Andy Worthington's Blog, page 109

Is President Obama Planning an Executive Order for the Closure of Guantánamo?

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.

Last Thursday, out of the blue, Carol E. Lee and Jess Bravin of the Wall Street Journal reported that senior Obama administration officials had told them that the White House was drafting options that would allow President Obama to close the “war on terror” prison established by President Bush at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, through the use of an executive order.

Such an order would bypass lawmakers in Congress, who have imposed a ban on bringing prisoners to the US mainland since 2010, in response to President Obama’s proposal to transfer prisoners from Guantánamo to a maximum-security prison in Thomson, Illinois. Lawmakers have also passed legislation designed to make it difficult to release prisoners to other countries.

Reading on, it became apparent that this was only an option being considered. As the article explained, the officials said that President Obama “strongly prefers a legislative solution over going around Congress.” However, because, as one official said, the president is “unwavering in his commitment” to closing the prison, which he promised to close on his second day in office, he “wants to have all potential options available on an issue he sees as part of his legacy.”

That is good news for those of us who remain concerned that Guantánamo has not been closed, because every day the prison remains open is a profound shame for all Americans who believe in justice. We at “Close Guantánamo” have maintained, since President Obama first encountered problems with fulfilling his promise, that he must not waver, because failing to fulfil his promise would be a major black mark on his legacy — and all presidents, whatever they might say, care about how they are remembered.

The Wall Street Journal described executive actions as “a centerpiece” of the Obama administration’s policy agenda, “in areas including the minimum wage, anti-discrimination rules and, potentially, immigration,” although that seems to be something of an exaggeration. President Obama has, to date, issued 183 executive orders, while George W. Bush issued 291, Bill Clinton issued 364 and Ronald Reagan issued 381.

Nevertheless, it is fair to say, as the Wall Street Journal did, that an executive order on Guantánamo would be likely to “provoke a sharp reaction from lawmakers,” not only because of their ban on the transfer of prisoners to the US mainland, but also because some lawmakers are clearly motivated by a desire to keep Guantánamo open forever.

Steve Vladeck, a law professor at American University, said that unilateral action “would ignite a political firestorm, even if it’s the best resolution for the Guantánamo problem,” explaining that “Republicans are sure to oppose it, while Democrats could be split.”

The administration officials told the Wall Street Journal that, if Congress imposes further restrictions on Guantánamo after the mid-term elections in November, as is possible, President Obama only really has two options for closing the prison, either by vetoing the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the annual bill establishing US military policy and funding, which includes the ban on bringing prisoners to the US mainland, or by signing the bill “while declaring restrictions on the transfer of Guantánamo prisoners an infringement of his powers as commander in chief, as he has done previously.”

The first option is unlikely, but the second is possible. As the Wall Street Journal explained, “Presidents of both parties have used such signing statements to clarify their understanding of legislative measures or put Congress on notice that they wouldn’t comply with provisions they consider infringements of executive power.”

The article also explained that, in the hope of stifling dissent, the administration intends to reduce the prisoner population by “quickly transferring” prisoners cleared for release. Of the 149 men still held, over half — 79 in total — have been approved for release, 75 by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established in 2009 to review all the prisoners’ cases, and four this year through the deliberations of Periodic Review Boards, established to review the cases of the majority of the remaining 70 prisoners who were not approved for release by the task force.

58 of these men approved for release are Yemenis, whose release has been blocked because of fears, throughout the US establishment, about the security situation in Yemen — although, in theory, their release should be easier since President Obama dropped a personal ban on their release last May, which he had first imposed in January 2010, after a failed airline bomb plot that was hatched in Yemen.

The Wall Street Journal article coincided with an announcement, by the Estonian government, that one prisoner, who cannot be safely repatriated, will be given a new home in Estonia. US officials said that “additional transfers are in the works,” and it is to be hoped that six other men will be given new homes in Uruguay in the not too distant future, although that decision “is tied up in that country’s Oct. 26 presidential elections. The current president has agreed to accept the detainees, while his opponent has said he wouldn’t.”

Officials also said that they were hoping that releasing prisoners would reduce political opposition to the transfer of prisoners to the US mainland because it would highlight the cost of keeping Guantánamo open. The annual cost per prisoner is $2.7 million, compared to $78,000 per prisoner at a supermax prison on the mainland, but that cost will only increase as prisoners are released, because of the overall cost of maintaining the prison. A senior official said, “As the number [of prisoners] becomes smaller at Guantánamo, the case for domestic transfers … becomes that much stronger.”

Despite the hopes for the release of the 79 men approved for release, it is clear that Guantánamo cannot be closed until some, most or all of the 70 other prisoners are transferred to the US mainland. Last December, when lawmakers were prevailed upon to drop some of their restrictions on the release of prisoners, they refused to drop their ban on bringing prisoners to the US mainland for any reason, and this was clearly on President Obama’s mind in his State of the Union address this year, when he stated, bluntly, that “this needs to be the year Congress lifts the remaining restrictions on detainee transfers and we close the prison at Guantánamo Bay.”

The Wall Street Journal noted that officials said that President Obama “now expects to miss that deadline,” describing that as “a departure from earlier this summer when White House aides were still saying it was possible.” Complications have involved a cynical backlash by lawmakers and the right-wing media against the release, in May, of five Taliban prisoners in  a prisoner swap for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the sole US prisoner of war in Afghanistan, and the current anti-Muslim sentiment fueled by the US decision to engage with ISIS militants in Iraq and Syria.

Speaking of transferring prisoners to the US mainland, officials said the US “has ample space in its prisons for several dozen high-security prisoners,” and explained that the administration “has reviewed several facilities that could house the remaining detainees, with the military brig at Charleston, S.C., considered the most likely.”

Following the publication of the Wall Street Journal article, the White House moved to distance itself from the reports by administration officials. As the Guardian described it, White House spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said, “Since the president came into office in 2009 the administration has been examining all possible ways we could get to closure of the facility, but we are not drafting options to override the law. We are continuing to work on transfers [of prisoners] and calling on Congress to lift restrictions.”

The caution is understandable, as John Boehner, the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, said in response to the article, “Even as Islamic jihadists are beheading Americans, the White House is so eager to bring these terrorists from Guantánamo Bay to the United States that it is examining ways to thwart Congress and unilaterally re-write the law.”

However, I do believe it is useful to consider that the executive order was mentioned to try to appeal not to fearmongers and cynical opportunists like Boehner, but to decent Americans — in Congress, in the media, and throughout the country in all walks of life — who recognize that something is profoundly rotten at Guantánamo, and that it must be brought to an end before President Obama leaves office, and this, of course, is something that, at “Close Guantánamo,” we wholeheartedly endorse.

What you can do now

To show your support of President Obama’s promise to close Guantánamo — and if you wish, to endorse an executive order as the only means of doing so, if Congress remains implacably opposed to the closure, on cynical grounds — call the White House on 202-456-1111 or 202-456-1414 or submit a comment online.

You can also call the Department of Defense and ask Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to issue certifications, as required by Congress, for prisoners cleared for release who are still held: 703-571-3343.

You can also call Cliff Sloan, the envoy for the closure of Guantánamo at the State Department, who was appointed by President Obama last year, to ask him to do more to secure the release of men long cleared for release: 202-647-4000.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer and film-maker. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, 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: I Discuss Guantánamo, Shaker Aamer, TTIP and the Corporate Takeover of our Lives with Richie Allen on Volcania Radio

Yesterday, I spent a delightful half-hour speaking to Richie Allen, a colleague of David Icke, for his show on Volcania Radio, which is streamed live via various sites, including David Icke’s, and is available below via YouTube. It’s also on David Icke’s site here.

Richie asked me first about Shaker Aamer, the last British prisoner in Guantánamo, and I ran through his story, his health problems, and the disgraceful fact that he is still held, even though, for the last seven years, the US government has been saying that it no longer wants to hold him, and the UK government has been calling for his return.

Richie and I also spoke about the specific torture program that was official policy at Guantánamo in the early years, which involved, amongst other things, prolonged isolation, forced nudity, the use of extreme heat and cold, the use of loud music and noise, the use of phobias, and the euphemistically named “frequent flier program,” whereby prisoners were subjected to prolonged sleep deprivation, being moved from cell to cell every few hours over a period of days, weeks or even months, to prevent them from sleeping adequately. The use of this particular package of torture techniques only came to an end when the prisoners secured access to lawyers after a Supreme Court victory in June 2004 — although I was at pains to stress to Richie that Guantánamo remains a place that is beyond the law, and that should not exist in a society that claims to be civilized.

