Good in depth reporting on Gitmo in today's Newsday (Pg 1 + 4 more pgs)

[tk2kewl]

Page 1
Still no day in court
Rumsfeld: prison is still needed
Lawyers caught in paper chase
Petitions filed in their own words

on edit: sorry, but there is just too much for me to excerpt at this time (I'm at work). I found the stories to be pretty thorough in their coverage of how the military is circumventing the Constitution and the Supreme Court ruling of last year.

[Igel]

1. I'm puzzled by possible inferences from two paragraphs in the

fifth link you posted.

"Unlike the habeas petitions of 30-plus pages filed by lawyers, the pro se petitions are handwritten and short - some just a few sentences, none more than two pages - and almost all in Arabic. Unofficial translations are attached. ...

"They come from men of all ages - Afghans mostly, but also a Syrian, an Iraqi and a Yemeni. They include a butcher, a bus driver, a blacksmith with 10 children, a shopkeeper and a physician. Most petitioners are unknowns. A few names match publicly identified terrorists. They all say their imprisonment is a mistake."

I can understand "handwritten", and short; I'm not sure what an official translation is in the US court system. And I'll take the reporter's "in Arabic" at face value.

But for most Afghans to be writing in Arabic would be rare: you'd get a strong concentration precisely of people that would regard Arabic as the proper language for such things from the madrassah educated, not random farmer or potter. A second inference is just that they've consulted and gotten Arabs or madrassah-educated folk to do the writing.

A third possible inference, assuming that I can't take the reporter's words at face value, is that the reporter's just being ignorant, and upon seeing something that looks like Arabic becaues of the script, assumes it must be Arabic.