Andy Worthington's Blog

Is This Justice? After 18 Years of Torture, Isolation and Unprecedented Co-Operation, CIA and Guantánamo Prisoner Majid Khan Should Be Released in Feb. 2022

Majid Khan, photographed as a student in 1999, and in recent years at Guantánamo.Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

On Thursday evening, in a military courtroom at Guantánamo Bay, Majid Khan, a Pakistani national who was held and tortured in CIA “black sites” for three years and four months after his initial capture in Pakistan in March 2003, and has been held at Guantánamo since September 2006, was finally allowed to tell the world the gruesome details about his treatment in the “black site” program, and at Guantánamo, in a statement that he read out at a sentencing hearing.

Some of the details of the torture to which Khan was subjected were made public nearly seven years ago, when the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report about the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program was made public — in particular, the shocking revelation that he was one of several prisoners subjected to “rectal feeding,” whereby, as the report described it, his “‘lunch tray,’ consisting of hummus, pasta with sauce, nuts, and raisins was ‘pureed’ and rectally infused.”

In his sentencing statement, however, which, as his lawyers at the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights explain, made him “the first so-called ‘high-value detainee’ at Guantánamo who has been able to speak publicly about the CIA torture program,” he revealed much more than was ever previously known publicly. As Vince Warren, CCR’s Executive Director, said, “We knew about some of the horrors he was subjected to, like the so-called ‘rectal feeding,’ from the Senate torture report, but the new details in his own words were chilling. From the ice-bath waterboardings to the ‘Torture Doctor’ who put hot sauce on the tip of his IV, the acts committed by our government shock the conscience — yet no one has ever been held accountable.”

Khan’s entire statement is available here, and it does indeed shed new light on the horrors of the torture program, but it is also a compelling account of how a young man, distraught at the death of his mother, was opportunistically targeted for recruitment by Al-Qaeda members in Pakistan, and ended up involved in plotting terrorist attacks (albeit ones that never materialized) and couriering money from Pakistan to Thailand, before his capture at his home in Karachi in March 2003.

Also compelling is Khan’s remorse for his actions. From the very beginning of his imprisonment, he told his captors the truth, but as he explained, “the more I cooperated and told them, the more I was tortured” — a shocking but unsurprising failure on the part of his interrogators to be able to ascertain when they were being told the truth, but one that has, sadly, been endemic in the “war on terror.”

It took until October 2007, when he was finally allowed to meet his lawyers, for the first steps to be taken towards the plea deal that he agreed to in his military commission trial in February 2012, which I wrote about here. In his statement, he described how, on meeting his lawyers for the first time, “I communicated to them that I would be willing to tell the truth and cooperate … to make things right. I made a decision early on that I was going to take responsibility for what I had done. I wasn’t going to let Guantánamo be the last chapter written in my life.”

As he proceeded to explain, “It took almost two years, before negotiations commenced regarding a plea deal in exchange for my cooperation”, but, finally, “On February 29, 2012, I pled guilty to all of the crimes that I was guilty of. Pleading guilty and deciding to cooperate with the U.S. Government was a very good decision. I have never doubted this decision and I remain steadfast in my commitment to assist the U.S. Government in any way that I can.”

In return for his assistance, which has involved him “cooperat[ing] with the U.S. authorities to include Prosecutors and Investigators, both for Commissions Cases and for federal, civil and criminal cases,” Khan has, unfortunately, had to endure long years of solitary confinement in Guantánamo, to add to his long years of solitary confinement in the CIA “black sites.” As he explained, “I have been essentially alone for almost a decade. I have no one to talk to with the exception of the occasional friendly guards, the FBI, and the occasional bird, iguanas, and cats that show up to visit me,” as well one particular senior military officer who “spent a lot of time talking with me, [and] mentoring me,” and who “was instrumental in my decision to cooperate.”

The pay off, however, is the promise of his imminent release. As I explained at the time of his plea deal, his “sentence will reportedly be capped at 19 years” from the time of his capture. In the intervening years, he unfortunately has had to wait for his sentencing as “prosecutors and defense lawyers clashed in court filings over who would be called to testify about Mr. Khan’s abuse in CIA custody, as the New York Times described it, adding that, “In exchange for the reduced sentence, Mr. Khan and his legal team agreed to drop their effort to call witnesses to testify about his torture, much of it most likely classified, as long as he could tell his story to the jury.”

Publicizing his statement, CCR explained that now, finally, “As a result of his cooperation, his legal team expects that the military commission will set events in motion for Mr. Khan to be transferred from Guantánamo as soon as February 2022,” when “the Biden administration must transfer him to a third country,” having ruled out repatriating him to Pakistan.

Is this justice? 

Interestingly, seven of the eight military jurors who, after his statement, as the Times described it, “issued a sentence of 26 years, about the lowest term possible according to the instructions of the court,” don’t seem to think so. In a hand-written letter to the Convening Authority for the military commissions, Army Col. Jeffrey D. Wood of the Arkansas National Guard, they urged clemency, stating:

Mr. Khan committed serious crimes against the U.S. and partner nations. He has plead guilty to these crimes and taken responsibility for his actions. Further, he has expressed remorse for the impact of the victims and their families.

Clemency is recommended with the following justification:

Mr. Khan has been held without the basic due process under the U.S. Constitution. Specifically, he was held without charge or legal representation for nine years until 2012, and held without final sentencing until October 2021. Although designated an “alien unprivileged enemy belligerent,” and not technically afforded the rights of U.S. citizens, the complete disregard for the foundational concepts upon which the Constitution was founded is an affront to American values and concept of justice.

Mr. Khan was subjected to physical and psychological abuse well beyond approved enhanced interrogation techniques, instead being closer to torture performed by the most abusive regimes in modern history. This abuse was of no practical value in terms of intelligence, or any other tangible benefit to U.S. interests. Instead, it is a stain on the moral fiber of America; the treatment of Mr. Khan in the hands of U.S. personnel should be a source of shame for the U.S. government.

Mr. Khan committed his crimes as young man reeling from the loss of his mother. A vulnerable target for extremist recruiting, he fell to influences furthering Islamic radical philosophies, just as many others have in recent years. Now at the age of 41 with a daughter he has never seen, he is remorseful and not a threat for future extremism.

Why everyone not charged at Guantánamo must also be released

I expect that Majid Khan will be released next February, and I hope that, as soon as possible after his release, and his resettlement in an as yet unidentified third country, he will end up reunited with his family, including the daughter he has never met. However, what also needs remembering, as plans for his release get underway, is that the belated and compromised justice in his case is more than has been afforded to the men still held who have never even been charged with a crime — currently, 27 of the other 38 men still held at Guantánamo (with the rest currently charged in the military commissions, or, in one case, having been through the process and having been convicted).

13 of these 27 men have been approved for release by high-level government review processes, and yet are still held, and the 14 others have neither been charged not approved for release, and have accurately been described as Guantánamo’s “forever prisoners.” These 27 men also need releasing by February 2022, unless, yet again, as the military commission system delivers some form of justice, and as has happened only sporadically throughout Guantánamo’s long history as the commissions have secured convictions or plea deals, its workings only cast into sharp relief how prisoners clearly regarded as far less significant — or those against whom the US cannot build any kind of case — continue to be held in a fundamentally lawless manner.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the struggle for housing justice — and against environmental destruction — continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

Like a Wheedling Abuser, the US Makes Groundless Promises in Julian Assange’s Extradition Appeal

Campaigners in support of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange outside the High Court in London on October 28, 2021, the second day of the US government’s appeal against a ruling by a judge in January, preventing Assange’s extradition on mental health grounds (Photo: Andy Worthington). Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

In January this year, when a British judge refused to allow Julian Assange’s extradition to the US, to face espionage charges — and a potential 175-year sentence — for the work of WikiLeaks in helping to expose US war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the groundless basis of most of the US’s supposed reasons for holding men indefinitely without charge or trial at Guantánamo, the US government should have backed down and allowed him to be freed to be reunited with his family.

Judge Vanessa Baraitser’s ruling, sadly, avoided the heart of the case — whether publishing damaging material in the public interest is a crime (which it isn’t, and mustn’t be allowed to be, if freedom of the press is to mean anything) — but homed in unerringly on the considered opinion of a psychiatrist that, if transferred to a maximum-security prison in the US, awaiting trial, Assange, because of his mental health issues, would take his own life.

The ruling was a valid condemnation both of the brutality of the US prison system in general, and of its particular unsuitability for those with mental health issues, and it was a vivid reminder that, back in October 2012, Theresa May, when she was home secretary, had refused to allow the extradition to the US of Gary McKinnon, a hacker with Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism, on the very same basis, and that the extradition of Lauri Love, another hacker with Asperger’s, had been refused by two High Court judges in February 2018.

Over the years, the fact that Assange also exhibited signs of Asperger’s had largely been ignored as a picture was created instead of some sort of uniquely arrogant individual, even though, when I met him in April 2011, to work as a media partner on WikiLeaks’ release of classified military files from Guantánamo, it had appeared obvious to me that he had Asperger’s.

It was some relief, therefore, when, during his extradition hearing last October (at which I submitted evidence about the importance of the release of those files), Dr. Quinton Deeley, a consultant neuropsychiatrist, “diagnosed Assange with Asperger’s syndrome after witnessing a two-hour autism assessment and conducting six hours of phone calls with [him] in Belmarsh prison”, as the Press Gazette explained at the time.

