Federal court trials

“Some issues,” the New York Times declared in an editorial on June 25, “require an unwavering stand. Preserving the role of law enforcement agencies in stopping and punishing terrorists is one of them. This country is not and should never be a place where the military dispenses justice, other than to its own.” Fine words, […]

Back in May, after the assassination of Osama bin Laden should have brought an end to the “War on Terror,” Frank Lindh, the father of John Walker Lindh, the first convicted prisoner in the Bush administration’s phoney war, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times, which I cross-posted here with commentary, calling for his […]

On Tuesday, the Pentagon issued a press release announcing that prosecutors in the Office of Military Commissions at Guantánamo had sworn charges against five prisoners: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi Bin al-Shibh, Walid Bin Attash, Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali and Mustafa al-Hawsawi. Accusing the five men of being “responsible for the planning and execution” of the […]

Last Monday, on the very same day that the Obama administration gave up on Guantánamo, so too did the Supreme Court. As far as we know, it was not a choreographed climbdown — nor had money been offered by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to rehabilitate their legacies — but the effect was the […]

Last Monday, when Attorney General Eric Holder conceded that his dream of prosecuting, in federal court, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and four other men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks, was officially over, derailed by Congressional opposition to the very notion of moving a single prisoner from Guantánamo to the US mainland to face a […]

Since May 2009, when President Obama first bowed to Republican pressure on national security issues, and abandoned a plan by White House Counsel Greg Craig to rehouse on the US mainland a couple of cleared prisoners at Guantánamo who were at risk of torture if repatriated, it has been apparent that no principles are sufficiently […]

Following a major feature on NPR, covering the little-known Communications Management Units (CMUs), located in Terre Haute, Indiana, and Marion, Illinois, where the inmates are mostly Muslims, who are subjected to surveillance 24 hours a day, have their mail monitored, and are prevented from having any physical contact whatsoever with their families during prison visits, […]

It has long been a regret of mine that I don’t have enough time to write about the domestic prison system in the US, because of the distressing scale of incarceration in the US (the highest per capita rate in the world, by far) and also because of the violence and brutality, and the use […]

Regular readers will know that I have long been concerned by the case of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, the Pakistani neuroscientist whose story is one of the murkiest in the whole of the “War on Terror.” Dr. Siddiqui disappeared with her three children in Karachi in March 2003, and for five years neither the US nor […]

Last Friday, Ken Ota of the newspaper Revolution asked me to do a phone interview to discuss the recent announcement that President Obama was planning a new series of trials by Military Commission at Guantánamo, to explain the significance of this announcement, and to run through the largely shambolic history of the Commissions since their […]