Detainee

Yesterday President Obama announced his intent to establish a system of preventive detention to stop would-be terrorists from “carrying out an act of war” — even when they “cannot be prosecuted for past crimes, in some cases because evidence may be tainted.” One of the most senior officials in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal [...]

So Ari Shapiro’s NPR story yesterday placed then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales — a.k.a. God’s gift to Talking Points Memo — at the center of the decision to torture Abu Zubaydah in the spring of 2002. Gonzales didn’t respond to Shapiro’s request for comment. But I notice in the Senate intelligence committee’s recently declassified narrative [...]

Michele Flournoy, undersecretary of defense for policy, testified that imprisoning some Guantanamo detainees in the United States would make it politically easier for European allies to take custody of some of the detainees. Robert Mueller, director of the FBI, testified to some concerns about holding Guantanamo detainees in America, out of fears that they’ll radicalize [...]

The headline of a just-released Senate Republican Policy Committee document on what to do with Guantanamo Bay detainees:
Meet Your New Neighbor, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad?
There’s actually nothing in the 15-page paper suggesting that Khalid Sheikh Mohammad could be released into American society. There is, however, an exposition of the problem of the 17 Uighur detainees who [...]

Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell assured reporters yesterday, “I see nothing to indicate that that date” — that is, the date to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, set by President Obama in a January executive order by year’s end — “is at all in jeopardy.” OK. The Democratic-controlled Congress removed all money for the closure [...]

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.

Why would the Obama administration, after having suspended the Bush military commissions that President Obama called an “enormous failure,” now be pushing to finalize the conviction and life sentence of a detainee who boycotted his trial due to procedures that he — and much of the world — insisted were unfair?
As I noted in my [...]

Recent reports quoting anonymous officials within the Obama administration suggest the president is considering reviving the same military commissions that he called “an enormous failure” as a candidate.

Check out this Bmaz post at Emptywheel about a rumor circulating through Arabic-language media that Ibn Shaikh al-Libi, a member of al-Qaeda who was tortured at the behest of the United States before claiming that Saddam Hussein had lent material support to the terrorist movement, has committed suicide in a Libyan prison. Confirmation is pending, [...]

Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.), pushing the Republican bill that would prevent the closure of the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba:
Releasing hardcore radical jihadists into Michigan or anywhere else in the United States should horrify law-abiding citizens. It would immediately and unnecessarily endanger American lives by sending trained terrorists into the very country that [...]