Murders in US custody

It’s hard to know where to begin with this profoundly important story by Scott Horton, for next month’s Harper’s Magazine (available on the web here), but let’s try this: The three “suicides” at Guantánamo in June 2006 were not suicides at all. The men in question were killed during interrogations in a secretive block in [...]

The following statement, made by Guantánamo prisoner Ahmed al-Darbi on July 1, 2009, was originally posted by the U.C. Davis Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas, a University of California research project, coordinated by Almerindo Ojeda, which is well worth visiting. I’m posting it here to accompany my article, “Torture And [...]

On Friday, in the New York Times, James Risen resuscitated a story that some commentators — myself included — presumed had dropped off the radar, never to be heard of again. The story concerns the massacre of at least 1,500 prisoners in northern Afghanistan at the end of November 2001, after the fall of the [...]

There’s been a lot of discussion in the last few days about the long-awaited (and twice-delayed) release of the 2004 CIA Inspector General’s Report, which, as Glenn Greenwald explained on Tuesday, “aggressively question[s] both the efficacy and legality” of the Bush administration’s interrogation tactics in the “War on Terror.” As Greenwald also explained,
In anticipation of the [...]

Forget the outgoing President’s lame, reality-defying farewell speech, and Dick Cheney’s last-ditch attempts to claim that the administration in which he served as Vice President never engaged in torture. The Bush era came to an end last Wednesday when, in one short interview, Susan J. Crawford, the senior Pentagon official overseeing the Military Commissions at [...]

Such is the turnover of stories in the news that genuinely shocking claims –- such as those made by Guantánamo detainee Omar Deghayes in a dossier released by his family two weeks ago –- often become tomorrow’s fish and chip paper without anyone having really paid attention.
As part of an attempt to refute claims by [...]

In an excellent article for the Boston Globe, Farah Stockman –- who visited the restive Afghan city of Gardez earlier this year –- reports on the unsettling case of Abdullah Mujahid, the city’s former police chief, who is currently languishing in a cell in Guantánamo, having been sent there in July 2003.
A member of the [...]

The Washington Spectator has the first major American article on released Guantánamo prisoner Murat Kurnaz since the publication of his book Fünf Jahre meines Lebens: Ein Bericht aus Guantánamo (Five Years of My Life: A Report from Guantánamo), which will be published in the US in January 2008.
Of particular interest are Kurnaz’s claims that he [...]