Hunger strikes in Guantanamo

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 [...]

Eleven years ago, the United Nations designated June 26 as the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture. Then-Secretary General Kofi Annan explained, “This is a day on which we pay our respects to those who have endured the unimaginable. This is an occasion for the world to speak up against the unspeakable. It [...]

As part of a series of recent releases from Guantánamo, three Saudi prisoners were repatriated, along with Guantánamo’s youngest prisoner, an Iraqi refugee, and four Uighurs who were sent to Bermuda. As I explained in a recent article, “Empty Evidence: The Stories Of The Saudis Released From Guantánamo,” all three men had been cleared for [...]

Yesterday, in the “Other Voices” section of the Miami Herald, Binyam Mohamed, the British resident and victim of “extraordinary rendition” and torture, who was returned to the UK in February, provided readers with his interpretation of the recent death in Guantánamo of the Yemeni prisoner Muhammad Salih. I’m cross-posting it here because of its significance, [...]

“Guantánamo’s Hidden History: Shocking Statistics of Starvation” is a report I’ve compiled for Cageprisoners analyzing the weight records for prisoners at Guantánamo (released by the Pentagon in March 2007), which demonstrate that, from January 2002, when the prison opened, until February 2007, when these particular records came to an end, one in ten of the [...]

In his speech in Egypt on Thursday, in which he promised “A New Beginning,” Barack Obama did not specifically mention the death of a prisoner at Guantánamo on Monday — and the extent to which the prison’s existence has soured relations between the United States and the Muslim world — except to repeat his most [...]

It has just been reported that Muhammad Ahmad Abdallah Salih (also known as Mohammed al-Hanashi), a Yemeni prisoner at Guantánamo, has died, apparently by committing suicide.
The news comes just three days after the second anniversary of another death at Guantánamo — that of Abdul Rahman al-Amri, a Saudi prisoner who died on May 30, 2007 [...]

The British human rights group Cageprisoners has just published a fascinating interview with Binyam Mohamed, the British resident, subjected to “extraordinary rendition” and torture, who was freed from Guantánamo on February 23. I have covered Binyam’s story in great depth over the last few years (see the list of articles at the end of this [...]

Ahmed Zuhair, a 35-year old Saudi prisoner at Guantánamo — and a father of ten — has been on a hunger strike since June 2005, at the start of a fraught summer at the prison in which up to 200 prisoners (over a third of Guantánamo’s total population at the time) embarked on a mass [...]

For three and a half years, since an account was first made public detailing the suffering of Binyam Mohamed, a British resident and a victim of “extraordinary rendition” and particularly brutal torture, he was one of the better-publicized prisoners held in the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
There have, in that time, been other compelling [...]