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20 years ago today, a US-led coalition illegally invaded Iraq, without approval from the UN Security Council, and on the basis of patently false claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction with which it could launch an attack on the West.

Those of us who are old enough to have lived through this dreadful time, and to have recognised the extent to which were lied to, have never forgiven — and never will — those who led us into this illegal war of choice.

For the neocons in the administration of George W. Bush — primarily, the vice-president Dick Cheney and the defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld — Iraq was unfinished business, after the first Iraq War in 1991, and, from 1998 onwards, Iraq was, explicitly, a target for regime change via the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) think-tank, founded in 1997, whose members also included other prominent figures in the administration of George W. Bush, including Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld’s deputy), Richard Perle (an adviser to the Pentagon as the Chair of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee) and John Bolton (another security adviser who was also the Ambassador to the UN from 2005-06).

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If there was any justice in this world, Donald Rumsfeld, the former US defense secretary from 2001 to 2006 under George W. Bush, who has died at the age of 88, would have been held accountable for his crimes against humanity at Guantánamo, in Afghanistan and in Iraq; instead, he apparently passed away peacefully surrounded by his family in Taos, New Mexico.

In response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Rumsfeld directed the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, when the Geneva Conventions regarding the treatment of prisoners in wartime were shamefully jettisoned, and he was also responsible for the establishment of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, which opened on January 11, 2002.

At Kandahar and Bagram — and at numerous other prisons across Afghanistan — all those who came into US custody were regarded as “enemy combatants,” who could be held without any rights whatsoever. The torture and abuse of prisoners was widespread, and numerous prisoners were killed in US custody, as I reported in When Torture Kills: Ten Murders In US Prisons In Afghanistan, an article I published 12 years ago today.

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It’s 19 years today since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 on the US mainland, in New York City and Washington, D.C., and I’m shocked to discover that one-third of my life has elapsed since the attacks took place. I was 38 years old when 9/11 happened, and now I’m 57. Even more shocking is the realization that my son, who is 20 now, was just one year old at the time.

On the morning of 9/11, my partner, Dot, called me to urgently come and watch the TV after the first plane had hit, and together we watched as the second plane hit. I remember thinking that it was blowback for American imperialism, and worrying how George W. Bush and his administration would react, but I had no idea what was to come. Instead, I got on with my life. Our baby son had been very ill, so I proposed marriage to his mother as a positive event to unite us, on Boxing Day 2001, just 16 days before the prison at Guantánamo opened, when the Marines were preparing the cages of Camp X-Ray.

We got married in July 2002, just before the “torture memos” prepared by John Yoo and signed by Jay S. Bybee were issued (in secret, of course), and in September I began work on what would be my first book, Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion, a counter-cultural history of Stonehenge that was published in June 2004, after the first British prisoners had been released (and whose accounts massively piqued my curiosity about just what was going on at Guantánamo), and just before the Supreme Court’s ruling in Rasul v Bush, establishing that the prisoners had habeas corpus rights.

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On March 6, indefatigable Guantánamo chronicler Carol Rosenberg, of the Miami Herald, reported that the Pentagon “plans to tear down Camp X-Ray, a weed-filled warren of chain-link-fence cells where the Bush administration held its first 311 war-on-terror prisoners at Guantánamo — and famously released a photo of kneeling captives in orange jumpsuits that stirred allegations of torture.”

Rosenberg added that, for many years, the prison’s various commanders had said that the site “was under a federal court protective order and could not be razed.” However, on March 5, Justice Department attorney Andrew Warden wrote to lawyers who represent Guantánamo prisoners, informing them that “the FBI has created an interactive, simulated three-dimensional, digital virtual tour of Camp X-Ray that shows all areas of the camp where detainees were held, interrogated, or otherwise present.”

