Closing Guantanamo: Where has the debate gone?

Closing Guantanamo: Where has the debate gone?Please join the Program on Human Rights for a discussion with Shane Kadidal - Senior Managing Attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights -on why the issue of closing the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center has all but disappeared as a matter of public discourse.

The Supreme Court’s Guantanamo detainee cases have attracted more attention than any other judicial decisions in the wake of 9/11, and the opinions are frequently required reading in law schools. Yet more than seven years after the decision in Rasul v. Bush and three years after the decision in Boumediene v. Bush, not a single detainee has been released by court order, the litigation has ground to a halt in the district courts, and the prison remains open despite the promises of both presidential candidates in the last election to close it. This talk will explore the reasons why, with particular emphasis on the manner in which the D.C. Circuit has managed, with some subtlety, to pull all the teeth from the Boumediene decision.
 
Shayana Kadidal is senior managing attorney of the Guantánamo Global Justice Initiative at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City. He is a graduate of the Yale Law School and a former law clerk to Judge Kermit Lipez of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. In his ten years at the Center, he has worked on a number of significant cases in the wake of 9/11, including the Center's challenges to the detention of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay (among them torture victim Mohammed al Qahtani and former CIA ghost detainee Majid Khan), which have twice reached the Supreme Court, and several cases arising out of the post-9/11 domestic immigration sweeps. He was also counsel in CCR's legal challenges to the “material support” statute (decided by the Supreme Court in 2010), to the low rates of black firefighter hiring in New York City, and to the NSA’s warrantless surveillance program