Andy Worthington's Blog, page 113

July 16, 2014

For the First Time, A Nurse at Guantánamo Refuses to Take Part in Force-Feedings, Calls Them a “Criminal Act”

Reprieve, the legal action charity whose lawyers represent a number of prisoners still held at Guantánamo Bay revealed yesterday that a nurse with the US military at the prison “recently refused to force-feed” prisoners “after witnessing the suffering” it caused them.

Abu Wa’el Dhiab, a Syrian prisoner long cleared for release from Guantánamo, who is in a wheelchair as a result of his physical deterioration after 12 years in US custody without charge or trial, told his lawyer Cori Crider during a phone call last week (on July 10) that the male nurse “recently told him he would no longer participate in force-feedings.”

Dhiab reported that the nurse said, “I have come to the decision that I refuse to participate in this criminal act.”

He added that, “after the man made his decision known, he never saw him again,” and Reprieve noted that he had “apparently been assigned elsewhere.”

Reprieve also noted that the nurse had spoken to Mr. Dhiab about what he perceived to be “the discrepancy between military descriptions of force-feeding and the reality.” He said, as Mr. Dhiab described it, “before we came here, we were told a different story. The story we were told was completely the opposite of what I saw.” Mr. Dhiab added that other nurses had “voiced their concern” about force-feeding, but had stated that they “had no power to object.” He said he frequently heard comments along the lines of, “Listen, we have no choice. We are worried about our job, our rank.”

Reprieve described how the nurse’s stand was “thought to be the first case of ‘conscientious objection’ to force-feeding at Guantánamo since a mass hunger-strike began at the prison last year.”

Abu Wa’el Dhiab’s story will be familiar to these who are studying Guantánamo closely, as he is one of six cleared prisoners offered new homes in Uruguay by President Mujica and is “currently engaged in a high-profile court battle against force-feeding, winning the first-ever disclosure of videotapes of the practice,” as Reprieve described it, and as I reported here.

Last month, his lawyers were permitted to watch the videotapes at a Pentagon facility in Virginia, and afterwards Cori Crider stated, “I had trouble sleeping after viewing them.” However, as was revealed in yesterday’s press release, the lawyers are “banned from disclosing their contents to the public or even, in unprecedented censorship, to other security-cleared Guantánamo lawyers.” On June 20, 16 mainstream media organizations submitted a motion in which they are seeking to have the force-feeding tapes made public.

In response to the news about the nurse’s principled opposition to force-feeding, Cori Crider said, “This is a historic stand by this nurse, who recognized the basic humanity of the detainees and the inhumanity of what he was being asked to do. He should be commended. He should also be permitted to continue to give medical care to prisoners on the base but exempted from a practice he rightly sees as a violation of medical ethics.”

In the Miami Herald, veteran Guantánamo reporter Carol Rosenberg reported how, in response to questions about the nurse, Navy Capt. Tom Gresback, a spokesman for the prison, said by email, “There was a recent instance of a medical provider not willing to carry out the enteral feeding of a detainee. The matter is in the hands of the individual’s leadership.” He added that the nurse had been given “alternative duties.”

Rosenberg added that the nurse’s refusal to force-feed prisoners took place “sometime before the Fourth of July.”

She also quoted Cori Crider saying that the nurse’s decision took “real courage,” and that “none of us should underestimate how hard that has been.”

Rosenberg also noted that the nurse was with the Navy medical corps, but explained that the Miami Herald had “not been able to determine the nurse’s name or home base,” although Cori Crider explained that Mr. Dhiab had “described the nurse as a perhaps 40-year-old Latino who turned up on the cellblocks in April or May, with the rank of a ‘captain,’” although Rosenberg thought it likely that he was a Navy lieutenant. She also noted how, last year, in the New England Journal of Medicine, civilian doctors on the US mainland had “decried as unethical the Guantánamo military medical staff’s practice of force-feeding mentally competent hunger strikers,” and had “urged a medical mutiny.”

No one knows how many of the 149 men still held at Guantánamo are currently on hunger strike, as the military stopped reporting the numbers in December, after a nine-month period in which numbers had been reported on a daily basis. In February, Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, stated that there were 35 hunger strikers at the time, and that 18 of them were being force-fed.

The Miami Herald also reported further details about Cori Crider’s recent call with Abu Wa’el Dhiab, noting that, as the newspaper put it, he “described how he came to witness the nurse’s evolution toward refusing to tube feed across two or three months of treatment.” Mr. Dhiab explained that this evolution was “very compassionate.”

Carol Rosenberg added further details about the force-feeding of prisoners, as explained to reporters who visit Guantánamo Bay but are not allowed to see the force-feedings take place. She wrote that “a Navy medical team uses a calculus of meals missed and weight lost to decide when to recommend a once or twice a day tube feeding of a can of Ensure or other nutritional supplement.” The commander of the camps, who is a Navy admiral and not a doctor, is required to approve each feeding, which is managed by a “sailor trained as a medic.”

The process of the force-feeding itself is well documented — not least in the video of Yasiin Bey (formerly the rapper Mos Def) being force-fed last year, and in the animated film about force-feeding produced for Reprieve and the Guardian.

Cori Crider also explained how, before his complete refusal to be involved in force-feeding, the nurse “at times waived a doctor’s order to do a tube feeding,” as the Miami Herald described it.

She said Mr. Dhiab had told her, “Here, whenever a person has a fever or is sick, the typical force-feeding crew were still very rough with you. However, when he came to the block and saw that the person had a fever or was sick, he would say, ‘OK, because you are sick, you are not able to receive force-feeding’ and left them alone for that day.”

Crider added that the nurse should be permitted to tell his story to Judge Gladys Kessler, who issued the order requiring the authorities to release videotapes of Mr. Dhiab’s force-feeding to his lawyers, “despite any nondisclosure agreements detention center staff are obliged to sign,” in the Miami Herald‘s words. Judge Kessler said last month that a full hearing on the merits of Abu Wa’el Dhiab’s force-feeding challenge should take place by Labor Day, which falls on the first Monday in September.

“If he [the nurse] wants to give that evidence he should be allowed to give it,” Crider added.

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.

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Published on July 16, 2014 12:33

July 14, 2014

Andy Worthington: An Archive of Guantánamo Articles and Other Writing – Part 15, July to December 2013

Please support my work!

Over eight years ago, in March 2006, I began researching and writing about the Bush administration’s “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo and the 779 men (and boys) held there since the prison opened in January 2002. Initially, I spent 14 months researching and writing my book The Guantánamo Files, based, largely, on 8,000 pages of documents publicly released by the Pentagon in the spring of 2006, and, since May 2007, I have continued to write about the men held there, on an almost daily basis, as an independent investigative journalist — for 20 months under President Bush, and, shockingly, for what is now five and a half years under President Obama.

My mission, as it has been since my research first revealed the scale of the injustice at Guantánamo, continues to revolve around four main aims — to humanize the prisoners by telling their stories; to expose the many lies told about them to supposedly justify their detention; to push for the prison’s closure and the absolute repudiation of indefinite detention without charge or trial as US policy; and to call for those who initiated, implemented and supported indefinite detention and torture to be held accountable for their actions.

As I highlight every three months through my quarterly fundraising appeals, I have undertaken the lion’s share of this work as a reader-supported journalist and activist, so if you can support my work please click on the “Donate” button above to donate via PayPal.

In January 2010, I began to put together chronological lists of all my articles, in the hope that doing so would make it as easy as possible for readers and researchers to navigate my work — the 2,238 articles I have published in the last seven years.

This 15th list, covering July to December 2013, marked a period of hope for campaigners, after the men still held embarked on a prison-wide hunger strike to remind the world of the ongoing injustice of Guantánamo, and put pressure on President Obama to revisit his failed promise to close the prison and to resume releasing prisoners, which he had largely stopped doing since the fall of 2010 when Congress raised obstacles that he was unwilling to overcome, even though he had the means to do so.

In the period from October 2010 to July 2013, just five men were freed from Guantánamo, even though, throughout that period, over half the men still held had been cleared for release in January 2010 by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established shortly after taking office in 2009.

However, as a result of the hunger strike, President Obama delivered a major speech on national security issues in which he promised to appoint two new envoys to deal with the closure of Guantánamo, and also promised to resume releasing prisoners, and as a result, between August and December, he released eleven men from the prison (see here, here, here, here and here).

Six more men have been freed in the last six months, but there are, sadly, no grounds for those who oppose the existence of Guantánamo to sit back and relax, as the release of prisoners has once more ground to a halt, and renewed action is required to put pressure on the administration.

Throughout the period covered by this list, as I described it when I published the previous list, I continued to be “involved in campaigning to resist the age of austerity cynically introduced by the Tory-led government here in the UK, which is being used to wage a disgusting and disgraceful civil war against the poor, the unemployed and the disabled, and whose main aim being to almost entirely destroy the state provision of services.” Specifically, much of my attention was focused on the campaign to save Lewisham Hospital, my local hospital in south east London, and I’m very glad to note that the campaign was successful, providing hope for others working to save their local hospitals and the NHS in general.

As I always explain when I publish these lists, and as I most recently explained in the introduction to my Definitive Guantánamo Prisoner List (updated in March this year), I remain convinced, through detailed research, through comments from insiders with knowledge of Guantánamo, and, most recently, through an analysis of classified military documents released by WikiLeaks, that between 95 and 97 percent of the 779 men and boys imprisoned in total were either completely innocent people, seized as a result of dubious intelligence or sold for bounty payments, or Taliban foot soldiers, recruited to fight an inter-Muslim civil war that began long before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and that had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or international terrorism.

The articles I wrote — and, on occasion, the photos I published — between July and December 2013 are listed below, separated into two categories: articles about Guantánamo, and articles about British politics. I hope you find the list useful.

An archive of Guantánamo articles: Part 15, July to December 2013

July 2013

1. Guantánamo, hunger strikes, force-feeding: Shaker Aamer and Other Prisoners Ask US Court to Stop the Force-Feeding and Forced Medication at Guantánamo

2. Guantánamo, hunger strikes, force-feeding: Guantánamo Hunger Strike: Nabil Hadjarab Tells Court, “I Will Consider Eating When I See People Leaving This Place”

3. Guantánamo, hunger strikes, force-feeding: In Court Submission, Hunger Striker Ahmed Belbacha Tells Obama, “End the Nightmare that is Guantánamo”

4. Guantánamo, hunger strikes, force-feeding: Justice Department Tells Court that Force-Feeding Guantánamo Hunger Strikers is “Maintaining the Status Quo”

5. Guantánamo, hunger strikes, radio: Radio: On Day 150 of the Hunger Strike at Guantánamo, Andy Worthington Talks to Michael Slate

6. Guantánamo media: Video: Rapper Mos Def (Yasiin Bey) Force-Fed Like Guantánamo Prisoners

7. Guantánamo, hunger strikes, TV: Video: On Day 150 of the Guantánamo Hunger Strike, Andy Worthington Tells RT Why the Prison is a Moral, Legal and Ethical Abomination

8. Guantánamo, hunger strikes, force-feeding: Judge Recognizes Force-Feeding as Torture, But Tells Guantánamo Prisoner Only President Obama Can Deal with the Hunger Strike

9. Guantánamo, hunger strikes, force-feeding: Guantánamo Hunger Striker Abu Wa’el Dhiab: “The Mistreatment Now is More Severe than During Bush”

10. Guantánamo campaigns: For Ramadan, Please Write to the Hunger Striking Prisoners at Guantánamo

11. Bradley Manning: Bradley Manning Trial: No Secrets in WikiLeaks’ Guantánamo Files, Just Evidence of Colossal Incompetence

12. Guantánamo, TV: Video: “Is Guantánamo Forever?” – Andy Worthington on “Inside Out” with Susan Modaress

13. Guantánamo, hunger strikes, force-feeding: From Guantánamo, Hunger Striker Abdelhadi Faraj Describes the Agony of Force-Feeding

14. Deaths at Guantánamo: EXCLUSIVE: The Last Days in the Life of Adnan Latif, Who Died in Guantánamo Last Year

15. Guantánamo lawyers: The Schizophrenic in Guantánamo Whose Lawyers Are Seeking to Have Him Sent Home

16. Shaker Aamer, UK politics, video: Video: Andy Worthington Calls for the Release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, Parliament Square, July 18, 2013

17. Guantánamo: “The Grotesque Injustice of Guantánamo: Insiders’ Accounts” – By Video, Andy Worthington Joins Event in Portland, August 1, 2013

August 2013

18. Bradley Manning, TV: Video: Andy Worthington Discusses the Bradley Manning Verdict on RT

19. Guantánamo, torture, video: Video: Culture of Impunity Part Two – Andy Worthington on Bush’s War Crimes, Bradley Manning and Guantánamo

20. Guantánamo, hunger strikes, force-feeding: Shaker Aamer and Other Guantánamo Prisoners Call Force-Feeding Torture, Ask Appeals Court for Help

21. Guantánamo campaigns: GTMO Clock Launched, 75 Days Since Obama’s Promise to Resume Releasing Prisoners from Guantánamo, and Six Months Since Hunger Strike Started

22. Shaker Aamer, UK politics, photos: Photos: Shaker Aamer Protest in London, and His Latest Message from Guantánamo

23. Guantánamo, Periodic Review Boards: Endless Injustice: Newly Announced Guantánamo Review Boards Will Be Toothless Unless Cleared Prisoners Are Freed

24. Guantánamo campaigns: Congratulations to John Grisham for Writing about the Injustice of Guantánamo

25. Guantánamo, hunger strikes: Guantánamo: British Ex-Intelligence Officer On Hunger Strike in Support of Shaker Aamer

September 2013

26. Guantánamo campaigns: GTMO Clock: 100 Days Since President Obama Promised to Resume Releasing Prisoners from Guantánamo, Just Two Men Freed

27. Prisoners released from Guantánamo: Who Are the Two Guantánamo Prisoners Released in Algeria?

28. Life after Guantánamo: Video: Al-Jazeera’s Powerful and Important Documentary, “Life After Guantánamo”

29. Guantánamo: Meet the Guantánamo Prisoner Who Wants to be Prosecuted Rather than Rot in Legal Limbo

30. Deaths at Guantánamo: Remember Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, Who Died at Guantánamo A Year Ago, Despite Being Cleared for Release

31. Guantánamo, Bagram, Al-Jazeera: Read My First Article for Al-Jazeera Calling for an End to the Injustice of Guantánamo and Bagram

32. Life after Guantánamo, hunger strikes: Ahmed Zuhair, Long-Term Former Hunger Striker at Guantánamo, Speaks

33. Close Guantánamo: Tom Wilner: President Obama Could Close Guantánamo Tomorrow If He Wanted To

34. Life after Guantánamo: Algeria’s Ongoing Persecution of Former Guantánamo Prisoner Abdul Aziz Naji

35. Omar Khadr: It’s Omar Khadr’s 27th Birthday: He’s Free from Guantánamo, but Still Unjustly Imprisoned in Canada

36. Torture: Andy Worthington Joins Film-Makers and Authors to Judge Contest for Short Films About Torture

37. Life after Guantánamo: Book and Video: Ahmed Errachidi, The Cook Who Became “The General” in Guantánamo

38. Close Guantánamo: Nothing to Celebrate Four Months After Obama’s Promise to Resume Releasing Cleared Prisoners from Guantánamo

39. Shaker Aamer, UK politics: Guantánamo Prisoner Shaker Aamer Complains to UK Tribunal About Intelligence Services’ Role in His Kidnapping and Torture

October 2013

40. Guantánamo, military commissions, Al-Jazeera: Read My Latest Article for Al-Jazeera on Guantánamo’s Military Commissions and the Surveillance State

41. Edward Snowden, surveillance, radio: Andy Worthington Talks to Voice of Russia About the Perils of Blanket Surveillance

42. Guantánamo, Shaker Aamer: In Court, Guantánamo Prisoner Shaker Aamer Asks for Independent Medical Evaluation

43. Guantánamo, Shaker Aamer: Clive Stafford Smith’s Support for an Independent Medical Evaluation for Shaker Aamer in Guantánamo

44. Guantánamo, radio: Radio: Andy Worthington Discusses the Ongoing Injustice of Guantánamo with Chuck Mertz on “This Is Hell”

45. Guantánamo, death row, radio: Reflections on Herman Wallace – and I Discuss Guantánamo on Radio Stations in Portland and Johannesburg

46. Shaker Aamer, photos: Photos: Free Shaker Aamer from Guantánamo, Parliamentary Vigil, October 9, 2013

47. Guantánamo, hunger strikes, force-feeding: Watch the Shocking New Animated Film About the Guantánamo Hunger Strike

48. Guantánamo, Periodic Review Boards: Some Progress on Guantánamo: The Envoy, the Habeas Case and the Periodic Reviews

49. Guantánamo lawyers: Lawyers Seek Release from Guantánamo of Tariq Al-Sawah, an Egyptian Prisoner Who is Very Ill

50. Guantánamo campaigns: Today, As Guantánamo Hunger Strikers Seek Relief in Washington Appeals Court, A US Protestor Will Be Force-Fed Outside

51. Guantánamo, hunger strikes, force-feeding: Although Two Men Weigh 75 Pounds or Less, Guantánamo Prisoner Moath Al-Alwi Says, “We Will Remain on Hunger Strike”

52. Guantánamo interviews: An Interview with Guantánamo Expert Andy Worthington for The Prisma, An Online Multi-Cultural Newspaper

53. Guantánamo media: How the Egyptian Media Has Reported the Story of Tariq Al-Sawah, a Severely Ill Prisoner in Guantánamo

54. Guantánamo campaigns: 150 Days of the GTMO Clock: Despite Obama’s Promise, Just Two out of 86 Cleared Prisoners Freed from Guantánamo

55. Omar Khadr: Lies and Injustice: Canada’s Ongoing Mistreatment of Omar Khadr

56. Guantánamo, hunger strikes, force-feeding: Will Appeals Court Judges Rule that Force-Feeding at Guantánamo Must Stop?

