Andy Worthington's Blog, page 111

Video: Andy Worthington Discusses the Need to Close Guantánamo on CCTV America with David Remes and J.D. Gordon

Yesterday, I was delighted to be asked to take part in CCTV America’s half-hour show, “The Heat,” to debate the question, “Will Obama shut down the Guantánamo Bay detention center?” The video of the show is available below in two parts on YouTube, and it can also be found on the CCTV America website.

CCTV America described the show as follows:

US President Barack Obama vowed in 2009 to close America’s Guantanámo Bay military prison in Cuba. Five years later, GTMO remains open … 149 prisoners are still languishing there without [in most cases] prospect of a trial that could free them. Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, said that GTMO’s prisoners are not entitled protection under the Geneva Conventions. The UN said it should be closed.

The detention center’s infrastructure is crumbling. The prisoners are aging and medical facilities are limited. US law doesn’t permit Guantanámo’s detainees to be transferred to the United States. There are 79 officially rated ‘low level’ detainees who are recommended for release to other countries under a resettlement policy, but that policy must still overcome major hurdles. Earlier this month, six ‘low level’ detainees were ready to board a plane to Uruguay when the agreement fell apart at the last minute.

Here’s the show:

The presenter of “The Heat” is Anand Naidoo, and the other guests on the Guantánamo show were David Remes, a lawyer who represents a number of Yemeni prisoners in Guantánamo, and J.D. Gordon, a retired US Navy officer, who was a spokesperson for the authorities at Guantánamo during the Bush administration.

I have known David and J.D. for many years. As well as representing a number of men still held, David also represented a prisoner named Adnan Latif. A Yemeni with severe mental health problems, who had been cleared for release on numerous occasions, Adnan Latif died exactly two years ago, allegedly by committing suicide, although the official story has been challenged. The fact that the show was taking place two years after his death added a poignancy to the broadcast for both David and I.

J.D. Gordon and I have frequently discussed Guantánamo and the “war on terror” online, although it would be fair to say that we do not see eye to eye, as J.D. believes — or professes to believe — the whole discredited nonsense about the prisoners being “the worst of the worst” that was peddled by senior Bush administration officials when Guantánamo opened.

On “The Heat,” I was unable to put up with any more of the lies and distortions, challenging J.D.’s claims about the men at Guantánamo being terrorists, and pointing out that very few of the men have ever been accused of terrorism, and the majority were either innocent men, caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, or soldiers, who had been involved with the Taliban in an inter-Muslim civil war in Afghanistan that morphed into the “war on terror” after the 9/11 attacks — and most of them were bought for money. Along the way I was also obliged to challenge J.D.’s unconnected digressions about ISIS, Lee Rigby and beheadings.

I hope you have time to watch the show, and that, if you like it, you will share it.

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.

Humiliating Tory Defeat in Parliament Over the Reviled and Unjust Bedroom Tax

On Friday, there was some rare good news regarding the British government’s assault on the unemployed, as a Private Member’s Bill aimed at mitigating the worst effects of the hated “bedroom tax” passed a crucial vote in the House of Commons.

Ever since the wretched Tory-led coalition government seized power in May 2010, the very foundations of the modern British state have been under attack. The brain-dead grandchildren of Margaret Thatcher, the modern-day Tories — and their Lib Dem facilitators — have launched a comprehensive assault on the welfare state, under the guise of an artificial “age of austerity,” lying and playing on people’s least savoury instincts to paint the unemployed as shirkers and scroungers, despite the fact that there is only one job available for every five unemployed people, and also to portray the disabled as being fit for work, when that is not the case, as well as imposing caps on and cuts to benefits, driving people out of their homes.

For my articles covering these policies, see here, here and here.

This shameful sleight of hand, which has failed to deliver any savings, also ignores how much of the benefits bill goes not to the unemployed but to the working poor, and, most disgracefully, how by far the biggest part of the welfare bill is for pensions – an area that governments, and particularly Tories, don’t want to touch, as old people vote, in significant numbers, and everyone in politics seems happy that the general movement of money is from the young to the old.

Throughout the last four years and four months, the Tories’ cynical assault on the welfare state has rarely foundered, in terms of public support, with one exception — the bedroom tax (introduced on April 1, 2013), a typically vengeful but poorly-conceived assault on the unemployed, requiring people in receipt of housing benefit but deemed to have a spare room to downsize to a smaller property if they cannot pay for their “spare room” or “spare rooms” at a cost of between £11 and £21 a week. Many people, of course, simply do not have this money to spare.

Beyond the horrors of a cabinet of millionaires deciding that people in social housing should not be entitled to a spare room, the implementation of the tax has been a disaster in practical terms, as there are very few smaller properties for people to move to, and, instead, people have in many cases had to leave the homes in which they have lived for decades and move to the private sector, where, of course, the costs are much higher.

In addition, many “spare rooms” are used by disabled people, for example, to store necessary medical equipment.

As the Guardian explained on Friday, “David Cameron’s authority received a damaging blow” when a Private Member’s Bill introduced by Andrew George, the Lib Dem MP for St. Ives, was voted through to a second reading by 306 votes to 231. As the Guardian also stated, “Seventy Conservative MPs ignored a three line whip and stayed away from Westminister,” and “Angie Bray, Tory MP for Ealing Central and Acton, voted against her party.”

In his bill, Andrew George has “proposed measures to exclude social housing tenants” from the bedroom tax “until they receive a ‘reasonable offer’ of alternative accommodation with the ‘correct number of bedrooms.’” An exemption would also be made “if a tenant needs an extra room for medical reasons or if the property has undergone substantial adaptations to help them live there.”

As the Guardian noted, despite the unpopularity of the bedroom tax, “Tory ministers have resisted frequent demands for the rules of the policy to be changed,” although the Lib Dems “abandoned full support for it earlier this year, insisting it was not working effectively and that changes should be made.”

Labour opposes the bedroom tax — and has pledged to scrap it. Chris Bryant, the shadow work and pensions minister, said on Friday that Labour “would support George’s bill but reiterated that the party wanted to scrap the bedroom tax should it win next year’s general election.” He added, “Some Government policies introduced since 2010 have been incompetent, and others, I believe, have been unfair, but this one manages to combine unfairness and incompetence to a phenomenal degree — quite a feat.”

Labour’s Rachel Reeves also “repeated her party’s calls for the entire policy to be scrapped,” as the Guardian put it. “David Cameron and Nick Clegg’s cruel and unfair bedroom tax has hit hundreds of thousands of people across the country causing misery, hardship and forcing families to rely on food banks,” she said.

Angie Bray, whose majority in west London is 3,716, told the Guardian that she “disagrees with claims from Tory ministers that changing the current policy would be costly.” She said, “I strongly believe that people should not be penalised in cases where they are agreeable to move but there is no suitable smaller accommodation for them to move to. Where people can demonstrate that they continue to seek to downsize but no suitable accommodation is available they should not then suffer financially as a result.”

Following the vote, Patrick Butler wrote that, although it is remains to be seen whether Andrew George’s bill “will make it through to the statute book,” the vote “means that the bill will now proceed to committee stage for further scrutiny, and potentially on to the Lords, keeping the issue high on the agenda for the next few months.”

