On Thursday, two Guantánamo prisoners were released, to start new lives in Germany, bringing the prison’s population to 174. Announcing their arrival, Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière stated that, by taking them in, Germany had “made its humanitarian contribution to closing the detention center.” He also noted that the two men had asked for their [...]
Over the next month, in an attempt to focus attention more closely on Guantánamo, and on the remaining prisoners who are held there, I’ll be publishing an eight-part series of articles (in conjunction with Cageprisoners, for whom I work as a Senior Researcher), telling, for the first time, the stories of the 176 men who [...]
Please support Andy Worthington’s groundbreaking work! In March 2009, I published a four-part list identifying all 779 prisoners held at Guantánamo since the prison opened on January 11, 2002, which I updated in January this year. To keep up with developments over the last six months, I have now updated it again, and the four [...]
In the last week, Omar Khadr, the only Western citizen still held in Guantánamo, has sacked his US lawyers and stated that he will boycott his forthcoming trial by Military Commission, scheduled to begin on August 10. He has also refused to have anything to do with a plea deal that was being negotiated between [...]
For the first two and a half years that the “War on Terror” prison at Guantánamo was open, the men held there had no recourse to justice if, as many of them claimed, they had been seized by mistake, as part of a largely indiscriminate dragnet involving substantial bounty payments to the Bush administration’s allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
On Monday, in an article entitled, “House Kills Plan to Close Guantánamo,” I described my despair at the House Armed Services Committee’s unanimous refusal to provide $350 million (out of a war budget of $726 billion) so that President Obama can close Guantánamo by moving prisoners to a facility in Illinois. As I explained in the article, I was not upset that the administration’s plan to replicate Guantánamo in Illinois was being turned down, because I have nothing but contempt for President Obama’s assertion that 48 of the remaining 181 prisoners can continue to be held indefinitely without charge or trial, and simply moving them from Guantánamo to the US mainland would only make matters worse. However, what distresses me about the Committee’s refusal to back the President’s plan is that its only purpose is to keep Guantánamo open forever.
Last Friday, the Court of Appeals in Washington D.C. delivered a genuinely disturbing ruling (PDF) regarding prisoners in the US prison at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, which has turned the clock back to the darkest days of the Bush administration, before prisoners seized in the “War on Terror” had any recourse to justice if they claimed they had been seized by mistake.
On April 20, unnoticed by any media outlet whatsoever, a Libyan prisoner at Guantánamo, Omar Mohammed Khalifh (also identified as Omar Abu Bakr) lost his habeas corpus petition. I learned about the ruling through a “Guantánamo Habeas Scorecard” maintained by the Center for Constitutional Rights, but although Judge James Robertson’s unclassified opinion is not yet available, to ascertain why he decided that the government had met its burden of proof in establishing that Khalifh was part of, or supported al-Qaeda and/or the Taliban, at least part of his story — and of the government’s allegations — can be found through publicly available documents, and through representations made on his behalf by his lawyer, Edmund Burke. Other information has been provided to me by the former Guantánamo prisoner Omar Deghayes, who is aware of how Khalifh has been treated at Guantánamo over the last eight years.
As two former Guantánamo prisoners begin new lives in Europe (an unidentified Yemeni in Spain, and a Syrian in Bulgaria, whose story I’ll be reporting soon), there are concerns that the ill-defined obligations of countries accepting cleared prisoners from Guantánamo have left the first prisoner given a new life in Spain — the Palestinian Walid Hijazi, who was released in February — in a precarious position, effectively abandoned by the State, and largely reliant on the kindness of strangers for his financial and psychological support.
Last December, I wrote about the case of Saeed Hatim, a Yemeni in Guantánamo whose habeas corpus petition had been granted by Judge Ricardo Urbina. At the time, Judge Urbina’s unclassified opinion had not been made publicly available, so all I had to go on were Hatim’s own statements at Guantánamo. In publicly available documents, he told his interrogators that he wanted to find a way to fight in Chechnya but concluded that he needed to train in Afghanistan.
