Eric Holder

For the US attorneys who represent prisoners in Guantánamo, and who have spent many years seeking justice for their clients, it has been a long, and generally disappointing road. After triumph in June 2004, when, in Rasul v. Bush, the Supreme Court granted the prisoners habeas corpus rights, allowing them to meet their clients for […]

Last week I returned from Poland, where I had been touring the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (which I co-directed with filmmaker Polly Nash), and discussing the importance of an ongoing investigation into the complicity of the Polish government in the establishment of a secret CIA torture prison in Poland in the […]

In the litany of injustices that still permeate the “War on Terror” prison at Guantánamo — including President Obama’s decision to hold 47 men indefinitely without charge or trial, the resistance by lawmakers to proposals to free prisoners cleared for release by the President’s Guantánamo Review Task Force, or to allow federal court trials for […]

Last Friday, Ken Ota of the newspaper Revolution asked me to do a phone interview to discuss the recent announcement that President Obama was planning a new series of trials by Military Commission at Guantánamo, to explain the significance of this announcement, and to run through the largely shambolic history of the Commissions since their […]

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 […]

With just two weeks to go before the ninth anniversary of the opening of the “War on Terror” prison at Guantánamo, almost everyone in a position of authority in the US has failed to resolve, in a satisfactory manner, the bitter legacy left by the Bush administration. In fact, to judge by two recent developments, […]

How messed up is American politics? Well, here are a few clues. Two weeks ago, the House of Representatives passed a $1.1 trillion continuing resolution, which funds the government through to September 30 next year. As The Hill explained, the resolution was needed “because Congress failed to pass any of the 12 regular appropriations bills […]

1. Since its founding in December 2006, WikiLeaks, which was established as, essentially, a secure information clearing house for whistleblowers around the world to provide sensitive information, some of which would then be released to the public, and which was reportedly set up by “Chinese dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and start-up company technologists, from the US, […]

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 […]