As first reported by the Associated Press, six of the remaining 13 Uighurs in Guantánamo have just arrived on the Pacific island of Palau, where they have been given new homes. The AP’s source said that, overnight, police were guarding the house where the men will live, in the heart of the capital, Koror.
In September, in an interview with Fox News, President Mikheil Saakashvili explained that Georgia was “absolutely” willing to host prisoners from Guantánamo. “You know, whatever we can do to help America in its war on terror, we will do,” he said.
The United Nations cannot account for tens of millions of dollars provided to the troubled Afghan election commission, according to two confidential U.N. audits and interviews with current and former senior diplomats.
The horrors of the US Agent Orange defoliation campaign in Vietnam, about which I wrote on Oct. 15, could ultimately be dwarfed by the horrors caused by the depleted uranium weapons which the US began using in the 1991 Gulf War (300 tons), and which it has used much more extensively–and in more urban, populated areas–in the Iraq War and the now intensifying Afghanistan War.
Since taking office, President Obama has sanctioned at least 41 Central Intelligence Agency drone strikes in Pakistan that have killed between 326 and 538 people, many of them, critics say, “innocent bystanders, including children,” according to published reports.
In a recent article, I examined the implications of an announcement that 75 of the remaining 223 prisoners in Guantánamo have been cleared for release. This came by way of a list posted in the prison, identifying the prisoners by nationality, and a statement by a military spokesman, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brook DeWalt, who explained, “It was an opportunity to just provide better communication. There’s a lot of information out there and you get a lot of things from a lot of different angles. It helps put it in a more succinct context for them [the prisoners].”
In a recent article, “On Guantánamo, Lawmakers Reveal They Are Still Dick Cheney’s Pawns,” I spelled out my despair and disgust at lawmakers from both parties (their names can be found here, here and here), who, since May, have voted for legislation severely curtailing President Obama’s ability to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba by his self-imposed deadline of January 22, 2010, and who, as a result, have sent just one resounding message to the American people and the wider world: the ghost of Dick Cheney still stalks the corridors of power.
Last week, the Obama administration finally admitted that it might not be possible to close Guantánamo by the President’s self-imposed deadline of January 22, 2010, when defense secretary Robert Gates told ABC News’ “This Week” that it was “going to be tough” to meet the deadline. The announcement followed what appeared to be strategic leaks [...]
On Sunday, following the revelation of the identity of one of two Uzbeks released from Guantánamo to take up a new life in the Republic of Ireland, I published a letter from Guantánamo written by this man, Oybek Jabbarov. The letter also included a statement by his lawyer, Michael J. Mone Jr., to a Committee of the US House of Representatives, in which Mone explained that Jabbarov was a refugee, living in northern Afghanistan with his pregnant wife, infant son, elderly mother and other Uzbek refugees at the time of the US-led invasion in October 2001,
I had written extensively about the fine work by Mohammed Jawad’s military defense attorney, Maj. David Frakt, who delivered a compelling speech to a House Committee in July, and by his former prosecutor, Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, who resigned as a prosecutor in September 2008, when he declared that the Commissions were incapable of delivering justice.
