Tunisians in Guantanamo

On Wednesday, four prisoners were released from Guantánamo: an Egyptian, a Libyan and a Tunisian arrived in Albania, and a Palestinian arrived in Spain. All four had been cleared by military review boards at Guantánamo under the Bush administration, and had then been cleared by President Obama’s interagency Task Force, but, like dozens of prisoners [...]

Three senior UK judges on Wednesday ordered the British government to publicly disclose previously classified information that reveals how Binyam Mohamed, a British resident, was tortured by the CIA while in Pakistani custody in April and May 2002.
In one short session, the Court of Appeal brought an end to a transatlantic game of cat and [...]

On Monday, the Obama administration announced that it had transferred four prisoners from Guantánamo: Sabir Lahmar, an Algerian, was transferred to France; an unidentified Palestinian was transferred to Hungary; and two Tunisians, Adel Ben Mabrouk bin Hamida Boughanmi and Mohammed Tahir Riyadh Nasseri, were transferred to the custody of the Italian government.
Sabir Lahmar, an Algerian [...]

In a recent article, “75 Guantánamo Prisoners Cleared For Release; 31 Could Leave Today,” I examined the implications of an announcement that 75 of the remaining 223 prisoners in Guantánamo have been cleared for release. This came by way of a list posted in the prison, identifying the prisoners by nationality, and a statement by [...]

As rumors swirl, suggesting that a number of the remaining 13 Uighur prisoners in Guantánamo (Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province) may soon be relocating to the tiny Pacific island state of Palau, a court case relating to nine of these men threatens to hurl a number of other prisoners in Guantánamo, who have also been [...]

In the Obama administration’s campaign to persuade other countries to rehouse prisoners from Guantánamo who have been cleared for release, but who cannot be repatriated because of fears that they will be tortured if returned to their home countries, progress has been slow.
Why European nations are reluctant to accept cleared Guantánamo prisoners
Despite an apparent accord [...]

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, examined the Bush administration’s record in the seven months after the Supreme Court’s ruling, in June 2008, that the prisoners had constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights, and [...]

On Wednesday, the British Muslim support group Help The Prisoners stated that it had “received notification from an inmate at Macomer prison” — an Italian high-security prison on the island of Sardinia — that “three Tunisian inmates from Guantánamo Bay will be transferred there.” This is disturbing news, because, as Help The Prisoners note, “Macomer [...]

In recent months, those who have been studying Guantánamo closely have come to the disturbing conclusion that the biggest obstacle to President Obama’s pledge to close Guantánamo by January 2010 comes not from the fearmongering and opportunistic politicians who recently voted to prohibit the use of any funds to release or to transfer prisoners to [...]

On Monday, the European Union and the United States made a joint statement in Luxembourg “on the Closure of the Guantánamo Bay Detention Facility and Future Counterterrorism Operations, based on Shared Values, International Law, and Respect for the Rule of Law and Human Rights” (PDF), which, as the Guardian put it, “cleared the last hurdles [...]