Release of Guantanamo detainee Asadullah Haroon Gul who was unlawfully imprisoned
Asadullah Haroon Gul has been released from Guantanamo Bay after fifteen years of detention without charge and returned to his home country of Afghanistan, where he will be reunited with his wife and daughter.
Asadullah Haroon Gul has been released from Guantanamo Bay after fifteen years of detention without charge and returned to his home country of Afghanistan, where he will be reunited with his wife and daughter.
The US rendered Asadullah to Guantanamo 2007. His family feared him dead for many years and for the first nine years of his captivity, he did not have access to a lawyer, despite multiple attempts to obtain legal representation. Reprieve and the law firm Lewis Baach Kaufmann Middlemiss filed a writ for a petition of habeas corpus on his behalf in 2016, in which they demanded his release.
After years of litigation, in October 2021, they prevailed: the District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that Asadullah's detention was not legal, because he had only been a part of Hezb-e-Islami (HIA), a group that has been formally at peace since 2016, and he was not a part of Al Qaeda. The judge thus ordered his release. Asadullah was the first Guantanamo Bay detainee in over ten years to win a habeas case.
Asadullah was also cleared for release by unanimous decision of six US federal agencies, namely the departments of State, Homeland Security, Justice, Defense, plus the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the office of the Director of National Intelligence in October 2021.
After months of waiting for the government to act, on April 25, 2022, Asadullah's lawyers moved to hold the government in contempt of court for failing to comply with its order of release. His release today is the result of a hard-fought battle.
Asadullah has suffered severe physical and psychological torture during his detention, including being beaten, hung by his wrists, deprived of food and water, and prevented from praying. He has been subjected to sleep deprivation, extreme cold temperatures and solitary confinement.
Asadullah's lawyer at Reprieve US, Mark Maher, said:
"After 15 years imprisoned without charge or trial and after a Federal judge declared his detention illegal, Asad is finally free.
"Asad missed his daughter's entire childhood and he will never get back what has been taken from him, but he is now at least able to rebuild his life with his family, who have waited so long to see him.
"Ending Asad's unlawful detention is an important step and we hope that the State Department will move quickly to release other detainees who have been cleared to leave but remain stuck in limbo, wondering when their long ordeal will end."
Asadullah Haroon's lawyer at Lewis Baach Kaufmann Middlemiss, Tara Plochocki, said:
We are thrilled that, after fighting us every step of the way, the government has finally released Asad. The decision in this case shows that no one, not even the US government, is above the law. We thank the State Department for its efforts over the last two months to effectuate the court's order and hope that they apply the same diligence to the other detainees who are eligible for release.
Reprieve is a UK-based human rights organization that uses the law to enforce the human rights of prisoners, from death row to Guantanamo Bay.
GOP Attack on Biodiversity, Climate 'Sticks Finger in the Eye of American People'
Critics of a House appropriations bill that guts environmental agencies warn it's a sign of what the Republicans will do if they retake the Senate and the presidency next year.
Democrats and watchdog groups reacted with outrage on Friday as a U.S. House environmental subcommittee led by Republicans approved an appropriations bill that would reduce funding for two federal agencies and limit their ability to protect the environment.
The House Appropriations Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Subcommittee voted to advance a bill to weaken the regulatory capacities of the Department of the Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), cutting funding for conservation, climate action, national parks, and environmental justice initiatives.
"This bill sticks a finger in the eye of the American people who care deeply about clean air, climate change, endangered species, and responsible use of public lands," said Greta Anderson, deputy director of Western Watersheds Project. "It's a nasty wishlist to defund the priorities of protecting a livable future."
The fiscal year 2025 bill proposes a 20% cut to the EPA's annual budget, from $9.2 billion to $7.4 billion, including a $749 million cut to state and tribal assistance grants. It also proposes reductions to many Interior agency budgets, including a $210 million cut to the National Park Service and a $144 million cut to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Taking aim at the government's ability to regulate industry, most of the Republicans' spending allocations are below fiscal year 2024 and almost all of them are below the amount requested by the Biden administration.
Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine), the subcommittee's ranking Democrat, said in a statement that the proposed EPA cut was "irresponsible" and that she was "greatly disappointed and frustrated" by the bill, which "completely disregards the reality of a warming planet and ignores the need for us to do more, not less."
Pingree's Democratic colleague, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), the ranking member of the full appropriations committee, agreed.
The bill "promotes dirty energy, taking the side of fossil fuel companies and those who deny the scientific reality rather than address the escalating risk to our economy and national security presented by the changing climate and growing number of extreme weather events," DeLauro said in the statement.
Critics of the bill also objected to the large number of "poison-pill" riders that seek to undo Biden administration rules and undermine the Endangered Species Act by naming specific animals for which listing can't be funded. Per a Trump-era Interior rule, the legislation also delists most gray wolf populations from the ESA.
"This proposal is a hatchet job of disastrous proportion that in an unprecedented scale, targets our nation's most imperiled species and the law saving them from extinction," Robert Dewey, vice president of government relations at Defenders of Wildlife, said in a statement.
The Republicans' bill includes proposed reductions to funding for clean water infrastructure projects, which Food and Water Watch (FWW) said was a step in the wrong direction—water and sewer systems need huge infusions of money just to meet current water quality standards.
