Andy Worthington's Blog, page 101

Photos and Report: Celebrating Magna Carta and Habeas Corpus and Campaigning to Save Legal Aid at the Not the Global Law Summit in London

See my photo set on Flickr here!

Yesterday, I was delighted to be a speaker at the Not the Global Law Summit, held in Old Palace Yard, opposite the Houses of Parliament, and also to have an opportunity to take the photos you can see in my photo set here. The event was called as a protest against the Global Law Summit, a three-day event taking place in the nearby Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, where tickets are £1500 (or £1750 on the door), and 2,000 delegates are in attendance from 110 countries, including 90 government ministers (see the speaker list here). As I mentioned in the text accompanying my photos, the Global Law Summit purports to celebrate Magna Carta in the year of its 800th anniversary, but in fact celebrates the law as a facilitator for corporate greed and unaccountable power.

The Not the Global Law Summit was also part of an ongoing campaign by the organisers, the Justice Alliance, to resist savage cuts to legal aid proposed by the Tory-led coalition government, and primarily by its chief butcher of the legal world, Chris Grayling, the first Lord Chancellor who is not from a legal background.

The Not the Global Law Summit also took place after a three-day Relay for Rights, featuring a giant puppet of Chris Grayling as King John, in the stocks. The Relay involved a 42-mile walk from Runnymede, where Magna Carta was signed in 1215, whose most lasting outcome was the creation of habeas corpus — the right not to be arbitrarily imprisoned, and to have a fair trial — which has been exported around the world and is our greatest defence against executive overreach.

It was in this context, as the co-director of the We Stand With Shaker campaign, that I spoke at the protest, about the importance of habeas corpus, and how disgraceful it is that the government is celebrating Magna Carta while Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, remains imprisoned without charge or trial after 13 years, despite being approved for release by the US authorities in 2007 and 2009. As I pointed out in my speech, David Cameron should be profoundly ashamed of the Global Law Summit, while Shaker is still held.

Other speakers at Not the Global Law Summit included Matt Foot, who was one of the main organisers, and Labour MP Karl Turner, the shadow attorney general. Foot said, “That Summit over there is a sham; it’s a sick joke. The only way to celebrate the anniversary of Magna Carta is to get rid of Chris Grayling,” and Turner told the rally, as an article on the Justice Gap website by Mary-Rachel McCabe explained, that “Grayling’s ‘bull in a china shop approach’ had rightfully earned him the title ‘Failing Grayling.’ The current Tory-led government is ‘beyond satire’, added the Labour MP for Hull. ‘Grayling’s incompetence is not because he doesn’t have a law degree; he is just incompetent. He has been held unlawful so many times, he ought to be in a prison rather than running the prison system.’”

McCabe added:

Prominent criminal defence barrister Francis Fitzgibbon QC accused Grayling of ‘breathtaking hypocrisy and stupidity’ and called on both limbs of the legal profession ‘to unite to fight for human rights, against the cuts to judicial review and above all the destruction of legal aid.’ Justice is ‘not a commodity that can be bought and sold to the highest bidder,’ said Fitzgibbon. ‘That we even have to be here protesting shows how extreme, subversive and insolent the people in charge have become.’

Professor Costas Douzinas, of Birkbeck College, was equally scathing in his critique of the government’s Magna Carta celebrations: ‘The Global Law Summit demonstrates that global capital has hijacked human rights,’ he said. ‘It demonstrates that global law is for capital, not for humans.’ The professor added that ‘Law without justice is like a body without a soul. It is a dead letter. It does not inspire obedience.’ Encouraging the rally not to give up the fight to save the justice system, he said: ‘The only battle we cannot win is the battle we do not join.’

The campaign also has celebrity support. Stephen Fry, Jo Brand and Tamsin Greig are featured in a video, Emma Thompson sent a letter of support that was read out at the summit, and Maxine Peake, the star of ‘Silk,’ took part in the protest, telling telling the rally that she was “honoured to be here to help you continue to stick it to that lot over there,” as she pointed towards the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre.

As the organisers note, legal aid in England and Wales was established in 1949, and “provides assistance to people who would otherwise not be able to afford legal representation or access to the court system.” However, in 2013, new legislation was introduced, which was aimed at “cutting the civil legal aid budget by a quarter (£320m) within a year,” removing legal aid “from most welfare benefits, housing and immigration (non-asylum) cases, as well as the majority of divorce and child contact cases.” In addition, the government “has also brought about drastic cuts to criminal cases, with the aim of slashing the criminal legal aid budget by a further £220million a year,” and criminal solicitors’ fees “have been cut by 8.75%, and are due to be cut again.”

One knock-on effect, which is not being reported by the mainstream media, is that some trials are unable to take place because there is no money for defence lawyers, meaning that some potential criminals are walking free — something that, if it were not the Tories doing it, would have the right-wing press in an uproar.

Grayling is also attacking judicial review, “the mechanism by which actions of the Government and Government bodies can be challenged in the courts,” as the organisers of Not the Global Law Summit describe it, noting also that, in a Daily Mail article in September 2013, he described judicial review as ‘a promotional tool for Left-Wing campaigners,’” and, as a result, he “is now trying to push through changes that will seriously restrict ordinary people’s access to judicial review.”

The government is also, of course, threatening to abolish the Human Rights Act, which will involve leaving the Council of Europe (and probably the EU) and withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights, which British Conservatives played a key role in developing after the Second World War, and the Tories are also dedicated to shielding themselves, the intelligence services and corporate interests from accountability for wrongdoing through increased secrecy, expanding the secret court system that, since 9/11, has been another nail in the coffin of British justice.

