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."

The hunger strike by inmates protesting conditions at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility in Cuba is forcing the Obama administration to revisit its policy of indefinite detention without trial for terrorist suspects. It's about time. As Mr. Obama noted Tuesday, the current policy is legally and morally unsustainable, and continuing it damages America's standing around the world without making the country any safer. The president needs to finally make good on his 2009 pledge to close Guantanamo, repatriate low-risk detainees to prisons in their home countries and bring the rest to the U.S. for trial.

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."

As a teenager in the mid-1990s, he moved with his parents to the United States from Pakistan. The family sought and received political asylum. They settled in Baltimore County and operated a gas station. The boy attended Owings Mills High School. His cricket skills helped him excel at baseball, the quintessential American game. "He always seemed like such a nice young man," said the chair of the English department. The nice young man graduated in 1999. He picked up a job as a data administrator with the Maryland Office of Planning.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

"Zero Dark Thirty," the film about the hunt for and killing of Osama bin Laden, got a fresh infusion of buzz over the weekend when outgoing Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta confirmed again that enhanced interrogation techniques aided the effort to find bin Laden. "Some of it came from ... interrogation tactics that were used," he said. "But the fact is, we put together most of that intelligence without having to resort to that. I think we could have gotten bin Laden without that. " In other words, the movie exaggerates the role played by enhanced interrogation techniques -- torture to some -- but they did have a role in the hunt for bin Laden.

Gov. Martin O'Malley said that plans for a new youth detention facility in Baltimore are "moving forward" and described the current building as "a very old and decrepit facility. " Momentum is building in Annapolis to fund a new 120-bed jail for youth who are charged as adults, which has ignited anger from activists who decry conditions at the facility but say the state should be building schools for children, not prisons. "When we try to address the issue, it becomes a political football," O'Malley said Monday morning on WTOP-radio's "Ask the Governor" program.

Maryland National Guard Sgt. Darren Lebowitz is leaving soon for Afghanistan as many U.S. troops return home. Lebowitz, who has served three tours in Iraq, volunteered for the mission. "I'm a glutton for punishment," he said as he trained Tuesday at this National Guard installation in Central Pennsylvania. As the United States and its coalition partners draw forces out of Afghanistan, more than 250 Maryland guardsmen are heading in. Members of three military police units are preparing for deployments to Kandahar and Bagram, where they will work with Afghan forces, provide security and take on any other assignments that might arise.

Youths detained at the Baltimore City Detention Center were moved over the weekend into a building that has air conditioning, state officials confirmed. The move comes amid increasing concerns over conditions for juveniles charged as adults at the city jail. While state officials who oversee the facility said it was planned as part of renovations at an annex building where juveniles were held, they also said those plans were accelerated based on what was best for the youths. The living quarters will continue to be a dorm-style arrangement in a 50-bed housing unit in the Wyatt Building, formerly used for an adult drug treatment program.

The U.S. Justice Department's civil rights division has not visited the Baltimore City Detention Center in nearly two years, despite an agreement with the state to oversee reforms at the facility. The jail's handling of juveniles has been a continuing concern for the Justice Department, and attorneys and youth advocates say changes made last year have exacerbated conditions. The Baltimore Sun has reported that youths describe regular attacks among detainees and lax supervision by correctional officers.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.