Uyghurs in Guantanamo

On Monday, the Pentagon announced that two prisoners had been released from Guantánamo. Abd al-Nisr Mohammed Khantumani, a 50-year old Syrian (also known as Abdul Nasir al-Tumani) was given a new home in Cape Verde, a former Portuguese colony off the West African coast, while Abdul Aziz Naji, a 35-year old Algerian, was repatriated to [...]

As I have explained in two recent articles, a global scramble by the Obama administration to find new homes for 17 Uighurs (Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province) who were, or are held in the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, has had mixed results. The men won their habeas corpus petitions in a US court in [...]

In 2002, when Guantánamo opened, 22 Uighurs (Muslims from China’s oppressed Xinjiang province) were held in the prison, even though interrogators in Afghanistan (where the prisoners were processed for Guantánamo) had already realized that they had no connection to al-Qaeda or the Taliban. The men were mostly seized by Pakistani villagers and sold to US [...]

On Radio Australia’s show “Pacific Beat,” reporter Sean Dorney traveled to the small Pacific island nation of Palau to discuss an appeal to the Australian government, made by Palau’s President Johnson Toribiong, asking Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to accept for permanent resettlement six Uighurs (Muslims from China’s oppressed Xinjiang province), who were cleared for release [...]

Please support my work!

NOTE: This list has now been superseded by a dedicated page, “Guantánamo Habeas Results: The Definitive List,” which will be used to monitor the ongoing habeas rulings.
As part of my series, “Guantánamo Habeas Week” (introduced here, and expanded, on April 23, to become “Guantánamo Habeas Fortnight”), it’s my pleasure to present [...]

On Monday, at 1.20 in the morning in London, I was, nevertheless, happy to get on the phone to talk to Cenk Uygur for The Young Turks, a daily online news show, which attracts a significant number of viewers, and, when it launched in 2005 (after three years as a radio show), was the first [...]

After eight years’ imprisonment without charge or trial, five former Guantanamo prisoners are beginning new lives this week — two in Switzerland and three in Georgia. Their stories reveal, yet again, how Republican lawmakers and media pundits in the US, who have, in recent months, renewed their fear-filled attacks on those still held, are guilty [...]

Last Monday, the Supreme Court declined to review a case brought on behalf of seven men in Guantánamo whose release into the United States was ordered by a US judge 17 months ago. The men in question are Uighurs, Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province, and the ruling ordering them to be rehoused in the US [...]

Congratulations to the Swiss Canton of Jura, which recently accepted the asylum claims of two Uighur prisoners at Guantánamo, and to the Swiss federal government for agreeing to accept Jura’s decision on Wednesday.
The two men in question — Arkin Mahmud, 45, and his brother Bahtiyar Mahnut, 32 — were seized with 20 other Uighurs in [...]

Last week, lawyer, ex-Army Captain and Iraq veteran Phillip Carter, described by Glenn Greenwald as “a very harsh critic of the Bush administration’s detention and interrogation policies,” suddenly resigned his post as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Policy, which he had occupied since April. Carter claimed that he was leaving due to “personal issues,” [...]