Detainees

- The Department of Justice identified Wednesday the additional political appointees who have done prior legal work on behalf of captives in the war on terror, after GOP lawmakers accused the Obama administration of stacking the department with top officials sympathetic to enemy combatants. Matthew Miller, a senior spokesman at the Justice Department, said the names were not released before because "we will not participate in an attempt to drag people's names through the mud for political purposes."

Baltimore police and correctional officers were searching Wednesday for a man who escaped from the downtown booking center and forced authorities to briefly shut down the Jones Falls Expressway when he apparently ran across the highway. In an unrelated incident at the city detention center, located near the booking center, prison officials said a detainee was stabbed during an altercation. Correctional officials said the detainee who escaped, Maury Figueroa, 29, got through a secured, controlled entryway while working on a sanitation detail.

On Aug. 2, U.S. District Court Judge Gladys Kessler ordered the U.S. Department of Justice to release the names of more than 1,180 individuals the government has detained in connection with its post-Sept. 11 investigation of terrorist activities. It was a victory for our democratic form of government. The 47-page ruling opens by stating a premise most Americans believe: "Secret arrests are a concept odious to a democratic society and profoundly antithetical to the bedrock values that characterize a free and open one such as ours."

The debate over how the U.S. deals with suspected terrorists captured outside the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan flared up again last week when the Obama administration announced charges in New York against a Somali man with alleged ties to militant groups in North Africa and the Middle East. The move directly challenges a ban imposed by Congress last year that prohibits the government from transporting Guantanamo Bay detainees captured overseas to this country for trial in civilian courts.

TALLADEGA, Ala. -- For the first time in nine days, the 148detainees, hostages and inmates at the Talladega federal prison ate a full meal yesterday morning, and doctors examined all nine remaining hostages and several detainees.Warden Roger Scott said that each person inside the prison's maximum security Alpha dorm had hamburger, rice, beans, bread and coffee.He said the Cuban detainees had not asked for food until yesterday. After the meal, prison doctors treated at least one detainee suffering from diabetes and the nine hostages.

A fight that broke out among detainees on a transport van at the Baltimore City Detention Center was brought under control by a an elite response team of correctional officers who happened to be gathered across the street. The team of about a dozen officers was outside Supermax, a maximum-security prison in the 400 block of E. Madison St., when the fight began shortly before 4 p.m. yesterday. A van returning from court with five detainees entered the gate at the detention center. Once the van was inside, two detainees in the vehicle began fighting, according to Barbara Cooper, a spokeswoman for the city detention center.

London -- Britain's highest court sent a stern message to the country's military yesterday, ruling that detainees held in British facilities throughout the world are protected under both the European Convention on Human Rights and British laws. The House of Lords upheld an appeal by the father of Baha Mousa, a 26-year-old detainee in Iraq who died in British custody in 2003. Mousa suffered 93 injuries, including broken ribs and a broken nose, according to lawyers for his family. But the lords, who act as the nation's high court, dismissed the cases of five other Iraqi civilians killed by British troops because the deaths occurred in the streets of Basra and not on British-owned or -occupied territory.

Fort Campbell, Ky. -- A senior enlisted man testified yesterday that he had angrily asked over a military radio why his soldiers had not killed several Iraqi men they had taken into custody during a combat sweep in Iraq last May. Minutes later, three detainees were shot dead. A 101st Airborne Division squad leader, Staff Sgt. Raymond Girouard, is charged with ordering his soldiers to kill the Iraqis. "I don't understand why we have these guys alive!" 1st Sgt. Eric Geressy testified he shouted over the radio shortly before two soldiers in Girouard's squad shot and killed the unarmed Iraqis.

When Jimmie Shannon began working at a residential center for detainees in Baltimore 22 years ago, he wasn't sure where the job would take him. He was, however, certain that he was there for the long haul. "And I'll tell you why," said Shannon, who retired as director of the Volunteers of America Chesapeake Supervised Residential Center. "Because I was looking for a job that I could have an influence on helping people." Shannon, 64, stepped down in July from his position overseeing a staff of 30 at the 95-bed facility, which houses male detainees awaiting trial or serving brief sentences for minor, nonviolent charges.

WASHINGTON - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld insisted yesterday that detainees from Afghanistan were being treated humanely at a U.S. base in Cuba, and rejected charges of ill treatment as exaggeration and "breathless" commentary. "The treatment of the detainees in Guantanamo Bay is proper, it's humane, it's appropriate and it is fully consistent with international conventions," Rumsfeld said during an hourlong Pentagon briefing dominated by questions about the detention of the 158 prisoners at Camp X-Ray.

