Doing Dirty Work Abroad

On Tuesday, Jan. 24, the Council of Europe announced the results of its long-awaited, months-long investigation into the possibility that torture victims have been shuttled around Europe to clandestine interrogation centers. The Council's investigations were led by Sen. Dick Marty of Switzerland, who, in the final report, excoriated European leaders for their complicity. Marty's findings also undermine U.S. denials that it does not practice torture overseas.

Marty's report is a zinger. He finds that the CIA conducted illegal activities in Europe by transporting and detaining prisoners while European governments looked on:

"What was shocking was the passivity with which we all, in Europe, have welcomed these things. Europeans should be less hypocritical and not turn a blind eye. There are those who do the dirty work abroad, but there are also those who know when they should close their eyes when that dirty work is being done."
While unable to offer formal, irrefutable proof of the existence of officially sanctioned CIA detention centers in Romania, Poland or other countries, as U.S.-based Human Rights Watch has argued, Marty concluded there was "a great deal of coherent, convergent evidence pointing to the existence of a system of 'relocation' or 'outsourcing' of torture."

As extensive as it is, Marty's report is only the beginning of Europe's evolving efforts to learn how this global network of American-sponsored interrogation sites touched the continent. Setting off a second extensive investigation last Wednesday, members of the European Parliament voted to establish a special committee specifically to analyze whether the U.S. violated European Union human rights norms in its handling of terrorist suspects.

The nearly 50-member body will begin its work in February and report back in a couple of months. The committee's justice commissioner earlier indicated that EU member states, as well as candidate countries, could face extensive sanctions if the allegations are found to be true.

After a leaked document last week indicated how Downing Street could effectively handle public inquiries about CIA rendition flights, the normally cool as a cucumber Tony Blair is coming under heavy pressure to reveal more about whether Great Britain is aware of and condones U.S. torture centers. The Guardian reported a few days ago that the leaked document shows the Blair government is trying to snuff attempts by MPs to find out exactly what and how much Britain knew about the torture flights.

Neutral Switzerland, interestingly, has been the only country to follow the Bush line, expressing more outrage over a possible leak of information about collaboration rather than the collaboration itself.

It is easy for cynics to blast Europeans about these investigations, given European nations' own history of using torture throughout World War II. But the European Union has been developing some real bite. Just this past week, EU pressure resulted in Turkey dropping its lawsuit against the famous novelist Orhan Pamuk for allegedly making critical comments toward Turkey.

Despite this, there's been an almost total lack of U.S. coverage about the torture centers since the report was issued. Perhaps journalists are too busy enjoying the blockbuster film "Hostel" -- a story about torture centers in poor former-Soviet bloc Eastern Europe nations -- to be paying much attention to real news in Eastern Europe.

Romania is nervous that it won't be able to join the EU if the allegations of complicity with the CIA are found credible. The EU's main satellite communications center is about to provide images of air bases in central Europe to Council investigators, possibly demonstrating clandestine CIA air traffic. And the EU has put Poland on notice that it is in the spotlight for its alleged collaboration. Back in the United States, the lack of any hint of action in Congress to understand these CIA flights is the lamentable reality. Indeed, the only real concern about our dwindling civil liberties has come during a unreported basement Democrats-only House Judiciary Committee hearing on Bush's warrantless domestic spying program.

Congress has shown no interest in either following up on the Council of Europe's investigation or instigating its own investigation into the torture centers.

Council of Europe investigator Marty has repeatedly said, "We do not want to weaken the fight against terrorism, but this fight has to be fought by legal means. Wrongdoing only gives ammunition to both the terrorists and their sympathizers."

The United States appears to need an outside entity to help put the brakes on what looks like a slow drift into a benign police state. Ironically, the former totalitarian states the United States helped rebuild after World War II may be the ones that help save us.

Noah Leavitt is an attorney who writes frequently on civil liberties and human rights issues. He can be contacted at nsleavitt@hotmail.com.

Jailhouse Salsa

The Bandleader Didn't Commit the Murder, Affidavit Claims

Stormville, New York— Inside the concrete walls of the behemoth Green Haven Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison hidden away in this bleak upstate town, Harry Ruiz, inmate No. 95-A-2026, is sitting in a barren conference room talking about music. Salsa music. Congas, timbales, guitars—Ruiz plays them all. He leads nine other convicts in a jailhouse band he named Alma Libre.
"It means your soul is free," Ruiz said in an interview last month. "Why did I name the band that? Because that's the way I feel. . . . I had nothing to do with this."