57. Military commissions, torture: Torture: The Elephant in the Room at Guantánamo’s Military Commissions

November 2013

58. Omar Khadr: How Canada Has Hidden the Truth About Omar Khadr: US War Crimes, Institutional Racism and Media Failures

59. Torture, extraordinary rendition: Third Victim of CIA Torture in Poland Granted Victim Status, as European Court of Human Rights Prepares to Hear Evidence

60. Close Guantánamo: Will the End of War in Afghanistan Spur Obama to Close Guantánamo?

61. Guantánamo: Andy Worthington Attends Amnesty Film Screening About Guantánamo in Canterbury, and a Day for Shaker Aamer in Battersea, Nov. 13 and 23

62. Torture, extraordinary rendition: African Human Rights Commission Hears Evidence About CIA Rendition and Torture Case from 2003

63. David Hicks, military commissions: Former Guantánamo Prisoner David Hicks Appeals His 2007 Conviction for Non-Existent War Crime

64. Omar Khadr, military commissions: “He Didn’t Commit a War Crime”: Omar Khadr’s US Lawyer Challenges His Conviction at Guantánamo

65. Close Guantánamo: Will Carl Levin’s Amendments to the NDAA Help President Obama Close Guantánamo?

66. Torture: New Report Condemns Role of Doctors, Psychologists and Psychiatrists as Torturers in Bush’s “War on Terror”

67. Guantánamo, torture, radio: Radio: Andy Worthington Discusses Guantánamo’s 12th Anniversary and Accountability for Torture with Scott Horton and Peter B. Collins

68. Close Guantánamo, Yemenis: Will A Rehabilitation Center Lead to the Release of the Cleared Yemeni Prisoners in Guantánamo?

69. Guantánamo campaigns: Award-Winning Soul Singer Esperanza Spalding Calls for Closure of Guantánamo in New Song, “We Are America”

70. Guantánamo, Shaker Aamer, TV: From Guantánamo, Shaker Aamer Says, “Tell the World the Truth,” as CBS Distorts the Reality of “Life at Gitmo”

71. Close Guantánamo: Senate Passes Bill to Help Close Guantánamo; Now President Obama Must Act

72. Omar Khadr, military commissions: Video: Omar Khadr’s US Lawyer, Sam Morison, Explains Why His Guantánamo War Crimes Conviction is a Disgrace

73. Guantánamo, torture: Penny Lane: What We Learned This Week About Double Agents at Guantánamo

December 2013

74. Palestinians in Guantánamo: Abandoned in Guantánamo: Mohammed Taha Mattan, an Innocent Palestinian

75. Algerians in Guantánamo: Meet the Cleared Algerian Prisoners in Guantánamo Who Fear Being Repatriated

76. Torture, extraordinary rendition: European Court of Human Rights Hears Evidence About CIA Torture Prison in Poland

77. Shaker Aamer: Shaker Aamer’s Latest Words from Guantánamo, and a Parliamentary Meeting on Human Rights Day

78. Torture, extraordinary rendition, radio: Radio: Andy Worthington Discusses the European Court of Human Rights’ Hearing About Poland’s CIA Torture Prison on Voice of Russia

79. Prisoners released from Guantánamo: President Obama Forcibly Repatriates Two Algerians from Guantánamo

80. Guantánamo, Periodic Review Boards, Al-Jazeera: Read My Latest Article for Al-Jazeera About the Problems with Guantánamo’s New Review Boards

81. Guantánamo, hunger strikes, Shaker Aamer: Hunger Strike Resumes at Guantánamo, as Shaker Aamer Loses 30 Pounds in Weight

82. Close Guantánamo: “Close Guantánamo,” Says Prison’s First Commander, Adds That It “Should Never Have Been Opened”

83. Prisoners released from Guantánamo: The Stories of the Two Guantánamo Prisoners Released to Saudi Arabia

84. Omar Khadr, military commissions: Omar Khadr Condemns His Guantánamo Plea Deal, As Canada Concedes He Is Not A “Maximum-Security Threat”

85. Prisoners released from Guantánamo: Two Sudanese Prisoners Released from Guantánamo, 79 Cleared Prisoners Remain

86. Close Guantánamo: How Congress Is Finally Helping President Obama to Release Prisoners from Guantánamo

87. Shaker Aamer: For Christmas, the Reverend Nicholas Mercer Calls for the Release of Shaker Aamer from Guantánamo, Denounces UK Involvement in Torture

88. Guantánamo anniversary: Close Guantánamo Now: Andy Worthington’s US Tour on the 12th Anniversary of the Prison’s Opening, January 2014

An archive of articles about British politics, July to December 2013

July to September 2013

October to December 2013

12. UK austerity, photos: Photos: The 10,000 Cuts and Counting Protest in Parliament Square, September 28, 2013

13. UK politics: London Events: Afghan War Protest, and Vigils for Talha Ahsan and Shaker Aamer, October 5-9, 2013

14. Save Lewisham Hospital: Appeal Court Victory for Lewisham Hospital – But Tories Respond with New Legislation to Close Dozens of Hospitals

15. UK austerity: Bonfires of Austerity: Anti-Tory Protests Across the UK on November 5, 2013

16. UK austerity, photos: Photos: Burning Effigies of Tories and Protesting About Austerity and PFI at the Bonfire of Cuts in Lewisham

17. London, housing crisis: Petition: Tell Boris Johnson Not to Approve the Monstrously Inappropriate Development Plans for Convoys Wharf in Deptford

18. Save the NHS: Save the NHS: Demonstrate in London to Save A&Es and Call for More Nurses

19. Save the NHS, photos: Save the NHS and Free Shaker Aamer from Guantánamo: Protest Photos, October and November 2013

20. UK civil liberties: Back in Print: The Battle of the Beanfield, Marking Margaret Thatcher’s Destruction of Britain’s Travellers

21. Save the NHS: Save the NHS: Sign the Petition to Stop Jeremy Hunt Closing Hospitals at Will + Lewisham Hospital Xmas Single

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

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Published on July 14, 2014 12:51

July 10, 2014

Canadian Appeals Court Rules That Former Guantánamo Prisoner Omar Khadr Should Be Serving a Youth Sentence

Good news about Guantánamo is rare – whether regarding those still held, or those released — so it was reassuring to hear this week that the Court of Appeal in Alberta, Canada, delivered a major blow to the Canadian government’s efforts to hold former prisoner Omar Khadr in federal prison rather than in a provincial jail. Khadr is serving an eight-year sentence handed down in a plea deal at his trial by military commission in Guantánamo in October 2010, and has been held in federal prisons since his return to Canada, where he was born in 1986.

The 27-year old was just 15 years old when he was seized in Afghanistan after a firefight with US forces in a compound. He had been taken there, and deposited with some adults, by his father, but on his capture, when he was severely wounded, he was abused in US custody and eventually put forward for a war crimes trial, even though, as a juvenile at the time of the alleged crime, he should have been rehabilitated rather than punished according to an international treaty on the rights of the child signed by the US (and by Canada), even though there is no evidence that the allegation that he threw a grenade that killed a US soldier is true, and even though there is no precedent for claiming that a combat death in an occupied country is a war crime.

Khadr has since explained that he only agreed to the plea deal because he could see no other way of ever getting out of Guantánamo, and last November, via his US civilian lawyer, Sam Morison, he appealed in the US for his conviction to be overturned. In recent years, US appeals court judges have delivered two devastating rulings, overturning two of the only convictions secured in the military commissions, in the cases of Salim Hamdan and Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, on the basis that the war crimes for which the men were convicted were not war crimes at the time the legislation authorizing the commissions was passed — and had, in fact, been invented by Congress.

As Sam Morison told Colin Perkel of The Canadian Press last November, “the main argument turns on whether what Khadr is accused of doing as a 15 year old in Afghanistan was in fact a war crime under American or international law.” Morison explained, “These things weren’t crimes, at least in 2002. They weren’t crimes at the time of the charged conduct. Even if you take the government’s allegations at face value, he still didn’t commit a war crime.”

Perkel added, “The basis for charging [Khadr] for the battlefield death was that he was not in uniform, and was therefore an ‘unprivileged combatant,’” but Morison pointed out, as Perkel put it, that “there is no authority under international law to elevate what Khadr did to the status of a war-crime, which includes such egregious acts as deliberately targeting and killing civilians as the 9/11 terrorists did.”

As Morison described it, “Merely being an unlawful combatant is not by itself a war crime. War crimes still have to be war crimes. It has to do with what you do.” And on this basis, as I explained at the time, “even if Khadr had thrown the grenade that killed US Special Forces Sgt. Christopher Speer, who died in the firefight, it was not a war crime.”

A decision has not yet been taken on Khadr’s US appeal, but in the meantime the government of Stephen Harper has been doing all it can to defend Khadr’s imprisonment in a maximum-security prison since his return to his home country in September 2012.

That false insistence that Khadr should be held in a maximum-security prison was dealt a major blow last August, when Canada’s prison ombudsman Ivan Zinger, the executive director of the independent Office of the Correctional Investigator, said that prison authorities had “ignored favorable information” in “unfairly branding” Khadr as a maximum security inmate.

As I explained in an article at the time:

Zinger wrote, “The OCI has not found any evidence that Mr. Khadr’s behaviour while incarcerated has been problematic and that he could not be safely managed at a lower security level. I recommend that Mr. Khadr’s security classification be reassessed taking into account all available information and the actual level of risk posed by the offender, bearing in mind his sole offence was committed when he was a minor.”

Zinger, who also called Khadr’s case “unique and exceptional,” added that Khadr had “shown no evidence of problematic behaviour while in Canadian custody,” and noted that the US authorities “had categorized him as minimum security” — a particularly pertinent point to highlight the injustice of his treatment in Canada.

In December, Khadr was reclassified as a medium-security risk, and in the new year he was moved from Edmonton, where he was being held as a maximum-security prisoner, to Bowden Correctional Institution, north of Calgary — although Ivan Zinger has continued to criticize the government, complaining in a letter in to the Correctional Service of Canada that Khadr was still “unfairly classified,” even though the authorities had “lowered his risk rating from maximum to medium security.”

As he explained (and as I described it):

[T]he Canadian prison authorities have described Khadr as being “polite, quiet and rule-abiding,” and as someone who “does not espouse the criminal attitudes or code of conduct held by most typical federal offenders,” and, crucially, have also noted that they do not possess any information to suggest that he “espouses attitudes that support terrorist activities or any type of radicalized behaviour.”

However, while Khadr’s prison move was progress, his efforts to get a Canadian judge to recognize that his punishment in his home country was disproportionate fell on deaf ears last October, when, in a court in Edmonton, Justice John Rooke refused to allow his transfer to a provincial jail. As I described it in an article at the time, Khadr’s long-term civilian lawyer, Dennis Edney, had “argued that, as a sentence for murder in Canada, eight years would be regarded as a youth sentence (because a life sentence is mandatory for an adult murder conviction), and therefore Khadr should not have been sent to a maximum security prison.”

However, as I also wrote at the time:

[A]lthough Justice Rooke agreed that eight years was not an adult sentence, he accepted eight years as an appropriate punishment for the other four war crimes that Khadr agreed to in his plea deal. As he wrote in his ruling, “Mr. Khadr’s sentence could have been a single youth sentence and four adult sentences. However, Mr. Khadr obviously cannot be in both an adult provincial facility for adults and a penitentiary at the same time.” He added, as the Toronto Star put it, that “where there is ambiguity, the law dictates that the inmate should serve an adult sentence.”

Omar Khadr’s appeals court victory

Justice Rooke’s ruling has now been struck down by the appeals court. “We have concluded that the chambers judge erred in law in finding that Khadr was properly placed in a federal penitentiary under the ITOA (International Transfer of Offenders Act),” Justices Catherine Fraser, Jack Watson and Myra Bielby ruled, adding, “We conclude that Khadr ought to have been placed in a provincial correctional facility for adults.”

The judges also stated, “In summary, the eight-year sentence imposed on Khadr in the United States could only have been available as a youth sentence under Canadian law, and not an adult one, had the offences been committed in Canada.”

As the Globe and Mail described it, the ruling was “a vindication of the view held by lawyers for Mr. Khadr that the Conservative government went out of its way to treat their client harshly — more harshly than the laws of Canada allow.”

As the judges noted, “While not explicitly stated, it appears that underlying the [Attorney-General of Canada’s] position on this appeal is the view that a cumulative sentence of eight years for the five offences to which Khadr pled guilty is not sufficiently long to reflect the seriousness of the offences.”

The court also noted that, “if the Canadian justice department wished to make that argument,” as the Globe and Mail put it, Khadr “could respond that the US military justice system treated him unfairly — an argument he might well win, for reasons the court took some pains to spell out.”

Partly this involves Khadr’s appeal against his conviction in the US (as mentioned above), but also, as the judges reminded the government, “[t]he legal process under which Khadr was held and the evidence elicited from him have been found to have violated both the Charter and international human rights law” in two rulings from the Supreme Court of Canada delivered before Khadr’s plea deal and his return to Canada from Guantánamo. One involved questioning him without counsel while he was still a teenager (as seen in the documentary film, “You Don’t Like the Truth: 4 Days in Guantánamo“), and the other involved turning over information from the interrogations to the US authorities.

As an aside, the Globe and Mail added that, last fall, Prime Minister Stephen Harper “named a little-known lower-court judge who found Canada nearly blameless in the Khadr affair to the Supreme Court,” but that “the court ruled the appointment of Justice Marc Nadon of the Federal Court of Appeal illegal.”

As the Globe and Mail put it, this week’s appeals court ruling “also brings [Khadr] a step closer to freedom.” Nate Whitling, one of his lawyers, said in an interview that his client now “has the right any time he wishes to apply to a Youth Court judge for early release,” as the newspaper put it, adding, “Without the ruling, his only chance at release would be through the National Parole Board.”

The Canadian Press added that, “[a]s a young offender, Khadr would get an annual review for release before a youth judge,” and noted that Whitling “said the judge could order his release and let him serve out his sentence in the community,” As CBC News described it, he told Rosemary Barton on CBC News Network’s Power & Politics, “A youth sentence carries many advantages under Canadian law. Such sentences are designed to rehabilitate and reintegrate people like Omar in recognition of the fact that the events occurred when they were youths. The law of Canada confirms that youths, like Omar, have diminished culpability for the actions that occur when they are children under the law.”

Whitling also said he “spoke by phone with Khadr after the court decision and, while his client is optimistic about a transfer and eventual application for release, he’s worried he won’t get the chance.”

The Canadian government’s disgraceful decision to appeal the ruling

That was understandable. While Whitling explained that the ruling meant that Khadr “will ask to be moved to jail in Fort Saskatchewan, north east of Edmonton, to be closer to his Edmonton lawyers,” within three hours of the ruling, Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney spoke out, saying that a youth sentence was “not appropriate” for Khadr, and stating that the government will appeal to the Supreme Court.

Blaney wheeled out the government’s usual statement about Khadr’s US conviction — that Khadr “pleaded guilty to heinous crimes,” and that the government has “vigorously defended against any attempt to lessen his punishment for these crimes” — and added, “That is why the government of Canada will appeal this decision and seek a stay to ensure that he stays in federal prison — where he belongs.”

Dennis Edney explained why the appeals court ruling was important. “We are pleased to get Omar Khadr out of the hands of the Harper government,” he said, adding, “This is a long series of judgments against this intractable, hostile government,” which “would rather pander to politics than to apply the rule of law fairly to each and every Canadian citizen.”

Edney also pointed out, “This government chose to misinterpret the International Transfer of Offenders Act and place Omar in a maximum security prison, where he spent the first seven months in solitary confinement, instead of treating him as a youth as required under both Canadian and international law.”

On CBC News, Françoise Boivin of the New Democratic Party (NDP) said the government should respect the appeals court ruling, and “should think twice” about appealing to the Supreme Court. “The Conservative government is starting to cost us a lot of money in all their court challenges that they seem to lose one after the other,” she said.

