Andy Worthington's Blog, page 104

Close Guantánamo: Andy Worthington’s US Tour Dates, January 8-15, 2015

To contact Andy for interviews, or to arrange events, please send an email.

January 11, 2015 is the 13th anniversary of the opening of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba for prisoners seized in the brutal and fundamentally lawless “war on terror” that the Bush administration declared after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

779 men have been held at the prison — plus at least one other, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, in the “black site” that the CIA ran briefly at Guantánamo. Over the years, that population has been reduced significantly. 532 men and boys were released by President Bush, and 110 have been released by President Obama. Nine others died at the prison, and one was transferred to the US mainland to face a trial, leaving 127 men still held.

This is still 127 men too many, because everything about Guantánamo is fundamentally unjust, and has been since the day the prison opened, and although President Obama has released 28 men in the last year, 59 of the 127 men still held have been approved for release (all but four by the Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established shortly after taking office in 2009), and the other 68 men must either be tried or released.

For the fifth year running, Andy Worthington is traveling to the US to take part in events to mark the anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo (on January 11), in a tour organised by the World Can’t Wait, with support from No More Guantánamos and Witness Against Torture. The tour takes in New York City, Washington D.C. (for the anniversary), Boston and other locations in Massachusetts, and Chicago. Andy will be representing the Close Guantánamo campaign and the We Stand With Shaker campaign he founded in November with activist Joanne MacInnes.

Andy Worthington’s “Close Guantánamo” US tour, January 2015

Thursday January 8, 2014, 6.30pm: Close the US Torture Camp at Guantánamo NOW: Stand with Shaker Aamer, Fahd Ghazy & all the Prisoners Unjustly Held, with Andy Worthington, Ramzi Kassem, Omar Farah, and Debra Sweet

Rutgers Presbyterian Church, 236 West 73rd Street, New York, NY 10023.

After flying into New York on Tuesday January 6, Andy Worthington takes part in this event, also featuring Debra Sweet, the national director of the World Can’t Wait, and two lawyers for men held at Guantánamo — Ramzi Kassem of City University of New York, and Omar Farah of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

As the Facebook page for the event states, “On January 11, the US torture camp at Guantanamo will have been open 13 years. More than 100 men are still held, the majority of whom were cleared for release years ago. They suffer not knowing if they will be released, held indefinitely. Some are still on protest hunger strike, and being force-fed by the US military. Shaker Aamer, the last held British subject, has been a leader among prisoners. He was cleared for release from Guantanamo in 2007 under Bush — yet remains, inexplicably, held. We will learn about a new campaign for his release, We Stand with Shaker. We will also view a new short film, “Waiting for Fahd,” which tells the story of Fahd Ghazy through moving interviews with his family in Yemen. Fahd was detained at 2002 when he was only 17 years old, and despite being cleared since 2007 he remains imprisoned.”

Sunday January 11, 2014, 1:30pm: Rally to Close Guantánamo and End Torture at the White House followed by a march to the Department of Justice.

At 1.30, the annual protest calling for the closure of Guantánamo will take place outside the White House, preceded by an Interfaith Service sponsored by the National Religious Coalition Against Torture, and followed by a march to the Department of Justice. See the Facebook page here.

Co-sponsored by Amnesty International USA, the Blue Lantern Project, the Center for Constitutional Rights, CloseGitmo.net, CloseGuantánamo.org, Code Pink, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the National Religious Coalition Against Torture, Reprieve, September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, the Torture Abolition and Survivor and Support Coalition, Veterans for Peace, We Stand with Shaker, Witness Against Torture, World Can’t Wait, and other organizations.

Monday January 12, 2014, 12.15-1.45pm: Leaving the Dark Side? Emptying Guantánamo and the CIA Torture Report, with Andy Worthington, Tom Wilner and Col. Morris Davis. Moderated by Peter Bergen.

New America, 1899 L Street NW, Washington, DC, 20036.

Andy and attorney Tom Wilner, who represented the Guantánamo prisoners before the Supreme Court in their habeas corpus cases in 2004 and 2008, co-founded the Close Guantánamo campaign in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo. For this event, they are joined at New America (formerly the New America Foundation) by Col. Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor of the military commissions at Guantánamo, who resigned in 2007, in protest at the use of torture, and has since become an outspoken critic of the prison and the “war on terror.” The moderator is journalist and author Peter Bergen, the Director of the International Security, Future of War, and Fellows Programs at New America.

Monday January 12, 2014, 7pm (time tbc): Closing Guantánamo and Seeking Accountability for Torture, with Andy Worthington

Old South Church, 645 Boylston Street, Boston, MA 02116.

This event  — Andy’s first ever in Massachusetts — is organized by the Northeast Regional Office of Amnesty International USA with No More Guantánamos, the World Can’t Wait and Close Guantánamo.

Tuesday January 13, 2014, 12.30pm: Closing Guantánamo and Seeking Accountability for Torture, with Andy Worthington

Harvard Law School, 1563 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138 (exact venue tbc).

This event is sponsored by Harvard Law ACLU chapter with No More Guantánamos, the World Can’t Wait and Close Guantánamo.

TBC: Wednesday, January 14, 12 noon: Closing Guantánamo and Seeking Accountability for Torture, with Andy Worthington

1215 Wilbraham Road, Springfield, MA 01119.

Lunch program sponsored by National Lawyers Guild WNEU Law chapter with No More Guantánamos, the World Can’t Wait and Close Guantánamo.

Wednesday, January 14, 7pm: Guantánamo at 13: How Obama Can Close the Illegal Prison, with Andy Worthington

Northampton Friends Meeting House, 43 Center Street, Northampton, MA 01060.

This event is sponsored by Pioneer Valley No More Guantánamos, with co-sponsors including the World Can’t Wait and Close Guantánamo.

Thursday January 15, 7pm: Close Guantánamo – End Torture, with Andy Worthington, Candace Gorman and Debra Sweet

Grace Place, 637 S. Dearborn, Chicago, Illinois 60605.

For this event in Chicago, Andy is joined by Guantánamo lawyer Candace Gorman and Debra Sweet, the national director of the World Can’t Wait.

See the Facebook page here. This event is organized by Chicago World Can’t Wait. If you can, please also join the Rally to protest a 14th year of Guantanamo, torture and indefinite detention at 4.30pm at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60603.

Andy then flies back to New York City on January 16, returning to the UK on January 17.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer and film-maker. 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.

As Three Yemenis Are Freed from Guantánamo, Video Highlights Plight of 52 Others, Long Cleared for Release

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.

On January 11, 2015, the prison at Guantánamo Bay will have been open for 13 long and unforgivable years. In the last year, President Obama has released 30 prisoners from Guantánamo, leaving 127 men still held, and today, on the last day of the year, the last of those 30 men — three Yemenis and two Tunisians, all approved for release in 2009 by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established shortly after taking office in January 2009 — were given new homes in Kazakhstan.

This is progress, after the lean period between October 2010 and July 2013 when just five men were released, because Congress imposed obstacles that the president was unwilling to expend political capital overcoming. However, 59 of the prisoners still held are men who, like the five just freed, are men the Guantánamo Review Task Force said should no longer continue to be held back in 2009, and their continued detention, therefore, remains a source of serious concern.

Of the 59, all but seven are Yemenis, and whilst it is reassuring that Yemenis approved for release are finally being freed — after nearly five years in which their release was banned by both the president and Congress, following a foiled airline bomb plot in December 2009 that was hatched in Yemen — it is still a significant uphill struggle for the administration to find new homes for these 52 men.

The odds would be much easier if the men were to be returned to their families in Yemen, but as the recent releases — four Yemenis to Georgia and Slovakia in November, and these three to Kazakhstan — show, the entire US establishment has not given up on its refusal to contemplate repatriating Yemenis, even though the entire review process approving their release was based on them not being a sufficient security threat to continue holding.

While we wait to see if the administration has found other malleable countries like Kazakhstan who are prepared to take in Yemenis in significant numbers — and while we formulate plans for the new year, and for putting pressure on the administration and on Congress, which we will inform you about in due course — we hope you have time to watch a powerful and moving video, “Waiting for Fahd,” via YouTube, telling the story of one of these men, Fahd Ghazy, represented by lawyers at the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights — just 17 when he was seized in 2001, and married with a young daughter whose early life he has missed, never to be regained.

