Pentagon to Identify Detainees

[cal04]

Military to Comply With Court Order at Guantanamo Bay
Pentagon officials are preparing to release the names of several hundred detainees at the U.S. detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the first time the government will publicly link names to previously revealed information about many captives at the island prison.

The change came when the government decided this week not to appeal a federal judge's order to provide names that were redacted from documents released under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the Associated Press. Although the government has previously released thousands of pages related to hearings on whether individual detainees are "enemy combatants," it has always withheld the names of the prisoners who participated in those hearings.

U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff ordered the Defense Department to release the names by next Friday. Pentagon officials said yesterday that the decision not to appeal the ruling, made by the Justice Department, came over the strong objections of the Defense Department general counsel's office, which has been seeking to prevent the release of the names.

The names of hundreds of detainees have become public since the Supreme Court in June 2004 allowed them to file federal court cases contesting their imprisonment. Others have been identified in the media and by advocacy groups, some after they were released. Over the past several years, The Washington Post has independently confirmed the names of 450 people who were detained at Guantanamo Bay for some part of the past four years. But the Pentagon has refused to discuss individual detainees in its custody.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/24/AR2006022401813.html

[merwin]

1. kick

[lovuian]

2. U.S. to release Guantanamo names

http://feeds.bignewsnetwork.com/?sid=f6c27babd4d71bf4

The Pentagon says it will comply with a judge's order to release the names and nationalities of hundreds of detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Lt. Cmdr. Joe Carpenter, a Pentagon spokesman, told The New York Times Saturday that the Defense and Justice departments were coordinating the effort to release the unedited transcripts of military tribunal hearings held to determine whether the detainees at Guantanamo had been properly categorized as enemy combatants.

Last year, the Pentagon released transcripts of 558 tribunals, but blacked out names and other identifying information about the prisoners.
more...

After years and years in prison we finally get their names!!!

[uppityperson]

3. About time.

[Trevelyan]

4. I am glad but we have no way of knowing how many people have been murdered

there including US military personnel who refused to go along with the torture. There are at least 4 suspicious military deaths at Guantanamo.
Halliburton just completed another section of the Concentration Camp at Gitmo and are working on another section to be opened in the summer which will "house" 500 more "detainees". A commenter at Empire Burlesque said that Seymour Hersh recently suggested that all Americans keep their passports up-to-date.

http://empireburlesquenow.blogspot.com=Tuesday, February 01, 2005
Unnatural Acts: No Place for Mercy in Bush's Babylon
Originally published in The Moscow Times, April 13, 2004.
After months of bad press, here at last was an act of genuine umanitarianism by U.S. troops in Iraq that could have been trumpeted to the skies: a unit of National Guard troops – part-time citizen-soldiers from Oregon – rescuing a group of prisoners from sadistic torture by the security forces of the newly "sovereign" Iraqi government. Yet the incident was buried by American brass, who repudiated their own soldiers – and backed the Iraqi torturers...

=“More than two years after we filed our Freedom of Information Act request, the FBI continues to withhold documents that the public clearly has a right to see,” said Jaffer. “As we’ve been saying from the outset, the public has a right to know what the government’s policies were and who put them in place.”The FOIA lawsuit is being handled by Lawrence Lustberg and Megan Lewis of the New Jersey-based law firm Gibbons, Del Deo, Dolan, Griffinger & Vecchione, P.C. Other attorneys in the case are Jaffer, Amrit Singh, and Judy Rabinovitz of the ACLU; Arthur Eisenberg and Beth Haroules of the NYCLU; and Barbara Olshansky of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

To date, more than 90,000 pages of government documents have been released in response to the ACLU's Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. The ACLU has been posting these documents online at <www.aclu.org/torturefoia >

The friend-of-the-court brief in Qassim v. Bush is available online at
http://www.aclu.org/intlhumanrights/gen/24248lgl20060223.html

The documents released today are available online at
http://action.aclu.org/torturefoia/released/022306/
http://www.aclu.org/intlhumanrights/gen/24249prs2006022...