#Detainees held at #Bagram air base in #Afghanistan have lost their latest bid to challenge their imprisonment.

In an 11-page ruling, U.S. District Judge James S. Gwin rejected Zia-ur-Rahman's habeas corpus bid for freedom.

Rahman alleges that the United States military captured him during a night raid of his home in
December 2008 and that he has been held ever since "without charge, without access to counsel, and without any judicial review or independent and impartial administrative process." He says he poses
no threat to the United States or to the coalition forces.

Judge Gwin followed the lead of prior cases in concluding Bagram detainees, unlike those held at Guantanamo Bay, do not enjoy habeas rights. The judge wrote:

"The Court recognizes certain inconsistencies about—and the unsettled nature of—the United States’s intentions for Bagram. But the lack of a certain end-date is not sufficient to extend the writ of habeas corpus to detainees."

 

 

Victims of the #Madoff Ponzi scheme can't sue the #SEC, and on Tuesday a federal judge explained why.

In a 29-page decision, U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman spelled out the reasoning for his March 26 ruling that Dennis J. Donahue, Jr. and two other investors could not sue the Securities and Exchange Commission for their losses to Bernie Madoff. Collectively, the three plaintiffs lost over $2 million. They sued, claiming the federal regulators botched their work.

Concluded Friedman:

"The financial losses suffered by the plaintiffs and other victims of Bernard Madoff’s fraud are undeniably tragic, and a desire to hold the government accountable for the SEC’s egregious and well-documented missteps is understandable. But were the plaintiffs to prevail, 'the SEC would become the guarantor of the investment decisions of individuals who choose to participate in regulated markets.'"

A #judge has dismissed a #lawsuit filed by #Guatemala natives who say they were involuntarily subjected to horrid U.S. medical experiments in the 1940s.

In a 26-page decision, U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton freely acknowledged the horrors inflicted during the tests sponsored by the U.S. Public Health Service and the Pan American Sanitary Bureau. The tests involved the deliberate infection of people with syphilis, gonorrhea, and chancroid; those infected included soldiers, prisoners, patients and prostitutes.

All told, the U.S. medical team intentionally exposed nearly 700 people to syphilis, nearly 600 to gonorrhea, and over 100 to chancroid. Of course, it was all for the finest of motives, to test the effectiveness of innoculations and penicillin.

States Walton:

"The Guatemala Study is a deeply troubling chapter in our Nation’s history. Yet, for the various reasons identified...this Court is powerless to provide any redress to the plaintiffs. Their pleas are more appropriately directed to the political branches of our government, who, if they choose, have the ability to grant some modicum of relief to those affected by the Guatemala Study."

The reasons for dismissal include the fact that that individuals who actually conducted the medical studies have since passed away, as well as the old standby of sovereign immunity.

The full horror is fleshed out in the original complaint, which included this explanation of the scientific method:

"The medical team started with inmates in the national penitentiary, using American taxpayer money to hire prostitutes who tested positive for syphilis or gonorrhea to offer sexual services to inmates. For prostitutes who were uninfected, PHS physicians placed an inoculum of the diseases on their cervixes before the sexual visits."

It gets worse. In mental asylums, where the prostitute disease-vectors were not allowed, doctors were "scraping the head of the patient’s penis with a hypodermic needle and then introducing directly to the raw skin liquid bacteria cultured from the open genital sores of other Guatemalan men."

The Obama administration offered assurances to the judge that officials were "committed to taking the appropriate steps to address the terrible wrong" that occured. Those steps have not yet been spelled out, although the administration has apologized to the Guatemalan government .

A #FOIA bid for #FBI documents on former House Majority Whip Tom DeLay has been rejected by a federal judge.

In a 22-page decision, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon rejected the request by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington to compel the FBI to turn over its investigative files. CREW argued, among other things, that DeLay's public stature and his own concession that he had faced a DoJ investigation overcame his privacy interests.

Besides DeLay's enduring privacy interests, Leon cited the FBI's reasonable desire to keep secret the identities of informants who, in the words of the Justice Department, could face "embarrassment, humiliation or even possible physical harm" if their names were to become public.

#Guantanamo Bay #detainee Tariq Mahmoud Al Sawah could obtain potentially exculpatory documents from the U.S. government, under a federal judge's decision made public Wednesday.

In the 20-page decision initially issued under seal April 20, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly directed government officials to turn over a photograph a witness once used to identify Al Sawah as well as "portions of reports of interrogations of him between June 2002 and October 2002 that relate to the 'surrounding circumstances' of the interrogations, including the use of coercive tactics, or that reflect upon Petitioner's mental condition or deterioration."

The photograph in question was shown to former detainee David Hicks, as U.S. officials built the case that Al Sawah was an explosives instructor for al Qaida. He is a citizen of Bosnia and Egypt.

While siding with the government in rejecting a number of other specific discovery requests, Kollar-Kotelly said she was "unpersuaded" by the government's arguments that Al Sawah's requests should be rejected out of hand because they were untimely or otherwise barred.

Kollar-Kotelly's decision spells the detainee's last name two different ways, both Al Sawah and Alsawam.

A #libel #lawsuit filed by 'Birther' Joseph Farah and others against Esquire magazine has been tossed out, with the judge ruling the disputed Esquire piece amounted to a "satirical swipe" protected by the First Amendment.

In a 20-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer granted Esquire's move to dismiss the libel action undertaken by Mr.  Farah, editor of WorldNetDaily.com, and author Jerome Corsi. Mr. Corsi authored the book entitled "Where’s the Birth Certificate? The Case That Barack Obama Is Not Eligible To Be President."

By prevailing under D.C.'s anti-SLAPP statute, Esquire may be in a position to seek attorneys fees. Good news for Laura Handman and her winning team at Davis Wright Tremain.

Messrs. Farah and Corsi have been serious about pursuing questions about the president's birth status, as the judge enumerates:

"From June to December 2008, WND posted more than 60 Internet items on the issue of the President’s birth certificate. In the period between January 2009 through January 2010, WND posted approximately 280 entries on its website that in some form questioned the legitimacy of the President’s short-form birth certificate. From February 2010 to March 2011,WND posted another approximately 266 articles on the same issue."

Esquire.com fired back with a May 2011 posting, purporting to report that WND had pulled the Corsi book from the shelves for being so bogus. The satire -- which was not, in fact, particularly funny -- was labeled a "libelous smear" by the WND team, which subsequently filed a $120 million lawsuit.

Judge Collyer was unsympathetic, noting in the course of dismissing the lawsuit under D.C.'s anti-SLAPP statute:

"The Blog Post contained an expression of views that communicated to members of the public in connection with an issue of public interest, i.e., the dispute over whether President Obama qualifies by birthright to be President of the United States. Having become such well-known proponents of one position on the issue, Plaintiffs cannot complain that the very intensity of their advocacy also became part of the public debate. Those who speak with loud voices cannot be surprised if they become part of the story."