Guantanamo

During my recent visit to Gangjeong, on Jeju Island, South Korea, where a protest community has struggled for years to block construction of a U.S. military base, conversations over delicious meals in the community kitchen were a delightful daily event. At lunchtime on my first day there I met Emily and Dongwon, a young and recently married couple, both protesters, who had met each other in Gangjeong. Emily recalled that when her parents finally travelled from Taiwan to meet her partner, they had to visit him in prison.

RT | July 3, 2014 Attorneys for a Canadian man who spent a decade detained by the United States military at Guantanamo Bay say details in the Obama administration’s recently released “drone memo” exonerates their client of war crimes. Omar Khadr was only 15 years old when he was captured by American forces in Afghanistan […]

RT | July 3, 2014 Attorneys for a Canadian man who spent a decade detained by the United States military at Guantanamo Bay say details in the Obama administration’s recently released “drone memo” exonerates their client of war crimes. Omar Khadr was only 15 years old when he was captured by American forces in Afghanistan […]

Peter B. Collins Presents Journalist Anand Gopal

I just started reading Rick Pearlstein's new book, The Invisible Bridge: That Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan.

RT | May 22, 2014

The US House of Representatives approved an annual defense spending bill early Thursday after rejecting a proposed amendment that would have prevented the United States government from indefinitely detaining American citizens.

A year ago, on May 23, 2013, I was in the audience at the National Defense University when President Barack Obama gave his major foreign policy address. Having worked for years trying to close the Guantanamo prison and stop US drone attacks, I was crushed to realize that the president’s speech was ending and he had not announced any significant change of course on either policy.

I knew a torturer. I liked him. The man loved his dog, you have to give him that. A Mongolian shepherd. He’d trained it so that if you pointed a gun or even just made bang-bang fingers, the dog would run and jump and push your arm aside with its paws, so he could take out his own gun and shoot you first. He was heartbroken when that dog died.

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.
— Voltaire, 1694-1778

By Marcellene Hearn | ACLU | April 29, 2014

I spent much of last week at the Post Theater in Fort Meade, watching the closed-circuit feed of the pre-trial military commissions hearings in the case of Abd al-Rahim Hussayn Muhammed al-Nashiri, who faces the death penalty for his alleged role in the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole.