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For Immediate Release
February, 03 2009, 02:08pm EDT
Contact:
Matt Daloisio, 201-264-4424, daloisio@earthlink.net
Tanya Theriault, 718-419-7619, tanyatheriault@yahoo.com
Citizens Urge New Attorney General Holder & President Obama to Release 17 Uighur Guantanamo Prisoners Into the US
Procession to Justice Department Today
WASHINGTON
Key human rights groups are urging President Barack Obama and Attorney
General Eric Holder to take a simple step that will right a seven-year
wrong: they want him to lift the Bush administration's appeal of
Judge Ricardo Urbina's order to release the 17 Uighurs imprisoned in
Guantanamo. This act would let stand Judge Urbina's order to bring the
men into the United States immediately. Part of a Muslim ethnic
minority in China, the Uighurs would likely face persecution by the
Chinese government if returned to China.
Witness Against Torture is coordinating national call-in days for
concerned people to plead with Attorney General Holder and President
Obama to withdraw the Bush administration's appeal. Over 20
organizations are urging their members to contact The White House and
the Justice Department. The call-in is part of the 100 Days Campaign
to Close Guantanamo and End Torture, which maintains a daily vigil
from 11am to 1pm in front of the White House. This week the vigil
banner reads "Free the Uighurs."
Today's vigil will include a procession to the Justice Department at
11:15 am to welcome Attorney General Eric Holder and ask him to make
his first official act as Attorney General the dropping of the appeal
in the Uighur case.
"Every new day of imprisonment without charge is another cruel
injustice for all the men held at Guantanamo, but especially for the
Uighurs, who have already been exonerated and ordered released by a
U.S. court of law," said Carmen Trotta of Witness Against Torture.
"At our daily vigil, when we tell bystanders about the hopeless
political limbo these men are in, they are outraged too. We're only
asking for the change President Obama promised: restore the rule of
law."
The government admits that the Uighurs were never "enemy combatants"
against the U.S. - they were sold to U.S. forces by bounty hunters.
In October 2008 U.S. District Court Judge Ricardo M. Urbina held that
their continued detention is unlawful. In a dramatic decision, he
ordered the men brought into the United States within 72 hours and
delivered into his courtroom so that details of their settlement could
be discussed. The Justice Department under the Bush administration
immediately appealed, however, and the Uighurs have remained
imprisoned under maximum security conditions.
Witness Against Torture is a grassroots movement that came into being in December 2005 when 24 activists walked to Guantanamo to visit the prisoners and condemn torture policies. Since then, it has engaged in public education, community outreach, and non-violent direct action. For the first 100 days of the Obama administration, the group held a daily vigil at the White House, encouraging the new President to uphold his commitments to shut down Guantanamo.
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Iran Says Trump Will Go Down as a 'Supreme War Criminal' If He Follows Through With Threat
"This is an express public incitement for war crimes and crimes against humanity—and, I would say, for genocide," said a spokesperson for Iran's Foreign Ministry.
Apr 06, 2026
Iranian officials on Monday warned US President Donald Trump that his name will be "etched in history as a supreme war criminal" if he follows through with his threat to wage total war on Iran's civilian infrastructure, including bridges and power plants.
Kazem Gharibabadi, Iran's deputy foreign minister, wrote on social media following Trump's Easter-morning outburst that "threats to attack power plants and bridges (civilian infrastructure) constitute war crimes under Article 8(2)(b) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions of 1977 (Article 52)."
"The president of the United States, in his capacity as the highest-ranking official of his country, has openly threatened to commit war crimes—an act that entails his individual criminal responsibility before the International Criminal Court and any competent national court," Gharibabadi added, vowing that Iran "will deliver a decisive, immediate, and regret-inducing response" to any attack.
Esmail Baghaei, a spokesperson for Iran's Foreign Ministry, said Trump's threats are "an indication of a criminal mindset."
"This is an express public incitement for war crimes and crimes against humanity—and, I would say, for genocide," Baghaei said in an interview on Sunday. "Threatening to attack a country's critical infrastructure, energy sector, it would mean that you want to put at risk the whole population."
Absolute bombshell. Iran's Spokesperson Esmail Baghaei accuses the Trump administration of a criminal mindset and public incitement for genocide. Threatening a nation's critical infrastructure puts the entire population at risk. The White House has completely abandoned morality. pic.twitter.com/HcBZGZho5p
— Furkan Gözükara (@FurkanGozukara) April 5, 2026
The US and Israel have already done significant damage to Iran's civilian infrastructure. The country's deputy health minister said Monday that more than 360 healthcare, education, and research centers have been hit by US-Israeli strikes, and dozens of medics have been killed since the bombing began on February 28.
But Trump on Sunday threatened an indiscriminate assault, telling Fox News that if the Iranians "don't make a deal and fast," he is "considering blowing everything up and taking the oil."
"You're going to see bridges and power plants dropping all over their country," the president said, setting a new deadline of 8 pm ET for the complete reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.
Trump's remarks came after he published a deranged post on his Truth Social platform demanding that Iran "open the Fuckin' Strait, you crazy bastards, or you'll be living in Hell."
Analysts and lawmakers in the US echoed Iranian officials' warnings that Trump's threatened attacks would constitute war crimes.
"Trump's advisers are telling him to hit civilian sites because it will cause unrest and potentially topple the regime. But just think about the insanity of this plan: kill tens of thousands of civilians in order to cause a national panic," US Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) wrote. "Bombing to induce political panic IS A WAR CRIME."
Dylan Williams, vice president for government affairs at the Center for International Policy, said that "any lawmaker who votes for supplemental funding for the war on Iran or against war powers resolutions to end it will be fully complicit in the war crimes threatened here, as well as those already committed by this unhinged and unfit Commander in Chief."
