Russians in Guantanamo

I’m delighted to report that three screenings of the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (directed by Polly Nash and myself), which is currently on a UK tour, have been arranged by pioneering grass-roots activists in the US. All the screenings are free, and Polly and I, and the production company Spectacle, [...]

On the evening of March 28, 2002, an armed group of FBI agents and Pakistani commandos, accompanied by a hundred local police, stormed Shabaz Cottage, an apartment in a quiet neighborhood in the city of Faisalabad, Pakistan. Their target, who had been tracked by the careless use of a satellite phone, was Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad [...]

On Sunday, the Pentagon admitted that 12 juveniles — those under the age of 18 at the time their alleged crimes took place — have been held at Guantánamo Bay (as opposed to the figure of eight that was submitted to the UN in May). But a RAW STORY count, drawn from the Pentagon’s own [...]

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 [...]

From Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, comes news that two of the three Tajik detainees released from Guantánamo in March –- Muqit Vohidov and Rukniddin Sharopov –- have received jail sentences of 17 years in “high-security penal colonies” (aka labour camps) for “serving as mercenaries in Afghanistan” –- where they were accused of aiding the [...]