Butler also noted that the bedroom tax “has always proved politically controversial,” causing “the first sign of trouble for ministers’ welfare strategy in December 2011 when the government was defeated in the Lords early on in the passage of the Welfare Reform Bill.” ON that occasion, “13 Liberal Democrat peers (and one Tory, the late Lord Newton) voted to throw out the policy. Not a single cross-bencher supported it.”

He added that, early on, the government “crucially lost naming rights for this most high profile of policies: only ministers and civil servants, with arcane fastidiousness, still call the bedroom tax the Removal of the Spare Room Subsidy.”

He added:

Unlike the benefit cap, which seemed to crystallise wider perceptions of fairness in relation to the welfare state, the public has never been convinced the bedroom tax is just. Pollsters have consistently found it uniquely unpopular among welfare reforms, especially among Labour and UKIP voters, sometimes by a clear majority.

This was the background to Labour’s promise to scrap the bedroom tax, which, it could be said, is a promise that would not have been made had it not been so unpopular. Moreover, a few other Tory MPs have also “admitted to second thoughts,” as Patrick Butler put it, “including Anne McIntosh, Nadine Dorries, and recently, UKIP defector Douglas Carswell.”

As Butler also noted:

Grim tales of bedroom tax misery and despair meanwhile have piled up: disabled tenants forced to move out of homes which had been expensively adapted at taxpayer expense; parents receiving bedroom tax demands for the bedroom vacated by their dead child; once sought-after family homes lying empty because no-one wants to risk becoming subject to the bedroom tax; estranged fathers unable to afford the charge for the spare bedroom where their visiting children stayed at weekends.

In addition, the United Nations housing envoy Raquel Rolnik focused on the bedroom tax in a review of Britain’s housing policies last October. Shamefully, after she wrote about how disturbing it was to see how the bedroom tax affecting “the most vulnerable, the most fragile, the people who are on the fringes of coping with everyday life,” senior Tories and the right-wing media attacked her.

However, the most powerful criticism in Patrick Butler’s article came from the Department for Work and Pensions’ own analysis of the policy, published in July, which “showed that it was not working well: a lack of alternative accommodation meant only 4.5% of tenants had been able to move to a smaller home, forcing thousands into dire ‘heat or eat’ financial hardship and debt.”

Butler also noted that, although ministers originally claimed the bedroom tax “would save £500m, by last November it had quietly revised this figure down to £400m.” Furthermore, councils and housing associations “say that by the time the costs of evictions, arrears and debt advice are factored in, the policy will save nothing.”

And as with so many Tory policies, while saving no money, this wretched policy nevertheless has so far managed not only to make numerous people leave their homes, for no purpose, but also to make numerous people’s financially marginal lives even more precarious, with all the horrendous stress that entails.

I thank Andrew George MP for his Private Member’s Bill, and wish it every success as it moves to a second reading. It is time the bedroom tax was consigned to the dustbin of history — to be followed, hopefully, by this entire wretched government.

What you can do now

You can see how your MP voted here (it’s under Division No. 47). Please email your MP (via “Write to Them”) to thank them if they voted for Andrew George’s bill and to encourage them to continue supporting it as it makes its way through Parliament, and to ask them to change their minds if they voted against it. There is also a campaign being run by 38 Degrees.

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.

Save the NHS: Photos of the People’s March for the NHS in London, September 6, 2014

[image error] See my photos of the People’s March for the NHS and the rally in Trafalgar Square on Flickr here!

Some people think that protest is futile, but in Lewisham, in south east London, we know that’s not true. In 2012 and 2013, a grass-roots people’s movement in Lewisham defeated plans by the government — and senior officials in the NHS — to severely downgrade services at Lewisham Hospital to pay for the debts accumulated by a neighbouring NHS trust. If the plans had gone ahead, the 270,000 people of Lewisham would have had no A&E (Accident & Emergency) Department, and would have had to join 500,000 other people, from two other boroughs, served by one A&E many miles away on a remote heath in Woolwich. In addition, all frontline acute services would have been cut at Lewisham, and, as a result, 90 percent of the Lewisham’s mothers would not have been able to give birth in their home borough.

Although we won a significant victory in Lewisham, the zeal of the government — and of senior NHS managers — for increased privatisation, and for cuts that can only damage the provision of services to those in need continues, and, as with so many facets of the opportunistic “age of austerity” declared by the Tory-led coalition government, mass opposition is in short supply. What we need, at the very least, is regular opportunities to show the government, the banks and the corporations that we are implacably opposed to their corruption and cruelty, and yet we have had only two major protests in the last four years — one in March 2011 (the TUC-led “March for the Alternative“), and another (“A Future That Works“) in October 2012.

In January last year, the Save Lewisham Hospital campaign got 25,000 people out on the streets of Lewisham, providing hope and encouragement to campaigners across the country, and on Saturday, thousands of NHS supporters gathered in Red Lion Square in Holborn and marched to Trafalgar Square for a rally that was a culmination of a three-week, 300-mile march by around 30 mums (the “Darlo Mums”) and others from Darlington, who recreated the 1936 Jarrow March, as the People’s March for the NHS.

The campaigners — led by two mums, Rehana Azam and Joanna Adams — were inspirational, delivering powerful encouraging words to the crowd about the importance of the NHS, and the importance of solidarity, that had been honed throughout the last three weeks of marching and meeting like-minded people along the way.

On their website, the campaigners, who are calling for the repeal of the 2012 Health and Social Care Act (which opened up the NHS to ever-increasing privatisation), explain, “[W]e aim to make the public aware of what the coalition government has been doing to our NHS and what has been happening to our hospitals and health services. It’s really hard to passively watch the rapid dismantling, privatisation and destruction of the NHS. First we had the Health & Social Care Act, then Section 75 and more recently Clause 119 of the Care Bill. The Government have legislated to open the NHS to the open market. We believe every penny saved in the NHS should go back into improving and developing our NHS. We don’t want to see private companies operating in the NHS under the heading of ‘efficiency’ when we know they are accountable to their share holders, who are only interested in maximum profit before patient health care.”

I hope you have the opportunity to look at my photos of the arrival of the Jarrow marchers in Holborn, and the march from Red Lion Square to Trafalgar Square, and that you will share them if you support the cause.

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.

What’s Happening with 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.

The short answer to the question, “What’s Happening with Guantánamo?” twelve years and eight months after the prison opened, is, unfortunately, “very little.”

Seventeen men have been released since President Obama delivered a major speech on national security issues last May, in which he promised to resume releasing prisoners after a period of nearly three years in which releases had almost ground to a halt, because of obstacles raised by Congress and the president’s unwillingness to spend political capital overcoming those obstacles.

Of the 17 men released, eleven were cleared for release in 2009 by a high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established shortly after taking office. However, of the 149 men still held, 75 others were also cleared for release by the task force, and their ongoing imprisonment is a disgrace. Four others have been cleared for release in recent months by Periodic Review Boards, established to review the cases of the majority of the men who were not cleared for release by the task force.

The majority of the cleared prisoners — 58 in total — are Yemenis, whose release was blocked by President Obama from January 2010 until his major speech last May. The trigger for this ban was a foiled airline bomb plot in December 2009, which had been hatched in Yemen, but although the president lifted his ban last May, none of the Yemenis cleared for release have yet been freed.

