I am aware, of course, that the Washington Post compiled a ground-breaking list of prisoners in the four years before the Pentagon was forced to release the names and nationalities of the prisoners, when information was hard to come by, and I am also aware that, last December, the New York Times compiled an online database, The Guantánamo Docket, which features entries for every prisoner held at Guantánamo, including (where available) transcripts of the tribunals and review boards used to ascertain, to the Bush administration’s satisfaction, whether the prisoners had been correctly designated as “enemy combatants,” and whether they could be approved for release or transfer.

This was clearly a major undertaking, but I maintain that, without further detailed analysis, it fails to address the bigger picture, which involves establishing a context in which to test the validity of the government’s assertions.

We have, in recent years, accumulated a wealth of evidence establishing why the Bush administration’s unadorned assertions need careful scrutiny. Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, a veteran of US intelligence who worked on the tribunals, has comprehensively demolished the credibility of the material used as evidence to justify holding the majority of the prisoners, as has an Air Force Major who also served on the tribunals. In addition, Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, a former prosecutor in the Military Commission trial system conceived by Vice President Dick Cheney and his legal counsel David Addington (the prime architects of the “War on Terror”), has done a similar job on the legitimacy of the Commissions, endorsing the views expressed over the years by numerous military defense lawyers, who, in some cases, have sacrificed their careers to oppose what they regarded as an unprecedented travesty of justice.

Lawyers for the prisoners have also made a significant contribution, revealing the prisoners’ shocking stories to the world after their accounts were, mysteriously, cleared by the Pentagon’s censors, and, in the last eight months, since the Supreme Court ruled that the prisoners had habeas corpus rights (reiterating an earlier ruling that was, they decided, overridden unconstitutionally by the Executive and Congress), judges have also played a significant role.

Since last June, judges in the Appeals Court and the District Court in Washington D.C. have thrown out the government’s cases against 17 Uighur prisoners (Muslims from China’s oppressed Xinjiang province), five Bosnians of Algerian origin, and Mohammed El-Gharani, a Saudi resident and Chadian national. El-Gharani was just 14 years old when he was seized in a random raid on a mosque in Pakistan, sold to US forces, and then, like the men mentioned above, subjected not only to vile treatment, but also to allegations based on groundless or inadequate intelligence, or on confessions made by other prisoners whose credibility has been challenged by military and intelligence personnel. The allegations against the prisoners are littered with these kinds of dubious claims, and it is exactly for this reason that the available documents need to be examined with a critical eye.

Researchers who have been involved in this kind of detailed analysis include staff and students at the Seton Hall Law School, who have produced several reports based on the Pentagon’s own documents, beginning with a pioneering report in 2006 (PDF), which established that, according to the government’s own evidence against 517 of the prisoners, 86 percent were captured by the Northern Alliance or Pakistani forces, 55 percent were not determined to have committed any hostile acts against the US or its allies, and only 8 percent were alleged to have had any kind of affiliation with al-Qaeda.

In a similar vein, my research for The Guantánamo Files, and much of my subsequent reporting, was based on a comprehensive analysis of the Pentagon’s prisoner lists, the allegations against the prisoners, and the transcripts of the hearings, which allowed me to establish an instructive chronology, explaining who was captured where and when: whether in Afghanistan, crossing into Pakistan from Afghanistan, or in Pakistan, for example, many hundreds of miles from the battlefields of Afghanistan. This then allowed me not only to present the prisoners’ stories in their own words, giving voices to the voiceless, but also to establish a necessary context for establishing which side was telling the truth: either the prisoners themselves, or the administration, which, as mentioned above, often mustered an array of transparently coerced or superficial evidence to justify its activities.

