David Hicks

Last Friday, Ken Ota of the newspaper Revolution asked me to do a phone interview to discuss the recent announcement that President Obama was planning a new series of trials by Military Commission at Guantánamo, to explain the significance of this announcement, and to run through the largely shambolic history of the Commissions since their […]

For T. S. Eliot, April was the cruelest month, but for the prisoners at Guantánamo it is January — from the dashed hopes of January 2009, when President Obama swept into office issuing an executive order in which he promised to close the prison within a year, to January 2010, when, having failed to do […]

To listen to certain Republican critics of last week’s verdict in the federal court trial of the Tanzanian Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a former Guantánamo prisoner and a former CIA “ghost prisoner,” you would think that the jury had found him not guilty, and that he had been released onto the streets of New York. In […]

As publicity for the newly-published memoir, Guantánamo: My Journey by the Australian David Hicks, who was held at Guantánamo from January 2002 until April 2007, when he was repatriated after accepting a plea deal at his trial by Military Commission, Hicks’ publishers have released three excerpts from the book to the media. All three excerpts […]

A month ago, when the Senate Armed Services Committee heard testimony on “legal issues regarding military commissions and the trial of detainees for violations of the law of war”, and the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties Subcommittee of the House Committee on the Judiciary held a hearing on “Legal Issues Surrounding the Military Commissions […]

As Barack Obama and his transition team begin looking at ways to fulfill the President-Elect’s pledge to close Guantánamo, Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files, recalls that Barack Obama also promised to “reject the Military Commissions Act” (the legislation that revived the system of “terror trials” conjured up in the Office of Vice President […]

Today, to mark Veterans Day, two former soldiers and war resisters, Brandon Neely (photo, left) and Benjamin Lewis, have an article on AlterNet, This Veterans Day, U.S. Soldiers Say ‘Stop the War’, which I recommend. Brandon Neely served as a military police officer from 2000 to 2005, and worked at Guantánamo for six months in […]

Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files, looks at recent disturbing developments in the Military Commission trial system at Guantánamo, and traces a chain of command that runs from the Commissions’ supposedly impartial “Convening Authority” all the way to the Office of the Vice President. A prosecutor resigns On September 24, Col. Lawrence Morris, the […]

As a 16th prisoner at Guantánamo, Noor Uthman Muhammed, is put forward for trial by Military Commission (the much-criticized system of trials for “terror suspects” invented in the wake of the 9/11 attacks), Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, provides a guide to the […]

As if there was any doubt that politics, rather than justice, drives much of the US administration’s Guantánamo policy, Harper’s Magazine reports that a US military officer has shed light on the murky process involved in the release of Australian detainee David Hicks from Guantánamo in May. Hicks, a convert to Islam who was sold […]