The military told Agence France Presse that guards found the prisoner unresponsive and not breathing Wednesday. “After extensive lifesaving measures had been exhausted, the detainee was pronounced dead by a physician.”

The death of Inayatullah may again focus some attention on the judicial quagmire that is the prison camp at Guantanamo. The vast majority of the hundred-plus prisoners there have yet to be accused of crimes even though they have been held for years. The conditions of the imprisonment are vague and continue to be inadequately monitored. As a result, the “War on Terror” facility has become a symbol of U.S. injustice and imperial privilege to much of the world, fueling anti-American sentiment and seeming to confirm terrorist recruitment propaganda.

Moves to relocate the prisoners and try them according to U.S. law have met a series of politically charged hurdles year after year. After vowing to make closing the camps at Guantanamo a top priority, President Obama has abandoned the project, seemingly content to allow it to chug along of its own accord, a military-judicial no man’s land paid for by U.S. taxpayers without an end in sight and beyond the rule of law.

Early in the Obama administration, there was talk of moving the prisoners to Supermax prisons in the U.S., like to the facility in Florence, Colorado, where many high-profile terrorists are being held.

Colorado politicians blanched at the idea but local residents and Supermax officials have been less squeamish.

Town Manager Tom Piltingsrud told the Denver Post in 2009 that Florence residents would likely support a transfer.

They took the initiative on establishing Supermax in the first place, scraping together money to buy land and then donating it to the government for the complex, he said.

They remain glad for the jobs it provides.

“It’s a recession-proof industry,” Piltingsrud said.

There already is a housing development with a Gary Player-designed golf course close to the federal prison complex that includes Supermax. It has 100 units now but could have up to 1,500 when completed….

Florence Mayor Bart Hall has little worry about maintaining the security of the area, even in the event of a large-scale transfer from Guantanamo.

Hall noted that in rural Colorado, people are pretty self-reliant.

“Most of us own guns,” he said.

Family members of previously deceased Guantanamo prisoners have filed lawsuits arguing that the Pentagon covered up details of the deaths. U.S. judges dismissed those complaints.

Scott Horton at Harpers wrote the unaddressed backstory to those alleged suicides:

Late on the evening of June 9 that year, three prisoners at Guantánamo died suddenly and violently. Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, from Yemen, was thirty-seven. Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi, from Saudi Arabia, was thirty. Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani, also from Saudi Arabia, was twenty-two, and had been imprisoned at Guantánamo since he was captured at the age of seventeen. None of the men had been charged with a crime, though all three had been engaged in hunger strikes to protest the conditions of their imprisonment. They were being held in a cell block, known as Alpha Block, reserved for particularly troublesome or high-value prisoners.

As news of the deaths emerged the following day, the camp quickly went into lockdown. The authorities ordered nearly all the reporters at Guantánamo to leave and those en route to turn back. The commander at Guantánamo, Rear Admiral Harry Harris, then declared the deaths “suicides.” In an unusual move, he also used the announcement to attack the dead men. “I believe this was not an act of desperation,” he said, “but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.” Reporters accepted the official account, and even lawyers for the prisoners appeared to believe that they had killed themselves. Only the prisoners’ families in Saudi Arabia and Yemen rejected the notion.

Two years later, the U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service, which has primary investigative jurisdiction within the naval base, issued a report supporting the account originally advanced by Harris, now a vice-admiral in command of the Sixth Fleet. The Pentagon declined to make the NCIS report public, and only when pressed with Freedom of Information Act demands did it disclose parts of the report, some 1,700 pages of documents so heavily redacted as to be nearly incomprehensible. The NCIS documents were carefully cross-referenced and deciphered by students and faculty at the law school of Seton Hall University in New Jersey, and their findings, released in November 2009, made clear why the Pentagon had been unwilling to make its conclusions public. The official story of the prisoners’ deaths was full of unacknowledged contradictions, and the centerpiece of the report—a reconstruction of the events—was simply unbelievable.

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Several grisly photos (warning: graphic pictures of dead bodies) of the aftermath of the early-morning raid have already surfaced. The Reuters news agency obtained them from a member of Pakistan’s security forces who entered bin Laden’s compound after a team of Navy SEALs shot and killed bin Laden. None of the photographs, however, show bin Laden, and President Obama has said his administration will not release any such pictures out of concern that they would incite additional violence or be used for anti-American propaganda.

