Ali Hamza al-Bahlul

This is the first part of a nine-part series telling the stories of all the prisoners currently held in Guantánamo (176 at the time of writing). See the introduction here, and Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six and Part Seven. The 20 prisoners listed below were the first group of prisoners [...]

On August 11, Ibrahim al-Qosi, a 51-year old former cook and driver for Osama bin Laden, was given a 14-year sentence by a military jury, after pleading guilty to one count of conspiracy, and one count of providing material support to terrorism at an earlier hearing on July 7, as I reported here. The sentence [...]

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 [...]

In the last week, Omar Khadr, the only Western citizen still held in Guantánamo, has sacked his US lawyers and stated that he will boycott his forthcoming trial by Military Commission, scheduled to begin on August 10. He has also refused to have anything to do with a plea deal that was being negotiated between [...]

Since coming to power 15 months ago, promising to close Guantánamo within a year, and suspending the much-criticized Military Commission trial system for terror suspects, President Obama’s zeal for repudiating the Bush administration’s “War on Terror” detention policies has ground to a halt. The rot set in almost immediately, when the new administration invoked the [...]

Lt. Col. David Frakt, Associate Professor of Law at Western State University College of Law and a Lieutenant Colonel in the US Air Force Reserve JAG Corps, served as lead defense counsel with the Office of Military Commissions, and has long distinguished himself as a particularly intelligent and knowledgeable critic of the Commissions, which were [...]

Last Tuesday, a little known court — the Court of Military Commissions Review — convened to hear appeals in the cases of the only two men sentenced in the Military Commission trial system established by Congress in 2006, after the first version, conceived by Vice President Dick Cheney and his close advisors in November 2001, [...]

On Monday, following a request from the Obama administration, Army Col. Stephen Henley, the military judge in the proposed trial by Military Commission of five men charged in connection with the 9/11 attacks — Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali and Walid bin Attash (from top to bottom in [...]

A month ago, when the Senate Armed Services Committee heard testimony on “legal issues regarding military commissions and the trial of detainees for violations of the law of war”, and the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties Subcommittee of the House Committee on the Judiciary held a hearing on “Legal Issues Surrounding the Military Commissions [...]

At Guantánamo this week, the Military Commission trial system convened for only the second time since President Obama announced a four-month freeze on all proceedings on his first day in office to give the new administration’s inter-departmental Guantánamo Task Force an opportunity to review the best ways in which to deal with the remaining prisoners [...]