President Barack Obama’s government handed over thousands of detainees to the Iraqi authorities, despite knowing there were hundreds of reports of alleged torture in Iraqi government facilities. Washington was warned by the United Nations and many human rights organisations that torture was widespread in Iraqi detention centres. But the Bureau of Investigative Journalism can reveal [...]
October 23, 2010 | Filed under
Torture |
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Three weeks ago, I wrote a bitter commentary about the repeated failures of the US government to release an innocent Yemeni prisoner in Guantánamo — a student, Mohammed Hassan Odaini, now aged 26, but just 18 when he was seized — even though he was cleared for release by a military review board under President Bush in 2006, and, to the best of my knowledge, had also been cleared for release last year by President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force.
June 21, 2010 | Filed under
Law |
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There are six hugely important developments that have happened in the last month that will provide extraordinary help to protect Israel’s security. Unfortunately, these events have been underreported in the media:
June 21, 2010 | Filed under
Commentary |
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For eight and a half years, the US prison at Bagram airbase has been the site of a disturbing number of experiments in detention and interrogation, where murders have taken place, the Geneva Conventions have been shredded and the encroachment of the US courts — unlike at Guantánamo — has been thoroughly resisted.
June 7, 2010 | Filed under
Torture |
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Last Friday, the Court of Appeals in Washington D.C. delivered a genuinely disturbing ruling (PDF) regarding prisoners in the US prison at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, which has turned the clock back to the darkest days of the Bush administration, before prisoners seized in the “War on Terror” had any recourse to justice if they claimed they had been seized by mistake.
May 26, 2010 | Filed under
Torture |
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Since coming to power 15 months ago, promising to close Guantánamo within a year, and suspending the much-criticized Military Commission trial system for terror suspects, President Obama’s zeal for repudiating the Bush administration’s “War on Terror” detention policies has ground to a halt. The rot set in almost immediately, when the new administration invoked the “state secrets doctrine” last February, to combat a lawsuit brought by several men subjected to “extraordinary rendition” and torture, and was sealed last May, when Obama delivered a major national security speech in which he announced that the Military Commissions were back on the table, and also announced his intention to continue holding some prisoners at Guantánamo without charge or trial.
May 4, 2010 | Filed under
Torture |
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Another night-time raid on a housing compound in Afghanistan. Another bunch of innocent Afghans killed. Another round of lies by the US-led forces of the so-called International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). Only this time, among the dead are two pregnant mothers and a teenage girl. And once again the US media remain mute, accepting the official story, which was of ISAF forces responding to an attack which in reality appears never to have happened.
March 14, 2010 | Filed under
World |
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For months, the various government departments dealing with things economic–Treasury, Commerce, Labor and of course the Council of Economic Advisers and the Federal Reserve, have been issuing soothing words that the nation’s economy is headed back up from the Great Recession that allegedly began in December 2007. But now comes word from the Department of Labor that, whoops, we minsunderestimated, as former President George W. Bush would say, the number of jobs lost.
February 4, 2010 | Filed under
Nation |
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You had to love the headline the Philadelphia Inquirer put on the jump page of columnist Trudy Rubin’s Sunday commentary about word that the Obama administration is hoping to talk with at least some mid-level Taliban leaders about giving up the fight and “coming over” to the “government” side. “Relax–No deal with Taliban is Imminent,” the headline read. “I suggest everyone take a deep breath,” Rubin wrote. “The US position toward talks with the Taliban has shifted somewhat, but no deal with top Taliban leaders is imminent, or even likely.”
January 31, 2010 | Filed under
Commentary |
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The Obama administration has signaled that it wants the Justice Department to relocate the 9/11 terror trials, according to Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY). The Senator’s spokesman, Josh Vlasto, said Schumer spoke “with high-level members of the administration and urged them to find alternatives.” The move comes a little more than a day after Mayor Michael Bloomberg called on the Justice Department to change the venue of the trial.
January 29, 2010 | Filed under
Law |
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