Military Commissions

One of the heroes of the Military Commissions at Guantánamo is Lt. Col. Barry Wingard, who has served for 26 years in the US military, works as a public defender in Pittsburgh, and is also a Judge Advocate General (JAG) in the Air Force. A veteran of the conflicts in Bosnia and Iraq, he was [...]

Last week, while the UK Court of Appeal was shining a spotlight on the case of Binyam Mohamed, ordering details of his torture by US agents to be revealed to the public, Binyam himself — a British resident, subjected to “extraordinary rendition” and torture, who was released from Guantánamo last February — was thinking about [...]

Last week, I was delighted to be invited by Jeff Farias to take part in his radio show, just a week after my previous visit. The show is available here (it starts just over two hours in), and Jeff wanted to talk in particular about my article on the recent appeal in the Military Commissions, [...]

Last Tuesday, a little known court — the Court of Military Commissions Review — convened to hear appeals in the cases of the only two men sentenced in the Military Commission trial system established by Congress in 2006, after the first version, conceived by Vice President Dick Cheney and his close advisors in November 2001, [...]

Yesterday evening, the Associated Press reported that, in court filings, Justice Department lawyers stated that Attorney General Eric Holder has decided that a sixth Guantánamo prisoner — an Afghan named Obaidullah — will be put forward for trial by Military Commission. On November 13, when Holder announced that five prisoners — including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed [...]

Last Tuesday, in a letter to Illinois governor Pat Quinn, five senior Obama administration officials — Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Attorney General Eric Holder, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, and Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano — announced that “the President has directed, with our unanimous [...]

For anyone who has studied Guantánamo’s Military Commissions closely over the last eight years, it was obvious that their revival last week, in a supposedly new and improved form, was bound to be a disaster.
First dragged out of obscurity in November 2001 by Dick Cheney and his close advisors, specifically to secure the convictions of [...]

So much for the First Amendment. Morris Davis, the retired Air Force Colonel who served as the Chief Prosecutor of the Military Commissions at Guantánamo from September 2005 until his resignation in October 2007, has just lost his job at the Congressional Research Service (a branch of the Library of Congress) for writing, in his [...]

Last week, lawyer, ex-Army Captain and Iraq veteran Phillip Carter, described by Glenn Greenwald as “a very harsh critic of the Bush administration’s detention and interrogation policies,” suddenly resigned his post as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Policy, which he had occupied since April. Carter claimed that he was leaving due to “personal issues,” [...]

In the wake of Attorney General Eric Holder’s announcement that five Guantánamo prisoners — including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — will face federal court trials in New York, and five others will face trials by Military Commission, much of the media has been consumed with the whining of opportunistic right-wing politicians, who persist in maintaining the [...]