On Monday, the New York Times ran a major feature on Guantánamo, “Decaying Guantánamo Defies Closing Plans,” in which Charlie Savage examined the current situation. His article began with a claim that, last month, a Boeing C-17 military transport plane arrived at the prison to take six long-cleared prisoners, who cannot be safely repatriated, to Uruguay, after President Mujica offered to take them, as I reported here.

The Times claimed that, just before the plane arrived, Vice President Biden had called President Mujica, “pressing him to resettle the men,” and also claimed that, although President Mujica had offered to accept the six men in January, by the time the US was “ready for the transfer” this summer, President Mujica “was worried that it would be politically risky to follow through because of coming elections in his country,” according to Obama administration officials who spoke to the Times, which added, “After four days of frantic negotiations between the two governments as the plane sat on the tarmac, the C-17 flew away without its intended passengers.”

As AFP reported on Tuesday, however, Diego Canepa, an assistant secretary in President Mujica’s office, denied the Times‘ claims. Canepa said, “At no point has any date been set,” adding, “There is a commitment that [the six inmates] will be received here and the date is being finalized with the US government.” He also said that the question of the men’s transfer would be settled “within two or three months.”

Diego Canepa also refuted the claim about Joe Biden, telling journalists, “There was a conversation with Biden but there was in no way any pressure on Mujica.”

According to the Times, the Obama administration “insists that the transfers to Uruguay will still occur after its election,” and “as many as 14 other releases could also happen by the end of the year if they get approved,” according to officials with knowledge of deliberations. Some, however, said a sense of urgency was required. Cliff Sloan, the State Department’s envoy for the closure of Guantánamo, appointed after Obama’s speech last May, along with Paul Lewis, his counterpart in the Pentagon, said, “Every month counts. The period between now and the end of the year is critical because the path to closure demands substantial progress in moving people from Guantánamo.”

After interviewing “two dozen administration, congressional and military officials,” the Times noted that “[a] split is emerging between State Department officials, who appear eager to move toward Mr. Obama’s goal [of closing the prison before leaving office], and some Pentagon officials, who say they share that ambition but seem warier than their counterparts about releasing low-level detainees.”

The problem is not just the release of the men cleared for release, but also the fate of the 70 others, who will need to be moved to the US if the prison at Guantánamo Bay is to be closed. On that, however, Congress has imposed a ban for several years.

Releasing prisoners

According to the conditions on releasing prisoners that have been imposed by Congress for several years, lawmakers must be notified 30 days before the release of any prisoner, and the defense secretary must also sign off on the release, to guarantee that they cannot threaten the US after being freed. The Times noted that Leon Panetta, the former defense secretary, “approved no low-level transfers,” whereas his successor, Chuck Hagel, has approved the release of the 11 men released since President Obama’s speech last May, although no one has been freed since the end of May this year.

According to the Times, news of the Uruguay deal “inspired similar talks with Brazil, Chile and Colombia,” according to regional news reports, and in the meantime the Obama administration was also arranging deals “to repatriate four Afghans and a Mauritanian,” deals that were completed in March, but that have not previously been reported. I mentioned the four Afghans here, and reported the Mauritanian’s story last year.

Despite this, there was no action from Chuck Hagel. The Times reported that he consults a number of national security agencies while examining proposed transfers, and some advisers, including Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “raised concerns about whether host countries can fulfill promises to keep watch on former detainees.”

In May, the White House sent Chuck Hagel a memo “saying he should accept more than ‘zero risk’” in approving prisoner transfers “because allowing the prison to remain open raised risks, too.” However, referring to the certification that must be made prior to any prisoner release, Hagel told the Times at the time, “My name is going on that document. That’s a big responsibility.”

In May, when the last prisoners were released — five Taliban prisoners exchanged for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the sole US prisoner of war in Afghanistan — the administration did not notify Congress, sparking disgraceful hysteria from Republican critics, who accused the administration of massive irresponsibility, and of breaking the law. As the Times stated, Hagel “said he was satisfied with the Qataris’ security assurances,” and also “argued that delaying the transfer would put Sergeant Bergdahl’s life at risk.”

One manifestation of the manufactured hysteria came from Republicans in the House of Representatives, who “retaliated by voting to forbid transferring any Guantánamo detainees anywhere” — a completely unacceptable ban that, as the Times noted, “may not become law,” although Rep. Howard McKeon (R-Ca.), the chair of the House Armed Services Committee, said, “I don’t see any support in the House for relaxing the current restrictions, or backing off our ban, in light of the president’s recent violation of the law.”

However, Cliff Sloan “argued that it is possible the politics could change if most of the low-level prisoners can be transferred,” because “[r]elocating a population of less than 100 to a domestic prison would be a smaller problem.”

Legal challenges

Legally, the administration continues to rely on the Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed the week after the 9/11 attacks, to justify the ongoing detention of the prisoners. However, new habeas corpus challenges are expected after the end of major combat operations in Afghanistan in December. J. Alan Liotta, the senior Pentagon official dealing with detainee affairs, told the Times that “he expects the detention authority to remain viable because most detainees are considered part of Al-Qaeda or an associated force, rather than solely Taliban, and the broader armed conflict continues.”

However, as the Times also noted, “law of war detention was designed for a conventional conflict that comes to an end after several years,” and in a recent order, Justice Stephen G. Breyer “took the unusual step of noting that the Supreme Court has not been asked whether the law ‘limits the duration’ of indefinite detention in the more open-ended war against Al-Qaeda.”

The Times also noted “signs of judicial impatience” in recent rulings — an appeals court ruling allowing judges to “oversee the conditions of confinement at Guantánamo,” and a decision taken in the District Court in Washington D.C. to allow a force-fed, hunger striking prisoner’s lawyers to view videotapes of his force-feeding and “forcible cell extractions.”

A decaying prison and an aging population

In other passages, the New York Times examined the decaying fabric of the prison, and problems with medical care and an aging population.

It was noted that parts of the prison “are fraying,” and that the secretive Camp 7, where the “high-value detainees,” including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, are held, “is built on unstable ground — a floor is described as buckling — and will need replacement for any long-term use.” Also of concern is the kitchen building, where “temperatures soar to 110 degrees at midday, steel supports are corroded, and workers must cover dry goods with plastic tarps during storms because of a leaky roof,” and the state of the troops’ quarters, “where some guards are required to live six to a small shack, with poor ventilation and no attached bathrooms.”

Last year, Southern Command requested around $200 million to update the prison, but the request was rejected by the Pentagon, although Congress “may approve about $23 million for two wish-list items: replacing the kitchen building and moving the medical clinic closer to Camps 5 and 6,” where almost all the prisoners are now held.

One main problem, from a medical point of view, is the prison’s aging population. The Times noted that the quality of the medical facilities has “raised concerns because Congress has prohibited sending even critically ill detainees to the United States” for treatment. Various Latin American countries were approached to take a prisoner in the case of an emergency, but they refused. Pentagon lawyers then “concluded that it was lawful not to evacuate a prisoner for urgent medical treatment,” meaning that specialized doctors must be “prepared on short notice to fly in with equipment.” As the Times added, however, “there are limits to what medical personnel can do without quick access to sophisticated hospital resources.”

