Andy Worthington

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 of indefinite detention to face trial by "military … Continue reading “Guantánamo Trial Delayed”

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 advisers – will be aware that their progress has been faltering at … Continue reading “Betrayals, Backsliding, and Boycotts”

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 was one of three suicide bombers responsible for killing seven members … Continue reading “Ex-Gitmo Suicide Bomber Fuels Pentagon Propaganda”

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 from Guantánamo, they, like the other 19 Afghans released in August, September … Continue reading “Who Are the Afghans Just Released from Guantánamo?”

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 from Guantánamo, his home for the last six years, to Sudan. Although … Continue reading “Who Are the Latest Gitmo Detainees to Be Released?”

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 supposed significance. Drawing, in particular, on the story of former Guantánamo prisoner Khalid al-Hubayshi, Andy … Continue reading “The Insignificance and Insanity of Abu Zubaydah”

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 so relatives of those killed in the attacks can watch on the U.S. mainland." Army … Continue reading “Shameless Propaganda Over Gitmo 9/11 Trials”

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 involvement in the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania on Aug. 7, … Continue reading “Latest Gitmo Charges Questionable”

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 have only sporadically registered on the media’s radar. Numbering 22 men in total, … Continue reading “A Chinese Muslim’s Desperate Plea From Gitmo”

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 established that Mr. Hekmati, known to the authorities in … Continue reading “The Afghan Hero Who Died in Guantánamo”