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The Department of Defense is constructing a new courtroom for war crimes trials at Guantánamo Bay which will not allow the public inside the chamber, The New York Times reports. The courtroom, the second at the military base, will also allow two military judges to preside over separate proceedings simultaneously. In larger cases, such as the trials of five men accused of planning the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the hearings would take place in the currently existing chamber that is accessible by the public via a gallery. The new chamber, which costs about $4 million, would be used...

A Navy captain who as head of a jury in a war-crimes court wrote a damning letter calling the C.I.A.’s torture of a terrorist “a stain on the moral fiber of America” said his views are typical of senior members of the U.S. military. Capt. Scott B. Curtis, the jury foreman, said it is just that he had the opportunity to express his thoughts in a letter proposing clemency for the prisoner Majid Khan, a Qaeda recruit who pleaded guilty to terrorism and murder charges for delivering $50,000 from his native Pakistan to finance a deadly bombing in Indonesia. But...

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis on Monday fired the top official overseeing the trials of five men being held at Guantánamo Bay who have been accused of plotting the 9/11 attacks.Harvey Rishikof is an attorney with experience in national security law, but with no military experience. According to the Miami Herald, there is no known reason for Mattis’ decision to fire the man he named convening authority for military commission last April. Two Pentagon lawyers have replaced Rishikof and Gary Brown, a legal adviser for military commissions who was fired by acting general counsel William S. Castle.Tom Crosson, a spokesman for...

The spiritual leader of the Taliban, Mullah Mohammed Omar, rarely makes public statements. Chased from his perch atop the Supreme Council of Afghanistan weeks after 9/11, he has spent the last dozen years in hiding, reportedly in Pakistan. He watched as Operation Enduring Freedom sought to bring democracy to his native land. Since the first step in that exercise was to attack Afghanistan’s terrorist core, he saw his home in Kandahar bombed, killing his stepfather and son. Such were the events back when the United States was serious about winning a war on terror. The remaining years of the...

A senior State Department official conceded that there were some concerns in Europe about accepting Guantánamo detainees. But the official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not designated to speak publicly on the issue, argued: “It is really just a small effort to help us deal with a legacy of the past. This is something we inherited, too.” Among the host of questions, European officials said, was whether the former prisoners would need to be monitored, whether they would have full travel rights in Europe and whether detainees might entangle their countries’ courts in years of legal...

An officer who served on the Guantánamo Bay military jury that convicted Salim Hamdan of providing material support for terrorism and sentenced to five months imprisonment on top of 61 months he has already spent in confinement at the military base awaiting trial tells The Wall Street Journal that the evidence against Osama bin Laden's former driver “simply didn't support prosecutors' depiction of a hard-core al Qaeda terrorist who hates America and its way of life” and that “along the spectrum” of terrorist activity, Hamdan fell on the “less significant end.”According to The Journal, this juror also insisted that the...

GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — A panel of six military officers convicted a former driver for Osama bin Laden of one of two war crimes charges on Wednesday but acquitted him of the other, completing the first military commission trial here and the first conducted by the United States since the aftermath of World War II.

Nathan Whitling and Dennis Edney, who are representing Omar Khadr, a 16-year old Canadian being held at Guantánamo Bay, released 10-minutes of snippets from videotaped interrogations by Canadian Security Intelligence Services agents “with hopes that public reaction to the footage will prompt Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper to lobby for his repatriation” reports The New York Times. “The video was made public under Canadian court orders … after intelligence reports made public last week showed Khadr was abused in detention at the U.S. naval base.” Abused? Puhleeze! The Stiletto has watched more brutal questioning on “Homicide: Life on the Street.”...

BAGHDAD — A former Kuwaiti detainee at the United States prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, was one of the bombers in a string of deadly suicide attacks in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul last month, the American military said Wednesday. Meanwhile, the Iraqi foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, urged American and Iranian officials to return to talks about Iraqi security, but said he understood that it was a difficult moment for reconciliation between the countries. Cmdr. Scott Rye, a spokesman for the American military, identified one of the Mosul bombers as Abdullah Salim Ali al-Ajmi, a Kuwaiti man who...

WITH the recent suicides, reports that detainees have been abused, mounting foreign pressure to close the detention center, and its Gulag-like symbolic resonance, the continued political viability of the Guantánamo Bay camp is increasingly in doubt. President Bush has himself said that he would like to close Guantánamo. But is he putting politics before American security? If Guantánamo is shut down, what will be done with the detainees? Critics argue that if the United States cannot prove before a court of law that detainees at Guantánamo Bay have committed a crime, then they should be released. This argument rests on...

WASHINGTON, May 26 - The American military commander at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, said today that investigators had found "no credible evidence" that a Koran had ever been flushed down a toilet there to unsettle detainees, and no serious incidents of intentional mishandling of the Muslim holy book by Americans. The commander, Brig. Gen. Jay W. Hood of the Army, said 13 possible incidents had been investigated in which the book might have been mishandled: 10 by guards and 3 by interrogators. Of the 13, only 5 embody "what could be broadly defined as mishandling of a Koran," the general said,...

Newsweek apologized yesterday for printing a small item on May 9 about reported desecration of the Koran by American guards at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, an item linked to riots in Pakistan and Afghanistan that led to the deaths of at least 17 people. But the magazine, while acknowledging possible errors in the article, stopped short of retracting it. The report that a Koran had been flushed down a toilet set off the most virulent, widespread anti-American protests in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban government more than three years ago. "We regret that we got any part of our...

The leader of the Miami-Dade-based Southern Command told Congress the Guantánamo detention center has been an intelligence bonanza. WASHINGTON - The Pentagon's chief of Latin American operations cast the Guantánamo Bay prison for terrorism suspects as a success Wednesday, downplaying abuse allegations and emphasizing the gains of intelligence gathering. The 550 or so captives at the Navy base in Cuba include ''highly trained, dangerous members of al Qaeda, its related terrorist networks and the foreign Taliban regime,'' Army Gen. Bantz Craddock said in written testimony for the House Armed Services Committee. About 4,000 reports from Guantánamo detainees have provided an...

FOUR British men who were released from Guantánamo Bay detention centre after three years in captivity have formally sued the US government after alleging they had been subjected to torture and other human rights violations. The groundbreaking legal claim was brought in Washington yesterday by Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal and Rhuhel Ahmed, who during their incarceration became known as the Tipton Three, and Jamal al-Harith, from Manchester, who have each demanded £5.5 million in the lawsuits from the United States. The men, who were captured in Afghanistan during the US "war on terror" in the aftermath of the attacks on...