Life after Guantanamo

Yesterday, former Guantánamo prisoner Adel al-Gazzar (aka Adel El-Gazzar), who had been living in Slovakia since being freed last January from America’s notorious prison on Cuban soil, returned, for the first time in ten years, to his home county, Egypt, where he was promptly arrested. This was not because of anything he had done, but [...]

Back in January, in the first glow of the liberation of Tunisia from the iron grip of its long-term dictator Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali, I wrote an article about the 12 Tunisian prisoners held at Guantánamo, and followed this up, in the first week in February, with another article examining how, in Tunisia, one former [...]

I’m delighted to cross-post below an interview with Khaled Ben Mustapha, one of seven French citizens held at Guantánamo, who was released in March 2005, and who recently spoke to Arnaud Mafille, an intern for Cageprisoners. This is a fascinating interview for a number of reasons; primarily, because of Ben Mustapha’s reflections on his time [...]

The gulf between what’s happening on the ground in the Middle East and the way it is perceived by the US intelligence services — as well as the gulf between how critics perceive America’s counterterrorism policies in the Middle East, and how those policies are perceived by US intelligence — were recently exposed in an [...]

Every now and then, someone in the mainstream media cuts through the general — and shameful — indifference about Guantánamo, publishing a powerful story that should change hearts and minds. This is the case with a feature in the latest issue of GQ by Michael Paterniti about one of the more notorious cases of cruelty [...]

In Tunisia, where the revolutionary impulses that are sweeping the Middle East began less than three months ago, with the self-immolation of 26-year old Mohamed Bouazizi, the flight of the dictator Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali, on January 14, was not just the end of a hated 31-year tyranny, but also the start of a determination [...]

Colonel Gaddafi has long demonstrated a fundamental disregard for the life of the Libyan people. Not content with murdering 1,200 prisoners in the Abu Salim prison massacre in June 1996, he then allowed men like Fouad Assad ben Omran, who recently spoke to Lindsey Hilsum of Channel 4 News, to make the journey to the [...]

“Now people are dying we’ve got nothing else to live for. What needs to happen is for the killing to stop. But that won’t happen until he [Gaddafi] is out. We just want to be able to live like human beings. Nothing will happen until protests really kick off in Tripoli, the capital. It’s like [...]

I recently cross-posted a fascinating article by my friend and colleague Jason Leopold, explaining how he had approached former Guantánamo prisoner David Hicks for an interview, after reading his autobiography, Guantánamo: My Journey, and how the encounter had challenged and affected him deeply. As a follow-up, I’m now cross-posting the full interview below, in which [...]

My friend and colleague Jason Leopold is a fascinating man, as anyone who has read his no-holds-barred confessional, News Junkie, can attest. In that book, Jason described the drug hell he inhabited, haunted by demons while striving to be a fabulously well-known and significant investigative reporter, how his life came crashing down after he achieved [...]