The number of prisoners currently on hunger strike at Guantanamo Bay has reached 100, forcing the United States to send 40 nurses and medical specialists to the detention center to monitor the situation over the weekend. Of those on strike, 21 are being force-fed. The inmates, many of whom are held without charge, are protesting their detention with the hunger strike, which began in February.

BBC:

Although such actions are frequent at Guantanamo, the current protest is one of the longest and most widespread.

Guantanamo officials deny claims that the strike began after copies of the Koran were mishandled during searches of prisoners' cells.

Violence erupted at the prison on April 13th as the authorities moved inmates out of communal cell blocks where they had covered surveillance cameras and windows.

Some prisoners used "improvised weapons" and were met with "less-than-lethal rounds", camp officials said, but no serious injuries were reported.

Nearly 100 of the detainees have reportedly been cleared for release but remain at the facility because of restrictions imposed by Congress and also concerns of possible mistreatment if they are sent back to their home countries.

During a White House press conference on Tuesday, President Obama said he will renew his first-term efforts to close the detention center. Obama reasoned that the existence of the facility damages the country’s image abroad, costs too much money and undermines U.S. counterterrorism efforts by serving as a recruiting tool for militants.

“I’m going to go back at this,” he said. “I’m going to reengage with Congress to try to make the case that this is not something that’s in the best interests of the American people.”

By Cora Currier, ProPublica

Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn unsealed an indictment Wednesday charging Ibrahim Suleiman Adnan Adam Harun with six terrorism-related counts.

The announcement that Harun is in U.S. custody in New York may also shed light on a small part one of the most secretive aspects of U.S. counterterrorism operations during the Bush administration: What became of terror suspects held by the CIA in its network of "black-site" prisons around the world? Or disappeared into foreign cells in extraordinary renditions?

With their indictment of Harun, prosecutors offered a basic account of how the 43-year-old Nigerian – described as "a prototype Al Qaeda Operative" – spent the last decade. He fought U.S. forces in Afghanistan, prosecutors said, before leaving for Africa, where he allegedly conspired to bomb U.S. diplomatic facilities. Harun, also known by his alias Spin Ghul, eventually wound up in Libyan prison for six years before he was released amid the turmoil of the uprising against Muammar Qaddafi.

Did the U.S. know that he was in Libya, and did they play a role in his detention? Did the CIA work with the Libyans to then obtain information from him?

Testimony from an alleged former CIA detainee, a leaked document from the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, and evidence from cases of others rendered to Libya suggest that might be so.

A spokesman for the CIA said that the agency "does not, as a rule, comment on matters before the courts." The U.S. Attorney's office for the Eastern District of New York declined to provide information beyond what was announced with the indictment. A lawyer for Harun, David Stern, also declined to comment.

The CIA has steadfastly refused to comment on the fates of most former detainees, publicly accounting for only 16 people of the roughly 100 the agency has said it once held. The U.S. has successfully dismissed lawsuits over rendition and asserted that much about the CIA program is still classified.

President Obama, for his part, ordered the CIA black-site prisons closed when he took office. (He allowed renditions to continue, with pledges of greater oversight of the countries where suspects were sent.) But still, little about the program has been officially disclosed.

Human Rights Watch and other organizations, as a consequence, have been trying to piece together the details of the CIA's detention and rendition programs for years. In 2009, ProPublica published a list of more than thirty people believed to have been held by the CIA whose whereabouts were still unknown—including a Spin Ghul.

Now and then, the fates of these detainees have emerged in the press or through rights groups, particularly since the upheaval caused by the Arab Spring.

Joanne Mariner, a senior researcher with Amnesty International who worked on identifying former detainees for Human Rights Watch, said that the information in the indictment of Harun lines up with what she knew about Spin Ghul. Operating in an arena of such secrecy, "when all this was going on, we'd get these little clues and bits of information. It's really quite interesting to see confirmation that these people did exist," she said.

