The Last of the Afghans (from the supplement to The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison)

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From Andy Worthington's site...

The Guantánamo Files: Additional Chapters Online - The Last of the Afghans (Part Two)
15.2.09

I’m delighted to announce that my three-year project to record the stories of all the prisoners held at Guantánamo is nearly complete. I’ve just posted the last of 12 additional online chapters supplementing my book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, and available from Amazon here and here). This additional chapter complements Chapter 17 of The Guantánamo Files, looking at the stories of 37 prisoners not mentioned in the book, either because their stories were not available at the time of writing, or to keep the book at a manageable length.

Although the majority of these men have been released from Guantánamo, eight are still held. As with the majority of the stories of the 220 or so Afghans who were held at Guantánamo, their stories, taken as a whole, exemplify the failures of both “Operation Enduring Freedom” (the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001) and the Guantánamo project to identify prisoners who were actually involved in terrorism — both because of chronic intelligence failures on the ground, and a lack of screening in the US prisons at Kandahar and Bagram, as dictated at the highest levels of the Bush administration.

Within the next week, I’ll be publishing a definitive prisoner list, identifying not only the 242 prisoners who are still held, and those who have been released (and the dates they were released), but also those who have been cleared for release, whose plight is one of the major stumbling blocks to Barack Obama’s promise to close Guantánamo within a year, as the majority of these prisoners cannot be repatriated because of fears that they will be tortured in their home countries.

The list will provide links to the stories of around half of the 779 prisoners who have been held at Guantánamo, and references will be provided for the other half, identifying where their stories can be found in The Guantánamo Files. The list will, I hope, be a useful research tool, not just in identifying the stories of those who have been released, but also as an aid to analyzing the stories of those who are still held, to compare the Bush administration’s long-standing assertions that the remaining prisoners are the “hardcore” with a more objective view, which, in the majority of cases, questions the quality of the so-called evidence against them, as is the case with the eight prisoners mentioned in this online chapter who are still held.

For much more and some links to the above information, please go:
here

In the COMMENTS section, Frances Madeson says...

In addition to everything else your work has been, it is an act of unconditional love to the whole wide world. You have loved your neighbor as yourself, and you are, as a result, golden. Innocence can never be restored; our rose colored glasses have been crushed into a fine powder. But they have been replaced by depth perception and ocular clarity, which will serve us far better going forward, as we must.

Frances February 16th, 2009 at 1:23 am

For my response to Frances, see the post just above entitled "Unconditional Love"