The Guantanamo Bay facility, which has so far been used to hold terrorists, will now also house illegal immigrants with criminal records.
'The unexpected turn of events and assertion of sovereignty by the Taliban has baffled the Pakistan security establishment.'
Human rights organisations have been alleging that the Guantanamo Bay military prison, set up by Bush Administration in 2002, was being used to detain and question terror suspects with harsh interrogation measures. The prison camp currently holds about 245 inmates. The executive orders in this regard were signed by Obama at a White House ceremony during his meeting with the retired military officials on Thursday.
"We are exploring all alternatives as to how best to do the main objective, which is to protect America. What we don't want to do is to let out somebody that comes back and harms us," Bush said.
President Barack Obama may not be able to fulfill his promise of closing down infamous Guantanamo Bay by the end of his term because of political opposition and "inertia" on part of the administration, a media report said on Saturday. The initial date for shutting down the detention facility was 2010 but there has been considerable resistance to the proposal that the prisoners be shifted to a prison in Illinois, according to the New York Times.
Philip Alston, a United Nations human rights expert has said that the trial of six 'alien unlawful enemy combatants' at the Guantanamo Bay under the Military Commission Act fails to meet the basic due process standards required for a fair trial under international humanitarian and human rights law.
"The Guantanamo issue is a sensitive issue for people. I very much would like to end Guantanamo. I very much would like to get people to a court," he told German TV station ARD.
The motion, made at the instance of Obama and US Defense Secretary Robert Gates, is expected to be considered early on Wednesday local time by the military judge hearing into the case against five men charged in 9/11 terror attacks and against Omar Khadr, a Canadian who is accused of killing an American soldier in Afghanistan in 2002
United States President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday announced the nomination of popular Fox News host and Army veteran Pete Hegseth, 44, as his defence secretary.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has agreed to enter a plea deal with the Joe Biden administration that could pave the way for him to avoid imprisonment in the United States, according to recently filed federal court documents, CNN reported.
The decision is seen as a stinging blow to the US administration
The US president announced the move during his first State of the Union address, reversing his predecessor Barack Obama's decision to close the controversial site "as soon as practicable".
United States President Barack Obama has appointed Cliff Sloan, a high-powered lawyer with extensive experience in all three branches of the government, as his special envoy for the closure of the much-criticised terrorist detention centre at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba.
At least 35 terrorists incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay were sent to fight against the West after being indoctrinated by "extremist preachers" in mosques, particularly the one at Finsbury Park in Britain, according to documents leaked by WikiLeaks.
Some Indian students, many of the from Andhra Pradesh, have fallen victims of the Guantanamo Bay mindset of the United States authorities which permits them to use demeaning and dehumanising methods against suspects under investigation or detention in order to prevent them from escaping and to locate them by using the Global Positioning System if they manage to escape.
Chinese-American Muslim James 'Yusuf' Yee, a former US Army Chaplain, talks about his harrowing experiences at Guantanamo Bay detention centre in Cuba.
The military trainers who came to Guantanamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of "coercive management techniques" for possible use on prisoners, including "sleep deprivation," "prolonged constraint," and "exposure," the New York Times said. All these methods were once described by the Americans as torture.
Specially designated global terrorist Sirajuddin Haqqani, who carries a reward of $10 million US bounty on his head, is the acting interior minister while his uncle -- Khalil Haqqani -- has been named as acting minister for refugees.
Despite widespread efforts to shut it down, Guantanamo Bay, the infamous extrajudicial detainment and interrogation facility of the United States located in Cuba, completes a decade of existence on Wednesday.
'Don't be fooled. There is nothing more moderate about the revived Taliban government'
No critical injuries or deaths were reported, officials said.
The United States will continue to focus on the Asia-Pacific region and shape a future of greater security, President Barack Obama said on Wednesday, even as he vowed to veto any Congressional bill imposing new sanctions on Iran to give "diplomacy a chance to succeed".
