The Guantánamo Document That Changed My Life 20 Years Ago Today

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20 years ago today, on April 20, 2006, a document was released by the Pentagon that changed my life, launching me on what has become the defining struggle (or jihad, in Arabic) of my time here on earth as an independent journalist and human rights activist: exposing the horrific injustice of the US’s “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, telling the stories of the 779 men — and boys — held there by the US military, and calling for the prison’s closure.

The document in question was a list of 558 prisoners held at Guantánamo at the time (see here or here), unwillingly released by the Pentagon through Freedom of Information legislation.

It was the first ever list of prisoners released by the US government, which, for four years and three months, since Guantánamo first opened on January 11, 2002 — to hold prisoners seized in connection with the global “war on terror” declared by the Bush administration after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 — had sought to shroud the prison and those held there in a veil of the utmost secrecy, behind which it could completely disregard all international and domestic laws and treaties concerning the treatment of those deprived of their liberty.

With the release of this document, it was suddenly possible, by cross-referencing with other documents unwillingly released by the Pentagon, and other available reports, to tell the stories of those held at Guantánamo, and to fatally puncture the Bush administration’s lies that those held were “the worst of the worst”, “terrorists” who were “seized on the battlefield”, and who were all hell-bent on inflicting the maximum amount of damage imaginable on the so-called “Land of the Free.”

Inventing a category of prisoner without any rights whatsoever

For those regarded as having committed crimes or for those detained in wartime, only two courses of action are legally applicable for depriving people of their liberty in countries that, like the US, claim to respect the rule of law. Those detained are either charged with a crime, and swiftly put on trial, or are held as prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions.

Under George W. Bush, however, the US government decided that those held at Guantánamo were “unlawful enemy combatants”, who could be held indefinitely without charge or trial, and who, fundamentally, had no rights whatsoever.

For the very small number of men who were to be charged with crimes relating to terrorism, the venue chosen for their intended prosecution was not the federal courts on the US mainland, but at Guantánamo itself, in military commission trials that had been unwisely dredged up from past military conflicts, and which, shockingly, were conceived, initially, as a method for swiftly executing alleged “terrorists” after brief capital trials in which information derived through the use of torture would be allowed.

For the first two and half years of their imprisonment, the anonymous victims of the “war on terror” were so thoroughly cut off from the world that, when it came to Guantánamo, the only valid comparison for the US under George W. Bush was with a full-blown dictatorship.

However, most of the US, from its politicians to its mainstream media and far too many of its citizens, didn’t care, as a permanent state of grief, fear and vengeance was cultivated and maintained by the government, by Congress and by the mainstream media.

Although brave lawyers began challenging Bush’s dictatorial regime almost immediately, it wasn’t until June 2004 that the Supreme Court ruled on a case, Rasul v. Bush, named after a British prisoner, Shafiq Rasul, that had been making its way through the courts for the previous two years.

The prisoners briefly secure habeas corpus rights

In Rasul, the Supreme Court ruled that, because the prisoners had no way of challenging the basis of their imprisonment, even if they declared that they were completely innocent and had been seized by mistake, they had habeas corpus rights; in other words, the right to challenge the government’s supposed evidence against them before an impartial judge.

It was a sign of how grotesquely the Bush administration had deliberately blurred the distinctions between alleged criminal behavior and the actions of foot soldiers in wartime that this ruling was required. Normally, there was no need to grant habeas corpus rights to people seized in wartime, because the Geneva Conventions applied, allowing them to be held unmolested until the end of hostilities. In the “war on terror”, however, the government had compelled the Court to act by failing to review the prisoners’ cases close to the time of place and capture, to ascertain whether or not they were combatants or civilians seized by mistake.

Historically, this was achieved by convening “competent tribunals” under the Geneva Conventions, at which those who claimed to be civilians caught by mistake could call witnesses to verify their claims. In the first Gulf War, around 1,200 “competent tribunals” were held, and, in around three-quarters of the cases, the US military recognized that they had made mistakes, and the wrongly-detained civilians were released. At Guantánamo, in contrast, the position taken by the Bush administration, primarily through Vice President Dick Cheney’s legal counsel David Addington, was that no mistakes were made, and that everyone detained was an “unlawful enemy combatant”, without any right to have those evidence-free assertions reviewed.