Giving evidence, Dr. Deeley said, “To my mind, it’s clear Mr. Assange presents as a person with an autistic spectrum condition.” As the Press Gazette noted, “He described Assange as ‘an intelligent person’ who shares the characteristics of ‘many high-functioning people on the autistic spectrum’, including engineers and computer scientists.” He also said that “he has ‘difficulty discussing his own emotions’, with a ‘primary focus on his own thoughts and interests’ and noted a ‘failure to initiate or sustain’ conversations.”

Instead of accepting Judge Baraitser’s ruling, however, as one administration — that of Donald Trump — seamlessly gave way to another, that of Joe Biden, the extradition request remained firmly in place, and the US government set about working out how to appeal Judge Baraitser’s ruling.

The approach taken resembles that of an abuser who has been caught out and responds by pledging to change their ways, even though such promises are profoundly untrustworthy. The US authorities have promised that, if extradited, Assange will “not be held before trial in a top security ‘Supermax’ prison or subjected to strict isolation conditions”, as the Guardian described it, and have also promised that, “if convicted [he] would be allowed to serve his sentence in Australia.”

James Lewis, the barrister representing the US government, told the High Court that the assurances “are binding on the United States”, even though that is untrue, as no mechanism exists whereby any government, court or any other organization outside the US can challenge the US government if they fail to honour their assurances. In addition, the US government has also carefully reserved the right to alter these assurances if Assange “commit[s] a further offence”, as the BBC described it, with no sign of what “a further offence” might mean.

As for the Australia promise, Assange’s barrister Edward Fitzgerald “said in a written submission [that] Australia had not yet agreed to take Assange if he was convicted”, and added that, “[e]ven if Australia did agree”, the US legal process “could take a decade, ‘during which Mr Assange will remain detained in extreme isolation in a US prison.’”

The US also took aim at the testimony provided last autumn by neuropsychiatrist Michael Kopelman, who had flagged up Assange’s suicide risk, but had, as the Guardian described the position taken by the US, “misled the previous judge by omitting to mention that Stella Moris, a member of WikiLeaks’ legal team, was also Assange’s partner and had two children with him.”

To my mind, the fact that Assange would be thoroughly separated from his partner and children rather tends to reinforce the notion that he would be a high suicide risk if extradited to the US, but then what do I know, as I’m not the abuser saying whatever it takes to get Assange into my grubby and punitive hands.

Assange also has other reasons not to trust a word the US government says. In summer, it was revealed that, as the Guardian described it, “Sigurdur Thordarson, who was a teenage worker at WikiLeaks before becoming an FBI informant, broke cover … when an Icelandic news website, Stundin, reported that he had ‘fabricated’ evidence cited by the US.”

As the Guardian proceeded to explain, Thordarson, “who has a series of convictions for sexual and financial crimes in Iceland”, received “a promise of immunity from prosecution in return for co-operating with the FBI”, but “has since told the Guardian that his participation with US authorities was borne ‘out of fear’ because he knew that charges were ready to be filed against him over hacking allegations.”

“I was not expecting that the indictment from the US … would make a major mistake like this. If this helps Julian to be freed from prosecution … furthermore the extradition, then I’m very happy that would help,” he said.

Even more alarmingly, Yahoo News reported last month that, in 2017, the Trump administration —led by a president so incoherent that, at one point, he had lavishly praised WikiLeaks — had “plotted to kidnap the WikiLeaks founder, spurring heated debate among Trump administration officials over the legality and practicality of such an operation.”

As the article explained, “Some senior officials inside the CIA and the Trump administration even discussed killing Assange, going so far as to request ‘sketches’ or ‘options’ for how to assassinate him. Discussions over kidnapping or killing Assange occurred ‘at the highest levels’ of the Trump administration, said a former senior counterintelligence official. ‘There seemed to be no boundaries.’”

And if this sounds outlandish, it may be instructive to note that, when I was working with WikiLeaks on the release of the Guantánamo files in April 2011, the Daily Telegraph, which had replaced the Guardian as WikiLeaks’ main UK media partner, and had also taken over sponsorship from the Guardian of the Hay Festival of Literature and Arts, got very excited about putting him on as a speaker. As Assange was, at the time, under house arrest in Norfolk, they proposed flying him there and back by helicopter to avoid breaking his curfew, to which Assange responded by stating that his lawyers had advised him never to travel by helicopter, because they were the easiest vehicle to sabotage.

It may be that, at the time, Assange was paranoid, but, as last month’s revelations show, evidence exists that, at least under Donald Trump, the US government was considering how to murder him. The figureheads may have changed, but the entities responsible are still part of the US government. How can they be trusted with Julian Assange’s health if his extradition goes ahead, and how can the British authorities ignore the reality of his Asperger’s diagnosis, and not insist that his proposed extradition, like those of Gary McKinnon and Lauri Love, must be denied?

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

For First Time Since 2010, A Judge Grants a Guantánamo Prisoner’s Habeas Corpus Petition, Ruling that Asadullah Haroon Gul’s Imprisonment is Unlawful

Asadullah Haroon Gul’s parents, Ibrahim and Sehar Bibi, with photos of their son, taken in their home in the Shamshatu refugee camp in Pakistan in January 2021 (Photo: Aftab Khan).Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, with the US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email.

In an important ruling in the District Court in Washington, D.C. last week, Judge Amit Mehta, an Obama nominee, granted the habeas corpus petition of Asadullah Haroon Gul, an Afghan prisoner held at Guantánamo without charge or trial since June 2007, and identified by the US authorities simply as Haroon al-Afghani.

The ruling is significant because it is the first time since July 2010 that a judge has granted a Guantánamo prisoner’s habeas corpus petition on the basis that his detention is unlawful. After the Supreme Court granted the Guantánamo prisoners constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights, in Boumediene v. Bush, in June 2008, there followed a two-year period that was the only time in Guantánamo’s history that the courts were able to objectively assess the basis of the prisoners’ detention, and in 38 cases judges ruled that the government had failed to establish that they had any meaningful connection to either Al-Qaeda or the Taliban.

By 2010, however, politically motivated appeals court judges had passed a number of rulings that gutted habeas corpus of all meaning for the Guantánamo prisoners. The last man freed after having his habeas corpus petition granted was Mohammed Hassen (aka Mohammed Hassan Odaini), a Yemeni who was freed in July 2010 after having his habeas petition granted in May 2010. Two other prisoners had their habeas petitions granted in July 2010, but they were amongst the six men whose successful petitions were subsequently overturned by the court of appeals, and, from July 2010 until October 2011, eleven men had their habeas petitions denied, until they, and their lawyers, gave up. Several efforts were made in the following years to interest the Supreme Court in taking back control of Guantánamo detainee issues, and to break through the obstacles raised by the court of appeals, but all, sadly, were in vain.

As an aside, I should also mention that, in October 2013, on the only occasion since Boumediene, the Justice Department declined to contest the ongoing imprisonment of a prisoner, the Sudanese citizen Ibrahim Idris, but that was because he had severe mental health problems. Judge Mehta’s ruling, however, is the first time for eleven years and five months that a prisoner of sound mind has had their imprisonment condemned by a court as unlawful.

The ruling was not entirely unexpected, given that the Justice Department’s reason for seeking Gul’s ongoing imprisonment was preposterous. He apparently held some sort of military-connected position within Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin (HIG), the militia force headed by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who had received significant US funding during the Soviet occupation in the 1980s, but had allied himself with Al-Qaeda after the US-led invasion in October 2001.

In 2016, however, HIG reached a peace deal with the Afghan government, which led to the release of HIG prisoners in Afghanistan, and even the repatriation, from the United Arab Emirates, of Hamidullah (aka Mawlawi Hamdullah Tarakhail), from a prominent HIG-supporting family, who had been transferred there from Guantánamo in August 2016.

The only place the peace deal didn’t seem to apply was Guantánamo. At Gul’s habeas corpus hearing in May, prosecutor Stephen McCoy Elliott claimed that, although the government “does not take lightly the fact that [Gul] has been detained more than 10 years,” we “have been and remain at war with al-Qaeda,” and that, as a result, his “detention, while lengthy, remains justified.”

As I explained at the time, the Justice Department’s position “thoroughly undermin[ed] the HIG peace deal, and indicat[ed] that, at Guantánamo, as is so often the case, the basis for prisoners’ continued imprisonment works to its own horrible logic, which has nothing to do with external reality.”

Judge Mehta is to be commended for having recognized and having refused to accept the preposterousness of the Justice Department’s position, although it remains to be seen if further challenges by prisoners succeed in persuading judges that their own imprisonment is also unjustifiable because of the end of the war in Afghanistan, rather than the very specific HIG-related basis of Gul’s imprisonment.

To add to Gul’s court success, he also had his release approved recently by a Periodic Review Board, a parole-type process set up by President Obama, in which a panel of officials from the relevant government departments and intelligence agencies concluded he could be safely transferred, with security arrangements, in light of his “lack of a leadership role in extremist organizations and his lack of a clear ideological basis for his prior conduct.”

