American torture

My half-hour interview about Guantánamo, past, present and future, the US torture program and the plight of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, with Bob Connors and Tom Walker on the Peace and Justice Report, a show on Sarasota Community Radio in Florida.

In the week that “The Report” – the film about the Senate report into the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program – is released, I cross-post, with my own introduction, a revealing interview conducted by Vice News with the report’s main author, former Senate staffer Daniel J. Jones.

My analysis of the broken Periodic Review Board system at Guantánamo, a parole-type process introduced by President Obama, to assess whether or not prisoners regarded as “too dangerous to transfer but not feasible for prosecution” could be released. The PRBs recommended 38 prisoners for release under Obama, whilst approving the ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial of 26 others. Under Trump, however, the process has become meaningless, because not a single prisoner has been recommended for release, and, as a result, the prisoners are now boycotting the process, with the most recent example being Hassan bin Attash, a Saudi who was just 16 or 17 years old when he was seized in 2002, and who has now, shamefully, spent over half his life imprisoned without charge or trial.

My report about a little-noticed ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in the case of Abu Zubaydah, for whom the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program was developed, in which, for the first time, an appellate court has stated that he was tortured, and has also recognized that the Bush administration’s description of him as a member of Al-Qaeda was mistaken. My article also includes a cross-post of an article about the case by Joseph Margulies, who was one of Abu Zubaydah’s lawyers for over ten years.

On the 18th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, one of the bitterest legacies of the “war on terror” that the Bush administration declared in response is Guantánamo, where the men held are sinking into despair under Donald Trump, including one man, Sharqawi Al Hajj, who, just last month, attempted suicide, cutting his wrists with a piece of glass while on a phone call with his lawyer. How long can this injustice continue?

I report on disturbing news from the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), who explain that one of their Guantánamo clients, Sharqawi al-Hajj, a torture victim, “forever prisoner” and long-term hunger striker, “stated on a recent call with his attorney that he wanted to take his own life.”

Marking the 17th anniversary of the “torture memos,” written by John Yoo and approved by Jay S. Bybee, I look at how the US’s decision to embark on a torture program continues to undermine justice, as defense lawyers for the men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks are taking exception to claims that the use of torture on their clients can be sidestepped because “clean teams” of FBI agents later interrogated them non-coercively. The lawyers claim – and have evidence to back it up – that actually the “clean teams” were working quite closely with the CIA throughout the whole process.

My report about the publication of “CIA Torture Unredacted,” a 400-page report by Sam Raphael, Crofton Black and Ruth Blakeley, drawing on their nine years of research into the US’s post-9/11 torture program, and, over the last four years, their efforts to “unredact” key information concealed in the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report about the program, released in December 2014.

Publicizing a powerful new report, ‘Deprivation and Despair: The Crisis of Medical Care at Guantánamo,’ by the Center for Victims of Torture (CVT) and Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), thoroughly refuting claims by the US authorities that Guantánamo prisoners receive care equivalent to that of US service members.

This year, on the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, which I’ve been writing about most years since 2007, generally in relation to Guantánamo and the CIA torture program, I examine the latest horror story to emerge from the US, via Donald Trump’s migrant detention program, recently described by a visiting doctor as comparable “to torture facilities.”