Obama Set to Revive Military Commissions

The Obama administration is preparing to revive the system of military commissions established at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, under new rules that would offer terrorism suspects greater legal protections, government officials said to The New York Times.Officials said that the Obama administration will seek a 90-day extension of the suspension as early as next week.

The rules would block the use of evidence obtained from coercive interrogations, tighten the admissibility of hearsay testimony and allow detainees greater freedom to choose their attorneys.

Under the administration’s rule changes, hearsay evidence would be admissible if a judge determines it is reliable, officials said. That provision would allow the government to introduce some intelligence material that would ordinarily be barred in federal court or military courts martial, the officials said.

“We’ll litigate this before they can proceed, absolutely,” said Anthony D. Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. “Any effort to tinker with military commissions would be an enormous mistake. There is no way to fix a flawed process that has not rendered justice.” A rare Amnesty op-ed in the Wall Street Journal was also not that friendly for Obama.

The Miami Herald reports that the May 27 hearing for Saudi Arabian Ahmed Darbi will be the first commission session since President Barack Obama took office and got a 120-day freeze in the war court proceedings.  At issue in the hearing is how much evidence might be presented at his military trial in a bid to show the man was tortured into confessing crimes he now denies.

Defense lawyers had earlier asked to submit the award-winning documentaries Taxi to the Dark Side and Torturing Democracy into the court record.

UK judges reopen Binyam Mohamed case

The unusual reopening of the case stemmed from submissions by Mr Mohamed’s lawyers and a number of media organisations including the BBC, Guardian News and Media, Times Newspapers and the New York Times.

During a High Court hearing, lawyers for the foreign secretary said the US government remained opposed to publication of certain paragraphs outlining Mr Mohamed’s treatment, even under President Barack Obama’s new administration. Mr Mohamed’s lawyer, Dinah Rose QC, told the two judges it had since become clear from statements made by Mr Miliband and others that this was not correct and the true position of the new US administration in fact remained “opaque”.

The two judges, Lord Justice Thomas and Mr Justice Lloyd Jones, said on Friday they will set out their reasons for reopening their judgement “in due course”.

But lawyers for Foreign Secretary David Miliband will still be able to argue that the information should not be made public. The Foreign Office said the foreign secretary had raised this case with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

“In the light of President Obama’s recent decision to release highly classified Department of Justice papers, we have checked again with the US whether this indicates a change in the US position on the release of a summary of US intelligence by the UK Courts.

“The US made their position clear that disclosure ‘could likely result in serious damage to UK and US national security’.”

Malaysia detains one person under ISA, releases 13 others

The New York Times reports that a man suspected of leading a radical Islamist group linked to the 2002 Bali bombings has been arrested in Malaysia, more than a year after his escape from a high-security prison in Singapore.  The suspect, Mas Selamat Kastari, was captured on April 1 by Malaysia’s Special Branch, a police intelligence agency, which acted on information from Singapore’s Internal Security Department, according to the Singapore’s Ministry of Home Affairs.

The Straits Times, a Singaporean newspaper, reported Friday that Mr. Kastari was arrested on the outskirts of Johor Baru, a Malaysian town about 15 miles from Singapore.After the newspaper article appeared, officials from Malaysia and Singapore confirmed they arrested Mr. Kastari in Malaysia, and didn’t explain why they didn’t announce his April 1 arrest earlier.

Kastari is apparantly being held in Malaysia for questioning. He hasn’t been formally charged with any crimes and was being held under Malaysia’s Internal Security Act, which allows for detention without trial.

More at the WSJ.

Malaysia released also 13 untried detainees on Saturday, including three Hindraf activists and 10 Southeast Asian terror suspects, one of whom had been held for six years. The last ten comprise three Malaysians, five Filipinos and two Indonesians, who were detained on suspicions that they have links to regional terror networks, such as Jemaah Islamiyah and Darul Islam Sabah.

Human rights groups estimate 14 people remain in custody under the security act, mainly for alleged links to militants and document forgery.

U.S. will not halt Afghan air strikes

The United States will not end air strikes in Afghanistan as demanded by President Hamid Karzai after two villages were hit by U.S. warplanes last week, White House National Security Advisor James Jones said on Sunday to the Washington Post.

Pakistan says army will eliminate “terrorists”, reports 700 killed

Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani said in a televised address on thursday that the militants in the SWAT valley were trying to hold the country hostage at gunpoint.

“Decisive steps have to be taken,” Gilani said.

“In order to restore honor and dignity of our homeland and to protect the people, the armed forces have been called in to eliminate the militants and terrorists.”

Pakistan’s Interior Minister said on Monday then that around 700 militants have been killed in a major offensive launched last week in the country’s northwest.Interior Minister Rehman Malik said military operation is the best option against the Taliban militants and he was favouring such action.

The Interior Minister said that around 2,69,000 (?) people have been displaced from Swat and other areas including Lower Dir and Buner, adding he expect hostilities will displace around four hundred thousands people. He urged the international community to help the displaced persons.

