Bosnians in Guantanamo

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 Algerian [...]

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 [...]

On Monday, just hours after the first war crimes hearing for four months was convened at Guantánamo, and just hours before the Pentagon announced that a sixth prisoner had died, apparently by committing suicide, the small group of reporters — “less than a dozen,” according to Michelle Shephard of the Toronto Star — who had [...]

So many of the stories relating to Guantánamo are bleak that I thought it was worth mentioning a recent interview with Lakhdar Boumediene, who was released from Guantánamo two weeks ago after seven years and four months of pointless and brutal imprisonment.
I first reported the story of Boumediene and his five compatriots — Algerians who [...]

Although I reported last week about an important court case in favor of Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed, a Yemeni prisoner in Guantánamo, there was little in the way of progress, during the first 115 days of the Obama administration, for the men who are still held, despite the President’s pledge to close the prison [...]

The continued imprisonment of at least 61 prisoners at Guantánamo, who have been cleared for release after multiple military review boards (or, in recent months, after rulings in a US court), was an affront to notions of justice when the Bush administration was in power, and is even more so now that Barack Obama, who [...]

Those of us who prefer justice to arbitrary and unaccountable detention without charge or trial were delighted when, last week, Barack Obama fulfilled a long-stated promise and issued a presidential order stating that Guantánamo will be closed “as soon as practicable, and no later than one year from the date of this order,” and establishing [...]