Just as Shaker Aamer is deprived  of his rights at Guantánamo, so terror suspects in the UK — both foreigners and British nationals — have been imprisoned without charge or trial in the UK, or held under a form of house arrest, on the basis of secret evidence, something that stands in absolute opposition to the principles of open justice on which our legal system is founded.

Moreover, in its latest counter-terrorist hysteria, the government is pushing ahead with extrajudicial citizenship-stripping measures (which I first wrote about last year here, here and here) that are also an affront to the central significance of habeas corpus to any country that regards itself as civilised.

In the year that marks the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta, I look forward to many more opportunities to highlight the need for habeas corpus to be celebrated and protected, as well as further opportunities to resist the government’s savage cuts.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, the director of “We Stand With Shaker,” calling for the immediate release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) 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).

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, and “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see 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.

Defending 800 Years of Habeas Corpus: We Stand With Shaker Attends Not the Global Law Summit in London on Monday

The following is a version of a press release I wrote and sent out on behalf of the We Stand With Shaker campaign that I launched in November with the activist Joanne MacInnes. The photo to the left, of campaigners about to set off from Runnymede to Parliament yesterday on a three-day Relay for Rights, shows, at the back, Chris Grayling, the Lord Chancellor, as King John. The first non-legal appointee to the job, he is to be publicly criticised at the Global Law Summit by Tony Cross, chairman of the Criminal Bar Association, who told the Independent, “I’m going to talk about how successive governments have treated public law with contempt, certainly over the last 20 years.”

Giant inflatable figure of Shaker Aamer to visit Queen Elizabeth Conference Centre to protest about hypocrisy of corporate Magna Carta celebration while Shaker is still denied habeas corpus at Guantánamo.

At 1pm on Monday 23 February, Andy Worthington and Joanne MacInnes, the directors of We Stand With Shaker, the campaign calling for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, will be joining lawyers at Old Palace Yard, opposite the Houses of Parliament, for Not the Global Law Summit, an event put together by the Justice Alliance.

The Justice Alliance is a lawyers’ organisation campaigning to defend legal aid from savage cuts imposed by the government, and Not the Global Law Summit is the culmination of Relay for Rights, a three-day march from Runnymede to protest about the hypocrisy of the Global Law Summit, taking place from 23-25 February at the Queen Elizabeth Conference Centre. While purporting to mark the 800th anniversary of the signing of Magna Carta, the summit, at which tickets cost £1500 a head, is actually an international corporate sham, described by the journalist Peter Oborne as “sordid, disgusting and debased.”

Before his principled resignation from the Daily Telegraph last week, in response to a conflict of interest regarding the HSBC tax evasion scandal, Oborne had been the chief political commentator at the Telegraph, and on January 8 had written a powerful article, “The hypocrites have jumped aboard the Magna Carta bandwagon,” roundly condemning the summit.

As he wrote:

The rank stench of moral hypocrisy will hang over the Queen Elizabeth Conference Centre. Before the last election, Mr Cameron promised a judge-led inquiry into the very serious allegations that the British state has been involved in torture. After nearly five years, it has gone nowhere. Who cares, when there’s a networking opportunity at the QE2?

Mr Cameron’s Government has launched a systematic attack on the legal aid system which gives poor people access to the justice system. There has always been a two-tier system of justice in Britain, one for the poor and one for those who can afford expensive private lawyers. The Government changes have widened this divide, and run flatly contrary to Magna Carta. So does the latest Criminal Justice Bill, with its vicious attack on judicial review, the main way in which arbitrary government decisions are held to account through the courts.

Most important of all, Mr Cameron is close to committing Britain to withdraw altogether from the European Convention on Human Rights, a document which entrenches the principles of Magna Carta in international law. Britain will, under Conservative plans, exit the Council of Europe, and become the awful bedfellow of only two European countries: Belarus and Kazakhstan.

To summarise, Mr Cameron’s Government has launched something close to an out-and-out attack on the rule of law. The idea that either he or his ministers give a damn for the principles that underlie Magna Carta is preposterous.

Echoing Peter Oborne, We Stand With Shaker will be highlighting the British and American governments’ disgraceful disregard for habeas corpus, which is the great and lasting achievement of Magna Carta, and which ended up being exported around the world to protect everyone from arbitrary imprisonment without charge or trial, because, while the summit takes place, Shaker Aamer continues to be held without charge or trial at Guantánamo, despite being twice approved for release by the US authorities, in 2007 and 2009. February 14th was the 13th anniversary of his arrival at the prison, and his ongoing imprisonment is a shame and disgrace for those pretending to honour the Magna Carta anniversary.

Or as Peter Oborne put it in his column:

Let’s never forget that Shaker Aamer, a British resident with four British children, is still rotting in Guantánamo Bay after being held there for 13 years without charge. Neither David Cameron nor any of his ministers have lifted a serious finger to help him — though this seems not to alarm the ambitious judges or the fat-cat lawyers, let alone the financial PR men and investment bankers [attending the summit].

If you’re in London, I hope you can come along. At 2pm, after the one-hour Not the Global Law Summit, at which Andy Worthington will speak, the giant inflatable figure of Shaker Aamer, which is at the heart of the We Stand With Shaker campaign, will be taken for a walk by the Queen Elizabeth Conference Centre, where there will be further photo opportunities.

If you can’t make it along, perhaps you can come to Parliament Square on Wednesday lunchtime (February 25) for the weekly vigil by the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign, when there will be a focus on the Global Law Summit. The vigil will be taking place from noon until 4pm, and coincides with the arrival of delegates at the Houses of Parliament from the nearly conference centre.

Also, on Tuesday February 24, the Shaker Aamer Parliamentary Group, led by John McDonnell MP, will be meeting at 2pm in Room D, 1 Parliament Street (see map here). All are welcome to attend.

