Last weekend, Clive Stafford Smith, the Director of the legal action charity Reprieve, travelled to Sudan to meet the recently released al-Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Haj. He had been represented by Reprieve since 2005 and was now a free man. This is an edited version of Clive’s report, which includes a passage specifically refuting Pentagon claims that Mr al-Haj, who had been on a hunger strike for 16 months prior to his release, and was taken to a hospital on his arrival in Sudan, “seemed like a healthy individual” as he departed from Guantánamo.
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(Book launch info at the end)
We are just seven weeks away from a particularly disturbing anniversary. On January 11, 2008, the Bush administration’s notorious “War on Terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay will have been open for six years. For all this time, the prisoners - or “detainees,” as the government insists on describing them - have been held without charge or trial, and with no sign of when, if ever, they will be released from what Lord Steyn, the British law lord, memorably described as a “legal black hole.”

Although 464 of these men have now been released - or, in rather fewer cases, transferred to the custody of their home governments - their stories remain largely unknown, as do those of the majority of the 310 detainees still held at Guantánamo.

In February 2006, when I first began researching the detainees’ stories, it was this combination of factors - the exceptional flight from domestic and international law on the part of US administration, and the fact that almost nothing was known about the men imprisoned in Guantánamo - that first prompted me to action.

In the first weeks of my research I was restricted, like everyone else who had attempted to answer the question, “Who is in Guantánamo?” to news reports and interviews with released detainees, and trawls for information that were often based on little more than gossip and rumour.
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