Detainees moving through immigration courts lack certain rights that most Americans take for granted, and among them is the right to legal counsel. Although a network of legal aid organizations has formed to try to provide detainees with lawyers, the immigration detention system does not always facilitate access to pro More…
One of the major problems with Secure Communities, an information-sharing program between federal and local law enforcement to catch illegal immigrants, is that it creates a surge in the number of people to be detained by federal authorities — and the feds don’t always have the facilities to More…
Apparently Robert Gibbs wasn’t playing. After the House Armed Services Committee expressly forbade the Defense Department from spending any money to purchase the Thomson Corrections Center in Illinois, the linchpin of President Obama’s pledge to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, the White House press secretary said More…
For the first time, the Department of Defense has established an office to guide policy on emerging non-traditional military activities like compliance with the rule of law, humanitarian emergencies and human rights. It’s a bureaucratic change that effectively frames international legitimacy as a security issue, a reflection of the legacy More…
Over four months after President Obama missed his self-imposed deadline to shutter the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, approximately 180 detainees remain behind the wire and within the walls of the seven camps that comprise Camp Delta. All have been there for years on end: The most recent detainee arrived More…
GUANTANAMO BAY — The military commission for Omar Khadr, the Canadian citizen held here since 2002 and charged with killing a U.S. soldier, doesn’t get underway until Wednesday morning. An idle press corps, even in the balmy Antillean spring, doesn’t make for a contented beast, so the media handlers at More…
That’s a shocking account about Steve Kappes, then the powerful associate deputy CIA director for operations, provided by The Washington Post’s Jeff Stein in a new Washingtonian profile of the powerful and widely respected deputy director:
According to an internal investigation, [Kappes] helped tailor the agency’s paper trail
One concern that may animate the Obama administration’s Guantanamo task force deciding that about 50 detainees must be held indefinitely without trial is that the basis for any prosecution is evidence obtained through torture or abuse. Judge John Coughenour, a sitting federal judge on the U.S. District Court in Seattle, More…
In reaction to the Obama administration’s Guantanamo Bay task force recommending that about 50 detainees at Guantanamo be indefinitely detained without trial, the Constitution Project, a prominent civil-libertarian advocacy group, released the following statement:
“Even if the Obama administration continues to work to close Guantánamo, by pursuing a policy
The Obama administration’s Guantanamo task force has concluded that there are approximately 50 detainees held at the facility in Cuba that the government should continue to detain, indefinitely, without trial. Either the task force reached that decision in Month 11 out of its 12-month operation or More…
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