For further information about Monday, and about Shaker Aamer and habeas corpus, please contact We Stand With Shaker’s co-directors:

Joanne MacInnes on: 07867 553580

Andy Worthington at: standwithshaker@gmail.com

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, the director of “We Stand With Shaker,” calling for the immediate release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) 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).

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, and “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see 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.

Photos: 13 Years in Guantánamo – Protest for Shaker Aamer Outside 10 Downing Street, February 14, 2015

See my photo set on Flickr here!

February 14, 2015 was the 13th anniversary of the arrival at Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, who, disgracefully, is still held, despite being approved for release by the US authorities twice, in 2007 and 2009.

To mark the occasion, the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign, with support from other groups including We Stand With Shaker (the group co-founded in November by Andy Worthington and Joanne MacInnes), the London Guantánamo Campaign, Reprieve and various Amnesty International groups held a lively protest opposite 10 Downing Street, with a number of speakers including Joy Hurcombe, the chair of SSAC, Katie Taylor of Reprieve, the journalists Yvonne Ridley and Victoria Brittain, the peace activist Bruce Kent, Andy Worthington and Shaykh Suliman Ghani, a teacher and broadcaster, and a friend of Shaker’s family. The speakers were ably coordinated by the campaigner David Harrold.

It was a great turnout, as I hope the photos show, and the particular focus of the event — just across the road — was David Cameron, the British Prime Minister. The British government claims that it is doing all it can to secure Shaker’s release, but that ultimately his fate is the in the hands of his US captors, but that is simply untrue. David Cameron could secure his return if he made it enough of a priority, which he should be doing, as Shaker is a legal British resident, with permanent leave to remain, and if any other legal resident found themselves imprisoned without charge or trial for years, and tortured, it is a safe bet to say that they would already have been released.

Representatives of the various campaigns delivered cards and messages to David Cameron after the speeches, and the journalist Peter Oborne — on the eve of his principled resignation from the Daily Telegraph — also turned up, and stood with Joanne MacInnes outside Downing Street, promoting We Stand With Shaker. On the morning of the launch of We Stand With Shaker in November, Peter wrote a powerful condemnation of Shaker’s ongoing imprisonment, and the indifference of politicians, for the Daily Telegraph, which was a huge boost for the campaign.

We are currently making new plans, in a bid to keep up the pressure on the British and American governments regarding Shaker’s ongoing, and completely unacceptable imprisonment, and will keep you posted. In the meantime, please feel free to sign Amnesty International’s petition for Shaker Aamer — to be delivered to both President Obama and David Cameron — which currently has over 31,000 signatures.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, the director of “We Stand With Shaker,” calling for the immediate release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) 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).

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, and “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see 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.

Please Read My New Al-Jazeera Article About the Significance of the Dismissal of David Hicks’ Military Commission Conviction at Guantánamo

Dear friends and supporters,

I hope you have time to read my new article for Al-Jazeera English, “The collapse of Guantánamo’s military commissions,” which, at the time of writing, has over 350 Facebook likes and shares, and has been tweeted over 125 times.

It’s my response to the news, on Wednesday February 18, that the the US Court of Military Commission Review dismissed the conviction against David Hicks, an Australian, and the first prisoner to be convicted in the much-criticized military commission trial system, in March 2007.

This was an expected result, following previous dismissals of convictions, beginning in October 2012, but it does not make it any less significant. Hicks first announced an appeal in October 2013, and then lodged a second appeal last August, both with the Court of Military Commission Review that was established in August 2007 because, until then, no review process existed for the commissions, and two of the judges involved had raised issues that only the court could resolve.

I don’t want to give away too much about my article, because I very much hope that you will have time to read it, and to share it if you find it useful, but suffice to say that the Hicks ruling, the fourth dismissal of a conviction (out of only eight cases that have proceeded to convictions) ought to sound the death knell for the commissions.

This is because they are an abject failure of justice, as I have been reporting since I researched and wrote my book The Guantánamo Files in 2006-07, and began writing on Guantánamo full-time as an independent journalist in May 2007 (see my first article here, and my archive of over 200 articles on the commissions here).

If there is ever to be any justice, as I explain in the article, the commissions must be scrapped, and the seven men still facing trials should be moved to the US mainland to face federal court trials, as was intended for five of them — those accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks — in November 2009. Unfortunately, at that time, the Obama administration also announced the return of the commissions, after a year-long hiatus, and within months the administration had also backed down on proceeding with federal court trials for the 9/11 co-accused when faced with criticism.

It is now time for both of those ill-conceived decisions to be reversed.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, the director of “We Stand With Shaker,” calling for the immediate release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) 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).

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, and “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see 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 Tale of Two Guantánamos: Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s World of Torture vs. the Senate’s Terrorist Fantasies

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I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012 with 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.

When it comes to Guantánamo, there are, sadly, two worlds of opinion, and the 122 men still held are, for the most part, caught in the struggle between the two.

In the first world, it is recognized that Guantánamo is a legal, moral and ethical abomination, a place where the prisoners held — 779 in total — were subjected to a series of ghastly experiments involving imprisonment without charge or trial, torture, and various forms of medical and psychological experimentation.

One man who endured particularly brutal torture at Guantánamo is Mohamedou Ould Slahi, the author of Guantánamo Diary, published last month and serialized in the Guardian, which has become a New York Times bestseller, even though Slahi is still held at Guantánamo. He wrote it in the prison as a hand-written manuscript in 2005, but it took until 2012 for it to be approved for release by the US authorities — albeit with over 2,500 redactions.