The US president's renewed threats came amid reports of a diplomatic effort, mediated in part by Pakistan, to enact a 45-day ceasefire to provide space for a lasting resolution to the war.
Axios reported that the talks are seen as "the only chance to prevent a dramatic escalation in the war that will include massive strikes on Iranian civilian infrastructure and a retaliation against energy and water facilities in the Gulf states."
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President Donald Trump's Department of Health and Human Services and its office in charge of providing care for unaccompanied immigrant children have been named in a civil lawsuit alleging that a three-year-old was sexually abused after immigration officials separated her from her mother at the US border, while her father waited for months to be reunited with the child.
The girl crossed the border with her mother last September but was separated from her mother after the woman was charged with making false statements, according to The Associated Press. She was sent to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which operates under HHS and places children in foster or shelter settings.
When Trump took office for his second term in January 2025, the average time a child was under ORR's care was 37 days, but as of February children were remaining in shelter or foster settings for an average of 200 days.
The process through which ORR releases children to the care of their parents or sponsors has grown more arduous under the Trump administration, and in the case of the three-year-old, she waited for five months in foster care while the government repeatedly told her father it couldn't make an appointment for him to be fingerprinted.
Court documents state that during that time, the girl reported being sexually abused by an older child who was living in the same foster setting in Harlingen, Texas. She told a caregiver that she had been abused multiple times and had suffered bleeding as a result.
ORR only told her father that there had been an "accident" in foster care. Officials did not tell him the result of a forensic exam and interview of his child, but the older child accused of the abuse was removed from the foster setting.
“I asked them, ‘What happened? I want to know. I’m her father. I want to know what’s going on,’ and they just told me that they couldn’t give me more information, that it was under investigation,” said the father, who is a legal permanent US resident and spoke to the AP anonymously to protect his daughter's identity. “She was so long in there... I just think that if they would have moved faster, nothing like that would have happened.”
The Trump administration has claimed its new restrictions for sponsors and family members seeking custody of their children who are in ORR's care have prevented traffickers from illegally bringing children into the US and have kept unaccompanied minors safe.
Family members like the three-year-old's father are required to submit to income verification, home inspections, and DNA testing.
The new procedures were immediately followed by a drastic jump in child detention times, according to the AP.
Legal advocates have filed lawsuits challenging the new restrictions on the grounds that they can cause prolonged detention for children. Lauren Fisher Flores, the legal director of the American Bar Association’s ProBar project and the attorney representing the girl's family, told the AP that the organization has worked on eight habeas corpus petitions on behalf of children who have been detained for an average of 255 days.
In the girl's case, the government finally allowed the father to be fingerprinted after attorneys sent a letter to ORR, but still did not provide a timeline for his daughter's release. His lawyers then filed a habeas petition, prompting the government to release the child to her father.
During the legal challenge, the father learned the details of what ORR had called an "accident" that happened in the foster setting.
“To have your child abused while in the government’s care, to not understand what has happened or how to protect them, to not even be told about the abuse, it is unimaginable,” Fisher Flores told the AP. “Children deserve safety and they belong with their parents.”
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The decision "will make it much more difficult to monitor US-Israeli bombing there, which seems to be the point," said one human rights campaigner.
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The satellite firm Planet Labs told customers, including major news outlets, that it was acting on the Trump administration's request as it announced it was implementing "an indefinite withhold of imagery" in Iran and across the Middle Eastern countries where the widening conflict started by the US and Israel is unfolding.
The Saturday announcement, said UK rights campaigner Sarah Wilkinson, was a sign that images of the war will be censored "to hide the truth."
Planet Labs sent an email to journalists who have regularly used the company's satellite images to report on the US-Israeli bombing of Iran and Iran's retaliatory actions on Saturday, saying that after receiving a request from the US government, it was "moving to a managed access model... and releasing imagery on a case-by-case basis and for urgent, mission-critical requirements or in the public interest."
Washington Post reporter Evan Hill suggested the announcement would limit reporters' access to information from "one of the most important US-based commercial satellite imagery providers on whom most media outlets rely."
The announcement comes as Iran's military capabilities have reportedly exceeded US expectations, with US intelligence reporting Iran has retained many of its missile and mobile launchers and casting doubt on the Pentagon's claims that the US is severely diminishing Iran's missile stockpile.
The White House's request for a suspension of satellite imagery was the latest sign that "Trump’s war is going swimmingly," said podcast host Mark Ames sardonically.
It also coincided with multiple threats over the weekend from President Donald Trump, who said this coming Tuesday would be "Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one"—with increased attacks on Iran's civilian infrastructure unless Iran agrees to a deal on Monday.
A major bridge was destroyed by the US on Saturday, while Israeli forces bombed a significant petrochemical complex, reportedly sending pollution into the surrounding city. At least 13 people were killed in the two attacks combined. A projectile that struck the vicinity of the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant also killed at least one person and raised concerns about a larger attack, which "could trigger a nuclear accident, with health impacts that would devastate generations," as World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.
Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch, said the Trump administration's demand for satellite images to be withheld "will make it much more difficult to monitor US-Israeli bombing there, which seems to be the point."
Data and imagery collected starting on March 9 will be withheld by Planet Labs. The company previously instituted a 14-day delay on the release of satellite images to ensure they would not be "leveraged" by "adversarial actors."
Also on Saturday, Al Jazeera reported that Israeli soldiers had "destroyed all of the CCTV cameras" around the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, a mission in the southern part of the country where three peacekeepers were wounded in a blast on Friday and several others have been killed since early March, including some by Israeli fire.
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