Blog of Rights

Jenny
Egan

Orange Ribbons on the Red Carpet

By Jenny Egan at 2:32pm
?The hype around this year's Oscars, which took place last night at Hollywood's Kodak Theatre, seemed to be triple because the writer's strike meant that the usual precursor shows like the Golden Globes were stiff, studio-shot affairs. So there were even more eyes peeled for dresses, style, and statements last night.

The ACLU was right in the mix. The first major nominee down th

Court Reviews President's Wartime Power Grab

By Jenny Egan at 9:46am
Does the President want to implement a policy of presidential prerogative trumping the Constitution, international law, and... well...everything - not just on foreign soil, but in America's heartland as well?

It sometimes seems that way. It was smack dab in the heart of the Midwest that Ali Saleh al-Marri was arrested in 2001. At the time, al-Marri was living with his wife and five children

All Together Now: "Torture of Prisoners Is Immoral, Unwise, and Un-American"

By Jenny Egan at 3:18pm

Huzaifa Parhat, well into his seventh year at Guantánamo, had a civilian judge review the evidence for his detention for the first time last week. The court ruled that the Pentagon's Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT) declaration that Parhat was an unlawful enemy combatant is "invalid." They declared that Parhat must be released or given a new hearing.

Guantanamo: Six Years Too Many

By Jenny Egan at 3:34pm
On January 11, 2002, 20 prisoners were led off a C-141 transport plane from Afghanistan and onto awaiting buses at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. From there, they were loaded onto a ferry and finally driven into the now-notorious Camp X-Ray. There they were kept for months on end in 6- by 8-f

Gov’t Double Talk Leaves Uighurs in Limbo

By Jenny Egan at 3:31pm

There is a lot of last-minute scrambling at Guantánamo in the waning days of the Bush administration. Some of it involves 17 prisoners of Uighur descent. The Uighurs are an ethnic Muslim minority who face persecution at home in the Xianjiang province of China. Although the Department of Defense concedes that these 17 men were never enemies of the United States, it continued to imprison them, holding them in cells 22 hours a day without any natural light, while the U.S. looked for somewhere to send them.

The Real Bad Apples

By Jenny Egan at 2:17pm

“If the detainee dies, you’re doing it wrong.”

Yesterday’s testimony by former DOD lawyer William Haynes and documents released by the Armed Services Committee highlighted how top Department of Defense and CIA officials selected and honed interrogation methods at Guantánamo by studying the torture techniques — sometimes called SERE techniques, for “Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape”) — that were used against U.S. soldiers during the Cold War.

CIA: Out of Touch Much?

By Jenny Egan at 12:43pm
I was just doing a little light reading this morning, on the New York Times website, about Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay when something caught my eye. Right there, atop a photo of Kal Penn and John Cho in orange jumpsuits was this:



A CIA recruitment ad. Odd.

So I did a little more poking and went

Standing Up for Fair Trials

By Jenny Egan at 3:47pm
There's been a lot of chatter in the last few months since Colonel Morris D. Davis, former chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay, revealed that prosecutions there were being affected by undue political pressure. His assertions about the timing and evidence garnered by tortur

Close Guantanamo NYC Action Update

By Jenny Egan at 3:42pm
So the plan this morning was to infiltrate the Today show viewing audience. We wanted millions of home viewers to see people wearing orange today and make sure people took note that this is the six-year anniversary of the arrival of the first prisoners at Guantanamo Bay's detention facility. The Today show has an outdoor studio audience, visible through the windows behind the anchors. The only problem was - we had to be subtle because the Today show screens out "political" protest. They also run on a time lag, ostensibly to keep streakers away, but which is also handy for switching camera shots and making sure no one with a message that might matter (not that "HI MOM" isn't an important sentiment, but you can always call the lady after the show).

I arrived at a very prompt 5:51 a.m. Here's how it went down after that:

Make That Three Torture Memos

By Jenny Egan at 1:28pm
The frustrating thing about doublespeak is not its untruth - lies can be called out and disproven. No, the frustration with doublespeak is that there is no position to pin down at all. The Bush administration continues to say "we don't torture" out of one side of their mouths while saying "it's necessary" out of the other. It's just damn near impossible to wrestle with that level of Read More»
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