Afghanistan

A major new report on secret detention policies around the world, conducted by four independent UN human rights experts, concludes that, “On a global scale, secret detention in connection with counter-terrorist policies remains a serious problem,” and that, “If resorted to in a widespread and systematic manner, secret detention might reach the threshold of a [...]

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On Friday January 15, 2010, the Pentagon responded to a FOIA request submitted by the ACLU last April, and released (PDF) the first ever list of 645 prisoners held, as of September 22, 2009, in the US prison at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan (the Bagram Theater Internment Facility), which has been [...]

At Guantánamo, as was recently revealed in the ruling of a District Court judge in the habeas corpus petition of one of the remaining 222 prisoners, the authorities’ view about the prisoners, back in 2003 or 2004, was that “there is no innocent person here.” The man who spoke these words was an unidentified senior [...]

Last year, I received one of those special emails out of the blue, from someone wise and compassionate, who, to my great delight, wished to thank me for the courage of my writing. This woman, who has worked in rural development and post-disaster rehabilitation for 20 years, mostly in Africa, has spent the last few [...]

Earlier today I published an exclusive article about Mohammed Jawad, the Afghan prisoner, seized as a teenager, who was freed from Guantánamo last month, in which Maj. David Frakt, his military defense attorney (who also represented him in the habeas corpus case that resulted in his release) described the contributions made by other members of [...]

On August 24, Mohammed Jawad, an Afghan prisoner who was, perhaps, as young as 12 when he was seized after a grenade attack in Kabul in December 2002 and transported to Guantánamo, was finally freed after his habeas corpus petition was granted, and returned to Afghanistan, where he was welcomed by President Hamid Karzai, who [...]

On Friday, in the New York Times, James Risen resuscitated a story that some commentators — myself included — presumed had dropped off the radar, never to be heard of again. The story concerns the massacre of at least 1,500 prisoners in northern Afghanistan at the end of November 2001, after the fall of the [...]

“A New Beginning”
Delivered at Cairo University
I am honored to be in the timeless city of Cairo, and to be hosted by two remarkable institutions. For over a thousand years, Al-Azhar has stood as a beacon of Islamic learning, and for over a century, Cairo University has been a source of Egypt’s advancement. Together, you represent [...]

In all the recent hysteria about the supposed dangers posed by the remaining 240 prisoners at Guantánamo, it has been easy to forget that sensible appraisals of the number of individuals with any meaningful connection to terrorism have long indicated that no more than a few dozen of those still held should be regarded as [...]

As regular readers know, I don’t normally cross-post articles from other sites, but I’m making an exception for this guest column in the Washington Note by Lawrence Wilkerson, the Chief of Staff of former Secretary of State Colin Powell, because it addresses some crucial aspects of the Bush administration’s detention policy in the “War on [...]