. Moreover, they say that the tribunals, known officially as military commissions, are illegal and have sued the American government to block them from going forward.

This spring, the detainee's lawyers will have the chance to make their case to the Supreme Court, when it hears Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. The name alone guarantees that it will be one of the most closely watched arguments of the year, and the eventual ruling will have far-reaching implications not just for Hamdan and the rest of the Guantánamo detainees, but also for presidential war powers and quite possibly for the future of democracy in the Middle East. If the war on terror is, at its heart, a battle to show the Islamic world that there is an alternative to oppressive theocracies and autocratic dictators, nothing is more important than how the United States government dispenses justice to detainees like Salim Hamdan. Until now, America's wartime practice has been to hold onto captured combatants until the end of hostilities, when there is no longer a threat of them returning to the battlefield. In this case, though, the battlefield is unmapped and the hostilities could continue for decades. For the moment, the government has broadly classified nearly all of the more than 500 detainees at Guantánamo as enemy combatants, but eventually it's going to have to start sorting them out. This will entail answering some difficult questions. Are all Muslim men who answered the call to jihad equally guilty? Which detainees represent a threat to the United States? Who is worth prosecuting, and how?


Just outside the Old City of Sana, a maze of densely packed, intricately adorned stone houses and centuries-old shops that rise like drip castles from narrow cobblestone streets, sits the modern Martyrs' Mosque. If the Old City evokes Yemen's prosperous, cosmopolitan days at the center of the world's spice trade, the Martyrs' Mosque, an imposing, ash-colored monolith, speaks to its present as the poorest and most primitive of the Arabian Peninsula states.

The big open square that fronts the mosque is a gathering place for the dispossessed. Homeless people lie on flattened cardboard boxes with gasoline cans repurposed as water jugs beside them. Dababs, minivans stuffed with passengers, career around Sana's crowded streets, jockeying for fares. Drivers struggle to be heard above the music issuing from loudspeakers on the three-wheeled cycles pedaled by cassette vendors. The smells of grilling meat and corn on the cob commingle with perfumed oil, urine and exhaust.

There are no women in sight here, only young men and boys, a reflection of Yemen's conservative Islamic culture. And although roughly 40 percent of all Yemeni men are unemployed, everyone here seems to be in a big hurry, hustling around, often holding hands, always in standard Yemeni dress: sandals, white robes and Western-style blazers with the labels showing on the outside of the left sleeve, just above the cuff. Long curved daggers known as jambiyas, reminders of the country's enduring tribal culture, hang from belts. Cheeks bulge with khat, which brightens the mood and sends the mind in every direction, an apt emblem of the combination of aimlessness and restlessness on display.

Ten years ago, Salim Hamdan was one of these men. He was born in about 1970 (no one, including Hamdan himself, knows for sure), hundreds of miles from Sana in the Wadi Hadhramaut, a 100-mile oasis in the mountainous desert of southeastern Yemen. His father was a farmer and shopkeeper, and the family lived modestly in a small, mud-brick home in a cliff town overhanging the fertile valley below. He was still a child when his parents died from illness, one a few years after the other. With no other family nearby, Hamdan went to live with relatives in Mukalla, a bleak port city of about 150,000 on Yemen's southern coast. By that point, Hamdan had already quit school, which is not unusual in Hadhramaut, where the imperatives of helping your family earn money far outweigh the comparatively abstract virtues of an education.

Within a few years he was on his own, living on the streets of Mukalla and working odd jobs. In 1990, Yemen, which had long been divided into two separate nations, the Islamic north and Marxist south, was officially unified. Hamdan, who was then 20, joined the mass migration north in search of work. There was a widespread sense that Sana, the new nation's capital, would soon be booming. As it turned out, the job prospects were not so promising, particularly for someone with Hamdan's limited qualifications. He soon found his way to the Martyrs' Mosque - where he picked up work driving a dabab - and then, six years later, to jihad.

Jihad - literally, "struggle" - is a slippery concept, one that has been subjected to almost endless interpretation, violent and nonviolent alike, emanating from a Muslim's basic religious duty to encourage the spread of Islam. In recent years, though, it often has come to be understood as a violent religious crusade against the United States. Hamdan and al-Bahri's routes to jihad could not have been more different, but in many ways each is emblematic of the men's respective countries, which represent the two biggest contingents at Guantánamo. In Saudi Arabia, jihad resonated with particular force with the educated, affluent and devout; in Yemen, it exerted an especially strong pull on the country's poor. Nearly half of the country's population lives below the poverty line; unlike its neighbors in the gulf, Yemen has very little oil, and what it does have is hoarded by the government. "Unless they are the sons of sheiks or political leaders, the young people have no way to use their energies," Nabil al-Sofee, a former spokesman for Islah, Yemen's Islamic party, told me recently in his office in Sana. "The one option that is in front of anyone who wants to achieve anything is jihad."

