Thing # 14 - Best of the Web 2.0

I chose Technorati and searched for "law" to see what would come up. Technorati came up with a decision on a Gitmo case that was released today:

Breaking: Court Rules for Gitmo Detainee, Against Pentagon
By Jeralyn, Section Terror Detainees Posted on Tue Oct 09, 2007 at 04:39:29 PM EST Tags: Guantanamo, Detainees (all tags)
A federal judge in Washington, D.C. Gladys Kessler, has granted a preliminary injunction to a Guantanamo detainee. It is believed to be the first time a federal court has said "no" to the Pentagon. The case is RAFIQ BIN BASHIR BIN JALLUL ALHAMI et al., vs. GEORGE W. BUSH, et al.
The opinion, unsealed today, is here.
In a nutshell, the Pentagon wanted to send Gitmo detainee Mohammed Rahman, a Tunisian, back to Tunisia to serve a 20 year sentence for a crime for which he was charged and tried in absentia since his arrival at Guantanamo. He objected, arguing among other grounds, he would be tortured in a Tunesian prison. He filed a habeas action seeking an order preventing his transfer.
From the opinion:
Petitioner Rahman (“Rahman”) is a Tunisian citizen allegedly captured by Pakistani bounty hunters and transferred to the custody of the United States on an undisclosed date. He has been detained in Guantanamo Bay since shortly after his capture. Rahman maintains that Combatant Status Review Tribunal (“CSRT”) proceedings have never resulted in any finding that he is an “unlawful” enemy combatant. On May 15, 2007, the Government provided notice to Petitioners and the Court of its intention to transfer Rahman out of Guantanamo Bay and release him to the Government of Tunisia. A 20-year prison sentence awaits Rahman in Tunisia.
More...
Rahman was tried in absentia under the Tunisian Patriot Act in 2003, convicted and sentenced to 20 years. He has severe health problems.
Rahman has presented evidence that he would face a serious threat of torture if rendered to a Tunisian prison. He cites to reports of international organizations that document torture of prisoners and police brutality in Tunisia. Rahman’s serious health problems, his Tunisian ex poste facto conviction in absentia, and his allegations of the indiscriminate use of torture in Tunisian prisons demonstrate the devastating and irreparable harm he is likely to face if transferred.
The Court noted it has the right to determine its own habeas jurisdiction. In deciding to grant the relief sought in the habeas filing seeking the injunction, Judge Kessler ruled:
In view of the grave harm Rahman has alleged he will face if transferred, it would be a profound miscarriage of justice if this Court denied the Motion based on the Court of Appeals’ decision in Boumediene and the Supreme Court later reversed or modified that decision. At that point, the damage would have been done.
....Finally, the Government suffers absolutely no harm from entry of the Preliminary Injunction, whereas the failure to grant Rahman the interim relief he seeks–-relief necessary to ensure his survival until the Supreme Court rules–-would be irremediable if Boumediene is reversed.
Great work by Rahman's defense lawyers, one of whom is Seton Hall Law Professor Mark Denbeaux.

A decision refused by the Supreme Court today was:
Supreme Court refuses torture case
Posted on October 9th, 2007 (14 minutes ago) by blogger
A German man who says he was abducted and tortured by the CIA as part of the anti-terrorism rendition program lost his final chance Tuesday to persuade U.S. courts to hear his claims.
The Supreme Court rejected without comment an appeal from Khaled el-Masri, effectively endorsing Bush administration arguments that state secrets would be revealed if courts allowed the case to proceed.
El-Masri, 44, a German citizen of Lebanese descent, says he was mistakenly identified as an associate of the Sept. 11 hijackers and was detained while attempting to enter Macedonia on New Year’s Eve 2003.
He claims that CIA agents stripped, beat, shackled, diapered, drugged and chained him to the floor of a plane for a flight to Afghanistan. He says he was held for four months in a CIA-run prison known as the “salt pit” in the Afghan capital of Kabul.
After the CIA determined it had the wrong man, el-Masri says, he was dumped on a hilltop in Albania and told to walk down a path without looking back.
The lawsuit against former CIA director George Tenet, unidentified CIA agents and others sought damages of at least $75,000.
“We are very disappointed,” Manfred Gnijdic, el-Masri’s attorney in Germany, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from his office in Ulm.
“It will shatter all trust in the American justice system,” Gnijdic said, charging that the United States expects every other nation to act responsibly, but refuses to take responsibility for its own actions.
“That is a disaster,” Gnijdic said.
El-Masri’s claims, which prompted strong international criticism of the rendition program, were backed by European investigations and U.S. news reports. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said that U.S. officials acknowledged that el-Masri’s detention was a mistake.
The U.S. government has neither confirmed nor denied el-Masri’s account and, in urging the court not to hear the case, said that the facts central to el-Masri’s claims “concern the highly classified methods and means of the program.”
El-Masri’s case centers on the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” program, in which terrorism suspects are captured and taken to foreign countries for interrogation. Human rights activists have objected to the program.
President Bush has repeatedly defended the policies in the war on terror, saying as recently as last week that the U.S. does not engage in torture.
El-Masri’s lawsuit had been seen as a test of the administration’s legal strategy to invoke the doctrine of state secrets and stop national security suits before any evidence is presented in private to a judge. Another lawsuit over the administration’s warrantless wiretapping program, also dismissed by a federal court on state secrets grounds, still is pending before the justices.
Conservative legal scholar Douglas Kmiec said the Bush White House uses the doctrine too broadly. “The notion that state secrets can’t be preserved by a judge who has taken an oath to protect the Constitution, that a judge cannot examine the strength of the claim is too troubling to be accepted,” said Kmiec, a law professor at Pepperdine University.
The court has not examined the state secrets privilege in more than 50 years.
A coalition of groups favoring greater openness in government says the Bush administration has used the state secrets privilege much more often than its predecessors.
At the height of Cold War tensions between the United States and the former Soviet Union, U.S. presidents used the state secrets privilege six times from 1953 to 1976, according to OpenTheGovernment.org. Since 2001, it has been used 39 times, enabling the government to unilaterally withhold documents from the court system, the group said.
The state secrets privilege arose from a 1953 Supreme Court ruling that allowed the executive branch to keep secret, even from the court, details about a military plane’s fatal crash.
Three widows sued to get the accident report after their husbands died aboard a B-29 bomber, but the Air Force refused to release it claiming that the plane was on a secret mission to test new equipment. The high court accepted the argument, but when the report was released decades later there was nothing in it about a secret mission or equipment.

I liked the ease of searching Technorati, I just put in the Advanced Search box the topic I wanted. It pulled up the latest news on a very hot topic, the detainees at Guantanamo Bay. I would like to see more relevant hits on that topic and not all the junk that has nothing to do with my search term. Technorati could be useful because it is easy to use. It is a little frustrating going through all the other information it pulled up that was irrelevant.