Andy Worthington's Blog, page 115

New Evidence Casts Doubt on US Claims that Three Guantánamo Deaths in 2006 Were Suicides

Eight years ago, on June 10, 2006, the world awoke to the news that three men — Yasser Al-Zahrani, Ali Al-Salami and Mani Al-Utaybi — had died at the Bush administration’s “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The authorities claimed that the three men had committed suicide, and, notoriously, as I explained in an article last year, “The Season of Death at Guantánamo,” the prison’s commander, Rear Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., “attracted widespread criticism by declaring that the deaths were an act of war. Speaking of the prisoners, he said, ‘They are smart, they are creative, they are committed. They have no regard for life, neither ours nor their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.’”

Doubts were immediately expressed about whether it was possible, in a facility well-known for the persistent monitoring of the prisoners, for three men to manage to kill themselves without any guards noticing, and questions were also asked about how, even if the men had evaded surveillance, they had actually managed to kill themselves when they were allowed almost no possessions in their cells.

It took until August 2008 for the official report on the deaths, conducted by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), to be made available, but as I explained in an article at the time, the investigators “unreservedly backed up the suicide story” by reporting that “Autopsies were performed by physicians from the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology at Naval Hospital Guantánamo on June 10 and 11. The manner of death for all detainees was determined to be suicide and the cause of death was determined to be by hanging, the medical term being ‘mechanical asphyxia.’”

The investigators also claimed that the three men had left suicide notes — although these have never been made available.

It took until January 2010 for the story of the deaths to resurface in a spectacular manner, when Harpers Magazine published “The Guantánamo ‘Suicides‘” by New York-based attorney and Harpers columnist Scott Horton, based on the testimony of several guards at the time, and, in particular, Army Staff Sgt. Joe Hickman. The men worked in the towers at Guantánamo, and, based on the movement of vehicles on the night of the men’s deaths, they concluded that the suicide story was implausible, and that the men had been transported to and from their cellblock — to what was described as “Camp No,” a secret facility outside the main prison, which, last year, was revealed as a facility known as “Penny Lane,” where prisoners “turned” by the CIA were held.

Without a thorough independent investigation, it was impossible to know what the truth was, although a major problem with the official suicide story, which was later hidden — the fact that the men had rags stuffed down their throats at the time of their death — suggested that they had been taken to “Camp No” and subjected to some sort of torture that went too far.

All three men, it should be noted, were long-term hunger strikers, well-respected by their fellow prisoners, and, as a result, it is readily apparent that they may well have aroused the hostility of parts of the military, and, perhaps, of some of the other shadowy groups operating at Guantánamo — perhaps the CIA, perhaps some other unidentified organization.

The authorities have persistently shut the door on calls for an independent investigation into the deaths, but the story refuses to go away, and in June’s issue of Harpers Magazine, it resurfaced again. In “The Guantánamo Suicides, Revisited” (only available to subscribers), Scott Horton wrote about “a statement by Master-at-Arms Denny, a member of the escort team that transferred the three detainees to the hospital,” which was Exhibit 25 in the NCIS report, although it was “missing from the version of the report that was released to the public following a Freedom of Information request,” and was only found “in a separate report prepared by the staff judge advocate assigned by the Navy to investigate the case.”

Denny’s statement dealt with Yasser Al-Zahrani, referred to as 093, his Internment Serial Number (ISN). As Horton explains, he “was a Saudi who had been seized at the age of seventeen in northern Afghanistan. No charges were brought against him, and he appears to have been slated for release and repatriation, a process interrupted by his death.”

Denny explained that, sometime after midnight on June 10, 2006, he and another member of the escort team “were instructed to transport a detainee suffering ‘life threatening symptoms’ from a cell block in Camp 1 to the camp’s clinic.” However, on arrival at the entrance to Camp 1, they were “informed that the detainee had already been moved to the clinic, a highly unusual violation of standard operating procedure.” Denny stated that it was “for this reason” that he “had a feeling something was wrong.”

