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...
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...
This has been another terrible week for Guantánamo's Military Commissions, established by Dick Cheney and his close advisors in November 2001 to try, convict and execute those responsible for 9/11 through a novel process so far removed from the US court system...
Finally, then, nearly six and a half years after the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. government has charged six Guantánamo detainees with, among other things, terrorism, murder in violation of the law of war, attacking civilians, and conspiracy – adding, for good...
As pre-trial hearings take place in the US prison complex at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, looks at the stories of the three defendants whose...
The media is buzzing with the news that Michael Hayden, the director of the CIA, admitted in an open session of Congress on Tuesday that waterboarding – a long-reviled torture technique, which produces the perception of drowning – was used on three...
The news that U.S. citizen José Padilla has received a prison sentence of 17 years and four months should provoke outrage in the United States, although it is unlikely that there will be much more than a whimper of dissent. The former gang member and convert to...
How humiliating. The story begins with the shameful case of Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian who was kidnapped by U.S. agents as he changed planes in New York in 2002 and rendered to Syria, where he was tortured for a year on behalf of the American authorities...
The Bush administration has maintained a low profile over the last month, as waves of indignation over the destruction of CIA videotapes showing the torture of two "high value" detainees have lapped ever closer to the White House. In the last few weeks, as...
As 2007 drew to a close, the tally of detainees released from Guantánamo throughout the year rose to 122, as another 10 Saudis were repatriated, to add to the 53 sent home between February and November. With 492 detainees now released – and 281 remaining...
