Guantanamo tribunals

Those of us who prefer justice to arbitrary and unaccountable detention without charge or trial were delighted when, last week, Barack Obama fulfilled a long-stated promise and issued a presidential order stating that Guantánamo will be closed “as soon as practicable, and no later than one year from the date of this order,” and establishing [...]

On January 13, in a declaration submitted to a Washington D.C. District Court in the case of Guantánamo prisoner Mohamed Jawad, Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, a former prosecutor in the Military Commission trial system, delivered perhaps the most blistering attack on the US military’s detention program by a former member of the Pentagon’s team to [...]

In the first part of this interview with Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, Andy Worthington, the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, examined why the government’s allegations against the prisoners at Guantánamo are unreliable. A veteran of US Army intelligence, Lt. Col. Abraham worked for OARDEC (the [...]

Since the election of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States, the closure of the “War on Terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba has become a hot topic. Throughout his election campaign, Obama pledged to close Guantánamo, and he reiterated his promise during his first TV interview as President-Elect, on November 15. [...]

On Thursday, in the US District Court in Washington D.C., Judge Richard Leon, an appointee of President George W. Bush, delivered a major blow to the outgoing administration’s “War on Terror” detention policies by ordering the immediate release of five Algerian-born Bosnian prisoners at Guantánamo, after concluding that the government had provided no credible evidence [...]

Guantánamo, it seems, is about to become a buzzword once more, as it is, in many ways, the most iconic symbol of Barack Obama’s challenge to undo the Bush administration’s zeal for unfettered executive power. Already, however, pundits are stepping forward to point out the difficulties involved in dismantling the system, whining about the dangerous [...]

In the real world, guilt and innocence are clearly defined, and those believed to be responsible for a crime are considered innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Since the 9/11 attacks, however, the US administration has done away with such long-standing conventions. Under the guise of waging a “War on Terror,” those [...]

In an extraordinary and unprecedented ruling in a US District Court, Judge Ricardo Urbina has ruled that 17 wrongly imprisoned Chinese Muslims at Guantánamo must be allowed entry to the United States. It is, as the media has been reporting, the first time that a US court has directly ordered the release of a prisoner [...]

The Military Commissions at Guantánamo — the trial system for “War on Terror” prisoners that was established in the wake of the 9/11 attacks — are of enormous significance, as they are the only point at which the Bush administration’s post-9/11 detention policies (focused, for the most part, on a disturbing legal limbo between the [...]

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 [...]