Ruiz is talking about murder. It was a shooting that happened on August 29, 1993, during the city's gang wars and crack feuds: one low-level dealer, standing at a bus stop in Harlem one summer night, struck with a single bullet. Now serving a 31-years-to-life sentence for the killing, Ruiz, 37, insists he was wrongly convicted. But not many people believe him. Ruiz's appeals in the state and federal court systems have been denied.

Now, however, he might have a chance. Michael Race, a private investigator and former NYPD homicide detective, has found a fresh lead that he hopes may prompt a judge to reopen the Ruiz case. The new evidence comes in the form of an affidavit from Juan Mirabal, a former Harlem drug lord who became a cooperating witness for federal prosecutors. Facing a life sentence after his arrest in 2000 for running a vast, violent drug enterprise, Mirabal opted to work with the feds, and according to prosecutors, his cooperation has led to convictions in eight major cases.

Mirabal not only identified key players in the drug trade, he also claimed that Ruiz is innocent. In a signed affidavit dated April 26, 2004, and obtained by the Voice, Mirabal, 31, confessed to hiring a man other than Ruiz to kill a wayward employee, the same victim that Ruiz was convicted of killing.

Ruiz's family first learned about Mirabal's confession when two police detectives visited the Harlem apartment of Ruiz's mother, Gladys Rodriguez, and told her about Mirabal's cooperation deal with the feds. The Ruiz family then decided to hire Race, who specializes in wrongful-conviction cases. To pay the investigator, Ruiz's fiancée, Lizzette Rivera, an old friend of Ruiz's who fell in love with him over the course of bimonthly prison visits, embarked on a home-cooked fundraising campaign, selling jewelry at raffle sales and hawking her specialty beef patties, with minced onions and green peppers and her own secret Spanish seasoning. Rivera estimates she raised $1,000 to pay Race, while other family members chipped in about $2,500.

"I know Harry will be coming home," Rivera says. "I just know. I can feel it."

In the next few weeks, Mirabal's statements are expected to be part of a new appeal being prepared on Ruiz's behalf by Ron Kuby, the civil rights attorney and radio personality, who has taken on the case pro bono. While these statements about the murder are inconclusive (Mirabal claims not to know the full name of the killer he hired), Kuby hopes they will convince a judge to reassess the evidence against Ruiz, who was convicted solely on eyewitness testimony from a 15-year-old girl.

Without physical, biological, or DNA evidence, which has been responsible for overturning so many convictions throughout the country in recent years, Kuby says Ruiz is similar to scores of other inmates who were convicted on weak evidence or by mistaken identifications. Since Ruiz's conviction in 1994, there have been 32 exonerations in New York State, according to Northwestern University School of Law's Center on Wrongful Convictions. Of that lot, about 75 percent of the bad cases rested on shoddy testimony from eyewitnesses—a problem Kuby argues was more prevalent a decade ago.

"Harry Ruiz is a product of a different time in New York," Kuby says. "He is a product of the drug wars of the late '80s and early '90s, a product of three times the number of murders, hardly the same number of cops, and sloppy work by law enforcement all around."

Sherri Hunter, a spokeswoman for Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau, declined to comment on the Ruiz case. The files have been archived and would take weeks to retrieve and analyze. Three former prosecutors who handled Ruiz's case for the D.A. did not return calls. A fourth former prosecutor, who would not speak for attribution, says it's unlikely a judge would reopen Ruiz's case, because former dealers like Mirabal are unreliable. Why would a judge reverse conviction on a 12-year-old murder because of new claims by a former Harlem crack lord, the former prosecutor asks, when 12 jurors found Ruiz guilty?

Kuby says Mirabal's track record as a star informant for the feds should be enough to push the D.A.'s office to reinvestigate. "This man's word was the golden standard of truth for the federal government and resulted in major convictions," Kuby says. "Now, all of sudden, why should his word be insufficient to cast doubt on the conviction of Harry Ruiz?"

