Book reviews

Since I began researching Guantánamo and the “war on terror” on a full-time basis over six years ago, my motive has been to pierce the lies told about the prisoners, falsely tarred as “the worst of the worst,” even though most of them were rounded up for money, or through poor intelligence, and to expose […]

Five and a half years ago, when I first began researching the stories of the Guantánamo prisoners in depth, for my book The Guantánamo Files, one of the most distinctive and resonant voices in defense of the prisoners and their trampled rights as human beings was Clive Stafford Smith, the director of the legal action […]

On August 30, when In My Time, former Vice President Dick Cheney’s self-serving autobiography was published, the timing was pernicious. Cheney knows by now that every time he opens his mouth to endorse torture or to defend Guantánamo, the networks welcome him, and newspapers lavish column inches on his opinions, even though astute editors and […]

In the US media, there’s a little bit of a buzz right now about the use of torture by the Bush administration, and much of it is the right sort of buzz — openly involving reminders that torture is a crime, and that, in addition, using torture is worthless if the aim is to produce […]

With fortunate timing, an event is taking place tonight at Amnesty International’s Human Rights Action Centre in London, which sheds light on an unjust, but largely unexplored corner of the government’s counter-terrorism policies that was not mentioned in the policy changes announced yesterday by Home Secretary Theresa May. As I explain in a separate article […]

Cageprisoners has just posted an excerpt from My Life with the Taliban by Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban government’s ambassador to Pakistan before the 9/11 attacks, who was seized by the Pakistani authorities a few months later. Handed over to the US authorities, he was one of a number of supposedly signficant prisoners held […]

The mainstream media likes to claim that it has high journalistic standards, but when the opportunity for a sensational headline turns up, those principles are often abandoned. A recent example of this was the hysterical response to the supposed swine flu epidemic last year, and a new example — central to my work and that […]

With just days to go before George W. Bush’s memoir, Decision Points, hits bookstores (on November 9), and with reports on the book’s contents doing the rounds after review copies were made available to the New York Times and Reuters, it will be interesting to see how many media outlets allow the former President the […]

I was in the United States, campaigning against torture as part of “Berkeley Says No to Torture” Week, when a new book of essays by human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce, Dispatches from the Dark Side: On Torture and the Death of Justice, was published in the UK. In these essays, originally published in the London […]

OK, I admit that the heading is more accurate in relation to Tony Blair’s sniping at Gordon Brown in his recently released memoir than it is to the issues that really concern us here — Iraq, Guantánamo, and the “War on Terror” — but I couldn’t resist using it. So what are Blair’s revelations about […]