From the Center for Constitutional Rights, April 2:

Supreme Court Denies Immediate Review of Guantanamo Cases
Clients May Wait Another Year in Detention Without Meaningful Way to Challenge Imprisonment
The Supreme Court announced today that it would not be hearing the cases of the Guantánamo detainees for the time being. The Court denied the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and co-counsel's motion to hear the case with three justices dissenting and two issuing a statement that the detainees should exhaust the process set up by the Detainee Treatment Act (DTA), allowing for limited appeals from the decisions of military review panels, before they would consider ruling on constitutional questions. Attorneys with the Center for Constitutional Rights expressed disappointment with the ruling.

Nine children were among 12 people killed when a suicide truck-bomber drove into a police station in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk April 2. A further 192 were injured in the blast, and many of the victims were children from a nearby primary school. Local hospitals were overrun with the injured, many of them school children.

"As Al Qaeda rebuilds in Pakistan’s tribal areas, a new generation of leaders has emerged under Osama bin Laden to cement control over the network’s operations, according to American intelligence and counterterrorism officials." Thus begins "New Generation of Qaeda Chiefs Is Seen on Rise" by Mark Mazzetti on the front page of the New York Times April 2. Mazzetti, mostly citing unnamed "intelligence officials," says a post-9-11 leadership has emerged, replacing apprehended directors like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and running a new network of training camps in the mountains of Pakistan.

The NYPD April 2 defended its surveillance of political activists before the 2004 Republican National Convention (RNC). The NYPD statement admitted "detectives collected information both in-state and out-of-state to learn in advance what was coming our way," but said the intention was to stop terrorists. The New York Times says still-secret NYPD reports show police went undercover sometimes posing as activists themselves, even made friends with protestors. "People are not going to want to go to demonstrate if they know big brother is in there with them, organizing the protest, watching them, whatever it may be," charged Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU).

A high-level al-Qaeda suspect who was in CIA custody for more than four years has alleged that his US captors tortured him into making false confessions about terrorist attacks in the Middle East, according to newly released Pentagon transcripts of a March 14 military tribunal hearing at Guantánamo. Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who US officials link to the 1998 East Africa embassy bombings and the 2000 USS Cole bombing in Yemen, told a panel of military officers that he confessed torture. "The detainee states that he was tortured into confession and once he made a confession his captors were happy and they stopped torturing him," Nashiri's representative read to the tribunal. "Also, the detainee states that he made up stories during the torture in order to get it to stop." (AND from WP, March 31)

Talli Nauman writes for Mexico's El Universal, April 2:

Environmentalists are rejoicing over the cancellation of a liquid natural gas (LNG) terminal project that the federal government had licensed Chevron Texaco to undertake adjacent to the Coronado Islands proposed protected area near Ensenada on the Pacific Coast of Baja California state.

Representatives at the third Continental Summit of the Indigenous Peoples and Nationalities in Iximche, Guatemala, spoke out against US plans to use corn crops to produce fuel. "We have a long tradition as corn growers, and using corn to produce fuel will be like sacrilege, commercializing our heritage for the benefit of large transnationals," said Cesar Tahu, a Quiche Maya leader. Juan Tiney, member of the Continental Summit Committee, emphasized the traditional place of corn as the staple food of Native Americans, protesting that "it will now be used to feed machines, for money and profits, destroying thousand-year-old cultures." (Press TV, Iran, March 31)

According to reports in major Dominican dailies on March 30, the Central Electoral Council (JCE) is planning to annul the Dominican birth certificate of human rights activist Sonia Pierre, the head of the Dominican-Haitian Women's Movement (MUDHA). JCE chief inspector Juan Tavarez Gomez and JCE security chief Victor Lantigua reportedly have determined that Pierre's birth certificate was based on false information and is therefore invalid.