That is certainly true, and I hope the Harper government is listening — not only because it loses every argument it tries to win in Omar Khadr’s case, and not only because it is wantonly spending taxpayers’ money doing so, but above all because its position is wrong, and fundamentally indefensible. It would be hard to conceive of a manner in which any other Canadian citizen has been treated as disdainfully by their government as Omar Khadr, and yet the lies and the racism of the government continue unabated, aided by unjustifiable initiatives like the one launched by Canada’s Welland Tribune in the wake of the appeals court decision — a poll asking readers, “Should Omar Khadr be allowed to transfer to a provincial jail?” as though, absurdly, the opinions of unqualified civilians regarding the law (and, specifically, the International Transfer of Offenders Act) are as valid as those of the judges who made the ruling.

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

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Published on July 10, 2014 11:55

July 9, 2014

The 9/11 Trial at Guantánamo: The Dark Farce Continues

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.

In two articles — this one and another to follow soon — I’ll be providing updates about the military commissions at Guantánamo, the system of trials that the Bush administration dragged from the US history books in November 2001 with the intention of trying, convicting and executing alleged terrorists without the safeguards provided in federal court trials, and without the normal prohibitions against the use of information derived through torture.

Notoriously, the first version of the commissions revived by the Bush administration collapsed in June 2006, when, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the Supreme Court ruled that the commission system lacked “the power to proceed because its structures and procedures violate both the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the four Geneva Conventions signed in 1949.”

Nevertheless, Congress subsequently revived the commissions, in the fall of 2006, and, although President Obama briefly suspended them when he took office in 2009, they were revived by Congress for a second time in the fall of 2009.

Despite this, just eight cases have been decided since the “war on terror” began — three under George W. Bush (David Hicks in March 2007, Salim Hamdan in August 2008 and Ali Hamza al-Bahlul in November 2008) and five under Barack Obama (Ibrahim al-Qosi in July 2010, Omar Khadr in October 2010, Noor Uthman Muhammed in February 2011, Majid Khan in February 2012 and Ahmed al-Darbi in February 2014). Of the eight, six involved plea deals, and what credibility the commissions had was shattered when the only two convictions that involved actual trials — those of Salim Hamdan and Ali Hamza al-Bahlul — were overturned on appeal in October 2012 and January 2013 on the basis that the war crimes for which they were convicted were not internationally recognized and had been invented by Congress. Further information about all these cases can be found in an article I put together in March, entitled, “The Full List of Prisoners Charged in the Military Commissions at Guantánamo.”

The government appealed in the case of Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, and a hearing took place last October, although no ruling has yet been taken by the court. However, the Hamdan and al-Bahlul rulings have already led to the government abandoning plans to proceed with any trials other than the ones currently taking place — for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks; for Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, accused of masterminding the attack on the USS Cole in 2000; and for Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, one of the last men to arrive at Guantánamo, in April 2007.

All of these men were held in CIA “black sites” before their transfer to Guantánamo, where, as I explained in my last update about the commissions in March, “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.”

In this article, I’ll provide updates on the 9/11 trial, and in a second article to follow I will look at developments in the case of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri and the arraignment of Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi.

Hearings generally take place every three months or so, and in 2013 defense lawyers in the 9/11 trial spent much of their time challenging a protective order, issued in December 2012 by the chief judge of the commissions, Col. James L. Pohl, accepting calls by prosecutors for material provided to the defense (through the process known as “discovery”) to be subjected to a protective order, because it “contains information that, if disseminated without authority, could pose a threat to public safety and national security and could implicate the privacy interests of the Accused and third parties.”

As I explained in October 2013:

[L]awyers for the prisoners argue that the protective order violates the UN Convention Against Torture, specifically through Judge Pohl’s acceptance, as Katherine Hawkins [a lawyer and researcher] put it, that “the defendants’ ‘observations and experiences’ of torture at CIA black sites are classified.” The men’s lawyers point out that the ban “violates the Convention Against Torture’s requirement that victims of torture have ‘a right to complain’ to authorities in the countries where they are tortured, and makes the commission into ‘a co-conspirator in hiding evidence of war crimes.’”

In December, at the last hearing of the year, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, one of the five alleged 9/11 co-conspirators, “was ejected twice from the courtroom for interruptions — in the first instance shouting, ‘This is torture! You have to stop the sleep deprivation and the noises,’” as I explained in an article in March. I added, “This led to questions about his mental competency, but these had not been addressed by January 31 this year, because he refused to talk to a mental health board whose members told the judge that they therefore didn’t know if he was fit to stand trial.” As a result, Judge Pohl was obliged to put off the next round of hearings, scheduled for February, and these did not take place until April, when bin al-Shibh’s competency was once more under scrutiny.

The strange case of the FBI investigation into the 9/11 defense team

However, bin al-Shibh’s mental state was almost immediately overshadowed by what appeared to be a fresh scandal, when, on April 14, defense lawyers “accused the FBI in open court of trying to turn a defense team security officer into a secret informant,” as the Miami Herald described it, prompting Judge Pohl to immediately call for a recess.

Jim Harrington, bin al-Shibh’s civilian defense attorney, said that two FBI agents had visited the home of his team’s Defense Security Officer, seeking information about who had provided media outlets with a statement produced by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed that had surfaced in January.

Defense Security Officers, who work for outside contractors, “have Top Secret security clearances,” as the Miami Herald put it, and are assigned to “guide team members, both lawyers and analysts, on what information should be blacked out in court filings — and what information can be released as unclassified.”

Jim Harrington noted that, when approached by the FBI, the Defense Security Officer — who, he said, had subsequently been suspended from the case — was made to “sign a non-disclosure agreement that appeared to draw him into a continuing informant relationship.”

In an emergency defense motion, lawyers stated, “Apparently as part of its litigation strategy,the government has created what appears to be a confidential informant relationship with a member of Mr. bin al Shibh’s defense team, and interrogated him about the activities of all defense teams. The implications of this intrusion into the defense camp are staggering. The most immediate implication, however, is that all defense teams have a potential conflict of interest between their loyalty to their clients and their interest in demonstrating their innocence to FBI investigators.”

On April 15, Judge Pohl, brushing aside the bin al-Shibh competency question by stating that he was “competent until somebody argued otherwise” (in the Miami Herald‘s words), “ordered everyone working for the 9/11 defense teams to notify their lead lawyer if US government agencies, including the FBI, had contacted them,” and “also sought a proposal from defense lawyers of what evidence he should gather, which people he should question.” When asked if he knew about the investigation, the chief prosecutor, Army Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, said, “No, we were not.”

Bizarrely, it transpired that the statement by KSM wasn’t even regarded as case evidence, and had been declared unclassified by the CIA, although an emergency prosecution filing at the end of February revealed that “prosecutors treated two copies as court evidence after defense lawyers handed them the document” in December.

On April 17, Brig. Gen. Martins announced that Justice Department lawyer Fernando Campoamor-Sánchez had been appointed as Special Trial Counsel, and was given until April 21 “to explain to the judge, in a ‘full factual submission,’ what he [had] been able to discover about what the FBI [was] doing.”

For his part, Judge Pohl acknowledged what appeared to be an FBI investigation. “Right now,” he said, “it appears from the state of the current record” that “there is some type of investigation by the FBI into Mr. Mohammad’s team.”

On April 21, Campoamor-Sánchez confirmed that the FBI was conducting an investigation that was related to the 9/11 trial, but was unrelated to the release of KSM’s statement. In a nine-page filing to the court, he wrote, as the Miami Herald described it, that the government “specifically kept Sept. 11 trial prosecutors in the dark” about what he described as a “preliminary investigation.”

The Herald added that the filing “does not make clear what the FBI is investigating.” Instead, Campoamor-Sánchez stated that he had given the judge “a second, classified document” in which he described “the nature of the actual FBI Preliminary Investigation being conducted.” He added that any wider disclosure would “jeopardize an ongoing FBI criminal investigation,” and explained in a footnote that the trigger for apreliminary investigation was “[a]ny ‘allegation or information’ indicative of possible criminal activity or threats to the national security.”

Campoamor-Sánchez asked Judge Pohl for an additional 30 days to find out more about the investigation, and the judge agreed, adjourned the proceedings until June. When the court reconvened on June 16, Campoamor-Sánchez confidently stated that “there is not any informant or mole in the defense camp,” adding that the FBI’s activity “created no conflict of interest because the agents weren’t investigating defense attorneys, only questioning their support staff.” He also stated that the defense lawyers “should trust in the prosecution argument supported by a sworn FBI affidavit that the investigation that kicked off the controversy by questioning defense team members was closed.”

The defense lawyers were not entirely reassured. “I do have a reasonable fear. I am trimming my sails. I am pulling my punches,” David Nevin, one of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s lawyers, told the judge. The lawyers explained that they had uncovered four separate episodes of the FBI questioning staff members, as part of two investigations which they were now being asked to believe were closed, even though they had only found out about them because the man questioned in April, Dante James, the classification specialist on the Bin al-Shibh team, had told them about it. The others, as the Miami Herald explained, were “a linguist on the team of the alleged mastermind, Khalid Sheik[h] Mohammed, in January 2013,” and, in November, “two former federal law enforcement officers working as civilian investigators” on the teams of Ramzi bin al-Shibh and Mustafa al-Hawsawi.

While the majority of the defense lawyers told Judge Pohl that uncovering the FBI investigation had created “suspicion and uncertainty in the 9/11 defense teams,” one lawyer, Walter Ruiz, said he had found no conflict of interest. Ruiz represents Mustafa al-Hawsawi, a Saudi captured with KSM in Pakistan in March 2003, who is accused of providing financial assistance and organizing travel arrangements for some of the 9/11 hijackers, and he explained that, although one of the two civilian investigators questioned by the FBI was his civilian investigator, Thomas Gilhool, “he had discussed what the FBI had done with both Gilhool and Hawsawi and concluded that, for his part, no conflict of interest exists.”

Furthermore, he and his client were seeking a separate trial because al-Hawsawi is “not interested in more delays.” Ruiz said that a separate trial would “let him more swiftly litigate several issues,” in particular the conditions at Camp 7, where the “high-value detainees” are held. He called it “pseudo isolation, which in long-term detention is sometimes considered torture.” He also criticized the lack of family contact and what he described as the inadequate provision of religious facilities, and called the manner in which the men have been held “tremendously embarrassing to our armed forces.”

What will be the impact of the Senate torture report on the 9/11 trial?

While the circumstances in which the FBI investigation was discovered cast another shadow on the credibility of the commissions, as well as providing another delay of many months in the seemingly interminable pre-trial hearings, it was not the only problem to surface in the last few months.

On April 2, James Connell, one of the lawyers for Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali (aka Ammar al-Baluchi), one of the five alleged 9/11 co-conspirators, was “trying to get a copy of the secret Senate report on CIA interrogations that has caused a bitter rift between the agency and Congress,” as the Miami Herald described it. Connell explained that “the report and related documents contain information about the torture of his client.” The 6,300-page report, commissioned by the Senate Committee on Intelligence, took four years to complete and was delivered to the committee in December 2012, but it has not yet been released, as all the parties involved — and particularly the CIA — argue about how much of it should remain classified.

Connell’s efforts have so far yielded no results, but on May 22 the Miami Herald reported that his interest in the torture report, and its repercussions for the 9/11 trial, were shared by Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the chair of the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

In a letter to President Obama, dated January 6, they wrote, “We write to urge that you direct all appropriate action to address the ongoing delay in the military commission trial of Khalid Shaykh Mohammad [sic] (KSM) and four other detainees being prosecuted at Guantánamo in connection with the 9/11 terrorist attacks.” They added, “Much of the delay is related to the continued classification of the information concerning the now defunct CIA Detention Interrogation Program.”

As will be discussed in detail in my forthcoming second article providing updates about the military commissions, on April 17 Judge Pohl ordered the CIA to provide details of the “black site” detention — “names, dates and places” — to Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri’s lawyers. The judge explained that the lawyers “are entitled to the information to prepare Nashiri’s defense.” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s lawyers have asked Judge Pohl to do the same in their client’s case, but progress is slow, as the CIA is still resisting Judge Pohl’s order in al-Nashiri’s case.

However, the lawyers’ concerns were echoed by Sens. Levin and Feinstein in their letter, in which they stated that it was urgent that the relevant information is declassified, because “the delay is further undermining the reputation of the military commissions with the American public and our friends and allies overseas.” They added, “The continued classification of information also interferes with our country’s long-delayed, but important efforts to publicly shine a light on the misguided CIA program you rightfully ended almost five years ago.”

The senators also said that if the administration did not resolve these issues, the 9/11 trial should be moved to a federal court — where, of course, it was supposed to take place, after an announcement by Attorney General Eric Holder in November 2009, until critics began a backlash and President Obama backed down.

In a letter dated February 10, White House Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler responded by stating that President Obama shares the senators’ commitment to “facilitat[e] the prosecution of those charged in connection with the 9/11″ attacks, but added that “declassification decisions, even with respect to historical legacy programs, are fact-based and must be made with the utmost sensitivity to our national security.”

Ruemmler also noted that the president and CIA director John Brennan “are committed to working with you and others on your respective committees to ensure that information regarding the RDI [rendition, detention and interrogation] program is declassified, consistent with our national security interests.”

Accurately, I believe, the Miami Herald described the Levin-Feinstein letter as “the latest turn in what’s erupted into an extraordinary behind-the-scenes battle between the CIA and its overseers in Congress over the Senate Intelligence Committee’s $40 million investigation into the interrogation program,” although the White House’s careful response showed only that the brakes are still on regarding the report’s eventual release.

And in the meantime, at Guantánamo, justice, in the cases of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the four other men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks, appears as elusive as ever.

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

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Published on July 09, 2014 12:32

July 6, 2014

The Rule of Law Oral History Project: How the Guantánamo Prisoners Have Been Failed by All Three Branches of the US Government

Two days ago I posted excerpts from an interview about Guantánamo and my work that I undertook as part of The Rule of Law Oral History Project, a five-year project run by the Columbia Center for Oral History at Columbia University Library in New York, which was completed at the end of last year.

In this follow-up article I’m posting further excerpts from my interview — with Anne McClintock, Simone de Beauvoir Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison — although, as in the previous article, I also encourage anyone who is interested in the story of Guantánamo and the “war on terror” — and the struggle against the death penalty in the US — to visit the website of The Rule of Law Oral History Project, and to check out all 43 interviews, with, to name but a few, retired Justice John Paul Stevens of the Supreme Court; A. Raymond Randolph, Senior Judge in the US Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit; Ricardo M. Urbina and James Robertson, retired Senior Judges in the US District Court for the District of Columbia; Lawrence B. Wilkerson, Former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell; Joseph P. Hoar, Former Commander-in-Chief, United States Central Command (CENTCOM); former military commission prosecutor V. Stuart Couch and former chief prosecutor Morris D. Davis; Brittain Mallow, Commander, Criminal Investigation Task Force, and Mark Fallon, Deputy Commander, Criminal Investigation Task Force. Also included are interviews with former prisoners, lawyers for the men, psychologists and a psychiatrist, journalists and other relevant individuals.

In this second excerpt from the interview, I explain how, at the time Anne and I were talking (in June 2012), the situation for the Guantánamo prisoners had reached a new low point, as the Supreme Court had just failed to take up any of the appeals submitted by seven of the men still held. These all related to the men’s habeas corpus petitions, and the shameful situation whereby, for ideological reasons, primarily related to fearmongering, a handful of appeals court judges, in the D.C. Circuit Court, had effectively ordered District Court judges to stop granting habeas corpus petitions submitted by the prisoners (after the prisoners secured 38 victories), by demanding that anything that purported to be evidence submitted by the government — however risible — be given the presumption of accuracy unless it could be specifically refuted.

For the Supreme Court decision, see my articles, “The Supreme Court Abandons the Guantánamo Prisoners” and “Meet the Seven Guantánamo Prisoners Whose Appeals Were Turned Down by the Supreme Court,” as well as my appearances on Democracy Now! and RT, and for the political maneuvering of the D.C. Circuit Court, see “As Judges Kill Off Habeas Corpus for the Guantánamo Prisoners, Will the Supreme Court Act?” and “Lawyer Laments the Death of Habeas Corpus for the Guantánamo Prisoners.”

With inaction for the president, and restrictions on the release of prisoners that were raised by cynical lawmakers, June 2012 represented the point at which it could be inarguably stated that the Guantánamo prisoners had been failed by all three branches of the US government. This was something that became abundantly clear just three months later, when Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, a Yemeni prisoner with mental health problems, who had been cleared for release under President Bush and President Obama, died at the prison, allegedly by committing suicide. For my analysis, see “Obama, the Courts and Congress Are All Responsible for the Latest Death at Guantánamo.”