As CCR explain:

The heartrending documentary “Waiting for Fahd,” tells the story of CCR client Fahd Ghazy, a Yemeni national unlawfully detained at Guantánamo since he was 17 and who is now 30. Through moving interviews with his beloved family in Yemen, “Waiting for Fahd” paints a vivid portrait of the life that awaits a man who, despite being twice cleared for release, continues to languish at Guantánamo, denied his home, his livelihood, and his loved ones because of his nationality.

Below is Fahd’s personal appeal to viewers of the film, which I’m posting in full because I believe it is an important part of Fahd’s story, complementing the film.

A personal appeal from Fahd Ghazy to the viewers of “Waiting for Fahd”

Thanksgiving, 2014

To begin, please forgive me for not saying the right things or making the right points. There are different cultures between us and many different experiences.

It hurts me that I do not have the privilege to express myself. I want to have the honor to speak out in my own voice and reach you directly — you who are thinking people. I want to say thank you for caring. You are willing to view me as a human being and that is something so precious to me.

My exposure to the world came through Guantánamo. I was 17 when they sent me here. At that time, I had rarely seen a television or heard a radio. Every significant event in my life, from funerals, to my own wedding, to the birth of my beloved daughter, Hafsa, happened in the Diwan of my own home. Now I am almost 31.

That means I grew up in Guantánamo. I grew up in this system. I grew up in fear. I hope that helps you to understand me.

I hope I will be heard.

Here, at Guantánamo, I am never heard. I am only ignored. In 13 years of imprisonment without charge, I’ve never been able to tell anyone who I really am.

I am not ISN 026. That is the government’s number.

My name is Fahd Abdullah Ahmed Ghazy. I am a human being — a man — who is loved and who loves.

I wish I had the ability to describe the passage of 13 years at Guantánamo. My own mind shuts down when I try to think about it. And I have no words that can make you truly understand.

In that time, I have lost so much both here inside the prison and outside in the world I left.

I miss my home — too much. But the truth is that if I returned to my village tomorrow, I would be a stranger, even among the people who love me the most.

A few days ago, Omar [Farah, Fahd's lawyer] brought me dozens of photographs of my village that were taken during the filming of “Waiting for Fahd.” I carried them back to my cell and held them with me like a treasure — I looked at every face, every building, and every mountain peak. I stayed up until the dawn hours before Fajr prayer, studying the images one by one. My mind and my heart raced. I wanted to be able to recognize every detail in the photos to be reminded of my life before Guantánamo. But it was nearly impossible.

I did not even recognize the faces of my best friends.

My younger brother, Abdur-Raheem, who I used to feed and care for and discipline, does not know me. Now he only knows of me.

The children in the village were just babies when I left. I have become just a name to them. There is even another Fahd Ghazy in the village now, a nephew of mine. He is already a teenager, nearly the age I was the last time I saw my home.

As for the old generation? They are nearly all gone, one by one, while I have been waiting.

The most tragic loss I endured at Guantánamo was the sudden death of my uncle. He became like a father to me when my own father died. He was also my teacher and my mentor. I relied on him and he looked after me.

He could not stand the pain of knowing that I had been imprisoned in this place. Whenever I was permitted to have calls to my family he would not participate. He would not allow himself to see me here or talk to me. He could not even bear to write me letters.

But I missed him terribly and I was selfish. I wanted to see his face, just to be reminded of him and feel comforted. I wrote to him. I pleaded with other family members. I begged him to accept a video call from me. Finally he agreed.

It was 8AM in Camp Echo on a Wednesday. The Red Crescent called the names of the family members in Sana’a who had come to join a video call with me. I cried just hearing my uncle’s name announced. I was overwhelmed, but he maintained his composure.

“We love you,” he said. “We are waiting for you. We will keep waiting for you.”

And then, right in front of my eyes, he died. He stopped talking and his head fell back. My family rushed to support him and the line cut. I sat in silence, shackled in my chair, helpless.

When the line reconnected there was no longer an image. I only heard my brother, Mohammed’s, voice. “He’s gone,” Mohammed said. “It was too much for him.”

In that moment I truly learned what Guantánamo is and how much power it has over those of us inside and those left outside.

Time has left me behind at Guantánamo. I have to accept this, but it makes me feel such loneliness and isolation. I appear fine on the outside, but I am being destroyed on the inside.

There is no guilt and no innocence here at Guantánamo. Those ideas are empty.

That’s just a game that is played.

But there is always right and wrong. That can never change.

Even the ones who have caged me know what is right. What is right is to free me. I have been cleared. That means a lot here at Guantánamo, except if you are from Yemen. I have been cleared for release since 2007, but I am still waiting for my freedom.

I have been waiting a lifetime just to start my life again.

The first time I saw Omar after he returned from Yemen, I was so overjoyed, just to see someone who was face-to-face with my daughter and my family. He had touched them. Here in front of me was someone who had actually been inside my house and ate the food I used to eat. He heard my mother’s voice. He experienced everything I had before and everything I want to have again. I could almost grasp it. For a moment, I was reconnected.

What you see in “Waiting for Fahd” is my dream. But I do not want it to be only a dream. I want it to come true. You can help make it come true. You can help me.

Children, I ask you to think about my daughter, Hafsa.

To the youth, remember age 17. Think about how I have been deprived of everything a young man needs to mature in this life: a job, education, experiences to learn from.

Wives, think of my wife who spent the spring of her life — her youth — waiting for me, caring for Hafsa alone.

Mothers, think of me when you think of your sons. Think of my mother longing for hers.

Fathers, think of me reaching out to my daughter from inside this place.

I have missed the best moments a father could ever enjoy: Hafsa’s first steps; walking her to school; witnessing her successes; helping her when she stumbles. I look forward to the day when I will no longer miss her. I will be next to her and from then on I will not miss a minute.

I am starving for those moments, when she looks at me and smiles or says a kind word or laughs.

That is the desire I have in the deepest part of my soul.

Now that you have heard my story and seen my dreams, you cannot turn away. You are excused only when you do not know. But now that you know, you cannot turn away.

Be a voice for the voiceless — for another human being who is suffering.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer and film-maker. 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.

Video: For We Stand With Shaker, Frankie Boyle Discusses Shaker Aamer’s Case with Sara Pascoe

I’m pleased to announce that a video of the legendary comedian Frankie Boyle being interviewed by his fellow comedian Sara Pascoe, and discussing the case of Shaker Aamer, is the third video to be made available by the We Stand With Shaker campaign, of which I am the co-director, with Joanne MacInnes, following on from the official campaign video (featuring my band The Four Fathers playing “Song for Shaker Aamer”, the campaign song I wrote), and the Human Rights Day video, featuring Juliet Stevenson reading from Shaker’s Declaration of No Human Rights, written in Guantánamo, and David Morrissey also providing commentary.

Frankie is a long-time supporter of Shaker. In December 2012 he donated the money he was awarded in a libel victory to Shaker’s legal costs, and last July, during a prison-wide hunger strike in Guantanamo, he embarked on a hunger strike in solidarity with Shaker.

We were delighted when he agreed to be interviewed for the campaign, and it was great to get Sara Pascoe on board to interview him. Unfortunately, I was playing a gig that day and couldn’t meet him myself, but it’s great to see the results of that meeting, admirably filmed and edited by Billy Dudley, the talented film student who made the promotional video for the campaign.

The video of Frankie and Sara is below:

If you like it, please feel free to share it as widely as possible. And please also follow us on Facebook and Twitter, if you don’t already, and check out our website, including the photos of celebrities standing with the giant figure of Shaker that is at the heart of the campaign, and of supporters standing with signs that read, “I Stand With Shaker.” You can submit your own photo here, and we encourage you to do so!

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer and film-maker. 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.

Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters Calls for the Release of Shaker Aamer from Guantánamo

My friends,

I’ve been offline for the last week, away from home with my family during this holiday period, staying in a house without wi-fi access. My apologies if you missed me, but I was also exhausted and run-down after the relentless work involved in the We Stand With Shaker campaign I launched with a colleague, Joanne MacInnes, on November 24, so I felt it was acceptable to have a short break.

