At the weekend, six of the remaining 13 Uighurs in Guantánamo -- Muslims from China's Xinjiang province -- were released to resume new lives in the tiny Pacific nation of Palau (population: 20,000). I have written at length about the plight of Guantánamo's Uighurs, innocent men caught up in...

One year and two weeks ago, District Court Judge Ricardo Urbina ordered that 17 Uighur prisoners at Guantánamo be released into the United States. Muslims from China's Xinjiang province, the Uighurs were seized and sold to U.S. forces by Pakistani villagers in December 2001, after they had fled a...

In a recent article, "On Guantánamo, Lawmakers Reveal They Are Still Dick Cheney's Pawns," I spelled out my despair and disgust at lawmakers from both parties (their names can be found here, here and here), who, since May, have voted for legislation severely curtailing President Obama's...

Last week, the Obama administration finally admitted that it might not be possible to close Guantánamo by the president's self-imposed deadline of January 22, 2010, when defense secretary Robert Gates told ABC News' This Week that it was "going to be tough" to meet the deadline. The announcement followed...

In four years of researching and writing about Guantánamo, I have become used to uncovering shocking information, but for sheer cynicism, I am struggling to think of anything that compares to the revelations contained in the unclassified ruling in the habeas corpus petition of Fouad al-Rabiah, a Kuwaiti prisoner whose...

On Monday, following a request from the Obama administration, Army Col. Stephen Henley, the military judge in the proposed trial by Military Commission of five men charged in connection with the 9/11 attacks -- Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, Mustafa al-Hawsawi and Walid bin...

Yesterday, U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly struck another decisive blow to the credibility of the Bush administration's detention policies at Guantánamo (and the continuation of those same policies by Obama's Justice Department), granting the habeas corpus petition of the Kuwaiti prisoner Fouad al-Rabia, a 50-year old aeronautical engineer...

In an exclusive interview with the BBC, Daniel Fried came across as an eminently reasonable man placed in a disturbingly unreasonable position by his bosses. A senior diplomat, who was the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs for four years, Fried was plucked from his job...

Yesterday, the day after the New York Times and the Washington Post reported that the Obama administration was planning to introduce tribunals for the prisoners held in the U.S. prison at Bagram airbase, Afghanistan, the reason for the specifically-timed leaks that led to the publication of the stories...

A month ago, rulings made by District Court judges in the habeas corpus appeals of prisoners held at Guantánamo seemed, for the most part, to confirm that the courts were uniquely placed to deliver justice to the prisoners after their long years of imprisonment, largely without charge or trial. Even...

The Spanish newspaper Público reported exclusively on Saturday that Judge Baltasar Garzón is pressing ahead with a case against six senior Bush administration lawyers for implementing torture at Guantánamo.

Back in March, Judge Garzón announced that he was planning to investigate the six prime architects of the Bush...

On August 28, in the first indication that European countries are prepared to help the Obama administration fulfill its promise to close Guantánamo by accepting prisoners who have been cleared for release, but who cannot be repatriated because of fears that they will face torture on their return, the Portuguese...

Back in September 2005, when I first began researching Guantánamo for my book The Guantánamo Files, the prison was still shrouded in mystery, even though attorneys had been visiting prisoners for nearly a year, following the Supreme Court's ruling, in June 2004, that they had habeas corpus rights. Researchers...

Four and a half months ago, 17 unjustly detained prisoners in Guantánamo wrote a letter to President Obama asking for their release. In the secretive world of Guantánamo, however, nothing is straightforward, and it has taken over four months for the letter to be cleared by the government's censors and...

Imagine if you were imprisoned for seven years without charge or trial, and then a judge ruled that the government's case against you consisted solely of unreliable allegations made by other prisoners who were tortured, coerced, bribed or suffering from mental health issues, and a "mosaic" of intelligence, purporting...

On Thursday, in a long-anticipated ruling (PDF), Judge Ellen Segan Huvelle granted the habeas corpus petition of Mohamed Jawad, an Afghan teenager seized after a grenade attack on a jeep containing two U.S. soldiers and an Afghan translator in December 2002, and ordered the government to transfer him to...

Last Thursday, while most U.S. media outlets were focused relentlessly on the marathon endurance test that was Sonia Sotomayor's Supreme Court confirmation hearing, the House Foreign Affairs Committee's Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights And Oversight held a hearing to investigate why the Bush administration had allowed Chinese...

At Guantánamo this week, the Military Commission trial system convened for only the second time since President Obama announced a four-month freeze on all proceedings on his first day in office to give the new administration's inter-departmental Guantánamo Task Force an opportunity to review the best ways in...

In an important article for Newsweek, "Independent's Day," Daniel Klaidman manages not only to present a convincingly intimate and sympathetic first-hand portrait of Eric Holder, the first African-American Attorney General in U.S. history, demonstrating how "[h]is first instinct is to shy away from confrontation, to search for common ground,"...

On Wednesday, I reported how Retired Rear Admiral John D. Hutson, the former Judge Advocate General of the US Navy from 1997 to 2000, had delivered compelling testimony to a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on "legal issues regarding military commissions and the trial of detainees for violations...