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As the Abu Ghraib scandal demonstrates, a photo is worth a thousand words — even if, as Errol Morris’ newly-released documentary Standard Operating Procedure demonstrates, those words are sometimes what the viewer wishes to see, rather than what actually happened.
There is, therefore, enormous excitement in the media about the first ever release of images from [...]

I’ve just posted the fourth of 12 additional online chapters supplementing my book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press/the University of Michigan Press). This chapter features stories that I could not include in the book, either for reasons of space (to keep the book [...]

This has been a bad week for the British government, in relation to two of the running sores of its foreign policy, both centred on the Overseas Territory of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.
Diego Garcia and the surrounding islands — known collectively as the Chagos Islands — were shamefully cleared of their existing population [...]

It doesn’t take much investigation to discover that Algeria has a bleak human rights record, which is one of the reasons that, until last week, when 49-year old Mustafa Hamlili and 28-year old Abdul Raham Houari were freed from Guantánamo, no Algerian prisoners had been repatriated. This was in spite of the fact that at [...]

On BBC Radio 4’s The World Tonight, singer-songwriter David Gray spoke out against the use of music as torture by the US military.
Gray’s chart-topping song Babylon, played repeatedly at ear-piercing volume, is one of dozens of songs, by artists including Eminem, Bruce Springsteen, Rage Against the Machine and Britney Spears, that has been used by [...]