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The Pentagon expressed concern yesterday about a "frivolous" complaint filed against Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld by a leftist group that is using a new German law that claims the right to investigate war crimes anywhere in the world.     The reaction was in response to a Nov. 30 lawsuit filed in Berlin by the Center for Constitutional Rights, whose founders include liberal activist William Kunstler.     The New York-based center filed the German complaint against Mr. Rumsfeld and other U.S. officials on behalf of four Iraqis who, the complaint says, were abused by U.S. guards at the Abu Ghraib prison...

GERMAN prosecutors have ordered arrest warrants for 13 people working for the CIA in connection with the alleged kidnapping of a Lebanese-born German man, public broadcaster NDR reported today. Authorities in the southern city of Munich are probing allegations by Khaled el-Masri that he was abducted by US agents in the Macedonian capital Skopje on New Year's Eve 2003 and flown to a prison in Afghanistan for interrogation before he was released five months later in Albania. Masri has said he was tortured while imprisoned. The Munich prosecutor's office declined to confirm the report. NDR said that the 13 suspects...

President Bush tried to armor the Republican Party before the mid-term elections by projecting himself as the commander-in-chief. Now he has torn the epaulets from his uniform to reveal himself as something no other president has ever been: torturer-in-chief. ... Bush imagined that he would use the period surrounding the 9/11 commemorations to revive his popularity and lift the Republican Party before the mid-term elections on the national security theme. His atmospherics, however, have been blown away by his grim realities. Going into the election, he has split the Republican Party and forced the country to face a debate on...

OTTAWA — When the prime minister unleashes his lap dogs to join a parliamentary pack attack, someone is about to die. Conservative MPs treated RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli with kid gloves during his first appearance before a parliamentary committee two months ago to explain his involvement in the Maher Arar affair. They dropped the gloves and savaged him during his second appearance on Tuesday, when he admitted to misleading MPs due to a severely flawed memory. It was an all-party Zach attack and when Stephen Harper stood in the Commons a few hours later, urging patience for ‘due process’ before...

Terrorism and Security: Major Canadian Media Organizations Possibly a Haven for Single-Issue Activists Government policy analyst lodges request for investigation of lop-sided media coverage of two terrorism related cases. Poor journalism widespread while watchdog bodies ineffective or biased. (I-Newswire) - Literally millions of Canadians have read the newspapers or seen coverage of the cases of Muhammed Mahjoub, a suspected terrorist being held indefinitely on a secret service security certificate, and Maher Arar, also suspected of having terrorist connections. While Canadian media such as the CBC and the Canadian Press have provided ample opportunities for Maher Arar and Muhammed Mahjoub and...

The Canadian edition of Time Magazine has chosen Syrian born Maher Arar as its Newsmaker of the Year. The Ottawa Ontario resident landed at JFK International Airport in New York in September 2002 after returning from Tunisia where his wife has family. The Canadian citizen was detained in New York and then shipped off to his native Syria where he was detained and tortured for over a year before being released. After returning to Canada, Arar chose not to blend into the woodwork but forced the Canadian government to hold an inquiry into his arrest and detention and to examine...

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Three undercover CIA officers arrived in Norway in the spring of 2003 as part of a possible secret operation targeting for rendition an Islamic militant living in Oslo known as Mullah Krekar, The Washington Post reported. Citing lawyers and unnamed European investigators, the newspaper said shortly after the agents arrived, Krekar received a warning from an anonymous Norwegian official that Krekar, then head of a Kurdish insurgent group, was a CIA target and should watch his back. The spies left Norway by the end of the summer, the report said. If the CIA was planning to abduct...

The 430 prisoners in the detention centre at Guantanamo Bay send and receive 44,000 pieces of mail per year. Lawyers fly in and out on the commercial flights from Miami to the U.S. base to meet with their clients. The International Red Cross inspects the camp and interviews prisoners. And yet the idea persists that Guantanamo represents some kind of "American Gulag"--and that the detainees are victims of a monstrous miscarriage of justice: innocent goatherds and blameless wedding guests swept up by blind American injustice. Ten days ago, I joined one of the regular tours of Guantanamo organized by the...

March 3 — Suspected Sept. 11 planner Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is believed to command a global network of al Qaeda terrorists, but in the three days since his arrest he has refused to tell interrogators anything about planned attacks, instead reciting the Koran to himself, U.S. officials told ABCNEWS. Mohammed was questioned for a third day by U.S. and Pakistani agents today. Analysts said interrogators were seeking details of any planned al Qaeda attacks and leads on the whereabouts of the world's most-wanted man, Osama bin Laden. Though the arrest of Mohammed in Pakistan on Saturday has been described as...

