Page 3 , 2 , 1

Judge Orders release of the man once claimed to be Guantanamos " highest value detainee" 

"Salahi's case is a national disgrace -- rendition, brutal torture, and eight years of arbitrary detention without charge or any reliable or credible evidence. While at Guantánamo, Salahi was held in total isolation for months, kept in a freezing cold cell, shackled to the floor, deprived of food, made to drink salt water and forced to stand in a room with strobe lights and heavy metal music for hours at a time. He was threatened with harm to his family, forbidden from praying, beaten and subjected to the "frequent flyer" program, during which he was awakened every few hours to deprive him of sleep.

Whitehouse Repeats Pentagon Lies About Guantanamo "Recidivists"

What is to be done about the idiocy that has spread, like a poisonous but imperceptible gas, from the Pentagon to Congress, and is now wafting through the White House, deranging all it touches? As it travels, this dismal infection transforms statistical impossibilities into magic numbers, which appear, to the uninformed observer, to confirm the most shameless lies of former Vice President Dick Cheney: that Guantánamo was teeming with hardcore terrorists, who couldn’t wait to “return to the battlefield.”

Main Obstacles To Closing Guantanamo

Eight years ago today the Bush regime opened their detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.  It went on to become a notorious symbol of the torture and racism that people the world over associated with the U.S. “war on terror.” As we mark this anniversary, many people hoped Barack Obama’s promise to close Guantánamo by Jan 22, 2010 would close that chapter.  But there are 2 things in the way of that

The closure Of Guantanamo Is The least We Can Do

When I visited Ruhal, it had been six years since he returned from Guantanamo. He had only just gotten a job and was grateful to finally be able to provide for his wife and baby daughter; but it had not been easy. He said that he had found it so hard to deal with the stigma that came with having gone to Guantanamo in the first place, as the government have never come out and said that he and others like him were innocent. Add to that, nightmares, flashbacks, paranoia - and it’s a wonder that any of these men recover at all.

More Skeletons In Guantanamos closet

In my recent interviews with Ruhal Ahmed and Omar Deghayes for a TV documentary, both talked of horrific abuse, and Omar said that people had died in Guantanamo. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, as we’ve seen homicides in Bagram and other CIA prisons, as well as countless instances of abuse with those at Abu Ghraib being the most obvious and famous. Whilst Guantanamo is far from a holiday camp, this is still quite a shock.

Guantanamo "Suicides" The Cover Up Begins

Last night on MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann, I focused on the first responses to “The Guantánamo ‘Suicides.’” Colonel Michael Bumgarner, the former commander at Camp America, had sent an email to the Associated Press, the text of which AP confirmed to me, in which he said he would have to get clearance from the Defense Department to speak, but then stated: This blatant misrepresentation of the truth infuriates me. I don’t know who Sgt. Hickman is, but he is only trying to be a spotlight ranger. He knows nothing about what transpired in Camp 1, or our medical facility. I do, I was there.

U.S Rights Abuses Are Europes Problem too

A year ago this week, within 48 hours of taking office, Barack Obama announced that Guantánamo Bay detention centre would close within 12 months and that the CIA’s network of secret prisons would be dismantled. Today, 198 prisoners remain in Guantánamo. The CIA is still allowed to carry out “rendition operations”, or kidnapping to be more accurate. It can still detain people in secret or hand them over to another country for interrogation. Dozens of people known to have been held in secret CIA prisons are still missing. Detainees continue to be denied a fair trial.

Guantanamo "Suicides" A Camp Delta Sargent Blows the Whistle

According to the NCIS, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell’s eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat. We are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his washbasin, slipped his head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until he asphyxiated.

Switzerland Accepts Two Uighur Brothers From Gunatanamo

“We welcome the Swiss government’s decision, which will allow Bahtiyar Mahmud and Arkin Mahmud to live free and productive lives,” said Uyghur democracy leader Rebiya Kadeer. “The government and people of Switzerland have made an extraordinary humanitarian gesture, which is even more remarkable in the face of unrelenting pressure from China not to accept the two men. This gesture finally ends the saga of two brothers who simply sought to live in peace and liberty.

Two Algerians Released from Guantanamo

Guantanamo for kids

It sounds unlikely but, according to Perera, it is well-established that juveniles have been held at Guantánamo, although the numbers are disputed. Reprieve, the charity for prisoners from death row to Guantánamo, has recorded that 22 under-16s have been held at the camp. The youngest juvenile still in custody is Mohammed el Gharani, who was 14 when picked up in a random raid on a mosque by Pakistani bounty-hunters and "sold" to the American authorities for $5,000.

Devil's Island To Guantanamo

L’AFFAIRE DREYFUS’, which shook belle époque Paris and split France in two, is a tangled web of conspiracy and cover-up compounded by lies and forgeries, with at its centre an innocent victim, wrongly convicted and cruelly imprisoned on a malarial tropical island under specially modified laws, only to be exonerated a decade later. No wonder it reminds Louis Begley of Guantánamo.The tale of Captain Alfred Dreyfus’s two court martials in 1894 and 1899, his military degradation, life sentence and deportation, presidential pardon and rehabilitation, has often been told.

One day We'll All Be Terrorists

The case against Hashmi, like most of the terrorist cases launched by the Bush administration, is appallingly weak and built on flimsy circumstantial evidence. This may be the reason the state has set up parallel legal and penal codes to railroad those it charges with links to terrorism. If it were a matter of evidence, activists like Hashmi, would probably never be brought to trial. Special administrative measures, known as SAMs, have been imposed by the attorney general to prevent or severely restrict communication with other prisoners, attorneys, family, the media and people outside the jail. He also is denied access to the news and other reading material.

Obama Needs To Live Up To Promises On Human Rights

recently, two teenaged Afghan boys told the Washington Post that this year in Bagram "they were beaten by American guards, photographed naked, deprived of sleep and held in solitary confinement for at least two weeks," clear violation of Obama's torture ban. These are not the only allegations of misconduct. The British government recently revealed that two men were captured in Iraq in 2004, transferred to Afghanistan by the Americans and have been held in Bagram ever since. Reprieve, a London-based legal charity, have identified the men as Amanatullah Ali and "Salahuddin," and says this transfer amounts to extraordinary rendition, a violation of international law

Guantamano Turns 8 While More Live Slip Away

The first detainees were kept in open cages, with almost no shelter from the elements.  Building new structures allowed the jailers to keep some men in complete isolation. "a prison in which the overwhelming majority of those held — at least 93 percent of the 779 men and boys imprisoned in total — were either completely innocent people, seized as a result of dubious intelligence or sold for bounty payments, or Taliban foot soldiers, recruited to fight an inter-Muslim civil war that began long before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and that had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or international terrorism."

Palau Deal Close For Uighur Guantanamo prisoners

Palau in June offered to take the 13 detainees — a major step toward the Obama administration's goal of finding new homes for terrorist suspects and other prisoners captured during the Afghan war who have been cleared of wrongdoing but cannot go home for fear of ill-treatment. But the island state's President Johnson Toribiong told the AP in June that some of the men were hesitant because of concerns about China, which has demanded they be sent home for trial. U.S. officials have said the men could be executed in China and have refused to send them there.