Maher Arar, the Canadian who was secretly whisked off to Jordan and Syria where he alleges he was tortured, wants criminal charges brought against the U.S. officials who authorized his seizure and transfer.

Attorneys for Maher Arar said Thursday that Canadian criminal charges should be brought against U.S. agents responsible for spiriting the Canadian man to Syria in 2002, where he was imprisoned and allegedly tortured for almost a year.

Drawing parallels to the charges brought against CIA operatives by a Milan magistrate last week, attorney Marlys Edwardh said Canadian law defined torture as illegal wherever it occurs. Arar, 34, was seized by U.S. agents while he was changing planes in New York, questioned for 12 days and then transported in shackles to Syria.

Canada has been conducting a judicial inquiry into Arar's case:

A Russian national and Muslim cleric held at Guantanamo and Kandahar and released says he witnessed episodes of Koran abuse there.

A Russian citizen released last year from Guantanamo Bay prison said on Tuesday U.S. guards at the camp regularly threw copies of the Koran into toilets. "In Cuba, they used to take them (the Koran) and throw them, take them and throw them, into lavatories or elsewhere. It happened regularly and this was to provoke protests," Airat Vakhitov, released from Guantanamo a year ago after 18 months in the camp, told reporters.

As for Kandahar, he said:

In Kandahar, they tore up copies of the Qur'an and even put it in a bucket of feces," he told the Associated Press.

Monday, several of 17 released Pakistani detainees also claim to have observed Koran desecration while at Guantanamo.

Italy has forwarded its arrest warrants for 13 CIA agents accused of kidnapping one of its citizens to Eurojust and Europol so that they can be picked up anywhere in Europe.

As of Monday, 13 CIA agents are being sought for arrest throughout Europe. The agents are accused of abducting Imam Abu Omar in Milan and taking him to Egypt where he was tortured. The formal transmission of the arrest warrants to the Eurojust judicial coordination office means that they are immediately effective throughout all E.U. member countries. [Eurojust is Europe's main agency for judicial cooperation]. At this stage every European police officer could arrest as well as identify the 13 CIA agents who are now “on the run.”

Wow. Extraordinary rendition hits a nerve in Italy. 13 American CIA agents have been ordered arrested for kidnapping Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, known as Abu Omar, in 2003 and sending him to Egypt where he reportedly was tortured.

Prosecutors believe the officers seized Omar as part of the CIA's "extraordinary rendition" program, in which terror suspects are transferred to third countries without court approval, according to reports Friday in newspapers Corriere della Sera and Il Giorno. The statement said Omar was attacked by two people while walking from home to a local mosque and hustled into a white van. He was taken to Aviano, a joint U.S.-Italian base north of Venice; another American air base in Ramstein, Germany; and then Cairo.

The New York Times has an article today about a New England Journal of Medicine article citing interrogators who report that doctors aided them at Guantanamo.

Several ethics experts outside the military said there were serious questions involving the conduct of the doctors, especially those in units known as Behavioral Science Consultation Teams, BSCT, colloquially referred to as "biscuit" teams, which advise interrogators. "Their purpose was to help us break them," one former interrogator told The Times earlier this year.

However, these reports are not new.

In August, 2004, a leading British medical journal published an article that criticized the medical ethics of the U.S. military at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and in Afghanistan. So did the New England Journal of Medicine.

And in January, 2005, the New England Journal of Medicine released an article by a Georgetown University law professor implicating army doctors in the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

For some additional insight, this op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle by Alfred McCoy on the CIA's history of torture is well-worth reading. McCoy is a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of "The Politics of Heroin," an examination of the CIA's alliances with drug lords, and "Closer Than Brothers," a study of the impact of the CIA's psychological torture method upon the Philippine military.

The ACLU announced today that the lawsuit against Donald Rumsfeld filed by human rights groups on behalf of 8 Iraqi and Afghan detainees who claim they were subjected to torture and abuse while in detention in U.S. facilities will be heard in the D.C. federal court:

A lawsuit that seeks to hold Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and others directly responsible for the abuse and torture of detainees in U.S. military custody will be heard in a federal court in the District of Columbia, a seven-judge panel ruled yesterday. The lawsuit, which was the first to name Secretary Rumsfeld in the ongoing torture scandal in Afghanistan and Iraq, was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights First on behalf of eight Afghan and Iraqi men who were tortured while they were held in U.S. detention facilities.

Human Rights Watch sent this letter out to Senators Monday (I received a copy by e-mail and don't have a link.)

June 20, 2005

Dear Senator:

Critics of the Bush administration's detention policies, including Senator Richard Durbin, have recently stirred controversy by comparing interrogation techniques used in Guantanamo and Iraq to those used in the Soviet penal system known as the "gulag."

