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By Peter Stothard
$4.75
Tom Hayden
$11.86
$40
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The number of detainees held at a Guantanamo-like military detention center in Afghanistan has almost tripled in the three years since President Obama took office. (more)
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Amy Goodman reports on Dr. John Leso, a psychologist who allegedly participated in the torture (or “harsh interrogation,” his defenders might say) of Guantanamo detainees and now faces trial in New York.
Posted on Apr 6, 2011
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Paul Keller (CC-BY)
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Military trials will resume at America’s notorious island gulag. The president failed during the last two years to shut down the detention facility, which he says helps America’s enemies recruit, and move trials to the civilian justice system. (more)
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AP / Mukhtar Khan
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Indian police and security forces have allegedly tortured hundreds of Kashmiris as WikiLeaked evidence shows the use of electrocution, beatings and sexual humiliation against detainees from 2005 to 2007.
Posted on Dec 17, 2010
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Flickr / zimpenfish (CC-BY-SA)
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After a three-year investigation, the government has decided not to charge the CIA officers who destroyed 92 videotapes of waterboarding after the White House and the agency had ordered that the recordings be preserved.
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U.S. Navy / PH1 Shane T. McCoy
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The president promised to restore our basic constitutional protections, but that was back in the campaign when we were drunk on hope. These days, “It can be hard to distinguish between the Bush administration and the Obama administration when it comes to detainee policy,” laments The New York Times.
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By Amy Goodman — Combat operations in Iraq are over, if you believe President Barack Obama’s rhetoric. But torture in Iraq’s prisons, first exposed during the Abu Ghraib scandal, is thriving, increasingly distant from any scrutiny or accountability.
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U.S. Army / Staff Sgt. Jon Soucy
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While President Barack Obama will miss his goal of shutting down Guantanamo by January, the U.S. has returned 12 detainees from the notorious prison to their respective homelands. That leaves more than 100 detainees awaiting repatriation.
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Reports are coming out that mercenaries from Blackwater Worldwide played central roles in some of the CIA’s most sensitive missions, including clandestine raids and the transport of detainees. Many guards claimed that Blackwater’s participation was so routine that the lines between military and contractor were blurred.
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AP / Charles Rex Arbogast
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A deal is being brokered that would probably make a state prison in rural Illinois the new home of detainees now held at the prison in Guantanamo Bay. Republicans have voiced outrage at the prospect of bringing the detainees Stateside, citing security threats.
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AP / Lynne Sladky
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By Marie Cocco — With the arrest of Najbullah Zazi, the man allegedly behind the biggest terror plot since 9/11, the truth is clearer than ever: Law enforcement stops terrorism. Not secret island prisons.
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Flickr / Rennet Stowe
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President Obama has ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed by January 2010. To meet that deadline, the administration may push for a new detention facility on U.S. soil. Such a compound, sources tell AP, would include space for the indefinite detention of prisoners deemed too dangerous to face trial.
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U.S. Navy / Shane T. McCoy
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Although a judge had called the case “an outrage” that was “riddled with holes,” just last week the government said it would continue to try to prosecute Mohammed Jawad, a Guantanamo detainee whose “confession” was reportedly obtained through torture. Now the administration plans to free Jawad and return him to Afghanistan.
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Flickr / .faramarz
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Iranian officials announced that 140 detainees have been released from prison in Tehran, while some 200 are still being held. But the numbers announced by authorities and those given by protest leaders differ significantly. According to the latter, thousands are still being held and about 100 people have been killed during the election protests.
Posted on Jul 28, 2009
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U.S. Army / Sgt. 1st Class Benjamin R. Bond
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The New York Times reports that a U.S. military review calls for “overhauling the troubled American-run prison [at Bagram Air Base] as well as the entire Afghan jail and judicial systems, a reaction to worries that abuses and militant recruiting within the prisons are helping to strengthen the Taliban.”
