detainees

The American Civil Liberties Union has just released a video of interviews with five former Guantanamo detainees, talking about their experiences of abuse in U.S. custody. It’s not easy to watch, but it’s certainly worthwhile.
Although the video (after the jump) doesn’t give any sense of why these men in particular were seized and detained by [...]

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 Michigan Messenger’s Todd Heywood reports:
The Standish City Council unanimously approved a resolution targeting President Barack Obama and federal authorities with one message: Send us your prisoners.

A federal court today ruled that the government can continue to suppress transcripts of former CIA prisoners now being held at Guantanamo Bay talking about abuse and torture they suffered in CIA custody. The ruling came in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union to obtain transcripts from the [...]

To follow up on my earlier post about Rep. Louis Slaughter (D-N.Y.) and her speech on her colleagues’ move to amend the Freedom of Information Act to prevent the release of photographs depicting abuse of detainees in U.S. custody, it’s worth looking at the conference report on the bill. The bill is called the “Protected [...]

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 [...]

Big news from The Washington Post:
Hundreds of prisoners held by the U.S. military in Afghanistan will for the first time have the right to challenge their indefinite detention and call witnesses in their defense under a new review system being put in place this week, according to administration officials.
The new system will be applied to [...]

A report by Physicians for Human Rights released on Monday claims that U.S. physicians and psychologists betrayed ethical standards by collecting data on detainees’ reactions to abusive interrogations to as to improve their effectiveness. This would appear to constitute experimentation on human prisoners, which is a professional ethics violation for physicians. The group is calling [...]

A four-plus page section of the 2004 CIA inspector general report on torture is called “Endgame,” and, ominously, all but two paragraphs, far separated from each other, are redacted. Here’s what the first one says:
The number of detainees in CIA custody is relatively small by comparison with those in U.S. military custody. Nevertheless, the Agency, [...]

As Daphne has written this week, the residents of Standish, Mich., are starting to turn against a proposal to send terrorism detainees from Guantanamo Bay to their town’s prison, a proposal floated by the legislature and seconded by Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) to alleviate Standish’s economic woes.  David Munson, the owner of a tavern in [...]