Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

Since sweeping into office pledging to undo all the malign results of the Bush administration’s brutal and ill-conceived “War on Terror,” Barack Obama has struggled to make as decisive a point as he did on that first day, when he pledged to close Guantánamo within a year, to ban the use of torture, and to […]

In a leak that seems designed to gauge public opinion — and that of lawyers and other relevant parties around the world — anonymous officials in the Obama administration have told the New York Times about a proposal, in draft legislation to be submitted to Congress, which, as the Times put it, “would clear the […]

Using some old-fashioned clerical detective work, Reprieve, the legal action charity that represents around 10 percent of the remaining 240 prisoners in Guantánamo, has compiled a report, “Ghost Detention on Diego Garcia,” identifying one of two prisoners rendered through the British Overseas Territory of Diego Garcia as Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni (and tentatively identifying the other […]

For five years and eight months, the Bush administration held Qatari national and legal US resident Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri without charge or trial as an “enemy combatant” in the Naval Consolidated Brig in Charleston, South Carolina. Arrested by the FBI in December 2001, and subsequently charged with crimes including credit card fraud and identity […]

Since the publication last week of the Senate Armed Services Committee’s report into detainee abuse in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo (PDF), much has been made of a footnote containing a comment made by Maj. Paul Burney, a psychiatrist with the Army’s 85th Medical Detachment’s Combat Stress Control Team, who, with two colleagues, was “hijacked” into […]

Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files, analyzes ten particularly disturbing facts to emerge from the four memos, purporting to justify the use of torture by the CIA, which were issued by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) in August 2002 and May 2005, and released by the Obama administration last week. The […]

In his first interview since his release from Guantánamo, British resident and torture victim Binyam Mohamed has reinforced all the horrendous claims made about his treatment since he was first seized in Pakistan in April 2002 — in particular, his torture in Pakistani custody (supervised by US agents), and his torture in Morocco and at […]

Last Thursday, US resident Ali al-Marri, the last “enemy combatant” on the US mainland, was indicted by a federal grand jury in Peoria, Illinois, for providing material support for terrorism, bringing to an end the Qatari national’s disturbing imprisonment for five years and eight months without charge or trial in a state of solitary confinement […]

Two separate universes were in evidence on Tuesday. In the world of Barack Obama, the sense of change, the optimism and the intelligence were palpable, as two million Americans from every part of the United States — and numerous visitors from around the world — flocked to Washington D.C. to watch his inauguration as the […]

Forget the outgoing President’s lame, reality-defying farewell speech, and Dick Cheney’s last-ditch attempts to claim that the administration in which he served as Vice President never engaged in torture. The Bush era came to an end last Wednesday when, in one short interview, Susan J. Crawford, the senior Pentagon official overseeing the Military Commissions at […]