Rosenberg added that “Trump administration attorneys consider it a suitable substitute,” and also explained that, although the prison supposedly closed in April 2002, when the first more permanent cells of Camp Delta were erected, it was used later in 2002 for the torture of Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Saudi prisoner regarded as the intended 20th hijacker for the 9/11 attacks. Just before George W. Bush left office, Susan Crawford, the convening authority of the military commission trial system set up under Bush at Guantánamo, explained to the Washington Post that she had refused to have al-Qahtani prosecuted because of the torture to which he was subjected, which included sleep deprivation, being threatened by dogs, sexual abuse, forced nudity, being shackled in painful positions, and being physically beaten. Read the rest of this entry »

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It has taken ten years, but on Wednesday (February 21), a US judge, District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema of the District Court in Alexandria, Virginia, ruled that “the treatment of three Iraqi individuals formerly detained at the infamous ‘hard site’ at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq constitutes torture, war crimes, and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, based on a thorough review of US domestic and international law.”

The victory was described in a press release by the Center for Constitutional Rights, who, with other lawyers, first submitted the case ten long years ago, under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS), which “allows non-US citizens to sue for violations of international law committed abroad that ‘touch and concern’ the United States. I wrote about it back in September, when Judge Brinkema allowed the case to proceed.

As I also explained at the time:

In the long legal journey to this important day, as CCR stated, “the Fourth Circuit denied CACI’s attempt to have the case dismissed under the ‘political question’ doctrine” in October 2016, and in June this year the District Court “affirmed that war crimes, torture, and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment are well-recognized and definable norms and thus fall within the court’s jurisdiction” under the Alien Tort Statute. The court then “ordered both parties to brief whether the record supports a finding that the plaintiffs suffered these violations,” and, as CCR noted, “Shortly after, CACI moved to dismiss the case,” the move that has just been turned down.

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Last week I was delighted to be invited to discuss Guantánamo, George W. Bush, torture and the “war on terror” by Scott Horton, the libertarian, Texan-based radio host, and the author of Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan, in which, as Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg notes in a review, he “masterfully explains the tragedy of America’s longest war and makes the case for immediate withdrawal.”

Scott and I have been talking several times a year — and sometime more frequently — since September 2007, when we first spoke about the case of US “enemy combatant” Jose Padilla, tortured on the US mainland. Our interviews have generally been for 20-25 minutes, but for our latest interview the brakes were off, and we spoke for a whole hour.

The show is available here, or here as an MP3, and I wholeheartedly recommend it as a tour through the darkness of the “war on terror” declared by the Bush administration after the 9/11 attacks, as manifested in CIA “black sites,” in the CIA’s “extraordinary renditions” to torture prisons in other countries, in Guantánamo, and in the wars — and the accompanying lawless prisons — in Afghanistan and Iraq. We also looked at the sad failures of the Obama years — not only his failure to close Guantánamo, but how extrajudicial assassination by drones replaced the messy detention, rendition and torture program of the Bush years, but is no more legally or morally acceptable. Read the rest of this entry »

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Great news from the District Court in Alexandria, Virginia, where three survivors of torture at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq by employees of a private military contractor, CACI Premier Technology, have finally been told that their case can proceed, 14 years since they were initially held, and over nine years since the case was first filed.

It is now so long since the torture took place that younger readers may be unaware of Abu Ghraib, the prison in Iraq where photos of abuse first surfaced publicly in April 2004, shocking Americans in a way that nothing had previously despite there being such a wide array of brutal, counter-productive policies undertaken in the wake of the 9/11 attacks — from Afghanistan to Iraq, and from “black sites” and proxy torture prisons to Guantánamo. As they say — and this is a sad truth for a writer to acknowledge — a picture is worth a thousand words.

