Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

Two separate universes were in evidence on Tuesday. In the world of Barack Obama, the sense of change, the optimism and the intelligence were palpable, as two million Americans from every part of the United States — and numerous visitors from around the world — flocked to Washington D.C. to watch his inauguration as the [...]

Forget the outgoing President’s lame, reality-defying farewell speech, and Dick Cheney’s last-ditch attempts to claim that the administration in which he served as Vice President never engaged in torture. The Bush era came to an end last Wednesday when, in one short interview, Susan J. Crawford, the senior Pentagon official overseeing the Military Commissions at [...]

With less than two weeks until the Bush administration leaves office, Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, reports on developments — or the lack of them — during the last month in the Military Commissions, the much-criticized trial system for “terror suspects” that was [...]

On December 11, the Senate Armed Services Committee (chaired by Senators Carl Levin and John McCain) issued a compelling report into the torture and abuse of prisoners in US custody (PDF), based on a detailed analysis of how Chinese torture techniques, which are used in US military schools to train personnel to resist interrogation if [...]

As regular readers know, I don’t normally cross-post other people’s articles, but as a long-standing opponent of the trial system for “terror suspects “ at Guantánamo (the Military Commissions, conceived by Vice President Dick Cheney and his close advisers in November 2001), I was disturbed to note that, on Monday, US citizens who had lost [...]