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A 21-year-old citizen of Chad who has been held for seven years at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba must be released, a federal judge ruled on Wednesday. U.S. District Judge Richard Leon said the government had not proven that Mohammed el Gharani was an enemy combatant and the detainee must be freed and sent home soon either to Saudi Arabia, where he was raised and his family lives, or Chad. Leon's ruling comes just before President-elect Barack Obama, who has vowed to close the prison camp, takes office on Tuesday. Since Obama's election in November, federal...

Just a month after President-elect Barack Obama takes office, he must tell the Supreme Court where he stands on one of the most aggressive legal claims made by the Bush administration — that the president may order the military to seize legal residents of the United States and hold them indefinitely without charging them with a crime. The new administration’s brief, which is due Feb. 20, has the potential to hearten or infuriate Mr. Obama’s supporters, many of whom are looking to him for stark disavowals of the Bush administration’s legal positions on the detention and interrogation of so-called enemy...

Guantánamo detainees would be entitled to £42 a week and NHS treatment Richard Ford, Home Correspondent It is little wonder that the prospect of Britain taking even a handful of the terror suspects being held in Guantánamo Bay is being described in Whitehall as a hot potato. Several departments must address issues ranging from any potential security risk the detainees pose to the immigration status under which they enter Britain, the housing and other benefits they can receive, and the inevitable public backlash. How people react to foreign terror suspects being given sanctuary in Britain with accommodation, weekly cash benefits...

Deal will help Obama to close down terror jail Britain is preparing to receive foreign terror suspects from Guantánamo Bay so that Barack Obama can shut it down, The Times has learnt. Government sources say that Britain now supports moves to rehouse the detainees, despite previous refusals to help President Bush. A Downing Street official said that a process to deal with the detainees was being put in place and that decisions “would be for the Home Secretary to decide on a case-by-case basis”. The issue is the subject of intense negotiations within Whitehall. The Foreign Office appears much keener...

American Civil Rights Union TheACRU.org As usual, the ACLU misreads the Constitution, and sides with those who would attack America and murder Americans, instead of following the Constitution and protecting Americans and America. The latest example is the ACLU promotion of the interests of an Al Qaeda representative in the US. The facts for this article, but not all of the legal conclusions, come from an article in the Los Angeles Times on 5 December, 2008. It concerns an apparent representative of Al Qaeda in the US, who is also a legal resident in the US. On 5 December, the...

In case anyone missed it, confessed 9/11 conspirator Ramzi bin al Shibh reminded those watching Monday's hearing that it fell on a major Muslim holy day. And he did it with a grisly salute to his spiritual leader -- al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden, still at-large. Bin al Shibh, a Yemeni, blurted out his well wishes ''to the entire Muslim world,'' in honor of Eid al Adha, the Feast of the Sacrifice -- and especially to ``Osama bin Laden, may God protect him.'' ''I hope the jihad continues and strikes the heart of America with all kinds of weapons...

The human rights crowd is right: Life is hard for a Guantanamo Bay detainee. The deprivation is unspeakable. According to the facility's "cultural adviser," their brains have not been "stimulated" enough. So this Thanksgiving, America has drawn up plans to provide the 250 or so suspected jihadists at the "notoriously Spartan" detention camp with basic sustenance including, as reported by the Miami Herald, movie nights, art classes, English language lessons and "Game Boy-like" electronic devices. Next up: Wii Fit, Guitar Hero, Sudoku, People magazine and macrame. Anything less would be uncivilized. On a deadly serious note, the detainees aren't the...

A jury of six U.S. military officers sentenced Hamdan at Guantanamo's first war-crimes trial earlier this year, and at the time he had already served five years and a month at the Cuba facility. Pentagon officials had suggested all along that they could hold the 40-year-old Guantanamo prisoner indefinitely regardless of the sentence. The Pentagon reserves the right to hold him and other "enemy combatants" who are considered dangerous to the United States, even those who are acquitted or complete sentences in the tribunal system.

Detention camp staff at the US Navy base in Cuba are already teaching English to the 255 inmates despite fears that it might allow them to eavesdrop on their guards. Barack Obama, the US president-elect, has promised to close the camp, which was set up to hold foreign terrorism suspects captured after the American-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. However, convinced that such a decision is a long way from being carried out, camp staff are attempting to soften the notoriously Spartan existence of Guantanamo inmates. "We want to keep their brains stimulated. We're not here to give degrees," Zak,...

