Guantanamo and habeas corpus

To mark the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, I have an article published on Truthout (which I’ll be publishing here tomorrow) and have just posted an article featuring statements by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and other UN experts, but in the meantime I thought this was a good opportunity to mark the […]

Three weeks ago, I wrote a bitter commentary about the repeated failures of the US government to release an innocent Yemeni prisoner in Guantánamo — a student, Mohammed Hassan Odaini, now aged 26, but just 18 when he was seized — even though he was cleared for release by a military review board under President […]

For the first two and a half years that the “War on Terror” prison at Guantánamo was open, the men held there had no recourse to justice if, as many of them claimed, they had been seized by mistake, as part of a largely indiscriminate dragnet involving substantial bounty payments to the Bush administration’s allies […]

The recently released Final Report of President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force (PDF) was supposed to provide a cogent and definitive analysis of the status of the remaining 181 prisoners, given that it took eleven months to complete, and involved “more than 60 career professionals, including intelligence analysts, law enforcement agents, and attorneys, drawn from […]

In 2002, when Guantánamo opened, 22 Uighurs (Muslims from China’s oppressed Xinjiang province) were held in the prison, even though interrogators in Afghanistan (where the prisoners were processed for Guantánamo) had already realized that they had no connection to al-Qaeda or the Taliban. The men were mostly seized by Pakistani villagers and sold to US […]

In the first of two articles about the Obama administration’s detention policies relating to the US airbase at Bagram, Afghanistan, I examined recent revelations about a secret prison inside the base, apparently run by a shadowy branch of the Pentagon, where Bush-era “enhanced interrogations,” involving sleep deprivation and isolation, are used, as authorized in Appendix […]

On the evening of March 28, 2002, Mohammed Hassen (also identified as Mohammed Hassan Odaini), an 18-year old Yemeni student at Salafia University in Faisalabad, Pakistan, made a decision that was to change his life forever. He had been visiting fellow students in another house connected with the university, had stayed for dinner, and had […]

Please support my work! President Obama’s hopes of closing Guantánamo, which were already gravely wounded by his inability to meet his self-imposed deadline of a year for the prison’s closure, now appear to have been killed off by lawmakers in Congress. Although the House Armed Services Committee was happy to authorize, by 59 votes to […]

On Thursday, a group of US citizens in Massachusetts were thrilled to hear that, in the District Court in Washington D.C., Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. had granted the habeas corpus petition of Ravil Mingazov, the last Russian prisoner in Guantánamo, who was seized in Pakistan in March 2002. Few people in America have heard […]

Please support my work! My thanks to everyone who supported my recent “Guantánamo Habeas Week” project, which, due to the scale of the project and some scheduling difficulties, actually ran for three weeks, with an introduction here, an interactive list of all 47 cases to date, and six detailed articles examining the unclassified opinions in […]