Andy Worthington's Blog, page 10

After Years in Secret Prisons, UAE Threatens Unsafe Repatriations to Yemen for Former Guantánamo Prisoners

Photos of 16 of the 18 Yemenis sent from Guantánamo to Yemen between 2015 and 2017, who were imprisoned instead of, as promised, being given new lives, and who are now being threatened with being sent back to Yemen, despite the dangers involved. The photos are taken from the classified military files from Guantánamo that were released by Wikileaks in 2011, and on which I worked as a media partner.


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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.

Depressing but important news about life after Guantánamo was published by the Associated Press on Wednesday, focusing on the appalling treatment that former Guantánamo prisoners have received since being resettled in the United Arab Emirates between November 2015 and January 2017, when President Obama left office; specifically, 18 Yemenis (out of 23 men in total sent to the UAE), who have now been told that the UAE is preparing to repatriate them, even though their lives may well be at risk in Yemen.

As reporter Maggie Michael described it, the prisoners “were promised they were being sent to a Muslim country for rehabilitation that would help integrate them into society, opening the way to jobs, money, and marriage, according to their lawyers and families. It was a lie.”

To anyone paying close attention, this wasn’t news. The Washington Post reported in May 2018 that former prisoners sent to the UAE after being unanimously approved for release by high-level US government review processes remain imprisoned, despite promises that their new host country would help them rebuild their lives. Missy Ryan’s story was entitled, “After over a decade at Guantanamo, these men were supposed to go free. Instead, they’re locked in a secretive center in the UAE.”

I wrote about the story shortly after its publication, as “Guantánamo Scandal: The Released Prisoners Languishing in Secretive Detention in the UAE,” but never followed up on it publicly, because the consensus amongst lawyers and NGOs seemed to be that the UAE would respond very badly to media criticism, and that it would be much better to try and persuade them to honor their promises to help the former prisoners rather than punishing them via international bodies like the United Nations.

With the latest news, however, it seems that everyone’s patience has run out. The UN started the ball rolling in July, sending a letter to the Emirati authorities decrying the treatment of  20 of the men transferred to the UAE from Guantánamo: “eighteen Yemeni detainees, who remain in detention without charge and suffer from ill-treatment”; Ravil Mingazov, “who continues to be detained in the UAE without charge, subjected to torture and ill-treatment, and threatened with repatriation to his native Russia, where he risks torture and abuse”; and Haji Hamidullah, “who was held in a secret location subjected to torture and ill-treatment, until he was forcibly repatriated to his native Afghanistan, on 23 December 2019, where he died suffering from health issues resulting from torture and ill-treatment in both Guantánamo and the UAE detention facilities.”

The Rapporteurs who wrote the letter noted, of the Yemenis, that they “have reportedly been punished by guards when they were deemed to be unpleasant. Punishments include deprivation of adequate food, exercise, and medical treatment for detainees suffering from diabetes and heart disease. One detainee stated that he has been tortured by guards and held in solitary confinement. As for family visits, detainees were brought to a third location to meet with their families, blindfolded and with their hands and feet tied together. Detainees have also been punished in retribution of visits, with one detainee saying that he is treated badly and moved to a dark room before each visit. Recently, at least one detainee began a hunger strike. This detainee is described as being close to death.”

There is much more in the Rapporteurs’ letter concerning the treatment of Ravil Mingazov and Haji Hamidullah, and last week they followed up on news of the proposal to repatriate the Yemenis by calling on the UAE to halt their plans, stating that “their forced return put their lives at risk and violated international human rights and humanitarian law.”

The Rapporteurs also stated, “We are seriously concerned about the secrecy surrounding the terms and mode of implementation of this resettlement programme agreed between the UAE and the United States,” adding, “It is worrying that instead of undergoing a rehabilitation programme, or otherwise be[ing] released … these men have been subjected to continuous arbitrary detention at an undisclosed location. Now they are at risk of being forcibly repatriated to their native Yemen amid an ongoing armed conflict and a profound humanitarian crisis.”

They also noted that the Yemenis “were allegedly forced to sign documents consenting to their repatriation, or otherwise remain indefinitely in Emirati detention,” and explained, “This repatriation process is happening without any form of judicial guarantees, or individual examination and assessment of risks, which blatantly violates the absolute prohibition of non-refoulement under international human rights and humanitarian law.”

Worse than Guantánamo

For the Associated Press Maggie Michael provided further details from the prisoners’ lawyers and families, noting how, “In short, sporadic phone calls from undisclosed locations in the UAE — including a notorious prison rife with torture — several whispered to their families that as bad as life in Guantánamo was, they wish they could return there.” She added that, “When one complained of ‘pressures’ three years ago, the call was cut off” and “he has not been heard from since.” She also noted how when Mingazov “staged a hunger strike, he was dumped in solitary confinement and roughed up.”

The AP also noted that a “senior Yemeni government official confirmed the plans, pending security arrangements,” and “a State Department official indicated the US government was aware that it was happening,” with both officials speaking ”on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press.” The UAE, meanwhile, “didn’t respond to AP questions.”

The fears about what will await these men if they are returned to Yemen are very real. As the AP noted, “Torture and arbitrary detention are widespread in networks of secret and formal prisons run by various factions controlling different parts of the country.” As Hussein, the brother of one of the Yemenis (identified as Bir to protect his identity), said, “Here the legitimate government itself is not safe. Who will be in charge of them?”

The family of a second Yemeni, identified as Salem, said, “We fear they will be gunned down or rounded up as soon as they put a foot in Yemen.” Another fear, as the AP noted, is that they will be “prime recruits for terrorists in Yemen,” like former prisoner Ibrahim al-Qosi, freed as a result of plea deal, who surfaced in al-Qaida publicity in Yemen two years later.

As the AP also explained, the ongoing imprisonment of these men “violates promises made by US officials” when they were first sent to the UAE, and “underscores flaws in the transfer program,” as well as “the failure of President Donald Trump’s administration to ensure their humane treatment,” which came about because of Trump’s complete lack of interest in monitoring the status of former prisoners (even for reasons of US national security). As the AP explained, he “dismantled an entire office” — the Office of the Envoy for Guantánamo Closure — that was “tasked with closing the Guantánamo facility, overseeing transfers, and following up on the resettled detainees.”

Although the “[t]erms of the agreements the US struck with the UAE and dozens of other countries that received Guantánamo detainees weren’t made public,” Ian Moss, a former chief of staff for the State Department’s Guantánamo envoy, told the AP, “We wanted these individuals after they were released to have a fresh start in life. It wasn’t part of the deal that they be incarcerated. That was never part of the deal.”

Moss “blamed the current administration for lack of engagement,” as the AP described it, saying, “the Emiratis knew that the Trump administration didn’t care about what they did with these people or how they treated them. This is disgraceful.”

Lee Wolosky, the envoy for Guantánamo closure from 2015 to 2017, when the Yemenis were transferred to the UAE, confirmed Moss’s account. “I can categorically deny that there was a plan to keep the men in detention following their transfer from US custody,” he stated by email.

Discussing the situation in the UAE, Katie Taylor, the coordinator of the legal NGO Reprieve’s “Life After Guantánamo” project, told the AP that she had documented “the lives of nearly 60 former detainees in 25 countries,” but explained that “the situation facing the men resettled in the UAE is among the worst and most troubling.”

Taylor’s comments are important, because they help to provide a wider context to the plight of the men in the UAE, which I have written about before — how everyone released from Guantánamo, but especially those resettled in third countries, are vulnerable to ill-treatment by their hosts, not just because of Donald Trump’s indifference to them, but because there is no internationally agreed code of conduct governing former Guantánamo prisoners, who remain, fundamentally, the “enemy combatants” without rights that the Bush administration first declared them to be when they initially ended up in US custody.

One day this serious omission needs to be addressed, but for now the gravity of Katie Taylor’s comments can be gleaned from recalling the circumstances other former prisoners have found themselves in — in particular, the two Libyans resettled in Senegal, who were then sent back to Libya (one willingly, the other unwillingly), where they subsequently disappeared into the hands of unfriendly militia. The only good news about this particular story is that apparently both men are still alive, and one of them, at least, is now a free man, but it — and the UAE story — underscore how vulnerable former Guantánamo prisoners remain to abuse by their host governments or their home governments.

For an earlier article on this topic, see Guantánamo’s Lost Diaspora: How Donald Trump’s Closure of the Office Monitoring Ex-Prisoners is Bad for Them – and US Security.

Examples of ill-treatment in the UAE

Of the 17 or 18 Yemenis in the UAE — “unconfirmed reports” suggested to the AP that “one Yemeni left prison because of medical complications” — one is represented by lawyer Patricia Bronte, who confirmed that “State Department officials had told her and the detainees that they would be held from six to 12 months in a rehabilitation facility, and then they would be allowed to reunite with their families in the UAE.” However, as she explained, “From early on, the assurances I have been given weren’t lived up to.”

She said that she had had “no contact with her client since his arrival in the UAE in 2016,” and family members of other prisoners told the AP that “their communication with their loved ones has been infrequent, and troubling.”

One example is Abdo, who is 41 years old, and whose name, like those of all the Yemenis mentioned, has been “withheld for fear that they might face retribution.” He told his brother Ahmed that “he spent 70 days in solitary confinement — blindfolded, handcuffed, and with hands and feet chained to the ground — upon his arrival.” As Ahmed described it, “There was no rehabilitation or ‘de-radicalization sessions.’” Instead, Abdo and other prisoners were “moved to a ‘filthy and dark prison’ for 16 months.”

Ahmed said that his brother had told him, “It was just terrible there,” and also explained that he was then “moved to al-Razin prison, located nearly 200 kilometers (125 miles) from Dubai, where human rights groups have documented abuses and torture. In the spring of 2019, Abdo was brought back to the ‘filthy’ prison, where he remains.”

According to Ahmed, Abdo said, “It’s not what I thought. I wish I return to Guantánamo … it’s 1,000 times worse here.” Then, as the AP described it, “the phone call was cut off.”

Another prisoner, Bir, briefly mentioned above, is a 41-year-old nurse, who was identified in 2015 in his Periodic Review Board (the parole-type process that led to his release) as “a ‘low-level Yemeni militant’ who was arrested in Pakistani raids in Sept[ember] 2002 and transferred to Guantánamo.” His brother, Hussein, told the AP that, “despite earlier promises of a new life, his brother ended up in ‘mysterious conditions. We know nothing.’”

Hussein added, “He continues to live behind bars with other Yemeni detainees, they are facing the most brutal injustice in the history.” He explained that, in phone calls which are allowed every 10 days, “He says nothing except for, ‘How are you?’ He can’t speak. They are banned.”

The AP article also mentioned Ravil Mingazov, noting that he “has never physically met his 19-year-old son Yusuf, who lives in London,” but “they have talked.” Yusuf said that “his father complained that he had been humiliated by his captors and had been deprived of food and medicine.” Mingazov’s mother, Zoria Valiullina, said her son had said that he “wanted to return to Guantánamo,” and had told her, “It’s better there.”

The family of another Yemeni, Abdel-Rab, 44, who had “worked as a house painter in Yemen” before his ill-fated trip to Afghanistan in 2000, which led, in turn, to Guantánamo, said that, after his transfer to the UAE, “he disappeared three years ago after two phone calls during which he complained about conditions, and nervously said, ‘I am under pressure … Guantánamo was much better. One billion times.’”

As the AP explained, after he said this, “The call was cut off,” and “he never called again.” His family members said they “have no clue if he is alive.” In June, disturbingly, “a man pretending to be Abdel-Rab called the family,” but as his brother said, “It wasn’t his voice. He wasn’t the same.”

The AP article also discussed Hamidullah, whose former attorney stated that “his client was a ‘model detainee,’ a ‘peaceful man’ who had never been a member of the Taliban,” and, in fact, had been “imprisoned by the Taliban in the late 1990s.”

Hamidullah “lived to tell about the conditions of his imprisonment in the UAE, though only barely.” After three and a half years in UAE prisons, he was returned to Afghanistan last December, but died in May this year, “having enjoyed just four months of freedom after nearly 20 years in detention,” as the AP explained, adding that his family “believes that the conditions he endured in UAE prisons contributed to his death.”

His son Ahmed spoke to the AP, and “recalled the first time he visited his father” in the UAE, describing, in faltering English, how he was “brought with chains in hands and feet, covered eyes with black cloth, and was also tighten with chains in the seat.”

After his return to Afghanistan, Hamidullah had “shared more details of his imprisonment” in the UAE with his son, telling him that the guards “forced him to strip naked every time he went to the bathroom.” The son called it “mental torture.”

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, 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), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from eight years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

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.

Asadullah Haroon Gul: The Hunger Striking Afghan Forgotten at Guantánamo

Sehar Bibi, the mother of Guantánamo prisoner Asadullah Haroon Gul, at the refugee camp in Peshawar where she lives with her son’s wife and daughter, and other family members. Gul has been held at Guantánamo without charge or trial since 2007. (Photo: AFP/Abdul Majeed).