The Times also noted that the prison’s senior medical officer “recently oversaw the creation of a ‘Detainee Acute Care Unit’ with several beds, ventilators, cardiac monitors, oxygen and other equipment.” He said that “about 20 to 25 prisoners have conditions that he is monitoring, such as diabetes and high blood pressure,” and “expects other problems, like heart disease, strokes and cancer to arise in coming years, as with any other population that is growing older.” The prisoners’ average age is currently 41.

One example of the medical problems caused by the remoteness of Guantánamo is the $1 million spent a few years ago on “a mobile cardiac catheterization lab” for a prisoner with serious heart problems who “ended up refusing the procedure.” Officials said “the unused equipment, packed up but stored outdoors, has since decayed.”

Just last month, a laser lithotripsy machine was brought to the prison “so that a visiting urologist could remove a detainee’s kidney stone.” As the Times explained, this is “a simple outpatient procedure,” which, nevertheless, “became very complicated because of the logistics” at Guantánamo.

As the 13th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks approaches, it is time that the obstacles preventing the release of prisoners and the eventual closure of Guantánamo are lifted, so that the abomination that is Guantánamo — a legal, moral and ethical abomination that ought to shame all decent Americans — is finally brought to an end.

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

Save the NHS: Please Join the Jarrow Marchers in London on Saturday September 6, 2014

On August 16, a group of mums in Darlington, in County Durham, set out on a march to the Houses of Parliament, ending this Saturday, September 6, “to build support for the NHS and to join up with amazing NHS campaigners across the country,” as they note on their website.

Their march, the People’s March for the NHS, was inspired by the Jarrow March in 1936, when, in the Depression, 200 people marched from Jarrow, 30 miles north of Darlington, to London to demand action from the government.

The campaign to save the NHS from the lying, Tory-led coalition government, whose leader, David Cameron, promised before the 2010 election that there would be no more top-down reorganisations of the NHS, is one that I have been involved in since 2011, when the privatising Health and Social Care Bill was first unveiled. I fought against the passage of the bill in the early months of 2012, and in October 2012 joined the Save Lewisham Hospital Campaign, which, over the following year, secured unprecedented grass-roots support (see here and here) against government and NHS management plans to disembowel Lewisham Hospital to pay for the debts of a neighbouring NHS trust. That campaign was ultimately successful, but privatisation continues to invade the NHS, as intended by the government, numerous hospitals face uncertain futures, and further legislation — like the hospital closure clause (Clause 119) of the 2013 Care Bill — have had to be resisted (again, with success).

As the Darlington campaigners note about their march:

[W]e aim to make the public aware of what the coalition government has been doing to our NHS and what has been happening to our hospitals and health services. It’s really hard to passively watch the rapid dismantling, privatisation and destruction of the NHS. First we had the Health & Social Care Act, then Section 75 and more recently Clause 119 of the Care Bill. The Government have legislated to open the NHS to the open market. We believe every penny saved in the NHS should go back into improving and developing our NHS. We don’t want to see private companies operating in the NHS under the heading of ‘efficiency’ when we know they are accountable to their share holders, who are only interested in maximum profit before patient health care.

Here’s what Louise Irvine, the chair of the Save Lewisham Hospital Campaign, had to say about the People’s March for the NHS on September 1:

I went on the march from Loughborough to Leicester yesterday with Jacky Davis of Keep Our NHS Public and was joined at the rally in Leicester by Carol and Barry from the Save Lewisham Hospital Campaign.

It was really inspiring and uplifting to be with so many fantastic people committed to the fight to defend the NHS. The march is getting lots of local press coverage with many people turning up at the rallies. It’s a really unifying initiative, linking people across the country, and showing that the issues that are facing us here in Lewisham and London are the same across England.

As I noted above, the marchers are arriving in London on Saturday September 6, and I will be joining them at Red Lion Square in Holborn at 2pm, and will then march with them to a rally in Trafalgar Square at about 3.30pm, where Owen Jones will be speaking, and Billy Bragg will be playing. If you’re interested, you can join the marchers in Luton tomorrow (September 4) or in St. Alban’s on Friday, or in Edmonton on Saturday morning.

Also, if you can leaflet to promote the event in Lewisham or elsewhere in south east London, please visit this page and contact the Save Lewisham Hospital Campaign. As they say, “Even just one hour leafleting your local school or station would be very helpful.” You can also follow the People’s March for the NHS on Facebook, and join the Save Lewisham Hospital Campaign Facebook page in support of the march here. In addition, you can follow the campaign on Twitter, and see here for photos.

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.

Two Long-Term Yemeni Prisoners Repatriated from Bagram; Are Guantánamo Yemenis Next?

Last week there was some good news from Bagram, in Afghanistan, bringing one of the many long injustices of the “war on terror” to an end, when Amin al-Bakri and Fadi al-Maqaleh, two Yemenis held without charge or trial since 2002 and 2003 respectively, were repatriated.

Al-Bakri, who is 44 or 45 years old and has three children, was a shrimp merchant and gemstone dealer, and was seized in Thailand on a business trip. Al-Maqaleh, who is 30 years old, was held at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq before being transferred to Bagram. The site of America’s main prison in Afghanistan from 2002 until its handover to the Afghan authorities in March 2013, Bagram (renamed the Parwan Detention Facility in 2009) also housed a secret CIA prison where al-Bakri and al-Maqaleh were held, and they continued to be held in a secretive US facility after the handover of Bagram to the Afghan government. According to the International Justice Network, which represents both men, they were also held in other “black sites” prior to their arrival at Bagram.

The men’s release follows years of legal wrangling. Despite official silence regarding the stories of the men held in Bagram’s “black site,” lawyers managed to find out about a number of the men held, including al-Bakri and al-Maqaleh, in part drawing on research I had undertaken in 2006 for my book The Guantánamo Files. Habeas corpus petitions were then submitted, for the two Yemenis, and for a Tunisian named Redha al-Najar, seized in Karachi, Pakistan in 2002, and Haji Wazir, an Afghan businessman seized in the United Arab Emirates, also in 2002.

In April 2009, in the District Court in Washington D.C., Judge John D. Bates granted the habeas petitions of the foreigners (but not Haji Wazir), on the basis that there was, effectively, no difference between the foreigners rendered to Bagram from other countries and the men sent to Guantánamo, who had been granted constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights by the Supreme Court in June 2008.

However, the Obama administration disagreed, and Judge Bates’ ruling was overturned by the appeals court in May 2010. As Josh Gerstein reported for Politico, “the legal saga continued in 2011 after Bates allowed the prisoners to amend their petitions in light of US plans to transition the Bagram prison to Afghan control. Ultimately, however, Bates found not enough had changed to allow the habeas cases to proceed. The D.C. Circuit upheld that ruling last December, prompting [a].”

Speaking about the release, Tina Monshipour Foster of the International Justice Network said in an interview, “We were pleasantly surprised that they sent the two of them back to Yemen,” adding, “It’s a big deal.”

In a written statement, she added, “Mr. al-Maqaleh and Mr. al-Bakri have been victims of grave human rights violations at the hands of the US government, including torture and extraordinary rendition, and we are absolutely thrilled that their abusive and unlawful imprisonment at Bagram has come to an end.”

