Ramzi bin al-Shibh

On Tuesday, the Pentagon issued a press release announcing that prosecutors in the Office of Military Commissions at Guantánamo had sworn charges against five prisoners: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi Bin al-Shibh, Walid Bin Attash, Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali and Mustafa al-Hawsawi. Accusing the five men of being “responsible for the planning and execution” of the [...]

Last Monday, when Attorney General Eric Holder conceded that his dream of prosecuting, in federal court, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and four other men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks, was officially over, derailed by Congressional opposition to the very notion of moving a single prisoner from Guantánamo to the US mainland to face a [...]

The mainstream media in the United States (and in the UK) has ignored the release last week of documents in Poland confirming that planes chartered by the CIA flew to the site of a secret CIA prison in north eastern Poland in 2002 and 2003. The documents, released by the Polish Border Guard Office, confirm [...]

On Friday, the Polish Border Guard Office released a number of documents to the Warsaw-based Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, which, for the first time, provide details of the number of prisoners transferred by the CIA to a secret prison in Poland between December 5, 2002 and September 22, 2003, and, in one case, the [...]

To complement my recent article, “UN Human Rights Council Discusses Secret Detention Report,” in which I explained how, two weeks ago, the UN Human Rights Council had — after some delays — finally discussed the findings of the “Joint Study on Global Practices in Relation to Secret Detention in the Context of Counter-Terrorism,” a detailed, [...]

Note: This article is published as part of “Guantánamo Habeas Week” (introduced here), which also features an interactive list of all 47 rulings to date (with links to my articles, the judges’ unclassified opinions, and more). Despite the Bush administration’s fearsome rhetoric regarding Guantánamo — that it contained “the worst of the worst” terrorists, who, [...]

Such is the hysterical disregard for the law in parts of the United States that when, on March 22, District Court Judge James Robertson ordered the release from Guantánamo of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a 38-year old Mauritanian who was once described as the “highest-value detainee at the facility,” Republican lawmakers were in uproar. The Hill [...]

It’s now over three weeks since veteran Justice Department lawyer David Margolis dashed the hopes of those seeking accountability for the Bush administration’s torturers, but this is a story of such profound importance that it must not be allowed to slip away. Margolis decided that an internal report (PDF) into the conduct of John Yoo [...]

See postscript below. On Monday, District Court Judge Thomas F. Hogan handed the government its ninth victory (against 31 losses to date) in the habeas corpus petitions of the prisoners held at Guantánamo, ruling that the government had established, by a preponderance of the evidence, that Musa’ab al-Madhwani, a 28-year old Yemeni, could continue to [...]

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 [...]