Military personnel threw away, and ultimately burned, confiscated Bibles that were printed in the two most common Afghan languages amid concern they would be used to try to convert Afghans, a Defense Department spokesman said Tuesday. The unsolicited Bibles sent by a church in the United States were confiscated about a year ago at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan because military rules forbid troops of any religion from proselytizing while deployed there, Lt. Col. Mark Wright said. Such religious outreach can endanger American troops and civilians in the devoutly Muslim nation, Wright said.

“The decision was made that it was a ‘force protection’ measure to throw them away, because, if they did get out, it could be perceived by Afghans that the U.S. government or the U.S. military was trying to convert Muslims,” Wright told CNN on Tuesday. Troops at posts in war zones are required to burn their trash, Wright said. The Bibles were written in the languages Pashto and Dari. This decision came to light recently, after the Al Jazeera English network aired video of a group prayer service and chapel sermon that a reporter said suggested U.S. troops were being encouraged to spread Christianity.

The military denied that earlier this month, saying much in the video was taken out of context. “This was irresponsible and dangerous journalism sensationalizing year-old footage of a religious service for U.S. soldiers on a U.S. base and inferring that troops are evangelizing to Afghans,” Col. Gregory Julian said. The military says a soldier at Bagram received the Bibles and didn’t realize he wasn’t allowed to hand them out. In the Al Jazeera video, which shows the Bibles at the prayer service, an unnamed soldier says members of his church raised money for them. The chaplain later corrected the soldier and confiscated the Bibles, Wright said.

Military officers considered sending the Bibles back to the church, he said, but they worried the church would turn around and send them to another organization in Afghanistan — giving the impression that they had been distributed by the U.S. government. That could lead to violence against troops or U.S. civilians, Wright said. Al Jazeera English, a Qatar-based international news service, said its reporters tried to get a response from military officials for its story but were unable to do so. The U.S. military air base at Bagram is home to thousands of troops from all branches of the U.S. military. The vast majority of the troops do not leave the base and are in various support roles for U.S. troops across Afghanistan.

“Perhaps most powerfully, the prosecutors showed the court the fake bombs, built by the F.B.I”

Four men were convicted on Monday on charges of planting what they believed were bombs outside synagogues in the Bronx and plotting to fire missiles at military planes.

The case was widely seen as an important test of the entrapment defense. It turned on the role of a government informer who spent several months secretly recording conversations with the men that included plans for mass violence and anti-Semitic comments, along with their moments of hesitation and concerns about hurting women or children. Prosecutors said that the plot revealed the dangers of homegrown terrorism, and that the informer, posing as a Pakistani terrorist, had presented the defendants with an opportunity to commit violence to which they were predisposed. But defense lawyers said the case crossed the line into entrapment. They said the informer, on behalf of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, dangled offers of money and lured impoverished men with no ties to international terrorism into a plot they could never have dreamed up on their own.

In the end, the entrapment defense failed, as it has in every other terrorism trial since Sept. 11, 2001. About 2:30 p.m. on Monday, the jury forewoman stood and began reading the verdicts with a wavering voice. “Guilty,” she said, 30 times, as the girlfriend of one of the defendants sobbed in the gallery. The four men — Onta Williams, Laguerre Payen, James Cromitie and David Williams IV — will be sentenced on March 24. Each could face life in prison. Mr. Cromitie and David Williams were convicted on all eight counts of the indictment. Onta Williams and Mr. Payen, who met the informer late in the investigation, were found not guilty on one of the counts: attempting to kill officers and employees of the United States.

All the men were quiet as the verdicts were read. Mr. Cromitie’s lawyer, Vincent L. Briccetti, patted his client on the shoulder, while a few seats away, David Williams wore a grim smile. After the jury left the room, Mr. Williams’s aunt, Alicia McWilliams-McCollum, stood and yelled obscenities, saying there was no justice. Court officers told her to leave. In an interview a few hours after the verdict, one juror indicated that the deliberations, which lasted eight days, had been taxing. “We considered that what they did was a serious crime. We also considered that they didn’t have that kind of background,” said the juror, who insisted that his name not be published. “We took our time. We dug deep.”

The events that led to the convictions started in June 2008, with a meeting outside a mosque in Newburgh, N.Y., between the informer, Shahed Hussain, and Mr. Cromitie. That day, prosecutors said, Mr. Cromitie sparked the interest of the authorities by saying he wanted to “do something” to America. Over the next 11 months the three other defendants joined a plot that included leaving bombs outside two synagogues in the Riverdale section of the Bronx and firing Stinger missiles at military transport planes at Stewart International Airport. In a statement, Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, said Monday: “Homegrown terrorism is a serious threat, and today’s convictions affirm our commitment to do everything we can to protect against it. The defendants in this case agreed to plant bombs and use missiles they thought were very real weapons of terrorism. We are safer today as a result of these convictions.”