In the second half of the show we spoke about the the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), a proposed new EU-US trade deal that is deeply alarming, because, as I explained in a recent article promoting my photos of a protest against TTIP in London at the weekend (part of a day of action across Europe), and my interview with RT, “the defenders of TTIP try to assure us that we have nothing to worry about, but as these are essentially the same people who, for 30 years, have been transferring power to corporations and banks at the expense of the people — and from hugely important public services like the NHS — it is foolish for anyone to think that they have our best interests at heart.”

I also spoke about how legitimate fears about TTIP, and of corporations being in a position to bully their way into key roles in our public services and elsewhere in society in large part through intimidation, because they have bottomless pockets and aggressive lawyers, echoed fears that NHS campaigners, myself included, identified in relation to the 2012 Health and Social Care Act, which established Clinical Commissioning Groups of GPs to oversee 80% of the NHS budget, and put doctors in a position of being fearful of being sued if they turn down multinational corporations seeking a slice of NHS business.

Richie and I also spoke in greater detail about how politicians as a whole (with a few brave exceptions) always put corporate interests above the needs of the people, the illegitimacy of the Tory-led coalition government, the failure of the first-past-the-post voting system, the self-destructive obsession with privatization, and much more besides, and I hope you have time to listen to the show, and to share it if you find it useful.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer and film-maker. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, 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: I Speak to RT about the Dangers of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) + My Photos of the London Protest

See the video below and see my photos on Flickr here.

On Saturday October 11, 2014, I attended a protest in Parliament Square, opposite the Houses of Parliament in London, against the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), a dangerous new EU-US trade deal, which, if passed, as the organisers of the London event explained, “would grant corporations the power to sue governments, threatening to lock-in the privatisation of our schools and NHS. Rules that protect workers, the environment, food safety, digital rights and privacy would be undermined, with harmful industries like fracking encouraged.” My article published just before the protest is here.

The London event was part of a day of action across Europe and the UK, and the events across all the countries were attended by a significant number of people, although only a few hundred people attended the London event, sharing Parliament Square with Kurdish campaigners.

I was delighted to speak to RT’s Harry Fear in Parliament Square for a televised broadcast, which is available below, and if you like it I hope you share it.

As I explained to RT, the defenders of TTIP try to assure us that we have nothing to worry about, but as these are essentially the same people who, for 30 years, have been transferring power to corporations and banks at the expense of the people — and from hugely important public services like the NHS — it is foolish for anyone to think that they have our best interests at heart.

Never underestimate the greed — and the disdain for the general public — that motivate those who would stand above us, and who regard themselves as superior.  The purpose of so-called “liberalising” trade agreements, after all, is to liberalise profiteering for the few, while eroding workers’ rights.

I hope, in the months to come, that more people see through the lies, and, in England in particular, will not continue to be taken in by the lies peddled by the corrupt media’s latest darlings, UKIP, and their leader, Nigel Farage, who is very much part of the problem and not the solution he pretends to be when he’s seen, as he is so often, propping up a bar somewhere. As a former international commodities trader, it is obvious where Farage’s real sympathies lie — with those in power, and not with the people. Like TTIP, he and his party of bigots should be shunned.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer and film-maker. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here – or here for the US).

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

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

Please Join the European Protests Against the Dangerous Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) on October 11, 2014

Please sign the European petition against TTIP here, which has received over 400,000 signatures in just four days.

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), a dangerous new EU-US trade deal, has been on my radar for some time, and I’ve been meaning to write about it for months, particularly in relation to the NHS.

As the #noTTIP website explains:

Our democracy, public services and environment are under threat. Behind closed doors, the EU and US are drawing up a new trade deal called the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). If agreed, TTIP would extend the power of big business over our society to unprecedented levels. Shamefully, the UK government are currently a major supporter. But together, we can defeat this agreement.

Tomorrow, Saturday October 11, 2014, across Europe, there will be protests against TTIP (as well as a handful of protests in the US), and I’ll be at the London protest, which takes place in Parliament Square, beginning at 2pm. There is also a Stop TTIP Facebook page here.

As the organisers explain further on the Facebook page for the London event:

If agreed, the EU-US Trade Deal (TTIP) would grant corporations the power to sue governments, threatening to lock-in the privatisation of our schools and NHS. Rules that protect workers, the environment, food safety, digital rights and privacy would be undermined, with harmful industries like fracking encouraged.

The organisers also provide the following encouragement:

Together we will raise our voices in the heart of Whitehall, transforming a space with art, theatre, workshops and music — and kick-starting a new movement with the power to win.

One of the first times I heard about TTIP was last November, in George Monbiot’s weekly column for the Guardian. Under the heading, “This transatlantic trade deal is a full-frontal assault on democracy,” which has been shared nearly 60,000 times, Monbiot wrote:

The purpose of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership is to remove the regulatory differences between the US and European nations. I mentioned it a couple of weeks ago. But I left out the most important issue: the remarkable ability it would grant big business to sue the living daylights out of governments which try to defend their citizens. It would allow a secretive panel of corporate lawyers to overrule the will of parliament and destroy our legal protections. Yet the defenders of our sovereignty say nothing.

Monbiot proceeded to explain how the mechanism that drives the TTIP — known as investor-state dispute settlement — is “already being used in many parts of the world to kill regulations protecting people and the living planet,” and his article continued with the following alarming examples:

The Australian government, after massive debates in and out of parliament, decided that cigarettes should be sold in plain packets, marked only with shocking health warnings. The decision was validated by the Australian supreme court. But, using a trade agreement Australia struck with Hong Kong, the tobacco company Philip Morris has asked an offshore tribunal to award it a vast sum in compensation for the loss of what it calls its intellectual property.

During its financial crisis, and in response to public anger over rocketing charges, Argentina imposed a freeze on people’s energy and water bills (does this sound familiar?). It was sued by the international utility companies whose vast bills had prompted the government to act. For this and other such crimes, it has been forced to pay out over a billion dollars in compensation. In El Salvador, local communities managed at great cost (three campaigners were murdered) to persuade the government to refuse permission for a vast gold mine which threatened to contaminate their water supplies. A victory for democracy? Not for long, perhaps. The Canadian company which sought to dig the mine is now suing El Salvador for $315m – for the loss of its anticipated future profits.

In Canada, the courts revoked two patents owned by the American drugs firm Eli Lilly, on the grounds that the company had not produced enough evidence that they had the beneficial effects it claimed. Eli Lilly is now suing the Canadian government for $500m, and demanding that Canada’s patent laws are changed.

These companies (along with hundreds of others) are using the investor-state dispute rules embedded in trade treaties signed by the countries they are suing. The rules are enforced by panels which have none of the safeguards we expect in our own courts. The hearings are held in secret. The judges are corporate lawyers, many of whom work for companies of the kind whose cases they hear. Citizens and communities affected by their decisions have no legal standing. There is no right of appeal on the merits of the case. Yet they can overthrow the sovereignty of parliaments and the rulings of supreme courts.

You don’t believe it? Here’s what one of the judges on these tribunals says about his work. “When I wake up at night and think about arbitration, it never ceases to amaze me that sovereign states have agreed to investment arbitration at all … Three private individuals are entrusted with the power to review, without any restriction or appeal procedure, all actions of the government, all decisions of the courts, and all laws and regulations emanating from parliament.”

There are no corresponding rights for citizens. We can’t use these tribunals to demand better protections from corporate greed. As the Democracy Centre says, this is “a privatised justice system for global corporations”.

For the NHS, which is a particular concern of mine, and one I have spent many years campaigning for — first against the Tories’ privatising Health and Social Care Act), and then in the ultimately successful efforts of Lewisham residents (where I live) to save Lewisham Hospital — I recommend this briefing paper by the Save Lewisham Hospital Campaign, “TIPP-ing Point: The NHS must be exempted from impending Free Trade deals,” and in August the Guardian ran a powerful article showing how “[m]ore than two-thirds of voters in 13 battleground constituencies want to see the NHS safeguarded” from TTIP. As the article explained:

Based on a poll of more than 2,600 voters across 13 marginal Tory-held seats, the survey found 68% opposed the inclusion of the NHS as part of the deal. Opposition was highest among those planning on voting for Labour or Ukip, 78% and 77% respectively, but even among Conservative supporters only 23% backed the inclusion of the NHS in TTIP.

The article also pointed out that critics of the TTIP say that it “threatens to make the outsourcing of health services in Britain irreversible by allowing US multinationals, or any firm with American investors, to sue any future UK government if it attempted to take privatised health services back into public ownership, jeopardising their profits.”

