Extraordinary rendition and secret prisons

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

On Friday, perhaps as a sop to critics — myself included — who have been complaining about President Obama’s failure to close Guantánamo by his self-imposed deadline of January 22, 2010, the Justice Department announced in a press release that two Algerian prisoners had been released.
Releasing prisoners to Algeria has always been a dubious business, [...]

On Friday, the ACLU secured a significant victory in its campaign to secure information about the prisoners held in the US prison at Bagram airbase, Afghanistan (known as the Bagram Theater Internment Facility), when the Pentagon released a list of the names of the 645 prisoners who were held on September 22, 2009 (PDF).
Even so, [...]

The weekend before Christmas, 12 prisoners were released from Guantánamo. In two previous articles, I told the stories of six of these men — two Somalis and four Afghans — and in this final article I look at the stories of the six Yemenis who were also released. These releases were enormously important, because Yemenis [...]