Speaking after the ruling was delivered, Tara J. Plochocki, who argued his case in May, said, “What the ruling means is that Mr. Gul’s detention is illegal. The grant of the writ does not mean the judge can order the government to put him on a plane to Kabul, but the government is required to obey court orders and to comply, it must release him.”

She added, as the New York Times described it, “that Mr. Haroon’s wife, daughter, brother and elderly mother live in Afghanistan and that he ‘is desperate to get home’ to make sure his daughter gets an education,” [b]ecause “the Taliban barred women and girls from going to school the last time they were in power.” She also explained that he “grew up in a refugee camp in Pakistan,” and, “[t]hat being the case, the United States might consider sending him there if he is not allowed to return to Afghanistan.”

As the Times also explained, “The White House declined to comment on the decision,” although, astonishingly, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department said that its lawyers “were still considering whether to appeal.”

That, as Tess Bridgeman explained for Just Security, “would be a mistake,” and “would be likely to make what the US government would consider ‘bad law.’” It could even, she added, “tee up for the Supreme Court the issue of whether Guantánamo detention operations remain viable at all,” which “would likely force the administration to argue for continued detention at the Supreme Court even when it’s trying to close the facility, and potentially face a loss.”

We can only hope that the Justice Department is listening — although it doesn’t have a good track record when it comes to Guantánamo — and that Asadullah Haroon Gul will be released as soon as possible. As his brother, Roman Khan, said after the ruling was announced, “This is such happy, sweet news for our family. We now pray that Asadullah is sent back home quickly — where he belongs. The family has eyes only to see him again. We are all waiting for him. His wife, his young daughter Maryam, his parents, me, his nieces and nephews. He has spent more than 14 years of his life in this dangerous and terrible prison without charge. We are thankful to the judges and to everyone who continue to press for his freedom.”

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

Yemeni Torture Victim and Insignificant Afghan Approved for Release from Guantánamo by Periodic Review Boards

Guantánamo prisoners Sanad al-Kazimi and Asadullah Haroon Gul, who have been approved for release by Periodic Review Boards.Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

Fresh from the news that Pakistani torture victim Ahmed Rabbani has been approved for release from Guantánamo by a Periodic Review Board, a parole-type process established by President Obama, comes the further revelation that two more “forever prisoners” have also been approved for release — Sanad al-Kazimi, a Yemeni, and Asadullah Haroon Gul, one of the last two Afghans in the prison.

The approval for the release of both men is long overdue, but it is reassuring that, after nearly 20 years, it has finally become unfashionable for the US government to suggest that men who have never been charged or tried can be held indefinitely in the notorious offshore prison at the US’s naval base in Cuba. This year, letters to President Biden from 24 Senators and 75 members of the House of Representatives have spelled out, in no uncertain terms, how men who have not been charged with crimes must be released.

In the case of Asadullah Haroon Gul, held at Guantánamo since 2007, the US’s reasons for holding him evaporated many years ago. Despite his youth (he was only around 19 years old when the US-led coalition invaded Afghanistan in October 2001), he had allegedly held some kind of leadership position in Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin (HIG), the militia led by the former warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. A recipient of significant US funding during the time of the Soviet occupation, Hekmatyar had turned against the US following the invasion in October 2001, but in recent years had joined the Afghan government via a peace deal in 2016 that had led to HIG members being released from prison (and one, sent to the UAE from Guantánamo, being repatriated).

Irritatingly, the one place this peace deal didn’t reach was Guantánamo, where the Justice Department, in particular, continues to behave as though the normal, evidence-based rules regarding people’s imprisonment don’t apply. In February, the Afghan government submitted a request for his release via an amicus brief, but when his lawyers sought to free him via a habeas corpus petition in the District Court in Washington, D.C., prosecutor Stephen McCoy Elliott claimed that, although the government “does not take lightly the fact that [Gul] has been detained more than 10 years,” we “have been and remain at war with al-Qaeda,” and that, as a result, his “detention, while lengthy, remains justified.”

Whilst it is reassuring that a PRB has approved Gul for release, it remains troubling that the Justice Department continues to retain such indefensible positions, and it is dispiriting that the Biden administration seems to have no interest in using the courts to redress the prolonged and unjustifiable imprisonment of men held for an unforgivably long time without charge or trial.

Gul’s case has been well-chronicled in recent years, but little has been heard of Sanad al-Kazimi, who was seized in Dubai in January 2003, and held in CIA “black sites” from August 2003 until his transfer to Guantánamo in September 2004.

His first PRB took place in May 2016, and his ongoing imprisonment was approved a month later. His next review was in December 2018, when Donald Trump was president, and like most of the prisoners at the time, he boycotted his hearing, having concluded that the process had become a sham, and his ongoing imprisonment was upheld.

To understand more of his story, we have to go back to an article I wrote in February 2009, when I stated:

Sanad al-Kazimi … has had a particularly bleak time. Accused of training in Afghanistan in 2001, swearing bayat [an oath of loyalty] to Osama bin Laden, and then of being involved with al-Qaeda activities in the Gulf in 2002 after his escape from Afghanistan, he was seized in the United Arab Emirates in January 2003, handed over to US forces, and tortured in various facilities in Afghanistan, including the “Dark Prison” and Bagram, until his transfer to Guantánamo. He has explained that, in this period, he “endured horrific physical abuse”; specifically, that he was “subjected to sensory deprivation techniques, causing extreme disorientation and psychological stress, physical and sexual assault, threat of rape, and repeated plunging into pools of cold water while suspended in the air by a mechanical lift.”

More of his story is reported here, based partly on a report by Jane Mayer, who interviewed his [former] lawyer, Ramzi Kassem, but what has not been explained — if al-Kazimi is really so dangerous — is why he was not put forward for a trial by Military Commission. My hunch is that, although he was tortured as though he were a “high-value detainee” with knowledge of the workings of al-Qaeda, he was actually nothing of the sort, and was, at most, a peripheral character. Or it may even be, as he stated at his tribunal in Guantánamo, that, although he had sworn bayat to bin Laden, he “later swore against him, and was wondering why that second sworn statement was not put into this evidence.”

In its decision, the review board finally seemed to have taken on board al-Kazimi’s regrets, and his relative insignificance. The board’s recommendation for his release noted his “lack of a leadership role in an extremist organization and the limited timeframe of his associations with [al-Qaeda] members.”

One-third of the men still held have now been approved for release

With these decisions taken by the Periodic Review Boards, 13 men out of the 39 men still held — a third of the total number of men still held — have been approved for release, and yet only one man has been freed since President Biden took office, even though he inherited five prisoners approved for release — one at the end of Donald Trump’s presidency, one in 2016, and three, shamefully, way back in the mists of time, in 2010. Five more men were approved for release in May and June this year.

The New York Times, reporting on these decisions, noted that Gul’s release will “most likely require reaching an agreement with the Taliban,” while al-Kazimi’s board specifically recommended his resettlement in Oman, “whose rehabilitation program received 30 detainees during the Obama administration.” As the Times also explained, a third country is required to resettle al-Kazimi because “Yemen is considered too unstable to monitor and help rehabilitate returnees.”

The Times added that “Oman has been considered an ideal, culturally compatible nation to receive Yemeni detainees. The country’s program has generated no known controversy and has helped Yemeni detainees find homes and jobs and, in some instances, allowed family members in Yemen to send women for them to marry.”

Noticeably, the Times also reported that the board “approved Mr. al-Kazimi’s transfer on Oct. 7, less than two weeks after the State Department official responsible for overseeing detainee transfer arrangements, John T. Godfrey, visited Oman, the United Arab Emirates and London in his capacity as acting coordinator for counterterrorism.”

This is encouraging news, as it suggests that the administration is focusing on Oman as a resettlement location — with the visits to the UAE and the UK, presumably, being in connection with the UAE’s punitive and shameful imprisonment of former prisoners, including 12 Yemenis threatened with enforced repatriation, and the threat to forcibly repatriate Ravil Mingazov, a Russian who faces human rights abuses if sent home, and whose wife and son were given asylum in the UK several years ago.

Responding to the news from the PRBs, al-Kazimi’s lawyer, Martha Rayner, a professor at Fordham Law School, said, as the Times described it, that “he was in ‘pretty good’ health and ‘looks forward to being transferred as quickly as possible.’”

She added that he “sought to be transferred to an Arabic-speaking country where he could be reunited with his wife and would be able to ‘someday see his four children and his grandchildren.’” As she described it, “What he wants is to live in a stable country in peace,” although he is “concerned about the unknowns ahead of him — and knows that many men have been cleared and yet languished for years.”

In Gul’s case, the Times explained that the board “said in its decision, also dated Oct. 7, that it had concluded he could be safely transferred, with security arrangements, in light of his ‘lack of a leadership role in extremist organizations and his lack of a clear ideological basis for his prior conduct.’” However, “It did not make a recommendation on where he should go,” and it is unclear whether the Taliban will endorse his return, because of Hekmatyar’s peace deal with the now-departed Afghan government.

That said, Gul’s family, including his wife and daughter, still live in the refugee camp in Pakistan where he was living prior to his capture, so it may be possible for him to return via the Pakistani authorities. It is certainly to be hoped that he does not remain separated from his family, as they mean so much to him, and he has already been cruelly kept apart from them for nearly 15 years.

