Guantánamo: The Definitive Prisoner List

By Andy Worthington |

I’ve just published the first definitive list of the 779 prisoners held in the U.S. prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, which is available in four parts. Click on the following links for Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

The list is the result of three years’ research and writing about Guantánamo, which began with my book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (Pluto Press) and has continued with regular reports about Guantánamo, many of which were published on Antiwar.com.

The list provides details of the 533 prisoners who have been released, and includes, for the first time ever, accurate dates for their release. It also provides details of the 241 prisoners who are still held, including the 59 prisoners who have been cleared for release. Although some stories are still unknown, the stories of nearly 700 prisoners are referenced either by links to my archive of articles about Guantánamo, or to the chapters in The Guantánamo Files where they can be found.

It is my hope that this project will provide an invaluable research tool for those seeking to understand how it came to pass that the government of the United States turned its back on domestic and international law, establishing torture as official U.S. policy, and holding men without charge or trial neither as prisoners of war, protected by the Geneva Conventions, nor as criminal suspects to be put forward for trial in a federal court, but as “illegal enemy combatants.”

I also hope that it provides a compelling explanation of how that same government, under the leadership of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld, established a prison in which the overwhelming majority of those held – at least 93 percent of the 779 men and boys imprisoned in total – were either completely innocent people, seized as a result of dubious intelligence or sold for bounty payments, or Taliban foot soldiers, recruited to fight an inter-Muslim civil war that began long before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and that had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, or international terrorism.

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