Guantanamo tribunals

Some of us have known for years that the US administration’s basis for holding prisoners without charge or trial in the “War on Terror” has more to do with a fantasy world in which nonsense masquerades as truth, logic is skewed, and nothing that is uttered remotely resembles evidence that would stand up in a [...]

In the history of legal challenges to the Bush administration’s assertion that it can hold “War on Terror” prisoners indefinitely without charge or trial, Parhat v. Gates has just joined a trio of Supreme Court verdicts — Rasul v. Bush (2004), Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006) and Boumediene v. Bush (twelve days ago) — as significant [...]

Those who cherish the United States’ historical adherence to the rule of law — myself included — were delighted to hear that the US Supreme Court ruled on Thursday, in the case of Boumediene v. Bush (PDF), that the prisoners at Guantánamo “have the constitutional right to habeas corpus,” enabling them to challenge the basis [...]

For the five Afghans who returned home on the same flight as al-Jazeera journalist Sami al-Haj and the other three prisoners described in my previous article, the future is disturbingly uncertain. As I reported last December, when 13 of their compatriots were released from Guantánamo, they, like the other 19 Afghans released in August, September [...]

The US Department of Defense announced today that Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian captured after a gunfight in Gujrat, Pakistan in July 2004, would be the fifteenth Guantánamo prisoner to be tried by Military Commission, in connection with his alleged involvement in the bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania on August 7, [...]