What Wikileaks Gitmo files says about our Western “values”

My following article appears in today’s ABC The Drum: The Wikileaks-released Guantanamo Bay files provide an invaluable insight into the mindset of the US and its allies since September 11. An infrastructure of torture was implemented, a practice still defended by the US government today, to allegedly protect the homeland from future attack. The result…

Who lives permanently at Gitmo?

American crimes at Guantanamo Bay continue day in day out and yet the corporate press largely ignores it. Independent journalist Andy Worthington is a notable exception. So which prisoners are left at the prison camp? Worthington has collated an invaluable list, explaining how they got there and very often it was through the paying of…

How many people are still locked up at Gitmo?

The running sore of Guantanamo Bay shows no sign of abating: In a comprehensive recent study, Physicians for Human Rights alleges that healthcare professionals experimented on human subjects in order to hone the torture techniques authorized by the Bush Administration. The Department of Justice’s retracted torture memoranda advise that doctors should be involved at every…

How we treat terror suspects is the sign of a true democracy

News that some of the alleged 9/11 masterminds will be tried in a New York city civilian court is welcome news but Andy Worthington, a Brit who has written about many of the Guantanamo Bay captives, issues caution on Democracy Now!: Well, I think—you know, I think it’s very appropriate that it does take place…

Prosecuting a child at Gitmo and calling it justice

Obama’s America: Everything about the last week’s events at Guantánamo has been deeply disturbing. On Monday, in defiance of international obligations requiring the rehabilitation of child prisoners, the US government — under President Obama — fulfilled the deepest wishes of the Bush administration, and persuaded Omar Khadr, the Canadian citizen who was just 15 years…

America says it is good and true and the globe laughs

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald on the inherent delusions of the American corporate media and posits: the world looks at us with contempt and slams the exceptionalist mindset: I’m asking this sincerely, not rhetorically:…  is there anything other than extreme self-delusion, grounded in blinding self-regard… (i.e., self-decreed exceptionalism), that can explain this?… … The Washington Post Editorial Page today is…

The cry of the innocent

The following list (also see Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4) is the culmination of a three-year project to record the stories of all the prisoners held at the US prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Text and images ©2024 Antony Loewenstein. All rights reserved.

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