Today's Stories

January 16-18, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Hail to the Chief

Jeffrey St. Clair
High Plains Grifter: Geo. W. Bush, a Concise Biography

January 15, 2009

Pam Martens
Wall Street Powerhouses Invested Alongside Madoff

Karl Grossman
Obama and the Military - Industrial - Scientific Complex

M. Shahid Alam
Gaza's Shattered Mirror

Jules Rabin
Gaza Besieged, Gaza Mauled

Alan Farago
The Nail-Gun Bailout

Ron Jacobs
The State of Black America: From Oscar Grant to Barack Obama

Timothy Seidel
Just Violence in Gaza? The Calculus of Proportionality

George Ochenski
Why No Montana Wilderness?

Todd Chretien
Taking a Stand for Justice in Oakland

Bob Fitrakis /
Harvey Wasserman
Obama's Marijuana Prohibition Acid Test

Website of the Day
Uranium Watch

January 14, 2009

Henry A. Giroux
Killing Children With Impunity

Kathy Kelly
Cease Fire, Cease Siege

Franklin Lamb
A Second Front? Hezbollah Militants Chafe as Gaza Burns

Mike Whitney
The Big Contraction: Why the Stimulus Alone Won't Work

Paul Craig Roberts
The Humiliation of America

Glen Ford
Sullying Dr. King's Legacy: the Congressional Black Caucus and Israel

Aditya Chakrabortty
The End of Property Porn

Dave Lindorff
Fattening the Rats: Feeding at the Bailout Trough

Jonathan Cook
Israel Bars Arab Parties From Elections

David Swanson
Conyers Explains Why He Didn't Push Impeachment

Martha Rosenberg
Fragile: Handle with Risperdal

Website of the Day
Report of a Red Cross Worker in Gaza

January 13, 2009

Norman Finkelstein
The Facts About Hamas and the War on Gaza

Jonathan Cook
Is Israel Using Experimental Weapons in Gaza?

Michael Neumann
Hamas and Gaza: Slave Revolts and Passionate Evasions

Coleen Rowley /
William John Cox
No Victors in the War on Dissent

Robert Sandels
Cuba and the Obama Administration: Subversion Through Trade?

Saul Landau
The Changeling: an Obama Nightmare

David Swanson
What to Ask Eric Holder

Wajahat Ali
Waltzing with War Crimes

Sam Bahour
No Other Option? A View From the West Bank

Stanley Heller
Why It's Useless to Lobby Congress on Gaza

Robert Jensen
Beyond Grief and Rage

Robin Mittenthal
Eating Away at the Land That Feeds Us

Website of the Day
The 50 Most Loathsome People in America

January 12, 2009

Uri Avnery
The Blood-Stained Monster Enters Gaza

Paul Craig Roberts
Our Collapsing Economy

Mike Whitney
Israel's Moral and Political Insanity

Ewa Jasiewicz
Oh, Quiet Night: Only Six Homes Were Bombed

Bill Quigley
A Day in Gaza

Dave Lindorff
From Vietnam to Gaza

Bill and Kathleen Christison
Blowback From a Tragic Error: a Message to Barack Obama

Jonathan Cook
Israel Ponders the Third Stage

Andy Worthington
Seven Years of Guantánamo

Kara N. Tina
Oakland on Fire

Brenda Norrell
Palestinians and American Indians: Russell Means Breaks the Silence on Obama

Nour Kharma
A Plea From a Teen in Gaza: "Will I Die, Too?"

Website of the Day
The Villages Group: an Antiwar Alliance in Sderot

January 9/11, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Israel's Onslaught on Gaza: Criminal, for Sure; But Also Stupid

Kathy Kelly
Tunnel Vision: Report from Arish, Egypt

Bill Quigley
Report From Rafah: Doctors Stopped at the Border

George Ciccariello-Maher
Oakland's Not for Burning?

Elaine C. Hagopian
Gaza: History Matters

Mike Roselle
Drowning in a Toxic River: What Can be Done to Save Appalachia?

Steve Hendricks
The Torturer-Elect?

Gary Leupp
Revisiting the Tale of Samson

Jonathan Cook
Outcry Over Israel's War Crimes

Karim Makdisi
The Ceasefire Plan: the UN Finally Acts, But Does It Mean Anything?

Rannie Amiri
Livni's Big Lie

Peter Morici
In the Jaws of a Depression

Peter Montague
Can Chemicals be Regulated?

