The media has passed on from "covering" Gitmo. Whatever the reason, there are still 176 men detained there - most of them for many years already and seemingly no prospect of being released anytime soon either.
Andy Worthington has for years been involved with the prisoners at Gitmo and written about the prison and the people in it: see previous posts on this blog.
Worthington is now planning on 8 detailed pieces focusing on the remaining prisoners, as he explains here on his blog:
"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 are still held.
The series begins with the stories of 20 men described by the US authorities as part of the “Dirty Thirty,” seized crossing from Afghanistan to Pakistan in December 2001, who are mostly regarded as having been bodyguards for Osama bin Laden, even though there is copious evidence that these allegations were produced by a number of prisoners who were tortured — including Mohammed al-Qahtani, for whom Guantánamo’s version of the CIA’s torture program was devised in the fall of 2002, and approved by then-defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
The articles to follow, covering the rest of the prisoners still held, deal with those seized in particular locations: two cover prisoners seized in Afghanistan; two more tell the stories of prisoners seized crossing from Afghanistan to Pakistan in December 2001; two deal with prisoners seized in Pakistan; and the final article covers the “high-value detainees” transferred to Guantánamo from secret CIA prisons in September 2006, and other prisoners, seized in a variety of countries, who were subjected to “extraordinary rendition” and imprisonment in secret CIA prisons.
In reading these articles, I hope that readers will be able to discover the stories of the men behind the statistics of Guantánamo — and the still-repeated and thoroughly unfounded claims that the prison holds “the worst of the worst.” In the accounts, readers will encounter a variety of different individuals. Many of these men traveled to Afghanistan before the 9/11 attacks to fight with the Taliban against the Northern Alliance, and suddenly found themselves to be enemies of America in a “War on Terror,” and others were not even involved in any kind of military conflict, and were, instead, students, humanitarian aid workers, missionaries, or economic migrants, caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Many of the 176 men who were still in Guantánamo at the time of writing were rounded up for the substantial bounty payments (averaging $5000 a head) that were paid by the US military for “al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects,” and, given that 596 men have already been released, it should be profoundly troubling that the majority of the men still held were either foot soldiers in an inter-Muslim civil war that had nothing to do with al-Qaeda or the 9/11 attacks, or civilians still struggling to establish their innocence."
Andy Worthington has for years been involved with the prisoners at Gitmo and written about the prison and the people in it: see previous posts on this blog.
Worthington is now planning on 8 detailed pieces focusing on the remaining prisoners, as he explains here on his blog:
"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 are still held.
The series begins with the stories of 20 men described by the US authorities as part of the “Dirty Thirty,” seized crossing from Afghanistan to Pakistan in December 2001, who are mostly regarded as having been bodyguards for Osama bin Laden, even though there is copious evidence that these allegations were produced by a number of prisoners who were tortured — including Mohammed al-Qahtani, for whom Guantánamo’s version of the CIA’s torture program was devised in the fall of 2002, and approved by then-defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
The articles to follow, covering the rest of the prisoners still held, deal with those seized in particular locations: two cover prisoners seized in Afghanistan; two more tell the stories of prisoners seized crossing from Afghanistan to Pakistan in December 2001; two deal with prisoners seized in Pakistan; and the final article covers the “high-value detainees” transferred to Guantánamo from secret CIA prisons in September 2006, and other prisoners, seized in a variety of countries, who were subjected to “extraordinary rendition” and imprisonment in secret CIA prisons.
In reading these articles, I hope that readers will be able to discover the stories of the men behind the statistics of Guantánamo — and the still-repeated and thoroughly unfounded claims that the prison holds “the worst of the worst.” In the accounts, readers will encounter a variety of different individuals. Many of these men traveled to Afghanistan before the 9/11 attacks to fight with the Taliban against the Northern Alliance, and suddenly found themselves to be enemies of America in a “War on Terror,” and others were not even involved in any kind of military conflict, and were, instead, students, humanitarian aid workers, missionaries, or economic migrants, caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Many of the 176 men who were still in Guantánamo at the time of writing were rounded up for the substantial bounty payments (averaging $5000 a head) that were paid by the US military for “al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects,” and, given that 596 men have already been released, it should be profoundly troubling that the majority of the men still held were either foot soldiers in an inter-Muslim civil war that had nothing to do with al-Qaeda or the 9/11 attacks, or civilians still struggling to establish their innocence."
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