Guantanamo

Reuters reports: It’s been dubbed the most expensive prison on Earth and President Barack Obama cited the cost this week as one of many reasons to shut down the detention centre at Guantanamo Bay, which burns through some $900,000 (£577,886) per prisoner annually. The Pentagon estimates it spends about $150 million each year to operate [...]

Laura Pitter writes: President Barack Obama finally broke his long silence on Tuesday on the need to close Guantanamo. Echoing comments he made four years ago — when, on his second day in office he promised to close the facility within a year — he said “Guantanamo is not necessary to keep America safe. It [...]

The Guardian reports: The lawyer who first drew up White House policy on lethal drone strikes has accused the Obama administration of overusing them because of its reluctance to capture prisoners that would otherwise have to be sent to Guantánamo Bay. John Bellinger, who was responsible for drafting the legal framework for targeted drone killings [...]

The presidential commentator-in-chief says that Guantánamo is not sustainable — and 100 prisoners on hunger strike seems to reinforce that observation. But Obama used to like to talk about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and say “the status quo is not sustainable”. Both of these sound like the observations of a powerless bystander — someone who can [...]

Jason Leopold reports: Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once declared that individuals captured by the US military in the aftermath of 9/11 and shipped off to the Guantanamo Bay prison facility represented the “worst of the worst.” During a radio interview in June 2005, Rumsfeld said the detainees at Guantanamo, “all of whom were [...]

The Observer reports: The last British resident being held in Guantánamo Bay may never be allowed to return to his family in London because of an alleged “secret deal” between US authorities, Saudi Arabia and the British security services. Shaker Aamer, 46, has been in the Cuban detention centre for more than 11 years without [...]

The Miami Herald reports: Confronted with claims that a portion of the Pentagon computer system used by defense lawyers is not secure, the chief Guantánamo judge Thursday postponed until June next week’s hearings in an ongoing death penalty trial at the war court in Cuba. Army Col. James L. Pohl, the judge, agreed to delay [...]

RT.com interviewed federal public defender Carlos Warner who read a statement from one of the prisoners, Faiz al-Kandari. CW: He said: “I scare myself when I look in the mirror. Let them kill us as we have nothing to lose. We died when Obama indefinitely detained us. Respect us or kill us. It is your [...]

McClatchy reports: It’s lunchtime on the communal cellblocks for cooperative captives, and detainees dressed in tan and white camp uniforms are steadfastly refusing the guards’ offer to wheel in food carts. Only if a prisoner pulls shut a gate to a chute called a sally port can a soldier lock it remotely and send in [...]

Amy Goodman writes: Reports are emerging from the US military prison at Guantánamo Bay that a majority of the prisoners are on a hunger strike. Of the detainees, 166 remain locked up, although more than half have been cleared by the Obama administration for release. Yet, there they languish – in some cases, now in [...]

Laura Poitras writes: When President Obama pledged to close the Guantánamo Bay prison on his first day in office as president in 2009, I believed the country had shifted direction. I was wrong. Four years later, President Obama has not only institutionalized Guantánamo and all the horrors it symbolizes, but he has initiated new extrajudicial [...]