Andy Worthington Language: English | Format: PDF | Pages: 350 | Size: 13 MB
On 11 January 2002, exactly four months
after the terrible events of 9/11, the first of 774 prisoners arrived at
a specially constructed prison on a US naval base in Guantánamo Bay,
Cuba. Until recently, it was impossible to tell the stories of these
men. Held without charge, without trial, without access to their
families, and, initially, without access to lawyers, they are part of a
peculiarly lawless experiment conducted by the US administration, which
has chosen to disregard both the Geneva Conventions and the established
rules of war, holding the men not as criminals or as Prisoners of War,
but as “illegal enemy combatants,” a category of prisoner which is
itself illegal.
For four years, those in overall charge
of Guantánamo – George W Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld –
maintained such a strict veil of secrecy that they refused even to
reveal the names of the prisoners, and it was not possible to provide a
comprehensive overview of the prisoners and their stories until spring
2006, when, in response to a Freedom of Information lawsuit, the
Pentagon was forced to reveal the names and nationalities of all the
prisoners held in Guantánamo, as well as 7,000 pages of transcripts of
tribunals convened to assess their status as “enemy combatants.”
The tribunal process was, like everything
else at Guantánamo, both illegal and deeply flawed. The prisoners were
not allowed legal representation, and were prevented from seeing the
classified evidence against them, which often consisted of allegations
based on hearsay or torture, but they were at least allowed to tell
their own stories, which were otherwise completely unknown. Through a
detailed study of these documents, as well as discussions with lawyers
representing the prisoners, and an analysis of press reports, interviews
with released prisoners and other reports compiled by human rights
organizations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, I
have been able to put together the first detailed history of Guantánamo
and its prisoners.
Beginning with the US-led invasion of
Afghanistan in October 2001, The Guantánamo Files explains, in detail,
the genesis of the prison, its counterparts in Afghanistan, its
development from 2002 to the present day, its role as a prison devoted
to interrogation and torture, the legal challenges that have been
launched against the administration, and the network of secret prisons
that underpins Guantánamo’s brutal illegality. More importantly, The
Guantánamo Files allows the prisoners to tell their own stories,
explaining who they are and the circumstances of their capture. In
contrast to the administration’s claims that they are the “worst of the
worst,” what the stories reveal most of all is that very few of them had
anything to do with al-Qaeda, and the vast majority were either Taliban
foot soldiers, recruited to fight an inter-Muslim civil war in
Afghanistan that began long before 9/11, or humanitarian aid workers,
religious teachers and economic migrants, who were, for the most part,
sold to the Americans by their allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Bringing these stories to life for the
first time, The Guantánamo Files vividly demonstrates the human cost of
the administration’s ill-conceived and violently executed “War on
Terror.”
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