The polling was commissioned by Unite, Britain’s largest trade union, which, as the Guardian described it, “has repeatedly warned about the potential impact on hospitals and GPs if the deal goes through without a specific veto for the NHS.”

Len McCluskey, Unite’s general secretary, said, “The Tories’ health act of 2012 opened our NHS up to profit-making US private firms and a new trade deal threatens to make the selloff permanent.” McCluskey wrote an article about TTIP and the NHS for the Guardian in July, entitled, “The NHS is being taken over by Wall Street. And Cameron won’t stop it,” and in response to the poll, he cast doubts on claims made in July by the EU’s chief negotiator, Ignacio García Bercero, who said he was confident that the NHS would be “fully safeguarded”.

McCluskey dismissed Bercero’s “vague assurances” and, as the Guardian put it, “called on David Cameron to act to safeguard the NHS by guaranteeing it would be exempt from any deal.”

He stated, “We don’t believe the empty promises coming from the bureaucrats in Brussels but Cameron could act today and protect our health service. Cameron’s silence is deafening. He is refusing to answer a very simple question. Are we going to exempt health from the EU-US trade agreement? Unless he acts the NHS will be at the mercy of US companies and Wall Street investors who will be able to sue the government in secret courts if it tries to reverse privatisation.”

I hope you’re able to join the protests tomorrow. A full list of UK events is here, and the European page is here. There is also a campaign being run by 38 Degrees that may be of interest.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer and film-maker. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, 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.

Experts Deliver Damning Testimony at Guantánamo Force-Feeding Trial

[image error] For an update on October 9, see below.

This week, a historic and unprecedented trial has been taking place in Washington D.C., as lawyers for Abu Wa’el Dhiab, a Syrian prisoner at Guantánamo, have been challenging the government’s claimed legality for force-feeding prisoners.

Mr. Dhiab has been a frequent hunger striker for the last seven years, and weighs just 152 pounds, despite being six feet five inches tall. Last February, he took part in a hunger strike that involved up to two-thirds of the remaining prisoners, who were in despair at ever being released or given justice, and he has continued his hunger strike, even though throughout this period he has been subjected to painful force-feeding. He is one of 75 of the remaining 149 prisoners who were approved for release by a government task force in 2009 — and four others have had their release approved this year through another review process, the Periodic Review Boards. He is also in a wheelchair as a result of his physical decline during his 12 years in US custody.

Last summer, Mr. Dhiab challenged the legality of his force-feeding in court, and, as I explained in an article on Sunday, in May, after some to-ing and fro-ing, Judge Gladys Kessler, in the District Court in Washington D.C., “briefly ordered the government to stop force-feeding Mr. Dhiab. This order was swiftly rescinded, as Judge Kessler feared for his life, but she also ordered videotapes of his ‘forcible cell extractions’ (FCEs) and his force-feeding to be made available to his lawyers.”

As I also explained, at the end of last week Judge Kessler delivered a powerful order prohibiting the government from holding a secret hearing in Mr. Dhiab’s case, which I wrote about here, and followed up with an even more powerful order calling on the government to prepare for public release eleven hours of videotapes showing Mr. Dhiab being dragged from his cell and force-fed.

On Monday, the trial began, with Mr. Dhiab’s lawyers making their case, which, as the Guardian explained, involves Mr. Dhiab seeking “an injunction to make the feedings less painful and to end the forced cell removals.” The lawyers also called on two expert witnesses, Dr. Sondra Crosby of Boston University and Stephen Xenakis, a psychiatrist and a retired Brigadier General in the US Army. Both witnesses had recently visited Mr. Dhiab at Guantánamo, and their powerful declarations can be found here and here.

In court, as the Guardian explained, Mr. Dhiab’s lawyers argued that the force-feeding at Guantánamo is “a method of punishment, not the medically viable procedure the government has long claimed,” something that documents obtained through FOIA legislation by Jason Leopold demonstrated on the first day of the trial.

One of Mr. Dhiab’s attorneys, Eric Lewis, said of his client’s hunger strike, “It’s a cry of humanity from a person who feels he has no choice left. Mr. Dhiab does not want to die, he wants to be treated like a human being.”

Lewis also held a 110cm force-feeding tube before Judge Kessler, telling her how the Guantánamo authorities “unnecessarily strapped him in a ‘five-point restraint’ chair and repeatedly inserted and removed the feeding tube, part of a ‘get-tough strategy to shut down the hunger strike.’” Lewis also cited a comment by Guantánamo’s recently retired warden, Army Col. John Bogdan, who was in charge when the prison-wide hunger strike began, and who said that the cell extractions and the feeding of hunger strikers “‘incentivized’ compliant behavior.”

The Miami Herald also reported Eric Lewis’ description of Dhiab’s force-feeding, which was powerful. He said, “He has been dragged out of his cell, trussed up like an animal, secured tightly to what the detainees universally called ‘the torture chair,’ had a 110-centimeter tube shoved up his nose, force-fed in the chair, then had the tube pulled out, forced from the chair to the ground and then carried back to his cell, put face down on a cement floor, the restraints removed with guards straddling his injured back.”

Noting how his medical records — obtained through an order by Judge Kessler — “show that his wheelchair, back brace and even his boxer shorts were ordered removed by Guantánamo medical personnel,” Dr. Crosby told the court, “It looks like medical care is being withheld because of disciplinary status and that should never happen. It feels punitive.”

Dr. Crosby also testified that Mr. Dhiab “believes Guantánamo guards have forcibly removed him from his cell more than 1,300 times,” a procedure which, he has stated, is “painful and abusive,” much “like the force-feedings themselves.”

In contrast, Justice Department attorney Andrew Warden, who has been working on Guantánamo issues since the Bush administration, and has had significant influence over the visits of lawyers for the prisoners throughout that time, claimed that force feeding is not a “painful procedure” and, as the Guardian put it, “is necessary for keeping Dhiab from serious injury or death.” He also defended the use of restraints and violent cell extractions “to prevent harm to guards and medical staff” from Mr. Dhiab, who, he said, had “kicked” Guantánamo staff and thrown bodily fluids at them, and had also used “abusive language” — hardly a powerful argument for the violence to which Mr. Dhiab has repeatedly been subjected.

In his testimony, Stephen Xenakis, responding to a claim by another Justice Department lawyer, Ronald Wiltsie, that Col. Bogdan had said that the restraint chair was “padded, comfortable and felt like a normal chair,” said that Bogdan was fit and able to do physical exercise, whereas Mr. Dhiab was not, and that what was important was that the prison authorities need to offer “individualized” care to patients like Mr. Dhiab to “get him in the best possible health so he can be transferred” (Mr. Dhiab, his lawyers and his supporters are all hoping that an offer by Uruguay to give him a new home, as he cannot be safely repatriated, will happen in the near future).

As Reprieve — whose lawyers Cori Crider and Alka Pradhan also represent Mr. Dhiab — noted in a press release, Stephen Xenakis also told the court that Mr. Dhiab “poses no realistic threat to guards at the prison and that if treated well could feasibly be force-fed in a single-point restraint chair rather than the five-point restraint chair currently being used.” He also testified that “the ‘forcible cell extractions’ make it impossible for the detainees to have a constructive relationship with those force-feeding them.”

Both Stephen Xenakis and Sondra Crosby also addressed Mr. Dhiab’s mental health. Responding to statements that he suspects that Jinns, or spirits, are a source of his pain, Crosby recommended that he should not be treated by the prison’s medical staff and should, instead, “receive an independent multi-discipline medical team to treat his ‘complex case,’ which she suspected might include some ‘psychosomatic’ illness,” as the Miami Herald described it.

Xenakis added, “He knows that when he’s in pain there’s a psychological dimension to it,” and also said that the Jinns were “a metaphor for his undiagnosed illnesses.”

On Tuesday, a third expert witness, Dr. Steven Miles, a professor of medical ethics at the University of Minnesota, testified, following up on his declaration, available here. He questioned “whether the force feeding was medically necessary,” as the Guardian put it, calling it “a form of punishment” and “an abuse of a prisoner for the purpose of a punitive regime,” and also revisited the use of olive oil for lubricating the feeding tubes at Guantánamo, which, as he first pointed out in a declaration in June (reported by Jason Leopold in July), “can cause a form of chronic inflammatory pneumonia,” in the Guardian‘s words.

