Guantanamo and US Senate/House of Representatives

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 [...]

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 [...]

In another exclusive report for Truthout, my friends and colleagues Jason Leopold and Jeff Kaye continue to shine an unerring light on the Bush administration’s torture program (see previous examples here and here), this time focusing on the role played by Bruce Jessen, the Air Force psychologist, who, with his colleague James Mitchell, established the [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

For those of us seeking a grown-up debate about Guantánamo in the two years since President Obama came into office, the most troubling development has been the retrenchment of Republican opposition to the closure of the prison, backed up by alarming support for the pro-Guantánamo position by members of the President’s own party. Like a [...]

For T. S. Eliot, April was the cruelest month, but for the prisoners at Guantánamo it is January — from the dashed hopes of January 2009, when President Obama swept into office issuing an executive order in which he promised to close the prison within a year, to January 2010, when, having failed to do [...]

Between January 18 and 21, a number of campaigning groups in the U.S. — No More Guantánamos, Witness Against Torture, the Defending Dissent Foundation, High Road for Human Rights Education Project, and WarIsACrime.org — are asking supporters to call Congress to ask their Senators and Representatives to help close Guantánamo by lifting a ban on [...]

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 [...]