One year ago, the Supreme Court told the Bush administration that in America, even detainees swept up in the war on terror and held at the military’s Guantanamo Bay prison camp were entitled to a day in court to contest their imprisonment.

Faruq Ali Ahmed is still waiting. A young Yemeni picked up in Pakistan in 2001, he has been held since then despite his insistence that he was doing nothing but teaching the Quran to children when war broke out. He is detained in part on the basis of accusations from a camp snitch who a military officer has denounced as a liar.

Newsday, 15 June 2005

It is no secret that the US military operates detention centres around the world for the interrogation of terror suspects. The treatment of prisoners in these places – including Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and Abu Ghraib in Iraq – has come in for intense scrutiny and evidence of human rights violations has been widely reported.

But less well-documented is the process by which terror suspects are sent by the United States for interrogation by security officials in other countries. This is known as “rendition” and is becoming increasingly controversial because many of these countries – including Syria and Egypt – are accused of using torture on prisoners, not least by the US State Department.

BBC News, 14 June 2005

The Supreme Court rejected on Monday a request by Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen held for three years as a suspected enemy combatant, for an immediate decision on his detention instead of waiting for a federal appeals court to rule. His attorneys asked the justices to decide whether President Bush has the power to seize U.S. citizens in civilian settings on American soil and subject them to indefinite military detention without criminal charges or a trial.

Reuters, 13 June 2005

On Thursday, President Bush stepped to a lectern at the Ohio State Highway Patrol Academy in Columbus to urge renewal of the USA Patriot Act and to boast of the government’s success in prosecuting terrorists. Flanked by Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, Bush said that “federal terrorism investigations have resulted in charges against more than 400 suspects, and more than half of those charged have been convicted.”

Those statistics have been used repeatedly by Bush and other administration officials, including Gonzales and his predecessor, John D. Ashcroft, to characterize the government’s efforts against terrorism. But the numbers are misleading at best.

An analysis of the Justice Department’s own list of terrorism prosecutions by The Washington Post shows that 39 people – not 200, as officials have implied – were convicted of crimes related to terrorism or national security.
Most of the others were convicted of relatively minor crimes such as making false statements and violating immigration law – and had nothing to do with terrorism, the analysis shows. For the entire list, the median sentence was just 11 months.

Washington Post. 12 June 2005