Word: hamdan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...previous weeks, the government had carted away over half a ton of similar materials from the cells of other prisoners - much of which, like Hamdan's notes, are protected by attorney-client privilege. "In these notes the government knows all of my future legal strategy," Hamdan writes in his affidavit. The government has said it seized the material as part of its investigation into the suicides of detainees at Guantanamo...
...midnight they took from me my notes that dealt with our future legal strategy and my questions," writes Hamdan, who was allegedly Osama bin Laden's driver. "I got mad and I called the guard in a raised voice because he was getting far away from me. At that moment the guard returned and took out a pepper spray can and put it in my face and demanded I be quiet and told me the discussion is over. I sat down complying with the guard's orders...
...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...
...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...