Omar Khadr

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 [...]

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 [...]

Since coming to power 15 months ago, promising to close Guantánamo within a year, and suspending the much-criticized Military Commission trial system for terror suspects, President Obama’s zeal for repudiating the Bush administration’s “War on Terror” detention policies has ground to a halt. The rot set in almost immediately, when the new administration invoked the [...]

Lt. Col. David Frakt, Associate Professor of Law at Western State University College of Law and a Lieutenant Colonel in the US Air Force Reserve JAG Corps, served as lead defense counsel with the Office of Military Commissions, and has long distinguished himself as a particularly intelligent and knowledgeable critic of the Commissions, which were [...]

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, [...]

With just over two months to go until President Obama’s deadline for the closure of Guantanamo, the administration has finally woken up to the necessity of actually doing something to facilitate the prison’s closure by announcing on Friday that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other prisoners accused of involvement in the terrorist attacks of September [...]

At Guantánamo this week, the Military Commission trial system convened for only the second time since President Obama announced a four-month freeze on all proceedings on his first day in office to give the new administration’s inter-departmental Guantánamo Task Force an opportunity to review the best ways in which to deal with the remaining prisoners [...]

If President Obama is serious about ever closing Guantánamo, and bringing justice to any of the 239 men still held there, the chaotic events on Monday, in the first hearing of the Military Commission trial system since the President’s four-month freeze on proceedings expired, should persuade him that all that awaits him, if he proceeds [...]