It is this mutation of American Exceptionalism that we all deplore. Roger Cohen was rightly concerned about this:

The manifold blunders of America in Iraq have made it unfashionable to recall such truths. Fashion is a poor compass. The next time a car bomb goes off, remember Saddon al-Saiedi, a 36-year-old Shiite army colonel, father of two, abducted by Saddam's goons on May 2, 1993, and never seen again. As he went, so went numberless others, without a bang. Totalitarian hell - malign stability - holds no hope. Violent instability is unacceptable but not hopeless. Baghdad is closer to Sarajevo than we have allowed.

Where is Cohen's concern about this?

In the most comprehensive accounting to date, six leading human rights organizations today published the names and details of 39 people who are believed to have been held in secret US custody and whose current whereabouts remain unknown. The briefing paper also names relatives of suspects who were themselves detained in secret prisons, including children as young as seven.

Dick Cheney's Washington, DC is closer to Saddam's Baghdad than he has allowed. When will Cohen write about his concern about the behavior of the Bush Administration?

The second installment of the WaPo series on the evil that is Vice President Dick Cheney and his henchmen is up. The series is a journalistic tour de force. And it is appropriately sickening. A close and complete reading of the magnificent reporting by Bart Gellman and Jo Becker is required. Read this on Attorney General Gonzales from the second installment:

That same day, Aug. 1, 2002, Yoo signed off on a second secret opinion, the contents of which have never been made public. According to a source with direct knowledge, that opinion approved as lawful a long list of specific interrogation techniques proposed by the CIA -- including waterboarding, a form of near-drowning that the U.S. government classified as a war crime in 1947. The opinion drew the line against one request: threatening to bury a prisoner alive.

. . . On June 8, 2004, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell learned of the two-year-old torture memo for the first time from an article in The Washington Post. According to a former White House official with firsthand knowledge, they confronted Gonzales together in his office.

Rice "very angrily said there would be no more secret opinions on international and national security law," the official said, adding that she threatened to take the matter to the president if Gonzales kept them out of the loop again.

Please read both installments to fully understand what this Administration is, what is has wrought and what we are still dealing with.

Despite reports to the contrary, the Bush Administration is not planning to close Guantanamo any time soon. Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for the National Security Council, issued a statement last night:

“The President has long expressed a desire to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and to do so in a responsible way,” Mr. Johndroe said. “A number of steps need to take place before that can happen such as setting up military commissions and the repatriation to their home countries of detainees who have been cleared for release. These and other steps have not been completed. No decisions on the future of Guantanamo Bay are imminent and there will not be a White House meeting tomorrow.”

Gitmo got a new prisoner this week.

More...

Even the conservative Fourth Circuit (or at least a divided panel on that conservative court) agrees that the Bush administration can't arrest someone who is in the United States, declare him an enemy combatant, and hold him indefinitely without trial.

The court said sanctioning the indefinite detention of civilians would have "disastrous consequences for the constitution — and the country."

The court's lengthy opinion (pdf) tells the story. TalkLeft background on the detention of Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri is collected here.

Here's Colin Powell making sense.

"If it was up to me, I would close Guantanamo. Not tomorrow, but this afternoon. I'd close it," he said.

"And I would not let any of those people go," he said. "I would simply move them to the United States and put them into our federal legal system. The concern was, well then they'll have access to lawyers, then they'll have access to writs of habeas corpus. So what? Let them. Isn't that what our system is all about?"

More ...

The only way to correct the multiple problems (and embarrassments) at Guantanamo is to close Guantanamo. A good first step would be to restore habeas corpus for Guantanamo prisoners. Two editorial voices in today's newspapers agree that it's time for a change.

From the NY Times:

The Guantánamo camp was created on a myth — that the American judicial system could not handle prisoners of “the war against terror.” It was built on a lie — that the hundreds of detainees at Gitmo are all dangerous terrorists. And it was organized around a fiction — that Mr. Bush had the power to create this rogue system in the first place.

It is time to get rid of it.

From the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Omar Khadr is the teenager who was captured and brought to Guantanamo at age 15. (Background here.)

His case came before the military tribunal at Guantanamo today and the Judge dismissed the charges on jurisdictional grounds.

