Military Commissions

Surprise is the last thing that anyone ought to feel on hearing the news that the Obama administration “has shelved the planned prosecution,” in a trial by Military Commission, “of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the alleged coordinator of the Oct. 2000 suicide attack on the USS Cole in Yemen,” as the Washington Post reported on Thursday, [...]

On August 12, the US administration’s intention to proceed with the war crimes trial of Omar Khadr, a Canadian who was just 15 years old when he was seized after a firefight in Afghanistan in July 2002, was temporarily delayed when Khadr’s military lawyer, Army Lt. Col. Jon Jackson, collapsed in the courtroom in Guantánamo [...]

On August 11, Ibrahim al-Qosi, a 51-year old former cook and driver for Osama bin Laden, was given a 14-year sentence by a military jury, after pleading guilty to one count of conspiracy, and one count of providing material support to terrorism at an earlier hearing on July 7, as I reported here.
The sentence was [...]

The Washington Post has just made available a letter from Guantánamo (PDF), written by Omar Khadr, the Canadian citizen who was just 15 years old when he was seized in Afghanistan in July 2002. The letter, to one of Khadr’s Canadian lawyers, Dennis Edney, was written on May 26, and touches on aspects of Khadr’s [...]

In a turnaround from the defiant position he took last week, when he sacked his US lawyers and stated that he would either boycott his impending trial by Military Commission, or would represent himself, Omar Khadr, the Canadian citizen who was just 15 years when he was seized in Afghanistan in July 2002, and who [...]

In the last week, Omar Khadr, the only Western citizen still held in Guantánamo, has sacked his US lawyers and stated that he will boycott his forthcoming trial by Military Commission, scheduled to begin on August 10. He has also refused to have anything to do with a plea deal that was being negotiated between [...]

In an alleged victory for the Military Commission trial system for terror suspects at Guantánamo, revived by President Obama last year despite the fact that he suspended the Commissions on his first day in office, a Sudanese prisoner, Ibrahim al-Qosi, accepted a plea bargain yesterday, and made a guilty plea on one count of conspiracy [...]

Note: Please see the postscript below by Col. Davis.
Today, the Daily Times in Pakistan has published an interview with Colonel Morris Davis, conducted by political analyst Ali Kamran Chishti. The interview is of interest for Col. Davis’ explanation of how Guantánamo operated as an illegal “intelligence squeezing” center, and for his description of the prison [...]

To mark the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, I have an article published on Truthout (which I’ll be publishing here tomorrow) and have just posted an article featuring statements by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and other UN experts, but in the meantime I thought this was a good opportunity to mark the [...]

Are we so inured to the implementation of torture by the Bush administration that we no longer recognize what torture is? Torture, according to the UN Convention Against Torture, to which the US is a signatory, is “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person [...]