"The proposed cuts would leave many with unsafe water and exacerbate the nation’s water affordability crisis, adding more pressure on household water bills at a time when families are already grappling with soaring costs for essential services," Mary Grant, a FWW campaign director, said in a statement, calling safe water "non-negotiable."
Grant said that to safeguard Americans' clean water from "foolishly political annual appropriations battles," Congress should pass the Water Affordability, Transparency, Equity, And Reliability (WATER) Act—a call she also made last year, when the same subcommittee advanced a similar bill.
The full appropriations committee will consider the bill on July 9. If the bill passes through the committee and then the full chamber, as last year's version did, it's unlikely to make headway in the Democratic-controlled U.S. Senate. However, critics of the bill warned that it's a sign of what the Republicans will do if they retake the Senate and the presidency.
Earlier this month, presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump said that he plans to gut federal agencies dealing with climate, such as the Interior Department. A union of EPA workers rebuked Trump for the remarks.
Supreme Court Refuses to Rescue Prison-Bound Steve Bannon
When he's done serving his four-month sentence for flouting congressional subpoenas, the former top Trump adviser faces a federal trial over the We Build the Wall scam.
Steve Bannon, a onetime senior adviser to former U.S. President Donald Trump who was convicted of defying congressional subpoenas related to the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection, must report to prison Monday after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected his 11th-hour bid to avert his four-month sentence.
In a single-sentence order with no public dissents, the Supreme Court stated that Bannon's "application for release pending appeal presented to the chief justice and by him referred to the court is denied."
In July 2022, a federal jury found Bannon guilty of two counts of contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena from the U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. That October, he was sentenced to four months in prison and fined $6,500. Bannon has remained free pending appeals and has benefited from a pause imposed by Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee.
David Schoen, an attorney for Bannon, toldThe Washington Post on Friday: "I fully believe the conviction will be reversed and it is a shame to see it mishandled like this. He never should be going to jail for even a day."
However, Bannon not only faces four months behind bars for flouting Congress, another federal trial awaits him over his alleged conspiracy to commit mail fraud and money laundering in connection with the
We Build the Wall fundraising scam.
Giving Women 'Fewer Rights Than a Bag of Trash,' Iowa Supreme Court Upholds 6-Week Abortion Ban
"This ruling will deny critical and lifesaving care to pregnant people in the state. Make no mistake: This law will result in the death of Iowans," said one abortion fund in the state.
"We now live in a state where pregnant people have fewer rights than a bag of trash," said the Iowa Abortion Access Fund Friday after the state Supreme Court ruled that a six-week abortion ban passed in 2018 can go into effect.
IAAF was quoting Iowa Supreme Court Justice Thomas Waterman, who noted in June 2023, when the court upheld an injunction against the ban, that the state prohibits police officers from searching residents' trash cans without a warrant.
"It would be ironic and troubling for our court to become the first state Supreme Court in the nation to hold that trash set out in a garbage can for collection is entitled to more constitutional protection than a woman's interest in autonomy and dominion over her own body," said Waterman at the time.
Advocates said that was exactly the status of reproductive rights in the state following Friday's ruling, in which a lower court was ordered to end a temporary block on the six-week ban.
In the 4-3 decision, the court stated that there is no constitutional right to abortion care, with Justice Matthew McDermott writing in the majority opinion that the right to an abortion is "not rooted at all in our state's history and tradition."
With so-called exceptions for pregnancies that endanger the life of the patient but no clarifying guidance from state officials about how urgent a pregnant person's medical condition must be before a doctor can provide an abortion, IAAF warned that the law will prove deadly for Iowans.
"No one should doubt Republicans are coming after contraception, surrogacy, and fertility treatments next, even though the majority of Iowans want those decisions to be made by women with their families and physicians."
"This ruling will deny critical and lifesaving care to pregnant people in the state. Make no mistake: This law will result in the death of Iowans," said the group.
The other so-called "exceptions" to the six-week ban include pregnancies that result from rape, if the crime is reported to police or a health provider within 45 days; incest, if reported within 45 days, or fatal abnormalities that are "incompatible with life."
But despite those exceptions—which in many cases since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, have threatened the lives of pregnant people—the ACLU warned that the decision "will force some people to remain pregnant against their will and rob them of their right to make private medical decisions."
Chief Justice Susan Christensen wrote in a dissent that the law "strips Iowa women of their bodily autonomy," while Planned Parenthood North Central States called the ruling a "devastating blow."
"Today's dangerous and reprehensible ruling will impact Iowans for generations to come," said Ruth Richardson, president and CEO of the group.
The ruling comes a day after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that emergency department doctors in Idaho can temporarily resume abortion care for people with pregnancy complications, but did not say that medical providers across the country can legally do the same, regardless of whether their state has an abortion ban—in accordance with the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA).
Iowa state auditor Rob Sand said the state Republican Party will not stop at taking away people's right to obtain abortion care.
"The decision strips reproductive freedom away from Iowa women," said Sand. "No one should doubt Republicans are coming after contraception, surrogacy, and fertility treatments next, even though the majority of Iowans want those decisions to be made by women with their families and physicians."