UK's Anti-Terrorism Legislation Censured

In a unanimous ruling, the European Court of Human Rights condemns Britain's anti-terrorism legislation arguing that it disrespects the private life of an individual.

All the seven judges censuring the UK legislation said that police searches, without reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing, breach the complainants' right to their private life under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, its statement said on Tuesday.

That the police are empowered to search the person's clothing and personal belongings, and having personal information exposed to public view, amounts to a clear interference and could also cause "humiliation and embarrassment" to the individual, noted the statement.'

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U.S. Holds Journalist Without Charges in Iraq

Reuters cameraman Ibrahim Jassam has been held since September. The U.S. military rejected a court order to release him, saying he is a 'high security threat.' No evidence has been presented.

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Camp Bucca: Iraq's Guantánamo Bay

It may seem hard to imagine a place where people incarcerated by the US military have fewer rights than they do in Guantánamo Bay.Welcome to Iraq.It is just after 4 am, and hundreds of Iraqis are lining up to visit their relatives outside Camp Bucca, which in August held about 18,000 detainees. Near the Kuwaiti border, Bucca shimmers in the predawn of the southern Iraqi desert, a beacon of light in a country where electricity is on for no more than twelve hours a day. It is the US military's largest detention center in Iraq. The total number of those officially in US custody in Iraq has fluctuated between a low of 7,200 and more than 26,000 since 2005.

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Peers Throw Out 42-Day Detention

The government's plans to extend terror detention limits to 42 days have been heavily defeated in the House of Lords.
Peers voted to keep the current 28-day limit on pre-charge detentions by 309 votes to 118 - a majority of 191.
Later the home secretary said it would be dropped from the counter-terrorism bill but would be in a new bill to be made law "should the worst happen''

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And what is " Should the worst happen" Mrs. Home Secretary?
Already got something lined up for us?

42-Day Detention Dropped As Unworkable

Gordon Brown is preparing for a humiliating climbdown over his proposal to hold terrorist suspects for 42 days after being told that it will be defeated in the House of Lords.
Ministers admit privately that there is not “a cat in Hell’s chance” of the legislation, which returns to the Lords this week, being passed into law.

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Government Says Six Years Not Long Enough to Prepare Evidence

Imagine being seized in Afghanistan or Pakistan, where you were, perhaps, a completely innocent man, sold for a bounty, or a Muslim soldier, fighting other Muslims in a civil war whose roots lay in the resistance to the Soviet occupation of the 1980s, which was partly funded by the United States.
Then imagine that, both during and after being treated with appalling brutality by US forces, you are given no opportunity to establish whether you are an innocent man seized by mistake, a soldier, or the victim of bounty hunters, and you are, instead, flown halfway around the world to an experimental offshore prison, where you are interrogated about your connections to al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.
At no point are you offered the protection of the Geneva Conventions (to which your captors are a signatory), which were designed to prevent the "humiliating and degrading treatment" of prisoners seized during wartime, and also to prevent their interrogation (prisoners may be questioned, but any form of "physical or mental coercion" is prohibited). Moreover, if you struggle to answer the questions put to you -- perhaps because you know nothing about al-Qaeda or Osama bin Laden -- you are not only interrogated relentlessly, you are also subjected to an array of "enhanced interrogation techniques," which contravene the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, to which your captors are also a signatory.

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