Crucially, the ruling in Rasul v. Bush allowed attorneys into Guantánamo to begin representing the men held on a pro bono basis, but while the arrival of lawyers brought the most blatant torture and abuse at the prison to an end, which had relied on the veil of total secrecy to keep it hidden, most of the prisoners who accepted representation by US attorneys, having overcome their initial concerns that they were secretly working for the government, didn’t have their cases publicized, to prevent any contamination of their planned hearings, and also to prevent what might otherwise have been a torrent of black propaganda emanating from the Bush administration and lapped up by compliant media.

In those early years, the only reports that emerged from Guantánamo were via the accounts of released prisoners, initially in brief comments made by released Afghan and Pakistani prisoners, who made up the bulk of the 200 or so prisoners released from 2002 to 2004, and particularly, from 2004 onwards, when European citizens were freed after belated pressure was exerted by their home governments, and when they began relating their accounts to generally sympathetic mainstream media outlets with a wide reach.

Convening unfair tribunals at Guantánamo

However, despite the importance of Rasul, Congress was subsequently prevailed upon by the Bush administration to pass laws aimed at stripping the prisoners of their newly-granted habeas rights, and the Bush administration, in a further snub to the Supreme Court, convened administrative military tribunals at Guantánamo — the Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs) and, later, the Administrative Review Boards (ARBs) — which were designed not to provide justice, but, shamefully, to rubber-stamp their designation, on capture, as “unlawful enemy combatants” who could be held indefinitely without rights, continuing the prison’s fundamental lawlessness.

Fundamentally, the CSRTs and ARBs echoed the “competent tribunals” that should have taken place when the prisoners were first seized, but they were deliberately worthless in the context of Guantánamo, far from the time and place of capture, when witnesses were unobtainable.

Although I had been aware of the disturbing lawlessness of Guantánamo from the day it opened, I spent the first four years of its existence working in another field entirely: writing two books, Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield (both still in print) about the contested landscape of Stonehenge, the great sun temple in southern England, the anarchic pagan free festivals that flourished there every summer from 1974 to 1984, and the vile police assault on those seeking to make their way to Stonehenge in 1985, at what has become known as the Battle of the Beanfield.

Because this research exposed me to profound questions about the nature and extent of civil liberties and human rights, and, eventually, the rule of law, as the UK’s highest court ruled that a military-style exclusion zone imposed at Stonehenge every summer for 15 years was illegal, paving the way for public access on the summer solstice to be restored, everything was in place for me to end the summer of 2005, which I had spent in idyllic circumstances, traveling with my family from festival to festival in the English countryside to promote my Beanfield book, by becoming ensnared in the far graver story of Guantánamo.

After attending a law event discussing the British prisoners still held in September 2005, I became appalled by the Bush administration’s continuing secrecy about who it was holding at the prison, and began conducting detailed research on the internet, also drawing on two speculative lists of the prisoners held, compiled by the British NGO Cageprisoners (now CAGE International) and the Washington Post.

The significance of the release of the prisoner list

It was not until March 2006, however, that the US’s obsessive secrecy first began to be decisively prised open publicly. In response to a Freedom of Information lawsuit filed by the Associated Press, the Pentagon was obliged to release, on March 3, 2006, over 5,000 pages of documents from Guantánamo; primarily, unclassified allegations against the prisoners, and transcripts from their CSRTs, with the names of a number of the prisoners included. An earlier lawsuit has led to the release of 2,000 pages of documents, in May 2005, although all identifying information had been redacted.

Although some of those in the files released in March 2006 were identified by their names, rather than just their prison numbers (their ISNs, or Internment Serial Numbers), it was not until the list of 558 prisoners was released on April 20, 2006, providing the names and nationalities of the 558 prisoners who had gone through the CSRT process, and the first round of the subsequent ARB process, that it was possible for investigative journalists and researchers to finally establish who the prisoners dismissed by Donald Rumsfeld as “the worst of the worst” really were, through cross-referencing the CSRT documents and unclassified allegations with the names on the prisoner list.

I immediately began working around the clock to create plausible biographies of the prisoners, based on whatever glimpses emerged of them through the transcripts of the tribunals, and to establish the important context of where and when they were seized, which was essential in ascertaining whether or not they had been foot soldiers with the Taliban, for example, or civilians seized by mistake. At no point, crucially, was it apparent that any more than a handful of these individuals had any meaningful association with Al-Qaeda or any other group connected to any kind of terrorism.

A second list, released on May 15, 2006 (see here and here), provided even more context — the names, nationalities and dates of birth of all 759 prisoners held from the date the prison opened. As I continued my research, I kept expecting to hear of similar efforts undertaken by mainstream media outlets or NGOs, but it turned out that I was alone, and became the sole independent custodian of the prisoners’ stories.

