Extraordinary rendition and secret prisons

My analysis of the recent, and almost entirely overlooked announcement by the Pentagon that it was turning down a plea deal negotiated in December 2024 with torture victim and Guantánamo prisoner Abd Al-Rahim Al-Nashiri, the alleged architect of the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000. The decision prioritizes vengeance, and an unwinnable trial, over the reality that successful prosecutions involving the death penalty at Guantánamo are bound to fail, because of the torture to which the defendants were subjected over many years when they were held in CIA “black sites.” In 2023, this was recognized by prosecutors in the 9/11 trial, who then negotiated plea deals taking the death penalty off the table in exchange for full confessions and life imprisonment. These were agreed in August 2024, but were then immediately challenged by then-defense secretary Lloyd Austin, who succeeded in having them overturned by the D.C. Circuit Court last June, after he had already left office. Al-Nashiri’s plea deal was publicly announced in March 2025, also taking the death penalty off the table in exchange for a full confession and life imprisonment, but it was finally turned down, just two weeks ago, not by Pete Hegseth, but by the billionaire deputy defense secretary, Steve Feinberg, bringing the Biden and Trump administrations into a rare accord, in which both, shamefully, oppose the only viable outcomes for the 9/11 trial and the trial of Al-Nashiri that can bring “closure” and some measure of justice over a quarter of a century after the USS Cole bombing took place.

My report about the important news that the British government has reached a “substantial” out-of court financial settlement with Guantánamo prisoner and CIA torture victim Abu Zubaydah, to prevent further public disclosure of their complicity in his torture in CIA “black sites” from 2002 to 2006, prior to his transfer to Guantánamo, where he has been held ever since without charge or trial. The settlement relates to information first disclosed in a rare and frank Parliamentary investigation into British complicity in 2018, when it was revealed that the UK intelligence services had fed questions for Abu Zubaydah to US interrogators, even though they knew that he was being tortured. The payout was made to prevent full disclosure of the details after the Supreme Court ruled in Abu Zubaydah’s favor in a case decided in December 2023. Unfortunately, the settlement will do nothing to secure Abu Zubaydah’s release from Guantánamo. Although the US authorities long ago walked back from claims that he was a significant member of Al-Qaeda, which they made after his capture, and has never charged him with a crime, he continues to be held at Guantánamo, one of three “forever prisoners” detained indefinitely. This is in spite of two European Court of Human Rights rulings, in 2014 and 2018, condemning his torture in “black sites” in Poland and Romania, which also led to significant financial settlements, and a devastating opinion issued by the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention in 2023, which called for his release and reparations for his suffering during his long and arbitrary imprisonment. Under Donald Trump, however, when an unarmed 37-year old mother and US citizen murdered by an ICE agent is described as a “domestic terrorist” by senior administration officials, there can be no real likelihood that a torture victim slandered as a terrorist for years, and still routinely referred to as a “terror suspect”, will be freed. As his ordeal continues, we must all reflect on how, while three governments have paid him significant amounts of money for their complicity in his torture, no mechanism exists that can compel his actual torturers to free him.

My report about the release of two more men from Guantánamo, following yesterday’s release of Mohammed Abdul Malik Bajabu. Former “black site” prisoners Mohammed Farik bin Amin and Mohammed Nazir bin Lep have been repatriated to Malaysia to serve out the rest of the sentences they received as part of plea deal at Guantánamo. While their release is appropriate, it also cannot help but shine a light on the 18 other men still held who were never charged with a crime at all — 15 long approved for release, whose freedom must be restored before President Biden leaves office, and three others, the “forever prisoners”, who have never been charged, but have not been approved for release either.

Wonderful news from Guantánamo, as Mohammed Abdul Malik Bajabu, the prison’s sole Kenyan prisoner, and one of 16 men who had long been approved for release, has been repatriated and reunited with his family, leaving 29 men in total still held at the prison. It is very much to be hoped that this release is followed by the release of more of, or, preferably, all of the 15 other men who have long been approved for release and who have been waiting for so long for their freedom to be restored.

My analysis of the significance of December 9 and 10, as the dates when the Genocide Convention and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights were adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948. December 10 also marks the 40th anniversary of the adoption of the UN Convention Against Torture, and December 9 the 10th anniversary of publication of the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s groundbreaking report about the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program. In a world of increasing chaos and depravity, in which it can appear that the mechanisms put in place after the Second World War no longer have any meaning, I argue that, in fact, efforts to prosecute individuals for genocide, and for war crimes and crimes against humanity, initially by UN-backed courts, and, since 2002, by the International Criminal Court, shouldn’t be dismissed, as demonstrated by the recent arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant. I also celebrate the importance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, particularly on generations of young people, assess the significance of the Senate torture report, and note how both the US and Israel remain in the spotlight for the torture and abuse in their prisons — at Guantánamo, and in Israel’s prisons for Palestinians. I also note how the sands of time can shift swiftly, as has just happened in Syria, where Bashar al-Assad has fallen, and his almost indescribably monstrous prisons have suddenly been liberated.

