Murders in US custody

Key findings from, and my analysis of a significant report by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem and Israel, issued on October 10, dealing with Israel’s notorious and unaccountable prisons for Palestinians. Always brutal and fundamentally lawless, involving military courts and “administrative detention” (endlessly renewable imprisonment without charge or trial), the prisons, in which children are also held, along with women and men, have quadrupled their population since October 7, 2023, from around 5,000 “detainees” to around 20,000. Conditions in the prisons have noticeably worsened, with the ICRC prevented from visiting, on the orders of security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, and with torture and abuse systematic and widespread, incidences of rape taking place, and over 50 “detainees”, including doctors abducted from hospitals, having died in unexplained circumstances. Much of the focus is on the notorious Sde Teiman prison, where “detainees” seized in Gaza have been held, although the abuse is widespread throughout the entire prison system, which, at various points, I compare with the US’s barbaric treatment of prisoners in the CIA “black sites”, at Bagram in Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib in Iraq, and Guantanamo, often finding that Israel has not only matched, but also exceeded the depths of depravity to which the US sank in its “war on terror.” This is my second article about the Commission’s report, the first having focused on its sections detailing Israel’s “war” on Gaza’s hospitals and its healthcare system.

Remembering Yasser al-Zahrani, Mani al-Utaybi and Ali al-Salami, the three men who died on this day at Guantánamo 17 years ago. The official narrative — that they committed suicide — is no more plausible than it was then, and other deaths at Guantánamo, also described as suicides, also remain suspicious.

I mark the 16th anniversary of the deaths of three men at Guantánamo, and revisit the implausibility of the official narrative, which is that they committed suicide. This is an act of remembrance that I engage in every year, and this year I include new information about the events of that particular night that was provided by former prisoner Mansoor Adayfi in his memoir ‘Don’t Forget Us Here,’ published last summer.

Reflecting on the US defeat in Afghanistan, as the Taliban once more control the country, I look at how, in Guantánamo and in the prison at Bagram Airbase, chronically poor intelligence, and the contempt for the rules regarding the detention of prisoners in wartime that was so typical of the “war on terror,” did so much to help the US lose the battle for “hearts and minds” in Afghanistan.

My article marking the 15th anniversary of the death at Guantánamo of three prisoners — all long-term hunger strikers and fiercely resistant to the brutal lawlessness of the prison — who, according to the US authorities, died in a “suicide pact,” although that explanation has been robustly challenged on several occasions in the intervening years.

Marking the anniversary of a sequence of deaths at Guantánamo that I have long described as the “season of death,” when, between May 30 and June 9, in 2006, 2007 and 2009, five prisoners died. They were all suicides, according to the authorities, but all five were long-term hunger strikers, who resisted the brutality and illegality of their confinement, and were not, therefore, obvious candidates for suicide, and many valid accounts have been put forward challenging the official stories.

On the 13th anniversary of three deaths at Guantánamo, contentiously described by the US authorities as suicides, I revisit that terrible night, remembering the men, and recalling the robust challenges that have been made over the years to the official narrative – that the men died by committing suicide.

A cross-post, with my introduction, of a detailed and important article by investigative journalist Jeffrey Kaye about the death at Guantánamo, in 2011, of Haji Naseem, a mentally troubled Afghan national, who was one of the last prisoners to arrive at Guantánamo, in 2007.

Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration.   In the long and sordid history of Guantánamo, few people — if any — have devoted as much time […]

Please support my work! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration.   Great news from Washington State, as Judge Justin Quackenbush, a federal court judge, has ruled that a “civil lawsuit brought by three victims […]