Co-authored with Deepa Kumar Beginning in June 2013, a series of news articles based on whistle-blower Edward Snowden’s collection of documents from the National Security Agency (NSA) took the world by storm. Over the course of a year, the Snowden material provided a detailed account of the massive extent of NSA’s warrantless data collection. What…
The shooting of three American Muslim students in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, earlier this month has focused attention on anti-Muslim hatred in the US. The murder of Deah Barakat, 23, Yusor Abu-Salha, 21, and Razan Abu-Salha, 19, was initially ignored by mainstream media in the US. Only when large numbers of Twitter users started circulating…
Co-authored with Harmit Athwal Britons following the news of protests against police killings of black people in the US should not feel too smug about the situation in the UK. Not for the first time, our outrage at American racism goes hand in hand with complacency about Britain’s own history of institutional racism and…
On his “Real Time” show on HBO recently, host Bill Maher told his audience: “Liberals need to stand up for liberal principles” and that “in the Muslim world, this is what’s lacking”. His guest, atheist writer Sam Harris, went on to state that “Islam is the mother-lode of bad ideas” and that “we are misled to think…
Co-authored with Emily Keppler and Muki Najaer The case of Ayyub Abdul-Alim fits a decades-long pattern of government criminalization of African-American Muslims. On the night of December 9, 2011, Siham Stewart called her husband, Ayyub Abdul-Alim, as he closed down his corner store, Nature’s Garden, in Springfield, Massachusetts. She asked him to bring home…
In the early years of its “war on terror”, the US government developed an international system of secret prisons. Those suspected of being Muslim terrorists were secretly captured by the CIA or the US military and flown between these “black sites” in a process called “extraordinary rendition”. We now know that CIA officers used torture…
An interview with Tom Mills, co-editor of New Left Project. The ‘War on Terror’ is a phrase most closely associated with George W. Bush. How has this war been affected by the change in Presidential administration? By and large the Obama administration has continued the policies and practices that were dominant at the end of the…
Co-authored with Jeanne Theoharis The UK government tried to disappear Talha Ahsan and Babar Ahmad to the US, but the basic rules of evidence were unexpectedly applied. Days after Talha Ahsan and Babar Ahmad were extradited to the US in 2012, the home secretary, Theresa May, began her speech to the Conservative party conference by…
Co-authored with Deepa Kumar The U.S. government has been snooping on prominent members of the Muslim-American community, according to documents released by National Security Agency whistle-blower Edward Snowden and publicized in a story by Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain of the online publication Intercept. That story reveals that the NSA and FBI covertly monitored the emails…
A review of Dirty Wars: the World is a Battlefield by Jeremy Scahill (New York, Nation Books, 2013). During his first term in office, Obama’s primary achievement in national security policy was the creation of silence. After the loud, divisive controversies of the Bush years, a bipartisan, media-endorsed consensus emerged. The official line was that invasions, torture, secret…