Guantanamo and US Senate/House of Representatives

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 [...]

Corine Hegland, the National Journal reporter who, in February 2006, broke some of the first stories about dissenting military officers in Guantánamo’s kangaroo court tribunals (the Combatant Status Review Tribunals), is back with an edgy cover story that begins with former Center for Constitutional Rights lawyer Barbara Olshansky’s accidental side-trip to Ethiopia, during a visit [...]

On Thursday, in an overwhelming display of conservative paranoia and liberal befuddlement, the US Senate voted by 94-3 to approve an amendment by Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell, the Senior Republican Senator for Kentucky and a champion of NIMBYism (Not In My Back Yard), declaring that prisoners in Guantánamo should not be transferred to facilities [...]

On Friday, in two separate decisions, judges in the United States delivered stinging rebukes to the administration regarding its policies of holding around 300 prisoners in Guantánamo without charge or trial, and its plans to try around 80 other prisoners before Military Commissions, the widely-reviled trial system for terror suspects, which permit the use of [...]