indefinite detention

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 [...]

Last month, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ordered the federal government to arrange for the release of Fouad Mahmoud Al Rabiah from the detention center at Guantanamo Bay. The evidence against the 50-year-old Kuwaiti engineer, she wrote in her declassified decision, is “surprisingly bare,” noting that all of his “confessions” appear to have been coerced by threats [...]

It’s hard to know whether this is good news or bad, but theoretically, at least, it could have been worse.
The Obama administration said on Wednesday that it will not seek new legislation from Congress authorizing the indefinite detention of about 50 terrorism suspects being held without charges at Guantanamo Bay. While that still upsets many [...]

A U.S. Marine reservist and general has created a detailed report recommending that up to 400 of the 600 prisoners at the U.S.-run prison at the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan have done nothing wrong and should be released, NPR reports.
Lawyers have been making that argument for years now, but the United States has insisted [...]

Writing about the role Deputy National Security Adviser John Brennan played in the Bush counterterror surveillance program, Marcy Wheeler, blogging for Glenn Greenwald at Salon today, argues that as NSA adviser, rather than CIA director (a position Brennan was nominated for, but Glenn helped torpedo the nomination by highlighting his previous role in the Bush [...]

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’s been one year since then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey proposed that Congress pass legislation declaring a new, expanded war with al-Qaeda and the Taliban — thereby granting the president the authority to detain indefinitely members of those groups anywhere in the world.

Reports today that the U.S. military is calling for an overhaul of the Bagram prison in Afghanistan follow weeks of little-reported protests by prisoners there, who since July 1 have refused to leave their cells or participate in video-phone calls with family members, all to protest their indefinite detention, says the International Committee of the [...]

Defense Department General Counsel Jeh Johnson moved the Obama administration into new territory from a civil liberties perspective. Asked by Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) the politically difficult but entirely fair question about whether terrorism detainees acquitted in courts could be released in the United States, Johnson said that “as a matter of legal authority,” the [...]

Here’s another point I should have made in my piece earlier today: Just because President Obama’s Justice Department has been asserting a remarkably broad, Bush-like view of his detention authority pursuant to the laws of war in the Guantanamo detainees’ habeas corpus cases, that doesn’t mean the president has to stick with that definition in [...]