Murat Kurnaz

As former US President George W. Bush arrives in Canada today to address a regional economic summit, where attendees will pay $599 a head to hear him and former President Bill Clinton as featured speakers, human right groups opposed to Bush’s visit, having petitioned the government to intervene, but with no response, are initiating a [...]

Please support my work! Freelance investigative journalist Andy Worthington continues his 70-part, million-word series telling, for the first time, the stories of 776 of the 779 prisoners held at Guantánamo since the prison opened on January 11, 2002. Adding information released by WikiLeaks in April 2011 to the existing documentation about the prisoners, much of [...]

For Truthout, my colleague Jeffrey Kaye, who is a full-time psychologist but somehow manages also to pursue a second career as a blogger, has just written an article about the use of water torture at Guantánamo (and elsewhere in the “War on Terror”), which has been securing excellent coverage online. I’m delighted to discover that [...]

In an 11-minute interview with Russia Today (see below), former Guantánamo prisoner Murat Kurnaz recalled how he was seized in Pakistan in November 2001, and his experiences in US custody in Afghanistan and at Guantánamo. Born in Germany, but only regarded as a resident because his parents are Turkish, Kurnaz was released in August 2006, [...]

Last week, in the first of two articles examining how “War on Terror”-related complicity in torture is under intense scrutiny in Europe, I ran through the history of Britain’s post-9/11 involvement in US torture, and its extensive forays into holding people without charge or trial in the UK, attempting to send foreign nationals back to [...]

To complement my recent article, “UN Human Rights Council Discusses Secret Detention Report,” in which I explained how, two weeks ago, the UN Human Rights Council had — after some delays — finally discussed the findings of the “Joint Study on Global Practices in Relation to Secret Detention in the Context of Counter-Terrorism,” a detailed, [...]

Two years and two months after three prisoners at Guantánamo died, apparently as the result of a coordinated suicide pact, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), which has been investigating the deaths ever since the three long-term hunger strikers were found dead in their cells on June 10, 2006, issued a 934-word statement on Friday [...]

On Thursday April 24, I was invited to take part in the Riz Khan show on al-Jazeera, with released Guantánamo prisoner Murat Kurnaz, and Paul Glastris, the editor-in-chief of Washington Monthly, whose latest issue features an extraordinary roll-call of politicians, military figures and other experts condemning the US administration’s use of torture. The show is [...]

The media is buzzing with the news that Michael Hayden, the director of the CIA, admitted in an open session of Congress yesterday that waterboarding –- a long-reviled torture technique, which produces the perception of drowning –- was used on three “high-value” al-Qaeda suspects in CIA custody in 2002 and 2003. The three men –- [...]

Murat Kurnaz In a busy week for former Guantánamo detainees, Der Spiegel reports that the sole German ex-detainee, Murat Kurnaz –- born in Bremen but ignored by the German government until Angela Merkel came to power, because he was the son of Turkish immigrant workers (gastarbeiter) –- is making headway with his long-standing claim, which [...]