Gitmo Detainee: I Was Tortured

(NEWSER) - Lakhdar Boumediene, the Guantanamo detainee who took on the Bush administration in a landmark Supreme Court case, was released today and flown to France to be reunited with relatives, the Washington Post reports. He was named the plaintiff in Boumediene v. Bush, the Supreme Court case that extended the right to habeas corpus to detainees. Though he’s not a French citizen, France agreed to accept the 43-year-old because he has family there. More»

Videos of sessions are 'sickening,' says lawyer

(NEWSER) - The Saudi national accused of being the "20th hijacker" on 9/11 is suing the government to release what his lawyers call "sickening" videos of his torture at Guantanamo Bay. Mohammed al-Qahtani was the victim of "torture and other profoundly cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment," involving marathon interrogation sessions, sleep deprivation, extreme temperatures, and "sexual and moral" humiliations, according to the suit filed in Manhattan Federal Court by the Center for Constitutional Rights. "The American public should be permitted to see what occurred for itself," says the suit. More»

Original charges were dropped because suspect was tortured

(NEWSER) - One of the "high-value" detainees imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay has been charged with planning the 2000 terrorist attack on the USS Cole in Yemen that killed 17 US sailors, reports the LA Times . Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, a Saudi of Yemeni descent, faces the death penalty if convicted of planning and orchestrating the attack on the Cole as it was docked in a Yemeni harbor. More»

Prosecutors say royalties from book on Guantanamo violate law

(NEWSER) - An Australian man who was captured fighting with Taliban forces in Afghanistan and spent five years in Guantanamo Bay prison , where he says he was tortured, has had a family trust frozen by the Australian Supreme Court, reports ABC News in Australia. The trust contains money David Hicks earned from his book Guantanamo My Journey , which the prosecutor's office says violates the Proceeds of Crime Act. More»

The practice is Un-American and must stop: John McCain

(NEWSER) - Some have used the death of Osama bin Laden as evidence to support the use of torture—but claims that such techniques led us to the al-Qaeda leader are simply not true, writes John McCain in the Washington Post . The senator points to former attorney general Michael Mukasey’s assertion that, under “harsh interrogation techniques,” Guantanamo prisoner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed revealed the name “of a trusted courier of bin Laden.” “That is false,” McCain writes. More»