Sudanese in Guantanamo

This is the first part of a nine-part series telling the stories of all the prisoners currently held in Guantánamo (176 at the time of writing). See the introduction here, and Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six and Part Seven. The 20 prisoners listed below were the first group of prisoners [...]

On August 11, Ibrahim al-Qosi, a 51-year old former cook and driver for Osama bin Laden, was given a 14-year sentence by a military jury, after pleading guilty to one count of conspiracy, and one count of providing material support to terrorism at an earlier hearing on July 7, as I reported here. The sentence [...]

In an alleged victory for the Military Commission trial system for terror suspects at Guantánamo, revived by President Obama last year despite the fact that he suspended the Commissions on his first day in office, a Sudanese prisoner, Ibrahim al-Qosi, accepted a plea bargain yesterday, and made a guilty plea on one count of conspiracy [...]

With just over two months to go until President Obama’s deadline for the closure of Guantanamo, the administration has finally woken up to the necessity of actually doing something to facilitate the prison’s closure by announcing on Friday that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other prisoners accused of involvement in the terrorist attacks of September [...]

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 [...]

With less than two weeks until the Bush administration leaves office, Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, reports on developments — or the lack of them — during the last month in the Military Commissions, the much-criticized trial system for “terror suspects” that was [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Recent events at Guantánamo are turning out like some kind of Christian fable. A principled military officer — politically Conservative, and a devout Catholic — who served in Iraq, where he was “praised by his superiors for his bravery,” and was now serving his government as a prosecutor in a system of special trials conceived [...]

As the US courts put pressure on the government to justify the long detention of prisoners at Guantánamo without charge or trial (following the Supreme Court’s ruling, in June, that they have constitutional habeas corpus rights, and that the government must justify their imprisonment), two of Guantánamo’s oldest prisoners have been quietly repatriated: 51-year old [...]