Defense Department

Jeffrey Kaye at Truthout has a good piece today on the suicide — or murder? — of Yemeni Guantanamo Bay prisoner Mohammad Ahmed Abdullah Saleh al Hanashi in June. It’s a powerful reminder of why human rights advocates, as well as U.S. military leaders, think it’s important to close that prison soon.
I admit I overlooked [...]

The Senate this afternoon defeated an amendment to an appropriations bill proposed by Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) that would have prevented the Pentagon from using funds to adapt or build any new facilities in the United States to house Guantanamo detainees. That would have included anyone charged, tried or convicted in a U.S. federal court. [...]

As former Vice President Dick Cheney and some Republican lawmakers continue to debate whether torture works and was a legitimate interrogation technique during the Bush administration, it’s almost jaw-dropping to read some of the memos that were written by the real experts on interrogation techniques in the U.S. government, warning the Defense Department all the [...]

When I wrote my earlier post about the group of illustrious Americans urging the Obama administration to close Guantanamo and bring suspected terrorists to justice in U.S. federal courts, I neglected to mention that Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), joined by Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Jim Webb (D-Va.), is today pushing a measure [...]

Great profile of Defense Secretary Robert Gates in the Christian Science Monitor. I’ve been writing for months now that Gates is the key swing vote in the Afghanistan debate within the Obama administration, and it’s good to see other reporters coming to a similar conclusion. But I particularly love this kicker:
At a recent Washington conference, [...]

Among other things in the Homeland Security appropriations bill President Obama signed into law yesterday is a provision that authorizes the Defense Department to continue to conceal photos of the torture and abuse of detainees by U.S. forces. The American Civil Liberties Union had specifically sought those photos, and sued to get them, among other [...]

The National Defense Authorization Act, passed yesterday by the House of Representatives, includes a largely overlooked provision that modifies the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which allows the government to try certain terror suspects — now called “unprivileged enemy belligerents” instead of the Bush-era term, “unlawful enemy combatants” — in military proceedings rather than Article [...]

House and Senate members today approved language for a homeland security appropriations bill that would give the Pentagon the right to continue withholding photos of the abuse of detainees in its custody, the ACLU reported on Wednesday.
The ACLU has been trying to get its hands on those photos, as well as other records, since 2003 [...]

The sun rose today and its gravitational force kept the planet twisting around it through the void, so naturally Fred and Kim Kagan, the neoconservative wing of counterinsurgency, have put out a call for between 40,000 and 45,000 additional troops to be sent to Afghanistan in the next year. Both Kagans advised the McChrystal strategy [...]

After former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee’s speech to the Values Voter Summit, he held a short press conference where I asked him to expand on something from his speech: His argument that President Obama had left America weaker by scrapping the Euro missile shield.
I heard Ambassador John Bolton, I heard many other people who are [...]