Children in Guantanamo

In May 2008, in a submission to the 48th Session of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (PDF), the Pentagon claimed that it had only held eight juveniles — those under the age of 18 when their alleged crimes took place — during the life of the Guantánamo Bay prison. This, however, [...]

Freelance investigative journalist Andy Worthington continues his 70-part, million-word series telling, for the first time, the stories of 776 of the 779 prisoners held at Guantánamo since the prison opened on January 11, 2002. Adding information released by WikiLeaks in April 2011 to the existing documentation about the prisoners, much of which was already covered in Andy’s [...]

Last week, I was pleased to take part in a studio discussion at Press TV’s London studios of the documentary film, “You Don’t Like the Truth: 4 Days Inside Guantánamo,” directed by Luc Cote and Patricio Hernandez, and focusing on the story of Guantánamo prisoner Omar Khadr, which will be officially released in the UK [...]

Delayed by a month due to other demands (primarily, a visit to the US and the trial by Military Commission of Omar Khadr), this is the eighth part of a nine-part series telling the stories of all the prisoners currently held in Guantánamo (174 at the time of writing). See the introduction here, and Part [...]

On September 18, I was delighted to be asked to attend “Eid Without Aafia,” and to conduct a live interview with former Guantánamo prisoners Shafiq Rasul and Ruhal Ahmed. The event, in east London, was organized by the Justice for Aafia Coalition to raise awareness about the case of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, the Pakistani neuroscientist [...]

On Sunday, a military jury at Guantánamo handed down a 40-year sentence to Omar Khadr, the Canadian citizen who was just 15 years old when he was seized after a firefight in Afghanistan. The decision brought to an end a week of hearings that began when Khadr, now 24, accepted a plea deal giving him [...]

Note: A detailed response to the 40-year sentence handed down by Omar Khadr’s military jury on Sunday will be published soon. Although largely symbolic, as Khadr’s plea deal involves an eight-year sentence instead, it nevertheless provided a suitably grim epitaph to a week of events in which the staggering injustices of the Bush administration’s “War [...]

Please support my work! Everything about the last week’s events at Guantánamo has been deeply disturbing. On Monday, in defiance of international obligations requiring the rehabilitation of child prisoners, the US government — under President Obama — fulfilled the deepest wishes of the Bush administration, and persuaded Omar Khadr, the Canadian citizen who was just [...]

This has been a very poor week for American justice. On Monday, the Obama administration secured a plea deal in the trial by Military Commission of Canadian citizen Omar Khadr, who was 15 years old when he was seized by US forces in July 2002. As a result, the United States has become the first [...]

Yesterday morning, wearing a dark suit, a white shirt and a dark tie, Omar Khadr, the Canadian citizen who was just 15 years old when he was seized after a firefight in Afghanistan in July 2002, ended an eight-year struggle — first by the Bush administration, and then by the Obama administration — to convict [...]