abuse

Fouad al Rabiah, a Kuwaiti Airways engineer accused of being an aide to Osama bin Laden who recently won his habeas corpus case in federal court, is a step closer to going home. McClatchy newspapers reports that the 50-year-old father of four was moved to the part of the Guantanamo detention center reserved for detainees [...]

Nick Baumann at Mother Jones reminds us that the Obama administration promised earlier this month to do its best to review about 224 more documents that might be responsive to the American Civil Liberties Union’s Freedom of Information Act longstanding requests for documents relating to the torture, abuse and death of detainees in U.S. custody.
Somehow, [...]

The New York Times’ lead editorial today is a powerful indictment of the Obama administration’s continuation of Bush-era efforts to conceal the facts of U.S.-sponsored torture.
Running through the list of situations that we’ve been reporting on in which the Obama administration continues to conceal evidence of torture — from the efforts of British resident Binyam [...]

A military judge’s ruling that U.S. officers used “cruel and inhuman” treatment and possibly “torture” on an Afghan teenager imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay provides strong support for the argument that the government should embark on a broader investigation of the treatment of “war on terror” detainees during the Bush administration.

This isn’t the long-awaited ethics report from the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility that Spencer referred to this morning, but another ethics report from that office reportedly bolsters Attorney General Eric Holder’s conclusion that the Department of Justice should re-open nearly a dozen cases of prisoner abuse and even murder that the Bush administration [...]

That’s what I asked Joshua Dratel, Chair of the John Adams Project Advisory Committee and a prominent defense lawyer who has represented numerous terror suspects before. Speaking this morning after the news broke that the Department of Justice is investigating military defense lawyers representing terror suspects, Dratel said he couldn’t talk about the specifics of [...]

Daphne Eviatar is guest-blogging for Glenn Greenwald today. The following is cross-posted at Salon.
If, as the latest reports indicate, Attorney General Eric Holder is serious about prosecuting the worst torture and abuse of “war on terror” prisoners that occurred during the Bush administration, then there’s some key evidence he’s going to want to take a [...]

The American Civil Liberties Union will file a brief tomorrow urging the federal court to suppress evidence gathered using torture, which the government wants to rely on in the case of Mohammed Jawad, the boy who “confessed” to throwing a grenade at U.S. soldiers after being arrested and tortured by Afghan authorities in 2002, then [...]

The Supreme Court returned the case of a Muslim Pakistani immigrant to a lower court, leaving questions about how specific a claim against a government official must be for it to be heard.

As part of an upcoming inside look at the prison at Guantanamo Bay set to air April 5, National Geographic has put together some interesting behind-the-scenes interviews with the prison guards there. Not surprisingly, the guards — well aware of the camera they’re talking to — come off as extremely well-trained and sensitive to the [...]