Wearing an olive-green prison jumpsuit in Green Haven, Ruiz says that when he heard the gunshot on the night of the murder he was sitting in his mother's kitchen about to eat a late dinner.

"I remember clearly," Ruiz says. "Arroz blanco, habichuelas, chuletas, tostones, ensalada, and a big glass of Pepsi. It was delicious."

Then 24 and living at home, Ruiz describes himself as shy and reserved. Unlike other kids on his street, Ruiz grew his hair long, dressed all in black like a punk rocker, and listened to metal bands like Queensrÿche.

And like many of his friends, he started peddling drugs on the side. While Ruiz was dealing on street corners between shifts working odd jobs, Mirabal had emerged as a drug kingpin. As Mirabal would later confess to prosecutors, he was storing hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, kilos of cocaine and crack, and caches of machine guns and semiautomatic weapons in a "safe house." (Mirabal served 43 months behind bars and is now free. In his affidavit he claims he knows Ruiz; Ruiz denies that he knows Mirabal.)

According to the affidavit, the motives behind the murder Mirabal ordered were a combination of street justice and deterrence. In the fall of 1992, Mirabal states that he suspected one of his workers, Felix Emmanuel, had conspired to steal $150,000, three kilos of cocaine, and several 9mm handguns from Mirabal's safe house. In retaliation, Mirabal claims in his affidavit, he paid a hit man $8,000 to have Emmanuel killed. Mirabal claims he knew the hit man he hired only by his street name—"Shorty." Mirabal paid the man $4,000 up front, his affidavit states. The day after the murder, he received a phone call from Shorty: "It's done." He agreed to meet Shorty in a Spanish restaurant, where he paid him another $4,000.

When Ruiz heard the gunshot, he claims he got up from his mother's kitchen table and walked outside his building to join a mob of people moving toward the crime scene. (His mother; his sister-in-law, Jacqueline Ruiz; and his sister, Hilda Rodriguez, all testified at the trial that Ruiz was home with them at the time of the shooting.) Ruiz says he then followed the crowd over to Amsterdam Avenue in front of a bus stop. Emmanuel was lying in the bus lane. He had been shot once in the head with a low-caliber pistol fired six to eight inches away, the medical examiner later determined.

At the crime scene, little evidence was recovered. No gun. No bullet. No fingerprints. Four days later, a 15-year-old girl and her mother walked into Harlem's 30th Precinct. The girl, Nilda Alomar, claimed to be a good friend of Emmanuel, and she told police she was in the street the night he was killed and had seen the man who shot him. According to the police report, Alomar said she recognized the killer, having seen him around the neighborhood. She said he "was wearing a black vest, black jeans, and baseball cap. In his right hand he had a black pistol. . . . I know his name to be Harry."

The case went cold. It was one of about 1,900 reported homicides in 1993, 56 of them reported in Harlem's 30th Precinct. In the months before Ruiz was first arrested, detectives were assigned to review old murder cases. Then Ruiz was spotted wearing clothes identical to those that Alomar had described, according to police. The arresting officer said Ruiz wore a black vest with no shirt, black pants, and a backward baseball cap.

During questioning, Ruiz says detectives offered him a deal—less prison time in exchange for a guilty plea for Emmanuel's murder. Ruiz refused. "Why am I gonna try and make a deal for something I didn't do?" Ruiz recalls asking. "They had nothing. They were fishing."

The cops did have something, though. They had Alomar, who later picked Ruiz out of a lineup. In that lineup, Ruiz says, he was flanked by scruffy, homeless men who looked nothing like him.

At the time of Ruiz's trial, in the fall of 1994, criminal courts were flooded with violent gangs like the Wild Cowboys and Latin Kings. The prosecutor, Helen Sturm, now a Family Court judge, centered her case on Alomar, who told jurors her story. Alomar talked about going out the night of the murder, partying with two 15-year-old friends. Then, Alomar claimed, walking in the street that night, from a distance of about 40 feet, she watched Ruiz approach Emmanuel from behind. He took a gun from his waistband, put it to Emmanuel's head, and pulled the trigger.

When asked to identify Ruiz sitting in front of her in the courtroom, Alomar, who claimed to have known Ruiz for about a year, had difficulty.

From the trial transcript:

Sturm: "I would ask you to look around the courtroom now and tell us if you see Harry Ruiz in the courtroom."

