The tribunals in Guantánamo and newly revealed military campaigns are reinforcing some less than admirable qualities. The stain will not wash out as easily as some might want.

For more on pruning back executive power see Pruning Shears.

Carol Rosenberg, a journalist for the Miami Herald and one of the few journalists who continue to follow operations and proceedings at the Guantanamo Bay prison reports “an emotionally ill detainee still being held at the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was first recommended for release by the Pentagon in 2004.”

Trying 15-year-old child soldier Omar Khadr for murder, the planned sentence life imprisonment, absurd and obscene on so many levels.

Justice has been discarded in favor of political expediency at Guantanamo, as Judge Patrick Parrish has allowed Omar Khadr’s confessions to be admitted into evidence in his military commission trial. Included among the confessions is one obtained by convicted torturer Joshua Claus under threat of rape and/or death for the then 15 year old suspect.

On Tuesday, the Obama administration is scheduled to begin its first trial of a prisoner held at Guantanamo Bay. Omar Khadr was only 15 when he was captured in a firefight in 2002 with U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Now 23, he’ll finally have his day in court. Only instead of an experienced federal court with a long history of trying terror suspects, Khadr will be tried in a military commission, created just last year. In the eight years since President George W. Bush created the first military commissions at Guantanamo, they have convicted only four terrorists – only two in contested trials. Regular federal courts in the United States, by contrast, have convicted more than 400 in the same time period.

A good amount of documentation on the involvement of psychologists in the torture and abuse of detainees or “terror suspects.” And, a new study provides even more revelations on the involvement of physicians making it increasingly clear that medical professionals put limits on ethical standards they were expected to follow in order to help the CIA interrogate detainees

The Obama administration had been cleared to effect the deportation of cleared Guantanamo prisoner Abdul Aziz Naji by no less than the Supreme Court, who rejected a lower court order blocking the action. What hasn’t been reported thus far is the role of Congress, who was mandated to have advance notice of the transfer. Meanwhile, in Algeria, Naji told the press about torture and the drugging of prisoners at Guantanamo.

My op-ed, “The War on Terror: Beyond the Military,” was recently published on The Huffington Post. I provided the full text of the op-ed and look forward to your comments.

The full text of Omar Khadr’s letter to his attorney from Guantanamo, with commentary. “Dennis you always say that I have an obligation to show the world what is going on down here and it seems that we’ve done every thing but the world doesn’t get it….”

In an editorial posted by the New York Times on Saturday afternoon, the editorial board condemned the Obama administration’s involuntary deportation of a Guantanamo prisoner to Algeria. The prisoner, 35-year-old Abdul Aziz Naji, was cleared of any charges in a wide-ranging review of Guantanamo prisoner status last year. Naji begged not to be sent back to Algeria, a country he fled after being attacked himself at age 17 or 18 by extremists. Naji feared the Algerian government could not protect him against the Islamic fundamentalist rebels that have been fighting the somewhat more moderate Islamic government for some twenty years now. Now he has disappeared, and the Algerian ambassador says the government cannot protect him against extremists.