From Andy Worthington Author and Journalist
By Andy Worthington

A week ago, I was invited by the BBC to be a guest on Richard Bacon’s show on Radio 5 Live as part of an hour-long discussion about whether or not the six Guantánamo detainees charged in connection with the 9/11 attacks would receive a fair trial. The other guest was Michael Goldfarb, the online editor of WorldwideStandard.com, the Weekly Standard’s Blog, who subsequently published a post that attempted to undermine my point of view, by mentioning one of my articles, published on CounterPunch (and here with links), in which I reported claims made by one of the Guantánamo detainees, Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi, that he has been infected with AIDS during his imprisonment at Guantánamo.

Mr. Goldfarb was dismissive of the article, which came as no surprise to me, because it also revealed — as confirmed by the Chief Medical Doctor at Guantánamo — that Mr. al-Ghizzawi has contracted tuberculosis during his imprisonment, and that he also suffers from hepatitis B, which was dormant before his arrival at the prison.

Those who read the full article would also have discovered that Mr. al-Ghizzawi’s case is central to complaints made in sworn statements last year by military officers, who worked on the tribunals at Guantánamo, that the entire system was rigged, through the use of generalized and often generic information masquerading as specific intelligence against individual detainees, to rubber-stamp the administration’s untested claims that everyone who had ended up in US custody — however randomly — was an “enemy combatant,” who could be held indefinitely without charge or trial.

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