Word: hamdan
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Thursday July 6, eight days after winning an important victory in the Supreme Court, Salim Hamdan met with his lawyers in Guantanamo to discuss legal strategy. After polishing off his favorite meal of Jamaican jerk chicken, Hamdan took hand-written, Arabic notes on a page of yellow legal paper, as his lawyers outlined a series of strategic questions. After the meeting, Hamdan's notes were confiscated, according to a sworn affidavit given by Hamdan and obtained by TIME...
...whole has been overtaken by events. While negotiations were under way, other members of Congress got the White House to agree to brief intelligence committee members on the eavesdropping as well as other anti-terror programs. More importantly, the Supreme Court has weighed in; in the case of Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld, it severely limited the White House's claims of unchecked wartime powers by ruling that the special military tribunals set up for detainees at Guantanamo were unconstitutional...
...Gitmo. But a Seton Hall University study culled from the government's own data found that only 8% of the camp's prisoners were actually fighters for al-Qaeda. More than half were not determined to have committed any hostile act against Americans or their allies. Even Salim Ahmed Hamdan, the detainee at the center of the Supreme Court case, was Osama bin Laden's chauffeur and bodyguard--hardly the criminal mastermind that requires a country to create a maximum security prison. To its credit, the government has been trying to repatriate the less dangerous detainees as well as those...
...covered by Geneva, which prohibits "humiliating and degrading treatment." Some techniques, like shackling prisoners for 24 hours and leaving them in their own excrement, are known to have been used at Gitmo and would certainly fall under that definition. Regardless of what the prevailing interpretations of the Hamdan decision are, the government would do well to read the tea leaves and begin envisioning a world in which officials will be forced by a future ruling similar to Hamdan to gather crucial intelligence while conforming to Geneva. Gitmo has always been a laboratory for the Bush Administration's edgiest ideas about...
...Guantánamo as a fount of intelligence may already be ending, however. There is only so much intel you can glean from a man who has been interrogated for four years. The base commander, Navy Rear Admiral Harry Harris Jr., told TIME shortly before the Hamdan decision that 75% of detainees held at Gitmo no longer face regular questioning, and some haven't faced it in six months or longer. So, as with many of the other issues raised by the Hamdan case, perhaps the interrogation debate should move away from Gitmo and focus on other places around the world...