Andy Worthington's Blog, page 112

“Most of the Hunger Strikers Are Vomiting on the Torture Chairs”: Emad Hassan’s Latest Harrowing Letter from Guantánamo

In the long-running struggle by prisoners at Guantánamo to get US judges to order the prison authorities to stop force-feeding them when they are on a hunger strike to protest about their indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial, the focus in the last few months has been on Abu Wa’el Dhiab, a Syrian prisoner, cleared for release in 2009 by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama appointed shortly after taking office, but still held, like 78 other prisoners cleared for release.

In May, in Washington D.C., District Judge Gladys Kessler delivered a powerful and unprecedented ruling in Mr. Dhiab’s case, ordering the government to stop force-feeding him, and also ordering the release, to his lawyers, of videotapes showing his force-feeding and “forcible cell extractions” (FCEs), where prisoners are violently extracted from their cells by a group of armored guards and taken for force-feeding after refusing to voluntarily drink the liquid nutritional supplements given to hunger strikers.

The order regarding Mr. Dhiab’s force-feeding was withdrawn by Judge Kessler shortly after it was issued, as she feared that otherwise Mr. Dhiab would die, but the videotapes have been seen by his lawyers, who described them as profoundly shocking — and 16 US media organizations are currently engaged in trying to get the videotapes released to the public.

Last week, Mr. Dhiab secured another victory, when Judge Kessler ordered the government to allow two independent doctors to visit him to assess the state of his health.

It may well be that the Obama administration will soon prevent Mr. Dhiab from causing them further irritation by releasing him to Uruguay, which has offered a new home to him and to five other men long cleared for release who, like Mr. Dhiab, cannot be safely repatriated.

However, two other hunger striking prisoners — Emad Hassan, a Yemeni, and Ahmad Rabbani, a Pakistani — have already submitted motions following up on the precedent established in Mr. Dhiab’s case, as I reported here. Rulings have not yet been delivered in these cases, but three weeks ago, Mr. Hassan, a prolific letter-writer, who, as Reprieve described it, has been “abusively force-fed more than 5,000 times since 2007 as part of the military’s efforts to break his hunger strike,” wrote a letter to Judge Kessler that was submitted by his lawyers, at the legal action  charity Reprieve, in Abu Wa’el Dhaib’s case, even though Judge Kessler is not presiding over his own case.

In his letter, Hassan wrote about the latest developments in the force-feeding program, describing how “[m]ost of the hunger strikers are vomiting on the torture chairs,” and noting how what is happening now is reminiscent of the events of June 2006, when three long-term hunger strikers died, reportedly by committing suicide — although the official story has long been challenged by personnel working at Guantánamo at the time, and by serious discrepancies and omissions in the internal investigation that followed the deaths.

In his letter, which includes references to a specific prisoner who is believed to be Abu Wa’el Dhiab, Emad Hassan wrote:

Many times I write a letter to describe the events here, in detail. Specific[a]lly, the hunger strikes. I stop! I can’t keep up with it. I have to go with what is going now. As right now: the F.C.E. team took him to be fed. The SMO [Senior Medical Officer] boosted his feed to two can[s] of [E]nsure plus 1 can of TwoCal. It took ten minutes for his stomach to hold the formula [and he] then began vomiting horribly.

I stopped my writting [sic]. I could not continue untill [sic] my brother stopped. I took a pen to resume my writing. Six lines, again, my brother start vomiting. The tube came from my mouth as the liquid gush from his stomach through his mouth.

What’s happening now remined [sic] me of 2006 events! Most of the hunger strikers are vomiting on the torture chairs. Under the ventilation hole in the roof the air beat him on the head. Very, very cold. 74 degree. The nurse or corpsman come to one. Will you drink or the F.C.E. team? The threatening tone is unmistakable.

Mr. Hassan went on to describe Judge Kessler as “the one who shows kind of empathy, understandable and HOPE,” and stated:

You are not alone in the road of justice, listen with me to the first bishop woman, Barbara Clementine Harris [the first woman to be ordained as a bishop in the Anglican Communion, in 1980]: “No one expect[s] us to eliminate all the evils of the world, nor to liberate all those who are oppressed, nor to feed all who are hungry, or to house the millions who are homeless. But when the oppressed see one who fight[s] for liberation, their burden become[s] lightened because they know that somebody stand[s] with them.”

Mr. Hassan also asked:

Your honor: how one person, detainee his health condison [sic] [is] in danger and [he] could die! At the same time, send the F.C.E. team to pick him up to be fed. Isn’t [it] a contrad[iction ?] Is it?!

Your honor: It is a great responsible [sic] on your shoulder. Every ward [sic], action or hint from you will be taken sirious [sic]. There are many people watching you, a right and wrong pleas. Follow your faith. [...]

Your honor: I would like to remind you [of] some thing: Medical ethics in time of conflict is identical to medical ethics in time of peace,” the World Medical Association explaining that.

You honor: You are an human [sic]. Would you let anyone humiliate you, spit on your face, or let him abolish your existence! [T]hink about it.

Speaking to Jason Leopold of VICE News, Alka Pradhan, one of Mr. Hassan’s lawyers at Reprieve, said that it was “unprecedented” for a Guantánamo prisoner to be able to “speak directly to a judge.” As Leopold described it, Pradhan had “tried in the past to get Guantánamo’s strict security censors to clear letters written by other detainees to federal judges, but she was always rebuffed.”

Pradhan told Leopold, “We were surprised the whole thing was unclassified. It’s amazing to see because it gives Judge Kessler an idea of what men are going through in their own words. Usually in a Guantánamo case the judge is dealing with a person she has never seen. There’s no way to make that human connection without this sort of evidence. This letter is the closest we can get to having the person’s face and voice in the courtroom.”

Pradhan also confirmed that her client continues to be force-fed twice a day, seven years after he first began his hunger strike. “They still take out tubes and reinsert them everyday,” she told Leopold. “He will occasionally drink the liquid nutrient. One of his nostrils is completely closed up. He only has one working nostril. But it gets infected and sore. That’s why he tries to drink the liquid nutrient.”

She also explained 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.”

Leopold also spoke to Guantánamo spokesman Navy Capt. Tom Gresback, who claimed that “there have been no major changes to the force-feeding policies,” as Leopold described it, reading from the carefully-prepared script that describes hunger strikes as “non-religious fasting,” and force-feeding as “enteral feeding.”

“Enteral feeding provided by the medical staff at Joint Task Force-Guantánamo (JTF-GTMO) to the detainees who choose to participate in non-religious fasting is prescribed following strict Standard Operating Procedures which are based on established medical protocols,” Capt. Gresback said. “With the exception of modifying the SOP to now use a water-based lubricant, the SOP for enteral feeding at JTF-GTMO has not changed.”

He added, as Leopold described it, that “any procedures that have been characterized as violent at Guantánamo ‘are in compliance with US law’” — a claim that contradicts the assertions, made by medical professionals worldwide, that force-feeding is akin to torture.

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.

US Judge Orders Guantánamo Authorities to Allow Independent Doctors to Assess Health of Hunger Striker Abu Wa’el Dhiab

Last week there was some good news regarding Guantánamo in the US courts in the long-running case of Abu Wa’el Dhiab, a hunger striker who has spent the last 14 months attempting to get the US courts to stop him being force-fed, and who, in the last three months, briefly secured an order stopping his force-feeding, and also secured access for his lawyers to videotapes of his force-feeding and the “forcible cell extractions” used to remove him from his cell. In response, the authorities have now taken to confiscating his wheelchair, and, as Reprieve put it, “manhandling him to be force-fed.”

