4.8.24
My analysis of the shameful news that, just two days after plea deals were announced in the cases of three of the men charged in connection with the 9/11 attacks — whereby the death penalty would be dropped in exchange for guilty pleas and the promise of life sentences instead — defense secretary Lloyd Austin has revoked those plea deals. The three men include Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, the alleged mastermind of 9/11, and the plea deals provided what appears to be the only viable conclusion to the legal impossibility of successful prosecuting them after their torture for three and a half years in various CIA “black sites.” Efforts to prosecute them have been ongoing since 2008, but are primarily stuck in a kind of “Groundhog Day,” because the men’s lawyers correctly seek to expose the torture to which they were subjected, while prosecutors seek to hide it, although over the last two years prosecutors have been working towards the plea deals, having apparently accepted that successful prosecutions are impossible. Austin’s capitulation — to Republican criticism, and to what appears to be the Democrats’ own commitment to a type of endless vengeance when it comes to the “black site” prisoners — is therefore a deplorable failure to accept the compromises needed to bring this sordid chapter in US history to an end, as well as to provide the remaining prisoners with adequate physical and mental health treatment, as required under international humanitarian law, and it is to be hoped that his “undue command influence” will be successfully challenged in court.
5.8.19
Marking the 17th anniversary of the “torture memos,” written by John Yoo and approved by Jay S. Bybee, I look at how the US’s decision to embark on a torture program continues to undermine justice, as defense lawyers for the men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks are taking exception to claims that the use of torture on their clients can be sidestepped because “clean teams” of FBI agents later interrogated them non-coercively. The lawyers claim – and have evidence to back it up – that actually the “clean teams” were working quite closely with the CIA throughout the whole process.
1.5.19
I follow up on a recent New York Times article by Carol Rosenberg about the US military’s problems with aging prisoners at Guantánamo, looking in particular at how these problems have arisen because, after 9/11, the US embraced torture (whch is incompatible with justice) and indefinite detention without charge or trial, which is also fundamentally unacceptable — and, of course, continues to be supported by Donald Trump.
11.4.18
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. I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary […]
3.9.17
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. As we approach the 16th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, those of us who care about justice, the rule […]
25.10.16
The military commissions at Guantánamo, as I have been reporting for ten years, are a shamefully deficient excuse for justice, a system dreamt up in the heat of America’s post-9/11 sorrow, when hysteria and vengeance trumped common sense and a respect for the law, and it was decided, by senior Bush administration officials and their […]
1.2.16
As all eyes are focused on Iowa, on the first caucus of this year’s Presidential election race, I thought I’d cross-post an interesting article about Guantánamo that was recently published in Rolling Stone, written by Janet Reitman. This is a long and detailed article, taking as its springboard a visit to one of the pre-trial […]
9.7.14
I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012 with US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email. In two articles — […]
1.2.14
In the long search for accountability for the torturers of the Bush administration, which has largely been shut down by President Obama, lawyers and human rights activists have either had to try shaming the US through the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, or have had to focus on other countries, particularly those that hosted secret […]
5.11.13
It’s almost exactly eight years since Dana Priest of the Washington Post first broke the story, on November 2, 2005, that, “according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents,” the CIA had been “hiding and interrogating some of its most important al-Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe … […]
Investigative journalist, author, campaigner, commentator and public speaker. Recognized as an authority on Guantánamo and the “war on terror.” Co-founder, Close Guantánamo and We Stand With Shaker. Also, photo-journalist (The State of London), and singer and songwriter (The Four Fathers).
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