Marwan Jabour, who alleges he was held in Afghanistan by the CIA ("Ghost Prisoner,") told Human Rights Watch that he was shown photos of Harun (whom he called Ghul) during interrogations, and was led to believe he was in U.S. custody. Jabour had met Harun in Pakistan in 2003, and described him as an African who spoke Arabic. Jabour was held from 2004 to 2006, during which time, according to this week's indictment, Harun was arrested in Libya.

A 2007 document from Guantanamo, released by Wikileaks, cites detailed information provided by Harun. For example: "Ghul also noted that Saudi authorities had detained Saudi Al Qaeda members…Ghul remarked that these two individuals were Al Qaeda members since approximately 1995." In the document he is identified as both Harun and Ghul, and described as a "Nigerian [sic] national and Al Qaeda operative." The citations refer to CIA intelligence reports, but don't specify where Harun was or when he provided the information.

Since Qaddafi's fall, evidence has emerged of close communication between the CIA and Libyan officials during the Bush administration, despite the Qaddafi regime's reputation for torture and brutal prison conditions. Documents found in the abandoned office of Libya's former top intelligence official refer to the rendition of several people to Libya and the sharing of information. Other "missing prisoners" believed to have been held by the CIA turned up in Libyan prisons. Some of them have given detailed accounts of detention in U.S. custody before being sent there.

"The U.S. delegated a lot of its detention capacity to abusive governments like Libya— they were perfectly happy to have Libya holding these people," says Mariner.

If the U.S. did know he was in Libya, it took authorities some time to catch up with him after he gained his freedom in June 2011.

After his release, Harun told prosecutors, he was placed on a ship full of Libyan refugees bound for Italy, where he was arrested for assaulting officials onboard. Italian authorities agreed to extradite him to the U.S. last fall.

Harun is the latest in a recent string of terror suspects brought to federal court from overseas by the Obama administration – including Osama Bin Laden's son-in-law Abu Gaith, who pleaded not guilty in federal court in Manhattan to conspiring to kill Americans earlier this month.

Some Congressional Republicans have insisted that such cases are better prosecuted in military commissions like the one at Guantanamo. Senator Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., said of Harun: "the administration has once again decided to forgo an extensive intelligence interrogation and instead bring an enemy combatant immediately into the federal court system."

According to court documents, Harun was interviewed by U.S. officials last September in Italy, with his Italian counsel present. He waived his Miranda Rights before those sessions. The indictment against him remained sealed because the government believed "he may be in a position to provide information…relevant to the national security of the United States."

Harun is scheduled to appear in court in Brooklyn this afternoon, and could face life in prison. Whether or not his trial reveals more about the CIA's role, at the very least, Harun can be crossed off the list of the missing.

By Cora Currier, ProPublica, Feb. 13, 2013

In one of President Barack Obama first acts in the White House, he ordered the closure of the CIA's so-called "black-site" prisons, where terror suspects had been held and, sometimes, tortured.  The CIA says it is "out of the detention business," as John Brennan, Obama's pick to head the agency, recently put it.

But the CIA's prisons left some unfinished business.  In 2009, ProPublica's Dafna Linzer listed more than thirty people who had been held in CIA prisons and were still missing.

Some of those prisoners have since resurfaced, but at least twenty are still unaccounted for.

Last week the Open Society Foundations' Justice Initiative released a report pulling together the most current information available on the fates of the prisoners. A few emerged from foreign prisons after the turmoil of the Arab Spring. One has died. (The report relied exclusively on media accounts and information previously gathered by human rights groups. The Open Society Foundations also donate to ProPublica.)

The report counts 136 prisoners who were either held in a CIA black site or subject to so-called extraordinary rendition, in which detainees were secretly shipped to other countries for interrogation.

Many of the prisoners were tortured, either under the CIA's "enhanced interrogation techniques" program or by other countries after their transfer. The report also lists 54 countries that assisted in some way with detention and rendition. The U.S. has not disclosed the countries it worked with, and few have acknowledged their participation.

The CIA declined our request to comment.

