FBI/CIA

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.

My analysis of the significance of a DoD Sanity Board’s assessment that Ramzi bin al-Shibh, one of five men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks, who are caught up in seemingly endless pre-trial hearings in Guantánamo’s broken military commissions, is unfit to stand trial because he suffers from PTSD and psychosis. That assessment has been accepted by the military judge in the 9/11 case, but meanwhile President Biden has refused to accept conditions requested by the 9/11 co-accused in plea deals that have been ongoing for the last 18 months, since prosecutors finally recognized that the use of torture had made a successful trial untenable. The conditions include the lifelong provision of adequate physical and mental health care, which has not been provided at Guantánamo, and which, ironically, has contributed significantly to bin al-Shibh’s inability to stand trial.

A long read featuring substantial excerpts from, and my detailed analysis of an absolutely devastating ruling against the US authorities in the military commission pre-trial hearings for Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. A Saudi national held and tortured in CIA “black sites” for nearly four years before his transfer to Guantánamo in September 2006, al-Nashiri’s trial judge, Col. Lanny Acosta, Jr., has just refused to allow prosecutors to use self-incriminating statements al-Nashiri made to a “clean team” of interrogators four months after his arrival at Guantánamo, because, he has concluded, there is no way that he was acting freely, given the extent of the torture to which was subjected in the “black sites,” and the “conditioning” that accompanied it, requiring him to tell his interrogators what they wanted to hear, to prevent further torture.

My report about a recent Periodic Review Board hearing in Guantánamo, not reported in the mainstream media, about Muhammed Rahim, the last Afghan in the prison, who delivered a heartfelt plea for his release. Despite claims that he was connected with Al-Qaeda, the US authorities have never provided any evidence to back up their claims.

My report about a devastating opinion issued by the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, regarding Abd Al-Rahim Al-Nashiri, held and tortured in CIA “black sites” for nearly four years, between 2002 and 2006, and at Guantánamo since September 2006. Although he has been charged in the military commissions, the Working Group concludes that his treatment has been so lawless and brutal that it constitutes arbitrary detention, and calls for his immediate release. The opinion follows a similarly devastating opinion relating to Abu Zubaydah, which I wrote about at the end of April.

A major article examining the cases of the 14 men still held at Guantánamo — “high-value detainees” and torture victims — who have not been approved for release, and what the US authorities can and should do with them, given that many have significant physical and/or mental health problems relating to their torture, or to the inadequacy of medical care at the prison. Following recent, highly critical reports by the UN and the ICRC, I look at the possibility of plea deals to resolve the deadlock in the trials of those who have been charged, and who may end up remaining at Guantánamo, but in a new facility providing “rehabilitation from torture, and adequate medical care”, and also suggest that other men not charged may also have to be provided with a similar, but non-penal facility providing the same level of care.

My report about what I describe as “the single most devastating condemnation by an international body that has ever been issued with regard to the US’s detention policies in the ‘war on terror’, both in CIA ‘black sites’ and at Guantánamo” — an opinion issued by the the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention about Abu Zubaydah, the first victim of the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program. The condemnation is not only of the US government, but also the governments of Pakistan, Thailand, Poland, Morocco, Lithuania, Afghanistan and the UK, although the most severe criticisms are directed at the US government, which is ordered to release him and to pay him compensation. The Working Group also expresses “grave concern” that the very basis of the detention system at Guantánamo — involving “widespread or systematic imprisonment or other severe deprivation of liberty in violation of fundamental rules of international law” — “may constitute crimes against humanity.”

A world exclusive: the story of Abu Faraj al-Libi, one of 14 “high-value detainees” brought to Guantánamo from CIA “black sites” in September 2006, who appeared publicly for the first time in June this year, for his latest Periodic Review Board, which, nevertheless, approved his ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial last month, as one of the prison’s four remaining “forever prisoners.”

It’s ten years since Majid Khan agreed to a plea deal at Guantánamo, and a month since his sentence came to an end, and yet, despite it being clear throughout this entire period that he would be eligible for release in March 2022, the US government has made no plans for his release.

Publicizing the new documentary film by Alex Gibney about Abu Zubaydah, for whom the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program was developed. He spent four and a half years in CIA torture prisons, and has been held at Guantánamo for over 15 years without charge or trial, with no sign of when, if ever, he might be released.