Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

Regular readers will know that I have long been concerned by the case of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, the Pakistani neuroscientist whose story is one of the murkiest in the whole of the “War on Terror.” Dr. Siddiqui disappeared with her three children in Karachi in March 2003, and for five years neither the US nor [...]

Last Monday, Moazzam Begg (former Guantánamo prisoner and the director of the NGO Cageprisoners) and I flew out to Poland to take part in a week-long tour of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (which I co-directed with filmmaker Polly Nash) to raise awareness of the plight of the remaining 172 prisoners [...]

For those of us seeking a grown-up debate about Guantánamo in the two years since President Obama came into office, the most troubling development has been the retrenchment of Republican opposition to the closure of the prison, backed up by alarming support for the pro-Guantánamo position by members of the President’s own party. Like a [...]

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 [...]

With just two weeks to go before the ninth anniversary of the opening of the “War on Terror” prison at Guantánamo, almost everyone in a position of authority in the US has failed to resolve, in a satisfactory manner, the bitter legacy left by the Bush administration. In fact, to judge by two recent developments, [...]

How messed up is American politics? Well, here are a few clues. Two weeks ago, the House of Representatives passed a $1.1 trillion continuing resolution, which funds the government through to September 30 next year. As The Hill explained, the resolution was needed “because Congress failed to pass any of the 12 regular appropriations bills [...]

Just when it seemed that President Obama’s paralysis regarding Guantánamo couldn’t get any worse — with any further trials or prisoner releases apparently on permanent hold because any other course of action would be politically inconvenient — the House of Representatives and the Director of National Intelligence have stepped in to make the prospect of [...]

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 [...]

On Wednesday December 1, from 6.30 to 9.30 pm, I’ll be discussing the fate of Aafia Siddiqui at the London Muslim Centre, 46-92 Whitechapel Road, London, E1 1JX, with other speakers including Moazzam Begg, former Guantánamo prisoner and the director of Cageprisoners, and the journalist Yvonne Ridley, who is a patron of Cageprisoners, and has [...]

To listen to certain Republican critics of last week’s verdict in the federal court trial of the Tanzanian Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a former Guantánamo prisoner and a former CIA “ghost prisoner,” you would think that the jury had found him not guilty, and that he had been released onto the streets of New York. In [...]