FBI/CIA

To complement my recent article, “UN Human Rights Council Discusses Secret Detention Report,” in which I explained how, two weeks ago, the UN Human Rights Council had — after some delays — finally discussed the findings of the “Joint Study on Global Practices in Relation to Secret Detention in the Context of Counter-Terrorism,” a detailed, […]

In a 27-page report, “Experiments in Torture: Human Subject Research and Evidence of Experimentation in the ‘Enhanced’ Interrogation Program” (available here), the organization Physicians for Human Rights has brought into sharp focus the role played by US medical personnel in torture and human experimentation. As the introduction on PHR’s website states, this is “the first […]

Note: This article is published as part of “Guantánamo Habeas Week” (introduced here), which also features an interactive list of all 47 rulings to date (with links to my articles, the judges’ unclassified opinions, and more). Despite the Bush administration’s fearsome rhetoric regarding Guantánamo — that it contained “the worst of the worst” terrorists, who, […]

Such is the hysterical disregard for the law in parts of the United States that when, on March 22, District Court Judge James Robertson ordered the release from Guantánamo of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a 38-year old Mauritanian who was once described as the “highest-value detainee at the facility,” Republican lawmakers were in uproar. The Hill […]

Yesterday, I took part in “The Big Questions” with Nicky Campbell on BBC1 (available on iPlayer here for the next week). The bi-weekly discussion show, which tours the country and covers three topics each fortnight, alighted on a Christian school in York on Sunday, and featured around a dozen “experts” on various topics (myself included) […]

Three senior UK judges on Wednesday ordered the British government to publicly disclose previously classified information that reveals how Binyam Mohamed, a British resident, was tortured by the CIA while in Pakistani custody in April and May 2002. In one short session, the Court of Appeal brought an end to a transatlantic game of cat […]

On January 15, 2010, the Pentagon released the first ever list of prisoners held in the Bagram Theater Internment Facility, the main US prison in Afghanistan for the last eight years (PDF). An annotated version of the list is available here. In a previous article, “Dark Revelations in the Bagram Prisoner List,” I examined the […]

A major new report on secret detention policies around the world, conducted by four independent UN human rights experts, concludes that, “On a global scale, secret detention in connection with counter-terrorist policies remains a serious problem,” and that, “If resorted to in a widespread and systematic manner, secret detention might reach the threshold of a […]

Last week, lawyer, ex-Army Captain and Iraq veteran Phillip Carter, described by Glenn Greenwald as “a very harsh critic of the Bush administration’s detention and interrogation policies,” suddenly resigned his post as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Policy, which he had occupied since April. Carter claimed that he was leaving due to “personal issues,” […]

Binyam Mohamed is a British resident, seized in Pakistan in April 2002, who was held in Pakistani custody, supervised by US agents, until July 2002, when he was sent by the CIA to be tortured for 18 months in Morocco, and was tied in with a “dirty bomb plot” that never even existed. After his […]