David Remes

Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed, an Algerian national who was captured in Pakistan and turned over to the U.S. military after fleeing from Afghanistan, was ordered released from the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay by a U.S. District Court judge yesterday, according to the human rights group CagePrisoners. Judge Gladys Kessler’s written opinion is still [...]

Human rights experts say there is a serious risk that some of the Guantanamo detainees cleared for release could face persecution or torture.

The Obama administration is putting a new plan in place at Afghanistan’s Bagram air field detention facility to bring indefinite detentions there — a practice viewed as a replication of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility’s more noxious functions — to an end. What does it include? Assigning U.S. military officials, who aren’t lawyers, to represent [...]

On Monday a federal court judge ordered the Department of Defense to release a 47-year-old father of two with a heart condition who it has imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay for the past seven years without justification.

Today’s news that Obama administration officials are touring a Michigan prison as a possible alternative location for detainees now imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay could make life easier for some of their defense lawyers. But some say it raises as many concerns as it resolves.
“I think it’s encouraging that they’re moving ahead despite the opposition,” said [...]

It wasn’t until late Friday afternoon that the Obama Justice Department, after years of wrangling over the fate of Mohammed Jawad, the Afghan boy arrested for allegedly lobbing a hand grenade at U.S. soldiers in 2002, admitted that it does not have enough evidence to continue to hold him indefinitely without trial under the laws [...]

Here’s another point I should have made in my piece earlier today: Just because President Obama’s Justice Department has been asserting a remarkably broad, Bush-like view of his detention authority pursuant to the laws of war in the Guantanamo detainees’ habeas corpus cases, that doesn’t mean the president has to stick with that definition in [...]

Perhaps to make the point that it can be done without risking U.S. lives, the Obama administration announced it will transfer Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian man indicted more than a decade ago on charges that he helped plan the 1998 bombing of the American Embassy in Tanzania. Ghailani was a fugitive until 2004, however, [...]

U.S. and Yemeni officials have reached an impasse in their attempts to negotiate the return of Yemeni prisoners currently held at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, reports The New York Times.
“I don’t know that there’s a viable ‘Plan B,’” an anonymous U.S. official told The Times.

Yesterday, I wrote about the 17 Chinese Uighurs’ petition to the Supreme Court challenging the decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruling that the federal courts have no authority to release the prisoners, even if they’ve been wrongfully imprisoned for years.
Well, yesterday the same D.C. Circuit Court issued another decision [...]