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 of the Trump administration. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

Regular readers will recall the sad story of Asadullah Haroon Gul, one of the last two Afghans amongst the 40 men still held in the prison at Guantánamo Bay. In correspondence from Guantánamo this year, Gul has written about the coronavirus, about being a “no value detainee”, and about the murder by police of George Floyd and the resurgent Black Lives Matter movement.

As seems abundantly clear — to everyone except his captors — Gul, one of the last prisoners to arrive at Guantánamo, in June 2007, is a fundamentally insignificant prisoner whose ongoing imprisonment makes no sense. The US has quite nebulously alleged that he was involved with Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin (HIG), led by the warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who had supported Al-Qaeda at the time of the US-led invasion. However, as I explained in July, “Gul very clearly had no meaningful connection with HIG, his involvement extending only to having lived, with his wife and family, in a refugee camp that HIG ran, but, as in so many cases of mistaken identity at Guantánamo, the US authorities didn’t care.”

To add insult to injury, Hekmatyar’s status has now changed. He reached a peace agreement with the Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, and at the start of this year a former Guantánamo prisoner with HIG associations, Hamidullah, was repatriated from the United Arab Emirates, where he had been sent with other Afghans in 2016, because of this agreement, surely undermining any efforts by the US to claim that Gul should still be held.

Furthermore, as I explained in April, he also spent the first nine years of his imprisonment without any representation whatsoever “until he finally secured an attorney, Shelby Sullivan Bennis of Reprieve, who described him as a ‘bright-eyed, chatty young man,’ after meeting him to try and help him prepare for his Periodic Review Board, a parole-type system set up under President Obama, which has, unfortunately, repeatedly refused to recommend his release, even though Sullivan Bennis told the board that, ‘Having completed a two-year university program in economics and mastered five different languages, Haroon is more able than most to begin a productive and peaceful life upon release. He wants nothing more than to return to his wife and daughter, whom he feels immensely guilty for having left to fend for themselves.’”

In July, Gul notified the world, via an article published on the Common Dreams website, that he was on a hunger strike, and weighed just 115 pounds. “I am an expert hunger striker now,” he wrote. “I have been going for almost nine weeks and have lost thirty pounds. I now weigh now 115 pounds — I checked this morning.”

He added, “The first three days were hard but after that, my stomach shrank and I was no longer hungry. I drink water because otherwise I would soon die, but I am not feeling thirsty. I am feeling very weak, though.”

As he also explained, “The new Senior Medical Officer is a decent guy. He comes by to check on me, and says he is sympathetic. He asks if I am going to harm myself or anyone else. I say no, it is just a peaceful protest. ‘Give me freedom or give me death.’ This principle is very important to me. I don’t want to just sit patiently in my cell until I die here. I do not want to die here at all, but I have to do something. I thought of a phrase I learned in English: ‘It’s a dog eat dog world.’ For now, I am the cannibal, because my body is eating itself. It has nowhere else to go for nutrition.”

As he also explained, “I have nightmares. They repeat and repeat. I am in a very dirty area. I try to avoid stepping, bare foot, in feces, though it turns out to be a land mine. Sometimes there are snakes, and I must find a path through them. I wake up suddenly, feeling cold, with my heart beating very fast. Maybe they will start force feeding me if I go under 110 lbs. They did it to me in 2013. They force you to take liquid nutrient. The nicer guards allow you to drink it in front of them but normally they put a 110 centimeter pipe up your nose. It is very painful. As it goes in you feel you must throw up and become desperate to take it out. It is more painful for me than when I was thrown out of the bus and my bones were broken. And this is every day. It can take an hour and a half but they cheat and do it quicker, which is actually more painful. All this time you are sitting in the Torture Chair, strapped down tightly.”

He also stated, “I am prepared to die, if it comes to it. I look ahead, and all I see is suffering. But what is the point of good health in life, if I cannot be home? My daughter was three months old when I last saw her. She is now thirteen, growing up without a father in a refugee camp where school has been closed for five months now because of the virus. If I was there I could help to teach her. I could even teach her the English I have learned here in Guantánamo. I am not hunger striking to make the military administration unhappy. After thirteen years detained without trial, it is the only form of protest left to me — the only way to assert my humanity. Guantánamo strips us of every human right but the right to life. Perhaps as my life ebbs away, the U.S. will at least be confronted with the pointless cruelty of keeping me here.”

Last week, Gul’s plight was once more publicized, with the AFP news agency reporting from Shamshatu refugee camp near Pakistan’s northwestern city of Peshawar, where his mother, Sehar Bibi, said, “No one is bothered about my son still being in Guantánamo Bay. All the other prisoners have been released but he is still languishing there. I have no more patience. I have lost my mind.”

As the family described it, Gul “was working as a honey trader travelling between Peshawar and eastern Afghanistan’s Jalalabad when he was arrested in 2006 in what his family claims was likely a trap to claim a cash reward for fighters.”

As AFP noted, the US government’s “push to end its long military entanglement in Afghanistan has made his imprisonment all the harder for his family to accept.” As part of negotiations between the US and the Taliban in Doha, “the US pressured the Afghan authorities to release thousands of hardened fighters, including many behind deadly attacks on foreigners.” And yet, as was explained by Clive Stafford Smith, the founder of the legal NGO Reprieve, who represents Gul, although the US government “insisted that the Afghans should release 5,000 Taliban,” they “have not released the one no-value Afghan from Guantánamo.”

Stafford Smith added, “The thing he finds psychologically most difficult is that he’s a nobody and he’s randomly still there.”

Addressing the US’s reasons for continuing to hold Gul, Kate Clark, the co-director of the Afghanistan Analysts Network, said that it was clear that he “was no significant terrorist figure.” She explained that the allegations against him, which were “initially kept secret until revealed by WikiLeaks” in 2011, “relied on a lot of hearsay.” She added, “Whatever you think about Guantánamo, he was not important enough to be there … if he was anything, he was a bit player.”

With just two weeks to go until the US Presidential Election, everyone who opposes the continued existence of Guantánamo must be fervently hoping that Donald Trump will no longer be president so that the release of insignificant prisoners — like Asadullah Haroon Gul — can resume.

In the nearly four years of his horrendous presidency, Trump has effectively sealed Guantánamo shut, refusing to even contemplate assessing whether or not it is acceptable that, of the 40 men still held, only nine are facing, or have faced trials, with the 31 others apparently consigned to endless imprisonment without charge or trial, even though five of them were unanimously approved for release by high-level US government review processes under President Obama, and the only justification for the imprisonment of the 26 others is a review process set up under Obama, the Periodic Review Boards, that has become so discredited under Trump that the prisoners are boycotting it.

“I do a lot of things to cooperate with the Americans, but still they are not happy,” Gul said in a statement provided by Stafford Smith, with AFP noting that, “In video chats facilitated by the Red Cross, Haroon’s family has noticed changes in his physical appearance and speaking habits,” following his most recent hunger strike.

“I was 175 pounds and now I am down to 110 pounds,” he said in the statement. “At least 65 pounds of me has escaped from Guantánamo.”

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, 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), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from eight years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

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.

Video: The War on Journalism – The Case of Julian Assange

The poster for ‘The War on Journalism: The Case of Julian Assange’, directed by Juan Passarelli, and released in August 2020, and a screenshot of Andy Worthington, one of the WikiLeaks experts interviewed for the film.


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 of the Trump administration. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

In a prison cell in HMP Belmarsh, in south east London, which is supposedly reserved for the most violent convicted criminals in the UK, Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks and a non-violent individual who has not been convicted of a crime, awaits a ruling regarding his proposed extradition to the United States, to face disgracefully inappropriate espionage charges related to his work as a publisher of classified US documents that were leaked by US soldier Chelsea Manning.

The first stage of hearings regarding Julian’s extradition took place in February, and were supposed to continue in May, but were derailed by the arrival of Covid-19. In February, I had submitted as evidence a statement in support of Julian, based on having worked with him as a media partner on the release of classified military files from Guantánamo in 2011. I expected to be questioned about my evidence in May, but, in the end, it wasn’t until September that the hearings resumed.

To coincide with the resumption of the hearings, a 38-minute film was released, “The War on Journalism: The Case of Julian Assange,” directed by filmmaker Juan Passarelli, for which I was interviewed, in the esteemed company of of John Pilger, UN torture rapporteur Nils Melzer, lawyers Jennifer Robinson and Renata Avila, Julian’s wife Stella Moris, journalists Barton Gellman, Margaret Sullivan, Iain Overton, Max Blumenthal and Matt Kennard, WikiLeaks’ editor in chief Kristin Hrafnsson, and Conservative MP David Davies.

The film is available below, via PeerTube, and provides a powerful summary of what WikiLeaks did, how and why the US, with the support of the UK, has responded so aggressively, and why that is both vindictive against Julian personally, but also a profound threat to press freedoms not just in the US, but worldwide.

To pick out a few highlights from the film, it includes a reflection on how President Obama — unlike Donald Trump — concluded that there was “no way to prosecute Julian Assange without endangering press freedom,” John Pilger discussing how the US’s intention is simply to “put Julian in a black hole and throw away the key,” and Nils Melzer talking about the long years to which Julian has been subjected to psychological torture.

Also significant is the section on the CIA co-opting a surveillance company to spy on Julian, via devices installed inside the embassy, in which it was revealed that meetings with his lawyers were spied on, an intrusion of attorney-client privilege that, on its own, as Matt Kennard explained, should have led to his extradition case being thrown out of court by the judge.

The month of hearings that took place at the Old Bailey has now passed, of course, and although it was a process that looked like it was legitimate — there was a judge, and lawyers on both sides, and evidence was submitted by numerous expert witnesses — it appeared to have been nothing more than a box-ticking exercise, an illusion intended to show that the process of extradition is subject to serious scrutiny, even though the conclusion has already been decided.

My own small involvement in the hearings was instructive. First of all — despite me travelling to the court to be a witness — the prosecution didn’t want to accept my statement, quibbling about aspects of it involving references to torture. There was then, as with other witness statements, protracted exchanges between the defence and the prosecution about changes demanded by the prosecution to enable statements to be read into the evidence without the witnesses being present. This was what happened with my evidence (my first statement, and a second submitted during the hearings), and, while I was spared a probably brutal encounter with prosecutor James Lewis, I didn’t get to see Julian, and my evidence — only a gist of which was was read into the evidence — was, as a result, unfairly watered down.

The ruling is due on January 4, 2021, and with the spotlight no longer on Julian — to the extent to which the mainstream media paid attention at all during the hearings — it concerns me that people will forget him. I’m stuck with one abiding memory of my efforts to present evidence in his case. On the first day that I was supposed to give evidence but didn’t get to do so (there was also a second occasion), I found myself thinking intensely about Julian’s long confinement — first in the Ecuadorian Embassy, for nearly seven years, and, for the last year and a half, in Belmarsh — as I cycled through London to the Old Bailey, as it was one of those luminous days on the cusp of summer and autumn, and the air was warm and calm. The freedom I felt, in a City whose streets were almost empty because of Covid, was intoxicating, and I felt acutely the extent to which Julian has been denied this freedom for so many years — and, if the US government has its way, will be entombed for the rest of his life.

In conclusion, I’m posting below some excerpts from an interview with John Pilger conducted by Arena, in Australia, just after the hearings ended, in which, responding to the question, “can you describe the prevailing atmosphere in the court?”, John said:

The prevailing atmosphere has been shocking. I say that without hesitation; I have sat in many courts and seldom known such a corruption of due process; this is due revenge. Putting aside the ritual associated with ‘British justice’, at times it has been evocative of a Stalinist show trial. One difference is that in the show trials, the defendant stood in the court proper. In the Assange trial, the defendant was caged behind thick glass, and had to crawl on his knees to a slit in the glass, overseen by his guard, to make contact with his lawyers. His message, whispered barely audibly through face masks, was then passed by post-it the length of the court to where his barristers were arguing the case against his extradition to an American hellhole.

Consider this daily routine of Julian Assange, an Australian on trial for truth-telling journalism. He was woken at five o’clock in his cell at Belmarsh prison in the bleak southern sprawl of London. The first time I saw Julian in Belmarsh, having passed through half an hour of ‘security’ checks, including a dog’s snout in my rear, I found a painfully thin figure sitting alone wearing a yellow armband. He had lost more than 10 kilos in a matter of months; his arms had no muscle. His first words were: ‘I think I am losing my mind’.

I tried to assure him he wasn’t. His resilience and courage are formidable, but there is a limit. That was more than a year ago. In the past three weeks, in the pre-dawn, he was strip-searched, shackled, and prepared for transport to the Central Criminal Court, the Old Bailey, in a truck that his partner, Stella Moris, described as an upended coffin. It  had one small window; he had to stand precariously to look out. The truck and its guards were operated by Serco, one of many politically connected companies that run much of Boris Johnson’s Britain.

The journey to the Old Bailey took at least an hour and a half. That’s a minimum of three hours being jolted through snail-like traffic every day. He was led into his narrow cage at the back of the court, then look up, blinking, trying to make out faces in the public gallery through the reflection of the glass. He saw the courtly figure of his dad, John Shipton, and me, and our fists went up. Through the glass, he reached out to touch fingers with Stella, who is a lawyer and seated in the body of the court.