Here are the fates of a few of the prisoners we listed as missing back in 2009:

• Ayoub al-Libi, also known as Mustafa Jawda al-Mahdi, is a Libyan who was allegedly interrogated and detained by US personnel in Pakistan and Afghanistan in 2004. The next year he was returned to Libya, where he was sentenced to death as member of LIFG, an Islamist anti-Gaddafi group (designated a terrorist organization by the U.S.) He was released when uprisings began against Gaddafi in February 2011. Human Rights Watch interviewed him in 2012.

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Snatching people off the streets. Hanging people from the ceiling. A man freezing to death alone on a concrete floor. This is the story of how the United States used its position to cajole, persuade, and strong-arm 54 other countries to take part in the CIA's post-9/11 campaign of secret detention and torture.

After the September 11 attacks against the United States, the CIA conspired with dozens of governments to build a highly classified program of secret detention and extraordinary rendition of terrorist suspects. The program was designed to place detainee interrogations beyond the reach of law. Suspected terrorists were seized and secretly flown across national borders to be interrogated by foreign governments that used torture, or by the CIA itself in clandestine "black sites."

A new report from the Open Society Justice Initiative, Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detention and Extraordinary Rendition(pdf), brings together for the first time the intricate details of 136 named victims of the program. It documents how 54 different governments around the world took part in their kidnapping, detention, and often torture. It documents, in case after case, who was targeted, where they were taken, and what happened to them.

H/T George Soros, Chairman and Founder, Open Society Foundations

By Cora Currier, ProPublica

A Senate committee is close to putting the final stamp on a massive report on the CIA's detention, interrogation and rendition of terror suspects. Senator Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who heads the Select Committee on Intelligence, called the roughly 6,000-page report "the most definitive review of this CIA program to be conducted."

But it's unclear how much, if any, of the review you might get to read.

The committee first needs to vote to endorse the report. There will be a vote next week.

Republicans, who are a minority on the committee, have been boycotting the investigation since the summer of 2009. They pulled back their cooperation after the Justice Department began a separate investigation into the CIA interrogations. Republicans have criticized that inquiry, arguing that the interrogations had been authorized by President George W. Bush's Justice Department.  (In August, Attorney General Eric Holder announced the investigation was being closed without bringing any criminal charges.)

Even if the report is approved next week, it won't be made public then, if at all. Decisions on declassification will come at "a later time," Feinstein said.

According to Reuters, the Senate report focuses on whether so-called "enhanced interrogation" tactics – including waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and other techniques – actually led to critical intelligence breakthroughs. Reuters reported earlier this year that the investigation "was expected to find little evidence" that the torture was in fact crucial.

Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney and others have repeatedly said that such tactics produced important information. They've also said waterboarding was used on only a handful of high-level detainees, a claim which recently came into question. Feinstein has previously disputed claims that such interrogations led to Osama Bin Laden. (It is also still unclearwhat key members of Congress knew about the program, and when they knew it.)

Much about the CIA's program to detain and interrogate terror suspects has remained officially secret, despite widespread reporting and acknowledgement by Bush.  Obama banned torture upon taking office and released documents related to program, including a critical report from the CIA's Inspector General.

But the Obama administration has argued in courts that details about the CIA program are still classified. (As we have reported, this has led the administration to claim in some cases that Guantanamo detainees' own accounts of their imprisonment are classified.)

"Immigrants For Sale" is a ground-breaking online documentary series that goes inside the private immigrant detention industry, through the lens of those most impacted, the players behind the trade and the multi-billion dollar profits that fuel it all.

Immigrants are for sale in this country. Sold to private prison corporations who are locking them up for obscene profits!

Here are the top 3 things you need to know about the Private Prison money scheme:

The victims: Private prisons don't care about who they lock up. At a rate of $200 per immigrant a night at their prisons, this is a money making scheme that destroys families and lives.

The players: CCA (Corrections Corporation of America), The Geo Group and Management and Training corporations—combined these private prisons currently profit more than $5 billion a year.

The money: These private prisons have spent over $20 million lobbying state legislators to make sure they get state anti-immigrant laws approved and ensure access to more immigrant inmates.

British authorities have demanded that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange present himself at Belgravia police station at 11.30am on Friday. According to the Guardian, "This is standard practice in extradition cases and is the first step in the removal process," and "Failing to surrender would be a further breach of conditions and he is liable to arrest." But if he complies, police may arrest him immediately, because he has breached the terms of his bail.