In addition, crucial research confirmed that many, if not the majority of the prisoners handed over by US allies were bought for bounty payments averaging $5000 a head, which encouraged a vast and unprincipled trade in Arabs who could be passed off as “al-Qaeda or Taliban suspects,” and also established that, in Afghanistan, before the prisoners were transferred to Guantánamo, the administration had, against the wishes of the military, refused to hold “competent tribunals” — also known as battlefield tribunals — under the Geneva Conventions relating to prisoners of war. Held close to the time and place of capture, and allowing battlefield prisoners the opportunity to call witnesses, these had, previously, been championed by the US military as a just and effective way of separating soldiers from civilians caught up in the fog of war, and in the first Gulf War, for example, the military held around 1200 battlefield tribunals, and decided, in three-quarters of the cases, that it had detained the wrong men.

My research was not an exact science, of course, but I remain convinced that it was — and is — the only manner in which to make sense of the bigger picture, and I remain disturbed by the fact that I was able to undertake this as a solitary independent journalist, and that no major media outlet devoted the required resources to investigating thoroughly the material that was made publicly available. As we have learned over the years — and are still, in many senses, establishing under a new President — the failure to thoroughly investigate the Bush administration’s supposed evidence against the prisoners in Guantánamo effectively allowed its hollow claims that they were “the worst of the worst” to go unchallenged.

Those interested in the truth should recall, as Jane Mayer explained in her book The Dark Side, that, in the summer of 2002, when John Bellinger, then the National Security Council’s top lawyer, was informed by a senior CIA analyst and by Guantánamo’s commander, Maj. Gen. Michael Dunlavey, that at least half the prisoners were there by mistake, his attempts to inform the White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, and to seek a review of the prisoners’ cases were thwarted when a scheduled meeting was hijacked by David Addington, who declared, imperiously, “No, there will be no review. The President has determined that they are ALL enemy combatants. We are not going to revisit it.”

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed.

A version of this article was published on the Huffington Post and ZNet.

The list is the result of three years’ research and writing about Guantánamo, which began with my book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press), and has continued with over 300 articles about Guantánamo for a variety of publications. The list provides details of the 533 prisoners who have been released, and includes, for the first time ever, accurate dates for their release. It also provides details of the 241 prisoners who are still held, including the 59 prisoners who have been cleared for release. Although some stories are still unknown, the stories of 700 prisoners are referenced either by links to my extensive archive of articles about Guantánamo, or to the chapters in The Guantánamo Files where they can be found.

As I explain in the introduction to the list:

“It is my hope that this project will provide an invaluable research tool for those seeking to understand how it came to pass that the government of the United States turned its back on domestic and international law, establishing torture as official US policy, and holding men without charge or trial neither as prisoners of war, protected by the Geneva Conventions, nor as criminal suspects to be put forward for trial in a federal court, but as ‘illegal enemy combatants.’

“I also hope that it provides a compelling explanation of how that same government, under the leadership of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, established a prison in which the overwhelming majority of those held — at least 93 percent of the 779 men and boys imprisoned in total — were either completely innocent people, seized as a result of dubious intelligence or sold for bounty payments, or Taliban foot soldiers, recruited to fight an inter-Muslim civil war that began long before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and that had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or international terrorism.”

About the author

Andy Worthington studied English Language and Literature at New College, Oxford. He writes regularly for the Guardian, the British human rights group Cageprisoners and the Future of Freedom Foundation. He has also written for the New York Times, Amnesty International, Index on Censorship, and FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), and his articles are published regularly on the Huffington Post, the Raw Story, AlterNet, Antiwar.com. CounterPunch and other websites. In 2008, he wrote the entry “Guantánamo Scandal” for the Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia.

The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison is published by Pluto Press and distributed in the US by Macmillan, and is available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK. Andy is also the author of two books on modern British social history.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed.

Also published on Antiwar.com, featured as Website of the Day on CounterPunch, and posted on many other sites, including World Can’t Wait, Liberal Conspiracy, Care 2 News Network, Statewatch, Dandelion Salad, RINF, The Vineyard of the Saker, 911Truth,org and the Center for Research on Globalization.