The campaign we established was for Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, calling in particular for David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, to drop the government’s official position — that the final decision about his fate rests in the hands of the Obama administration — and to demand his release and his return to the UK.

This is required of the PM under the government’s obligations to Mr. Aamer, a legal British resident who had been given indefinite leave to remain in the UK with his British wife and British children before his kidnap in Afghanistan (where he had traveled with his family to undertake humanitarian aid projects) and his rendition to Guantánamo in February 2002.

Mr. Aamer was cleared for release from Guantánamo under President Bush in 2007, and again under President Obama in 2009. In addition, the British government has been requesting his return since 2007. His continued imprisonment is, therefore, completely unacceptable — and inexplicable too, unless one accepts, as I think is necessary, that both the US and the UK governments, at the urging of their security services, would prefer to send him back to Saudi Arabia, the country of his birth, where he would be prevented from talking about what — as the foremost campaigner for the prisoners’ rights within Guantánamo — he knows about various crimes committed by his captors in the “war on terror.”

The We Stand With Shaker campaign has attracted significant support from celebrities and MPs, as well as from the Daily Mail, which featured our open letter to David Cameron and our Human Rights Day video featuring Juliet Stevenson and David Morrissey in the week before Christmas.

Over the Christmas period the Daily Mail ran a story suggesting that Mr. Aamer will be released in the new year, which, of course, everyone involved in the campaign hopes is true. The article was entitled, “Last British inmate at Guantanamo set to be freed in the new year in fresh push by Obama to empty prison,” but although it was being treated as though it came via a Pentagon press release, it was a lot more vague than that on close inspection.

In the opening paragraph we learned that Mr. Aamer “could by freed in the new year,” but then, after the seemingly unequivocal statement, “Clive Stafford Smith, Mr Aamer’s lawyer, told the newspaper that he believes his client will be returned to Britain,” we discovered that he actually said, “I cannot believe they will not include Shaker, as it would be totally irrational. It’s very hard for them to come up with an explanation as to why this hasn’t been done.”

I’m sure I’ll be looking more closely at this claim in the days to come, but for now I wanted to make sure that I didn’t overlook another important article about Shaker Aamer that was published in the Daily Mail just before Christmas, written by Roger Waters, the chief songwriter of Pink Floyd, who is a supporter of my work and of the We Stand With Shaker campaign, having attended the launch in London — opposite the Houses of Parliament — on November 24.

Roger wrote some very kind words about me in his article, and I’d like to return the favor, commending him for his commitment to resisting injustice — in Palestine as well as at Guantánamo and more widely in the “war on terror.” Unfortunately, far too many people in the worlds of art and entertainment — actors, writers, artists as well as musicians — fail to take a stand against injustice, despite their ability to reach large numbers of people. I am proud to count Roger as an exception, and as a friend — and also to thank all the other actors, writers and musicians who have declared their support for the We Stand With Shaker campaign, signing our open letter to David Cameron and standing with the giant inflatable figure of Shaker Aamer that is at the heart of our campaign.

My Pink Floyd hit and this tragedy

By Roger Waters, Daily Mail, December 23, 2014

The revelations about the Americans’ torture of terror suspects have rightly caused outrage across the world.

The U.S. government has owned up to the shadow of institutionalised brutality that has hung over ‘The Land Of The Free’ since the inception of the War On Terror after 9/11.

The sense of disquiet should extend to the political establishment in Britain, given the mounting evidence that our own intelligence and security agencies may have colluded with the CIA in rendition, torture and a disregard for international human rights law including the Geneva Conventions.

Nothing illustrates our own national disgrace more graphically than the case of Shaker Aamer, a 46-year-old family man from London, who has now been held for almost 13 years in the notorious detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, having been seized by the U.S. military in Afghanistan in November 2001.

During Mr Aamer’s long spell of incarceration, he has never been put on trial or even had any charges levelled against him.

He has been subjected to systematic torture, humiliation and degradation, deprived not just of his liberty, but of all rights normally afforded to those in custody yet to be proven guilty of any crime.

The time has surely come for a judge-led inquiry to find out the true extent of Britain’s role in the barbaric treatment of Mr Aamer.

Yesterday, the Daily Mail reported on the growing pressure on David Cameron from nine human rights groups for just such an inquiry into the CIA’s torture of prisoners, including Mr Aamer.

No human being should be subjected to such monstrous and prolonged treatment — 13 years, with no evidence produced to suggest a crime!

It is little wonder that one recent medical report stated Mr Aamer is now suffering from a host of serious health problems, including failing eyesight, kidney damage and depression.

This is, after all, a man who has been incarcerated for so long without trial that he has never even seen his youngest child, a 12-year-old son.

His experience is a scandalous affront to justice, making a complete mockery of respect for the law and due legal process.

Even cold-blooded murderers rarely serve as lengthy a sentence as Mr Aamer has had to endure, and, if they do, they will at least have been convicted in a court by a jury of their peers.

I have a deep personal involvement in the campaign to release Mr Aamer, ever since his case was brought to my attention by the renowned defence advocate Clive Stafford Smith.

With a spirit of selfless determination, Clive runs the organisation Reprieve, which campaigns for the rights, among many others, of British prisoners held overseas. Appalled by Mr Aamer’s plight, Clive had contacted him and lent him his support.

That is how I became involved. In one letter to Clive from Guantánamo, Mr Aamer began with the opening lyrics of one of my songs, ‘Hey You’, from the 1979 Pink Floyd album ‘The Wall’. Mr Aamer said the lyrics captured his experience in Guantánamo. These lyrics run:

Hey you! Out there in the cold

Getting lonely, getting old. Can you feel me

Hey you! Standing in the aisles

With itchy feet and fading smiles. Can you feel me

Hey you! Don’t help them to bury the light

Don’t give in without a fight.

Clive was able to pass Mr Aamer’s letter on to me, and I was profoundly touched that ‘Hey You’ had had such a resonance with him. Other parts of his letter reinforced how much this man was suffering. He explained that for most of the time, he had to stay in his tiny cell and was denied access to a computer, books, journals or even stationery.

He was occasionally allowed to write a letter, but even this was difficult because the pens provided by the guards were wobbly and soft, like a ballpoint with the plastic outer casing removed.

Apparently, this was a security precaution to stop the detainees attacking their guards — an obviously ridiculous measure, given that the guards outnumbered the prisoners ten to one and were armed with M16 rifles.

On a more uplifting note, in his letter Mr Aamer paid tribute to an American Christian pastor who had been in touch with him and had spoken of his work to build an understanding between Christianity and Islam.

This highlighted Shaker’s attachment to the idea of understanding between peoples and faiths, to the idea of reconciliation and peace, and his fundamental opposition to extremism.

But then, his entire story seemed to undermine the American claims that he was a dangerous extremist embedded with Al-Qaeda and bent on the destruction of Western civilisation.

Born in Saudi Arabia and trained as a nurse, he came to Britain in the mid-1990s, married a British woman and started a family.

In 2001, he moved with his family to Afghanistan, where he began work for a humanitarian charity. This fact is disputed by the Americans, who claim he became an Al-Qaeda fighter.

Really? Where is the evidence?

Shaker has never been allowed to defend himself in a court of law. In effect, he has been held purely on the whim of the U.S. authorities.

This abuse of power exhibits all the hallmarks of despotism. Either we believe in freedom to live under the law, including the law of Habeas Corpus, or we don’t. Either we, the so‑called enlightened West, are law-abiding or we are a tyranny.

Strangely, the U.S. government, the ‘tyranny’ that guards the rest of us from Shaker Aamer, now appears all the more culpable with the extraordinary news that the British Government has repeatedly called upon them to release him.

The failure to heed this request must raise suspicions that American and British intelligence are worried that, if Mr Aamer is set free, he might reveal the shocking complicity of British intelligence in the savage interrogation of prisoners at Guantánamo, and at secret rendition sites elsewhere in the world.

Last month, I attended a gathering in Parliament Square in support of a movement to free Shaker Aamer. Among the others present was the campaigning journalist Andy Worthington. Andy, to his eternal credit, has devoted much of his recent working life to exposing the horrors of Guantánamo.