On August 12, District Judge Gladys 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 “has 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.”

Mr. Dhiab is one of 75 men still held (out of the remaining 149 prisoners) who were cleared for release by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force  appointed by President Obama shortly after taking office in January 2009. He has not been released because he cannot be safely repatriated and a third country must be found that will take him.

It was recently revealed that he is one of six men who, it is expected, will soon be given new homes in Uruguay, but for the last five years he, like other cleared prisoners, has been stuck in Guantánamo as lawmakers raised obstacles cynically designed to prevent them from being freed, and President Obama refused to spend political capital prioritizing their release. Mr. Dhiab’s suffering is such that he is now confined to a wheelchair, and his despair at ever being reunited with is wife and his four children is such that last year he embarked on a hunger strike — and ended up being painfully force-fed — as part of the prison-wide hunger strike that reawakened the world’s media to the plight of the Guantánamo prisoners, and forced President Obama to promise renewed action regarding the release of prisoners.

As Reprieve explained, Judge Kessler also ordered Guantánamo’s warden, Col. John Bogdan, a controversial figure whose heavy-handed approach to security seems to have played a major role in provoking last year’s hunger strike, “to answer three questions in writing under oath regarding his involvement in the punitive force-feeding and FCE (Forcible Cell Extraction) tactics used at Guantánamo.” In addition, “Current and former senior medical officers have been ordered to each answer seven questions about their role in the force-feedings.” Reprieve also noted that Col. Bogdan “instituted a policy during his tenure in which wheelchair-bound hunger-strikers have to be hauled to force-feedings by a riot squad, even if the detainee asks to go by himself.”

Mr. Dhiab’s lawyer Cori Crider, who is Reprieve’s Strategic Director, last saw her client during a visit three weeks ago and immediately submitted a sworn declaration to the court as part of the filing requesting an urgent independent medical examination. As was explained in a press release, Crider wrote that his health has “deteriorated to the point that she now fears his life is at risk,” adding that he “appeared frail and listless, his face had no color and [he] spent the afternoon lying prostate on the floor, his agony evidently unrelieved by pain medication he had been given.” She also described how he had “clutched his side in pain and grimaced repeatedly … as he lay on the floor.”

Crider added that, the day after she returned from her visit, Mr. Dhiab was “unable to come to the phone … compounding worries for his state,” and explained that if he “does not now receive a medical assessment independent of the military command structure,” he “may become incurably ill or worse.”

On August 7, Reprieve explained in another press release that, in hearings prior to Judge Kessler’s latest ruling, Justice Department lawyers claimed that Mr. Dhiab was “very functional,” and refused to tell the District Court in Washington D.C. why Guantánamo officials confiscated his wheelchair, calling questions about its policies “time-consuming and burdensome.”

The DoJ lawyers also said it was “improper” for Mr. Dhiab’s lawyers “to ask why Guantánamo authorities forbade him from using a wheelchair to be moved to the force-feeding chair,” as Reprieve put it, noting also that the US government “refused to respond to written questions about its force-feeding policy.”

Another ruling by Judge Kessler regarding government secrecy

Providing further details, Courthouse News reported on August 15 that Judge Kessler’s order for Col. Bogdan asks “why he would not let Dhiab go to his feeding by wheelchair, whether he considered alternatives to a restraint chair, the reason behind conducting force-feedings every time a detainee drops below 85 percent of his ideal body weight, and other queries.”

The author of the article, Adam Klasfeld, also noted that Judge Kessler “wanted to know whether risk of infection increases from ‘keeping a nasogastric feeding tube in place for days or weeks at a time or from multiple daily insertions,’ the ‘largest quantity and quickest speed of enteral feeding that a patient can tolerate comfortably,’ and if the process is ‘unnecessarily painful or could be made less painful.’”

As the article also explained, Col. Bogdan “has until Sept. 5 to answer the questions, and Dhiab’s lawyers must submit expert medical reports about preferred practices ten days later.”

The Courthouse News article was prompted by another ruling from Judge Kessler, this one granting a government request to “prohibit the distribution of, or discussion of, the Forcible Cell Extraction (‘FCE’) videotapes related to this case with any other counsel than the attorneys of record in this case and the security-cleared attorneys in three related cases.”

Interest in the the videotapes has come not just from lawyers, but from 16 major US news organizations who are seeking access to the tapes and who, on August 8, “criticized what they said was the Obama Administration’s ‘blunderbuss claims’ that disclosing the tapes would be harmful to national security,” as Reprieve described it, adding that the news organizations called the claims “illogical and implausible,” and “contradicted by the Government’s own past disclosures” of details about Guantánamo during press tours.

In its article, Courthouse News reflected on what Judge Kessler’s ruling about the secrecy of the videotapes might mean for the news organizations’ request, noting that, while the order “does not impact that request,” Judge Kessler noted that she “anticipates that consideration of that motion will, almost inevitably, raise some of the substantive arguments” addressed in it.

If a ruling is taken regarding the news organizations’ request, I will of course respond swiftly with my own commentary, but in the meantime it’s worth adding October 6 to your calendar — and also worth keeping an eye on the news for the anticipated release of Abu Wa’el Dhiab. As noted above, however, there are three other cases in which videotapes are being sought by prisoners, and I’ll be reporting soon on one of those cases.

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.

Free the Yemenis! Gitmo Clock Marks 450 Days Since President Obama’s Promise to Resume Releasing Prisoners from Guantánamo

[image error]Please visit, like, share and tweet the Gitmo Clock, which marks how many days it is since President Obama’s promise to resume releasing prisoners from Guantánamo (450), and how many men have been freed (17). This article was published yesterday, as “Gitmo Clock Marks 450 Days Since President Obama’s Promise to Resume Releasing Prisoners from Guantánamo; Just 17 Men Freed,” on 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 August, we at “Close Guantánamo” launched the Gitmo Clock, an initiative designed to perform two functions: firstly, to measure how long it is since President Obama’s promise, in a major speech on national security on May 23, 2013, to resume releasing prisoners from Guantánamo; and, secondly, how many men have been released.

Yesterday (August 16) marked 450 days since that promise, and we hope that you will visit the Gitmo Clock, like it, share it and tweet it to act as a reminder of what has been achieved in the last 15 months, and, more importantly, what remains to be achieved.

In the two years and eight months up to President Obama’s promise, just five men were released from Guantánamo, even though, throughout that period, 86 of the remaining prisoners were cleared for release. Those recommendations were made by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established, shortly after taking office in 2009, to review the cases of all the prisoners still held at the time, and to decide whether they should be released or prosecuted, or whether, in some cases, they should continue to be held without charge or trial.

The task force delivered its final report in January 2010, but the men were not freed for two reasons. The first was because cynical lawmakers in Congress passed legislation designed to prevent the release of prisoners under any circumstances (although there was a waiver in the legislation allowing the president to bypass Congress if he regarded it as being in the national security interests of the US — a waiver that he chose not to use).