It opened two decades ago with the pops of champagne corks and an excited proclamation from Maryland's penitentiary warden, who called it a "Godsend. " The official name was the Maryland Correctional Adjustment Center, but everyone called it "Supermax. " Housing the state's worst-of-the-worst, the downtown Baltimore prison didn't do much adjusting or correcting. Its name became synonymous with a gulag, investigated by federal authorities who criticized conditions as inhumane, and targeted by lawsuits, many won by inmates.

State officials formally turned over the keys to a Baltimore corrections facility to the federal government Tuesday, marking a new era in housing U.S. detainees in Maryland that authorities called cheaper, more efficient and more just. The deal also means the promise of $20 million in federal funds toward new state prisons. The Maryland Correctional Adjustment Center —known as "Supermax" when it served as a maximum-security prison for state inmates — will now house only detainees awaiting trial in federal court in Baltimore, for which the state will receive $1.9 million per month.

State and federal public safety officials are expected to unveil Tuesday details of how a former maximum-security prison in Baltimore will be used to consolidate housing for most of Maryland's federal pretrial detainees who, in the past, had been spread across 18 jails in the Mid-Atlantic region. As part of the arrangement, the U.S. Department of Justice will contribute an additional $20 million in federal funding to assist in the construction of new minimum-security facilities in Jessup, officials said.

The warden who oversees the Baltimore Central Booking and Intake Center and seven other corrections employees have been suspended because of the alleged use of excessive force that left a female detainee hospitalized, state corrections officials said. Officials said a 26-year-old woman, who faced minor charges and was detained at the facility Jan. 8, was taken to a local hospital for injuries not considered to be life-threatening after the alleged abuse, according to a release from the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services.

A series of violent incidents at the Baltimore City jail has prompted a lockdown that could remain in effect through the end of the year or longer, according to state officials and inmate advocates. Program providers said they were recently notified that they would not be able to visit the Baltimore City Detention Center at least through the end of December. Advocates are concerned that key services and even holiday visits, such as an annual program in which children are able to visit their mothers on Christmas, could be blocked.

A former high-ranking official who oversaw the state's pretrial detention centers pleaded guilty Thursday to stealing from arrestees money that had been contaminated with body fluids and burying most of it in a junkyard. Benjamin F. Brown, 60, of Crofton, was fired in August from his position of deputy commissioner of the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services' pretrial division. His responsibilities included oversight of Baltimore's Central Booking and Intake Facility, the first stop for people arrested in the city.

WASHINGTON -- Under the glare of world condemnation for abuse of U.S. detainees at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, the Pentagon ordered for the first time yesterday that all of its prisoners in the war on terrorism be treated humanely under international law. It took the highly unusual step of publishing on the Army Web site a new military interrogation manual that prohibits such practices as hooding, using electric shock, depriving detainees of sleep or...

Among the hundreds of men imprisoned by the American military at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, there are those who brashly assert their determination to wage war against what they see as the infidel empire led by the United States. "May God help me fight the unfaithful ones," one Saudi detainee, Ghassan Abdallah Ghazi al-Shirbi, told a military hearing where he was accused of being a lieutenant of al-Qaida. But there are many more, it seems, who sound like Abdur Sayed Rahman, a self-described Pakistani villager who says he was arrested at his modest home in January 2002, flown off to Afghanistan and later accused of being the deputy foreign minister of that country's deposed Taliban regime.

Recently, I was horrified when I read the findings in a new report from Physicians for Human Rights called "Experiments in Torture: Human Subject Research and Evidence in the 'Enhanced' Interrogation Program." This new report uncovered and documented evidence of the involvement of U.S. military and intelligence health professionals in performing experiments on detainees, without their consent, in the custody of the U.S. during the past decade. Such experimentation violates the legal and ethical protections provided by the Nuremberg Code, the Geneva Conventions, federal regulations governing human subject research (known as "The Common Rule")

- The Department of Justice identified Wednesday the additional political appointees who have done prior legal work on behalf of captives in the war on terror, after GOP lawmakers accused the Obama administration of stacking the department with top officials sympathetic to enemy combatants. Matthew Miller, a senior spokesman at the Justice Department, said the names were not released before because "we will not participate in an attempt to drag people's names through the mud for political purposes."