TV News LIES

The key appellate court that’s incited a Senate-confirmation clash confronted on Monday touchy questions about searches of detainees at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay.

Even as a bitterly divided Senate prepared to add new judges to the powerful U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, a panel showed the court’s long reach by considering a challenge to Guantanamo search procedures. Initiated in May amid a detainee hunger strike, the new procedures include flat-hand frisking of groins and buttocks when detainees travel within Guantanamo to meet with attorneys.

Two Algerians were sent back to Algeria Thursday after more than a decade at Guantanamo, despite their lawyers' entreaties that they be sent elsewhere for their safety.

Djamel Ameziane, who had been detained at the U.S. naval station since his 2002 capture in Pakistan, and Belkecem Bensayah, who was captured in Bosnia the same year, fear that they will be targeted by militants or persecuted by Algeria's notoriously harsh security forces, their attorneys said.

Federal prosecutors routinely threaten extraordinarily severe prison sentences to coerce drug defendants into waiving their right to trial and pleading guilty, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. In the rare cases in which defendants insist on going to trial, prosecutors make good on their threats.

Federal drug offenders convicted after trial receive sentences on average three times as long as those who accept a plea bargain, according to new statistics developed by Human Rights Watch.

Four immigrant rights activists ended their 22-day fast Tuesday on the National Mall and were immediately replaced with eight others who pledged to continue the fast to try to persuade Congress to pass immigration reform that includes a pathway to citizenship for the 12 million people living illegally in the United States.

The four activists — Cristian Avila of Mi Familia Vota in Arizona, Lisa Sharon Harper of Sojourners in Washington, D.C., Dae Joong Yoon of the National Korean American Service and Education Consortium in Los Angeles, and Eliseo Medina of the Service Employees International Union — took their first bites of bread from a priest before being led away to be checked by doctors.

Europe's human rights court shone a rare public light Tuesday on the secret network of European prisons that the CIA used to interrogate terror suspects, reviving memories and questions about the "extraordinary renditions" that angered many on the continent.

At Tuesday's hearing, lawyers for two terror suspects currently held by the U.S. in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, accused Poland of human rights abuses. The lawyers say the suspects fell victim to the CIA's program to kidnap terror suspects and transfer them to third countries, and allege they were tortured in a remote Polish prison.

Police on Monday arrested the head of the defense team for the 21 women and girls sentenced for protesting in Egypt last month, a colleague and member of the defense team told CNN.

Lawyer Ahmed El-Hamrawy was arrested at his home in Alexandria at dawn Monday, lawyer Mahmoud Farouq told CNN. "I can't separate his arrest from the girls' case," said Farouq, who is part of the team defending the 21 jailed protesters. "This means that any lawyer who comes close to the case will be detained."