Qala-i-Janghi massacre

In the Bush administration’s “War on Terror,” the gulf between rhetoric and reality was always pronounced, and never more so than when Vice President Dick Cheney spoke out. Cheney’s lies and distortions were on open display in the last month before his departure from the White House, as he sought to leave his legacy of […]

In an extraordinary and unprecedented ruling in a US District Court, Judge Ricardo Urbina has ruled that 17 wrongly imprisoned Chinese Muslims at Guantánamo must be allowed entry to the United States. It is, as the media has been reporting, the first time that a US court has directly ordered the release of a prisoner […]

Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, looks at the stories of the ten Saudis released from Guantánamo on December 29, and reveals that they include Taliban foot soldiers, missionaries, humanitarian aid workers, and one genuine surprise –- the director of a blacklisted charity, who […]

To celebrate the official UK publication (today) of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press), I’ve just posted the first of 12 additional chapters featuring stories that I could not include in the book, either for reasons of space –- to keep a tight narrative […]

Now that the time is approaching when the Supreme Court will once more decide whether the detainees at Guantánamo have the right to challenge their detention in the US courts (a right the Supreme Court gave them in June 2004, but which was snatched away from them in subsequent legislation fuelled by paranoia and Democratic […]

From Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, comes news that two of the three Tajik detainees released from Guantánamo in March –- Muqit Vohidov and Rukniddin Sharopov –- have received jail sentences of 17 years in “high-security penal colonies” (aka labour camps) for “serving as mercenaries in Afghanistan” –- where they were accused of aiding the […]

The English-language Arabic daily newspaper Asharq al-Awsat recently ran an intriguing article, Life After Guantánamo, about a released Guantánamo detainee, Mishal al-Harbi, which I only came across because it was mentioned on John Burgess’ well-balanced Crossroads Arabia website. Al-Harbi, who is now 27 years old, but who was only 21 when he was captured after […]

Following the recent announcement that 16 detainees had been returned to Saudi Arabia from Guantánamo, the world’s media were swift to pick up on the story of one of these men: Juma al-Dossari, a joint Bahraini-Saudi national, who had attempted to commit suicide on at least 14 occasions in Guantánamo, and whose poignant laments –- […]