Phil Carter has resigned as Assistant Secretary for Detainee Affairs. This is really quite a surprise given how perfect he was for the job.
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Lawrence of Arabia
Four more years of Bush it is: Obama to revive military trials
President Barack Obama has announced he is to revive military trials for some detainees at Guantanamo Bay. However, in a statement he said legal rights for those facing the military commissions would be improved.
Between this, the regular invocation of “national security” in court cases and the recent decision to withhold the photos (to avoid backlash against American militarism…by Americans), what more could your average American autocrat ask for?
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aziz
One of the guards in Gitmo has converted to Islam. This is a perfect example and case study of “passive da’wah“.
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The ACLU has obtained a draft of the order to close Guantanamo Bay.
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baraka
A U.S. military officer warned Pentagon officials that an American detainee was being driven nearly insane by months of punishing isolation and sensory deprivation in a U.S. military brig, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.
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Daniel Larison on torture and detainees.
Of course, when the government is allowed to define who an “enemy combatant” is, up to and including U.S. citizens such as Padilla, it takes away the possibility of reviewing the very designation that strips the detainee of legal rights, and then without those rights he cannot contest his detention. Better still from the government’s perspective, because the detainees are charged with terrorism and would not have been uniformed members of any military, they cannot claim the status of prisoners of war and so the government tries to find a way to evade international legal obligations as well. The argument that these detainees should not have access to the courts relied on the belief that terrorist suspects should not be processed through civilian courts, which presupposed that their status as terrorist suspects had some basis in reality. The entire system was justified according to the assumption that the government never makes mistakes and always acts in good faith, when we know that the opposite is typically the case.
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Willow recently threw down the gauntlet about waterboarding and torture over at Dean’s World.