Jihad has an almost mythic appeal in Yemen. Its roots run all the way back to the seventh century, when the Prophet Muhammad is said to have declared, "Allah, give me fighters from behind me," his back turned conspicuously to Yemen. In its more modern incarnation, jihad can be traced to 1967, when Yemen was still divided and the British withdrew from its southern half. Finally free of its longtime occupiers, South Yemen quickly established ties to the Soviet Union, Cuba and China, and in 1970 became the Arab world's first Communist state.

South Yemen's new identity inaugurated two decades of hostilities with North Yemen, a Muslim state whose allegiances were to Saudi Arabia and Egypt. It didn't take long for North Yemen's rulers - including the president of today's unified Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh - to exploit the conflict's religious undertones. By the time the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, many young North Yemenis already accepted that it was their duty as Muslims to confront Communist unbelievers. And so, over the next several years, scores of young Yemeni men answered their clerics' calls for jihad. Afghanistan's mujahedeen received support from many Arab countries, in addition to the United States, but the Yemenis were among the fiercest of the so-called Afghan-Arab fighters. Unlike the jihadis from wealthier states in the Persian Gulf, they were accustomed to hard living, and the rugged, mountainous terrain of Afghanistan was similar to that of Yemen.

When the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, the leaders of many Arab countries, understandably worried about the combustible mix of religious zealotry and combat experience in which these men had been steeped, discouraged the jihadis from returning home. North Yemen, for its part, not only welcomed back its own fighters, it opened its borders to jihadis from other Arab countries as well. The heroic stature of these fighters was cemented in 1994, when the still-simmering tensions between Yemen's Islamists and Marxists erupted into a full-fledged civil war and President Saleh called on the ex-jihadis to help defeat the Communists. The north emerged victorious, and Saleh rewarded many of these men for their efforts. For his help mobilizing the troops, Sheik Abdul Majid al-Zindani, an ex-Arab-Afghan warrior and bin Laden's onetime spiritual mentor, was awarded the chancellorship of Iman University in Sana, a platform from which he has since steered countless young Yemeni men toward the path of jihad.

The Yemeni government did little to stanch the flow of jihadis, even in the face of increasing international pressure. A consummate pragmatist, President Saleh gave the U.S. permission to use its ports to refuel in the 1990's, but to the Arab world he presented himself as a leader who was not afraid to stand up to the West. In the wake of the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen in 2000, Saleh scoffed at rumors that the U.S. was planning to intensify its military presence in the country: "Yemen is a graveyard for the invaders," he told Al Jazeera. After 9/11, however, President Saleh went to Washington to pledge his support for the war on terror. But having spent so many years nurturing and exploiting the country's culture of jihad, he had to be careful about how he went about dismantling it. Extraditing Islamic radicals, or even putting them in jail for more than a couple of years, would provoke the country's powerful extremist element.

The centerpiece of Saleh's solution was to appoint a respected jurist and cleric, Hamoud al-Hitar, to meet with imprisoned extremists and persuade them that Islam does not, in fact, condone acts of terrorism. When I visited al-Hitar at his heavily guarded home in Sana one night last fall, he explained to me how the so-called Committee on Thoughtful Dialogue works. He called it "intellectual surgery" and described it as a simple process: he leads radicals through a series of questions about their beliefs, using the Koran or the hadith, a collection of the Prophet Muhammad's teachings, to show them how they have been misled. At the end of the program, those participants who vow not to take part in future acts of terrorism are granted presidential pardons and set free. To the obvious question - Why believe that they'll honor the vow? - Judge al-Hitar gave the obvious answer: These are men who take their ideology seriously; they would never sign a pledge renouncing their beliefs if they didn't mean it. A couple of years ago, President Saleh released hundreds of men with connections to Al Qaeda under the auspices of Judge al-Hitar's dialogue program. One of those men was Nasser al-Bahri.


