Tunisians in Guantanamo

On Monday March 30, in a committee room in the House of Commons, Diane Abbott MP chaired a meeting entitled, “Britain’s Guantánamo? The use of secret evidence and evidence based on torture in the UK courts,” to discuss the stories of some of the men held as “terror suspects” on the basis of secret evidence, […]

The continued imprisonment of at least 61 prisoners at Guantánamo, who have been cleared for release after multiple military review boards (or, in recent months, after rulings in a US court), was an affront to notions of justice when the Bush administration was in power, and is even more so now that Barack Obama, who […]

As part of my ongoing project to record the stories of all the prisoners held at Guantánamo, I’ve just posted the tenth of 12 additional online chapters supplementing my book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, and available from Amazon here and here). This […]

Those of us who prefer justice to arbitrary and unaccountable detention without charge or trial were delighted when, last week, Barack Obama fulfilled a long-stated promise and issued a presidential order stating that Guantánamo will be closed “as soon as practicable, and no later than one year from the date of this order,” and establishing […]

Just two weeks ago, in a habeas corpus case in a Washington D.C. court, Judge Richard Leon turned the clock back to January 11, 2002 (the day Guantánamo opened) by ruling that the US government could continue holding two prisoners at Guantánamo — the Yemeni Muaz al-Alawi and the Tunisian Hisham Sliti — because the […]

On the seventh anniversary of the opening of the “War on Terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba (on January 11, 2002), this is perhaps a rather bleak title, given that Barack Obama has pledged to close the prison, but recent events in a US District Court — largely overlooked in the mainstream media — have […]

As rumors continue to fly regarding Barack Obama’s plans to close the notorious “War on Terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, one country in the European Union, Portugal, took the opportunity offered last Wednesday by the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — one of whose Articles declares, “Everyone has the right to […]

Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files, looks at the US authorities’ recent underhand attempts to return cleared prisoners from Guantánamo to regimes where they face the risk of torture, despite US court orders preventing their enforced repatriation. For many of the prisoners at Guantánamo, the forthcoming US Presidential election holds little promise of change. […]

In the second of an occasional series looking at prisoners in Guantánamo who have been cleared for release after multiple military reviews, but who are still held in the notorious offshore prison, Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, looks at the little-known stories of […]

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, […]