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access.gpo.gov
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More than two dozen former detainees at the Bagram military base in Afghanistan say they were beaten, deprived of sleep and threatened with dogs while under U.S. supervision there between 2002 and 2008. None of the detainees were ever charged, and some got apologies upon release.
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fbi.gov
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The first Guantanamo detainee to be tried in a U.S. civilian court arrived in New York on Tuesday. Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani faces charges for his alleged role in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in East Africa. His trial will serve as an important test for plans to try other terror suspects in civilian courts, at a time when some critics contend that such transfers will endanger U.S. security.
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hugh.freeshell.org
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On Tuesday, federal Judge Thomas Hogan ordered that the evidence regarding more than 100 Guantanamo Bay detainees be made public, rejecting the U.S. government’s request to keep the unclassified information secret. These sealed documents may reveal the government’s justification (or lack thereof) for the prisoners’ continued detention.
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http://lefteyeonthemedia.wordpress.com/
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The Pentagon has denied claims made by a former U.S. general that the detainee abuse photos President Obama refuses to publish depict scenes of rape and torture. The rebuttal came only hours after Britain’s Daily Telegraph published retired Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba’s story. “That news organization has completely mischaracterized the images,” Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told the press Thursday.
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By Marjorie Cohn — Two days after his inauguration, President Obama pledged to close Guantanamo within one year. The Republicans, led by Sens. John McCain, Mitch McConnell and Pat Roberts, immediately launched a concerted campaign to assail the new president.
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By Eugene Robinson — I realize that many Americans, given the scope of the economic crisis and the ambitions of the new administration, would rather look forward than revisit the past. The business of torture, however, is too unspeakable to be left unfinished.
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Rainer Hachfeld, Neues Deutschland, Germany —
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telegraph.co.uk
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Much like an unsympathetic friend counseling you after a breakup, recently installed Zimbabwean Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai is calling on the world to “get over” the wrongs of President Robert Mugabe.
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DoD
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A 2006 memo from the State Department to the U.S. Transportation Command suggested holding Guantanamo detainees after they had been cleared in order to avoid bad press. “Got it ... Thank you,” was the reply, and indeed, no prisoners flew out of Guantanamo for three months.
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By Marie Cocco — There is absolutely no reason to create some newfangled and untested system to charge and try those few terrorism suspects whose legal fates present President Obama with an excruciating political decision.
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U.S. Army / Staff Sgt. Jon Soucy
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President Obama has asked for a stay in all military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay while his administration figures out how to handle the legal cases of the detainees still held in the island prison. The move was welcomed by Human Rights Watch and the ACLU as a positive first step.
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A bipartisan report released by Sens. Carl Levin and John McCain blames former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other high-level officials for interrogation abuses. Based on an 18-month investigation by the Senate Armed Services Committee, the report determined that prisoner abuse “was not simply the result of a few soldiers acting on their own,” as the administration has claimed.
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By Eugene Robinson — The federal manslaughter indictment of five Blackwater Worldwide security guards for the horrific massacre of more than a dozen Iraqi civilians in Baghdad may look like an exercise in accountability, but it’s probably the exact opposite.
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By Eugene Robinson — Terrorism (for the umpteenth time) is a tactic, not an enemy. One of the most urgent tasks for President-elect Barack Obama’s “team of rivals” is coming up with a coherent intellectual framework—and a winning battle plan—for George W. Bush’s globe-spanning “war on terror.”
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worldbiography.net
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Two recently disclosed memos from 2003 and 2004 show the Bush administration giving CIA torture techniques, most famously waterboarding, an explicit executive nod after worries arose in the intelligence community about the legality of the treatment of detainees.
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In Jonathan Mahler’s new book, George W. Bush emerges as the most lawless president in American history, the first to usurp the law as a matter of policy.
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AP photo / Janet Hamlin, Pool
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Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s former driver, has been sentenced by a military jury to five and a half years in prison—most of which he’s already served in detention. The prosecution wanted his sentence to be 30 years or longer, but it needn’t be too upset: The military has said it can hold Hamdan indefinitely if it feels like it. Hamdan’s lawyers are expected to appeal.