Al-Bahri declined to see me for the better part of the two weeks I spent in Yemen. Then, the night before I was scheduled to fly home, he agreed to meet me the following evening at a relative's home in Sana. A tall, rangy man with a receding hairline and a neatly trimmed beard, al-Bahri looked older than his 33 years. He sat on a floor cushion, his long legs extending from the bottom of his creaseless white robe. Early in our conversation, which lasted more than five hours, the power failed. For the rest of the night, the narrow room was illuminated by two candles. Al-Bahri apologized for excusing himself repeatedly to urinate, explaining that he was diabetic.

According to al-Bahri, his decision to renounce Al Qaeda and terrorism had nothing to do with Judge al-Hitar's dialogue program, which he doubts has truly changed any minds. Rather, he said that during his two years in prison in Yemen, almost half of which was spent in solitary confinement, he had the chance to do a lot of reading and thinking. He continues to believe that America is oppressing and exploiting Muslims, but he no longer accepts that the random murder of innocent people is a legitimate expression of jihad, which, he said, "has its time and place, like prayer." There was also the issue of maturity. "When we reach our 30's, we come to regret what we did in our 20's," he told me matter-of-factly, like an ex-campus radical reflecting on a minor act of civil disobedience in his distant past.

Al-Bahri was not eager to talk about Hamdan; because he feels responsible for his brother-in-law's fate, he said that discussing him was too depressing. Not surprisingly, what he did say distanced Hamdan from the military operations of Al Qaeda. Al-Bahri described Hamdan as almost childlike, a cheerful, simple-minded man. According to al-Bahri, Hamdan at first seemed excited about jihad, but he lacked both the zeal of a holy warrior and the religious grounding or inclination to grasp the ideology of the movement. As al-Bahri tells it, Hamdan went to Tajikistan for jihad but stayed in Afghanistan because working as a driver and mechanic in bin Laden's motor pool paid better than driving a dabab in Sana.

If al-Bahri was quick to exonerate Hamdan, he showed no hesitation implicating himself as a senior member of what may be the most notorious terrorist organization the world has ever known. Al-Bahri sounded neither nostalgic nor remorseful talking about his years as one of bin Laden's chief bodyguards; he could have been a retired executive dispassionately recollecting his years with the firm. Yet he was, in one sense, cautious: while he was willing to answer any question I asked, he explicitly disassociated himself from each specific attack that took place during his time with bin Laden.

Al-Bahri's future had come into focus as a teenager in Jidda, when he first fell under the influence of radical Saudi clerics. "I saw that my function was to carry guns and defend Muslims wherever they were," he told me. "That was the holy work that would lead me to paradise." Having grown up in Saudi Arabia, Islam's holiest land, he responded personally when he heard bin Laden describe his country as an agent of the Americans and pledge to drive America from the Arabian Peninsula. What's more, al-Bahri had left Saudi Arabia for Bosnia in the early 90's and had been without the guidance of a religious leader ever since. In bin Laden, al-Bahri said, he had found "a new spiritual father."

Al-Bahri rose quickly through the ranks of Al Qaeda. Under the alias Abu Jandal, he helped create new training camps that bore little resemblance to the kind he attended as a young man in Bosnia, where jihadis learned such conventional skills as assembling and firing weapons and reading maps. The focus now was on fighting in cities and preparing for martyrdom operations, which meant learning how to blend in with local populations and attack civilian targets. Bin Laden was clear about the goals. "He would say over and over again that we must carry out painful attacks on the United States until it becomes like an agitated bull," al-Bahri recalled, "and when the bull comes to our region, he won't be familiar with the land, but we will." During the late 90's, al-Bahri fought with the Taliban against the Northern Alliance and served as one of bin Laden's personal bodyguards during his frequent tours of Qaeda training camps around Afghanistan.

After the attacks on the U.S. embassies in East Africa in the summer of 1998, al-Bahri said, bin Laden placed him in charge of the organization's guest houses in Kabul and Kandahar, where it was his duty to help inspire and train new recruits to undertake terrorist operations against the United States. It was at this point, al-Bahri says, that he started having second thoughts about Al Qaeda, not because he doubted its mission, but because he wasn't convinced these recruits were prepared to carry it out.

Jihad, it occurred to al-Bahri, had evolved from a genuine religious mission to a cattle call for any and all Muslims. Even years later, having renounced terrorism, he seemed irritated by what he characterized as Al Qaeda's failures of management. "We were getting young people who were not committed to jihad, also very young people, 15 or 16 years old," he told me. "What could we do with them? I said we should accept only religious young people. Only the religious understand what jihad means. But my voice was not being heard." Al-Bahri told me that bin Laden knew he was becoming disillusioned, and that's why he encouraged him and Hamdan to marry sisters in 1999; in al-Bahri's interpretation, by tying him to Hamdan, who had fewer options and was thus less likely to leave, bin Laden would have a better chance of keeping al-Bahri in the fold.

