Twenty-Two Years After the Philadelphia Massacre

by Hans Bennett, The Defenestrator

In a surprise development, the US Supreme Court agreed June 29 to hear an appeal they had refused to hear in April, asking whether "foreign citizens imprisoned indefinitely" by the US military can go to federal court and whether their imprisonment amounts to "unlawful confinement" from which a federal judge might free them. The court is to hear arguments next term, which begins Oct. 1.

The press is abuzz with the June 26 release of the CIA's "family jewels," nearly 700 pages of documents concerning domestic meddling, foreign assassinations and other real and potential violations of the Agency's charter that then-director James Schlesinger ordered compiled in 1973 in response to the scrutiny focused by the Watergate scandal. The front-page coverage in the New York Times noted (on the front page, above the fold) that in a note to Agency employees, current CIA director Gen. Michael V. Hayden said the release of documents was part of the Agency's "social contract" with the American public, "to give those we serve a window into the complexities of intelligence." Added the Times: "General Hayden drew a contrast between the illegal activities of the past and current CIA practices, which he insists are lawful."

Late on June 21 the US House of Representatives voted 214-203 against an amendment to the Foreign Operations Appropriations Bill that would have closed the US Defense Department's Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), a combat-training school for Latin American soldiers, formerly the US Army School of the Americas (SOA). Critics say that since its founding in 1946, SOA/WHINSEC has trained many of the region's worst human rights violators.

Following the recent revelations about Ethiopia, a second African country has been named as hosting secret US detention center for terror suspects. Seymour Hersh's latest in the June 25 New Yorker, "The General's Report"—a reference to Antonio Taguba, who investigated the Abu Ghraib scandal—includes some quotes from a "recently retired high-level C.I.A. official" (anonymous, and therefore unverfiable, of course) about the "wrangling" over interrogation guidelines in the wake of the scandal. Writes Hersh:

A trial on the apparent CIA kidnapping of a Muslim cleric in Milan has been suspended to allow time for Italy's supreme court to rule on whether prosecutors overstepped their constitutional bounds. The trial is not expected to resume until late October. The Italian government conteds that the prosecutors should not have sought the extradition of the US agents, and thus revealed their identity.

In what is being hailed as a landmark decision, a 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals panel ruled 2-1 that the federal Military Commissions Act doesn't strip Ali al-Marri, a legal US resident, of his constitutional right to challenge his accusers in court, and that the government must allow him to be released from military detention.

Despite recent denials by the Ethiopian regime, Der Spiegel corroborates June 11 that "terror suspects have been questioned by US officials in Ethiopia after being transferred from Somalia and Kenya. The captives included Europeans who were detained, interrogated and then released without charge." Up to 100 suspects are thought to have been transferred to Ethiopia in the process known as "extraordinary rendition." Der Spiegel spoke with Swedish citizen Munir Awad, 25, who was released from Ethiopian detainment three weeks ago. He told Der Spiegel that he had travelled to Mogadishu in December with his girlfriend Safia Benaouda, 17, also a Swedish citizen. He said that after Ethiopian forces invaded they fled to Kenya, where they were arrested by local militia, handed over to US troops and sent to Addis Ababa.