first 4 paragraphs, this is great news that the judge is attempting to follow centuries of legal precedent

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Gitmo_judge_No_coercive_questioning_evidence_0722.html

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba - The judge in the first American war crimes trial since World War II barred evidence on Monday that interrogators obtained from Osama bin Laden's driver following his capture in Afghanistan.

Prosecutors are considering whether to appeal the judge's ruling — a development that could halt the trial of Salim Hamdan that began earlier Monday after years of delays and legal setbacks.

"We need to evaluate ... to what extent it has an impact on our ability to fully portray his criminality in this case, but also what it might set out for future cases," said Army Col. Lawrence Morris, the tribunals' chief prosecutor.

Hamdan, who was captured at a roadblock in Afghanistan in November 2001, pleaded not guilty at the start of a trial that will be closely watched as the first full test of the Pentagon's system for prosecuting alleged terrorists. He faces a maximum life sentence if convicted of conspiracy and aiding terrorism.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/04/washington/04gitmo.html?_r=1&ref=us&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin

July 4, 2008
Two Subplots in Guantánamo’s Long Legal Story
By WILLIAM GLABERSON
The long legal story of the Bush administration’s effort to prosecute detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, now has two fast-moving subplots. Either one could soon write something of a final chapter.

One plot will proceed in a federal courthouse in Washington, where lawyers for a detainee filed papers on Thursday seeking an injunction that, if granted, could be the death knell for the Bush administration’s military commissions at Guantánamo.

The other will play out in a makeshift courtroom overlooking Guantánamo Bay itself, where military prosecutors are pressing ahead with plans for what, later this month, would be the first of the trials the administration has been seeking for nearly seven years.

Either one could be decisive.

“This is a critical moment for the proceedings,” said Joanne Mariner, a lawyer at Human Rights Watch.

http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2008/05/who-are-gitmo-defendants.html

Today, the U.S. dropped charges against the so-called '20th hijacker'.

That got me wondering, who are the remaining Guantanamo defendants?

It turns out that they are not "Al Qaeda terrorists", but a bunch of kids, a car pool driver, and others who may have been involved in a civil war within their own country, but not a war against the United States.

For example, an article written by former Wall Street Journal editor and influential conservative Paul Craig Roberts includes the following bombshell:

The six that the United States are bringing to "trial" include two child soldiers for the Taliban and a car pool driver who allegedly drove Osama bin Laden.

US drops charges against Saudi in Sept. 11 attacks
By BEN FOX, Associated Press Writer
Tue May 13, 12:49 AM ET

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - The Pentagon has dropped charges against a Saudi at Guantanamo who was alleged to have been the so-called "20th hijacker" in the Sept. 11 attacks, his U.S. military defense lawyer said Monday.

Mohammed al-Qahtani was one of six men charged by the military in February with murder and war crimes for their alleged roles in the 2001 attacks. Authorities say al-Qahtani missed out on taking part in the attacks because he was denied entry to the U.S. by an immigration agent.

But in reviewing the case, the convening authority for military commissions, Susan Crawford, decided to dismiss the charges against al-Qahtani and proceed with the arraignment for the other five, said Army Lt. Col. Bryan Broyles, the Saudi's military lawyer.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080513/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/guantanamo_sept11_trial

”Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives.
I think we are being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and
I think I am liable to be put away as insane for expressing that.
That’s what’s insane about it "

-- John Lennon

Flyby News Notes -
Editor - Jonathan Mark - www.FlybyNews.com
April 21, 2008 - WTC Destruction Published * Martial Law Will Stay

Editor’s Notes:

For those who watched the Oscars Sunday night, finally something of substance surfaced that is worthy of mention. The documentary titled: Taxi to the Dark Side, was hands down the winner.

"A harrowing film throwing the spotlight on US interrogation techniques at military facilities won the Oscars best documentary prize here Sunday.

Alex Gibney's "Taxi to the Dark Side" investigates the death in custody of a Afghan taxi-driver, Dilawar, at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan in 2002.

An investigation into the death later found Dilawar had been repeatedly kicked and punched and was chained to the ceiling of his cell for days.

Gibney, who also produced hit documentary "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room", said in his acceptance speech that his wife had wanted him to make a romantic comedy.

Rupert Cornwell: Torture, terror and a trial system that is tainted

Wednesday, 13 February 2008
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/rupert-cornwell-torture-terror-and-a-trial-system-that-is-tainted-781498...

If George W Bush has his way, this will be al-Qa'ida's Nuremberg. A presidency that began with the deadliest terrorist attacks in history on American soil will end with the trial, conviction and sentencing to death of those who planned them.

Read Part One: http://valenzuelasveritas.blogspot.com/2008/02/crusade-of-surge-and-siege-part-one-of.html

Hear No Evil, See No Evil

Americans’ ever-enduring, catatonic sleepwalk through the Empire’s vast array of bread and circus, as always produced by the Ministry of Truth and the Department of Propaganda, better known as the corporatist media, has succeeded in the creation of an ignorant, incurious and dumbed down populace completely bereft of knowledge of what is done in its name. With no concern for or understanding of geography, cultures, history, alien societies, the outside world and of the imperial aspirations of the Empire, Americans have proved easy targets to the manipulations and deceptions of the corporatist world. Seemingly unwilling to gain knowledge of anything outside American Idol or the weekly NASCAR rat race, the soldier ants and worker bees of the Empire are content to circumvent the horrors of war and the myriad crimes against humanity committed in their name in order to maintain their beautiful minds at peace.

