Sunday, April 23, 2023

Andy Worthington discusses my released client

 Historian Andy Worthington has covered Guantanamo since the beginning. Every attorney who has represented a man at Guantanamo has at least one copy of his book The Guantanamo Files (one for the office and the other to keep at the secure facility where we work on the cases). The book provided the known information on the men held at the prison and allowed us to figure out the connections (or lack thereof) of the men to each other. Andy has written about my client on several occasions over the years including this piece: Algerian Suffering from PTSD Mistakenly Identified as an Associate of Abu Zubaydah, Is Approved for Release from Guantánamo and now Andy has written the epilogue here. As far as any of us know Mr. Bakhouche is the only detainee that the military has never provided an accurate photo of. That lack of an accurate photo from the early days is exactly what caused Mr. Bakhouche to be held for more than 21 years. Unfortunately the military never had to explain how it could hold a man when the photo(s) they were using to identify him were of someone else. And of course the pathetic judge in Mr. Bakhouche's case could not have cared less.