For the last two years, the prisoners held in the “War on Terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba have been challenging the basis of their detention through habeas corpus petitions filed with the District Court in Washington D.C., where they have met with a notable degree of success. Of the 51 cases decided, 37 have been won by the prisoners, a 73 percent success rate that has involved judges casting an objective eye — often for the first time ever — on the statements of the prisoners themselves, on the statements of their fellow prisoners, and on the “mosaic” of intelligence reports that makes up the majority of the government’s evidence. In 3 out of 4 cases, the judges have concluded that the government has been relying on dubious confessions extracted through torture, coercion or bribery, and/or that its “mosaics” are full of holes.
July 31, 2010 | Filed under
Law |
Read More »
Last week, the release from Guantánamo of Abdul Aziz Naji, who was transferred to Algerian custody against his wishes, overshadowed other news from the prison, and with good reason. As I explained in an article at the time, the Obama administration, the Supreme Court and the D.C. Circuit Court, which all played prominent roles in his enforced repatriation, had flouted the United States’ commitment, under the terms of the UN Convention Against Torture, not to “expel, return (‘refouler’) or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.”
July 31, 2010 | Filed under
Law |
Read More »
Unfortunately, I don’t have time to examine the question posed in the title of this piece as carefully as I’d like, but even the quickly posted Wikipedia entry on Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) Task Force 373 notes that there is a large discrepancy between the amount of targets on TF373’s “kill/capture” list as reported [...]
July 28, 2010 | Filed under
World |
Read More »
Professor Bob Bea, of UC Berkeley, a civil engineer with years of expertise in marine oil drilling, says he is concerned that during the current crisis of BP’s blown-out well deep under the Gulf of Mexico, government scientists may not be getting all the information they need from the secretive oil company in order to [...]
July 27, 2010 | Filed under
Nation |
Read More »
CNN fails to mention that one of its own on-air contributors, Jeffrey Toobin, was a member of the JournoList. Kurtz tries to undermine the work of the reporters who were members of the list by saying they are “not beat reporters.” Ackerman, however, is one of the best intelligence/defense reporters in the business and has [...]
July 26, 2010 | Filed under
TPRvideo |
Read More »
In a turnaround from the defiant position he took last week, when he sacked his US lawyers and stated that he would either boycott his impending trial by Military Commission, or would represent himself, Omar Khadr, the Canadian citizen who was just 15 years when he was seized in Afghanistan in July 2002, and who [...]
July 22, 2010 | Filed under
Law |
Read More »
Last Thursday, Rep. John Conyers (D-Michigan), the Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, released the previously undisclosed testimony of Jay S. Bybee, delivered to the Committee on May 26 as part of its investigations into advice given by Justice Department lawyers to the Bush administration regarding the use of torture in the “War on Terror.” [...]
July 22, 2010 | Filed under
Law |
Read More »
With the election of Barack Obama and his slogan “Yes, we can,” Afghans too, like many Americans, were hopeful for a new chapter in the U.S. engagement in Afghanistan. Afghans believed that, perhaps, the new administration would lend an open ear to them and listen to their concerns, instead of producing strategy after strategy, continuing [...]
July 22, 2010 | Filed under
Commentary |
Read More »
On Monday, the Pentagon announced that two prisoners had been released from Guantánamo. Abd al-Nisr Mohammed Khantumani, a 50-year old Syrian (also known as Abdul Nasir al-Tumani) was given a new home in Cape Verde, a former Portuguese colony off the West African coast, while Abdul Aziz Naji, a 35-year old Algerian, was repatriated to [...]
July 22, 2010 | Filed under
Torture |
Read More »
It is time to ask why on earth the Obama administration and the Coast Guard are allowing BP to continue keeping a tight lid on the top of the run-away, damaged well in the Gulf of Mexico. Leaks from the sea floor are appearing and growing in number, making it clear that the BP Deepwater [...]
July 20, 2010 | Filed under
Commentary |
Read More »
