Return to torture

As part of its alleged “desire not to hold detainees any longer than necessary,” the Pentagon announced on Tuesday that two Guantánamo prisoners had been transferred to Algeria. This follows the repatriation of two other Algerians — Mustafa Hamlili and Abdul Raham Houari — at the start of July, who were the first Algerians to [...]

It doesn’t take much investigation to discover that Algeria has a bleak human rights record, which is one of the reasons that, until last week, when 49-year old Mustafa Hamlili and 28-year old Abdul Raham Houari were freed from Guantánamo, no Algerian prisoners had been repatriated. This was in spite of the fact that at [...]

Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, explains why news that four British residents are to be released from Guantánamo provides grounds for cautious celebration, but also points out that two British residents will not be coming home.
I was at a mosque in Glasgow on [...]

The recent conviction, in a Tunisian court, of former Guantánamo detainee Abdullah bin Omar undermines claims by the US administration that it has found adequate ways of repatriating wrongly arrested detainees to their home countries.
A former railway engineer, bin Omar (51) left Tunisia because of religious persecution in 1989. Taking his wife and children with [...]

The story of Guantánamo detainee Lofti Lagha, which I first broke here, and subsequently reported on here and here, reached a predictably sad conclusion last week when he was sentenced to three years in prison. The 39-year old, who had traveled to Afghanistan in 2001 after several years as an illegal immigrant in Italy, was [...]