Alomar: "Yes I do."

Sturm: "And can you indicate where, please?"

Alomar: "There."

At this point, instead of pointing at Ruiz, Alomar pointed to the back of the room, to another person. The trial judge, Alfred Kleiman, then asked Alomar to stand up on the witness stand and point to Ruiz.

The second time Alomar got it right.

Explaining her mistake, Alomar said: "He looked like him. I just got confused. . . . He looks like Harry."

During a cross-examination, Ruiz's court-appointed lawyer, Thomas Dunn, asked Alomar: "There was doubt when you were asked this morning to identify Harry Ruiz, wasn't there: yes or no?"

Alomar: "Yes."

Dunn: "In fact, you pointed out someone in the back of the courtroom; isn't that a fact?"

Alomar: "He looks like Harry."

In his interview with the Voice, Ruiz says that after all his failed appeals it may be impossible to convince anyone he is innocent. To keep his mind clear and emotions stable, he sticks to his Green Haven routine. Alma Libre practice every Monday, he has a $7-a-week job as a copy clerk, and every other week, his fiancée, Rivera, takes a bus upstate to visit. They don't talk about the crime or developments in his case, she says, but of marriage, family, and the promise of a new life. Because of prison restrictions, Ruiz has never taken a bite of one of Rivera's beef patties.

"I'm dying to taste them," he says. Ruiz is eligible for parole in 2025. Wedding plans are pending.

Geoffrey Gray
January 3rd, 2006 12:19 PM
http://villagevoice.com/news/0601,gray,71462,5.html

Some Soldiers Who Have Humanity

Guantanamo Prisoner Records Horrors Of Detention

WASHINGTON: A man now detained at Guantanamo has given a harrowing account of his treatment at the hands of his captors and keepers, reported Amnesty International.

A report released by Amnesty to mark the fourth anniversary of the transfer of detainees to the notorious camp maintained by the United States on leased Cuban territory, includes an account provided by Saudi detainee Jumah al-Dossari’s civilian lawyer. The first person account was written in longhand in July 2005 by the still-imprisoned Jumah al-Dossari. He writes, “I am writing the story of what I have suffered from the day I was kidnapped on the Pakistani border and sold to American troops until now and my being in Guantanamo, Cuba. What I will write here is not a flight of fancy or a moment of madness; what I will write here are the established facts and events agreed upon by detainees who were eyewitnesses to them, representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) as well as soldiers, investigators and interpreters.”

Al-Dossari writes that he passed through several small jails where there was a lot of abuse. “I had previously met several people when I was on the border, they were of different nationalities. They had left Afghanistan and the Pakistan Army abused us and gave us the worst food. They put me in a cell measuring four metres by four metres in which there were 59 prisoners without mattresses, blankets or a bathroom; there was only one bucket in the cell for everyone to relieve themselves in without a screen. They stole any passports from prisoners who were of many nationalities and also abused them. They abused me personally and beat me several times during investigations. The worst tribulation for us was when they transported us from one place to another: they would tie us up in the most savage way, so much so that some of us got gangrenous fingers and our hands and feet swelled and turned blue. They would tie us up for long periods of time in military trucks, sometimes from daybreak until night, in addition to the hours that they spent transporting us in trucks.”

Finally, the group of prisoners arrived at the Kohat airport where an American military plane, American soldiers and an American interpreter who spoke Arabic were waiting for them. “They took one by one and handed us over to the American soldiers. The deal was done and they sold us for a few dollars and they were not interested in us,” he adds.

According to al-Dossari, there were 30 of them, whom the soldiers mistreated. They beat them and took their pictures. They also kicked him in the stomach after he complained of pain. The plane landed at Kandhar after midnight. This happened in January 2002. There was even worse treatment for them in store. He was taken in to face two interrogators. The beatings and interrogations continued. He was asked to confess that he was a terrorist. He was in the third group to be moved to Guantanamo. They were put in cages and told not to talk or even touch the mesh. To relieve themselves, they had to be taken out. There was no privacy. Al-Dossari says one detainee by the name of Abdul Aziz Al-Masri was ill in hospital where beaten up in front of the doctors and nurses. His injuries were excessive and caused his spine to break. He is now hemiplegic. At the end of 2003, al-Dossari writes during an interrogation session, the Quran was desecrated and he was told that “this is a holy war between the star of David and the cross against the crescent.” By then Camp 5 had been constructed where he was taken and put in solitary. He says his state of health has worsened and he falls and faints every day. On 12 June he was given a plate of food with a dead scorpion on it. “Since the day that they threatened until now, I have been removing insects and dung beetles from the food and showing it to the soldier who then says, ‘Do you want another plate?’” He has also been on hunger strike

