Afghanistan

This is the second article in “Bagram Week” here at Andy Worthington, with seven articles in total exploring what is happening at the main US prison in Afghanistan through reports, analyses of review boards, and the voices of the prisoners themselves, and ongoing updates to the definitive annotated Bagram prisoner list. So what’s happening at [...]

Every now and then, someone in the mainstream media cuts through the general — and shameful — indifference about Guantánamo, publishing a powerful story that should change hearts and minds. This is the case with a feature in the latest issue of GQ by Michael Paterniti about one of the more notorious cases of cruelty [...]

In a recent article, Spanish Court Gives Go-Ahead for Guantánamo Torture Investigation to Continue, I explained the significance of the recent decision by the Spanish National Court (Audiencia Nacional) to proceed with an investigation into torture at Guantánamo. The case is based on the country’s universal jurisdiction laws, and the court’s decision was described by [...]

Following the death at Guantánamo last week of Awal Gul, an Afghan held for nine years without charge or trial, his body was returned to his home country, where 5,000 people attended his funeral on Monday in the Najmul Jihad area of Jalalabad. With typical insensitivity, the US authorities responded to Gul’s death — apparently [...]

1. Since its founding in December 2006, WikiLeaks, which was established as, essentially, a secure information clearing house for whistleblowers around the world to provide sensitive information, some of which would then be released to the public, and which was reportedly set up by “Chinese dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and start-up company technologists, from the US, [...]

Time will tell if Labour’s new leader, Ed Miliband, is a genuine force for change, but I was impressed during his campaign that he so clearly recognized that the Labour Party had failed and that criticizing the electorate was both insulting and counter-productive. In an interview with the Guardian in August, for example, he stated, [...]

For years, we have been told by our elected leaders that US and British soldiers have been dying in Afghanistan to prevent al-Qaeda from committing another terrorist attack, or to keep them off the streets of Britain. On December 1, 2009, announcing a “surge” of 30,000 extra troops to Afghanistan, President Obama claimed in a [...]

On Friday September 3, in the District Court in Washington D.C., Judge John D. Bates handed another victory to the government in its ongoing effort to continue holding insignificant prisoners at Guantánamo, when he denied the habeas corpus petition of Shawali Khan, an Afghan prisoner. Khan was accused of providing assistance to members of Hezb-e-Islami [...]

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 [...]

Please support my work! 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 [...]