The second reason was because two-thirds of the cleared prisoners were Yemenis, and the entire US establishment has been unwilling to release Yemenis because of fears about the security situation in Yemen. In January 2010, following a failed airline bomb plot that was hatched in Yemen, President Obama responded to widespread hysteria following the failed attack by issuing a ban on releasing any of the cleared Yemeni prisoners, which stood until he dropped it in his speech last May.

Despite this, no Yemeni has been released since the promise in May 2013, although President Obama has released 17 other prisoners in the last 15 months, with the assistance of the two envoys for the closure of Guantánamo that he appointed following his speech last May — Cliff Sloan in the State Department and Paul Lewis in the Pentagon. Two Algerians were released last August, and two more in December, and also in December two Saudis, two Sudanese and the last three Uighurs in the prison (Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province) were released as well. In March this year, another Algerian was released, and in May five Taliban prisoners were released in exchange for the US soldier Bowe Bergdahl.

Although the release of these men constitutes progress, it is important to remember that, of the 149 men still held, over half of them — 79 in total — have been cleared for release but are still held: 75 cleared by the task force in January 2010, and four others cleared for release since the start of the year by Periodic Review Boards, convened to review the cases of 71 men who were not recommended for release by the task force.

By all accounts, six other men will soon be freed, and given new homes in Uruguay, but President Obama still needs to do much more to fulfil the promise he made last May. What is particularly needed is for the refusal to release Yemenis to be overcome. These men need to be freed; otherwise, the decisions that were taken to release them mean nothing, and all that differentiates America from a dictatorship is that dictators do not hold review processes for prisoners held without charge or trial and then refuse to release men cleared for release by those review boards.

For America not to be more cruel than a dictatorship, the Yemenis must be freed now.

What you can do

Call the White House and ask President Obama to release the Yemenis cleared for release. Call 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.

European Court of Human Rights Delivers Powerful Condemnation of US Torture Program and Poland’s Role Hosting a CIA “Black Site”

[image error]Last week there was some extremely important news for those of us who have spent many long years hoping to hold senior US officials — up to and including former President George W. Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney — accountable for approving and implementing a torture program in the “war on terror,” when the European Court of Human Rights unanimously condemned the US for implementing a program of extraordinary rendition and torture, and condemned Poland for its involvement in the program by hosting a secret torture prison — a CIA “black site” –  on its soil in 2002-03.

The rulings were delivered in the cases of two men, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi national accused of masterminding the attack on the USS Cole in 2000, and Abu Zubaydah (a Saudi-born Palestinian whose real name is Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn), mistakenly described as al-Qaeda’s number 3 after his capture in March 2002. In its report on the rulings, the New York Times provided a more appropriate description of Zubaydah as someone who is “believed to have overseen the operation of guesthouses in Pakistan,” who vetted recruits and “provided letters of recommendation allowing them to be accepted for training at a paramilitary camp in Afghanistan” — which, it should be noted, was not affiliated with al-Qaeda.

Both men are currently held at Guantánamo, where they have been since September 2006, but they were held for over four years in “black sites” where they were subjected to torture, including the site in Poland that the European Court of Human Rights highlighted in its rulings.

The existence of the prison was first exposed in November 2005, and I have been writing about it since 2006, although the Polish authorities have refused to officially acknowledge its existence. Nevertheless, an investigation into the prison began in Poland in March 2008, and al-Nashiri and Zubaydah — and a third man, Walid bin Attash — were given “victim status” as a result of that investigation between 2010 and 2013 (see here and here).

The rulings by the European Court of Human Rights followed a hearing in December, which I wrote about here, and an archive of my articles about European complicity in torture, primarily involving Poland, but also Romania and Lithuania, where “black sites” were also located, but where there has been greater resistance to investigations, can be found here.

As the Guardian described it, Poland “became the first EU country held to account for its involvement in the CIA’s extraordinary rendition programme” when the court “found it guilty of the unlawful detention and torture” of al-Nashiri and Zubaydah, by failing to prevent the two men from being subjected to “torture and inhuman or degrading treatment” after their arrival at the prison.

The court also ruled that the Polish government “had failed to conduct a proper investigation into the episode, and ordered it to pay €100,000 (£79,000) compensation to each of the men,” as the Guardian put it, adding that the rulings “are the first in a series of cases being brought against European states,” with Romania and Lithuania to follow. The court noted that the compensation was awarded because of the “extreme seriousness of the violations” of the European Convention on Human Rights, and also awarded Abu Zubaydah €30,000 costs.

At December’s hearing, the court heard that the prison both men were held at, at the Stare Kiejkuty military base in north east Poland, was codenamed “Quartz,” and that both al-Nashiri and Zubaydah, who had previously been held in Thailand, were flown there on the same executive jet in December 2002. Both men are amongst the three men the US has admitted subjecting to waterboarding (a form of controlled drowning and an ancient torture technique), the other being Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.

As the Guardian noted, the judgment in the Abu Zubaydah case “recounted how he had described being repeatedly beaten, confined in a small box, and brought out to be repeatedly waterboarded.”

In Zubaydah’s words, taken from the account he gave to representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross, after his arrival at Guantánamo in September 2006, which was later leaked:

I was … put on what looked like a hospital bed, and strapped down very tightly with belts. A black cloth was then placed over my face and the interrogators used a mineral water bottle to pour water on the cloth so that I could not breathe. After a few minutes the cloth was removed and the bed was rotated into an upright position. The bed was then again lowered to horizontal position and the same torture carried out again with the black cloth over my face and water poured on from a bottle. I struggled against the straps, trying to breathe, but it was hopeless. I thought I was going to die.

In al-Nashiri’s case, the judgment described “how he had been kept naked, subjected to mock executions, hoisted by his wrists while his arms were shackled behind his back, and told that his mother would be sexually abused before him,” as the Guardian put it.

As well as condemning Poland for its involvement in the torture of Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the court also made a point of noting that Zubaydah’s continuing imprisonment without trial at Guantánamo was “a flagrant denial of justice,” words that the US will presumably try to ignore, even though it applies not just to Zubaydah but to almost all of the 149 men still held — although not al-Nashiri, who, ironically, is on trial at Guantánamo, but is engaged in a protracted struggle to get the authorities to allow evidence of his torture to be discussed.

In another blow not just for Poland but for the US, The court found that “the rendition programme was completely illegal,” as the Guardian described it, because its rationale had been “specifically to remove those persons from any legal protection against torture and enforced disappearance and to strip them of any safeguards afforded by both the US constitution and international law.”

The court also spelled out what it thought of Poland’s involvement, calling it “inconceivable” that plans “could have landed in Poland,” and the CIA “could have operated the prison,” without the awareness of the Polish government — as Senator Josef Pinior has long maintained (and as I wrote about in 2012).

The court stated, “It is also inconceivable that activities of that character and scale, possibly vital for the country’s military and political interests, could have been undertaken on Polish territory without Poland’s knowledge and without the necessary authorisation being given at the appropriate level of the state authorities.”

In addition, the court ordered the Polish government to “seek assurances from the US that Nashiri will not face the death penalty” in his trial by military commission, knowing full well, I am sure, that, when charges were referred against al-Nashiri, in September 2011, the Pentagon stated, “The Convening Authority referred the charges to a capital military commission, meaning that, if convicted, Al-Nashiri could be sentenced to death.”

