http://www.andyworthington.co.uk Author & Journalist Fri, 18 Jul 2008 12:29:11 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en You may well ask. A month ago, the Supreme Court ruled, in Boumediene v. Bush, that the Guantánamo prisoners have constitutional habeas corpus rights; in other words, the right to ask why, after six and a half years’ imprisonment without charge or trial, they are being held. The highest judges ... http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2008/07/18/whats-happening-with-the-guantanamo-cases/ As the Abu Ghraib scandal demonstrates, a photo is worth a thousand words -- even if, as Errol Morris’ newly-released documentary Standard Operating Procedure demonstrates, those words are sometimes what the viewer wishes to see, rather than what actually happened. There is, therefore, enormous excitement in the media about the first ... http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2008/07/15/screwed-up-and-abused-omar-khadrs-canadian-interrogations-at-guantanamo/ I’ve just posted the fourth 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). This chapter features stories that I could not include in the book, either for reasons of ... http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2008/07/12/the-guantanamo-files-additional-chapters-online-escape-to-pakistan-the-saudis/ This has been a bad week for the British government, in relation to two of the running sores of its foreign policy, both centred on the Overseas Territory of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. Diego Garcia and the surrounding islands -- known collectively as the Chagos Islands -- were shamefully ... http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2008/07/08/scandal-of-diego-garcia-rendition-flights-strains-us-uk-relations/ It doesn’t take much investigation to discover that Algeria has a bleak human rights record, which is one of the reasons that, until last week, when 49-year old Mustafa Hamlili and 28-year old Abdul Raham Houari were freed from Guantánamo, no Algerian prisoners had been repatriated. This was in spite ... http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2008/07/07/repatriation-as-russian-roulette-will-the-two-algerians-freed-from-guantanamo-be-treated-fairly/ On BBC Radio 4’s The World Tonight, singer-songwriter David Gray spoke out against the use of music as torture by the US military. Gray’s chart-topping song Babylon, played repeatedly at ear-piercing volume, is one of dozens of songs, by artists including Eminem, Bruce Springsteen, Rage Against the Machine and Britney Spears, ... http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2008/07/03/david-gray-complains-about-the-use-of-music-as-torture-in-the-war-on-terror/ The wheels of injustice grind so slowly at Guantánamo that it’s probably a coincidence that charges were announced against another alleged terrorist just hours after the details were revealed of how comprehensively the government had been ridiculed for its “War on Terror” detention policy in the Court of Appeals in ... http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2008/07/02/guantanamo-trials-another-torture-victim-charged/ Some of us have known for years that the US administration’s basis for holding prisoners without charge or trial in the “War on Terror” has more to do with a fantasy world in which nonsense masquerades as truth, logic is skewed, and nothing that is uttered remotely resembles evidence that ... http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2008/07/01/guantanamo-as-alice-in-wonderland/ In the history of legal challenges to the Bush administration’s assertion that it can hold “War on Terror” prisoners indefinitely without charge or trial, Parhat v. Gates has just joined a trio of Supreme Court verdicts -- Rasul v. Bush (2004), Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006) and Boumediene v. Bush (twelve ... http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2008/06/25/six-years-late-court-throws-out-guantanamo-case/ In the second of an occasional series looking at prisoners in Guantánamo who have been cleared for release after multiple military reviews, but who are still held in the notorious offshore prison, Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, looks ... http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2008/06/23/italys-forgotten-residents-in-guantanamo/