Al-Dossari concludes his account by affirming, “I would thus like to point out that not all of the soldiers in Guantanamo tortured and oppressed us. There were some soldiers who treated us humanely, some of them would cry because of what was happening to us and were embarrassed by the style of management at the camp and even by the American government, their lack of justice and oppression of us. To give an example, when I was in Camp India in Camp Delta and I was being tortured, an Afro-American came to me. He said sorry to me and gave me a cup of hot chocolate and some sweet biscuits. When I thanked him, he said, ‘I don’t want your thanks. I want you to know that we are not all bad and we think differently.’ When I was talking to a soldier and I told him what happened to me, he cried and had tears in his eyes. He was clearly moved. He said sorry to me about what had happened to me and he also offered me some food. These are examples to show the reader that there are some soldiers who have humanity, irrespective of their race, gender or faith.

”khalid hasan

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2006%5C01%5C14%5Cstory_14-1-2006_pg7_48

Florida Eight Grader Murdered By Cops

"A Florida eighth grader who pulled out a pellet gun in class and was shot by police has died of his injuries, his brother said."

Lawyer: Authorities Were Told Student's Gun Was Fake

LONGWOOD, Florida (CNN) -- The father and brother of a teenager shot at school Friday while brandishing a pellet gun told authorities before an officer opened fire that Christopher Penley's gun was not real, the family's attorney said Saturday.
The eighth-grader is clinically brain dead and being kept on life support to harvest his organs, attorney Mark Nation said.

When Ralph Penley arrived at the school Friday to help police and school officials defuse the situation, he wasn't allowed inside, Nation said.

Nation said Ralph Penley was "angry" because he had spoken to police before his son was shot and told them Christopher did not have a real gun. Christopher's younger brother told school officials the same thing, Nation said.

Asked if the father blames police for his son's death, Nation said, "I'm not here to point a finger at anybody at this time."

Seminole County Sheriff Don Eslinger said one of his deputies shot Penley after he pointed the gun at him, which had been painted so it would look more real.

One of Penley's classmates said he, too, thought the gun was real -- and that Penley was going to kill him -- until he grabbed the pistol and realized it was fake.

Jennings "Bucky" Hurt, a longtime friend of the family, told reporters that Ralph Penley had hsi son's organs harvested because he wanted "other children to live if his son had to die."

The ordeal began about 9:30 a.m. Friday at the 1,100-student Millwee Middle School in suburban Orlando, Florida.

Maurice Cotey and his classmates were about to take a test when two students noticed the gun in Penley's backpack. Cotey heard one of them say, "This kid has a gun." (Watch the aftermath of the Friday incident -- 1:54)

"The teacher, she went to the phone and told the office, and then he, the kid, he went to the lights and turned them off" before pulling the weapon and showing it to the class, Cotey, 13, told Orlando's WKMG TV.

At first, Cotey thought the gun was fake, he said, but Penley "seemed so sure that it was a real gun, so it like scared me, kind of."

Everyone darted from the classroom except Cotey and a girl, he said. Penley looked at Cotey and said, "You stay." The girl ran out.

With his gun in Cotey's back, Penley told his classmate to get against the blackboard. Cotey began pleading.

"Please don't shoot me, please don't shoot me," Cotey recalled telling Penley, who ordered him into the closet.

As the two walked toward the closet door, Penley grabbed Cotey and turned him around, and Cotey seized the chance to try to wrest away the gun from his older classmate, he said.

"He started to point the gun at me, so I started to grab for it and he pulled it away," Cotey told WKMG. "And then I grabbed for it one more time 'cause he pointed it at me for like a little while, so I grabbed it and I twisted it and I pointed it at him."

It was then that Cotey knew for sure the gun was a fake. (Watch Cotey describe the frightening ordeal -- 1:33)

"While I was twisting it, it started to come apart like a toy gun would, like a dollar-store type toy," he said.

