President Barack Obama has come
under some criticism for slowing his promised withdrawal of U.S. troops
from Iraq and for beefing up U.S. forces in Afghanistan, but his
70-day-old administration at least has dumped one part of George W.
Bush's bellicose foreign policy: the phrase "global war on terror."
Last Friday it was announced that,
under instructions from the attorney general to the director of public
prosecutions, the police are to investigate claims by released
Guantánamo prisoner Binyam Mohamed
that MI5 agents had knowledge of his US-directed torture, and that they
also provided information to his interrogators while he was being held
incommunicado.
U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema is
scheduled to issue a ruling in the Eastern District of Virginia at the
end of April in a case that will send a signal to the Muslim world and
beyond whether the American judicial system has regained its
independence after eight years of flagrant manipulation and
intimidation by the Bush administration. Brinkema will decide whether
the Palestinian activist Dr.
The Obama administration appears to be backing away from the phrase "global war on terror," a signature rhetorical legacy of its predecessor.
In a memo e-mailed this week to Pentagon staff members, the Defense Department's office of security review noted that "this administration prefers to avoid using the term 'Long War' or 'Global War on Terror' [GWOT.] Please use 'Overseas Contingency Operation.' "
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - Many detainees locked up at Guantanamo were innocent men swept up by U.S. forces unable to distinguish enemies from noncombatants, a former Bush administration official said Thursday. "There are still innocent people there," Lawrence B. Wilkerson, a Republican who was chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, told The Associated Press. "Some have been there six or seven years."
ROME - A trial in which 25 CIA agents are accused of kidnapping a terrorism suspect ran into serious difficulties last night when Italy's constitutional court upheld key objections raised by the Italian government.
Prosecutors say the suspect - Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, also known as Abu Omar - was snatched off the streets of Milan six years ago and flown to Egypt. There, he has claimed, he was tortured under interrogation.
In the aftermath of 9/11, when another attack on the United States was feared and war consumed Afghanistan and Iraq, the soldiers deployed to the military detention centre at Guantanamo Bay were told they were a vital part in the fight against terrorism in their role of guarding the "worst of the worst."
Terry Holdbrook was one of those soldiers, and one of the detainees he met soon after arriving in 2003 was Canadian Omar Khadr. Both teens – the American guard, 19, and the Canadian captive, 16 – talked easily about life.
THE BRITISH government is under fresh pressure to concede police and judicial inquiries into allegations that the security service, MI5, colluded in the torture of British resident Binyam Mohamed, who was released from Guantánamo Bay last month.
WASHINGTON - When John C. Yoo, a former Justice Department lawyer, was selected by President George W. Bush in May 2004 to join a government board charged with releasing historical Nazi and Japanese war crimes records, trouble quickly followed.
The Abu Ghraib torture scandal was exploding, and fellow panelists learned that Mr. Yoo had written secret legal opinions saying presidents have sweeping wartime power to circumvent the Geneva Conventions. They protested that it was absurd to name Mr. Yoo, who they believed might have sanctioned war crimes, to a war crimes commission.
After being held in captivity as an accused "enemy combatant" by the U.S. Government for more than five years
without charges or a trial of any kind, Ali Al-Marri -- who was a legal
resident in the U.S. and was on U.S. soil at the time of his detention
-- was, two weeks ago, finally indicted and charged with various crimes in a federal court. The
indictment came as the U.S.
