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.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
RSS