Ralph Nader
Move Fast to Restore the Rule of Law

Andy Worthington
The Dying Days of the Guantánamo Trials

Nadia Hijab
A Music School Silenced in Gaza

Dan Bacher
Unholy Alliance: Nature Conservancy Backs Schwarzenegger's Big Ditch

Catherine Fenton
The American Peace Movement and Israel

David Macaray
Wal-Mart Caught Stealing

Valia Kaimaki
Why Greek Youths Took to the Streets

Richard Morse
Haiti's Gas Gang

David Yearsley
To Gotham City with Dexter Gordon

Charles R. Larson
The Horror, the Horror

Richard Rhames
Gaza and the Goon Squad Meet the Wizard

Stephen Martin
Meltdown Memo to Come?

Lorenzo Wolff
What They Sing About When They Sing About Love

Poets' Basement
Anderson, Beatty and Valentine

Website of the Weekend
Gaza Protest

January 8, 2009

Jean Bricmont /
Diana Johnstone
Gaza Seen From Paris

Franklin Lamb
How Dershowitz Misstates, Misrepresents and Misapplies the Law

Paul Craig Roberts
The Difficulty of Being an Informed American

Kevin Alexander Gray
Give Burris His Seat

Chris Floyd
The Enduring Priorities in Obama's Time of Change

Ewa Jasiewicz
Riding on Fire in Gaza

Steve Conn
Sanjay Gupta and Obama

Harvey Wasserman
Kill the Nuclear Stimulus!

Wayne S. Smith
An Opening to Cuba?

Linda Mamoun
Re-settling Gaza: the Real Goal of the Israeli Invasion?

Adam Turl
Unions and Young Workers

Chris Papaleonardos
Mourning Maria Dimitriadi

Website of the Day
On the Wing

January 7, 2009

Saree Makdisi
What Kind of Security Will This Barbarism Bring Israel?

Franklin Lamb
Bend Over Professor Dershowitz, It's Time for Your Check Up

William Blum
America's Other Glorious War

Belén Fernández
The Trauma Vortex: Israel's Monopoly on Psychological Suffering

Lawrence Davidson
What is New About Gaza?

Allan Nairn
Adm. Dennis Blair and the Church Killings in East Timor

Jonathan Cook
What is Israel's Objective?

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad
Watching the War on BBC

Deepak Tripathi
Bush, as He Leaves

Cal Winslow
Now is the Hour to Defend Democracy in the Labor Movement!

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
To Students Planning Careers: Be Mindful

Dr. Hannah Safran
No More Recycled Military Solutions

Website of the Day
CNN: Israel Broke the Ceasefire First

January 6, 2009

Pam Martens
It's All One Big Lie

Victoria Buch
Real Estate War in Gaza: the History and "Morals" of Ethnic Cleansing

Neve Gordon
Israel's New War Ethic

Tami Sarfatti /
Yonatan Mendel
What Silence Says: Gaza is Still Waiting on Obama

Mike Whitney
The Gaza Bloodbath

Alan Farago
After the Fall

Gary Leupp
A Hamas Coup d'Etat in 2007?

Larry Everest
Silent Partner: the US-Backed War on Gaza

Ron Jacobs
The New Iraqi Sovereignty

David Macaray
Union-Busting is Alive and Well

Stephanie Basile
Where's Anna's Money?

Stacey Warde
An Uncle's Unrest

Website of the Day
Israeli Refusenik on Gaza

January 5, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
Will There be a Recovery?

Sousan Hammad
Phoning Home to Gaza

Wajahat Ali
Flying While Brown

Mats Svensson
Longing in Gaza

Jen Marlowe
Abeer's Baby

Muhammad Ali Khalidi
Gaza Phone Tag

Brian Cloughley
Israel is Immune From Criticism

Faheem Hussain
Gaza and India: a View From Pakistan

William Cook
Consider the Realities of Gaza

Dr. Trudy Bond
The Madness Among Us

Christopher Ketcham
The Revenge of the Blogger at the National Press Club: a Rotten Washington Interlude

Steve Early
Who Rules SEIU?

Dave Lindorff
When It Comes to Terrorism and POW Cases, Equal Justice Under Law is a Joke

Website of the Day
The Endangered Fish of the Colorado River Basin

January 2 - 4, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Diary of 2008: an Incredible, Hope-Filled Year

Uri Avnery
Molten Lead in Gaza

Jonathan Cook
The Real Goal of the Gaza Assault

Paul Craig Roberts
Whatever Happened to Western Morality?

