Guantanamo

February 14 marks the 10th anniversary of the arrival at Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, who is now the last British resident in the prison, but was once one of 15 British citizens and residents held at Guantánamo. Shaker’s story is one that I have told and retold over the years, including in the documentary film, [...]

The story of Guantánamo’s Uighurs has always been one of monstrous injustice — as well as a monstrous failure of intelligence, and an equally monstrous failure when it comes to the US government taking responsibility for its own mistakes. This is not a unique occurrence in Guantánamo, of course, but it has long been emblematic [...]

Yesterday, I posted a short video of a speech I gave on January 10, while I was visiting the US for events marking the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, prior to a screening of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (which I co-directed with Polly Nash) at a branch of [...]

On January 10, while I was visiting the US for events marking the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, the World Can’t Wait, the campaigning organization responsible for my visit, hosted a screening of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (which I co-directed with Polly Nash) at a branch of Busboys [...]

To mark the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, on January 11, I was involved in two particular projects — firstly, the establishment of a new campaign and website, “Close Guantánamo,” designed to raise awareness of the continuing injustice of Guantánamo, and, in particular, the injustice of continuing to hold 89 of the remaining [...]

When looking at the stories of the released Guantánamo prisoners, one of the most tragic individual stories of last year was that of Adel al-Gazzar (aka Adel El-Gazzar), a former officer in the Egyptian army, who lost a leg in US custody and spent eight years in Guantánamo. Adel returned to Egypt last June, after [...]

Since July 2008, when the first Algerian prisoners were repatriated from Guantánamo, the position taken by the US government — first under George W. Bush, and, for the last three years, under Barack Obama — has been that Algeria is a safe country for the repatriation of prisoners cleared for release. Lawyers and NGOs aware [...]

Ten years ago, foreign prisoners, seized in other countries, began to arrive in the US prison at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan. Some were held in a secretive part of the prison, and had often passed through other secret facilities in Afghanistan or elsewhere. The majority of these prisoners ended up in Guantánamo, but some were [...]

Please support my work! Since March 2006, I have been researching and writing about Guantánamo and the 779 men (and boys) held there, first through my book The Guantánamo Files, and, since May 2007, as a full-time independent investigative journalist. For three years, I focused on the crimes of the Bush administration and, since January [...]

On Monday, marking the third anniversary of President Obama’s failed promise to close the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo within a year, Navi Pillay, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, expressed what a UN news release described as “deep disappointment” that the Obama administration had failed to close Guantánamo and had, instead, “entrenched [...]