The Supreme Court has ruled that foreign terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay have rights under the U.S. Constitution to challenge their detention in civilian courts.

The justices, in a 5-4 ruling Thursday, handed the Bush administration its third setback at the high court since 2004 over its treatment of prisoners who are being held indefinitely and without charges at the U.S. naval base in Cuba.

"We hold these petitioners do have the habeas corpus privilege," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the court majority in the 70-page opinion.

The most stunning revelation in a 370-page Justice US Department Inspector General's report released this week was that agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had formally opened a "War Crimes" file, documenting torture they had witnessed at the Guantánamo Bay US prison camp, before being ordered by the administration to stop writing their reports.

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The report makes it absolutely clear that torture was ordered and planned in detail at the highest levels of the government--including the White House, the National Security Council, the Pentagon and the Justice Department. Attempts to stop it on legal or pragmatic grounds by individuals within the government were systematically suppressed, and evidence of this criminal activity covered up.

There was no immediate reaction from the White House on these new revelations. Responses from other agencies directly implicated in the crimes at Guantánamo were indicative of the general atmosphere of impunity in which the torture detailed in the IG's report continues to this day.

In a stunning turnaround, the former chief military prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay said Thursday he would be a defense witness for the driver of Osama bin Laden.

Air Force Col. Morris Davis, who resigned in October over alleged political interference in the U.S. military tribunals, told The Associated Press he will appear at a hearing for Salim Ahmed Hamdan.

"I expect to be called as a witness ... I'm more than happy to testify," Davis said in a telephone interview from Washington. He called it "an opportunity to tell the truth."

At the April pretrial hearing inside the U.S. military base in southeast Cuba, Hamdan's defense team plans to argue that alleged political interference cited by Davis violates the Military Commissions Act, Hamdan's military lawyer, Navy Lt. Brian Mizer, told the AP.

Ruling in a case of four Britons who formerly were detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the D.C. Circuit Court decided Friday that the prisoners have no right to sue top Pentagon officials and military officers for allegedly torturing them and defiling their religious beliefs while they were held at the military prison. The Court applied several different legal theories in rejecting all of the claims of abuse and arbitrary imprisonment, but the end result was that there was nothing left of the detainees' legal challenge.

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U.S. District Judge Ricardo M. Urbina threw out all of the claims except that under the religious freedom law, concluding that those allegations could go forward because the Act did apply to the detainees at Guantanamo because of the scope of U.S. control of the military base and prison there, and because the detainees there were "persons" under the Act.

On December 30th Joint Task Force Guantanamo (JTF-GTMO) announced the fifth death in custody of a Guantanamo captive.

The JTF-GTMO asserted that 68 year-old Abdul Razzak was a confirmed jihadist and military leader.

It is interesting to compare the JTF-GTMO claims with his testimony.

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Is it possible that Razzak was lying? Sure. It is possible. But what is clear is that even though Razzak was in US custody for six years -- no member of the US counter-terrorism establishment bothered to take the trouble to contact Ismail Khan, to see if Razzak had been telling the truth.

Many other captives were told that the USA couldn't find the witnesses they requested, even though those witnesses were members of Karzai's cabinet, or they were senior members of Karzai's administration.

Unfortunately, the American counter-terror establishment did not take any steps to check out the alibis of any of its captives.

Another aspect of Razzak's case is that his death casts doubt on the meme that the Guantanamo captives are getting excellent health care. Razzak died of colorectal cancer. Colorectal cancer is a very slow-growing kind of cancer, that takes decades to get to the fatal stage. It is also very easily detected, decades before it becomes dangerous, when one is receiving competent, modern medical care. After fifty everyone should get a butt periscope. A tube with a camera, and tiny pincers, is inserted up the butt. A doctor monitors the camera, and if he or she sees a pre-cancerous polyp, the pincers are used to snip it off.

If Razzak had been getting the excellent health care the Bush Presidency claims, his cancer would have been detected back in 2002.

George Bush and Dick Cheney were always talking about how great it was there. Cheney even said "they've got everything they could possibly want."

Interesting comment:

This is not to justify the lack of medical care in Gitmo, but there may be more factors. Do the US Army MDs know their stuff? Will the patients accept screening (due to religious beliefs of personal fears)? Can they even do colonoscopy in Gitmo? I wonder if there are any gastroenterologists there. If not, the detainee would have to be transported to another location (in the US) and then could make a claim for habeus or other legal motions.

The first Gitmo trial has ended, but not before the defendant was stripped of two of his attorneys. Detainee #002 entered a guilty plea and will serve 9 months in an Australian prison. In return, he signed a statement stipulating that he had never been tortured or mistreated by the Americans -- despite previously reporting being beaten and deprived of sleep during his more than five years at the prison. The agreement bars him from suing the U.S. government for alleged abuse, forfeits any right to appeal, and imposes a gag order that prevents him speaking with news media for a year.