Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi

After eight years’ imprisonment without charge or trial, five former Guantanamo prisoners are beginning new lives this week — two in Switzerland and three in Georgia. Their stories reveal, yet again, how Republican lawmakers and media pundits in the US, who have, in recent months, renewed their fear-filled attacks on those still held, are guilty […]

On Saturday, I spoke by phone to Georgian journalist Ketevan Khachidze about the three men released from Guantánamo to Georgia last week, congratulating the country on its humanitarian gesture, and explaining why fears that the government is accepting “terrorists” are gravely misplaced, and are based on unsubstantiated propaganda by the Bush administration. In addition, I […]

One of the saddest stories in Guantánamo is that of Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi, a Libyan married to an Afghan woman and with a newly-born baby daughter, who was running a small bakery in Jalalabad, Afghanistan at the time of the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001. Fearing that he would be seized in the […]

On January 22, in an executive order relating to the closure of Guantánamo, President Barack Obama established a comprehensive review of the cases of the remaining 242 prisoners, to work out who could be released and who should continue to be held. The executive order explained that the review was to be “conducted with the […]

In the first part of this interview with Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, Andy Worthington, the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, examined why the government’s allegations against the prisoners at Guantánamo are unreliable. A veteran of US Army intelligence, Lt. Col. Abraham worked for OARDEC (the […]

On Sunday, in his first television interview since winning the Presidential election, Barack Obama repeated his campaign pledge to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay and to ban the use of torture by US forces. Speaking on 60 Minutes, he explained, “I have said repeatedly that I intend to close Guantánamo, and I will follow […]

It really doesn’t get any worse than this. Candace Gorman, lawyer for Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi, a Libyan detainee at Guantánamo, reports that her client has been infected with AIDS. Mr. al-Ghizzawi explained to his lawyer in a letter that he was told about his infection by a doctor at Guantánamo, adding that he believes that […]

The grim story of the Guantánamo suicides –- the deaths of three men, Ali al-Salami, Mani al-Utaybi and Yasser al-Zahrani in June 2006, and another, Abdul Rahman al-Amri, in May this year –- took another turn last week, when, in the absence of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service’s long-awaited report into the deaths, Navy Capt. […]

Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, the Guantánamo whistleblower, is in the news again. The civilian lawyer, who worked as a military intelligence officer for 26 years in the Army reserves and was decorated for his support of counter-terrorism efforts following 9/11, first came to prominence last month, when he became the first military insider to criticize, […]