In June, Dr. Miles stated, “The decision to use olive oil is a remarkable instance of negligent medical care in reckless disregard of standard medical practice which was defined to minimize risks,” adding, “The fact that olive oil is listed … as a routinely used lubricant suggests that other prisoners, including [Hassan and Dhiab], have been placed at risk of lipoid pneumonia.”

As a result, the military stopped using olive oil at Guantánamo, but it is difficult to know the extent of the damage already done. In court on Tuesday, Dr. Miles stated that if olive oil “reach[ed] the lungs due to misplaced insertions, [it] would be hard to detect by physicians for released or transferred detainees, as it might look on x-rays like tuberculosis or lung cancer.” He called the use of olive oil as a lubricant “astonishing to me,” and said of his analysis, “There’s simply no debate about this. All the medical literature I’ve found said the [lubrication] had to be water-soluble. One doesn’t have to make very many salads to know olive oil is not water soluble.”

Dr. Miles also took exception to the confirmation, provided in Mr. Dhiab’s medical records, that Guantánamo’s Joint Medical Group would “sometimes have force-feeding sessions occur multiple times a day,” which, he said, “increased the risk of harm and infection to a patient.” He “recommended that the tubes remain in place for several weeks at a stretch to minimize risk” to a prisoner, and he also decried the practice of strapping force-fed prisoners into a “five-point restraint chair,” in which their head and limbs are all tied down. Dr. Miles said, “It’s a form of punishment that is wrapped around the business” of force feeding.

Refuting Justice Department claims about the need for restraints because of the dangers posed by prisoners, which were submitted by the attorney Patrick Davis, Dr. Miles said that “in 20 years of working in hospitals with proximity to gang activity, I’ve never had to do that.”

Dr. Miles also took exception to claims made by Guantánamo personnel and Justice Department officials that prisoners are only force fed when their hunger striking poses “a major health risk.” As the Guardian described it, he “questioned the metrics used at Guantánamo for determining that threshold, saying they overly relied on body weight, to the exclusion of iron levels, calcium levels and red blood cell size, which he testified provide more precise measurements of malnutrition-related dangers.”

In response, Patrick Davis and Andrew Warden “sharply rejected the claim of frivolous force feeding,” as the government began to present its own case on Tuesday, although they drew only on “unnamed Guantánamo medical staff,” who apparently “said weight loss was one factor among several determining the necessity of the feeding, although it was the most detailed of the government’s public criteria.”

It was not only on this point that the Justice Department failed to call witnesses. Its entire case was presented without witnesses, involving, instead, declarations by Guantánamo personnel, which, as the Guardian put it, “means Guantánamo detention and medical officials will neither be subjected to cross-examination nor have to testify under oath” — a sure sign, it seems me, of the weakness of the government’s case.

As Cori Crider, one of Mr. Dhiab’s lawyers at Reprieve, stated after Tuesday’s hearing, “Three medical experts have now testified that there is something rotten at the core of Guantánamo — treatment of hunger strikers is not proper medical care but a punitive strategy to try to break them.”

UPDATE October 9: Over three hours of the third and final day of the trial, yesterday, involved a closed session in which the legal teams and the judge watched and discussed the videotapes of Abu Wa’el Dhiab’s violent cell extractions and his force-feeding. Spencer Ackerman in the Guardian wrote that, as the lawyers emerged from the closed session, “attorneys for Dhiab said they watched the reaction of their Justice Department adversaries,” and one of them, Jon Eisenberg said, “I just had to wonder: what are they thinking?”

This is a valid question, and over the last few days I have repeatedly wondered, as I have for many years, why Justice Department lawyers in the civil division — the division that deals with Guantanamo — so aggressively pursue every possibility to keep everyone in Guantanamo and to defend brutal treatment and a lack of accountability.

Even more than this, however, I wonder why President Obama seems never to have shown an interest in the civil division lawyers working on Guantanamo, and, even more pertinently, why Eric Holder never showed any interest either — never showing any sign of thinking that perhaps aggressive Bush-era lawyers like Andrew Warden should not be allowed to continue in the same job, and never apparently suggesting that an overview of the lawyers’ role would be useful, so that, for example, the recommendations made by President Obama’s Guantanamo Review Task Force were cross-referenced with the prisoners’ habeas corpus petitions. Instead, what happened over and over again was that the Justice Department challenged the habeas petitions of prisoners recommended for release, instead of not contesting them. The only exception was in 2013, in the case of Ibrahim Idris, a Sudanese man who was severely mentally and physically ill, and who was released in December (see here, here and here).

We now have to wait and see what happens on two fronts — the release of the videotapes of Abu Wa’el Dhiab’s violent cell extractions and force-feeding, which Judge Kessler ordered last week; and the outcome of this week’s trial.

I expect the government will appeal the order to release the videotapes, although I haven’t heard anything about a challenge yet, and I would hope that, with Judge Kessler accepting that the tapes can be edited to remove any possibility of identifying anyone apart from Mr. Dhiab, there are no credible grounds for a government appeal to be successful. I really do believe that the release of the videotapes could be hugely significant, because, to my sorrow as a writer, I realize how images — and moving images — can have a much greater impact than words alone.

On the outcome of the trial, a ruling is probably many weeks away. As the Guardian noted, Judge Kessler “requested closing arguments to be submitted as briefs, not orally in court, by 17 October,” so a ruling will occur sometime after that.

As the Guardian also noted, “Dhiab may not remain at Guantánamo for the outcome of his challenge. He is awaiting a transfer for resettlement in Uruguay, the result of a diplomatic brokerage reached in the spring.” To my mind, it would make sense for the Obama administration to try and get him out of Guantanamo as soon as possible. However, I have thought that for many months, since Judge Kessler’s first endorsement of Mr. Dhiab’s legal challenges back in May, but he was not freed, and in the meantime the Uruguay deal seems to have cooled.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer and film-maker. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, 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.

Gitmo Clock: 500 Days Since Obama’s Promise to Resume Releasing Prisoners; 79 Cleared Men Still Held

[image error] Please visit, like, share and tweet the Gitmo Clock, marking 500 days since President Obama’s promise to resume releasing prisoners from Guantánamo.

On May 23, 2013, President Obama promised, in a major speech on national security issues, to resume releasing prisoners from Guantánamo, after a period of nearly three years in which just five prisoners were released.

The slow-down in prisoner releases came about because of Congressional obstruction to the release of prisoners for largely cynical reasons (in passages in the annual National Defense Authorization Act), and because President Obama was unwilling to spend political capital overcoming those obstructions, even though a waiver in the legislation allowed him to do so.

The slow-down was unacceptable because over half of the remaining prisoners had been approved for release by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established shortly after taking office in January 2009 — and yet they were held, year after year, making a mockery of America’s claims that it believes in justice.

This was such an intolerable situation that a majority of the remaining prisoners embarked on a prison-wide hunger strike last year. This attracted widespread domestic and international criticism of the situation at Guantánamo, prompting President Obama to make the speech last May in which he promised to resume releasing prisoners.

Via the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, I launched the Gitmo Clock last summer, to mark how many days it is since President Obama’s promise, and how many prisoners have been released, and while I’m glad to note that 17 men have been freed since the speech, I am profoundly disappointed that 79 of the remaining 149 prisoners have been approved for release — 75 by the Guantánamo Review Task Force, and four since January this year by a new review process, the Periodic Review Boards — but are still held.

In addition, it is worth noting that 58 of these men are Yemenis, and that their release continues to be justified, throughout the US political establishment, because of fears about the security situation in Yemen, fears which impose on the men still held the unjustifiable status of men who are held solely because of their nationality.

Yesterday it was 500 days since President Obama’s promise, and to mark the occasion we are asking you to please visit the Gitmo Clock, to like it, share it and tweet it, and to contact the White House and the Pentagon to ask for renewed action in releasing prisoners from Guantánamo.

Please contact the White House and the Pentagon

Call the White House and ask President Obama to release all the prisoners who have had their release approved by the Guantánamo Review Task Force or by Periodic Review Boards. Call 202-456-1111 or 202-456-1414 or submit a comment online.

Call the Department of Defense and ask Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to issue certifications, as required by Congress, for the prisoners cleared for release: 703-571-3343.

Note: This article was published yesterday — as “Gitmo Clock Marks 500 Days Since President Obama’s Promise to Resume Releasing Prisoners; 79 Cleared Prisoners Still Held” – on the website of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, 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.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer and film-maker. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, 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.