Although the majority of these men have been released from Guantánamo, eight are still held. As with the majority of the stories of the 220 or so Afghans who were held at Guantánamo, their stories, taken as a whole, exemplify the failures of both “Operation Enduring Freedom” (the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001) and the Guantánamo project to identify prisoners who were actually involved in terrorism — both because of chronic intelligence failures on the ground, and a lack of screening in the US prisons at Kandahar and Bagram, as dictated at the highest levels of the Bush administration.

Within the next week, I’ll be publishing a definitive prisoner list, identifying not only the 242 prisoners who are still held, and those who have been released (and the dates they were released), but also those who have been cleared for release, whose plight is one of the major stumbling blocks to Barack Obama’s promise to close Guantánamo within a year, as the majority of these prisoners cannot be repatriated because of fears that they will be tortured in their home countries.

The list will provide links to the stories of around half of the 779 prisoners who have been held at Guantánamo, and references will be provided for the other half, identifying where their stories can be found in The Guantánamo Files. The list will, I hope, be a useful research tool, not just in identifying the stories of those who have been released, but also as an aid to analyzing the stories of those who are still held, to compare the Bush administration’s long-standing assertions that the remaining prisoners are the “hardcore” with a more objective view, which, in the majority of cases, questions the quality of the so-called evidence against them, as is the case with the eight prisoners mentioned in this online chapter who are still held.

Note: See the column on the left for the first eleven online chapters.

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With just one more online chapter to complete, the mission I set myself three years ago — to record the stories of all the prisoners in Guantánamo — is now close to completion, and will be followed by the first definitive prisoner list, identifying not only those who are still held, and those who have been released (and the dates they were released), but also those who have been cleared for release, whose plight is one of the major stumbling blocks to Barack Obama’s promise to close Guantánamo within a year, as the majority of these prisoners cannot be repatriated because of fears that they will be tortured in their home countries.

Of the 779 prisoners who have been held at Guantánamo, the stories of around 10 percent are unknown, because they were released in 2003 or 2004, and the Pentagon has not been obliged to release and information relating to these prisoners, but the rest will be sourced and referenced in the definitive list. Links will be provided to the stories of half of these prisoners, and references will be provided for the other half, identifying where their stories can be found in The Guantánamo Files. The list will, I hope, be a useful research tool, not just in identifying the stories of those who have been released, but also as an aid to analyzing the stories of those who are still held, to compare the Bush administration’s long-standing assertions that the remaining prisoners are the “hardcore” with a more objective view, which, in the majority of cases, questions the quality of the so-called evidence against them.

This eleventh online chapter features the stories of 17 of the 220 or so Afghan prisoners who have been held at Guantánamo, revealing, as I also discussed at length in The Guantánamo Files, how the majority of the Afghans were seized not because they were a threat to the US or its allies, but largely because they were sold to US forces by their Afghan allies or were seized in raids based on dubious intelligence. Three of those discussed — including Mohamed Jawad, put forward for trial by Military Commission — were juveniles at the time of their capture. The chapter also includes the stories of half-a-dozen stray foreigners. In addition, I look at the stories of six of the 50 or so Guantánamo prisoners who were subjected to “extraordinary rendition” and detention in secret prisons before their transfer to Guantánamo, and cast an objective eye on the supposed evidence used to justify their extraordinarily brutal treatment.

Note: See the column on the left for the first ten online chapters, and the last.

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With just two more online chapters to complete (hopefully in the coming week), the mission I set myself three years ago — to record the stories of all the prisoners in Guantánamo — is now within reach, and will be followed by the first definitive prisoner list, identifying not only those who are still held, and those who have been released (and the dates they were released), but also those who have been cleared for release, whose plight is one of the major stumbling blocks to Barack Obama’s promise to close Guantánamo within a year, as the majority of these prisoners cannot be repatriated because of fears that they will be tortured in their home countries.

