Bisher al-Rawi

Some horrors may await us on the economic front when George Osborne, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, finishes sharpening his scythe, but for those of us who care about human rights and civil liberties, and who have been aghast for the last 13 years at the Labour government’s paranoid, cruel and chaotic anti-terror legislation, […]

In the Court of Appeal yesterday morning, six former Guantánamo prisoners — Bisher al-Rawi, Jamil El-Banna, Richard Belmar, Omar Deghayes, Binyam Mohamed and Martin Mubanga — won a resounding victory against the government, when three senior judges, including Lord Neuberger, the Master of the Rolls, overturned a ruling that, for the first time in British […]

In response to the hysteria regarding Amnesty International’s association with former Guantánamo prisoner Moazzam Begg and Cageprisoners (which I reported in detail here), another former prisoner, Bisher al-Rawi, has written the following letter to the Times, which I found to be eloquent, understated and unerringly accurate about the role of Amnesty in providing hope to […]

Those of us who have been aware that the principles of open justice in the UK are being threatened in an unprecedented manner have, to date, focused largely on the use of secret evidence in cases related to terrorism — widely ignored by the general public, and by much of the media — and on […]

In summer, ACLU representatives traveled to the UK to interview five former Guantánamo prisoners: Moazzam Begg and Omar Deghayes (both featured in my new film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” co-directed by Polly Nash), plus Bisher al-Rawi, Ruhal Ahmed and Shafiq Rasul (the latter being two of the “Tipton Three,” featured in the 2006 […]

At a press conference to mark his first 100 days in office, President Obama declared, “We have rejected the false choice between our security and our ideals by closing the detention center at Guantánamo Bay and banning torture without exception.” I have looked at the President’s misleading statement about Guantánamo, and analyzed his progress — […]

As British resident Binyam Mohamed stepped off a plane at RAF Northolt on Monday February 23, six years and ten months since he was first abducted by the Pakistani authorities at Karachi airport, it was impossible not to sympathize with the words written in a statement made by the tall, thin, slightly-stooped 30-year old, and […]

This has been an extraordinary week for British resident, torture victim and Guantánamo prisoner Binyam Mohamed. Last Thursday, his lawyers’ ten-month campaign to secure the disclosure of documents in the possession of the British government, which apparently confirm details of his “extraordinary rendition” and torture, sparked a crisis when the High Court judges in his […]

The following report –- on actions across London by the London Guantánamo Campaign and Cageprisoners to mark the sixth anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo as a lawless “War on Terror” prison –- was published on the website of the National Guantánamo Coalition. I reproduce it here because it covers, in detail, the range of […]

On Friday morning, on the sixth anniversary of the opening of the US administration’s lawless prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a group of human rights campaigners presented a letter to Prime Minister Gordon Brown at 10 Downing Street, requesting him to act on behalf of Binyam Mohamed and Ahmed Belbacha, the two remaining British residents […]