Mauritanians in Guantanamo

In the struggle in the US courts to establish who can be detained at Guantánamo, and on what basis, following the Supreme Court’s ruling, in June 2008, that the Guantánamo prisoners have constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights, there are three main players: the District Court judges, who, in 57 cases over the last two years, [...]

This is the seventh 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 One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five and Part Six. This seventh article tells the stories of 13 prisoners seized in [...]

Back in March, when Judge James Robertson of the District Court in Washington D.C. granted the habeas corpus petition of Guantánamo prisoner Mohamedou Ould Slahi, there was uproar in Congress. For many years, Slahi, a Mauritanian national who had lived in Germany and Canada, was touted by the Bush administration as the “highest-value detainee at [...]

Note: This article is published as part of “Guantánamo Habeas Week” (introduced here), which also features an interactive list of all 47 rulings to date (with links to my articles, the judges’ unclassified opinions, and more). Despite the Bush administration’s fearsome rhetoric regarding Guantánamo — that it contained “the worst of the worst” terrorists, who, [...]

Please support my work! NOTE: This list has now been superseded by a dedicated page, “Guantánamo Habeas Results: The Definitive List,” which will be used to monitor the ongoing habeas rulings. As part of my series, “Guantánamo Habeas Week” (introduced here, and expanded, on April 23, to become “Guantánamo Habeas Fortnight”), it’s my pleasure to [...]

Such is the hysterical disregard for the law in parts of the United States that when, on March 22, District Court Judge James Robertson ordered the release from Guantánamo of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a 38-year old Mauritanian who was once described as the “highest-value detainee at the facility,” Republican lawmakers were in uproar. The Hill [...]

As part of my ongoing project to record the stories of all the prisoners held at Guantánamo, I’ve just posted the tenth of 12 additional online chapters supplementing my book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, and available from Amazon here and here). This [...]

Forget the outgoing President’s lame, reality-defying farewell speech, and Dick Cheney’s last-ditch attempts to claim that the administration in which he served as Vice President never engaged in torture. The Bush era came to an end last Wednesday when, in one short interview, Susan J. Crawford, the senior Pentagon official overseeing the Military Commissions at [...]

For over five and a half years, as I explain in depth in my newly released book, The Guantánamo Files, the prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has held hundreds of completely innocent men. Humanitarian aid workers, teachers or students of the Koran, businessmen, economic migrants, and refugees from persecution –- all were swept up for [...]