We were here for the ultimate [act] of what the philosopher Guy Debord called The Society of the Spectacle: a man fighting for his life. Yet his crime is to have performed an epic public service: revealing that which we have a right to know: the lies of our governments and the crimes they commit in our name. His creation of WikiLeaks and its failsafe protection of sources revolutionised journalism, restoring it to the vision of its idealists. Edmund Burke’s notion of free journalism as a fourth estate is now a fifth estate that shines a light on those who diminish the very meaning of democracy with their criminal secrecy. That’s why his punishment is so extreme.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, 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), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from eight years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

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.

Guantánamo Voices: An Amazing Comic Book Version of the Guantánamo Story

The front cover of “Guantánamo Voices: True Accounts from the World’s Most Infamous Prison,” and a page from the chapter based on an interview with attorney Shelby Sullivan-Bennis, featuring the campaign to secure the release of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, drawn by Kasia Babis, a Polish cartoonist and political activist.


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 of the Trump administration. 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.

I have nothing but praise for “Guantánamo Voices: True Accounts from the World’s Most Infamous Prison,” a brand-new book, just published by Abrams, which was written by Portland-based multi-media journalist Sarah Mirk, and illustrated by a number of talented graphic artists.

I should say upfront that I was the fact checker for the book, having been in contact with Sarah for many years. In 2018, I appeared, in comic book form, illustrated by the Australian artist Jess Parker, in Guantánamo Bay is Still Open. Still. STILL!, a story in the comics anthology magazine The Nib, for which Sarah is an editor, based on an interview she had conducted with me in October 2017.

Previously, I had met Sarah in London in January 2009, when she came to the UK with former Guantánamo guard Chris Arendt for an extraordinary tour of the UK, also featuring former prisoner and British citizen Moazzam Begg (released in 2005) and other ex-prisoners, called “Two Sides, One Story,” which was organized by the advocacy group Cageprisoners (now CAGE).

In telling “true accounts” from Guantánamo, Sarah visited the prison on a media tour in 2019, and interviewed nine individuals who know it well: Moazzam Begg and another former prisoner, Mansoor Adayfi, a Yemeni resettled in Serbia in 2016, who has established himself as a talented writer; three lawyers (our co-founder Tom Wilner, who represented the prisoners in their Supreme Court cases in 2004 and 2008, Alka Pradhan, who is part of the defense team for Ammar al-Baluchi, one of five men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks, and Shelby Sullivan-Bennis, who represents a number of the men still held), as well as Katie Taylor of Reprieve, who heads up the legal NGO’s “Life After Guantánamo” project, Col. Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor of the military commissions, who resigned when asked to defend the use of torture, Mark Fallon, the former director of the Criminal Investigative Task Force, which was responsible for interrogations at Guantánamo, who has since become an implacable critic of the prison, and Navy lawyer and whistleblower Matthew Diaz.

All of them provide poignant and powerful accounts of their experiences, which are brought vividly to life by the artists. Particularly noteworthy is the book’s rich “sunset tones” color palette, permeating the entire project and giving it a unique feel, which was envisioned by Sarah, and brought to life by the artist Kasimir Lee.

In a press release to accompany the book’s release, Sarah spoke of how meeting Chris Arendt brought Guantánamo to life for her. Before this, she said that it “didn’t feel like a real place, full of real people,” adding, “That obscurity is by design. As I learned more about Guantánamo, I realized that the government didn’t want us to understand who was imprisoned there or to think of them as actual people. In the stories told by high-ranking government officials, the detainees were dehumanized terrorists — people so violent and savage in their anti-American hatred that they would chew through the fuel lines of an airplane, given the chance. They were so vicious that they couldn’t possibly be put on trial in regular American courts. In the language of the U.S. government, Guantánamo isn’t a prison, and the people there aren’t prisoners — they’re ‘detainees’ in a safe, humane, and legal ‘detention facility’ that has held hundreds of people from around the world without trial for 18 years.”

As Sarah also explained, “The goal of ‘Guantánamo Voices’ is to challenge these false narratives and change the way Americans understand Guantánamo. Sharing the experiences of people who have worked at the prison or been held there reveals the lies that the U.S. government used to create and maintain the prison in the years after 9/11. These myths are rooted in racism, xenophobia, and Islamophobia. It’s hard to face what we did and continue to do, as a country, at Guantánamo. But understanding this reality is the only way to finally, one day, seek justice and accountability.”

Sarah also explained why the graphic medium is so powerful for telling the story of Guantánamo. As she stated, “Comics have the unique power to make the invisible visible. Visual representations of Guantánamo are tightly controlled and censored because the government subjectively approves all photographs of the pitons. Journalists are not allowed to speak with current prisoners, and former prisoners are not allowed to come to the United States, limiting the access of news stories that would focus on their experiences and perspectives. Comics are a medium that can get around this censorship.”

I hope you’ll be interested in buying “Guantánamo Voices.” As Sarah explains on her website, it’s available in the US from Barnes and Noble, Powells, Indiebound and Amazon. For international orders, you can get it from the Book Depository, Indigo (Canada), Waterstones (UK), and Booktopia (Australia), and you can also buy copies directly from Sarah herself.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, 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), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from eight years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

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 Talk to Scott Horton About the Injustice of Julian Assange’s Extradition Case and the Importance of the Leaked Guantánamo Files

A supporter of Julian Assange outside the Old Bailey in London on October 1, 2020, the last day of his extradition hearing. The balloons were part of an initiative celebrating the 14th anniversary of the founding of WikiLeaks, on October 4.


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 of the Trump administration. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

Last week, during the fourth and last week of hearings regarding the proposed extradition to the US of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, two statements I made in his defence (via the tireless Gareth Pierce and her colleagues) were read into the evidence at the Old Bailey in London. The two statements were subsequently made available by Antiwar.com — the first, from February, is here, and the second, made last week, is here. A decision on the extradition case is expected to be delivered by Judge Vanessa Baraitser on January 4, 2021.

It took a certain amount of to-ing and fro-ing in court to get my statements accepted, and for some time efforts were made to get me to testify in person, and to be cross-examined by the prosecutor, but — perhaps mercifully — the latter course of action didn’t eventually transpire, as the prosecutor, James Lewis, had, throughout the hearings, maintained “very systematic techniques of denigrating and browbeating” expert witnesses, according to the human rights activist (and former Ambassador) Craig Murray, who attended the hearings for the whole month.

My statements related to my work with WikiLeaks as a media partner on the release of classified military files from Guantánamo in 2011, in which I noted how much of the supposed evidence used to justify imprisonment at Guantanamo was, as I described it in my first statement, information extracted from “the Guantánamo prisoners’ fellow prisoners who had been subjected to torture or other forms of coercion either in Guantánamo or in secret prisons run by the CIA”, or information which was equally “unreliable because fellow prisoners had provided false statements to secure better treatment in Guantánamo.”

This remains crucial information about the extent to which the supposed evidence iused to justify the Guantánamo prisoners’ ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial is in fact profoundly unreliable, and I am very pleased that it was entered into the evidence, although I wish more people knew about it, as it remains a largely unknown truth to a majority of Americans, despite the release of the files being, as I also described it in my statement, “the anatomy of a crime of colossal proportions perpetrated by the US government on the majority of the 779 prisoners held in Guantánamo.”

In my statements I also noted that WikiLeaks and all the media partners undertook publication in as responsible a manner as possible, refuting one of the prosecution’s key claims — that the release of the files leaked to WikiLeaks by Chelsea Manning had endangered lives.

Few mainstream media outlets gave the hearings the attention they deserved, so I am grateful to the independent journalists and commentators — like Craig Murray, and Kevin Gosztola of Shadowproof, to name just two — who paid attention for the whole month, and made available detailed information about what took place.

To Craig Murray, in particular, I am grateful that, after both myself and Patrick Cockburn had our evidence read out, he wrote, “The rich and detailed evidence of Patrick Cockburn on Iraq and of Andy Worthington on Afghanistan [and Guantánamo] was, in each case, well worthy of a full day of exposition. I should love at least to have seen both of them in the witness box explaining what to them were the salient points, and adding their personal insights. Instead we got perhaps a sixth of their words read rapidly into the court record. There was much more.”

Murray also complained about how “some of the evidence is being edited to remove elements which the US government wish to challenge, and then entered into the court record as uncontested, with just a ‘gist’ read out in court. The witness then does not appear in person. This reduces the process from one of evidence testing in public view to something very different” — and obviously inferior.

Shortly after my statement was entered into evidence, the indefatigable Scott Horton asked me for a half-hour interview, which I was delighted to undertake, as Scott and I have been talking on and off for 13 years now, and it is always a pleasure to talk to him. The show is here, and the MP3 is also available here.

I began by discussing the broken extradition process, and how it is being used for political purposes in Julian Assange’s case, in explicit defiance of the rules preventing extradition for political purposes, and I also noted how the prosecution’s efforts to allege that WikiLeaks’ actions caused harm had already been discredited during Chelsea Manning’s trial.

I also spoke at length about the significance of the Guantánamo files — the Detainee Assessment Briefs (DABs) on 765 of the 779 prisoners held by the military at Guantánamo since the prison opened on January 11, 2002. As I explained, the history of the prison is such that those seeking to shine light on its operations and the men — and boys — held there have, from the very beginning, had to “drag out secrets that the US government wanted to keep hidden,” while lawyers have had to fight to secure any rights whatsoever for the prisoners.

This led to the unusual position, in 2004, of the Supreme Court granting the prisoners habeas corpus rights, even though they were supposedly seized in wartime, because the Court recognized that the Bush administration had set up a system whereby there was absolutely no way that anyone held could seek release, even if, as many of them claimed, they had been seized by mistake.

In talking to Scott, I was able to elaborate on how the release by WikiLeaks of the Guantánamo files provided — for the first time in official US government documents — the names of prisoners who had told lies about their fellow prisoners; in some cases, on a prodigious basis. I was not blaming the prisoners themselves for doing so. Many of them were tortured, or otherwise abused, while others were bribed with the promise of better living conditions, of “luxury items” that must have been hard to resit in a prison with, in general, no luxuries whatsoever.

I explained how significant this information was, to add to information already unearthed by attorneys and investigators, to the documents released by the Pentagon through Freedom of Information legislation in 2006, which provided some of this information,but without any of the sources being named, and to reports by a handful of dedicated journalists.

One particular journalistic investigation I recall, from 2006, involved a military representative assigned to assist a prisoner in his Combatant Status Review Tribunal (a bureaucratic exercise in 2004, designed to rubber-stamp the prisoners’ prior designation as “enemy combatants” without rights) wondering why the man in question so vociferously denied an allegation that he had been seen in Afghanistan at a certain time. Checking the files of other prisoners accused by the same man, he found a pattern of allegations made about all of these men being in Afghanistan when none of them were even in the country at the time. The Guantánamo files put a name to this false informant, and to many others who did the same.

One day, I hope, more people will realize the truth about Guantánamo — that most of the supposed evidence used to justify the prisoners’ ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial is profoundly unreliable, and its extraction, through torture, abuse and bribery, is nothing short of a national scandal.

For now, however, I’m grateful to have had that information entered into the record in Julian Assange’s extradition case, and to have been able to talk to Scott Horton about it, and I hope you have time to listen to the show, and that you’ll share it if you find it useful. There was much more in it that I haven’t discussed above.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, 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), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from eight years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

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.

Mohammed Al-Qahtani: Will Severe Mental Illness Secure His Release from Guantánamo?

Guantánamo prisoner Mohammed al-Qahtani, who is seeking release from the prison because of severe mental health issues that cannot be adequately addressed by Guantánamo staff. The text accompanying the photo describes his current mental state.


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 of the Trump administration. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

For anyone seeking a single story that is emblematic of the horrors of Guantánamo, the story of Mohammed al-Qahtani ought to be instructive.

One of hundreds of prisoners seized in the chaos of Afghanistan after the US-led invasion in October 2001 and sent to Guantánamo after brutal treatment in US prisons in Afghanistan, al-Qahtani finally came to the attention of the US authorities in Guantánamo when it was assessed that he was the same man who had tried and failed to enter the US before the 9/11 attacks, and was presumed to have been intended to be the 20th hijacker.

He was then subjected to a horrible torture program, personally approved by then-defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, which lasted for several months in late 2002, and which, as Murtaza Hussain explained for the Intercept in April 2018, involved him being subjected to “solitary confinement, sleep deprivation, extreme temperature and noise exposure, stress positions, forced nudity, body cavity searches, sexual assault and humiliation, beatings, strangling, threats of rendition, and water-boarding.” On two occasions he was hospitalized with a dangerously low heart rate.

The log of al-Qahtani’s torture is here, and it led to the only time in Guantánamo’s history when a senior government official acknowledged that a prisoner had been tortured. “We tortured Qahtani. His treatment met the legal definition of torture,” Susan Crawford, the convening authority for the military commission trial system at Guantánamo, told Bob Woodward just before George W. Bush left office, explaining why she had refused to refer his case for prosecution.