As Mark Maher, his lawyer at Reprieve, said in a statement after the news that he had been approved for release was announced, “The board’s recommendation is welcome, but we should remember Asadullah has spent over 14 years of his life in prison without charge or trial. He should have been home long ago, so while his clearance is a relief, it is not justice. Asadullah missed his daughter’s entire childhood. He should be reunited with his family as soon as possible, but there is no way to restore what has been taken from them.”

In conclusion, I also look forward to hearing more news about “forever prisoners” being approved for release. With these decisions, 14 of the 39 men still held continue to languish in the frustrating and unjustifiable limbo of being “forever prisoners,” and we continue to remind the Biden administration that this is unacceptable, and that all of these men — who include the artists Moath al-Alwi and Khalid Qassim, the mentally ill torture victim Mohammed al-Qahtani, and Abu Zubaydah, for whom the post-9/11 torture program was created — must also be freed, unless they are to be charged with crimes.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

Torture Victim Ahmed Rabbani, A Case of Mistaken Identity, Approved for Release from Guantánamo

Guantánamo prisoner and torture victim Ahmed Rabbani, who has just been approved for release from the prison via a Periodic Review Board. Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

Via Middle East Eye, and reporter Peter Oborne (formerly the chief political columnist of the Daily Telegraph, until his resignation in 2015), comes the welcome news that Guantánamo prisoner and torture victim Ahmed Rabbani has been approved for release from the prison via a Periodic Review Board, a parole-type process established in 2013 by President Obama.

Oborne was told about Rabbani’s approval for release by his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, the founder of Reprieve. “Even if it is nearly two decades late, it is fabulous that Ahmed has been cleared for release,” Stafford Smith said.

A Pakistani national of Rohingya origin, Rabbani , who is now 52 years old, was seized with his brother Abdul Rahim in Karachi in September 2002, and, after two months in Pakistani custody, spent 18 months in CIA “black sites” in Afghanistan, including the notorious prison identified by the CIA as ‘COBALT,’ but also known as the Salt Pit, or, as the prisoners described it, “the dark prison.” There he was hung naked from an iron shackle, with his feet barely touching the ground, and, like the other men held there, subjected to loud music designed to prevent them from sleeping.

The US authorities thought that he was a significant individual in Al-Qaeda, Hassan Ghul, but the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report into the CIA’s torture program, whose executive summary was released in 2014, established that he was a case of mistaken identity. This ought to have been obvious to the US authorities, because the real Hassan Ghul was held at ‘COBALT’ at the same time as him, but it is one of many examples of chronic failures of intelligence in the “war on terror” declared by George W. Bush after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. As Peter Oborne also noted, Rabbani was also one of a number of “black site” prisoners who were subjected to torture “without the approval of CIA headquarters.”

The Rabbani brothers were moved to Guantánamo in September 2004, where they have been held ever since without charge or trial. In May, a Periodic Review Board approved Abdul Rahim for release, and it is reassuring that Ahmed has now also been approved for release, even if, as Clive Stafford Smith cautioned, “We must not get ahead of ourselves as being cleared for release in Guantánamo does not automatically mean you go home.”

As Stafford Smith further explained, “One of my clients hums ‘Hotel California’ at me — ‘You can check out [anytime you want], but you can never leave’” — adding that “four men [three, actually] are still there though they were cleared over ten years ago. But at least we are now going to be arguing about when he should go home, rather than whether [he should].”

For Ahmed Rabbani’s family, the news has brought hope after nearly two decades of misery. His 18-year old son Jawad, who was born six months after his father’s abduction, “described the impact of his father’s detention on his upbringing”, as Peter Oborne put it. He told Middle East Eye that, “while he had never physically met his father, he was elated to hear of his release.” As he described it, “I feel so happy because I will meet and have experiences with him. Now, at last, I will have someone I can rely on and give me guidance.”

Release the “forever prisoners”

With Ahmed Rabbani’s PRB success, eleven of the 39 men still held at Guantánamo have been approved for release — the three in 2009, mentioned above, one in 2016, one in 2020, and six this year — and it is imperative that the Biden administration acts swiftly to release them, or, if they cannot be safely repatriated, to find third countries prepared to resettle them, before the very notion of being approved for release from Guantánamo becomes thoroughly discredited.

It is also hugely important that the Biden administration recognizes that the 16 other men still subject to review by the Periodic Review Boards — men never charged or tried, like Rabbani, and aptly described as “forever prisoners” — must either be charged or released.

Ongoing court cases suggest that, rather dispiritingly, the Biden administration has no desire to accept a legal route to the release of any of these men — by refusing to mount a challenge to their habeas corpus petitions, for example — but if this is the case then the PRBs must approved their release instead, and the administration must then release them.

To some right-wing critics, releasing any of these men remains unacceptable. Ahmed Rabbani was not Hassan Ghul, but, even though the fog of torture makes it difficult to separate fact from fiction, he may have played some sort of role as a facilitator for Al-Qaeda, sorting out accommodation and arranging travel for operatives in Karachi. However, in June, another facilitator, Sharqawi al-Hajj (whose nickname was “Riyadh the Facilitator”) was also approved for release, and in the cases of both these men, and of others still held, there are three compelling and unassailable reasons for resisting right-wing criticism.

The first is that, in November 2008, a man named Salim Hamdan, who had worked as a driver for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, was freed after a military commission trial that summer. A military jury gave him a sentence of five and a half years, and the military judge then decided that it should include time already served. This was a ruling that, as I wrote at the time, ought to have spelled “The End of Guantánamo”, because most of the men still held had been less significant than Hamdan.

That never happened, of course, but after nearly 20 years of Guantánamo’s existence, the second reason for not questioning Rabbani’s approval for release is because it is now clear that, even if any of the low-level facilitators approved for release (like Sharqawi al-Hajj, and, theoretically, Ahmed Rabbani) had been charged with crimes, their sentences would, in all likelihood, have already been served.

And the third reason, of course, as I will keep returning to until it is properly taken on board by the administration, is that there is simply no justification for holding anyone at Guantánamo without charge or trial for nearly 20 years. The Biden administration has recognized this in its PRB decisions to date, but it also needs to recognize that every one of the 16 “forever prisoners” must also be released unless they are to be charged.

These 16 still include a handful of foot soldiers who are held not for what they did before their capture, but because they have resisted their long and unjust imprisonment through hunger strikes and through organizing resistance, but, crucially, they also include men like Abu Zubaydah, for whom the post-9/11 torture program was invented on the mistaken basis that he was involved with Al-Qaeda rather than being the facilitator for a rival training camp.

The military commission system — in which ten men are facing trials, and two have already been through the process — has been widely and justifiably criticized as a broken facsimile of justice, but there is no good reason why the men charged cannot be transferred for trials in federal courts, if the administration finally recognizes how dysfunctional they are.

Men held forever without charge or trial, however, are held in what is, fundamentally, a lawless state, arbitrarily detained by an executive branch and a Congress that seem to regard them, unforgivably, as their own personal prisoners. It is time for this crushing and unforgivable injustice to be brought to an end.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

Never-Ending Injustice: State Secrets and the Torture of Abu Zubaydah

An illustration featuring Abu Zubaydah by Brigid Barrett from an article in Wired in July 2013. The photo used is from the classified military files from Guantánamo that were released by WikiLeaks in 2011.Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, with the US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard arguments in the case of the notorious torture victim and Guantánamo prisoner Abu Zubaydah, for whom the US’s post-9/11 torture program was invented. Zubaydah, whose real name is Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, was held and tortured in CIA “black sites” for four and a half years, after his capture in a house raid in Pakistan in March 2002, until his eventual transfer to Guantánamo with 13 other so-called “high-value detainees” in September 2006, and he has been held there without charge or trial ever since.

Wednesday’s hearing was the result of an appeal by the government against a ground-breaking ruling two years ago, by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, in which the judges openly declared that Abu Zubaydah had been tortured. It was, as Abu Zubaydah’s attorney, Cornell University law professor Joseph Margulies, explained, “the first time an appellate court” had “come right out and said that the enhanced interrogation techniques were torture.”

While this was significant, it wasn’t the main topic of the case, which involved the state secrets privilege, whereby government officials can argue that sensitive information whose disclosure, they claim, might endanger national security, must not be disclosed in a court. Abu Zubaydah’s lawyers were — and still are — seeking permission for the architects of the torture program, the contractors James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, to be questioned about the details of his torture while he was held in a “black site” in Poland, in 2002-03, after his initial torture in a “black site” in Thailand in 2002, for use in the Polish government’s ongoing investigation.

A lower court had earlier ruled that, as the San Francisco Chronicle described it, any questioning of Mitchell and Jessen “would expose state secrets about CIA detention and interrogation practices,” but the appeals court refuted Justice Department claims that the questioning of Mitchell and Jessen “could reveal classified information about CIA intelligence sources, foreign government cooperation and terrorist investigations,” pointing out that “some information about the CIA’s torture program and its past operation in Poland has long been known to the public,” and in any case, as Judge Richard Paez explained in the court’s majority opinion, the purpose of confidentiality rules “is to protect legitimate government interests, not to shield the government from uncomfortable facts.”

