Guantanamo whistleblowers

As the Obama administration prepares to relaunch Dick Cheney and David Addington’s reviled Military Commissions (with claims that they will be used for less than 20 of the 240 prisoners still held), senior officials have been largely silent about the eventual fate of the rest of the prison’s population, with the exception of a few [...]

Since publishing the first definitive list of the 779 prisoners who have been held in the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba (available in four parts — Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4), I have received some wonderful feedback, but I have also been asked to consider the contributions made by other [...]

On January 22, in an executive order relating to the closure of Guantánamo, President Barack Obama established a comprehensive review of the cases of the remaining 242 prisoners, to work out who could be released and who should continue to be held. The executive order explained that the review was to be “conducted with the [...]

In the first part of this interview with Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, Andy Worthington, the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, examined why the government’s allegations against the prisoners at Guantánamo are unreliable.
A veteran of US Army intelligence, Lt. Col. Abraham worked for OARDEC (the Office [...]

Since the election of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States, the closure of the “War on Terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba has become a hot topic. Throughout his election campaign, Obama pledged to close Guantánamo, and he reiterated his promise during his first TV interview as President-Elect, on November 15.
In [...]

The repatriation from Guantánamo of Salim Hamdan, a former driver for Osama bin Laden, to serve out the last month of his sentence for providing material support for terrorism in Yemen, will surely hasten the demise of the prison, as promised by President-Elect Barack Obama, even though the circumstances of Hamdan’s departure were as furtive [...]

In the real world, guilt and innocence are clearly defined, and those believed to be responsible for a crime are considered innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Since the 9/11 attacks, however, the US administration has done away with such long-standing conventions.
Under the guise of waging a “War on Terror,” those in [...]

Those who cherish the United States’ historical adherence to the rule of law — myself included — were delighted to hear that the US Supreme Court ruled on Thursday, in the case of Boumediene v. Bush (PDF), that the prisoners at Guantánamo “have the constitutional right to habeas corpus,” enabling them to challenge the basis [...]

As a recent decision by a military judge makes clear, the wheels of justice revolve in slow motion at Guantánamo, as those responsible for the exercise of political and judicial processes — the executive, Congress and the Supreme Court — engage in prolonged tussles that last for years. Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files: [...]

On Thursday February 28, Stephen Abraham, the US military intelligence officer whose explosive statements last year about the manifest failures of the tribunal process at Guantánamo (available here and here) are widely credited with persuading the Supreme Court to look once more at the detainees’ rights (see here and here), spoke about his experiences at [...]