The court also criticized Poland for its prosecutor-led investigation, which, the Guardian noted, has “faced accusations that it has been drawn-out and ineffective,” although it should be noted that the US’s absolute refusal to cooperate has not helped matters. However, the court criticized Poland for having “failed to provide an effective remedy,” adding that its attitude to the investigation also “amounted to a breach” of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Responding to the ruling, Joseph Margulies, who is one of Abu Zubaydah’s lawyers and a visiting professor of law and government at Cornell University, told the New York Times that, the ruling was “a seminal decision that would help force a public reckoning in Europe and the United States about the secret rendition program and its tactics,” as the Times put it.

Margulies said, “It’s the first time a court has condemned a European state for its role in the rendition program. From top to bottom, the case is a comprehensive condemnation of the CIA, the black-site program and Poland’s role in it.”

Amrit Singh of the Open Society Justice Initiative, which represents al-Nashiri and produced a major report on the rendition and torture program last year, said the ruling “ended the impunity for those engaged in abuses connected with the rendition program,” as the Times described it. “In stark contrast to US courts that have closed their doors to victims of CIA torture,” she said, “this ruling sends an unmistakable signal that these kind of abuses will not be tolerated in Europe, and those who participated in these abuses will be held accountable.”

For the Polish president, spokeswoman Joanna Trzaska-Wieczorek admitted that the ruling was “embarrassing for Poland,” and called it “a burden both in terms of our country’s finances as well as its image,” although she did not rule out an appeal. That, however, strikes me as unlikely.

What needs to happen now is for the Polish ruling to have a tangible impact on the imminent release of an edited and redacted version of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s damning report on the torture program, and for Romania and Lithuania also to face condemnation from the European Court of Human Rights. It is not time for President Obama to try and brush it all under the carpet once more by conceding, as he did on Friday, “We tortured some folks,” but adding, “it is important for us not to feel too sanctimonious in retrospect about the tough job that those folks had,” because “a lot of those folks were working hard under enormous pressure and are real patriots.”

As Article 2.2 of the UN Convention Against Torture (which Ronald Reagan signed) states, “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”

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 Review Boards Clear Kuwaiti Prisoner Fawzi Al-Odah for Release, But Defend Ongoing Imprisonment of Fayiz Al-Kandari

I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012 with US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email.

On July 14, the board members of the Periodic Review Boards at Guantánamo — consisting of representatives of the Departments of State, Defense, Justice and Homeland Security, as well as the office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — approved the release of Fawzi al-Odah, one of the last two Kuwaiti prisoners in Guantánamo, but recommended that the other Kuwaiti, Fayiz al-Kandari, should continue to be held.

This is good news for Fawzi al-Odah, but the decision about Fayiz al-Kandari casts a dark cloud over the whole process. I have been covering the stories of both men for many years, and it remains as clear to me now as it always has been that neither man poses a threat to the US. Here at “Close Guantánamo,” we profiled both men back in February 2012, shortly after Tom Wilner and I, the co-founders of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, had been in Kuwait trying to secure their release (see here, here and here).

The Periodic Review Boards were established last year, to review the cases of 46 Guantánamo prisoners specifically detained on the basis that they are allegedly too dangerous to release, even though insufficient evidence exists to put them on trial.

The decisions about the supposed danger posed by the men — despite the lack of evidence against them — were taken by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama appointed to review the prisoners’ cases shortly after he took office in 2009, and when he implemented the task force’s recommendations in March 2011, in an executive order authorizing the specific imprisonment without charge or trial of these 46 men, he promised that there would be periodic reviews of their cases to establish whether or not they continued to be regarded as a threat.

This is the process that only belatedly began last November, after 25 other prisoners were added to the list of those eligible for PRBs. These 25 had initially been recommended for prosecution by the task force, but had been withdrawn from consideration for trials when two appeals court rulings, in October 2012 and January 2013, dealt a major blow to the credibility of the military commissions — the trial system chosen for the Guantánamo prisoners under President Bush, and continued under President Obama — by overturning two of the only convictions secured in the commissions’ lamentable post-9/11 history.

Since the Periodic Review Boards began, nine prisoners have had their cases reviewed. Decisions have not yet been taken in the cases of two of these men — Muhammad al-Shumrani and Muhammad al-Zahrani — but of the seven others, four, including Fawzi al-Odah, have now been recommended for release (see here and here and here), while three others, including Fayiz al-Kandari, have been recommended for ongoing imprisonment on the basis that “continued law of war detention … remains necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States” (see here and here).

Prior to the decision in al-Odah’s case, all of the men recommended for release were Yemenis, who have not been released because the entire US establishment is fearful about the security situation in Yemen. This is completely unacceptable, as it is more damaging to America’s reputation for justice to continue holding men cleared for release than to free them, but in al-Odah’s case the restrictions do not apply, and it is likely, therefore, that he will be freed soon.

In al-Odah’s case, the board concluded that “continued law of war detention … does not remain necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States,” and added that, in making its determination, the board noted his “low level of training and lack of a leadership position in al-Qaeda or the Taliban” and his “personal commitment to participate fully in the Government of Kuwait’s rehabilitation program and comply with any security measures, as well as [his] extensive family support.”

The Board also found al-Odah’s “statements to be credible regarding his commitment not to support extremist groups or other groups that promote violence, and noted the positive changes in [his] behavior while in detention.” The board also “considered information provided by the Government of Kuwait that indicated its confidence in its legal authority to require and maintain [his] participation in a rehabilitation program and commitment to implement robust security measures.” This, the board noted, includes al-Odah’s “participation in a full rehabilitation program for at least one year of in-patient rehabilitation.”

In al-Kandari’s case, unfortunately, although the board found him “credible with respect to his desire to return to his family, which appears willing to help with his reintegration,” the board members also decided that he “almost certainly retains an extremist mindset and had close ties with high-level al-Qaeda leaders in the past,” even though there is no evidence for either claim. As I explained back in 2009 in a major profile of al-Kandari, his history is one of caring for others and engaging in charitable activities, and the allegations of his involvement with al-Qaeda simply do not stand up under scrutiny, as he arrived in Afghanistan in August 2001, and had no time to do any of the things of which he has been accused — which, absurdly, include a claim that, in a ridiculously short amount of time, he became a spiritual adviser to Osama bin Laden.

In attempting to justify their decision, the board considered that al-Kandari had a “susceptibility for recruitment” to terrorism “due to his connections to extremists and his residual anger at the US,” and also “noted a lack of history regarding the efficacy of the rehabilitation program Kuwait will implement for a detainee with his particular mindset.” What I find alarming about this conclusion is the suggestion that al-Kandari’s resentment at losing 12 years of his life in Guantánamo is somehow unacceptable, when it is surely understandable to be angry, and this, in itself, is a not the same thing as being so angry that you engage in terrorism when released — something that, I can confidently say, having heard so much about him and having met his large extended family, would never happen in his case.

The board added that it “appreciates the efforts of the Kuwaiti government and encourages the officials at the Al Salam Rehabilitation Center” in Kuwait, a facility funded by the Kuwaiti government solely for al-Odah and al-Kandari, to “continue to work with” al-Kandari, presumably through correspondence — unless visits to Guantánamo are on the cards.

His case will be reviewed in six months, and the board members expressed their hope that he would remain involved in the process.

Here at “Close Guantánamo,” we hope so too, but we also understand why Fayiz al-Kandari might be reflecting that there is no justice at Guantánamo. As his military defense lawyer Barry Wingard wrote back in In July 2009, in an op-ed for the Washington Post:

Each time I travel to Guantánamo Bay to visit Fayiz, his first question is, “Have you found justice for me today?” This leads to an awkward hesitation. “Unfortunately, Fayiz,” I tell him, “I have no justice today.”

