Human Rights First

That’s what Ken Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, and Gabor Rona, international legal director of Human Rights First, said in a conference call with reporters this afternoon, after meeting with the Department of Justice’s Special Interagency Task Force on Detainee Disposition.
“In order to save its ability to conduct military commissions, albeit with these [...]

Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ statements yesterday that he expects the United States will have to transfer up to 100 prisoners from Guantanamo Bay to the United States, where they’d be held indefinitely without trial, was an odd juxtaposition with yesterday’s guilty plea of Ali Saleh Kahlah Al-Marri.
On the one hand, Attorney General Eric Holder said [...]

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) has really started something.
He reportedly brought his idea for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to the White House Tuesday, talking with President Obama’s new White House Counsel Greg Craig about the proposal. “I went over some of the parameters of it and they were well aware at the [...]

President Obama really opened a big fat can of worms when he issued those executive orders last week.  Not only did he make all sorts of promises on state secrets that he’s now being called on to fulfill, but in promising to review the conditions of detention at Guantanamo Bay, he opened himself up to [...]

Whatever you think of the prosecution and conviction yesterday of the Holy Land Foundation following a 7-week trial, it does seem to prove that federal courts are capable of handling the prosecution of suspected terrorists.
Holy Land former chairman Ghassan Elashi and Shukri Abu-Baker, the group’s chief executive, were convicted of a combined 69 counts, including [...]

Monday’s news that President-elect Barack Obama and his advisers are planning to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay and prosecute some of the prisoners detained there in special national-security courts has prompted a retreat by the Obama team and swift responses by advocates on all sides.
On Tuesday, senior Obama foreign policy adviser Denis McDonough said [...]

As The Associated Press reported on Monday, President-elect Barack Obama is wasting no time in making plans to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center and ship the current prisoners out of there. Where they go, what happens to them and what happens to all the other suspected terrorists still in U.S. detention around the [...]