During the summer of 2000, Hamdan and al-Bahri came back to Sana for a brother-in-law's wedding. Within a matter of weeks, several Qaeda operatives in a small boat filled with explosives rammed the U.S.S. Cole, which was on a refueling stop in Yemen. Shortly after the attack, Yemeni intelligence agents started rounding up suspected extremists. Al-Bahri tried to flee but was arrested at the airport trying to return to Afghanistan. Hamdan had already taken his wife and her parents on a pilgrimage to Mecca, and word quickly reached him in Saudi Arabia that if he came back to Yemen he'd be picked up, too. Instead, he went back to bin Laden, taking his wife with him.

In the wake of Sept. 11, al-Bahri told me, three F.B.I. agents came to the prison where he was being held in Yemen to interrogate him. The transcripts from their interviews are classified, but al-Bahri says they were mainly interested in the structure and ideology of Al Qaeda. Asked if bin Laden had access to chemical or nuclear weapons, al-Bahri replied that bin Laden had something far more powerful: men who are determined to complete their covenant with God and carry out martyrdom operations against the United States.


Detainees' lawyers estimate that there are currently about 100 Yemeni prisoners in Guantánamo. If even a fraction of this many Americans had been imprisoned in a foreign country for four years, the vast majority without charges, there would be a national outcry. In Yemen, however, most of the detainees' families are completely in the dark. Half of the people in the country are illiterate. Those who can read find few stories about Guantánamo. Many of the papers are state-run, and the rest are under intense pressure to toe the government line. President Saleh knows that drawing attention to the detainees would only further inflame anti-American sentiments and in so doing create more problems for him.

A Yemeni human rights group called HOOD has a rough list of Yemenis who are being held at Guantánamo and has made contact with some of their relatives, but the families are not in communication with anyone in the U.S. government. The detainees' defense lawyers periodically come to Yemen to meet with the families who have authorized them to represent their relatives, though in some cases the detainees themselves doubt their American lawyers' good intentions. While I was in Yemen, I spent several days visiting the families of detainees with David H. Remes, a partner at the Washington firm Covington & Burling, which represents 17 of the Yemenis at Guantánamo. Remes prefaced several of his meetings by saying that their sons, brothers or husbands would be very angry if they knew he was there.

Hamdan, too, sent word through his lawyers that he didn't want me to contact his family, but I was able to get in touch with his wife's brother, Muhammad al-Qala, through HOOD. Al-Qala, a staff sergeant in the Yemeni army, invited me to his home to meet his sister, Hamdan's wife, Um Fatima. Since her husband's arrest, she and her two daughters have been living with her brother, his family and their mother in a cramped two-story stone house in central Sana. Hamdan's lawyers came to Yemen about a year and a half ago to see her, and the lawyer's interpreter is in fairly regular contact with al-Qala, but no one whom Hamdan left behind seems to have any real sense of the gravity of his situation or the significance of his case: what could a superpower like the United States possibly want with Salim?

Sitting perfectly straight on the shiny, floral-patterned blue floor cushions that lined the small upstairs living room in her brother's home, Um Fatima spoke for three hours through an interpreter about her husband. Al-Qala, a stocky man with a dark mustache and glassy, expressionless eyes, sat beside her chain-smoking Marlboros and working on a big wad of khat. Um Fatima and Hamdan's two daughters, 6 and 4, raced in and out in T-shirts and sweatpants. Um Fatima's full-length covering revealed only her eyes, but the difficulty of talking about her husband was evident; several times, she became so upset that she had to excuse herself and leave the room.

Um Fatima and Hamdan were married in Sana in 1999. She had not met him before their wedding day but was nevertheless a happy bride. They stayed in Sana for a few months before returning to Afghanistan. Um Fatima was reluctant to go, and was shocked at the conditions once they arrived. Their mud-brick home had dirt floors and no running water or electricity. It was also remote: Tarnak Farms, the walled Qaeda complex in which they lived, was tucked into a vast expanse of treeless desert and brush about 30 minutes outside Kandahar. Um Fatima's days were spent alone inside the house with her infant daughter. Hamdan, she told me, would return in the early evenings, often with clothes stained with grease from his work fixing the various cars and trucks used on the farm. Um Fatima said she would occasionally complain to him about their life there. "Salim would always tell me to be patient, that someday we would return to Yemen," she said.