The AP, however, maintains that such a judgment call runs counter to its ability to determine whether the photographs are newsworthy. Michael Oreskes, senior managing editor of the AP, told The Atlantic’s John Hudson, “In the week since the raid there’s been a whole series of story-lines about what happened in this raid. At this point, anything that might shed more light on what occurred is potentially quite newsworthy. So we would like this imagery to fully understand what happened during this event.”

In the text of its FOIA request, the AP wrote hopefully to the administration, reminding it of the promises that had been during the Obama campaign:

“The Obama White House ‘pledged to be the most transparent government in U.S. history,” wrote the AP,  “and to comply much more closely with the Freedom of Information Act than the Bush administration did.’”

The AP joins Politico, Fox News, Judicial Watch and Citizens United (the controversial right-wing nonprofit group at the center of a notorious and contested Supreme Court decision) in filing FOIA requests for the pictures. So far, Politico is the only organization to report that it’s received an acknowledgment of its request, which has been forwarded to U.S. Army Intelligence.

If in fact that means that the Army has possession of the photos, it might make the FOIA requests a bit harder for the government to fight. Were the photos classified as presidential records, they couldn’t be released until at least after Obama leaves office, but if, as appears to be the case, the Army has them, it’s slightly more difficult to block their release to news agencies like the AP, Politico and Fox News.

Still, even though the Army is subject to immediate FOIA requests, petitions to see the pictures from the media and the public could be shot down for any number of reasons. In a post on the blog for George Washington University’s National Security Archive, the organization’s Nate Jones laid out several ways that the government could make the photos exempt from FOIA requests, thus blocking their release.

Writing last week, before the crop of FOIA requests was known, Jones explained that the government could use any of several exemption statutes pertaining to national security to block the photos’ release, or it could even cite privacy laws protecting the bin Laden family, an action for which there is actually precedent (PDF).

If all else fails, Jones says, President Obama can lean on Congress to quickly pass a law granting a statutory exemption to the photos — meaning there would be a case-specific injunction against release. That may seem at first blush like a last-ditch effort, but there are in fact 240 such exemptions currently on the books, including one against the release of any more pictures of detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib than have already been made public.

Of course, any organization faced with a FOIA exemption can appeal the decision, but it’s a drawn-out process unlikely in such a high-profile case to bear any fruit. Barring any major surprises (or leaks), the photographs of bin Laden’s death seem unlikely to ever see the light of day.

WikiLeaks announced it will be revealing details on each detainee every day over the coming month. According to National Public Radio, the new information was made available to the The New York Times by another source, on the condition of anonymity; the two media outlets are reporting on the information in tandem.

In this latest secret documents release, WikiLeaks, headed by Julian Assange (who last week made TIME’s 2011 list of most influential people in the world), says it is “shining the light of truth on a notorious icon of the Bush administration’s ‘War on Terror.’”

All told, WikiLeaks released details on 758 out of 779 total cases of detainees at the Cuba prison — details obtained from thousands of pages worth of memoranda from the Joint Task Force at Guantánamo Bay to the U.S. Southern Command in Florida, from January 2002 to February 2009. Details include prisoners’ personal information, capture information, prisoners’ health assessments, given reasoning for detainment, detainees’ accounts, ‘enemy combatant’ status and photos of most of the 171 prisoners still held in the prison. In addition, the organization has released summaries of evidence and tribunal transcripts on the first 201 prisoners released between 2002 and 2004, which, according to WikiLeaks, have never before been made public.

Wikileaks says these documents reveal evidence that the U.S. detained innocent men by mistake and offered “substantial bounties” to allies for al-Qaeda or Taliban suspects.

From WikiLeaks:

Crucially, the files also contain detailed explanations of the supposed intelligence used to justify the prisoners’ detention. For many readers, these will be the most fascinating sections of the documents, as they seem to offer an extraordinary insight into the workings of US intelligence, but although many of the documents appear to promise proof of prisoners’ association with al-Qaeda or other terrorist organizations, extreme caution is required.

The documents draw on the testimony of witnesses — in most cases, the prisoners’ fellow prisoners — whose words are unreliable, either because they were subjected to torture or other forms of coercion (sometimes not in Guantánamo, but in secret prisons run by the CIA), or because they provided false statements to secure better treatment in Guantánamo.

As details on detainees — and the evidence against them — makes its way to the public, The New York Times, The Guardian, and National Public Radio have provided varying insights on what this information tells us about the how the U.S. government has handled Gitmo.

