Judge John Bates

When President Obama relinquished the term “enemy combatant” from the government’s lexicon as a justification for holding prisoners indefinitely without charge or trial, he didn’t give up the power to hold people he deemed were fighting the United States. But the question remained: how does the government decide who those people are, and what evidence [...]

In a groundbreaking ruling today that directly contradicts the Bush and Obama administration’s insistence that detainees held by the U.S. government at the Bagram prison in Afghanistan have no right to challenge their detention in U.S. courts, a federal judge ruled on Thursday that in fact, they do.
U.S. District Court Judge John Bates ruled that [...]

The New York Times has picked up on the Bagram detainee story I wrote about two weeks ago, ratcheting up the pressure on the Obama administration to start deciding what it’s going to do about the 600 or so prisoners held by the U.S. Defense Department there.
As we reported back in the first week of [...]