by Andy Worthington
As part of its alleged “desire not to hold detainees any longer than necessary,” the Pentagon announced on Tuesday that two Guantánamo prisoners had been transferred to Algeria. This follows the repatriation of two other Algerians – Mustafa Hamlili and Abdul Raham Houari – at [...]
By Afshin Rattansi, Press TV, Tehran
Press TV interviewed Andy Worthington from Reprieve, a human rights group which gives legal representation to prisoners being treated unjustly by powerful governments.
Press TV: 7 years after 9-11, more than a million dead perhaps in Iraq, tens of thousands in Afghanistan. They’ve failed to convict in the first US [...]
By Andy Worthington, AlterNet
A military jury’s verdict on Wednesday in the first U.S. war crimes trial since World War Two — that Yemeni Guantánamo prisoner Salim Hamdan is guilty of material support for terrorism, but not guilty of terrorism itself — was the culmination of two weeks of proceedings that provided some extraordinary insights into [...]
By Andy Worthington
As the Abu Ghraib scandal demonstrates, a photo is worth a thousand words — even if, as Errol Morris’ newly-released documentary Standard Operating Procedure demonstrates, those words are sometimes what the viewer wishes to see, rather than what actually happened.
There is, therefore, enormous excitement in the media about the first ever release of [...]
Will the two Algerians freed from Guantánamo be treated fairly?
by Andy Worthington
It doesn’t take much investigation to discover that Algeria has a bleak human rights record, which is one of the reasons that, until last week, when 49-year-old Mustafa Hamlili and 28-year-old Abdul Raham [...]
Andy Worthngton
The ruling in Parhat v. Gates invokes Lewis Carroll: “the fact the government has ’said it thrice’ does not make an allegation true.”
Some of us have known for years that the U.S. administration’s basis for holding prisoners without charge or trial in the “War on Terror” has more to do with a fantasy world [...]
by Andy Worthington
Senator ignores mounting evidence of torture and abuse
This is clearly no time for being mealy-mouthed. After nearly seven years of ruinous warmongering, economic meltdown, and the shredding of the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Geneva Conventions, and the UN Convention Against [...]
Andy Worthington, author of “The Guantánamo Files,” introduces a new report, by legal action charity Reprieve, detailing the rendition and torture of British resident Binyam Mohamed, who faces a trial by Military Commission in Guantánamo.
While much reporting after last week’s arraignments focused on KSM’s desire to be executed, torture itself is on trial at Guantánamo Bay.
This has been a disturbing week for British resident and Guantánamo prisoner Binyam Mohamed, who endured two and a half years of torture at the hands of Pakistani agents, the CIA, and the United States’ proxy torturers in Morocco, before being transferred to Guantánamo in September 2004.
ABC News reported that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his four co-defendants — Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali and Walid bin Attash — walked into the courtroom shortly after 9 am, wearing turbans and white robes, and explained that when the judge, Marine Col. Ralph Kohlmann, asked Mohammed if he understood that he could get the death penalty if convicted, he replied, “I wish to be martyred.”
With four more prisoners charged last week, the Bush administration seems intent on trying as many Guantánamo detainees as possible before November.
Like alcoholics queuing up drinks at closing time, the Bush administration is pressing charges against prisoners at Guantánamo at a frantic rate, anxious to be seen to be validating the chronic lawlessness of the [...]
By Andy Worthington
As the US administration prepares to charge British resident Binyam Mohamed in a Military Commission at Guantánamo, Andy Worthington reports on his last-minute appeal to Prime Minster Gordon Brown to intervene on his behalf. [...]
By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
First Posted on February 26, 2008
They say journalists provide the first draft of history. With the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan, that draft led to an almost universal consensus, at least among Americans, that the attack was a justifiable act of self-defense. The Afghanistan action is commonly viewed as a “clean” conflict [...]
By ANDY WORTHINGTON
Alone in the civilized world (and, it should be noted, in most other countries regarded as barbaric dictatorships), the US administration has a penchant for ignoring international laws regarding the legal distinctions between adults and children, subjecting teenagers, in Afghanistan and Guantánamo, to brutal detention without charge or trial, and, in the case [...]
By ANDY WORTHINGTON
For most of 2008, the media’s interest in Guantanamo 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 [...]
Counterspin (5/16/08-5/22/08)
This week on CounterSpin: race, Wright and Barack Obama. You might have been tempted to think that the controversy over Barack Obama and Rev. Jeremiah Wright ended back when Obama gave a long speech on race and his long association with Wright’s church. Or maybe you figured that when Obama gave another set of [...]
By Andy Worthington, AlterNet
The Al Jazeera cameraman was never charged.
After four and a half months of inexplicable inertia, the U.S. administration has finally seen fit to release another group of prisoners from Guantánamo, including the Sudanese al-Jazeera cameraman and journalist Sami al-Haj. Despite claims from within the administration that it was hoping [...]
By Andy Worthington
Al-Jazeera has the first interview with Sami al-Haj since his return to the Sudan from Guantánamo late last night. The journalist, seized while on assignment for al-Jazeera in December 2001, had been on hunger strike for the last 16 months of his 76-month imprisonment without charge or trial by the United States, and [...]
Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, examines a recent statement from the US military that appears to have been issued for propaganda purposes, and explains how its timing seems designed to deflect attention from recent negative publicity relating to the proposed trials of Guantánamo [...]
Sami al-Haj is a journalist, but one unlike any other. For over six years, since December 15, 2001, when he was seized by Pakistani soldiers on the Afghan border, while on assignment as a cameraman for the Qatar-based broadcaster al-Jazeera, he has been in a disturbing but unique position: a trained journalist held as an [...]
By Andy Worthington 25.9.07
Back in December 2004, during a hearing regarding the definition of “enemy combatants,” Judge Joyce Hens Green asked a pointed question to Deputy Associate Attorney General Brian Boyle: “If a little old lady in Switzerland gave money to a charity … and the money was passed to al-Qaeda, could she be held [...]
by Andy Worthington
Andy Worthington is a historian based in
London. He is the author of
The Guantánamo Files, the first book
to tell the stories [...]
Seema Saifee, a US lawyer representing 4 of 17 Uygur detainees in Guantanamo Bay that have been unlawfully arrested
and deported from Afghanistan.
Below is an article written by Seema Saifee published by Jursit:
British historian and journalist Andy Worthington has described Guantánamo as part of “a cruel and misguided response by the Bush administration to the September [...]
Guantanamo Bay News
