Just Updated: Parts 1-3 of My Six-Part Definitive Guantánamo Prisoner List

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Today the grotesque and unforgivable prison at Guantánamo Bay, on the grounds of the US’s military base in Cuba, has been open for 6,118 days — 6,118 days of denying foreign-born Muslim prisoners due process rights (the right to be charged with a crime, and put on trial), or the protections of the Geneva Conventions, in a place set up to be beyond the reach of the rule of US law, where men could be — and were — tortured and subjected to human experimentation; where nine men have died, and where there is still no end in sight for this legal, moral and ethical abomination.

Today I’m publicising the links to the first three parts of my six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, which I first compiled in 2009, and which I’ve just updated, for the first time since 2016 — Part One (covering prisoners with the Internment Serial Numbers 1-133), Part Two (covering prisoner numbers 134-268) and Part Three (covering prisoner numbers 269-496). The six parts of the prisoner list provide details of all 779 prisoners held by the US military at Guantánamo since the prison opened, with references to where they appear in the 2,230 articles I have written about Guantánamo over the last — nearly — ten and a half years, and where their stories are told in my book The Guantánamo Files.

That book, published eleven years ago, a year and half after I began working as a full-time unpaid freelance researcher and writer on Guantánamo, involved me researching and telling the stories of the men held there, and demonstrating how few of them seem to have had any genuine connection to al-Qaeda or any form of international terrorism, and how they were overwhelmingly either just foot soldiers in an inter-Muslim civil war in Afghanistan that preceded the 9/11 attacks, or, in many cases, civilians caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, cynically picked off by officials or warlords looking to make some money off the US’s commitment to paying bounty payments for any Muslim who could be passed off as a “terror suspect.”

In adding new links to the prisoner list, and even seeking out some new photos to add, I was, perhaps unsurprisingly, reminded of what a long and horrible journey it has been to expose the truth about Guantánamo, and to try and get the wretched place closed down. It took me back to when we still didn’t know exactly who was held at the prison, because the US refused to tell the world for over four years until they lost a Freedom of Information lawsuit in the spring of 2006, releasing the names and nationalities of the prisoners, and 8,000 pages of supporting documents that formed the basis of my research.

Further revelations came in 2011, when WikiLeaks released the classified military files on all the prisoners (except 14 of them), as leaked to them by Chelsea Manning. I worked as a media partner with WikiLeaks on the release of those documents, and then spent nearly a year writing detailed analyses of the first 422 prisoners to be released (the plan was to complete analyses of all 779 prisoners’ stories (or rather the 465 that were available), but I ran out of steam — and, crucially, funding.

In updating the list, I also recalled how I have told the stories of 338 men released since 2007, including Shaker Aamer, who I campaigned for specifically, and whose entry takes up what appears to be around half of Part 3 of the list, but under Donald Trump, of course, all releases have essentially ground to a halt. Of the 41 men held when he took office 21 months ago, just one has been released — to continue serving a sentence in Saudi Arabia that was agreed as part of a plea deal in Guantánamo’s discredited military commission trial system.

I am about to update the stories of these men in a series of individual articles, because, as we have learned over the last 21 months, if the president — in this case, Donald Trump — doesn’t want to release anyone from Guantánamo, he doesn’t have to, and — military commission plea deals notwithstanding — there is no domestic or international mechanism that can force him to do so, and the men still he’d deserve to be heard from, to prevent them disappearing from memory their silent suffering drowned out in the tsunami of daily outrage that Trump’s presidency entails.

If you’re an attorney representing any of the prisoners still held, and you’d like to help me provide updates on the stories of the men, please get in touch. Otherwise, I hope these updates are helpful, and will post the final three parts in the next week or two.

If you appreciate what I’m doing, and have been doing since March 2006, please do feel free to make donation to support my work, which is almost entirely dependent on the generosity of benefactors — like you!

With thanks for your support as ever,

Andy Worthington
London
October 11, 2018

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 music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in 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), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from six years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of a new documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. Since August 2018 he has been part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

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, The Complete Guantánamo Files, 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.