What no one discussed at the time — although US officials knew — was that al-Qahtani was also mentally ill. As one of his lawyers, Ramzi Kassem, a law professor at City University of New York, said, “The government knew from very early in his detention that this man was manifesting serious psychiatric conditions. As early as 2002 [before his torture], a senior FBI official reported observing ‘behavior consistent with extreme psychological trauma’ in Mr. Qahtani, like ‘talking to nonexistent people, reportedly hearing voices, crouching in a corner of the cell covered with a sheet for hours on end.’”

When al-Qahtani was eventually allowed to meet a lawyer (after the Supreme Court granted the prisoners habeas corpus rights in June 2004), the lawyers discovered that he had “documented mental health issues going back to the age of 8,” as Kassem explained, and that he had been committed to a mental health facility in Saudi Arabia in 2000.

The Intercept’s report coincided with a submission by his lawyers to the District Court in Washington, D.C., in which they sought to get the judge, Rosemary Collyer, to order the government “to ask for his current condition to be formally examined by a mixed medical commission, a group of neutral doctors intended to evaluate prisoners of war for repatriation.”

I wrote about that court submission here, and followed up in March this year, when, prior to her retirement, Judge Collyer ruled on the case, ordering the mixed medical commission to go ahead. Her ruling, as Carol Rosenberg explained for the New York Times, involved her spelling out that “she was granting a request” by al-Qahtani’s lawyers “to compel the United States to apply an Army regulation designed to protect prisoners of war and to create ‘a mixed medical commission’ made up of a medical officer from the US Army and two doctors from a neutral country chosen by the International Committee of the Red Cross and approved by the United States and Saudi Arabia.”

In August, Judge Ellen Huvelle, who was assigned the case after Judge Collyer’s retirement, reiterated the court’s commitment to securing a mixed medical commission for al-Qahtani, after the government appealed to the D.C. Circuit Court, and on September 29 the appeals court dealt another blow to the government, refusing to accept the government’s efforts to delay the ruling.

As the Center for Constitutional Rights explained in a press release, Ramzi Kassem said, “Mohammed al-Qahtani was already gravely mentally ill when he was taken into US custody and tortured. None of this is seriously disputed by the government so we hope that today’s ruling sends a message that it is high time for Mohammed’s ordeal to end and for the larger travesty at Guantánamo to conclude.”

For CCR, Shayana Kadidal said, “Our client has suffered from schizophrenia since his adolescence. The government has never seriously challenged that conclusion, nor could it. Today’s ruling means the military will have to break with its preferred habit of inertia and move this process forward towards a conclusion all parties acknowledge will result in a finding that Mohammed suffers from schizophrenia, and should be sent home to a psychiatric facility in Saudi Arabia.”

AS CCR further explained, “Mr. al-Qahtani suffers from serious mental and physical health conditions, including schizophrenia. Medical records prove that that incurable disorder long predates his imprisonment. In addition, he suffers from major depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) resulting from his systematic torture at Guantanamo beginning in 2002.”

CCR also explained that the motion for a mixed medical commission was filed in 2017, and medical experts have declared that, since it was first filed, al-Qahtani’s condition “has deteriorated to an alarming degree.” As CCR described it, “He suffers from an inability to control his behavior that is triggered by hallucinations, such as “screaming, being angry, throwing things, [and] taking off [his] clothes;” he has withdrawn from interacting with his family; and he has failed to attend meetings with his attorneys and then forgotten that he missed them.”

In the New York Times, Carol Rosenberg noted that Justice Department lawyers greeted the ruling with what seems to me to be a typically scaremongering over-reaction, warning that the first use at Guantánamo of a mixed medical commission “would be disruptive and unleash more requests by other prisoners.”

As Rosenberg described it, “The order has rattled the Defense Department, which considers the Guantánamo detention center its domain and any Red Cross role as advisory. The current prison commander, Rear Adm. Timothy C. Kuehhas, predicted in a court filing in April that the detainees would exploit the creation of a mixed medical commission ‘to undermine their health or injure themselves,’ to seek medical repatriation, and ‘jeopardize the safety of the guard force.’”

She added that “the three-judge panel at the circuit appeals court ruled that the decision to conduct a fact-finding in the context of a habeas corpus petition was not subject to review by the higher court,” with the judges — Karen LeCraft Henderson, Judith W. Rogers and David S. Tatel — adding that, “even if it was, the government did not demonstrate in its filings that conducting a mixed medical commission at Guantánamo ‘might have a ‘serious, perhaps irreparable, consequence.’”

Hopefully, the commission will now go ahead, and other prisoners — also with long-standing mental health issues — might also get to have the state of their mental health assessed, but no one should get too carried away with any enthusiasm that there will be a just resolution to al-Qahtani’s long-standing — and deteriorating — mental state.

Elsewhere in the court system, appointments made by Donald Trump have already started to poison any notion that the long injustice of Guantánamo can reach any kind of resolution in the courts, as a recent decision in the D.C. Circuit Court, led by a Trump appointee, Judge Neomi Rao, showed, when the court made an unprecedented — and alarming —  decision that Guantánamo prisoners are not entitled to invoke the due process protections of the Constitution. And in the Supreme Court, of course, there is now a dangerous right-wing bias, with the Court unlikely to deal fairly with any Guantánamo case that makes its way to them, having worked its way through the lower courts.

And beyond all this, of course, is the fundamental lawlessness of Guantánamo, where the law has barely made itself felt over 18 years, where the legacy of torture still lives on, and where parts of the government remain as determined as ever that tortured prisoners — like Mohamed al-Qahtani, and like other men tortured in CIA “black sites” — should never be freed.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, 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), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from eight years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

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.

A Roadmap for the Closure of Guantánamo

The US flag at Guantánamo Bay (Photo: Brennan Linsley/Reuters).


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 of the Trump administration. 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.

With just five weeks to go until the Presidential Election, we’re pleased to note that, recently, six organizations involved in the long struggle to try and get the prison at Guantánamo Bay closed — the ACLU, Human Rights First, the Center for Victims of Torture, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, and September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows — published detailed proposals for how, if voters remove Donald Trump from the White House in November, a new administration can move towards the closure of the prison.

Following up on our thoughts about this topic, which we published in July, in an article entitled, If Elected in November, Will Joe Biden Close Guantánamo?, we’re cross-posting below the NGOs’ proposals, as published on the Just Security website, which we think deserve to be as widely read as possible.

We are particularly taken with two suggestions put forward by the NGOs: firstly, that “the executive branch can expedite transfers by not opposing detainees’ habeas cases”; and, secondly, that progress towards the prison’s closure can also be effected by “charging a small subset of the remaining detainees in federal courts.”

On the former point, the current law governing the disposition of Guantánamo prisoners — the NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act), “which is likely to remain at least through the end of Fiscal Year 2021” — prevents “transfers to the United States for any purpose, including for medical treatment or criminal prosecution,” bans transfer to certain countries (Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen), and imposes a set of conditions on the defense secretary that must be fulfilled before any release can take place, However, as the NGOs note, there has rarely been “meaningful consideration of what the law permits,” rather than what is prevented.

Looked at this way, because “the foreign transfer certification requirements don’t apply when a detainee’s release or transfer is pursuant to the order of a U.S. court or competent tribunal that has jurisdiction over the case,” the option for the next administration of “not opposing detainees’ habeas cases” could be a very constructive way forward. We have previously written about the necessary revival of the Office for Guantánamo Closure to facilitate transfers — to home countries, and to third countries where that is not viable, or not considered viable — which was set up by President Obama in the State Department, and played a huge role in the release of nearly 200 prisoners under Obama, but has been effectively dissolved under Trump. However, we are impressed that the NGOs have gone one step further, and propose that what is needed is “a directorate, or its equivalent, at the National Security Council.”

On the second point — charging prisoners in federal court — the NGOs explain that “Congress doesn’t need to lift the U.S. transfer ban in order to use the federal judiciary,” because, as Steve Vladeck, professor of law at the University of Texas School of Law, has explained, “under the right circumstances, a Guantánamo detainee can plead guilty via videoconference in an Article III court.” As the NGOs proceed to explain, “Indeed, with the consent of all parties, the executive branch can negotiate and accept pleas, and effectuate sentences, in federal court but remotely from Guantánamo, without running afoul of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure or relevant constitutional protections. Such detainees could then serve out any remaining time on their sentences abroad, subject to terms of their pleas deals and agreements with transfer countries.”

On prisoner releases, the NGOs also call, as we do, for the “immediate transfer of the five detainees long approved for transfer by the Guantánamo Review Task Force or the Periodic Review Boards (PRBs),” and also insist that “[t]he remaining men who have not and will not be charged with a crime should be repatriated or resettled to third countries as soon as possible,” providing detailed information about how a new administration should proceed if further reviews are deemed necessary.

We hope you have time to read the whole article, and that you’ll share it if you find it useful. We need as many people as possible thinking about, and discussing these topics as the election approaches.

Toward a New Approach to National and Human Security: Close Guantánamo and End Indefinite Detention

By Hina Shamsi, Rita Siemion, Scott Roehm, Wells Dixon, Rev. Ron Stief and Colleen Kelly, Just Security, September 11, 2020

On January 11, 2021, the detention facility at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba will enter its 20th year. Forty Muslim men remain captive there, at a cost of $540 million per year; $13 million per detainee. Twelve of them [see our footnote 1] have been charged in the fundamentally broken military commission system, including five men accused of varying degrees of responsibility for the September 11, 2001 attacks whose case has not yet gone to trial and won’t anytime soon.

Many of the 40 men are torture survivors, some of them formerly disappeared at “black sites” before being sent to Guantánamo. All of them have been exposed to the physical and psychological trauma associated with prolonged indefinite detention. They are also aging rapidly and increasingly exhibiting complex medical conditions that staff at Guantánamo are not equipped to manage, such as severe coronary vascular disease, complex post-traumatic stress disorder, and traumatic brain injury. Any condition that requires magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computerized tomography (CT scans), or cardiac catheterization cannot be treated adequately at the detention facility.

Putting an end to the extralegal, abhorrent, and wasteful policies and practices with which Guantánamo will forever be synonymous is a human rights obligation, a moral responsibility, and a national security imperative. That’s why calls for its closure have ranged from President Bush to President Obama, the military to medical professionals, international jurists to a wide range of human rights organizations and local activists, to the late Senator John McCain.

Closing Guantánamo responsibly is not an intractable problem, the checkered history of prior efforts notwithstanding. It can be done, and in relatively short order, if decision-making is swift, decisive, and governed by the following principles:

There is no perfect solution

After nearly two decades of indefinite detention, and multiple attempts at a thoroughly failed military commission process, there is now no perfect solution for finally turning the page on this dark chapter — far from it. Pursuing justice for the September 11, 2001 attacks became immediately complicated when the government subjected the accused to torture and detained them on an island that was meant to be outside the law.

Complications can still be managed, however, and the United States has to account for several sets of obligations, including the Constitution, human rights, and humanitarian law (especially the U.N. Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, or CAT). Ensuring fidelity to professed American ideals will make solutions stronger and more sustainable.

Take full advantage of the options that current law allows

The legal landscape around closing Guantánamo is typically (and understandably) viewed from the perspective of what’s prohibited. Indeed, current law — which is likely to remain at least through the end of Fiscal Year 2021 — restricts detainee transfers to the United States for any purpose, including for medical treatment or criminal prosecution. There’s a similar limitation on transfers to Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. And the Secretary of Defense must certify a set of conditions — some of which have at times proven onerous — prior to other foreign transfers (including congressional notification 30 days in advance).

Rarely is there meaningful consideration of what the law permits. Two such options are especially important: first, the foreign transfer certification requirements don’t apply when a detainee’s release or transfer is pursuant to the order of a U.S. court or competent tribunal that has jurisdiction over the case. So the executive branch can expedite transfers by not opposing detainees’ habeas cases. There is no requirement in law or in practice that the government contest detainees’ habeas petitions. And indeed, there is precedent for the government ceding the writ in some cases: for example, in 2013, the Obama administration withdrew its opposition to Ibrahim Idris’ habeas petition (he was subsequently repatriated to Sudan).

Second, charging a small subset of the remaining detainees in federal courts already can be an integral part of the path towards closure despite the ban on transfers to the United States. As Steve Vladeck has explained in depth, Congress doesn’t need to lift the U.S. transfer ban in order to use the federal judiciary because, “under the right circumstances, a Guantánamo detainee can plead guilty via videoconference in an Article III court.” Indeed, with the consent of all parties, the executive branch can negotiate and accept pleas, and effectuate sentences, in federal court but remotely from Guantánamo, without running afoul of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure or relevant constitutional protections. Such detainees could then serve out any remaining time on their sentences abroad, subject to terms of their pleas deals and agreements with transfer countries.

Don’t wait for Congress

To say the least, Congress has been supremely unhelpful in facilitating closing Guantánamo, especially when plans have involved bringing detainees to the United States, including for prosecution in federal courts. (See, for example, the Senate’s 90-9 vote prohibiting funding for transfer, release or incarceration in the U.S. when the Obama administration tried to go that route in 2009. Or the seven consecutive years — through fiscal year 2020 — when Congress debated then ultimately decided to forgo even temporary U.S. transfers just for emergency medical care when treatment isn’t available at Guantánamo).

