By: Andy Worthington

Andy Worthington — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 14:34:55 +0000

The New York Post ran the following piece:
http://www.nypost.com/seven/02082008/news/regionalnews/times_gitmo_gaffe_782705.htm
As a point of interest, the Post ran a very short quote from me. One of their reporters had contacted me by email, and I had replied that I was not prepared to comment directly on the Note, but that I was “happy to explain that I would be extremely disappointed if anyone were to presume from comments made by the editorial board at the Times that my book ‘The Guantanamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison’ is anything other than a well-researched and meticulously sourced work of analytic non-fiction, in which, after drawing largely on documentation released by the Pentagon, I concluded that those in charge of America’s ‘War on Terror’ were responsible for ‘a catastrophic failure of justice.’” The Post did not, however, run the whole of this comment. I also wrote, “I stand by the findings in my book – that up to half of all the detainees were completely innocent men, seized by mistake, that most of the rest were Taliban recruits, who had traveled to Afghanistan before 9/11 with the intention of taking part in an inter-Muslim civil war, that no more than 40 of the detainees are connected in any meaningful way with al-Qaeda (as cited by various CIA officials over the years), and that indulging in torture and denying prisoners rights either as Prisoners of War or as criminals shames the reputation of the United States as a nation founded on adherence to the law.” I added, “I also stand by my comment, cited by the Times and taken from my website, that Guantanamo is part of ‘a cruel and misguided response by the Bush administration to the Sept. 11 attacks.’”

Comments on: Scott Horton on Guantánamo and the New York Times’ Editor’s Note

By: Andy Worthington

By: Andy Worthington