Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi

Two weeks ago, in light of the uprising in Tunisia that brought to an end the 23-year reign of terror of President Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali, I wrote an article about the twelve Tunisians held in Guantánamo throughout the prison’s nine-year history — the two men transferred to Tunisia in June 2007, who were subsequently [...]

For the United States and other Western countries, the popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt (which threaten to spread to other countries, including Yemen and Algeria) are something of a nightmare. Just as the authorities in these countries are struggling — and failing — to cope with popular uprisings, so too the United States and [...]

For T. S. Eliot, April was the cruelest month, but for the prisoners at Guantánamo it is January — from the dashed hopes of January 2009, when President Obama swept into office issuing an executive order in which he promised to close the prison within a year, to January 2010, when, having failed to do [...]

In sifting through the avalanche of US diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks, only the Guardian, in the Western media, has picked up on cables from Islamabad relating to the case of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, the Pakistani neuroscientist who disappeared with her three young children in Karachi on March 30, 2003, and did not reappear until [...]

In one narrative of the “War on Terror,” President Bush scrapped the protections of the Geneva Conventions — including Common Article 3, which prohibits “cruel treatment and torture” and “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.” — for prisoners at Guantánamo, and established the prison as an offshore interrogation center to protect [...]

Forgive me, dear readers, for bombarding you with articles about the financial settlement recently reached between the British government, 15 former Guantánamo prisoners and Shaker Aamer, the remaining British resident in Guantánamo, and for repeating, over the last week, since this story first broke, that sustained pressure must be exerted on both the British and American goverments to [...]

The mainstream media likes to claim that it has high journalistic standards, but when the opportunity for a sensational headline turns up, those principles are often abandoned. A recent example of this was the hysterical response to the supposed swine flu epidemic last year, and a new example — central to my work and that [...]

This is the sixth part of a nine-part series telling the stories of all the prisoners currently held in Guantánamo (174 at the time of writing). See the introduction here, and Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five and Part Seven. This sixth article tells the stories of 14 prisoners seized in [...]

I’m cross-posting below an extraordinary account by former Guantánamo prisoner (and Cageprisoners director) Moazzam Begg of his first visit to Pakistan since he was abducted from his house in Islamabad on January 31, 2002, and subsequently held in US custody — in Afghanistan and at Guantánamo — for three years. Moazzam’s account includes retracing his [...]

On Tuesday evening — the day before Colonel Muammar Gaddafi marked the 41st anniversary of the coup that brought him to power — 37 political prisoners were released from the notorious Abu Salim prison in Tripoli, site of a brutal massacre of prisoners in 1996, when up to 1,200 men were murdered. Although the release [...]