This dynamic isn’t likely to change anytime soon. Assuming the next president — whoever it is — doesn’t want to have to stand before the nation on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 and explain why the military commissions continue to stagger along and Guantánamo remains open, he can’t wait for the legislature. The good news is he doesn’t have to.

Below is a roadmap for closing the prison that the next president can execute within the four corners of current law and through existing funding. The process should begin with revoking Executive Order 13823 — which mandates the continuation of detention operations at Guantánamo — then proceed as follows:

Immediately establish internal accountability and oversight mechanisms

It is critical that senior White House officials are charged with ensuring that Guantánamo is closed expeditiously, and that the process begins immediately. Primary responsibility should rest with a senior director of a reconstituted multilateral affairs and human rights directorate, or its equivalent, at the National Security Council (“senior director”). This is because the primary work involved includes negotiating with foreign countries, ensuring human rights and international humanitarian law obligations are met in the process of transferring or trying any of the detainees, and working with receiving states to monitor humane treatment and, where applicable, that fair trial guarantees are met. Thus, responsibility for this NSC-led process should not be assigned to any of the defense, intelligence, or counter-terrorism directorates, although their assistance will be required at various stages in the process.

The senior director should have the responsibility to:

Identify relevant agency personnel with appropriate authority who will be responsible for addressing the recommendations set out below that are relevant to their agency. At the State and Defense Departments, this could include reestablishing Special Envoy for Guantánamo Closure Offices, or something comparable.Ensure inter-agency participation, including through a regularly convened NSC-led inter-agency policy process.Resolve inter-agency disputes and ensure full implementation of final decisions.

Swiftly transfer detainees who have not been or will not be charged with a crime

This process should begin with immediate transfer of the five detainees long approved for transfer by the Guantánamo Review Task Force or the Periodic Review Boards (PRBs). The remaining men who have not and will not be charged with a crime should be repatriated or resettled to third countries as soon as possible. If the government believes that additional administrative review is necessary prior to any transfer of a detainee who isn’t already approved for transfer that process must move quickly. In addition to the procedural protections in the PRB process, any new administrative review should adhere to the following substantive and procedural requirements:

Factors weighing substantially in favor of transfer, and that cannot weigh against transfer, should include:Already prolonged indefinite detention, including any time in U.S. custody prior to transfer to Guantánamo.Credible allegations of violations of CAT for which U.S. personnel bear direct or indirect responsibility.Compromised health, scope and complexity of projected medical needs, and Guantánamo’s limited medical care capabilities.Factors that should not be considered in transfer recommendations or determinations include:A detainee’s historical or contemporary refusal to participate in all or part of the Periodic Review Board process or any prior review process.Any disciplinary information related to confinement at Guantánamo.Any behavioral assessment based in any way on a detainee’s conduct while detained at Guantánamo.Any “jail house chatter” or similar statements made by detainees while in confinement at Guantánamo.Detainees’ counsel and/or a personal representative should have full access to all information that will be evaluated in making transfer recommendations or determinations, including any classified detainee compendia such as those that have previously been provided to Periodic Review Board members.The original basis for a detainee’s capture and detention cannot be the determinative factor for a recommendation or determination to continue detention, and any such recommendation or determination must be based on a specific, legitimate, and serious need — and lawful basis — to continue to detain.

Detainees who are transferred must not be sent to a country where there are substantial grounds for believing they would be in danger of being subjected to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment (CIDT), including continued indefinite detention without charge or trial, or otherwise be forcibly transferred. Nor should detainees be subject to transfer conditions that violate their human rights.

To facilitate expeditiously negotiating transfer agreements with foreign governments, the U.S. should agree to:

Provide sufficient funding for effective rehabilitation and reintegration, which in any individual case may include, but not be limited to, medical and psychological care, housing, education, job training, a living stipend for some period, and family reunification.Provide detainees (through their counsel for those represented) and foreign officials with detainees’ complete medical records, declassified if / where necessary, subject to detainees’ consent.Permit foreign government medical personnel to examine detainees, subject to detainees’ consent.Permit diplomatic officials from foreign governments to participate in visits or interviews; (i.e., such visits should not be limited to security personnel).To the maximum extent possible, involve counsel in the transfer negotiation process, in particular with respect to providing foreign governments with holistic and accurate information (whether proactively or in response to questions).Continue to allow the International Committee of the Red Cross to conduct “exit interviews” with detainees who are designated for transfer, and ensure such interviews are conducted with sufficient lead time to adequately address any resulting concerns.Work with resettling governments to ensure that resettled detainees are provided with a secure, recognized legal status, with a clear track to permanent residency for detainees who wish to reside permanently in transfer countries.

As discussed above, the government should agree to drop its opposition to detainees’ existing habeas petitions — or to not oppose new ones — in order to facilitate court-ordered releases.

Pursue plea agreements with detainees the government is prosecuting or will prosecute

Where sufficient evidence untainted by torture and/or CIDT exists to prosecute or continue to prosecute detainees, the administration should pursue plea agreements whenever possible in those cases.

Plea negotiations should be governed by the following principles:

There is no historical analogue to this context, which provides an opportunity for creative solutions.Federal judges can hold arraignments, take pleas, enter judgements, and impose sentences via videoconference from Guantánamo with consent of all parties.There are significant rights and accountability concerns on all sides of these cases that must be accounted for.Victims and their family members deserve to know, and should be provided, as much detail as possible about the planning and execution of the September 11, 2001 attacks, or other attacks in which the defendants were involved.For plea deals that recommend incarceration beyond time already served at Guantánamo, the administration should prioritize negotiating agreements with foreign governments that allow sentences to be served outside the United States, subject to any terms of the plea deal regarding conditions of confinement.

For any detainee for whom there is not sufficient evidence, untainted by torture and/or CIDT, to continue to prosecute, the administration should withdraw any charges and apply the steps outlined above for detainees who have not been charged with a crime.

* * * * *

President George W. Bush transferred about 500 detainees from Guantánamo. President Obama transferred almost 200, 50 of whom were repatriated or resettled during his last nine months in office, with closure a priority and the clock ticking. To be sure, there are challenges associated with negotiating dispositions for some of the remaining 40 that the previous 50 did not present. There will be hard choices, and thorny questions will undoubtedly arise that require creative navigation.

But there are tools and strategies available to facilitate closure (as outlined above) that have not yet been utilized to the fullest, or in many cases at all, that could produce results quickly and deliver solutions even in what are seen as the most difficult cases. With the political will to pursue these paths, the next President can finally close Guantánamo, ensure a return to policies that comply with the Constitution and human rights, and generate good will in the international community by living up to professed American ideals.

Hina Shamsi, the Director of the ACLU’s National Security Project

Rita Siemion, the Director of National Security Advocacy at Human Rights First

Scott Roehm, the Washington Director of the Center for Victims of Torture

Wells Dixon, a Senior Staff Attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights

Rev. Ron Stief, the executive director of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture

Colleen Kelly, a co-founder of September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows

Footnote 1: Actually, only nine of the 40 men still held are currently facing, or have faced charges in the military commissions: Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, Ramzi Bin al-Shibh, Walid Bin Attash, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri and Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi are currently involved in protracted pre-trial hearings, while Majid Khan is still awaiting sentencing after a plea deal in 2012, and Ali Hamza al-Bahlul received a life sentence after a conviction in 2008, most elements of which have been overturned on appeal.

Note: This was Part I of a four-part feature on Just Security marking the 19th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Please also see the following:

Part II: Uphold the Prohibition on Torture
Part III: End Unlawful, Secret, and Unaccountable Use of Lethal Force
Part IV: End “Endless Wars”

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, 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), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from eight years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

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.

An Assessment of the Importance of the Classified Guantánamo Military Files Released by WikiLeaks and My Role in Analyzing Them

A screenshot of the front page of WikiLeaks’ publication of the classified military files from Guantánamo that were released in 2011, and on which I worked as a media partner.


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 of the Trump administration. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

I’m currently waiting to be called as a witness in the notorious extradition case of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, currently taking place in the Old Bailey, and, as a result, I haven’t been posting about the hearings, which began three weeks ago, and have one week left to run, since the hearings began, when I wrote an article entitled, The Ongoing and Unjustifiable Persecution of Julian Assange. For information about disagreements in court regarding my testimony, see this post by Craig Murray, and for detailed information about the events of the last three weeks, see his daily reports, and those of Kevin Gosztola of Shadowproof. Gosztola has also produced this guide to all the journalists and organizations covering the hearings in the absence of dedicated daily coverage by any mainstream media.

My involvement with Assange’s extradition hearing came about because, nine and a half years ago, I worked with WikiLeaks as a media partner on the release of classified military files from Guantánamo that had been leaked by US soldier Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning. The release of the files followed the release, in 2010, of the “Collateral Murder” video, showing US helicopter pilots killing civilians, including two Reuters journalists, and laughing about it, extensive war logs from the Afghan and Iraq wars, and over 250,000 US diplomatic cables.

Julian Assange is now fighting to prevent his unjustifiable extradition to the US, to face charges under the Espionage Act that would mean life in prison if he were to be convicted. And what’s profoundly alarming about this, as should not even need saying at all, is that Assange’s alleged crimes are not crimes at all.

As is the case in all countries that pride themselves on not being dictatorships, the right to free speech — in the US, via the celebrated First Amendment — is meant to ensure that information that is in the public interest, regarding government wrongdoing, can be published without those involved paying for it by being imprisoned for life on trumped-up charges.

My involvement with WikiLeaks on the release of the Guantánamo files can be found via the Wikileaks ‘Gitmo Files’ page, or via my website — see my introductory article,  WikiLeaks Reveals Secret Guantánamo Files, Exposes Detention Policy as a Construct of Lies, for example, and also feel free to check out the 422 detailed prisoner profiles published in 2011-12, in 34 separate articles, as The Complete Guantánamo Files (the Wikileaks Files).

However, what I missed a few months back — and am cross-posting for you now — is an article about the significance of the files, and my analysis of them, that was written by the journalist and author Patrick Lawrence for Consortium News, as the seventh part of an eight-part series, The Revelations of WikiLeaks, entitled, The Revelations of WikiLeaks: No. 7— Crimes Revealed at Guantánamo Bay.

The series was described by Consortium News as “looking back on the major works of the publication [WikiLeaks] that has altered the world since its founding in 2006”, and “an effort to counter mainstream media coverage, which these days largely ignores WikiLeaks’ work, and instead focuses on Assange’s personality. It is WikiLeaks’ uncovering of governments’ crimes and corruption that set the U.S. after Assange, ultimately leading to his arrest on April 11 last year and his indictment under the U.S. Espionage Act.”

I’m delighted to have the files — and my work on them — recognized by Patrick Lawrence and Consortium News, because, to be honest, both have generally received insufficient attention over the last nine and a half years, in part because of a depressingly widespread lack of interest in Guantánamo, and in part because, just one week after the files’ publication, in April 25, 2011, the US suddenly decided that it was time to assassinate Osama bin Laden.

This was an action that not only revealed the US’s Wild West instincts at their worst (with bin Laden killed rather than captured alive and put on trial); it also, crucially, shut down whatever interest there may have been in the Guantánamo files, and also allowed Dick Cheney and other defenders of Guantánamo to claim that it was the use of torture that had led to identifying bin Laden’s location (it wasn’t), and to defend the existence of all the post-9/11 prisons where all the quaint old laws against torture and indefinite, arbitrary detention had been discarded, including Guantánamo.

In contrast, as I have always maintained, the Guantánamo files released by WikiLeaks are of huge significance because they expose, to anyone prepared to spend time studying them, that much of what constitutes the supposed evidence against the prisoners was actually produced by their fellow prisoners, who were subjected to torture or other forms of abuse, or were bribed with better living conditions, with some particular prisoners responsible for lying about many dozens of prisoners, claiming that they were engaged in activities in Afghanistan, for example, when, demonstrably, they weren’t even in the country.

The Revelations of WikiLeaks: No. 7— Crimes Revealed at Guantánamo Bay

By Patrick Lawrence, Consortium News, June 24, 2020

“Gitmo Files” lifted the Pentagon’s lid on the prison, describing a corrupt system of military detention resting on torture, coerced testimony and “intelligence” manipulated to justify abuses at the base.

WikiLeaks released a cache of classified documents on April 25, 2011, it called “Gitmo Files.” They consist of reports the Joint Task Force at Guantánamo Bay sent to the Southern Command in Miami, under which JTF-Gitmo had imprisoned and interrogated suspected terrorists since January 2002, four months after the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington.

These memoranda, known as Detainee Assessment Briefs, or DABs, were written from 2002 to 2008. They contain JTF-Gitmo’s detailed judgments as to whether a prisoner should remain in prison or be released either to his home government or to a third country. Of the 779 prisoners detained at Guantánamo at its post–Sept. 11 peak, “Gitmo Files” is comprised of DABs on 765 of them. None had previously been made public. As was WikiLeaks’ practice, it gave numerous news organizations access to “Gitmo Files” at the time of publication.