Selected Documents Relating to National Security and Counter-Terrorism Relevant to International Refugee Protection

The United Nations High Commissioner of Refugees, updated its list of selected documents that relate to national security and counterterrorism issues relevant to international refugee protection. Read it here.

UK secret service accused over arrest of two Britons in Syria

Maryam Kallis, 36, from west London, and Yasser Ahmed, 28, from Woking, Surrey, were arrested eight weeks ago on consecutive days in Damascus by Arab plainclothes officers. Lord Ahmed, a Labour life peer who is representing the families, said to The Guardian he had been told last week by a senior official at the Syrian Embassy in London that other British agencies – and not the Foreign Office – had been involved in the detention.Yasser Ahmed’s father, Ahmad Zahur Qureshi, said he had been told by a ­reliable source who had spoken to Syrian diplomats that the arrests had been “British-driven” and related to “terrorism allegations”.

Both Mrs Kallis and Mr Ahmed have been denied access to lawyers and are understood to have been moved between a number of Syrian jails. The foreign secretary, David Miliband, raised the case with Syrian ministers last Friday, asking for them to be released or charged.

British embassy staff have only visited the pair twice in nearly 60 days, the last time being almost three weeks ago for 15 minutes. They told Mrs Kallis’s family that she had been “very emotional” and looked frail and tired, while Mr Ahmed was “under strain”.

Brain scanning may be used in security checks

(The Guardian)Distinctive brain patterns could become the latest subject of biometric scanning after EU researchers successfully tested technology to verify ­identities for security checks.

The experiments, which also examined the potential of heart rhythms to authenticate individuals, were conducted under an EU-funded inquiry into biometric systems that could be deployed at airports, borders and in sensitive locations to screen out terrorist suspects.

Another series of tests fitted a “sensing seat” to a truck to record each driver’s characteristic seated posture in an attempt to spot whether commercial vehicles had been hijacked.

Details of the Humabio (Human Monitoring and Authentication using Biodynamic Indicators and Behaviourial Analysis) pilot projects have been published amid further evidence of biometric technologies penetrating everyday lives.

The Foreign Office plans to spend up to £15m on fixed and mobile security devices that use methods including “Facial recognition (two and/or three dimensional), fingerprint recognition, iris recognition and vein imaging palm recognition”.

The biometric sensors and systems, it appears, will primarily be deployed to protect UK embassies around the world. The contract, about which the FCO declined to elaborate further, also mentions “surveillance” and “data collection” services.

The Home Office, meanwhile, has confirmed rapid expansion plans of automated facial recognition gates: 10 will be operating at major UK airports by August.

Passengers holding the latest generation of passports travelling through Manchester and Stansted are already being checked by facial-recognition cameras.

Biometric identity checks are also becoming more common in the world of commercial gadgets. New versions of computer laptops and mobile phones are entering the market with built-in fingerprint scanners to prevent other people running up large bills and misusing pilfered hi-tech equipment.

Among security experts there is a preference for developing biometric security devices that do not rely on measuring solely one physiological trait: offering choice makes scanning appear less intrusive and allows for double-checking.

The holy grail of the biometrics industry is a scanning mechanism that is socially acceptable in an era of mass transit and 100 per cent accurate. Researchers are eager to produce ‘non-contact’ biometric systems that can check any individual’s identity at a distance.

The US government’s secretive IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity) is seeking development proposals to enhance such technologies. Insisting that it is not interested in ‘contact-type’ biometrics, it asks for ideas that will “significantly advance the intelligence community’s ability to achieve high-confidence match performance … [for] high fidelity biometric signatures”.

The Humabio project, based in Greece, is involved more in blue-sky scientific thinking than in intelligence work. Its research, highlighted in the latest issue of Biometric Technology Today, is at a “pre-commercial, proof-of-concept stage”.

Court Rebuffs FBI Censorship of Critical Manuscript on FBI terrorism programme

A federal court rejected in a May 6 order most of the objections raised by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to publication of a 500-page manuscript critical of the FBI counterterrorism program that was written by retired FBI Special Agent Robert G. Wright.  The manuscript had been submitted for pre-publication review in October 2001.

“In its efforts to suppress this information, the FBI repeatedly changed its position, presented formalistic objections to release of various portions of the documents in question, admitted finally that much of the material it sought to suppress was in fact in the public domain and had been all along, and now concedes that several of the reasons it originally offered for censorship no longer have any validity,” Judge Kessler observed.

HT secrecy news

CIA Says Pelosi Was Briefed on Use of ‘Enhanced Interrogations’

Intelligence officials released documents this evening saying that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was briefed in September 2002 about the use of harsh interrogation tactics against al-Qaeda prisoners, seemingly contradicting her repeated statements over the past 18 months that she was never told that these techniques were actually being used.In a 10-page memo outlining an almost seven-year history of classified briefings, intelligence officials said that Pelosi and then-Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.) were the first two members of Congress ever briefed on the interrogation tactics. Then the ranking member and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, respectively, Pelosi and Goss were briefed Sept. 4, 2002.