Guantanamo and US Senate/House of Representatives

This is clearly no time for being mealy-mouthed. After nearly seven years of ruinous warmongering, economic meltdown and the shredding of the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention Against Torture, Sen. John McCain, who recently shelved his lifelong opposition to torture by voting against a bill banning the [...]

Widely reported in the last few days were comments made by the United States’ most senior military official, Admiral Mike Mullen, during a visit to Guantánamo on Sunday. In his first trip to the prison since he became chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in October, Admiral Mullen told reporters, “I’d like to see [...]

Anyone dropping in on the US Senate from outer space would be confused to discover that, on Wednesday, an amendment to the Defense Authorization Bill, aimed at restoring habeas corpus rights to the detainees in Guantánamo –- rights which were granted by the Supreme Court in 2004, but which were taken away last fall in [...]

Despite claims last week by House Representative John Murtha (D-Pa.) that he would put forward amendments to the administration’s colossal Defense Appropriations bill (see article here), the House of Representatives rolled over last night and passed the proposed legislation by 395 votes to 13, and Murtha, who had actually prepared the amendments to close Guantánamo [...]

In an update from Congressional Quarterly, just two days after Vice President Dick Cheney shuffled out from under his rock to declare on CNN that he thought that proposals to close Guantánamo were a bad idea and that operational plans for Iraq were not the business of Congress, staff writer John Donnelly reports that “House [...]