When the two men entered the clinic, they “found Al-Zahrani on a stretcher, his feet blue and his body limp.” Horton notes that the NCIS report claimed that all three of the men who died “used their bedsheets to fashion restraints for their hands and to make nooses,” but Denny stated that Al-Zahrani “was handcuffed when he first saw him, and only later did a soldier wrap ‘an altered detainee sheet, that looked like the same material ISN 093 used to hang himself,’ around the detainee’s right wrist.”

Denny also stated that the prison’s Combat Camera team “began documenting the scene — again, standard operating procedure — but were ordered to stop filming by Colonel Michael Bumgarner,” the prison’s warden, and Horton also notes that “video that would have provided documentation of movements into and out of the cell block, as well as of events that transpired at the detainee clinic, does not appear in the materials released by the NCIS, although the existence of the footage has been confirmed in a memorandum from the staff judge advocate dated June 15, 2006.”

Horton then notes that emergency medical technician (EMTs) “arrived in ambulances to transport the three prisoners to the base’s hospital, and “immediately started chest compressions on Al-Zahrani, because, the master-at-arms stated, ‘medical was not doing it.’”

As Horton asks, “One wonders why medical personnel at the clinic had not attempted to resuscitate the patient, who at this point was still alive.”

Denny was then “ordered to accompany Al-Zahrani to the hospital,” and traveled with the EMTs, who “resumed the chest compressions.” At this point in time, Denny explained that the monitor showed that Al-Zahrani’s heart was still beating, and he also “noted that the cloth Al-Zahrani allegedly used to hang himself was still wrapped tightly around [his] neck.”

As Horton notes, “The application of CPR [cardiopulmonary resuscitation] with the cloth still in place, while the patient’s neck was ‘swollen, puffy,’ and ‘a purple color,’ is not only an unlikely resuscitation method but might have done Al-Zahrani further harm.”

After arriving at the hospital, Denny was called by Col. Bumgarner , who told him that the other two men were dead and asked about Al-Zahrani. Horton explains how one of the medical staff looked at Denny and “held his thumb and index finger about an inch apart and said, ‘He’s that close to death.’” He was pronounced dead about 75 minutes after Denny’s escort team was first ordered to report to Camp 1.

As Horton proceeds to note:

The government’s insistence that Al-Zahrani died by hanging himself in his cell, having fashioned a rope from bedsheets and bound his own hands, is highly improbable. How, then, did he die? The tower guards I interviewed suggested that Al-Zahrani was moved to Camp No on the night of June 9. According to an Associated Press report from November 2013, this facility, which the CIA called Penny Lane, was used to “turn” prisoners into intelligence assets prior to their release. (It was shut down following the three deaths.) The interrogations there most likely involved “dryboarding,” a conditioning technique in which a rag or a sock is stuffed down a detainee’s throat, which can result in ashyxiation.

Horton also explains that Denny’s statement initially “took up three pages of the original NCIS report,” but that, in the version made public, “duplicates of other pages from the report were renumbered to stand in their place — strongly suggesting that the exclusion of Exhibit 25 was deliberate.”

That, I think, is something of an understatement, and I note that, on June 4, Harpers published a Q&A between Scott Horton and Professor Mark Denbeaux of the Seton Hall Law School in New Jersey, with some much stronger language. Seton Hall has played a major role in investigating the deaths, publishing a hugely detailed report, “Death in Camp Delta,” a month before Horton’s article, and, in May this year, publishing a follow-up report, “Uncovering the Cover Ups: Death in Camp Delta,” that led to Horton’s update.

Denbeaux explained how the document was found, which made it clear that the NCIS had “destroyed crucial contradictory statements and concealed the existence of other contradictory evidence,” and had also “reconstructed the ‘crime’ scene and fabricated still other evidence.”

As he stated:

Three Seton Hall students looked into a previously unexamined file that was explicitly not part of NCIS’s investigation, but rather an internal military inquiry into the guards’ conduct that night — the Staff Judge Advocate’s (SJA) report. That inquiry was closed in August of 2006. Buried inside was the medical escort’s statement.

One student, guided by a senior fellow, found this three-page document amid the jumble of the SJA file. She read it, puzzled over it, and then, along with two other students, began to understand that it related to one of the three deaths. At first, all three of the students were skeptical — the facts that the document described so completely contradicted the NCIS’s conclusions. Another investigator from the Center for Policy and Research [which worked with Seton Hall on the report] independently reviewed the SJA file and came to the same conclusion.