The three men are Suhail Najim Abdullah Al Shimari, Asa’ad Hamza Hanfoosh Zuba’e and Salah Hasan Nusaif Al-Ejaili, and their lawyers at the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) stated in a press release after the ruling that the men, “formerly detained at the infamous ‘hard site’ at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were subjected to treatment that could constitute torture or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment,” according to the judge who allowed the case to proceed, Judge Leonie Brinkema. Read the rest of this entry »

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This Wednesday, May 17, Chelsea Manning — formerly known as Bradley Manning — will be released from prison, in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where she has been held for the last seven years. Her role as a whistleblower was immense. As a private, she was responsible for the largest ever leak of classified documents, including the “Collateral Murder” video, featuring US personnel indiscriminately killing civilians and two Reuters reporters in Iraq, 500,000 army reports (the Afghan War logs and the Iraq War logs), 250,000 US diplomatic cables, and the Guantánamo files, released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, on which I worked as a media partner. See my archive of articles based on those files here.

By that time, Manning was already in US custody in a military brig in Quantico, Virginia, which I first wrote about in December 2010, in an article entitled, Is Bradley Manning Being Held as Some Sort of “Enemy Combatant”? I continued to follow her story closely into 2011 (see here and here), which included President Obama’s indifference to criticism by the United Nations, and when Manning’s trial finally took place, in 2013, I made a particular point of dealing with those parts of the trial in which the significance of the Guantánamo files was examined.

As I stated just before the trial began, “Bradley’s key statement on the Guantánamo files is when he says, ‘the more I became educated on the topic, it seemed that we found ourselves holding an increasing number of individuals indefinitely that we believed or knew to be innocent, low-level foot soldiers that did not have useful intelligence and would’ve been released if they were held in theater.’” Read the rest of this entry »

Exactly 15 years ago, terrorists attacked the United States, killing 2,996 people, in the World Trade Center and on two hijacked aeroplanes, and changing the world forever.

Within a month, the US had invaded Afghanistan, aiming to destroy al-Qaeda and to topple the Taliban regime that had harbored them. That mission was largely accomplished by early 2002, but instead of leaving, the US outstayed its welcome, “snatching defeat from the jaws of victory,” as Anand Gopal, the journalist and author of No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes, explained to me several years ago.

In addition, of course, the Bush administration — led by a president who knew little about the world, attended by two Republican veterans, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who believed in the president’s right to act as he saw fit in times of emergency, unfettered by any kind of checks and balances (the unitary executive theory) — also set up a secret CIA program of kidnap and torture on a global scale, and prisons in Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, in Cuba, where the Geneva Conventions did not apply, and where they tried to pretend that indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial was the new normal, rather than a dangerous aberration. Read the rest of this entry »

In the long quest for accountability for those who ordered and implemented the crimes committed by the United States since 9/11 in its brutal and counter-productive “war on terror,” victory has so far proven elusive, and no one has had to answer for the torture, the extraordinary rendition, the CIA “black sites,” the proxy torture prisons elsewhere, the shameful disregard of the Geneva Conventions and the embrace of indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial that has been such a shame and disgrace for anyone not blinded by the violence and vengeance that have consumed so much of the US’s actions and attitudes in the last 14 and a half years.

In the US itself, President Obama made it clear from the beginning that he was looking forwards and not backwards when it came to accountability, as though sweeping the crimes mentioned above under the carpet would remove their poison from infecting US society as a whole. An early example of refusing to allow any victims of extraordinary rendition and torture anywhere near a courtroom was the Obama administration, in 2009 (and into 2010), invoking the “state secrets doctrine” (a blanket denial of any effort to challenge the government’s actions) to prevent the British resident and torture victim Binyam Mohamed and others from challenging the Boeing subsidiary Jeppesen for its role as the CIA’s travel agent for torture.

In February 2010, President Obama also allowed a Justice Department fixer to override the conclusions of an ethics investigation into John Yoo and Jay Bybee, who wrote and approved the 2002 “torture memos” that cynically purported to redefine torture so it could legally be used by the CIA. The investigation had concluded that they were guilty of “wrongful conduct,” but they received only a slapped wrist after Deputy Attorney General David Margolis concluded instead that they had merely exercised “poor judgment.” Read the rest of this entry »