Guantanamo

January 11, 2012 is a profoundly depressing anniversary — marking ten years since the Bush administration established its “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and decided that those who ended up in US custody would not be screened to ascertain whether or not they were combatants, and would be sent to Guantánamo to [...]

This Christmas, when so many of us spend time with our families, my thoughts are with Omar Khadr, a scapegoat in the “war on terror” for two countries — not just the United States, which has held him at Guantánamo for over nine years, but also Canada, his home. Seized at the age of 15 [...]

January 11, 2012 is the 10th anniversary of the opening of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo, and, to mark this bleak anniversary, dozens of campaigning groups are staging en event, “10 Years Too Many: National Day of Action Against Guantánamo.” Click on the image to enlarge. Beginning at 12 noon outside the White [...]

Last week, the Associated Press reported that officials at Guantánamo, stung by lawyers’ criticism of conditions in a disciplinary block known as “Five Echo,” had fought back against claims that the cells are too small to be regarded as humane, that the toilets are inadequate, the lights are too bright and the air in the [...]

When I began researching and writing about Guantánamo, nearly six years ago, one of the stories that seized my attention was that of Mohammed El-Gharani, a Chadian national, who had grown up with his parents in Saudi Arabia, and, after traveling to Pakistan to study, had been picked up in a random raid on a [...]

In an extraordinary ruling in the UK yesterday (PDF), the Court of Appeal ordered the British government to secure the release of a prisoner, Yunus Rahmatullah, who is 29 years old, and has been held in the US prison at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan since March 2004. Born in Pakistan but raised in the Gulf [...]

As the debate over the dreadful detainee provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act has demonstrated, when lawmakers, unprovoked, have unilaterally decided that what America needs is mandatory military custody for terror suspects (with the intention of holding people for life without charge or trial), something has gone horribly wrong, and a rational perspective on [...]

Back in June, I wrote about the case of Adel el-Gazzar, who, after eight years in US custody, mostly at Guantánamo, and another 17 months in Slovakia (where he was held in prison-like conditions and only released after embarking on a hunger strike), had returned to his homeland, where he was promptly arrested and imprisoned [...]

Two weeks ago, I wrote an article entitled, “As Judges Kill Off Habeas Corpus for the Guantánamo Prisoners, Will the Supreme Court Act?” in which I covered the latest grim news from the US courts regarding the Guantánamo prisoners’ habeas corpus petitions (see “Guantánamo Habeas Results: The Definitive List” for more). As I explained in [...]

Last week, when the Senate voted, by 93 votes to 7, to pass the latest National Defense Authorization Act (PDF), they passed legislation that not only approved a budget of $662 billion in military spending for the next fiscal year, but also demanded mandatory military custody for all terror suspects seized in future. The military [...]