American torture

To coincide with the publication of my article, “What Torture Is, and Why It’s Illegal and Not ‘Poor Judgment,’” in which I revisited the scandalous whitewash of the Justice Department report into the conduct of John Yoo and Jay Bybee (the lawyers who sought to redefine torture in the notorious “torture memos” of August 2002), [...]

It’s now over three weeks since veteran Justice Department lawyer David Margolis dashed the hopes of those seeking accountability for the Bush administration’s torturers, but this is a story of such profound importance that it must not be allowed to slip away.
Margolis decided that an internal report (PDF) into the conduct of John Yoo and [...]

On February 10, the Court of Appeal brought to an end an 18-month campaign by foreign secretary David Miliband to prevent the publication of a short summary, prepared by two High Court judges, explaining how US agents had subjected the British resident Binyam Mohamed to what was described as “at the very least cruel, inhuman [...]

In a principled editorial on Wednesday, the New York Times responded to the internal Justice Department report on the conduct of lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel, in which the authors’ findings — that John Yoo and Jay Bybee were guilty of “professional misconduct”, and should be referred to their respective bar associations for [...]

The long-awaited report by the OPR (the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility) into the conduct of the lawyers in the OLC (Office of Legal Counsel), regarding their role in approving the use of torture, has finally been published (PDF).
The report largely focuses on two memos dated August 1, 2002, and a third dated March [...]

Yesterday, I took part in “The Big Questions” with Nicky Campbell on BBC1 (available on iPlayer here for the next week). The bi-weekly discussion show, which tours the country and covers three topics each fortnight, alighted on a Christian school in York on Sunday, and featured around a dozen “experts” on various topics (myself included) [...]

Three senior UK judges on Wednesday ordered the British government to publicly disclose previously classified information that reveals how Binyam Mohamed, a British resident, was tortured by the CIA while in Pakistani custody in April and May 2002.
In one short session, the Court of Appeal brought an end to a transatlantic game of cat and [...]

In December, lawyers for Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, won an important court case in which judges ordered the British government to release information in its possession regarding claims that MI5 agents were present in the US prison in Kandahar, Afghanistan, when Shaker Aamer was subjected to torture, prior to his transfer [...]

On January 15, 2010, the Pentagon released the first ever list of prisoners held in the Bagram Theater Internment Facility, the main US prison in Afghanistan for the last eight years (PDF). An annotated version of the list is available here. In a previous article, “Dark Revelations in the Bagram Prisoner List,” I examined the [...]

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 [...]