Tunisians in Guantanamo

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 [...]

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 [...]

Last December, in a typically bullish defense of the Bush administration’s conduct in the “War on Terror,” Vice President Dick Cheney stated, “On the question of so-called ‘torture,’ we don’t do torture, we never have. It’s not something that this administration subscribes to. [W]e proceeded very cautiously; we checked, we had the Justice Department issue [...]

In 2007, after four rounds of administrative reviews at Guantánamo, Hedi Hammamy, a Tunisian prisoner, born in 1969, was cleared for release, having satisfied the Pentagon that he no longer represented a threat to the United States or its allies, and no longer possessed any ongoing intelligence value. He was not released, however, because, although [...]

On Monday March 30, in a committee room in the House of Commons, Diane Abbott MP chaired a meeting entitled, “Britain’s Guantánamo? The use of secret evidence and evidence based on torture in the UK courts,” to discuss the stories of some of the men held as “terror suspects” on the basis of secret evidence, [...]

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 [...]