A Mauritanian, born in 1970, Slahi was singled out for a specific torture program, approved by Donald Rumsfeld, in 2003. He had aroused US suspicions because he was related to Abu Hafs, the spiritual advisor to Al-Qaeda (who, lest we forget, opposed the 9/11 attacks), and because, while living in Germany in 1999, three would-be jihadists, including Ramzi bin al-Shibh, an alleged facilitator of the 9/11 attacks, had stayed for a night at his house.

However, although Slahi had trained and fought in Afghanistan in 1991-2, when, apparently, he had sworn allegiance to Al-Qaeda, that was the extent of his  involvement with terrorism or militant activity, as Judge James Robertson, a District Court judge, concluded in March 2010, when he granted Slahi’s habeas corpus petition.

The Obama administration appealed Judge Robertson’s ruling, and in November 2010 the court of appeals — the D.C. Circuit Court — backed the government, vacating Judge Robertson’s ruling, and sending it back to the lower court to reconsider.

That never happened, and Slahi ended up abandoned. The high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established shortly after taking office in January 2009 had recommended him for prosecution in its final report two months before his habeas corpus petition was granted, and this stood until April 2013, when he was determined to be eligible for a new review process, the Periodic Review Boards, along with 24 other men who had initially been recommended for prosecution by the task force, and 46 others who had been recommended for ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial, on the profoundly dubious basis that they were too dangerous to release, but that insufficient evidence existed to put them on trial.

It is to be hoped that the many readers of Slahi’s engaging but harrowing memoir will add necessary weight to the campaign to close Guantánamo. As the Indian author Pankaj Mishra noted in a recent review of the book in the Guardian, touching on much of its power:

Guantánamo Diary, Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s extraordinary account of rendition, captivity and torture reveals, more vividly than any book in the previous decade of shock-and-awe ferocity, how he and countless other men became victims of a profound sense of individual and collective emasculation. His captors tried to re-establish their full-spectrum dominance in a variety of ways. There is among them the permissive libertarian who announces, “Today, we’re gonna teach you about great American sex”, as two topless women rub themselves against Slahi’s shackled body, and play with his penis. “William the Torturer” threatens to have Slahi’s entire family sexually assaulted and to send him to an American prison where “terrorists like you get raped by multiple men at the same time”. A more thoughtful supremacist believes that “there are two kinds of people in the world: white Americans and the rest of the world. White Americans are smart and better than anybody.” Slahi’s casual use of the phrase “If I were you” incites a blistering reproof: “Don’t you ever dare to compare me with you, or compare any American with you.” There is the cultural nationalist who informs Slahi, “We don’t like you to speak English. We want you to die slowly.” […]

His torture in Guantánamo — periodic beatings, sleep deprivation, isolation, diet manipulations — yielded no information of any value. The CIA, the FBI and military intelligence failed to link him to the many acts of terrorism they accused him of. Nevertheless, for more than 13 years, Slahi’s frail physical self seems to have offered his captors the satisfaction of ritually humiliating a religious and political “other” and then finding in his degradation the much-needed proof of his moral and physical inferiority. As one interrogator put it to Slahi, “in the eyes of the Americans, you’re doomed. Just looking at you in an orange suit, chains, and being Muslim and Arabic is enough to convict you.”

In contrast to Slahi — and the growing body of readers in the US who have understood, through reading his book, the extraordinary depravity of America’s behaviour post-9/11 — some lawmakers in Congress continue to live in a world of hysteria in which everyone at Guantánamo is a dangerous terrorist, even though there has never been any evidence whatsoever to indicate that this kind of claim is credible. Reliable sources within the US establishment have always pointed out that no more than a few dozen of the men held at Guantánamo have ever genuinely been accused of involvement with any form of terrorism.

The dangerous absurdity of the “Detaining Terrorists to Protect America Act of 2015″

Last week, while Slahi’s account continued to appal all decent people, the Senate Armed Services Committee passed, by 14 votes to 12, legislation proposed by Sen. Kelly Ayotte and supported by other Republican lawmakers including John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Richard Burr, which, with outrageous hyperbole, is called the “Detaining Terrorists to Protect America Act of 2015.”

The bill reinforces existing legislation (the annual National Defense Authorization Act) prohibiting the transfer of prisoners to the US mainland for any reason, and preventing the administration from buying any facility to be used as a prison, and it also prohibits the release of any prisoners to Yemen. Of the 122 men still held, 54 have been approved for release (50 by Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force and four in the last year by Periodic Review Boards), and all but seven of these men are Yemenis. There has been a long-standing reluctance, across the US establishment, to repatriate Yemenis because of security fears about Yemen, but in recent months the Obama administration has overcome this problem, finding third countries to offer new homes to Yemenis approved for release — 12 to date. In November, Georgia took three men and Slovakia took one, in December three men were resettled in Kazakhstan, and in January four men were sent to Oman, and one was rehoused in Estonia.

Where the bill enters new and entirely unacceptable territory, however, is in its two-year suspension on the transfer of any prisoners “who have ever been designated or assessed by Joint Task Force Guantánamo to be a high or medium risk to the U.S., our interests, or our allies.”

As the Washington Post explained, “While the Pentagon no longer uses such designations, all remaining detainees at Guantánamo were at one time categorized as either ‘high risk’ or ‘medium risk,'” according to the classified military files that were released by WikiLeaks in 2011. It’s also hugely important to recognize that the risk assessments were routinely exaggerated, and were, in any case, based on generally unreliable information — for the most part, statements made by the prisoners themselves, or their fellow prisoners, under the use of torture and other forms of abuse, as well as bribery.

If the bill is passed by the Senate — which, distressingly, seems likely, although a vote is not imminent — President Obama will be forced to veto it if he is to continue releasing prisoners as he has over the last three months, with the release of 26 men long approved for release.