An upset student came to me, saying, “I think that we have found something horrible. At least one of the detainees was alive hours later than reported. He was left to die. First in the detainee clinic, where he lay unattended on a gurney with ropes tied around his neck. He was later found in an ambulance with faint vital signs because the ropes were still around his neck. When they cut the ropes off, his vital signs improved. But when he arrived at the hospital, he lay there while Camp Delta kept calling, asking if he were dead yet. And finally he died. This is more horrible than I could possibly have imagined.”

Denbeaux added:

It got worse. The NCIS investigators not only removed a damning document, they took steps to hide its existence. It belonged in the NCIS report. Three other students found that the investigators had taken the escort’s sworn statement; it had originally been stamped with NCIS notations and placed with the proper exhibit numbers into the file. But it was no longer there! In its place were three random, disconnected pages — photocopies of other pages already in the file. NCIS had attempted to destroy this chilling statement. No one reading the file would ever have known that it once included a three-page statement from a sworn eyewitness that sharply contradicted the NCIS’s conclusions.

Denbeaux also provided Horton with other discoveries that, as Horton put it, “raised red flags”:

The medical history of one detainee was missing from the NCIS file, but we found it in his medical records. His history contained a description of the cause and manner of his death by the senior medical officer who declared him dead at the clinic. The officer’s report did not mention hanging. It stated that the cause of death was asphyxiation caused by clogged airways. That would be consistent with having rags stuffed down their throats, but not hanging.

The computer logs showing who entered and exited the cells show that an unknown number of people came and went in the hours after the men were declared dead and before the NCIS investigation began. And they show that during those trips objects were brought in, and others removed, several times.

A guard on the previous shift had reported that the contents of the cells, which he had searched just before the detainees supposedly died there, were inadequate for the purpose for which the prisoners supposedly used them: to hang themselves and conceal what they were doing.

The students also noted the absence of evidence. Where were the suicide notes? Where were the biographies of those supposedly suicidal men? And, most tellingly, where were the initial statements of the guards from that night? The only recorded guard statements were given four days after the deaths, long after the guards made their first statements.

As I remember the three men who died — which I do every year — and as I also remember the other men who died in the “season  of death” — Abdul Rahman Al-Amri, who died on May 30, 2007, and Muhammad Salih, who died on June 1, 2009 (both of whom had the dubious natures of their deaths examined by Jeff Kaye in 2012) — I only hope that one day there will be an independent investigation into the deaths of Yasser Al-Zahrani, Ali Al-Salami and Mani Al-Utaybi, for the simple reason that the official story is horribly unsatisfactory, and the families of the deceased men, as well as the American people, deserve the truth.

Note: Please also see Jeff Kaye’s analysis of the Seton Hall report and its findings on Firedoglake, and also see this Star-Ledger interview with Mark Denbeaux and Adam Kirchner, one of the Seton Hall students who worked on the report.

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.

Quarterly Fundraiser: Can You Help Me Raise $2500 for My Work on Guantánamo?

Please support my work!

Dear friends and supporters,

Every three months, I ask you, if you can, to make a donation to support my work on Guantánamo, which I have been researching, writing about and campaigning about since 2006. Most of my work is unpaid, so many of my articles, the maintenance of this website and the social media associated with it, and most of my media appearances are only possible with your support.  If you can help out at all, please click on the “Donate” button above to donate via PayPal (and I should add that you don’t need to be a PayPal member to use PayPal).

All contributions to support my work are welcome, whether it’s $25, $100 or $500 — or, of course, the equivalent in pounds sterling or any other currency. You can also make a recurring payment on a monthly basis by ticking the box marked, “Make This Recurring (Monthly),” and if you are able to do so, it would be very much appreciated.

Readers can pay via PayPal from anywhere in the world, but if you’re in the UK and want to help without using PayPal, you can send me a cheque (address here — scroll down to the bottom of the page), and if you’re not a PayPal user and want to send a check from the US (or from anywhere else in the world, for that matter), please feel free to do so, but bear in mind that I have to pay a $10/£6.50 processing fee on every transaction. Securely packaged cash is also an option!