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: The Wonderful WOMAD Festival, Charlton Park, Wiltshire, July 2014

See my photos on Flickr here!

Every year since 2002, I have attended the WOMAD world music festival (it stands for ‘World of Music, Arts and Dance’) with my family and with friends. My wife runs children’s workshops at the festival, and for five days, at the end of July every year, we escape from the city and join the gathering of the tribes in a trouble-free version of the festival idyll that was first dreamt up by the counter-cultural pioneers of the 1960s and 1970s, and has since grown to appeal to — well, almost everyone, if Glastonbury’s success is anything to go by.

WOMAD had a capacity crowd this year for the first time since it moved to its current residence, Charlton Park in Wiltshire, from Reading in 2007. That meant that 40,000 people turned up to be hammered by the relentless sun and to be thrilled, entertained and moved by musicians who are not generally on the mainstream musical radar in the UK — with the exception of Sinead O’Connor, who stepped in at the last minute to replace the late Bobby Womack, and who was extraordinarily powerful, her unique mixture of vulnerability and anger bringing many in the crowd to tears, and not just during “Nothing Compares 2 U.” Sinead played many songs from her new album, “I’m Not Bossy, I’m the Boss,” which promises to be excellent.

From further afield, I enjoyed Clinton Fearon from Jamaica, formerly of the roots reggae legends the Gladiators, the legendary Manu Dibango and the magisterial Youssou N’Dour, but WOMAD is also about making new discoveries, in my case Bassekou Kouyate and Ngoni ba, Malians who lit up the first night, folk legends Martin Simpson and Dom Flemons, and — my favourites this year — Debademba, a very funky, rocking and soulful bunch of West African groovesters featuring the Malian griot singer Mohamed Diaby and guitarist Abdoulaye Traoré, who was born in Burkina Faso.

There is, of course, more than just the music at WOMAD. The festival has some great food, and there’s always great company, amongst the festival-goers in general, and, for me, in my own tribe of south Londoners. It was great to sing and play guitars in our camp — including some wonderful harmony singing on Saturday night — and it was refreshing to see such a diverse age range at the festival, where those attending have grown up together over the years, as young adults grow older, and their kids turn into teenagers and, in turn, young adults themselves.

I hope you enjoy my photos from the festival — and who knows? Perhaps it will inspire you to join us next year!

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 Read “Britain’s Latest Counter-Terrorism Disasters,” My New Article for Al-Jazeera About Diego Garcia, Babar Ahmad and Talha Ahsan

Dear friends and supporters,

I’ve been away since last Wednesday, but I hope that you have time to read my latest article for Al-Jazeera, “Britain’s Latest Counter-Terrorism Disasters,” if you didn’t see it when it was published on the day of my departure (to the WOMAD festival in Wiltshire) and to like it, share it and tweet it if you find it of interest. It concerns two recent problems with the UK’s conduct in the “war on terror” — specifically, the latest embarrassment about British knowledge of what the US was doing with terror suspects on the UK’s Indian Ocean territory of Diego Garcia (a story that has been bubbling away for nearly 12 years), and the colossal waste of time and effort involved in the long UK detention without charge or trial of two British citizens, Babar Ahmad and Talha Ahsan (held for eight and six years), their extradition to the US in October 2012, their plea deals ast December and their sentencing last week, which has led to an order for Talha Ahsan’s immediate release, and a sentence for Babar Ahmad that will probably see him freed in the UK in just over a year.

The US, of course, is severely to blame for both of these policy disasters — through its policy of extraordinary rendition and CIA “black sites” under the Bush administration, which the UK readily supported, and through the UK-US Extradition Act of 2003, which was used to extradite Talha Ahsan and Babar Ahmad, even though it is clearly not a well-functioning system, as the UK government conceded that the two men could not have been put on trial in the UK.

Back in 2008 and 2009, in particular, I wrote extensively about Britain’s revolting counter-terrorism policies in the wake of 9/11: about the high-level attempts to hide British complicity in the torture of Binyam Mohamed, a British resident held in Guantánamo, who had been tortured in Morocco; about the foreign nationals held without charge or trial in the UK, on the basis of secret evidence presented in closed sessions in a special national security court, and the others — including British nationals — held on control orders, a form of house arrest that also involved secret evidence and no trials; and, on occasion, about Diego Garcia (see here, and see my Guardian article here).

Since the Tories seized power with the help of the Liberal Democrats in May 2010, the active threats to the fabric of British society have been severe that, in addition to my Guantánamo work, I have generally only had time to focus, when time has allowed, on the government’s war on the NHS and its assault on the poor, the unemployed and the disabled, although I did try to keep up with the story of Babar Ahmad and Talha Ahsan (see here and here). I am also involved in pushing for the release of Shaker Aamer, the last British prisoner in Guantánamo, and in recent months I have also covered the government’s terrible citizenship-stripping policy (see here, here and here), and the extremely dubious arrest of former Guantánamo prisoner Moazzam Begg (see here and here).

I’m delighted that this current opportunity arose for me to revisit, for Al-Jazeera, Britain’s counter-terrorism policies through these two examples, and I hope to find time to address other matters of concern, regarding this disgraceful government, over the coming months.

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: Free Shaker Aamer from Guantánamo – Parliamentary Vigil, July 16, 2014

See my photos of the latest protest for Shaker Aamer on Flickr here.

On July 16, 2014, I joined campaigners with the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign — calling for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison — at Parliament Square, opposite the Houses of Parliament, for their last Parliamentary vigil before the summer recess. The campaigners have been holding vigils every Wednesday lunchtime throughout the spring and summer, and will resume weekly vigils in September, unless Shaker is released in the meantime. See my photos on Flickr here.

Shaker’s British wife and his four British children live in Battersea, where they lived with Shaker before he was seized after the 9/11 attacks in Afghanistan. He had travelled to Afghanistan with his family to provide humanitarian aid, but while his wife and children safely returned to the UK, he was caught by bounty hunters, and was eventually sold to US forces.

Shaker was first cleared for release from Guantánamo under the Bush administration, in 2007, and he was cleared for release again in January 2010 by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama appointed to review the cases of all the prisoners after he took office in 2009. His release has also been requested by successive UK governments since 2007. And yet, although all the other British citizens and residents held in Guantánamo have been freed, he is still imprisoned, perhaps because he is a charismatic and eloquent man, who has always stood up for the prisoners’ rights, and both the US and the UK governments fear what he will say on his release.

Sadly, although Shaker would agree to a life of silence if it ensured that he could be reunited with his family, he remains held, and is suffering physically and mentally, as Dr. Emily A. Keram, an independent psychiatrist, explained in a submission to a US court after being allowed to meet with him for three days in December. That submission also included shocking details, in Shaker’s own words, of how he was treated in US custody in Afghanistan as well as his treatment in Guantánamo.

Unfortunately, on June 24, District Judge Rosemary Collyer rejected Shaker’s request for her to order his release on that grounds that, as the New York Times decribed it, “he is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental and physical ailments.”

