Gitmo Habeas Scoreboard

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Obama: Guantanamo Won’t Close by January Deadline

The Washington Post reports that President Obama said yesterday that the U.S. detention facility will remain open past the January 2010 deadline for closure he set during his first days in office.

Oh, So That’s the Fifth Category of Detentions

As long as I’m praising Marc “I Won The Morning” Ambinder, check out this rather significant data point he mines from a Washington Post story on the final dispensation of Guantanamo detainees:

Administration officials say they expect that as many as 40 of the 215 detainees at

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Al-Qaeda Assistant Sentenced to Eight Years in Prison

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 More…

DOJ Loses Gitmo Case, But DOD Could Try Again

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 More…

Obama Administration Says It Doesn’t Need a New Law to Keep Holding Prisoners Indefinitely

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 More…

U.S. General: Most Bagram Detainees Should Be Released

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 More…

If the ‘War on Terror’ Is Over, So Is the Right to Preventive Detention

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 More…

Gitmo Defense Lawyers Say Moving Prisoners to United States Isn’t Good Enough

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 More…

Obama May Seek Authority Outlined by Mukasey

It’s been exactly one year since then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey proposed in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute 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 More…