Iraq

On Saturday, I was privileged to be a speaker at the Amnesty International Student Conference 2010, at the Human Rights Action Centre in London, where I spoke about Guantánamo — and, specifically, about the plight of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, who is still held, despite being cleared for release in […]

Announcing the release of the largest collection of classified US military documents leaked by an insider — 391,832 field documents relating to the war in Iraq from 2004 to 2009 — Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said at a press conference in London today, “This disclosure is about the truth. We hope to correct some of […]

Last Wednesday, on Day Four of “Berkeley Says No to Torture” Week — the largest gathering of anti-torture experts and activists since the Bush administration’s “War on Terror” began over nine years ago — one of the obstacles to attracting support for a mass movement against the crimes and human rights abuses of the Bush […]

Time will tell if Labour’s new leader, Ed Miliband, is a genuine force for change, but I was impressed during his campaign that he so clearly recognized that the Labour Party had failed and that criticizing the electorate was both insulting and counter-productive. In an interview with the Guardian in August, for example, he stated, […]

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 […]

As combat operations officially end in Iraq, nearly seven and a half years after the Bush administration’s illegal invasion, it is difficult to know how to summarize succinctly the tragic cost of the enterprise. I retain nothing but disdain — and a desire for accountability — for those who initiated this criminal, and criminally ill-conceived […]

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 fascinating interview with Mohammed Furat, the Iraqi editor of the Institute for War & Peace Reporting (IWPR), an Iraqi and former Guantánamo prisoner (one of the three Iraqis released from Guantánamo in January 2009), told his story. His account is fascinating on his own terms, as it provides an insight into how vulnerable […]

In the first of two articles about the Obama administration’s detention policies relating to the US airbase at Bagram, Afghanistan, I examined recent revelations about a secret prison inside the base, apparently run by a shadowy branch of the Pentagon, where Bush-era “enhanced interrogations,” involving sleep deprivation and isolation, are used, as authorized in Appendix […]

On April 30, 2010, as I explained in Part One and Part Two of this three-part transcript, The UC Davis Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas organized an event to mark the fifth anniversary of its excellent Guantánamo Testimonials Project, which, for the first time, enabled a discussion to take place, […]