Guantanamo whistleblowers

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 […]

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 […]

As the Obama administration prepares to relaunch Dick Cheney and David Addington’s reviled Military Commissions (with claims that they will be used for less than 20 of the 240 prisoners still held), senior officials have been largely silent about the eventual fate of the rest of the prison’s population, with the exception of a few […]

Since publishing the first definitive list of the 779 prisoners who have been held in the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba (available in four parts — Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4), I have received some wonderful feedback, but I have also been asked to consider the contributions made by other […]

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 […]

Since the election of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States, the closure of the “War on Terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba has become a hot topic. Throughout his election campaign, Obama pledged to close Guantánamo, and he reiterated his promise during his first TV interview as President-Elect, on November 15. […]

The repatriation from Guantánamo of Salim Hamdan, a former driver for Osama bin Laden, to serve out the last month of his sentence for providing material support for terrorism in Yemen, will surely hasten the demise of the prison, as promised by President-Elect Barack Obama, even though the circumstances of Hamdan’s departure were as furtive […]

In the real world, guilt and innocence are clearly defined, and those believed to be responsible for a crime are considered innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Since the 9/11 attacks, however, the US administration has done away with such long-standing conventions. Under the guise of waging a “War on Terror,” those […]

Those who cherish the United States’ historical adherence to the rule of law — myself included — were delighted to hear that the US Supreme Court ruled on Thursday, in the case of Boumediene v. Bush, that the prisoners at Guantánamo “have the constitutional right to habeas corpus,” enabling them to challenge the basis of […]