From The New York Times:

What began as a jury-rigged experiment after the 2001 terrorist attacks now seems like an enduring American institution, and the leaked files show why, by laying bare the patchwork and contradictory evidence that in many cases would never have stood up in criminal court or a military tribunal.

[...]

The government’s basic allegations against many detainees have long been public, and have often been challenged by prisoners and their lawyers. But the dossiers, prepared under the Bush administration, provide a deeper look at the frightening, if flawed, intelligence that has persuaded the Obama administration, too, that the prison cannot readily be closed.

[...]

The dossiers also show the seat-of-the-pants intelligence gathering in war zones that led to the incarcerations of innocent men for years in cases of mistaken identity or simple misfortune.

[...]

[F]or all the limitations of the files, they still offer an extraordinary look inside a prison that has long been known for its secrecy and for a struggle between the military that runs it — using constant surveillance, forced removal from cells and other tools to exert control — and detainees who often fought back with the limited tools available to them: hunger strikes, threats of retribution and hoarded contraband ranging from a metal screw to leftover food.

From The Guardian:

The files depict a system often focused less on containing dangerous terrorists or enemy fighters, than on extracting intelligence. Among inmates who proved harmless were an 89-year-old Afghan villager, suffering from senile dementia, and a 14-year-old boy who had been an innocent kidnap victim.

[...]

The range of those still held captive includes detainees who have been admittedly tortured so badly they can never be successfully tried, informers who must be protected from reprisals, and a group of Chinese Muslims from the Uighur minority who have nowhere to go.

One of those officially admitted to have been so maltreated that it amounted to torture is prisoner No 63, Maad al-Qahtani. He was captured more than nine years ago, fleeing from the site of Osama bin Laden’s last stand in the mountain caves of Tora Bora in 2001. The report says Qahtani, allegedly one of the “Dirty 30″ who were bin Laden’s bodyguards, must not be released: “HIGH risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” The report’s military authors admit his admissions were obtained by what they call “harsh interrogation techniques in the early stages of detention.” But otherwise, the files make little mention of the widely-condemned techniques that were employed to obtain “intelligence” and “confessions” from detainees such as waterboarding, sleep deprivation and prolonged exposure to cold and loud music.

The files also detail how many innocents or marginal figures swept up by the Guantánamo dragnet because US forces thought they might be of some intelligence value.

A few key findings outlined by National Public Radio:

• A former detainee, Abu Sufian Ibrahim Ahmed Hamuda Bin Qumu, who is believed to be training rebel forces in Libya, has closer ties to al-Qaida than previously understood publicly.
• Tariq Mahmud Ahmad al Sawah, who claimed to have designed the prototype for a shoe bomb that failed to ignite on a U.S. plane in 2001, was recommended for release from the prison.
• Shaker Aamer, also known as Sawad al-Madani, said he had no connection to al-Qaida. His military assessment says he was Osama bin Laden’s personal English translator.
• Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the suspected plotter of the USS Cole attack in Yemen, reported directly to Osama bin Laden.
• Guantanamo officials were aware that they had innocent men in captivity, yet it took months to return them to their home countries.
• One detainee from Yemen informed on so many of his fellow detainees that authorities decided the reliability of his information was “in question.”
• A Russian detainee was transferred to the control of Russian authorities, on the basis of assurances that he would be incarcerated back in Russia, only to be released from Russian custody a short time later. A Saudi detainee threatened to arrange the murder of “four or five” Americans in revenge for his imprisonment but offered not to follow through on the threat if he were paid $5 million to $15 million in compensation.

The Times and NPR have created a database featuring government documents, court records and media reports on the 779 detainees at Guantánamo.

In Crowley’s resignation statement, he does not apologize for his comments, instead taking “full responsibility” for them and exhorting the government to exercise power in a way that is “prudent and consistent with our laws and values.”

Crowley wasn’t the only public official last week to decry the ongoing treatment of Manning at the Marine Corps Brig in Quantico, Virginia. Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) announced back in February that he had requested an audience with Manning in Quantico. On Friday, he said in a radio interview that his request has not been officially denied, but that he has been bounced around the Department of Defense and two branches of the military for the last month without getting an answer. “The fact that he’s awaiting trial and they’re doing this to him raises serious questions about our criminal justice process.”