My analysis of the hugely important ruling in the military commissions at Guantánamo by Judge Matthew McCall, the military judge in the 9/11 trial, who has ruled that defense secretary Lloyd Austin had no right to revoke the plea deals that were agreed three months ago with three of the men charged in connection with the 9/11 attacks — Khalid Shaykh Mohammad, the alleged mastermind of the attacks, and two of his alleged accomplices, Walid bin Attash, and Mustafa Al-Hawsawi. The plea deals, which took the death penalty off the table in exchange for life imprisonment, and, crucially, involved confessions from the three men that would constitute some kind of closure for the 9/11 victims’ families, took two and a half years to negotiate and arrange, after prosecutors finally recognized that the torture to which the men were subjected in CIA “black sites” was so horrific that it made the notion of successful prosecutions fundamentally unviable. Judge McCall forensically analyzed Lloyd Austin’s revocation of the plea deals, and found, unerringly, that he had no right to do, having handed responsibility to the Convening Authority, retired US Army Brigadier General Susan Escallier (previously the Chief Judge in the US Army Court of Criminal Appeals), who had full authority to approve them. It is to be hoped that the government doesn’t appeal, as it is threatening to do, because the plea deals are the only way to bring to an end a broken process, fatally infected by the use of torture, that has been mired, for the last 12 years, in seemingly endless pre-trial hearings with no trial date in sight.

My obituary for former Guantánamo prisoner Abdul Rahim Rabbani, who died on November 1 at just 57 years of age. A chef, he was seized with his brother Ahmed, a taxi driver, during a number of house raids in Karachi, in Pakistan, on September 11, 2002, and the brothers spent a year and a half in CIA “black site” torture prisons before being flown to Guantánamo in September 2004, where they were held without charge or trial for 18 and a half years until their release in February 2023. The US authorities claimed that they were “Al-Qaeda facilitators”, but never put them on trial, suggesting that their supposed evidence was non-existent. Nevertheless, the brothers were repeatedly recommended for ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial by various high-level government review processes until May 2021, when Abdul Rahim was recommended for release by a Periodic Review Board, with a similar recommendation for Ahmed following in October 2021. Unfortunately, inadequate medical treatment at Guantánamo, and the inadequate provision of care in Pakistan after his release, contributed significantly to Abdul Rahim’s death, a problem that afflicts numerous former prisoners, and that was highlighted in a withering report last year by UN Special Rapporteur Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, after a visit to the prison, and numerous meetings with former prisoners.

Key findings from, and my analysis of a significant report by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem and Israel, issued on October 10, dealing with Israel’s notorious and unaccountable prisons for Palestinians. Always brutal and fundamentally lawless, involving military courts and “administrative detention” (endlessly renewable imprisonment without charge or trial), the prisons, in which children are also held, along with women and men, have quadrupled their population since October 7, 2023, from around 5,000 “detainees” to around 20,000. Conditions in the prisons have noticeably worsened, with the ICRC prevented from visiting, on the orders of security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, and with torture and abuse systematic and widespread, incidences of rape taking place, and over 50 “detainees”, including doctors abducted from hospitals, having died in unexplained circumstances. Much of the focus is on the notorious Sde Teiman prison, where “detainees” seized in Gaza have been held, although the abuse is widespread throughout the entire prison system, which, at various points, I compare with the US’s barbaric treatment of prisoners in the CIA “black sites”, at Bagram in Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib in Iraq, and Guantanamo, often finding that Israel has not only matched, but also exceeded the depths of depravity to which the US sank in its “war on terror.” This is my second article about the Commission’s report, the first having focused on its sections detailing Israel’s “war” on Gaza’s hospitals and its healthcare system.

My analysis of the shameful news that, just two days after plea deals were announced in the cases of three of the men charged in connection with the 9/11 attacks — whereby the death penalty would be dropped in exchange for guilty pleas and the promise of life sentences instead — defense secretary Lloyd Austin has revoked those plea deals. The three men include Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, the alleged mastermind of 9/11, and the plea deals provided what appears to be the only viable conclusion to the legal impossibility of successful prosecuting them after their torture for three and a half years in various CIA “black sites.” Efforts to prosecute them have been ongoing since 2008, but are primarily stuck in a kind of “Groundhog Day,” because the men’s lawyers correctly seek to expose the torture to which they were subjected, while prosecutors seek to hide it, although over the last two years prosecutors have been working towards the plea deals, having apparently accepted that successful prosecutions are impossible. Austin’s capitulation — to Republican criticism, and to what appears to be the Democrats’ own commitment to a type of endless vengeance when it comes to the “black site” prisoners — is therefore a deplorable failure to accept the compromises needed to bring this sordid chapter in US history to an end, as well as to provide the remaining prisoners with adequate physical and mental health treatment, as required under international humanitarian law, and it is to be hoped that his “undue command influence” will be successfully challenged in court.

Examining yet another facet of the ongoing chronic injustice at Guantánamo — the recent sentencing, for war crimes, of Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, Guantánamo’s most profoundly disabled prisoner, who suffers from a chronic degenerative spinal disease, which, despite seven operations at the prison, has not been adequately resolved, and will in all probability eventually leave him paralyzed. A 62- or 63-year old Iraqi Kurd, whose real name is Nashwan al-Tamir, al-Iraqi has been held at Guantánamo for over 17 years, after being held in a CIA “black site” for six months. Although the US authorities initially tried to tie him to Al-Qaeda and terrorism, the main charges against him ended up relating to his time as a military commander in Afghanistan at the time of the US-led occupation. At his sentencing, al-Iraqi was profoundly apologetic to the family members of those who were killed as a result of his orders in Afghanistan; however, the military jury delivered the maximum sentence, of 30 years, although this was reduced to ten years via a plea deal he agreed to two years ago. Nevertheless, this means that he will not be released until 2032, which still seems hugely punitive, given his contrition, his medical condition, and the fact that, when his sentence ends, he will have been held for 26 years in total.