Mark B. Gombiner, who represented Onta Williams, called the notion that citizens were safer “pure nonsense,” adding, “It does not reflect anything that happened during the investigation and prosecution.” Mr. Gombiner and the other defense lawyers had tried to make their cross-examination of the informer, Mr. Hussain, the centerpiece of their case. For days in court, they questioned him about his criminal history, his financial dealings and his life in Pakistan, saying inconsistencies in his testimony showed he was a liar. They said he felt compelled to deliver a conviction to satisfy his government handlers and expected to be rewarded with citizenship.

Throughout the investigation, the defense lawyers said, it was Mr. Hussain, not the defendants, who steered the conversation toward religious justifications for violence. Karen J. Greenberg, executive director of the Center on Law and Security at New York University, who sat through much of the trial, said: “If this wasn’t an entrapment case, then we’re not going to see an entrapment case in a terrorism trial. We really need to think about ideology as part of entrapment. In this case, they took people who might or might not commit hate crimes, and led them along the path to jihad.”

But the prosecutors said most of the recordings showed the men were ready to act. In one of the recordings, Mr. Cromitie, who was especially voluble, said he wanted to make a “big noise.” Jurors saw recordings of the men inspecting inert bombs and Stinger missile launchers, and scouting Stewart Airport, where they planned to fire missiles at C-5 Galaxy military transport planes. Perhaps most powerfully, the prosecutors showed the court the fake bombs, built by the F.B.I., that Mr. Cromitie left in cars outside the synagogues. They were bundled into bags with 500 ball bearings, which, prosecutors said, were intended to kill.

Colin Moynihan contributed reporting.

An Act of Terrorism? Blackwater Sniper Shot Dead Three Iraqi Guards At Iraqi Media Center in February

Steve Fainaru of the Washington Post discusses his new account of the February killings. After a brief investigation, the U.S. government concluded that the actions of Blackwater fell within approved rules governing the use of force, but the Iraqi police described the shootings as an “act of terrorism.” [includes rush transcript] Legal and political woes continue for the private military firm Blackwater. Iraq’s Interior Minister announced this week he would authorize raids against Western military firms to ensure compliance with Iraqi weaponry laws. Scrutiny of the private military industry in Iraq has peaked following the killing of seventeen Iraqis by Blackwater guards in September.

Meanwhile, here in the United States, the Bush administration has shown its first audible signs of distancing itself from Blackwater. On Tuesday, the White House quietly missed a deadline to weigh in on a wrongful death case brought by families of three American servicemembers who died when a Blackwater aircraft crashed in Afghanistan. Blackwater CEO Erik Prince, a major Republican donor, said: “After the President has said that as commander-in-chief he is ultimately responsible for contractors on the battlefield, it is disappointing that his administration has been unwilling to make that interest clear before the courts.” Meanwhile, the Washington Post has * revealed* new details of a little-noticed killing by Blackwater operatives in Iraq earlier this year. On February 7th, Blackwater forces shot dead three guards working for the state-funded Iraqi Media Network in Baghdad. An Iraqi police report described the shootings as an “act of terrorism.” The police concluded that Blackwater opened fire without any provocation.

But the U.S. government concluded that the actions of the Blackwater guards fell within approved rules governing the use of force. The Iraqi Media Network sought to sue Blackwater in an Iraqi court, but an Iraqi judge rejected the petition, citing a 2004 law signed by L. Paul Bremer, the former head of the U.S. occupation. To date, neither Blackwater nor the U.S. embassy have apologized or paid any compensation to the victims’ families. Steve Fainaru is the Washington Post reporter who wrote this new account of the February killings.We contacted Blackwater to invite them on the program, but they did not respond to our requests.Steve Fainaru, foreign correspondent for the Washington Post, specializing in private security issues.