Speaking to the Washington Post, Foster said she believed the US “might have wanted to free the men before the Supreme Court weighed in,” and also “said she expects that petition and another raising similar issues to go forward despite [the] releases because the petitions also cover the claims of two other men still in US custody at Bagram: [Reda] Al-Najar and a Pakistani man known as Amanatullah.” The Post also noted that the cases “could be mooted if the men are released or turned over to Afghan custody as the US military winds down its combat presence in Afghanistan.”

The Post also noted that, “Beginning in 2010, military detainee review boards [at Bagram] had cleared both men for release on three occasions,” adding that, in 2012, “Yemen agreed to accept Bakri and Maqaleh. At the time, the Yemeni foreign minister said the two men would be denied passports and prevented from traveling after being resettled.”

Foster also said her clients were being held in Sana’a, the Yemeni capital, but explained that it was “unclear if they would be prosecuted or released under some kind of supervision,” as the Post described it. “Nobody told us what the plan is,” she said.

The Post also reported that a Yemeni official said that the two men “were being held in a secure facility while being processed,” and added that al-Bakri was in “bad shape” physically. A US military official was quoted as saying that he “had been diagnosed with leukaemia, although as the Post put it, it was “not clear when the US learned that Amin al-Bakri was sick and whether that played a role in his release.”

Will the Bagram transfers lead to the release of Yemenis from Guantánamo?

The biggest question prompted by news of the release of Amin al-Bakri and Fadi al-Maqaleh is whether it will lead to the release of Yemenis from Guantánamo. Josh Gerstein noted that the release of the two men “could be a precursor for releases of dozens of Yemenis held at Guantánamo Bay,” and this was echoed in other media reports.

86 of the remaining 149 prisoners in from Guantánamo are Yemenis, and 58 of them have been cleared for release — 55 since 2009, when the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force appointed by President Obama recommended their release, and three in recent months through the deliberations of Periodic Review Boards, a new review process for prisoners not being tried, and not cleared for release by the task force.

In January 2010, when the task force issued its report, President Obama halted the release of Yemenis after Omar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian man recruited in Yemen, had tried and failed to blow up a plane bound for Detroit with a bomb in his underwear. The president’s ban — an unacceptable form of “guilt by nationality” — stood until last May, when, in a major speech on national security issues, the president announced that he was lifting his ban. As Josh Gerstein noted, however, “in the more than a year since the president made that announcement, no Yemeni has actually been sent home from the island prison.”

Expanding on his notion that the release of the two Yemenis from Bagram “could be seen as a trial run for release of some of the Guantánamo Yemenis,” Josh Gerstein noted that “[p]risoner releases in combat theaters like Afghanistan and Iraq have generally drawn less attention and criticism than releases from Guantánamo, even though many of the Yemenis at he Guantánamo are considered low-level fighters.” Specifically, as Jennifer Daskal pointed out for Just Security, “whereas Congress has since 2009 passed a number of restrictions on transfers of detainees out of Guantánamo, it has left decisions regarding transfers of foreigners out of Afghanistan largely to the discretion of the administration.”

Foster told Politico that “lawyers advocating for the release of Al-Maqaleh and Al-Bakri explicitly urged that the men be used to demonstrate that releases to Yemen were feasible.” She said, “We had argued for a long time to officials that these two cases be a test. They can be watched and people can report back to folks in D.C. that it wasn’t the end of the world to repatriate people to Yemen.”

Foster also said, as Politico described it, that “no one ever told her that Obama’s moratorium on prisoner transfers applied directly to her clients, but they made clear that the same worries about Yemen drove the reluctance to send prisoners there.” In Foster’s words, “They didn’t say it was covered by that policy, but did indicate the same rationale and same problem sending people to Yemen from Bagram as it did at Guantánamo.”

Who is still held at Bagram?

Noting that the Pentagon “is moving swiftly to empty the prison in Afghanistan as the US and its allies draw down combat forces in Afghanistan by the end of the year,” the Washington Post explained that a US military official told them that the number of prisoners in US custody in Bagram — none of whom are Afghans — was now 27, “down from more than 50 in December.”

Lt. Col. Myles B. Caggins III, a Pentagon spokesman for detainee policy, said, “As we wrap up our combat mission in Afghanistan, we are working diligently to resolve the disposition of the few remaining non-Afghan detainees in US custody at Parwan.” He added, “The decision to transfer a detainee is made only after direct conversations with the receiving country about the threat a detainee may pose after transfer.”

In February, the Washington Post reported that 35 of the men still held were Pakistani, but since then ten were released, at the end of May, and nine more were released two weeks ago. One of the men released in May, Yunus Rahmatullah, “is suing the Ministry of Defense and Foreign Office, accusing them of responsibility for his subjection to torture and severe abuse over 10 years,” as the Guardian explained on July 29.

As the Guardian also noted, Yunus Rahmatullah “was captured by British special forces in Iraq in 2004 and handed over to US troops soon afterwards … He is believed to have been first held at Camp Nama, a secret detention facility at Baghdad airport that British troops helped to run,” and “was later transferred to Iraq’s notorious Abu Ghraib jail” before being rendered to Bagram.

In July, Reuters reported  that a French national and a Kuwaiti were also repatriated from Bagram at the end of May. Also in July, when 38 non-Afghan prisoners were still held, the Guardian reported that they were undertaking hunger strikes.

“Sometimes they stopped eating to protest unclean drinking water,” the Guardian noted. “Other times they stopped eating because their comrades were placed in segregated housing. Still other times they stopped eating out of dissatisfaction with their access to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), their only source of connection to their families and the outside world.”

The Washington Post also noted that, in addition to Redha al-Najar, another Tunisian is still being held, as well as a Jordanian and a Russian. The paper suggested that the Obama administration was “considering prosecuting a handful of these detainees in either the federal courts or military commissions,” although the latter, at least, seems highly unlikely. US officials said the Russian was “at the top of the prosecution list.” Someone “familiar with the detainee population” also said that a man from Kazakhstan, Farabi Ryskulov, was repatriated on August 4, “despite concerns he might be tortured.”

After so many years of secrecy at Bagram, it is alarming that we still do not know exactly who is held in US custody at — or near — the site of so much of America’s horrific treatment of prisoners in its “war on terror,” which is about to enter its 14th year of operations, but the release of Amin al-Bakri and Fadi al-Maqaleh is to be commended, and while I await news of further releases from Bagram, I also hope to hear positive news about the imminent release of other Yemeni prisoners from  Guantánamo, which, to put it mildly, is long overdue.

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.

Guantánamo Violence: Prisoners Report Shaker Aamer “Beaten,” Another Man Assaulted “For Nearly Two Hours”

In a recent letter to the British foreign secretary Philip Hammond, Clive Stafford Smith, the founder and director of the legal action charity Reprieve, described how he has “just received a series of unclassified letters from various detainees who we represent in Guantánamo Bay,” which “tell a disturbingly consistent story” — of “a new ‘standard procedure’ where the FCE team [the armored guards responsible for violently removing prisoners from their cells through 'forcible cell extractions'] is being used to abuse the prisoners with particular severity because of the on-going non-violent hunger strike protest against their unconscionable treatment.”

With particular reference to Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, who is still held despite being cleared for release since 2007, Stafford Smith noted in his letter, dated August 22,  “I have not received a recent letter from Shaker Aamer as I understand that he is seriously depressed — which is not surprising given all that he has been through.”

