This report was written by Jeffrey Kaye and originally published on Truthout. In the controversy over whether torture, especially waterboarding, was used to gather information leading to the capture of Osama bin Laden, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told Fox News’ Sean Hannity recently that “no one was waterboarded at Guantanamo by the US [...]
August 6, 2011 | Filed under
Torture |
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Since I began my quest to discover the stories of the Guantánamo prisoners, and to bring those stories to the world, which I first embarked upon over five years ago, I have endeavoured to make that information as accessible as possible. A major step in achieving this took place in March 2009, when I first [...]
June 3, 2011 | Filed under
Law |
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This report was written by Jason Leopold and originally published on Truthout. Imagine that the more than 700 Guantanamo files released two weeks ago by WikiLeaks contained information explaining how interrogators obtained “intelligence” from “war on terror” detainees captured or sold to US forces after 9/11, such as this firsthand account: On a couple of [...]
May 7, 2011 | Filed under
Torture |
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This report was written by Jason Leopold and Jeffrey Kaye and originally published on Truthout. The White House has categorically denied that it set up a task force to address the psychological well being of military families and had First Lady Michelle Obama appoint as one of its members the former chief psychologist at Guantanamo, [...]
March 29, 2011 | Filed under
Politics |
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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 [...]
February 25, 2011 | Filed under
Law |
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Every now and then I’m forcefully reminded of the extent to which Guantánamo is still used by unscrupulous lawmakers as a political plaything, even though it is a place where, by any objective measure, a small number of terrorist suspects are held alongside insignificant Taliban foot soldiers and others unfortunate enough to be in the [...]
November 3, 2010 | Filed under
Politics |
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President Obama’s hopes of closing Guantánamo, which were already gravely wounded by his inability to meet his self-imposed deadline of a year for the prison’s closure, now appear to have been killed off by lawmakers in Congress. Although the House Armed Services Committee was happy to authorize, by 59 votes to 0, a budget of over $700 billion for war ($567 billion for “defense spending” and $159 billion for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq) for the fiscal year beginning in October, lawmakers unanimously saw through — and turned down — a fraction of this budget for what the administration had labeled a “transfer fund” — money intended to close Guantánamo and buy a new prison in Illinois for prisoners designated for trials or for indefinite detention without charge or trial.
May 24, 2010 | Filed under
Politics |
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The Department of Justice today announced that three detainees have been transferred from the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay to the custody and control of Georgia. As directed by the President’s January 22, 2009 Executive Order, the interagency Guantanamo Review Task Force conducted a comprehensive review of these cases. As a result of that review, which examined a number of factors, including security issues, the detainees were approved for transfer by unanimous consent among all the agencies involved in the Task Force. In accordance with Congressionally-mandated reporting requirements, the Administration informed Congress of its intent to transfer these detainees at least 15 days before their transfer.
March 23, 2010 | Filed under
Law |
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On Wednesday, four prisoners were released from Guantánamo: an Egyptian, a Libyan and a Tunisian arrived in Albania, and a Palestinian arrived in Spain. All four had been cleared by military review boards at Guantánamo under the Bush administration, and had then been cleared by President Obama’s interagency Task Force, but, like dozens of prisoners in Guantánamo, they could not be repatriated because of fears that they would be tortured if returned to their home countries or subjected to other ill-treatment, or because they were effectively stateless.
February 25, 2010 | Filed under
Law |
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A federal judge who spoke at length with ProPublica about his experience working through about a dozen constitutional challenges mounted by Guantanamo prisoners is being asked by a detainee’s lawyer to remove himself from a pending case based on quoted portions of his interviews.
February 2, 2010 | Filed under
Law |
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