As part of its alleged "desire not to hold detainees any longer than necessary," the Pentagon announced on Tuesday that two Guantánamo prisoners had been transferred to Algeria. This follows the repatriation of two other Algerians -- Mustafa Hamlili and Abdul Raham Houari -- at the start of...

Two years and two months after three prisoners at Guantánamo died, apparently as the result of a coordinated suicide pact, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), which has been investigating the deaths ever since the three long-term hunger strikers were found dead in their cells on June 10, 2006, issued...

In the end, then, it came down to this: Barack Obama needed a vice-presidential candidate with well-established Washington credentials, foreign policy experience and an ability to connect with blue-collar workers.

And while Joe Biden -- a 65-year old working class Irish Catholic, the Senator for Delaware since 1972, and the...

As the Olympics and the war in Georgia threaten to sweep all before them, the significance of the lenient sentence handed down by a military jury to Guantánamo prisoner Salim Hamdan in the first full US war crimes trial since the Nuremberg Trials -- and the government's response to...

In a decision that will shock those watching the conclusion of the first full US war crimes trial since the Nuremberg Trials, the military jury that yesterday convicted Salim Hamdan of providing "material support for terrorism" has sentenced him to serve five and a half years in prison. Given...

The existence of a secret, CIA-run prison on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean has long been a leaky secret in the "War on Terror," and recent revelations in TIME -- based on disclosures by a "senior American official," who was "a frequent participant in White...

On Monday July 28, the U.S. Department of Defense announced that it had transferred three prisoners -- a Qatari, an Afghan and a prisoner from the United Arab Emirates -- to their home countries from the prison at Guantánamo Bay. Adding that they "were determined to be eligible for...

On June 12, when the Supreme Court ruled, in Boumediene v. Bush, that the prisoners at Guantánamo had constitutional habeas corpus rights, it was not immediately clear if the decision would have an impact on the Military Commissions at Guantánamo, the alternative legal system for trying "War on Terror"...

Wake up, America! On July 15, the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled by 5 votes to 4 in the case of Al-Marri v. Pucciarelli (PDF) that the president can arrest US citizens and legal residents inside the United States and imprison them indefinitely, without charge or...

As the Abu Ghraib scandal demonstrates, a photo is worth a thousand words -- even if, as Errol Morris' newly-released documentary Standard Operating Procedure demonstrates, those words are sometimes what the viewer wishes to see, rather than what actually happened.

There is, therefore, enormous excitement in the media about...

It doesn't take much investigation to discover that Algeria has a bleak human rights record, which is one of the reasons that, until last week, when 49-year old Mustafa Hamlili and 28-year old Abdul Raham Houari were freed from Guantanamo, no Algerian prisoners had been repatriated. This was in spite...

The wheels of injustice grind so slowly at Guantánamo that it's probably a coincidence that charges were announced against another alleged terrorist just hours after the details were revealed of how comprehensively the government had been ridiculed for its "War on Terror" detention policy in the Court of Appeals in...

Some of us have known for years that the US administration's basis for holding prisoners without charge or trial in the "War on Terror" has more to do with a fantasy world in which nonsense masquerades as truth, logic is skewed, and nothing that is uttered remotely resembles evidence that...

In the history of legal challenges to the Bush administration's assertion that it can hold "War on Terror" prisoners indefinitely without charge or trial, Parhat v. Gates has just joined a trio of Supreme Court verdicts -- Rasul v. Bush (2004), Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006) and Boumediene v. Bush...

In the second of an occasional series looking at prisoners in Guantánamo who have been cleared for release after multiple military reviews, but who are still held in the notorious offshore prison, Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison,...

As Barack Obama talks sense on Guantánamo, McCain's far-right drift ignores mounting evidence of torture and abuse in "War on Terror" prisons.

This is clearly no time for being mealy-mouthed. After nearly seven years of ruinous warmongering, economic meltdown and the shredding of the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights,...

On Sunday, just two days after the Supreme Court's momentous ruling that the prisoners at Guantánamo have constitutional habeas corpus rights -- and as John McCain started a right-wing backlash by declaring, with Cheney-like hyperbole, that it was "one of the worst decisions in the history of this country"...

Those who cherish the United States' historical adherence to the rule of law -- myself included -- were delighted to hear that the US Supreme Court ruled on Thursday, in the case of Boumediene v. Bush (PDF), that the prisoners at Guantánamo "have the constitutional right to habeas corpus,"...

Two weeks ago, I wrote a brief article in remembrance of Abdul Rahman al-Amri, a Saudi prisoner at Guantánamo, and a long-term hunger striker, who died on May 30, 2007, apparently by committing suicide. June 10 was another bleak and overlooked anniversary, as it was exactly two years ago...

Now here's a weird one to ponder on the eve of the arraignments at Guantánamo of five prisoners -- including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed -- who are charged with facilitating the 9/11 attacks.

I've always thought that there was something particularly perverse about charging minor Afghan insurgents in specially conceived...