13 year old Palestinian girl in wheelchair victim of hit and run by Israeli settlers

Guantánamo Exclusive: Former Chief Prosecutor, Ex-Prisoner Call on Obama to Close Prison
On the 10th anniversary of when the United States began detaining terror suspects at its Guantánamo Bay military base in Cuba, we speak with a former prisoner and the ex-chief U.S. prosecutor, who both call for the Obama administration to close the base. “People are locked up in isolation camps… People lost their hands, lost their eyes, lost their limbs,” says Omar Deghayes, who was arrested in Pakistan as a terror suspect and held in U.S. custody from May 2002 until December 2007, most of that time at Guantánamo. “Some people were subjected to sleep deprivation. They weren’t allowed to sleep… And they had to live under those conditions for six years … without being convicted of any crime, which is the most unacceptable thing.” Asked if prisoners were tortured at Guantánamo, Air Force Colonel Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor at the military prison, answers, “I don’t think there’s any doubt.” Davis resigned his position in 2007 in protest of what he called political interference in the military commissions of Guantánamo prisoners. “In many of the cases, we had evidence independent of that [torture] that was sufficient to establish guilt. But to use torture to gain intelligence and then also to turn around and use that as evidence in an American court is just not consistent with American principles,” Davis says.http://www.democracynow.org/2012/1/10/guantnamo_exclusive_former_prisoner_chief_prosecutor

NDAA: Obama Signs Law Restricting Transfer of Guantánamo Prisoners and Expands Indefinite Detention
It has been 10 years since the United States began detaining people at its military base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. We speak with someone who has worked to defend the rights of those prisoners for the last decade: Michael Ratner, president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights. While dozens continue to face an unknown future at Guantánamo, we ask Ratner to comment on President Obama’s recent approval of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which some legal experts say would authorize the military to indefinitely jail anyone it considers a terrorism suspect — without charge or trial. “The Center represented the first people out of Guantánamo over 10 years ago. At that time, the detention of people, the military trials, was all done by a presidential order. When Obama took office, he continued the same actions. And recently, in theNDAA, those actions, the ability to detain people, the ability to use military commissions, etc., were actually put into law, and Obama, contrary to his claim that he was going to veto it, signed it, making him the first president ever in the United States to sign into law indefinite detention as part of the policy of the United States.” Ratner adds that “the NDAA puts very heavy restrictions on moving people out of Guantánamo… We are now in the longest period, almost a year, in which nobody has been transferred out of Guantánamo.”
http://www.democracynow.org/2012/1/10/ndaa_obama_signs_law_restricting_transfer

Analysis / Op-ed