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More Afghan captives head for Cuba Security at the base has been massively beefed up Another 30 Taleban and al-Qaeda prisoners have left Afghanistan by plane for Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, it is reported. The prisoners, who were shackled and had white caps covering their faces, boarded a C-17 transport plane at trhe US base in Kandahar, the Associated Press reports. Each prisoner was flanked by two US soldiers as they walked across the tarmac to the aircraft. Most lights at the US base were switched off and security was tight. The first group of 20 detainees arrived in Guantanamo ...

Most people have to deal with the reality that confronts them. They start with that reality and try to do the best they can within its limitations and within their own limitations. But there are large and growing numbers of people -- especially among the intelligentsia -- whose starting point is some abstraction that they wish to apply to reality. For example, even in the face of a worldwide terrorist organization that has declared open warfare on every American man, woman and child, those whose starting point is abstraction focus on the "civil rights" of terrorists. No one in World ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- Since the United States leased land in Guantanamo Bay from Cuba in 1903, the government has used this site for incarcerating prisoners of war. Guantanamo Bay, officially still Cuban, is not subject to U.S. law, rendering activities there largely free from public scrutiny. Today it is the temporary home of 140 imprisoned Taliban and al-Qaeda combatants captured in Afghanistan. Despite the crimes of which these prisoners are accused, the United States has a responsibility under international law to respect certain standards of imprisonment. The International Committee of the Red Cross and other human rights organizations currently ...

Now that the fighting in Afghanistan is largely over, the sophisticated have emerged, blinking into the new sunlight to explain — again — why America is bad. As is usually the case with such storms, the America-bashing wind blows in from the East, picking up speed in Western Europe before it reaches our shores. But, not surprisingly, there are plenty of people watching Europe and nodding their heads like Weather Channel addicts. I had to read about them while I was writing about this absurd controversy over our treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo yesterday. I don't want to spoil ...

Taleban and al-Qaeda prisoners now being sent from Afghanistan to an American naval base in Cuba will face harsh conditions of detention. Not all of them may be sent to the detention centre at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. There have been reports that they were to be sedated during the long flight to Cuba aboard US military cargo planes. The aircraft carrying the prisoners may also be escorted by jet fighters at least some of the way. Prisoners are to be chained to their seats and may be hooded during the trip. They will also be ...

Guantanamo Detainees Said Plotting Sun Jan 27, 9:08 AM ET By TONY WINTON, Associated Press Writer GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba (AP) - Military guards at a detention camp at Guantanamo Bay say they have noticed a command structure emerging among the terrorist suspects being held there, camp leaders said Saturday. The leaders seem to surface during prayer sessions. Photos AP Photo Slideshows AP Photo Camp X-Ray, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba Of the evolving leadership structure, Brig. Gen. Mike Lehnert said, "We have indications that many have received training, and that they are observing actions such as security procedures." Lehnert, a ...

The National Post's Stewart Bell reported from Afghanistan during the U.S. bombing of al-Qaeda and Taliban forces. Yesterday he was the only Canadian among a group of foreign reporters granted access to the U.S. detention site at Guantanamo Bay. His report: The Taliban and al-Qaeda prisoners held at the U.S. military base here on Cuba's southern coast are being guarded partly by female Military Police officers, a shocking role reversal for Afghan fighters unaccustomed to taking orders from women. During the Taliban's five years in power, women were banned from showing their faces, working or going to school. They were ...

U.N.'s Robinson: Cuba Detainees Are Prisoners of War Jan. 16 GENEVA (Reuters) - U.N. human rights chief Mary Robinson said Wednesday the 50 Taliban and al Qaeda fighters being held at a U.S. Navy base in Cuba were prisoners of war and entitled to the protection of international law. Robinson said most legal experts disagreed with Washington's view that the fighters were "illegal combatants" and therefore not protected by the Geneva Conventions on prisoners rights. "The situation is complex (but) ... the overwhelming view of legal opinion is that they were combatants in an international armed conflict," the United Nations ...

Nation Welcome to Camp X-Ray When is a war prisoner not a POW? When the U.S. brings Afghan detainees to Guantanamo Bay BY MICHAEL ELLIOTT It's not going to be a country club," said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld last week, describing the new military detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and nobody ever expected it would be. The 110 al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners admitted to "Gitmo" by the end of last week are, said Rumsfeld, "the hardest of the hard core," men who had killed "dozens and dozens of people." But though it may lack tennis courts and a putting ...