Brian Eno
Stealing Gaza: an Experiment in Provocation

Ralph Nader
America Must Stop Shirking Its Responsibility on Gaza

Omar Barghouti
UN Complicity in Israel's Massacre in Gaza

Graham Usher
Where Pakistan's Generals and the ISI Draw Their Lines

P. Sainath
The Economy is Worse Than It Appears

Belén Fernández
Pardon Our Dust: Israel's PR Campaign for Gaza

Deb Reich
Shiv'a in Gaza, December 2008

Gary Leupp
Defacing Mr. Jefferson's Wall: Preachers and the Inauguration

Michael Yates
Top Chef or Top Wage Thief? Tom Colicchio and the Economics of Restaurants

Joanne Mariner
How to Close Guantánamo

Seth Sandronsky
Funding the Israeli Military: the US Pipeline

Cynthia McKinney
We Lived to Tell the Story

Sonja Karkar
Israel's Dogs of War

Deepak Tripathi
Gaza in Perspective

Robert Fantina
Obama, Afghanistan and Israel

John Ross
The Year No One Can Remember

Norm Kent
The Heat on Duval Street: Why Head Shop Raids are Unfair and Unjust

Larry Portis
Syria and the Arab Barbie Doll--Before the Deluge

Richard Rhames
Is Conscience Dead?

Dee C. Lubell
We Come From the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright

David Yearsley
A Gay German at the Courts of the Medici and Hanover, and of Course the BBC

Lorenzo Wolff
Joe Ely, the Fighting Rooster of Rock

Marc Catone
Looting Lennon's Legacy

Poets' Basement
Five Poems by Grzegorz Wróblewski

Website of the Weekend
Earth in High Rez

January 1, 2008

Jennifer Loewenstein
If Hamas Did Not Exist

Oren Ben-Dor
The Self-Defense of Suicide

Wajahat Ali
The U.S. Response to the Gaza Crisis: Unfair and Unbalanced

Saul Landau
In Cuba No One Man Could Steal $50 Billion From Other People

David Michael Green
What to Expect While We're Expecting

Website of the Day
Morbid Anatomy

December 31, 2008

Pam Martens
Wall Street's Collapse and the Ownership Society

Neve Gordon /
Jeff Halper
Where's the Academic Outrage Over the Bombing of a University in Gaza?

Ted Honderich
The First Casualty of Israel's War

Brian Cloughley
Five Little Girls on a Sofa: Gaza's One-Sided Images

Ron Jacobs
What is Hamas, Really?

Vijay Prashad
Hot Rod and His Sikh Warrior: Blago's Indian Connections

Franklin Lamb
Mr. Mubarak, Tear Down That Wall!

Mike Whitney
My Brilliant Career

David Macaray
What Really Killed the Auto Bailout

Richard Thieme
The Betrayal of the Commons

Mary Lynn Cramer
Who Wins What in Gaza?

Stephen Lendman
The Troubling Case of the Fort Dix Five

Worthy Group of the Day
Western Shoshone Defense Project

December 30, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
May We No Longer Be Silent

Tariq Ali
The Gaza Ghetto and Western Cant

Robert Bryce
The $775,000-a-Year GI

Jonathan Cook
Electioneering with Bombs

Gary Leupp
The Fishbarrel War

Dave Lindorff
Tough Guys Don't Walk: Will Cheney Seek a Pardon?

Brian McKenna
Ted Downing and Troublemaker Anthropology

John Walsh
The End of the Green Party

Ramzy Baroud
Gaza and the World

Bob Sommer
The Education of David Frost

Worthy Activist of the Day
Support Marie Mason

December 29, 2008

Jennifer Loewenstein
Israel's Attempted Endgame in Gaza

Neve Gordon
What, Exactly, is Israel's Mission?