I hope that the Senate will not pass this wretched bill, and that lawmakers will, instead, read Slahi’s book, and reflect on how and why Sen. Ayotte and her colleagues want to keep holding him, even though he clearly has no connection with terrorism and does not pose a threat to the US.

Slahi is not the only man who should no longer continue to be held, of course. Sen. Ayotte and her colleagues also want to keep holding the 54 men approved for release through high-level government review processes, and have also failed to realize that Slahi is not the only one of the other 68 men who should not be regarded as a threat. 13 years after Guantánamo opened, and with just ten men facing trials, or having been tried, it is, in fact, irresponsible of lawmakers to suggest that there is a case for holding the majority of these men, many of whom, like Slahi, can realistically be regarded as more sinned against than sinning.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, the director of “We Stand With Shaker,” calling for the immediate release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) 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).

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, and “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see 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.

Photos: “There is No Love in Guantánamo” – We Stand With Shaker Protest at the US Embassy in London, February 13, 2015

See my photo set on Flickr here!

The last week has been hugely busy for campaigners working to try to secure the closure of Guantánamo; and, specifically, the release of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison. February 14 was the 13th anniversary of Shaker’s arrival at Guantánamo, even though he was first told nearly eight years ago that the US no longer wanted to hold him, and, in 2009, was approved for release a second time by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established shortly after first taking office in January 2009.

His continued imprisonment is an absolute disgrace — for both the British and American governments — and no more excuses are acceptable, although they continue to be furnished by both sides. Last month, Shaker’s case was raised by David Cameron when he met President Obama in the US, but that only led to the president promising to “prioritize” his case, which has led nowhere to date. In fact, the outcome of this meeting was pure evasion: if Shaker’s case was genuinely prioritized, he would be home in London with his family a month from now — after the required 30-day notice to Congress — whereas the outgoing defense secretary Chuck Hagel, who must make the certifications to Congress that it is safe to release prisoners, recently explained that he hadn’t even been given Shaker’s file.

On the eve of the 13th anniversary of Shaker’s arrival at Guantánamo, the We Stand With Shaker campaign, which I established with Joanne MacInnes in November, planned to hand in a giant Valentine’s Day card for Shaker to the Ambassador, Matthew W. Barzun, with the following message: “We urge you to ask President Obama to secure the immediate release from Guantánamo of British resident Shaker Aamer. Please tell the president we want Shaker returned to his loved ones in London now.” Supporters were also encouraged to send smaller versions of the card directly to the Ambassador.

As I explained in an article on Thursday, which listed the 60+ MPs and celebrities who had signed the card:

The organizers had originally been told that they would be able to hand in the giant card to the Embassy, but permission was refused on Wednesday. MPs from the newly established Shaker Aamer Parliamentary Group, which has cross-party support and is led by John McDonnell MP, had been intending to hand in the card, and celebrities involved in the We Stand With Shaker campaign had also been intending to turn up to show their support.

Snubbed, the MPs decided not to turn up, but We Stand With Shaker decided to make a point of turning up with the giant card, notifying the media and securing a visit from music legend Roger Waters, a high-profile supporter of the campaign, who undertook a number of interviews in support of Shaker; in particular, this interview with Sky News, which ran a major feature on Shaker on Friday.

Please check out my photo set on Flickr, and watch out for a second set soon, from the well-attended protest outside Downing Street on February 14, at which I delivered a powerful speech directed at David Cameron, and his failure to demand Shaker’s immediate release, as he should for any legal British resident imprisoned without charge or trial for 13 years and subjected to torture and other forms of abuse.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, the director of “We Stand With Shaker,” calling for the immediate release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) 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).

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, and “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see 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.

“There’s a Part of Our Heart That’s Missing”: Shaker Aamer’s Sons Speak to Sky News on 13th Anniversary of His Arrival at Guantánamo

Yesterday (February 13) began with Sky News broadcasting an interview with two of the three sons of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, who is still held despite being approved for release from the prison by the US authorities in 2007 and 2009. The two boys who were interviewed are Mikhail (or Micheal), 15 and Faris, who is 13 on Saturday, and whose birth, extraordinarily, took place on the day that his father arrived at Guantánamo. Shaker’s other son is Saif, and he also has a daughter, Johaina.

In their first TV interview, Shaker’s sons spoke about their father, and below is a transcript I’ve put together.

Ian Woods: Boys, I’d like to begin by showing you an interview that we arranged to have done yesterday at Guantánamo with a US officer explaining why your father is still detained.

Lt. Col. Myles Caggins (on video): In 2009 Shaker Aamer’s detention status was reviewed. As a result he was placed in a category we call ‘eligible for transfer’. At some point in the future we’ll find a new home for him to be repatriated or resettled to.

Ian Woods: Can I ask you what you think of that explanation [about] why your father is still there?

Mikhail Aamer: I feel very sad because the man said they were going to try to find him a home, but I think his home is here in London with his family.

He also said, “They should consider that he has a family in London instead of trying to relocate him somewhere else, because there are people waiting for him in London.”

Ian Woods: What has it been like for you growing up without a father?

Mikhail Aamer: It’s been very upsetting and sad. We’ve seen other people with their parents, with their dads, how they enjoy themselves, how they’re so close to them. It’s like there’s a part of our heart that’s missing because we’ve been yearning for him to come home for many years and nothing’s happened yet.

Ian Woods: But things have changed in recent years because you’re able to Skype with him through the Red Cross, is that right?

Mikhail Aamer: Yes that’s right. The Skype has been very good at lifting our hopes up again because we’ve been able to speak to him, see how he’s doing there, and he’s a very funny person. He always makes jokes. He lightens the mood a lot of the time. We talk about what’s going on in our lives, how our education is.

