In any credible court system, the eve-of-election conviction of an associate of Osama bin Laden for producing promotional material for al-Qaeda, which directly encouraged impressionable young men to join a violent jihad against the United States, would be a resounding...
Now here's a problem that anyone with half a brain could have seen coming. On Monday the second trial by military commission at Guantánamo – in other words, the second U.S. "war crimes" trial since the Second World War, following the...
Hardly a day goes by without some extraordinary news from the military commissions, the system of "terror trials" conceived in the office of the vice president in November 2001, and their days now seem to be as numbered as those of the Bush administration...
When is a child not a child? Apparently, when he is Omar Khadr, a 15-year-old Canadian who was shot in the back after a firefight in Afghanistan in July 2002. Omar has been in U.S. custody ever since, first at a prison at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, and for the...
As the Washington Post reported yesterday, the US Justice Department has dropped the key allegation against British resident and Guantánamo prisoner Binyam Mohamed – that he was involved, with American citizen Jose Padilla, in a plot to detonate a...
In the last three weeks, two events have occurred that have dealt what should have been a knockout blow to the Military Commissions at Guantánamo, the system of trials for "terror suspects" – outside of the US court system and the US military's own judicial...
In an extraordinary and unprecedented ruling in a US District Court, Judge Ricardo Urbina has ruled that 17 wrongly imprisoned Chinese Muslims at Guantánamo must be allowed entry to the United States. It is, as the media has been reporting, the first time that a US...
As the U.S. courts put pressure on the government to justify the long detention of prisoners at Guantánamo without charge or trial (following the Supreme Court's ruling, in June, that they have constitutional habeas corpus rights, and that the government must...
Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files, looks at recent disturbing developments in the Military Commission trial system at Guantánamo, and traces a chain of command that runs from the Commissions' supposedly impartial "Convening...
It could all have been so different. Between September 2002 and April 2003, the five defendants in the forthcoming 9/11 trial at Guantánamo – Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali (aka Ammar al-Baluchi), and...
