Abu Zubaydah’s Torture Diary by Andy Worthington

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by Andy Worthington
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.andyworthington.co.uk
16 March, 2010

To coincide with the publication of my article, “What Torture Is, and Why It’s Illegal and Not ‘Poor Judgment,’” in which I revisited the scandalous whitewash of the Justice Department report into the conduct of John Yoo and Jay Bybee (the lawyers who sought to redefine torture in the notorious “torture memos” of August 2002), I reproduce below a transcript of the statements made by the “high-value detainee” Abu Zubaydah during interviews with representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross, following his transfer to Guantánamo from secret CIA prisons in September 2006.

Countdown: Mysterious “Suicides” At Guantanamo Bay Prison!

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Replaced video May 22, 2014 with a similar video (not the exact one from Dec. 2009)

mmflint on Jan 19, 2010

MSNBC Keith Olbermann

http://harpers.org/archive/2010/03/the-guantanamo-suicides/

When President Barack Obama took office last year, he promised to restore the standards of due process and the core constitutional values that have made this country great. Toward that end, the president issued an executive order declaring that the extra-constitutional prison camp at Guantánamo shall be closed as soon as practicable, and no later than one year from the date of this order. Obama has failed to fulfill his promise. Some prisoners are being charged with crimes, others released, but the date for closing the camp seems to recede steadily into the future. Furthermore, new evidence now emerging may entangle Obama’s young administration with crimes that occurred during the Bush presidency, evidence that suggests the current administration failed to investigate seriously—and may even have continued—a cover-up of the possible homicides of three prisoners at Guantánamo in 2006.

Four Men Leave Guantánamo; Two Face Ill-Defined Trials In Italy by Andy Worthington

by Andy Worthington
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.andyworthington.co.uk
5 December 2009

On Monday, the Obama administration announced that it had transferred four prisoners from Guantánamo: Sabir Lahmar, an Algerian, was transferred to France; an unidentified Palestinian was transferred to Hungary; and two Tunisians, Adel Ben Mabrouk bin Hamida Boughanmi and Mohammed Tahir Riyadh Nasseri, were transferred to the custody of the Italian government.

Sabir Lahmar, an Algerian freed in France

UK Judges Compare Binyam Mohamed’s Torture To That Of Abu Zubaydah by Andy Worthington

by Andy Worthington
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.andyworthington.co.uk
26 November 2009

Binyam Mohamed is a British resident, seized in Pakistan in April 2002, who was held in Pakistani custody, supervised by US agents, until July 2002, when he was sent by the CIA to be tortured for 18 months in Morocco, and was tied in with a “dirty bomb plot” that never even existed. After his ordeal in Morocco, he spent four months in the CIA’s “Dark Prison” in Kabul, and was then flown to Guantánamo in September 2004.

For the last 15 months, Mohamed has watched as two British High Court judges have tried to release to the public information conveyed by the US intelligence services to their British counterparts regarding his torture in Pakistan, prior to his rendition to Morocco.

Andy Worthington on Antiwar Radio and ABC: Gitmo, Torture, Trials and his new film

Scott Horton
Antiwar Radio

with Andy Worthington
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.andyworthington.co.uk
25 November 2009

Andy Worthington, author of The Guantanamo Files, discusses Obama’s broken promise to close Gitmo within a year, the enthusiastic U.S. embrace of rendition and torture after 9/11, the extralegal indefinite detention of innocent prisoners, endemic racism that makes torture less objectionable and the dangerous legal precedents established by failing to prosecute Bush administration crimes.

New Book: The Guantánamo Lawyers – and a talk by Jonathan Hafetz by Andy Worthington

by Andy Worthington
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.andyworthington.co.uk
25 October 2009

Published on November 9 by NYU Press (and available from Amazon), The Guantánamo Lawyers: Inside a Prison, Outside the Law, is edited by Mark Denbeaux (Seton Hall Law School) and Jonathan Hafetz (ACLU) and “contains over one hundred personal narratives from attorneys who have represented detainees held at ‘GTMO’ as well as at other overseas prisons, from Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan to secret CIA jails or ‘black sites.’” A website for the book is here.

This is a powerful book, covering every facet of the Bush administration’s lawless “War on Terror,” and is essential reading for anyone who wants an insight into the stories of the men held, from the only people outside the US administration (and the International Committee of the Red Cross) who have been allowed to meet them. It is also invaluable for anyone who wants to understand the legal struggles to secure rights for these men, and to hear, from first-hand experience, the kinds of obstructions that have been raised at every step of the way between the lawyers and their clients.