Since last year’s prison-wide hunger strike, when Guantánamo was front-page news, the prison had largely slipped off the mainstream media’s radar until last week’s prisoner exchange — in which five Taliban prisoners were released from Guantánamo, in exchange for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the sole US PoW in Afghanistan — was hijacked by opponents of President Obama and his administration and turned into a cynical, manufactured scandal.

I have been engaged in challenging this poisonous hysteria through my writing, and through TV and radio appearances. However, most of my work in the last three months has been an effort to keep the focus on Guantánamo, as President Obama’s enthusiasm for closing the prison — affirmed in a major speech on national security issues last May — appeared to be dwindling.

Now, with this new scandal, it is imperative that those of us who oppose the ongoing existence of Guantánamo — as a human rights nightmare and a monstrous failure of justice, where men are still held neither as criminal suspects nor as prisoners of war, even though no other category of prisoner is acceptable — try to keep the prison in the news, try to keep pressure on President Obama and on Congress, where many lawmakers have been doing all they can to keep the prison open, and try to remind people that the 149 men still held there are human beings, and that the highest percentage ever of those men — 78 individuals, or 52 percent of those still held — have been cleared for release, 75 by President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force in January 2010, and three in recent months by Periodic Review Boards, established to review the cases of almost all the men who have not previously been cleared for release. Just ten men, of the 149 still held, have been or will be charged in the military commission trial system at Guantánamo (see my full list here, which was one of my projects in the last three months).

I hope you can donate to support my work, so that I can continue to try to keep these men in the public eye, to push for their release — both the majority of the men, who are from Yemen, where the US puts security fears above the need to release prisoners it says it no longer wants to hold, and those from elsewhere, some of whom need new homes.

My first article in my mission to educate people about Guantánamo and to push for the prison’s closure was just over seven years ago, after a Saudi prisoner had died at the prison. At the time, I had no idea that Guantánamo would still be open seven years later, but I have learned that great injustices often require unprecedented opposition — and great patience — to be addressed as they need to be, and for the misguided policies that created them to be thoroughly repudiated.

As the manufactured scandal over Bowe Bergdahl and the released Taliban prisoners shows, those seeking to defend the indefensible — essentially, those who like imprisoning, for life, people whose detention they do not even have to justify — are not giving up their cruelty,and their disdain for the law, without a bitter struggle.

With your help, I will continue to oppose them, and to call for justice.

With thanks, as ever, for your support,

Andy Worthington

London

June 9, 2014

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.

Review Board Approves “Forever Prisoner” Ghaleb Al-Bihani for Release from Guantánamo, But Also Approves Ongoing Detention of Salem Bin Kanad

Six weeks ago, I reported on the Periodic Review Boards for two “forever prisoners” at Guantánamo — Ghaleb al-Bihani and Salem bin Kanad — who are both Yemenis, and were regarded by the Guantánamo Review Task Force, appointed by President Obama to review all the remaining prisoners’ cases in 2009, as too dangerous to release, even though it was acknowledged that insufficient evidence existed to put them on trial.

The PRBs — involving representatives of the Departments of State, Defense, Justice and Homeland Security, as well as the office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who meet at an office in Virginia and hear testimony by, or on behalf of the prisoners by video link from Guantánamo — took place to establish whether these two men should still be regarded as a threat, or whether they should be recommended for release.

This category of prisoner — as opposed to those approved for release, or those recommended for prosecution — is particularly problematical, as it relies on a presumption that the so-called evidence against the Guantánamo prisoners is somehow reliable, when that is patently not the case. The files on the prisoners are for the most part a dispiriting collection of unreliable statements made by the prisoners themselves or by their fellow prisoners in circumstances that were not conducive to telling the truth — immediately after capture, in America’s notorious prisons in Afghanistan, or in Guantánamo, all places and circumstances where torture and abuse were rife; or, in some cases, where bribery (the promise of better living conditions, for example) was used to try to secure information that could be used as evidence.

In March 2011, when President Obama shamefully approved the ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial of 48 men designated as being too dangerous to release, he tried to sweeten the pill by promising periodic reviews of the men cases. However, these only finally materialized last year, at which point the credibility of the trial system at Guantánamo — the military commissions — was also in tatters, with the result that 25 prisoners out of the 36 originally recommended for trials were also added to the list of those eligible for Periodic Review Boards, making 71 men in total (as two of the original 48 had died in the meantime).

