Abu Zubaydah

With just over two months to go until President Obama’s deadline for the closure of Guantanamo, the administration has finally woken up to the necessity of actually doing something to facilitate the prison’s closure by announcing on Friday that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other prisoners accused of involvement in the terrorist attacks of September [...]

Today was supposed to be the day that the Justice Department — after two delays — released an unclassified version of the CIA Inspector General’s 2004 Report into the interrogations of “high-value detainees” in the “War on Terror,” which Democrat Congressional staffers described as the “holy grail,” according to Greg Sargent of the Plum Line, [...]

In a guest column for the “Accountability for Torture” initiative organized by the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files, follows up on an article about the UN International Day in Support of Victims of Torture (and a cross-post of an interview with the wife of rendition victim Abou Elkassim [...]

In a world exclusive, Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files, reveals new information, from a source in Libya, about Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the former US “ghost prisoner” who died in a Libyan jail last month, focusing, in particular, on the prisons in which he was held, and the ways in which torture was used [...]

Using some old-fashioned clerical detective work, Reprieve, the legal action charity that represents around 10 percent of the remaining 240 prisoners in Guantánamo, has compiled a report, “Ghost Detention on Diego Garcia” (PDF), identifying one of two prisoners rendered through the British Overseas Territory of Diego Garcia as Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni (and tentatively identifying [...]

As the Obama administration prepares to relaunch Dick Cheney and David Addington’s reviled Military Commissions (with claims that they will be used for less than 20 of the 240 prisoners still held), senior officials have been largely silent about the eventual fate of the rest of the prison’s population, with the exception of a few [...]

The reawakening of the biggest scandal in the whole of the Bush administration’s bleak and brutal tenure — the fact that prisoners in the “War on Terror” were tortured not to protect America, but to find excuses to justify the invasion of Iraq — began three weeks ago, with a surprising revelation in the [...]

David Remes, an attorney for 16 Yemeni prisoners in Guantánamo, claimed today that the government’s detention policy was “in tatters,” after District Court Judge Gladys Kessler (photo, left) comprehensively demolished the Justice Department’s case against a Yemeni prisoner held in Guantánamo without charge or trial for seven years (PDF).
Judge Kessler ruled last Monday that the [...]

After I picked up on the breaking story of the death of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi on Sunday evening (with follow-up articles here and here), there was considerable interest from bloggers, including, in particular, the Brad Blog and Empty Wheel at Firedoglake, before the mainstream media finally picked up on it.
It remains to be seen whether [...]

For new readers, this article provides an overview of the story of the death of US “high-value detainee” Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, his “extraordinary rendition” by the CIA, and the torture that led to his false confession about a connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. It draws on my article yesterday, announcing his death, and another [...]