Jose Padilla

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, [...]

In August 2008, while British resident Binyam Mohamed still languished in a prison cell in Guantánamo, two British High Court judges attempted to inform the public about what, in May 2002, the CIA had told their British counterparts about how they had treated him while he was being held in Pakistani custody, shortly before a [...]

Since the publication last week of the Senate Armed Services Committee’s report into detainee abuse in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo (PDF), much has been made of a footnote containing a comment made by Maj. Paul Burney, a psychiatrist with the Army’s 85th Medical Detachment’s Combat Stress Control Team, who, with two colleagues, was “hijacked” into [...]

Reinforcing claims made over the last few years — by FBI agents, by author Ron Suskind, and by myself — that the supposed senior al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah was less significant than he was made out to be, the Washington Post ran a front-page story yesterday, in which, drawing on interviews with “former senior government [...]

Two weeks ago, when the Obama administration announced that it was bringing to an end the disturbing isolation endured by Ali al-Marri, a US resident who has been held without charge or trial for seven years and two months — and who, most worryingly, has spent the last five years and nine months as an [...]

In brighter times, before a fog of fear descended on the United States, and the discourse of decent men and women was coarsened by an acceptance of the use of torture as a “no-brainer,” it would have been inconceivable that an American could have been held for seven years without charge or trial on the [...]

As the Washington Post reported yesterday, the US Justice Department has dropped the key allegation against British resident and Guantánamo prisoner Binyam Mohamed — that he was involved, with American citizen Jose Padilla, in a plot to detonate a “dirty bomb” in a US city.
For over three years, Binyam’s lawyers at Reprieve, the London-based legal [...]

Wake up, America! On July 15, the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled by 5 votes to 4 in the case of Al-Marri v. Pucciarelli (PDF) that the President can arrest US citizens and legal residents inside the United States and imprison them indefinitely, without charge or trial, based solely on his assertion [...]

The news that US citizen Jose Padilla has received a prison sentence of 17 years and four months should provoke outrage in the United States, although it is unlikely that there will be much more than a whimper of dissent.
The former gang member and convert to Islam –- whose arrest in May 2002 was trumpeted [...]

As the Fourth Circuit appeals court considers the case of Ali al-Marri, Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files, investigates the story of the last “enemy combatant” held without trial in Guantánamo’s shadowy American counterpart, the naval brig in Charleston, South Carolina.
Torture is defined in many ways. To the US administration, nothing that it ever [...]