Judge Collyer gave her rejection in what the Times described as “a terse one-page order.” An accompanying memorandum opinion, which explained her ruling, was sealed, as was the submission of the Justice Department. Judge Collyer ordered the DoJ “to file a public version of her order and its documents by July 9,” but that date has come and gone, with no sign of any release of documents.

At the vigil, John Hall, the Parliamentary assistant to Jane Ellison MP, the constituency MP for Shaker and his family, brought us updates regarding the latest efforts to  secure Shaker’s release; primarily, notification that letters have been sent to Cliff Sloan and Paul Lewis, the envoys for the closure of Guantánamo, in the State Department and the Pentagon, who were appointed by President Obama last year — and replies are awaited.

We anticipate that, after the recess, there will also be a day for Shaker Aamer involving events in the Houses of Parliament, and also that we will try to secure the full Parliamentary debate about Shaker’s case that we were promised last year after over 117,000 people signed an e-petition to the British government.

I’ll keep you posted about these plans, but in the meantime I found it useful to revisit what Clive Stafford Smith, the director of Reprieve, said after the backbench debate in Westminster Hall, in April 2013, which was triggered by the e-petition.

During that session, as Reprieve noted, then-Foreign Office Minister Alistair Burt responded to MP’s questions about why Shaker Aamer continues to be held at Guantánamo by saying, “I have a supposition [of why the US is continuing to hold Shaker Aamer] but it’s not a detail I can go into.”

In response, Clive Stafford Smith said, “It is deeply suspicious that the UK won’t say why their friends in the US refuse to transfer Shaker home to London. The US and UK intelligence services appear to be working together to ensure Shaker stays where he is or gets shipped off to Saudi Arabia. Shaker knows too much. Given that he could appear as a witness against the perpetrators of some the UK’s dirtiest secrets over their role in the ‘war on terror’, it is far better for the intelligence services if he is sent away to another prison in Saudi Arabia.”

He added, “We don’t doubt William Hague’s sincerity when he says that he wants Shaker released. Mr. Hague needs to get assurances from his own security service that they haven’t provided information to be used to keep Shaker in arbitrary detention, and that any falsehood they have told to the CIA have been corrected. National embarrassment isn’t a reason to keep a man who has been cleared for release locked away in prison. Shaker must be returned to his family in London at once.”

With William Hague’s abrupt departure from the cabinet last week, those questions now need to be directed to his successor, Philip Hammond, but they remain as crucial as ever, because it does indeed appear that it is, fundamentally, embarrassment that is keeping Shaker, first cleared for release over seven years ago, locked up in Guantánamo with — still — no end in sight to his unacceptable imprisonment.

If you wish to take further action, please sign and share the international petition calling for Shaker Aamer’s release from Guantánamo, and, if you’re in the UK, please write to your MP to ask them to demand his immediate release, and his return to the UK. You can contact your MP here.

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 Hunger Striker Abu Wa’el Dhiab’s Wife Calls for Videos of his Force-Feeding to be Made Public

Regular readers will know that one of the most prominent Guantánamo prisoners at present is Abu Wa’el Dhiab, a Syrian national, separated from his wife and his four children for over 12 years, who recently persuaded a US judge to order the government stop force-feeding him as a response to the hunger strike that he embarked on last year. Soon after, Judge Gladys Kessler reluctantly rescinded her order, as she feared that Mr. Dhiab might die if he was not force-fed, but she also ordered the government to release videotapes of Mr. Dhiab’s force-feeding — and of him being forcibly extracted from his cell — to his lawyers.

This was the first time a judge had ordered evidence of force-feeding and cell extractions to be released to any of the prisoners’ lawyers, and when lawyers watched the videos, in the secure facility in Virginia where they must travel to view  all classified, one of his legal team, Cori Crider of 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.” Although the men’s lawyers are the only people allowed to see the videos, 16 mainstream media organizations recently submitted a motion calling for them to be made public.

Abu Wa’el Dhiab, who is confined to a wheelchair as a result of his treatment in US custody, is one of 75 prisoners still held who were cleared for release in January 2010 by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established shortly after first taking office in January 2009. This disgraceful situation has arisen because of Congressional obstruction, a refusal by President Obama to spend political capital overcoming that obstruction, even though he has the means to do so, and the US establishment’s collective unwillingness to release Yemeni prisoners, who make up the majority of the cleared prisoners, because of unreasonable fears about the security situation in that country.

This unacceptable situation continues to drag on, poisoning America’s claims to be a nation that believes in justice, and while it now appears that Abu Wa’el Dhiab will be released in the not too distant future — to Uruguay, at the request of President Mujica, along with five other men cleared for release who cannot be safely repatriated — Mr. Dhiab is not yet a free man, and, as a result, I am delighted to make available a powerful article about his situation, written by his wife and recently published on the Huffington Post.

Umm Wa’el Dhiab’s article about her husband is below:

The Obama Administration Must Let the American People See Footage of My Husband Being Force-Fed in Their Name

By Umm Wa’el Dhiab, Huffington Post, July 15, 2014

Last week, Obama administration lawyers filed a stack of documents in a case about my husband — including sealed videos of him being taken to be force-fed at Guantánamo Bay. I don’t think I could bear to see those videos. It shocks me, though, that the American people may never be given the opportunity to see for themselves what is happening in their name.

Sixteen of America’s biggest media organizations have asked for the right to air them, judging them to be in the public interest. The government is fighting their request, scrabbling to cover up what is going on every day in the prison.

Indeed, when I read their documents last week, I was struck by how hard these government lawyers have tried to keep everything about my husband from public view, and not just by suppressing the videos of his abuse but by avoiding describing the man himself. At no point amidst all the legal jargon did they write anything about him: who he actually is or why he might be on hunger strike. I want to tell them.

More than a decade has passed since Abu Wa’el was taken from us in the night. I had just given birth to our fourth child; our other children were just toddlers. My husband is a kind man and a superb cook. I miss the dishes he learned to prepare in his father’s restaurant. He is guilty of no crime, has never been charged, and was told by President Obama five years ago that he would be released from Guantánamo.

This year has been one of the hardest to be without him. Last July we were still living in Syria. The civil war forced us to leave for Lebanon, and then to seek shelter in Turkey. I tried to rejoin my family in Jordan but was immediately taken in for questioning at the border and refused entry because of Abu Wa’el’s detention at Guantánamo. The stigma travels. We’ve made it back to Istanbul now. I’m proud that the children are registered in school, and that their teachers tell me that they have already caught up in their studies.

I had to do all that alone. Abu Wa’el is nearing his 13th year at Guantánamo Bay. When I speak to his American lawyers, I can tell that they are shocked and appalled by his case. I’m not so shocked. I was a teacher in Syria. The government locked me up twice in the past just because of Abu Wa’el’s detention, so I know what it means when politics disregards the law.

The children always ask me about their father. I cry when I think about the fact that he has missed their whole childhood now. He has missed kissing them, stroking their hair, telling them stories to help them drift off to sleep. Maria has carried his picture around with her for years now. Ahmad keeps telling me that he will travel to free his father when he gets older.

I promised my husband that I would get them to safety, after we lost so many loved ones in the civil war. Abu Wa’el promised me in return that he would come and join us by whatever means he could. So, 12 years after his arrest, with no movement on his case, he decided to stop eating. I hate the thought of him doing this. But I understand. The rest of us are safe now, waiting for him. We’ve dealt with enough over the last decade. It’s time for our family to be reunited and for us to start living again.