Musicians (Finally) Say No To Music Torture by Andy Worthington + The Divine Comedy: Guantanamo

by Andy Worthington
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.andyworthington.co.uk
22 October 2009

Well, that took a while. Nearly a year after George W. Bush’s Republican party was voted out of office, and at least five years after reports first surfaced that music was being used in “War on Terror” facilities in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo as part of a package of “enhanced interrogation technique,” — which, in any world other than the reality-defying one inhabited by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, would have been defined as torture — several noted musicians have spoken out to condemn the practice.

As was reported widely yesterday, REM, Pearl Jam, Trent Reznor, Tom Morello, and other artists including Jackson Browne, Billy Bragg, Michelle Branch, T-Bone Burnett, David Byrne, Rosanne Cash, Marc Cohn, Steve Earle, the Entrance Band, Joe Henry, Bonnie Raitt, Rise Against, and The Roots launched a formal protest against the use of music as torture.

Jason Leopold and Andy Worthington on closing Guantanamo Bay Prison

by Andy Worthington
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.andyworthington.co.uk
11 October 2009

Three months ago, veteran progressive radio host Peter B. Collins interviewed me for an in-depth podcast on his website, where, as I described it at the time, he is “pioneering a listener-funded new media project to make hard-hitting political interviews available online without editorial interference from networks and without the often extensive advertising breaks that do so much to disrupt the flow of so many shows.”

On Guantánamo, Lawmakers Reveal They Are Still Dick Cheney’s Pawns by Andy Worthington

by Andy Worthington
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.andyworthington.co.uk
6 October 2009

I like to believe that, despite studying Guantánamo for four years, I still have a sense of humor, but last Thursday I lost it, after 258 members of the House of Representatives (including 88 members of President Obama’s own party) voted for an idiotic, paranoid and unjust motion proposed by Rep. Hal Rogers (R-Ken.), which was designed to “Prohibit the transfer of GITMO prisoners, period” (those were his exact words). Just 163 Representatives voted against the motion, which, as JURIST described it, also supports “adding Guantánamo detainees to the federal ‘no fly’ list, and adopting Senate language forbidding the release of photos showing detainee abuse.”

No justice for Gitmo detainee?

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RussiaToday
October 05, 2009

New developments in the case of young Gitmo prisoner Mohammed Jawad are once again making headlines. His military lawyers say that Jawad had been tortured throughout his imprisonment at Guantanamo Bay and they want those responsible to be held accountable. Their efforts, however, seem to be overshadowed by the fact that the Department of Defense has repeatedly ignored requests for a war crimes investigation into his treatment at the prison. RT’s Dina Gusovsky speaks to one of Jawad’s lawyers, Eric Montalvo.

75 Guantánamo Prisoners Cleared For Release; 31 Could Leave Today by Andy Worthington

by Andy Worthington
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.andyworthington.co.uk
5 Oct. 2009

Last week, the Obama administration finally admitted that it might not be possible to close Guantánamo by the President’s self-imposed deadline of January 22, 2010, when defense secretary Robert Gates told ABC News’ “This Week” that it was “going to be tough” to meet the deadline. The announcement followed what appeared to be strategic leaks by administration insiders, which were designed to blame White House Counsel Greg Craig for the government’s woes.

Why it has taken so long to clear 75 prisoners for release

A Truly Shocking Guantánamo Story: Judge Confirms That An Innocent Man Was Tortured To Make False Confessions by Andy Worthington

by Andy Worthington
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.andyworthington.co.uk
30 Sept. 2009

In four years of researching and writing about Guantánamo, I have become used to uncovering shocking information, but for sheer cynicism, I am struggling to think of anything that compares to the revelations contained in the unclassified ruling in the habeas corpus petition of Fouad al-Rabiah, a Kuwaiti prisoner whose release was ordered last week by Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly (PDF). In the ruling, to put it bluntly, it was revealed that the US government tortured an innocent man to extract false confessions and then threatened him until he obligingly repeated those lies as though they were the truth.

Torturing Democracy

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Warning

This video may contain images depicting the reality and horror of war/violence and should only be viewed by a mature audience.

Best quality video: Torturing Democracy

The annotated transcript of “Torturing Democracy” provides the script of every word spoken during the 90-minute documentary, backed up with specific citations, footnotes and links, and includes documentation for the dramatizations in the film. Posting the annotated transcript allows viewers to check the facts for themselves, and enables researchers to build on the reporting to take the story even further.

To download this 385k file in PDF format, click here.

For more info. see: Bush White House ‘endorsed torture’

see

Torture on Dandelion Salad