Tag: Guantanamo (page 21)

The U.S. is beginning preparations for trials of the 14 terror suspects flown from secret prisons abroad to Guantanamo. It has set up a secret war room in a suburb of Virginia.

The Bush administration has set up a secret war room in a Virginia suburb where it is assembling evidence to prosecute high-ranking detainees from Al Qaeda including the man accused of being the mastermind of the September 2001 attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, government officials said this week.

What kind of room do the detainees' lawyers get? If you answered "none," I suspect you are correct.

Update: Check out this great editorial in the Washington Post today.

Detainee 940, Adel Hamad, a husband, father, aid worker and teacher, is from Sudan. Here's his story, told by his public defender's investigator and others.

Update: Related: This article appeared in last Sunday's New York Times.

The FBI has released new documents pursuant to the ACLU's Freedom of Information Act request showing Guantanamo detainee abuse. They detail abuses witnessed (but not performed by) FBI personnel. (You can view the released documents here.)

FBI agents documented more than two dozen incidents of possible mistreatment at the Guantanamo Bay military base, including one detainee whose head was wrapped in duct tape for chanting the Quran and another who pulled out his hair after hours in a sweltering room.

7 Guantanamo detainees have been returned to Afghanistan and freed.

The AP has conducted an investigation into what happens when these "vicious killers" -- many of whom turned out to be harmless farmers kidnapped and sold to Americans -- are returned.

Through interviews with justice and police officials, detainees and their families, and using reports from human rights groups and local media, The Associated Press was able to track 245 of those formerly held at Guantanamo.

The findings are very interesting. I hope you'll follow the link and read them.

Via law prof Michael Froomkin at Discourse. Net, the Bush Administration is rushing plans for new prison construction at Guantanamo.

The Miami Herald reports:

The Pentagon is invoking emergency authority to fast-track funding of a comprehensive war-crimes court compound at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, according to a letter to Congress obtained by The Miami Herald.

Department of Defense spokesmen would not say when -- if ever -- the Pentagon had last invoked similar authority.

The text of the Pentagon's November 17 letter attempting to justify the plan is here (pdf.) The proposal itself is here (pdf.)

Froomkin says:

Hard to escape the feeling that the rush here is that once the Democrats are in Congress they won't allow this sort of travesty, and Rumsfeld wants to, as Menachem Begin used to put it, "make facts" on the ground.

I'd add that they are probably going to try to house as many detainees there as possible before January when the Dems take reign. It will be a lot harder to get the detainees out of Gitmo once situated there than it will be to prevent new arrivals.

Via Crooks and Liars, Rolling Stone has a very long feature article on Omar Khadr, who as I wrote here, here and here, comes from a long line of al Qaeda fighters and has been imprisoned at Guantanamo since he was 15.

As Jeanne of Body and Soul wrote a few years ago:

The problem is, Omar Khadr is as much a victim of these people as a member of the family. He's eighteen years old. When he was captured in Afghanistan, he was fifteen -- a child turned into a soldier by parents from hell. And our government's response to this victim of child abuse was to abuse him further.