Prior to the WikiLeaks release, very little was known about the prison operation at the U.S. naval base on the southeastern coast of Cuba. In 2006, in response to a Freedom of Information suit filed by The Associated Press four years earlier, the Pentagon made public transcripts of military court hearings held at Guantánamo Bay. While these revealed the identities of some detainees for the first time, they contained little detail of how those imprisoned were treated, interrogated, and then judged.

“Gitmo Files” thus lifted the lid on a Defense Department operation that had been shrouded in secrecy for the previous nine years. They describe a profoundly corrupt system of military detention and interrogation that rested on torture, coerced testimony, and “intelligence” manipulated to justify the military’s practices at the Guantánamo base.

“Most of these documents reveal accounts of incompetence familiar to those who have studied Guantánamo closely,” wrote Andy Worthington, a WikiLeaks associate who managed the publisher’s analysis of the documents, “with innocent men detained by mistake (or because the U.S. was offering substantial bounties to its allies for al-Qaeda or Taliban suspects), and numerous insignificant Taliban conscripts from Afghanistan and Pakistan.” Worthington called the 765 documents WikiLeaks published “the anatomy of a colossal crime perpetrated by the U.S. government.”

Obama’s First Term

Barack Obama had begun his first term as president slightly more than two years before WikiLeaks published “Gitmo Files.” During his political campaign he had promised to close the facility within a year of assuming office; at that time 241 prisoners were still in detention. An interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force Obama appointed to review these cases concluded that only 36 could be prosecuted.

But Obama succumbed to “the politics of fear in Congress,” as Worthington puts it. There were still 171 prisoners when “Gitmo Files” was published; 40 now remain — some cleared and awaiting release, some charged and awaiting military trial, some convicted, and others, 26 of the total, under indefinite detention.

The Documents

The memoranda collected in “Gitmo Files” shine a revealing light into the U.S. military’s system of arrest, detention, and interrogation of terror suspects after the Sept. 11 tragedies. The files include the DABs covering the first 201 prisoners released from Guantánamo, between 2002 and 2004. Nothing had previously been known about these detainees. The military briefs on these cases recount the histories of innocent Afghans, Pakistanis, and others — a baker, a mechanic, former students, kitchen workers — who should never have been detained in the first place.

These early-release detainees were among the easiest to identify as posing low or no security risks. Their stories reflect the indiscriminate method of arrests U.S. forces used immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks. “Gitmo Files” terms these detainees “The Unknown Prisoners of Guantánamo” because no record of their presence at Gitmo had been made public prior to the April 2011 release.

They were effectively “disappeared” — unacknowledged detainees — apparently because their patent innocence was an embarrassment for the Pentagon and, especially, those operating the Guantánamo prison.

Azizullah Asekzai was one of these early-release detainees. He was a family farmer in his early twenties when the Taliban conscripted him to fight its cause in Afghanistan. After one day of training on an AK–47, Asekzai attempted to escape to Kabul, but a local militia ambushed the vehicle he was traveling in and Asekzai was captured. He was subsequently turned over to U.S. forces; he was transferred to Guantánamo in June 2002.

Asekzai’s DAB explains his transfer thus:

The detainee was arrested and transported to Bamian, where he was imprisoned for almost five months before being transferred to U.S. forces. Detainee was subsequently transported to Guantánamo Bay Naval Base because of his knowledge of a Taliban draftee holding area in Konduz and of Mullah Mir Hamza, a Taliban official, in Gereshk District of Helmand Province. Joint Task Force Guantánamo considers the information obtained from him and about him as neither valuable nor tactically exploitable. [Italics added.]

Asekzai’s DAB is dated March 2003, and he was released the following July. While his time at Guantánamo was relatively brief, his story is important because of the light it sheds on how those writing DABs manipulated the facts in case after case to mask what amounted to a dragnet method of arrests in Afghanistan. In Asekzai’s case, as in many others, this meant making up the military’s motives to obscure the groundless basis for his detention and transfer to Guantánamo.

Here is an explanatory comment Wikileaks included with its “Unknown Prisoners” files:

The “Reasons for Transfer” included in the documents, which have been repeatedly cited by media outlets as an explanation of why the prisoners were transferred to Guantánamo, are, in fact, lies that were grafted onto the prisoners’ files after their arrival at Guantánamo. This is because, contrary to the impression given in the files, no significant screening process took place before the prisoners’ transfer[s]…. Every prisoner who ended up in U.S. custody had to be sent to Guantánamo, even though the majority were not even seized by U.S. forces, but were seized by their Afghan and Pakistani allies at a time when substantial bounty payments for “al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects” were widespread.

These bounty payments were not limited to small-time Afghan or Pakistani bounty hunters. In his 2006 memoir, “In the Line of Fire,” Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s former president, acknowledges that in handing over 369 terror suspects to the U.S., the Pakistani government “earned bounty payments totaling millions of dollars.”

“Gitmo Files” also includes a section on the 22 children also detained at Guantánamo after it opened. Three were still in detention at the time of the WikiLeaks release. In addition, the documents detail the cases of the 399 prisoners released from 2004 to the day “Gitmo Files” was published. They also give the background of the seven men who had died at Guantánamo by April 2011.

Each DAB is signed by the Guantánamo commander at the time of the report. While they included JTF-Gitmo’s assessment and recommendation for each prisoner, the disposition of each case was determined at a higher level. In addition to the judgments of JTF-Gitmo, the DABs also reflect the work of the Criminal Investigation Task Force, the post–Sept. 11 Pentagon agency created to conduct interrogations, and the “behavior science teams,” or BSCTs.

These were the now-infamous psychologists who participated in the “exploitation” of prisoners during interrogations — in many cases condoning the use of waterboarding and other forms of torture.

JTF-Gitmo’s standard practice was to present each DAB in nine sections. These begin with a detainee’s identity and personal background and run to his health, the detainee’s account of events, an evaluation of this account, and the JTF-Gitmo assessment and recommendation of each case. Worthington has scrutinized each of these sections in the DABs to unearth information that might otherwise remain obscured. On the section covering the health of detainees, for instance, he writes, “Many are judged to be in good health, but there are some shocking examples of prisoners with severe mental and/or physical problems.”

‘Capture Information’

In the sections labeled “capture information,” the DABs report how and where each prisoner was apprehended, the date of his transfer to Guantánamo, and the above-noted “reasons for transfer.” Worthington terms these last accounts “spurious,” offering this explanation: “The reason that this is unconvincing is because… the U.S. high command, based in Camp Doha, Kuwait, stipulated that every prisoner who ended up in U.S. custody had to be transferred to Guantánamo — and that there were no exceptions.”

This is why those writing DABs found it necessary to doctor the reasons for transfer, “as an attempt to justify the largely random rounding-up of prisoners,” as Worthington puts it.

The last section of a DAB is called “EC status” and explains whether or not a detainee is still considered an “enemy combatant.” These judgments are based on military tribunals held at Guantánamo in 2004–05. Worthington writes, “Out of 558 cases, just 38 prisoners were assessed as being ‘no longer enemy combatants,’ and in some cases, when the result went in the prisoners’ favor, the military convened new panels until it got the desired result.”

Worthington’s work on “Gitmo Files” is key to an adequate understanding of the 765 DABs covered in the WikiLeaks release. Read on their own, the military’s briefs appear to be routine bureaucratic accounts of the processing of each prisoner. But as Worthington explains, these documents are essentially whitewashes that often obscure more than they reveal. As noted, explanations of the intelligence used to justify the prisoners’ detention were often concocted and inserted into a prisoner’s record after he was arrested and sent to Guantánamo.

Ghost Prisoners

Another significant flaw Worthington identifies is the JTF-Gitmo’s repeated use of the same witnesses to testify against numerous prisoners — in the case of one witness, 60 of them. Worthington identifies many of these repeat witnesses as “high-value detainees,” or “ghost prisoners,” in Guantánamo parlance, and details their histories in confinement.

As he explains, “The documents draw on the testimony of witnesses — in most cases, the prisoners’ fellow prisoners — whose words are unreliable, either because they were subjected to torture or other forms of coercion (sometimes not in Guantánamo, but in secret prisons run by the CIA), or because they provided false statements to secure better treatment in Guantánamo.”

Equally important, in many of the DABs — perhaps most of them — it is difficult to detect the prisoners’ true histories, which in the majority of cases reveal their innocence and the injustice of their imprisonment. This is why Worthington’s work on “Gitmo Files” was an essential part of WikiLeaks’ method. He spent long months analyzing the documents; in some cases, Worthington found and interviewed released detainees to get their accurate accounts of events on the record. He then wrote a lengthy series of articles explaining his findings.

These voluminous writings are featured prominently on the “Gitmo Files” website. They are effectively a gateway into the inventory of the DABs that comprise “Gitmo Files.” Worthington’s “Unknown Prisoners” report comprises a 10–part series of articles. Worthington’s work, including his book, “The Guantánamo Files,” is noted in his introductory essays for each of the categories he uses to classify Guantánamo detainees.

Another of these categories, titled “Abandoned in Guantánamo,” concerns the 89 Yemenis still in detention at Guantánamo when “Gitmo Files” was published—more than half of those remaining. President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force, named in 2009, recommended that 36 Yemenis be released immediately and 30 others be held in “conditional detention” until Yemen’s security situation improved.

As Worthington notes, most of the Yemenis remained in prison at the time he wrote. Of those Yemenis still in detention, 28 had already been cleared for release. Of them, six had been “approved for transfer,” as the task force put it, as early as 2004, three more in 2006, and 10 in 2007.

Gitmo Files” details the cases of 19 Yemenis still detained in 2011. Most of these were assessed as low-ranking Taliban or Al Qaeda infantry soldiers of no “intelligence value.” Saeed Hatim (known in his DAB as Said Muhammad Salih Hatim), was among these 19. Born in 1976, Hatim began studying law in Sanaa in 1998. After two years he dropped out to care for his ailing father. Here is a portion of Hatim’s own account as written into his DAB:

“Detainee was concerned by Russia’s war in Chechnya after he witnessed the ‘oppression’ [of the Muslims] on television. Detainee was ‘outraged’ about what the Russians were doing to the Chechens, and decided to travel to Chechnya to fight jihad alongside his Muslim ‘brothers.’ Detainee informed his family of his decision to travel to Chechnya and they refused to provide financial assistance. Detainee then spoke with several of his friends and members of his mosque, who agreed to help detainee raise money for the trip. Detainee left for Afghanistan in approximately March 2001.”

Hatim’s DAB says he admitted that Al Qaeda recruited him after his time in Chechnya. He purportedly fought U.S. forces in a major battle in the Afghan mountains at the end of 2001. JTF-Gitmo assessed Hatim as a “medium risk,” but it classified him as a “low threat from a detention perspective” and of low intelligence value.

Hatim was first recommended for release in January 2007. He was similarly recommended a year later; a habeas corpus petition his attorney subsequently filed was granted in 2009. That judgment was vacated shortly before “Gitmo Files” was released in 2011.

Here is the relevant portion of Worthington’s report and analysis of the Hatim case:

“In Saeed Hatim’s case… Judge Ricardo Urbina ruled out self-incriminating statements made by Hatim himself, accepting that he made them while being mistreated and threatened with torture in Kandahar after his capture, and also that he repeated them at Guantánamo ‘because he feared that he would be punished if he changed his story.’”

Judge Urbina also ruled out the government’s major claim against Hatim — that he had taken part in a showdown between Al Qaeda and U.S. forces in Afghanistan’s Tora Bora mountains in December 2001 — because the only source for that claim was one of the notoriously unreliable witnesses identified in the WikiLeaks documents, who, in Judge Urbina’s words, “has exhibited an ongoing pattern of severe psychological problems while detained at Gitmo.”

Quoting an interrogator, the judge also noted that hospital records at Guantánamo said the witness against Hatim “had ‘vague auditory hallucinations’ and that his symptoms were consistent with a ‘depressive disorder, psychosis, post-traumatic stress, and a severe personality disorder.’” The interrogator concluded by “refus[ing] to credit what is arguably the government’s most serious allegation in this case based solely on one statement, made years after the events in question, by an individual whose grasp on reality appears to have been tenuous at best.”

US Officials React

Official reactions to the release of “Gitmo Files” were by and large predictable. The Obama administration’s statement, released by Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, and Daniel Fried, Obama’s special envoy on detainee issues, asserted, “It is unfortunate that several news organizations have made the decision to publish numerous documents obtained illegally by WikiLeaks concerning the Guantánamo detention facility.”

Referring to Obama and George W. Bush, his predecessor, Morrell and Fried also said, “Both administrations have made the protection of American citizens the top priority and we are concerned that the disclosure of these documents could be damaging to those efforts.”

Significantly, there is no record of the president’s response to the release.

The Pentagon came under special criticism with the Gitmo release’s revelation of the detention of 22 children at Guantánamo. As Worthington explains, in May 2008 the Pentagon had reported to the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child that it had held only eight juveniles (those under 18 when their alleged transgressions took place) since Guantánamo began receiving detainees in 2002.