Ian Woods: You’ve spent your entire life with your father in Guantánamo. What’s that been like for you?

Faris Aamer: It’s upsetting and quite shocking that I’ve never met him in my entire life.

Mikhail Aamer: I’m hoping that soon he’ll get released because I’ve been hearing a lot from my dad when we talk to him on Skype that he has a feeling that he’ll be released soon so I hope that will eventually happen.

Ian Woods: Do you visualise that? Can you imagine what that’s going be like?

Mikhail Aamer: No, it’s just too much for me to take in, so I’m just going to wait for it to actually happen.

Ian Woods: But to have a father back in your house again …

Mikhail Aamer: Yes it’s going to be a huge step for our family. I’m just waiting for the day to come.

At another point in the interview, Mikhail spoke about the first time Shaker spoke to them via Skype.

“We were all very excited,” he said. “We were very energetic. We couldn’t wait to see him. And then when the phone call finally happened, we couldn’t believe it was actually him. His voice. We hadn’t heard it for such a long time. It was very surprising to hear his voice again. It was a shock.”

He also spoke about having their hopes dashed regarding their father’s release.

“We felt very happy,” he said. “We thought there might be a chance for him to come home, but it just kept getting delayed.”

Please visit the Sky News page for the main feature on Shaker, also featuring Shaker’s lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, the director of Reprieve, former Staff Sgt. Joseph Hickman, who worked at Guantánamo when three prisoners allegedly committed suicide in 2006 (and whose book Murder at Camp Delta was published last month), former Guantánamo prisoner Moazzam Begg, a close friend of Shaker’s, and the actress Juliet Stevenson, a prominent supporter of We Stand With Shaker, the campaign I established with the activist Joanne MacInnes in November.

There was also footage from today’s protest outside the US Embassy, which was called at short notice after the Ambassador refused to accept a giant Valentine’s Day card asking him to ask President Obama to secure Shaker’s release, and an interview with Roger Waters (ex-Pink Floyd), who I’m proud to call a friend, and who was enthusiastic about attending the protest. I also spoke to Adam Boulton of Sky News Tonight, in the pouring rain outside the US Embassy shortly after 7pm, two hours after the protest ended, and that interview is here, via Twitter.

I believe that, even with just a few supporters present (the author Anna Perera and Shaker’s family’s former imam, Shaykh Suliman Ghani, as well as Roger) we nevertheless made a good point about the Ambassador’s refusal to accept the card, which was going to be presented by a delegation of MPs led by John McDonnell, the chair of the newly established Shaker Aamer Parliamentary Group, and other celebrity supporters.

Photos to follow. In the meantime, thanks as ever for your support. Today, Saturday February 14 (Valentine’s Day itself), there’s a rally in Parliament Square at 12 noon, and we (We Stand With Shaker) will then march to 10 Downing Street with the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign to deliver, at 2pm, a message of solidarity with Shaker to David Cameron, and to urge him to call for Shaker’s immediate return to the UK and his family much more vigorously than he has to date. Do come along if you’re in London or anywhere near!

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, the director of “We Stand With Shaker,” calling for the immediate release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) 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).

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, and “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see 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.

US Ambassador Snubs 60 Celebrities and MPs Calling for Release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer

[image error]Campaigners will be at US Embassy at 4pm with a giant Valentine’s Day card for Shaker, signed by over 60 MPs, celebrities and other supporters. UPDATE 1.30pm: Music legend Roger Waters (ex-Pink Floyd) and Saeed Siddique, Shaker Aamer’s father-in-law, will be attending the protest.

Issued as a press release by the We Stand With Shaker campaign.

In a shocking development, the US Ambassador, Matthew W. Barzun, has refused to meet with British MPs, celebrities and other supporters of the We Stand With Shaker campaign, who were planning to hand in a giant Valentine’s Day card for Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, on Friday February 13, the day before the 13th anniversary of Mr. Aamer’s arrival at Guantánamo.

The card reads: “We urge you to ask President Obama to secure the immediate release from Guantánamo of British resident Shaker Aamer. Please tell the president we want Shaker returned to his loved ones in London now.”

Shaker Aamer has twice been approved for release by the US authorities — under President Bush in 2007 and under President Obama in 2009.

The organisers had originally been told that they would be able to hand in the giant card to the Embassy, but permission was refused on Wednesday. MPs from the newly established Shaker Aamer Parliamentary Group, which has cross-party support and is led by John McDonnell MP, had been intending to hand in the card, and celebrities involved in the We Stand With Shaker campaign had also been intending to turn up to show their support. The full list of signatories on the card is below.

Instead, the co-directors of the campaign, Joanne MacInnes and Andy Worthington — and some of the campaign’s high-profile supporters — will be outside the US Embassy at 4pm with the giant Valentine’s Day card and the giant inflatable figure of Shaker Aamer that is at the heart of the campaign, and they will be available for a photo opportunity and for interviews.

Responding to the news, Andy Worthington said, “This is typical of the manner in which Shaker Aamer continues to be treated with disdain by the US authorities. The Ambassador is snubbing British MPs, and in the meantime we hear that, despite David Cameron discussing Shaker’s case with Barack Obama last month, defense secretary Chuck Hagel apparently knows nothing about it.”

He added: “The Ambassador should welcome a visit from the MPs, President Obama should take the necessary steps to secure Shaker’s release, and David Cameron must renew calls for his release and return to the UK with far more vigour than he has shown to date. It is intolerable that Shaker Aamer is about to begin his 14th year of imprisonment without charge or trial at Guantánamo, when he was first told he would be going home eight long years ago.”