Joshua Frank
Obama and the "Special Relationship"

George Salzman /
Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The War Against Palestine: Exception From Humanity

Norman Solomon
A Hundred Eyes for an Eye

Ewa Jasiewicz
Gaza Today: "This is Just the Beginning"

Rob Larson
The Banks Laugh All the Way to the Bank

Kenneth Libby
Arne Duncan's Dark Years in Chicago

Robert Weissman
The 10 Worst Corporations of 2008

Elsa Johnson
High Noon at Black Mesa: Bush's Farewell Gift to Peabody Coal

Nicola Nasser
Resolution 1850: Bush's Parting Gift

Belén Fernández
Hanukkah Games

Worthy Group of the Day
Nuclear Information and Resource Service

December 26-28, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The Medusa's Head

Dr Eyad Al Serraj
The Boming of Gaza: "An Earthquake on Top of Your Head"

Jeffrey St. Clair
Cancerous Air

Bradley Simpson
Obama's New Intel Chief, Dennis Blair, Ran Interference for Indonesia's Butchers

Ralph Nader
Government Without Laws

Gary Leupp
Obama and the Graveyard of Empires

Ellen Cantarow
Richard Falk, Israel and the NYT

Matt Landon
The Great Coal Ash Flood: a Report From Swan Pond Road

David Macaray
SAG's Terrible Dilemma

Patrick Bond
End of Neoliberalism? Sorry, Not Yet

Norm Kent
Invoking Bigotry: Obama and Rick Warren

Brian T. Ketcham
Fuel Efficiency is Easy--Just Don't Let Detroit Tell You How to Do It

Rannie Amiri
War Clouds Over Gaza

Larry Portis
Changing the Ethnic Vocabulary

Richard Rhames
Welcome to Soup Kitchen America

Stephen Lendman
29 Red Flags: Early Suspicions About Bernard Madoff

James L. Secor
Unheralded Coup

Ramzy Baroud
Iraq, the Plot Thickens

Harold Pinter
Art, Truth and Politics: the Nobel Lecture

Cpt. Paul Watson
Tracking the Cetacean Death Star

Howard Lisnoff
Nixon's Cambodian Shock Treatment

Michael Dee
The Bill of Rights, Killed in Action by the War on Drugs

Steve Conn
Eight Predictions for 2009

Poets' Basement
Valentine, Kaung, Moser and Graham

Worthy Group of the Weekend
United Mountain Defense

December 25, 2008

Judy Gumbo Albert
What Were Those 1960s Terrorists Thinking, Anyway?

Rev. William E. Alberts
The Sole of Christmas

Hannah Mermelstein
Caution: Settlers Ahead

Worthy Group of the Day
Citizens' Coal Council

December 24, 2008

Bill Quigley
Five Bailout Lessons From Katrina

Saul Landau
Then and Now: Venezuela and Cuba, 1960-2008

Sam Smith
Evangelism and Politics

Brian Cloughley
Torture, Slaughter and Lies

John Ross
Where's al-Zaidi's Pulitzer?

Eric Walberg
Cold War Shivers

Norm Kent
What Will Obama Do About Marijuana?

Stephen Martin
Reasons for Cheerfulness

Worthy Group of the Day
Collateral Repair Project

December 23, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Ponzi Paradigm

Michael Yates
The Tombstone Economy

Chuck Spinney
The New York Times Flames Out in Defense Dogfight

Vijay Prashad
India's Reckless Road to Washington, Through Tel Aviv

Brian Horejsi
Interior Decorating: Obama, Salazar and the Future of America's Public Lands

David Macaray
Obama's Best Pick?

Neil Watkins /
Sarah Anderson
Ecuador's Conscientious Default

David Michael Green
Hey, Reagan Democrats! Now Do You Get It?

Worthy Group of the Day
Focus on the Corporation

Weekend Edition
January 16-18, 2009

Torturing a Teenager

Guantánamo's Forgotten Child

By ANDY WORTHINGTON

Just two weeks ago, in a habeas corpus case in a Washington D.C. court, Judge Richard Leon turned the clock back to January 11, 2002 (the day Guantánamo opened) by ruling that the U.S. government could continue holding two prisoners at Guantánamo -- the Yemeni Muaz al-Alawi and the Tunisian Hisham Sliti -- because the authorities had demonstrated, to his satisfaction, that they met the criteria for being regarded as “enemy combatants.”

According to the definition of an “enemy combatant” that Leon himself had been obliged to choose from several options before proceeding with the cases, this meant that they were “part of or supporting Taliban or al-Qaeda forces, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the U.S. or its coalition partners,” which “includes any person who has committed a belligerent act or has directly supported hostilities in aid of enemy armed forces.”

This was a disturbing development, because both men, who have been held for seven years, remain in an unprecedented legal limbo, despite having secured the right to have their cases reviewed in a court of law following a ruling by the Supreme Court last June. Unlike enemy prisoners of war, who are held in accordance with the Geneva Conventions, or criminal suspects, who are expected to face a trial in a timely manner, the “enemy combatants” imprisoned solely on the President’s whim in the wake of the 9/11 attacks can apparently be held indefinitely.