As I have explained in a series of articles about the Periodic Review Boards, which have had only patchy coverage in the mainstream media, the entire review process is flawed, because it seeks to validate Guantánamo’s ongoing and unjustifiable system of holding men neither as criminal suspects nor as prisoners of war, when there is no third way, but at least two of the first three review boards decided that the men whose cases were being examined — all Yemenis — should be released (see here and here for my reports).

In the bleakly surreal reality of Guantánamo, however, all this meant was that they were added to the list of 55 other Yemenis who were cleared for release by the task force (in its final report in January 2010), but who are still held because everyone in a position of power and responsibility in the US government is worried about the security situation in Yemen; in other words, men cleared for release because they are not regarded as posing a threat to the US will, the US fears, not be monitored closely on their return home, as though they were men who had not been cleared for release in the first place because they are not regarded as posing a threat to the US.

Ghaleb al-Bihani approved for release

On May 28, the fourth Periodic Review Board — for Ghaleb al-Bihani, who had worked as a cook for forces supporting the Taliban prior to the 9/11 attacks and the US invasion of Afghanistan, and who, in Guantánamo, has developed serious health problems — recommended his release. In his PRB, al-Bihani had distanced himself from a claim (unsubstantiated, it should be noted) that a least one of his family members had ties with Al-Qaeda, and had addressed his desire to be resettled in another country, as well as providing evidence of his diligent efforts at self-improvement during his long imprisonment. In their final determination, the board stated that, unanimously, they had “determined continued law of war detention of the detainee is no longer necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States.”

The final determination continued:

In making this determination, the Board considered the detainee’s plans for the future, as well as his desire and efforts to separate himself from family members with known ties to extremism. The Board found the detainee credible on his commitment to living a peaceful life. The Board also considered the detainee’s low level of training and lack of leadership position in al-Qa’ida or the Taliban. The detainee’s shift in behavior from being disruptive in detention to playing a positive and constructive role in the administration of the camp, his efforts to improve his health situation, and his efforts to improve himself through exploring non-extremist matters were also noted by the Board.

The board recommended that al-Bihani “be transferred with the standard security assurances, as negotiated by the Guantánamo Detainee Transfer Working Group,” also The Board recommending, as requested by al-Bihani, “resettlement in a third country with appropriate support, including adequate medical care.”

The decision to approve al-Bihani’s release was apparently taken on May 15, but it was not announced until May 28. Pentagon spokesperson Army Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale said that the board had determined that al-Bihani “can be transferred from the US base in Cuba ‘as soon as practicable,’” as the Associated Press described it, “without specifying when [he] might be moved from the prison.”

Responding to the decision, Pardiss Kebriaei, Senior Attorney at the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, who represents Mr. al-Bihani, stated:

The Periodic Review Board’s decision approving Mr. Al-Bihani for transfer from Guantánamo is encouraging. The security and other agencies on the board rightly determined that his continued detention of more than 12 years is unnecessary. Indeed, Mr. Al-Bihani was an assistant cook 12 years ago for a Taliban-affiliated group that no longer exists, and he is now seriously ill.

Kebriaei added, crucially:

The Obama administration must now give effect to the board’s decision and release Mr. Al-Bihani. Simply adding him to the group of dozens of men cleared to leave Guantánamo, but still indefinitely detained, does nothing to end his wrongful detention or close the prison. As Mr. Al-Bihani stated at his hearing, his hope is for resettlement in a third country, where he may begin a new life. He would also accept repatriation to Yemen.

Kebriaei also noted, in another important assessment of the absurd situation that prevails at Guantánamo:

Since President Obama lifted his self-imposed moratorium on transfers to Yemen a year ago and promised a “case-by-case” review of individual men, not one Yemeni has been released. In fact, no Yemeni has left Guantánamo alive in nearly four years, despite the fact that one-third of the remaining men at Guantánamo are Yemenis approved for transfer. The administration’s stated commitment to close Guantánamo will continue to ring hollow until it starts treating detained men from Yemen as individuals and stops seeing them solely through the prism of their national origin and country conditions. It can start with the release of a sick former cook.