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AP photo / Brennan Linsley
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By Stanley Kutler — John McCain and Barack Obama’s differences over the Supreme Court’s recent Guantanamo decision speak volumes about the two candidates and their competing visions for America.
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commons.wikimedia.org
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With statements such as “if the detainee dies, you’re doing it wrong” guiding our government’s thinking during the formation and implementation of interrogation techniques, it’s no wonder Carl Levin and others were outraged in the Senate on Tuesday.
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By Marie Cocco — The forceful language of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s decision in the case granting detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp the right to contest their confinement in federal court is the voice of a Supreme Court majority that is fed up.
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AP photo / Brennan Linsley, pool
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The Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, ruled Thursday that detainees at Guantanamo Bay have a right to trial in civilian courts. As Justice Anthony Kennedy of the majority wrote, “The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times.” It has been widely speculated that such a ruling would ultimately force the closure of the detention facility.
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By Marie Cocco — Seven years after the 9/11 attacks, if we were to seek a portrait that is emblematic of the way the U.S. has tried—and failed—to bring those responsible for the heinous plot to justice, we would have to produce a photograph of Mohammed al-Qahtani.
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It’s unfortunately not unusual anymore to hear about the politicization of American legal and intelligence institutions under the Bush administration, but, even so, this report by The Nation’s Ross Tuttle about how the trials of six key prisoners at Guantanamo Bay have allegedly been rigged from the get-go is disturbing. Updated
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dw-world.de
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U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy, who in June 2005 ordered the Bush administration to protect “all evidence and information regarding the torture, mistreatment and abuse of detainees” at Guantanamo Bay, has now ordered the administration to explain why it destroyed two videotapes of such treatment just five months later.
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CIA Director General Michael Hayden has been summoned by Congress and will appear Tuesday and Wednesday before the Senate and House Intelligence committees to answer questions about the destruction of secret CIA videotapes that documented the abuse of detainees. The White House counsel, meanwhile, has ordered press secretary Dana Perino to keep quiet on the matter.
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theithacajournal.com
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Some 150 students donned hoods and turned their backs in silent protest of former Attorney General John Ashcroft at Cornell University on Thursday. Cornell law student and protest co-planner Michael Siegel told Truthdig the demonstrators were meant to represent “the detainees who were arrested and imprisoned without due process under Ashcroft’s leadership.”
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guardian.co.uk
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Web site Wikileaks has uncovered a 238-page manual that addresses almost every aspect of detainees’ lives at the Guantanamo detention facility. Cooperative prisoners, for example, should be allowed three showers a week instead of two, the manual says.
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guardian.co.uk
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The British government’s Foreign Affairs Committee will look into charges by a number of sources, including human rights groups and a retired U.S. general, that sovereign British land has been used as a CIA “black site” prison. The island of Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean, has been leased to the United States and is the site of an American military base but remains British territory.
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By Andy Borowitz — Fresh on the heels of its reality show “Kid Nation,” in which children are sent to perform hard labor on a ranch with no adult supervision, CBS announced today that it is readying a reality show in which children will be sent to the federal detention camp at Guantanamo.
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Although the White House says no decision is imminent, the Associated Press is reporting that the Bush administration is close to shutting down the island prison and transferring the detainees to military facilities inside the U.S., where they could face trial. The vice president and attorney general have previously shot down any attempt to close Gitmo, but anonymous sources say a consensus for closure is building.
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nndb.com
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Colin Powell has come out against Guantanamo Bay: “Guantanamo has become a major, major problem ... in the way the world perceives America and if it were up to me I would close Guantanamo, not tomorrow but this afternoon.” The former secretary of state has been eager to rehabilitate his image in recent years after a disastrous WMD sales pitch at the U.N.
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By Marie Cocco — Now we’ve bungled our own kangaroo courts. Two military judges, acting separately in the cases of two alleged terrorists, have dismissed war crimes charges against both. The legal reasoning is technical. But this breakdown is no technicality—it is farce.
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