Military Commissions

For those of us seeking a grown-up debate about Guantánamo in the two years since President Obama came into office, the most troubling development has been the retrenchment of Republican opposition to the closure of the prison, backed up by alarming support for the pro-Guantánamo position by members of the President’s own party. Like a [...]

For T. S. Eliot, April was the cruelest month, but for the prisoners at Guantánamo it is January — from the dashed hopes of January 2009, when President Obama swept into office issuing an executive order in which he promised to close the prison within a year, to January 2010, when, having failed to do [...]

On the afternoon of January 11, after I had spoken at a rally outside The White House and at a protest outside the Department of Justice, the New America Foundation in Washington D.C. hosted a panel discussion, “Nine Years of Guantánamo: What Now?” which I had organized as part of a week-long US tour to [...]

Just when it seemed that President Obama’s paralysis regarding Guantánamo couldn’t get any worse — with any further trials or prisoner releases apparently on permanent hold because any other course of action would be politically inconvenient — the House of Representatives and the Director of National Intelligence have stepped in to make the prospect of [...]

I first heard from Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institution about two years ago, when he was conducting research into the cases of the prisoners held at Guantánamo, for a project entitled, “The Current Detainee Population of Guantánamo: An Empirical Study.” Wittes got in touch because he had drawn on my analysis of 8,000 publicly [...]

To listen to certain Republican critics of last week’s verdict in the federal court trial of the Tanzanian Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a former Guantánamo prisoner and a former CIA “ghost prisoner,” you would think that the jury had found him not guilty, and that he had been released onto the streets of New York. In [...]

On Monday, I’ll be publishing my own detailed response to the outcome in the federal court trial of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, and the Republican hysteria that has arisen because the jury dismissed 284 charges against him — relating to his alleged participation in the US embassy bombings in Africa in August 1998 — but found [...]

Delayed by a month due to other demands (primarily, a visit to the US and the trial by Military Commission of Omar Khadr), this is the eighth part of a nine-part series telling the stories of all the prisoners currently held in Guantánamo (174 at the time of writing). See the introduction here, and Part [...]

On national security issues, there are now two Americas. In the first, which existed from January to May 2009, the rule of law flickered briefly back to life after eight years of the Bush administration. In this first America, President Obama swept into office issuing executive orders promising to close Guantánamo and to uphold the [...]

On Sunday, a military jury at Guantánamo handed down a 40-year sentence to Omar Khadr, the Canadian citizen who was just 15 years old when he was seized after a firefight in Afghanistan. The decision brought to an end a week of hearings that began when Khadr, now 24, accepted a plea deal giving him [...]