extrajudicial detention

A public indictment could shed light on CIA’s secret program

by News Sources 03.24.2013

By Cora Currier, ProPublica, March 22, 2013 Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn unsealed an indictment Wednesday charging Ibrahim Suleiman Adnan Adam Harun with six terrorism-related counts. The announcement that Harun is in U.S. custody in New York may also shed light on a small part one of the most secretive aspects of U.S. counterterrorism operations during the [...]

Read the full article →

Bagram: Obama’s legal black hole

by News Sources 07.16.2012

The Daily Beast reports: Guantanamo Bay is still often in the public eye, especially now that a military commission is pursuing the 9/11 case there against alleged terrorist mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. But there’s a site where the United States is holding detainees overseas in even more restrictive conditions then Guantanamo: a prison in Afghanistan, [...]

Read the full article →

Polish ex-official charged with aiding CIA

by News Sources 03.29.2012

The New York Times reports from Warsaw: The former head of Poland’s intelligence service has been charged with aiding the Central Intelligence Agency in setting up a secret prison to detain suspected members of Al Qaeda, a leading newspaper here reported on Tuesday, the first high-profile case in which a former senior official of any [...]

Read the full article →

Too many victims of the war on terror remain imprisoned across the world

by News Sources 01.10.2012

Mary Fitzgerald writes: It didn’t take long before one of the incentives offered to coax the Taliban to the negotiating table came to light: last week the Guardian carried reports of American plans to release several high-ranking Taliban leaders from Guantánamo Bay. They include Mullah Khair Khowa, a former interior minister, Noorullah Noori, a former [...]

Read the full article →

The NDAA’s historic assault on American liberty

by News Sources 01.02.2012

Jonathan Turley writes: President Barack Obama rang in the New Year by signing the NDAA law with its provision allowing him to indefinitely detain citizens. It was a symbolic moment, to say the least. With Americans distracted with drinking and celebrating, Obama signed one of the greatest rollbacks of civil liberties in the history of [...]

Read the full article →

With reservations, Obama signs act to allow indefinite detention of U.S. citizens

by News Sources 12.31.2011

ABC News reports: In his last official act of business in 2011, President Barack Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act from his vacation rental in Kailua, Hawaii. In a statement, the president said he did so with reservations about key provisions in the law — including a controversial component that would allow the military [...]

Read the full article →

With indefinite detention bill, has Congress also expanded rendition of U.S. citizens abroad?

by News Sources 12.22.2011
Read the full article →

U.S. Senate passes ‘indefinite detention’ bill

by News Sources 12.17.2011

Glenn Greenwald writes: Condemnation of President Obama is intense, and growing, as a result of his announced intent to sign into law the indefinite detention bill embedded in the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). These denunciations come not only from the nation’s leading civil liberties and human rights groups, but also from the pro-Obama [...]

Read the full article →

Inside Romania’s secret CIA prison

by News Sources 12.08.2011

The Associated Press reports: In northern Bucharest, in a busy residential neighborhood minutes from the center of Romania’s capital city, is a secret that the Romanian government has tried for years to protect. For years, the CIA used a government building — codenamed Bright Light — as a makeshift prison for its most valuable detainees. [...]

Read the full article →

Senate bill grants power to imprison Americans indefinitely without trial

by News Sources 11.30.2011

The New York Times reports: Defying the Obama administration’s threat of a veto, the Senate on Tuesday voted to increase the role of the military in imprisoning suspected members of Al Qaeda and its allies — including people arrested inside the United States. By a vote of 61 to 37, the Senate turned back an [...]

Read the full article →

US detention post-9/11: Birth of a debacle

by News Sources 09.08.2011

Lisa Hajjar writes: Days after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration started making decisions that led to the official authorisation of torture tactics, indefinite incommunicado detention and the denial of habeas corpus for people who would be detained at Guantánamo, Bagram, or “black sites” (secret prisons) run by the CIA; kidnappings, [...]

Read the full article →

In records of court case lie details of secret airlifts of terror suspects to CIA-run prisons

by News Sources 09.03.2011

The Associated Press reports: The secret airlift of terrorism suspects and American intelligence officials to CIA-operated overseas prisons via luxury jets was mounted by a hidden network of U.S. companies and coordinated by a prominent defense contractor, newly disclosed documents show. More than 1,700 pages of court files in a business dispute between two aviation [...]

Read the full article →

Obama under fire over detention of terror suspect on US navy ship

by News Sources 07.07.2011

The Guardian reports: The Obama administration approved the secret detention of a Somali terror suspect on board a US navy ship, where for two months he was subjected to military interrogation in the absence of a lawyer and without charge. The capture and treatment of Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame has rekindled the debate within the US [...]

