Abu Zubaydah

Like alcoholics queuing up drinks at closing time, the US administration is pressing charges against prisoners at Guantánamo at a frantic rate, anxious to be seen to be validating the chronic lawlessness of the last seven years before November’s Presidential election. At the end of last week, four more prisoners were put forward for trial […]

Abu Zubaydah, an alleged senior al-Qaeda operative, has been held without charge or trial as a “high-value detainee” for over six years, first in secret CIA custody, and then in Guantánamo, while battles have raged within the administration over his supposed significance. Drawing, in particular, on the story of former Guantánamo prisoner Khalid al-Hubayshi, Andy […]

Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, reports on the US administration’s recent announcement that it has filed charges against six Guantánamo prisoners for their alleged involvement in the 9/11 attacks. Finally, then, nearly six and a half years after the 9/11 attacks, the US […]

As pre-trial hearings take place in the US prison complex at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, looks at the stories of the three defendants whose cases are being heard this week and next –- two alleged “child soldiers,” and a […]

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 –- […]

News that Jose Padilla’s lawyers are seeking to hold former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and 59 other US officials responsible for “abusive and unconstitutional tactics used against Mr. Padilla while he was held in military custody as an enemy combatant from 2002 to 2006” has temporarily revived the story of the Chicago-born former gang member […]

An article by New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer is always a cause for celebration, and her latest, The Black Sites, is no exception. Beginning with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s “confession” four months ago, during his tribunal in Guantánamo, that “I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew Daniel Pearl in the […]

Military psychologists and torture In Rorschach and Awe (great title!), a must-read article in Vanity Fair, Katherine Eban explores how two military psychologists, James Elmer Mitchell and Bruce Jessen –- trained in the secretive SERE program (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape), which conditions soldiers to endure captivity in enemy hands –- were largely responsible for “reverse-engineering” […]