Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani

Please support my work! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration.   I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of […]

The military commissions at Guantánamo, as I have been reporting for ten years, are a shamefully deficient excuse for justice, a system dreamt up in the heat of America’s post-9/11 sorrow, when hysteria and vengeance trumped common sense and a respect for the law, and it was decided, by senior Bush administration officials and their […]

Since May 2009, when President Obama first bowed to Republican pressure on national security issues, and abandoned a plan by White House Counsel Greg Craig to rehouse on the US mainland a couple of cleared prisoners at Guantánamo who were at risk of torture if repatriated, it has been apparent that no principles are sufficiently […]

Last Friday, Ken Ota of the newspaper Revolution asked me to do a phone interview to discuss the recent announcement that President Obama was planning a new series of trials by Military Commission at Guantánamo, to explain the significance of this announcement, and to run through the largely shambolic history of the Commissions since their […]

For those of us seeking a grown-up debate about Guantánamo in the two years since President Obama came into office, the most troubling development has been the retrenchment of Republican opposition to the closure of the prison, backed up by alarming support for the pro-Guantánamo position by members of the President’s own party. Like a […]

Last Tuesday, the Real News Network was one of a number of media organizations, independent journalists and activists filming the rally outside The White House and the protest outside the Department of Justice calling for the closure of Guantánamo on the 9th anniversary of the prison’s opening, and I’m delighted to note that a six-minute […]

I first heard from Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institution about two years ago, when he was conducting research into the cases of the prisoners held at Guantánamo, for a project entitled, “The Current Detainee Population of Guantánamo: An Empirical Study.” Wittes got in touch because he had drawn on my analysis of 8,000 publicly […]

To listen to certain Republican critics of last week’s verdict in the federal court trial of the Tanzanian Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a former Guantánamo prisoner and a former CIA “ghost prisoner,” you would think that the jury had found him not guilty, and that he had been released onto the streets of New York. In […]

On Monday, I’ll be publishing my own detailed response to the outcome in the federal court trial of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, and the Republican hysteria that has arisen because the jury dismissed 284 charges against him — relating to his alleged participation in the US embassy bombings in Africa in August 1998 — but found […]

On national security issues, there are now two Americas. In the first, which existed from January to May 2009, the rule of law flickered briefly back to life after eight years of the Bush administration. In this first America, President Obama swept into office issuing executive orders promising to close Guantánamo and to uphold the […]