In what appears to be nothing more than propaganda masquerading as news, the U.S. military has announced, as Reuters described it, that it will "televise the Guantánamo trial of accused September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and five other suspects...
Latest Gitmo Charges Questionable
The U.S. Department of Defense announced Monday that Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian captured after a gunfight in Gujrat, Pakistan, in July 2004, would be the fifteenth Guantánamo prisoner to be tried by military commission, in connection with his alleged...
A Chinese Muslim’s Desperate Plea From Gitmo
The stories of the Uighurs in Guantánamo Muslims from the oppressed Xinjiang province of China, formerly known as East Turkistan have long demonstrated chronic injustice on the part of the U.S. authorities to those who know of them, although they...
The Afghan Hero Who Died in Guantánamo
On February 5, the New York Times published a front-page story by Carlotta Gall and myself, Time Runs Out for an Afghan Held by the U.S., about Abdul Razzaq Hekmati, a 68-year old Afghan detainee who died in Guantánamo on December 30, 2007, in which we...
Guantánamo’s Shambolic Trials
This has been another terrible week for Guantánamo's Military Commissions, established by Dick Cheney and his close advisors in November 2001 to try, convict and execute those responsible for 9/11 through a novel process so far removed from the US court system...
Gitmo Charges: Why Now? And What About the Torture?
Finally, then, nearly six and a half years after the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. government has charged six Guantánamo detainees with, among other things, terrorism, murder in violation of the law of war, attacking civilians, and conspiracy adding, for good...
Guantánamo Trials: Where Are The Terrorists?
As pre-trial hearings take place in the US prison complex at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in Americas Illegal Prison, looks at the stories of the three defendants whose...
Waterboarding: Two Questions for Michael Hayden
The media is buzzing with the news that Michael Hayden, the director of the CIA, admitted in an open session of Congress on Tuesday that waterboarding a long-reviled torture technique, which produces the perception of drowning was used on three...
Padilla’s Sentence Should Shock and Disgust All Americans
The news that U.S. citizen José Padilla has received a prison sentence of 17 years and four months should provoke outrage in the United States, although it is unlikely that there will be much more than a whimper of dissent. The former gang member and convert to...
Canada’s Gitmo Torture Warning Shows Double Standards
How humiliating. The story begins with the shameful case of Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian who was kidnapped by U.S. agents as he changed planes in New York in 2002 and rendered to Syria, where he was tortured for a year on behalf of the American authorities...