In Ground-Breaking Ruling, US Judge Gladys Kessler Orders Guantánamo Force-Feeding Videos to be Made Public

Congratulations to Judge Gladys Kessler of the District Court in Washington D.C., who, yesterday, followed up on a powerful order prohibiting the government from holding a secret hearing in the case of Guantánamo hunger striker Abu Wa’el Dhiab, which I wrote about here, with an even more powerful order calling on the government to prepare for public release eleven hours of videotapes showing Mr. Dhiab being dragged from his cell and force-fed.

This ruling is the latest in a string of powerful rulings by Judge Kessler, who, in May, briefly ordered the government to stop force-feeding Mr. Dhiab. This order was swiftly rescinded, as Judge Kessler feared for his life, but she also ordered videotapes of his “forcible cell extractions” (FCEs) and his force-feeding to be made available to his lawyers, who had to travel to the Pentagon’s secure facility outside Washington D.C. to see them. After viewing them, Cori Crider, his lawyer at Reprieve, said, “While I’m not allowed to discuss the contents of these videos, I can say that I had trouble sleeping after viewing them,” and added, “I have no doubt that if President Obama forced himself to watch them, he would release my client tomorrow.”

In a press release, Reprieve explained that the eleven hours of video footage — consisting of 28 tapes in total — “is to be redacted for ‘all identifiers of individuals’ other than Mr. Dhiab,” and further explained how Judge Kessler’s ruling came in response to a motion submitted in June by 16 major US media organizations, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, McClatchy, the Guardian, the Associated Press and others, seeking to have the videotapes unsealed.

In a statement quoted in Judge Kessler’s ruling, Mr. Dhiab endorsed the request for the videotapes to be unsealed, stating, “I want Americans to see what is going on at the prison today, so they will understand why we are hunger-striking, and why the prison should be closed. If the American people stand for freedom, they should watch these tapes. If they truly believe in human rights, they need to see these tapes.”

In her ruling, Judge Kessler specifically made reference to the need for First Amendment rights to be protected with reference to Guantánamo, stating, “In short, it is our responsibility, as judges, as part of our obligation under the Constitution, to ensure that any efforts to limit our First Amendment protections are scrutinized with the greatest of care. That responsibility can not be ignored or abdicated.”

She also described the government’s justifications for seeking to keep the whole of the evidence on the videotapes sealed as a demand that is “unacceptably vague, speculative, lack[ing specificity, or … just plain implausible,” and added, “It strains credulity to conclude that release of these videos has a substantial probability of causing the harm the Government predicts.”

The Guardian noted that Judge Kessler countered another argument — that, if the tapes were made public, the prisoners “would learn how to develop ‘countermeasures’ to defeat force-feeding,” despite the fact that, in some cases, they have been force-fed for seven years — by noting that it “strains credulity.”

She also dismissed the government’s claim that releasing the videos would violate the Geneva Conventions because it would violate Mr. Dhiab’s right not to be held up to “public curiosity” by stating, “The Government’s claim, if accepted, would turn the Third Geneva Convention on its head. Rather than a source of rights to humane treatment, Article 13 would become a means to shield from public view treatment that Mr. Dhiab (and undoubtedly other detainees) believe to be inhumane.”

This is not the first time the authorities have invoked the Geneva Conventions, and the right not to be held up to “public curiosity,” to prevent knowledge about Guantánamo being made public. Media visitors to Guantánamo are permanently prohibited from showing the faces of prisoners when they take photos during prison tours, which has the effect of hindering the public’s ability to empathize with them.

Moreover, the ban on photos identifying the men held has been disturbingly thorough throughout Guantánamo’s long and ignoble history. A handful of photos have been released publicly after they were taken by representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross and were subsequently released by the men’s families, but for the most part what we know to this day of what the prisoners look like, or looked like, has come from the Detainee Assessment Briefs, the classified military files that were released by WikiLeaks in 2011. However, none of the photos that have been released show the horrors of force-feeding, of prisoners weighing 100 pounds or less, which, if made publicly available, would invite comparisons with the Nazis’ concentration camps, and would, I believe, lead to action to bring about the prison’s closure.

It may be that the videotapes of Mr. Dhiab will perform this important function, and I certainly hope so.

The process of obscuring from the videotapes what Judge Kessler referred to as “all faces other than Mr Dhiab’s, voices, names, etc.” is “likely to take some days,” as Reprieve explained, adding that, while the redactions are made, Judge Kessler ordered the tapes to remain under seal. In the meantime, the hearing that I wrote about yesterday will begin on Monday (October 6), at 10am in Washington D.C. — unless it is delayed by an anticipated government appeal.

In response to the ruling, Cori Crider said, “It is high time the bright light of the truth was shone on Guantánamo’s force-feeding practices. It has always been the height of hypocrisy for the Guantánamo authorities to take media groups on ‘show tours’, while forbidding them from talking to prisoners or seeing evidence like this, which shows the grim reality of life at the prison. I look forward to the day when this evidence is made public, and I believe the outcry that results will hasten the close of Guantánamo Bay.”

Jon Eisenberg, who represents Mr. Dhiab in the US, said, “We firmly believe that once the veil of secrecy is lifted from the abusive treatment of hunger-striking prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, the abuse will end. This decision by Judge Kessler is a big step toward lifting that veil of secrecy.”

Alka Pradhan, of Reprieve US, added, “This may well be the most significant court decision on Guantánamo Bay in years. No longer does the American public have to rely on propaganda and misinformation, but can finally watch the videotapes and judge for themselves whether this terrible prison should continue to be the image America projects to the world, or whether we should reclaim our values and shut it down for good.”

Note: Please see here for the website of Lewis Peake, the artist who drew the illustration at the top of this article in 2008, as part of a series of five illustrations based on drawings by Guantánamo prisoner Sami al-Haj, which the Pentagon censors had refused to allow the public to see. Reprieve commissioned Lewis Peake to reproduce the drawings based on descriptions of what Sami had drawn, and I reproduced them in my article, “Sami al-Haj: the banned torture pictures of a journalist in Guantánamo.”

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer and film-maker. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, 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.

Judge in Guantánamo Force-Feeding Case Rejects Government’s Call for Secret Hearing

[image error]Sometimes, when it comes to Guantánamo, the shamelessness of the US government know no bounds.

The most recent example is in the case of Abu Wa’el Dhiab, a Syrian prisoner, long cleared for release and confined to a wheelchair as a result of his treatment over the last 12 years. In despair at ever being released, Mr. Dhiab embarked on a hunger strike last year, as part of the prison-wide hunger strike that reminded many people of the existence of Guantánamo — and in May he won an unprecedented court victory, when, as I described it recently, a US judge — District Judge Gladys Kessler, in  Washington D.C. — ordered the government to stop force-feeding him, and to preserve videotaped evidence of his force-feeding, and his “forcible cell extractions” (FCEs), whereby a team of armored guards drags him out of his cell to take him to be force-fed.

Soon after, Judge Kessler reluctantly dropped her ban on Mr. Dhiab’s force-feeding, fearing that otherwise he would die. However, she also ordered the government to release the videotapes to Mr. Dhiab’s lawyers, which was another unprecedented decision.

On August 12, as I explained in another article, Judge Kessler ordered the authorities at Guantánamo to allow two independent doctors to visit the prison to evaluate Mr. Dhiab’s health. As his lawyers at the legal action charity Reprieve explained in a press release, his health had “deteriorated so much that there are now concerns for his life.” As Reprieve also explained, the doctors will “also testify, along with a force-feeding expert, at a hearing scheduled for October 6, about the medical effects of the force-feedings on Mr Dhiab.”

In its latest bout of shamelessness, the government attempted, at short notice, to persuade Judge Kessler that this hearing had to take place in secret, but she refused to comply with that request, and, in a five-page order, delivered a withering put-down of the government’s position, describing it as “extraordinary” and “deeply troubling.”

Below I’m posting the whole of Judge Kessler’s ruling, so readers can see for themselves what Spencer Ackerman, in the Guardian, described as Judge Kessler’s “occasionally mocking tone,” as she took apart the government’s feeble arguments, one by one.

MEMORANDUM OPINION

Petitioner Abu Wa’el (Jihad) Dhiab has been detained at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, since as early as 2002. In 2009, he was declared eligible for release. As of October 1, 2014, he still remains a detainee at Guantánamo Bay.

On April 18, 2014, Mr. Dhiab (represented by counsel) filed a Motion for Preliminary Injunction. While some of his requests for judicial relief have changed over time, his major requests are for a preliminary injunction barring the Government from subjecting him to forcible cell extractions (“FCE”) and from placing him in a Five-Point Restraint Chair for the purpose of transporting him to or from forced-feeding, so long as he indicates that he is willing to submit to such feeding compliantly. After much preliminary litigation activity, on August 12, 2014, the Court set October 6 & 7, 2014, as a firm date for the Preliminary Injunction Hearing. Thus, the Parties have known for a period of two months the date upon which the hearing would go forth.

