For most of 2008, the media's interest in Guantánamo has focused not on the majority of the 273 prisoners who are still held there without charge or trial and largely unknown to the outside world, but on the 13 who have been plucked from the grinding obscurity...
Betrayals, Backsliding, and Boycotts
Anyone who has kept half an eye on the proceedings at the military commissions in Guantánamo – the unique system of trials for "terror suspects" that was conceived in the wake of the 9/11 attacks by Vice President Dick Cheney and his close...
Ex-Gitmo Suicide Bomber Fuels Pentagon Propaganda
Rather horribly, it seems, a former Guantánamo prisoner, Abdullah al-Ajmi, a Kuwaiti who was repatriated in November 2005 and who later married and had a child, blew himself up as a suicide bomber in Mosul, Iraq, last month. According to the U.S. military, Ajmi...
Who Are the Afghans Just Released from Guantánamo?
For the five Afghans who returned home on the same flight as al-Jazeera journalist Sami al-Haj and the other three prisoners described in my previous article, the future is disturbingly uncertain. As I reported last December, when 13 of their compatriots were released...
Who Are the Latest Gitmo Detainees to Be Released?
Late on Thursday evening, I joined in the widespread celebrations – at least in those parts of the world that care about the injustice of holding people in prison without charge or trial – that attended the repatriation of al-Jazeera journalist Sami al-Haj...
The Insignificance and Insanity of Abu Zubaydah
Abu Zubaydah, an alleged senior al-Qaeda operative, has been held without charge or trial as a "high-value detainee" for over six years, first in secret CIA custody, and then in Guantánamo, while battles have raged within the administration over his...
Shameless Propaganda Over Gitmo 9/11 Trials
In what appears to be nothing more than propaganda masquerading as news, the U.S. military has announced, as Reuters described it, that it will "televise the Guantánamo trial of accused September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and five other suspects...
Latest Gitmo Charges Questionable
The U.S. Department of Defense announced Monday that Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian captured after a gunfight in Gujrat, Pakistan, in July 2004, would be the fifteenth Guantánamo prisoner to be tried by military commission, in connection with his alleged...
A Chinese Muslim’s Desperate Plea From Gitmo
The stories of the Uighurs in Guantánamo – Muslims from the oppressed Xinjiang province of China, formerly known as East Turkistan – have long demonstrated chronic injustice on the part of the U.S. authorities to those who know of them, although they...
The Afghan Hero Who Died in Guantánamo
On February 5, the New York Times published a front-page story by Carlotta Gall and myself, Time Runs Out for an Afghan Held by the U.S., about Abdul Razzaq Hekmati, a 68-year old Afghan detainee who died in Guantánamo on December 30, 2007, in which we...