From Andy Worthington Author and Journalist
By Andy Worthington

For over five and a half years, as I explain in depth in my newly released book, The Guantánamo Files, the prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has held hundreds of completely innocent men. Humanitarian aid workers, teachers or students of the Koran, businessmen, economic migrants, and refugees from persecution – all were swept up for bounty payments, either in Afghanistan or Pakistan, at a time when the US military was offering $5000 a head for al-Qaeda suspects.

While many of these innocent men were Afghans, who were sold to the US military by rivals, secure in the knowledge that the Americans had neither the will nor the curiosity to investigate the veracity of the stories with which their futures were swept away, many others were foreigners – Arabs mainly, from Saudi Arabia, the Yemen and other Gulf countries, and from the North African countries bordering the Mediterranean. Some were seized in Afghanistan, either by soldiers of the Northern Alliance or by opportunistic villagers, others were captured crossing from Afghanistan to Pakistan, where their flight from the chaos precipitated by the US-led invasion and the collapse of the Taliban was construed as a sign that they were fleeing from combat, and many others were picked out randomly on the streets of Pakistan’s cities, far from any battlefield.

One of these innocent men, Mohammed al-Amin, who hails from an even more distant location – the western Saharan country of Mauritania – has just been released from Guantánamo, and his story, though brutal, is typical of the suffering that these men have been forced to endure for five and a half years. While reading it, remember that his is not a unique case, that hundreds of other innocent men have been treated in a similar manner, and that many of them still remain in Guantánamo. It is one thing to tout the 778 men who have been held in Guantánamo as “the worst of the worst,” as the administration did when the prison was set up in January 2002, but it is quite another to realize that 431 of these men have now been released, and that a large number of them, like Mohammed al-Amin, were completely innocent of any wrong-doing.

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