On September 26, 2014, less than two weeks prior to the start of the long-scheduled Hearing, the Government filed a Motion to Seal Preliminary Injunction Hearing … requesting that the Court take the extraordinary step of completely closing the entire Preliminary Injunction Hearing to the public. This request, which appears to have been deliberately made on short notice is — in this Court’s view — deeply troubling.

One of the strongest pillars of our system of justice in the United States is the presumption that all judicial proceedings are open to the public whom the judiciary serves. As the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit has observed, “[t]he First Amendment, through a free press, protects the people’s right to know that their government acts fairly, lawfully, and accurately.” [Detroit Free Press v. Ashcroft, 2002].

The Government argues that closing the Preliminary Injunction Hearing to the public (with the exception of brief unclassified opening statements), is necessary because the “record in this case includes inextricably intertwined classified, protected, and unclassified information.” The Government contends that closing the Hearing will prevent any unauthorized disclosure of classified or protected information, thereby purportedly ensuring that the hearing proceeds in an efficient manner … It denies that Mr. Dhiab will suffer any prejudice as a result of such closure.

For the following reasons, the Government’s Motion will be denied.

First, as Petitioner points out, the hearing can be bifurcated [split in two] into open and closed sessions to accommodate the Government’s concerns. Petitioner is presenting only three witnesses, all experienced expert witnesses, who understand the difference between open and closed sessions and classified and unclassified information. One of those witnesses, Dr. Steven Miles, lacks any security clearance at all and therefore can be heard entirely in open Court. The other two witnesses can bifurcate their testimony into public sessions discussing their written reports, which have already been filed in public on the Court’s docket, and closed sessions involving any classified or protected information, during which the hearing can be closed to the public. Petitioner’s counsel anticipates that full examination of those two experts can be completed in one day on October 6.

Second, the Government does not intend to call any live witnesses, and, therefore, there need be no worry about monitoring their testimony.

Third, as to the presentation and/or discussion of documentary evidence, a great deal of it is already public and has been filed in public on the Court’s docket. To the extent it has not, its submission can be bifurcated into public and closed proceedings.

Fourth, the Government’s only argument to the contrary is that Petitioner’s public information is inextricably intertwined with classified and protected information. As a result, the Government argues that a bifurcated hearing “is rife with the risk of slip ups and inadvertent disclosure of protected or classified information.” … In prior hearings before this Court, counsel and the Court have dealt carefully and professionally with classified, protected and public information. The courtroom has been sealed without any problems whenever necessary to discuss classified and protected information. Moreover, it is in the interest of all counsel to be vigilant during the Hearing to bring any potentially classified or protected information to the Court’s attention before testimony is given.

Fifth (and really first in significance), the law is clear that “[t]he presumption of openness may be overcome only by an overriding interest based on findings that closure is essential to preserve higher values and is narrowly tailored to serve that interest.” [Press-Enterprise Co. v. Superior Court of California, 1984] (emphasis added). Closing the hearing in its entirety certainly would not be a “narrowly tailored solution” when the alternative of bifurcation is a reasonable, sensible, and doable alternative.

Sixth, the Government claims that the entire proceeding should be closed because bifurcation of testimony and the periodic closing of the courtroom will cause “significant logistical burdens,” “delay,” and “great cost in the continuity of questioning.” As the United States Court of Military Appeals said, even though a bifurcated hearing “may involve complex and delicate matters for resolution by the trial judge … th[o]se are matters judicial officers must and should be equipped to properly determine. [United States v. Grunden, 1977]. This Court has full faith in the ability of counsel and the Court, acting together, to handle in an efficient and appropriate manner, all the classified and protected information. Moreover, a reasonable amount of delay and logistical burdens are a small price to pay for the virtues of judicial transparency.

Finally, it is no secret that Mr. Dhiab’ s case has received a good deal of publicity in the press. As Judge Hogan said in In re Guantanamo Bay Detainee Litigation [2009], “[p]ublic interest in Guantánamo Bay generally and these proceedings specifically has been unwavering.” With such a long-standing and ongoing public interest at stake, it would be particularly egregious to bar the public from observing the credibility of live witnesses, the substance of their testimony, whether proper procedures are being followed, and whether the Court is treating all participants fairly.

In sum, the Government has failed to meet its burden of establishing a substantial probability of prejudice to a compelling interest. The Government seems to have forgotten the words of the Supreme Court in Press-Enterprise Co. v. Superior Court …, which are as wise and relevant today as they were in 1984:

The value of openness lies in the fact that people not actually attending trials [and other proceedings] can have confidence that standards of fairness are being observed; the sure knowledge that anyone is free to attend gives assurance that established procedures are being followed and that deviations will become known. Openness thus enhances both the basic fairness of the . . . trial and the appearance of fairness so essential to public confidence in the system. (emphasis in original).

For all these reasons, the presumption of openness and the absence of any grounds that justify overcoming that presumption compel denial of the Respondents’ Motion.

Gladys Kessler

United States District Judge

October 2, 2014

*****

Also of relevance to Abu Wa’el Dhiab’s case is an article his lawyer, Cori Crider, Reprieve’s Strategic Director, wrote for the Guardian just two days before Judge Kessler’s ruling, which I’m posting below in its entirety, because I cannot better — or paraphrase — Crider’s eloquence, as she decries the ongoing horrors of Guantánamo. Of particular interest are the following: her explanation of why attempting to suppress the testimony of three expert witnesses is so disingenuous, as one, Dr. Sondra Crosby, “has already testified in public” at one of Guantánamo’s military commissions, in April; and the quote from Abu Wa’el Dhiab — “They want all of us to be invisible: the detainees, the kind people like the nurse who would not force-feed us, the people who could tell Americans the truth.”

I’m also impressed with Crider’s analysis of the importance of the video tapes that she saw back in June, when she stated, “While I’m not allowed to discuss the contents of these videos, I can say that I had trouble sleeping after viewing them,” and added, “I have no doubt that if President Obama forced himself to watch them, he would release my client tomorrow.”

In Tuesday’s column for the Guardian, she wrote, “Over the summer I watched the videos — 11 bleak hours of filmed abuse. Some of the images have burned into my brain in much the same way that, 10 years ago, the Abu Ghraib photos burned my mind, and perhaps yours.” She also noted how “The DoD is so nervous about this footage going public that I have been forbidden even to discuss it with other security-cleared lawyers representing other clients on hunger strike, with whom we were always previously trusted to discuss classified issues.”

I also found her closing words extremely powerful, where she wrote that the prison at Guantánamo is “not just a prison,” but “a warehouse of the forgotten, run by a military that doesn’t have the faintest idea how to treat the sick souls of people held without charge for over a dozen years.”

Gitmo hunger strikes are a cry for help. Why is the US fighting back with secret torture?

By Cori Crider, The Guardian, September 30, 2014

“Safe, Humane, Legal, Transparent”: so goes the slogan of the world’s most famous offshore prison. It’s an Obama-era rebrand, a bid by Gitmo’s PR people to persuade Americans that today’s is a kinder, gentler Guantánamo Bay. There’s just one wrinkle: Gitmo is still dangerous, nasty, lawless and secretive — and the evidence just keeps piling up.

At the forefront of this war over the truth is the first-ever trial concerning the practice of force-feeding prisoners on hunger strike, due to start Monday. My client, Abu Wa’el Dhiab — a Syrian man who has never been charged, and indeed has been cleared to leave Guantánamo by the US government for more than five years — has been fighting for over a year to reform the way he and other hunger-strikers have been treated. He’s finally about to have his day in court.

But the Obama administration refuses to accept this unusual intrusion of justice into its island idyll. On Friday, US justice department attorneys filed a motion asking the court to hear all evidence in the trial entirely in closed court, save a short, anodyne opening statement from lawyers on both sides.

What we had planned to discuss in public is no secret — at least, not a legitimate one. Three expert witnesses would take the stand to talk openly about the gruesome effects of force-feeding on Abu Wa’el. A bioethicist, a torture physician and a psychiatrist who is also a retired Brigadier General [Stephen Xenakis]  would testify that force-feeding as currently practiced at Guantánamo Bay is punitive — that it is a transparent effort by prison authorities to break detainees’ will and stop them from hunger-striking. What force-feeding emphatically is not, these experts will say, is proper medical care. It is a gross violation of medical ethics. But if the government gets its way, throughout this testimony, the courtroom’s public gallery will be empty.

