War on Terrorism

Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos, Part 4

by Andy Worthington April 23, 2009

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files, analyzes ten particularly disturbing facts to emerge from the four memos, purporting to justify the use of torture by the CIA, which were issued by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) in August 2002 and May ...

Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos, Part 3

by Andy Worthington April 22, 2009

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files, analyzes ten particularly disturbing facts to emerge from the four memos, purporting to justify the use of torture by the CIA, which were issued by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) in August 2002 and ...

Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos, Part 2

by Andy Worthington April 21, 2009

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files, analyzes ten particularly disturbing facts to emerge from the four memos, purporting to justify the use of torture by the CIA, which were issued by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) in August 2002 and May ...

Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos, Part 1

by Andy Worthington April 20, 2009

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files, analyzes ten particularly disturbing facts to emerge from the four memos, purporting to justify the use of torture by the CIA, which were issued by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) in August 2002 and May ...

The Story of Ayman Batarfi, a Doctor in Guantánamo

by Andy Worthington April 13, 2009

Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files, tells the strange story of Ayman Batarfi, a Yemeni doctor held as an “enemy combatant” for over seven years, whose release from Guantánamo was approved by the Obama administration’s Guantánamo review board on March 30. No one in the U.S. military ever doubted that Ayman Batarfi, a slim and articulate Yemeni, who ...

Farce at Guantánamo

by Andy Worthington April 6, 2009

In 2007, after four rounds of administrative reviews at Guantánamo, Hedi Hammamy, a Tunisian prisoner, born in 1969, was cleared for release, having satisfied the Pentagon that he no longer represented a threat to the United States or its allies and no longer possessed any ongoing intelligence value. He was not released, however, because, although the U.S. government had ...

Arrogance and Torture: A History of Guantánamo

by Andy Worthington April 1, 2009

The mesh-wire cages, suitable only for animals, are empty now and overgrown, but they will stand forever as a symbol of the Bush administration’s brutal and destructive “war on terror” policies, implemented in the wake of the terrorist attacks on the U.S. mainland on September 11, 2001. This is Camp X-Ray, the first of the prison camps at the U.S. ...

Abu Zubaydah and the Futility of Torture

by Andy Worthington March 30, 2009

Reinforcing claims made over the last few years — by FBI agents, by author Ron Suskind, and by myself — that the supposed senior al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah was less significant than he was made out to be, the Washington Postran a front-page story yesterday, in which, drawing on interviews with “former senior government officials who closely followed ...

The Nobodies Known as Former Enemy Combatants

by Andy Worthington March 16, 2009

Changing the names of things was a ploy that was used by the Bush administration in an attempt to justify some of its least palatable activities. In response to the 9/11 attacks, for instance, the nation was not involved in a limited pursuit of a group of criminals responsible for the attacks, but instead embarked on an open-ended “war ...

Why the U.S. Under Obama Is Still a Dictatorship?

by Andy Worthington March 9, 2009

Two weeks ago, when the Obama administration announced that it was bringing to an end the disturbing isolation endured by Ali al-Marri, a U.S. resident who has been held without charge or trial for seven years and two months — and who, most worryingly, has spent the last five years and nine months as an “enemy combatant” in ...

The Cruel Isolation of America’s “Enemy Combatant”

by Andy Worthington March 2, 2009

Last Thursday, U.S. resident Ali al-Marri, the last “enemy combatant” on the U.S. mainland, was indicted by a federal grand jury in Peoria, Illinois, for providing material support for terrorism, bringing to an end the Qatari national’s disturbing imprisonment for five years and eight months without charge or trial in a state of solitary confinement that is unprecedented in ...

Obama’s “Humane” Guantánamo Is a Bitter Joke

by Andy Worthington February 23, 2009

The “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where the majority of the remaining 242 prisoners have been held for seven years without charge or trial, “complies with the humanitarian requirements of the Geneva Conventions,” according to a government official who spoke to the New York Times after reading an 85-page report prepared for President Obama by ...