A Comparative Case Study of the Construal of the Persona of 3 who are ‘the worst of the worst’ Copyright © 2009 Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines http://cadaad.net/ejournal Vol 3 (1): 58 – 79 ISSN: 1752-3079 GERARD O‟GRADY Cardiff University ogradygn@cardiff.ac.uk Abstract This study examines the representation of three prisoners held at Guantanamo in the online editions of four newspapers; The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Guardian and The Independent. It does this: by examining the verbal processes and the Participant Roles in which the three detainees were represented in the four titles over a four year period; by explicating the attributed voices used in each title’s reported discourse; and by contrasting the construals of the three detainees in reported clauses with the construals of the detainees in a small human rights corpus from the same period. The study found that despite the newspapers’ overt claims to be opposed to the extra-judicial imprisonment of terrorist suspects at Guantanamo the representations of the three detainees suggested that the two American titles positioned themselves vis-a-vis the three prisoners ideologically as implicit promoters of a ‘national security’ discourse while the British pape rs managed to ideologically position themselves at times as supportive of the national security argument and at other times as supportive of the human rights discourse. Key words: Critical Discourse Analysis, Systemic Functional Grammar, Printed media, Bias 1. Background This paper examines the representations of 3 individuals, imprisoned at the time of writing at Guantanamo, in 4 newspapers. Wodak (2001) proposes that in order to fully understand a discourse and why a media text is a site of contestation, the text and the discourse it is part of must first be placed in its historical context. Otherwise, it will be impossible to attempt to describe the motivations of the text producers. Accordingly, the paper briefly sketches the history of the military prison at Guantanamo, summarises how the three prisoners under discussion came to be imprisoned before examining how the 4 newspapers represented their detentions. Following the invasion of Afghanistan – itself a response to the Sept 11 th attacks – the United States captured numerous suspected Al Qaeda and Taliban soldiers and sympathizers many of whom were initially held at an airbase near Kandahar. In line with President Bush‟s decree of Feb 7 2002 that the imprisoned suspects were not entitled to the protections of the Geneva Conventions it was decided to transfer some prisoners to the American naval facility at Guantanamo Bay Cuba. As Guantanamo is on land