President Barack Obama has staked his presidency on winning his “necessary” war in Afghanistan. Coming into office, one of his first acts, on Feb. 18, was to boost US troop levels in that country by 17,000, bringing the total number of soldiers and Marines in the country to about 57,000, to which one must also [...]
By sheer coincidence, I had just been alerted to the publication of a number of documents relating to the ongoing habeas corpus cases of the Guantánamo prisoners last Thursday, and was reading, with mounting disbelief, the government’s supposed case against Khalid al-Mutairi, one of the last four Kuwaiti prisoners, when I received an email notifying [...]
Rejecting arguments from both the Bush and Obama administrations, a federal judge has ordered the release of an Afghani who may have been as young as 12 when he was detained 6 ½ years ago for allegedly wounding two U.S. soldiers and an Afghan translator by throwing a grenade at their unmarked jeep.
U.S. District Court [...]
Former Vice President Dick Cheney Cheney pressured George W. Bush and other top administration officials to deploy U.S. soldiers to a Buffalo NY suburb to arrest suspected terrorists, according to a report.
Using American soldiers for domestic law enforcement purposes would have been unprecedented. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 generally prohibits the armed forces from [...]
Faced with impending defeat in a U.S. District Court habeas corpus case, the Obama administration devised a new strategy for continuing the detention of Mohammed Jawad, an Afghani who may have been as young as 12 in 2002 when he allegedly wounded two U.S. soldiers with a grenade.
Justice Department lawyers announced Friday that they would [...]
The House Intelligence Committee formally announced Friday that it will probe whether the CIA broke the law by failing to inform Congress about a top secret assassination program reportedly aimed at targeting leaders of al-Qaeda.
Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, said the probe will be part of a wide-ranging investigation about the way in which the [...]
A prominent human rights group is calling on the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate why the administration of former President George W. Bush blocked three different probes into war crimes in Afghanistan where as many as 2,000 surrendered Taliban fighters were reportedly suffocated in container trucks and then buried in a mass grave by [...]
A clandestine National Security Agency spy program code-named Echelon was likely one of the programs the Bush administration used to tap into the emails, telephone calls and facsimiles of thousands of average American citizens, according to half-a-dozen current and former intelligence officials from the NSA.
The existence of the program has been publicly known for years. [...]
In recent months, those who have been studying Guantánamo closely have come to the disturbing conclusion that the biggest obstacle to President Obama’s pledge to close Guantánamo by January 2010 comes not from the fearmongering and opportunistic politicians who recently voted to prohibit the use of any funds to release or to transfer prisoners to [...]
Lawmakers and human rights advocates are questioning the assertion by the administration of President Barack Obama that Guantanamo terror suspects could be imprisoned indefinitely even if they are found not guilty by a U.S. court.
That assertion was made at a congressional hearing this week by Jeh Johnson, the Defense Department’s chief lawyer. He said that [...]