OSAMA bin Laden's former driver Salim Hamdan will be transferred out of Guantanamo Bay to Yemen, CNN has reported citing unnamed US sources. A jury of six US military officers at a Guantanamo terrorism trial in August sentenced Hamdan to five years and six months in prison for supporting terrorism - which taking into account time served, amounted to only an additional five months. The Pentagon refused to confirm the report. "In general we don't talk about transfers until they are completed," Pentagon spokesman Mark Ballesteros said. Hamdan, a native of Yemen and about 40 years old, was picked up...

WASHINGTON, (AP) -- A federal judge on Monday refused to block the military trial of a Canadian held at Guantanamo Bay and charged with killing a U.S. soldier while still a juvenile. Omar Khadr, of Toronto, was 15 when he allegedly killed Delta Force soldier Chris Speer of Albuquerque, New Mexico, with a grenade during a firefight in Afghanistan in 2002. The son of an al-Qaida figure, Khadr was seriously wounded in the battle and has been held with the adult population at Guantanamo Bay since being transferred there in 2002. Khadr argued in pleadings in U.S. District Court that...

That was the view of Eric Holder, Oama's choice for Attorney General, in a CNN interview in 2002 (as recalled by the WSJ today): One of the things we clearly want to do with these prisoners is to have an ability to interrogate them and find out what their future plans might be, where other cells are located; under the Geneva Convention that you are really limited in the amount of information that you can elicit from people. It seems to me that given the way in which they have conducted themselves, however, that they are not, in fact, people...

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) -- A U.S. military judge has blocked Pentagon prosecutors from using a Guantanamo prisoner's statements to U.S. authorities as trial evidence, saying they were tainted by an earlier confession tortured out of the suspect by Afghan officials. Mohammed Jawad's confession to U.S. authorities in Afghanistan following his capture in 2002 was the last incriminating statement available to prosecutors for the Afghan's war-crimes trial at Guantanamo Bay, his military defense attorney, Air Force Maj. David Frakt, said Thursday. Wednesday's dismissal of Jawad's confession in U.S. custody decimates the government's case against the Afghan prisoner at Guantanamo...

WASHINGTON — DEVELOPING STORY: A federal judge ordered the release of five terror suspects held at Guantanamo Bay prison for seven years without charges.

WASHINGTON, (AP) -- A federal judge has ordered the release of five Algerian terror suspects who have been held without charges almost seven years at Guantanamo Bay. In the first civilian court ruling for terror suspects challenging their detention, U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon said Thursday that the five men could not be held indefinitely as enemy combatants.

PHOENIX, Nov. 16 (UPI) -- Muslim leaders in Arizona have drawn increased scrutiny from federal officials in the past year because of a string of suspicious incidents, officials say. Although no one in the state has been accused of supporting terrorists, one Mesa, Ariz., man was charged with lying to the FBI during the terror financing investigation into a Muslim charity accused of funneling money to the Palestinian group Hamas, The Arizona Republic reported Sunday. Also drawing attention to Arizona Muslims was a target-shooting episode in Phoenix that involved a large group of Muslim men and boys firing hundreds of...

A 39-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of arson near Malibu Creek State Park, a sheriff's deputy said Sunday. Suren Sahakyan was booked on suspicion of arson at the sheriff's Lost Hills Station and held in lieu of $75,000 bail, said Deputy Byron Ward of the Sheriff's Headquarters Bureau. An area resident saw the man on shoulder of Stokes Canyon Road near Mulholland Highway, starting a fire using paper and leaves about 5:20 p.m. Saturday, Ward said. The resident stomped out the fire, and Sahakyan fled but was caught by sheriff's deputies a short distance away.

DEVELOPING: A military jury has convicted a man who was accused of being an aide of Usama bin Laden and making propaganda videos for Al Qaeda in the second Guantanamo war crimes trial. A jury of officers announced the verdict Monday at the U.S. base in Cuba.

A federal judge has ordered the Bush administration to release 17 detainees at Guantánamo by the end of the week, the first such ruling in nearly seven years of legal disputes over the administration's detention policies. The judge, Ricardo Urbina of U.S. District Court, ordered Tuesday that the 17 men be brought to his courtroom Friday from Guantánamo, where they have been held since 2002. He indicated that he would release the men, members of the restive Uighur Muslim minority of western China, into the care of supporters in the United States, initially in the Washington area. "I think the...

Federal Judge Release Gitmo Detainees into U.S.by Kenneth Hanner (more by this author) Posted 10/07/2008 ET Updated 10/07/2008 ET A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the release of several Chinese Muslim detainees from Guantanamo Bay into the United States. The men all are ethnic Uighurs and come from a region of China that borders Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Chinese government considers them terrorists and the U.S. has refused to return them to their home country due to fears they will be persecuted. The men were detained by the U.S. since their capture in 2001. In 2004, their status as enemy...