Worthington took the occasion to elaborate on the “Gitmo Files” disclosure. In his commentary he wrote: “My new research coincides with a new report by the UC Davis Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas, ‘Guantánamo’s Children: The WikiLeaked Testimonies,’ drawing on the release, by WikiLeaks, of classified military documents shedding new light on the prisoners, identifying 15 juveniles, and suggesting that six others, born in 1984 or 1985, and arriving at Guantánamo in 2002 or 2003, may have been under 18, depending on when exactly they were born (which is unknown, as it is in the cases of numerous Guantánamo prisoners).”

In total, Worthington asserted, the number of children imprisoned at Guantánamo may have been as many as 28.

Like the president, the Pentagon remained silent on this question after “Gitmo Files” was published. There is no record of a Defense Department response to the WikiLeaks disclosures concerning children and Worthington’s analysis of them.

In April 2019 — eight years after “Gitmo Files” was published — military courts continued to grapple with the record of events, specifically the use of torture, during the post–Sept. 11 “war on terror.”

In a report datelined April 5, 2019 the New York Times explained, “Seventeen-and-a-half years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, and a decade after President Barack Obama ordered the C.I.A. to dismantle any remnants of its global prison network, the military commission system is still wrestling with how to handle evidence of what the United States did to the Qaeda suspects it held at C.I.A. black sites. While the topic of torture can now be discussed in open court, there is still a dispute about how evidence of it can be gathered and used in the proceedings at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.”

This week [the last week of June 2020] the Justice Department filed a new indictment against Assange, superseding that filed in May 2019 and broadening the charges lodged against him last year. This is the most recent official reaction to “Gitmo Files.” This latest indictment, presented in the Eastern Virginia District Court and dated June 24, alleges that Chelsea Manning produced “Gitmo Files” at Assange’s urging between November 2009 and May 2010. In keeping with WikiLeaks’ most fundamental principle, it has never disclosed the source of “Gitmo Files.” Neither has Manning stated that she was the source, although this has been widely considered as likely.

Proving that Assange actively solicited the documents Manning passed to WikiLeaks— “Collateral Murder,” “Afghan War Diary,” “Iraq War Logs,” and now, allegedly, “Gitmo Files” — is key to the U.S. case against Assange under the Espionage Act.

The June 24 court document indicates that the Justice Department has no hard evidence of this charge. Manning continues to assert, as she has since her arrest in May 2010, that she acted of her own volition in gathering and dispatching the documents WikiLeaks published. The indictment alleges only that Manning, in assembling what became “Gitmo Files,” used certain search phrases — “detainee+abuse,” for example —that the indictment identifies with WikiLeaks’ categorization of documents — an allegation far short of accepted standards of proof.

Press Reaction

On the “Gitmo Files” home page, WikiLeaks names 10 “partners” with which it worked in making the documents public. Worthington is listed as one, though his work puts him in a category of his own. The others include the Washington Post, the Telegraph, La Repubblica, Le Monde, and Der Spiegel. These news outlets were given copies of “Gitmo Files” in advance to allow them time to review and analyze the documents and plan their coverage prior to the April 25, 2011, release.

Conspicuously missing from this WikiLeaks list, and reflecting a prior dispute they had with Julian Assange, are the New York Times and the Guardian. Both newspapers obtained the documents from a source other than WikiLeaks, presumably one of the news outlets on the WikiLeaks list of partners. To its credit, the Times now maintains a web site, The Guantánamo Docket, giving the name and legal status of each detainee still in custody at Guantánamo.

The noteworthy aspect of the media coverage of the “Gitmo Files” release was the marked difference in the way U.S. and non-American news outlets shaped their stories: U.S. media tended to emphasize the dangers and threats presented by those in captivity at Guantánamo; other media reported correctly that among the important revelations in “Gitmo Files” was the innocence of most of those seized and detained.

Noting this pattern, WikiLeaks urged readers and viewers to compare the lead paragraphs in the main BBC and CNN stories:

The BBC, under the headline, “WikiLeaks: Many at Guantánamo ‘not dangerous,’” reported, “Files obtained by the website WikiLeaks have revealed that the U.S. believed many of those held at Guantánamo Bay were innocent or only low-level operatives.”

CNN’s report appeared under the headline, “Military documents reveal details about Guantánamo detainees, al–Qaeda,” and began, “Nearly 800 classified U.S. military documents obtained by WikiLeaks reveal extraordinary details about the alleged terrorist activities of al–Qaeda operatives captured and housed at the U.S. Navy’s detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.”

Among the others to note this disparity were Glenn Greenwald, then the foreign affairs columnist at Salon, and Laura Flanders at the Nation. Greenwald’s piece on the news coverage of “Gitmo Files” appeared under the headline, “Newly Leaked Documents Show the Ongoing Travesty of Guantánamo” but is no longer available in the Salon archives.

Flanders detected the same bias in the coverage published by the Washington Post, National Public Radio, and the Times. The latter two “use the cop-out term ‘harsh interrogation techniques,’” she noted, to avoid mention of the word torture.

“So the takeaway in the United States,” Flanders wrote, “will remain ‘dangerous terrorists!’ and Guantánamo will most likely remain open three years after the president vowed to close it, while overseas the rest of the world will continue to wonder why the country that claims to love freedom so much is continuing to imprison and torture innocent people.”

In one of the essays WikiLeaks published with “Gitmo Files,” Worthington analyzed the broader significance of the tilt in American coverage. He wrote: “The release of the documents prompted international interest for a week, until it was arranged by President Obama (whether coincidentally or not) for U.S. Special Forces to fly into Pakistan to assassinate Osama bin Laden. At this point an unprincipled narrative emerged in the mainstream media in the U.S., in which, for sales and ratings if nothing else, unindicted criminals from the Bush administration — and their vociferous supporters in Congress, in newspaper columns, and on the airwaves — were allowed to suggest that the use of torture had led to locating bin Laden (it hadn’t, although some information had apparently come from “high-value detainees” held in secret CIA prisons, but not as a result of torture), and that the existence of Guantánamo had also proved invaluable in tracking down the al-Qaeda chief.”

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, 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), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from eight years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

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.

Covid Lockdown: Video of My Band The Four Fathers Playing at a Small Party in a London Park That Would Now Be Illegal

A screenshot of The Four Fathers playing in a park in south London on August 29, 2020.


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On the August Bank Holiday weekend, my band The Four Fathers played a largely acoustic set — and then joined other musicians in a jam session — as part of a little party in our local park in south London, parts of which were filmed by our bassist’s daughter, and which now constitute a record of what London looked like five months after the government first declared a lockdown to prevent the spread of the Covid-19 virus.

The party normally takes place in a friend’s house, but this year, because of Covid-19, everyone concerned recognised that even a well-behaved house party wasn’t acceptable at the time, and so the proposal to move it to our local park was suggested instead.

In the earliest days of lockdown, London’s parks were patrolled by the police and local officials to make sure that no one stopped or mingled during their allotted one hour of exercise a day, but, as the peak of the panic passed, parks then became the focal point of human interaction, and while there were some obvious examples of slightly reckless behaviour — parties of young people drinking late into the night, provoking the wrath of the curtain-twitching brigade — for the most part people were aware of social distancing, and were simply trying to balance the need to avoid spreading the virus with an equally important need to socialise.

And so, on Saturday 29th August, from the early afternoon until the early evening, when it started to get cold, around 30 of us in total had a party, with some live music, in our local park. Some young singer-songwriters amongst our children (all now young adults) also sang, and my son Tyler (The Wiz-RD) also performed a technically thrilling and sometimes very funny beatbox set.

Check out the video below, featuring the last verse and chorus of our anti-Brexit anthem, ‘I Want My Country Back (From The People Who Wanted Their Country Back)’, and the last half of our live favourite ‘Fighting Injustice’, about the housing crisis, followed by two songs recorded as we jammed with other local musicians — our new ecological call to arms, ‘This Time We Win’, and another rousing version of ‘Fighting Injustice.’

The party — with its food, drink, entertainment and chatter — was the kind of event that provided us all with some much-needed social bonding, and while we were clearly not all masked and obsessed with social distancing, neither were we getting drunk and slobbering all over each other, which, sadly, for emotional extroverts, or those accustomed to liberating their emotions through alcohol, seems to be one of the surest ways to encourage the spread of the virus.

The reason we held our party was not because of a deliberate disregard for the government’s pronouncements; rather, it was because, for many months, we had been meeting in parks and in gardens, and, more recently, at pubs and restaurants (generally, outside, although indoor seating was also available when the government allowed these businesses to reopen). We had also been keeping an eye of the very low infection rates in the borough of Lewisham, and had reached the conclusion that, like the majority of Londoners, our behaviour after the height of lockdown — when everyone pretty much stayed home, only venturing out to the local shops, or for one hour’s exercise a day — was, as we nudged towards what was a tolerably sociable existence, demonstrably safe.

Sadly, however, even by the Bank Holiday weekend this type of event was of dubious legality, because, although it consisted of less than 30 people, as stipulated by the government just a week before, those 30 people were only supposed to be from two households or “bubbles.”

The new legislation included fines of £10,000, which could be imposed on those breaking the rules, but this was clearly designed not to suppress a generally polite outdoor gathering of mostly middle-aged people, but to stop illegal raves, which had taken off all over the country as some young people’s appetites and energy overcame their fear of the virus, and also to stifle rowdy house parties. However, the announcement of the ban and the fines had already put a huge dampener on the social gatherings that had happily been taking place over the summer months, as the virus remained under control.

Note: For a good explanation of the rules, see this Freedom News article.

Since our party, however, a similar gathering is now pretty much unthinkable, as the government has stepped up its ban, prohibiting gatherings of more than six people outdoors, or in other people’s homes — unless, as some wag explained on Twitter, there’s a till involved.

Joking aside, musicians — like the wonderful Sesh Brehs in south London, young jazz musicians who jammed in parks throughout the summer, bringing joy to many people’s lives — can only adjust to his new reality if it means that they are able to perform in venues, as has started to happen. However, with infection rates now on the rise, its remains to be seen if we’re not about to enter a much worse phase of containing this pandemic than we were when the lockdown began easing back in May, with opportunities for live culture even more savagely curtailed than ever.

I hope not, because, as much as I understand the trepidation caused by the current increase in infection rates, it has yet to be demonstrated that the accompanying death rates — which currently, are extremely low — can justify a further return to widespread societal isolation, with all the economic and mental health costs that that brings, rather than a continuation of the social and cultural interactions that millions of us have been practising, for the most part as safely as possible, throughout summer.

If the bans start being imposed again, we need to ask ourselves if the problem is with us, or with a government that encouraged people to go on foreign holidays, that has insisted on sending children back to school, and, until a sudden U-turn yesterday, has also aggressively been telling people to go back to their offices — all of which it has introduced without even having tests available to the majority of people who need them, and without any notion of how to create a functional test and trace system, without which we seem destined to undergo, for the foreseeable future, blanket and largely indiscriminate lockdowns of various kinds that are entirely the fault of our unprecedentedly useless government.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, 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), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from eight years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

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 New York Times’ Linda Greenhouse on Guantánamo: “Born in Fear and Sustained Through Political Cynicism and Public Indifference”

Guards in a watchtower at Guantánamo Bay.


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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.

Two weeks ago, the 18 year-long struggle by lawyers, NGOs and all decent people to bring justice to the men held at Guantánamo reached a new low point in the court of appeals (the D.C. Circuit Court) in Washington, D.C., as I explained at the time in an article entitled, Trump-Appointed Appeals Court Judge Rules That Guantánamo Prisoners Don’t Have Due Process Rights.

The judge in question, Judge Neomi Rao, appointed by Donald Trump last year, is an enthusiastic supporter of the opposition, by various judges in the court, to the landmark Supreme Court case Boumediene v. Bush, decided in June 2008, which granted constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights to the Guantánamo prisoners.

That ruling led to the only time in Guantánamo’s history when the law has successfully applied at the prison. From 2008 until 2010, 38 prisoners had their habeas corpus petitions granted by District Court judges, and the majority of those men were released.

In the appeals court, however, a group of judges opposed to the Boumediene decision worked assiduously to undermine it, so that five of those 38 decisions were reversed or vacated, and, more significantly, by the summer of 2010 habeas corpus had been rendered meaningless for the Guantánamo prisoners. No prisoner has had a habeas corpus petition granted since that time, and yet the Supreme Court, year after year, has also failed to respond to the fact that its position on detention in the “war on terror” had been usurped, mangled and effectively reversed by presumptuous judges in a lower court.

Sadly, it would be fair to observe that almost nobody cares about the fundamental lawlessness that underpins the imprisonment of the remaining 40 men at Guantánamo. In part, this is because the legal issues involved are not readily comprehensible to lay people, hinging, as they do, on questions of due process. But the lack of interest is also because of the black propaganda emanating from parts of the Republic Party and the right-wing media about Guantánamo, dating back many years, and, correspondingly, the general silence about Guantánamo from the so-called liberal mainstream media and from Democratic lawmakers.

