A motley crew of Senate Republicans, joined by Sen. Lieberman, have introduced a bill to make Guantanamo a permanent “terrorist” prison. Once upon a time, this could have been dismissed as GOP posturing. But recent events suggest this is more likely a harbinger of the future fate of the US Naval prison, as President Obama [...]
This report was written by Jason Leopold and originally published at Truthout. Within the past month, more than 15 Guantanamo detainees protested an indefinite detention order signed by President Barack Obama in March that resulted in their relocation to another camp at the prison facility – where they said the conditions are worse – by [...]
The new release of Guantánamo documents from Wikileaks is a veritable Sargasso Sea of lies, half-truths, undigested intel, and tortured “evidence.” I do not cheer this particular release, as the energy it will take to set the record straight will be mammoth, and most of the detainees have no one in their corner to rescue [...]
WikiLeaks’ latest revelations — secret military files on almost all of the 779 prisoners held in the US “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — are already causing a stir, and for good reason, as they resuscitate a story that appears to have been forgotten in the last few years: how, in their [...]
Last Monday, on the very same day that the Obama administration gave up on Guantánamo, so too did the Supreme Court. As far as we know, it was not a choreographed climbdown — nor had money been offered by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to rehabilitate their legacies — but the effect was the [...]
A number of commentators have replied to Attorney General Eric Holder’s announcement today that five suspects in the 9/11 attacks, including alleged Al Qaeda mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, will not be tried in civilian courts for the terrorist attacks almost ten years ago, but will be tried by President Obama’s revamped military commissions tribunals. What [...]
If I was an American lawyer who had fought for many years to secure habeas corpus rights for the prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — in other words, the right to ask an impartial judge to rule on my captors’ reasons for slinging me in a legal black hole and leaving me to rot [...]
Long ago, individuals from around the world came to America to escape kings and monarchs that had the power to treat people with utter distain, sending their children to wars on a whim, and imprisoning people without charge or judicial review, sometimes for life. For many, the behavior of these rulers became so intolerable that [...]
For the US attorneys who represent prisoners in Guantánamo, and who have spent many years seeking justice for their clients, it has been a long, and generally disappointing road. After triumph in June 2004, when, in Rasul v. Bush, the Supreme Court granted the prisoners habeas corpus rights, allowing them to meet their clients for [...]
Two weeks ago, in light of the uprising in Tunisia that brought to an end the 23-year reign of terror of President Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali, I wrote an article about the twelve Tunisians held in Guantánamo throughout the prison’s nine-year history — the two men transferred to Tunisia in June 2007, who were subsequently [...]
