u.k.

A British High Court on Friday ordered that previously redacted text concerning the alleged torture of former Guantanamo Bay detainee Binyam Mohamed must be made public.
This is a breakthrough for Mohamed, because while he claims that he was tortured while detained in Pakistan and interrogated by U.S. and British agents, he’s never been able to [...]

The British Conservative Party has just wrapped its 2009 conference, its last before what is universally expected to be a 2010 victory over the ruling Labour Party. In his closing speech, party leader David Cameron appeared to put some daylight between the commitment of Prime Minister Gordon Brown and the commitment of the incoming government.
“We [...]

In Geneva, where the U.S. delegation has arrived in advance of tomorrow’s multilateral negotiation with Iran’s nuclear program, senior U.S. diplomats set expectations for the talks in a background briefing for reporters. The key points: the disclosure of the hidden nuclear facility at Qom has “strengthened the sense of purpose and unity amongst the 5+1 [...]

I’m not in Pittsburgh, but I do have al-Jazeera English on my TV, so here’s the announcement from the leaders of the U.S., the U.K. and France, revealing the existence of (another) heretofore undisclosed nuclear facility in Iran. The facility is reportedly still under construction, and the Iranians have belatedly claimed to the International Atomic [...]

This case has dropped a off the radar screen lately, but Bob Egelko at the San Francisco Chronicle today reminds us that the Obama administration is still fighting on three different fronts release of information that would likely show that U.S. officials tortured British former Guantanamo detainee Binyam Mohamed.
Mohamed is one of the plaintiffs in [...]

It’s not just residents of Alexandria, Va., who are uncomfortable with the prospect of hosting Guantanamo Bay detainees in their backyards. Some residents of the Pacific nation of Palau, where 13 Chinese Uighurs detained at Gitmo are set to be relocated, are expressing indignation over what they consider their government’s failure to consider the opinions [...]

This story, which was reported in The Guardian and confirmed by publicly filed court documents, is one of the stranger means the Obama administration has used thus far to keep quiet the sins of its predecessor.
As I’ve written before, lawyers representing the ex-Guantanamo detainee Binyam Mohamed have been complaining that the U.S. government is forbidding [...]

We’ve been speculating that Sen. Pat Leahy’s (D-Vt.) proposed truth commission to investigate alleged lawbreaking during the Bush administration may not be going anywhere, but now it seems Leahy is saying that himself.
Charlotte Dennett, a journalist and former candidate for Vermont attorney general, writes in Consortiumnews.com that in a meeting with Leahy on Monday, the [...]

According to news reports over the weekend, the relentless Spanish judge and human rights prosecutor, Baltasar Garzon, who first came to international attention for prosecuting Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, will likely soon charge former high-level Bush administration lawyers for violating international law by providing the legal framework to allow the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo [...]

It’s interesting to note the contrast when someone charges government complicity with torture in the United Kingdom, versus here in the United States.
Ever since Binyam Mohamed — the Ethiopian-born Guantanamo detainee who claims he was tortured as part of the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” program (and whom I’ve written about previously here) — was returned [...]