In her telling, Um Fatima was doing hardship duty for a few years so that her husband could earn good money working for a sheik she'd never heard of. Even now, years later, the fact that she had lived inside the walls of a heavily fortified Qaeda compound while her husband worked for the most infamous terrorist of our time does not seem to have penetrated her version of reality.

Um Fatima last saw her husband on Nov. 24, 2001. She was eight months pregnant. At the time, U.S. forces were closing in on Kandahar, the Taliban's last stronghold in Afghanistan. Hamdan, who had been away for a couple of months with bin Laden, had recently returned to take Um Fatima and their daughter to Pakistan. In a borrowed car, with American B-52's circling the skies overhead, they made their way through the Maruf mountains toward the border. Hamdan decided to let Um Fatima cross into Pakistan alone; security was tight, and even if the border guards had no idea that he worked for bin Laden, being a Yemeni man trying to leave was enough to cause suspicion. He told her he would find another way through and come find her in a few days.

Over the course of the next few weeks, as Um Fatima traveled deeper into Pakistan in the back of a pickup truck with a group of Afghan refugees, she gradually lost hope that she would ever see her husband again. Entering her ninth month of pregnancy, she became so hysterical, she told me, that some sympathetic strangers in Karachi bought her a plane ticket home. At the airport in Sana, she was interrogated for five hours about her husband's whereabouts. Um Fatima said she assumed he was dead.

Two and a half months later, she received a letter from him on International Committee of the Red Cross stationery. "My sweetheart, peace and blessings be upon you," it began. "I did not die. Allah prescribed a new life for me. Now I am a detainee with the Americans.. . ."

Um Fatima showed me all of the letters she has received from Hamdan since then. Later that night, the interpreter who read the dozen or so letters to me told me how unusual they were. Yemeni men tend to be commanding and aloof with their wives. Hamdan's letters were emotive, like those of a longing schoolboy. There are drawings of his dagger ("please take care of my jambiya for me"), simple poems ("the bird danced and the bird sang. . .") and the promise to "see each other very, very, very, very, very soon, God willing."


In a three-page military order issued on Nov. 13, 2001, President Bush authorized the special tribunals before which Salim Hamdan and other non-American enemy combatants are to be tried. The trials will held in Guantánamo before panels of three to seven military officers selected by an administration appointee. Two-thirds of a majority will be required for non-death-penalty convictions. (A death sentence requires unanimity.) These are war-crimes tribunals, though unlike the recent international tribunals in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, the list of offenses pertain to acts of terrorism rather than genocide.

The administration opted for these special tribunals over the U.S. criminal courts for a number of practical reasons. Broadly speaking, certain rights that would be considered fundamental in a civilian court wouldn't apply. If defendants were suspected terrorists, for instance, they couldn't very well be permitted to see all the evidence against them as some of it would no doubt be classified for national-security reasons.

Practical considerations aside, the creation of the nation's first war-crimes tribunals since World War II sent a symbolic message, putting the war against Islamic extremism in the same class as the war against Nazism. Moreover, the tribunals fit with the Bush administration's larger strategy to reassert and expand presidential authority in the aftermath of 9/11. The executive branch would have complete control. Not only was Congress - the body empowered by the Constitution to convene military tribunals - left out of the decision to establish them, but it also wasn't consulted on how the tribunals would work. Instead, the administration's lawyers wrote all of the rules, from the composition of the panels to the standards for admissible evidence to the definition of a war crime. The judiciary branch was also cut out of the process: contested verdicts would be reviewed not by a federal court of appeals but by a three-member panel picked by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

The first batch of defendants for the tribunals, Hamdan and three others, were carefully selected and then repeatedly vetted on their journey up the chain of command. Case summaries were passed from the military lawyers assigned to the prosecution team to the Pentagon's adviser for the tribunals to Paul D. Wolfowitz, then deputy defense secretary, to President Bush. Hamdan was originally slated to be the first Arab tried.

