Afghans in Guantanamo

Now here’s a weird one to ponder on the eve of the arraignments at Guantánamo of five prisoners — including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — who are charged with facilitating the 9/11 attacks.
I’ve always thought that there was something particularly perverse about charging minor Afghan insurgents in specially conceived “terror courts” at Guantánamo, as though there [...]

As a 16th prisoner at Guantánamo, Noor Uthman Muhammed, is put forward for trial by Military Commission (the much-criticized system of trials for “terror suspects” invented in the wake of the 9/11 attacks), Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, provides a guide to the [...]

For the five Afghans who returned home on the same flight as al-Jazeera journalist Sami al-Haj and the other three prisoners described in my previous article, the future is disturbingly uncertain. As I reported last December, when 13 of their compatriots were released from Guantánamo, they, like the other 19 Afghans released in August, September [...]

From the moment that the Toronto Star unleashed a gruesome, and previously unpublished photo of the chest wounds sustained by 15-year old Omar Khadr, after a firefight in Afghanistan in July 2002, it was clear that the resumption of Khadr’s pre-trial hearing at Guantánamo last week would once more raise murky issues of torture and [...]

In an important front-page story in the Guardian, Michael Semple, the Irish UN official arrested in Afghanistan at Christmas — along with British EU official Mervyn Patterson — and subsequently expelled for posing a threat to national security by making contact with the Taliban, has robustly defended his actions.

British Royal Marines in Helmand province. Expelled [...]