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In a Democracy Now exclusive, Sami Al-Arian speaks to us from prison where is on a hunger-strike. The Palestinian professor and activist was found not guilty over a year ago of 17 charges against him yet he remains in jail and the US government seems unwilling to release him. Al-Arian’s case has been one of the most closely watched – and controversial – post 9/11 prosecutions in the United States. In February 2003, he was arrested and accused of being a leader of the militant group Palestinia...

Canada’s Conservative government recently offered a belated and perfunctory apology to torture-victim Maher Arar. A Syrian-born Canadian citizen, Arar was fingered by Canada’s security agencies to their US counterparts as a terrorist suspect, detained by US immigration officials in September 2002 while in transit through New York’s JFK Airport, and subsequently deported to Syria where he was imprisoned for almost a year without charge and repeatedly tortured....

A unit of Britain’s elite military force, the Special Air Service (SAS), is to be permanently based in London. Its team of assassins, surveillance specialists and bomb-disposal experts will be on 24-hour alert. The Ministry of Defence has requested that the location of the unit be kept secret....

"...two officers got out of the car and approached Common Ground volunteers. One of them, officer Lusk (badge number 1811) was involved in a previous incident where, he ... and another off duty officerin uniform broke into the office without a warrant and took computers and files belonging to Common Ground....

The Labor government in the Australian state of Queensland was forced last Friday to announce it would prepare charges against a senior police officer for killing an Aboriginal prisoner in November 2004. A week later, charges have still to be laid. If the case proceeds, it will be the first time that a police or prison officer has faced trial for any of the more than 250 indigenous deaths in custody across Australia since 1980....

The national website for up-to-the-minute information and to sign up for the supporters' list serve is www.cdhrsupport.org. Donations should be made out to CDHR/AGAPE and sent to the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights, P.O. Box 90221, Pasadena, CA 91109....

Frederick Hitz served as inspector general at the Central Intelligence Agency from 1990 to 1998. He says: “I'm against extraordinary rendition on a number of grounds. Principally, because of the immorality of it, the illegality of it, [and] the fact that it doesn't work.”...

The Bush administration has declared Ali al-Marri an “enemy combatant” and is claiming the right to jail him forever without pressing charges. On Thursday al-Marri’s attorneys appeared in a federal court to fight his five-year detention. The case marks one of the first challenges of the Military Commission Act and its suspension of the writ of Habeas Corpus. Constitutional scholars warn that if the government prevails it would expose more than twenty million noncitizens residing in the United...

El Aaiun, Western Sahara, January 30, 2007 The Sahara Press Service(SPS) reported that Sahrawi prisoners incarcerated in the Carcel Negra (Black Prison) in El Aaiun, Western Sahara started an indefinite hunger strike to protest against the "inhumane treatment and hard conditions of detention" they are subjected to....

The FBI appears to have adopted an invasive Internet surveillance technique that collects far more data on innocent Americans than previously has been disclosed. Cnet News reports that instead of recording only what a particular suspect is doing, agents conducting investigations appear to be assembling data on thousands of Internet users at a time into massive databases....