Pakistanis in Guantanamo

I’ve just posted the seventh 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/the University of Michigan Press, and available from Amazon here). This additional chapter complements Chapter 9 of The Guantánamo Files, looking at the stories of 21 [...]

News that three more prisoners have been released from Guantánamo is cause for celebration, as all three men should never have been held in the first place. In a report to follow, I’ll look at the stories of the two Afghans released — one a simple farmer, the other a juvenile at the time he [...]

On Sunday, just two days after the Supreme Court’s momentous ruling that the prisoners at Guantánamo have constitutional habeas corpus rights — and as John McCain started a right-wing backlash by declaring, with Cheney-like hyperbole, that it was “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country” — McClatchy Newspapers, whose 31 titles [...]

The news that Abdullah Mehsud, a 32-year old Taliban commander released from Guantánamo in March 2004, has killed himself with a hand grenade after being cornered by security forces in Pakistan, has unleashed a wave of belligerent bombast from right-wing commentators. Leaving aside the fact that he was reportedly killed in March 2005, bloggers such [...]

In March, when Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the most high-profile al-Qaeda terror suspect in US custody, “confessed” during his tribunal in Guantánamo that he was the architect of 9/11 and had also played a part in 30 other plots (both real and conceptual), there were mixed responses. No one tried to deny Mohammed’s main claim [...]