This tenth chapter encapsulates many of the ongoing problems at Guantánamo in its eighth year of existence. Although three of the 12 prisoners discussed have been released, one returned to Tunisia to face ill-treatment and a jail sentence following a corrupt show trial. In addition, three other prisoners are amongst those who have been cleared but cannot be repatriated, and the other six demonstrate some of the fundamental problems with the government’s evidence that have plagued many other prisoners, as claims of their involvement with terrorism rub up against other exculpatory material, with no clear indication as to which sources are the most trustworthy.

However, based on a close examination of the government’s allegations over the last three years, my conclusion, as I explain in the introduction to this online chapter, is that the majority of the supposed evidence consists primarily of dubious allegations made by other prisoners, which, as Judge Richard Leon recently demonstrated in two sets of habeas corpus cases, does not stand up to any kind of independent scrutiny. Rather than indicating terrorist involvement, as intended, these allegations tend, instead, to demonstrate “how the Bush administration tried to build cases against prisoners based not on evidence that led to their capture but on interrogations — often in deeply unpleasant circumstances — that were designed to justify rounding them up in the first place.”

Note: See the column on the left for the first nine online chapters, and the last two.

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With just a few more online chapters to complete, I’m close to accomplishing the mission I set myself three years ago: to record the stories of all the prisoners. Once these last chapters are complete, in just a few weeks’ time, I’ll be able to create the first definitive prisoner list identifying who is still held, who has been released and the dates they were released. The list will also contain links to 350 prisoner stories on my website and references to the rest in The Guantánamo Files, providing what I hope will be a useful research tool for those concerned with closing Guantánamo, and for others who are interested in knowing who has been held, how and where they were captured, and what their stories reveal about the Bush administration’s conduct in the “War on Terror.”

In the meantime, this ninth chapter recounts more stories that are largely unknown, even though Guantánamo has now been open for seven years and it ought to be a shock to the conscience to realize that men are still being held in US custody who have never had a chance to challenge the basis of their detention, or to utter a word to the outside world.

Now that President Obama has declared that Guantánamo will close, and a variety of shallow and pessimistic critics have started to rise up to warn that the prison is still full of dangerous men, it is my hope that this project to record the prisoners’ stories will also provide further useful material for those who wish to refute these sweeping generalizations with something closer to the truth: that even now, after 528 prisoners have been released, the majority of those who remain do not constitute a threat to the United States, and would never have been imprisoned at all if the Bush administration’s “War on Terror” detention policies had not been such a catastrophic failure of justice, and of common human decency.

As I explain in the introduction to this latest online chapter, “Taken from cars and buses, seized in the street, or kidnapped in house raids, their capture seems largely to have been based on dubious intelligence on the part of both the US and Pakistani intelligence agents, a desire by the Pakistani authorities to be willing associates in the ‘War on Terror,’ or the naked appeal of money, as the Americans were offering bounty payments averaging $5000 a head for “al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects,” and any stray foreigner was therefore an attractive proposition.”

Note: See the column on the left for the first eight online chapters, and the last three.

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Mostly foreign stragglers, picked up individually by opportunistic Afghan soldiers, or by US forces acting on dubious intelligence, they were amongst the 45 or so prisoners seized in Afghanistan in late 2001, who were not held in Sheberghan prison, which features in Chapters 3 and 9, and in the previous online chapter.

What is most notable about their cases — beyond a demonstrable lack of any involvement with terrorism — is that those who are still detained have mostly been cleared for release, but cannot be repatriated for a variety of reasons that I explain in the chapter. As Barack Obama begins working out how to fulfill his pledge to close Guantánamo, securing a new home for these men –- and many dozens more –- will be a major challenge.

I now have just four more online chapters to complete –- two looking at prisoners seized in Pakistan, and two looking at the mainly Afghan prisoners seized between January 2002 and July 2003, when the industrial-scale rendition of prisoners to Guantánamo came to an end. I hope to have these completed by the end of the year, and to follow it up with a definitive list of all of the 779 prisoners held at Guantánamo.