The appeals court intended that the case should be sent back to the lower court to “take a closer look to determine which subjects could be safely examined,” but the government appealed, meaning that it then made its way up to the Supreme Court, whose decision to accept it was significant, because, although it was primarily about torture, and not Guantánamo, it was nevertheless the first case with any connection to Guantánamo that the Supreme Court had deigned to hear since Boumediene v. Bush, in December 2007, which was decided in June 2008.

That case confirmed that the prisoners held at Guantánamo had constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights, empowering judges to hear the government’s case against them, and over the course of the next  two years 32 prisoners had their habeas corpus petitions granted by District Court judges, who ordered their release.

Shamefully, appeals court judges then rewrote the rules, specifically to gut habeas corpus of all meaning for the Guantánamo prisoners, and, just as shamefully, the Supreme Court has refused, ever since, to take back control of the legal arguments involving the imprisonment of men at Guantánamo, even though they have been presented with numerous opportunities to do so.

The Supreme Court hearing

A transcript of the oral arguments in Wednesday’s Supreme Court hearing has helpfully been made available online, and much of it reveals how, seamlessly, the Biden administration has taken on the position maintained by the Trump administration regarding the alleged necessity of hiding information about Abu Zubaydah’s torture, even though much of it is public knowledge — primarily, through the extensive coverage of it in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report into the CIA’s torture program, whose executive summary was released in December 2014, and through testimony by Mitchell and Jessen on two previous occasions.

That said, as Joe Margulies explained to Democracy Now! on Thursday, although “we know a fair amount about what happened to [Abu Zubaydah in] Thailand … we don’t know what happened to him in Poland.” Mitchell, as he explained, stated in previous testimony that Abu Zubaydah “was treated very shabbily” in Poland, but as Margulies explained, “he uses those kind of euphemisms for the most grotesque torture. And that’s all he says. But no one has ever questioned him about what went on in Poland. The Polish prosecutor knows where the site was. He knows when it operated. But inside the cell, he doesn’t know. There were only three people there. It was Abu Zubaydah, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen.”

As he also explained, Mitchell and Jessen are “perfectly willing to provide this testimony. When we sought their testimony in this case, they said, ‘We have no objection. We’re happy to tell you. We’re happy to sit down for a deposition.’ It was the United States government that intervened and said, ‘No, their testimony is a state secret, and you can’t have any of it.’”

What happened on Wednesday, however, to everyone’s surprise was that, first of all, as Margulies put it, “virtually every justice on the court described Abu Zubaydah’s treatment as torture. They used that word. There were no euphemisms. There was no equivocation. Everyone understood that what happened to him was torture.”

And, secondly, Justice Breyer, Justice Gorsuch and Justice Sotomayor all asked, “Why is it that you can’t just let Abu Zubaydah testify?” As Margulies explained, “That obviously would obviate the need for Mitchell and Jessen’s testimony. And what was as interesting as their request that Abu Zubaydah be allowed to testify was the government’s equivocation and inability to answer that … [T]he solicitor general was asked to provide a follow-up statement, so they’ll be filing something else, explaining whether they’re going to allow Abu Zubaydah to testify. And if they do, that will be a sea change at Guantánamo. That will be a radical change. Guantánamo was built to be an isolation chamber, and they have never allowed any detainee to have uncensored access to the outside. The whole purpose of it was to prevent that kind of communication. So, if that changes, that will be a radical thing.”

Margulies also highlighted a third surprise — as he described it, “Justice Breyer’s observation, which we have been arguing on Abu Zubaydah’s behalf for some time, [and] other detainees have [also] made this argument, that there are no hostilities left in Afghanistan. The legal justification for continuing to hold guys has disappeared. We’ve been making that argument, and yesterday we heard a Supreme Court justice accept it as though it were commonplace. How could anyone think otherwise?”

There was also another shock in the hearing, following Justice Breyer’s questioning about why Abu Zubaydah was even being held, when he referred to Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, a case decided by the Supreme Court in June 2004, in which, as he described it, “we said you could hold people in Guantánamo,” as long as “active combat operations against Taliban fighters” were “going on in Afghanistan.”

After stating, “Well, they’re not anymore,” Justice Breyer asked David Klein, representing Abu Zubaydah, “why is he there?” — in other words, why is he still held — and followed up by asking, “have you filed a habeas or something to get him out?” to which Klein delivered the bombshell response, “There has been a habeas proceeding pending in D.C. for the last 14 years.” This clearly shocked Justice Breyer, who asked twice, and with incredulity, “They don’t decide it?”

“Held incommunicado”

While all of the above should — must — provide fertile ground for further challenges in Abu Zubaydah’s case, and against the entire ongoing existence of Guantánamo, it is worth dwelling on how, in the oral arguments, what shone through above all about the government’s position is how thoroughly successive administrations have worked to shield the CIA from scrutiny of its actions in the torture program — and, by extension, any accountability for what was done.

As Joe Margulies explained, “even Mitchell and Jessen, when they were torturing him in Thailand, after six days of virtually 24-hour-a-day torture, decided that they were done, that they had emptied the content of his head … [T]hey cabled that to CIA headquarters in Langley, and Mitchell believes it was Jose Rodriguez [Director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center] who cabled back,” stating, as Mitchell described it, “You guys are a bunch of pussies. You’ve got to continue this. Blood is going to be on your hands if there’s another attack. Keep torturing him.”

Margulies added, “And so they did, for another two weeks. And what they eventually concluded is that Abu Zubaydah was telling the truth all along. Contrary to what they believed when they started torturing him, he was not a member of al-Qaeda. He had no involvement with the planning for 9/11. He’s never been a member of al-Qaeda. He is ideologically opposed to al-Qaeda, which is what he had been saying. And they eventually concluded that that was true.”

Raymond Bonner, a journalist who joined Margulies for the show, added that cables from Thailand to the CIA, as the torture began, showed Mitchell and the interrogators stating, “He might die. And if he does, we’re going to cremate him. And if he doesn’t, we want assurances that he will never be in a position to tell his story.” In response, the CIA cabled back, “You have the assurances of everyone here that he will be held incommunicado for the remainder of his life.” As Bonner explained, “[T]hat is exactly what is happening. We’re never going to hear from Abu Zubaydah. I would be stunned if he’s allowed to testify.”

In addition, when Joe Margulies was asked by Amy Goodman, “Can you talk about what condition he is in today, after all of this time, held for so many years, the last number of years, 15 years, in Guantánamo?,” Joe Margulies’ answer confirmed the extent to which, shamefully, Guantánamo continues to function as an “isolation chamber,” particularly for the “high-value detainees” subjected to the CIA’s torture program.

“No, actually, I can’t,” Margulies replied, “because his condition, and my observation of it, is classified … Everything he tells me and everything I learned from him is classified at the highest level. It’s top secret. So, if he says to me, for instance, ‘I’m having terrible headaches, and I vomit every morning,’ I can’t relay that to you. I can’t say this is what he says. I can only write it down and then submit it to the CIA for declassification. And we have submitted over a hundred pages of Abu Zubaydah’s statements and recounting of what happened to him. and that’s been submitted for years, and the CIA has never cleared it. Many years ago, they authorized me to say that I am very concerned about his welfare, very concerned or gravely concerned, some adverb like that. And I can tell you that nothing has changed between then and now. I remain very concerned. But that’s all I’m allowed to say.”

It remains to be seen how the Supreme Court will respond in its ruling, but, if nothing else, Wednesday’s hearing aired a number of profoundly uncomfortable truths about the government’s position: from its obsessive defense of the CIA’s torture program to its refusal to even consider allowing Abu Zubaydah to testify, its failure to proceed with a habeas corpus case for 14 unforgivably long years, and its unwillingness to consider the significance of the withdrawal of the last US troops from Afghanistan.

Guantánamo’s very existence is now untenable, and yet, as I explained in a recent article, the Justice Department continues to defend it with largely undimmed zeal. The Biden administration is apparently reviewing the prison’s operations, and has been told, over and over, by Senators, by members of the House of Representatives, and by numerous credible officials, that continuing to indefinitely hold men without charge or trial at Guantánamo is unacceptable.

Of the 39 men still held, 17 are in this category — accurately described in the media as “forever prisoners” — and Abu Zubaydah is one of them. And yet, despite the growing body of critics telling the government that, unless these men are to be charged, they must be released, it remains unclear if the administration is listening, or if they are still wedded to that disgusting promise made by the CIA back in 2002 — that, even though his torture is no longer a secret, Abu Zubaydah “will be held incommunicado for the remainder of his life.”

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

The Enemy Within: How the US Justice Department Has Spent 19 Years Defending Arbitrary Detention at Guantánamo

Campaigners for the closure of Guantánamo outside the Justice Department in Washington, D.C. on January 11, 2015, the 13th anniversary of its opening (Photo: Debra Sweet via Flickr). Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

It’s a sign of the chronic failure of the US justice system to deliver anything resembling justice to the men held at Guantánamo Bay that, nearly 20 years after the prison was established to hold them, for the most part, indefinitely without charge or trial — even though they were never adequately screened at the time of their capture — lawyers and judges are still arguing about whether or not those men have any right to see the government’s purported evidence against them.

Specifically, the arguments involve the extent to which — if at all — the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause applies to the men held at Guantánamo, in which the most prominent players resisting its application have been, historically, judges in the appeals court in Washington, D.C. (the D.C. Circuit), and lawyers in the Civil Division of the Justice Department, who, under George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, and now under Joe Biden, have strenuously resisted efforts to extend to the Guantánamo prisoners any meaningful right to challenge the basis of their imprisonment.

