Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

On national security issues, there are now two Americas. In the first, which existed from January to May 2009, the rule of law flickered briefly back to life after eight years of the Bush administration. In this first America, President Obama swept into office issuing executive orders promising to close Guantánamo and to uphold the [...]

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 [...]

With just days to go before George W. Bush’s memoir, Decision Points, hits bookstores (on November 9), and with reports on the book’s contents doing the rounds after review copies were made available to the New York Times and Reuters, it will be interesting to see how many media outlets allow the former President the [...]

This is the second (and final) part of the transcript of an Intelligence Squared U.S. debate, “Treat terrorists like enemy combatants, not criminals,” held in New York on September 14. The first part is here. The motion was proposed by former CIA director Gen. Michael Hayden and torture apologist Marc Thiessen, and opposed by Lt. [...]

On September 14, Intelligence Squared U.S., an organization founded in 2006 that holds “Oxford-style debates” in New York, with high-profile figures discussing hot political topics, held a debate on the motion, “Treat terrorists like enemy combatants, not criminals,” which was proposed by former CIA director Gen. Michael Hayden and torture apologist Marc Thiessen, and opposed [...]

On Friday, in his first press conference since May, President Obama was concerned primarily with the economy, but also found time to answer a couple of questions about Guantánamo that were put to him by Ann Compton of ABC News Radio. For the most part, the media overlooked this section of the press conference, focusing [...]

The mainstream media in the United States (and in the UK) has ignored the release last week of documents in Poland confirming that planes chartered by the CIA flew to the site of a secret CIA prison in north eastern Poland in 2002 and 2003. The documents, released by the Polish Border Guard Office, confirm [...]

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 [...]

Last Thursday, Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), the Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, released the previously undisclosed testimony of Jay S. Bybee, delivered to the Committee on May 26 as part of its investigations into advice given by Justice Department lawyers to the Bush administration regarding the use of torture in the “War on Terror.” [...]

To mark the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, I have an article published on Truthout (which I’ll be publishing here tomorrow) and have just posted an article featuring statements by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and other UN experts, but in the meantime I thought this was a good opportunity to mark the [...]