An Iraqi police report described the shootings as “an act of terrorism” and said Blackwater “caused the incident.” The media network concluded that the guards were killed “without any provocation.” – Washington Post

PARIS, May 25 — When the nightmare finally ended — seven years at Guantanamo Bay, two years of force-feeding through a tube in his right nostril, the long struggle to proclaim his innocence before a judge, and finally 10 days of hospitalization — Lakhdar Boumediene celebrated with pizza for lunch in a little Paris dive. “When we were at the restaurant,” Boumediene said Monday, shortly after the meal that marked his release from doctors’ care and reentry into normal society, “I told my wife that for the first time I felt like a man again, tasting things, picking things up in my fingers, eating lunch with my wife and my two daughters.” Boumediene, 43, had been in a French military clinic under physical and psychological observation since his arrival in Paris on May 15 aboard a U.S. government aircraft that carried him — in shackles — away from the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

In what he describes as an ugly mistake by U.S. authorities, Boumediene, an Algerian citizen, had spent seven years there as terrorism suspect No. 10005. Later he became the plaintiff in a landmark Supreme Court case, Boumediene v. Bush, that in June 2008 gave Guantanamo detainees the right to seek judicial review of their imprisonment. Boumediene, in a lengthy interview in a Paris suburb, said he joined the case to represent the scores of prisoners held at Guantanamo charged with being “enemy combatants” and having no power to challenge the accusation in court. Later ordered released by a U.S. district judge in Washington, he represents something new: dozens of prisoners whom the U.S. government has decided to release but cannot, because no other country will take them in and most Americans do not want them on U.S. soil.

At the request of the Obama administration, France agreed to take in Boumediene but appears reluctant to accept any more detainees. Britain accepted one released Guantanamo prisoner in February and has promised to take in a second. In all, human rights activists say, Washington is looking for homes for about 60 such prisoners, swept up without trial in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and now judged fit for release. Boumediene’s version of events is impossible to verify independently. But he described himself as collateral damage in those sweeps, an aid worker in Bosnia wrenched from his life and, he said, interrogated endlessly about something about which he had no knowledge.

Boumediene, who at the time was an aid worker with the Red Crescent, was arrested in Bosnia in October 2001 along with five other Algerians accused of plotting to blow up the U.S. and British embassies in Sarajevo, charges that were later withdrawn. In January 2002, the six were turned over to U.S. officials and flown to Guantanamo, despite rulings by several Bosnian courts that there was no reason to deport them. U.S. interest was high because one of the six Algerians, Belkacem Bensayah, was accused by U.S. investigators of being an al-Qaeda operative in Bosnia. Moreover, Bosnian police had discovered a piece of paper in Bensayah’s home with a handwritten number and a name that corresponded to that of a senior al-Qaeda leader in Afghanistan.

Boumediene, in the interview, said he did not know Bensayah well but that, as a fellow Algerian, Bensayah had come to Boumediene’s Red Crescent office seeking help for his family. In addition, he said, Bensayah’s wife sought assistance after her husband’s arrest, and Boumediene provided money for a lawyer. Boumediene said U.S. officials concluded that those connections linked him to al-Qaeda’s activities in Bosnia. In addition, Boumediene said, a stint in Pakistan in the early 1990s aroused the suspicions of U.S. investigators and may have landed his name on a watch list shared by Algerian security services with their U.S. counterparts.

The Alaska-based reporter who was briefly handcuffed and detained by security detail for Alaska Senate candidate Joe Miller offered additional details about his ordeal in an interview with The Huffington Post on Monday. Tony Hopfinger, who edits the website Alaska Dispatch, said that the roughly 25 minutes that he was detained in a empty corridor with only one private security guard watching him, was intimidating, maddening and cause for concern about the treatment of the press by political candidates. “Getting handcuffed by somebody you don’t know at a public school, no one had said it was a private event or cast it that way, I mean intimidated, yeah [I was]. But I guess I was more pissed off. Miller, I felt, was going to answer my question on the reprimand part,” said Hopfinger.

“I think, just like in other parts of the country, the media is finding itself having a hard time doing its job in this political cycle because, whenever we ask questions, there are certain candidates out there who decry ‘lamestream media’ or whatever. Mr. Miller has had plenty of time to answer questions. He has been given plenty of opportunities. He somehow believes he shouldn’t be questioned about his background and yet he wants a job in six years, to a post where there are only 100 in the entire country, and we are not supposed to ask questions about anything of his past. There is a little bit of shoot the messenger. It is happening up here, and other parts of the country. There are certain candidates who just want to turn this around and act like it’s the media causing the problem. That has always been there, that element. It is just more ramped up this political cycle.”

On Sunday, Miller’s private security guards handcuffed and detained Hopfinger after he tried to ask the candidate about his time at the Fairbanks Northstar Borough. Miller was accused of using borough equipment in the unsuccessful 2008 attempt to oust state Republican Party Chairman Randy Ruedrich. Hopfinger said that he followed Miller through the school hallway, hoping to get an on-the-record explanation about the issue. At some point, he said, he found himself alone among reporters and “surrounded by a bunch of security guard types and Miller supporters.” Miller never told him to stop asking questions, he said. But his backers did.