None of this appears in the government documents. Abu Wa’el is named simply as “petitioner.” Over 45 pages, the Obama administration’s lawyers use every possible argument to explain why the way they force-feed him should not be examined in detail. At one point, apparently, they even say that the former senior medical officer — the man who once approved forcing a tube in and out of my husband’s nose twice a day — should not be questioned because it would interrupt his annual vacation.

In the past, I wouldn’t have expected this kind of secrecy of America. But over the past few months, I’ve seen it repeatedly. First, the government fought to prevent our lawyers from seeing the force-feeding videos. Now they forbid our lawyers from even discussing their content with other security-cleared lawyers in secret. Then they opposed the request from 16 of their country’s most reputed media groups for access to the material. They are doing their best to make sure that what has happened — is happening — to my husband never sees the light of day.

What is even more confusing to me is that the solution to all this appears to be within the government’s grasp. The US media has recently been reporting that my husband is one of six Guantánamo prisoners who might be resettled, and that the transfer documents are on the desk of the secretary of defense. I read those articles repeatedly. It is hard to believe that our family might actually be one signature away from seeing each other again.

America was shocked by the images from Abu Ghraib. These films from Guantánamo threaten to do the same. The American people should be given the chance to see them, and to decide whether they accept what is being done daily to my husband. I am certain that if they are given the chance, they will see the reality: the simple desperation of an innocent man, held without charge or trial, using the only means at his disposal to get back to his wife and children.

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.

More Farcical Proceedings at the Military Commissions in 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 I published “The 9/11 Trial at Guantánamo: The Dark Farce Continues,” the first of two articles providing updates about the military commissions at Guantánamo.

The commissions were established under President George W. Bush in November 2001, were ruled illegal by the Supreme Court in June 2006, revived by Congress in the fall of 2006, suspended by President Obama in January 2009, and revived again by Congress in the fall of 2009, but they have always struggled to establish any credibility, and should not have been revived by the Obama administration.

Last week’s article, as the title indicates, covered developments — or the lack of them — in pre-trial hearings for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks, who were held and tortured in CIA “black sites” for years before their arrival in Guantánamo in September 2006.

These five — all designated by President Bush as “high-value detainees” — were first charged in February 2008, and then, under President Obama, were going to be prosecuted in federal court in New York until opponents of the idea started making a fuss and President Obama capitulated and returned them to the military commissions instead.

The ongoing pre-trial hearings for Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri

This second article looks primarily at developments — or the lack of them — in the case of another “high-value detainee,” Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who was also held and tortured in CIA “black sites” prior to his arrival at Guantánamo in September 2006, and is one of three prisoners that the US admits to having subjected to waterboarding (an ancient form of torture, which involves controlled drowning). Al-Nashiri is accused of masterminding the attack on the USS Cole in 2000, in which 17 US sailors were killed, and 39 were injured.

Like the 9/11 co-accused, he was first charged under President Bush in 2008, but unlike KSM and the other four men he was never considered for a federal court trial under Obama. When the planned New York 9/11 trial was announced in November 2009, he was one of five men put forward for the third version of the commissions — the one that the Obama administration unwisely endorsed — even though, from the beginning, no one could genuinely explain what criteria were used to decide who would be put forward for federal trials, and who would be tried by military commission.

For all these prisoners, the heart of the problem, as I explained in March, is that “they were subjected to torture — which, of course, makes a fair and open trial improbable, and has led to a protracted game of cat and mouse as the government tries to suppress all mention of torture, while the defense teams try to expose it.”

When I last wrote about al-Nashiri’s case, in the article in March that I mentioned above, based on hearings in February, al-Nashiri had briefly threatened to sack his civilian lawyer, Rick Kammen, lawyers in the case had sparred over the use of hearsay evidence, and had held a secret meeting with the judge regarding CIA “black sites,” and his own legal team had sought to have the death penalty dismissed in the case of a conviction because of the use of secret evidence which al-Nashiri cannot see, and had held another secret meeting with the judge to discuss the use of classified information. At the end of it all, Judge Pohl had set a date of December 4 for the trial to begin, although as I noted at the time, “it remains to be seen if that date will hold.”

On April 9, a redacted transcript for the secret meeting with the judge (on February 22) regarding information about al-Nashiri’s imprisonment in CIA “black sites,” was released, just five days after McClatchy reported that the Senate Intelligence Committee’s as yet unpublished six-year, $40 million report on torture found that “CIA officers subjected some terrorism suspects after the Sept. 11 attacks to interrogation methods that were not approved by either the Justice Department or their own headquarters, and illegally detained 26 of its 119 captives in CIA custody.”

Al-Nashiri’s lawyers, of course, are seeking information that will help them to prepare for their client’s planned trial. As the Miami Herald reported, “Defense lawyers have security clearances that allow them to know certain aspects of the still-secret CIA Rendition, Detention and Interrogation program,” but “they aren’t entitled to a list of nations and names” as they prepare for the trial.

At the hearing on February 22, Rick Kammen, al-Nashiri’s civilian lawyer since 2008, argued, as the Miami Herald described it, that CIA agents “so fundamentally dismantled their prisoner’s personality with [their] ‘enhanced interrogation’ program that he told investigators what they wanted to hear.”

Kammen said, “The guy that was arrested is dead. They haven’t killed his body but they’ve killed whoever that guy was. Because that’s what this program was designed to do, it was designed to turn people into a state of learned helplessness where they were powerless to say no to government agents.”

Al-Nashiri’s case also clearly demonstrates how torture remains the central issue around which notions of justice must be gauged. The government argues that, because the CIA’s Rendition, Detention and Interrogation program remains classified, “even defense lawyers with security clearances aren’t entitled” to all the details of how, where and by whom he was treated. If al-Nashiri “happens to remember the places he was kept, he can volunteer the details to his lawyers,” as the Miami Herald put it, but, absurdly, his defense team “cannot discuss with him 14 percent of the so-called discovery in his case because it is classified at a level that Nashiri can’t hear about,” according to prosecutors.

Judge Pohl orders prosecutors to provide detailed information about al-Nashiri’s torture to his lawyers

Nevertheless, on April 14, the judge in his case, Army Col. James Pohl, who is the commissions’ chief judge and also presides over the 9/11 trial, ordered prosecutors to comply extensively with the defense’s requests, as the following excerpts from his ruling show:

5. The Prosecution will provide the Defense the following discovery information:

a. A chronology identifying where the Accused was held in detention between the date of his capture to the date he arrived at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba in September 2006;

b. A description of how the Accused was transported between the various locations including how he was restrained and how he was clothed;

c. All records, photographs, videos and summaries the Government of the United States has in its possession which document the condition of the Accused’s confinement at each location, and the Accused’s conditions during each movement between the various locations;

d. The identities of medical personnel (examining and treating physicians, psychologist, psychiatrists, mental health professionals, dentists, etc.), guard force personnel, and interrogators, whether employees of the United States Government or employees of a contractor hired by the United States Government, who had direct and substantial contact with the Accused at each location and participated in the transport of the Accused between the various locations. […]

e. Copies of the standard operating procedures, policies, or guidelines on handling, moving, transporting, treating, interrogating, etc, high value detainees at and between the various facilities identified in paragraph 5a.

The order also includes further points — f to j — not mentioned here.