The excerpt below comes from Day 2 of my three-day interview, and is from pages 43 to 59 of the transcript, which is available here. Please note that, in the passages below, I have added a few links that are particularly useful for readers wanting to know more.

Excerpt from The Rule of Law Oral History Project interview with Andy Worthington

Conducted by Anne McClintock

Q: I wonder if we could pick up some of the threads from yesterday. Perhaps we could start with last week on June 11 [2012]. It seems to me that something fairly momentous happened, a critical legal turning point for the prisoners, and I wondered if you could perhaps recap what happened and what that might mean for the prisoners.

Worthington: Yes. There have always been—not always. Initially, there was only one route out of Guantánamo, and that was diplomatic arrangements between the Bush administration and the home countries of the prisoners who were held. Now, from almost the beginning, in fact, from the beginning, from day one, a handful of lawyers who realized that something terribly wrong had taken place started to try to get habeas corpus rights for the Guantánamo prisoners. It took two and a half years for that process to lead to the Supreme Court ruling in Rasul v. Bush, in June 2004, that the prisoners did have habeas corpus rights.

Now what that did, hugely importantly—what that did was it opened the prison to visiting lawyers. It broke the spell of silence that had enshrouded Guantánamo for all that time, where, effectively, we found out afterwards, they were torturing people with impunity. And they stopped, at least in the sense of the torture program. They didn’t call it that, but that’s what it was. They stopped. As soon as they were going to be subjected to outside scrutiny, then they changed the way they behaved in that sense.

They fought back with the help of a compliant Congress, which twice passed legislation that included provisions designed to strip the prisoners of the habeas corpus rights that the Supreme Court had given them. So the Detainee Treatment Act in 2005 and the Military Commissions Act in 2006. It took until June 2008 for the Supreme Court to revisit its ruling and to rule—I think this is important—that the habeas-stripping provisions that Congress had passed in those two acts were illegal, were unconstitutional rather, and to insist that the prisoners had constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights.

Now that’s a huge ruling, but what they didn’t do, what the justices didn’t do, was stipulate exactly what the standards were to justify the ongoing detention of prisoners when they submitted their habeas corpus petitions to the District Court in Washington, D.C.

So the judges of the District Court got together. They decided what the standards were and they started reviewing the habeas corpus petitions of the men. Something over two dozen of those cases were won by the prisoners.

Q: And that was when, Andy?

Worthington: Actually, I think the figures are different than that. Thirty-eight cases? I can’t remember the exact numbers [Note: It was 38 cases]. A majority of the cases were won by the prisoners from October 2008 until the summer of 2010. It led to the release of over two-dozen prisoners, so the only people who left Guantánamo through any legal means were the ones who had their habeas corpus petitions granted and were released from Guantánamo. In the summer of 2010, in particular, the D.C. Circuit Court, so the court of appeals in Washington, the District of Columbia, started fighting back in earnest. Actually, in January 2010, they issued a ruling claiming that there should be no constraint on the president’s wartime powers, which pretty much everyone disagreed with. The alarming figure was Judge A. Raymond Randolph.

Now he’s a senior judge in the D.C. Circuit Court. He had approved every piece of legislation under Bush relating to Guantánamo that was subsequently overturned by the Supreme Court. But he and some of his fellow judges decided that the rules were too lax; that what the District Court judges were doing was releasing prisoners by granting their habeas corpus petitions. They decided they were doing that because they weren’t approaching the alleged evidence in the right way, so they imposed restrictions on the District Court’s ability to have any kind of objective analysis of the evidence. [A] number of rulings have been issued and have ended up, towards the end of 2011, with a ruling in which an intelligence report produced in the field—which pretty much everyone would say is going to be imprecise, needs to be something that is open to questioning as to its reliability—they basically said that it should be trusted; that all government evidence should be presumptively regarded as accurate, unless the prisoners can prove that it isn’t.

Q: And also, presumably, some of those could have been extracted under coercive conditions.

Worthington: Well, the problem isn’t just with—this isn’t so much to do with the government’s intelligence report, although the intelligence reports produced in the field would be based on interrogations shortly after capture, when it’s extremely unlikely that people weren’t being treated coercively. Also, it would be based on information that could have been extracted from the Afghans or the Pakistanis, who were holding these men before they were handed over to U.S. custody.

So yes, it’s extremely unreliable. But it’s not the major problem with the evidence. That’s part of it. The other main problem with the evidence is that the statements that the U.S. government relies on that were produced by the prisoners themselves, or by their fellow prisoners in Guantánamo or by other prisoners in other facilities, run by or on behalf of the United States, where people were also being interrogated—there are profound problems with that evidence, either because people were tortured or otherwise coerced; because people were bribed, in some cases with better living conditions; and, in some cases, mentally ill people were bribed or coerced.

Q: And in many cases implicating, so there was a kind of proliferation of the naming of names.

Worthington: Yes. I think the key to how people were coming up with this information is to bear in mind that there was what was called the “family album.” There were albums of photographs of prisoners, or of people who were at-large and suspects. There were always these photo albums and people were shown the photo albums. “Who is this man? You know this man. When did you last see this man? When did you last have dinner with this man? When were you last buying surface-to-air missiles from this man?” All of this is going on.

Q: During the interrogation process.

Worthington: Everywhere. There was a man who was held in the Jordanian prison, where the Jordanians were holding prisoners for the United States government and torturing them. He said every day that’s what it was. Every day was photos—”Who’s this? Who’s that? Who’s this?” People he didn’t know. You have to invent a story, unless you’re one of those people who doesn’t crack, in which case terrible things happen to you.

Q: Well, we know that [John S.] McCain [III], when he was being tortured, gave the names of the Green Bay Packers, the football team.

Worthington: Well, all of it is unreliable.

Q: Right. Right.

Worthington: So the decision by the Supreme Court not to accept appeals by seven Guantánamo prisoners—it’s the second year that they haven’t accepted any appeals—

Q: This was last week, you mean.

Worthington: Yes. This was last week.

Q: June 11, was it?

Worthington: It was the day before the fourth anniversary of the Boumediene [Boumediene v. Bush, 2008] ruling, when the Supreme Court gave the prisoners constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights, which have now been shut down by the District Court—by the Circuit Court, rather.

In this particular ruling about giving the presumption of accuracy to intelligence reports produced in the field, there was a dissenting judge, Judge David Tatel—if that’s how you pronounce his surname—who said, “I don’t see why on earth we should be presumptively regarding this kind of report as accurate. And if we go ahead with this, the end result will be that no prisoners will get their habeas corpus petitions granted.” Now that’s the dissenting judge in the D.C. Circuit Court, who, as far as I can see, did what the Supreme Court should have done in that case, at least in that case, if not in the other cases. The other cases involved prisoners who were trying to challenge the basis of their detention on various other issues. Some of those, I think, had a great weight to them. One of them is Faiz [Fayiz] al Kandari, one of the last two Kuwaitis, who was trying to get the Supreme Court to say that some limit must be set on the extent to which the government can rely on hearsay evidence. He is a prisoner who has barely uttered a word that incriminates himself in his ten years in custody, and the entire case against him is constructed on the statements of unreliable witnesses.

But they didn’t take up any of this. They didn’t take up any of it. What they’ve done—they’ve done what Judge Tatel said was happening. They have negated their own ruling. Four years ago, a differently composed court—a pre-Obama court, ironically—gave habeas corpus to the prisoners. The Circuit Court took it away and the Supreme Court has decided not to reinstate it.

Q: Do you think there’s a political climate that has motivated that or do you think these are personal decisions made by individual judges?

Worthington: Yes, I think there’s a political climate. If we look at the person who is no longer the driver of these rulings in so many ways, it’s Justice [John Paul] Stevens, who retired two years ago. Justice Stevens was ninety. Justice Stevens grew up through huge periods of upheaval, through the rise of fascism; through the Second World War; through the Cold War. His knowledge of history, his long knowledge of history and his determination to treat the law as something that I think you should constantly be checking to make sure that you’re not being swayed politically—I think that was his role. Obama has two appointees. They don’t have that kind of long historical view or that political objectivity, frankly. Then the disappointment is—so appointments made by Obama are defending the disgraceful national security state that was implemented by George W. Bush. And, of course, the conservative judges are going to back that. Where are the liberals?

Q: So you have judicial bankrupting of habeas corpus, but you have the executive bankrupting, as well. And Congress?

Worthington: Oh, yes. And Congress, as well. Yes. Obama, separate to his judicial appointments—I do think that’s extraordinary that, on certain issues, I would imagine that maybe on gender issues, or immigration issues, or certain traditional liberal issues, those two appointments, those two women, will be making liberal decisions, but not on national security. We’ve got the right wing national security state that was introduced by George W. Bush.

Obama issued the executive order on his second day in office, promising to close Guantánamo within the year, and then didn’t. When challenged, he has repeatedly capitulated, particularly on—his White House counsel, Greg [Gregory B.] Craig, had this plan to bring some of the Uighurs, the Chinese guys who couldn’t be safely repatriated but who were innocent men wrongly detained, who had won their habeas corpus petition, and had planned to bring two of these guys initially to live in the United States. That would have been a huge, huge development in puncturing the myth of Guantánamo and the dangerous terrorists held there. But once Representative [Peter T.] King got a hold of that story and threatened to cause a big fuss [and Rep. Frank Wolf "took to the floor of the House to accuse the Obama administration of wanting to let terrorists run free in American cities"], Obama capitulated.

Now at that stage, his excuse was that he was trying to preserve the need for consensus on his healthcare reforms. But he showed weakness. It was the first sign of weakness which led to his opponents realizing that he would crack under pressure.

So on the Yemeni issue, after the capture of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the underpants bomber—it does seem like, from what we can understand, this was the moment that he took this personally as a threat. But however much that affected his approach to aggressively pursuing terrorists, that that may have been the genesis of his wishing to preside personally over his “kill list” for the drone program, that’s got nothing to do with Guantánamo. What he capitulated on swiftly was criticism by mainly Republicans again, by members of his own party, that he must respond to the capture of a Nigerian man trying to blow up an airplane, who was apparently recruited in Yemen—that he must respond to that by refusing to release any Yemeni prisoners from Guantánamo. Which he did. Even though, at that point, twenty-nine of the prisoners in Guantánamo had been cleared for release by his own task force, and another thirty had been put into a category the task force called conditional detention, whereby they would be released if somebody—and no opinion was given as to what godlike figure would make this decision—but that if at some point if it was regarded that the situation, the security situation in Yemen had improved, these thirty would be released.

Q: Were these thirty Yemenis?

Worthington: Yes. The task force primarily decided that twenty-nine of these Yemenis should be released. Now, in fact, [six] Yemenis, [seven] Yemenis, in total, were released, before Abdulmutallab was captured. [Six] were released just days before and one was released a few months before that because he had won his habeas corpus petition, and the government decided not to appeal it. But the twenty-nine who should have been released haven’t been.

Q: Andy, you probably know better than anybody the context of the situations. When you say they should have been released—if you were to argue with somebody who didn’t know what was going on, how would you convince them that these were men who were not masterminds, who were not terrorists, should have been released?

Worthington: Well, first of all, I would say that the majority of people in Guantánamo were never associated with any kind of terrorist activity whatsoever, or even plotting any terrorist activity, or even of sitting down in a room and for five minutes even considering thinking about talking about the possibility of engaging in any terrorist activity. They’re not terrorists.

Q: That’s extraordinarily important. I want to come back to what I asked you, but just in terms of that, because I think it’s so important, is there a number that you can give me of men who, to some degree, approximated—somebody who had been engaged in some kinds of hostilities?

Worthington: Well, when 517 files were analyzed by researchers at the Seton Hall Law School in New Jersey, in 2006, so that’s two-thirds of the prisoners, they discovered that only eight percent were alleged to have been involved in any kind of activities.

Q: I think the administration even admitted that—that they conceded that that was the case.

Worthington: Well, I think the best analysis, really, is that officials spoke to the New York Times in 2004 and said that no more than a few dozen of these people ever had any involvement with anything. Larry Wilkerson told me, and he said this on a few occasions, when they brought the high-value detainees into Guantánamo in September 2006, they did that so that they could say that they actually had somebody dangerous in Guantánamo. Everybody knows that there was nobody above any kind of mid-level operative and a few Taliban leaders in Guantánamo before September 2006. The operatives who spoke to the New York Times said a few dozen maximum.

After that, ten prisoners were brought to Guantánamo from secret prisons who were not high-value detainees, but medium-value detainees. Now if we take the administration at its word, which is difficult to do, then we can add ten to this. Fourteen arrive in September 2006 from the CIA’s torture prisons, and two more who arrived after that are also regarded as high-value detainees. That’s twenty-six, twenty-four to fifty, maximum. Fifty maximum, out of 779, who were of any significance. The rest of the people at Guantánamo are innocent people seized by mistake or low-level Taliban foot soldiers. The privates, the people who—

Q: And, as we know, the Taliban had nothing to do with 9/11 anyway.

Just to round out the question on figures—at any given time, how many people have passed through Guantánamo, up from the very beginning to this current point?

Worthington: Seven-hundred-seventy-nine. What we don’t know is how many other people were held, if any were held, in the CIA secret prison within Guantánamo called Strawberry Fields, which existed in 2003, from September-October 2003 to March 2004.

Q: I want to come back to that question about the CIA, the internal CIA dark site. But just to interrupt—you were talking about the Yemeni prisoners, and I was asking you, of those, would you say that those are in the same category of people who had nothing to do with 9/11?

Worthington: Absolutely, they had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. No. The problem with the way that people have been categorized is that, first of all, you have to say that hardly any of these people were allegedly involved in terrorism. So what you’re looking at is people who are completely innocent. Obviously, supporters of Guantánamo don’t regard innocence as being an even conceivable explanation. But anybody who isn’t that rigidly fixed understands that, yes, this was so incompetent—money was involved, money was changing hands, bounties were being paid, intelligence was so poor—

Q: Were bounties involved in Yemen? I know they were, very significantly, in Pakistan and Afghanistan, but were bounties—

Worthington: Nobody was seized in Yemen. No. I mean, a few Yemenis may have been held in secret prisons, but not in Guantánamo.

There are, however, many hundreds of innocent people who were held, and there still are some. It’s just that the government claims that it’s got a case, so, like Faiz [Fayiz] al Kandari, that I was talking about, the Kuwaiti—all the evidence comes from unreliable witnesses, all of it.

Q: And haven’t a number of men been cleared for release, even under Bush, and have been there for what, eight years? Even though they’ve been cleared already?

Worthington: Well, there are about sixty-five prisoners who had been cleared for release, approved for transfer, when Obama took over. Most of those people are still there.

The problem is related to the problem of rounding people up who are innocent, or soldiers, or terror suspects, and claiming that they’re all one category of human being who has no rights— enemy combatants. So the basis of understanding the threat level of people at Guantánamo is based on what the military perceives their threat to be, and not just what threat they think they pose, but what intelligence value they have. Guantánamo is primarily set up as an intelligence-harvesting center, an illegal, offshore, intelligence-harvesting center, whereby these people would produce evidence that fitted this notion, this intelligence notion, of a mosaic, so that potentially insignificant pieces of information, when all put together, might add up to a bigger picture. The logic behind that, essentially, actually, was that if the Bush administration could have rounded up hundreds of thousands, or millions of Muslim men, and imprisoned them for the rest of their lives, and kept this mosaic building up, they would have been happy. It’s such an insane basis for what their notion of intelligence gathering was. It was so much the opposite of the precise intelligence gathered from somebody that they know has detailed information, and how do they unlock that? A completely crazy setup.

So the Yemenis who were held, for the most part, were low-level foot soldiers, and not necessarily—although some of them had been—not necessarily people who had traveled to Afghanistan for humanitarian aid, for example.

So there is an issue there. Like I’ve said, if there is an issue there that involves them being soldiers, then they should have been held as soldiers. Then we could all be asking how long does the war in which they were detained last? Because you can only legitimately hold soldiers, enemy prisoners of war, until the end of hostilities.

When did that end? Some people would say it ended in 2002; some people would say it ended in 2004 when Hamid Karzai became the president. The United States government will presumably argue that it will end when hell freezes over because this war on terror is infinite. But, you know, I’d like to [litigate] that one. I’d like to see people [litigate] that one because we could find out whether they could possibly sustain that argument. But we’re not doing that.

So the basis on which these people are cleared for release—that’s not the wording that’s used; the wording that’s used is “approved for transfer,” and the basis on which is that they are no longer regarded as a threat to the United States or of having sufficient intelligence value to justify their ongoing detention—what it really is is a recognition that the system whereby a whole bunch of people were thrown into a legal black hole for the rest of their lives wasn’t actually justifiable, and that seeing as it was based around a threat, or the end, or the intelligence value that these people posed, then there was a process of letting them go.