While the government has not accused Hamdan of being a member of Al Qaeda per se, it does say that he picked up and delivered weapons for use by Qaeda associates, trained at a Qaeda camp and served as a bodyguard and driver for bin Laden. The formal charge being brought against him is conspiracy, which the administration defines as having "joined an enterprise of persons who shared a common criminal purpose." In a sense, the conspiracy charge is a logical one for prosecuting members of organizations like Al Qaeda that deliberately subdivide tasks and inform very few people about operations. "To capture the nature of some enterprises, to deconstruct what makes them effective, you have to focus on the different kinds of contributions, from the target spotter to the weapons transporter to the financier," says Ruth Wedgwood, a law professor at Johns Hopkins who helped the Pentagon revise some of the rules for the tribunals.

In the U.S. criminal courts, conspiracy is especially popular among prosecutors going after organized-crime rings; it gives them leverage to lean on foot soldiers to testify against their superiors. In the context of war-crimes tribunals, however, conspiracy becomes more complicated. Because it can be applied to people at every level, it can create a moral equivalence between low-level players and leaders. This very issue came up at Nuremberg, when an assistant attorney general in the Roosevelt administration attacked a Pentagon proposal to file conspiracy charges against German foot soldiers because it might, in the world's eyes, weaken the impact of the charges against the Nazi leaders. (The proposal was never adopted.) What's more, because conspiracy is such a broad, catch-all charge, it's an easy one for prosecutors to fall back on when their proof of guilt is thin. The U.S. criminal-court system has numerous protections against this - jury trials, judges who are insulated from politics, access to an independent court of appeals - most of which are absent from the tribunals. "In the American criminal system, we can have a conspiracy doctrine because we have this unique set of vibrant protections," says Neal Katyal, a Georgetown law professor, the architect of Hamdan's lawsuit against the Bush administration and a champion of the conspiracy charge in the criminal context. "But when it comes to war-crimes trials, the international consensus is that conspiracy is a no-no. When the U.S. Congress itself defined war crimes in two statutes in 1996 and 1997, it didn't include conspiracy."

Brig. Gen. Thomas L. Hemingway, an Air Force judge advocate general who is currently serving as the Pentagon's adviser on the tribunals, wouldn't discuss the government's evidence against Hamdan other than to point out that the prosecution has already given the defense 18,000 pages of discovery, including incriminating photographs and summaries of Hamdan's numerous statements to interrogators. "You want a one-word characterization of the case against Hamdan?" General Hemingway asked me. "Solid."

The government is certainly aware that the first trials will be closely scrutinized, and it seems improbable that it would choose a case that wasn't airtight. Hamdan's story also has narrative appeal. Unlike the vast majority of enemy combatants, who came to Afghanistan with the cresting wave of jihadis after 1999, he worked for bin Laden from 1996 until his capture in November 2001, a stretch of time that spanned not just 9/11 but also the 1998 attacks on two U.S. embassies in East Africa and the 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole. And while many jihadis never even met bin Laden, Hamdan has not disputed working directly for him. A skilled prosecutor could turn his trial into the history of Al Qaeda's decade-long war against America and in so doing illuminate the nature of our enemy; the tribunals will be open to the press, except for when classified evidence is presented. Whatever evidence the government may have against Hamdan, it's hard to believe he could have worked for bin Laden for five years, through several high-profile terrorist attacks, without the knowledge of Al Qaeda's intentions or bin Laden's trust. And given that he has admitted to being a driver, the progression to transporting weapons is hardly a leap.

Yet it seems clear that Hamdan was not a high-ranking officer of Al Qaeda. By the time the United States decided to try him in 2003, there were certainly people in custody suspected of more serious crimes. Why not prosecute the more heinous offenders first? The government won't discuss how it settled on Hamdan, but it's easy to make some logical inferences. It stands to reason that the more hard-core the suspected terrorist, the more useful the information he possessed. The government may not have been done questioning the "highest value" detainees when it decided to issue its first indictments. (Hamdan's once-regular interrogations, which started almost immediately after his arrest and continued for the better part of two years, ceased in early 2004, shortly before the government announced that he'd been selected for trial.) The United States was also entering uncharted waters with the tribunals; terrorism is not yet codified as a war crime in international law. It's possible that the government wanted to wait to try its most prized detainees until it had the opportunity to test its legal theories on smaller players.

The treatment of the prisoners may have been a factor as well. Lawyers for the administration had long since built their legal defense of coercive interrogations. Nevertheless, for the first tribunals the government may have wanted "clean" - as in not mistreated or tortured - defendants, both to avoid embarrassment and to prevent issues about the veracity of their statements to interrogators. This, however, is not a point that Hamdan's lawyers intend to concede. Hamdan has already implied in an affidavit that some of his statements were coerced. He says he was punched and kicked after failing to answer certain questions, and that one of his interrogators placed a pistol on the table between them during their sessions.


