Comment: Hiding at Guantánamo On Wednesday, Abd al Rahim al Nashiri will be arraigned at what is called the Expeditionary Legal Center at Guantánamo Bay. “Expeditionary” is the right word: the proceedings will enter new territory, on a course that is only half-plotted. Nashiri is charged with planning the bombing of the U.S.S. The trial is expeditionary in another sense, too: it seems, in some respects, to have been thrown together at the last minute. A great deal of thought has been put into certain details—there’s a brand-new Web site, which cost the government half a million dollars, with a feature that allows you to add proceedings at Guantánamo to your calendar—and almost none into other, basic ones. There are reasons, or at least excuses, for the jerry-built feel of the military commissions. I have tried to be as supportive as I know how to be in creating flexibility for the executive branch and not micromanage the war. We don’t have jails? Photograph by John Moore/Getty Images.
Welcome, Nato, to Chicago's police state | Bernard Harcourt With Nato delegates arriving Saturday night, the City of Chicago has been turned into a police state. Courtesy of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who several months ago began implementing new draconian anti-protest measures, Chicago has gone on security lockdown. Starting early Friday night, 18 May 2012, the Chicago Police Department began shutting down – prohibiting cars, bikes, and pedestrians – miles and miles of highways and roads in the heart of Chicago to create a security perimeter around downtown and McCormick Place (where the Nato summit is being held). Eight-foot tall, anti-scale security fencing went up all over that perimeter and downtown, including Grant Park; and the Chicago police – as well as myriad other federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, such as the FBI and the US secret service – were out in force on riot-geared horses, bikes, and patrols – batons at the ready. So, welcome, Nato, to the Chicago police state 2012. A few further points are worth mentioning.
Why Obama Can't Close Guantanamo The last two prisoners to leave the U.S. detention center at Guantánamo Bay were dead. On February 1, Awal Gul, a 48-year-old Afghan, collapsed in the shower and died of an apparent heart attack after working out on an exercise machine. Then, at dawn one morning in May, Haji Nassim, a 37-year-old man also from Afghanistan, was found hanging from bed linen in a prison camp recreation yard. In both cases, the Pentagon conducted swift autopsies and the U.S. military sent the bodies back to Afghanistan for traditional Muslim burials. The responsibility lies not so much with the White House but with Congress, which has thwarted President Barack Obama's plans to close the detention center, which the Bush administration opened on January 11, 2002 with 20 captives. On paper, at least, the Obama administration would be set to release almost half the current captives at Guantánamo. To continue reading, please log in. Don't have an account? Register Register now to get three articles each month.
David Donnelly: Private Prisons Industry: Increasing Incarcerations, Maximizing Profits and Corrupting Our Democracy Earlier this year in Louisiana, a plan by Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA) to privatize prisons narrowly failed in a legislative committee by a vote of 13 to 12. The 12 members of the House Appropriations Committee who voted to approve the prison privatization plan have received more than three times more money from private prison donors than the 13 members who voted against the plan, according to an analysis of data from the Louisiana Ethics Administration and the National Institute on Money in State Politics. This is but one example of many in a new report from Public Campaign and PICO National Network, Unholy Alliance: How the Private Prison Industry is Corrupting Our Democracy and Promoting Mass Incarceration, highlighting the increasingly powerful and influential private prison industry. While the overall prison population has grown dramatically over the last two decades, the growth of inmates being detained in private, for-profit prisons has skyrocketed. This isn’t an accident.
Terror on Trial | William Shawcross on Legal Proceedings Against Extremists U.S. Private Prison Population Grew 37 Percent Between 2002-2009 As Industry Lobbying Dollars Grew 165 Percent By Zaid Jilani on September 26, 2011 at 1:40 pm "U.S. Private Prison Population Grew 37 Percent Between 2002-2009 As Industry Lobbying Dollars Grew 165 Percent" Today, the Michigan Messenger reports about how the private prisons behemoth Corrections Corporations of America grew over the last decade, expanding both its prisoner population and its political clout. Then, citing figures from the Justice Policy Institute, the Messenger notes that lobbying dollars from the major private prison operators grew from $840,885 to $1,391,056 from 2002 to 2009: This means that as industry lobbying dollars increased 165 percent between 2002 and 2009, the U.S. private prison population grew 37 percent.
Innocent and Imprisoned: A Former Gitmo Detainee Speaks Out - Conor Friedersdorf - Politics Held without charges for seven years, he was finally freed when a federal judge reviewed the evidence against him. His captors never paid. For a brief moment at the end of George W. Bush's tenure, before Barack Obama even took office, a few naive souls hoped that Bush Administration officials would be investigated to determine if they broke the law while in power, tried if the evidence warranted it, and jailed (like so many less-politically-connected American lawbreakers) if their guilt was proved beyond a reasonable doubt. Those who advocated treating Bush Administration officials as if they were accountable to the rule of law as regular citizens were deemed radicals. Despite the significant burden frequently paid by American citizens in the name of maintaining the rule of law, it was deemed unthinkable in mainstream political discourse that Bush officials would be subject to what some would call a strict, originalist interpretation of duly passed statutes and treaties. It is here.
The Influence of the Private Prison Industry in Immigration Detention | Detention Watch Network Introduction Since the late 1990’s, the number of people held in immigration detention has exploded. On any given day, ICE detains over 33,000 immigrants; this is more than triple the number of people detained in 1996. In the last 5 years alone, the annual number of immigrants detained and the costs of detaining them has doubled: in 2009, 383,524 immigrants were detained, costing taxpayers $1.7 billion at an average of $122 a day per bed. Nearly 2.5 million individuals have passed through immigration detention facilities since 2003. Although private corporations have long exercised influence over detention policy in a variety of contexts, a recent accumulation of evidence indicates that the main contractors involved in the explosive growth of the immigration detention system have been involved in heavy lobbying at the federal level. This research was conducted in partnership with Grassroots Leadership and Sarah V. Breakdown of private immigration detention beds by state 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
What we might want to remember about forgetting on the 10th anniversary of the Prison Camp at Guantanamo JOHN MOORE/Getty Images Ten years ago today, George W. Bush’s first 20 prisoners arrived at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. Dahlia Lithwick writes about the courts and the law for Slate. Follow In the foreign press they are saying that the camp “weighs heavily on America’s conscience” and that “the shame of Guantanamo remains.” So while the rest of the world experiences this day in terms of how the United States ever got itself into this situation and what it’s all done to America’s reputation abroad, here in the United States the discourse is confined to how we will continue to live with it and why. That’s always been the challenge of Guantanamo: making it seem real to Americans who have tended to think of the Cuban camp as the potted palm in the war on terror. From the perspective of a legal journalist, the real tragedy of this anniversary lies not in all the waste, and error, and gratuitous suffering.
The Private Prison Business