Guantanamo At Crisis Point

Hunger Strike, Defiance Spread Among Guantánamo Bay Inmates

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — The number of Guantánamo Bay detainees participating in a hunger strike has ballooned from three to around 75, the U.S. military said Monday, revealing growing defiance among prisoners held for up to 4 -1/2 years with no end in sight.

Navy Cmdr. Robert Durand called the hunger strike at the U.S. naval base in southeastern Cuba an "attention-getting" tactic to step up pressure for the inmates' release and said it might be related to a May 18 clash between detainees and guards that injured six prisoners.

"The hunger-strike technique is consistent with al-Qaida practice and reflects detainee attempts to elicit media attention to bring international pressure on the United States to release them back to the battlefield," Durand said from Guantánamo Bay.

The United States now holds about 460 people at Guantánamo on suspicion of links to al-Qaida or the Taliban. But human-rights groups say innocent people have been sent to the jail. Defense lawyers said the hunger strike, which began last year, reflects increasing frustration among men who have little contact with the world outside the remote prison.

"I think it is escalating because the people down there are getting more and more desperate," said Bill Goodman, legal director for the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents many of the detainees. "Obviously, things have reached a crisis point."

The military did not release the names of the striking detainees, and lawyers said they have no way of learning if their clients are involved until they can visit the base.

"All these men want is a chance to have a trial," said Zachary Katznelson, an attorney for Reprieve, a British human-rights group that represents 36 Guantánamo detainees. "If they are guilty, punish them. If not, then send them home."

Only 10 of the prisoners have been charged and face trial before military tribunals. The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule in June whether President Bush overstepped his authority in ordering the tribunals.

Four of the detainees on hunger strike are being force-fed, including the three who were participating in the protest before the recent increase, Durand said.

By Ben Fox
The Associated Press

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003027107_gitmo30.html

Faulty Evidence Masquerading As Science

Faulty Testimony Sent 2 to Death Row, Panel Finds

Faulty evidence masquerading as science sent two men to death row for arson in Texas and led to the execution of one of them, a panel of private fire investigators concluded in a report released Tuesday in Austin.

Texas Department of Criminal Justice

Cameron T. Willingham was executed for setting fire to his home, killing his three daughters.

The report, prepared for the Innocence Project, a legal clinic dedicated to overturning wrongful convictions, was presented to a new state panel, the Texas Forensic Science Commission, created by the Legislature last year to oversee the integrity of crime laboratories.

Barry C. Scheck, a co-director of the Innocence Project, said the report offered "important evidence of serious scientific negligence or misconduct in the investigations, reports and testimony of Texas state fire marshals" and called into question not just the two cases but also many others based on similar arson analyses.

The nine-member forensic panel, late to start up and as yet unfinanced, "will review it and investigate," said its chairwoman, Debbie Lynn Benningfield, a fingerprint expert and retired deputy administrator of the Houston Police Department's latent laboratory section.

The report examined prosecution arson testimony in the trials of two men: Ernest R. Willis, convicted of killing two women in a house fire in 1986 in Iraan, and Cameron T. Willingham, convicted of burning his home in Corsicana in 1992, killing his three young daughters.

Mr. Willingham was executed by lethal injection on Feb. 17, 2004, after Gov. Rick Perry rejected a plea for a last-minute stay, once the courts and the State Board of Pardons and Paroles had declined to intervene.

Mr. Willis was exonerated and pardoned on Oct. 6, 2004, and collected almost $430,000 for 17 years of wrongful imprisonment.

The report says that prosecution witnesses in both cases interpreted fire indicators like cracked glass and burn marks as evidence that the fires had been set, when more up-to-date technology shows that the indicators could just as well have signified an accidental fire. In one case, the signs were accepted as proof of guilt, the report said; in the other, they were discarded as misleading.

"These two outcomes are mutually exclusive," Mr. Scheck said. "Willis cannot be found 'actually innocent' and Willingham executed based on the same scientific evidence."

Mr. Willingham's stepmother, Eugenia Willingham, who traveled to Austin from Ardmore, Okla., to attend a news conference about the report, said, "I've known it all along," adding, "I wish it could have happened before he was executed."

To analyze the evidence, the Innocence Project commissioned five unpaid experts: Douglas J. Carpenter of Combustion Science and Engineering in Columbia, Md.; Daniel L. Churchward of Kodiak Fire and Safety Consulting in Fort Wayne, Ind.; John J. Lentini of Applied Technical Services in Marietta, Ga.; Michael A. McKenzie of the law firm Cozen O'Connor in Atlanta; and David M. Smith of Associated Fire Consultants in Tucson.

In the Willingham trial, the committee found, a deputy state fire marshal, Manuel Vasquez, erred in tracing the blaze to an accelerant. The committee discredited his finding of arson. "Each and every one of the 'indicators' listed by Mr. Vasquez means absolutely nothing," the report said.

A Corsicana assistant fire chief, Douglas Fogg, "seemed to harbor many of the same misconceptions held by Mr. Vasquez," the report went on. It concluded that the fire had been "grossly misinterpreted." Mr. Fogg did not respond to a message left on his answering machine. Mr. Vasquez is dead.

Calls to offices in the Texas Fire/Arson Investigation division of the Texas Department of Insurance were not returned Tuesday.

Other Texas arson investigators and a retired agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation testified that the fire charged to Mr. Willis was also arson, the report said. One prosecution witness said fires were rarely caused by accidentally dropped cigarettes; in fact, cigarettes are the leading cause of fire deaths, the report said.

Many arson investigators were self-taught and "inept," the report said, adding: "There is no crime other than homicide by arson for which a person can be sent to death row based on the unsupported opinion of someone who received all his training 'on the job.' "

Texas leads the nation in inmates serving time for arson, the report said: 666 as of 2002, the latest year for which statistics are available.

Kathy Walt, a spokeswoman for Governor Perry, said the forensic science commission, to which Mr. Perry names four members, was the right body "to help the criminal justice system improve by establishing appropriate standards for labs and investigations."

Ms. Walt said that minutes before Mr. Willingham's execution, the governor was faxed an earlier report by an arson specialist, Gerald L. Hurst, disputing the prosecution's arson testimony, but that Mr. Perry had no way of evaluating it after the courts and pardons board had turned down the final appeals.

By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
Published: May 3, 2006
HOUSTON, May 2

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/03/us/03execute.html?th&emc=th