Salem bin Kanad not approved for release

The second Periodic Review Board decision — to continue holding another prisoner, Salem bin Kanad (who seems to have both Saudi and Yemeni origins, even though the US lists him as a Yemeni) — took place on May 21, but was only made available on the PRB website a few days ago. Coinciding with the engineered uproar about the release of five Taliban prisoners in exchange for US PoW Bowe Begdahl, it failed to get a mention anywhere in the media, which was disappointing, as the PRB decisions deserve to have proper coverage.

I had fears that, although there was no evidence that bin Kanad, a Taliban foot soldier, posed a threat to the US, it would not help his case that he refused to take part in his PRB, so that the board members had no way of interacting with him, and in their final determination, as I feared, the board “determined continued law of war detention of the detainee remains necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States.” No one was on hand to point out the irony of recommending a minor Taliban foot soldier for ongoing imprisonment at the same time that five Afghan prisoners who held leadership roles in the Taliban were being freed in Qatar in a prisoner swap.

The board explained that they had “considered the detainee’s history of fighting on the frontlines in a Taliban unit, including possibly serving in a low-level leadership role and possibly receiving extremist training,” and also “noted inconsistencies regarding the detainee’s behavior while in detention and a lack of clarity regarding threatening anti-US statements made by the detainee in the past” — that later assessment providing an insight into what is regarded a supposing a threat; namely, having made “threatening anti-US statements … in the past.”

The board also recognized that bin Kanad had initially taken part in the process of meeting his the representatives appointed by the military, but then ceased his involvement, with the result that they felt they “had insufficient information on the detainee’s family and the support they are prepared to provide him upon his return as well as the detainee’s skills and employment prospects.” Pointedly, they added that they “had difficulty assessing the detainee’s credibility due to his decision not to participate in the hearing,” and, as a result, looked forward to reviewing his file in six months’ time. They also encouraged him “to fully participate in any future review.”

I hope that we will have some positive new soon about the release of prisoners clear for release through the PRBs — as well as those cleared by the task force over four years ago — because, every day that cleared prisoners are not freed is a day that ought to bring shame and disgrace on the United States.

To conclude this round-up, I’m also posting below the statement that Ghaleb al-Bihani presented to his PRB, which was not available until recently, and which provides further insight into his state of mind and his hopes for the future. It also makes clear that, although he has consistently been listed by the US as a Yemeni, he was born in Saudi Arabia, where he lived until his ill-fated decision to travel to Afghanistan, and his subsequent imprisonment at Guantánamo.

Periodic Review Board

Ghaleb Nasser Al-Bihani, ISN 128, April 8, 2014

Statement of Ghaleb Nasser Al-Bihani

I am still learning English, so I would like to present my statement in Arabic.

My name is Ghaleb Nasser Al-Bihani and my ISN is 128. I was born in Tibuk, Saudi Arabia, where I lived continuously until I was about 21, but I am a Yemeni citizen. I was born in 1979. I was brought to Guantánamo when I was 22 and I am now 34 years old.

I want a chance to build a normal life the same way other people build their lives. I don’t need an easy life, and I don’t want a hard life. I just want an ordinary life.

I want my own family. I want to become a father, and I look forward to the day when I can hold my baby in my hands. I want to provide for my family and my child.

It may be hard, but I want to pursue my education. The first thing I want to do is take classes that will help me find a good job — like English, computer and carpentry classes. Since my days would be spent working or looking for a job, I would plan to take classes in the evening.

I also want to take care of my health. I have diabetes and related problems, including severe back pain and migraines.

I have these hopes because I want a stable life. I want a happy life for my children. I want to take good care of them and provide them with an education, because I know their future will depend on it. I want to give them a better life than I had. I lost both my parents when I was a young boy, and it was hard growing up without a mother or father. I want to be in a position where I can give my children the guidance that I did not have.

I have done my best to prepare for the life that I want. I have struggled on a daily basis here because of my health, and I have felt desperate and frustrated. You can imagine that when you feel like this, you do not always act in ways you want.

