Mohammed al-Qahtani

This is the first part of a nine-part series telling the stories of all the prisoners currently held in Guantánamo (176 at the time of writing). See the introduction here, and Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six and Part Seven. The 20 prisoners listed below were the first group of prisoners […]

Yesterday was the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, established by the United Nations General Assembly in December 1997, to mark the ratification of the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment on June 26, 1987. As UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan explained on June 26, 1998 (when […]

It’s now over three weeks since veteran Justice Department lawyer David Margolis dashed the hopes of those seeking accountability for the Bush administration’s torturers, but this is a story of such profound importance that it must not be allowed to slip away. Margolis decided that an internal report into the conduct of John Yoo and Jay […]

The weekend before Christmas, 12 prisoners were released from Guantánamo. In two previous articles, I told the stories of six of these men — two Somalis and four Afghans — and in this final article I look at the stories of the six Yemenis who were also released. These releases were enormously important, because Yemenis […]

It’s a sign of how much the Bush administration skewed America’s moral compass that we are currently facing the possibility that the only way to bring the torturers to account is through a “Nonpartisan Commission Of Inquiry” — essentially, a toothless truth and reconciliation commission — of the type proposed by Sen. Patrick Leahy, the […]

Forget the outgoing President’s lame, reality-defying farewell speech, and Dick Cheney’s last-ditch attempts to claim that the administration in which he served as Vice President never engaged in torture. The Bush era came to an end last Wednesday when, in one short interview, Susan J. Crawford, the senior Pentagon official overseeing the Military Commissions at […]

In the real world outside the US Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, Barack Obama’s pledge to close Guantánamo and scrap the Military Commissions (the system of trials for “terror suspects” that was established in the wake of the 9/11 attacks) has provoked a rare outburst of frenzied media coverage. With no concrete plans announced […]

As Barack Obama and his transition team begin looking at ways to fulfill the President-Elect’s pledge to close Guantánamo, Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files, recalls that Barack Obama also promised to “reject the Military Commissions Act” (the legislation that revived the system of “terror trials” conjured up in the Office of Vice President […]

As a 16th prisoner at Guantánamo, Noor Uthman Muhammed, is put forward for trial by Military Commission (the much-criticized system of trials for “terror suspects” invented in the wake of the 9/11 attacks), Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, provides a guide to the […]

I’ve just posted the third of 12 additional online chapters supplementing my book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison. This chapter features stories that I could not include in the book, either for reasons of space (to keep the book at a manageable length) or, in some cases, […]