President Obama has again disappointed many who believed in his promises. This time it was his election pledge to close Guantanamo. Any doubt about his abandoning his once ironclad promise of closing the prison looks distant, if it ever happens at all during his watch, specially since last night he gave the green light for military trials to resume there and even established rules to hold some of the detainees indefinitely. Read the rest of this entry »

After five days of deliberations, the trial of Ahmed Ghailani ended with the jury finding him not guilty on all but one of 286 charges. He was the first Guantanamo detainee to be tried in a civilian court and his case was seen as a test of President Obama goal of trying the Guantanamo detainees in federal court. Read the rest of this entry »

Thirty five years after the death of the Spanish dictator Franco, Falange, the fascist Spanish party is still active in Spain. Now, together with Manos Limpias, a Spanish ultra-right civil servants’ trade union organization, they have filed a case against judge Baltasar Garzón, internationally well know for indicting Osama bin Laden and the Chilean dictator Pinochet. Read the rest of this entry »

The whole world knows that when Barack Obama was inaugurated president he arrived to the Oval Office to find severe problems left by his predecessor. But Obama has already been president for one year and things have not improved. Read the rest of this entry »

President Obama has been less than nine months in office when he won the Nobel Peace Prize this Friday. It seems the decision took even the audience in the Norwegian capital of Oslo by surprise. But not only there. The world is in a state of disbelief and divided about the award. Read the rest of this entry »

While the war in Afghanistan and how to solve it is all over the media and everybody is offering different points of view to avoid another Vietnam quagmire, very few, from the American government on, talk or even think about the infamous Bagram military prison in the middle of the Afghan country. Read the rest of this entry »

In the last days most of the talk in the US is about health care. I already wrote about it on June 29th and on July 9th and with the many and very different proposals being on the table at the moment, I intend to keep a close track on the new developments. In the meanwhile, I want to go back to Guantanamo, which Obama had said he wanted closed. Read the rest of this entry »