"arbitrary detention is as unacceptable when applied to foreign Muslims held at Guantánamo as it is when possibly directed at US citizens - Andy Worthington
March 3: "Czars, Libya, and Recent Developments"
March 22: Marjorie Cohn addresses America's policy of torture
March 15: sustaining resistance to John Yoo
A U.S. soldier wields his assault rifle as another soldier handles a shotgun while standing at the gate of Bagram airbase during a protest against Quran desecration on Feb. 21. (Massoud Hossaini / AFP - Getty Images)
Thousands of Afghans are protesting outside of the Bagram Air Base today, after Afghans working inside the facility revealed that US military personnel were burning large numbers of Qurans at the base...
A number of Afghan workers were also injured during the burning, when they realized that Qurans were being destroyed and attempted to pull them out of the fire, suffering serious burns.
Instead of handing over the main detention center in Afghanistan to Kabul's control, the U.S. is expanding the facility and keeping it under Washington's control...
"Welcome to a special broadcast by Project Censored on Pacifica Radio. Join Mickey Huff, along with co-hosts Dr. Peter Phillips; Dr. Andy Roth, the associate director of Project Censored; and Abby Martin of Media Roots. Today's special program is "Brought to Justice? -- The Indefinite Detention and Targeted Killing of the Rule of Law." Joining us will be investigative journalist Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files and co-director of "Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo"; Pardiss Kebriaei, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, who has represented a number of the men detained at Guantánamo and is also counsel in Al-Aulaqi v. Obama, which concerns targeted killings by the executive in zones outside of armed conflict. We will also have music and commentary from one of the most notable political folk musicians of our time, the one and only David Rovics. We hear from Dr. Almerindo Ojeda, professor of linguistics and director of the Guantánamo Testimonials Project at University of California, Davis; and we round out today's special with Stephanie Tang of World Can't Wait...
Katherine Darmer, Chapman University law professor and champion of gay rights and equality, has died
c/o The Orange County Register:
Darmer... took a stand on waterboarding, including during a Chapman debate with John Yoo, a former Bush administration lawyer whose memos justified coercive interrogation tactics including waterboarding."Prior to the War on Terror, we took the position that waterboarding was torture and prosecuted it as such," Darmer said of the interrogation method. "How effective is a tactic you have to use 266 times? We are lawyers. Our job is to follow the law. Torture is illegal, and it's also wrong."
opposition to lawsuits for rendition abuses has affected other nations' "perceptions of our stature and our moral legitimacy" - Joe "Chip" Pitts, Stanford law school lecturer and former chairman of Amnesty International USA
Massachusetts town vows to defy indefinite detention law
"WHEREAS, the indefinite detention of any person without trial violates the 5th and 6th amendments of the Constitution of the United States, Article III of the Constitution of the United States, and the Posse Comitatus Act...
Woods will soon be relieved of his post at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, where his misadventures led to clashes with defense attorneys over the illegal search of confidential correspondence between prisoners and their counsel.
In Smithfield, NC, protesters regularly gather at the small airport to press their demand for an investigation into Aero Contractors, a private company rumored to have ties to the CIA and its "extraordinary rendition" program of secret detentions.
10 years after the first "high-value" detainee was hooded and forced into a CIA plane, Aero's presence remains for opponents a powerful symbol: a rare, visible reminder of what they view as a uniquely shameful chapter in America's history...
In "exceptional circumstances" where there is a threat to human life or public safety, CSIS [Canadian Security Intelligence Service] may share information with relevant authorities, "including information based on intelligence provided by foreign agencies that may have been derived from the use of torture or mistreatment."
The preaching platform that the University of California provides John Yoo enables the professor's continued assault on civil liberties and human rights. Protection of the "torture professor" illustrates the extent to which political calculation supplants ethical deliberation by the university to provide principled leadership. photo by Lisa Bernheim
"the willingness to defend persistent and deeply rooted forms of racial, economic and social inequality is often driven by a fear of those deemed 'other', whose presence, voices and ideas defy the crippling registers of intellectual conformity and forms of knowledge that merely reinforce 'common sense', the status quo and right-wing populism...
Tolerance, indeed promotion, of Yoo works to constrain challenge to official narratives and policies of the torture state, and suppresses redress of the injustice, even death, suffered by its victims.
"Our journey toward Abu Ghraib began in earnest with a single document -- written and signed without the knowledge of the American People...
"In beginning to tell the stories of the remaining 171 prisoners at Guantanamo, we are
delighted to start with the story of Abdul Razak Qadir, one of five Uighurs, Muslims from
China's Xinjiang province...
On January 13th, Andy Worthington introduced a
new Close Guantanamo Now! petition to his
Bay Area audience. Find video of the event,
A Conversation With Truthout Journalist
Jason Leopold, here.
779 prisoners have been held at Guantanamo since
the prison opened on January 11, 2002. Of those,
600 have been released or transferred, and eight
have died.
The remaining men are human beings, with feelings, and with families, who, after
ten years, continue to be subjected to arbitrary detention.