Note: See the column on the left for the first seven online chapters, and the last four.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

They were amongst the 80 or so prisoners (including those in Chapter 3, The Convoy of Death), who were seized in northern Afghanistan, mostly in November 2001, in connection with the fall of Kunduz, the Taliban’s last stronghold in northern Afghanistan, and they were subsequently imprisoned in dire conditions in Sheberghan prison, which was featured in the film The Road to Guantánamo, before being transferred to the US prison at Kandahar, and on to Guantánamo.

Featuring stories that were excluded to keep the book at a manageable length, this additional chapter looks at a handful of stragglers from the Gulf, and two Tajiks, although the majority of the stories focus on Afghans and Pakistanis.

As Barack Obama begins planning his new administration, it will serve, I hope, as a reminder of the many wrongly imprisoned men — innocent men, and Taliban foot soldiers with no knowledge of al-Qaeda — who have been held at Guantánamo since the prison opened nearly seven years ago, and of the violence, arrogance and failures of intelligence that have underpinned the entire project. Almost all the men in this additional chapter have been freed, but of the 258 prisoners who remain at Guantánamo, there are many similar stories of individuals in the wrong place at the wrong time, seized and sold for money, and of lies and false confessions masquerading as evidence.

The architects of this colossal and chilling betrayal of justice are on their way out, and it is time to close Guantánamo as soon as is humanly possible.

Note: See the column on the left for the first six online chapters, and the last five.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

Featuring some stories that were not available at the time of writing, and others that were excluded to keep the book at a manageable length, this additional chapter also focuses on the stories of eight of the 18 Uyghurs (or Uighurs), Chinese Muslims who had fled persecution in their homeland, and were living in a run-down settlement in the Tora Bora mountains.

Unconnected with either al-Qaeda or the Taliban, the Uyghurs have long been the most unfortunate group of prisoners at Guantánamo, and their story is currently very topical, as, after years of abuse, neglect and political manipulation by the authorities, their release into the United States was ordered by a District Court judge on October 7. The government has appealed, reviving long-discredited claims that the men remain a threat to the United States, but I hope the stories in this additional chapter help to demonstrate that the opposite is true; that the Uyghurs have only one enemy (the Chinese government), and that they have long looked to the United States as a potential savior, and a beacon of democracy.

Note: The first two additional online chapters are available here and here, and see the left-hand column for the other six.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and see here for my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

For the majority of the prisoners, it is the first time that their stories have been presented in public, and although my information is generally limited to what has been made available by the Pentagon, it remains a serious indictment of the US administration that, nearly seven years after their capture, their stories are coming to light for the first time.

This additional chapter complements Chapter 6 of The Guantánamo Files, looking at the stories of 20 Yemeni prisoners not mentioned in the book. They were amongst the 250 or so prisoners (almost a third of Guantánamo’s entire population) who were captured crossing from Afghanistan to Pakistan in December 2001. This chapter also complements the previous online chapter, in which I looked at the stories of the Saudis captured at the same time.

In many ways it is more significant than the previous chapter, because, although the circumstances in which the Saudis and the Yemenis were captured are remarkably similar — and both groups were a mixture of Taliban foot soldiers (unconnected to 9/11 or al-Qaeda) and innocent men (humanitarian aid workers, missionaries, and others in the wrong place at the wrong time) — the majority of the Yemenis are still languishing at Guantánamo, while the majority of the Saudis have been repatriated to take part in a successful rehabilitation program.

This is also an anniversary of sorts, as this is my 300th post since I first began blogging about Guantánamo last May. My thanks, as ever, to my readers, and to the various websites who support my work — in particular, Antiwar.com, the Huffington Post, CounterPunch, AlterNet, Cageprisoners and ZNet. If you’re new to the site, an introduction to what it’s all about is here, and you can also navigate via “Categories” in the right-hand column. If you like what you see, please sign up for the RSS feed in the left-hand column, tell your friends, buy the book, and feel free to send me comments.

Note: The first three additional online chapters are available here, here and here, and see the left-hand column for the other seven.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and see here for my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.