By Andy Worthington at andyworthington.co.uk
The Pentagon’s reluctant, court-ordered release of the first ever prisoner list from Guantánamo on April 20, 2006, enabled me to refute the lies that the prison held “the worst of the worst.”
Today, as I explain in my new article on my website, The Guantánamo Document That Changed My Life 20 Years Ago Today, is the 20th anniversary of the release, by the Pentagon, on April 20, 2006, of the first ever publicly-released prisoner list revealing the names and nationalities of 558 of the 759 prisoners held at Guantánamo at that point in time.
The release of the document came after the prison had been almost entirely shrouded in a deliberate veil of secrecy for the first four years and three months of its existence, enabling torture and other abuse to take place, inflicted on men and boys held as “unlawful enemy combatants” without any fundamental rights whatsoever as human beings.
A second list, revealing information about all 759 prisoners, was released in May 2006, and 20 more prisoners — mostly alleged “high-value detainees” — arrived at Guantánamo from CIA “black sites” in September 2006, and also in 2007 and 2008, when transfers to the prison came to an end.
The list was unwillingly released by the Pentagon through Freedom of Information legislation, via a lawsuit submitted by the Associated Press, and it provided the first significant key to enable me, as an independent researcher, to begin to build up a coherent picture of who was held at Guantánamo, by cross-referencing the list with other documentation, and to understand how and why the Bush administration had fundamentally misled the world by claiming that the prisoners were “the worst of the worst.”
As I have always maintained, there was never any evidence that any more than a few percent of prisoners held at Guantánamo had any meaningful connection to Al-Qaeda or other groups allegedly involved in terrorism.
My work led to the publication, after a year of incessant research and writing, of my book “The Guantánamo Files”, published in September 2007, and my subsequent work as an independent journalist and human rights activist, writing and publishing thousands of articles on my website, telling more of the prisoners’ stories, and campaigning to get the prison closed.
Read more here.
The article is also an invitation, if you value my work for the last 20 years as the foremost independent expert on Guantánamo, to support my reader-funded efforts to continue this work. Times are harder than ever before, but if you can help out at all it will be very greatly appreciated.
Read the original post at andyworthington.co.uk