Human Rights Watch | This Wednesday, unless the UK foreign secretary takes rapid action, Britain’s High Court will hold a hearing to assess whether the UK government should be ordered to hand over secret documents to lawyers for a Guantanamo detainee. The detainee in question, Binyam Mohamed, faces possible charges of conspiracy and material support for [...]
Open Democracy | In a key intervention in the 42 days debate last month, the former head of MI5, Baroness Manningham-Buller stated: “arguments can be made to justify any time of detention, just as in other countries, although mercifully not here, they can be made to justify any method of interrogation.”
That remark elided key questions about [...]
Reuters - A British court ruled on Thursday that the government must disclose evidence to a defendant being held at Guantanamo Bay, a decision that carried with it implicit criticism of U.S. government detention policies.
In its ruling, the High Court said Britain’s Foreign Office must provide Binyam Mohamed, a British resident detained in Pakistan in [...]
The use of torture by the US Government in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in New York on September 11, 2001 has come under increasing criticism.
In 1863 at the height of the US civil war, president Abraham Lincoln set the principles for interrogation of prisoners with a famous instruction “military necessity does not admit [...]
By Bob Egelko | After more than six years as a prisoner of the United States, former TV cameraman Sami al-Hajj is back at work with Al-Jazeera, the largest broadcaster in the Arab world, a thorn in the side of most Arab governments - and, by most indications, a target of deep hostility from the Bush [...]
By Carol Rosenberg | GUANTANAMO BAY NAY BASE, Cuba — One general testified about another general at the war court Wednesday, describing a Pentagon official fast-tracking trials here as “abusive, bullying, unprofessional.”
Moreover, in testimony, Army Brig. Gen. Gregory Zanetti, deputy prison camps commander, described the approach employed earlier this year by his [...]
By Kathryn Muratore | This past week, the head of the Chinese National Counterintelligence Executive (NCIX) held a press conference noting that “Somebody with a wireless device in the US should expect it to be compromised while he’s there.”
Oh wait, no, that didn’t happen.
In a case of the pot calling the kettle black, the US NCIX [...]
GUANTANAMO BAY U.S. NAVAL BASE, Cuba (Reuters) - It was no coincidence the U.S. military jurors at Guantanamo timed the prison sentence they gave Osama bin Laden’s driver to end just before President Bush’s term does, legal analysts say.
The timing seems intended to give the next U.S. president who takes office on Jan. 20 a [...]
By Ritsuko Ando in New York | A MAN with a black hood pours water on the face of a prisoner in an orange jumpsuit strapped to a table: no, it’s not Guantanamo Bay naval base, but New York’s Coney Island amusement park.
The scene using robotic dolls is an installation built by artist Steve Powers [...]
Saudi Arabia prisons to replace Guantanamo bay
Pakistan Daily
Saudi Arabia is to build five modern prisons in the kingdom to replace US Guantanamo detention facility, a new report has revealed.
Jordanian daily quoted unnamed sources as saying that US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Saudi officials are cooperating to construct the prisons which are to replace Guantanamo [...]
A Guantanamo detainee on Wednesday urged a human rights panel that investigates abuse cases in the Americas to review his accusations that he was tortured in the US “war on terror” prison.
Djamel Ameziane, an Algerian who has been held at the US naval base in Cuba for six years as an “enemy combatant” without charge, [...]
By Matthew Rothschild
Who is Bush to lecture the Chinese—or anyone, for that matter—on human rights?
There he was in Thailand, pressing China to uphold human rights when he has done more than any other President to heap scorn on them.
After 9/11, he said, “I don’t care what the international lawyers say. We’re going to kick some [...]
AKI | Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden’s former driver, Salim Hamdan, convicted by a US military jury on Wednesday of supporting terrorism, did not receive a fair trial, said rights group Amnesty International.
“The conviction of Salim Hamdan under procedures that do not meet international fair trial standards compounds the injustice of his more than five [...]