The stunning ruling by Army Col. Peter Brownback came just minutes into Khadr's arraignment, in which he faced charges he committed murder in violation of the law of war, attempted murder in violation of the law of war, conspiracy, providing material support for terrorism and spying.

"The charges are dismissed without prejudice," Brownback pronounced as he adjourned the proceeding.

The reason:

Khadr had been classified as an "enemy combatant" by a military panel years earlier at Guantanamo Bay, but because he was not classified as an "alien unlawful enemy combatant," Brownback said he had no choice but to throw the case out.

The Military Commissions Act, signed by President George W. Bush last year after the U.S. Supreme Court threw out the previous war-crimes trial system, says specifically that only those classified as "unlawful" enemy combatants can face war trials here.

More...

Tony Lagouranis interrogated prisoners in Iraq. He says "I tortured people."

At Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, the site of the 2003-04 abuse scandal, Lagouranis used to relax in the old execution chamber. He and a friend would sit near the trapdoor and read the Arabic scratched into the wall. They found a dirty brown rope. It was the hangman's noose. "If there is an evil spot in the world, that was one of them," Lagouranis said.

At Abu Ghraib and sometimes at the facilities in Mosul, north Babil province and other places where Lagouranis worked, the Americans were shot at and attacked with mortar fire. "Then I get a prisoner who may have done it," he said. "What are you going to do? You just want to get back at somebody, so you bring this dog in. 'Finally, I got you.' "

Now, he's tortured. This is a long article, but it doesn't make me any more sympathetic towards Lagouranis than I was towards Charles Graner.

Why are we hearing about this now? Because his book is about to be published.

More...

CNN is reporting a Saudi detainee has committed suicide. Some information is available here.

In other Gitmo news, 15 American lawyers are in Yemen.

Fifteen American lawyers have come to Yemen in order to reveal the truth about the situation of Yemeni detainees at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, they said this week at a press conference in Sana’a. They claim that the U.S. government was lying when it said that Yemen has refused to accept its detainees back into the country. “The main purpose of our visit is to expose the lie that the Yemeni government does not want its citizens back,” said Tina Foster, the executive director of the International Justice Network.

A few more details. The New York Times also reports, with some reactions from Guantanamo lawyers.

The ACLU announced today it is suing Jeppesen, a Boeing subsidiary for its participation in secret renditions.

The lawsuit, which the ACLU said it would file Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, charges that Jeppesen knowingly provided direct flight services to the CIA that enabled the clandestine transportation of the men to secret overseas locations, where they were tortured and subjected to other "forms of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment" under the agency's "extraordinary rendition" program.

"American corporations should not be profiting from a CIA rendition program that is unlawful and contrary to core American values," said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the ACLU. "Corporations that choose to participate in such activity can and should be held legally accountable."

More information about the lawsuit is available at the ACLU website here.

Sen. Tom Harkin has introduced The Guantanamo Closure Act of 2007. From the ACLU:

The ACLU today welcomed Senator Tom Harkin's (D-IA) introduction of the Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility Closure Act of 2007, a bill that would close the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The bill cuts off funds for everything except sending charged or sentenced detainees to Fort Leavenworth and transferring the remaining detainees to their home countries or other countries that will not torture or abuse them. The bill would effectively end the practice of indefinite detention without charge or due process for detainees who have been held for as long as five years without charge and without knowing the reason for their detention. It will also provide an incentive for the government to finally charge those detainees the government believes are guilty of crimes against the United States.

More...

Salon today has an article about another CIA ghost detainee, Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, kept in a secret overseas prisons for months, undisclosed to the Red Cross and finally transferred to Guantanamo.

The C.I.A. (read White House) takes the position that these detainees are unlawful combatents and not entitled to protections of the Geneva conventions.

While the U.S. military recently adopted new rules for interrogation in the wake of the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, legal and human rights experts say the CIA may be continuing to flout the law -- potentially using abusive interrogation tactics at secret prisons known as "black sites" -- at the direction of the Bush White House.

Red Cross officials confirmed to Salon that the CIA did not alert them during the months that al-Hadi was a prisoner with the agency. "We have repeatedly asked U.S. authorities to be notified and have access to all detainees, including those held by the CIA," said Simon Schorno, a spokesman for the Red Cross in Washington. "But we did not have access to Mr. al-Hadi before his transfer [to military custody]. For us, that is problematic."

More...