Guantanamo suicides

In the first detailed interview with a prisoner released from Guantánamo to Algeria, Abdul Aziz Naji, forcibly repatriated last week, has spoken to the Algerian newspaper El Khabar, describing his experiences during his eight years in US custody. While this is a welcome demonstration of transparency on the part of the Algerian authorities, it is [...]

Note: Please see the postscript below by Col. Davis.
Today, the Daily Times in Pakistan has published an interview with Colonel Morris Davis, conducted by political analyst Ali Kamran Chishti. The interview is of interest for Col. Davis’ explanation of how Guantánamo operated as an illegal “intelligence squeezing” center, and for his description of the prison [...]

Sometimes the truth is so sickening that no one in a position of authority — senior government officials, lawmakers, the mainstream media — wants to go anywhere near it.
This appears to be the case with the deaths of three men at Guantánamo on June 9, 2006. According to the official version of events, Salah Ahmed [...]

On June 2 last year, the Pentagon announced that a Yemeni prisoner at Guantánamo, Mohammed al-Hanashi (also known as Muhammad Salih) had died, reportedly by committing suicide. He was the fifth reported suicide at Guantánamo, following three deaths on June 9, 2006 and another on May 30, 2007, and he was the sixth man to [...]

On April 30, 2010, as I explained in Part One and Part Two of this three-part transcript, The UC Davis Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas organized an event to mark the fifth anniversary of its excellent Guantánamo Testimonials Project, which, for the first time, enabled a discussion to take place, [...]

Exactly three years ago, having recently finished the manuscript for my book The Guantánamo Files, I began working on a full-time basis as a freelance journalist. My inspiration was the death in Guantánamo of a 34-year old Saudi prisoner, Abdul Rahman al-Amri, who died, reportedly by committing suicide, on May 30, 2007. In the course [...]

In December, lawyers for Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, won an important court case in which judges ordered the British government to release information in its possession regarding claims that MI5 agents were present in the US prison in Kandahar, Afghanistan, when Shaker Aamer was subjected to torture, prior to his transfer [...]

Just over two hours into progressive radio host Jeff Farias’ Thursday show (available here), I joined Jeff to discuss Scott Horton’s extraordinary article for Harper’s Magazine (which I discussed here), in which, through interviews with four members of the US military who were serving at Guantánamo in June 2006, Scott established a viable and chilling [...]

It’s hard to know where to begin with this profoundly important story by Scott Horton, for next month’s Harper’s Magazine (available on the web here), but let’s try this: The three “suicides” at Guantánamo in June 2006 were not suicides at all. The men in question were killed during interrogations in a secretive block in [...]

In a guest column for the “Accountability for Torture” initiative organized by the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files, follows up on an article about the UN International Day in Support of Victims of Torture (and a cross-post of an interview with the wife of rendition victim Abou Elkassim [...]