Guantanamo and habeas corpus

Or, Praise for Those Defending Rights and Liberties in the “War on Terror” A Talking Dog/Andy Worthington co-production Andy suggested that he and I team up on a top ten list of what we felt after at least seven years of winter in the American judicial system, when we now have some semblance of the sun breaking […]

As Barack Obama arrives in Washington D.C. to prepare for office, Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files, hopes to put the plight of the Uighurs — innocent men held at Guantánamo in what appears to be a state of perpetual limbo — at the top of the in-tray marked “homeland security.” Without a just […]

The announcement on December 1 that President-Elect Barack Obama had retained Robert Gates as defense secretary was intended to demonstrate Obama’s desire for a “big-tent” administration that transcended partisan politics. Gates, who voiced his desire to close the Pentagon’s notorious Guantánamo Bay prison almost as soon as he took over from Donald Rumsfeld in December […]

On Thursday, in the US District Court in Washington D.C., Judge Richard Leon, an appointee of President George W. Bush, delivered a major blow to the outgoing administration’s “War on Terror” detention policies by ordering the immediate release of five Algerian-born Bosnian prisoners at Guantánamo, after concluding that the government had provided no credible evidence […]

The case of Binyam Mohamed just gets weirder and weirder. For the last six months, the British resident and Guantánamo prisoner, who was seized in Pakistan in April 2002, has been engaged in a transatlantic struggle to secure evidence relating to his “extraordinary rendition” and torture, by or on behalf of the CIA, which involved […]

Guantánamo is full of bleak stories. How could it fail to be, when it is a vast failed experiment, a “terror prison” that contains few terrorists, a place where innocent men and foot soldiers from someone else’s war — never adequately screened to determine whether they actually constituted a threat to the United States — […]

In an extraordinary and unprecedented ruling in a US District Court, Judge Ricardo Urbina has ruled that 17 wrongly imprisoned Chinese Muslims at Guantánamo must be allowed entry to the United States. It is, as the media has been reporting, the first time that a US court has directly ordered the release of a prisoner […]

Imagine being seized in Afghanistan or Pakistan, where you were, perhaps, a completely innocent man, sold for a bounty, or a Muslim soldier, fighting other Muslims in a civil war whose roots lay in the resistance to the Soviet occupation of the 1980s, which was partly funded by the United States. Then imagine that, both […]

You may well ask. A month ago, the Supreme Court ruled, in Boumediene v. Bush, that the Guantánamo prisoners have constitutional habeas corpus rights; in other words, the right to ask why, after six and a half years’ imprisonment without charge or trial, they are being held. The highest judges in the land ruled four […]

Some of us have known for years that the US administration’s basis for holding prisoners without charge or trial in the “War on Terror” has more to do with a fantasy world in which nonsense masquerades as truth, logic is skewed, and nothing that is uttered remotely resembles evidence that would stand up in a […]