Conditions at Guantanamo

Every now and then, when the authorities at Guantánamo want to demonstrate how well catered for the prisoners are, a story emerges that purports to demonstrate how well-stocked the prison library is, and how the prisoners are enjoying a range of titles, including J.K. Rowling’s best-selling series of Harry Potter novels. The first time I [...]

As of today, the results of the Guantánamo prisoners’ habeas corpus petitions stand at 38 victories for the prisoners against 15 victories for the government, after two recent rulings. On July 21, Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. granted the habeas petition of Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, a 34-year old Yemeni, while, in another courtroom, Judge [...]

Sometimes the truth is so sickening that no one in a position of authority — senior government officials, lawmakers, the mainstream media — wants to go anywhere near it. This appears to be the case with the deaths of three men at Guantánamo on June 9, 2006. According to the official version of events, Salah [...]

On April 30, 2010, as I explained in Part One and Part Two of this three-part transcript, The UC Davis Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas organized an event to mark the fifth anniversary of its excellent Guantánamo Testimonials Project, which, for the first time, enabled a discussion to take place, [...]

On April 30, 2010, as I explained in Part One of this three-part transcript, The UC Davis Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas organized an event to mark the fifth anniversary of its excellent Guantánamo Testimonials Project, which, for the first time, enabled a discussion to take place, before an American [...]

On April 30, 2010, The UC Davis Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas organized an event to mark the fifth anniversary of its excellent Guantánamo Testimonials Project. Entitled “Guantánamo: A conversation this side of the wire,” the event enabled, for the first time, a discussion to take place, before an American [...]

Are we so inured to the implementation of torture by the Bush administration that we no longer recognize what torture is? Torture, according to the UN Convention Against Torture, to which the US is a signatory, is “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person [...]

I’ve helped unleash a blogging monster! Two weeks ago, I was delighted to receive an email from Morris Davis, the retired Air Force colonel and former chief prosecutor for the Military Commissions at Guantánamo Bay, who resigned when placed in a chain of command under the Pentagon’s General Counsel William J. Haynes II. As he [...]

Such is the prevailing disregard for the fate of the 183 prisoners remaining in Guantánamo that last week, when Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, the Chief of Staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, submitted a declaration in a case brought by a former prisoner, in which he stated, unambiguously, that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney [...]

It’s hard to know where to begin with this profoundly important story by Scott Horton, for next month’s Harper’s Magazine (available on the web here), but let’s try this: The three “suicides” at Guantánamo in June 2006 were not suicides at all. The men in question were killed during interrogations in a secretive block in [...]