As I explained in a recent article, Judge Leon was observing the law as it currently stands when he ruled that al-Alawi and Sliti were “enemy combatants” (and when he also held, in November, that although the government had failed to establish a case against five Bosnians of Algerian origin, the sixth, Belkacem Bensayah, had also been correctly designated as an “enemy combatant”), but it remains a cruel and unjust law, as the three men in question continue to be held with less rights than those afforded to the most murderous individuals imprisoned on the U.S. mainland, even though none of them is alleged to have harmed a single U.S. citizen.

While this remains a deeply disturbing problem that Barack Obama will have to remedy of he is to have any chance of fulfilling his stated ambition to “regain America’s moral stature in the world,” Judge Leon struck another blow for justice yesterday by ruling that the government had failed to establish a case against another prisoner, Mohammed El-Gharani, and ordering his release “forthwith.”

Torturing a teenager

A Chadian national and Saudi resident, El-Gharani was just 14 years old when he was seized by Pakistani forces in October 2001, in a raid on a mosque in Karachi, Pakistan, 700 miles from the battlefields of Afghanistan. As with all but three of the 22 confirmed juveniles who have been held at Guantánamo, the U.S. authorities never treated him separately from the adult population, even though they are obliged, under the terms of the UN’s Optional Protocol on the Rights of the Child (on the involvement of children in armed conflict) to promote “the physical and psychosocial rehabilitation and social reintegration of children who are victims of armed conflict.”

Instead, El-Gharani was treated with appalling brutality. After being tortured in Pakistani custody, he was sold to U.S. forces, who flew him to a prison at Kandahar airport, where, he said, one particular soldier “would hold my penis, with scissors, and say he’d cut it off.” His treatment did not improve in Guantánamo. Subjected relentlessly to racist abuse, because of the color of his skin, he was hung from his wrists on numerous occasions, and was also subjected to a regime of “enhanced” techniques to prepare him for interrogation -- including prolonged sleep deprivation, prolonged isolation and the use of painful stress positions -- that clearly constitute torture. As a result of this and other abuse, including regular beatings by the guard force responsible for quelling even the most minor infractions of the rules, El-Gharani has become deeply depressed, and has tried to commit suicide on several occasions.

A case without evidence

This is distressing enough, in and of itself, but as Judge Leon revealed yesterday, this sustained mistreatment took place even though the authorities had no case against El-Gharani. Although he insisted, for over seven years, that he “traveled to Pakistan from Saudi Arabia at the age of 14 to escape discrimination against Chadians in that country, acquire computer and English skills, and make a better life for himself,” and that he “remained there until his arrest,” the government claimed that he “arrived in Afghanistan at some unspecified time in 2001,” and was “part of or supporting Taliban or al-Qaeda forces,” because he

(1) stayed at an al-Qaeda-affiliated guesthouse in Afghanistan;
(2) received military training at an al-Qaeda-affiliated military training camp;
(3) served as a courier for several high-ranking al-Qaeda members;
(4) fought against US and allied forces at the battle of Tora Bora; and
(5) was a member of an al-Qaeda cell based in London.

In his ruling, Judge Leon demolished the government’s claims with the same dispassionate rigor with which he demolished the claims -- from a single, unverifiable source -- against five of the six Bosnian Algerians whose release he ordered in November.

“Unlike most of the other cases reviewed to date by this Court,” Leon wrote, the government’s supposed evidence against El-Gharani consisted “principally” of statements made by two other prisoners at Guantánamo. “Indeed,” he added, these statements are either exclusively, or jointly, the only evidence offered by the Government to substantiate the majority of their allegations,” and, in addition, “the credibility and reliability of the detainees being relied upon by the Government has either been directly called into question by Government personnel or has been characterized by Government personnel as undermined.”

Dismissing the allegations, one by one

Dismissing the allegation that El-Gharani stayed at an al-Qaeda-affiliated guesthouse, Leon explained that the government “relies “exclusively on the statements of a particular Guantánamo detainee whose reliability had been characterized by the Government’s own interrogators as undermined,” and added that the account was “plagued with internal inconsistencies.”

Dismissing the allegation that El-Gharani took part in the battle of Tora Bora, Leon explained that the government “relies exclusively on a different detainee, to establish this fact,” but that this prisoner’s credibility has also been “seriously called into question by Government personnel who have specifically cautioned against relying on his statements without independent corroboration.” He added that the government “did not produce any such corroboration.”

