Guantanamo and US District Courts/Appeals Courts

Ten days ago, when I traveled to Sheffield with my friend, the former Guantánamo prisoner Omar Deghayes, for a screening of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (which I co-directed with Polly Nash), I asked Omar what Guantánamo was like at Christmas, as I knew that he had spent five Christmases imprisoned [...]

On December 22, during a largely self-congratulatory news conference by President Obama, dealing with a number of achievements notched up in the last session before the Democrats lose control of the House of Representatives (including the new START treaty, on arms control, and the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell”), one of the administration’s conspicuous [...]

In an attempt to bring to an end a nearly four-year deadlock in the case of Ahmed Belbacha, an Algerian prisoner in Guantánamo, lawyers at the London-based legal action charity Reprieve have “started high court proceedings to force the British government to disclose information that they say could free him from Guantánamo Bay and save [...]

Following Wikileaks’ release of 251,287 US diplomatic cables, which has, if nothing else, revealed that secrecy and the Internet appear to be mutually incompatible, a handful of media outlets immediately picked up on references to Guantánamo — and the Obama administration’s negotiations with other countries — in the cables. Britain’s Daily Mail led the way, [...]

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, [...]

On September 22, in the District Court in Washington D.C., Judge Reggie B. Walton denied the habeas corpus petition of Tawfiq al-Bihani (described in court documents as Toffiq al-Bihani), a Yemeni who was raised in Saudi Arabia, giving the government its 18th victory out of 56 cases decided, with the other 38 having been won [...]

This is the seventh part of a nine-part series telling the stories of all the prisoners currently held in Guantánamo (174 at the time of writing). See the introduction here, and Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five and Part Six. This seventh article tells the stories of 13 prisoners seized in [...]

“Terror ruling threatens civilian prosecutions,” screamed the Los Angeles Times last Thursday. “Ruling in ’98 East Africa embassy bombings is setback for US,” wailed the Washington Post. The headline writers were referring to the federal court trial, in New York, of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a former CIA “ghost prisoner” (for two years and two months), [...]

Last June, in the District Court in Washington D.C., a ruling was delivered on the habeas corpus petition of a Syrian prisoner in Guantánamo, Abdul Rahim al-Janko (also identified as Abdul Rahim al-Ginco), which exemplified all that was wrong with the Bush administration’s detention policies in the “War on Terror,” and which also dealt a [...]

This is the sixth part of a nine-part series telling the stories of all the prisoners currently held in Guantánamo (174 at the time of writing). See the introduction here, and Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five and Part Seven. This sixth article tells the stories of 14 prisoners seized in [...]