The craziest aspect of the government’s request to close down this trial is that one of our cleared experts, Dr. Sondra Crosby, has already testified in public in one of the military commissions (the quasi-criminal but less-fair “trials”) at Gitmo. This April, she spoke, on camera and in detail, about the torture of a defendant — Abd al-Rahim Hussein Muhammad Abdah al-Nashiri — who is one of the three people the US government admits it waterboarded. That is a “top secret” case; if a doctor could talk about torture then, why can’t a doctor call the torture of a cleared inmate what it is today?

In a recent phone conversation with me from Guantánamo, Abu Wa’el offered his own view on the government’s motivations for keeping so much in this case so unnecessarily secret:

They want all of us to be invisible: the detainees, the kind people like the nurse who would not force-feed us, the people who could tell Americans the truth.

He was right. Since the start of the mass hunger strike last year and the start of our litigation, the government has thrown up obstacle after obstacle to keep the public from understanding what force-feeding at the base really looks like.

First, the Obama administration insisted there should be no trial of force-feeding at all, claiming the courts had no power to police abuses at the base. Then it prematurely declared the hunger strike “over” and announced that Department of Defense would no longer publish the total number of prisoners on hunger strike. Around the same time, the government even wiped the inconvenient term “hunger striker” from its lexicon: talk to a Pentagon spin doctor today, and you will find there is no such thing as a hunger strike, no such thing as force-feeding. Today there are only “noncompliant detainees” who engage in “non-religious long-term fasts” and must be “enterally fed”.

This is what the Pentagon refuses to say: twice a day, every day, it puts cleared hunger-strikers through abuse that would shock most Americans if they could but see it.

But testimony from a couple of experts is not the same as watching a tube go down a man’s throat, you might say. You might even ask: what is the government so afraid of?

Part of the answer lies in a cache of secret force-feeding videos. Earlier this year, we forced the government to give us a pile of tapes of Abu Wa’el being hauled from his cell by Guantánamo’s riot squad (the so-called “Forcible Cell Extraction” team) and strapped into a chair for force-feeding. Over the summer I watched the videos — 11 bleak hours of filmed abuse. Some of the images have burned into my brain in much the same way that, 10 years ago, the Abu Ghraib photos burned my mind, and perhaps yours.

The DoD is so nervous about this footage going public that I have been forbidden even to discuss it with other security-cleared lawyers representing other clients on hunger strike, with whom we were always previously trusted to discuss classified issues. The Pentagon doesn’t want you to get anywhere close to these images; the government doesn’t even really want you to hear in public from other people, like our security-cleared experts, who have seen what force-feeding looks like.

But those who have seen the tapes know the truth: what we do to hunger-strikers at Guantánamo shames America — not just in the bad old days of George W Bush, but today, in 2014.

Gitmo is not just a prison. It is a warehouse of the forgotten, run by a military that doesn’t have the faintest idea how to treat the sick souls of people held without charge for over a dozen years. The basic problem at the heart of our case is that the Obama administration refuses to see my client’s hunger strike as a peaceful, last-resort protest against more than a decade of injustice. Instead, it views his protest not as a cry of humanity, but as a disciplinary problem that must be stamped out.

The US government is wrong. Abu Wa’el Dhiab is starving himself because he feels he and other prisoners at Guantánamo have no other choice. And when we go to trial next week, and experts testify about what is really going on at the base, right now, in our name, they should be allowed to do it in public to the greatest possible extent. The truth about Gitmo should be heard loud and clear — “legal and transparent” — not just in a courtroom in Washington but all across the world.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer and film-maker. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here – or here for the US).

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

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

Photos and Essay: The Inspiring Council House Occupation in Stratford That Is Resonating Across London

[image error] See my photos of my visit to the Focus E15 Open House Occupation in Stratford here.

On Friday, I paid a visit to the Carpenters Estate in Stratford, in east London, to show solidarity with the Focus E15 Mothers, a group of single mums, from Stratford, who were recently kicked out of a hostel where they had been staying, because of budget cuts, and were threatened with being scattered across the UK.

On Open House Weekend (September 20-21), making a great political point while the rich and powerful opened up prestigious properties for a day or two, the mums occupied a small block of flats, in perfectly habitable condition, which had been boarded up for years as part of the Labour-controlled council’s ongoing attempts to empty the Carpenters Estate so that it can be sold to housing developers.

In an article for the Guardian last week, Aditya Chakrabortty succinctly analysed the current situation regarding the Carpenters Estate,” which, he wrote, “was long ago cleared of most of its residents as Newham council tried to flog the land. Except the last deal fell through, leaving around 600 council homes empty. This is in a borough where more than 24,000 households are waiting for somewhere to live, and where, last winter, the shopping precinct was full of rough sleepers.”

The campaigners I met on Friday — augmented by other housing activists, and with visitors not only from Stratford but from across London — were friendly, articulate and committed. While I was there, they won an important court victory, at Bow County Court, when a judge told Newham Council that a possession order, issued at noon for an appearance at 2pm, was unjust, because it was an unacceptably short amount of time for the campaigners to prepare a case. As Zoe Williams noted in the Guardian, around 30 people gathered outside the court, chanting, “Housing is a human right, here to stay and here to fight, they are wrong and we are right, housing is a human right.”

A new hearing has been set for Thursday, October 2, at 10am, and anyone who supports the occupiers can join the Facebook page here, and, if you can, turn up to support them.

Last Friday, after the victory, the campaigners continued to involve the community in their campaign, setting up a free food stall outside the flats, and a free shop on a small patch of embanked grass nearby where donated items — clothes, books and toys, for example, were made available to anyone who needed them. Upstairs, in the media room, a press release was prepared, while outside others involved in the campaign added events to a blackboard, beginning with an open mike session at 6pm.

I had to leave at 5.30, sadly, but was in no doubt that what I had seen in action –  real community solidarity — would continue. And the power of their actions was confirmed the moment I arrived at the occupied block of flats, when a resident — a black woman in her 50s — told me, a stranger, how happy she was to see the flats occupied, and how it was something she had been praying for for years.

In contrast to the needs of the estate’s residents — and the tens of thousands of people on Newham’s housing waiting list — the council has long claimed that it needed to close down the estate, and move residents to other locations, because it was too expensive to refurbish the three tower blocks that make up the bulk of the estate’s homes. However, that argument has not convinced numerous residents.

In June 2012, when UCL was in talks with Newham Council about creating a new campus on the estate (a plan that later fell through), one long-term resident, Mary Finch, who had lived on the estate for 40 years, told Dave Hill of the Guardian, “I think that the Olympics has lost me my home. I think they’re gonna have to come in here and drag me out. Why should somebody be able to force you out of your home? A home that’s got nothing wrong with it, that’s standing solid? I do not want to go.”

Back in June 2012, Dave Hill noted how “[s]low dispersal of the estate’s residents, mostly to alternative dwellings nearby, ha[d] been in progress for some time,” and wrote about how Newham’s executive mayor, Sir Robin Wales, claimed that this was justified by “the need to embrace a host of development opportunities created not only by the draw of the [Olympic] Games and the [Olympic] park but also … by the economic arteries formed by the improved transport hub at Stratford station.”

Wales told Hill, “It’s always a balance if you want to do something for an area. What is the wider community getting at the expense of the inconvenience caused to local residents? People in Carpenters are concerned. I would be too. I completely understand that. But with UCL we would get an amazing, top university coming to the area. Our vision is for science and hi-tech providing jobs and skills. It would be such a good offer from the point of view of our kids.”

Two other Carpenters residents saw through Wales’ dissembling. Joe Alexander and Osita Madu of the campaigning group CARP (Carpenters Against Regeneration Plan) pointed out that the estate “works well as a community, so why dismantle it?” Madu said, “We’re not some kind of social ill or blight on the landscape that needs help. Somehow Newham council thinks we’re a social problem that needs to be addressed.”

Anyone who has seen the way in which Newham embraced big business for the Olympics cannot disagree with Osita Madu’s analysis of how the Carpenters Estate and its residents were perceived, and this conclusion was reinforced for me on Friday when, to reach the estate, I not only had to pass the cluster of private high-rises that were built for the Olympics, but also a number of building sites for further towering monstrosities that filled every piece of land in the vicinity of the Olympic Park, with the exception of the land still occupied by the Carpenters Estate.

