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U.S. peace activist Cindy Sheehan (L) hugs Zohra Zewahi, mother of the Guantanamo detainee Omar Deghayes, during a news conference in Havana January 9, 2007. Sheehan and other activists are in Cuba and plan to march to the gates of the U.S. Navy base in Guantanamo, Cuba on January 11, to demand the closure of the base. Read the details about Omar Deghayes and his family at Sweetness & Light...

Berkeley, Calif., home to the hippie movement of the 1960s, is considering rolling out the welcome mat to freed Guantanamo Bay detainees. The City Council is poised to vote Tuesday night on a resolution that would invite "one or two" detainees to live in Berkeley once they are cleared of wrongdoing and released from the U.S. detention facility in Cuba. It would also ask Congress to allow cleared Guantanamo detainees to resettle in the U.S. The city reportedly has its sights set on a Russian ballet dancer and an Algerian who was a top-rated Italian chef in Austria. They would...

The ongoing incarceration of the last British resident held at Guantanamo Bay is making a "mockery of justice", according to human rights campaigners. Shaker Aamer, 43, will have been held without charge for exactly nine years tomorrow. Amnesty denounced the "cruel limbo" he has been left in as the campaign group renewed calls for him to be tried or released back to his wife and children in the UK. Aamer is originally from Saudi Arabia but is married to a British citizen and has four British children. Aamer was captured in December 2001 by the US, which has claimed he...

Guantanamo Bay detainees might have a new home in the United States: Berkeley. The City Council is to vote Feb. 15 on a resolution to invite detainees who have been cleared of wrongdoing to resettle within Berkeley's sunny confines. Of the 38 detainees who have been cleared, Berkeley would invite two: a Russian ballet dancer and an Algerian who was a top-rated Italian chef in Austria. "Our hearts are with all those people who were never tried, held for years and in some cases tortured," said Wendy Kenin, chairwoman of the city's Peace and Justice Commission, which crafted the resolution....

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) -- Hundreds of mourners, some chanting anti-American slogans, turned out Monday for the funeral of an Afghan prisoner at Guantanamo Bay who collapsed and died while exercising at the U.S. detention center last week. The mourners ran alongside a vehicle carrying the body of 48-year-old Awal Gul - the seventh detainee to die at the detention center in Cuba since it was opened in January 2002.

As the cliche goes, there are no coincidences in politics. Obama fundraiser group Code Pink just happened to have arrived in Cairo last week for the group’s ninth visit there in two years as part of its campaign to undermine the Mubarak government and help Hamas, the terrorist group that controls Gaza. Code Pink and the media are trying to portray the leftist group's 'sudden' appearance in Cairo Wednesday as an act of courageous support for a democratic revolution. Nothing could be further from the truth.Code Pink protests the Mubarak government in Tahrir Square, Cairo, Egypt. February 2, 2011. Code...

The extradition hearing for WikiLeak's founder Julian Assange is set to begin Monday in London, with his lawyers prepared to make arguments he could eventually end up in Guantanamo Bay if first extradited to Sweden. Assange, of Australia, is wanted for questioning by Swedish prosecutors for incidents with two women in August and faces possible charges of rape, unlawful coercion and sexual molestation. He maintains the encounters were consensual. After Swedish authorities requested that a European Arrest Warrant be issued, Assange turned himself in to U.K. police on Dec. 7. After a week in custody, he was granted bail on...

MIAMI -- Joint Task Force-Guantanamo announced today that a detainee died of apparent natural causes late Tuesday evening. The detainee is identified as Awal Gul, a 48-year-old Afghan. He arrived at Guantanamo in October 2002. Gul was housed in Camp 6, which provides communal living areas for up to 20 detainees. He collapsed in the shower after exercising on an elliptical machine. Other detainees in his cell block then assisted Gul to the guard station for medical attention. The guards immediately alerted medical personnel, who upon arriving at the cell block found him unresponsive. He was immediately transported to the...

NEW YORK – A judge sentenced the first Guantanamo detainee to have a U.S. civilian trial to life in prison Tuesday, saying anything he suffered at the hands of the CIA and others "pales in comparison to the suffering and the horror" caused by the bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998. U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan sentenced Ahmed Ghailani to life, calling the attacks "horrific" and saying the deaths and damage they caused far outweighs "any and all considerations that have been advanced on behalf of the defedndant." He also ordered Ghailani to pay a $33...

