When the White House press shop sent out its statement criticizing Israel this afternoon — I received mine at 2:14 p.m. — the headline above the statement read: “Statement by White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs on the Approval of Settlement Expansion in Jerusalem.” But the version that appears online has the headline “Statement by White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs on Jerusalem.”

I don’t know what happened here. Israel claims all of Jerusalem as its undivided capitol, but the claim is rejected by the Palestinians and the United Nations, and the U.S. maintains its embassy in Tel Aviv so as to avoid the appearance of taking sides in the dispute. The Gilo area of Jerusalem in question did not fall into Israeli hands until the 1967 war, and so while there’s a dispute in the press over whether it should be called a settlement, the United Nations considers it to be one. From, ahem, Wikipedia:

Gilo is located over the 1967 Green Line. According to HonestReporting, Gilo is not a “settlement” in the most widespread sense of the term, which HonestReporting states “can conjure up images of isolated enclaves in the West Bank”. Gilo lies within Jerusalem’s municipal boundaries and is geographically contiguous to surrounding Jewish neighborhoods that pre-dated the Six Day War. Some media outlets, including The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, Associated Press, Boston Globe and CBS News,have described Gilo as a “neighborhood”.^[11] A CNN memorandum to its staff stated that “We refer to Gilo as a ‘Jewish neighborhood on the outskirts of Jerusalem’… We don’t refer to it as a settlement.” Palestinians and media watch groups feel this is not accurate.^[12] Other media outlets such as the BBC, AFP, Reuters and the Economist describe Gilo as a “settlement”.^[11] The United Nations also describes Gilo as an “Israeli settlement” in East Jerusalem.^[13]

Fiji’s UN Ambassador, Berenado Vunibobo. He hosted a book launch for Bolton and [co-author Brett] Shaefer at the end of October.

This raises eyebrows, shall we say, because Fiji has been under military rule since since December 2006, when Commodore Bainimarama toppled the government. Since then, Human Rights Watch reports that Bainimarama has consolidated his power and detained political opponents.  Fijian troops are even barred from participating in UN Peacekeeping missions.   And, just last week, the self-appointed Bainimarama expelled top diplomats from Australia and New Zealand who criticized his regime.

Remember this the next time someone — oh, John McCain, I’m looking to you — pretends that the Bush administration was ever genuinely interested in human rights. In fairness to Bolton, he never bought in to that flimsy pretext for flexing American military power.

This is not an identical situation to Iraq. Eide says humanitarian services won’t be interrupted — how can he promise that? — and he’s also leaning on Karzai for anti-corruption measures by leveraging the prospect of a U.N. pullback. So perhaps he’s turning the attack into an advantage.

The run off was certain to be more fraudulent than the Aug 20 vote with more ghost poling centers and the same corrupt officials in charge. We are now stuck with the same corrupt and inefficient [incumbent President Hamid] Karzai that we had for the last seven years but now he is also rightly seen as illegitimate by a large segment of the Afghan population and by public opinion in the troop contributing countries. No amount of spin can obscure the fact that we spent upwards of $200 miilion on an election that has been a total fiasco.

The Afghan elections commission, which both Abdullah and Galbraith identified as a body filled with Karzai loyalists, has announced there will be no runoff election on Nov. 7 now that the challenger has pulled out. Galbraith wrote in an op-ed published yesterday that the runoff is was sure to be as disastrous as the first round of voting anyway.

Some aspects of the resolution and Goldstone’s letter cannot be reconciled. The resolution says that “Hamas was able to significantly shape the findings of the investigation mission’s report by selecting and pre-screening some of the witnesses and intimidating others.” Goldstone replied that the allegation is “devoid of truth and I challenge anyone to produce evidence in support of it.”

For a thorough and judicious reading of both the resolution and Goldstone’s letter, see this Ron Kampeas post.

