Guantanamo and US District Courts/Appeals Courts

Those of us who have been studying Guantánamo closely were not surprised when, on March 7, President Obama announced that he was lifting a ban on trials by Military Commission at Guantánamo, which he imposed on his first day in office in January 2009, and also issued an executive order establishing a periodic review of [...]

For the US attorneys who represent prisoners in Guantánamo, and who have spent many years seeking justice for their clients, it has been a long, and generally disappointing road. After triumph in June 2004, when, in Rasul v. Bush, the Supreme Court granted the prisoners habeas corpus rights, allowing them to meet their clients for [...]

Regular readers will know that the ongoing injustice at Guantánamo, where 172 men remain, is so severe that President Obama’s promise to close the prison has, instead, turned into a concession by defense secretary Robert Gates, speaking to the Senate Armed Services Committee last week, that “the prospects for closing Guantánamo, as best I can [...]

In the litany of injustices that still permeate the “War on Terror” prison at Guantánamo — including President Obama’s decision to hold 47 men indefinitely without charge or trial, the resistance by lawmakers to proposals to free prisoners cleared for release by the President’s Guantánamo Review Task Force, or to allow federal court trials for [...]

Two weeks ago, in light of the uprising in Tunisia that brought to an end the 23-year reign of terror of President Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali, I wrote an article about the twelve Tunisians held in Guantánamo throughout the prison’s nine-year history — the two men transferred to Tunisia in June 2007, who were subsequently [...]

In the debate about the closure of Guantánamo, I have made my position abundantly clear, in, for example, my recent articles, Guantánamo Forever?, The Political Prisoners of Guantánamo and Obama’s Collapse: The Return of the Military Commissions. Lacking courage, President Obama has allowed a cynical Congress to oppose his plans to bring prisoners to the [...]

Last Tuesday, while activists, journalists and lawyers were holding a rally outside The White House to ask President Obama to honor his pledge to close Guantánamo, and to raise awareness of the plight of the remaining 173 prisoners, Judge Richard Leon, in the District Court down the road, refused to grant the habeas petition of [...]

Political prisoners? Surely that can’t be right, can it? Surely it’s only dictatorships in far-flung corners of the world who hold political prisoners, and not the United States of America? Sadly, no. As the “War on Terror” prison established by President Bush begins its tenth year of operations, and as it begins to be forgotten [...]

On the 9th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, it may sound uncharitable to President Obama to be asking whether all plans to close the prison have failed, and to be asking whether it might remain in operation for as long as anyone can foresee. After all, the President may have failed to close it [...]

With just two weeks to go before the ninth anniversary of the opening of the “War on Terror” prison at Guantánamo, almost everyone in a position of authority in the US has failed to resolve, in a satisfactory manner, the bitter legacy left by the Bush administration. In fact, to judge by two recent developments, [...]