The United States on Wednesday charged Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the 9/11 terror attacks, along with four alleged plotters, vowing to seek the death penalty in a much-awaited military trial.
"We appeal to the officials of past governments to return to their country as we will give them full protection of their lives. We are faced with the huge task of rebuilding and reconstruction of war-ravaged Afghanistan," he said.
"We have not made any decisions with regard to releases," State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland told media persons when asked about news reports regarding release of Taliban prisoners from Guantanamo as part of the reconciliation process.
Breaking a yearlong silence, the parents of the only American soldier held by Taliban have abruptly made public that he is the focus of a prisoners exchange being negotiated between the Obama administration and the insurgent group.
The Obama administration has defended its decision to go in for trial of Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, the son-in-law of Osama bin Laden and a former spokesman for Al Qaeda, in a civil court in New York instead of those in Guantanamo Bay.
The United States had reached a tentative deal with the Taliban to allow, among other things, the transfer of five Afghans from the Guantanamo Bay prison in lieu of their public renunciation of terrorism, but the agreement failed to take off because of Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai's objections. A report in the Washington Post has claimed that the deal was the closest the two parties came to genuine peace negotiations after nearly a year of talks.
Pakistan's Inter-Services intelligence facilitated terrorists to cross the border to carry out strikes on Indian targets chosen by the Pakistan Army, several detainees at the Guantanamo Bay facility told US interrogators, according to a fresh set of American diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks.
United States authorities have described Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency as a terrorist organisation and considered it as much of a threat as the Al Qaeda and the Taliban, according to a secret document which also names Lashkar-e-Tayiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed and Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami.
United States President Barack Obama is still committed to closing down the infamous Guantanamo Bay detention centre, a promise he had made during his presidential campaign, his spokesman said on Tuesday after his government's U-turn over trial of the 9/11 accused."We remain committed to closing Guantanamo because it's in our national security interest," White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters during an off-camera briefing.
The entire world will be eagerly following the 'trial of the century' in which Khalid Mohammed Sheikh, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 terror strikes and hoards of other terror plots, faces death penalty if found guilty by a US military tribunal in Guantanamo Bay.
The initial talks between the United States and Taliban in Qatar on the release of five of the militant group's prisoners from the Guantanamo Bay detention center have failed, a media report said on Monday.
The alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, will be tried in a military commission at the Guantanamo Bay terrorist detention center along with four suspected co-conspirators, the Pentagon said.
United States President Barack Obama on Tuesday lifted the freeze on military trials for Guantanamo Bay terror suspects by signing an executive order that will create a formal system of indefinite detention of such prisoners. Within hours of his taking over as the President, Obama announced a freeze on Guantanamo Bay trials along with a vow to shut down the infamous camp within a year.
The lawyer of Julian Assange, the founder of whistleblower website Wikileaks, has said that the journalist faces the threat of the death penalty or detention at Guantanamo Bay if he is extradited to Sweden on accusations of rape and sexual assault. "Indeed, if Assange were rendered to the USA, without assurances that the death penalty would not be carried out, there is a real risk that he could be made subject to the death penalty," his lawyer said.
The administration's attempt to buy an unused prison in Thomson, Illinois to relocate the 180 remaining detainees in Guantanamo Bay, which also includes the five conspirators, has also been blocked by the Republicans, the New York Daily News reported.
Osama bin Laden's former cook, Ibrahim al Qosi, has pleaded guilty at a trial in Guantanamo Bay to conspiracy and providing support for terrorism, representing the first conviction of the Barack Obama administration at the controversial war crimes court. According to the BBC, the 50-year-old man from Sudan has admitted that he had worked as bin Laden's bodyguard in Afghanistan and helped him avoid capture by US forces. Qosi was detained in Afghanistan in 2001.
Pakistani-Canadian Omar Khadr, the youngest detainee at Guantanamo Bay has pleaded guilty to war crimes, including murder of an American army personnel in Afghanistan in 2002.
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