I was proud to be there, standing as I did alongside other Brits who still care about the law, about standards, about justice, about fair play.

Thanks to the recent Senate report into CIA torture, the public mood has changed, maybe even dramatically, in the past few days.

It is possible people are coming to see that justice is important and that the British legal principles dating back to Magna Carta in 1215 enshrine the rights of the individual and are to be defended at all costs.

Detention and incarceration without trial have absolutely no place in the legal system which we, the British people, are all rightfully proud to call our own.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer and film-maker. 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.

Four Insignificant Afghan Prisoners Released from Guantánamo

More good news regarding Guantánamo, as four Afghans have been released, and returned to Afghanistan in what US officials, who spoke to the New York Times, “are citing as a sign of their confidence in new Afghan President Ashraf Ghani.”

The Times added, “Obama administration officials said they worked quickly to fulfil the request from Ghani, in office just three months, to return the four — long cleared for release — as a kind of reconciliation and mark of improved US-Afghan relations.”

The Times also noted that there is “no requirement that the Afghan government further detain the men” — Shawali Khan, 51 (ISN 899), Abdul Ghani, 42 (ISN 934), Khi Ali Gul, 51 (ISN 928) and Mohammed Zahir, 61 (ISN 1103) — adding that Afghanistan’s government-appointed High Peace Council also “requested the repatriation of the eight Afghans who are among the 132 detainees remaining at Guantánamo,” 63 of whom have been cleared for release.

The release of the men had created tension in Washington D.C., with defense secretary Chuck Hagel, who is required to certify to Congress that it is safe to release prisoners, refusing to sign off on their release after Gen. John F. Campbell, the senior US commander in Afghanistan, “raised concerns they could pose a danger to troops in the country.”

However, administration officials also said that Gen. Campbell and all the “military leaders on the ground have now screened the move.” Australia’s ABC News explained that a senior US official had said that the four men were “identified as ‘low-level detainees’ who were cleared for transfer long ago and were not considered security risks in their homeland.” They were “originally detained on suspicion of being members of the Taliban or affiliated armed groups,” but a second senior US official said, “Most, if not all, of these accusations have been discarded and each of these individuals at worst could be described as low-level, if even that.”

I have been writing about these men’s cases for many years, and have had no doubt that there has never been any reason for their detention. In an article in July 2012, I explained their stories as follows:

Shawali Khan, whose habeas petition was denied in September 2010, was a shopkeeper, who seems, quite clearly, to have been falsely portrayed as an insurgent by an informant who received payment for doing so. To add further shame to the ruling, the judges of the D.C. Circuit Court refused his appeal [in] September [2011], apparently consigning him to Guantánamo forever on an apparently legal basis. [Also see a profile here by Len Goodman, one of his lawyers].

Abdul Ghani [was] a poor villager who scavenged for scrap metal, [and] was put forward for a [military commission] trial in 2008 because the authorities claimed that he had played a part in attacks and planned attacks as part of the insurgency against US forces. Ghani has always refuted the charges, and the charges against him were dropped before George W. Bush left office, and have not been reinstated. [Also see a profile here by Lt. Col. Barry Wingard, one of his lawyers].

Khi Ali Gul [was] captured in Khost and accused of taking part in a bomb plot and being part of a Taliban assassination team. During his long years in Guantánamo, he has stated that he fought with US forces in Tora Bora, and described one occasion when “the Americans were sleeping and we were guarding them.” He added, “If I were their enemy, I would have killed them all.” He was captured at a checkpoint, where, he said, “there were some people that I had a dispute with,” and he added that they “told the American soldiers a lie,” and he was then arrested.

Mohammed Zahir, 48 years old at the time of his capture in July 2003 … stated in Guantánamo that he was a teacher, and said that he had been set up by Taliban sympathizers, who arranged for his arrest by telling lies to the US forces. In contrast, however, the US authorities claim[ed] that he was employed by the Taliban in the Secret Information Office in Ghazni, and that he “possessed information associated with weapons caches, arms dealings and Taliban personalities.”

It is worth noting, however, that these claims were almost certainly dismissed when he and the other men were approved for release in 2009 by President Obama’s high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force.

Looking to the future, the New York Times pointed out that, for President Obama to close Guantánamo, he “faces the challenge of working out what to do with any detainees who aren’t cleared for transfer — either because the United States wants to prosecute them or continuing holding them because they are considered too dangerous to release.” Only ten men are facing — or have faced — trials, and the rest are in the unacceptable position of being “considered too dangerous to release,” even though the task force that made those recommendations admitted that they had insufficient evidence to prove their claims — or to put the men on trial. All but those facing trials — so currently 59 of those still held — are gradually having their cases reviewed by Periodic Review Boards, which have so far reviewed the cases of nine men and recommended six for release.

However, while President Obama needs to press ahead with the release of all the prisoners cleared for release, the biggest outstanding problem for him, if he is to fulfill his promise to close the prison, which he made on his second day in office in January 2009, is to somehow overcome the huge obstacle raised by Congress, which “has passed legislation blocking detainees from coming to the US for detention or trial,” as the Times put it.

On Friday, President Obama issued a statement objecting to Congress’s latest restrictions on closing Guantánamo, in next year’s National Defense Authorization Act, calling the closure of Guantánamo a “national imperative.” He also pointed out that, despite having recently released the last three prisoners in the Parwan Detention Center (formerly known as Bagram), “the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, remains open for the 13th consecutive year, costing the American people hundreds of millions of dollars each year and undermining America’s standing in the world.” He added, “The continued operation of this detention facility weakens our national security by draining resources, damaging our relationships with key allies and partners, and emboldening violent extremists.”

The Times also noted that some supporters of the closure of Guantánamo — and I count myself in this camp — question “whether the United States has the authority to continue detaining prisoners captured in the Afghan conflict after the end of combat operations at year’s end.”

J. Wells Dixon, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, said, “We will certainly expect to see legal challenges to continued detention at the end of hostilities, which is just in a couple weeks.”

Dixon, who worked on Shawali Khan’s case, “said he hopes Khan can reunite with his father and brother after nearly 13 years at Guantánamo.” Specifically, Dixon said, “He was sent to Guantánamo on the flimsiest of allegations that were implausible on their face and never fully investigated. He never should have been there.”

This is not only true of the four Afghans just released; it is also, I have long maintained, true of some, or perhaps most of the eight Afghans still held — Obaidullah, for example, Mohammed Kamin and Karim Bostan.

I hope we will shortly be hearing about more releases from Guantánamo — including Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, also cleared for release, who is the focus of a high-profile campaign, We Stand With Shaker, that I launched a month ago with a colleague, Joanne MacInnes. In the meantime, however, it is worth sparing a thought for these four men whose implausibly long ordeal — imprisoned for 11 or 12 years without adequate explanation — has finally come to an end.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer and film-maker. 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.