Signatories to the Valentine’s Day card for Shaker Aamer

John McDonnell MP (Labour, Hayes and Harlington)

David Davis MP (Conservative, Haltemprice and Howden)

Caroline Lucas MP (Green, Brighton Pavilion)

Mark Durkan MP (SDLP, Foyle)

Mike Weir MP (SNP, Angus)

Andrew Mitchell MP (Conservative, Sutton Coldfield)

Joan Ruddock MP (Labour, Lewisham Deptford)

Alistair Burt MP (Conservative, North East Bedfordshire)

Sadiq Khan MP (Labour, Tooting, and Shadow Secretary of State for Justice)

Dr. Julian Huppert MP (Liberal Democrat, Cambridge)

Gavin Shuker MP (Labour and Cooperative, Luton South)

Sir Bob Russell MP (Liberal Democrat, Colchester)

Andy Slaughter MP (Labour, Hammersmith)

Hywel Williams MP (Plaid Cymru, Arfon)

Stephen Timms MP (Labour, East Ham)

Yasmin Qureshi MP (Labour, Bolton South-East)

Jeremy Corbyn MP (Labour, Islington North)

John Leech MP (Liberal Democrat, Manchester Withington)

Diane Abbott MP (Labour, Hackney North and Stoke Newington)

Baroness Helena Kennedy QC (Labour, House of Lords)

Clive Stafford Smith, Director, Reprieve

Kate Allen, Director, Amnesty International UK

Shami Chakrabarti, Director, Liberty

Denis Halliday, former Assistant Secretary-General, United Nations

Roger Waters, musician (ex-Pink Floyd)

Cori Crider, lawyer, Reprieve

Carol Ann Duffy, Poet Laureate

Sophie Ellis-Bextor, singer

Janet Ellis, actress/broadcaster

Juliet Stevenson, actress

Mark Rylance, actor

Frankie Boyle, comedian

Jeremy Hardy, comedian

Harriet Walter, actress

Bill Paterson, actor

Julie Hesmondhalgh, actress

Rhys Ifans, actor

Bill Nighy, actor

Sara Pascoe, comedian

Peter Oborne, journalist and author

Nick Davies, journalist and author

Jemima Khan, journalist

Bianca Jagger, President and Chief Executive, Bianca Jagger Human Rights Foundation

Anna Perera, author, Guantanamo Boy

Shaykh Suliman Ghani, TV presenter and teacher

Peter Tatchell, human rights campaigner

Dr. David Nicholl, neurologist

Gillian Slovo, novelist and playwright

Lisa Appignanesi, writer

Dr. Saleyha Ahsan, doctor and journalist

Charlie Winston, musician

Ken Loach, film director

Mike Leigh, film director

David Lan, artistic director of Young Vic

Nicolas Kent, theatre director

Carol Anne Grayson, writer/researcher

David Knopfler, musician

Sarah Gillespie, musician

SE (His Excellency) Prince Stefano Massimo di Roccasecca dei Volsci

Susie Orbach, psychotherapist and writer

Lindsay German, Chair of Stop The War

John Rees, presenter of The Report, Islam Channel

Joanne MacInnes, We Stand With Shaker

Andy Worthington, We Stand With Shaker

Joy Hurcombe, Chair, Save Shaker Aamer Campaign

For further information, please contact Joanne MacInnes on 07867 553580 or email Andy Worthington.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, the director of “We Stand With Shaker,” calling for the immediate release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) 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).

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, and “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see 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.

On Eve of 13th Anniversary of Shaker Aamer’s Arrival at Guantánamo, Renewed Calls for Action from Barack Obama and David Cameron

Despite a promise from President Obama to “prioritise” Shaker Aamer’s case after a recent meeting with British Prime Minister David Cameron, the US defense secretary Chuck Hagel has told reporters that Shaker’s file was “not on [his] desk.”

He reportedly said, “As far as I know, I have made a decision on everything that is ready to be made a decision on.” Mr. Hagel’s role is crucial, as, by law, he must sign off on any planned releases from the prison, after Congress has been given 30 days’ notice.

In a letter to David Cameron, Cori Crider, the Strategic Director of the human right organisation Reprieve, challenged the Prime Minister about what had taken place during his recent meeting with the US president. She wrote:

What assurances were you given regarding Shaker’s case by the President during your visit, beyond what the NSC spokesperson said publicly on Mr Obama’s behalf? Did the President provide any indication on when Shaker’s family can expect to see him returned to London? Did you ask the President to ensure that Shaker’s case was sent to Secretary Hagel for his consideration? And finally, in the light of Secretary Hagel’s comments, will you now press the Obama administration on providing a concrete timetable for Shaker’s return?

Clive Stafford Smith, Shaker’s lawyer, and the founder and director of  Reprieve, stated:

The US Defense Secretary’s admission that Shaker’s case isn’t even on his desk suggests that Obama’s claims to be ‘prioritising’ it may be little more than weasel words. If the US government wanted to ‘prioritise’ invading a country they could do it in a week, so sending one man home to his family in London cannot be too much to ask. Coming just days after David Cameron personally requested that Shaker be returned home to Britain, it doesn’t say much for the state of the ‘Special Relationship.’

He added:

Shaker has been cleared for release twice by the US Government itself. The UK wants him brought home. It is an affront to justice that he continues to be detained, without charge or trial, 13 years after his arrival at Guantánamo. The suspicion must be that the US fears he will reveal yet more about its shameful torture programme if he is ever allowed to speak freely.

Today, February 13, the We Stand With Shaker campaign will be protesting outside the US Embassy in London with a giant Valentine’s Day card for Shaker, to urge the US Ambassador, Matthew W. Barzun, to ask President Obama to secure Shaker’s release. Valentine’s Day marks the 13th anniversary of Shaker’s arrival at Guantánamo — and also the birth of his youngest son, who he has never met — and we feel justified in having made a card bearing the message, “There is no love in Guantánamo.”