In late November, a few weeks after the Supreme Court agreed to hear Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, Hamdan was moved from his regular cellblock in Camp Delta to a separate, smaller cellblock called Tango. When his lawyers learned about the development in early December, they were not pleased. Not only had Hamdan's relocation violated the explicit order of a federal judge that he be kept among the general population at Delta, but he also would be right next to Ali Hamza Ahmed Sulayman al-Bahlul, a supposed Qaeda propagandist with a reputation for turning other detainees against their U.S. attorneys. "He's getting put with a known advocate for firing lawyers - against a federal order - and I don't even get told about it?" Katyal's co-counsel, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, told me after Hamdan's move. Swift and Katyal promptly filed an emergency motion to have their client returned to a normal cellblock, and the authorities at Guantánamo complied.

Many detainees assume that their lawyers are American spies, a suspicion fed by the fact that nearly every document or letter that they bring in or take out of the camp has to pass through military censors. Hamdan's lawyers say they have a good relationship with him; still, they worry about losing him to what they consider to be the prison's more radical element. So while Katyal plots strategy from his office near Capitol Hill in Georgetown, Swift, a voluble, boyish-looking 44-year-old Navy JAG, shuttles back and forth to Guantánamo Bay with their interpreter, Charles Schmitz, a soft-spoken professor of geography and an expert in Yemeni culture, to reassure their client that they are on his side and to persuade him to have faith in a legal system that he doesn't understand.


It was hard enough for Swift, who was appointed by the government, to earn Hamdan's confidence when he first started meeting with him - in his Navy uniform - in early 2004; he now finds himself having to constantly earn it back. As the indefinite detentions of hundreds of Muslim men, many of whom were already predisposed to Islamic extremism, enters its fifth year, Guantánamo is turning into an anti-American hothouse. For the government, the radicalization of Guantánamo is a complicated issue. The main form of protest in the camps is the hunger strike, and a prisoner's starving himself to death would turn Guantánamo, already a public-relations problem, into a full-scale disaster. (As of Dec. 30, more than 30 detainees had been hospitalized and were being force-fed.) Radicalization also undermines one of the principal goals of imprisonment: deterrence. As Guantánamo's critics like to say, "If you weren't a terrorist when you went in, you will be when you're let out."

But radicalization has its advantages for the Bush administration too. Last summer, some detainees told their American lawyers that they would no longer meet with them, and a number went so far as to formally fire them. The government considers the legions of adversarial defense attorneys working pro bono for the detainees - from corporate lawyers to human-rights lawyers to law professors - to be an impediment to their ability to prosecute the war on terror. Among other things, the lawyers have filed hundreds of habeas corpus petitions in order to challenge their clients' continued detention without recourse.

More broadly, radicalization helps validate Guantánamo's existence. The more anti-American the detainees become, the greater the danger they pose and thus the more necessary it is to continue to detain them. So when Swift first heard about the decision to move Hamdan next to al-Bahul, he wondered whether it wasn't deliberate. "If they succeed in radicalizing Salim," he said, "then they've justified his trial." (The Pentagon would not comment on why an individual detainee might have been moved.)

Last August, Hamdan joined a prisonwide hunger strike to protest the conditions on Guantánamo. The detainees' numerous demands included the return of religious books that had been taken from them. When Swift next visited Hamdan in late August, he found him unusually intransigent. For two days, Hamdan refused to meet with him altogether. Not long after Swift returned home to Northern Virginia, he got a call from another lawyer at Guantánamo informing him that Hamdan, a slight man to begin with, had passed out from dehydration in his cell and was taken to the medical clinic at Delta and put on an IV drip. Swift flew back down to Guantánamo Bay almost immediately and managed to persuade Hamdan to start eating again by appealing to the same sense of solidarity that he says prompted him to join the strike in the first place. The best way to help his fellow detainees, Swift told him, was not to martyr himself but to follow through on their challenge to the system.

Like the government, Hamdan's lawyers also see him as much more than a detainee; to them, he represents the pretext for a historic and unconstitutional presidential power grab. As Hamdan's lawyers and other critics see it, the administration, by unilaterally creating the tribunals, defining the offenses and handpicking the panels, is not only denying detainees fair trials, it is also violating bedrock principles of the American government. To put an even finer point on it, they say the Bush administration is undermining the very values it purports to be defending in its war against Islamic extremism. They would like to see Hamdan and other enemy combatants tried before a traditional military court, a pre-existing legal system approved by Congress with built-in provisions for the complications that arise during wartime.

