American Civil Liberties Union

On April 30, the University of California, Davis, celebrated the fifth year of its Guantánamo Testimonials Project, an effort to gather first-hand testimony of the abuse of detainees held there in U.S. custody, and to make their stories available to the general public. The anniversary was marked with a milestone of its own: for the first time, a public discussion between a former detainee — Omar Deghayes — and former Gitmo guard Terry Holdbrooks took place before an American audience. (Since his one-year stint as a guard at Guantánamo, Holdbrooks has converted to Islam and is now known as Mustafa Abdullah.)

The New York Times ran an excellent editorial today underscoring the injustice of prosecuting alleged former child soldier Omar Khadr in the first military commissions trial since the Military Commissions Act (MCA) of 2009.

(Originally posted on Daily Kos.)

Bombshell Testimony from Bagram Interrogator Convicted of Abuse, Reporters Banned from Gitmo for Reporting his Name

On Thursday, pretrial hearings continued in the case of Canadian Omar Khadr, who has spent a third of his life in U.S. detention since he was captured at age 15. Though the Obama administration has claimed it intends to erase the taint of torture and abuse from the Bush-era Guantánamo military commissions, the government is trying to use evidence coerced out of the teenage boy in an illegitimate trial eight years later.

Hearings continued Monday and Tuesday in the case of Canadian Omar Khadr, the last Western national still being held at Guantánamo. Now 23, Khadr was 15 when he was captured by U.S. forces in Afghanistan for allegedly throwing a grenade that killed a U.S. medic. Unless a plea bargain is reached, Khadr will be the first person prosecuted in a military commission under President Obama.

We have long known, since the creation of the military commissions, that the question of torture is at the heart of these proceedings. Since Omar Khadr first announced he had been abused while detained at Bagram and Guantánamo, we've faced the shameful possibility that he could be convicted using confessions extracted through torture and abuse. This week the commission is examining whether self-incriminating statements Khadr made to interrogators should be excluded from trial because of torture and other abuse.