Cotey pointed the gun toward Penley's legs, but Penley kicked him into the closet, the 13-year-old said.

Cotey was able to get out of the closet and run out of the classroom. Penley already had gone and was running from a school resource deputy and others who were chasing him, Eslinger said.

As he ran, Penley could be heard saying, "I'm going to kill myself or I'm going to die somehow," according to Eslinger. At one point, he held the gun to his neck, another time to his head.

Penley fled to an isolated alcove area and went into a restroom where he refused to speak with negotiators, the sheriff said.

Authorities pleaded with the boy inside the bathroom to put down his weapon, Eslinger said, but the boy refused.

"He refused to even comment. All he said was his first name. He did not drop the firearm," the sheriff said.

Finally, the boy came out of the bathroom and "raised the firearm in a tactical position and pointed it" at a SWAT team member, who "decided to use deadly force," Eslinger said. (Full story)

The boy's motive was not immediately clear.

After the shooting, deputies discovered what Cotey had suspected -- the gun was phony. It was an airsoft pellet gun, and the normally brightly colored tip had been painted black to make it look more authentic, Eslinger said.

Such guns generally shoot plastic pellets or paintballs.

In a news conference after the shooting, authorities displayed the gun alongside a real 9 mm handgun. To the naked eye, there was little difference between them.

"It was a terrible situation," the sheriff told reporters.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/01/14/teen.shot/index.html

Article 5 of the 1975 World Medical Association Tokyo Declaration

Scandal of Force-Fed Prisoners

Hunger strikers are tied down and fed through nasal tubes, admits Guantánamo Bay doctor

New details have emerged of how the growing number of prisoners on hunger strike at Guantánamo Bay are being tied down and force-fed through tubes pushed down their nasal passages into their stomachs to keep them alive. They routinely experience bleeding and nausea, according to a sworn statement by the camp's chief doctor, seen by The Observer.

'Experience teaches us' that such symptoms must be expected 'whenever nasogastric tubes are used,' says the affidavit of Captain John S Edmondson, commander of Guantánamo's hospital. The procedure - now standard practice at Guantánamo - 'requires that a foreign body be inserted into the body and, ideally, remain in it.' But staff always use a lubricant, and 'a nasogastric tube is never inserted and moved up and down. It is inserted down into the stomach slowly and directly, and it would be impossible to insert the wrong end of the tube.' Medical personnel do not insert nasogastric tubes in a manner 'intentionally designed to inflict pain.'

It is painful, Edmonson admits. Although 'non-narcotic pain relievers such as ibuprofen are usually sufficient, sometimes stronger drugs,' including opiates such as morphine, have had to be administered.

Thick, 4.8mm diameter tubes tried previously to allow quicker feeding, so permitting guards to keep prisoners in their cells for more hours each day, have been abandoned, the affidavit says. The new 3mm tubes are 'soft and flexible'.

The London solicitors Allen and Overy, who represent some of the hunger strikers, have lodged a court action to be heard next week in California, where Edmondson is registered to practise. They are asking for an order that the state medical ethics board investigate him for 'unprofessional conduct' for agreeing to the force-feeding.

Edmonson's affidavit, in response to a lawsuit on behalf of detainees on hunger strike since last August, was obtained last week by The Observer, as a Guantánamo spokesman confirmed that the number of hunger strikers has almost doubled since Christmas, to 81 of the 550 detainees. Many have been held since the camp opened four years ago this month, although they not been charged with any crime, nor been allowed to see any evidence justifying their detention.

This and other Guantánamo lawsuits now face extinction. Last week, President Bush signed into law a measure removing detainees' right to file habeas corpus petitions in the US federal courts. On Friday, the administration asked the Supreme Court to make this retroactive, so nullifying about 220 cases in which prisoners have contested the basis of their detention and the legality of pending trials by military commission.

Although some prisoners have had to be tied down while being force-fed, 'only one patient' has had to be immobilised with a six-point restraint, and 'only one' passed out. 'In less than 10 cases have trained medical personnel had to use four-point restraint in order to achieve insertion.' Edmondson claims the actual feeding is voluntary. During Ramadan, tube-feeding takes place before dawn.

