This time last year, President Obama responded to the 2011 National Defense Authorization Act with a signing statement. Objecting to the law’s restrictions on the transfer of Guantanamo detainees to the U.S. for trial or to their home countries, the president promised : “My Administration will work with the Congress to seek repeal of these restrictions, will [...]

The death of Osama bin Laden last week is prompting the Obama Administration , members of Congress and the American public to re-think the war in Afghanistan, and to wonder how the demise of the world’s most famous terrorist might hasten its end. That’s as it should be. But for now, there are still 100,000 troops on the ground [...]

The flood of news stories in the wake of the latest Wikileaks document dump reveal how one Guantanamo detainee after another was imprisoned at Gitmo for years based on tips from informants that turned out to be false. As James Carafano of the Heritage Foundation said in today’s New York Times, that’s not a big [...]

Gulet Mohamed, the 19-year-old American citizen detained in Kuwait in December where he says he was tortured in prison could be on his way back to the United States soon, according to Justice Department lawyers. But that won’t answer the larger question his detention and alleged torture in Kuwait raises: has the United States adopted a [...]

Shortly after taking office, President Obama announced he’d close CIA prisons and end abusive interrogations of terrorism suspects by U.S. officials. But the Obama administration has notably preserved the right to continue “renditions” – the abduction and transfer of suspects to U.S. allies in its “war on terror,” including allies notorious for the use of [...]

This past May, PFC Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old Army intelligence analyst who allegedly boasted of leaking video and documents to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, was arrested. Originally held in Kuwait, in July he was transferred to a prison at the Quantico Marine Corps Base in Virginia. (Firedoglake has a helpful timeline of events here.) According to [...]

After Ahmed Ghailani was found guilty of participating in a conspiracy to bomb two U.S. embassies in November, a conviction that could land him life in prison (his sentencing hearing is scheduled for January), the usual slate of right-wing pundits took to the airwaves, eager to denounce President Obama for trying the suspected terrorist at all. Liz [...]

“How is it that judicial approval is required when the United States decides to target a U.S. citizen overseas for electronic surveillance, but … judicial scrutiny is prohibited when the United States decides to target a U.S. citizen overseas for death?” That’s just one of many intriguing questions raised — but not answered — by [...]

Since Ahmed Ghailani’s conviction on only one of 285 criminal counts on Wednesday, the verdict has been pronounced by supporters of military commissions as the reason to stop trying any terror suspects in civilian courts. In their op-ed in the Washington Post today , Brookings Institution fellow Benjamin Wittes and Harvard Law Professor Jack Goldsmith attack that reasoning, [...]

In a surprising verdict issued late Sunday afternoon, a military commission jury sentenced Omar Khadr to 40 years in confinement. Given that Khadr has already served eight years at the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, that’s a 48-year sentence for a child soldier. Khadr is also the only fighter charged by the U.S. government [...]

The government’s star witness in the sentencing hearing of Omar Khadr continued to talk for hours on the stand today, explaining his view of why he believes that the Canadian captured in 2002 at the age of 15 is “highly dangerous.” But it turns out that much of the information Dr. Michael Welner relied upon, including [...]

In testimony Tuesday afternoon that literally had my jaw dropping, a forensic psychiatrist called by the U.S. government testified that Omar Khadr, the Canadian who Monday pled guilty to a slew of terrorist acts including murder, is too dangerous to be released because he is sincerely religious and became even more devout at the Guantanamo [...]

This morning I sat in a U.S. military commissions courtroom in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and watched the first child soldier charged by a Western nation since World War II plead guilty to crimes he was never even accused of. If the guilty plea of Omar Khadr this morning was a face-saving effort by the U.S. [...]