Katyal, who served as Vice President Gore's co-counsel in the suit over the 2000 election, draws a sharp distinction between waging war, an act over which the president should have broad authority, and meting out justice. And so, working at his own expense with research support from a loose network of law students from Georgetown, Yale and the University of Michigan along with attorneys from the law firm Perkins Coie, Katyal has written more than a thousand pages of briefs arguing that the president has neither the authority to create the tribunals without explicit Congressional approval nor the right to deny Hamdan status as a prisoner of war, and in so doing strip him of protections guaranteed by the Geneva Conventions. "The Geneva Conventions were written precisely to make it difficult for political leaders facing political pressure to suspend basic rights and P.O.W. protections," Katyal says. "The moment we let a president say he can determine whether someone is a prisoner of war, other countries are going to start doing it back to us."

Katyal's arguments found traction in federal court in Washington in the fall of 2004. Just as Hamdan's second round of preliminary hearings were getting under way at Guantánamo, Judge James Robertson, a former Naval officer, ruled in his favor, declaring the tribunals illegal and abruptly halting the proceedings 30 minutes after they had begun. In July 2005, however, a three-judge appeals panel that included John G. Roberts Jr., now chief justice of the Supreme Court, overturned the decision. Katyal and Swift petitioned the Supreme Court for review, and in November, after delaying action on the case for several weeks, the court announced that it would hear Hamdan v. Rumsfeld.

This was not the final word, though. No sooner had the Supreme Court agreed to consider Hamdan's case than a Republican senator from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham, introduced a last-minute amendment to a defense-authorization bill explicitly denying all Guantánamo detainees habeas corpus rights, or access to the U.S. federal courts. This had been the administration's intent from the moment it started sketching out its legal strategy in the war on terror in the aftermath of 9/11, but the last time the issue came before the Supreme Court, in the spring of 2004 in another detainee case, the court ruled against the president (with a loud dissent from Justice Scalia). Now Graham was effectively interceding on the administration's behalf in what amounted to an end run around the Supreme Court.

Days later, however, Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, persuaded Graham to change the wording of the amendment so that it would not derail pending cases, including Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. It has since passed both the House and the Senate and at press time awaited the president's signature.


What about the hundreds of detainees who have not yet filed suits protesting their imprisonments? Aside from trial or continuing detention, the only option for the United States is to send them back to their respective nations. To date, it has released about 260 men, including a handful of Yemenis, all of whom remain in prison in Yemen, no doubt at the behest of the Bush administration. But Yemen is an unpredictable ally. In November, the United States suspended it from an aid program worth hundreds of millions of dollars, citing enduring governmental corruption, fiscal irresponsibility and the failure to enact democratic reform. Meanwhile, Islamic fundamentalism continues to gather strength in Yemen. Recently, three of the country's best-known extremists, including al-Zindani, one of bin Laden's spiritual mentors, called for a new coalition dedicated to confronting Islam's enemies and promoting Muslim values. The ongoing detention of 100 Yemenis at Guantánamo Bay may only help their cause and increase their leverage with President Saleh. So the United States finds itself trapped between two unappealing choices: hold these men as the potentially endless war against terrorism goes on, or return them to a breeding ground for Islamic radicalism in Yemen.

For his part, Hamdan's immediate concerns have more to do with day-to-day life at Guantánamo Bay - how much time detainees are permitted to exercise and at what time of day, what books they are allowed to read, what comfort items they are allowed to keep in their cells - than with the future of his historic lawsuit against the United States government. As Schmitz, his interpreter, told me recently, "The most important thing to him is what we can deliver in the camp, and that is zip."

Shortly after the Supreme Court agreed to hear Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, Swift visited Hamdan's cell armed with several front-page newspaper articles about the development. When Swift delivered the news, Hamdan smiled. Within a matter of minutes, though, his mood had visibly darkened, Swift says. Then Hamdan asked him, "What is this exactly that I've won?"

Jonathan Mahler, a contributing writer for the magazine, is working on a book about the Hamdan case, to be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

    The Bush Administration vs. Salim Hamdan, 8.1.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/08/magazine/08yemen.html?hp

    Voir aussi > http://news.findlaw.com/nytimes/docs/tribunals/ushamdan704.html et http://news.findlaw.com/nytimes/docs/tribunals/hamdanrums110804opn.pdf