The opinions expressed in 2012 are no less vociferous now, and with good reason, as the gulf between the rich and the poor continues to grow, with politicians, for the most part, interested only in developers and their narrow market — generally, rich Londoners, and rich foreign investors. Across London, unaffordable housing continues to rise up, as part of a wildly distorted housing market that is deliberately untamed by government or the banks, accompanied by various strategies — including benefit cuts, and cynically packaged regeneration plans for those living on estates like the Carpenters –  which are designed to move those on lower incomes, as well as anyone who finds themselves unemployed, out of London altogether.

Below I’m cross-posting an article written for the Guardian last week by Jasmine Stone, one of the Focus E15 Mothers, which eloquently explains how the occupation came about, as well as providing a number of important rallying cries — pointing out that housing “is a basic human right, not a privilege,” and explaining that this is why the campaigners “are demanding social housing, not social cleansing.”

Why I’m occupying a boarded-up east London council house

By Jasmin Stone, Guardian, September 23, 2014

A group of local mothers are squatting next to London’s Olympic Park to tell the government we need social housing, not social cleansing

My daughter was 13 months old when I received the eviction notice. I was living in a hostel in Stratford, London E15. The letter said that we had two months to get out. We were homeless; that’s why we were in the hostel in the first place. We didn’t have anywhere else to go. There were 210 other young women living there. Now it’s luxury flats. The council said they would rehouse us, but it turned out they were threatening to move us hundreds of miles away, to Manchester, Hastings and Birmingham.

When we met Newham’s Labour mayor, Sir Robin Wales, he told us: “if you can’t afford to live in Newham, you can’t afford to live in Newham”.

We grew up in Newham. We find this attitude disgusting. No one on low wages or benefits, or even an average income, can afford to live here.

Newham is a place for a variety of people, not just one class. We know that Newham is not alone either – people are being displaced every day from boroughs all over London. This is why we formed the Focus E15 Mothers campaign to fight for decent, local social housing for all those who need it.

This weekend, the Open House event ran across London. It gave people the opportunity to go inside buildings across the capital that are usually closed to the public. We decided to participate by opening up a closed council house on the Carpenters Estate, a large public housing estate next to the Olympic Park. Many residents have been evicted and cleared out of here by Newham council, which is trying to capitalise on the Olympics by selling the land off to private developers. They have tried every trick in the book to get rid of the remaining residents. They even told them there was asbestos in the tower blocks to get them out before the Olympics, and then let al-Jazeera and the BBC use one of the blocks during the games. Now the estate remains empty except for a handful of people.

The boarded-up house we have opened is in beautiful condition. It has running water, a power shower, working gas and electricity. Just by adding a sofa, table and chairs and some plants, we have turned this house into a home, and solved the housing crisis for one of the 6,500 rough sleepers or thousands of other homeless people in London. Newham council claims it can’t afford to house us, yet it found the money to hire dozens of private security guards on Sunday to try, unsuccessfully, to keep us out of the empty properties on the Carpenters Estate.

There are more than 2,000 other properties on the Carpenters Estate alone that could be made available as homes almost instantly. But the council leaves them to rot and deteriorate through weather damage, so they are in a bad enough way for the council to say they are in an unliveable condition.

Housing in London is now a commodity that the super-rich buy, like fine wine or art. It has been dubbed the “tax-haven on the Thames”. At least £122bn of property in England and Wales is held through companies registered in offshore tax havens, resulting in the loss of billions of pounds of tax that could be used to rebalance the housing market.

We wanted to participate in Open House to show how many houses sit empty in London and what an easy solution there is to the housing crisis.

This crisis, as it is usually covered in the newspapers, is one experienced by the middle classes, whose steady march from private renting to home ownership has been stopped in its tracks by the hugely inflated market. For members of the working class, however, the crisis is much more virulent. It involves not only the prospect of annual rent increases, the impossibility of home ownership and poor-quality housing, but also removal and displacement from the place in which you were born, leading to isolation in a place where you know nobody and opportunities for jobs are non-existent.

A new type of housing has been put in place called “affordable housing”, which has replaced social housing. It sounds good, but affordable housing costs up to 80% of the market rate – and is still ridiculously unaffordable. It makes no more sense to have a free market in housing than one in education, water or healthcare.

Housing, like these other things, is a basic human right, not a privilege. This is why we are demanding social housing, not social cleansing. In addition, rent caps to limit out-of-control rents, mansion taxes and higher stamp duty for the wealthiest would be simple reforms that have a dramatic impact on housing. Simply taking action to restrict the privileges of the 1% could result in a relatively fairer housing situation in London.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer and film-maker. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, 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.

Charges Against Moazzam Begg Dropped; Why Was He Ever Held in the First Place?

This morning, at the Old Bailey, the Crown Prosecution Service dropped all charges against Moazzam Begg, the former Guantánamo prisoner, who had been arrested in February on the basis of an alleged involvement in terrorism relating to visits he had made to Syria in 2012.

As I explained in an article at the time, “The Suspicious Arrest of Former Guantánamo Prisoner Moazzam Begg,” and in a radio interview with the US reporter Andrea Sears, it was impossible to believe that Begg, one of the most scrutinised Muslims in the UK, would have engaged in any activities that could be construed as terrorism.

He had indeed visited Syria, but had been in search of information relating to the US torture program that the Syrian government undertook on America’s behalf from 2002 onwards. Moreover, after his first visit in the summer of 2012, and before his second and last visit in December, the UK security services had interviewed him and had not attempted to prevent him from underraking his second visit.

It is also worth mentioning that, at the time of his visits, the UK was actually supporting those opposed to the Assad regime.

As the BBC explained this morning, his trial “was due to start on Monday, following a hearing at which he had pleaded not guilty to all the charges.” However, “at a pre-trial review on Wednesday morning lasting just five minutes, prosecution lawyers told the court that the CPS had decided there was insufficient evidence to continue with the prosecution.”

As the Guardian described it, the judge, Mr. Justice Wilkie, then “entered a formal verdict of not guilty” and “ordered that Begg be set free immediately from Belmarsh high security prison.”

The charges against him involved claims that he attended a terrorist training camp in Syria “knowing or believing instruction or training was provided there for the purposes of terrorism” between October 9, 2012 and April 9, 2013 and that he possessed documents for a purpose connected to terrorism and terrorist funding, which as the Guardian explained, “related to electronic documents found on a laptop computer in his possession,” plus five other charges relating to the possession of an article for a purpose connected to terrorism — apparently a Honda generator — between December 31, 2012 and February 26, 2014.

At a pre-trial hearing in court this morning, however, Christopher Hehir, a prosecutor, said, “The prosecution have recently become aware of relevant material, in the light of which, after careful and anxious consideration, the conclusion has been reached that there is no longer a realistic prospect of conviction in this case. The prosecution therefore offers no evidence.”

Begg’s lawyer, Gareth Peirce, said, as the Guardian described it, that “he should never have been charged, as his activities did not amount to terrorism.” She described Begg as “a good man trying to the right thing in a very difficult world.”

Following the verdict, the CPS refused to provide an explanation about the new material that had persuaded them to drop the case, and West Midlands police were also not very forthcoming. Assistant Chief Constable Marcus Beale said, “New material has recently been disclosed to police and CPS, which has a significant impact on key pieces of evidence that underpinned the prosecution’s case. Our criminal justice system — quite rightly — demands a very high standard of proof. I understand this is going to raise many questions. However, explaining what this newly revealed information is would mean discussing other aspects of the case which would be unfair and inappropriate as they are no longer going to be tested in court.”

He also said, “From the beginning this case has challenged the relationship between West Midlands police and some of the communities we serve. I would like to reassure them and Mr. Begg that at every stage of this investigation my officers acted in the best interests of the public and of justice.”

That latter comment may be true, but it may be that Marcus Beale was not told about the political machinations behind the scenes. Two months before Begg was arrested, in December 2013, his passport was taken away from him after a visit to South Africa, and as I wrote after his arrest, “This struck me as intimidation, and an attempt to put off any Muslim intending to travel to Syria for any reason, and the arrest seems to be more of the same.”

I also cannot help but wonder about the timing of the charges being dropped. Now that a quiescent Parliament has fallen for the Prime Minister’s claims that a new bombing campaign is needed against the so-called “terrorists” we once supported in Syria, there no longer seems to be any need for a prominent figure to be jailed to send a message to British Muslims that they are not allowed to visit war zones under any circumstances. Now they can be bombed with impunity by the RAF (if they are in Iraq), and by the US Air Force if they are in Syria.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer and film-maker. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, 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.