The shameful dinosaurs of the Senate — hopelessly out of touch with reality, for the most part, and haunted by specters of their own making — approved, by 93 votes to 7, the passage of the National Defense Authorization Act (PDF), which contains a number of astonishingly alarming provisions — Sections 1031 and 1032, designed [...]
When it comes to Guantánamo, the prisoners held in the Bush administration’s experimental prison have mostly been abandoned by those who should have acted on their behalf in all three branches of government – the executive branch, Congress and the judiciary. In June 2004, for a brief moment, George W. Bush’s excesses were checked by [...]
Last week, Omar Khadr, the Canadian citizen and former child prisoner, was supposed to leave Guantánamo after nine years and three months in US custody. No one thought that Khadr would return to Canada as a free man, as he has another seven years to serve in a Canadian jail as part of a plea [...]
What a strange and alarming place we’re in, when the US government, under a Democratic President, kills two US citizens it dislikes for their thoughts and their words, without formally charging them with any crime, or trying or convicting them, using an unmanned drone directed by US personnel many thousands of miles away. And yet, [...]
When something is irredeemably broken, the sensible course of action is to get rid of it. However, when it comes to military trials for terror suspects in the Bush administration’s “war on terror,” however broken the system is, government officials and lawmakers have repeatedly gathered round to put it back together again, and continue to [...]
Many Americans probably think that the “War on Terror” began on September 11, 2001, when the terrible terrorist attacks took place, whose 10th anniversary has recently been marked. However, the “War on Terror” actually began on September 14, 2001, when Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force, which authorized the President “to use [...]
On August 30, when In My Time, former Vice President Dick Cheney’s self-serving autobiography was published, the timing was pernicious. Cheney knows by now that every time he opens his mouth to endorse torture or to defend Guantánamo, the networks welcome him, and newspapers lavish column inches on his opinions, even though astute editors and [...]
Last month, the third anniversary of Boumediene v. Bush (on June 12) passed without mention. This was a great shame, not only because it was a powerful ruling, granting the Guantánamo prisoners constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights, but also because, after that bold intervention, which led to the release of 26 prisoners who subsequently won [...]
In late April, WikiLeaks released its latest treasure trove of classified US documents, a set of 765 Detainee Assessment Briefs (DABs) from the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Compiled between 2002 and January 2009 by the Joint Task Force that has primary responsibility for their detention and interrogation of the prisoners, these detailed military [...]
In a triumph for the principles of open justice, and a snub to the Tory-led coalition government, the British Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Wednesday that the government and the intelligence agencies cannot use secret evidence in court to prevent open discussion of allegations that prisoners were subjected to torture. The appeal, by lawyers for [...]
