Current Analysis Postcard from Guantánamo On June 14, 123 people -- including a military judge, teams of civilian and military defense lawyers and prosecutors, eight courtroom observers, and 15 journalists -- flew on a C-17 from Andrews Air Force Base to Guantánamo Bay for military commission proceedings. It is my fifth trip to Guantánamo, Lisa Hajjar • 4 min read
Current Analysis State of the Drones During his State of the Union Address last night, President Barack Obama said: We don’t need to send tens of thousands of our sons and daughters abroad, or occupy other nations. Instead, we will need to help countries like Yemen, Libya and Somalia provide for their own security, and help allies who Lisa Hajjar • 6 min read
MER Article Anatomy of the US Targeted Killing Policy As President Barack Obama geared up for the 2012 campaign, he and his administration were eager to capitalize on their most bipartisan “victory” -- the targeted killing of Osama bin Laden on May 2, 2011. With the one-year anniversary of bin Laden’s death approaching, top officials took to podiums to Lisa Hajjar • 25 min read
MER Article Bagram, Obama's Gitmo On President Barack Obama’s second day in office, one of the three executive orders he signed was a commitment to close the detention facility on the naval base at Guantánamo Bay as soon as possible but no later than one year thence. An inter-agency task force headed by White House counsel Greg Crai Lisa Hajjar • 28 min read
Current Analysis Getting It Wrong in Guantánamo I was at Guantánamo Bay prison on Halloween. In a ghoulishly fitting coincidence, that was the same day a former child solider was convicted for war crimes for the first time since the end of World War II. Eight years and one day after Omar Khadr arrived at Guantánamo, his military commission case c Lisa Hajjar • 2 min read
Current Analysis Travesty in Progress At 23, Omar Khadr is the youngest of the 176 people still imprisoned at the US military’s detention facility in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. He has been there for eight years, one third of his life. A Canadian, he is the only citizen of a Western country remaining in detention, Lisa Hajjar • 27 min read
Current Analysis Grave Injustice On June 14, the Supreme Court buried the prospect of justice for Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen of Syrian origin who was “extraordinarily rendered” by the United States (via Jordan) to Syria in 2002. Arar was suing the US officials who authorized his secret transfer, without charge, to a country inf Lisa Hajjar • 20 min read
MER Article American Torture Starting with the publication of the Abu Ghraib photos in April 2004, [1] there has been a steady cascade of revelations about the Bush administration’s brutal and dehumanizing interrogation and detention policies. These days, the last refuge for die-hard deniers is the euphemization that “enhanced interrogation” is not “torture. Lisa Hajjar • 15 min read
Current Analysis Israel's Military Court System Is the Model to Avoid Should the United States, seeking to recalibrate the balance between security and liberty in the “war on terror,” emulate Israel in its treatment of Palestinian detainees? That is the position that Guantanamo detainee lawyers Avi Stadler and John Chandler of Atlanta, and some others, have advocated Lisa Hajjar • 3 min read
Current Analysis The Power of The Guantánamo Bar Association If you doubt that we are still “a nation of laws,” you haven’t visited the American Civil Liberties Union web site to peruse the thousands of pages of government documents concerning the “war on terror” made available through Freedom of Information Act litigation. While Bush administration policy ma Lisa Hajjar • 4 min read
Current Analysis Torture and the Lawless “New Paradigm” The president who campaigned on a pledge to “restore honor and dignity to the White House” has now been compelled to declaim: “We abide by the law of the United States, and we do not torture.” In the closing months of 2005, President George W. Bush has been forced to repeat this undignified denial s Lisa Hajjar • 14 min read
Current Analysis Banning Torture Affirms America's Humanity Torture, as President George W. Bush clearly knows, is against the law. The administration keeps reasserting this point because the US torture saga keeps deepening. Under fire for the “enhanced interrogation techniques” employed in secret CIA jails and at Guantánamo Bay, Bush rejoined that the US f Lisa Hajjar • 2 min read
