Good News! The Updates to My Six-Part Definitive Guantánamo Prisoner List Are Now Complete

Please support my work! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo for the next three months.

On October 5, I announced that I had just updated the first four parts of the six-part definitive Guantánamo Prisoner List that I first created in March 2009, and have updated five times since. At the time, I stated that I would be updating the final two parts with the next few days, but although I updated Part 5 recently, it has taken me until now to get round to updating Part 6, which includes the 14 “high-value detainees” brought to Guantánamo in September 2006, the  ten “medium-value detainees” who arrived from  CIA “black sites” earlier, in September 2004, the handful of men brought to Guantánamo in 2007-08, and a selection of largely random Afghans.

So I’m pleased to be able to report that all six parts are now complete — providing links to the 2000 articles about Guantánamo and the men held there that I have written since May 2007, plus references to the men’s stories in my book The Guantánamo Files, published in 2007. I have also added new photos, so that there are now nearly 200 photos accompanying the men’s stories — mostly from the classified military files released by WikiLeaks in 2011, on which I worked as a media partner.

See Part 1 (covering ISN numbers 1-133), Part 2 (ISNs 134-268, including Adnan Latif, who died in 2012, and Shaker Aamer), Part 3 (ISNs 269-496), Part 4 (ISNs 497-661, including Moazzam Begg), Part 5 (ISNs 662-928, including Abu Wa’el Dhiab, Omar Deghayes, Mohamedou Ould Slahi and Omar Khadr) and Part 6 (ISNs 929-10029, including the “high-value detainees”).

Please also note that this update to the definitive Guantánamo prisoner list — like so much of my work — is only possible with your support. I have no institutional or media backing for this work, so if you can support me at all, please do. I’m currently still trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my work on Guantánamo for the rest of the year if you can help. Please click on the ‘Donate’ button above to make a donation via PayPal (and see here for further information).

As I stated when I first published the prisoner 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.

And as I noted when I published the first of the latest updates three weeks ago, because it also “looks likely that Guantánamo will remain open when President Obama leaves office, I hope that it also provides useful information for those still seeking to close Guantánamo, and to bring to an end this bleak chapter in American history.”

Thanks, as ever, for your support.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose debut album ‘Love and War’ and EP ‘Fighting Injustice’ are available here to download or on CD via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and the Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.