Clearly, there are profound and fundamental differences between the global detention system the United States has established in places such as Guantanamo Bay, and the prison camps of Stalin's Soviet Union. .....

Nonetheless, in his floor statement of June 14th, Senator Durbin was absolutely right in two important respects.

The Administration and the right wing will not succeed in its attempt to smear Illinois Senator Dick Durbin. Durbin’s comments have had the positive effect of stimulating more discussion about the fact that the Bush Administration’s policies have put our troops at risk and hurt our efforts to win the war on terrorism.

Durbin’s constituents, who know him best, seem to recognize that was his intent. Durbin’s hometown paper, the State Journal Register writes,

The real message of Durbin's statement - that we must investigate and stop inhumane treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo and other military prisons - is one we can't afford to ignore.

Greg Hinz writes in Crain’s Chicago Business,

Mistreating people, some possibly innocent, in a harsh prison forever is not an Illinois value. Nor is it an Illinois value to take a person who might possess some intelligence of possible value, stake them out naked on the ground, turn up an air-conditioner until they’re shaking with cold, play ear-splitting music, and watch them defecate and urinate on themselves. That, in fact, was the conduct Mr. Durbin was protesting.

And the Daily Southtown editorializes,

President Bush spoke in Europe today, and he defended both secret renditions and Guantanamo:

"We've got some in custody - Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is a classic example. The mastermind of the September the 11th attack that killed over 3,000 of our citizens," Mr Bush said at a press conference after meeting with European Union leaders. "And he is being detained because we think he could possibly give us information that might not only protect us, but protect citizens in Europe," Mr Bush said.

"And at some point in time he will be dealt with, but right now we think it's best that he be kept in custody. We want to learn as much as we can in this new kind of war about the intention, and about the methods, about how these people operate," he said. "And they're dangerous, and they're still around, and they'll kill on a moment's notice."

When exactly is that point? When he, and not a court, decides? Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has been held since March 1, 2003. The U.S. even took his 7 and 9 year old sons into custody. Ramzi bin al Shibh has been held in secret overseas detention since September, 2002. How much more information will they give after two or three years? How do we know Mohammed masterminded the 9/11 attacks? Shouldn't a judge or a jury decide that?

You can add former President Bill Clinton to the list of prominent public figures calling for Guantanamo to be closed or cleaned up. In an interview with Financial Times, Clinton says:

"Well it [Guantánamo Bay] either needs to be closed down or cleaned up. It's time that there are no more stories coming out of there about people being abused.”

In May, 2004, TChris wrote about Sean Baker.

Sean Baker was a member of a Military Police company assigned to Guantanamo Bay in January 2003, when he was ordered to play the role of a detainee during a training exercise. Baker quickly learned how detainees are treated when things go wrong.

Baker says what took place next happened at the hands of four U.S. soldiers - soldiers he believes didn't know he was one of them - has changed his life forever. "They grabbed my arms, my legs, twisted me up and unfortunately one of the individuals got up on my back from behind and put pressure down on me while I was face down," said Baker. "Then he - the same individual - reached around and began to choke me and press my head down against the steel floor. After several seconds, 20 to 30 seconds ... when I couldn't breath, I began to panic and I gave the code word I was supposed to give to stop the exercise, which was 'red.'"

What a political ploy. Newt Gingrich must really think he has a comeback coming. As if we'd ever forget his Contract on America. He is calling on the U.S. Senate to censure Sen. Dick Durbin for his Guantanamo remarks.

In a letter sent to United States Senators on Saturday, June 18, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich called on the Senate to censure Senator Richard Durbin for his speech comparing U.S. servicemen serving in Guantanamo Bay to those of the Nazi Gestapo, Soviet KGB, and Pol Pot's killers in Cambodia.

"Senator Richard Durbin has dishonored the United States and the entire U.S. Senate. Only by a vote to censure Senator Durbin for his conduct can the U.S. Senate restore its dignity and defend American honor," Gingrich wrote.

Durbin never compared U.S. servicemen to nazis. He was talking about interrogation techniques used at Gitmo.
Gingrich writes:

Incredibly, Senator Durbin is sticking to his original assertion that there is indeed, in his own words, an "historic parallel" between U.S. soldiers at Guantanamo Bay and the killers under Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot.

As an aside, why does Gingrich write his letter with the letterhead of "Office of Speaker Newt Gingrich." He hasn't been in Congress, let alone the House Speaker, for years.

Check out conservative blog Balloon Juice's condemnation of Gingrich's call. And Armando at Daily Kos.