Dismissing the allegation that El-Gharani attended an al-Qaeda-affiliated training camp, Leon explained that the government “pointed to statements of both of the detainees described above.” However, after noting that he suspected that the government believed that this constituted corroborating evidence, he dismissed both accounts, because, “when viewed together, [they] are not factually compatible, each placing the petitioner at the camp at different points in time, multiple months apart, during the year 2001.”

Dismissing the allegation that El-Gharani was an al-Qaeda courier, Leon explained that, although this claim relied on classified evidence -- “which did not include statements of any other detainees” -- the information was “woefully deficient to establish this point by a preponderance of the evidence.” He added, “besides having internal inconsistencies, the Government’s evidence raises serious questions about whether certain alleged al-Qaeda correspondence was even on the person of the petitioner as opposed to one of eight other individuals who were turned over to U.S. authorities at Kandahar at the same time as petitioner.”

And finally, dismissing the allegation that El-Gharani was a member of an al-Qaeda cell in London in 1998, Leon explained that the government was “relying exclusively on the statements of the detainee whose reliability is described above as being undermined.” This was, indeed, the most extraordinary allegation, as El-Gharani was just 11 years old at the time, and, as his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, explained in his book, The Eight O’Clock Ferry to the Windward Side: Seeking Justice In Guantánamo Bay, “he must have been beamed over to the al-Qaeda meetings by the Starship Enterprise, since he never left Saudi Arabia by conventional means.”

Leon’s verdict was marginally less colorful, but no less devastating. “Putting aside the obvious and unanswered questions as to how a Saudi minor from a very poor family could have even become a member of a London-based cell,” he wrote, “the Government simply advances no corroborating evidence for these statements it believes to be reliable from a fellow detainee, the basis of whose knowledge is -- at best -- unknown.”

A hopeful precedent

Judge Leon then granted El-Gharani’s habeas claim, with another statement that soundly trounced the government’s basis for holding him, and that ought to have struck fear into those parts of the Pentagon and the Justice Department that are responsible for presenting the government’s evidence in the Guantánamo habeas cases. “Simply stated,” he wrote, “a mosaic of tiles bearing images this murky reveals nothing about the petitioner with sufficient clarity, either individually or collectively, that can be relied upon by this Court.”

While El-Gharani’s imminent release demonstrates, however belatedly, that justice is possible for the prisoners at Guantánamo, the fundamental problem with the definition of an “enemy combatant” -- and its implications for those against whom the government manages to establish some sort of a case -- must not be brushed aside because of this latest victory.

However, there is reason to hope that the ruling in El-Gharani’s case will lead to the release of other men against whom the government’s only evidence of alleged wrongdoing are statements made by other prisoners whose reliability has been called into doubt by government officials. As was revealed in a declaration in November 2007 by Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, a veteran of U.S. intelligence who worked for the organization responsible for compiling the evidence against prisoners, “Most of the information collected … consisted … of information obtained during interrogations of other detainees,” because the organization had little or no access to the intelligence agencies. This is worrying enough, as there is ample evidence that prisoners were tortured, coerced or bribed into producing false confessions, but what makes it even more disturbing is that lawyers for the prisoners -- and those who have studied the documentation closely, as I did for my book The Guantánamo Files -- are aware that statements made by a number of “unreliable” prisoners (including the two cited in El-Gharani’s case) are being used as evidence in many other cases.

As I have explained in a previous article (drawing on some exemplary research conducted by Corine Hegland for the National Journal), a military official discovered in 2004 that one of these prisoners, described as a notorious liar by the FBI, had made groundless allegations against 60 prisoners in total, which were, nonetheless, being used by the government as evidence, and this is just one example of an infection so widespread that it suggests that Judge Leon’s description of the evidence as a murky mosaic of tiles should be replaced by an even more skeptical conclusion: that it is, instead, the tip of a particularly murky iceberg.

As Clive Stafford Smith said to me today, “It is a sad day when patently false information produced by people who have been tortured to inform results in a child being imprisoned in Guantánamo Bay. Mohammed El-Gharani has spent a third of his young life in prison for the most unjustifiable of reasons, and it is my fervent hope, as the habeas cases proceed, that the revelation of other false confessions will be followed by rulings that are as just as the one delivered yesterday by Judge Leon.”

Andy Worthington is a British historian, and the author of 'The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison' (published by Pluto Press). Visit his website at: www.andyworthington.co.uk

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