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009 (out of the 532 released by President Bush), and the 101 prisoners released from February 2009 to December 8, 2014 (by President Obama), whose stories are covered in more detail than is available anywhere else –- either in print or on the internet –- although many of them, of course, are also covered in The Guantánamo Files, and for the stories of the other 390 prisoners released by President Bush, see my archive of articles based on the classified military files released by WikiLeaks in 2011: June 2007 –- 2 Tunisians, 4 Yemenis (here, here and here); July 2007 –- 16 Saudis; August 2007 –- 1 Bahraini, 5 Afghans; September 2007 –- 16 Saudis; September 2007 –- 1 Mauritanian; September 2007 –- 1 Libyan, 1 Yemeni, 6 Afghans; November 2007 –- 3 Jordanians, 8 Afghans; November 2007 –- 14 Saudis; December 2007 –- 2 Sudanese; December 2007 –- 13 Afghans (here and here); December 2007 –- 3 British residents; December 2007 –- 10 Saudis; May 2008 –- 3 Sudanese, 1 Moroccan, 5 Afghans (here, here and here); July 2008 –- 2 Algerians; July 2008 –- 1 Qatari, 1 United Arab Emirati, 1 Afghan; August 2008 –- 2 Algerians; September 2008 –- 1 Pakistani, 2 Afghans (here and here); September 2008 –- 1 Sudanese, 1 Algerian; November 2008 –- 1 Kazakh, 1 Somali, 1 Tajik; November 2008 –- 2 Algerians; November 2008 –- 1 Yemeni (Salim Hamdan) repatriated to serve out the last month of his sentence; December 2008 –- 3 Bosnian Algerians; January 2009 –- 1 Afghan, 1 Algerian, 4 Iraqis; February 2009 — 1 British resident (Binyam Mohamed); May 2009 —1 Bosnian Algerian (Lakhdar Boumediene); June 2009 — 1 Chadian (Mohammed El-Gharani), 4 Uighurs to Bermuda, 1 Iraqi, 3 Saudis (here and here); August 2009 — 1 Afghan (Mohamed Jawad), 2 Syrians to Portugal; September 2009 — 1 Yemeni, 2 Uzbeks to Ireland (here and here); October 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti, 1 prisoner of undisclosed nationality to Belgium; October 2009 — 6 Uighurs to Palau; November 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian to France, 1 unidentified Palestinian to Hungary, 2 Tunisians to Italian custody; December 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti (Fouad al-Rabiah); December 2009 — 2 Somalis, 4 Afghans, 6 Yemenis; January 2010 — 2 Algerians, 1 Uzbek to Switzerland, 1 Egyptian, 1 Azerbaijani and 1 Tunisian to Slovakia; February 2010 — 1 Egyptian, 1 Libyan, 1 Tunisian to Albania, 1 Palestinian to Spain; March 2010 — 1 Libyan, 2 unidentified prisoners to Georgia, 2 Uighurs to Switzerland; May 2010 — 1 Syrian to Bulgaria, 1 Yemeni to Spain; July 2010 — 1 Yemeni (Mohammed Hassan Odaini); July 2010 — 1 Algerian, 1 Syrian to Cape Verde, 1 Uzbek to Latvia, 1 unidentified Afghan to Spain; September 2010 — 1 Palestinian, 1 Syrian to Germany; January 2011 — 1 Algerian; April 2012 — 2 Uighurs to El Salvador; July 2012 — 1 Sudanese; September 2012 — 1 Canadian (Omar Khadr) to ongoing imprisonment in Canada; August 2013 — 2 Algerians; December 2013 — 2 Algerians, 2 Saudis, 2 Sudanese, 3 Uighurs to Slovakia; March 2014 — 1 Algerian (Ahmed Belbacha); May 2014 — 5 Afghans to Qatar (in a prisoner swap for US PoW Bowe Bergdahl); November 2014 — 1 Kuwaiti (Fawzi al-Odah); November 2014 — 3 Yemenis to Georgia, 1 Yemeni and 1 Tunisian to Slovakia, and 1 Saudi; December 2014 — 4 Syrians, a Palestinian and a Tunisian to Uruguay.

New Life in Uruguay for Six Former Guantánamo Prisoners

Good news from Uruguay, where five of the six men released from Guantánamo on December 7 and given new lives in Montevideo have been photographed out and about in the city. From left to right, in the photo, they are: Ali Hussein al-Shaaban, Ahmed Adnan Ahjam and Abdelhadi Omar Faraj (all Syrians), Tunisian Abdul Bin Muhammad Abbas Ouerghi (aka Ourgy) and Palestinian Mohammed Abdullah Taha Mattan, photographed by Pablo Porciuncula, after eating lunch at a house in Canelones department, near Montevideo on December 14. See more photos here.

The sixth man, Abu Wa’el Dhiab, the Syrian who became confined to a wheelchair whilst at Guantánamo, had been on a hunger strike and had challenged the US authorities in the courts, has not yet been seen publicly, but is apparently recovering from his long ordeal. His lawyer, Cori Crider of Reprieve, commented that he “had difficulty believing he would ever be released until he boarded the plane out of the US military base,” as the Guardian put it. Crider said, “You inhale the air for the first time as a free man and only then it’s real. It’s going to take some time for him to come down from his hunger strike, he’s six foot five and only weighs about 148 pounds, he’s extremely thin, in pain, emaciated and still confined to a wheelchair.”

Immediately after their arrival, the Associated Press reported that Michael Mone, Ali al-Shaaban’s Boston-based lawyer, said that, with the exception of Abu Wa’el Dhiab, “The other men are all up on their feet. They have big smiles on their faces and they are very happy to be in Uruguay after 12 plus years of incarceration.” As the AP described it, Mone was “accustomed to his client being shackled and strictly monitored during meetings in Guantánamo,” and said it was “an emotional experience to see al-Shaaban experiencing freedom for the first time in years.” The AP also reported that al-Shaaban “spoke by phone with his parents, who are in a refugee camp in a country Mone declined to identify, fleeing the turmoil of their homeland.”

Mone also said of his client, “He’s relaxed, he’s not flinching every time there’s a knock on the door or the close of a gate. He just seems so much more alive than when I used to see him in Guantánamo.”

The AP also noted that Uruguay’s defense minister Eleuterio Fernandez Huidobro had welcomed the men to their new home, and had told a local radio station that he expected them to find “a job, work to put bread on the table, bring the family, live in peace and sit in the stands of a stadium, becoming a fan of some soccer team.”

One of the men, Abdelhadi Omar Faraj, released a letter, via his lawyer Ramzi Kassem, a law professor at City University of New York, in which he thanked the people of Uruguay for taking them in, and added that he had “already become a fan of the country’s national soccer team,” as the AP put it.

Faraj, the AP continued, “described himself as an innocent man from a modest background who had worked as a mechanic and butcher” before he was seized after crossing from Afghanistan to Pakistan in December 2001, and, he said, sold to US forces.

“Were it not for Uruguay,” he said, “I would still be in the black hole in Cuba today. It is difficult for me to express how grateful I am for the immense trust that you, the Uruguayan people, placed in me and the other prisoners when you opened the doors of your country to us. We cannot thank you enough for welcoming us in your land.”

A week after their arrival, at a press conference on Tuesday December 16, President Mujica made a point of showing a document from the US State Department, dated December 2, which stated that there was no information that “the men were involved in conducting or facilitating terrorist activities against the United States or its partners or its allies,” as the Miami Herald described it, adding that “[m]embers of Uruguay’s opposition had requested the release of the documents as proof that the men are not dangerous.”

“I never doubted, just by using my common sense, that they were paying for something they never did,” President Mujica also said, adding, “We considered this to be a just cause and we had to help them.”

The Miami Herald also reported that, after being released from the military hospital where they were first housed, so that their health could be checked, the men have been staying in a house in Montevideo “as guests of a major labor union,” and have been taking Spanish classes. Four of the men, the newspaper added, “were seen strolling through Uruguay’s capital last week and stopping to buy cheese and bread in their first long walk in freedom.”

On Massachusetts’ MassLive website, further details were provided by Buz Eisenberg, one of the lawyers for Mohammed Taha Mattan, the Palestinian who was nearly given a new home in Germany over four years ago.

Eisenberg said, “Mattan has been granted refugees status, from the United States of America, because he was kidnapped, held for 12 and a half years and tortured, with not one charge filed against him, which is contrary to every law.” He added, “His release should have been earlier this year, but was blocked by the secretary of defense, who had to sign certification required by congress, 30 days before a transfer, and it just sat there.”

Mattan, who is now 35 years old, was seized, with other young men, in a guesthouse in Pakistan in March 2002, and always maintained that “his travels were for the purpose of religious study.” As Eisenberg noted, “He was deemed innocent so many times,” adding, “He has finally been transferred, from  Guantánamo, to Uruguay, to rebuild his life, that was stolen from him by his kidnapping, and he is grateful to Uruguay and congress for not impeding his ability to start his new life.”

Prior to Mattan’s release, Eisenberg met with him in Guantánamo, where, he said, “his client was held for days, in isolation,” and where he never saw him unshackled. “He was apprehensive, but overjoyed to be in any place but Guantánamo, to get out of hell,” Eisenberg said of Mattan’s state of mind before his release.

Eisenberg also explained that Mattan has been associated with Jama’at al-Tablighi, a huge Islamic missionary organization, and had been such a good student in the West Bank that he had “elected to travel and do service work” with the organization “as a way of getting into university.”