Indeed, the corporatist media has triumphed in completely erasing America’s two disastrous occupations of Muslim lands from the peoples’ conscious and concern, in effect shifting the ongoing debacles away from the daily reality of Americans and towards the abyss of a most cavernous memory hole. Methodically and systematically, the quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan, with all their inconvenient truths, with all their disturbing realities, with all their corresponding death, suffering and destruction, have virtually vanished into a vacuum of nothingness, transported by the corporatist state into a clandestine and secretive reality, making of these disasters non-existent nightmares that vanish upon the waking of a new day.

January 11 2008 is the 12th International Day of Truth Action on the Eleventh Day of Every Month until Justice. The day marks 76 months of 9/11 lies and is the 6th anniversary of the opening of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp. Wherever you are on January 11 - join us in united action for 9/11 truth. We're not stopping until justice.

6 Years of Guantanamo Day of Action
Action Networks Groups taking action every eleventh
January 11 Forum Add your location

The Eleventh Day of Every Month

Italia 9/11 * CIA * Habeas * Yucca * $-down
Flyby News Notes -
Editor - Jonathan Mark - www.FlybyNews.com
December 7, 2007 - Italia 9/11 * CIA * Habeas * Yucca * $-down

”.. all the democratic groups of both America and Europe,
including those of the Italian center-left, know very well
already that the disastrous [September 11, 2001] attack was
planned and realized by the CIA and the Mossad, with the help
of the Zionists, in order to put under trial the Arab countries and to
lure the Western powers to intervene in both Iraq and Afghanistan.”

-- Former Italian President Francesco Cossiga
Quote in Italy's popular newspaper, 30 November 2007

1) Ex-Italian President: Intel Agencies Know 9/11 An Inside Job
- - Former Air Traffic Controller Robin Hordon speaks out on 9/11
- - Seven Senior Republican Appointees Challenge Official Account of 9/11
2) C.I.A. Admits It Destroyed Tapes of Harsh Interrogations
- - US intelligence report shows war drive against Iran based on lies
- - Two-Thirds of Israelis Oppose Attack on Iran: Poll
- - Habeas Corpus War for Guantanamo Prisoners
- - Legal Action by Inmates Could Close Guantanamo

Guns & Butter

Wednesday, March 7, 2007, 1:00pm

Tyranny Abroad, Police State at Home

Interview with attorney and President of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Michael Ratner. Michael Ratner has led the center in its aggressive legal fight against the post - 9/11 violations of civil liberties by the Bush administration. He was part of a small group of lawyers that first took on representation of the Guantanamo detainees in January 2001, a case that went to the supreme court where a major victory was won in June 2004.

KPFA 94.1 FM Berkeley 1pm PST, and streaming and archived at www.kpfa.org

www.gunsandbutter.net

Evidence is assembled from secret files

Source: iht.com

By David Johnston and Neil A. Lewis
Published: January 12, 2007

WASHINGTON: The Bush administration has set up a secret war room where it is assembling evidence to prosecute high-ranking Qaeda suspects, including the accused mastermind of the September 2001 attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, government officials said this week.

The effort to sift the classified files of the Pentagon, FBI, CIA and other intelligence agencies amounts to the first concrete steps that the government has taken to press ahead with war crimes trials of high-level terror suspects under a plan announced by President George W. Bush in a speech last September.

At the time, Bush said that Mohammed and 13 other high-level terror suspects had been transferred from secret prisons around the world to the military detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where they would be held pending trial.

Mohammed al-Qahtani, detainee No. 063, was forced to wear a bra. He had a thong placed on his head. He was massaged by a female interrogator who straddled him like a lap dancer. He was told that his mother and sisters were whores. He was told that other detainees knew he was gay. He was forced to dance with a male interrogator. He was strip-searched in front of women. He was led on a leash and forced to perform dog tricks. He was doused with water. He was prevented from praying. He was forced to watch as an interrogator squatted over his Koran.

That much is known. These details were among the findings of the U.S. Army’s investigation of al-Qahtani's aggressive interrogation at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

But only now is a picture emerging of how the interrogation policy developed, and the battle that law enforcement agents waged, inside Guantanamo and in the offices of the Pentagon, against harsh treatment of al-Qahtani and other detainees by military intelligence interrogators.

In interviews with MSNBC.com — the first time they have spoken publicly — former senior law enforcement agents described their attempts to stop the abusive interrogations. The agents of the Pentagon's Criminal Investigation Task Force, working to build legal cases against suspected terrorists, said they objected to coercive tactics used by a separate team of intelligence interrogators soon after Guantanamo's prison camp opened in early 2002. They ultimately carried their battle up to the office of Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, who approved the more aggressive techniques to be used on al-Qahtani and others.

two honest articles about US torture plans:

http://ncronline.org/NCR_Online/archives2/2006c/092906/092906s.htm

http://www.antiwar.com/lobe/?articleid=9740

Whacko christian is a 911 truther.

http://home.hamptonroads.com/stories/story.cfm?story=111593&ran=56921

Chomsky news:

Chomsky Addresses Crisis in Middle EastAlive and Well, Professor Emeritus
Speaks to Packed Audience in Kirsch Auditorium

http://www-tech.mit.edu/V126/N41/41chomsky.html