Friday, December 14, 2007

Quick notes:

Guantanamo inmate represented by Portland lawyers is released (Hat'tip varro)

Guantanamo staff trashing web sites and spreading propoganda

by Stephen Soldz Page 1 of 1 page(s)

http://www.opednews.com

The Wikileaks group have struck again. Today they revealed that Guantanamo staff have been engaged in a campaign of propaganda, revising the web encyclopedia Wikipedia entries, including removing detainee IDs from Wikipedia, and posting pro-Guantanamo propaganda around the web. He, or they, have posted repeated encouragement for readers of various web sites to go the the "JTF GTMO" web site, Wikileaks reports. For example, in response to the Wired article reporting the Wikileaks release of the 2004 Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures manual, an GTMO IP address posted:

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Former Critic of Military Tribunals is Now the Chief Judge at Gitmo by Mary Shaw

House Passes Ban On Waterboarding

The Padilla Tapes by Ralph Lopez

CIA Torture Jet wrecks with 4 Tons of COCAINE

Railroading A Journalist In Iraq By Tom Curley Saturday, November 24, 2007; Page A17 (The WaPo)

At long last, prize-winning Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein may get his day in court. The trouble is, justice won't be blind in this case -- his lawyer will be.

Bilal has been imprisoned by the U.S. military in Iraq since he was picked up April 12, 2006, in Ramadi, a violent town in a turbulent province where few Western journalists dared go. The military claimed then that he had suspicious links to insurgents. This week, Editor & Publisher magazine reported the military has amended that to say he is, in fact, a "terrorist" who had "infiltrated the AP."

We believe Bilal's crime was taking photographs the U.S. government did not want its citizens to see. That he was part of a team of AP photographers who had just won a Pulitzer Prize for work in Iraq may have made Bilal even more of a marked man.


In the 19 months since he was picked up, Bilal has not been charged with any crime, although the military has sent out a flurry of ever-changing claims. Every claim we've checked out has proved to be false, overblown or microscopic in significance. Now, suddenly, the military plans to seek a criminal case against Bilal in the Iraqi court system in just days. But the military won't tell us what the charges are, what evidence it will be submitting or even when the hearing will be held.

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“Bilal Is No Insurgent” (A Daily News photographer rallies behind his jailed Iraqi colleague.) by Morgan A. Zalot

You can hear it in his voice—pain that transcends oceans and spans time, evidence of memories of war played on a continuous loop in his mind.

And when Jim MacMillan speaks of Bilal Hussein, a comrade from his time in Iraq whose photographs of the war might cost him his life, you can almost see the weight of the world on his shoulders.

“He was a man full of joy, and his work was exemplary, outstanding,” says MacMillan, 46, a 16-year veteran Philadelphia Daily News photographer who also worked at the Baghdad bureau of the Associated Press from May 2004 to April 2005. “His pursuit was no less than heroic.”

When MacMillan was in Iraq, he met Hussein, 36, one of 14 children of a prominent family from Fallujah. The two were among the group of 11 AP photographers awarded the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography in 2005.

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Judge Orders Bilal Hussein Hearing Kept Secret December 09, 2007 By Daryl Lang

Bilal Hussein, the Iraqi Associated Press photographer who has been held as a security detainee for nearly 20 months, was present for most of a seven-hour hearing Sunday in a Baghdad court.

Beyond those basic facts, nothing else about the hearing was made public. A judge ordered the proceedings be kept secret.

The U.S. military planned to presented evidence against Hussein at the investigative hearing, the first step toward a criminal trial in the Central Criminal Court in Iraq (CCCI).

In a statement Sunday, the AP's director of media relations Paul Colford said Hussein and his lawyers were allowed to view the materials presented at the hearing but not given copies to take with them.

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