He added, “However, our other clients have reported that ‘[o]n Sunday, Shaker ISN 239 was beaten when the medical people wanted to draw blood.’”

In a press release, Reprieve noted that Mr. Aamer “has previously described being beaten by the FCE team up to eight times a day,” and added that he “has been held for long periods of solitary confinement since 2005 and is in extremely poor health.”

Reprieve added, “An independent medical examination conducted earlier this year,” which I wrote about here, “diagnosed him with severe post-traumatic stress, and recommended urgent psychiatric treatment and ‘reintegration into his family.’”

Reprieve also explained that, in June, Hammond’s predecessor, William Hague, wrote to Clive Stafford Smith stating that the British government had “received assurances from the US Government that Mr. Aamer’s health remains stable and that he has access to” what was described as “the detainee welfare package.”

In the letter to Philip Hammond, Clive Stafford Smith also quoted from a letter in which one of Reprieve’s clients mentioned other prisoners who are being treated brutally, and who are both long-term hunger strikers — Abu Bakr Alahdal (ISN 171), a Yemeni, and Tarek Baada (ISN 178), another Yemeni, who has been on hunger strike since 2007.

Reprieve’s client wrote:

In the last four days an FCE team has been brought in to beat the detainees. Anyone who refuses to comply will be beaten. They broke ISN 171’s hand. They twisted ISN 178’s hand and leg such that he cannot use his leg to walk.

Stafford Smith also explained how Emad Hassan (ISN 680), another Yemeni, long cleared for release, who has also been on a hunger strike since 2007, “writes of the same incidents, describing a beating administered to ISN 171 [Abu Bakr Alahdal] that lasted one hour and 55 minutes.”

Stafford Smith proceeded to explain that, in another letter, another Reprieve client, Khalid Qassim (ISN 242), who is also Yemeni, “describes the same kind of matters. He was himself FCE’d in an effort involuntarily to take his weight and he described being beaten badly.”

In his letter to Philip Hammond, Clive Stafford Smith concluded by stating, “I am particularly concerned about the mental health of Mr. Aamer and other prisoners in light of this latest bout of sustained violence,” and asked for the foreign secretary’s imminent “reassurance” that the government “has raised this concern forcefully with the US government.”

Last month, when Emad Hassan submitted a letter to US District Judge Gladys Kessler in the case of Abu Wa’el Dhiab, another hunger striker, long cleared for release, who is leading the prisoners’ legal challenges against their force-feeding, and who has secured the limited release of videotapes showing the force-feeding and “forcible cell extractions,” his description of how brutal the force-feeding is currently prompted Alka Pradhan of Reprieve to tell Jason Leopold of VICE News that she thought Mr. Hassan was “describing policy changes that have been implemented since the arrival of a new Guantánamo warden and commander of the detention facility last month,” as Jason Leopold put it. She said, “Every time you get a new commander, they will tighten up the rules if they had loosened before, and that’s what I think we’re seeing.”

If that is the case, it is time that senior officials in the Obama administration paid closer attention to what is happening at Guantánamo — although one way of doing that, of course, would be to free Shaker Aamer, Emad Hassan, Abu Bakr Alahdal, Tarek Baada, Abu Wa’el Dhiab and all the the prisoners long cleared for release but still held — of the 149 men still held, the 75 cleared for release in 2009 by President Obama’s high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force, and the four others cleared for release in recent months by newly-established Periodic Review Boards.

What you can do now

If you’re in the UK, please contact Philip Hammond, the foreign secretary, and ask him to take urgent action on Shaker’s behalf. You can email him here via his Private Office at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). A general phone number for the FCO is 020 7008 1500.

If you’re in the US, you can call the White House on 202-456-1111 or 202-456-1414 or submit a comment online.

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.

Ali Hamza Al-Bahlul, David Hicks and the Legal Collapse of the Military Commissions at 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 week, lawyers for former Guantánamo prisoner David Hicks, an Australian who, in March 2007, was the first Guantánamo prisoner to accept a guilty plea in a military commission trial in order to get out of the prison, appealed his conviction — for the second time in the last ten months.

Hicks had accepted a plea of providing material support for terrorism in exchange for being returned to Australia and being freed after just nine months. However, in October 2012 the court of appeals in Washington D.C. (the D.C. Circuit Court) threw out the conviction of another prisoner who had been convicted of providing material support for terrorism in a military commission trial, paving the way for Hicks to challenge his conviction.

That man was Salim Hamdan, a Yemeni who had worked as a paid driver for Osama bin Laden, and who had been convicted in the summer of 2008. As the Circuit Court described it, “When Hamdan committed the conduct in question, the international law of war proscribed a variety of war crimes, including forms of terrorism. At that time, however, the international law of war did not proscribe material support for terrorism as a war crime.”

Last October, as I explained at the time:

[Hicks] lodged an appeal with the US Court of Military Commission Review, “arguing for a summary dismissal of the conviction,” as the Sydney Morning Herald described it, “because the offence was not a war crime at the time Mr. Hicks was detained, and his guilty plea was made under duress because of his detention, torture and abuse at Guantánamo.”

The court has not yet heard that appeal, but on August 20 Hicks submitted another appeal to the Court of Military Commission Review, asking the court to “summarily vacate his conviction for a single charge of providing material support for terrorism,” as his lawyers explained in a summary of their submission to the court, adding, “He argues that his conviction must be vacated based on the D.C. Circuit’s en banc decision in Bahlul v. United States, which holds unanimously that it is unlawful to try a defendant by military commission for material support based on pre-2006 conduct.”

Ali Hamza al-Bahlul’s crucial challenges to the legitimacy of the military commissions

Bahlul v. United States refers to the case of another prisoner convicted in a military commission trial, Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, who also won his appeal in the D.C. Circuit Court — in January 2013. A Yemeni who had produced a promotional video for al-Qaeda, al-Bahlul had been given a life sentence in November 2008 after a one-sided trial in which he had refused to mount a defense.

As I explained at the time, the court of appeals “vacated his conviction for material support, conspiracy, and another charge, solicitation, citing a supplemental brief filed by the government on January 9, 2013, advising the Court that it took the ‘position that Hamdan requires reversal of Bahlul’s convictions by military commission.’”

Following that ruling, the government appealed, and the en banc court — the full court rather than a three-judge panel — heard the case on September 30 last year, and delivered its verdict on July 14, prompting Hicks’ latest challenge.

In five separate opinions totalling 150 pages, the judges, as Hicks’ lawyers described it, “were entirely clear on one point: all seven judges agreed that providing material support for terrorism is not a war crime triable by military commission based on conduct occurring prior to 2006, even for a defendant who gave up that argument at trial.”

As his lawyers also noted:

The Bahlul court held that the Act did authorize retroactive prosecution of material support, but also held unanimously that material support is not an international war crime, or an offense historically triable by military commission under domestic precedent, and thus was a “plain” constitutional violation as applied to conduct before 2006. The court vacated Mr. Bahlul’s material support conviction accordingly.