Some detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba will likely never be released because of the danger they pose, and those tried and acquitted will still be subject to continued detention as enemy combatants, a Pentagon spokesman said Tuesday.
Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, made the remarks as Salim Hamdan, a Yemeni, awaited a verdict in the [...]
MSNBC | GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba - A military jury on Wednesday found a former driver for Osama bin Laden guilty on some counts but cleared him of others in the first Guantanamo war crimes trial.
A panel of six American military officers delivered the decision in the case against Salim Hamdan, a Yemeni.
The jury [...]
By Andy Worthington | The ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus wrote: “In war, truth is the first casualty.” These words are particularly apt in relation to the British Overseas Territory of Diego Garcia, leased to the United States in 1971, where the truth – that a secret “War on Terror” prison existed from 2002 until as recently [...]
The Bush administration informed all foreign intelligence and law enforcement teams visiting their citizens held at Guantanamo Bay that video and sound from their interrogation sessions would be recorded, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post. The policy suggests that the United States could possess hundreds or thousands of hours of secret taped conversations [...]
GUANTANAMO BAY, CUBA — In hopes of encouraging better behavior among terrorism suspects in a maximum-security facility here, parts of it will be gradually transformed to let some of the men eat, visit and exercise together.
The planned easing of conditions in some cell blocks of Camp 6 is part of an effort to provide more [...]
Andy Worthington
Six “High-Value” Guantánamo Prisoners Held, Plus “Ghost Prisoner” Mustafa Setmariam Nasar
The existence of a secret, CIA-run prison on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean has long been a leaky secret in the “War on Terror,” and yesterday’s revelations in TIME — based on disclosures by a “senior American official” (now retired), [...]
The U.S. military has removed journalists from a Guantanamo courtroom for a secret session of the war crimes tribunal.
It is the first time the U.S. has held a closed session at the tribunals created to prosecute alleged terrorists at the base in Cuba.
Observers without security clearance were told to leave Thursday while a defense witness [...]
Hersh admits not writing an article on this obvious act of treason because the neocons didn’t actually see their demented plan through.
The video is entitled “The Al Qaeda Plan,” an echo of “The Nazi Plan” made by Oscar-winning director George Stevens as evidence in the Nuremberg war crimes trials of German leaders after World War II.
By Carol Rosenberg | GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba — In his seventh of month of U.S. captivity, Osama bin Laden’s driver told a pair of FBI agents that it was America’s fault that the al Qaida leader was alive.
The message was, ”You had these opportunities, America. You didn’t do anything,” FBI agent George Crouch [...]
By Jeff Stein | Air Force Col. Morris D. Davis, who resigned last year after two years as chief prosecutor at Guantanamo, today described the military commissions system as fatally “tainted” by politics and designed to produce guilty verdicts, no matter what the costs.
The possibility of the system delivering “credible verdicts is doubtful,” Davis said Tuesday in a remarkable interview [...]
Some interesting information emerged from the Guantanamo Bay naval base yesterday in the form of a direct admission from a US prosecutor that the fourth plane was “shot down”.
By IAN AUSTEN | OTTAWA — The video is blurry and the soundtrack muffled, but the technical shortcomings of the video recordings released Tuesday did not obscure the emotions of Omar Khadr as he was interrogated at the Guantánamo Bay detention center in Cuba.
Mr. Khadr, just 16 years old at the time of the taping, in [...]
Canadian officials knew youth was being tortured
By Michelle Shephard | The first time Omar Khadr was questioned, he was lying in a military hospital bed in Afghanistan with two gaping holes in his chest – the exit wounds of the bullets that were shot through his back before his capture by U.S. Special Forces.
Interrogators [...]
By John Pilger | The military has created a wall of silence around its frequent resort to barbaric practices, including torture, and goes out of its way to avoid legal scrutiny
Five photographs together break a silence. The first is of a former Gurkha regimental sergeant major, Tul Bahadur Pun, aged 87. He sits in a [...]
Infighting and political grandstanding are holding up measures to close the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay.
By SCOTT SHANE | The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”
What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their [...]
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