<p>GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba (CNN) -- Twenty Afghan war detainees spent a "calm and peaceful" first night in a temporary detention center -- 6-by-8 chain-link cells on the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the head of security for the detention center said Saturday.</p>

War in Afghanistan More captured fighters flown to Cuba amid US indifference to concern about their status The US pressed ahead yesterday with its controversial policy of flying al-Qaida and Taliban prisoners from Afghanistan to a US naval compound at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Another 30 detainees boarded a transport plane bound for the island last night. Guarded by American troops with attack dogs, the men, shackled and wearing taped-over ski goggles, shuffled in the darkness into a C-17 plane at Kandahar airport. They wore surgical masks over their mouths and noses, because some had tested positive for tuberculosis, a military ...

A court in India has sentenced to death seven men convicted of attacking the American cultural centre in Calcutta in January 2002. Those convicted include Aftab Ahmed Ansari, who the judge said had planned the attack in which five policemen were killed and nearly 20 others injured. Two other men were acquitted for lack of evidence. The attack heightened tensions in South Asia, coming just weeks after a bloody raid on India's parliament. India accused Pakistan of having a link to both attacks which was strongly denied by Islamabad. Although India still supports the death penalty it is rarely carried...

KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - Malaysia has arrested 13 suspected members of an Islamic militant group with links to Zacarias Moussaoui, the Frenchman on trial for the September 11 attacks on the United States, Bernama news agency said on Friday. The suspects, belonging to a wing of a group the authorities call Kumpulan Militan Malaysia (KMM), had connections with Moussaoui when he was in Malaysia between September 4 and 15 and again on October 5 in 2000, the state-run news agency quoted Inspector-General of Police Norian Mai as saying. "They were arrested because they are believed to be carrying out activities ...

Top brass flew to Baghdad with publicity-shy empowerment businessman Mzilikazi Wa Afrika, Jessica Bezuidenhout and Andre Jurgens Two of the ANC's most powerful officials travelled to Iraq with a controversial Johannesburg businessman just weeks before he landed a R1.2-billion state oil deal. Sandi Majali is one of about 270 people around the world who have been named in an alleged sanctions-busting scam involving oil from former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime. The names appeared in Iraqi State Oil Marketing Organisation documents found after the fall of Saddam. Majali, 41, who heads the media-shy empowerment company Imvume Resources, has for the...

The USA is getting ready to make Iraq the second target after Afghanistan during the process of the global anti-terrorist operation. Experts say, the Americans will attack Iraq not earlier, than around the middle or the end of February. Debka, the news services, informed that the American pursuit planes and the bombing planes will be dispatched in Kuwait, in Sinai and in the Israeli Negeva. The command of the Third US Army, with Paul Mikolashek at the head, has moved from Fort McPherson to Kuwait. Israel is becoming one of the main supporting points during the attack on Iraq, ...

Keith Weissman and Steven Rosen Are PhDs and Middle East Experts Who Did Some Lobbying. They Thought They Were Doing What Washington Insiders Always Do. Thomas O’Donnell didn’t reveal his job when he phoned Keith Weissman in 2004 and got the policy analyst’s wife. He says he didn’t want to scare her. When Weissman returned the call and found out O’Donnell was an FBI agent, his first reaction was to attempt a joke: “What did I do?” “I’m sure you didn’t do anything,” O’Donnell told him. He wanted to meet that day, for five or ten minutes, and get Weissman’s...

Detention transformed doctor into man of peace Saudi carries no bitterness home as he ends San Antonio stay 05/25/2002 By DAVID McLEMORE / The Dallas Morning News SAN ANTONIO - Dr. Al-Badr Al-Hazmi sits easily on the carpeted floor of the mosque. He speaks with a soft intensity, the words spilling out as he describes the day his life was turned upside down. Stony-faced FBI agents whisked him from his San Antonio home a day after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. He was flown to New York and secreted in a detention cell for nearly two weeks. Like hundreds...

TRUTH in the David Hicks affair remains as elusive as ever after fresh allegations this week from inside the US military that the Guantanamo Bay commissions are so seriously flawed that a fair trial is impossible. The most damaging blows yet to the commissions -- still supported by the Howard Government -- came from three US Air Force prosecutors involved in the trials who have quit the investigation in protest. One, John Carr, said the process appeared to have been rigged and that the first four cases -- including Hicks -- had been been "handpicked" and would not be acquitted....

Homegrown terrorist Jeffrey Leon Battle considered America the “land of the kaffirs,” or unbelievers, and the American people “pigs.” He once lamented to an acquaintance—who happened to be a government informant—that the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks did not sufficiently damage the U.S. economy. “This is the land of the enemy,” he said of his own country in a May 8, 2002, conversation secretly recorded by the government. He explained to a friend how his “burning desire” to become an Islamic martyr had inspired his aborted quest to join forces with al Qaeda in Afghanistan, where he could kill American...