Spain open to accepting Guantanamo prisoners

Spain has told the United States it is open 'in principle' to accepting prisoners from the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos said Wednesday.

read more digg story

Can Jihadis Be Rehabilitated?

By Bobby Ghosh

It's been described as the Betty Ford Center for terrorists: Saudi Arabian officials boast that the Care Rehabilitation Center, outside Riyadh, has successfully deprogrammed scores of former jihadis, including more than 100 ex-inmates of the U.S.'s Guantánamo Bay military prison. As recently as last fall, Saudi officials claimed the program had a 100% success rate.

That claim was dashed last week, when two alumni of the rehab program proudly announced to the world that they had returned to the jihad. In a video posted online, Saudi nationals Said al-Shihri and Abu al-Hareth al-Oufi — former detainees at Guantánamo Bay — boasted that they had become leaders of al-Qaeda in Yemen. (See pictures of the Care Rehabilitation Center.)

The video could hardly have come at a worse time for the Obama Administration, which has just announced that it will close Gitmo within a year and is already being accused by some Republicans of jeopardizing U.S. security. But it is doubly discomfiting for the Saudi government. Officials in Riyadh now say they have rearrested at least nine other men who had previously been rehabilitated; it's not clear how many of those are ex-Gitmo detainees.

read more | digg story

The Most Controversial Jail in the World - Gitmo Documentary

While the families of 9/11 victims want the Guantanamo Bay detention camps to remain open, President-elect Barack Obama and many other critics believe the military prison is a failure of the American government. After working for a year and a half to arrange media access to the camp, Adrian Baschuk reports from the controversial detention center.



read more digg story

Obama orders Guantanamo shut

(01:29) Report
Jan. 22 - President Obama vowed to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center within a year.

The prison became a stain on the human rights record of the United States and a symbol of detainee abuse and detention without charge under the Bush Administration.Deborah Lutterbeck reports from Washington.

SOUNDBITE: US President Barack Obama


read more digg story

Should Obama Prosecute Bush for Illegal Programs & Crimes?

Some people are calling for President-elect Obama to investigate programs associated with the torture of detainees and warrantless surveillance. But others caution to leave history to judge the Bush administration. What is to be gained in prosecuting the outgoing president?

read more | digg story

Torturing Democracy

"Torturing Democracy" trailer...you can also watch the 3 part documentary at http://www.torturingdemocracy.org/

"I've become an old man here. Death in this situation is better than being alive and staying here without hope."
-Detainee #232



read more digg story

Gitmo Whistleblower Talks To BBC About Torture

Former Gitmo guard Chris Arendt has told a BBC interviewer about the abuses he saw there. He was quite clear that what he saw was ''torture'' and that some of his fellow guards were so violent as to be ''psychotic.''
Here's Arendt talking at the "Winter Soldiers" press conference hosted by IVAW back in April last year.


read more digg story

The Bush Administration's Most Despicable Act

"This is not the America I know," President George W. Bush said after the first, horrifying pictures of U.S. troops torturing prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq surfaced in April 2004. The President was not telling the truth. "This" was the America he had authorized on Feb. 7, 2002, when he signed a memorandum stating that the Third Geneva Convention — the one regarding the treatment of enemy prisoners taken in wartime — did not apply to members of al-Qaeda or the Taliban. That signature led directly to the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay. It was his single most callous and despicable act. It stands at the heart of the national embarrassment that was his presidency.

The details of the torture that Bush authorized have been dribbling out over the years in books like Jane Mayer's excellent The Dark Side. But the most definitive official account was released by the Senate Armed Services Committee just before Christmas. Much of the committee's report remains secret, but a 19-page executive summary was published, and it is infuriating. The story begins with an obscure military training program called Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape (SERE), in which various forms of torture are simulated to prepare U.S. special-ops personnel for the sorts of treatment they might receive if they're taken prisoner. Incredibly, the Bush Administration decided to have SERE trainers instruct its interrogation teams on how to torture prisoners. (Read "Shell-Shocked at Abu Ghraib?")

read more digg story

Senate report: Rumsfeld to blame for detaine torture

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other members of the Bush administration "conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees," claims a Senate Armed Services Committee report issued Thursday.

According to the committee, prisoners were tortured in the Iraqi prison Abu Ghraib, the US prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and other US military installations. Senators Carl Levin (D-MI) and John McCain (R-AZ) were responsible for the content of the Senate's findings.

read more digg story

Why Won't Bush Release the Uighur Prisoners at Gitmo?

By Daphne Eviatar, Washington Independent

As the Bush term ends, his administration is using every possible excuse to keep its captives from the "war on terror" imprisoned.

Pity the Uighurs. Originally known best in this country for their unusual name (pronounced WEE'-gurz), the group of 17 Chinese Muslims has been locked up at Guantanamo Bay for the past seven years. That has contributed to the Uighurs new-found notoriety as hapless victims of a U.S. detention policy that can't send them home, yet can't send them anywhere else.
The Bush administration has acknowledged that it no longer considers the Uighurs "enemy combatants" subject to detention. Yet on Nov. 24, it vigorously fought a court's order to release them in the United States -- insisting that only the president and his Homeland Security Dept. have the authority to make that call. (Because the 17 Chinese Muslims received weapons training in Afghanistan, the administration claimed they posed a threat and cannot be allowed to live here. Yet the government has never presented any evidence that the men intended to use their training to stage attacks in the United States.)
The case has become such a global embarrassment for the U.S. that a group of 10 distinguished conservatives recently wrote to the administration appealing for the Uighurs' release, saying their continued detention without cause "undermines our standing in the world."

read more digg story

Judge Orders Five Detainees Freed From Guantánamo

In an important test of the Bush administration’s detention policies, a federal judge ruled that five Guantánamo Bay prisoners are not being lawfully held.

read more digg story

Confessions of a former Guantánamo prosecutor

The inside story of a military lawyer who discovered stunning injustice at the heart of the Bush administration's military commissions.

read more | digg story

Oct. 23, 2008 | When Army Lt. Col. Darrell Vandeveld began his work in May 2007 as a prosecutor at the Guantánamo Bay military commissions, the Iraq war veteran was one of the most enthusiastic and tenacious lawyers working on behalf of the Bush administration. He took on seven cases. In court hearings he dismissed claims of prisoner abuse as "embellishment" and "exaggeration." Once, when a detainee asked for legal representation only for the purpose of challenging the legitimacy of the military commissions, Vandeveld ridiculed the request as "idiotic."