War on Terrorism

A Hollow Inauguration

by Andy Worthington January 25, 2013

On January 11, the 11th anniversary of the opening of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo, I was in Washington D.C., with human rights groups, lawyers, anti-torture groups (mostly religious), and other concerned persons, calling on Barack Obama to fulfill the promise he made to close the prison when he took office in 2009. It was my ...

Three Reasons Why the Charges against Bradley Manning Should be Dropped

by Tim Kelly January 22, 2013

A military judge has rejected a request to dismiss all charges against U.S. soldier Bradley Manning, who stands accused of passing secret material to the whistle-blower website WikiLeaks. Judge Denise Lind said there was no prosecutorial misconduct, ruling out the dropping of all 22 counts against Manning. The judge, however, did acknowledge Manning’s mistreatment at the hands of the U.S. ...

Eleven Years of Guantánamo: End This Scandal Now!

by Andy Worthington January 11, 2013

Eleven years ago, on January 11, 2002, the Bush administration proudly presented to the world one of its major responses to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 — a prison on the grounds of the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, designed to hold hundreds of men and boys seized in the “war on terror” that was ...

Canada’s Shameful and Unending Disdain for Omar Khadr

by Andy Worthington January 4, 2013

Three months ago, Omar Khadr, the Canadian citizen seized as a child and held and abused by the U.S. government in Guantánamo for ten years, was returned to Canada, where he now languishes in a maximum-security prison. Technically speaking, the Canadian government is legally entitled to imprison him for another five years and ten months, according to

Clinton’s Legacy, Part 2: The Attacks on 9/11

by Sheldon Richman January 1, 2013

Part 1 | Part 2 Last month I sought to correct the record by showing that the administration of Bill Clinton (1993–2001), which is almost universally viewed with nostalgia, played a major role in inflating the housing bubble, which led to the Great Recession, thanks to aggressive polices pushed by his second secretary of Housing and Urban ...

Private Murders versus Government Murders

by Michael Tennant December 24, 2012

The December 14 murder of 20 children and 6 women at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, has garnered vast media attention and caused countless people with no connection to the victims to grieve for them. This is not a new phenomenon: nearly all mass murders carried out by civilians generate the same type of coverage and response. But ...

Will Guantánamo Ever Be Closed?

by Andy Worthington December 7, 2012

Nearly eleven years after the Bush administration’s “war on terror” prison opened on the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, its much-mooted closure seems as remote as ever. Last week, there were encouraging noises, when Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, presented a report prepared by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) looking ...

The Long Pursuit of Accountability for Bush’s Torture Program

by Andy Worthington November 29, 2012

In June 2004, in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal, a notorious memo from August 2002 was leaked. It was written by John Yoo, a lawyer in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel and it claimed to redefine torture and to authorize its use on prisoners seized in the “war on terror.” I had no idea ...

The Banality of Evil: How the U.S. Government Killed an Innocent Man

by Andy Worthington November 19, 2012

Now that the all-consuming and insanely expensive presidential election is over for another four years, Barack Obama’s in-tray still contains Guantánamo, where, of the 166 men still held, 86 were cleared for release by the Guantánamo Review Task Force. Consisting of officials from the relevant government departments and the intelligence agencies, the Task Force analyzed the cases ...

The War on Terrorism, the Constitution, & Civil Liberties: UC Boulder

by Future of Freedom Foundation November 19, 2012

From October 15-19, 2012 The Future of Freedom Foundation and the Young Americans for Liberty co-sponsored a College Civil Liberties Tour that brought a panel of three lawyers – a libertarian, a liberal, and a conservative – to five campuses on the West Coast. The three panelists, inluding Jacob G. Hornberger, Glenn Greenwald, Bruce Fein, and along with moderator ...

Another Torture Victim on Trial at Guantánamo

by Andy Worthington October 29, 2012

In the last two weeks, the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay enjoyed a brief resurgence of interest, as pre-trial hearings took place in the cases of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other men accused of directing and supporting the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, and in the case of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi national accused of ...

The 9/11 Trial: Torturing Justice

by Andy Worthington October 22, 2012

The last time the U.S. government wheeled out Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the four other men accused of initiating and being involved in the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, was in May this year, and, as is usual, the mainstream media turned out in force. That occasion was the formal arraignment of the men and it was ...