Binyam Mohamed

In sifting through the avalanche of US diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks, only the Guardian, in the Western media, has picked up on cables from Islamabad relating to the case of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, the Pakistani neuroscientist who disappeared with her three young children in Karachi on March 30, 2003, and did not reappear until [...]

In the Wandsworth Guardian, tenacious reporter Paul Cahalan has, for many years, covered the story of the former Battersea resident Shaker Aamer, who is still held in Guantánamo, despite being cleared for release by a military review board under the Bush administration in 2007. As has been revealed in the last few days, Shaker is [...]

The official announcement on Tuesday in the House of Commons, by Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke, that the govermment has reached a financial settlement with a number of former Guantánamo prisoners brings to an end a court case that promised to be long, expensive and full of disturbing revelations about British complicity in torture and abuse. [...]

Today, the British government will announce that it will pay millions of pounds in compensation to a number of former Guantánamo prisoners, including Moazzam Begg, Omar Deghayes, Binyam Mohamed, Bisher al-Rawi, Jamil El-Banna, Richard Belmar and Martin Mubanga, who, since last year, have been involved in a civil claim for damages against the intelligence agencies [...]

The mainstream media likes to claim that it has high journalistic standards, but when the opportunity for a sensational headline turns up, those principles are often abandoned. A recent example of this was the hysterical response to the supposed swine flu epidemic last year, and a new example — central to my work and that [...]

On Thursday, two Guantánamo prisoners were released, to start new lives in Germany, bringing the prison’s population to 174. Announcing their arrival, Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière stated that, by taking them in, Germany had “made its humanitarian contribution to closing the detention center.” He also noted that the two men had asked for their [...]

Sometimes a story is so troubling that it takes some time to digest, and the ruling delivered last Wednesday by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (PDF), in a lawsuit filed by the ACLU on behalf of five men subjected to “extraordinary rendition” and torture, is one such story. The men — Binyam Mohamed, Ahmed [...]

On Monday, the Pentagon announced that two prisoners had been released from Guantánamo. Abd al-Nisr Mohammed Khantumani, a 50-year old Syrian (also known as Abdul Nasir al-Tumani) was given a new home in Cape Verde, a former Portuguese colony off the West African coast, while Abdul Aziz Naji, a 35-year old Algerian, was repatriated to [...]

In a detailed and strongly-worded letter to Sir Peter Gibson, chosen by Prime Minster David Cameron to lead an inquiry into British complicity in the torture of British nationals and residents abroad, Clive Stafford Smith, the director of the legal action charity Reprieve, has called on Gibson to step down from his role as the [...]

With what the Guardian described yesterday as the “almost unprecedented” release of “security service reports of interviews with detainees in Guantánamo Bay and other overseas detention centres,” the coalition government failed in its attempt to persuade the High Court to bring a temporary halt to a civil claim for damages filed by six former Guantánamo [...]