Journalists
have been allowed to inspect refurbished facilities at Bagram airbase
in Afghanistan, the largest US military hub in the region and home to a
controversial prison.
Al
Jazeera's correspondent James Bays, who was among those who inspected
the facilities on Sunday, said Bagram, unlike its Guantanamo
counterpart, was clearly not going to be shut down soon.
In the wake of terrible news out of Afghanistan, there is renewed debate at the Pentagon and White House over the future of the war.
In the first five days of the month, there have been more deaths of U.S. service members than in all of October in 2008. And the calls for an end to the war were increasingly loud outside the White House Monday afternoon.
Prisoners
held by the US military in Afghanistan will for the first time have the
right to challenge their indefinite detention and call witnesses in
their defence, according to published reports.
The new system,
due to come into effect this week, would allow more than 600 Afghan
prisoners held at the Bagram military base to submit evidence in their
defence, The New York Times said on Saturday.
Last week, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) demanded that the Obama administration release information on 600 detainees held at Bagram airbase
in Afghanistan. The request mirrors that made to the Bush
administration seven years before, regarding the men held in Guantánamo
Bay.
Back in September 2005, when I first began researching Guantánamo for my book The Guantánamo Files,
the prison was still shrouded in mystery, even though attorneys had
been visiting prisoners for nearly a year, following the Supreme
Court's ruling, in June 2004, that they had habeas corpus rights.
Researchers at the Washington Post and at Cageprisoners<
Today was supposed to be the day that the Justice Department --
after two delays -- released an unclassified version of the CIA
Inspector General's 2004 Report into the interrogations of "high-value
detainees" in the "War on Terror," which Democrat Congressional
staffers described as the "holy grail," according to Greg Sargent of
the Plum Line,
writing in May, "because it is expected to detail torture in
unprecedent
At a press conference to mark his first 100 days in office,
President Obama declared, "We have rejected the false choice between
our security and our ideals by closing the detention center at
Guantánamo Bay and banning torture without exception." I have looked at
the President's misleading statement about Guantánamo, and analyzed his
progress - or lack of it - in closing the prison in a previous article,
and in this second article I'm going t
NEW YORK - Lawyers for a
Guantanamo detainee who claims he was held and tortured in one of the
"black site" secret prisons run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency
is demanding that the CIA preserve cells and interrogation
paraphernalia there as evidence of mistreatment.
The strategic exposition of the "newness" theme during Barack Obama's first presidential trip abroad reached its apogee in Turkey. Obama conducted a campaign-style "town hall" meeting with students in Istanbul, and toured the historic Blue Mosque, a masterpiece of Turkey's multicultural history and architecture.
