Mohamedou’s release comes after long legal battles and an outpouring of support worldwide, and he expressed his gratitude: “I feel grateful and indebted to the people who have stood by me. I have come to learn that goodness is transnational, transcultural, and trans-ethnic. I'm thrilled to reunite with my family.”
The ugly legacy of George W. Bush’s torture program continues to haunt U.S. foreign policy as the “poster child” for waterboarding, Abu Zubaydah, makes an appeal for his release from Guantanamo, writes Marjorie Cohn.
Can you believe it? We’re in the last year of the presidency of the man who, on his first day in the Oval Office, swore that he would close Guantánamo, and yet it and everything it represents remains part of our all-American world.
President Obama’s proposed plan is too little, too late.
Art as politics in the powerful new exhibit at the Whitney Museum in New York by Laura Poitras. Museum director Adam Weinberg sets the show "in the tradition of socially and politically engaged artists - progressive artists such as Ben Shahn and Alice Neal." He said, "The aim of the projections is to provoke moral and ethical responses." Indeed, they do. Or they should.
Gitmo is an offshore penal colony that’s close enough to administer with ease, but far enough away to exist on the margins of legality.
Since Obama took office in 2009, Pentagon officials have been throwing up bureaucratic obstacles to thwart the president's plan to close Guantanamo.
Negotiating prisoner releases with the Pentagon was like "punching a pillow," said James Dobbins, the State Department special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan from 2013 to 2014. Defense Department officials "would come to a meeting, they would not make a counter-argument," he said. "And then nothing would happen.
President Obama has the constitutional power to shut down the prison there and return Guantanamo to Cuba.
The status of the controversial facility, along with its inhabitants, remains mired in delays, appeals and political dramas that make shutting the prison increasingly difficult to imagine.
117 countries criticized, shamed and attacked the U.S. for police violence and racial discrimination at the United Nations Human Rights Council hearing in Geneva. Among the various concerns raised were the failure to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, the continued use of the death penalty, the need for adequate protections for migrant workers and protection of the rights of indigenous peoples.
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