The Ros-Lehtinen/Berman resolution currently has 124 co-sponsors, and unless something changes before close of business today, it should come up for debate on Tuesday. Weil said, “Chairman Berman expects to issue a complete response to Judge Goldstone” before the House considers the resolution.

Update: This item has been changed. I misunderstood Weil to say that the staffers were discussing prospective changes to the resolution text based on Goldstone; in fact, they’re just discussing the letter, and anything beyond that is premature. My apologies to Weil.

Today, gunmen overran and killed six U.N. employees in Kabul. The attack happened in a U.N. guest house used by about 40 foreigners, most of whom work for the U.N. elections commission. The New York Times:

The Taliban claimed responsibility. A Taliban spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid said the attack was meant to warn people not to help in the Nov. 7 presidential runoff election between the incumbent, Hamid Karzai, and his challenger, Abdullah Abdullah.

“We have already informed that anyone who works for the second round will be targeted,” he said. “This is one of the attacks.”

There appears to be no sign that the U.N. will abandon Afghanistan, but the parallel is still ominous.

A federal judge in July said that without his statements given under torture, the government’s case against Jawad, who was around 12 years old when he was arrested for allegedly throwing a hand grenade at U.S. soldiers, was “riddled with holes” and based on wholly unreliable evidence. She ordered that he be freed.

Mark Magnier at the Los Angeles Times tracked down Jawad in Kabul, Afghanistan, where he found a 19-year-old struggling with mood swings as he tries to reconcile himself to having lost his adolescent and teen years to confinement and mistreatment in a U.S. prison. Jawad was one of many detainees who tried to commit suicide at Guantanamo.

Jawad tells Magnier that he now suffers from headaches, remains haunted by prison memories, and worries about those he left behind, who had become a sort of surrogate family. About 220 detainees are still at Guantanamo Bay, which may or may not be closed in January, as President Obama promised shortly after he took office.

Jawad reportedly asked Magnier to tell President Obama, the United Nations or anyone else who could do anything to help the prisoners who remain there. “People there are sick,” he told Magnier. “They should be treated. They should be freed.”

Although UNICEF and some other civil groups are trying to help Jawad get counseling, education and job training, neither the U.S. nor the Afghan government has provided Jawad with any assistance.

A Defense Department official told the L.A. Times that financial assistance for former Guantanamo detainees would cost too much, and “we don’t want to give them money to buy equipment that could come back to hurt us.”

The U.N. has no choice but to address this, which is surely Galbraith’s intent. It’s not just the credibility of Hamid Karzai that’s on the line anymore.

Notice, as well, this reference to where the Obama administration stands on the question. This is from a description of how Galbraith attempted to stop Afghan election officials from counting so-called ghost polling centers in the balloting:

Along with ambassadors from the United States and key allies, I met with the Afghan ministers of defense and the interior as well as the commission’s chief election officer…

And such is the way that Galbraith enlists Amb. Karl Eikenberry as an ally.

Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's alleged driver, was held in Cuba at Guantanamo Bay prison camp like these detainees. (Department of Defense photo by Petty Officer 1st class Shane T. McCoy, U.S. Navy)

As the pressure grows on the Obama administration to close the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay by January, so too does the risk that some of the Guantanamo detainees cleared for release could be returned to countries where they’ll face persecution or torture, say human rights experts. The men remaining at Guantanamo mostly come from countries that are notorious for torturing prisoners. And the Obama administration has not ruled out returning the men to those places, even though, labeled “enemy combatants” by the Bush administration, they could face retaliation back home.

Meanwhile, it remains unclear whether the courts can step in and stop the administration from returning prisoners to countries known to torture. In April, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the federal courts have no authority to interfere with where the administration wants to send a Guantanamo detainee. The lawyers on that case, Kiyemba v. Obama, plan to appeal to the Supreme Court this month, but in the meantime, men from Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and other countries notorious for abusing prisoners could be returned to those countries over their objections. Their lawyers are now scrambling to try to stop that.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court deferred its decision in a related case on whether to review a ruling that judges have no authority to order Guantanamo detainees released into the United States. The court’s punt came in the case of 13 Uighurs, the Chinese Muslim prisoners who have been cleared for release by the U.S. government but cannot return to China for fear of persecution there. But while the Uighurs in that case have been denied the right to be released into the United States, in a way, they’re lucky; the Obama administration has said it will not return them to China.

