Guantanamo special report

Tribunal debate centers on details

Despite the inflamed rhetoric, Rep. Steve Israel said he left last Wednesday's House Armed Services Committee hearing on the president's tribunals for terrorist suspects thinking that the divide in Congress really isn't that great.

Pols at odds on war crime tribunal issue

Congress appears to be deeply divided on how to fix the president's war crime tribunals for terrorists after the Supreme Court struck them down for failing to conform with military and international law.

New stance on rights

Reacting to a recent Supreme Court ruling, the Defense Department shifted its stance and announced yesterday it would apply the Geneva Conventions' minimum standards of humane treatment as a matter of law, not just of policy, to al-Qaida detainees captured in the war on terror.

ANALYSIS

Can Bush turn aside detainee ruling?

The Supreme Court's Hamdan decision against the president's military commissions contains potentially sweeping implications, but it also faces a Bush administration that has shown a dedication to limiting the effects of adverse rulings, to protect executive authority.

Bush loss in high court

In a sharp rebuke to President George W. Bush, the Supreme Court yesterday ruled that the military commissions he created to try detainees held in Guantanamo Bay are illegal, violating U.S. military law and the international laws of war under the Geneva Conventions.

Potential for 'significant case'

In what could be an enormously significant case, the Supreme Court today will hear arguments on a challenge to the president's power in the war on terror by a Yemeni man being held at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp as Osama bin Laden's driver.

Guantanamo report rejected

The White House summarily dismissed a scathing United Nations report that calls on the United States to conduct trials for the 500 detainees being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, - or to release them.

Senate bill modifies petition access

The Senate yesterday modified its ban on the right of terror suspects held at Guantanamo Bay to claim their innocence in petitions to federal court in the face of withering criticism from human rights, legal and civil liberties groups.

Terror suspects' legal relief in jeopardy

After four years of growing international criticism of the Bush administration's treatment of war-on-terror suspects and dozens of lawsuits from prisoners who claim they are being held with no basis, it took the Senate barely an hour of debate late last week to reverse a year-old Supreme Court decision and strip the courts of the power to hear their cases.

Senate strips Guantanamo detainees of right to sue

The Senate voted last night to strip away the right of war-on-terror prisoners held at the military's Guantanamo Bay jail in Cuba to challenge their detentions in court.

Writers jailed in 2002 for political satire

Badr Zaman Badr and his brother Abdurrahim Muslim Dost relish writing a good joke that jabs a corrupt politician or distills the sufferings of fellow Afghans. Badr admires the political satires in "The Canterbury Tales" and "Gulliver's Travels," and Dost wrote some wicked lampoons in the 1990s, accusing Afghan mullahs of growing rich while preaching and organizing jihad. So in 2002, when the U.S. military shackled the writers and flew them to Guantanamo among prisoners whom Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared "the worst of the worst" violent terrorists, the brothers found life imitating farce.

Lawyers bring new allegations of abuse at Guatanamo

The Pentagon has engaged in a new form of medical abuse at Guantanamo Bay by force-feeding detainees on a hunger strike in ways that are deliberately painful and cause life-threatening vomiting and weight loss, defense lawyers say.

Inmate's writings raise questions of identification, treatment at Guantanamo

By the third week of the hunger strike, the fasting inmate wrote, the cellblocks echoed with groans. Emaciated prisoners were vomiting blood or dropping unconscious to the floor. The military hospital overflowed with strikers being force-fed through their noses.

Detainee: They blinded me

The allegations read like a deranged horror novel.

One prisoner's story

When Dr. Mohammed Ali Shah came home from exile, a convoy of well-wishers met him on the mountain road from Kabul and draped flower garlands around his neck. They flocked to greet the son of one of Gardez's most prominent families, and celebrate the fact that professionals and entrepreneurs were returning to rebuild this disheveled, dusty town after 25 years of war.

In transcript, detainee answers U.S. charges

The following are excerpts from the unclassified transcript of a hearing called a Combatant Status Review Tribunal. It was held in March at Guantanamo for Mohammed Ali Shah, whose comments were translated by the tribunal's translator from the Afghan Persian dialect.

Furor over hunger strike

The number of inmates on a seven-week hunger strike at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay has plummeted to 36 from 131 one week ago, the Pentagon said yesterday. Defense lawyers suspect the number remains far higher and are seeking court intervention to ensure fasters aren't being abused.

Medical ethics violated at Gitmo, critics charge

The Pentagon has routinely violated medical ethics by sharing prisoners' medical records with interrogation teams at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the country's leading medical journal charges in a new article.

Gitmo truth of fiction?

The bearded prisoner in an orange jumpsuit waved his arms as frantically as a castaway trying to flag a boat on the horizon.

It's almost like home

GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba - "Will that be 2-percent or whole milk?" the server asked sweetly before frothing up a latte at Starbucks, just down the road from the Subway and Pizza Hut.

Inside a Gitmo review

Handcuffed, with his bare feet shackled to the floor, the young, bearded Saudi glared at a group of military officials as one of them listed reasons he should still be considered an enemy combatant, too dangerous to release from the maximum-security detention camp here.

Congress divided on rights of Gitmo detaines

A Senate Democrat Wednesday called Guantanamo Bay "an international embarassment" as two Republicans said Congress should write new rules for the detention and judgment of enemy combatants in the U.S. war on terrorism.

At Gitmo, still no day in court

One year ago, the Supreme Court told the Bush administration that in America, even detainees swept up in the war on terror and held at the military's Guantanamo Bay prison camp were entitled to a day in court to contest their imprisonment.

Petitions filed in their own words

First, Muhibullah said, the bombs came, severely injuring him and destroying his house in central Afghanistan. Then, Americans admitted the bombing might have been a mistake and took him away, to treat his wounds, they said.

Rumsfeld: Gitmo detention center necessary

Rebuffing calls to shut down Guantanamo Bay prison, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Wednesday he sees no alternative to keeping the jail open indefinitely to protect the United States.

No lawyers and thin accusations

At the tribunals the U.S. military established at Guantanamo to determine whether prisoners were enemy combatants, they had no right to a lawyer, to discover evidence against them, or to insist on witnesses.

Lawyers caught in paper chase

Accustomed to representing clients in less exotic settings, lawyers for prisoners at the military's Guantanamo prison use phrases like "bizarre" and "Alice in Wonderland" to describe the obstacles they face.