Article 5 of the 1975 World Medical Association Tokyo Declaration, which US doctors are legally bound to observe through their membership of the American Medical Association, states that doctors must not undertake force-feeding under any circumstances. Dr David Nicholl, a consultant neurologist at Queen Elizabeth's hospital in Birmingham, is co-ordinating opposition to the Guantánamo doctors' actions from the international medical community. 'If I were to do what Edmondson describes in his statement, I would be referred to the General Medical Council and charged with assault,' he said.

· Yesterday the new German Chancellor Angela Merkel became the latest leader to condemn the United States for practices at the prison. In a magazine interview days before her first visit as premier to the US, Merkel said Washington should close Guantánamo and find other ways of dealing with terror suspects.

David Rose
01/08/06 "The Observer"

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

Wait A Minute!

"Elisa Massimino, Washington director of Human Rights First, said the senators' statement should send a clear warning to military and CIA interrogators that they would be subject to criminal prosecution if they abuse a detainee."

3 GOP Senators Blast Bush Bid To Bypass Torture Ban

Reject assertion he has right to waive rules to protect US security

By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff | January 5, 2006

WASHINGTON -- Three key Republican senators yesterday condemned President Bush's assertion that his powers as commander in chief give him the authority to bypass a new law restricting the use of torture when interrogating detainees.

John W. Warner Jr., a Virginia Republican who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican, issued a joint statement rejecting Bush's assertion that he can waive the restrictions on the use of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment against detainees to protect national security.

''We believe the president understands Congress's intent in passing, by very large majorities, legislation governing the treatment of detainees," the senators said. ''The Congress declined when asked by administration officials to include a presidential waiver of the restrictions included in our legislation. Our committee intends through strict oversight to monitor the administration's implementation of the new law."

Separately, the third primary sponsor of the detainee treatment law, Senator Lindsey O. Graham, Republican of South Carolina, told the Globe in a phone interview that he agreed with everything McCain and Warner said ''and would go a little bit further."

''I do not believe that any political figure in the country has the ability to set aside any . . . law of armed conflict that we have adopted or treaties that we have ratified," Graham said. ''If we go down that road, it will cause great problems for our troops in future conflicts because [nothing] is to prevent other nations' leaders from doing the same."

The White House did not return calls yesterday about the senators' statements. On Friday, in signing the ban on torture, Bush issued a ''signing statement," saying he would interpret the restrictions in the context of his broader constitutional powers as commander in chief. A ''signing statement" is an official document in which a president lays out his interpretation of a new law.

A senior administration official later confirmed that the president believes the Constitution gives him the power to authorize interrogation techniques that go beyond the law to protect national security. But in enacting the law, Congress intended to close every loophole and impose an absolute ban on all forms of torture, no matter the circumstances, Graham said.

David Golove, a New York University law professor who specializes in executive power issues, said the senators' statements ''mean that the battle lines are drawn" for an escalating fight over the balance of power between the two branches of government.

''The president is pointing to his commander in chief power, claiming that it somehow gives him the power to dispense with the law when he's conducting war," Golove said. ''The senators are saying: 'Wait a minute, we've gone over this. This is a law Congress has passed by very large margins, and you are compelled and bound to comply with it.' "

Elisa Massimino, Washington director of Human Rights First, said the senators' statement should send a clear warning to military and CIA interrogators that they would be subject to criminal prosecution if they abuse a detainee.

''That power [to override the law] was explicitly sought by the White House, and it was considered and rejected by the Congress," she said. ''And any US official who relies on legal advice from a government lawyer saying there is a presidential override of a law passed by Congress does so at their peril. Cruel inhuman and degrading treatment is illegal."

But Golove said that it is politically unlikely that Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales would prosecute an official for taking an action Bush ordered him to take. Still, he said, Congress has a number of tools for compelling the president to obey the law. Congress can withhold funds for programs. It can subpoena administration officials to testify under oath. It can pass stricter laws or block legislation Bush needs. In an extreme and politically unlikely scenario, it can impeach the president.

Bush's interpretation of another detainee-related provision in the new law sparked further friction yesterday with some lawmakers.

The provision stripped courts of the jurisdiction to hear most lawsuits from detainees held at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Citing that provision, the administration said this week that it would ask courts to dismiss more than 180 Guantanamo lawsuits.

http://www.boston.com