Four men being held as terror suspects at a US military base in Afghanistan are asking a federal judge for the right to sue for their release — a right already given to detainees at Guantanamo Bay.
A hearing yesterday was to test whether a Supreme Court decision last year allowing al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects at the US naval base in Cuba to challenge their detention should be extended to detainees held at other military prisons overseas.
The government argues that the detainees should have their cases heard by military tribunals.
“This court has no jurisdiction to review this,” the Justice Department wrote in a Dec. 19 motion asking for the case to be dismissed.
It added: “Federal courts should not thrust themselves into the extraordinary role of reviewing the military’s conduct of active hostilities overseas, second-guessing the military’s determination as to which captured aliens as part of such hostilities should be detained, and in practical effect, superintending the executive’s conduct in waging a war.”
But lawyers for the four men in yesterday’s case in US District Court say the Guantanamo standard needs to be applied to other prisons.
Otherwise, “a lot of the Guantanamo detainees could be transferred to Afghanistan — basically shifting the problem somewhere the government argues that they cannot challenge,” said Kathleen Kelley of the International Human Rights Clinic at Stanford Law School, who is representing three of the four men.
“We are saying that’s just not true,” Kelley said on Tuesday. “Detainees cannot be held without process indefinitely anywhere by the US government.”
More than 200 detainees are challenging their imprisonment at Guantanamo, where many have been held for years without being charged with a crime.
But more than 600 are being held at Bagram Air Base outside of Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital. In Iraq, officials estimate thousands are imprisoned in US-maintained detention centers.
The evidence against the four men at the heart of yesterday’s case is unknown, and many facts about how and whether they were initially swept up and imprisoned after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, have never been made clear. Their lawyers are largely relying on statements from the International Committee of the Red Cross and other detainees who have since been released to build their case for freedom.
Tina Foster of the International Justice Network said none of the four — two Yemeni, one Tunisian and one Afghan — were in Afghanistan at the time they were captured in 2002. At least two of them disappeared for several years, then turned up in Bagram, Foster said.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
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Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
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