Guantanamo op-eds

For the Guardian’s Comment is free, this is my take on the response of European governments to the proposed resettlement of Guantánamo prisoners who cannot be repatriated because of fears that they will be tortured, and, perhaps, to others who have not yet been cleared for release by the Pentagon, but against whom no case [...]

The answer ought to be yes, if the verdict of the Senate Armed Services Committee Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in US Custody is to mean anything.
The bipartisan report (PDF), based on a two-year investigation and released on December 11 by Senators Carl Levin and John McCain, concludes that the torture and abuse of [...]

During the election campaign, one of the sticks with which John McCain’s team attempted to beat Barack Obama was a claim that he was soft on terrorism, or, as Senator McCain’s national security director Randy Scheunemann declared to reporters in June, “Senator Obama is a perfect manifestation of a September 10th mind-set … He does [...]

On Sunday, in his first television interview since winning the Presidential election, Barack Obama repeated his campaign pledge to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay and to ban the use of torture by US forces. Speaking on 60 Minutes, he explained, “I have said repeatedly that I intend to close Guantánamo, and I will follow [...]

In the end, the election of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States struck me as both more and less extraordinary than I had anticipated. I suppose I thought it was in the bag when right-wing pundits started defecting, acknowledging that they couldn’t stomach the idea of Sarah Palin as President if [...]

Last week, Bill Kovach, former Washington Bureau Chief of the New York Times and the founding chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, blasted the US media for its failure to ask tough questions of both presidential candidates regarding their opinions of the Bush administration’s unprecedented adherence to the controversial “unitary executive theory” of government.
The [...]

“Contempt of court” is the title of an article I wrote for the Guardian’s “Comment is free” section today, in which I looked at the UK High Court’s latest judgment in the case of British resident and Guantánamo prisoner Binyam Mohamed, a victim of “extraordinary rendition” and torture who is engaged in a transatlantic struggle [...]

“Guantánamo’s bleak farce” is the title of an article I wrote for the Guardian’s “Comment is free” section today, in which I looked at the significance of the Pentagon’s announcement that it had dropped “war crimes” charges against five prisoners facing trial by Military Commission at Guantánamo (the novel system of trials for “terror suspects” [...]

“The trail of torture” is the title of an article I wrote for the Guardian’s “Comment is free” section today, in which I looked at yesterday’s revelation in the Washington Post that torture techniques, including waterboarding, had been approved for use by the CIA in two previously undisclosed secret memos issued by the White House [...]

Iraq, Iran, Russian, Pakistan, Afghanistan: It was an impressive foreign policy list in Friday’s Presidential debate, and by all sensible accounts Barack Obama did a decent job convincing Americans that his opponent may not be the expert that he claims to be.
Missing from the debate, however, as it has been since Obama clinched the Democratic [...]