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...
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...
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...
The Bush administration has maintained a low profile over the last month, as waves of indignation over the destruction of CIA videotapes showing the torture of two "high value" detainees have lapped ever closer to the White House. In the last few weeks, as...
As 2007 drew to a close, the tally of detainees released from Guantánamo throughout the year rose to 122, as another 10 Saudis were repatriated, to add to the 53 sent home between February and November. With 492 detainees now released – and 281 remaining...
Two years after being cleared for release from Guantánamo by a military review board, Adel Hassan Hamad, a hospital administrator who worked for a Saudi charity, and Salim Muhood Adem, who worked with orphans for a Kuwaiti NGO, have been repatriated to the...
Whether to impress the Supreme Court with its sense of justice prior to next month's showdown over detainees' rights, or, more likely, to placate the Saudi government following the death of a third Saudi detainee in Guantánamo in May, the Bush administration...
Torture is defined in many ways. To the Bush administration, nothing that it ever does is torture. In keeping with the notorious "Torture Memo" of August 2002, drafted primarily by Vice President Dick Cheney's chief counsel, David Addington, "enhanced interrogation...
Speaking to journalists last week, Navy Capt. Theodore Fessel Jr., the chief representative at Guantánamo for the Pentagon's Office of Administrative Review of Detained Enemy Combatants (OARDEC), which oversees the tribunals and review boards convened to assess...
For over five and a half years, as I explain in depth in my newly released book, The Guantánamo Files, the prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has held hundreds of innocent men. Humanitarian aid workers, teachers or students of the Koran, businessmen,...
