Last week, Omar Khadr, the Canadian citizen and former child prisoner, was supposed to leave Guantánamo after nine years and three months in US custody. No one thought that Khadr would return to Canada as a free man, as he has another seven years to serve in a Canadian jail as part of a plea [...]
As Egypt’s military rulers were pardoning 334 of the thousands being held for military trials, the generals may be preparing to administer the coup de grâce to Egypt’s nascent democracy. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) has drafted a set of “supra-constitutional” principles that would grant the military outsized influence in writing a [...]
U.S. “drug war” funds and training are being used to support a known drug trafficker’s war against campesinos, a Honduran expert at the University of California at Santa Cruz charged today. Campesinos are Latin American peasants, usually farmers. Prof. Dana Frank said today, “New Wikileaks cables reveal that the U.S. embassy in Honduras — and [...]
If you thought you were finished reading about CIA “black sites” and “extraordinary renditions,” you were just a tad premature. Turns out that after all the investigations in a raft of countries, a virtual treasure trove of never-seen-before documents has reached the major European legal charity, Reprieve. As a result, Reprieve is calling on Lithuanian [...]
The UN Assistance Mission to Afghanistan (UNAMA) has released its October 2011 report on “Treatment of Conflict-Related Detainees in Afghanistan” (PDF). Ten years after the US invaded Afghanistan to oust the Taliban regime, and ostensibly dismantle the Al Qaeda forces linked to the 9/11 attacks, the regime in place is not only hopelessly corrupt and [...]
What a strange and alarming place we’re in, when the US government, under a Democratic President, kills two US citizens it dislikes for their thoughts and their words, without formally charging them with any crime, or trying or convicting them, using an unmanned drone directed by US personnel many thousands of miles away. And yet, [...]
Now that U.S.-born Islamist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, a member of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, has been killed by a drone strike in Yemen, human rights groups and legal experts are again debating the central question: Was it legal? And today, as was the case in previous discussions of this question, the answer seems [...]
As 20 of Bahrain’s physicians were being sentenced to prison terms of 5-15 years for treating victims of peaceful demonstrations, the US Government was readying the red bows on a package of $200 million in military sales to the tiny Gulf nation. The arms sale comes less than three months after the US included Bahrain [...]
At least 88 people are believed to have died in Syria prisons – with evidence that at least 52 of them were tortured or subjected to other ill-treatment — during five months of pro-reform protests, according to a new report from Amnesty International. The dead included 10 children, some as young as 13. The report, [...]
It made headlines when historian Susan M. Reverby of Wellesley College discovered a decades-old program run from by the U.S. Public Health Service’s studies in Guatemala from 1946 to 1948. That’s because the researchers deliberately inoculated subjects with syphilis in order to study sexually transmitted disease, and they did so without informed consent for the [...]
