Guantanamo and US Supreme Court

I like to believe that, despite studying Guantánamo for four years, I still have a sense of humor, but last Thursday I lost it, after 258 members of the House of Representatives (including 88 members of President Obama’s own party) voted for an idiotic, paranoid and unjust motion proposed by Rep. Hal Rogers (R-Ken.), which [...]

On Monday, one day after the New York Times and the Washington Post reported that the Obama administration was planning to introduce tribunals for the prisoners held in the US prison at Bagram airbase, Afghanistan, the reason for the specifically-timed leaks that led to the publication of the stories became clear. The government was hoping [...]

In recent months, those who have been studying Guantánamo closely have come to the disturbing conclusion that the biggest obstacle to President Obama’s pledge to close Guantánamo by January 2010 comes not from the fearmongering and opportunistic politicians who recently voted to prohibit the use of any funds to release or to transfer prisoners to [...]

While everyone was looking at a map, trying to work out exactly where Palau is, following the announcement on Tuesday that Guantánamo’s 17 Uighur prisoners were to be resettled there, it now transpires that four of the men have been quietly flown to Bermuda instead. This is rather a surprise, to put it mildly. The [...]

On Friday, court-watchers received some deeply depressing news — 33 pages of unconstitutional hogwash directed at the Supreme Court by President Obama’s Justice Department (PDF), in which no stone of dubious legality was left unturned in the administration’s desperate and unprincipled attempts to mimic its predecessors by preventing 17 Uighurs at Guantánamo from being resettled [...]

Although I reported last week about an important court case in favor of Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed, a Yemeni prisoner in Guantánamo, there was little in the way of progress, during the first 115 days of the Obama administration, for the men who are still held, despite the President’s pledge to close the prison [...]

At a press conference to mark his first 100 days in office, President Obama declared, “We have rejected the false choice between our security and our ideals by closing the detention center at Guantánamo Bay and banning torture without exception.” I have looked at the President’s misleading statement about Guantánamo, and analyzed his progress — [...]

Speaking at a press conference to mark his first 100 days in office, Barack Obama made two bold claims about the policies he has already implemented to tackle the Executive overreach of the Bush administration, with regard to detention and interrogation policies in the “War on Terror.” “We have rejected the false choice between our [...]

Since coming to power in a blaze of reforming glory, promising to close Guantánamo within a year, to stop the CIA from running offshore torture prisons, and to restore the Geneva Conventions to prisoners seized in wartime, the Obama administration has proceeded to make a number of poor decisions in relation to its predecessors’ reviled [...]

First, the good news. Adel Abdul Hakim, one of five Uighurs (Muslims from China’s oppressed Xinjiang province), who was released from Guantánamo in May 2006, has had his asylum claim accepted by the Swedish government. The Uighurs’ story It has been a long journey for Adel. Seized in Pakistan and sold to US forces in [...]