Guantanamo lawyers

In December, I was privileged to work with the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights on three reports about Guantánamo that were published to mark the 10th anniversary of the opening of the prison on January 11, 2012, and released at a press conference in Washington D.C. that I reported here. The three reports are [...]

Last week, I was in the US for a series of events to mark the 10th anniversary of the opening of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, which I wrote about here and here. I also made three TV appearances, and undertook seven radio interviews, one of which was covered here. Three other [...]

Yesterday, at “Guantánamo Forever?” an event at the New America Foundation in Washington D.C., attorney Tom Wilner and journalist Andy Worthington launched “Close Guantánamo,” a new campaign and website designed to provide education about the ongoing injustice of Guantánamo, to provide a focus for those who believe that the prison must be closed, and to [...]

Today, prisoners at Guantánamo will embark on a peaceful protest, involving sit-ins and hunger strikes, to protest about their continued detention, and the continued existence of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, three years after President Obama came to office promising to close it within a year, and to show their appreciation of the protests [...]

January 11, 2012 is a profoundly depressing anniversary — marking ten years since the Bush administration established its “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and decided that those who ended up in US custody would not be screened to ascertain whether or not they were combatants, and would be sent to Guantánamo to [...]

Last week, the Associated Press reported that officials at Guantánamo, stung by lawyers’ criticism of conditions in a disciplinary block known as “Five Echo,” had fought back against claims that the cells are too small to be regarded as humane, that the toilets are inadequate, the lights are too bright and the air in the [...]

Clive Stafford Smith, the director of the London-based legal action charity Reprieve, has just visited Guantánamo, for the first time in a number of years, as his colleagues have been undertaking visits instead, and has returned with a renewed sense of horror at the continued existence of Guantánamo, that bleak icon of the Bush administration’s [...]

Over the last few years, my colleague Jason Leopold at Truthout has been doggedly pursuing a number of important stories about the Bush administration’s torture program, and the lack of accountability for those who authorized or implemented aspects of the program. Working sometimes with the psychologist and blogger Jeff Kaye, Leopold has investigated human experimentation [...]

Regular readers will know that the Guantánamo prisoners’ habeas corpus petitions led to the release of 26 prisoners between December 2008 and January 2011, providing confirmation that the US courts were able to address mistakes made by the Bush administration in rounding up “detainees” in its “War on Terror,” to expose those mistakes, and even [...]

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 [...]