On a very fundamental level, these arguments shouldn’t even be taking place at all. Way back in the mists of time, in Boumediene v. Bush, in June 2008, when the Supreme Court affirmed the Guantánamo prisoners’ constitutionally guaranteed right to challenge the basis of their detention via a writ of habeas corpus, the Court’s intention was that they would be entitled to a “meaningful review” of the basis of their imprisonment, in which the government would have to present its evidence openly, and have it challenged.

How Boumediene was gutted

However, as Jonathan Hafetz, a Professor of Law at Seton Hall University School of Law, explained in an article for Just Security on Sept. 1, “Since Boumediene, lower courts have sought to interpret the Supreme Court’s direction to provide ‘meaningful review’ to habeas detainees at Guantánamo. District court judges initially interpreted this review aggressively, insisting that the government provide actual evidence that a detainee directly engaged in hostilities (here’s a notable example that highlights the tone and tenor of previous judicial skepticism of the government’s positions defending detention) and granting habeas relief in nearly sixty percent of cases.”

As Hafetz added, however, “the D.C. Circuit — led by Judge A. Raymond Randolph, who openly denounced Boumediene — drastically narrowed this review in a series of decisions. As a result, more searching judicial inquiries of the government’s allegations — of the kind Boumediene seemed to require — were replaced by deference to multiple-level hearsay statements in government intelligence reports and, most importantly, to the expansive use of ex parte evidence, which flouts principles of fundamental fairness and severely undermines the ability of detainees to meaningfully challenge the government’s allegations.”

The two years after Boumediene marked the only time that the law has meaningfully applied at Guantánamo. 32 men had their release ordered by District Court judges, who found that the government had failed to establish that they were, in any meaningful sense, connected to either Al-Qaeda or the Taliban. However, the appeals court’s rulings brought to an abrupt this brief period when the law applied, and since the summer of 2010 no prisoner has secured a habeas ruling ordering their release, and most efforts to try to do so have been abandoned.

A key ruling in this period was Kiyemba v. Obama, in which, as the attorney Tom Wilner, who represented the prisoners in their Supreme Court cases, explained, the court ruled that, “although the detainees may have a right to a habeas hearing, they have no constitutional right to due process of law.”

It took until 2019 — and a shift in the D.C. Circuit Court’s make-up under President Obama — for judges, in Qassim v. Trump, a case involving the Yemeni prisoner Khalid Qassim, to “reverse [this] eight-year rule that has prevented Guantánamo detainees from seeing and rebutting the evidence purportedly justifying their detentions,” as Tom Wilner, who argued the case, explained. The judges were Obama nominees Patricia Millett and Cornelia Pillard, and Judge Harry Edwards, appointed by President Carter in 1980, and as I described it in an article in June, they “granted Qassim’s request to reverse the District Court’s denial of his petition for habeas corpus, sending it back to the lower court ‘to conduct Mr. Qassim’s habeas proceeding in accordance with procedures that would afford him a ‘meaningful review’ of the basis for his detention.’”

Unfortunately, Qassim’s case subsequently disappeared in the lower court’s collective in-tray, although it was not the end of the struggle for due process. As I also explained in my article:

[I]n May 2020 Judge Millett wrote the majority opinion in another case, Ali v. Trump, involving Abdul Razak Ali, an Algerian, in which the court, as New York Times columnist Linda Greenhouse explained, “held that the district court had been right to reject the inmate’s habeas petition, but wrong to do so categorically. Judge Millett noted that while ‘circuit precedent has not yet comprehensively resolved’ the question, ‘the district court’s decision that the Due Process Clause is categorically inapplicable to detainees at Guantánamo Bay was misplaced.’”

I added that, although this was “a perfectly reasonable ruling,” it “provoked fury” from Judge Randolph, who, as Greenhouse explained, “refused to sign Judge Millett’s opinion, accusing her of ignoring what he insisted was clear Supreme Court precedent that made the due process guarantee unavailable to ‘a nonresident alien enemy detained by the United States outside of our sovereign territory.’”

As I also explained:

Moreover, in September 2020, Judge Randolph was part of a panel led by Trump appointee Judge Neomi Rao, in Al Hela v. Trump, a case involving Abdulsalam al-Hela, a Yemeni businessman and politician allegedly involved with al-Qaeda, in which, responding to Al Hela’s claim that “the government’s reliance on anonymous hearsay in the intelligence reports it used to justify his continued detention violated his right to due process,” Judge Reo stated, “we reject Al Hela’s due process claims on the threshold determination that, as an alien detained outside the sovereign territory of the United States, he may not invoke the protection of the Due Process Clause.”

Greenhouse added that, “A footnote to her opinion contained the astounding assertion that ‘our court has adhered to Eisentrager’s holding [the World War II ruling relied upon by opponents of due process at Guantánamo] that the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause does not apply outside the territorial United States and therefore cannot be invoked by detainees at Guantánamo Bay.’”

The third judge, Judge Thomas Griffith, who has subsequently retired, issued a separate opinion, in which he pointed out that “we have never made such a far-reaching statement about the Clause’s extraterritorial application,” but as Greenhouse added, “The objection was fruitless.”

Judge Griffith’s opinion may have been “fruitless” at the time, but it has subsequently had resonance, as an appeal against Judge Rao’s ruling was successful, and a full en banc court heard the case, now known as Al-Hela v. Biden, on Sept. 30. It may be, as Jonathan Hafetz argued a month ago, that “the full D.C. Circuit appears poised to (finally) recognize that the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause applies to detainees at Guantánamo.” As he explained, “Not only were there sufficient votes on the Circuit to vacate and revisit the panel’s ruling to the contrary, but because of the change in presidential administration, the US government itself no longer disputes that the Clause applies.”

This sounds promising, but, as Hafetz added, although the Biden administration — after internal debates noted by the New York Times in July (see here and here) — may no longer dispute that the Due Process Clause applies, it is arguing instead that, in Hafetz’s words, “the Court should avoid the issue by ruling that the petitioner already received all the process he would have been due under the Constitution, including the ‘meaningful review’ guaranteed by the Suspension Clause under Boumediene” — even though that position actually appears to undermine its contention that it no longer opposes due process rights at Guantánamo.

The Al-Hela en banc hearing

While the court is clearly no longer as dominated by ideologically malignant right-wingers as it was when habeas corpus was first gutted a decade ago, it remains to be seen whether a majority of the judges will uphold Al-Hela’s appeal. As Middle East Eye reported, “While some judges showed concern over the limited legal options available to Guantánamo detainees to challenge their detention, others appeared cautious about issuing a sweeping constitutional ruling.”

Moreover, the Justice Department’s position remains as intransigent as it always has been. Flailing around for justifications to continue to deny him any rights, DoJ attorney Sarah Harrington seized on the fact that, in June, a review process at Guantánamo — the Periodic Review Boards — approved him for release. Harrington ignored the principle of due process by focusing narrowly on al-Hela’s particular case, stating that, because negotiations were ongoing to secure his transfer to their country, “I don’t think it would be appropriate for a court to try to impose itself into the negotiations that are going on”, as The Hill reported, also noting that she added that any ruling by the court “would just be sort of words on a paper and I don’t think it would have any effect.”

As the Washington Post reported, many of the judges had probing questions for the DoJ lawyers, although none of them seemed to be adequately addressed. Several judges “asked how the end of the Afghanistan war affected his continued detention,” with Judge Judith Rogers specifically asking Harrington, “You don’t deny that circumstances have changed dramatically?” to which Harrington’s reply was that , although circumstances may have changed, “Biden and his military leaders have ‘made clear that conflict with al-Qaeda and associated forces’ continues and Hela’s detention remains lawful” — even though that contradicts the PRB’s decision that al-Hela should be released because he no longer poses a threat to the US.

As the Post also explained, “Several judges, including [Ketanji Brown] Jackson [a Biden appointee] and Robert L. Wilkins [an Obama appointee], also expressed concern about the current system that allows the government to share certain classified evidence against a detainee only with the presiding judge, and not the detainee’s lawyer.” The Hill also picked up on this, noting that Judge Millett had “questioned the Biden administration’s attorney about its position that detainees have robust opportunities to bring legal challenges when their defense attorneys are often prohibited from viewing classified information that could be considered important evidence,” asking, “How can this process be remotely fair under [the DoJ’s] view” of the Constitution. Ignoring the specifics of Judge Millett’s question — about withheld evidence, which strikes to the heart of the due process concerns — the government, according to the Post, “took the unusual step of filing a letter with the court” — [s]everal hours after the argument ended” —  “to clear up any mistaken impression from the hearing that there were ever times when evidence was so highly sensitive that it would also be withheld from the judge.”

Sen. Dick Durbin’s letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland

Fundamentally, the Justice Department’s position remains at odds with the administration’s stated intention not to accept Judge Rao’s position that due process rights do not extend to the men held at Guantánamo, and on this point it is not only worth remembering the long years in which DoJ lawyers have done all they can to keep men at Guantánamo, but also to look specifically at a letter that Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), the Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, sent to Attorney General Merrick Garland in July, urging the Justice Department “to reconsider its approach to ongoing detention at Guantánamo Bay.”

