Around 1,700 pages on the US government’s use of private contractors for rendition flights have been disclosed in a case involving a business dispute between Richmor Aviation Inc. and SportsFlight Air. As AP reports, the documents “shed new light on the U.S. government’s reliance on private contractors for flights between Washington, foreign capitals, the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and, at times, landing points near once-secret, CIA-run overseas prisons.”

The British press is reporting that ten major human rights and anti-torture organizations have announced they will not be cooperating or participating in the United Kingdom Torture Inquiry, headed by Sir Peter Gibson. The organizations, who sent a letter on August 3 to Sara Carnegie, Solicitor to the Detainee Inquiry, cited a lack of transparency and credibility in the proposed investigation, noting, “Plainly an Inquiry conducted in the way that you describe and in accordance with the Protocol would not comply with Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights.”

The ACLU was in court today to defend a US citizen, who was illegally detained and mistreated by US officials in Kenya and Ethiopia. The citizen, Amir Meshal, a man from New Jersey, was in Mogadishu, Somalia, studying Islam in December 2006 when violence erupted. He fled to Kenya in a boat, spent three weeks in a forest looking for shelter and assistance and was arrested by the joint US-Kenyan-Ethiopian task force.

The Obama administration is using U.S. vessels to hold ghost prisoners. We don’t even know how many. The old bad days of the Bush administration are back, and the details aren’t pretty, and the outstanding questions about what is really going on are many.

Ian Cobain and Richard Norton-Taylor at the UK Guardian are reporting that the widely heralded 2010 announcement of a British government official inquiry into UK torture is facing a boycott by British human rights and attorney groups. The reason is undue secrecy. The handwriting was on the wall for some time on this sham inquiry, but the British human rights and lawyer groups kept fighting to make something real out of it.

It appears that the CIA has labeled its disappearances simply a matter of flawed bureaucracy rather than a clear example of the problems that result when you eliminate due process.

One of the main narratives emerging in coverage of the violence that plagued Egypt’s popular uprising on Wednesday and Thursday is that the Interior Ministry is primarily responsible, as seen for example in the CNN video here. We heard from Al Jazeera English on Thursday that Egypt’s attorney general has banned former Interior Minister Habib al-Adly from leaving the country and has frozen his assets. In this post, I provide some background on the Interior Ministry and how its 1.4 million employees are deployed. But one should not assume that the Interior Ministry is the only other problem once Mubarak is gone. As Jane Mayer has pointed out in detail, Vice President Omar Suleiman, who is now being openly discussed by the US government as the leader of a potential interim government should Mubarak step down, has been the primary conduit for CIA renditions to Egypt for torture.

At one level, the United States has responded to the Wikileaks release of State Department cables by tightening their internal operations, basically looking at their own insufficiencies in protecting information. I think they have an unrealistic expectation of the inherent insecurity of information in a technological age, but at least they’re pointing the finger in the proper direction.

At the other level, the US is straining to find a suitable law with which to charge Julian Assange, who is not an American citizen and who did not engage in this particular practice on American soil.

When the votes were tallied on the night of November 2, 2008, I was at a bar in Moab, Utah – the one rabid Democratic stronghold in a rabidly Republican state – to enjoy the hysteria as Barack Obama was summoned to lead the country out of the disaster of eight years of George W. Bush. People shook hands, hooted, clinked glasses, got drunk, raised fists, wept. The good liberals had elected a visionary Democrat to the presidency, who, blessed with a Democratic majority in Congress, would fashion “hope” and “change” into a palpable policy. I was told that in parts of Brooklyn, my hometown, voters ran through the streets banging pots and pans. The feeling was of religious jubilee – the new dispensation was upon us, and 2009 would mark the emancipation from the old rottenness. Corruption and fraud and deceit and war and oligarchy would be washed from the body politic. It was the beginning of the restoration of the republic.

It’s been almost three weeks now since I wrote about the U.S. decision to revoke the visa of prominent Irish anti-renditions activist Edward Horgan, and not much has changed. The revocation came only a month before Dr. Horgan was slated to visit the United States to attend a major conference at Duke University on the battle against the government’s use of extraordinary rendition. What does the Obama administration fear from the presence of Dr. Horgan? If there is fear, it is on the side of those who politically oppose U.S. policies, and see the revocation of Horgan’s visa as political retribution against policy critics.