In response to the ruling, Rick Kammen described the information the judge ordered released as material that “the prosecution has publicly resisted producing,” adding, “The prosecution’s argument that the defense is precluded from checking the government’s work is frivolous. One of the defense functions is to check the government’s story.”

The CIA, on the other hand, refused to discuss whether or not they would comply with Judge Pohl’s order. The day after (April 23), prosecutors instead filed a motion asking the judge to reconsider his order, at a session where discussions took place regarding the planned trial in December, and Judge Pohl stated that he thought it might last up to a year, and that he might have to hand it, or the 9/11 trial, to another judge, to avoid an impossible workload.

On April 24, torture once more resurfaced, when Dr. Sondra Crosby, an expert in treating victims of torture, was called upon to provide an assessment of al-Nashiri, and stated, “I believe that Mr. al Nashiri has suffered torture — physical, psychological and sexual torture.” She was responding to a defense motion seeking to establish that military doctors had failed to treat him for the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and major depression he was diagnosed with last year by a military medical board, and sought to delay the start date for his trial.

The Miami Herald reported that Dr. Crosby said of al-Nashiri, “He suffers from chronic pain. He suffers from anal-rectal complaints,” and also has “difficulty defecating, hemorrhoids, pain in sitting for a long time,” which, she said, were typical of “survivors of sexual assault.”

She also explained that he “has scars on his wrists, legs [and] ankles” which are “consistent with the allegations and history that he gave me,” and stated that he “suffers from wide mood swings” — from “irritability, anger, extreme emotional intensity to silence” — which, she said, are “red flags” of the trauma caused by torture.

She also noted that “military medical staff treating him had failed to ask the right questions, if any,” and, having been given access to his medical history since his arrival at Guantánamo, added, “There was no trauma history in the records I read. They treated the symptoms without treating the cause.”

On April 27, an alternative perspective was provided by an Army psychiatrist who testified anonymously via video feed from Texas, and who stated that his primary finding was that al-Nashiri had Narcissistic Personality Disorder, rather than “some stressor that happened years ago.”

The chief prosecutor unsuccessfully urges Judge Pohl to withdraw his order

The next development came on May 4, with a New York Times article focused on a motion submitted on April 23 by the chief prosecutor, Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, who asked Judge Pohl to withdraw his order requiring the government to give defense lawyers detailed classified information about al-Nashiri’s treatment in CIA “black sites.” Brig. Gen. Martins asked the judge to allow the wider struggle over the Senate torture report to play out, and also revealed, in a statement on April 27, that “he had been pushing the CIA for more than a year to declassify additional information about what interrogators did to Mr. Nashiri, allowing it to be discussed with the defendant and examined in open court.”

In his motion, Brig. Gen. Martins also attached a copy of a letter sent on February 10 from White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler, to Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Carl Levin, the leaders of the Senate Intelligence and Armed Forces Committees. explaining that CIA director John Brennan “was taking steps to declassify certain information about the program.”

On May 28, at Guantánamo, the wrangling continued. As prosecutors continued to put pressure on Judge Pohl to rescind his order, Rick Kammen told the judge, “It’s a brave and courageous order. That’s why they want you to walk it back.” He added, “The cynical part of me thinks it’s going to get you fired,” and, as the Miami Herald described it, compared “the magnitude of what Pohl did to Judge John Sirica‘s order to the White House to produce audiotapes in the Watergate scandal.”

Brig. Gen. Martins responded by offering to tweak the existing protective order, to allow prosecution lawyers to share, for the first time, a limited amount of classified information with al-Nashiri’s legal team.

The day after, another closed session took place, and the story then went quiet again until June 26, when Judge Pohl responded to that closed session by issuing an 11-page ruling, which, as the Miami Herald described it, “retain[ed] the thrust” of his April discovery order.

Prior to the revised ruling being unsealed, the Miami Herald also noted that a memo circulated in the office of the Chief Defense Counsel stated that Judge Pohl “stands by the prior order, insofar the government is required to produce information about the who, what, where, and when of both Nashiri and his alleged co-conspirators’ treatment in CIA custody,” but noted that it has one “major concession,” giving prosecutors some “leeway in redacting, ‘anonymizing’ and summarizing the details,” via a footnote in which the judge “suggests that prosecutors might selectively invoke the Intelligence Identities Protection Act” to “withhold from defense lawyers the names of CIA agents who worked at the black sites.” The newspaper added that it was unclear if, in addition, the government could “shield the identities of medical personnel, guards, interrogators and contractors on a case-by-case basis.”

Since then, Judge Pohl has resigned from al-Nashiri’s case, appointing, on July 10, Air Force Col. Vance H. Spath as his successor. He wrote that he chose to step down “to ensure continuity of the proceedings and to avoid scheduling conflicts” with the 9/11 trial. This was flagged up previously, but it is still slightly unnerving that he has withdrawn form the trial, having shown such unwillingness to back down when criticized by prosecutors.

It remains to be seen how Col. Spath will perform. On May 27, it was revealed that the trial date had been moved back to February 9, 2015, so he has just seven months to settle into his new role. Judge Pohl had scheduled a hearing for August 4 to 8, but it is at present unclear if the new judge will stick to that timetable.

Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi is charged

In other developments, charges were referred on June 3 against Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, one of the last prisoners to arrive at Guantánamo in 2007, after being captured in Turkey in October 2006. A Pentagon press release announced that, “as a senior member of al Qaeda,” he “conspired with and led others in a series of unlawful attacks and related offenses in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere from 2001 to 2006. These attacks and other offenses allegedly resulted in the deaths of US and coalition service members.”

On June 18, al-Iraqi, who is now 53 years old, was arraigned, and Carol Rosenberg reported that he “looked significantly older than his pre-capture photo.” He told the judge, Navy Capt. J. Kirk Waits, that he wanted a civilian attorney as well as his Pentagon-assigned military lawyers, because “a civilian lawyer would receive less resistance in Iraq and Afghanistan than a member of the military would,” as one of his attorneys, Army Lt. Col. Chris Callen, explained.

Although al-Iraqi is not accused of murder, Rosenberg noted that he is accused of “classic war crimes punishable by life in prison” — specifically, “targeting medical workers and civilians as well as foreign troops in Afghanistan” — in 2003 and 2004.

He is regarded by the US authorities as being involved with both al-Qaeda and the Taliban, but as Lt. Col. Callen said, “If you would say he’s Taliban, we would argue he’s a lawful combatant.” He added, “It seems at the start of the war they conflated the two,” then adopted a policy of “pick one.”

Al-Iraqi is originally from Mosul, although he has a wife and children in Afghanistan, and his lawyers describe him as “a courteous former non-commissioned officer in the Iraqi Army who handled logistics and administrative functions during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war,” who then “fled his homeland for a new life in Afghanistan after Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, and before the US-led Operation Desert Storm.”

They added that he hasn’t taken part in hunger strikes, is a pious Muslim, and has read everything in the library in the secretive Camp 7, where the “high-value detainees” are held. They also describe him as “more like a Taliban soldier than a terrorist.”

No conclusion

I hope that the analysis above demonstrates, as did last week’s article on the 9/11 trial, that justice remains elusive at Guantánamo, and will do so until the military commissions are scrapped, and the trials are moved to federal court instead, something that should’ve taken place in 2009. If that had happened, we might have been in a position to have been talking about these trials in the past tense. As it is, every time the court convenes, it most closely resembles Groundhog Day.

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.