A notable exception is New York Times columnist Linda Greenhouse, who has been writing about Guantánamo, in depth and perceptively, for many years. For her latest column, published the day before the 19th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Greenhouse turned her attention to this latest ruling and the tortured legal history that precedes it, in an article entitled, A Court Just Slammed the Guantánamo Gate Shut, which we’re posting below in the hope of reaching corners of the US electorate and the wider world that may have missed it in the Times.

To tell the story of why the legal struggles over Guantánamo are so significant, Greenhouse focuses on the malignant role played by Judge A. Raymond Randolph, who was on the panel that reviewed the case of Guantánamo prisoner Abdulsalam al-Hela in which Judge Rao wrote the majority opinion. Randolph has been with the court since 1990, and, as Greenhouse explains, “Early in the Guantánamo saga, he wrote three majority opinions for the appeals court denying the detainees access to federal court. The Supreme Court overturned all three. The third was the case that became Boumediene, and since that day, Judge Randolph has written or joined a remarkable series of opinions that have sapped the Supreme Court decision of much of its meaning.”

This is the judge who, in a 2010 speech to the Heritage Foundation, as Greenhouse notes, “shockingly compared the five justices in the Boumediene majority to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s characters in ‘The Great Gatsby,’ Tom and Daisy Buchanan, ‘careless people who smashed things up’ and who ‘let other people clean up the mess they made.’” As Greenhouse also observes, it is also worth noting that Trump’s dangerous and politically biased Attorney General William Barr “is fully on board in the war against Boumediene, referring to it in a speech to the Federalist Society last year as ‘the most blatant and consequential usurpation of executive power in our history,’” and thereby reviving the Unitary Executive Theory so beloved by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, which holds that, particularly at a time of crisis, there should be no constraints of the president’s authority to do as he sees fit — which, in the case of the last 19 years, means rendition, torture and arbitrary lifelong imprisonment without charge or trial at Guantánamo.

How did this coup in the appeals court happen? Greenhouse explains that, although the Supreme Court, in Boumediene, held that “the prisoners’ access to federal court was not simply a statutory right but was grounded in the Constitution’s protection of the ‘privilege of the writ of habeas corpus,’” Justice Kennedy’s opinion left a major question unanswered: “Now that the Guantánamo prisoners could petition for habeas corpus, what rights could they actually assert in their challenges to their continued detention? What substantive rights did they possess?”

It was these ill-defined or undefined areas of Boumediene that the appeals court attacked, weaving “a tight web of rules favoring the government; for example, accepting gossamer chains of circumstantial evidence as sufficient proof that an inmate’s designation as an enemy combatant was correct.”

For the judges like Randolph who oppose Boumediene, they believe that the Supreme Court erred in its interpretation of the Second World War decision in Johnson v. Eisentrager, which, as Greenhouse describes it, “held that federal courts lacked jurisdiction over cases brought by German prisoners of war being held overseas by the United States.” Refuting Eisentrager was at the heart of Rasul v. Bush, the first Supreme Court case applying to the Guantánamo prisoners, in June 2004, establishing that the government could no longer get away with pretending that Guantánamo was Cuban, when every aspect of its operations was under US control.

In contrast, those backing Boumediene have sought to establish that the prisoners have due process rights that are being unfairly suppressed by those clinging to the Eisentrager ruling. Two recent rulings — in Qassim v. Trump last year, and Ali v. Trump this year — have led to judges, in two cases in which the majority opinion was written by Judge Patricia Millett, an Obama appointee, challenging rulings indicating that “a due process argument was categorically unavailable to a noncitizen held outside the country.” In the second of these, however, Judge Randolph was so incensed that “he 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 Greenhouse proceeds to explain, “to accept Judge Randolph’s opinion as an accurate account of the state of the law is to ignore the entire trajectory of the Supreme Court’s Guantánamo cases,” and yet, in the most recent case, Al Hela v. Trump, the compliant Judge Rao fully endorsed Randolph’s position, writing, in a footnote, what Greenhouse called “the astounding assertion” that “our court has adhered to Eisentrager’s holding 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.”

For “astounding assertion,” a more appropriate phrase would be “bare-faced lie.” Greenhouse notes that in a dissenting opinion, Judge Thomas B. Griffith, who has now retired, objected that “we have never made such a far-reaching statement about the Clause’s extraterritorial application,” but neither Rao nor Randolph cared, and nor too did most of the US media or the American people.

There will be a challenge to this ruling, of course, and maybe that will led somewhere, but there appears, sadly, to be no cure for the general amnesia and indifference surrounding Guantánamo. As Greenhouse notes, in a poignant conclusion, “I’ve come to think of Guantánamo, born in fear and sustained through political cynicism and public indifference, as a mirror of ourselves during these opening decades of the current century, trapped no less than our 40 remaining ‘forever’ prisoners with no obvious end to their imprisonment.”

A Court Just Slammed the Guantánamo Gate Shut

By Linda Greenhouse, New York Times, Sept. 10, 2020

Does the public care about the 40 remaining inmates with no obvious end to their imprisonment?

It’s more than 12 years since the Supreme Court cracked open the prison gates at Guantánamo Bay, ruling that the prisoners held there, the living embodiments of the post-9/11 war on terror, had the constitutional right to petition the federal courts for release.

The decision, Boumediene v. Bush, was an unexpected affirmation that the rule of law had survived the shock of Sept. 11, 2001, against all odds and despite the effort by the administration of President George W. Bush to treat the U.S. naval base in southeastern Cuba as a black hole where law couldn’t enter and the “worst of the worst” could never leave.

Now another 9/11 anniversary is upon us, always an occasion to contemplate that day and where it has brought the country. But even so, why write about Guantánamo now, in the midst of a presidential campaign during which the island prison is never mentioned, with a new term about to begin at the Supreme Court, which has turned down every Guantánamo case for the past decade?

Here’s the reason: The federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., has just slammed the Guantánamo gate shut.

Has anyone noticed? Guantánamo once stirred public passions. Now that the inmate population is down to 40, from the nearly 800 who passed through the prison in its 18-year existence so far, do people still care?

The decision, Al Hela v. Trump, issued late last month by a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, did not go completely unnoticed; the indispensable Carol Rosenberg, who has covered Guantánamo longer and better than any journalist alive, reported on it for the Times. But in the public policy space it has been met with silence.

It’s my simple premise in this column that people should notice and should care, one reason being that the decision represents the culmination of judicial politics as raw as any I’ve ever observed. Conservative judges have hated the Boumediene decision from the moment in June 2008 when Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his opinion for a 5-to-4 majority, over a dissenting prediction by Justice Antonin Scalia that the decision “will almost certainly cause Americans to die.”

Justice Kennedy has retired and Justice Scalia has died, but Judge A. Raymond Randolph is still on the D.C. Circuit, where he has served since 1990. Early in the Guantánamo saga, he wrote three majority opinions for the appeals court denying the detainees access to federal court. The Supreme Court overturned all three. The third was the case that became Boumediene, and since that day, Judge Randolph has written or joined a remarkable series of opinions that have sapped the Supreme Court decision of much of its meaning.

Last month’s Al Hela decision, which he joined (the newest member of the panel, Judge Neomi Rao, appointed last year by President Trump, wrote the majority opinion), was the final blow. One might even call it a triumph for a judge who in a 2010 speech to the Heritage Foundation shockingly compared the five justices in the Boumediene majority to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s characters in “The Great Gatsby,” Tom and Daisy Buchanan, “careless people who smashed things up” and who “let other people clean up the mess they made.” (And I’ll note that Attorney General William Barr is fully on board in the war against Boumediene, referring to it in a speech to the Federalist Society last year as “the most blatant and consequential usurpation of executive power in our history.”)

How can a lower court render a Supreme Court decision a nullity? We saw a recent example in the bold refusal of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit to apply to an anti-abortion law in Louisiana despite a 2016 Supreme Court decision that struck down an identical law in Texas. The Supreme Court made properly short work of that defiance in its decision this summer in June Medical Services v. Russo.

The Guantánamo situation is more subtle and for that reason more interesting. In one of its first Guantánamo decisions, Rasul v. Bush in 2004, the Supreme Court overturned a decision by Judge Randolph and held that the naval base, although obviously located in a foreign country, was functionally part of the United States and for that reason was subject to the jurisdiction of the federal courts. The justices in that decision rejected the applicability of a post-World War II decision, Johnson v. Eisentrager, which held that federal courts lacked jurisdiction over cases brought by German prisoners of war being held overseas by the United States.

The Rasul decision was based on the court’s interpretation of a jurisdictional statute. The Boumediene ruling went deeper, holding that the prisoners’ access to federal court was not simply a statutory right but was grounded in the Constitution’s protection of the “privilege of the writ of habeas corpus.” Justice Kennedy’s opinion left a major question unanswered, however: Now that the Guantánamo prisoners could petition for habeas corpus, what rights could they actually assert in their challenges to their continued detention? What substantive rights did they possess?

In the immediate aftermath of Boumediene, dozens of prisoners filed habeas petitions, and federal district judges in Washington granted 38 of them, an impressive number given that the number had been zero not long before. The Obama administration, in office by then, released about half of the successful petitioners without a fight. But it successfully appealed other cases. The D.C. Circuit in fact has never affirmed a grant of habeas that the government contested. Case by case, in many with opinions by Judge Randolph, the appeals court wove around the prison camp a tight web of rules favoring the government; for example, accepting gossamer chains of circumstantial evidence as sufficient proof that an inmate’s designation as an enemy combatant was correct.

Decisions of that kind, based on factual evaluations of the prisoners’ claims, made it unnecessary for the appeals court to decide the open question about how the Constitution itself might apply. The question lingered in the background of many of the cases. Last year, in Qassim v. Trump, a three-judge D.C. Circuit panel strongly suggested that a claim under the Constitution’s due process guarantee would be upheld in the right case; the panel vacated and sent back the District Court’s decision holding that a due process argument was categorically unavailable to a noncitizen held outside the country.

Judge Randolph was not on the panel in the Qassim case. But in May of this year, he was on the panel in another case, Ali v. Trump, in which the same judge who wrote the opinion in Qassim, Patricia Millett, again wrote for the majority. As in the Qassim case, her opinion 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.”

This modest opinion, reserving the hard question for another day, was nonetheless enough to set Judge Randolph off. Concurring only in the judgment, he 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.”

The precedent Judge Randolph cited for this sweeping proposition was the old post-World War II Eisentrager case, the very case that the Supreme Court had rejected in 2004 when it treated Guantánamo as a functional part of the United States that came within the jurisdiction of the federal courts. I’ll be polite: to accept Judge Randolph’s opinion as an accurate account of the state of the law is to ignore the entire trajectory of the Supreme Court’s Guantánamo cases.

That brings me to the most recent case, Al Hela. Judge Randolph got lucky when the panel was designated. Instead of serving with two of the appeals court’s more liberal members, Judge Millett and Judge Judith Rogers, as in the Ali case, he was joined by two conservative colleagues, Judge Rao and Judge Thomas Griffith. All three agreed that the habeas petition filed by Abdulsalam Al Hela, a Yemeni tribal sheikh held at Guantánamo since 2004, was deficient for a variety of standard reasons.

Judge Griffith, who retired from the appeals court last week, argued in a separate opinion that there was no need to venture further into constitutional territory. But in her controlling opinion, Judge Rao said it was time to decide the due process issue because Mr. Al Hela claimed in his habeas petition 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.

But no such right applied to him, Judge Rao wrote, concluding that “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.” A footnote to her opinion contained the astounding assertion that “our court has adhered to Eisentrager’s holding 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.”

Judge Griffith, in his separate opinion, properly objected: “But we have never made such a far-reaching statement about the Clause’s extraterritorial application.” The objection was fruitless. Judge Randolph had done his work and had the last word, at once cryptic and completely clear in a concurring opinion consisting of a single sentence: “I agree with the court’s decision not only for the reasons expressed in its opinion, but also for the additional reasons stated in my opinion concurring in the judgment in Ali v. Trump.”

What might happen next is anyone’s guess. It’s not out of the question for the full D.C. Circuit to reconsider the panel decision, as it did last week when it overturned a panel opinion in the Michael Flynn case, restoring the district judge’s discretion to decide whether to yield to the Trump administration’s demand to dismiss the prosecution of the president’s former national security adviser. It’s conceivable the Al Hela case could end up at the Supreme Court. I have trouble conjuring five votes there even to sustain the Boumediene precedent, let alone to carry it into due process territory.

While I’ve never been to Guantánamo, I have revisited it regularly during my years writing this column. Why care about Guantánamo at this late date? As the 9/11 anniversaries have accumulated and the shock of that day has been absorbed into our national narrative, I’ve come to think of Guantánamo, born in fear and sustained through political cynicism and public indifference, as a mirror of ourselves during these opening decades of the current century, trapped no less than our 40 remaining “forever” prisoners with no obvious end to their imprisonment. There have been a few redemptive moments in this story, and the Boumediene decision was one of them. If it’s now to be buried without even a decent funeral, we should at least take note.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, 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), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from eight years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

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.