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As a Russia-related scandal engulfs the White House, with the resignation of national security adviser Michael Flynn, Donald Trump’s disgraceful immigration ban continues to attract condemnation in US courts. The ban, which bars entry to the US to anyone from seven countries with mainly Muslim populations (Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen) for 90 days, and refugees for 120 days (with a total ban on refugees from Syria) was first subjected to a nationwide stay nine days ago, when District Judge James Robart, a senior judge in the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington, declared that the ban was unconstitutional, and granted a temporary restraining order against it that applied nationwide. Washington State’s Attorney General Bob Ferguson had successfully argued in court that the ban “violated the guarantee of equal protection and the first amendment’s establishment clause, infringed the constitutional right to due process and contravened the federal Immigration and Nationality Act,” as the Guardian described it.

Last week, three judges in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco upheld Judge Robart’s ruling, having found that the government had “pointed to no evidence that any alien from any of the countries named in the order has perpetrated a terrorist attack in the United States,” and added that, “[r]ather than present evidence to explain the need for the executive order, the government has taken the position that we must not review its decision at all,” in the Guardian’s words.

Yesterday, in Virginia, a third blow for the government came when District Judge Leonie Brinkema, in Aziz v. Trump, issued a preliminary injunction against the order based specifically on the issue of religious discrimination. Read the rest of this entry »

Good news from Guantánamo, as nine prisoners have been released, bringing the remaining number of prisoners down to 80. The nine men freed are all Yemeni citizens, but all have a connection with Saudi Arabia. Four were born there to Yemeni parents, while the other five have close family members who live in the country.

Only one of the nine is at all well-known: Tariq Ba Odah, a long-term hunger striker, who, last year, asked a judge to order his release, via a habeas corpus petition, because of the precarious state of his health. After more than eight years on a permanent hunger strike, he weighed just 74 pounds, and, according to medical experts and his lawyers, was at risk of death. Disgracefully, the Justice Department challenged his habeas petition, and, at the end of the year, Reuters revealed that the Pentagon had prevented representatives from an undisclosed foreign country that was prepared to offer him a new home from having access to his medical records, so that the country in question dropped its resettlement offer.

The New York Times also discussed the long history of how Saudi Arabia came to take in the Yemenis, revealing how the move completed “a long-sought diplomatic deal ahead of a planned visit to Riyadh by President Obama in the coming week.” Read the rest of this entry »

I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012 with US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email.

On Monday, President Obama fulfilled the first of three promises he made a month ago to resume releasing prisoners from Guantánamo, by appointing an envoy at the State Department to deal with prisoner transfers.

In a speech on national security issues on May 23, in which the President spoke at length about Guantánamo, he made the following promises: “I am appointing a new, senior envoy at the State Department and Defense Department whose sole responsibility will be to achieve the transfer of detainees to third countries. I am lifting the moratorium on detainee transfers to Yemen, so we can review them on a case by case basis. To the greatest extent possible, we will transfer detainees who have been cleared to go to other countries.”

In fulfilling the first promise, President Obama has appointed Clifford Sloan, described by The Hill as “a veteran Washington attorney and civil servant.” He was “an associate counsel to former President Clinton and an assistant to the solicitor general in the first Bush administration,” and also “worked as associate counsel in the Office of Independent Counsel investigating the Iran-Contra affair and clerked for Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens.” More recently, he was the publisher of Slate magazine, and legal counsel for the Washington Post‘s online operations. Read the rest of this entry »