Mohammed al-Qahtani

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 [...]

In the real world outside the US Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, Barack Obama’s pledge to close Guantánamo and scrap the Military Commissions (the system of trials for “terror suspects” that was established in the wake of the 9/11 attacks) has provoked a rare outburst of frenzied media coverage. With no concrete plans announced [...]

As Barack Obama and his transition team begin looking at ways to fulfill the President-Elect’s pledge to close Guantánamo, Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files, recalls that Barack Obama also promised to “reject the Military Commissions Act” (the legislation that revived the system of “terror trials” conjured up in the Office of Vice President [...]

As a 16th prisoner at Guantánamo, Noor Uthman Muhammed, is put forward for trial by Military Commission (the much-criticized system of trials for “terror suspects” invented in the wake of the 9/11 attacks), Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, provides a guide to the [...]

I’ve just posted the third of 12 additional online chapters supplementing my book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison. This chapter features stories that I could not include in the book, either for reasons of space (to keep the book at a manageable length) or, in some cases, [...]

Anyone who has kept half an eye on the proceedings at the Military Commissions in Guantánamo — the unique system of trials for “terror suspects” that was conceived in the wake of the 9/11 attacks by Vice President Dick Cheney and his close advisers — will be aware that their progress has been faltering at [...]

Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, reports on the US administration’s recent announcement that it has filed charges against six Guantánamo prisoners for their alleged involvement in the 9/11 attacks. Finally, then, nearly six and a half years after the 9/11 attacks, the US [...]

Whether through a desire to impress the Supreme Court with its sense of justice prior to next month’s showdown over the detainees’ rights, or, as is more probable, through a placatory deal with the Saudi government following the death of a third Saudi detainee in Guantánamo in May this year, the US administration released another [...]

In another resounding demonstration of the importance of legally constituted checks and balances on executive power in the United States, the Associated Press, after filing a request to the Pentagon under the Freedom of Information Act, has secured 58 transcripts from the latest round of annual Administrative Review Boards at Guantánamo, convened to assess whether [...]

Following the recent announcement that 16 detainees had been returned to Saudi Arabia from Guantánamo, the world’s media were swift to pick up on the story of one of these men: Juma al-Dossari, a joint Bahraini-Saudi national, who had attempted to commit suicide on at least 14 occasions in Guantánamo, and whose poignant laments –- [...]