Keyword: gitmo
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A BRIT who spent two years in Guantanamo Bay as a terror suspect is cashing in with a computer game based on the US detention camp. Moazzam Begg, 41, will appear as himself in the Xbox 360 game, which could rake in £3million. Rendition: Guantanamo, due to go on sale in October, lets players control a detainee trying to shoot his way out. Begg, of Sparkhill, Birmingham, is shown in the game as head of an organisation helping the suspect to escape. Human rights activist Begg was thrown into the camp on Cuba in 2003 after the CIA held him...
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GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba (AP) -- A session of the Guantanamo war crimes court that began Sunday will likely show the difficulties President Barack Obama faces in changing the system and closing the prison by January. The case in question, of a Canadian charged with killing an American soldier, is stalled by infighting among lawyers. Other defendants have even more complex legal issues, and officials say the U.S. may have to choose between delaying Guantanamo's closure or quickly finding somewhere else to hold the trials. "I don't think they'll get a single trial done by January," said Michael Berrigan,...
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A Wild West cattle town is desperate to boost its ailing economy by offering its jail as a new home for the inmates of Guantanamo Bay. Senators and congressman from across America have insisted that their states will not accept terrorist suspects in the homeland, but the folk of Hardin, Montana (population: 3,384) are made of sterner stuff. Greg Smith, Hardin's economic development director, volunteered its state-of-the-art prison to the federal government. "This is a dying town," he said. "Businesses here are struggling like there's no tomorrow. But here is a solution that would help us, help the United States...
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FOX News' Catherine Herridge is the only American network TV correspondent at Guantanamo Bay for the first session of the "Obama Commissions." The closed door session is the case of Omar Khadr, who was picked up on the battlefield in Afghanistan in 2002, at the age of 15. Khadr is accused of killing a U.S. soldier. During Herridge's trip, she will be staying in what's known as "tent city," a cluster of tents where journalists share sleeping accommodations. Journalists bunk together away from the military, with separate tents for men and women. All photos Herridge and her photographer Geoff Doyle...
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Katherine Harris just reported on Fox News that they are installing satellite television (5 channels) at GITMO for the prisoners including Al Jazerra(English speaking).
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GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- These captives already get to order fast-food takeout from the base and have access to a phone booth for weekly calls. Now some 17 Uighur Muslims awaiting a nation to grant them asylum are about to go high-tech, with laptops and web training. While awaiting details of President Barack Obama's order to close the prison camps by Jan. 22, commanders here have ordered 20 laptops for the captives of Camp Iguana. ''As you know, detainees are leaving this place,'' said Army Lt. Col. Miguel Mendez, who oversees detainee classes, a multilingual library and now-emerging...
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For the first time in his presidency, Americans are getting a glimpse of Barack Obama on the defensive. Over the past few weeks, Obama has been back on his heels over torture and terror, issues on which he surely thought he had the upper hand. And he spent Thursday battling charges from a man he surely thought he had vanquished in November, former Vice President Dick Cheney. It took some worried calls from Capitol Hill Democrats, congressional aides said, to convince him otherwise – that he needed to give a speech defending his plan for closing the terror prison at...
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Come on, my Republican friends, you can do better than this. From Rush Limbaugh (who doesn't want the job) to Mike Steele (who wanted it until he got it) back to Dick Cheney? Has anyone heard of new faces, new ideas, "change" — all the things Americans voted for overwhelmingly? The fact that the president was rebuked by his own party in both the Senate and the House this week on the closing of Gitmo makes clear that there is a debate to be had in this country about terrorism: about where to keep suspected terrorists, and where and how...
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Let's stipulate that President Obama is a wonderful speaker, vigorous in promoting his policies and even eloquent at times. But there's a problem: He's not persuasive. Obama is effective at marketing himself. His 64 percent job approval (Gallup poll) is a reflection of this. But in building public support for his policies, Obama has been largely unsuccessful. You'd never guess this from the laudatory press coverage of Obama. With every major speech or press conference, the media and a sizable chunk of the political community--including many Republicans--assume Obama has carried the day. Actually, he rarely has. The most striking example...
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A longer-term problem is that once Guantanamo is closed the option of holding captured enemy combatants any place overseas will be undermined. Over time, more and more such individuals, including the ones convicted by military commissions, would have to be brought to the U.S., especially as Europe backs away from taking such individuals. Aggregating the world's worst jihadists on American soil, from which they can never be repatriated, is not a smart way to fight a war. Meanwhile, the legality of incarcerating captured terrorists in U.S. domestic prisons is far from clear. Today the Guantanamo detainees are held under well-established...
