American Civil Liberties Union

Last week's military commissions proceedings in the trial of Abd al Rahim Al-Nashiri in Guantánamo Bay demonstrates the grave threat to justice posed by an ad hoc approach to a defendant's rights. Life and death decisions—Al-Nashiri could face the death penalty—mustn't be made using improvised rules, but in last week's pre-trial hearings at Guantánamo, the rules continued to be made up as the military commissions churn on.

The hunger strike in Guantánamo is now in its fourth month. At the military’s latest count, 100 of the 166 prisoners are on strike, motivated in large part by their indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial. Twenty-nine of those men are being force-fed, the largest number yet during this hunger strike. Force-feeding in Guantánamo is a brutal, degrading experience.

A detailed and harrowing first-person narrative of a prisoner's experiences in Guantánamo is available to the public for the first time: Slate today published a three-part series of excerpts from The Guantánamo Memoirs of Mohamedou Ould Slahi. The excerpts were culled from a manuscript hundreds of pages in length, which Slahi provided his attorneys, a pro bono team of ACLU and other lawyers. After being classified for years, Slahi's memoirs – of arrest, rendition, torture, and imprisonment without charge or trial – are finally seeing the light of day, albeit with some redactions.

The ongoing crisis in the prison at Guantánamo Bay is escalating, and new details are emerging as media have been allowed to visit this week. A few days ago, as part of an operation to shift hunger-striking prisoners from communal living to individual cells, Guantánamo guards shot at prisoners using what the military calls "less-than-lethal" ammunition, hitting at least one person. The AP reports that five prisoners were injured, as prisoners apparently resisted.