Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi

On August 11, Ibrahim al-Qosi, a 51-year old former cook and driver for Osama bin Laden, was given a 14-year sentence by a military jury, after pleading guilty to one count of conspiracy, and one count of providing material support to terrorism at an earlier hearing on July 7, as I reported here.
The sentence was [...]

On Friday, the Polish Border Guard Office released a number of documents to the Warsaw-based Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, which, for the first time, provide details of the number of prisoners transferred by the CIA to a secret prison in Poland between December 5, 2002 and September 22, 2003, and, in one case, the [...]

In the history of the “War on Terror,” few stories are as disturbing as that of Abu Zubaydah. Seized in Pakistan in March 2002, Zubaydah was initially regarded as a “high-value detainee” of such significance that the Bush administration conceived its torture program specifically for use on him, but the case against him has steadily [...]

To complement my recent article, “UN Human Rights Council Discusses Secret Detention Report,” in which I explained how, two weeks ago, the UN Human Rights Council had — after some delays — finally discussed the findings of the “Joint Study on Global Practices in Relation to Secret Detention in the Context of Counter-Terrorism,” a detailed, [...]

For eight and a half years, the US prison at Bagram airbase has been the site of a disturbing number of experiments in detention and interrogation, where murders have taken place, the Geneva Conventions have been shredded and the encroachment of the US courts — unlike at Guantánamo — has been thoroughly resisted.
In the last [...]

Note: This article is one of the last two articles published as part of “Guantánamo Habeas Week” (introduced here, and also see the articles here, here, here and here), which I extended to become “Guantánamo Habeas Fortnight.” This project also includes an interactive list of all 47 rulings to date (with links to my articles, [...]

The story of Abu Zubaydah — a Saudi-born Palestinian whose real name is Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn — has always been absolutely central to the “War on Terror.” Seized in a house raid in Faisalabad, Pakistan on March 28, 2002, he was immediately touted as “al-Qaeda’s chief of operations and top recruiter,” who would be [...]

Friday marked the seventh anniversary of the illegal invasion of Iraq, but by now, it seems, the American people have become used to living in a state of perpetual war, even though that war was based on torture and lies. Protestors rallied across the country on Saturday, but the anti-war impetus of the Bush years [...]

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 [...]

Over the weekend, 12 prisoners were released from Guantánamo, as the Justice Department announced in a press release on December 20. I have previously reported the stories of the two Somalis who were released — emphasizing how nothing about their cases demonstrated that they were “the worst of the worst” — and will soon be [...]