Andy Worthington is a journalist and historian, and the Communications Officer for Reprieve, the legal action charity that represents 35 Guantánamo prisoners. His book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison brings to life the stories of the detainees in Guantánamo and analyses to what extent “the gloves came off” with 9/11. Al-istiqamah.com speaks exclusively to Andy about his book and recent promotional tour in the US.

Al-istiqamah: Andy, what made you decide to write a book on the Guantánamo detainees?

Andy Worthington: I had been extremely worried about what was happening at Guantánamo from the first day the prison opened, on January 11, 2002, and those grimly iconic images of the shackled, orange-clad prisoners were disseminated around the world.

As the years passed, I maintained an interest in what was happening at Guantánamo, and began seeking out reports on the prisoners – on Cageprisoners, in particular – in an attempt to find out who was there, but it was not until spring 2006, after watching Michael Winterbottom’s film The Road to Guantánamo, about the Tipton Three, and reading released British prisoner Moazzam Begg’s book Enemy Combatant, that I seriously asked myself the fateful question, “Who is in Guantánamo?” I was particularly energized by Moazzam’s account, because, although he was held for over three years in US custody, he spent almost two years in solitary confinement (in Guantánamo), and it was his often brief sketches of other prisoners he encountered that especially fired my imagination.

I was then fortunate that my research coincided with the first major release of documents relating to the prisoners in Guantánamo. Some documents were made available in 2005, under Freedom of Information legislation – primarily 517 “Unclassified Summaries of Evidence” against the prisoners (all issued without names to identify them), which formed the basis of a ground-breaking analysis by the Seton Hall Law School in the United States, who used the documents to establish that, according to the Pentagon’s own accounts, 86 percent of the prisoners had not been captured by US forces, but by their Afghan and Pakistani allies, and only 8 percent were alleged to be involved in any way with al-Qaeda.

The 2006 documents were far more substantial, however, and were only released after the Associated Press won a lawsuit against the Pentagon. These documents included, for the first time, the names and nationalities of all the prisoners, and 8,000 pages of transcripts from the Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs), held to establish whether they had been correctly designated as “enemy combatants,” who could be held without rights, and the annual Administrative Review Boards (ARBs), convened to assess whether they still constituted a threat to the US and/or whether they still had ongoing intelligence value.

These hearings were horribly corrupt, of course, as the prisoners were presented with a military representative instead of a lawyer, and were prevented from either seeing or hearing secret evidence against them, which could have been – and in many cases clearly was – obtained through the torture, coercion or bribery of other prisoners, either in Guantánamo or in other secret prisons run by the CIA.

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