As Sen. Durbin wrote:

I urge you to ensure that the Department of Justice’s approach to ongoing detention at US Naval Station Guantánamo Bay reflects the values of our nation. Indefinite detention is antithetical to the ideals of liberty that the United States of America was founded upon. Every day that the prison remains open, its existence calls into question our commitment to human rights and the rule of law.

Unfortunately, for nearly two decades, executive branch lawyers, policymakers, and the courts have continued to rationalize indefinite detention at Guantánamo with numerous legal theories and justifications. The result of this approach is that we have continued to hold dozens of men without charge, trial, and access to due process.”

He added:

For years, the Department has sought to advance legal theories to justify detention until the end of a war with no definite end; the detention as “enemy combatants” of individuals who are not alleged to have taken up arms against us; and the denial of even the basic protections of due process. Further, the Department has frequently opposed the habeas petitions of detainees who are elderly, ill, or already approved for transfer.

The Department’s legal positions should reflect our nation’s commitment to liberty and the rule of law, recognizing that our nation is strongest when it adheres to its core values. Legal positions or arguments that may have once seemed justified to some in the aftermath of 9/11 must be viewed in light of current circumstances. As we approach the 20th anniversary of those attacks and the withdrawal of US forces in Afghanistan, the Department should revisit its positions and arguments regarding the continued authority to detain men without charge or trial — and without due process — at Guantánamo.

Most imminently, the Department should revisit its argument that detainees have no right to due process. For nearly two decades, our nation has failed to provide due process to detainees held at Guantánamo, resulting in the use of unreliable hearsay and coerced or torture-derived evidence and a shamefully low burden of proof for depriving men of their liberty. These inadequate standards and procedures have made it nearly impossible for detainees to prevail in litigation challenging their detention, and have significantly hindered efforts to close the prison.

Referring to the then-forthcoming Al-Hela hearing, Sen. Durbin noted that the Justice Department “has the opportunity and the responsibility to adjust course.”

He added:

In its 2008 decision in Boumediene v. Bush, the Supreme Court held that the Suspension Clause of the Constitution applies to Guantánamo, enabling detainees to challenge the legality of their detention through habeas corpus. In reaching this conclusion, the Supreme Court applied its longstanding functional approach to determine the applicability of the Constitution to non-citizens outside of the United States and held that “[i]n every practical sense Guantánamo is not abroad; it is within the constant jurisdiction of the United States.”

The Supreme Court did not directly rule on the applicability of the Due Process Clause to Guantánamo detainees in Boumediene, but the Court’s reasoning applies with equal force to that issue, given the close relationship between habeas and due process rights. As the Court noted in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld [in June 2004], the writ of habeas corpus can be employed “as a mechanism of judicial review” and the Due Process Clause “informs the procedural contours of that mechanism in [those instances].”

It is well past time for the Department to reconsider its approach to the applicability of the basic safeguards of due process to the men who remain imprisoned without charge or trial at Guantánamo, as well as other positions that help perpetuate this moral stain on our nation.

Sadly, as last week’s hearing showed, the Justice Department doesn’t appear to have properly taken Sen. Durbin’s criticisms on board, refuting Judge Rao’s position that due process doesn’t apply at Guantánamo in a fundamentally meaningless manner. The Justice Department’s position that al-Hela — or any other Guantánamo prisoner, for that matter — has “already received all the process he would have been due under the Constitution, including the ‘meaningful review’ guaranteed by the Suspension Clause under Boumediene,” as Jonathan Hafetz described it, is simply untrue, as the legal wreckage of the last decade shows, and the Justice Department should be ashamed of itself for providing, over a period of nearly 20 years, a procession of inexcusable obstacles preventing justice being delivered to the men held at Guantánamo.

As Tom Wilner explained to me after the hearing, “The concept of due process is straightforward. It is those processes and procedures developed through the centuries under the common law to ensure that anyone deprived of liberty has a fair opportunity to rebut the charges against him. It is perhaps the most fundamental protection of individual liberty in Anglo-American law, incorporated directly into the US Constitution. Adherence to those procedures — to due process of law — is the essence of the rule of law. Anyone deprived of due process is by definition deprived of the procedures necessary to ensure that he has a fair opportunity to rebut the charges against him.”

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

Celebrating 1,600 Days of My Photo-Journalism Project ‘The State of London’

The most recent photos published as part of Andy Worthington’s ongoing photo-journalism project ‘The State of London.’Please click on the ‘Donate’ button below to make a donation to support my photo-journalism project ‘The State of London’.

 

Sunday marked 1,600 days since I first began posting a daily photo of London — with an accompanying essay — on my Facebook page ‘The State of London’, drawn from the daily bike rides I’d been making for the previous five years through the 120 postcodes of the London Postal District (those beginning with WC, EC, E N, NW, SE, SW and W), which covers 241 square miles.

I’m immensely grateful to the nearly 4,800 followers ‘The State of London’ has gathered on Facebook over the last four years, and the nearly 1,100 on Twitter, and if you can make a donation to support the project, it will be very gratefully received, as I have no institutional backing, and am reliant on you, my readers, to enable me to carry on cycling and taking photos, and researching and writing the essays that accompany every photo.

Please click on the ‘Donate’ button above if you can make a donation via PayPal. The page is set to dollars, because I also use it to support my work on ongoing work campaigning to get the prison at Guantánamo Bay closed, which I began 15 years ago, but for donations in pounds, all you really need to know is the conversion rate, which is currently about 3:4, so a donation of £15, for example, would be $20.

London has changed significantly since I first set out to record ‘The State of London’ over nine years ago, in the run-up to the 2012 Olympic Games. The flag-waving jingoism that involved, and the hike in property prices that also accompanied it, have cast a shadow on the capital — and on the country — ever since. The nationalist fervour of 2012 partly led to the Brexit vote in 2016, while the boost to land and property values has seen the skyline of London remade as towers of unaffordable housing — some built on the sites of former council estates, cynically destroyed for profit — have continued to rise up as though, economically, we are in some sort of a boom, and not a slow economic death spiral.

Two other factors have contributed to the disconnect between reality and illusion in the nine years since I began this project — and in the four years since I first began to post daily photos of my experiences: the realities of climate change have assumed increasing significance, as reflected in the emergence of Extinction Rebellion, whose protests I’ve been covering since they first occupied a number of bridges in October 2018, and, of course, a pandemic arrived, in the form of Covid-19.

In a completely unprecedented manner, the arrival of Covid-19 involved governments around the world — including the UK — launching lockdowns that, initially, saw the streets of the capital (and particularly the West End and the City) apocalyptically empty, as global tourism collapsed, the roads emptied, and the over-priced and over-crowded rail and Tube network of commuter journeys also collapsed, with people working from home, while their offices stood empty — and, in particular, those of the banks and financial services companies that had also been changing the skyline by moving into vast new office blocks erected during this tumultuous decade in which the forces of global capital, bailed out after the global crash they caused in 2008, turned to land and property as the next battleground in their war on the people.

Those of you who have been following ‘The State of London’ for the last 18 months will know that, from the start of the first lockdown, I began diligently chronicling the ghost city in photos — in particular in an unbroken 120-day run from March to July 2020, and again in winter, when a particularly harsh second lockdown followed — and while we are now back to some sort of “normal”, it is clear that life has been irrevocably changed.

It’s not easy to see on the surface, but, sadly, Covid has led to the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, and now the full impact of Brexit is also conspiring to raise prices, to bankrupt British companies, who have found it almost impossible to export to the EU, and to empty supermarket shelves and petrol stations — in large part because of the unavailability of European lorry drivers. Astonishingly, at least 700,000 EU workers left London when the first lockdown began, as the hospitality and entertainment industries collapsed, and, although these sectors are now in recovery, the workers haven’t returned, and nor are they likely to, and British people themselves are often either unwilling or unable to take their place.

Furthermore, office workers have not returned to their offices on a full-time basis — and many, perhaps, never will — and although tourists have returned to the West End, very few are foreign tourists, who spent the most, and it is not yet clear whether the landlords of the West End and the City will accept that there needs to be a permanent reduction in their exorbitant pre-pandemic rents and leases if many businesses are to survive. And behind it all, of course, as Extinction Rebellion made clear in their recent fortnight of protests, lies the spectre of catastrophic climate change, which we need to act on with the utmost urgency, but seem unable to do so.

While environmental collapse, air pollution, and, I would say, the general unaffordability of housing remain the most pressing concerns for Londoners, ‘The State of London’ has never been all about doom and gloom. It also celebrates the seasons, the sun, the River Thames and its tributaries, and the capital’s hills and canals and parks and woods. Increasingly, I have also been delving into its history, not only via its listed buildings, but also through researching its changing patterns of land use and ownership, and its still-admirable, though diminished, provision of social housing, and I look forward to continuing this journey for many years to come, and to having you with me on the way.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

Over 330,000 Concerned Citizens Sign a Petition Urging President Biden to Close Guantánamo

Campaigners outside the White House, on September 20, 2021, prepare to deliver a petition to President Biden, signed by over 330,000 concerned citizens, calling on him to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay without further delay.Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, with the US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email.

On Monday, largely unnoticed by the mainstream media, campaigners delivered a petition to the White House, signed by over 330,000 people, urging President Biden to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay. They were joined online by former prisoner Mansoor Adayfi, whose Guantánamo memoir, “Don’t Forget Us Here,” was published last month.