The news that Kucinich is being stonewalled in his attempts to visit Manning comes just days after a report that Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.), a freshman congressman affiliated with the Tea Party, will this week visit Guantánamo Bay with five other congressmen whose names have not been disclosed. The purpose of the visit is said to be an investigation of detainee treatment and a review of military trials at Guantánamo. West, a retired career Army officer, faced disciplinary action following a 2003 incident in which he used gunplay as an intimidation tactic during an interrogation in Iraq. He was ultimately ordered to pay a $5,000 fine but avoided court-martial.

Assistant United States Attorney John Durham is close to completing a preliminary review of whether there is evidence that CIA agents violated the law when they used brutal methods to interrogate terror detainees, Attorney General Eric Holder said in speech Thursday night.

Holder, speaking in a question and answer session after his remarks at the University of the District of Columbia Law School, said Durham is ”close to the end of the time that he needs and will be making some recommendations to me.”  Holder’s comments were his fullest status report to date on the one  of the Justice Department’s most politically sensitive inquiries.

The question Durham’s investigating is ostensibly a narrow one: whether CIA interrogators acted outside of what Holder called the “pretty far-out OLC opinions” that justified torture. But there’s some room of interpretation of those strictures. A recently declassified CIA inspector general’s report from 2004 found that interrogators used mock executions and death threats with power drills and other gruesome techniques on detainees not explicitly outlined in even those “far-out” opinions. But they were operating in the spirit of those opinions, and most definitely with the sanction of policy from the Bush administration. So how will Durham calibrate what’s in and out of sanctioned boundaries?

Perhaps more saliently, what will Holder do in response? Indicting CIA interrogators without indicting the policymakers who put them in positions to break the law doesn’t exactly resemble justice. But neither does declining to indict torturers, especially when the Obama administration is trying to promote a rules-based international order more generally. Adam Serwer has a good post about the domestic politics the already-demonized Holder has to manage:

Of course, if there are prosecutable cases, and Holder chooses to pursue any of them, the GOP will paint the whole effort as a witch hunt against the CIA. That point if view is likely to draw more attention than the opposite one from the left, which is that the investigation didn’t go far enough in that it did not include those administration officials who authorized torture to begin with.

“The U.S. should be conducting its own criminal investigation of the officials responsible for sending an innocent man to Syria for a year to be interrogated under torture, not covering for them.  Again, the Canadians are doing the right thing by criminally investigating not only Syrian officials, but officials from the U.S. as well. The Obama administration should look to the Canadian example and do what’s right – apologize to Maher and hold his torturers accountable.”

I’ll update when I have more.

Update: LaHood tells me that Arar has met with RCMP investigators and the investigation has “been going on for least four years.”

The Center for Constitutional Rights’s Maria LaHood said in a statement that the court ”has effectively condoned torture by denying Maher’s right to seek a remedy. It is now up to President Obama and Congress to apologize to Maher for what the Bush administration did to him, to make clear that our laws prohibiting torture apply to everyone, including federal officials, and to hold those officials accountable.”

Through the collection of  ”detailed medical information” from detainee interrogations that physicians and mental-health experts used to shape subsequent interrogation regimens, Physicians for Human Rights charges that medical personnel involved in the torture violated their professional ethics and long-standing legal restrictions on human experimentation. Those violations “could rise to the level of war crimes and crimes against humanity,” the group writes in its report. It calls for an “immediate criminal investigation” into its charges, as well as a host of oversight mechanisms to determine that no such biological experimentation continues.

Just months after 9/11, the CIA hired two psychologists with experience in a training program to help U.S. servicemembers survive enemy torture, known as SERE, to help design an interrogation program for hard-to-crack al-Qaeda detainees. Those psychologists, Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell, set to work on a detainee in CIA custody, Abu Zubaydah, and under their guidance in the summer of 2002, Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times. Their work contributed to the establishment of several other interrogation methods not permitted under decades-long understandings of the Geneva Conventions, like keeping a detainee’s body so painfully contorted as to prevent him from falling asleep.

Jim Risen of The New York Times has the CIA’s rebuttal:

“The report is just wrong,” said Paul Gimigliano, an agency spokesman. “The C.I.A. did not, as part of its past detention program, conduct human subject research on any detainee or group of detainees. The entire detention effort has been the subject of multiple, comprehensive reviews within our government, including by the Department of Justice.”

The National Religious Campaign Against Torture emailed reporters a statement on the report: ”These revelations are profoundly disturbing and raise for us the question of what more remains hidden.  The spiritual health of our nation will continue to suffer until the full truth opens a path to the justice and healing that our nation so desperately needs.”