If you’re in London, please come along to the US Embassy at 4pm, to join other supporters of the campaign in demanding Shaker’s release.

Also, on Saturday February 14 (Valentine’s Day itself), we will be in Parliament Square at 12 noon, and we will then march to 10 Downing Street with the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign to deliver, at 2pm, a message of solidarity with Shaker to David Cameron, and to urge him to call for Shaker’s immediate return to the UK and his family more vigorously than he has to date — something that, in light of this latest disappointing news, is of renewed importance.

I hope to see some of you there!

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, the director of “We Stand With Shaker,” calling for the immediate release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) 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).

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, and “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see 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: Andy Worthington Discusses Guantánamo and We Stand With Shaker on KBOO FM in Portland and Radio Islam in Chicago

I’m happy to make available two recent interviews I undertook with radio stations in Chicago, and in Portland, Oregon.

The first was with an old friend, Linda Olson-Osterlund, for KBOO FM, a community station in Portland, Oregon, and our 27-minute interview is available here, as an MP3, starting at 4:38, after adverts for the radio station.

Linda and I have spoken many, many times before, and it was a pleasure to talk to her again. I was delighted that she opened the show with “Song for Shaker Aamer,” the campaign song I wrote and played with my band The Four Fathers for We Stand With Shaker.

We Stand With Shaker is the campaign I launched two and a half months ago with the activist Joanne MacInnes, to call for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison.

This is how Linda described the show: “Host Linda Olson-Osterlund talks with British author and film-maker Andy Worthington about the news coming out of the illegal prison at Guantánamo Bay and the international protest movement against it. You will hear both good news and bad from prisoner releases to revelations about torture experimentation and murder at the facility. You will also hear about the January 10th protest on Dick Cheney’s lawn and January 11th at the White House.”

The good news was the flurry of prisoner releases at the end of last year and into the new year, although there have now been no releases for nearly a month, and Sen. Kelly Ayotte and other lawmakers, including John McCain and Lindsey Graham, have just introduced a disgusting and unacceptable bill, the proposed “Detaining Terrorists to Protect America Act of 2015,” which is intended to prohibit the release of any prisoner who has ever been declared a high or medium threat by the authorities at Guantánamo, even though these designations — which can be found in the classified military files released by WikiLeaks in 2011 — are profoundly unreliable, as they contain a considerable amount of information extracted from prisoners using torture, or other forms of abuse — and also through bribery (with all kinds of “comfort items” denied to uncooperative prisoners) or through exhaustion, when prisoners, relentlessly dragged to interrogation after interrogation, gave up resisting, and simply told their interrogators whatever they wanted to hear.

This wretched bill also ignores the fact that, of the remaining 122 prisoners, 54 have been approved for release, and, of the 68 others, only ten are facing, or have faced trials, and the rest are undergoing a thorough review process — the Periodic Review Boards  — to assess whether they should continue to be held, a process that should not be dismissed and replaced by naked political maneuvering.

Linda and I also spoke about the Senate torture report (which I wrote about here and here), and the important book Murder in Camp Delta by former Staff Sgt. Joseph Hickman, revisiting the disputed triple suicide at Guantánamo in June 2006, which was also covered by Democracy Now!, Vice News and Newsweek. For my previous articles about Sgt. Hickman’s story, and its coverage by law professor and journalist Scott Horton, see here, here and here.

As Linda mentioned, we also spoke about the invasion of Dick Cheney’s house on January 10, and the annual protest against Guantánamo outside the White House on January 11, both of which are featured in photo sets I took, here and here.

The second interview was with Radio Islam in Chicago, with whom I had not spoken previously, and my interview came about because I visited Chicago as part of my US tour, and was put in touch with the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago. I spoke to CIOGC while I was in the US, and this then led to my appearance on Radio Islam.

I was part of an hour-long show, available here, via SoundCloud,which was co-hosted by Tahera Shireen Rahman and Imam Matthew Ramadan, and which focused on Guantánamo Diary (serialized in the Guardian), an extraordinary account written at Guantánamo in 2005 by Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian prisoner, still held at Guantánamo, which has just been published, and which, I’m delighted to note, has become a New York Times best-seller. I know Slahi’s case well — see here, here, here and here for my analysis of his habeas corpus petition and discussion of how he was singled out for torture at Guantánamo —  and I can only hope that it will help to lead to his release, and that the truth he exposes so frankly and so eloquently will win out over the cynical hysteria of Sen. Ayotte and her colleagues.

Distressingly, although Slahi’s habeas petition was granted in March 2010, when a US judge concluded accurately that, although he moved in proximity to individuals connected to terrorism, he had no personal involvement with terrorism whatsoever, the Obama administration appealed that ruling, which was vacated and sent back to the lower court in November 2010, although, disgracefully, his case has never been re-considered, as it should have been. He is now one of the 50+ men still held who are awaiting Periodic Review Boards.

The show began with Larry Siems, who edited Slahi’s diary for publication, and Larry was followed by Nancy Hollander, who is Slahi’s attorney. I got to speak from 42 minutes in, until the end of the show, and I very much hope you have time to listen not only to me, but to the whole hour’s show, as it is very rewarding. I had the opportunity to complement Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s story by talking about Shaker Aamer and, again, the We Stand With Shaker campaign that is still ongoing — and please see here for our latest initiative: a Valentine’s Day campaign to mark the 13th anniversary of Shaker’s arrival at Guantánamo on Saturday.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, the director of “We Stand With Shaker,” calling for the immediate release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) 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).

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, and “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see 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.