Tag Archives: end unlawful detention

Iranian Guards Compare Evin Prison to Guantanamo

September 26, 2011 at 1:15 PM

The release of detained American hikers Josh Fattal and Shane Bauer by the Iranian government last Wednesday was a rare bit of good news. They have now arrived back in the United States and on Sunday gave their first press conference on US soil.

Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal

Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal at press conference in New York, September 25 (Photo by Michael Nagle/Getty Images)

Josh and Shane were detained by the Iranian authorities, along with their friend Sarah Shourd, while hiking along the Iraq- Iran border in 2009.

They were held in Iran’s notorious Evin Prison on espionage charges for more than two years. They had little contact with the outside world and communication with their families was almost impossible.

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CIA 'Shocked' Prisoners They Sent To Libya Were Tortured

September 8, 2011 at 4:36 PM

Abdel Hakim Belhaj ©Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images

This past weekend has provided a few new insights into what Dick Cheney’s policy of ‘working the dark side’ actually entailed and offered a piquant example of the law of unintended consequences.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) was able to gain access to the headquarters of Libyan Intelligence after the organization’s building in Tripoli fell to rebel control. HRW’s researcher found files detailing the relationship that developed between the CIA and Gadhafi’s external intelligence service in the years after September 11th.

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Dick Cheney's Ten Year War on Truth

August 31, 2011 at 9:44 AM
Amnesty activists protest Cheney's memoir at Department of State

Amnesty activists present Cheney's memoir as evidence of war crimes to the Department of Justice on August 30th. (Mladen Antonov/AFP/Getty Images)

On Tuesday former Vice-President Richard ‘Dick’ Cheney published his memoirs, In My Time, and, as widely expected, he has used this new platform to restate his wholehearted support for some of the most egregious human rights abuses committed by the Bush administration.

We thought it might be instructive to examine some of the claims he makes in his memoirs and see how well they stack up against the established facts.

In an interview with CNN in June 2005 Dick Cheney spun a rosy picture of conditions in Guantanamo:

“We spent a lot of money to build it. They’re very well treated there. They’re living in the tropics. They’re well fed. They’ve got everything they could possibly want.”

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The Winter of Human Rights

June 24, 2011 at 6:55 PM

By Elaine Scarry, Professor of English and American Literature at Harvard University and author of “The Body in Pain” and the recently published “Thinking in an Emergency,” part of the Amnesty International Global Ethics Series

Early on the morning of December 9, 2008, I flew from Boston to New York City to be present at the U.S. Court of Appeals Second Circuit’s rehearing of Arar v. Ashcroft.  The trial was scheduled for 2:00 p.m., but anticipating the courtroom would be packed, I felt it would be prudent to arrive by 8:30 a.m.

Maher Arar

From Amnesty USA's infographic on the Maher Arar case, taken from photo by © Bud Schultz.

Six months earlier a Second Circuit panel of three judges had declined to hear Maher Arar’s claims on the grounds – put forward by Mr.Ashcroft’s defense – that doing so would jeopardize national security. Then suddenly, out of the blue, this very same court – but  this time the full panel of 12 judges – had decided en banc and sua sponte (collectively and on its own) to reconsider the case.

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Doubling Down On Failure At Guantanamo

April 27, 2011 at 12:51 PM

There are still 172 detainees held at the Guantánamo Bay detention centre © Amnesty International

Released just as President Obama seems to have washed his hands of closing Guantanamo, a new batch of leaked government documents provide fresh insight into just how inadequate, iniquitous and ultimately counterproductive, the US foray into indefinite detention has been.

The new document cache consists of Detainee Assessment Briefs (DABs) – essentially case summaries – produced by intelligence analysts at Guantanamo between 2002 and 2009 that were first leaked to Wikileaks and then by someone in the Wikileaks community to the press.

The picture of Guantanamo that emerges from these new documents is of an arbitrary review process, operating from a presumption of guilt not innocence, thrown together on the fly, and overseen by individuals with so little understanding of cultural nuance that they might as well have been drafted in from Mars.

The New York Times points out that the qualification “possibly” appears 387 times about intelligence used in the files, with the qualifiers “unknown” and “deceptive” appearing 188 times and 85 times respectively. Further proof that the intelligence business is anything but a precise science.

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