Salim Hamdan

The Military Commissions –- the Stalinesque show trials dreamt up in November 2001 by Dick Cheney and his cabal of close advisors, including David Addington –- have been dogged by controversy ever since. Killed off by the Supreme Court in June 2006, brought back to life through the ghoulish Military Commissions Act a few months [...]

On Friday, in a second legal development dealing with Guantánamo (see here for the first), the administration attempted to revive its beleaguered –- and much reviled –- system of Military Commissions. Just as the tribunals at Guantánamo –- the Combatant Status Review Tribunals –- have been condemned for providing a pale and unjust imitation of [...]

In the Miami Herald, veteran Gitmo-watcher Carol Rosenberg is the first to report on the appointment of a successor to Navy Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, the Judge Advocate’s General (JAG) lawyer, who fought a long, principled, and career-destroying battle to defend his client, Salim Hamdan, a 36-year old Yemeni who had been one of Osama [...]

On Friday, in two separate decisions, judges in the United States delivered stinging rebukes to the administration regarding its policies of holding around 300 prisoners in Guantánamo without charge or trial, and its plans to try around 80 other prisoners before Military Commissions, the widely-reviled trial system for terror suspects, which permit the use of [...]

It’s been another busy week at Guantánamo. On 4 June, the US administration attempted to hold the first of the reconvened Military Commissions since the farcical ‘trial’ of David Hicks in March, when the Australian Taliban volunteer –- persistently regarded by the administration as one of ‘the worst of the worst’, and one of only [...]