This impressive achievement was coordinated by the progressive activist network Daily Kos, MPower Change, which describes itself as “the largest Muslim led social and racial justice organization in the United States,” and other organizations familiar to those engaged in the long struggle to get Guantánamo closed — Amnesty International USA, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the Justice for Muslims Collective — as well as the Juggernaut Project, NorCal Resist, Progress America, the Progressive Reform Network, and South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT).

The date chosen was the 20th anniversary of George W. Bush’s declaration to Congress that the US was launching a “war on terror” in response to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. As Bush said on that day, “Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists and every government that supports them. Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.”

You can still sign the petition, if you haven’t done so already. The text of it is posted below.

Petition: President Biden must close Guantánamo prison

The U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba is an enduring international symbol of injustice and torture, and it continues to cause profound harm to the 39 men who remain imprisoned. New reports show that President Biden is currently reviewing policies with the goal of closing the prison — we must make sure that he moves quickly to end indefinite detention without charge or trial and close Guantánamo once and for all.

The prison, designed to indefinitely detain Muslims, is a critical fixture of the post-9/11 “War on Terror” that has predominantly criminalized, surveilled, incarcerated, and tortured Muslims, U.S. citizens and non-citizens alike, with little legal recourse. While Guantánamo is part of the US’s carceral state, its existence in the War on Terror symbolizes a place beyond the law where the US government has extended the boundaries of what is considered acceptable treatment of Muslims in addition to other marginalized communities. Moreover, Guantánamo has exported its harsh conditions to domestic prisons such as Communication Management Units, located in Terre Haute, Indiana and Marion, Illinois.

Since 2002, the U.S. has imprisoned nearly 800 Muslim men and boys. Today, 39 men remain. Most have never been charged with a crime, and none have had access to a fair trial. Many were tortured by the U.S., and all have suffered from the physical and psychological effects of indefinite detention for over a decade. A number of men have even been approved for transfer by the government, yet political delays have kept them languishing behind bars.

[On] the 20th anniversary of the global “War on Terror” […] ending indefinite detention and closing the prison is a necessary step towards justice, accountability, and reconciliation.

Guantánamo is just one the U.S. government’s more contemporary pursuits in egregious human rights violations in a long history of abuses against Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities within the US and abroad. The prison is part of the decades-long legacy of mass incarceration and U.S. militarism, and more recently, the connections with the mass immigration detention and deportation apparatus have also become clear. Calls for its closure must be part of our collective demands to expose the U.S.’s racist history and contemporary practices in policing and mass incarceration, and demand investment instead in community healing and other needs.

President Biden has said he intends to close Guantánamo. Now he must take action towards that goal. The Biden administration should release the dozens of men who have never been charged with a crime to their home or third countries and resolve the remaining cases by bringing them to federal court for trial or negotiating their transfer to foreign countries to serve sentences. The U.S. must ensure that no one is transferred to countries where they are in danger of persecution and torture.

Add your name: Urge the Biden administration to close Guantánamo prison and end indefinite detention once and for all.

As the petition was delivered, the following spokespeople provided comments.

Sijal Nasralla, Campaign Director at MPower Change, said, “Nearly 800 Muslim men and boys have been imprisoned indefinitely at Guantánamo Bay, most never even charged with a crime, all without access to anything resembling a fair trial. President Biden has the authority and power to permanently close Guantánamo Bay, turning it from a living symbol of torture and injustice to a historical warning to future generations. President Biden should keep his promise. He should close Guantánamo. Twenty years of institutionalized Islamophobic violence is twenty years too long.”

Alli Jarrar of Amnesty International USA said, “Closing the detention center at Guantánamo Bay has been one of Amnesty International’s demands of the U.S. government since the notorious site was opened almost 20 years ago. Over a dozen Amnesty branches worldwide have contributed to this effort to call on President Biden to finish what Obama failed to do: shutter the facility once and for all, immediately. Its continued existence is a perpetuation of human rights abuses, a reminder of torture and indefinite detention, and it is an international embarrassment for the United States.”

Aliya Hussain, Advocacy Program Manager at the Center for Constitutional Rights, said, “Every day that Guantanamo remains open is another day added to the unprecedented and cruel, decades-long detention without charge or fair trial of Center for Constitutional Rights clients and the rest of the men who languish there. President Biden has the authority, roadmap, and public support necessary to close Guantánamo, and we join hundreds of thousands of activists from all over the world in urging him to take immediate action to fulfill that goal.”

Carolyn Fiddler, Communications Director at Daily Kos, said, “It’s long past time for the Biden administration to close Guantánamo prison and end indefinite detention once and for all. With the 20th anniversary of the global ‘War on Terror’ approaching, Guantánamo remains part of the nation’s decades-long legacy of mass incarceration and U.S. militarism. Closing this facility is an essential step towards justice, accountability, and reconciliation.”

Dr. Maha Hilal, Co-Director at the Justice for Muslims Collective, said, “In the post 9/11 War on Terror, Guantánamo has always been an emblematic example of how institutionalized Islamophobia has been manifested in the last two decades. It is outrageous that the prison remains open, that prisoners continue to be abused, and that those released are abandoned by the U.S. government. Biden must close Guantánamo immediately in addition to addressing the horrific aftermath of the prison and the lives that have been destroyed by it. The U.S. must be held accountable and this is one way to move forward towards this goal.”

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

Radio: I Discuss the Never-Ending Limbo of Guantánamo with Chris Cook on Gorilla Radio

Andy Worthington calling for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay outside the White House on January 11, 2020, and the logo for Chris Cook’s Gorilla Radio show in Victoria, Canada.Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

Yesterday, I was delighted to talk to Chris Cook, for his Gorilla Radio show, broadcast every Thursday morning on CFUV 101.9FM in Victoria, on Vancouver Island in Canada. Chris and I have spoken many times over the years, and his show admirably fulfills its remit to cover topics relating to “social justice, the environment [and] community,” and to “provid[e] a forum for people and issues not covered in the corporate media.”

Chris and I spoke in the second half of the one-hour show, which is available here as an MP3.

At the start of the show, Chris spoke about the US’s recent drone attack in Afghanistan, in which civilians, mistakenly identified as ISIS-K terrorists, were killed. He noted that Rep. Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has “expressed regret for those killed in what he characterized a ‘mistake with horrific consequences,’” but asked, pointedly, “why America was continuing its attacks against the country it has reportedly withdrawn from.”

In the first half of the show, he then spoke to independent journalist Vanessa Beeley, who specialises in the Middle East, about the ongoing crisis in Syria, and that interview is well worth a listen.

Rep. Schiff provided the link to my interview, with Chris noting that he was one of 75 members of the House of Representatives to sign a letter to President Biden, in August, calling for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, and we discussed the significance of this letter, and of an earlier letter, from 24 Senators, also calling for the prison’s closure.

I explained how positive it was to see lawmakers openly calling for the closure of Guantánamo, and, in particular, finally recognizing how unacceptable it is for the US to be holding, on an indefinite basis, men who have never been charged with a crime or put on trial, but I added two notes of caution; firstly, that no Republicans signed on to either letter, and, secondly, that the withdrawal of the last US troops from Afghanistan last month seems, counter-intuitively, to have slowed progress towards the closure of Guantánamo, rather than hastening its demise, as would be logical.

As has so often been the case, scaremongering has returned to haunt Guantánamo — this time following the US withdrawal from Guantánamo, on the spurious basis that some of the Taliban’s leaders were held at the prison, and that this somehow reflects on the dangerousness of those still held, even though no Taliban members are still at Guantánamo, and the release of Taliban prisoners was undertaken either as part of the peace process in Afghanistan, or through US failures of intelligence.

Sadly, however, even before the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Biden administration had been moving far too slowly on Guantánamo. President Biden inherited 40 prisoners from Donald Trump, but although six of these men had been approved for release by high-level government review processes — and five more were approved for release in May and June — only one of these men has been freed, and widespread calls for Biden and Antony Blinken, the Secretary of State, to revive the Office of the Special Envoy for Guantánamo Closure, created by President Obama but shut down by Trump, to deal with resettlement issues, and to move towards Guantánamo’s closure, have not yet led to an Envoy being appointed.

The administration needs to urgently revive the role of the Envoy, and also to respond to calls not just for the ten men approved for release to be freed, but also for the 17 other men held indefinitely without charge or trial as “forever prisoners” to also be freed, if they are not going to be charged with crimes.

Chris also helpfully promoted my quarterly fundraiser to support my Guantánamo work, and my ongoing photo-journalism project ‘The State of London,’ which led, via a discussion of independent and corporate media, to a conversation about freedom of speech, before we ended our interview by returning to Afghanistan and Guantánamo to discuss my article, How the Disaster of Guantánamo Foretold US Defeat in Afghanistan, in which I explained, primarily via an analysis of Guantánamo and Bagram, the main US prison in Afghanistan, how the US, from the beginning of its occupation, lost the battle for “hearts and minds” by imprisoning Afghans without rights, and often on the basis of spectacularly inept intelligence, including many men who had actually been working with US forces.

There was more in the show than I’ve covered above, and I hope you have time to listen to it, and will share it if you find it useful.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.