The Washington Timeswww.washingtontimes.com Pentagon lets terrorism suspect see lawyerPublished December 3, 2003     ASSOCIATED PRESS     Reversing course, Pentagon officials have decided to allow a U.S.-born terrorism suspect access to a lawyer, the Defense Department announced yesterday.     The Defense Department will make arrangements over the next few days for a lawyer to visit Yaser Esam Hamdi "subject to appropriate security restrictions," a Pentagon statement said.     Mr. Hamdi is being held as an "enemy combatant," a designation the Bush administration says denies him rights to a lawyer or a trial.     The Supreme Court is considering whether to hear an appeal from a public...

VIDEO HERE.

President Obama said he'll seek the repeal of provisions in the new defense authorization bill barring the transfer of terrorist suspects to the U.S. for civilian trials. Obama said he had signed the defense authorization bill despite its inclusion of a measure barring the use of funds to transfer prisoners away from the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for trials in the U.S. But the president said he believed those provisions unconstitutionally interfered with his powers and that he would seek their repeal — leaving alive his stated goal of closing the U.S. military base in Cuba.

President Obama’s legal advisers, confronting the prospect of new restrictions on the transfer of Guantánamo detainees, are debating whether to recommend that he issue a signing statement asserting that his executive powers would allow him to bypass the restrictions, according to several officials. If Mr. Obama were to issue such a statement, it could represent a more aggressive use of unilateral executive powers than what he exerted in his first two years in office. The issue has arisen as the Republican Party takes control of the House.

WASHINGTON - A military investigation into FBI reports of prisoner abuse at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, recommended that the base's former commander be reprimanded, but a top general rejected the recommendation, according to a congressional aide familiar with the inquiry's findings. In the latest examination of a facility that has become a battleground over the U.S. treatment of detainees from the war against terrorism, the aide said investigators recommended that Army Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller be reprimanded for failing to oversee the interrogation of a high-value detainee, which was found to have been abusive. But Gen....

More Afghan captives head for Cuba Security at the base has been massively beefed up Another 30 Taleban and al-Qaeda prisoners have left Afghanistan by plane for Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, it is reported. The prisoners, who were shackled and had white caps covering their faces, boarded a C-17 transport plane at trhe US base in Kandahar, the Associated Press reports. Each prisoner was flanked by two US soldiers as they walked across the tarmac to the aircraft. Most lights at the US base were switched off and security was tight. The first group of 20 detainees arrived in Guantanamo ...

  www.thejakartapost.com Print January 23, 2002   Taliban's detention The premature and hypocritical concern voiced by otherwise reputable international organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International over detention conditions of Taliban and al-Qaeda prisoners at the U.S. Guantanamo Bay Naval Station in Cuba is not just utterly misplaced, but outright ridiculous. If given the choice, millions of destitute, hungry and freezing Afghan refugees would gladly change places with Taliban prisoners in their roofed, albeit open-air, wire cage accommodations with three square meals a day, medical attention, sanitary facilities, not to ...

<p>February 4, 2002 -- Some of the terror thugs being held at Camp X-Ray are having regrets about their actions, a Muslim Navy cleric said yesterday.</p> <p>Lt. Abuhena Saiful-Islam, who meets daily with the 158 detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, said that while many continue to maintain their innocence, others are having second thoughts.</p>

Detainees or POWs? Ancient distinctions. By Mackubin Thomas Owens is professor of strategy and force planning at the Naval War College in Newport. His views do no necessarily reflect those of any agency of the U.S. government. January 24, 2002 8:55 a.m. as President Bush's decision launch a "war against terrorism" in response to September 11 now hoisted the United States on its own petard? That would seem to be the case as international organizations and even officials of allied countries such as Great Britain have intensified criticism of the United States concerning its treatment of captured al Qaeda and ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- Since the United States leased land in Guantanamo Bay from Cuba in 1903, the government has used this site for incarcerating prisoners of war. Guantanamo Bay, officially still Cuban, is not subject to U.S. law, rendering activities there largely free from public scrutiny. Today it is the temporary home of 140 imprisoned Taliban and al-Qaeda combatants captured in Afghanistan. Despite the crimes of which these prisoners are accused, the United States has a responsibility under international law to respect certain standards of imprisonment. The International Committee of the Red Cross and other human rights organizations currently ...

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba -- Some of the detainees at this American base are not Muslim but Christian, U.S. military officials say, describing inmates as members of a "global community" who in some cases may be sympathetic to groups other than the Taliban or al-Qaida. "I personally did not expect . . . some of the nations that are represented in Camp X-Ray," Lt. Col. Bill Costello, a spokesman for the joint task force in charge of the detention camp, said Tuesday. Since the first prisoners arrived from Afghanistan just over a month ago, the number of nationalities represented ...