It’s becoming clearer by the week that the scheme described in Chapter 4 was not unique.

Last month a federal judge granted the habeas corpus petition of Uthman Abdul Rahim Mohammed Uthman (PDF), a young Yemeni detainee who was arrested in December 2001 and transferred to Guantánamo in January 2002. The U.S. alleged that Uthman, who was 20 at the time he was captured, was one of Osama bin Laden’s bodyguards. That allegation rested on the statements of two other Guantánamo detainees, Sharqwi Abdu Ali Al-Hajj and Sanad Yislam Ali Al Kazimi: Hajj told interrogators he’d met Uthman at a meeting bin Laden attended in Afghanistan shortly after 9/11, and Kazimi identified a photograph of Uthman for his interrogators and said “he heard” that Uthman had become a bodyguard for bin Laden.

As with Binyam Mohamed, it turns out these statements were gathered at Bagram air base after the two men had been tortured, first in foreign dungeons and then in the CIA’s “Dark Prison.”

And as in the case of Farhi Saeed Bin Mohammed — when Judge Gladys Kessler ruled that information Binyam Mohamed provided that incriminated Bin Mohammed was inadmissible because of his treatment in Pakistan, Morocco, and the Dark Prison — Judge Henry Kennedy, Jr. ruled last month in Uthman’s case that

The Court will not rely on the statements of Hajj or Kazimi because there is unrebutted evidence in the record that, at the time of the interrogations at which they made the statements, both men had recently been tortured.

As Judge Kennedy wrote:

Uthman has submitted to the Court a declaration of Kristin B. Wilhelm, an attorney who represents Hajj, summarizing Hajj’s description to her of his treatment while in custody. The declaration states that while held in Jordan, Hajj “was regularly beaten and threatened with electrocution and molestation,” and he eventually “manufactured facts” and confessed to his interrogators’ allegations “in order to make the torture stop.” After transfer to a secret CIA-run prison in Kabul, Afghanistan, Hajj was reportedly “kept in complete darkness and was subject to continuous loud music.”

Uthman also submitted a declaration of Martha Rayner, a Professor at Fordham University Law School who represents Kazimi, regarding Kazimi’s description of his treatment in detention. Rayner reports that while Kazimi was held in the United Arab Emirates, his interrogators beat him; held him naked and shackled in a dark, cold cell; dropped him into cold water while his hands and legs were bound; and sexually abused him. Kazimi told Rayner that eventually “[h]e made up his mind to say ‘Yes’ to anything the interrogators said to avoid further torture.” According to Rayner’s declaration, Kazimi was relocated to a prison run by the CIA where he was always in darkness and where he was hooded, given injections, beaten, hit with electric cables, suspended from above, made to be naked, and subjected to continuous loud music. Kazimi reported trying to kill himself on three occasions. He told Rayner that he realized “he could mitigate the torture by telling the interrogators what they wanted to hear.” Next, Kazimi was moved to a U.S. detention facility in Bagram, Afghanistan, where, he told Rayner, he was isolated, shackled, “psychologically tortured and traumatized by guards’ desecration of the Koran” and interrogated “day and night, and very frequently.” Kazimi told Rayner he “tried very hard” to tell the interrogators at Bagram the same information he had told his previous interrogators “so they would not hurt him.”

Once again, the position of the U.S. government — this time advanced by the Obama administration — was that because the Bagram “clean team” interrogations did not involve torture, statements the men made at Bagram should be admissible. Once again, a federal judge rejected this position, finding that the treatment the men had been subjected to in Jordan and another country undermined the reliability of their statements in Bagram.

I’ve spent the last few months trying to absorb the full implications of the “Ponzi scheme” we covered in Chapter 4. Now, with the Uthman habeas ruling, we’re left to consider what it means that this chapter was not an isolated horror, but rather one episode in a much larger story in which scores of characters — U.S. interrogators, rendition crews, U.S. and foreign government officials, foreign jailers and torturers, CIA jailers and torturers, FBI “clean teams,” U.S. military jailers at Bagram and Guantánamo, just for starters — played specific, well-defined roles again and again over the course of several years. We’re faced with the scope and utter deliberateness of the scheme.

