Book reviews

Five and a half years ago, when I first began researching the stories of the Guantánamo prisoners in depth, for my book The Guantánamo Files, one of the most distinctive and resonant voices in defense of the prisoners and their trampled rights as human beings was Clive Stafford Smith, the director of the legal action [...]

On August 30, when In My Time, former Vice President Dick Cheney’s self-serving autobiography was published, the timing was pernicious. Cheney knows by now that every time he opens his mouth to endorse torture or to defend Guantánamo, the networks welcome him, and newspapers lavish column inches on his opinions, even though astute editors and [...]

In the US media, there’s a little bit of a buzz right now about the use of torture by the Bush administration, and much of it is the right sort of buzz — openly involving reminders that torture is a crime, and that, in addition, using torture is worthless if the aim is to produce [...]

With fortunate timing, an event is taking place tonight at Amnesty International’s Human Rights Action Centre in London, which sheds light on an unjust, but largely unexplored corner of the government’s counter-terrorism policies that was not mentioned in the policy changes announced yesterday by Home Secretary Theresa May. As I explain in a separate article [...]

Cageprisoners has just posted an excerpt from My Life with the Taliban by Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban government’s ambassador to Pakistan before the 9/11 attacks, who was seized by the Pakistani authorities a few months later. Handed over to the US authorities, he was one of a number of supposedly signficant prisoners held [...]

I was in the United States, campaigning against torture as part of “Berkeley Says No to Torture” Week, when a new book of essays by human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce, Dispatches from the Dark Side: On Torture and the Death of Justice, was published in the UK. In these essays, originally published in the London [...]

OK, I admit that the heading is more accurate in relation to Tony Blair’s sniping at Gordon Brown in his recently released memoir than it is to the issues that really concern us here — Iraq, Guantánamo, and the “War on Terror” — but I couldn’t resist using it. So what are Blair’s revelations about [...]

Published on November 9 by NYU Press (and available from Amazon), The Guantánamo Lawyers: Inside a Prison, Outside the Law, is edited by Mark Denbeaux (Seton Hall Law School) and Jonathan Hafetz (ACLU) and “contains over one hundred personal narratives from attorneys who have represented detainees held at ‘GTMO’ as well as at other overseas [...]

Every war produces its own iconic protestors. Vietnam, for example, had Ron Kovic, disabled in combat, and part of the campaigning group Vietnam Veterans Against the War, whose memoir, Born on the Fourth of July, was eventually made into a movie by Oliver Stone. One day, if the United States ever gets to look back [...]

When Torture Taxi, by Trevor Paglen, “an expert on clandestine military installations,” and crime journalist A.C. Thompson was published in the United States in September 2006, it was the first book to focus on the CIA’s programme of “extraordinary rendition,” in which, as the authors describe it, terror suspects “were taken to countries where they [...]