Q: Do you think, to some degree, the whole extraordinarily labyrinthine legal process of keeping them there—do you think that, to some degree, it might be fair to say that, in a way, Guantánamo needs to exist for the reasons that you gave when you said that some of the high-value detainees were brought in order to indicate that there are some bad guys? That if we were to close Guantánamo, does it perhaps remove a kind of geography of legitimacy? That this is the place where men in orange suits can be seen to visibly embody a threat which legitimizes the global war?

Worthington: I think the men were brought to Guantánamo from the secret prisons because of the ruling in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. The ruling in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld [in June 2006] was the one that said, “Look, by the way, did you remember that when you hold prisoners they have to be held with minimum standards of decency, and that everybody is covered by Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibits ill treatment and torture?” Three months after that ruling, less than three months after that ruling, George Bush has a press conference in which he says, “You know, I always told you that we didn’t have any secret prisons. Well, now I’m telling you that we did. But we just closed them and we’ve moved all these people to Guantánamo.”

So it was associated with that. It was about the humane treatment of prisoners. The game was up.

Q: So it’s kind of a performance of legitimacy, in a sense; that we’re playing by the rules.

Worthington: Well, the thing is, as well—I almost have to say, frankly, that everything that the Bush administration embarked on, embarked on with no thought whatsoever about how it was going to end. So setting up a global network of torture sites appeared to make sense to them at the beginning. Then, after a while, what on earth use is it? You can’t keep torturing somebody. In intelligence, they’ll tell you twenty-four hours. They were torturing people for years.

Q: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a hundred and how many times was he waterboarded?

Worthington: Yes, well, you know. He was held for four and a half years in secret prisons before they moved him into Guantánamo, where he remains completely isolated. None of it really made sense. So I think they were ready to give up on their big project of holding people for years and torturing them because that’s idiotic.

Q: It’s irrational at best.

You mentioned earlier the secret site, Strawberry Fields, inside Guantánamo. Could you say something about that?

Worthington: Well, that story was rumored for many years, and it finally, I think, was confirmed by the Associated Press in the summer of 2010, I believe. The AP ran a number of really good reports, actually, about the movement of prisoners between the sites that existed in—so after Thailand, which was used for three prisoners at the very beginning, then people were moved to Poland, and then there was a network that involved Poland and Romania and Lithuania and Morocco. Now when Poland closed in September 2003, or October, some prisoners were then flown to the secret prison within Guantánamo that was identified as Strawberry Fields—what a terrible use of that song. Then in March of 2004, when the writing was on the wall that the Supreme Court were going to grant the prisoners’ habeas corpus rights in Rasul, then they were moved out.

Q: Where to?

Worthington: Either to Romania or Lithuania or Morocco. There seemed to be quite a lot of shuttling about.

Q: So these are ghost prisoners that have simply appeared and disappeared, but left a kind of ghostly trace.

Worthington: Well, I think, on record, in a memo that was unclassified in April 2009, [Steven G.] Bradbury, who was in the OLC—was he in the OLC? No, I can’t remember his exact role now. Yes, he was in the OLC, the Office of Legal Counsel, in the Justice Department. He spoke about the high-value detainee program and said that there were ninety-four people all together in the program, and that twenty-eight of them were subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques. Those twenty-eight, I am presuming, are the ones who were moved around this network of the secret prisons. Though the other people were almost certainly held in Afghanistan, possibly in Iraq—

Q: In Bagram and Kandahar?

Worthington: In Bagram, not in Kandahar. That closed.

Q: And Ghazni? And Bagram?

Worthington: Well, nobody knows quite how many secret facilities there were, but there were a number of them.

Q: So in a sense, conceivably, if the number 779 is what we know passed through, conceivably there were other—we don’t really know the full total of people who were passing through Guantánamo.

Worthington: No. But I don’t think many were held in that facility within Guantánamo. But no actual evidence has surfaced to say there were X-number of individuals, and they included Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, whoever. We don’t know.

Q: I want to ask one back question pertaining to last week, and then I would like to talk about the high-value detainee program.

Just in brief, then, do you think habeas corpus is extinct at the moment, given what happened last week for the prisoners who remain in Guantánamo?

Worthington: Yes.

Q: So what’s the next step for them? Is there another step for them?

Worthington: Well, the next step is that those of us who care have to persuade the United States government that its present course of action is unacceptable and that history will not look favorably on people who, for reasons of political expediency, decided to maintain the most monstrous legal aberration of the twenty-first century.

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

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Published on July 06, 2014 13:18

July 4, 2014

Andy Worthington’s Interview about Guantánamo and Torture for Columbia University’s Rule of Law Oral History Project

Read my full interview here.

On Independence Day in the US, I’d like to direct readers to a wonderful resource, The Rule of Law Oral History Project, undertaken by the Columbia Center for Oral History at Columbia University Library in New York. The project’s website explains that The Rule of Law Oral History Project was “initiated in 2008 to explore and document the state of human and civil rights in the post-9/11 world. In its first year, the project conducted a series of interviews with attorneys in order to document legal challenges against capital punishment in the United States. Recognizing important intersections between litigation challenging the administration of capital punishment and the legal architecture of post-9/11 detention policies and practices, the Rule of Law Oral History Project expanded in 2010 to study the statutory and constitutional challenges of the use of the detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay.”

I was interviewed for this project two years ago by Anne McClintock, a delightful interviewer who is Simone de Beauvoir Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and who was very generous in support of my work, as this exchange shows:

Q (Anne): [D]o you know Adam Hochschild?

Worthington: No.

Q: A wonderful writer. He wrote a fabulous book called King Leopold’s Ghost. He’s a historian; he’s a journalist at [University of California] Berkeley. But he talks about the great forgettings of history, and I think U.S. history is a history that’s based on cultural amnesia. That’s why I think your work is so extraordinarily important because you’re taking this forgotten history, the great forgettings, and you’re insisting in recalling it to memory.

I then received a transcript to review, and, some time later — after reviewing the transcript in fits and starts (one time while waiting in a long queue to enter the US at JFK Airport in New York) — completed it and returned it, for it to be included in the final project, which features 43 interviews.

As well as myself, there are interviews with — to name some of the 43 — retired Justice John Paul Stevens of the Supreme Court; A. Raymond Randolph, Senior Judge in the US Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit; Ricardo M. Urbina and James Robertson, retired Senior Judges in the US District Court for the District of Columbia; Lawrence B. Wilkerson, Former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell; Joseph P. Hoar, Former Commander-in-Chief, United States Central Command (CENTCOM); former military commission prosecutor V. Stuart Couch and former chief prosecutor Morris D. Davis; Brittain Mallow, Commander, Criminal Investigation Task Force, and Mark Fallon, Deputy Commander, Criminal Investigation Task Force; former Guantánamo prisoners Moazzam Begg and Feroz Ali Abassi; Guantánamo lawyers Yvonne R. Bradley, Joshua L. Dratel, Shane Kadidal, Ramzi Kassem, Zachary P. Katznelson, Pardiss Kebriaei, Robert C. Kirsch, Clive Stafford Smith, Charles D. Swift, P. Sabin Willett and Thomas B. Wilner; Michael Ratner, President Emeritus, Center for Constitutional Rights; psychologists Ghislaine Boulanger, Steven Reisner and Stephen Soldz; psychiatrist Stephen N. Xenakis; Karen J. Greenberg, Director, Center on National Security, Fordham Law School; journalists Scott Horton and Jane Mayer; Jameel Jaffer, Deputy Legal Director, ACLU; Jeremy Varon of Witness Against Torture; British human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce; and former UK control order detainee Cerie Bullivant.

Below I’m posting an excerpt from the three-day interview that Anne conducted with me. This is from the first day, and in it we discuss, primarily, how I undertook my research into Guantánamo, beginning with the names and nationalities of the prisoners being released for the first time following a lawsuit in 2006, along with 8,000 pages of documents relating to them — the unclassified summaries of evidence and transcripts of the tribunals and review boards for those prisoners who had taken part in them — and how I then analyzed all this information and shaped it into a coherent narrative. We also discussed the case of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, whose lies, produced under torture, helped to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and we also discussed the use of torture, and why it was used. The section I’m posting here comes from pages 9 to 24 of the transcript.

In an article to follow, I’ll post another excerpt, from the second day of our three-day interview, in which we spoke about how, under President Obama, the Guantánamo prisoners have been failed by all three branches of the US government — the Obama administration, Congress, and the courts; and, specifically, the D.C. Circuit Court and the Supreme Court.

Please note that, in the transcript below, I have added a few links that are particularly useful for readers wanting to know more.

Excerpt from The Rule of Law Oral History Project interview with Andy Worthington

Conducted by Anne McClintock

Worthington: For the first time [after the release of the documents relating to Guantánamo in spring 2006] we knew who the prisoners were—their names, their nationalities, eventually their dates of birth, their places of birth, and the allegations against them, and the transcripts of the tribunals, and the review boards in which they’d taken part or not taken part. If they didn’t take part, it was just allegations. If they did take part, then that was the most direct opportunity to hear people. Some of those people really came to life through that. I could hear them. These are translations, often—

Q: So their voices, as people, were coming through.

Worthington: —but even so, I would get them as people. Yes. They really came through. Some of them were just amazing. Some of those people really came to life. But yes, that’s the background. Where were we? You were asking me about how I’d approached the stories.

Q: Well, no, you’re really answering it. Well, one was how—were there any specific challenges for you in turning these fragments, these echoes, into—?

Worthington: Well, to establish a context. I spent a long time studying—this was the great thing about the internet because all the newspaper stories could be found online. A decade before, I would have had to have been up in some library—

Q: Through the microfiche.

Worthington: So it was extraordinary. So I was able to establish that a whole bunch of prisoners, for example, were part of the Qala-i-Jangi [Janghi] massacre in November 2001. It was a fortress in northern Afghanistan. Several hundred prisoners had been rounded up and taken there. Some of them had fought back against their captors and there had then been a massacre. Eighty-six of these men had survived in a basement, and they’d been bombed, they’d been electrocuted, they’d been flooded, and eighty-six of them came out alive.

Q: And John Walker Lindh was part of that.

Worthington: John Walker Lindh was one—the American Taliban as he will be forever known. The American scapegoat.

That was just one example. I then realized that there was another very large group of men. I would say somewhere between 200 and 250 had been caught in a week-long period in December 2001 crossing from Afghanistan into Pakistan, who were all, as a result, alleged members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, fleeing from Tora Bora, which clearly wasn’t necessarily true because there was a huge exodus of people [including numerous civilians]. Other people I discovered were captured in various contexts in Afghanistan. Another group of people were captured in other contexts in Pakistan, around 100 or 120 in various house raids in Pakistan—

Q: Including Moazzam Begg?

Worthington: Including Moazzam. Those house raids had taken place mostly in January to July 2002. Then there was a separate group of prisoners who had been caught in all kinds of different locations around the world. All of those people had passed through various secret prisons run by the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency], or on behalf of the United States government in other countries, where torture was rife, and had ended up in Guantánamo.

Q: Could you say something about the bounties?

Worthington: Well what emerged, primarily, on the bounties was that certainly a lot of the prisoners had spoken about how they saw money being exchanged. There was also some research—I can’t actually remember who undertook the research into the PSYOPS [Psychological Operations] leaflets. The psychological operations branch of the military had been regularly dropping leaflets across Afghanistan and then Pakistan. Most of those were aimed at getting people to turn in bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri, or Mullah Omar, and offering $25 million for that. But they were leaflets that offered villagers money for life if they turned in Al Qaeda or Taliban suspects. It seems pretty accepted—I think—that the average amount of money that was being paid out was $5,000.

Q: That’s right. Five to ten sometimes. Which is an enormous amount of money.

Worthington: Well, it’s equivalent to about $125,000 in Pakistan and [half] a million in Afghanistan.

Q: So there was basically a large case of people being paid to kidnap, or hand over, or name somebody, and they would end up in Guantánamo, or Bagram, or Kandahar, or an Egyptian—

Worthington: Yes. Well, certainly people were being rounded up on that basis in Afghanistan and Pakistan. A lot of the people who were—roughly a quarter to a third of the people who were caught fleeing from Afghanistan to Pakistan—well, who knows? The U.S. military decided that they were all fleeing from Tora Bora and then set about trying to prove that. They were turned in for bounties. The Pakistani villagers that caught a lot of these people got the bounty anyway. But the context in which they were captured would lead to the presumption by the U.S. military that these people had come from a military zone. But the fact is that that wasn’t true either. But in those cases it wasn’t that arbitrarily somebody was sold for a bounty. There was a context in which you could infer that quite easily.

But in some ways that’s almost just the start of the confusion. Essentially, what the U.S. then had was a load of people about whom [they] knew nothing, apart from the fact that it presumed that they had been involved in a military context or had been told that by the people who had sold them. That’s pretty much all they had. And notice in that, that I don’t mention the word “terrorism,” because the word “terrorism” barely figures in this. The root problem with the war on terror— there are two main problems with it. One is that the United States government decided it was going to hold prisoners without any rights whatsoever as human beings. In the second case, it decided that there was essentially no distinction between terrorists and people engaged in a military conflict halfway around the world.

Q: Well, I think the word “terrorist,” especially in latter-day reporting by journalists, TV pundits, and so on—the word “terrorist” has come to have what I’ve noticed is a strange function. People will say, “The ‘terrorists’ at Guantánamo,” as if to be called a terrorist is already to impose guilt.

Worthington: Yes, yes.

Q: The question, then, is not the guilt, because the guilt is assumed in the word “terrorism.” You are assumed to be guilty already. The crime is already implicit in the very name that these prisoners are labeled with. Then the question, in many of these people’s minds, is simply what punishment is commensurate with that crime. The guilt is assumed. It’s what I call the logic of the witch.

Worthington: Absolutely.

Q: It’s a latter-day version of what happened to witches.

Worthington: It is, exactly.

Q: But I wanted to follow up a question, then. It seems to me that one of the questions is—it seems a very simple question, but it’s a very, in my view, terrible question—is if, as you and then following you other people have demonstrated, that so many of the prisoners were humanitarian aid workers and religious workers and Taliban foot soldiers, and these people caught up fleeing, and so on. You used a wonderful phrase once—guilt by nationality; that they were assumed to be guilty because they were either in the wrong place or guilt by place, or guilt by nationality or identity. But then it seems to me that—one of the most chilling aspects of Guantánamo is that from the very earliest days, as early as 2002, [Lawrence B. Wilkerson, Colin Powell's Chief of Staff], in an extraordinary admission, acknowledged that the Bush administration and certainly the people at Guantánamo—I think [General Geoffrey D.] Miller said, “You’re sending me ‘Mickey Mouse’ prisoners.” [Wilkerson] said they knew these people were ordinary people—

Worthington: Well, some people did. The problem is, who knew and who didn’t? Miller never said that. Miller just did what he was told. It was [General Michael E.] Dunlavey, who was the commander at the time—

Q: Dunlavey. You’re exactly right.

Worthington: —who said, “Stop sending me so many Mickey Mouse detainees.” The problem is—let’s go right to the very top, almost—well, depending. I think the very top is Dick [Richard B.] Cheney rather than George W. Bush. But George had to sign everything. Dick Cheney has persistently maintained that everybody who is held at Guantánamo is dangerous people.

Q: “The worst of the worst.”

Worthington: He’s done that ever since the population at Guantánamo was at its height. At any one time I think Guantánamo held about 660 prisoners. So you could follow a trail of him always saying the same thing. It doesn’t matter how many people are released; they’re all “the worst of the worst.” Does he believe that? I don’t know what he believes. The problem is that I don’t know how much is cynicism and how much is a genuine belief. Because people who don’t want to hear the truth just shut their ears to it when they’re in positions of power, and may not know. Maybe a better example is the judges of the D.C. Circuit Court [U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit]. So Judge A. Raymond Randolph [interviewed here], Judge Laurence [H.] Silberman, Judge Janice Rogers Brown, the three most prominent, very, very conservative judges, who apparently believe that the existential threat posed by the people at Guantánamo is such that the normal rules of law don’t apply, and that it is their job to prevent these dangerous liberals in the District Court [U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia]—even though many of them are not dangerous liberals at all; right wing judges appointed by George W. Bush, for example—that they must stop anyone from being released from Guantánamo through habeas corpus. I think they believe that.

So they bought the lie—there are terrorists at Guantánamo.

Q: Certainly most Americans have bought that lie. But if you start reading between the lines of people who are doing interrogations, people in the camps, you begin to get a sense that they know they’re not getting information. One of the early questions I wanted to ask you is that it seems to me—and I’d like to hear what you think about it—that it seems to me that in trying to understand why torture these people—this question of why were they tortured in the beginning and why have they continued to be tortured for so long and up to this day—it seems that, in the beginning, it wasn’t really to extract information to prevent another 9/11. But in the case of [Ibn al-Shaykh] al-Libi, I wonder if you could perhaps talk about that case, which it seems to me is one of those small events that had epochal effects, which Colin [L.] Powell took to Congress, and took to the Security Council, and with it took the U.S. to war. Could you tell me—I’ve been trying to find out a little bit more about al-Libi’s case. Could you talk about that case?