To read more about and see documentary evidence of the Bush administration's torture program, go to thetorturereport.com.

The very first sentence on Facebook's privacy guide page states: "You should have control over what you share."

That seems fairly simple, doesn't it?

But many of Facebook's recent actions, such as its much-criticized "privacy transition," have made it harder for users to retain control over their information. Is this week more of the same?

Earlier this week, following up on its recent policy changes, Facebook announced its plans to create more dynamic profiles using "Connections." What exactly counts as a connection wasn't clearly defined either time, but seems to include things like friends lists, likes and interests, events, groups, and activities. (Today's announcement of the Social Graph API includes News Feed, Wall, Notes, Photos, and Videos as "connections" too, but Facebook may be overusing the word to mean different things.)

More importantly, it also isn't clear whether users will have real control over how their connections are shared. Both Facebook's Monday announcement and its recent policy changes have suggested that users cannot prevent applications, pages, and other third parties from accessing these connections. (They may be able to "hide" them from other Facebook users, but not from the government, advertisers, or anyone else with the ability and incentive to create apps or pages.) However, today's new documents for developers point to the Extended Permissions page that requires that applications and pages to explicitly ask the user before accessing various "connections," including interests, events, groups, and location.

If Facebook believes that you "should have control over what you share," it should resolve this by giving users real control over whether their connections can be accessed by apps and pages. Doing so still won't resolve other issues, like the "app gap" that allows your friends' applications to view your personal information without your knowledge or consent, but it would be one step in the right direction.

Otherwise, the only way you can keep control of your information is to refuse to use Facebook to share or connect at all. And that's not what we mean by control.

So don't let Facebook take away control over your personal information! Tell Facebook that you want to have control over your friends, groups, events, and interests so that you — and not Facebook, the government, or anyone else — choose how and when they are shared!

Demand control of your personal information — Demand Your dotRights!

For those of you who were unable to join us in person on April 8 for the panel discussion with Tariq Ramadan, Dalia Mogahed, George Packer, Jacob Weisberg and Joan Wallach Scott, you can watch it on C-SPAN's Book TV (click on "Watch This Program" on the right side of the page).

And if you did join us, and enjoyed that event, we're cohosting another event with PEN American Center next week. Called "Face to Face: Confronting the Torturers," the evening of readings will feature Aasif Mandvi of The Daily Show, and renowned writers and artists reading from writings that literally and figuratively confront torture. It's next Thursday, April 29 at 9:30 at Joe's Pub (425 Lafayette St.). Tickets are $15/$10 for ACLU/PEN members and students with a valid ID.

We hope you'll join us!

Sometimes, it feels like we at the ACLU are fighting an uphill battle when we try to draw attention to just how bloated and ineffective the Transportation Security Administration's (TSA) airline watchlist is. We've pointed out that dead people, heads of state, U.S. senators, and little kids are on the list.

Well, add 6-year-old Allison Mosher to that unfortunate group.

The Boston Herald reports that when Allison's father Peter tried to print out boarding passes for their family's vacation to the Grand Canyon, he was unable to print out Allison's. When he called the airline, the employee told him that Allison "had been flagged by TSA security," and that she's on the no-fly list.

Peter Mosher has reached out to Sen. Scott Brown's office for assistance in getting Allison off the watchlist to prevent future impediments to Allison's travel. But we think Peter's final comment to the Herald pretty much sums up what we've been arguing all along:

“It’s not just an inconvenience,” he said. “It makes us less safe because they’re spending time investigating a 6-year-old, instead of actually going after real terrorists.”

It’s worth noting that it can take an act of Congress to be removed from the watchlist. That’s the only way Nelson Mandela was able to get off. But for little Allison Mosher, that's not a likely option.