Is Yemen the Next Afghanistan?
12-07-2010
IN RECENT WEEKS, Al Qaeda has sounded more confident than ever, issuing threats and calls to arms, along with publishing its Internet magazine and introducing an English-language online magazine called Inspire. In May, a botched air raid led to the death of a tribal leader in Marib who was negotiating on the government's behalf with a local Al Qaeda leader, infuriating the local tribes and further eroding President Saleh's credibility. On June 19, four heavily armed men stormed the fortified headquarters of the Political Security Organization in the southern port city of Aden, freeing prisoners suspected of being Al Qaeda members and escaping unharmed.
|
Bin Laden driver to war-court convict
09-07-2010
A sometime driver for Osama bin Laden pleaded guilty at the military commission at Guantánamo Bay, making it the first conviction under President Barack Obama.
|
A Cautious Welcome for British Torture Inquiry
08-07-2010
Human rights campaigners have reacted with cautious optimism to the British government’s official announcement of a judicial inquiry into the involvement of the British security services -- MI5 and MI6 -- in torture and rendition since the 9/11 attacks, although many pressing questions are, as yet, unanswered.
|
Bin Laden Cook Accepts Plea Deal at Guantánamo Trial
08-07-2010
In an alleged victory for the Military Commission trial system for terror suspects at Guantánamo, revived by President Obama last year despite the fact that he suspended the Commissions on his first day in office, a Sudanese prisoner, Ibrahim al-Qosi, accepted a plea bargain yesterday, and made a guilty plea on one count of conspiracy and one count of providing material support to terrorism.
|
The Dickensian world of extradition
08-07-2010
The British government must move decisively to protect its citizens from the unfair US/UK extradition treaty of 2003
|
Torture Complicity Under the Spotlight in Europe (Part Two): Germany and France
07-07-2010
The official announcement of the inquiry this week has done little to alleviate these fears, with David Cameron explaining that most of the inquiry will be held in secret, and adding, "Let's be frank, it is not possible to have a full public inquiry into something that is meant to be secret."
|
Torture inquiry must reveal the truth
07-07-2010
Without holding perpetrators to account torture will never be stopped. The new inquiry must send a message to the world
|
When it comes to waterboarding, labels matter
06-07-2010
The press's failure to call waterboarding torture impedes honest discussion of the darkest years of the Bush presidency
|
Guantanamo Bay, And The Obama Administration’s Failure Of Leadership
06-07-2010
As predictable as the Administration’s failure to close the prison has been the media’s efforts to paper over that failure, and to blame the delays on anyone but the President and his team.
|
Time to Reckon with Torture
03-07-2010
This past February, I was at a hearing in the Georgia House Defense & Veterans Affairs Committee to testify against a measure that would have had the effect of keeping the prison at Guantanamo Bay open by urging Congress to prohibit the transfer of Guantanamo detainees to the United States.
|
Torture Complicity Under the Spotlight in Europe (Part One): The UK
02-07-2010
Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when the United States -- the post-World War II driver of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Geneva Conventions, prohibiting torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment -- went off the rails and introduced a horrendous global program of rendition, torture, arbitrary detention and prisons beyond the law, other countries who were drawn into the “War on Terror” have striven to keep their own involvement quiet, and for good reason. Although the Bush administration was drunk on unfettered executive power, and was largely encouraged and supported by members of Congress, elsewhere these supposedly “robust” responses to terrorism were conducted with far more subterfuge, as the governments in question recognized that they were crimes, and, at worst, crimes against humanity.
|
Dangerous game: a reply to Gita Saghal and her supporters
01-07-2010
In the week following June 26, International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, the co-author with Moazzam Begg of his book Enemy Combatant: the terrifying true story of a Briton in Guantanamo, comes to the defence of his work and that of Cageprisoners. A bitter controversy has only fed Islamophobia, demonised an innocent person, and obscured the real human rights issues at stake
|
Obama’s Moral Bankruptcy Regarding Torture
01-07-2010
Saturday was the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, established twelve years ago to mark the day, in 1987, when the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Punishment or Treatment came into force, but you wouldn’t have found out about it through the mainstream US media.
|
Drones, Not So Much. F-16s? Yes, Please.
01-07-2010
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistanis widely welcomed the news that their nation had received three F-16 fighter aircraft from the United States over the weekend. Dawn, considered the most prestigious English news daily of the country, ran a front-page article in its Sunday issue.
|
Amnesty International: The Cancer of Democracy
30-06-2010
Last month, representing Amnesty International in a meeting at the State Department, I listened to the new Legal Adviser Harold Koh, former Dean of the Yale Law School, describe the Obama administration as the anti-torture presidency.
That is a bold claim and the International Day in Support of the Victims of Torture is the perfect moment to take a step back and review the administration's record on this issue. Can Obama really claim to be the anti-torture president?
|
Rock Bands Got Backstage Tours at Gitmo Prison
29-06-2010
(June 27) -- On a sweltering January afternoon in 2008, Kelly Keagy -- aging rock star, drummer for Night Ranger, the guy who belts MOTORINNN' on that one power anthem from the '80s -- found himself in the prison facility at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
|
How many Americans are targeted for assassination?
28-06-2010
When The Washington Post's Dana Priest first revealed (in passing) back in January that the Obama administration had compiled a hit list of American citizens targeted for assassination, she wrote that "as of several months ago, the CIA list included three U.S. citizens." In April, both the Post and the NYT confirmed that the administration had specifically authorized the assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki. Today, The Washington Times' Eli Lake has an interview with Obama's top Terrorism adviser John Brennan in which Brennan strongly suggests that the number of U.S. citizens targeted for assassination could actually be "dozens":
|
Three Neglected Ex-Guantánamo Prisoners in Slovakia Embark on a Hunger Strike
26-06-2010
On Thursday, Branislav Tichý, the director of Amnesty International Slovensko, told the press that three former Guantánamo prisoners, who had been released in Slovakia on January 25 this year, had embarked on a hunger strike. According to the Slovak Spectator, Tichý explained that they were “protesting bad conditions and the treatment they are receiving from Slovak authorities in a detention facility in Medved’ov in Trnava Region.”
|
Robert Fisk: Ghosts from the past: Syria's 30 years of fear
24-06-2010
A grim report sheds light on the thousands of 'disappearances' during Hafez al-Assad's 30-year rule
|
Witnessing Against Torture: Why We Must Act
24-06-2010
An old cliché says that anyone who has herself for a lawyer has a fool for a client. Nevertheless, going to trial in Washington, D.C., this past June 14, I and twenty-three other defendants prepared a pro se defense. Acting as our own lawyers in court, we aimed to defend a population that finds little voice in our society at all, and to bring a sort of prosecution against their persecutors.
|
