Free Republic

Former detainee at Guantánamo Bay has taken a leading role in the military opposition to Col Muammar Gaddafi, it has emerged, alongside at least one other former Afghan Mujahideen fighter. Rebel recruits in the eastern port city of Derna are being trained by Sufyan Bin Qumu, a Libyan who was arrested following the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, and held at Guantánamo for six years. Port city of Derna, Libya Abdel Hakim al-Hasidi, a senior Libyan rebel commander in Derna, was also held following the invasion of Afghanistan and handed over to Libyan custody two months later. Both men...

DARNA, Libya—Two former Afghan Mujahedeen and a six-year detainee at Guantanamo Bay have stepped to the fore of this city's military campaign, training new recruits for the front and to protect the city from infiltrators loyal to Col. Moammar Gadhafi... Abdel Hakim al-Hasady, an influential Islamic preacher and high-school teacher who spent five years at a training camp in eastern Afghanistan, oversees the recruitment, training and deployment of about 300 rebel fighters from Darna... Sufyan Ben Qumu, a Libyan army veteran who worked for Osama bin Laden's holding company in Sudan and later for an al Qaeda-linked charity in Afghanistan,...

Obama promises to close gitmo.

Earlier this month, President Obama issued an executive order establishing a process for reviewing whether prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay continue to pose a threat. Under this order, those who have not been charged with a crime may continue to be detained indefinitely, and may come before a review board every three years, which will evaluate whether continued incarceration is necessary for public safety. The order is a striking development because, not only has President Obama effectively adopted yet another cornerstone of President Bush’s terrorism policy, but he did so unilaterally by executive order, providing detainees solely an executive branch...

A foreign policy adviser to President Obama said this evening that the Administration has "rehabilitated" the concept of human rights, tarnished by the Iraq war, in a way that laid the groundwork for international collaboration. Samantha Power, a senior director on the National Security Council best known for her human rights advocacy before she entered the White House, spoke at Columbia University in New York City two hours before the president's planned speech in Libya tonight. Obama "has used his pulpit and a number of speeches ... to kind of clear the brush that had gathered around the norms in...

Navy lawyers on Fox. They say Obama is blocking military prosecution of terrorists held at Gitmo by blocking any money needed to proceed and by throwing up roadblocks. Obama has no intention of allowing these murderers to be tried by military commissions. Apparently, he plans to quietly release them at some time. Surprising that military people are saying so in public. Suggests a growing divide between Obama and the military. (As an aside, military is against our actions in Libya but is following orders).

U.S. lawmakers keep quiet about Guantanamo tourBy Lesley Clark | The Miami Herald Posted on Wednesday, March 9, 2011 Rep. Allen West toured the secretive Camp 7 at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — where the alleged Sept. 11 plotters are held — but wouldn’t say Tuesday what he saw. “There’s nothing more I can say other than the fact I saw Camp 7,” the Broward Republican told reporters on a conference call, hours after he and a bipartisan delegation of House Armed Services Committee members returned from a daylong tour of the offshore detention camp. “It looks like a Camp 7.”...

President Obama quietly signed an executive order on Monday instituting a system for indefinitely holding terrorist detainees at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay (Gitmo), Cuba. The administration also announced that terrorist trials by military commission would recommence. This is a win for U.S. security, but the country has paid a heavy price for Mr. Obama’s on-the-job training in counterterrorism. The low-key announcements stand in marked contrast with the bombast with which Mr. Obama approached this issue just a few years ago. During the 2008 presidential campaign, then-Sen. Barack Obama harshly criticized President George W. Bush’s detainee policies. When...

President Obama quietly signed an executive order on Monday instituting a system for indefinitely holding terrorist detainees at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay (Gitmo), Cuba. The administration also announced that terrorist trials by military commission would recommence. This is a win for U.S. security, but the country has paid a heavy price for Mr. Obama’s on-the-job training in counterterrorism. The low-key announcements stand in marked contrast with the bombast with which Mr. Obama approached this issue just a few years ago. During the 2008 presidential campaign, then-Sen. Barack Obama harshly criticized President George W. Bush’s detainee policies. When...

President Obama yesterday formalized indefinite detention for dozens of men held at Guantanamo Bay and announced that the Pentagon would move ahead with military trials for a handful of other detainees. In an executive order, which we first reported on in June 2009, the White House created a board to periodically review the dangerousness of prisoners being held without charge or trial. The order says the new process will allow detainees -- some in custody for nearly a decade -- to challenge the government's determination that they pose a threat if released. While the order is new, most of the...

“Hope” and “change” may have been the twin messages of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, but the pledge that best embodied the central theme was his promise to shutter the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba within one year of taking office. For the American and international left, Gitmo was the most powerful symbol of everything that was wrong with the Bush presidency and the U.S. war on terrorism. They maintained it was an evil place, where innocent bystanders who had been caught up in America’s imperialist aggression in the Middle East could be held indefinitely, incarcerated without cause...

Omar Khadr is getting a formal education in prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to help allay fears he will return to Canada an angry and perhaps dangerous young man with a grudge against society, says his Canadian lawyer. Khadr's defence team enlisted a Canadian university professor to design a home schooling program to prepare the 24-year-old, who was born in Toronto, for his return to Canada, says Dennis Edney. Pentagon lawyers travel to the U.S. naval prison every other week to do the teaching. “We provide them with the material, and then they go to Guantanamo and sit with Omar...

Leahy fears Gitmo will stay open By MATT NEGRIN | 03/07/11 6:18 PM Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy warned late Monday that the White House’s order on renewing Guantanamo Bay military commissions will jeopardize the closing of the prison that President Obama has promised to shutter. In a statement released in the evening, Leahy, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said Obama’s executive order “has done little to change” the damage that the Guantanamo prison has had on the American judicial system. “The process outlined in the Executive Order falls far short of core constitutional values by failing to provide judicial...

President Obama announced Monday that military trials will resume for detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, saying the tribunals are an "important tool in combating international terrorists."

Complete title: Judicial Watch Obtains Bush Defense Department Documents Detailing Terrorist Threat Posed by Guantanamo Detainees “There is substantial risk that detainees at Guantanamo, upon release, would set out to kill Americans or other innocent civilians around the world.” White House Spokesman Jay Carney on February 17, 2011: “The president remains committed to closing Guantanamo.” Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, announced today that it received documents from the Department of Defense (DOD) detailing the policies of the Bush administration related to the detention of “enemy combatants” at Guantanamo Bay, as well as the...

Code Pink coordinator offers Gitmo terrorists her house’s spare bedroom. In light of the vote late last night by the Berkeley City Council to consider taking in freed Gitmo terrorists, a Code Pink coordinator went on national television to demonstrate how radical and un-American she was by offering room and board to Islamic terrorists who didn’t have any place to go. Code Pink’s coordinator for the Golden State’s chapter of Code Pink, those militant women who are anti-war to the max, Holly Harwood, said that freed Gitmo terrorists were welcome in her home and that she already had a spare...

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....