Enemy Combatant

Depending on who you ask, the sentencing yesterday of Ali Saleh Kahlah Al-Marri to eight years in prison is either evidence that the civilian federal judicial system can successfully handle terror cases, or evidence that it’s a dismal failure.
Yesterday, Jonathan Hafetz, the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who represented Al-Marri in his challenge to military [...]

President Obama confirmed Wednesday that he plans to keep the controversial military commissions alive.

Human rights experts say there is a serious risk that some of the Guantanamo detainees cleared for release could face persecution or torture.

Today’s news that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights will hear the claims of kidnapping and torture filed against the United States by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of Khaled El-Masri, an innocent German citizen and car salesman subjected to the Bush administration’s extraordinary rendition program in 2003, may not go over so [...]

Since my piece on the intensifying battle over “preventive detention” was published, Ken Gude from the Center for American Progress wrote to point out an important distinction that deserves more emphasis.
As I note in my story, Gude and Kate Martin, Director of the Center for National Security Studies, have both written in support of the [...]

Other judges will not be bound by the decision, but there are reasons for advocates to be hopeful.

Palau’s decision to accept the 17 Chinese Uighurs held at Guantanamo Bay, whom the United States and numerous other countries refused to take, may have been influenced by a generous foreign aid offer from the United States.
The Associated Press reports that “two U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the U.S. was prepared [...]

And so ends a demagoguery-laced vignette from the Age of Terrorism, as Daphne and Weigel have been all over: the tiny Pacific archipelago of Palau has agreed to “resettl[e] and repatriat[e]” the 17 Uighur detainees housed at Guantanamo Bay whom the Bush administration no longer considered enemy combatants. Having no basis under which to detain [...]

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 [...]

When President Obama relinquished the term “enemy combatant” from the government’s lexicon as a justification for holding prisoners indefinitely without charge or trial, he didn’t give up the power to hold people he deemed were fighting the United States. But the question remained: how does the government decide who those people are, and what evidence [...]