To be sure, the administration has also promised not to send any detainees to countries where they’re likely to be tortured. But it has also said that in some situations it will accept “diplomatic assurances” from those countries that it will treat the returning detainees humanely. These are, essentially, promises from a torturing country that it won’t torture a particular individual being sent there. But how reliable are those “assurances” really?

Human rights advocates say they’re not at all.

“The record on diplomatic assurances is extremely poor,” said Joanne Mariner, Director of the Terrorism and Counterterrorism program at Human Rights Watch. “It’s rare we see the text of the assurances, so it’s not clear what they consist of, and whether there’s a post-return monitoring mechanism. But there are some very well known cases in which people were sent to Egypt and Syria with diplomatic assurances, and then were tortured.”

Judy Rabinovitz, Deputy Director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, agrees. “We think there are real problems inherently with the reliability of such assurances and the ability to monitor them,” she said. After all, she noted, most of these countries have signed the United Nations Convention Against Torture, but they’re still torturing prisoners. “When you have a country that’s notorious for torturing, how can diplomatic assurances be reliable? They know they’re not supposed to torture. They’ve signed a treaty. How is an assurance worth more than a treaty?”

One of the most infamous recent cases of torture following assurances from a foreign government involved the Canadian citizen Maher Arar, arrested at JFK airport and sent to Syria for interrogation, supposedly with diplomatic assurances that he’d be treated humanely. Arar says he was brutally tortured there. Human Rights watch has released several reports on the increasing reliance of the United States and other countries on such “diplomatic assurances,” and documented that in many cases, they have not worked. What’s more, it’s often impossible to know whether an individual returned has been tortured, since the country that returns the prisoner has no credible way of determining how he was treated, and both countries have an incentive to say the detainee was treated humanely.

Technically, the United States is bound by the Convention Against Torture and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights not to send people to countries where they face a real risk of torture. (The Bush administration argued those laws did not apply to prisoners held abroad.) But as Mariner explained, that often leads those countries to rely on “diplomatic assurances” to say the risk has been diminished. That’s exactly what the Bush administration said it did when it sent terror suspects for questioning under its “extraordinary rendition” program, and many of those suspects claim they were subsequently tortured.

The choice, says Mariner, is either to trust the discretion of the executive branch, or to have some sort of system for deciding the legitimacy of the prisoner’s fears. The D.C. Circuit ruling eliminated the possibility of the federal courts playing that role. That ruling took effect in early September, clearing the way for the U.S. government to begin to return Guantanamo detainees to countries known to torture prisoners.

The administration announced earlier this week that it has cleared 75 Guantanamo detainees for release. The list includes nine prisoners from Tunisia, seven from Algeria, four from Syria, three from Libya, three from Saudi Arabia, two each from Uzbekistan, Egypt, the West Bank and Kuwait, and one each from Azerbaijan and Tajikistan. None of these countries has a strong human rights record.

About 30 of the prisoners cleared for release fear return to their home countries, said Mariner.

Ahmed Belbacha is one such prisoner at risk. He fled his home country of Algeria in 1999 during a civil war between government forces and a militant Islamic group. A former soldier in the Algerian army, he was at risk from both sides. He sought asylum in the UK, where he worked cleaning rooms in a hotel. In 2001, however, while traveling in Pakistan where he was offered free Islamic education, he was captured by the Pakistani Army and turned over to the U.S. military shortly after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. The U.S. military deemed Belbacha an “enemy combatant” because he had attended prayer services led by a fundamentalist sheik, travelled on a fake French passport and received small arms training in Afghanistan. Belbacha was sent to the prison at Guantanamo Bay in 2002. But in 2007, the Bush administration decided that he did not pose a threat and cleared him for release. But by this time, Belbacha was afraid to go home; he fears retaliation and torture from both the Algerian government and radical Islamists.

