Prisoners

Hozaifa Parhat, a fruit seller from China's Muslim west, spoke passionately before a Guantanamo tribunal about his love for America and swore he never planned to fight the United States. The Chinese, however, were another matter. "I left my country to try to get something, get back and liberate my people and get our country independence," the ethnic Uighur testified in November 2004.

The Senate Intelligence Committee is preparing to launch an investigation of the CIA's detention and interrogation programs under President George W. Bush, setting the stage for a sweeping examination of some of most secretive and controversial operations in recent agency history.

An accused killer who stabbed the judge during his murder trial in Stockton used a 6-inch metal shank that he hid from his jailers even though they were warned he had a weapon, investigators said Thursday. Murder suspect David Paradiso, who was on the witness stand Wednesday, was able to slip behind Superior Court Judge Cinda Fox and stab her as bailiffs were distracted by a courtroom outburst from his mother and brother, said San Joaquin County Sheriff's Det. Dave Konecny.

A former Guantanamo Bay prisoner has accused British intelligence of feeding questions to the CIA that he says were put to him while he was tortured in Pakistani and Moroccan jails. The allegations by Binyam Mohamed, a British resident, are expected to fuel demands by human rights groups for a full investigation into whether Britain's support for the Bush administration's "war on terror" amounted in his case to complicity with torture.

Shiite Muslim clerics Friday called for the release of the Iraqi journalist sentenced to three years in prison for throwing his shoes at then-President George W. Bush. Sheik Suhail Uqabi, a follower of anti-U.S. cleric Muqtada Sadr, said the sentence imposed on Muntathar Zaidi is "a verdict against the Iraqi people who refuse the American occupation" of Iraq. Efforts to release detained Sadr loyalists and others who have opposed the U.S.

There will no longer will be "enemy combatants" at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the Obama administration said Friday. Moreover, the new president no longer claims that his title as commander in chief allows him to order people deemed to be dangerous captured and held without trial.

When the CIA began what it called an "increased pressure phase" with captured terrorist suspect Abu Zubaida in summer 2002, its first step was to limit the detainee's human contact to just two people. One was the CIA interrogator, the other a psychologist. During the extraordinary weeks that followed, it was the psychologist who apparently played the more critical role.

Despite the growing demands to bring criminal charges against the authors of the so-called torture memos, even critics of the Bush administration see problems with seeking to prosecute lawyers such as John C. Yoo, Jay S. Bybee or Steven G. Bradbury. First, the lawyers would have to be shown to have deliberately misinterpreted the law against torture. "It would be a real stretch.

On a Saturday night in May last year, Jay S. Bybee hosted dinner for 35 at a Las Vegas restaurant. The young people seated around him had all served as his law clerks in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, the post Bybee assumed after two turbulent years at the Justice Department, where as head of the Office of Legal Counsel he signed the legal justifications that have become known as the "torture memos."

Congress is unlikely to form an independent panel to study the Bush administration's program of harsh interrogations of terrorism suspects now that President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid have voiced opposition to the idea. Reid (D-Nev.) said he preferred to allow the Senate Intelligence Committee to finish its investigation of the Bush-era practices before taking further action. That could take the rest of the year, he said.