Bosnians in Guantanamo

On Monday, just hours after the first war crimes hearing for four months was convened at Guantánamo, and just hours before the Pentagon announced that a sixth prisoner had died, apparently by committing suicide, the small group of reporters — “less than a dozen,” according to Michelle Shephard of the Toronto Star — who had [...]

So many of the stories relating to Guantánamo are bleak that I thought it was worth mentioning a recent interview with Lakhdar Boumediene, who was released from Guantánamo two weeks ago after seven years and four months of pointless and brutal imprisonment. I first reported the story of Boumediene and his five compatriots — Algerians [...]

Although I reported last week about an important court case in favor of Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed, a Yemeni prisoner in Guantánamo, there was little in the way of progress, during the first 115 days of the Obama administration, for the men who are still held, despite the President’s pledge to close the prison [...]

The continued imprisonment of at least 61 prisoners at Guantánamo, who have been cleared for release after multiple military review boards (or, in recent months, after rulings in a US court), was an affront to notions of justice when the Bush administration was in power, and is even more so now that Barack Obama, who [...]

Those of us who prefer justice to arbitrary and unaccountable detention without charge or trial were delighted when, last week, Barack Obama fulfilled a long-stated promise and issued a presidential order stating that Guantánamo will be closed “as soon as practicable, and no later than one year from the date of this order,” and establishing [...]

Just two weeks ago, in a habeas corpus case in a Washington D.C. court, Judge Richard Leon turned the clock back to January 11, 2002 (the day Guantánamo opened) by ruling that the US government could continue holding two prisoners at Guantánamo — the Yemeni Muaz al-Alawi and the Tunisian Hisham Sliti — because the [...]

On the seventh anniversary of the opening of the “War on Terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba (on January 11, 2002), this is perhaps a rather bleak title, given that Barack Obama has pledged to close the prison, but recent events in a US District Court — largely overlooked in the mainstream media — have [...]

With less than two weeks until the Bush administration leaves office, Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, reports on developments — or the lack of them — during the last month in the Military Commissions, the much-criticized trial system for “terror suspects” that was [...]

As three Bosnian Algerians — Mustafa Ait Idr, Hadj Boudella and Mohammed Nechla — returned to their families in Bosnia-Herzegovina on Tuesday, Ait Idr spoke briefly to reporters. “For almost seven years,” he said, “I was at the end of the world, at the worst place in the world. It would have been hard even [...]

On Thursday, in the US District Court in Washington D.C., Judge Richard Leon, an appointee of President George W. Bush, delivered a major blow to the outgoing administration’s “War on Terror” detention policies by ordering the immediate release of five Algerian-born Bosnian prisoners at Guantánamo, after concluding that the government had provided no credible evidence [...]