It is difficult to know why the CDPP has decided now to officially go after David Hicks’ royalties. One wonders if it had anything to do with the warm reception and ovation he received when he spoke to “a packed audience of 1000 people at the Sydney Writers’ Festival” last May. At the same event, Hicks “also warned that Julian Assange could face a similar abandonment by the Australian government, if the US government get their hands on him.”

The WikiLeaks Guantanamo Files database has some significant omissions, not least the misidentification of detainee 990 as someone else. Detainee 990 was really Abdurahman Khadr and a CIA asset sent to Guantanamo to spy on his brother Omar Khadr and other prisoners. Another missing file concerns former U.S. citizen Yaser Hamdi, whose case was famously taken all the way to the Supreme Court.

Solitary confinement will slowly wear down the mental and physical condition of Bradley Manning, held in 23-hour isolation in the brig at Marine Corps Base Quantico, in Quantico, Virginia, the same facility that held John Hinckley, Jr. That is my assessment after talking to David House last weekend.

On Thursday, President Obama announced the results of his administration’s latest review of our war on Afghanistan. As expected, he reported that it was “on track.”

Just days after a new report (pdf) was released, providing further evidence that torture of detainees in Afghanistan continues at the “secret” site at Bagram Air Base, Reuters informs us that a detainee in NATO custody has been “found dead” in his cell.

The New York Times has a fresh story on the training of Afghan security forces, and despite making claims of training progress in the headline, the story documents, yet again, that US efforts to shape a Western security force in Afghanistan are failing.

BBC reports that the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has confirmed the existence of a second prison site at Bagram. The presence of a second site has long been suspected, a prison the Afghans call Tor Prison, or the “Black” Prison.

In the wake of the decision by the Justice Department to find the OLC lawyers who wrote the torture memo guilty only of “poor judgment” not professional misconduct, we need to take a closer look at the extreme views of one of the men exonerated and what this exoneration says about us as a nation and a people.