detainee treatment
33 Articles

Words Matter in War
Command Sergeant Major John Wayne Troxell, the senior enlisted adviser to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, shared this attention-grabbing message with his more than…

Guantanamo: Donald Trump’s Opportunity
The Trump Administration’s response to last week’s attacks in downtown Manhattan could go either of two directions: The United States could continue to flounder with indecision…

UAE, a Key US Partner in Yemen, Implicated in Detainee Abuse
One of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s regrettable statements during the Iraq war was his infamous response to an Army specialist asking about the lack of armor for military…

Medical Complicity in CIA Torture, Then and Now
The US government released a series of documents about the CIA torture program on June 14 and 15, in response to Freedom of Information Act lawsuits by the ACLU and Vice News.…

The New US Anti-Torture Law: A Genuine Step Forward
Just over two months ago, on the day before Thanksgiving, President Obama signed into law an important provision concerning torture that has garnered surprisingly little attention.…

The US Must Ensure Umm Sayyaf Is Not Subjected to Human Rights Abuses
Umm Sayyaf, the wife of a suspected high-ranking ISIL member, is back in the news at The Daily Beast. US special operations forces captured Sayyaf in Syria in May and brought her…

The apparent end of the “gag orders” for GTMO detainees
Back in February, I explained that the protective orders in two Military Commissions cases had been amended to now permit the defendants and their counsel to speak publicly about…

The Complexity of Addressing Sexual Violence Experienced by Guantanamo Bay Detainees
The Senate Torture Report enabled deeper understanding of the depth and range of violence experienced at CIA black sites by male detainees who later ended up at Guantanamo Bay,…

Guest Post: DoD Directive 2310.01E
As Steve Vladeck noted yesterday, the Department of Defense is out with a new version of its Directive 2310.01E on detainee operations. Steve asks the big question: why now?…