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Of course, it's one thing to say that they are not enemy combatants and should therefore be released. It is quite another thing, though, to say that they should be released into the United States (which, because of their terrorist affiliations, would violate federal immigration law). But as Cliff noted earlier today, alluding to the stellar work of Tom Joscelyn at the Standard, federal judge Richard Urbina did try to order their release into the U.S. (Here at NRO, the editors weighed in on Judge Urbina's absurd decision, here.) Fortunately, in a well reasoned decision authored by Judge Raymond Randolph...
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SYDNEY (Reuters) - The United States has made a new request for Australia to accept a group of detainees from Guantanamo Bay for resettlement, a government spokeswoman said on Saturday. The request is the first by President Barack Obama's administration, which plans to close down the detention camp in Cuba within the next year. Media reports have said the request involves a group of Uighurs from China's largely Muslim western province of Xinjiang. Beijing has reportedly been pressing Washington to return them to China, but U.S. officials have expressed concerns about their likely treatment there.
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HARDIN, Mont. (AP) - On Capitol Hill, politicians are dead-set against transferring some of the world's most feared terrorists from Guantanamo to prisons on U.S. soil. But at City Hall in this impoverished town on the Northern Plains, the attitude is: Bring 'em on. Hardin, a dusty town of 3,400 people so desperate that it built a $27 million jail a couple of years ago in the vain hope it would be a moneymaker, is offering to house hundreds of Gitmo detainees at the brand-new, never-used institution. The medium-security jail was conceived as a holding facility for drunks and other...
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Remember him? He was the 43rd president of the United States. Folksy kinda guy. Some people might have forgotten that Bush once ran the White House. Between President Obama's still-sky-high poll numbers, Dick Cheney's inability/refusal to get off the stage -- and the steel-cage death match the two staged last week over Guantanamo Bay and terrorist interrogation -- you'd be forgiven if you started thinking that Obama succeeded Cheney back in January. And so, the man who rather magnanimously said that Obama "deserves my silence," has ended up partly breaking that vow by giving a speech on Thursday. To be...
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President Obama maintains that closing the detainee detention center at Guantanamo Bay and transferring the terrorists to a supermax prison in the U.S. will clean up America's image in the world. Don't bet on it -- just take a look at the way human rights groups are complaining about the Tamms supermax prison in southern Illinois. Conditions at Tamms, says Amnesty International, "appear to be unnecessarily punitive and may breach international standards for humane treatment." Human Rights Watch asserts that Tamms and other supermax centers, including a federal facility in Colorado, likely violate treaties such as the Convention Against Torture...
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Against the backdrop of President Obama's insistence on proceeding with closing the Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility despite rising opposition from American citizens and their elected representatives, the Center for Security Policy (CSP) has announced the release of the latest in its Occasional Paper Series, Keep Gitmo Going: The case for retaining the vital detention and interrogation facility at Guantánamo Bay. The white paper identifies the national security, public safety, and legal and economic challenges associated with closing Guantánamo and transferring detainees to the United States or to foreign custody. Anywhere from 10-20 percent of the nearly 500 detainees released from...
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PRAGUE -- The head of U.S. Central Command, General David Petraeus, has told RFE/RL he thinks that "on balance" the expected closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and abandonment of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques will "help" U.S. efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the struggle against transnational extremist violence.
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Former Cuban president Fidel Castro is criticizing ex-U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney for defending American interrogation methods against terror suspects. Castro says torture should never be used to extract information. Castro says that the U.S. itself engaged in acts of terrorism against Cuba after the 1959 revolution he led.
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"No one can terrorize a whole nation unless we are all his accomplices." — Edward R. Murrow Let's talk about the next terrorist attack. We cannot know what form it will take, where it will occur or what the casualty count will be. But one thing we do know: we know we'll be told it happened because President Obama dismantled the policies of his predecessor. Indeed, former Vice President Dick Cheney has been pre-emptively making that case ever since he was sprung from his undisclosed location. In a spate of television interviews and a high-profile speech last week, he's contended...
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Even as he declared, “There are many things I like and many things I don’t like” about the Obama administration’s first few months in office, the editorial page editor of The New York Times called Barack Obama “the most extraordinary president of my lifetime.” “If nothing else, the Republican Party’s hysterical reaction to everything he does and says is testament to that fact,” said Andrew Rosenthal. Obama was a central topic of Rosenthal’s May 19 talk from the bima of Temple B’nai Abraham in Livingston, where the Montclair resident delivered a broad-ranging address interrupted by frequent laughter. “What is amazing...
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