Tajiks in Guantanamo

In the first part of this three-part series examining the Guantánamo prisoners’ attempts to secure their release via the US courts, Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files, looked at how, after the Supreme Court’s ruling, in June 2008, that the prisoners had constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights, the Bush administration lost 23 of the [...]

Two weeks ago, the indefatigable Carol Rosenberg of the Miami Herald, Guantánamo’s most dedicated reporter, outlined the story of Umar Abdulayev, the last Tajik prisoner in Guantánamo, who has been cleared for release from the prison on two occasions — once by a military review board under the Bush administration, and six weeks ago by [...]

I’m delighted to announce that my three-year project to record the stories of all the prisoners held at Guantánamo is nearly complete. I’ve just posted the last 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 [...]

The continued imprisonment of at least 61 prisoners at Guantánamo, who have been cleared for release after multiple military review boards (or, in recent months, after rulings in a US court), was an affront to notions of justice when the Bush administration was in power, and is even more so now that Barack Obama, who [...]

As part of my ongoing project to record the stories of all the prisoners held at Guantánamo, I’ve just posted the ninth 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 [...]

Guantánamo, it seems, is about to become a buzzword once more, as it is, in many ways, the most iconic symbol of Barack Obama’s challenge to undo the Bush administration’s zeal for unfettered executive power. Already, however, pundits are stepping forward to point out the difficulties involved in dismantling the system, whining about the dangerous [...]

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 [...]

To celebrate the official UK publication (today) of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press), I’ve just posted the first of 12 additional chapters featuring stories that I could not include in the book, either for reasons of space –- to keep a tight narrative [...]

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 [...]

From the website Ferghana.ru comes news of a former Guantánamo detainee, Abdul-Karim Ergashev, who was sold to gullible US forces by an unscrupulous Afghan official, and who “intends to slap US President George W Bush and the Pentagon with an injury claim.” 42-year old Ergashev (also known as Abdulrahmon Rajabov) travelled to Afghanistan in 2001 [...]