Podcast: The "Definitive List" of Guantánamo Detainees

Much is already known about the prison at Guantánamo.

The ACLU and other organizations have written about it exhaustively in blog posts, legal briefs, reports and op-eds. But for all the information that's already out there, London-based journalist Andy Worthington has recently made available "Guantanamo: The Definitive Prisoners List." This online resource supplements Worthington's 2007 book, The Guantanamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, which chronicles, through information gleaned from the Pentagon's own records released through the Freedom of Information Act, individual histories of each detainee who was imprisoned at Gitmo since it opened in January, 2002.

Today we published a new webpage that features a podcast interview between Andy Worthington and Jonathan Hafetz, Staff Attorney for the ACLU's National Security Project. They discuss what sets the "Definitive List" apart from other detainee databases, what many of the detainees have in common, and the plight of Mohammed Jawad, an ACLU client who was a teenager when he was captured. (A transcript of the interview is also available here.)

You might think of Worthington's "Definitive Prisoners List" as "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Guantánamo Detainees, But Didn't Know Where to Begin."

Well, now you do.