Which of These Two Men Got Life?
24-02-2010
What a difference a name makes! Two young men, university students in their twenties, have been sentenced by a Federal District Court. One received a five year sentence; the other received life without possibility of parole. Both were born and raised within a short distance of each other. One is Bethesda, Maryland; the other in Falls Church, Virginia. But, one is Muslim. Can you guess which one?
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More Skeletons Escape From Guantanamo's Closet
23-02-2010
Anyway, I bring this up because the Pat Tillman story is important for anyone who still thinks that the military are unable to cover up their own mistakes. Pat was an NFL star turned Army Ranger, an all-American hero, who was killed in a friendly fire incident in Afghanistan, so if the Army lied to his family about the circumstances of his death, imagine what they’d do if he had been a suspected terrorist held in the world’s most controversial detention centre.
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Hatred and Another Agenda: A Response by Moazzam Begg
22-02-2010
I had not imagined that the poorly researched Sunday Times article last week with the suggestion that it promised to expose a tangible link between Amnesty International, the Taliban and I was actually a prelude to something far more sinister against Cageprisoners and I in the days to come.
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As Police Launch New Torture Inquiry, It’s Time for Shaker Aamer to Come Home from Guantánamo
22-02-2010
On Friday, it emerged in a UK court that the Metropolitan Police is investigating allegations that MI5 was complicit in the torture, in US custody in Afghanistan, of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident still held at Guantánamo. In the High Court, Richard Hermer QC, counsel for Aamer, told Mr. Justice Sullivan that Met officers had visited his solicitors, Birnberg Peirce, on Wednesday. “It became apparent they are now investigating allegations raised by Mr. Aamer into the alleged complicity of the UK security service in his mistreatment,” he said, adding that the police had made an application to the court “for release of relevant documents” relating to Aamer’s allegations that the confessions he made in US custody were obtained through torture.
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Will Parliament Rid Us of the Cruel and Unjust Control Order Regime?
19-02-2010
Since last June, when, in the wake of a significant ruling in the European Court of Human Rights, the Law Lords ruled that imposing control orders breaches Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees the right to a fair trial, the system established in haste and paranoia in early 2005 has been crumbling.
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Omar Al-Deghayes: My Guantanamo Nightmare
19-02-2010
Omar Al-Deghayes, the Libyan national living in Britain, considers his six-year incarceration in Oscar Block and Fifth Block in Guantanamo as a service to God. He does not harbor any ill will towards his jailers and views those days as a trial and tribulation. In an interview with Asharq Al-Awsat in London, Al-Deghayes recounts how he lost sight in his right eye while in detention and says that three of his American guards came to London to apologize to him after they left their military service for their treatment of the prisoners
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Letter to the Sunday Times From Sam Zarifi, Amnesty International’s Asia-Pacific Director.
18-02-2010
I do not oppose our current initiative working with Moazzam Begg in the recent European tour seeking to convince European states to receive more of the Guantánamo detainees who cannot be repatriated because of the risk of further human rights abuses.
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The Problem with Gita
17-02-2010
Will the concept of a Muslim human rights activist ever be fully acceptable in Western society? During my many years working at the Islamic Human Rights Commission, several valuable minutes were wasted every morning deleting hate mail which often described the organisation as an oxymoron or a contradiction in terms before descending into a volley of Islamophobic and racist abuse. For those who send such emails, Islam and human rights cannot coexist.
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Letters from the children of Shaker Aamer to Barack Obama
16-02-2010
The children of Shaker Aamer write two very emotional letters to Barack Obama asking for their father to be returned to them.
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Torture as Foreign Policy: The Omar Khadr Decision
15-02-2010
JURIST Special Guest Columnist Gail Davidson, Executive Director of Lawyers Rights Watch Canada, says that the Supreme Court of Canada was simply wrong in taking the extraordinary step of denying Canadian Guantanamo detainee Omar Khadr the remedy ordered by the courts below — the only remedy available — based on the arbitrary power of the executive to conduct foreign affairs....
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Torture claims and tangled tenses
15-02-2010
Let's suppose, against all the indignant protestations, that MI5 officers had been "complicit" in the torture of Binyam Mohamed, that is to say, knowingly took advantage of that torture. Is this denied by MI5 chief Jonathan Evans (Storm grows over MI5 torture claim, 13 February): "We did not practise mistreatment or torture and do not do so now, nor do we collude in torture or encourage others to torture on our behalf."? I think it is not denied. In the past tense, he denies that we practised torture, but is silent about whether we were complicit or colluded. Then in the present tense, it is denied that we now collude in torture, using the ambiguity of the continuous present, which affirms that we don't torture people, to suggest that we haven't colluded in torture in the past.
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Details of British Resident's Brutal Torture by CIA Officers Released
12-02-2010
Three senior UK judges on Wednesday ordered the British government to publicly disclose previously highly classified information that reveals how Binyam Mohamed, a British resident, was brutally tortured by the CIA while in Pakistani custody in April and May 2002.
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Defending Moazzam Begg and Amnesty International
10-02-2010
Just when it seemed that Republicans in America had a monopoly on Islamophobic hysteria, the Sunday Times prompted a torrent of similar hysteria in the UK by running an article in which an employee of Amnesty International — Gita Sahgal, head of the gender unit at the International Secretariat — criticized the organization that employed her for its association with former Guantánamo prisoner Moazzam Begg.
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Cageprisoners' Response to Sunday Times Attack
08-02-2010
I was shocked and extremely disappointed to see your article in today's Sunday Times make no reference at all to the questions you so ardently sought to have answered (as mentioned below) and, that I explained to you in some detail in our telephone conversation yesterday.
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Yvonne Ridley on Dr. Aafia Siddiqui
08-02-2010
Dr AAFIA Siddiqui is a bright, intelligent woman who has been through hell having being kidnapped, tortured in secret prisons, gunned down by US soldiers and renditioned to America where she is now facing attempted murder charges against those who shot her. Only in the cock-eyed crosshairs of George W Bush’s War on Terror could this happen and I hope to God that the jurors who will go through the evidence during the next few hours, if not days, see through this rotten legacy and recognize the case for what it is … a tissue of lies enveloped in a web of deceit.
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Terror and academic freedom
08-02-2010
Draconian anti-terror laws are blocking the serious study of terrorism and counter-terrorism at UK universities
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THE TRUTH ABOUT US JUSTICE
06-02-2010
Even some of the US media expressed discomfort over the verdict returned by the jurors … there was a general feeling that something was not right.
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Aafia Siddiqui Trial Coverage
04-02-2010
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Aafia Siddiqui Trial Day Twelve
04-02-2010
After a day and a half of deliberation, a 12-member jury found Siddiqui guilty today on charges that she tried to kill a team of U.S. soldiers and FBI agents in Afghanistan in 2008.
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Rachid Ramda: An Unsurprising But Disconcerting Verdict
03-02-2010
On the 13th of October at 5.30 pm, at the end of a month of debate, the Special Court of Assizes in Paris judging on the appeal of M. Rachid Ramda found him guilty of “complicity in murder and attempted murder relating to terrorism by having given the orders and provided the means” for the bombings of Saint-Michel, Maison-Blanche and Musee d'Orsay in 1995 and sentenced him to life imprisonment with a concurrent sentence of 22 years without remission.
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