The End of Guantánamo

The repatriation from Guantánamo of Salim Hamdan, a former driver for Osama bin Laden, to serve out the last month of his sentence for providing material support for terrorism in Yemen, will surely hasten the demise of the prison, as promised by President-elect Barack...

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Why Guantánamo Must Be Closed

On Sunday, in his first television interview since winning the presidential election, Barack Obama repeated his campaign pledge to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay and to ban the use of torture by U.S. forces. Speaking on 60 Minutes, he explained, "I have said...

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Guilt by Torture

The case of Binyam Mohamed just gets weirder and weirder. For the last six months, the British resident and Guantánamo prisoner, who was seized in Pakistan in April 2002, has been engaged in a transatlantic struggle to secure evidence relating to his...

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Life Sentence Fails to Justify Gitmo Trials

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...

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An Empty Trial at Guantánamo

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...

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When Is a Child Not a Child?

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...

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