detainees

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 [...]

This is nice.
Four Muslims from China once confined to small prison cells as suspected terrorists at Guantánamo are now sprucing up the wide-open spaces of an oceanside golf course for the PGA Grand Slam of Golf.
The Uighurs who moved to the British island territory in June have joined crews working toward the October tournament, said [...]

Following up on my story posted this morning about the government’s botched case against an Afghan teenager held at Guantanamo Bay, I spoke today to Maj. Gen. David Frakt, the lead military defense lawyer on the case who’s represented Jawad both before the U.S. military commission at Guantanamo Bay and in his habeas corpus case [...]

I was out on Friday and offline this weekend, but don’t miss Adam Serwer at Tapped birddogging a CBS report on a Pentagon survey ostensibly showing an 18 percent “recidivism” rate for released Guantanamo detainees. According to Serwer, CBS didn’t report that the survey isn’t actually finished, which seems like quite the relevant detail.
But one [...]

Read Marcy Wheeler for a blistering takedown of CIA Director Leon Panetta’s Washington Post op-ed yesterday. The short version of Panetta’s argument is that he proved his good faith by informing Congress about the “significant actions” he shuttered, but Congress reacted with “a fresh round of recriminations about the past.” Stop the violence!
The op-ed itself [...]

Lara Jakes of The Associated Press reports that the Obama administration is studying an option to close Guantanamo: open a facility in the United States — either in Michigan or, maybe, in Leavenworth, Kans. — that would house all the Guantanamo detainees in advance of both civilian trials and military commissions. Both would occur on-site, [...]