“He was a victim of the process of buying bodies and offering bounties to warlords, poor people and policemen,” Eisenberg said of his capture. He has also represented other prisoners, and he explained that he became involved because he “took an oath (as a lawyer) to support and defend the US Constitution.”

Lauren Carasik, another of Mattan’s lawyers (and the director of the international human rights clinic at the Western New England University School of Law), said she had “long been concerned about the injustice of Guantánamo.” She added, “When I first spoke with Buz Eisenberg about Mattan’s case, I was struck by his compelling story and the travesty of his detention without trial for so many years. I was also aware that fear and misperception, about many of the men imprisoned at Guantánamo, had eroded the nation’s commitment to justice and fairness.”

“[T]he real test of our core democratic principles,” she also said, “is how we protect the integrity of the legal system not only in the easy cases but also in the difficult ones. So it was an easy decision to join the team of lawyers who had been working tirelessly on Mattan’s behalf.”

Speaking of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the CIA torture program (see my article here), Eisenberg said that, while he was “not surprised” by it, “this is not who we should be.” Lauren Carasik added, “President Obama has made his position clear: we should look forwards, not backwards, on torture. But the Convention Against Torture requires nations to investigate and prosecute violations of its prohibitions and to provide redress to victims. Until we have accountability for torture, and fulfill our obligations under federal and international law, we risk repeating this ill-advised and inhumane conduct, at an incalculable cost to our moral standing in the world. Accordingly, we cannot be satisfied with the Senate’s report. Instead, the nation must: undertake a complete, impartial and unclassified investigation into our practices that should serve as the basis for reforms both within the C.I.A. and its oversight mechanisms; prosecute those who have violated the law; and provide reparations for victims” (see her article for Al-Jazeera here).

As the six men released from Guantánamo settle into their new lives in Uruguay, there are reasons to believe that they are in a place where they will be cared about. As the Guardian noted of the Uruguayan people, “The good will is evident even on the streets of Montevideo where [Cori] Crider has been the object of spontaneous clapping and congratulations from passers-by who recognize her from appearances on the local media. ‘It’s amazing,’ said Crider. ‘The good will from the government and even from people on the street is unlike anything I have encountered in my 10 years of doing this.'”

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer and film-maker. 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.

Why Guantánamo Mustn’t Be Forgotten in the Fallout from the CIA Torture Report

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.

It’s a week now since the 500-page executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s 6,700-page report into the post-9/11 CIA torture program was published, and here at “Close Guantánamo,” we are concerned that (a) the necessary calls for accountability will fall silent as the days and weeks pass; and (b) that people will not be aware that the use of torture was not confined solely to the CIA’s “black sites,” and the specific program investigated by the Senate Committee, and that it was a key element of the Bush administration’s post-9/11 detention program — in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and in Guantánamo, where elements of the current operations can still be defined as torture.

The Senate Committee report contains new information, of course — much of it genuinely harrowing — but journalists and researchers uncovered much of the program over the last ten years, and that body of work — some of which I referred to in my article about the torture report for Al-Jazeera last week — will continue to be of great relevance as the executive summary is analyzed, and, hopefully, as the full report is eventually made public.

Mainly, though, as I mentioned in the introduction to this article, it is crucial that the news cycle is not allowed to move on without an insistence that there be accountability. The Senate report chronicles crimes, authorized at the highest levels of the Bush administration, implemented by the CIA and two outside contractors, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, who had worked for a military program designed to train soldiers how to resist torture if captured, but who had no real-life experience of interrogations, or any knowledge of Al-Qaeda or the individuals involved (see Vice News’ extraordinary interview with Mitchell here).

The use of torture is never allowed, as Article 2.2 of the UN Convention Against Torture, signed by Ronald Reagan in 1988 and ratified by the US in 1994, makes clear. That article states, “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”

The Convention also makes it clear that torturers must be prosecuted. Following the publication of the executive summary, Ben Emmerson, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, called for prosecutions.

In a statement, he wrote, “The individuals responsible for the criminal conspiracy revealed in today’s report must be brought to justice, and must face criminal penalties commensurate with the gravity of their crimes. The fact that the policies revealed in this report were authorised at a high level within the US Government provides no excuse whatsoever. Indeed, it reinforces the need for criminal accountability. International law prohibits the granting of immunities to public officials who have engaged in acts of torture. This applies not only to the actual perpetrators but also to those senior officials within the US Government who devised, planned and authorised these crimes.”

Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, has also called for prosecutions in a column for the Washington Post.

Torture at Guantánamo

As I also mentioned in the introduction to this article, we at “Close Guantánamo” are also concerned that people may fail to realize how torture was a key element in US detention policy, post-9/11, in Afghanistan, in Iraq and at Guantánamo. Torture and abuse sadly replaced the Geneva Conventions after 9/11, in Kandahar and Bagram in Afghanistan, at Abu Ghraib and numerous other facilities in Iraq, leading to the deaths of over 100 prisoners, and at Guantánamo torture and abuse have also been rife throughout the prison’s nearly 13-year history.

Most notoriously, Donald Rumsfeld, not to be outdone by the CIA program, implemented a torture program for one particular prisoner, Mohammed al-Qahtani, regarded as the intended 20th hijacker for the 9/11 attacks, whose use migrated — being applied, between 2002 and 2004, to over 100 prisoners in total, who were subjected to an array of techniques including prolonged isolation, the use of loud music and white noise, the use of extreme heat and cold, forced nudity, exploitation of phobias, painful shackling, and what was euphemistically called the “frequent flier program,” whereby prisoners were moved from cell to cell every few hours, to prevent sleep, for days, weeks or even, in some cases, months.

This torture program largely came to an end after the Supreme Court granted the prisoners habeas corpus rights at the end of June 2004, allowing lawyers to pierce the veil of secrecy that had enabled torture and abuse to proceed, almost unchecked, for over two years.

However, the punishment and isolation of prisoners regarded as significant and troublesome throughout the prison’s history, up to and including the present day, is a largely unwritten story that will, hopefully, be exposed one day, as it will, I believe, expose how the treatment of these men — who include Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison — has involved torture and unacceptable abuse.

Better known about is the abuse of hunger strikers, who are force-fed despite medical experts’ condemnation of force-feeding as an unacceptable course of action to pursue with mentally competent prisoners — see my article here about a letter written by 150 doctors condemning force-feeding during last year’s prison-wide hunger strike at Guantánamo.

In addition, in June this year, speaking about Israel’s plans to authorize the force-feeding of hunger-striking Palestinian prisoners — in passages that could have been equally applied to hunger strikers at Guantánamo — Juan Méndez, the UN Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, stated, “It is not acceptable to force-feed or use threats of force-feeding or other physical or psychological coercion against individuals who have opted for the extreme recourse of a hunger strike to protest against their detention without charge and conditions of detention and treatment. The desire of the inmates not to eat must be respected for as long as it is clear that they are making that choice voluntarily. Even if it is intended for the benefit of the detainees, feeding induced by threats, coercion, force or use of physical restraints are tantamount to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.”

Another aspect of torture that is of particular relevance to the torture report is that 13 “high-value detainees,” including notorious torture victims Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who were flown to Guantánamo from CIA “black sites” in September 2006, are not only still held, but have been gagged since their arrival, in an effort to prevent the outside world from hearing about their torture, and to prevent anyone from being held accountable for it (a 14th man, it should be noted, is the only one to have been transferred to the US mainland, where he was tried and successfully convicted in federal court, in what should have been a model for all future prosecutions).

Apart from the partly censored transcripts of their Combatant Status Review Tribunals in early 2007 — legally required for them to be assessed as “enemy combatants” and thereby made eligible for military commission trials — their every exchange with their lawyers has remained classified. All exchanges between lawyers and prisoners are initially treated as presumptively classified, but in the cases of all the other prisoners, notes can be submitted to a Pentagon censorship board, which, with a semblance of fairness, decides what information can be unclassified and what should remain classified. In many of these other cases, much information has been unclassified — often casting the authorities in a poor light — but in the cases of the HVDs every word uttered remains classified.

