enemy combatants

The Obama administration is making plans to send about 25 detainees from the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay to federal prisons, to be tried in civilian federal courts, according to Newsweek.
As TWI reported last week, the biggest ongoing controversy is over where to try the five suspected 9/11 co-conspirators. The administration has said it prefers [...]

The Supreme Court just announced that it will hear the case of the Chinese Muslim Uighurs — detainees at Guantanamo Bay cleared for release but still in prison there — to decide whether a court can order the government to release detainees into the United States.

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 [...]

The National Defense Authorization Act, passed yesterday by the House of Representatives, includes a largely overlooked provision that modifies the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which allows the government to try certain terror suspects — now called “unprivileged enemy belligerents” instead of the Bush-era term, “unlawful enemy combatants” — in military proceedings rather than Article [...]

Today’s news that Obama administration officials are touring a Michigan prison as a possible alternative location for detainees now imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay could make life easier for some of their defense lawyers. But some say it raises as many concerns as it resolves.
“I think it’s encouraging that they’re moving ahead despite the opposition,” said [...]

It wasn’t until late Friday afternoon that the Obama Justice Department, after years of wrangling over the fate of Mohammed Jawad, the Afghan boy arrested for allegedly lobbing a hand grenade at U.S. soldiers in 2002, admitted that it does not have enough evidence to continue to hold him indefinitely without trial under the laws [...]

NPR’s report this morning that the Brookings Institution’s Benjamin Wittes has proposed what’s expected to be a highly influential plan for “preventive detention” — which could lock up “dangerous” terror suspects potentially forever without charge or trial — gives even more urgency to the question that Spencer raised here more than a month ago.
Will the [...]

As expected, yesterday President Obama signed a supplemental appropriations bill that prohibits the release of Guantanamo detainees into the United States, and restricts the president’s ability to release them to other countries without Congressional approval.
The little-noticed provision raises constitutional questions about who has the power to control the release of detainees — the president, Congress [...]

As reporters scoured the latest batch of documents dumped on the Senate Judiciary Committee Monday night for clues to Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor’s views on any matter that may potentially come before the Supreme Court, Fox News report on Tuesday that Sotomayor “appeared to justify the treatment of two men, Yaser Hamdi and Jose [...]

Faced with bipartisan resistance to the idea of releasing any of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay into the United States, Attorney General Eric Holder on Thursday promised a Senate committee that he would not release any suspected terrorists into the United States, CNN reports.
Lucky for the Chinese Uighurs currently held there, about seven of whom [...]