Reuters reports:

On Thursday, British police summoned Assange to a London police station, demanding he leave the embassy. But Assange later told BBC television in a telephone interview: "Our advice is that asylum law both internationally and domestically in the UK takes precedence to extradition law, so the answer is almost certainly not."

On Sunday, Ecuador's ambassador to the UK left London to return home for talks on Assange's application for asylum. Assange remains under Ecuador's protection while it considers the application, and is "beyond the reach of the police" while he remains in the building.

Earlier this week, a letter signed by leading US figures in support of Assange's application for political asylum in Ecuador was delivered to the country's London embassy. Among its signatories were Michael Moore, Oliver Stone, Noam Chomsky and Danny Glover. Others who put their names to it included the author Naomi Wolf, comedian Bill Maher and Daniel Ellsberg, the former US military analyst turned whistleblower, who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971 and has been a long-standing supporter of Assange.

Full message from the video:

Dear brothers and sisters. Now is the time to open your eyes!

In a stunning move that has civil libertarians stuttering with disbelief, the U.S. Senate has just passed a bill that effectively ends the Bill of Rights in America.

The National Defense Authorization Act is being called the most traitorous act ever witnessed in the Senate, and the language of the bill is cleverly designed to make you think it doesn't apply to Americans, but toward the end of the bill, it essentially says it can apply to Americans "if we want it to.

Bill Summary & Status, 112th Congress (2011 -- 2012) | S.1867 | Latest Title: National Defense Authorization Act for.

This bill, passed late last night in a 93-7 vote, declares the entire USA to be a "battleground" upon which U.S. military forces can operate with impunity, overriding Posse Comitatus and granting the military the unchecked power to arrest, detain, interrogate and even assassinate U.S. citizens with impunity.

Even WIRED magazine was outraged at this bill, reporting:

Senate Wants the Military to Lock You Up Without Trial

...the detention mandate to use indefinite military detention in terrorism cases isn't limited to foreigners. It's confusing, because two different sections of the bill seem to contradict each other, but in the judgment of the University of Texas' Robert Chesney — a nonpartisan authority on military detention — "U.S. citizens are included in the grant of detention authority."

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[Photo of the teepee that led to Wednesday's Occupy Oakland raid - via @geekeasy]

Khali Johnson was arrested for "basically littering," which could somehow turn into his third strike and a lifetime in prison.

You may recall that I told you all about the situation with Khali last month, after his arrest during a December 16th Oakland Police raid. There was great concern because Khali had been held in detention unusually long, appeared at each court hearing severely bruised and didn't have access to his prescribed psychiatric medication.

More Via:

The threat of life imprisonment looms for Occupy Oakland activist Marcel Johnson - better known by his alias, Khali - after a third-strike arrest during the demonstration. Having spent about 15 years incarcerated already, 38 year-old Khali said he was trying to turn his life around by distributing food to the needy at the Occupy Oakland encampment, where he was a frequent, vocal, sometimes endearing presence. On December 16 he was arrested outside City Hall for violating anti-encroachment laws — namely, for a dispute about a blanket — which normally wouldn't have warranted more than a few hours jail time. Since Khali was in fact violating his probation terms for a different case in Sacramento, he was taken to Santa Rita and made to serve some jail time in lieu of going to trial, his attorney Dan Siegel explained. There, Khali was held in solitary confinement and not given his psychiatric medications, which might explain why he got into an altercation with a peace officer — the exact circumstances of which are still widely disputed. Now, Khali faces a felony assault charge in place of his original misdemeanor. As of Friday, December 23, Khali's bail was set at $580,000, according his attorney, Dan Siegel.

Siegel won't be representing Khali in the assault case, but luckily was able to convince a judge to order a medical evaluation that hopefully will explain the altercation between Khali, and the officer in Santa Rita. The next scheduled court date for Khali is January 9th in Pleasanton where he will face that potential "third strike," and bail that would be completely out of reach as Khali is homeless, with no money or possessions to his name.