Bosnians in Guantanamo

For Truthout, my colleague Jeffrey Kaye, who is a full-time psychologist but somehow manages also to pursue a second career as a blogger, has just written an article about the use of water torture at Guantánamo (and elsewhere in the “War on Terror”), which has been securing excellent coverage online. I’m delighted to discover that [...]

Saber Lahmer (aka Sabir Lahmar) is one of the six Algerians held at Guantánamo from its earliest days, having been kidnapped by US agents in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in connection with an alleged plot to blow up the US embassy in Sarajevo, even though the plot has never been backed up by any evidence, and was never [...]

In the struggle in the US courts to establish who can be detained at Guantánamo, and on what basis, following the Supreme Court’s ruling, in June 2008, that the Guantánamo prisoners have constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights, there are three main players: the District Court judges, who, in 57 cases over the last two years, [...]

Last week, in the first part of this two-part series, I began looking at how the Conservative-dominated D.C. Circuit Court has responded to the rulings in the District Court regarding the habeas petitions of the prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay, where, to date, 38 out of 53 cases have been won by the prisoners. In [...]

Please support my work! NOTE: This list has now been superseded by a dedicated page, “Guantánamo Habeas Results: The Definitive List,” which will be used to monitor the ongoing habeas rulings. As part of my series, “Guantánamo Habeas Week” (introduced here, and expanded, on April 23, to become “Guantánamo Habeas Fortnight”), it’s my pleasure to [...]

On Monday, the Obama administration announced that it had transferred four prisoners from Guantánamo: Sabir Lahmar, an Algerian, was transferred to France; an unidentified Palestinian was transferred to Hungary; and two Tunisians, Adel Ben Mabrouk bin Hamida Boughanmi and Mohammed Tahir Riyadh Nasseri, were transferred to the custody of the Italian government. Sabir Lahmar, an [...]

In a recent article, “75 Guantánamo Prisoners Cleared For Release; 31 Could Leave Today,” 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 [...]

So here’s a little-noticed story, courtesy of the Blog of Legal Times. Back in November last year, Belkacem Bensayah, an Algerian who had been living in Bosnia since the 1990s, was the first prisoner to lose his habeas corpus appeal. The judge, Bush appointee Richard Leon, granted the appeals of the five men who had [...]

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 [...]

Three weeks ago, Lakhdar Boumediene, an Algerian who was kidnapped and sent Guantánamo just a week after the prison opened, was finally released. I had been following Boumediene’s story for years, first in my book The Guantánamo Files, in which I described the non-existent plot to bomb the US embassy in Sarajevo, Bosnia, where Boumediene [...]