In light of the torture report, questions must be asked about the dangerous and unacceptable cocoon of secrecy that still surrounds these men, just as it should also be noted that dozens more prisoners held at Guantánamo over the years — many of whom are still held — were also subjected to the CIA torture program in various “black sites,” as well as, in some cases, in the outsourced foreign torture prisons — in Jordan, for example — in which the Senate report was not particularly interested.

For there to be an adequate follow-up to the torture report, the cases of all these men should be examined. This is in addition to a proper investigation of the stories of all the other prisoners whose torture and abuse took place solely in Bagram or other non-CIA prisons in Afghanistan, and in Guantánamo.

In conclusion, I’d like to remind readers that Guantánamo’s final torture story concerns the very nature of detention at the prison — for the most part, arbitrary, open-ended imprisonment without charge or trial. In establishing Guantánamo, the Bush administration did away with the requirement that you can only be deprived of your liberty if you are charged with a crime and given a federal court trial, or if you are a soldier, kept off the battlefield until the duration of hostilities, and treated humanely and in accordance with the Geneva Conventions.

This “war on terror,” as we have learned, still may have no end, and trials, of course, have been forthcoming in very few cases. In fact, the authorities have openly stated that they are happy to imprison more people without charge or trial — because they regard them as dangerous but don’t have the evidence to prove it — than they are to put men on trial, even in the military commission system that fails to meet internationally recognized standards of fairness and justice.

As well as being profoundly unjust, this system of indefinite detention without charge or trial can be severely damaging to the prisoners’ mental health, as they have no idea when, if ever, they will be released — and, as we must realize, there is no automatic mechanism that will lead to their release, and they are, in a very real sense, all political prisoners, to be freed only as the result of political maneuvering, and by no other means.

And the final horror? Well, the final horror is that, in October 2003 — over eleven years ago, when Guantánamo had been open for less than two years — a man called Christophe Girod, a senior representative of the International Committee of the Red Cross, told the New York Times, “One cannot keep these detainees in this pattern, this situation, indefinitely.” He added, ”The open-endedness of the situation and its impact on the mental health of the population has become a major problem.”

I have returned to these comments time and again over the years, and for one simple reason: if arbitrary, open-ended detention was causing such mental health issues over eleven years ago, how almost unthinkably bad must it be now for so many men still held in Guantánamo, a prison that should never have been opened, and that, in light of the Senate torture report, needs closing as soon as possible.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer and film-maker. 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.

Shaker Aamer Speaks from Guantánamo, and His Family Talk About His 13-Year Ordeal

Today, the Daily Mail, which has thrown its weight behind We Stand With Shaker — the campaign to secure the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, which I launched three weeks ago with my colleague Joanne MacInnes — published an article dealing with Shaker’s recent phone call to his family from the prison — shockingly, the first call he has been allowed to make in two and a half years. The article also included comments made by his father-in-law, Saeed Siddique, and by Clive Stafford Smith, the director of the legal action charity Reprieve, who visited Shaker at Guantánamo last week.

The Mail began its coverage by describing the call — on an iPad provided by the International Committee of the Red Cross, who also facilitated the call — noting that the screen was “filled by a familiar round face with a white-flecked beard and deeply-etched lines,” but adding, “Though the man forced one of his big, trademark smiles, fear and misery were seared in his eyes.”

The family, the article explained, “bolstered his spirits with uplifting stories about their lives — how his children were faring well at school and growing up to make him proud,” although it added that they too — his wife, Zin, and their four children (the youngest of whom is 13, and has never met his father) “struggled to mask their sorrow.”

The very fact that he was allowed to call his family, however, must give hope that his release may be imminent. Although he was banned from talking to his family in 2012 — presumably, though this is not stated, as a punishment for his refusal to be cooperative and to cease his persistent resistance to the injustice of being held indefinitely without charge or trial — he “has been permitted to make two Skype calls to them in the past month.”

The Mail noted that the most recent call “lasted an hour” and took place last Thursday, on the day the Mail “began campaigning for his release on the grounds that to imprison anyone … indefinitely without testing their guilt or innocence before a court of law violates the most fundamental principle of western justice.”

The call to the family was described to the Mail by Shaker’s father-in-law, Saeed Siddique, 72, who said that he “remained in the room for the first 15 minutes, before withdrawing so that his daughter and grandchildren could speak to him privately.”

Describing Mr. Siddique as “a softly-spoken retired imam,” the Mail noted that he said, “We have no idea why they are allowing Shaker to call us now, after such a long and very painful silence.” He added, echoing my suggestion above, “It might be a sign that something is about to happen,” but he also pointed out, “we have been disappointed so many times that we daren’t raise our hopes.”

This is certainly true. In February 2009, when Binyam Mohamed, the only other British resident still held at that time, was flown back to the UK — because his case had become a dark transatlantic farce in which two governments were trying, and failing to hide evidence of torture and complicity in torture — it was expected that Shaker would also be on that plane.

As the Mail described it, “The family decked the house with balloons and ‘Welcome Home’ bunting. But it had to be taken down when Aamer was not released.” Mr. Siddique said that he suspected that the reason Shaker wasn’t freed, despite having been cleared for release in 2007 by the US, was “because it was feared he would reveal bombshell secrets about his years in detention,” which would be damaging not just to the US, but to the British government as well — and to the British security services. Mr. Siddique said, “I think they wanted to leave him there because MI6 had warned them what would happen if he came back.”

The Mail also noted that Shaker’s solicitor in London, Irene Nembhard, suggested that “the reason the Americans haven’t released him — despite freeing 18 other detainees in recent weeks — might be because they are relying on flawed ‘intelligence’, provided many years ago by the British security services, warning them that it wouldn’t be safe to send him back to Britain.”

Despite the absurdity of the US not releasing someone a high-level task force said should be released (as happened with Shaker when President Obama’s high-level Guantánamo Review Task Force approved him for release for the second time in 2009), his family were at pains to point out that, if required, Shaker would “stand trial in a British court, or indeed any court, to prove his innocence.” They defend, absolutely, his account of visiting Afghanistan to provide humanitarian aid work — and not the absurd claims that surfaced in Guantánamo: that he traveled to join Al-Qaeda and served as Osama bin Laden’s personal interpreter — claims that, if regarded as true by the US authorities, would not have led to President Obama’s task force approving him for release.

As the Mail described it, Shaker said that “he went to live in Afghanistan to experience life in an Islamic country and to do charity work, having been presented with obstacles when he applied to move his family to his native Saudi Arabia, to be near his parents.” The Mail also noted that, after 9/11 and the US-led invasion, according to his account, “he attempted to return to Britain but was captured by the keepers of a guesthouse where he was lodging and sold to the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, who, in turn, sold him to the Americans for a $5,000 bounty.”

His father-in-law asked — “incredulously,” in the Mail‘s words — “Why would he have applied to live in Saudi [Arabia], if he had wanted to fight with the Taliban or Al-Qaeda?” He also said that Shaker had “approached the Saudi embassy in London and had two or three meetings with them.”

He added, “He would welcome the chance to tell all this to a British court. If there’s anything against him, let them put him before a judge and jury.” He also said that, “as the family patriarch,” he “would personally vouch for his son-in-law’s good behavior, were he to be returned to Britain.”

The day before Shaker’s most recent call to his family, he was visited at Guantánamo by Clive Stafford Smith, who is not allowed to reveal details of their conversations until his notes — as with all notes of meetings between Guantánamo prisoners and their lawyers — have passed through the Pentagon’s declassification process.

However, he did say that Shaker “boomed with laughter” when he was told about the release of the 500-page executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report, and what the Mail described as “the CIA’s self-justifying response to it.”

The Mail added, “The reason for his ironic mirth was clear. Though his name doesn’t appear in the shameful report, when Mr. Stafford Smith asked him, some time ago, to catalogue his torture, he replied that it would be quite impossible — because he had endured it, albeit in a sometimes subtle form, on every one of the 4,600-odd days he has been in custody.”

Stafford Smith said, “If he were to write it all down, it would be ten times as long as the abridged report released by the Senate.”

The Mail described this, aptly, as “a sobering thought,” adding that it was also sobering “to learn that, while incarcerated, Shaker Aamer’s father, a brother and a sister have died,” and that his mother is “critically ill,” according to Mr. Siddique, who also said that “she might not live long.”