Worthington: Well, yes. Al-Libi was the “emir” of the Al Khaldan training camp, which is an independent training camp. He was captured in December 2001. He was interrogated briefly by the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] and was then taken off them, bundled onto a plane, apparently put in a very small box, and was told, “While you’re in the air, we’re going to find your mother and fuck her,” which is what I think one of the CIA guys said to him. He was then sent to Egypt. He was then tortured. I believe he was waterboarded and, as a result, said that two Al Qaeda operatives had been meeting with Saddam Hussein to obtain chemical and biological weapons. He recanted that claim, but apparently nobody told Colin Powell.

Q: And I have read—I don’t remember where—but I’ve read that some of the CIA, maybe in Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side—

Worthington: It might well have been.

Q: It might have been in the The Guantánamo Effect, but some of the CIA were very uneasy about it, and they had said to Powell, “This is dubious. This is dodgy information that you’re getting.” But aside from that, Powell then took it, nonetheless.

Worthington: Yes.

Q: And he has subsequently said that this was the most embarrassing decision.

Worthington: Yes. My feeling is that if he didn’t know, he ought to have known that he shouldn’t have been saying that. But the same thing happened in the UK. The BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation] almost got shut down because a journalist rightly accused the British government of sexing up the intelligence dossier about Iraq, which is exactly what happened. But, apparently, he wasn’t allowed to say that because apparently that wasn’t true. And they didn’t. But they did. Nobody had a reason to invade Iraq, so they had to invent it.

Q: They had to invent one. Well, then, that really is my question. In some sense, wasn’t the early torture less anything to do with stopping another 9/11 than literally inventing an enemy, inventing an enemy that would provide a [unclear], for which it did not invent a rationale for going to war in Iraq?

Worthington: What Larry [Lawrence B.] Wilkerson told me when I interviewed him was that he said that in 2009 he had heard in that period—so in 2009, maybe from 2008—in his discussions with people, that it was as early as December 2001 that they knew there wasn’t a second attack that was going to come. So, to that extent, the intelligence was shifting towards justifying the invasion of Iraq.

Now that’s huge.

Q: That’s huge.

Worthington: See, what some people do is they then follow that up and say that the whole of Guantánamo is some kind of illusion. I don’t think that’s the case. Now, again, at what level are people scared, and at what level are they pretending to be scared, and it’s all cynical. I mean deeply, deeply cynical.

Now I would say, actually, through analyzing the files that were released by WikiLeaks, which are very detailed intelligence assessments of the prisoners in Guantánamo, attempting to rate their dangerousness, the risks they pose, attempting to rate the value of their intelligence, and also noting their behavior in Guantánamo, that this wasn’t purely cynical; that they were engaged in an effort to establish that the people that they held were of some significance; that clearly what they did as part of that process was that, from the beginning, they realized that they did have Mickey Mouse detainees, and if they could, within that process, establish that somebody didn’t really know anything, and didn’t really pose a threat, then they would release them.

I don’t think all of that was cynical. I think that that was believed. I would be surprised if we were able to sit down with some of the senior officials in the Bush administration and say, “But surely you must have realized that almost none of these people had anything on anything,” but they would just not believe that. And they wouldn’t be saying that cynically. They would be thinking, “What would be the dumbest approach to the terrorists in Guantánamo, in the United States, in what passes for some of the discourse?” It would be, “Well, these are bad guys.” Otherwise, what the hell were they doing, these ferocious, dangerous, ideologically warped Muslims, walking around Afghanistan with guns? What were they doing if that wasn’t what we said it was?

I think there are various things going on. I actually think that the line that involved torturing people to obtain false intelligence to justify an illegal war—I have mentioned a few times, it seems to me, that that would be treason in some way; that that is committing a huge crime as somebody in a very high position in the United States government. I think that is the case. But then, you know, authorizing, arranging for people to be tortured, when that is a crime in the United States, is also a crime.

Q: Absolutely. It’s a crime within the U.S., and international law.

Worthington: Well, the United States doesn’t care about international law, but domestically, it is.

Q: Are there also, in Guantánamo, different levels for reasons for the abuse—that there might have been reasons to torture people to get information and so on? But then once people have been there for years, it seems as if torture takes on another dynamic; that there are ways in which torture may be used, or abuse may be used, in order for the guards to impose their will, to keep order. I think, certainly in Abu Ghraib, and I’d like us to talk maybe more, broaden us, to talk about more than Guantánamo.

Worthington: What happened in Guantánamo is that they introduced the torture techniques. There’s an array of torture techniques—prolonged isolation, the frequent flier program, a horrible sleep deprivation program, whereby people were moved from cell to cell every few hours so they couldn’t sleep for days, weeks, even months, I believe. Short-shackling in painful positions; nudity; extreme use of heat and cold; the use of loud music and noise; preying on phobias. The paper trail is there for how, in the summer of 2002, in the autumn of 2002, interrogators sought to use these techniques on a handful—we know that Mohammed al-Qahtani—but there were a few other—

Q: Abu Zubaydah?

Worthington: Well, no. Abu Zubaydah wasn’t in Guantánamo at the time. So it was in Guantánamo. There were a handful of people that they wanted to use this on, and al-Qahtani is the one we specifically know about. Rumsfeld kind of signed off on most of that. So what the CIA had, which was a variation on that, was then replicated at Guantánamo.

Now according to all the reports, the one I’ve drawn on for years is that somebody who was there told the New York Times, off the record in 2004, that it was one in six of the prisoners that this was applied to. Recently I came across somebody suggesting that it was much more than that.

So, you know, it was pretty standard operating procedure for about two years, at Guantánamo, was to put people through hell and then interrogate them.

Q: To soften them up.

Worthington: Yes, essentially—part of the softening up. “People aren’t going to talk to us unless we abuse them, unless we torture them”—exactly the opposite of what experts in interrogation would tell you. Exactly the opposite. Where the FBI guys who are on the record say, “If I could get the president of the United States and the head of the CIA and all these people to stand up one day and say, ‘We absolutely adhere to what we have been told by skilled interrogators in the FBI, that is how we’re going to behave,’ we’d be in a much better place.” Because everything that Dan Coleman and Jack Cloonan have said about, “What you think they’re doing, abusing people like this, is going to get them to talk to you? Are you insane?” It’s about rapport-building. It’s about you being clever and finding a way.

Q: Isn’t that, in a sense, a strange question? Why, then, did they do that?

Worthington: Well, I think they did that because of vengeance.

Q: I agree with you. I think so. I mean, that’s what I have felt—

Worthington: —and that’s what’s still being sold in the United States is a spirit of vengeance.

Q: I agree with you. Yes.

Worthington: And if you want a longer history of that, then it’s something tapping into a homicidal streak in the American psyche. It’s a very uncomfortable thing, but it’s all connected. When these things happen, we’re looking for that point at which within the internment of Japanese Americans, and America will say, “Oh, my god, what did we do?” It may not happen this time. We may be headed for permanent barbarism. The justification is, “How dare they do that to us? We’re the best.” It is.

Q: Thank you for saying that. I think that’s really how I’ve come to see it. In fact, I don’t know if you’ve read Fear Up Harsh, by Tony Lagouranis, who was an interrogator, torturer, and he’s got an extraordinary paragraph—I’ll send it to you; I wrote a piece about it—in which he said when we started out torturing it was intelligence gathering. We realized we were getting nothing, and he said that the terrible, the scary thing, was that it started to change into something else, and we began to torture simply to show our power and to say to them, “You must look into the face of American power. You did this to us,” knowing that these people were not terrorists, knowing that they were not responsible.

Worthington: Well, that’s why you don’t cross the line. That’s why you put up those barriers, to prevent you from becoming barbaric. We worked hard to achieve that, because that’s exactly what he discovered; that once you open up those gates—

Q: —you go into a dark labyrinth.

Worthington: Then you’re torturing people for fun. I’m sorry. You are.

Q: For vengeance. Yes. And to impose your will. Right. Right.

Worthington: And how pointless is that?

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

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Published on July 04, 2014 13:04

July 3, 2014

Video: Todd Pierce Discusses the Lawlessness of Guantánamo’s Military Commissions on “London Real”

[image error]I’ve been meaning for some time to post a video of my friend Todd Pierce, a retired major in the US Army JAG (Judge Advocate General) Corps, being interviewed on the “London Real” show run by US ex-pat — and former banker — Brian Rose.

Todd retired from the US military in November 2012, but he had previously been involved in representing two prisoners charged in the military commissions at Guantánamo, revived by the Bush administration in November 2001, ruled illegal by the Supreme Court in June 2006, revived again by Congress in the fall of 2006, and revived again under President Obama in 2009.

Todd was part of the legal team for Ibrahim al-Qosi, from Sudan, who accepted a plea deal and was freed in July 2012, and Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, who refused all representation, and was given a life sentence in November 2008 after a disgraceful one-sided trial. Ironically, al-Bahlul is one of two prisoners (along with Salim Hamdan) who shook the tattered credibility of the commissions in October 2012 and January 2013, when the appeals court in Washington D.C. threw out the convictions against both men on the basis that the alleged war crimes for which they had been convicted were not war crimes at all, and had been invented by Congress. In al-Bahlul’s case, the government has appealed, but a ruling has not yet been delivered, and he remains held.

Todd and I have been friends for some time. He has introduced me to several defense attorneys for the Guantánamo prisoners, and we have spent time together in New York, Washington D.C. and London. In January, I took part in a couple of events with him during my US tour to mark the 12th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, and videos of one of those events, in New York, are available here.

Todd recorded the show in February, while he was visiting the UK as part of the presentation to Chelsea Manning (via his old school friend Aaron Kirkhouse) of the Sam Adams Associates Award for Integrity in Intelligence at the Oxford Union (see my post here and my photos here), but it was not made available until May. I’m posting it now because it seems appropriate — on the eve of the Independence Day in the US — to listen to Todd talk about the lawlessness of the military commission system set up at Guantánamo to try alleged terrorist suspects seized in the Bush administration’s “war on terror.”

The interview starts about nine minutes in, and I hope you have time to watch it, as Todd is extremely knowledgable about the history of the military commissions, having researched and reviewed the complete records of the military commissions held during the Civil War, which are stored at the National Archives in Washington D.C., during his time as a defense attorney in the military commissions.

One of the themes Todd uncovered involved the Bush administration’s belief in the “unitary executive theory” — the belief, as Todd described it in 2010, that “if the president did something, it could not be illegal — the dictator’s prerogative.” The “unitary executive theory” was particularly beloved by Vice President Dick Cheney and his advisors, including David Addington, John Yoo and Robert Delahunty, but as Todd explains, it’s important for people to know that “these ideas were actually legal theories expounded by Carl Schmitt, the Nazi ‘Crown Jurist’ of the 1930s.” For mar eon this see, “US Military Attorney Compares Rationale for “War on Terror” to Nazi Ideology,” Todd’s article, with my own introduction, which I cross-posted on my site in January 2012.

Todd has since developed a detailed explanation of how, in response to challenges to the legal rationale for the commissions, the authorities have ended up in the ludicrous position of trying to justify the commissions by referring back to the Civil War and the use of military commissions in a domestic context — in particular, how they were used to punish domestic dissent or treason. As Todd explained it to me, this has led to a situation where the commissions are justified on the basis of Civil War rulings involving Americans being unpatriotic — a situation that cannot, of course, be extended to non-Americans held at Guantánamo, who never owed any kind of allegiance to the US in the first place.

There is much more in the show — including Todd’s own detailed history of Guantánamo, discussions of Edward Snowden, the NSA and President Obama’s drone program. I do hope you have time to watch the show, and to share it if you find it useful.

This was how Brian described the show:

Todd Pierce knows a lot about the Guantánamo Detention Camp. As a Major with the US Army Judge Advocate General Corp his job was to defend three of the detainees at Guantánamo Bay and he considers indefinite detention a form of torture.

Todd is also a military historian and believes that George W. Bush’s famous quote “You are either with us or against us” made the USA a de facto Authoritarian government. He claims that Bush and Cheney turned to Civil War precedents to create military tribunals for trying alleged “terrorists.”

Furthermore he believes that Edward Snowden’s revelations of the unrestricted access to information by those who govern us severely restricts the way a fair society can function. He has unique insights on the problems of the NSA, unmanned drone strike policy, and the arcane law know as the Espionage Act of 1917.

Join me in welcoming Todd Pierce for a critically important episode of London Real.

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

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Published on July 03, 2014 15:12

July 1, 2014

For Ramadan, Please Write to the Prisoners in Guantánamo, Forgotten Again

Every six months, I ask people to write to the prisoners in Guantánamo, to let them — and the US authorities — know that they have not been forgotten.

The letter-writing campaign was started four years ago by two Facebook friends, Shahrina J. Ahmed and Mahfuja Bint Ammu, and it has been repeated every six months (see here, here, here, here, here and here). This latest campaign also coincides with the holy month of Ramadan, which began on June 29.

Guantánamo remains a legal, moral and ethical abomination, a place where the men still held — 149 in total — are, for the most part, indefinitely imprisoned without charge or trial, even though over half of them — 75 men — were cleared for release in January 2010 by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force established by President Obama when he took office in 2009, and three others were cleared for release in recent months by a new review process, the Periodic Review Boards.

In 2010, the task force recommended who to release, who to prosecute, and who to continue holding without charge or trial, on the extremely dubious basis that they were “too dangerous to release,” even though insufficient evidence existed to put them on trial. What this means, of course, is that the supposed evidence is no such thing, and consists largely of extremely unreliable statements made either by the prisoners themselves, or their fellow prisoners, in circumstances that were not conducive to telling the truth — involving the use of torture, for example, or other forms of abuse, and in some cases, bribery, when prisoners told lies to secure favorable treatment.

The Guantánamo Review Task Force’s report was published in January 2010, but it was not until June 2013 that a document explaining which prisoners had been placed into which categories was released through FOIA legislation. I analyzed that document here, and noted which prisoners had been placed in which categories in the prisoner list on the CloseGuantánamo.org website. Then, in February 2014, my friend and colleague Jason Leopold published a prisoner list, which he had just obtained from the Pentagon through a FOIA request, and which had not previously been made public, identifying 71 of the 166 prisoners held in April 2013 who had been designated as eligible for Periodic Review Boards. I analyzed that document here, and also added the information to the prisoner list on the CloseGuantánamo.org website.

These 71 men consisted of 46 men designated for ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial, and 25 others designated for prosecution, until two appeals court cases severely dented the viability of trials in the military commissions system at Guantánamo, when judges dismissed the convictions against two prisoners on the basis that the war crimes for which they has been tried had actually been invented by Congress and were not legally recognized.

In the list below, I have divided the remaining 149 prisoners into those cleared for release (78), those listed as being eligible for Periodic Review Boards (61) and those charged or tried in the military commissions system (10). Please note that I have kept the spelling used by the US authorities in the “Final Dispositions” of the Guantánamo Review Task Force.

Last May, after the prisoners, in despair at ever being released or being treated with justice, embarked on a prison-wide hunger strike that drew international criticism for President Obama’s failure to close the prison as he promised, the president made a new promise, in a major speech on national security issues, to resume releasing prisoners.

In the previous three years, the release of prisoners had slowed to a trickle because of opposition by Congress that the president was unwilling to spend political capital overcoming, even though he had the means to do so. The president also promised to appoint two envoys, in the Pentagon and the State Department, to deal with the release of prisoners and to work towards the closure of the prison, and, with support from important figures like Sen. Carl Levin, the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Congress was also persuaded to ease its restrictions on the release of prisoners in December.

As a result of all of the above, twelve prisoners were released between August last year and March this year, and five more — all with leadership positions within the Taliban — were released in Qatar at the end of May in exchange for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the sole US prisoner of war in Afghanistan.

In his speech last May, President Obama also dropped his ban on releasing any cleared Yemeni prisoners, which he imposed after a Nigerian man, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who was recruited in Yemen, had tried and failed to blow up a plane bound for the US on Christmas Day 2009 with a bomb in his underwear.

However, despite this, no Yemenis have yet been freed, even though they make up the majority of the prisoners cleared for release, and this failure — based on the US establishment’s fears regarding the security situation in Yemen — needs to be addressed as soon as possible.

Writing to the prisoners

If you are an Arabic speaker, or speak any other languages spoken by the prisoners besides English, feel free to write in those languages. Do please note that any messages that can be construed as political should be avoided, as they may lead to the letters not making it past the Pentagon’s censors, but be aware that your messages may not get through anyway — although please don’t let that put you off.

When writing to the prisoners please ensure you include their full name and ISN (internment serial number) below (these are the numbers before their names, i.e. Shaker Aamer is ISN 239)

Please address all letters to:

Detainee Name

Detainee ISN

U.S. Naval Station

Guantánamo Bay

Washington, D.C. 20355

United States of America

Please also include a return address on the envelope.

