About the Author

Andy Worthington

Andy Worthington is a historian, writer and author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison (2007) and two books on modern British social history. Contact him at andy@andyworthington.co.uk.

Judge Rules That Afghan “Rendered” To Bagram In 2002 Has No Rights

In a depressing if predictable decision last Monday, District Court Judge John D. Bates ruled that Haji Wazir, an Afghan businessman seized in the United Arab Emirates in 2002 and rendered to the US prison at Bagram airbase, can continue to be held as a prisoner without rights, even though he has never had an adequate opportunity to test whatever allegations the US military is using to justify his detention, and even though he has been given no sign of when, if ever, his detention will come to an end.

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My Message To Obama: Great Speech, But No Military Commissions and No “Preventive Detention”

More worryingly, Obama also confirmed that, in some cases, he would indeed be pressing for trials using a revised version of the Military Commissions that were first conceived as an appropriate venue for “terror suspects” by Dick Cheney and David Addington, arguing – wrongly, I believe – that they have a noble history, are “an appropriate venue for trying detainees for violations of the laws of war,” and will, with some tweaking, be “fair, legitimate, and effective.”

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Guantánamo: A Real Uyghur Slams Newt Gingrich’s Racist Stupidity

Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House of Representatives, hit a new low in the debate by lashing out at Guantánamo’s Uyghurs (also known as Uighurs), 17 men from China’s Xinjiang province, who, after a stunning court victory last June, are the only prisoners in Guantánamo to have persuaded the Bush administration to drop its claims that they were “enemy combatants.”

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