The article concluded, “She is blind and will never see her son again — but it would come as some comfort to know that her son might, one day soon, be freed and not have to depend on Skype to be in contact with his wife and children.”

This is very much to be hoped for — and as we keep campaigning to secure Shaker’s release, we must also hold onto the hope that, one day soon, Shaker may be reunited with those nearest and dearest to him.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer and film-maker. 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.

We Stand With Shaker: Open Letter to David Cameron Calls for Release of Shaker Aamer from Guantánamo and His Return to the UK

Today (December 15), the We Stand With Shaker campaign that I launched with campaigner Joanne MacInnes three weeks ago secured a ringing endorsement from the Daily Mail — which highlighted Shaker’s plight in a front-page story and editorial on Friday — with the publication, in today’s edition of the Daily Mail, of an open letter to David Cameron, which I wrote, calling for the PM “to pick up the phone to President Obama, and to bring Shaker Aamer home.” The letter was also published on the We Stand With Shaker website.

The open letter is signed by dozens of actors, comedians, politicians, writers and other prominent individuals, including music legend Roger Waters (ex-Pink Floyd) and Clive Stafford Smith, the director of the legal action charity Reprieve, who both attended the launch on November 24, the comedian Frankie Boyle, the journalist Jemima Khan, actress Juliet Stevenson, actor Mark Rylance, singer Sophie Ellis-Bextor, Shami Chakrabarti, the director of Liberty, and Kate Allen, the director of Amnesty International UK.

More signatories will be published in the Daily Mail tomorrow — and I will be updating the list here and on the We Stand With Shaker website accordingly.

The full letter is below. Please feel free to share it widely! There is a real momentum to the campaign at the moment, with lots of TV coverage today, and a profile of the campaign in the Guardian‘s G2 supplement.

Please also continue to support us — on Facebook and on Twitter, watch our campaign video and our Human Rights Day video, check out our photos of celebrities standing with our giant inflatable figure of Shaker, and feel free to send in photos of yourself holding signs that read, “I Stand With Shaker” to our website, to join the others here. Also on this page are details of how you can contact David Cameron, Barack Obama and other senior officials to demand Shaker’s release.

An Open Letter to David Cameron Calling for the Release of Shaker Aamer from Guantánamo and His Return to the UK

Dear Mr. Cameron,

As we approach 2015, the 800th anniversary of the signing of Magna Carta, which introduced habeas corpus to the world, we call on you to urgently address the case of Shaker Aamer, a legal British resident with a British wife and four British children. He continues to be imprisoned without charge or trial in the US prison in Guantánamo,Bay, Cuba, in violation of the right not to be arbitrarily imprisoned which was enshrined in the Magna Carta.

Mr. Aamer’s ongoing imprisonment is all the more shocking because he has been approved for release by the United States on two occasions — by a military review board under President Bush in 2007, and by a high-level, inter-agency task force under President Obama in 2009. The British Government has been requesting his return since 2007, and we received assurances from you in June 2013 that you had raised his case with President Obama.

In a letter to Mr. Aamer’s daughter, Johina, last June, you wrote, “Despite efforts to secure his release, it remains the case that he has been cleared for transfer but not for release.” You added, “It also remains the case that any decision regarding your father’s release remains ultimately in the hands of the US Government.”

Does your comment to Mr. Aamer’s daughter about being cleared for transfer refer to rumours that the United States Government would like to send Mr. Aamer back to Saudi Arabia, the country of his birth? This would, no doubt, be convenient for the United States as from there Mr Aamer would be unable to talk about the torture and abuse he has witnessed and personally experienced during his long imprisonment.

However, what the US would like to do with Mr. Aamer is irrelevant, as the British Government has a non-negotiable responsibility to secure the return of Mr. Aamer, given his status as a legal British resident. We can find no reason why, given the special relationship between our two countries, you cannot call President Obama and tell him that Mr. Aamer must be returned to the UK as swiftly as possible.

We urge you to pick up the phone to President Obama, and to bring Shaker Aamer home.

Joanne MacInnes, We Stand With Shaker

Andy Worthington, We Stand With Shaker

Joy Hurcombe, Chair, Save Shaker Aamer Campaign

Roger Waters, musician (ex-Pink Floyd)

Clive Stafford Smith, Director, Reprieve

Juliet Stevenson, actress

Mark Rylance, actor

Frankie Boyle, comedian

Jeremy Hardy, comedian

Harriet Walter, actress

Bill Paterson, actor

Sara Pascoe, comedian

Janet Ellis, actress/broadcaster

Nicholas Kent, theatre director

Sophie Ellis-Bextor, singer

Peter Oborne, journalist and author

Jemima Khan, journalist

Nick Davies, journalist and author

John Pilger, journalist and broadcaster

David Davis MP (Conservative, Haltemprice and Howden)

Sir John Randall MP (Conservative, Uxbridge and South Ruislip)

Alistair Burt MP (Conservative, North East Bedfordshire)

Caroline Lucas MP (Green, Brighton Pavilion)

John McDonnell MP (Labour, Hayes and Harlington)

Andy Slaughter MP (Labour, Hammersmith)

George Galloway MP (Respect, Bradford West)

Jeremy Corbyn MP (Labour, Islington North)

Mark Durkan MP (SDLP, Foyle)

Norman Baker MP (Liberal Democrat, Lewes)

John Leech MP (Liberal Democrat, Manchester Withington)

Jean Lambert MEP (Green, London)

Baroness Jenny Jones (Green, House of Lords)

Baroness Helena Kennedy QC (Labour, House of Lords)

Shami Chakrabarti, Director, Liberty

Kate Allen, Director, Amnesty International UK

Denis Halliday, former Assistant Director-General, United Nations

Anna Perera, author, Guantanamo Boy

Benjamin Zephaniah, poet and author

Shaykh Suliman Ghani, imam, Tooting Islamic Centre

John Rees, co-founder, Stop the War Coalition

Peter Tatchell, human rights campaigner

Moazzam Begg, Director of Outreach, Cage

Dr. David Nicholl, neurologist

Gillian Slovo, novelist and playwright

Lisa Appignanesi, writer

Clare Solomon, press officer, People’s Assembly Against Austerity

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer and film-maker. 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 the Senate Torture Report, Guantánamo and We Stand With Shaker with Scott Horton and Pippa Jones

As I mentioned yesterday when I posted two videos of TV coverage of the We Stand With Shaker campaign, which aims to secure the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, it’s been a busy three-week period — firstly with the launch of the campaign outside Parliament on November 24, and then, last week, with the release of our short film for Shaker for Human Rights Day, featuring Juliet Stevenson and David Morrissey, reading from Shaker’s Declaration of No Human Rights, which he wrote in Guantánamo in response to the US betrayal of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and also, last Tuesday, with the release of the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report into the CIA torture program, which I wrote about here for Al-Jazeera.

Last week I undertook a couple of radio interviews to discuss all of these issues, speaking for on the Scott Horton Show, with the Texas-based interviewer with whom I have been talking about the horrors of Guantánamo, executive overreach, arbitrary dentition and torture for more than seven years — a duration of time that has probably come as a surprise to both of us.

Our latest encounter — 23 minutes in total — is here, and I hope you have time to listen to it.

On Friday, I spoke to British ex-pat Pippa Jones, for her show on Talk Radio Europe. Pippa and I have spoken before — although we don’t have quite the history that Scott and I have. It was a pleasure to talk to Pippa as well — about the torture report and We Stand With Shaker — and our 20-minute interview is here. The interview begins at about 7:45 and runs through to 28:15.

I’d also like to take the time to mention another interview I did — with another old friend, Peter B. Collins, who is based in the Bay Area, for Sibel Edmonds’ Boiling Frogs Post website. This was on November 27, after the We Stand With Shaker campaign began, but before the torture report was issued, and I recommend  it, but it’s only available to subscribers. See here for details.

I hope you have time to listen to these shows, as the topics discussed continue to attract attention in the media — the unacceptable ongoing imprisonment of Shaker Aamer, despite the fact that he has twice been approved for release, and the hugely important calls for those responsible for implementing the torture program under the Bush administration to be held accountable for their actions.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer and film-maker. 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.