UN rights experts urge Biden to close Guantánamo detention facility
UN human rights experts on Monday called for President-Elect Joe Biden’s administration to close the Guantánamo Bay detention center immediately. The UN experts asserted that detainees are being held there indefinitely, in cruel and inhumane conditions. January 11 was the nineteenth anniversary of the establishment of Guantánamo. Seven hundred prisoners were at the facility in 2003, [...]
On Friday, June 26, 2020, the Supreme Court of the United States decided a Suspension Clause challenge to expedited immigration proceedings. In the widely anticipated judgment, the Court determined that no habeas could be brought as the original habeas petitioner was not in fact asking for the habeas relief of release. In so many words, [...]
US senators concerned over potential COVID-19 outbreak at Guantanamo Bay
A group of US senators wrote to the US Secretary of Defense Wednesday expressing concern about the potential for a “significant outbreak” of COVID-19 at the Pentagon prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The letter seeks to determine how the military is safeguarding the 40 prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay and the American forces responsible for [...]
The Annihilation of International Law and the Right to Freedom of Speech: Julian Assange
Julian Assange is an Australian hacker, famous for revealing US secrets relating to war crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan. A whole cache of classified information was published by Assange’s organization WikiLeaks, which revealed the details of the ruthless murders of innocent civilians and the capture of hundreds of innocent civilians in the US’s Guantanamo [...]
Pakistan High Court commutes death sentence in Daniel Pearl case
A court in Pakistan on Thursday commuted the death sentence of the man accused of beheading Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002. Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh had been arrested and sentenced to death for orchestrating the kidnapping and murder of Pearl. Pearl had been in Pakistan following a story about “shoe bomber” Richard [...]
Federal judge allows psychological evaluation of Guantanamo detainee
A judge for the US District Court for the District of Columbia on Friday granted a Guantanamo Bay detainee’s motion to compel a psychological evaluation by a mixed medical commission. Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Saudi Arabia national who, for the past 18 years, was detained at Guantanamo and subject to torture as a result of his alleged [...]
Retired US Supreme Court Justice Justice John Paul Stevens died on Tuesday at 99 years old. Stevens was appointed by President Gerald Ford in 1975 and retired in 2010 after serving more than 34 years on the bench. He was known for his evolution into a liberal-leaning judge who authored a number of precedential opinions, [...]
House approves defense bill limiting presidential authority to attack Iran
The US House of Representatives approved an amendment to the defense bill for fiscal year 2020 on Friday that would require the president to obtain congressional approval before ordering a military strike against Iran. The amendment passed 251-170, largely along party lines but with 27 Republican representatives signing on. The bill itself, the 2020 National [...]
The US Supreme Court’s Monday orders added five new cases on a range of topics from the EPA to race discrimination in media, but denied a case filed by a current Guantanamo prisoner. A Yemeni national, al-Alwi, has been held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for 17 years, since the early days of the war on [...]
The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled Tuesday that more than two years of decisions by Colonel Vance Spath, a military tribunal judge who formerly oversaw the case of Abd Al-Rahim Hussein Muhammed Al-Nashiri, should be discarded because he failed to disclose his application to be an Immigration Judge in the Department [...]