In 2007, Belbacha’s lawyers told the court that they’d learned that the U.S. government planned to return their client to Algeria, and filed an emergency motion asking the court to prevent his transfer. The court ruled it did not have the power to do that, and Belbacha appealed. The court of appeals held off deciding the case though, while waiting for the Supreme Court to rule on whether detainees have the right to challenge their detention in federal courts. (It ruled they did last year in Boumediene v. Bush.) In the meantime, the court temporarily enjoined the U.S. government from sending Belbacha to Algeria.

Then, in April, the D.C. Circuit ruled in Kiyemba v. Obama that the courts have no authority over where the government sends the men. Now, Belbacha is worried again, and his lawyers are scrambling to keep the court from issuing an order that will allow the government to transfer Belbacha to Algeria. His lawyers say he’s now even more likely to be tortured by the Algerian government if he returns there because his struggle to avoid transfer there has drawn international attention and support from human rights groups. As his lawyers put in their brief to the court: “He believes that his strenuous and widely-publicized efforts to avoid transfer to Algeria place him in the government’s crosshairs.”

Belbacha’s lawyers have filed a motion with the court asking that his case be “held in abeyance” until the lawyers handling the Kiyemba case have an opportunity to file a petition to the Supreme Court, and then until the Supreme Court decides whether to hear the case. Holding the case off would leave in effect a June 2008 district court order prohibiting the government from transferring him to Algeria.

The Department of Justice, meanwhile, is vigorously fighting to lift that order, arguing that the D.C. Circuit has already decided that the courts don’t have authority to prevent a detainee’s transfer, and that the government has promised not transfer any detainee to a country where “he is more likely than not to be tortured.”

That’s not sufficient assurance for Belbacha and his lawyers, however. “The U.S. has not assured Belbacha that he won’t be sent back,” said David Remes, Executive Director of Appeal for Justice and a lawyer for Belbacha. As the law stands now, there is no court or independent arbiter to whom Belbacha can appeal.

Human rights advocates say that Algeria’s abusive treatment of two other prisoners recently returned there by the UK raises serious concerns. According to Human Rights Watch, the men were reportedly threatened and beaten in custody. Statements coerced from them were used against them at trial, and both were sentenced to several years’ imprisonment.

Lawyers for Guantanamo detainees from Libya and Tajikistan who similarly fear persecution if returned home have also asked federal judges to at least temporarily prevent their clients’ transfer until the Supreme Court can consider whether courts have any authority over the administration’s decisions about where to send them.

The Obama administration, in another context, has similarly indicated that it is willing to send people to countries known to torture. In making recommendations on the transfer of terror suspects to other countries for interrogation – commonly known as renditions – an Obama administration task force recommended that renditions be permitted to countries known to practice torture, so long as the administration obtains assurances that the suspect will be treated humanely. Although the Obama administration has promised to monitor and enforce those assurances, Human Rights Watch has found that “monitoring is no panacea” because the prisoners cannot be guaranteed confidentiality. Their reports of abuse to foreign monitors would be easily traceable to them, placing them at serious risk of retaliation.

Reaction was swift from the campaign of Abdullah Abdullah, the former Afghan foreign minister who finished second to Mr. Karzai in the Aug. 20 election and who would face him again if the recount and fraud review were to lead to a runoff. “By firing someone like Peter Galbraith from his post, it is the first sign that fraud is victorious over the law,” said Salih Mohammad Registani, the deputy campaign manager for Mr. Abdullah.

Over the last several days, the U.S. has joined the U.N. in acquiescing to the election fraud.