Writing The Guantánamo Files

I pitched a proposal for a book to the tenacious left-wing publisher Pluto Press, which was accepted, and then spent over a year engaged in an obsessive quest for the truth, which resulted in my book The Guantánamo Files, accurately described as “the first book to tell the story of every man trapped in Guantánamo”, which I submitted in May 2007, and which was published four months later.

Crucially, what my research revealed was that the majority of the prisoners were not “seized on the battlefield”, as the US alleged, but had been seized elsewhere, confirming reports that most had been handed over by their Afghan and Pakistani allies, and that substantial bounty payments were involved.

I was able to establish that a number of men had been seized in Afghanistan in the early months of the US-led invasion, and that most of these men had either survived a massacre in a prison, or massacres in containers as they were transported from one location to another. I was also able to establish that the largest group of prisoners — hundreds in total — had not been seized in Afghanistan, but in Pakistan, after crossing from Afghanistan in December 2001.

These men were all portrayed as Al-Qaeda fighters who had been involved in the Battle of Tora Bora, but in all likelihood they consisted of a mix of foot soldiers, missionaries, aid workers and economic migrants, mainly from Europe and the Middle East, who had been attracted by the notion that the Taliban had created a “pure Islamic state” in Afghanistan, or who had simply been drawn by its affordability, compared to their home countries or their experiences as marginalized migrants in Europe.

I also established that numerous prisoners, who had not even set foot in Afghanistan, had been seized in house raids in Pakistan, largely between January and July 2002, which were noteworthy for the general incompetence of the military intelligence involved, and that around 40 men had been transferred to Guantánamo after spending time in the CIA’s network of “black site” torture prisons, or in proxy prisons operated by US allies in the Middle East.

The largest group of prisoners sent to Guantánamo were Afghans — many reluctant Taliban conscripts, or men betrayed by their rivals in Afghanistan itself — who continued to be sent to Guantánamo in significant numbers until November 2003, when their transfers ceased, and Bagram prison in Afghanistan took over as the primary prison for Afghans and others seized during the US’s ongoing occupation.

A group of ten or so “medium-value detainees” arrived from the CIA “black sites” in September 2004, while 14 more men, the so-called “high-value detainees”, arrived from the CIA “black sites” in September 2006, and six more in 2007 and 2008.

The transfer in September 2006 marked the first time that it was feasible to suggest that at least some of these men fitted the almost non-existent description of those held at Guantánamo being anyone at all who could meaningfully be described as having been involved in Al-Qaeda and acts of international terrorism, including the 9/11 attacks.

Locating the time and location of the prisoners’ capture helped me to interpret which of the competing narratives exposed in the US government’s files — the US’s own accounts, and those of the prisoners themselves — was the most credible, and I believe that the passage of time has confirmed most of my assessments that, to put it bluntly, almost no one held at Guantánamo had any significant involvement with terrorism, and that they were, instead, overwhelmingly either insignificant foot soldiers, or civilians seized by mistake.

After I submitted the manuscript of The Guantánamo Files to Pluto Press, I almost immediately began writing regularly about Guantánamo on my website, telling stories untold in the mainstream media, or following up on mainstream media reporting that provided information, but lacked the crucial context of always pointing out that the very basis of Guantánamo, and everything to do with it, represented the most colossal failure imaginable of international law and of basic human standards of decency.

Please support my work if you can

I’ll post another article soon telling the story of my relentless independent journalism and activism over the last 19 years, but for now, if you’ve enjoyed the account above, please do consider, if you can, making a donation to support my work.

Although I have worked, at various times, with the UN, WikiLeaks, Cageprisoners (now CAGE International), Reprieve, the Center for Constitutional Rights and members of the European Parliament, and have written articles for the New York Times, the Guardian and Al Jazeera, I have undertaken most of my work over these two defining decades of my life — over 2,600 articles about Guantánamo, numerous personal appearances and media appearances, as well as specific campaigns and activism — on the basis that it needed doing, and that, as a truly independent writer, largely excluded from the mainstream media, with its inbuilt biases, or its often paralyzing obsession with “objectivity”, I would need to be reliant on the financial support of my readers to enable me to continue this work.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of a photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’, which ran from 2012 to 2023), 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 (see the ongoing 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 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”, which you can watch on YouTube here.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the 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, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here. He has also, since, October 2023, been sickened and appalled by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and you can read his detailed coverage here.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s new Substack account, set up in November 2024, where he’ll be sending out a weekly newsletter, or his RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and the full military commissions list.

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