guantanamo

Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed, an Algerian national who was captured in Pakistan and turned over to the U.S. military after fleeing from Afghanistan, was ordered released from the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay by a U.S. District Court judge yesterday, according to the human rights group CagePrisoners. Judge Gladys Kessler’s written opinion is still [...]

Jeffrey Kaye at Truthout has a good piece today on the suicide — or murder? — of Yemeni Guantanamo Bay prisoner Mohammad Ahmed Abdullah Saleh al Hanashi in June. It’s a powerful reminder of why human rights advocates, as well as U.S. military leaders, think it’s important to close that prison soon.
I admit I overlooked [...]

Yesterday’s announcement that the Obama administration will try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other 9/11 suspects in federal court has been hailed as everything from “an important step forward for justice” by Human Rights Watch to “a step backwards for the security of our country [that] puts Americans unnecessarily at risk” by Senate Minority Leader [...]

As former Vice President Dick Cheney and some Republican lawmakers continue to debate whether torture works and was a legitimate interrogation technique during the Bush administration, it’s almost jaw-dropping to read some of the memos that were written by the real experts on interrogation techniques in the U.S. government, warning the Defense Department all the [...]

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, [...]

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 — [...]