Wrong Claim, Wrong Party, Wrong Court: Assessing the Petition Brought by a Coalition of Clergy, Lawyers, & Professors on Behalf of Detainees Held by the U.S. Military in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba

2002 ◽  
Author(s):  
John C. Eastman
Keyword(s):  
The U.S ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 113 (4) ◽  
pp. 849-855

On June 10, 2019, the Supreme Court denied certiorari in a case in which the D.C. Circuit held that the United States could continue to detain an individual at Guantánamo Bay until the cessation of the hostilities that justified his initial detention, notwithstanding the extraordinary length of the hostilities to date. The case, Al-Alwi v. Trump, arises from petitioner Moath Hamza Ahmed Al-Alwi's petition for a writ of habeas corpus challenging the legality of his continued detention at the United States Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay. The Supreme Court's denial of certiorari was accompanied by a statement by Justice Breyer observing that “it is past time to confront the difficult question” of how long a detention grounded in the U.S. response to the September 11 attacks can be justified.


2006 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 153-155
Author(s):  
Soha Srour

This panel discussion, held on 27 June 2006 and sponsored by the Councilon American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), featured James Yee, a 1990 WestPoint graduate and Muslim chaplain assigned to Camp Delta (Guantanamo Bay) and attorney Gene Fidell of Feldesman, Tucker, Leifer, and Fidell, whohas worked on cases involving Guantanamo Bay inmates. The discussiontook place at the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, DC.After making opening remarks on illegal immigrants and terrorism,Mohammad Nimer (research director, CAIR) introduced Chaplain Yee, whohad served at Camp Delta from November 2002 to September 2003. Whilethere, he experienced the detention center's living conditions and receivedawards and recognition for his service. On 10 September 2003, however, hewas arrested and accused of espionage, aiding the enemy, mutiny, and sedition.Eventually, he was locked up alongside enemy combatants YasserHamdy and Jose Padilla in a naval brig in South Carolina. Later, all chargeswere dropped, including unrelated charges regarding national security.Yee explained his role as advocating for the free exercise of worship. Headvised the camp commander on religious aspects of prison operations andlistened to prisoners’ complaints and concerns, including authorized andunescorted access to the cells. In addition, he observed detainee treatmentand made recommendations. He described two operations: detention operationsrun by military police or guards (e.g., providing them with clothes) andintelligence gathering, which included extracting information. Yee wasassigned to the former group, as the commanding general at the time, MajorGeneral Geoffrey Miller, considered it unethical for the chaplain to be presentduring intelligence gathering operations ...


2018 ◽  
pp. 99-125
Author(s):  
Carl Lindskoog

Chapter 5 examines the government’s first detention camp at the U.S naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the experience of the Haitian refugees—the original Guantanamo detainees—held there from 1991 to 1994. An important part of this history also involves the government’s detention of HIV-positive Haitians in the world’s first and only “HIV prison camp.” Examining the political and legal challenges to the government’s use of off-shore detention at Guantanamo, this chapter illuminates the history of the legal struggle over the government’s authority to detain in such extraterritorial facilities and debates over how far the U.S. Constitution might reach beyond the United States’ territorial boundaries, and when exercising the U.S. Constitution can lead to human rights abuses.


2008 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 562-595 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fiona de Londras

In December 2007 the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in its latest Guantánamo Bay cases, Boumediene v. Bush and Al Odah v. United States. Interestingly, the argumentation offered in this litigation was almost exclusively domestic—international human rights law did not feature in spite of its capacity to add significantly to the weight and persuasiveness of the arguments petitioners' In respect of both the geographic scope and the content of constitutional standards, international human rights law has a well-developed body of jurisprudence that, this Article argues, ought to have been advanced by counsel for the petitioners. This Article both exposes the potentially significant international human rights law arguments that could have been advanced, and explores some possible reasons for the marginalization of this body of law. The Article concludes that this strategic decision on the part of counsel for the petitioners robbed the U.S. Supreme Court of an opportunity to assert the relevance of human rights law to the “War on Terrorism,” and to expand on the relationship between international and domestic constitutional standards and, for those reasons, is to be lamented.


Author(s):  
Sharada Balachandran Orihuela

The conclusion considers the importance of acts of piracy, terrorism, and narcotrafficking in helping to consolidate and expand the reach of U.S. state power in a post 9/11 world. The U.S. state has grown and been strengthened by framing certain behaviors as requiring extralegal measures to suppress acts of “inexplicable villainy.” Indeed, perhaps this is why piracy continues to matter. Debates around the existence of Guantanamo Bay and drone strikes point to the capaciousness of the language of terrorism, which has been borrowed from the language of piracy in legitimizing extrajudicial expressions of state power. Indeed, the existence of extrajudicial spaces and expressions of state power, which run counter to the protections guaranteed by the state, have made apparent the need to sustain and perpetuate the language of piracy. It would seem that piracy’s significance has not diminished in the years since the Civil War’s conclusion.


2018 ◽  
pp. 126-144
Author(s):  
Carl Lindskoog

Haitian detention at Guantanamo Bay continued to focus attention on U.S. detention practice in 1995 as the government’s detention of hundreds of unaccompanied Haitian youth generated enormous controversy and loud calls for their freedom. Chapter 6 documents this struggle over child detention before it moves to an examination of two key pieces of legislation in 1996 that had a decisive impact on the history of immigration detention in the U.S. The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) and the Illegal Immigration and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) were measures that consummated the marriage of immigration restriction and mass incarceration, devastated immigrant communities, and led to an enormous expansion of the immigration detention system. Finally, chapter 6 illustrates what the immigration detention system had become by the late 1990s and how, despite the extraordinary power and cruelty of the system, detainees continued to exercise resistance.


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