Marjorie Cohn defends the legacy of Michael Ratner from an attack by Yale law professor Samuel Moyn.
An Unprincipled Attack on a Human Rights Giant
Tag: Guantanamo Bay
The Enduring Shame of Guantanamo
From the Archive: In his State of the Union address Tuesday, President Trump announced that he had signed an executive order to keep the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay open. On this occasion, we republish an article from 2012 by…
The Remarkable Story of Fidel Castro
Since Fidel Castro’s death, the mainstream U.S. news media has been on a flashback to the Cold War presenting one-sided denunciations of the “communist dictator,” but there is another side to the story, explains Marjorie Cohn.
“We Are Adopting Principles of Fascism”
Retired Army JAG Major Todd Pierce explains how his perspective on U.S. foreign policy and politics has changed as he watched the nation’s slide into “perpetual war,” in Part Two of an interview with Philip Weiss of Mondoweiss.
“Everything That We Have Done Since 9/11 Is Wrong”
“Everything that we have done since 9/11 is wrong,” says retired Army JAG Major Todd Pierce, whose personal journey to that conclusion helps explain why so many ex-military people are growing disillusioned with U.S. foreign policy.
Obama’s Gitmo Failure
As President Obama approaches his final year in office, he has yet to fulfill one of his earliest promises, closing the Guantanamo Bay prison. It remains a grievance used by terror groups as a recruiting tool, but the prison has other legal…
A Political Edge from Guantanamo
Though many of today’s domestic and international crises date back to George W. Bush’s presidency, Republicans see a political edge in frustrating President Obama’s efforts to solve them, reveling in a new narrative about Obama’s “weakness.” The Guantanamo mess is…
How Congress Undermined 9/11 Cases
Congressional “tough-guy-ism” blocking President Obama’s plan to shutter the Guantanamo Bay prison and insisting on military tribunals for 9/11 terrorism suspects is making the prosecutions harder than if they had been transferred to civilian courts, an irony addressed by ex-CIA analyst…
The Dark Side of ‘Zero Dark Thirty’
Movie-goers across America can now see the hunt-for-bin-Laden film, “Zero Dark Thirty,” and its graphic portrayal of torture as a key element in that search. But the filmmakers distort the facts and ignore the reality that torture is illegal, immoral…
Kafkaesque Legacy of Gitmo/Bagram
More than a decade after the 9/11 attacks and George W. Bush’s “war on terror,” U.S. justice remains mired in Kafkaesque legal swamps at Guantanamo Bay and Bagram, places where murky theories about “unlawful combatants” mean detainees have no real…