Guantanamo

Last week, when the High Court ordered the release of documents relating to alleged British complicity in the torture and ill-treatment of British nationals in US custody, as part of a civil claim for damages filed by six former Guantánamo prisoners, 16 pages of those documents related to interrogations by British agents of one of [...]

In the last week, Omar Khadr, the only Western citizen still held in Guantánamo, has sacked his US lawyers and stated that he will boycott his forthcoming trial by Military Commission, scheduled to begin on August 10. He has also refused to have anything to do with a plea deal that was being negotiated between [...]

Those of us committed to hammering away at Dick Cheney’s “Dark Side” in an effort to restore some sanity to the world, to call to accountability those who turned America into a “Torture Nation,” and to call for justice or freedom for those imprisoned as part of the “War on Terror,” count on a network [...]

With what the Guardian described yesterday as the “almost unprecedented” release of “security service reports of interviews with detainees in Guantánamo Bay and other overseas detention centres,” the coalition government failed in its attempt to persuade the High Court to bring a temporary halt to a civil claim for damages filed by six former Guantánamo [...]

Finally! 48 days after a District Court judge ordered the release of Mohammed Hassan Odaini, a Yemeni prisoner in Guantánamo, the Obama administration has sent him home.
Odaini’s case had become an embarrassment for the administration, which had been obliged to concede that it had no basis on which to appeal the judge’s decision. As an [...]

On Thursday, in the District Court in Washington D.C., Judge Paul Friedman took the tally of victories by the Guantánamo prisoners to 37, out of 51 cases decided, when he granted the habeas corpus petition of Hussein Almerfedi, a 33-year old Yemeni, and instructed the Obama administration to “take all necessary and appropriate steps to [...]

Human rights campaigners have reacted with cautious optimism to the British government’s official announcement of a judicial inquiry into the involvement of the British security services — MI5 and MI6 — in torture and rendition since the 9/11 attacks, although many pressing questions are, as yet, unanswered.
These concern the scope of the inquiry, its transparency [...]

In an alleged victory for the Military Commission trial system for terror suspects at Guantánamo, revived by President Obama last year despite the fact that he suspended the Commissions on his first day in office, a Sudanese prisoner, Ibrahim al-Qosi, accepted a plea bargain yesterday, and made a guilty plea on one count of conspiracy [...]

Last week, in the first of two articles examining how “War on Terror”-related complicity in torture is under intense scrutiny in Europe, I ran through the history of Britain’s post-9/11 involvement in US torture, and its extensive forays into holding people without charge or trial in the UK, attempting to send foreign nationals back to [...]

Back in August 2007, I reported the story of Muqit Vohidov and Rukhniddin Sharopov, Tajik prisoners in Guantánamo, released in March 2007, who had just been sentenced to 17 years in “high-security penal colonies” (aka labor camps) for “serving as mercenaries in Afghanistan.” The two men were convicted of aiding the Taliban by fighting for [...]