Life after Guantanamo

Colonel Gaddafi has long demonstrated a fundamental disregard for the life of the Libyan people. Not content with murdering 1,200 prisoners in the Abu Salim prison massacre in June 1996, he then allowed men like Fouad Assad ben Omran, who recently spoke to Lindsey Hilsum of Channel 4 News, to make the journey to the […]

“Now people are dying we’ve got nothing else to live for. What needs to happen is for the killing to stop. But that won’t happen until he [Gaddafi] is out. We just want to be able to live like human beings. Nothing will happen until protests really kick off in Tripoli, the capital. It’s like […]

I recently cross-posted a fascinating article by my friend and colleague Jason Leopold, explaining how he had approached former Guantánamo prisoner David Hicks for an interview, after reading his autobiography, Guantánamo: My Journey, and how the encounter had challenged and affected him deeply. As a follow-up, I’m now cross-posting the full interview below, in which […]

My friend and colleague Jason Leopold is a fascinating man, as anyone who has read his no-holds-barred confessional, News Junkie, can attest. In that book, Jason described the drug hell he inhabited, haunted by demons while striving to be a fabulously well-known and significant investigative reporter, how his life came crashing down after he achieved […]

Saber Lahmer (aka Sabir Lahmar) is one of the six Algerians held at Guantánamo from its earliest days, having been kidnapped by US agents in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in connection with an alleged plot to blow up the US embassy in Sarajevo, even though the plot has never been backed up by any evidence, and was never […]

Two weeks ago, in light of the uprising in Tunisia that brought to an end the 23-year reign of terror of President Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali, I wrote an article about the twelve Tunisians held in Guantánamo throughout the prison’s nine-year history — the two men transferred to Tunisia in June 2007, who were subsequently […]

Last week, NBC News surprised everyone by featuring an interview conducted in Pakistan with Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni, a former Guantánamo prisoner — and an innocent man seized in Indonesia in January 2002, at a time when the Bush administration was out of control, kidnapping men around the world and subjecting them to “extraordinary rendition” […]

For the twelve Tunisians held in Guantánamo over the last nine years, the news that a popular uprising forced the hated dictator, President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, to flee the country for Saudi Arabia last Friday, after 23 years in power, will have come as a profound surprise, and also as a source of deep […]

For several years now, one organization in the US government has persistently undermined attempts to have a grown-up debate about the perceived dangerousness of prisoners at Guantánamo, and the need to bear security concerns in mind whilst also trying to empty the prison and to bring to an end this particularly malign icon of the […]

Despite numerous references to Guantánamo in the 251,287 US diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks, which deal largely with negotiations to rehouse cleared prisoners who could not — or cannot — be repatriated because of fears of torture or other ill-treatment in their home countries, there has been almost no mention of why this need to […]