“I figure I’m at a public school and they are telling me I’m trespassing,” he said. “And it was just a matter of seconds, I’m challenging this trespass issue and the next thing you know they got me detained and I’m in handcuffs and they put me in another corridor of the building. So for 25 minutes no one even knew where the hell I was… They said we were going to call the police and I said, ‘Fine, call the police.'”Hopfinger said that both he and his paper have not yet ruled out considering legal remedies. But his preference is to let Miller’s actions “speak for themselves.” “Right now, we will look at whatever options we need to look at,” he said. “I think really, at the end of the day, I would just prefer to see Mr. Miller .”Miller’s campaign put out a statement after the incident saying that Hopfinger “physically assaulted another individual and made threatening gestures and movements towards the candidate” – charges denied by Hopfinger.

The Alaska Republican’s office also has said they didn’t know that Hopfinger was a “blogger” (he’s not, the Dispatch is a for-profit start-up news website that employs four reporters, two of whom have won Pulitzer Prizes for their reporting).

Miller has been critical of the Alaskan media, saying that they focus on irrelevant issues and he has instead opted to appear frequently on Fox News. “We’ve drawn a line in the sand. You can ask me about background, you can ask me about personal issues — I’m not going to answer,” Miller said recently. He has been especially critical of the Alaska Dispatch, saying “one of the major investors, publishers in that blog is a max donor to the Murkowski campaign.” Miller is the lone candidate in the Senate race refusing to attend the site’s sponsored debate (which is taking place, ironically, tonight).

Minister for Immigration, Damian Green, introduced the report stage and third reading of the Identity Documents Bill in the Commons. The Bill passed its remaining stages.

• Video and Audio: Identity Documents Bill, remaining stages 
• Commons Hansard: Identity Documents Bill, remaining stages
• Bills before Parliament: Identity Documents Bill
• Bills before Parliament 2010-11
• About Parliament: Passage of a Bill

Report stage

What happens at report stage?

What happens after report stage?

A British man is among tens of thousands of people imprisoned without charge in Iraq, according to an Amnesty International report.  The human rights group said 30,000 detainees were being held without trial in Iraq, and criticised the Iraqis and the US for violating prisoners’ rights.  Ramze Shihab Ahmed, 68, a dual UK-Iraqi national, has been detained in Iraq since December 2009.  His wife claims he has been tortured in prisons in Baghdad. Rabiha al-Qassab said her husband had suffered electric shocks to his genitals and suffocation by plastic bag, and called on the government to increase its efforts to secure his release or push for a fair trial.

“What my husband has suffered at the hands of his interrogators is inhumane and sickening.  “I’m desperately worried about him. He already had health problems before all this,” she said.  “I’d like to see the UK government stepping up efforts to get Ramzi released or at least given a fair trial if there’s anything that could reasonably be held against him.  “The Iraqi authorities should either try or release him – not go through this disgusting charade of torture and false confessions.” Mr Ahmed was arrested after travelling to Iraq in an attempt to free his detained son Omar.  His whereabouts were unknown until March when he was able to make a short phone call to his wife in London.  Amnesty said the use of torture to extract confessions in Iraq was routine – and the confessions were frequently used as evidence in court.

The group also claimed several detainees had died while in prison, apparently as the result of torture or ill-treatment. Malcolm Smart, Amnesty International’s Middle East and north Africa director, said the Iraqi authorities had “signally failed to take effective action to stop torture and punish the perpetrators, despite overwhelming evidence to its use”.  “They have a duty to investigate, to hold perpetrators accountable and bring them to justice, and to provide reparations to the victims.

“The Iraqi authorities’ failure to take such concrete steps sends a message that such violations are tolerated and can be repeated,” he said. Amnesty is appealing to Foreign Secretary William Hague asking him to increase pressure upon the Iraqi authorities to intervene in Mr Ahmed’s case. The Foreign Office said they were granted access to Mr Ahmed in April. He is now being visited regularly.  A Foreign Office spokesman said: “We are very concerned by Mr Ahmed’s allegations of mistreatment, and raised them with the Iraqi authorities at a senior level as soon as we were aware of them.  “We have repeatedly made clear to the Iraqi authorities how seriously we take such allegations, and have requested that they be investigated.

“We expect the Iraqi government to follow through on its commitment to investigate these allegations.”  Amnesty said that couple escaped from Iraq several years ago. Mr Ahmed was part of a failed 1992 plot to oust Saddam Hussain.  About 10,000 of the 30,000 detainees being held without trial in Iraq had been recently transferred from US custody, following the end of US combat operations in the country. The US handed over control of the last remaining military-run detention facility to the Iraqi authorities in July.  Amnesty said it did so without proper assurances that prisoners’ rights would be respected.