The three men picked up in Somalia are wanted for fighting in a group that the US has designated as a “terrorist organization” against forces backed by the US. There is no evidence of the time that they plotted any attacks or were coming to America with al-Shabaab fighters intent on carrying out some kind of nefarious plot. This means a court is going to try and prosecute these men essentially for being on what the US government considers to be the wrong side of a conflict in Somalia.

Hamdan attorney and now Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal says that the issue is not Arar’s torture, but narrow questions of whether Arar can even ask for some relief in the US Courts.

Americans should ponder the meaning of this decision, which explicitly places state interests above individual rights, even when such rights include not being sent to a country that will torture that individual. That such torture was done at the behest of the U.S. government, with written questions given to the torturers, only exacerbates the issue.

Maxwell-Gunther Dispatch.com, the web news site for personnel and interested partisans of Maxwell-Gunter Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama, reported on September 17 that Col. (Dr.) James W. Walter has been awarded the Air Medal “for his meritorious service on delicate assignments providing medical care to enemy detainees.”

From January 2007 to 2009 as the senior detainee movement flight surgeon, he provided 106 combat hours of support to the 14 Joint Task