No al-Nashiri Trial in “Near Future”
Although Attorney General Eric Holder said last fall that Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri should be tried by military commission for his alleged role in the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, that trial will apparently not be happening anytime soon. In papers filed in a federal appellate court this week, lawyers for the Department of Justice mention that “no charges are either pending or contemplated with respect to al-Nashiri in the near future,” The Washington Post reports. The Defense Department said yesterday, however, that “[p]rosecutors in the Office of Military Commissions are actively investigating the case against Mr. al-Nashiri and are developing charges against him,” according to the Post. Al-Nashiri, who is being held at Guantanamo, was captured in late 2002 and later waterboarded.
Guantanamo
An investigation by ProPublica has found that federal judges have sided with Guantanamo detainees in more than half of the identified cases in which detainees argued that the case against them involved “interrogation evidence collected under questionable circumstances.” The investigation found 15 such published rulings in habeas corpus cases filed by detainees (although there may be others where the relevant information is secret), and that the court decided in favor of the detainee in eight of them. “In most of the cases the government lost, the judges rejected statements even from the ‘clean’ sessions that the Bush administration began administering in 2002 to collect evidence to use in court,” ProPublica says (in a report published jointly with The National Law Journal). In an editorial this morning, The New York Times takes note of the investigation and concludes that “[h]ad Bush-era interrogators held to similar standards [as the judges], there would be fewer dubious detention cases at Guantánamo, and the government would have a much stronger case against those prisoners who are there legitimately.”
Herald Reporter Wins First Amendment Award
Carol Rosenberg of The Miami Herald will receive the Society of Professional Journalist’s First Amendment Award for her coverage of Guantanamo, reports McClatchy (the Herald‘s parent company).
Three Arrested in Canada; Suspected of Bomb Plans
As part of an investigation that has been ongoing for a year, the Canadian Mounties arrested three people this week and charged them yesterday with “knowingly facilitating a terrorist activity,” The Wall Street Journal reports. Serge Therriault of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said that “[a] vast quantity of terrorist literature and instructional material was seized, showing that the suspects had the intent to construct an explosive device for terrorist purposes,” the Journal says. The investigation is still continuing, including outside of Canada, although American officials have said that there is no U.S. element. The men are allegedly connected with an undisclosed international terrorist organization, and one of them, Hiva Alizadeh, is suspected of having traveled outside Canada to learn to build bombs. Another of the three, Khurram Syed Sher, a pathologist, auditioned for “Canadian Idol” in 2008, singing Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated.” Wall Street Journal, New York Times‘s The Lede blog.
FBI Agent Grilled in Bronx Bomb Plot Trial
As the trial of four men accused of attempting to bomb two Bronx synagogues continued yesterday, defense attorneys cross-examined FBI agent Robert Fuller and sought to develop their argument that the men were entrapped. In an e-mail that defense attorney Vincent Briccetti had Fuller read aloud, but was then stricken from the record, Fuller said that he wanted informant Shahed Hussain to get defendant James Cromitie to buy an illegal gun so that the government would still have something “in our back pocket if things went south,” according to The New York Times. Later, while being questioned by prosecutors, Fuller said that he wanted to “get illegal guns off the street” by having Hussain buy them from Cromitie. New York Times, WNYC.
News stories compiled by the staff of the Center on Law and Security
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