His lawyers added that the Bahlul ruling requires his material support conviction to be dismissed, because it “is based on his alleged conduct occurring more than a decade ago.” and Hicks “argues that it is beyond any dispute that he was convicted of an offense that was not actually a crime at the time of his alleged conduct.” His alleged guilt, the lawyers conclude, “is illusory, and he asks the CMCR to … vacate his conviction because there is no point in further delaying this inevitable result.”

Wells Dixon at the Center for Constitutional Rights, which worked on the filing, told the Miami Herald, “No matter how this case is framed, David Hicks was convicted of a non-offense. The principled and just result is to set aside his conviction without delay, as would happen in any ordinary criminal case.”

This seems clear, but what is not yet known is how much the latest Bahlul ruling will affect the future of the military commissions, which are still limping along with seemingly endless pre-trial hearings in the cases of Khalid Sheikh Mohamed and four other men accused of planning and assisting the 9/11 attacks, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, accused of being involved in the attacks on the USS Cole in 2000.

As a result of the Hamdan and Bahlul rulings, the authorities at Guantánamo abandoned efforts to prosecute anyone who was solely charged with providing material support, as I explained in an article in June 2013, “US Military Admits Only 2.5 Percent of All Prisoners Ever Held at Guantánamo Will Be Tried.”

In the July ruling, the D.C. Circuit Court not only confirmed that al-Bahlul’s material support conviction was overturned, but also confirmed that his conviction for soliciting others to commit war crimes was overturned as well. As veteran court reporter Lyle Denniston explained for SCOTUSblog, “The court ruled that a military commission did not have the authority to try those other two charges for conduct that occurred before Congress created such crimes in the Military Commissions Act of 2006.”

However, on the third count on which he was initially convicted, conspiracy to commit war crimes, the D.C. Circuit Court rejected a constitutional challenge brought by al-Bahlul, but did so, as the National Law Journal explained, in “a fractured ruling that left unclear how future cases against terrorism suspects might proceed.”

Lyle Denniston also explained that, constitutionally, the most important part of the ruling was the conclusion, by five of the judges, that the Ex Post Facto Clause, which “bars criminal prosecution for conduct that happened before it was made a crime,” applies to Guantánamo prisoners facing war crimes charges. Until this ruling, Denniston pointed out, prisoners at Guantánamo “have had only one constitutional right: to pursue habeas challenges to their continued detention.”

He also explained that the ruling on the Ex Post Facto Clause means that, “in each case pursued by military prosecutors at Guantánamo, they must show that the conduct being treated as a crime was in fact formally made a crime by act of Congress at the time.” This, he noted, “requires the prosecutors to examine the scope of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, and compare it to the history of US military commission prosecutions going back at least to the Civil War.”

In addition, despite the ruling on conspiracy, the D.C. Circuit Court indicated that it might be dependent on other challenges that were not addressed by the en banc panel of judges, and, as Lyle Denniston put it, “ordered the three-judge panel that originally had heard Bahlul’s appeal to rule on them first.”

Once those challenges have been examined, al-Bahlul’s case will return to the Court of Military Commission Review to ascertain what impact the rulings should have on his life sentence.

Al-Bahlul launches another legal challenge

In the meantime, of course, David Hicks has a much more straightforward appeal — although al-Bahlul’s lawyers are not resting. On August 13, they submitted another appeal, which, in Lyle Denniston’s words, “looms as a potentially profound threat to the very existence” of the military commissions at Guantánamo.

This particular challenge involves an argument that the military commissions discriminate against foreign nationals, because, as al-Bahlul’s lawyers explained, the legislative history of the Military Commissions Act “leaves no doubt that Congress created criminal procedures that it viewed as unacceptable if applied to US citizens.”

The lawyers also noted that convicting al-Bahlul for his role as a propagandist violated his right to free speech under the First Amendment. As they explained in their brief, his trial in 2008 “was not about the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. It was not about the inner workings of Al Qaida. It was not about a terrorist mastermind. It was not about planning or perpetration of any terrorist attacks.  Instead, in the autumn of 2008, before a nine-member military commission, the government of the United States put a film on trial.”

The Justice Department has until September 17 to file its own brief. Al-Bahlul’s reply is to be filed by October 6, and the three-judge panel is scheduled to hear the case on October 22. Watch this space for the outcome.

Note: See here for the original of the photo of David Hicks by Adam Thomas on Flickr.

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.

Guantánamo Torture Victim Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Harrowing Memoir to be Published in January 2015

[image error]In January 2015, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a prisoner at Guantánamo, will become the first prisoner still held to have his memoir published. Guantánamo Diary, which he wrote by hand as a 466-page manuscript, beginning in 2005, will be published in the US by Little, Brown and Company and in the UK by Canongate, and the date of publication is January 20, 2015. His lawyers tenaciously fought for seven years to have his diary declassified, and were ultimately successful, although parts of it remain classified. The publishers describe it as “not merely a vivid record of a miscarriage of justice, but a deeply personal memoir — terrifying, darkly humorous, and surprisingly gracious”, and “a document of immense historical importance”.

A Mauritanian, Mohamedou Ould Slahi is a cousin of Abu Hafs al-Mauritani (real name Mahfouz Ould al-Walid), a spiritual advisor to Al-Qaeda, who disagreed with the 9/11 attacks, and he also briefly communicated with the 9/11 attackers while living in Germany. These connections led Col. Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor of the military commissions at Guantánamo, to describe him as a “Forrest Gump” character, “in the sense that there were a lot of noteworthy events in the history of al-Qaida and terrorism, and there was Slahi, lurking somewhere in the background,” although, as Col. Davis stressed, in early 2007 “we had a big meeting with the CIA, the FBI, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Justice, and we got a briefing from the investigators who worked on the Slahi case, and their conclusion was there’s a lot of smoke and no fire.”

Ironically, Abu Hafs is now a free man, while Slahi is still held. Slahi handed himself in to the Mauritanian authorities on November 2001, and was then rendered to a secret torture prison in Jordan by the CIA, where he was interrogated for eight months until the Jordaninans concluded that he was an innocent man. Nevertheless, the US then flew him to to Bagram in Afghanistan, and then on to Guantánamo, where “he was designated a ‘special project’ and subjected to isolation, beatings, sexual humiliation, death threats, and a mock kidnapping and rendition,” as his publishers explained — and as was mentioned in an article in the Guardian.

Abu Hafs, on the other hand, who had been on al-Qaeda’s shura council and had been the head of the sharia committee, fled to Iran after the 9/11 attacks, where he was held under house arrest from 2003 until April 2012. At that point, the Iranian government deported him to Mauritania. He was released on July 7, 2012 “after renouncing his ties to [al-Qaeda] and condemning the September 11 attacks.”

In March 2010, US District Judge James Robertson granted his habeas corpus petition, and ordered his release, as I explained at the time, and in a subsequent article based on a detailed analysis of the judge’s opinion, “Mohamedou Ould Salahi: How a Judge Demolished the US Government’s Al-Qaeda Claims,” but the government appealed, and the appeals court in Washington D.C. — the D.C. Circuit Court — vacated Judge Robertson’s ruling, and sent the case back to the District Court to reconsider.

Shamefully, Slahi’s case has not been reconsidered, even though the appeals court ruling took place nearly five years ago, in November 2010.

Three extracts from Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s diary were published by Slate last year, and, as the Guardian put it, they reveal “harrowing details of Slahi’s ordeals, from sexual humiliation to the freezing cold cell in which he was imprisoned.”

