War on Terrorism

The Black Hole of Guantánamo

by Andy Worthington March 22, 2010

When it comes to dealing with the thorny question of how to close Guantánamo, the remaining prisoners have been caught between two competing systems since President Obama took office last January, and the result, to put it mildly, has been confusing. Under President Bush, prisoners were cleared for release by military-review boards, established to review the supposed evidence against them, ...

Guantánamo Uighers Back in Legal Limbo

by Andy Worthington March 9, 2010

Last Monday, the Supreme Court declined to review a case brought on behalf of seven men in Guantánamo whose release into the United States ordered by a U.S. judge 17 months ago. The men in question are Uighurs, Muslims from Chinas Xinjiang province, and the ruling ordering them to be re-housed in the United States was made in ...

Torture Whitewash

by Andy Worthington February 23, 2010

The long-awaited report by the OPR (the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility) into the conduct of the lawyers in the OLC (Office of Legal Counsel), regarding their role in approving the use of torture, has finally been published (PDF). The report largely focuses on two memos dated August 1, 2002, and a third dated March 14, ...

Repeating Pentagon Lies on Gitmo Recidivism

by Andy Worthington February 8, 2010

What is to be done about the idiocy that has spread, like a poisonous but imperceptible gas, from the Pentagon to Congress, and is now wafting through the White House, deranging all it touches? As it travels, this dismal infection transforms statistical impossibilities into magic numbers, which appear, to the uninformed observer, to confirm the most shameless lies of ...

When the Military Serves as Police

by Jacob G. Hornberger February 4, 2010

What happens when the military is used in a police capacity? You get a “war on terrorism,” one in which people think that the laws of war now apply to the situation. But in actuality, nothing could be further from the truth. What you actually get is a criminal-justice problem that inevitably goes horribly awry, causing the problem to ...

The Feds’ Post–9/11 Airport-Worker Purge

by James Bovard February 1, 2010

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the federal government feared that people would lose faith in the government’s promise to protect them. The feds had dismally failed to stop the 19 hijackers who took down four planes and sowed panic from coast to coast. So the government did what it does best: Round up the usual suspects. Starting in ...

From Safe Republic to Unsafe Empire

by Bruce Fein February 1, 2010

It is the best of times for the American Empire. The United States bestrides the planet as an unrivalled colossus. Its annual military budget exceeds $650 billion. That staggering sum is greater than the annual military expenditures of the next 25 countries combined. The defense spending of Russia, the superpower opponent of the United States during the Cold War, is ...

Lawyers Appeal Guantánamo Trial Convictions

by Andy Worthington February 1, 2010

Last Tuesday, a little-known court — the Court of Military Commissions Review — convened to hear appeals in the cases of the only two men sentenced in the military commission trial system established by Congress in 2006, after the first version, conceived by Vice President Dick Cheney and his close advisors in November 2001, was ruled illegal by ...

September 11 and the Downward Arc of American Thought

by Joseph Margulies January 26, 2010

Days after the thwarted Christmas bombing, the Rasmussen Group took a poll. They asked whether the failed bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, should be tried in civilian or military court. Seventy-one percent said military. They also asked whether he should be waterboarded to extract information about his connection to terrorism. In a sign of the times, 58 percent of respondents said ...

Two Algerian Torture Victims Are Freed From Guantánamo

by Andy Worthington January 25, 2010

On Friday, perhaps as a sop to critics — myself included — who have been complaining about President Obama’s failure to close Guantánamo by his self-imposed deadline of January 22, 2010, the Justice Department announced in a press release that two Algerian prisoners had been released. Releasing prisoners to Algeria has always been a dubious business, akin to ...

Obama’s Countdown to Failure on Guantánamo

by Andy Worthington January 18, 2010

Barring some frankly unattainable miracle, this will be the week that President Obama’s international credibility, regarding his promises to undo the Bush administration’s “war on terror” detention policies, takes a nosedive. The president began well, freezing the much-criticized military commissions trial system on his first day in office, and, on his second day, issuing executive orders requiring Guantánamo to ...

National Security: The Big Fraud

by Sheldon Richman January 12, 2010

The handwringing about the would-be Christmas Day airplane bomber and the politicians’ tiresome declarations that it will never happen again miss the point: As long as the U.S. government pursues its imperial program of invasion, regime change, occupation, and sponsorship of corrupt governments in the Muslim world, Americans will be targets for avengers. This does not excuse the killing ...