Let's be honest, the circumstances surrounding the 'prisoner swap' between Bowe Bergdahl and five high-ranking Taliban prisoners in Guantanamo Bay just don't add up. The initial narrative President Obama pitched of the prisoner swap as a signal of successful...
Here at the Duck and elsewhere, there has been much discussion of the gaps between academia and the policy world. I took part in a program that seeks to bridge that gap--the Council on Foreign...
Regarding the revelations in the latest diplo-document-dump, there are some good questions to be asked. Charli is wondering who actually did the leaking and Ben Wittes is concerned about the effect...
Not so much.Lawfare blog has a post on today’s Executive Order on Guantanamo Bay. (Link to the Obama administration's fact sheet PDF here). Lawfare tends to be more conservative than most...
I finally took the time (and found the courage) to watch Steve McQueen's "Hunger" (2008). It is the story of the events that led to the 1981 Irish hunger strike at Maze Prison in which Bobby Sands and nine other men died. The film is hauntingly beautiful from an aesthetic standpoint and horrifying intellectually. There are very few films which actually merit the adjective "powerful," this is one of them. (I am still processing this film in my mind, but I thought I would share a few thoughts in case others have seen it and thought it through...)Critics will undoubtedly take issue with the...
According to the Department of Defense, many of the captives released from the U.S. prison on Guantánamo Bay "return" to extremist activity -- and the rate is increasing. This is from the LA Times story of January 7: A new report estimates that one-fifth of the detainees who have been released from the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have resumed extremist activity, a Defense Department official said Wednesday, a figure that intensifies the debate over the prison.The Pentagon report on the released detainees remains classified and officials refused to discuss it publicly. But...
Republicans say they don't want terrorists in their backyard -- even if their backyard is a federal maximum security prison. Apparently, Democrats in Congress are somewhat frightened by this stance because they have refused to provide $80 million to finance the closing of Gitmo. They will deny funds until the Obama administration provides a plan to provide justice for the prisoners at Gitmo. While that use of leverage might make some sense, the Republican argument against moving prisoners to the US is purely political theater. It simply doesn't stand up to basic scrutiny. Consider:1. U.S....
A conference was recently held at the University of Maastricht on Human Rights and Methodology, which explored the following questions:By which criteria can a product of human rights research be qualified as a methodologically sound piece of work? What are examples of such good practices and what are examples of practices that are unsatisfactory from a methodological point of view? And are there aspects and considerations that are typical for the methods of research applied in the field of human rights?In his keynote, David Forsythe lamented the paucity of methodological rigor in human...
"The third hearing of my man took place at two o'clock at night; I had previously worked for eighteen hours on end. He had been woken up; he was drunk with sleep and frightened; he betrayed himself. From that time I cross-examined my people chiefly at night....Once a woman complained that she had been kept standing outside my room the whole night, awaiting her turn. Her legs were shaking and she was completely tired out; in the middle of her hearing, she fell asleep. I woke her up; she went on talking, in a sleepy mumbling voice, without fully realizing what she was saying, and fell asleep...