WASHINGTON - A key report ordered by U.S. President Barack Obama as part of his effort to close the internationally condemned Guantanamo prison will be delayed six months, but officials insisted on Monday they were still on track to shut it down by January.
Amid divisions between the administration and lawmakers over the fate of Guantanamo inmates, Obama aides said a task force crafting a new policy on terrorism detainees would miss its Tuesday deadline for offering its full recommendations.
An al-Jazeera reporter who was imprisoned in Guantánamo Bay plans to launch a joint legal action with other detainees against former US president George Bush and other administration officials, for the illegal detention and torture he and others suffered at the hands of US authorities.
The case will be initiated by the Guantánamo Justice Center, a new organization open to former prisoners at the US base, which will set up its international headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, later this month.
Former Guantánamo detainee Binyam Mohamed has launched an urgent legal attempt to prevent the US courts from destroying crucial evidence that he says proves he was abused while being held at the detention camp, the Guardian has learned. The evidence is said to consist of a photograph of Mohamed, a British resident, taken after he was severely beaten by guards at the US navy base in Cuba.
The image, now held by the Pentagon, had been put on his cell door, he says.
According to The New York Times
this morning, violent clashes between Chinese government forces and
Muslim Uighurs -- that country's long-oppressed minority -- have left
at least 140 people dead and close to 1,000 injured. This incident in
Western China highlights an important fact about America's "War on
Terror."
OK, so nearly 12 years after he was indicted
for his alleged part in the African embassy bombings in August 1998,
over six years since he was seized after a gunfight in Gujrat, Pakistan
in July 2004, and four years after his transfer to Guantánamo -- after
two years in secret CIA prisons, where, he says,
he was "a victim of the cruel 'enhanced interrogation techniques'" --
Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian and one of 14 supposedly
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
In over three years of researching and reporting about the prisoners
held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, I learned early on to expect, as one of
Guantánamo's first commanders, Maj. Gen.
Policies that were wrong under George W. Bush are no less wrong because Barack Obama is in the White House.
One of the most disappointing aspects of the early months of the
Obama administration has been its unwillingness to end many of the
mind-numbing abuses linked to the so-called war on terror and to
establish a legal and moral framework designed to prevent those abuses
from ever occurring again.
Since
sweeping into office pledging to undo all the malign results of the
Bush administration's brutal and ill-conceived "war on terror," Barack
Obama has struggled to make as decisive a point as he did on that first
day, when he pledged to close Guantanamo prison within a year, to ban
the use of torture, and to ensure that the US military abided by the
Geneva Conventions in its treatment of prisoners.
