Charlie Savage, in the NYTimes: The Senate Armed Services Committee has approved a bill that would significantly relax legal restrictions on the transfer of detainees out of the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, giving President Obama much greater flexibility as he attempts to revive his effort to close the facility. Approved late last week …
Torture
Long Reads: President Obama Still Wants to Close Guantanamo
. The President deserves full credit for a succinct explanation of why the situation at Guantanamo is a humanitarian disaster and a foreign policy embarrassment. (I couldn’t find an embed containing just the President’s comments; the official White House channel includes only the full 48-minute press conference — relevant portion starts at 25:20.) If nothing …
Long Reads: President Obama Still Wants to Close GuantanamoPost + Comments (60)
Gitmo: The Forced Feedings Will Continue Until Morale Improves
If the strategy isn’t working, it must be time to double down: (Reuters) – The U.S. military is sending additional medical personnel to the Guantanamo prison camp, where more than half the captives have joined a hunger strike to protest their open-ended detention, a camp spokesman said on Monday… House said the new arrivals would …
Gitmo: The Forced Feedings Will Continue Until Morale ImprovesPost + Comments (26)
Torture revisited
Hardly surprising: A nonpartisan, independent review of interrogation and detention programs in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks concludes that “it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture” and that the nation’s highest officials bore ultimate responsibility for it. The sweeping, 577-page report says that while brutality …
Hunger Strike At Guantanamo Continues
ABC News/AP: Prisoners taking part in an expanding hunger strike at Guantanamo Bay leveled new complaints about their military jailers Wednesday as a team from the International Committee of the Red Cross made a fact-finding trip to the U.S. base in Cuba. In an emergency motion filed with a federal court in Washington, lawyers say …
Hollywood liberals
I didn’t see Zero Dark Thirty. It’s the same reason I didn’t see Quantum of Solace or Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, I just didn’t like the title. That, and I felt that after reading Andrew Sullivan blockquote Eli Lake’s reply to Matt Ygelsias’s argument that Megan McArdle was wrong to criticize Manohla Dargis’s review …
How Do You Say “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” in Arabic
Be nice if we, as a nation, had the moral authority to speak out about this: Former detainees and defectors have identified the locations, agencies responsible, torture methods used, and, in many cases, the commanders in charge of 27 detention facilities run by Syrian intelligence agencies, Human Rights Watch said in a multimedia report released …
How Do You Say “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” in ArabicPost + Comments (65)