Gitmo

An Amherst Special Town Meeting approved a resolution last night welcoming one or two cleared Guantanamo Bay detainees to Amherst, Mass. — once Congress agrees to lift the latest bans on their transfer. The town of 30,000 residents says it’s the first municipality in the nation to officially welcome the detainees.
I reported earlier that Amherst [...]

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, [...]

Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSblog points out that the Supreme Court’s decision to hear the case of 17 Chinese Muslim Uighur detainees who a judge ordered released into the United States will likely also force the Justices to consider the constitutionality of two bills President Obama signed yesterday.
The issue in Kiyemba v. Obama is whether the [...]

Winning his freedom was a big step for Mohammed Jawad, reportedly the youngest prisoner at Guantanamo Bay until he was released in August. But Jawad, who two U.S. judges have said was tortured in U.S. custody, is still suffering from the effects of his treatment during seven years in custody without charge, according to a [...]

A few more points worth noting about the new Military Commissions Act amendments passed by Congress yesterday: Just as the House bill circulating earlier did, the amendments passed would still allow some coerced testimony to be used in court if the military judge decides it’s reliable and it wasn’t obtained using “cruel, inhuman, or degrading [...]

This post has been corrected. Previously, the post was incorrectly based on an earlier version of the bill.
The Military Commissions Act amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010 (H.R. 2647) were approved in Congress yesterday and are en route to the President for his signature. The full text of the bill [...]

The political wrangling over where Guantanamo Bay detainees are going to go is only getting more complicated — and stranger — as the president’s deadline for closing the U.S. detention facility by late January draws closer.
On Tuesday, the Senate voted 79 to 19 to allow the Guantanamo detainees to come to the United States — [...]

The possibility prompts fervent opposition from Republicans, who say the 9/11 terrorists should never be allowed anywhere on U.S. soil, let alone in a civilian U.S. court.

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.

The donation of an anthology of post-9/11 commentary by Professor Noam Chomsky has been rejected from the library at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, reports The Miami Herald.
While the prison offers inmates books and videos on Harry Potter and the World Cup, which are among the more than 16,000 items it holds, leftist intellectual commentary [...]