A Yemeni prisoner at the Guantanamo Bay prison, who has been participating in a hunger strike which has been ongoing for weeks, has requested “emergency humanitarian relief” from a federal district court because prisoners are being denied access to potable water.

The motion for emergency relief filed on March 26 by his attorneys asserts, “For the past three days, prison authorities have denied” Musa’ab Omar al Madhwani – “and others within his and one other cell block – access to potable water. When Musa’ab and his fellow prisoners requested drinking water, the guards told them to drink from the faucets.

President Barack Obama signed the intelligence authorization bill—the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Included in the bill were restrictions that would make it harder for his administration to transfer detainees from Guantanamo Bay prison and the Bagram prison in Afghanistan.

The US has handed over the prison at Bagram Air Force base to Afghanistan, in the latest in a series of transitions to have the Afghans take control of their own security. The prison transfer was part of a bargain won months ago by Afghan President Hamid Karzai. However, hundreds of prisoners at the facility remain under US control.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) has released a major new report detailing how the Bush Administration and other allied governments tortured and imprisoned opponents of former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. The prisoners were then rendered to Gaddafi’s own prisons where many of them were tortured.

The United States and Afghanistan have signed a deal to transfer all prisoners in the military-run prisons at Bagram Air Force Base to the control of the Afghans, a move that paves the way for a long-term security arrangement.

The Strategic Partnership Agreement, which Washington and Kabul have been discussing for over a year, will be the framework for U.S. involvement in Afghanistan beyond 2014, when the last foreign combat troops are due to leave Afghanistan.

Negotiations in Afghanistan on a long-term military agreement are breaking down because of resistance to night raids by US forces and US-run prisons. There’s also the fact that Afghans and Pakistanis, like most people I assume, don’t particularly like it when you kill their citizens and desecrate their most sacred rituals. Just recently, t he US and NATO apologized for inadvertently burning Korans at one of their air bases

The focus on Guantanamo over the past couple years has hidden the fact that the number of detainees there has been dissipating somewhat. The number of detainees at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan has exploded, with detainees captured throughout the world moved over to Bagram and shielded from any habeas proceedings. Bagram has become the black hole. So it’s good news, on its face, that the Administration wants to repatriate non-Afghan detainees out of Bagram.

Walter Pincus was the guy at the Washington Post known for writing skeptical stories about the Iraq debacle that wound up on page A17. He still gets that level of respect today, even when he’s got better information than anyone else. In this case, Pincus advances the story of permanent bases in Afghanistan (I’m calling them permanent bases, even if they end up being “joint bases” in the end), by taking a look at the construction contracts.

The voices of the tortured keep speaking to me. They will not be quieted. They will continuing speaking long after I am old and gone. Will they be heard, or buried again in a spiritual dungeon built out of human indifference, ignorance, and fear?

When the votes were tallied on the night of November 2, 2008, I was at a bar in Moab, Utah – the one rabid Democratic stronghold in a rabidly Republican state – to enjoy the hysteria as Barack Obama was summoned to lead the country out of the disaster of eight years of George W. Bush. People shook hands, hooted, clinked glasses, got drunk, raised fists, wept. The good liberals had elected a visionary Democrat to the presidency, who, blessed with a Democratic majority in Congress, would fashion “hope” and “change” into a palpable policy. I was told that in parts of Brooklyn, my hometown, voters ran through the streets banging pots and pans. The feeling was of religious jubilee – the new dispensation was upon us, and 2009 would mark the emancipation from the old rottenness. Corruption and fraud and deceit and war and oligarchy would be washed from the body politic. It was the beginning of the restoration of the republic.