The investigation into the shooting death of Spc. Alyssa Peterson found her suicide came soon after she was reassigned for objecting to prisoner interrogation techniques but did not specifically give a reason for her action. A Flagstaff soldier who died in Iraq committed suicide after she refused to participate in interrogation techniques being practiced by her U.S. Army intelligence unit, according to a report about an Army investigation aired by a Flagstaff radio station. U.S. Army Spc. Alyssa R. Peterson, 27, died Sept. 15, 2003, in Tel Afar, an Iraqi city of about 350,000 residents in the northern part of...

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba (AP) — A military officer probing new charges of prisoner abuse here will encounter a pervasive atmosphere of hostility and suspicion between the detainees and U.S. troops who consider themselves at war. Even on a recent, controlled visit, an Associated Press reporter and photographer found that the prison brims with hatred. Former prisoners say the guards kick and punch them for no reason and treat them as subhuman. Guards say the inmates fling excrement at them, along with racial slurs and death threats. Guantanamo is under renewed scrutiny after a U.S. Marine at Camp Pendleton...

A paralegal and a military lawyer who brought forward allegations about prisoner abuse at the Guantanamo Bay detention center have been ordered not to speak with the press, lawyers and a military spokeswoman said Saturday. Marine Lt. Col. Colby Vokey, who represents a detainee at the U.S. naval base in eastern Cuba, filed a complaint with the Pentagon last week alleging that abuse was ongoing at the prison. He attached a sworn statement from his paralegal, Sgt. Heather Cerveny, in which she said several Guantanamo guards bragged in a bar about beating detainees, describing it as common practice. Muneer Ahmad,...

"No free speech for fascists!" screamed two burly ruffians as they charged the stage where David Horowitz was attempting to speak. "I probably would have suffered some bodily harm," Horowitz later wrote on his blog. Luckily, he writes, about half a dozen supporters "sprang to my rescue and beat the living crap out of the two deserving reds, dragging them unceremoniously from the theater." (1)Mr. Horowitz was fortunate. But he remains a target. We now know that the October 21 attack at the Liberty Film Festival in Los Angeles was no random event. It is part of a wider effort, orchestrated...

U.S. Troops Arrest Relative of Al-DouriBy CHRIS BRUMMITTASSOCIATED PRESS TIKRIT, Iraq (AP) - U.S. troops arrested a relative of Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, and believe he may help in the hunt for the most senior former regime figure still at large, a U.S. officer said Wednesday. The man, who was not identified, was arrested late Tuesday in a raid in Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's hometown, said Lt. Col. Steven Russell, who led the operation. Russell described the suspect as a "close relative" of al-Douri, who was the vice chairman of the Baath Party's Revolutionary Command Council and a longtime confidant of Saddam....

WASHINGTON - The rift among Republicans over the treatment of terrorism detainees appears to have closed, with maverick GOP Sen. John McCain telling NBC News on Friday that a deal reached with President Bush will lead to fair trials and interrogations but not torture. “We got what we wanted, and that is the preservation of the Geneva Conventions,” McCain, an Arizona Republican, said on NBC’s “Today” show. “There will be no more torture. There will be no more mistreatment of prisoners that would violate standards of conduct we would expect of people who work for the United States of America.”

CIA operatives taking over the interrogation of captured top al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah [BBC News backgrounder] from FBI agents in 2002 had him stripped, exposed to extreme cold and subjected to loud rock music in an effort to extract sensitive information, the New York Times reported Sunday.

Three men knelt on the street in front of Dale Hale. Their bodies were shrouded in sand-colored jumpsuits and burlap sacks covered their heads. The chains around their necks were clipped to black leashes that they held in their hands and offered to passersby. “Take the leash!” they shouted through the sacks. “Does this make you sick to your stomach? It should, because people are being tortured!” The startling display of anger at the war in Iraq drew a crowd quickly. The group of protesters, which was made up of sign-wielding students and Norman residents as well as the hooded...

Clip and save] State Department seeks to delay supply of M-26 artillery rockets to Israel Israel Asks U.S. to Ship Rockets With Wide Blast By DAVID S. CLOUD The New York TImes August 11, 2006 www.nytimes.com/2006/08/11/world/middleeast/11military.html?hp&ex=1155355200 &en=4887d0ebeb1cdf33&ei=5094&partner=homepage WASHINGTON, Aug. 10 - Israel has asked the Bush administration to speed delivery of short-range antipersonnel rockets armed with cluster munitions, which it could use to strike Hezbollah missile sites in Lebanon, two American officials said Thursday. The request for M-26 artillery rockets, which are fired in barrages and carry hundreds of grenade-like bomblets that scatter and explode over a broad area, is...

KABUL: Less than a year after his release from Guantanamo Bay, a former Taliban envoy has written a book on his "humiliation" with the hope it will add pressure on the United States to wind up the controversial prison. Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban's former ambassador to Pakistan and the face of the regime at the time of its fall, spent nearly four years in US detention before being released and handed over to Afghan authorities in September 2005. "I have been humiliated and tortured. By depicting the oppression that is going on in Guantanamo, I have tried to...

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....