In one section, Slahi wrote:

The cell — better, the box — was cooled down so that I was shaking most of the time. I was forbidden from seeing the light of the day. Every once in a while they gave me a rec[reation] time in the night to keep me from seeing or interacting with any detainees. I was living literally in terror. I don’t remember having slept one night quietly; for the next 70 days to come I wouldn’t know the sweetness of sleeping. Interrogation for 24 hours, three and sometimes four shifts a day. I rarely got a day off.

Larry Siems, who is the editor of Slahi’s diary and was previously the lead writer and researcher on The Torture Report, which provides a detailed analysis of the Bush administration’s torture program (and which I wrote about here), told the Guardian that Slahi’s ordeal “almost defies the imagination,” and that he “endured one of the most stubborn, brutal, and deliberate interrogations on record.”

Siems also said that the book “really shatters that secrecy that surrounds Guantánamo,” which “was devised in and for secrecy; secrecy was essential in order that the abuses that took place there could happen, and it was even more essential to conceal those abuses, and the many grave mistakes and bad decisions that accompanied those abuses, from public view. To maintain that secrecy, two groups of voices have been almost completely suppressed: the voices of the men and women who served in the facility, and found themselves in the middle of these terrible policies, and the voices of the prisoners themselves. Guantánamo Diary gives us both — which has something to do with why it remained classified for so long, I’m sure.”

Siems also said that, as a writer, Slahi “manages to do something that I think very few of us could do: he treats everyone he writes about as individuals, trying, as he puts it, ‘to be as fair as possible to the US government, to my brothers, and to myself’. In doing that, he renders an account of Guantánamo that is unlike anything we have seen before, one where humour and unexpected kindnesses exist alongside dumbfounding degradations and brutalities.”

Slahi’s lawyer, Nancy Hollander, called the book “a window into the prison in Guantánamo Bay, written by a young man who suffered physical and psychological torture but who can still separate the good from the bad and the truth from the lies and present it all in a language he learned from his guards … The reader will learn what the United States government has tried to keep secret.”

Hollander said that she saw Slahi at the start of the month, and he reported that he was “pleased” about the publishing deal, and “grateful to all the people who have made this book a reality.” She added, “He is well considering that he has been imprisoned for 14 years. His spirit remains strong and he is continuing to study. He can now read and speak in Spanish — his fifth language.”

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.

Pentagon Defends Bowe Bergdahl/Guantánamo Prisoner Swap as Government Accountability Office Delivers Critical Opinion

In a move that has no legal weight, but which will embolden supporters of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, the Government Accountability Office, the non-partisan investigative arm of Congress, which is “charged with examining matters relating to the receipt and payment of public funds,” has concluded that the Department of Defense broke the law when, in May, five Taliban prisoners in Guantánamo were released in Qatar in a prisoner swap for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the only US prisoner of war in Afghanistan.

The GAO concluded that the DoD acted in violation of section 8111 of the Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2014, which “prohibits DOD from using appropriated funds to transfer any individuals detained at Guantánamo Bay unless the Secretary of Defense notifies certain congressional committees at least 30 days before the transfer.”

When the prisoner swap was announced, a tsunami of manufactured outrage poured forth from Republicans and right-wing pundits, even though both defense secretary Chuck Hagel and President Obama provided robust explanations about why they had bypassed Congress. As I explained at the time, Hagel said that the decision to go ahead with the swap — which, it should be noted, had been mooted for at least two years — came about after intelligence suggested Bergdahl’s “safety and health were both in jeopardy, and in particular his health was deteriorating.”

As I also explained at the time:

As Al-Jazeera described it, the decision “was not relayed to Congress because officials believed Bergdahl’s life would be further endangered.” In Hagel’s words, “We couldn’t afford any leaks, for obvious reasons.” He added that President Obama’s decision to order the exchange was made “essentially to save his life,” and also explained that administration officials had concluded that the president “had the authority to order the operation under Article 2 of the Constitution.”

President Obama also spoke about the prisoner swap, its timing and the role of Congress. In Warsaw, during a trip to Poland to discuss Eastern European security, he said, “We have consulted with Congress for quite some time about the possibility that we might need to execute a prisoner exchange in order to recover Bergdahl. We saw an opportunity, and we were concerned about Bergdahl’s health. We had the cooperation of the Qataris to execute an exchange, and we seized that opportunity.” He added that “the process was truncated because we wanted to make sure we would not miss that window.”

As the Washington Post explained, the 7-page GAO report “also said that the Pentagon ran afoul of the law by funding the prisoner swap with money not intended for that purpose,” and explained that the Antideficiency Act ”prohibits agencies from spending congressional appropriations on unauthorized activities.” As the GAO put it, “We have consistently concluded that the use of appropriated funds for prohibited purposes violates the Antideficiency Act, because zero funds are available for the purpose.”

The report also revealed the total cost of the prisoner swap: $988,400, or just $11,600 short of a million dollars, which might seem like a large amount if you overlook the fact that it costs $2.7 million a year to hold each of the men still held at Guantánamo, and that, last summer, the total cost of running the prison since it opened in January 2002 had reached $5.24 billion.

Highlighting the DoD’s point of view, the Post noted that the Pentagon ”argued that the transfer was lawful under a section of the appropriations act that allows the defense secretary to move Guantánamo prisoners in the interest of national security.” However, the GAO claimed that the DoD “was still required to give Congress advance notice of the action.” As the report put it, “To read [the law] otherwise would render the notification requirement meaningless.”

Nevertheless, the Defense Department has continued to assert that no laws were broken. After the report was made public on Thursday, the Pentagon stated that the Justice Department had “determined before the transfer was implemented that the move would be legal,” as the Post put it.

Essentially reiterating what Chuck Hagel and President Obama had stated after the prisoner swap, Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. John Kirby said, “The administration had a fleeting opportunity to protect the life of a US service member held captive and in danger for almost five years. Under these exceptional circumstances, the administration determined that it was necessary and appropriate to forego 30 days’ notice of the transfer in order to obtain Sgt. Bergdahl’s safe return.”

Rear Adm. Kirby also pointed out that, in June, Hagel had testified to Congress that “the recovery of Sgt. Bergdahl was conducted lawfully and in accordance with our responsibility to bring home a soldier taken captive in armed conflict. This is a judgment shared by the Justice Department.”

As the Post also noted, the GAO “did not issue an opinion on whether the transfer was necessary for national security purposes,” even though that was as key element of the prisoner swap, As well as securing the safe return of Sgt. Bergdahl, the swap can — and should — be seen as a necessary move in the negotiations that will have to take place with the Taliban as the war in Afghanistan winds down, and is, therefore, categorically a move that involved — and continues to involve — national security issues.

I hope that the Obama administration will not be fazed by the ruling, and will press ahead with the release of six men in Uruguay, as planned. It remains disappointing that the decisions involved in the prisoner swap — about saving Sgt. Bergdahl’s life, and negotiating with the Taliban — have aroused such a cynical display of venom from President Obama’s opponents, as it is absolutely clear to me that, if a Republican was president at the time, exactly the same decisions would have been taken — although if a Republican was president, it can realistically be argued that the obstacles raised by lawmakers would never have been imposed in the first place.

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.