pentagon

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 [...]

The major investigation of the Fort Hood shooting is a joint law-enforcement effort led by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division and supported by the FBI. That investigation will contribute to Nidal Malik Hasan’s ultimate prosecution in military court. There’s also an intelligence investigation that’s being kicked up to John Brennan at the White House. Now, [...]

The Senate this afternoon defeated an amendment to an appropriations bill proposed by Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) that would have prevented the Pentagon from using funds to adapt or build any new facilities in the United States to house Guantanamo detainees. That would have included anyone charged, tried or convicted in a U.S. federal court. [...]

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 Justice Department released more documents — or, at least, less-redacted documents — late Friday to the American Civil Liberties Union as part of the government’s obligation in a pending Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
These latest documents provide a glimpse of the early struggles between the FBI and the Pentagon over just how to conduct [...]

Great profile of Defense Secretary Robert Gates in the Christian Science Monitor. I’ve been writing for months now that Gates is the key swing vote in the Afghanistan debate within the Obama administration, and it’s good to see other reporters coming to a similar conclusion. But I particularly love this kicker:
At a recent Washington conference, [...]

Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSblog points out that the Supreme Court’s decision to hear the case of 17 Chinese Muslim Uighur detainees who a judge ordered released into the United States will likely also force the Justices to consider the constitutionality of two bills President Obama signed yesterday.
The issue in Kiyemba v. Obama is whether the [...]

The donation of an anthology of post-9/11 commentary by Professor Noam Chomsky has been rejected from the library at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, reports The Miami Herald.
While the prison offers inmates books and videos on Harry Potter and the World Cup, which are among the more than 16,000 items it holds, leftist intellectual commentary [...]

The National Defense Authorization Act, passed yesterday by the House of Representatives, includes a largely overlooked provision that modifies the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which allows the government to try certain terror suspects — now called “unprivileged enemy belligerents” instead of the Bush-era term, “unlawful enemy combatants” — in military proceedings rather than Article [...]

House and Senate members today approved language for a homeland security appropriations bill that would give the Pentagon the right to continue withholding photos of the abuse of detainees in its custody, the ACLU reported on Wednesday.
The ACLU has been trying to get its hands on those photos, as well as other records, since 2003 [...]