Guantanamo op-eds

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. [...]

“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 [...]

While pundits have been busy analyzing Friday’s Presidential debate, no one has been talking about a crucial issue that has completely disappeared from the election campaign since Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination in August, even though it is absolutely central to the complaints about the Bush administration’s behaviour over the last seven years. The [...]

“Bush’s Bitter Legacy” is the title of an article I wrote for the Guardian’s “Comment is free” section today, in which I briefly ran through the legal and moral desolation of the Bush administration’s “War on Terror,” and pointed out that, although both Barack Obama and John McCain have pledged to close Guantánamo (the most [...]

Just when you think that there can be no more outrageous proposals from the current Lame Duck government, and that it’s down to a straight race between Barack Obama, a man with profound respect for the rule of law, and John McCain, who, I fear, may allow the malign spirits of Dick Cheney and David [...]

“Diego Garcia: the UK’s shame” is the title of an article I wrote for the Guardian’s “Comment is free” section today, which follows revelations in TIME magazine that a senior US official, who was present in the White House Situation Room in 2002, recalled two occasions on which a CIA representative talked about a secret [...]