The Center for Constitutional Rights calls on the Obama administration to certify that its new interrogation team, known as the HIG, does not engage in any similar human experimentation:

CCR also demands that the new intra-agency interrogation unit that was disclosed in February 2010 explain the nature of the “scientific research” it is conducting to improve the questioning of suspects. The current government may attempt to take advantage of ambiguity in Appendix M of the Army Field Manual, added by the Bush administration and left in place by the Obama administration, to justify the ongoing use of some “enhanced” interrogation techniques such as sleep deprivation in the new interrogation guidelines. Any ongoing unlawful human experimentation to “perfect” such techniques must immediately cease.

For more, see Jeff Kaye, who first disclosed the existence of Appendix M.

Update: Check out this video about the report:

That’s been a concern of Holt’s for a while. He’s argued that not only will videotaping interrogations function as a measure to prevent detainee abuse, but it’ll create a useful lessons-learned library for training interrogators or honing their skills. Last October, he got a measure requiring the videotaping into the conference report for the defense appropriations bill.

“The Pentagon’s long awaited regulation of the provision I secured in last year’s National Defense Authorization Act continues the process of putting our detainee policies back on sound legal footing while improving our ability to get actionable intelligence,” Holt said in response to a request for comment from TWI (and subsequently emailed out in a press release). “As President Obama and local law enforcement officials across the country already know, we get better intelligence and protect both the interrogator and the person being interrogated by requiring recordings.”

A suspected al Qaeda organizer once called “the highest value detainee” at Guantánamo Bay was ordered released by a federal judge in an order issued Monday.

Mohamedou Ould Slahi was accused in the 9/11 Commission report of helping recruit Mohammed Atta and other members of the al Qaeda cell in Hamburg, Germany, that took part in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

That doesn’t mean Slahi’s release from Guantanamo Bay is imminent, or even definite, said Nancy Hollander, the Albuquerque-based attorney who argued Slahi’s habeas case. “There’s figuring out where he can go, and if the government is going to move for a stay or an appeal,” Hollander said, adding that Slahi “doesn’t even know yet” that he won his case. Nor has Hollander read it: The ruling, by Judge James Robertson, is classified. Hollander or an associate will have to travel to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia just to have a hope of reading it.

For a sampling of what Slahi experienced at Guantanamo, check out page 139 of the Senate Armed Services Committee’s 2008 report into the abuse of detainees in the custody of the Department of Defense:

The memoranda indicate that, on several occasions from July 8 through July 17, Slahi was interrogated by a masked interrogator called “Mr. X.” On July 8, 2003 Slahi was interrogated by Mr. X and was “exposed to various lighting patterns and rock music, to the tune of Drowning Pool’s ‘Let The Bodies Hit [the] Floor.’” On July 10, 2003 Slahi was placed in an interrogation room handcuffed and standing while the air conditioning was turned off until the room became “quite warm.” The next day, Slahi was brought into the interrogation booth and again remained standing and handcuffed while the air conditioning was again turned off. After allowing Slahi to sit, the interrogator later “took [Slahi's] chair and left him standing for several hours.” According to the memo, Slahi was “visibly uncomfortable and showed signs of fatigue. This was 4th day of long duration interrogations.”

On July 17, 2003, the masked interrogator told Slahi about a dream he had where he saw “four detainees that were chained together at the feet. They dug a hole that was six feet long, six feet deep, and four feet wide. Then he observed the detainees throw a plain, unpainted, pine casket with the number 760 [Slahi's internment serial number (ISN)] painted on it in orange on the ground.”

On August 2, 2003 an interrogator told Slahi “to use his imagination and think up the worst possible thing that could happen to him” and asked him “what scares him more than anything else.”

Yet Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld did not approve a “special interrogation plan” for Slahi until August 12, 2003 — five days after Slahi apparently broke by the interrogation. Even after that, Slahi was “interrogated” to the point where he told a Guantanamo psychologist he was “hearing voices” in his head, and a military prosecutor assigned to his case said he was “very concerned about the allegations of detainee abuse at GTMO and Afghanistan.” That prosecutor, Lt. Col. Stuart Couch, would refuse to participate in Slahi’s prosecution after learning about what was done to Slahi during “interrogation.”

Asked to describe her reaction when she heard that she won Slahi’s habeas case, Hollander responded, “Joy.”