Read the full article →

CIA prisons in Poland ‘illegal’

by News Sources 05.31.2011

SAPA reports: Secret prisons operated by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) on Polish territory violated international law and the Polish constitution according to legal experts, reported the daily Gazeta Wyborcza on Monday, citing sources close to an investigation. The CIA held terror suspects inside a military intelligence training base in Stare Kiejkuty, north-eastern Poland [...]

Read the full article →

Israel, extraordinary rendition and the strange case of Dirar Abu Sisi

by News Sources 04.22.2011

Richard Silverstein reports: On a cold Ukrainian winter night in mid-February 2011, a Gaza civil engineer named Dirar Abu Sisi was lying in bed in a railroad sleeper car traveling to Kiev to visit his brother, Yousef, whom he hadn’t seen in 15 years. Abu Sisi had come to Ukraine as a refugee applying for [...]

Read the full article →

Obama’s secret prison network

by News Sources 04.08.2011

The Associated Press reports: “Black sites,” the secret network of jails that grew up after the Sept. 11 attacks, are gone. But suspected terrorists are still being held under hazy circumstances with uncertain rights in secret, military-run jails across Afghanistan, where they can be interrogated for weeks without charge, according to U.S. officials who revealed [...]

Read the full article →

The “Bush-tortured” excuse for indefinite detention

by News Sources 03.11.2011

Glenn Greenwald writes: Yesterday, I wrote about the fictitious excuse being offered to justify why Obama is continuing the indefinite detentions and military commissions which defined the Bush/Cheney Guantanamo detention scheme:  it’s Congress’ fault.  Today we have a new excuse:  it’s Bush’s fault.  Because Bush tortured some of the detainees, this reasoning goes, Obama is incapable of prosecuting [...]

Read the full article →

Obama is the change Bush could believe in

by News Sources 03.07.2011

Thanks to Antony Loewenstein for the headline. Politico reports: The Obama administration, which famously pledged to be the most transparent in American history, is pursuing an unexpectedly aggressive legal offensive against federal workers who leak secret information to expose wrongdoing, highlight national security threats or pursue a personal agenda. In just over two years since [...]

Read the full article →

Don’t deny detainees their day in court

by News Sources 01.05.2011

Amos N. Guiora and Laurie R. Blank write: The idea that every person deserves his or her “day in court” is a fundamental principle in the United States and many countries worldwide. Yet more than nine years after 9/11, the United States remains paralyzed not just about how to give the thousands of detainees in [...]

Read the full article →

‘Disappeared’ Pakistanis — innocent and guilty alike — have fallen into a legal black hole

by Paul Woodward 12.31.2010

Without a single reference to President Obama’s drone war in Pakistan, extrajudicial detention of prisoners at Guantanamo, the torture of suspected terrorists, CIA-run secret prisons, rendition, presidential authorization to assassinate US citizens, or the United States’ long history of supporting governments that use their power to suppress political dissent by making their opponents “disappear,” the [...]

Read the full article →

Iranian general murdered in Israel’s Ayalon prison?

by News Sources 12.28.2010

Richard Silverstein writes: New and astonishing developments in the case of Prisoner X, known to a source within Ehud Barak’s inner circle as Ali Reza Asgari, retired Iran Revolutionary Guard general and former deputy defense minister. I exposed the name of Prisoner X here a few weeks ago. Today, brings news from Israel that Asgari [...]

Read the full article →

Will not one but two Guantanamos define the American future?

by Paul Woodward 04.20.2010

At TomDispatch, Karen J. Greenberg writes: On his first day in office, President Barack Obama promised that he would close the Bush-era prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, “as soon as practicable” and “no later than one year from the date of this order.” The announcement was met with relief, even joy, by those, like me, [...]

Read the full article →

Obama’s secret prisons in Afghanistan endanger us all

by Paul Woodward 02.12.2010

Johann Hari writes: Osama Bin Laden’s favourite son, Omar, recently abandoned his father’s cave in favor of spending his time dancing and drooling in the nightclubs of Damascus. The tang of freedom almost always trumps Islamist fanaticism in the end: three million people abandoned the Puritan hell of Taliban Afghanistan for freer countries, while only [...]

Read the full article →

Obama’s secret prisons

by Paul Woodward 01.29.2010

Obama’s secret prisons By Anand Gopal, TomDispatch, January 28, 2010 One quiet, wintry night last year in the eastern Afghan town of Khost, a young government employee named Ismatullah simply vanished. He had last been seen in the town’s bazaar with a group of friends. Family members scoured Khost’s dust-doused streets for days. Village elders [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries