Just Updated: Parts 4-6 of My Six-Part Definitive Guantánamo Prisoner List

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Last month, I published an article linking to the first three parts of my six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, which I had just updated, and I’ve now updated the fourth, fifth and sixth parts — Part Four (covering prisoners with the Internment Serial Numbers 497-661), Part Five (covering prisoner numbers 662-928) and Part Six (covering prisoner numbers 929-10029). 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 2,232 articles I have written about Guantánamo over the last ten and a half years, and where their stories are told in my book The Guantánamo Files.

As I explained in my article last month, my book, published in 2007, was the result of over a year’s research and writing — as a full-time unpaid freelance researcher and author — in which I told the stories of the majority of the men held at Guantánamo, analyzing where they were captured, telling their stories, and, as I put it,  “demonstrat[ing] 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.’”

Today the shameful prison at Guantánamo Bay — where 40 men continue to be held, mostly without charge or trial or anything resembling due process — has been open for 6,152 days — 6,152 days in what I described last month as a prison “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”, because of Donald Trump’s vileness and stupidity.

In updating the prisoner list, for the first time since October 2016, I was reminded of quite how long Guantánamo has been with us, and quite how long I have been researching and writing about it. I first created the prisoner list almost ten years ago, in March 2009, in the first few months of Barack Obama’s presidency, when it still seemed possible that he would be true to his word, and would close it within a year of taking office.

That promise never came true, of course, which was not only a black mark against Obama, but also an opportunity for Donald Trump to claim the prison as his own, and to openly declare his intention to keep it open and to fulfill that malevolent intent, because, shamefully, no one can be released from Guantánamo unless the president — or Congress — wants them to be released, a situation that fundamentally demonstrates how outrageously unjust the prison is.

My thanks to everyone taking an interest in my work on Guantánamo over the last 12 and a half years. In an effort to keep Guantánamo in the public eye, I’m planning to write a series of individual articles about the 40 men still held, so if you’re an attorney who represents any of them, and you’d like to help me provide updates on their stories, please get in touch. Otherwise, I hope these updates are helpful. 

If you appreciate what I’m doing, 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
November 14, 2018

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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. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was 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. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, the resistance continues.

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.