The 78 prisoners cleared for release

Below are the names of the 78 prisoners in Guantánamo — out of the remaining 149 — who have been cleared for release. The phrase used by the task force to describe the recommendations for 55 of these men was “Transfer to a country outside the United States that will implement appropriate security measures.” Their identities were first revealed in September 2012. See below for the 30 other Yemenis recommended for “conditional detention,” and also for the three men recommended for release this year by Periodic Review Boards.

The 20 non-Yemeni prisoners cleared for release

ISN 038 Ridah Bin Saleh Al-Yazidi (Tunisia)

ISN 168 Adel Al-Hakeemy (Tunisia)

ISN 174 Hasham Bin Ali Omar Sliti (Tunisia)

ISN 189 Salem Abdu Salam Ghereby (Libya)

ISN 197 Younis Abdurrahman Chekkouri (Morocco)

ISN 239 Shaker Aamer (UK-Saudi Arabia)

ISN 257 Imar Hamzayavich Abdulayev (Tajikistan)

ISN 309 Mjuayn Al-Din Jamal Al-Din Abd Al-Fadhil Abd Al-Sattar (UAE)

ISN 326 Ahmed Adnan Ahjam (Syria)

ISN 327 Ali Hussein Muhammed Shaban (Syria)

ISN 329 Abd Al-Hadi Omar Mahmoud Faraj (Syria)

ISN 502 Abdul Bin Mohammed Abis Ourgy (Tunisia)

ISN 684 Mohammed Tahanmatan (Palestine)

ISN 722 Jihad Deyab (Syria)

ISN 757 Ahmed Abdel Aziz (Mauritania)

ISN 894 Abdullah Bin Ali Al-Lufti (Tunisia)

ISN 899 Shawali Khan (Afghanistan)

ISN 928 Khi Ali Gul (Afghanistan)

ISN 934 Abdul Ghani (Afghanistan)

ISN 1103 Mohammed Zahir (Afghanistan)

The 25 Yemeni prisoners cleared for release

ISN 034 Al-Khadr Abdallah Muhammad Al-Yafi (Yemen)

ISN 035 Idris Ahmad Abd Al-Qadir Idris (Yemen)

ISN 152 Asim Thahit Abdullah Al-Khalaqi (Yemen)

ISN 153 Fayiz Ahmad Yahia Suleiman (Yemen)

ISN 163 Khalid Abd Al-Jabbar Muhammad Uthman Al-Qadasi (Yemen)

ISN 170 Sharaf Ahmad Muhammad Mas’ud (Yemen)

ISN 224 Abd Al-Rahman Abdullah Ali Shabati (Yemen)

ISN 249 Muhammed Abdullah Al-Hamiri (Yemen)

ISN 254 Muhammad Ali Husayn Khanayna (Yemen)

ISN 255 Said Muhammad Salih Hatim (Yemen)

ISN 259 Fadhel Hussein Saleh Hentif (Yemen)

ISN 511 Sulaiman Awath Silaiman Bin Agell Al-Nahdi (Yemen)

ISN 553 Abdul Khaled Al-Baydani (Yemen)

ISN 554 Fahmi Salem Said Al-Asani (Yemen)

ISN 564 Jalal Salam Awad Awad (Yemen)

ISN 566 Mansour Mohamed Mutaya Ali (Yemen)

ISN 570 Sabri Muhammad Ibrahim Al-Qurashi (Yemen)

ISN 572 Salah Mohammad Salih Al-Dhabi (Yemen)

ISN 575 Saa’d Nasser Moqbil Al-Azani (Yemen)

ISN 680 Emad Abdallah Hassan (Yemen)

ISN 686 Abdel Ghaib Ahmad Hakim (Yemen)

ISN 689 Mohammed Ahmed Salam (Yemen)

ISN 690 Abdul Al-Qader Ahmed Hassain (Yemen)

ISN 691 Muhammad Ali Salem Al-Zarnuki (Yemen)

ISN 1015 Husayn Salim Muhammad Matari Yafai (Yemen)

The 30 Yemeni prisoners cleared for release but designated for “conditional detention”

These men were cleared for release by the task force, although the task force members conjured up a new category for them, “conditional detention,” which it described as being “based on the current security environment in that country.” The task force added, “They are not approved for repatriation to Yemen at this time, but may be transferred to third countries, or repatriated to Yemen in the future if the current moratorium on transfers to Yemen is lifted and other security conditions are met.”

ISN 026 Fahed Abdullah Ahmad Ghazi (Yemen)

ISN 030 Ahmed Umar Abdullah Al-Hikimi (Yemen)

ISN 033 Mohammed Al-Adahi (Yemen)

ISN 040 Abdel Qadir Al-Mudafari (Yemen)

ISN 043 Samir Naji Al-Hasan Moqbil (Yemen)

ISN 088 Adham Mohamed Ali Awad (Yemen)

ISN 091 Abdel Al-Saleh (Yemen)

ISN 115 Abdul Rahman Mohammed Saleh (Yemen)

ISN 117 Mukhtar Anaje (Yemen)

ISN 165 Adil Said Haj Ubayd (Yemen)

ISN 167 Ali Yahya Mahdi (Yemen)

ISN 171 Abu Bakr Ibn Ali Muhammad Al-Ahdal (Yemen)

ISN 178 Tariq Ali Abdullah Ba Odah (Yemen)

ISN 202 Mahmoud Omar Muhammad Bin Atef (Yemen)

ISN 223 Abd Al-Rahman Sulayman (Yemen)

ISN 233 Abd Al-Razaq Muhammed Salih (Yemen)

ISN 240 Abdallah Yahya Yusif Al-Shibli (Yemen)

ISN 251 Muhammad Said Salim Bin Salman (Yemen)

ISN 321 Ahmed Yaslam Said Kuman (Yemen)

ISN 440 Muhammad Ali Abdallah Muhammad Bwazir (Yemen)

ISN 461 Abd Al-Rahman Al-Qyati (Yemen)

ISN 498 Mohammed Ahmen Said Haider (Yemen)

ISN 506 Mohammed Khalid Salih Al-Dhuby (Yemen)

ISN 509 Mohammed Nasir Yahi Khussrof (Yemen)

ISN 549 Umar Said Salim Al-Dini (Yemen)

ISN 550 Walid Said bin Said Zaid (Yemen)

ISN 578 Abdul Al-Aziz Abduh Abdullah Ali Al-Suwaydi (Yemen)

ISN 688 Fahmi Abdullah Ahmed Al-Tawlaqi (Yemen)

ISN 728 Abdul Muhammad Nassir Al-Muhajari (Yemen)

ISN 893 Tawfiq Nasir Awad Al-Bihani (Yemen)

The three Yemeni prisoners cleared for release by Periodic Review Boards

ISN 031 Mahmud Abd Al-Aziz Al Mujahid (Yemen)

ISN 045 Ali Ahmad Al-Rahizi (Yemen)

ISN 128 Ghaleb Nassar Al-Bihani (Yemen)

The 61 prisoners eligible for Periodic Review Boards

Of the 61 prisoners notified that they were eligible for Periodic Review Boards in April 2013, the 38 listed below had been recommended for continued imprisonment without charge or trial in January 2010 by President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force. 26 of these 38 were recommended for “Continued detention pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force (2001), as informed by principles of the laws of war.”

The 26 prisoners recommended in January 2010 for continued detention (without possible transfer to imprisonment in the US), but determined to be eligible for a Periodic Review Board in April 2013

ISN 028 Moath Hamza Ahmed Al-Alwi (Yemen)

ISN 037 Abdel Malik Ahmed Abdel Wahab Al-Rahabi (Yemen)

ISN 041 Majid Mahmud Abdu Ahmed (Yemen)

ISN 042 Abd al Rahman Shalbi Isa Uwaydah (Saudi Arabia)

ISN 044 Muhammed Rajab Sadiq Abu Ghanim (Yemen)

ISN 131 Salem Ahmad Hadi Bin Kanad (Yemen)

ISN 195 Mohammed Abd al Rahman Al-Shumrant [Shumrani] (Saudi Arabia)

ISN 232 Fawzi Khalid Abdullah Fahad Al-Odah (Kuwait)

ISN 242 Khalid Ahmed Qasim (Yemen)

ISN 244 Abdul Latif Nasir (Morocco)

ISN 324 Mashur Abdullah Muqbil Ahmed Al-Sabri (Yemen)

ISN 434 Mustafa Abd al-Qawi Abd Al-Aziz Al-Shamiri (Yemen)

ISN 441 Abdul Rahman Ahmed (Yemen)

ISN 508 Salman Yahya Hassan Mohammad Rabei’i (Yemen)

ISN 552 Faez Mohammed Ahmed Al-Kandari (Kuwait)

ISN 695 Omar Khalif Mohammed Abu Baker Mahjour Umar (Libya)

ISN 708 Ismael Ali Faraj Ali Bakush (Libya)

ISN 713 Mohammed Al-Zahrani (Saudi Arabia)

ISN 836 Ayub Murshid Ali Salih (Yemen)

ISN 837 Bashir Nasir Ali Al-Marwalah (Yemen)

ISN 838 Shawqi Awad Balzuhair (Yemen)

ISN 839 Musab Omar Ali Al-Mudwani (Yemen)

ISN 840 Hail Aziz Ahmed Al-Maythali (Yemen)

ISN 841 Said Salih Said Nashir (Yemen)

ISN 1045 Mohammed Kamin (Afghanistan)

ISN 10025 Mohammed Abdul Malik Bajabu (Kenya)

Note: 037 and 131 had their ongoing imprisonment approved by Periodic Review Boards in 2014.

In addition, the 12 men below were recommended for “Continued detention pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force (2001), as informed by principles of the laws of war, subject to further review by the Principals prior to the detainee’s transfer to a detention facility in the United States.” This is a reference to the Obama administration’s plans to bring prisoners to a facility on the US mainland, so that Guantánamo could be closed. These plans were blocked by Congress, but it is unclear why the task force only designated these 12 men for possible transfer to the US because, if the 26 others were to continue being held at Guantánamo, it would have been impossible to close the prison. In April 2013, they were determined to be eligible for a Periodic Review Board.

The 12 prisoners recommended in January 2010 for continued detention (with possible transfer to imprisonment in the US), but determined to be eligible for a Periodic Review Board in April 2013

ISN 027 Uthman Abd Al-Rahim Muhammad Uthman (Yemen)

ISN 029 Mohammed Al-Ansi (Yemen)

ISN 235 Saeed Ahmed Mohammed Abdullah Sarem Jarabh (Yemen)

ISN 522 Yassim Qasim Mohammed Ismail Qasim (Yemen)

ISN 560 Haji Wali Muhammed (Afghanistan)

ISN 576 Zahar Omar Hamis bin Hamdoun (Yemen)

ISN 975 Karim Bostan (Afghanistan)

ISN 1017 Omar Mohammed Ali Al-Rammah (Yemen)

ISN 1119 Ahmid Al-Razak (Afghanistan)

ISN 1463 Abd al-Salam Al-Hilah (Yemen)

ISN 10023 Guleed Hassan Ahmed (Somalia)

ISN 10029 Muhammad Rahim (Afghanistan)

The task force originally recommended 36 prisoners for prosecution. Three accepted plea deals in their military commissions at Guantánamo, and one other, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, was transferred to the US for a federal court trial (before Congress banned the transfer of prisoners to the US mainland for any reason, even trials), at which he received a life sentence. Of the remaining 32, 23 were determined to be eligible for a Periodic Review Board in April 2013, after two of the only convictions secured in the military commissions were overturned by appeals court judges.

The 23 prisoners recommended for prosecution but not charged, who were determined to be eligible for a Periodic Review Board in April 2013

ISN 063 Mohamed Mani Ahmad Al-Kahtani [Al-Qahtani] (Saudi Arabia)

ISN 535 Tariq Mahmoud Ahmed Al-Sawah (Egypt)

ISN 569 Suhayl Abdul Anam Al-Sharabi (Yemen)

ISN 682 Abdullah Al-Sharbi (Saudi Arabia)

ISN 685 Said bin Brahim bin Umran Bakush (Algeria) aka Abdelrazak Ali

ISN 694 Sufyian Barhoumi (Algeria)

ISN 696 Jabran Al-Qahtani (Saudi Arabia)

ISN 702 Ravil Mingazov (Russia)

ISN 753 Abdul Sahir [Zahir] (Afghanistan)

ISN 760 Mohamedou Ould Slahi (Mauritania)

ISN 762 Obaidullah (Afghanistan)

ISN 1094 Saifullah Paracha (Pakistan)

ISN 1453 Sanad Al-Kazimi (Yemen)

ISN 1456 Hassan Bin Attash (Saudi Arabia)

ISN 1457 Sharqawi Abdu Ali Al-Hajj (Yemen)

ISN 1460 Abdul Rabbani (Pakistan)

ISN 1461 Mohammed Rabbani (Pakistan)

ISN 10016 Zayn Al-Ibidin Muhammed Husayn (Palestine) aka Abu Zubaydah

ISN 10017 Mustafa Faraj Muhammed Masud Al-Jadid Al-Usaybi (Libya)

ISN 10019 Encep Nurjaman (Indonesia) aka Hambali

ISN 10021 Mohd Farik bin Amin (Malaysia)

ISN 10022 Bashir bin Lap (Malaysia)

ISN 3148 Haroon al-Afghani (Afghanistan)

The 10 prisoners charged or tried

The seven prisoners currently facing charges

ISN 10011 Mustafa Ahmad Al-Hawsawi (Saudi Arabia)

ISN 10013 Ramzi Bin Al-Shibh (Yemen)

ISN 10014 Walid Mohammed Bin Attash (Yemen)

ISN 10015 Mohammed Al-Nashiri (Saudi Arabia)

ISN 10018 Ali Abd Al-Aziz Ali (Pakistan)

ISN 10024 Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (Kuwait)

ISN 10026 Nashwan Abd Al-Razzaq Abd Al-Baqi (Hadi) (Iraq)

The two prisoners already convicted via plea deal

ISN 768 Ahmed Al-Darbi (Saudi Arabia)

ISN 10020 Majid Khan (Pakistan)

One other prisoner convicted under President Bush

Ali Hamza al-Bahlul was not included in the task force’s deliberations, as he had been tried and convicted in a one-sided trial by military commission in October 2008, at which he refused to mount a defense. His conviction was dismissed by an appeals court in January 2013, although the government has appealed.

ISN 039 Ali Hamza Al-Bahlul (Yemen)

Note: For further information on the prisoners, see my six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list (Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five and Part Six).

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

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Published on July 01, 2014 12:46

June 30, 2014

London’s Insane Housing Bubble – and the Sickening Greed that is Strangling the Capital

Everywhere I look in London, monstrous new housing developments are rearing up — unaffordable to most working people, and largely bought up by foreign investors. While some take up residence, others leave their investments empty or join the frenzy of home-grown landlords in the buy-to-let market, fleecing an ever-increasing percentage of London’s workforce, who simply cannot afford to buy a property and have no choice but to cough up whatever outrageous amount they are asked to pay by landlords who have been unregulated since the days of Margaret Thatcher, the great liberator of unfettered greed.

This is the new London, in which those involved in new housing developments act as pimps for rich foreigners and for Britain’s own wealthiest property owners, and struggling British workers are preyed on by their fellow citizens, in a market driven by the greedy sense of entitlement that motivates far too many landlords, and a housing bubble kept inflated by the government and the Bank of England, whose refusal to raise interest rates is the primary driver of an economy in which profiteering on housing is seen, by far too many people, as their only viable investment.

However, the situation is now so dire that last week a YouGov poll commissioned by the Evening Standard — normally nothing more than a front for the mortgage industry — revealed that “[h]alf of Londoners want house prices to fall.”

A third of respondents said they wanted property prices to go down “a lot,” while another 18% wanted them to decrease “a little.” Just one in six people expressed a hope that prices would continue to rise. As the Standard noted, with house prices rising at almost 20% a year, there have, since May, been “signs of a slowdown,” with Londoners “refusing,” or, more aptly, “unable to pay ever more astronomical sums.”

Breaking down the figures, it transpired that those aged 25 to 39 were most concerned, with 56% of this age group “wanting property prices to fall.” Of the over-60s, 38% backed lower house prices, while 21 percent wanted prices to rise further.

The differences in the responses of the various age groups was unsurprising, of course, as the over-60s are “far more likely to be owner-occupiers,” as the Standard put it, while the 25-39 year olds are those lumbered with the tag “Generation Rent” by complacent media outlets. I was appalled when that phrase was first coined, as it was indicative of an indifference towards inequality that had even contaminated established journalists, who once upon a time would have been up in arms that the government and the Bank of England, with the collusion of a servile media, was making younger people into the victims of a rigged housing market that favours those who are older and richer.

Responding to the poll for the Evening Standard, Paula Higgins, the chief executive of the HomeOwners Alliance, a lobby group that “champions the interests of Britain’s homeowners and aspiring homeowners,” said, “There has been a fundamental, historic shift in attitudes that I don’t think the Government is aware of yet.”

She added, in a comment that is all too rare in the media, “People who own properties may have made money out of them but they now realise their children and grandchildren won’t have the same opportunities unless the Government stops this boom and bust property cycle.”

In the Guardian, Dave Hill, in his housing blog on June 24, also looked at London’s housing problems, responding to a survey, by Ipsos MORI for the Chartered Institute of Housing, which “found that 36% of the Londoners asked endure ‘a great deal’ or ‘a fair amount’ of stress over their housing costs.”

The questions were asked to both mortgage holders and those renting, and as Hill pointed out, those who were concerned also “fear that high housing costs will force them to move from the area where they live.”

This, he added, is not surprising, because the 2011 census “revealed that over a quarter of London households were renting privately, a rise of nearly ten per cent compared with ten years earlier,” and that this increasing number of people “are likely to give at least half their monthly earnings to their landlords, according to the latest figures on this from Shelter.” In fact, Shelter’s research revealed that “up to 59% of a typical London family’s income is spent on rents,” and “[p]rivate rents ‘eat up’ more than 50% of a family’s monthly earnings in 23 out of the capital’s 33 boroughs.”

“Meanwhile,”Hill added, “anyone on a half-normal sort of income who’s managed to become a first-time buyer in the capital in the past couple of years will probably be in hock up to the hilt.”

Hill also noted that, although “[r]ents are much lower in the social rented sector, which in 2011 still accounted for 24% of Greater London’s 3.39 million dwellings — down just a small amount from 25.7% ten years earlier” — that sector too has its own problems; primarily, overcrowding.

As he pointed out, an analysis of English Housing Survey statistics conducted by Shelter in 2011 “found that 43% of London children living in social rented dwellings” were living in “overcrowded” housing conditions. In London as a whole the predicament was little better, with 24% of children — 391,000 individuals — enduring overcrowding, “adversely affecting their privacy, health and education.” This, shockingly, was an 18 per cent rise since 2008, and it is clear that, in the three years since the census and this report, the situation has only continued to deteriorate.

The day after Hill’s column was published, Shelter issued another report, this one exposing how the current housing boom means that, as the Guardian described it, “[f]ewer than two in every 10 homes for sale in England are affordable for working families on average wages,” and in some areas “would-be buyers are priced out completely, even if they can raise a sizeable deposit.”

In London, Shelter noted that there were 14 local authority areas “where not a single two-bedroom or larger property was affordable to a typical family, and in 13 there were no one-bedroom homes within reach of the average first-time buyer.” The charity also found that “in all 32 of the capital’s boroughs fewer than 10% of homes were affordable to couples with children,” and that, for single buyers, “this figure extended to the entire south-east and south-west” of England.

The Independent extracted an even more shocking figure from the report, establishing that “there are only 86 affordable properties for local families with children in the whole of London,” and, based on the report, the BBC published a table of affordable properties here.

According to Campbell Robb, the chief executive of Shelter, the solution needed is to help “small local builders to find the finance they need to get building, and investing in a new generation of part-rent, part-buy homes,” but I don’t agree. What I believe we need is a full-blown programme of new, genuinely affordable social housing — not the “affordable” figure chosen by Boris Johnson, which is set at 80% of market rents — as happened with council housing in the 1930s, and from the 1950s to the 1980s until Margaret Thatcher took an axe to it.

Under Thatcher, “right-to-buy” was a supposedly democratising programme of selling off council properties, which, as the Daily Mirror reported in March 2013, has led to a situation in which “a third of ex-council homes sold in the 1980s under Margaret Thatcher [are] now owned by private landlords,” and in one London borough “almost half of ex-council properties are now sub-let to tenants.” For good measure, the Mirror also reported that Charles Gow, the multi-millionaire son of Ian Gow, Thatcher’s Housing Minister “during the peak years of right-to-buy,” is a buy-to-let landlord who, with his wife, owns “at least 40 ex-council flats on one South London estate.”

Personally, I’d like to vote for a government that sets a massive social housebuilding programme as a priority, and that works with the banking sector to secure low-interest loans to finance it, and to provide rents set at around £50 per week per person — and if you think that’s a pipe dream, consider this wonderful self-built house, which cost just £21,000 to build (and see here for the plans).

Dave Hill has a few more practical suggestions — such as “penalising … empty dwellings, land banks and seven-figure mansions with higher taxes” and “cutting the benefit bill by switching local housing allowance outlay into investing in properly affordable homes instead,” as well as “stopping giving property developers the run of the place.”

These are all good suggestions, but, as he also notes, it will take political vision to implement any major step forward, and that seems sorely lacking. The Ipsos MORI survey found that, when “asked which political party has the best housing policies for London, half the respondents said ‘none’ or ‘don’t know’ and 44% said they didn’t think politicians were that bothered about housing anyway.”

And why would politicians act anyway? As Hill also noted, “London owner-occupiers might now be (just about) a minority — a fraction fewer than 50% compared with just under 60% in 2001 — but those many who, like me, are being regularly wooed by estate agents bearing clients prepared to buy their house from them for five or ten times what they paid for it, have grounds for feeling very content indeed.” As he added, “While one third of Londoners may have big housing expense worries, it seems that two thirds don’t,” and “[a]n awful lot of poor people don’t vote.”

Last week’s Evening Standard survey suggests a slightly different picture, as the 36 percent who are worried is replaced by 51 percent who want the cost of housing to fall, a number that almost exactly matches the majority of us — albeit small, but a majority nonetheless — who are not owner-occupiers.

Perhaps what we really need is for Londoners in rented accommodation, whether in social housing or privately rented accommodation, to capitalise on the fact that we are now a majority, and to develop a serious lobbying presence. Many people who rent may indeed be poor and may not vote, but enough of us do vote to be a threat to the existing order that favours only existing owner-occupiers. As affordability becomes ever harder for more and more people to cope with, I think we have a powerful case to make for a social housing revolution that will create a more equal and just society.

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

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Published on June 30, 2014 12:36

June 28, 2014

Guantánamo Lawyers Urge Obama Administration to Approve Release of Six Men to Uruguay

Lawyers for six prisoners at Guantánamo — four Syrians, a Palestinian and a Tunisian, who have long been cleared for release from the prison, but are unable to return home — sent a letter to the Obama administration on Thursday calling for urgent action regarding their clients. I’m posting the full text of the letter below.

It’s now over three months since President José Mujica of Uruguay announced that he had been approached by the Obama administration regarding the resettlement of five men — later expanded to six — and was willing to offer new homes to them. I wrote about the story here, where I also noted that one of the men is Abu Wa’el Dhiab, a Syrian man, consigned to a wheelchair as a result of his suffering at Guantánamo. Dhiab is on a hunger strike and being force-fed, and has, in recent months, mounted a prominent legal challenge to his treatment, securing access for his lawyers to videotapes showing his force-feeding and violent cell extractions. The other Syrians are Abdelhadi Faraj (aka Abdulhadi Faraj), Ali Hussein al-Shaaban and Ahmed Adnan Ahjam, the Palestinian is Mohammed Taha Mattan (aka Mohammed Tahamuttan), and the Tunisian, whose identity is revealed for the first time, is Adel El-Ouerghi (aka Abdul Ourgy (ISN 502)).

All six men were cleared for release from the prison in January 2010 by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama appointed shortly after taking office in 2009, and in their letter the lawyers provided detailed explanations of how the deal has progressed since first being mooted late last year and how it appeared to be confirmed months ago, before it had first been mentioned publicly. “In February,” they wrote, “some or us were informed that, while it was not possible to ascertain precisely when transfer would occur, it was ‘a matter of weeks, not months.’”

The lawyers also asked “if there is any reasonable explanation for the prolonged delay to implement the transfer that was agreed upon months ago between the United States and Uruguay” and urged immediate action. “These men should not be used as scapegoats in the current bout of US partisan politics,” they stated, with reference to the manufactured hysteria that followed the recent exchange of five Taliban prisoners for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the sole US prisoner of war in Afghanistan, adding, “Time is not on our side.”

The Uruguay deal, as the New York Times noted, “has been awaiting the signature of Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel since March.” On May 28, Hagel stated that he would “make decisions fairly soon” about President Mujica’s offer, as Reuters described it.

Hagel “said he was taking his time in reaching a decision” about the six men, “as well as other detainees, in order to be sure that releasing them was the responsible thing to do.” En route to Alaska prior to starting a tour of Asia and Europe, Hagel said, “I’ll be making some decisions on those specific individuals here fairly soon,” He added that the US Congress “had assigned him the responsibility of notifying it of a decision to release detainees,” as Reuters put it.

“My name goes on that document. That’s a big responsibility,” he said, adding, “I have a system that I have developed, put in place, to look at every element, first of all complying with the law, risks, mitigation of risk. Does it hit the thresholds of the legalities required? Can I ensure compliance with all those requirements? There is a risk in everything … I suspect I will never get a 100-percent deal.”

As the New York Times noted, “the legal, policy and political difficulties” surrounding Guantánamo “escalated after the deal last month that secured the release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl in exchange for five former Taliban officials, sent to Qatar,” which “angered lawmakers in part because the administration bypassed a law requiring 30 days’ notice before transferring Guantánamo detainees” — even though the administration made a good case for not notifying Congress, as I explained here.

Last week, in response, the Republican-dominated House of Representatives added an amendment to next year’s National Defense Authorization Act to bar the transfer of any prisoners out of Guantánamo for any reason. The amendment passed by 230 votes to 184, with lawmakers mostly split along party lines, but, as the New York Times noted, it “faces an uncertain future in the Senate,” where Democrats currently have a majority, and where, last year, strenuous moves were successfully made by senior Democrats — including Sen. Carl Levin, the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee — to ease the restrictions on releasing prisoners that had been in place for the previous two years.

The New York Times explained that, as a result of the cynical backlash to the recent prisoner exchange, they were told by officials “familiar with internal deliberations” that “Hagel and his advisers have been reluctant to proceed with transfers of even low-level prisoners.”

Their reluctance — at odds with comments made by an administration official to the Guardian three weeks ago — “would strand at least 11 low-level detainees whose transfer arrangements were cleared months ago but are awaiting Mr. Hagel’s approval and the notification to Congress,” as the New York Times reported. Officials said that, as well as the Uruguay six, the 11 also “include four Afghans the administration agreed in February to repatriate” — the first time this has been mentioned publicly, although I have been writing about it for years — and one other unidentified prisoner. Campaigners for the closure of Guantánamo will be hoping that this man is Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, whose ongoing imprisonment is inexplicable.

Shaker Aamer, unfortunately, recently received some bad news from the US courts. In April, as I reported here, his lawyers asked a federal judge to order his release because he is chronically ill — an analysis based on a three-day visit with him that was undertaken in December by an independent psychiatrist, Dr. Emily A. Keram, who collected his statements here.

As the New York Times reported, however, District Judge Rosemary Collyer rejected Shaker Aamer’s request on Tuesday “in a terse one-page order.” As was also explained, “An accompanying memorandum opinion explaining her reasoning was sealed.” In addition, “The Justice Department’s filings in the case were also sealed, but Judge Collyer ordered it to file a public version of her order and its documents by July 9.”

Below is the lawyers’ letter about the Uruguay deal, sent from Main Street Legal Services, Inc. at City University of New York School of Law, where Ramzi Kassem, the lawyer for one of the six, Abdelhadi Faraj, is a law professor, and delivered to defense secretary Chuck Hagel; Paul Lewis, the Special Envoy for Guantánamo Closure at the DoD; Cliff Sloan, the Special Envoy for Guantánamo Closure at the State Department; National Security Advisor Susan Rice; Lisa Monaco, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism; and Stephen Pomper, Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights.

Guantánamo Lawyers’ Letter to the Obama Administration Calling for the Release of Six Men to Uruguay

Dear Madams/Sirs,

The signatories to this letter represent a number of prisoners held at the US Naval Station at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba who have been approved for transfer for years and are now slated for resettlement in the Oriental Republic of Uruguay, a country that is prepared to welcome them immediately. We write to inquire about the status of that resettlement effort and to offer any assistance we can provide to expedite our clients’ transfer.

We represent the Guantánamo prisoners identified in our signature blocks, below, in connection with their habeas corpus cases presently pending in US federal court. In late-2013 and early-2014, we were independently informed by US representatives that our respective clients had been identified as candidates for resettlement in Uruguay.

As a result, many of us requested urgent calls with our clients to explain that they would be interviewed by a delegation from Uruguay. Our clients welcomed that opportunity and subsequently met with the Uruguayan delegation during its visit to Guantánamo. The Uruguayan movement then formally issued our clients invitations to resettle, which they gratefully accepted. In February, some or us were informed that, while it was not possible to ascertain precisely when transfer would occur, it was “a matter of weeks, not months.”

You can well imagine the hope these invitations engendered for our clients, and indeed for us. They were informed by the Uruguayan government delegation, as well as by the undersigned as their attorneys, that they had been formally invited to resettle in Uruguay. More importantly, after more than twelve years of internment, they would soon be leaving Guantánamo.

The principal details of the transfer arrangement were explained to us by US government representatives and, with their consent, we communicated, those specifics to our clients. They were to be transferred to Uruguay as a group so they would not feel isolated in their new home. They would receive adequate support and assistance, including proper housing, stipends, Spanish language lessons, professional training, and help finding employment.

In short, at the initiative of the United States and thanks to the combined efforts of the US Ambassador to Uruguay, Julissa Reynoso, those of Special Envoy Clifford Sloan and his team at the State Department, and the good will of the government of Uruguay and its people, these long-imprisoned men were given the promise of a new life. And, from our extensive exchanges with them, we know that our clients want nothing more than the chance to settle down and lead peaceful lives in Uruguay.

Yet, as you are aware, the long-awaited transfers to Uruguay have not taken place. In fact, to our knowledge, the Secretary of Defense has not provided Congress with the 30-day transfer notification required by statute.

This is despite the fact that our clients have all been approved for transfer by the US government’s interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force, which included the Defense Department — indeed, some had been cleared by the US military’s Administrative Review Board under the Bush Administration. It is also despite the reality that all of the other pieces have been in place for many months now: Uruguayan President José Mujica and other relevant officials in his government signed off earlier this year on the resettlement of our clients in their country; the White House and the State Department also long ago approved the transfer; and our clients have all consented.

It would be unfortunate in the extreme, to say the least, if the reaction from Congress to the recent exchange of five Guantánamo prisoners for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl has chilled the Defense Department’s willingness to proceed with the resettlement of our clients in Uruguay. These men should not be used as scapegoats in the current bout of US partisan politics. There is no real reason for their continued imprisonment at Guantánamo and Uruguay has nobly stepped forward to welcome our clients in a bid to aid President Obama’s effort to shutter the prison at Guantánamo. The moment is ripe for this step to be taken towards the realization of that oft-repeated promise.

Time is not on our side. Congress is considering further restrictions on the President’s ability to transfer prisoners out of Guantánamo. Also, upcoming elections and government turnover in Uruguay this Fall make expedition all the more critical.

In light of our common interest with the US government, we write to offer any assistance we might be able to provide and to ask if there is any reasonable explanation for the prolonged delay to implement the transfer that was agreed upon months ago between the United States and Uruguay. We respectfully urge President Obama to take urgent action and the Secretary of Defense to notify Congress formally so that our clients can finally begin the long process of rebuilding their lives.

Very truly yours,

Ramzi Kassem

Main Street Legal Services, Inc.

City University of New York School of Law

Counsel for Abdelhadi Faraj (ISN 329)

Laura Carasik

Clinical Professor of Law

International Human Rights Clinic

Western New England University School of Law

Counsel for Mohammed Abdullah Taha Mattan (ISN 684)

Samuel C. Kauffman

Kauffman Kilberg LLC

Counsel for Abdelhadi Faraj (ISN 329)

Stewart Eisenberg

Weinberg & Garber, P.C.

Counsel for Mohammed Abdullah Taha Mattan (ISN 684)

Cori Crider

Reprieve

Counsel for Abu Wa’el Dhiab (ISN 722)

Gordon S. Woodward

Schnader Harrison Segal & Lewis LLP

Counsel for Mohammed Abdullah Taha Mattan (ISN 684)

Michael A. Cooper

Jessica M. Klein

Anil K. Vassanji

Sullivan & Cromwell

Counsel for Adel bin Mohammad El Ouerghi (ISN 502)

Eldon V.C. Greenberg

Garvey Schubert Barer

Counsel for Abdelhadi Faraj (ISN 329)

Jerry Cohen

Burns & Levinson LLP

Counsel for Mohammed Abdullah Taha Mattan (ISN 684)

David S. Marshall

Law Offices of David S. Marshall

Counsel for Ahmed Adnan Ajam (ISN 326)

Michael E. Mone, Jr.

Esdale, Barrett, Jacobs & Mone, LLP

Counsel for Ali Hussein Al Shaaban (ISN 327)

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Published on June 28, 2014 15:37

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