Sometimes my health condition has gotten worse and made me even more tense, anxious and depressed, and given me insomnia. It got so bad last year that I asked my attorney to write a letter to the camp administration and discuss with them my health and psychological condition. I wanted to be transferred to Camp Echo just so that I could keep to myself and be in a calm environment.

But I am trying. My lawyer and relative can tell you that I have requested many books because I want to educate and improve myself, and I spend most of my time reading. In my cell now, I have many books, including English and Spanish language books, a book about diabetes and high blood pressure, a book about the Dalai Lama, and the biography of Martin Luther King. I like to read biographies because I want to learn about other peoples’ lives and the circumstances they faced, and how they were able to overcome their difficulties and move on with their lives. I want to learn how they were able to learn positive lessons from their difficulties, and how they were able to reach their goals in life without looking at the past. I hope to have the same strength and patience to overcome my difficulties.

Given a choice, I will build the life that I imagine in a new country — maybe Qatar, or countries in Europe, Latin America, or Asia that may be willing to take me. When I think of freedom, I think of a new country — a place where I can have my own independent life, where there are opportunities, where the security situation is better, and where education is important. I thought of Qatar because it is an Arab country, so it would be familiar, but also because its economy is strong, its security situation is stable, it has job opportunities, and it can provide good medical treatment for my conditions. It is a modern country with freedoms, where I would be able to live my life as an equal person.

I want to settle in a third country. If I am transferred to such a place, I can promise you that I would not try to go back to Saudi Arabia or go to Yemen, where I have never even been or lived.

But I am willing to go to any country that the government decides is an appropriate option for me. For the chance to build this new life, I will accept security measures that other transferred detainees have been subject to. I will also participate in a rehabilitation program.

For years, I have said these things about my hopes for my life to everyone who has asked. I have said it before and I will say it again — I want to build a new future for myself.

I can’t change the past, and I can’t control what other people do or what goes on in a given country. But I can control my own actions. For years I have talked about what my hopes are for the future and what my decisions would be. I have struggled through the effects of my diabetes to try to improve myself, to show that these are not simply words. I have a bright vision of my future. It is all I think about. I am asking for the chance to make my vision a reality.

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 and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

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

Radio: Andy Worthington Talks to Scott Horton and Peter B. Collins About the Latest Manufactured Guantánamo Scandal

That manufactured scandal, as I hope everyone reading this realizes, is the feigned outrage of lawmakers and media pundits regarding President Obama’s decision to rescue a captured US soldier from Afghanistan by exchanging him for five Taliban prisoners in Guantánamo, who were sent to Qatar, which I first wrote about here, and followed up with an article entitled, “Missing the Point on the Guantánamo Taliban Prisoner Swap and the Release of Bowe Bergdahl.” Yesterday, I was invited to discuss the manufactured scandal on Democracy Now! and in the last few days I have also spoken about it on the Scott Horton Show (just days after my previous appearance on the show), and with Peter B. Collins on his show from the Bay Area.

My 20-minute interview with Scott is here , and my 40-minute interview with Peter is here . Although it is for subscribers only, you can pay just $1 for a day pass , although other subscription offers, from $5 a month, are also available.

According to the unprincipled, opportunistic lawmakers and commentators laying into the Obama administration regarding the prisoner exchange, the rescued US soldier, Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, held by the Taliban-affiliated Haqqani Network in Afghanistan for the last five years, is a deserter who should have been abandoned, even though no objective investigation has established the truth — or otherwise  — of this claim.

With regard to the five Taliban officials released in exchange for Bowe Bergdahl, it is true that these are men who, to varying degrees, held leadership positions with the Taliban and who had not been cleared for release from the prison — unlike 78 of the remaining 149 prisoners, cleared for release for years but still held — but while the critics have been wailing about how they were too dangerous to release, the facts and the justifications for the deal say otherwise.

The government has stated that the deal — first discussed in 2011 — went ahead last week because of fears that Bergdahl was seriously ill, and because of assurances from the government of Qatar that they will not be free to travel for a year. Crucially, another important aspect of the story overlooked by the critics involves, firstly, the need for negotiations with the enemy as a war winds down (which is hugely important as there will be a major drawdown on US troops in Afganistan in December 2014), and secondly, an understanding that the justification for holding Taliban prisoners will expire with the drawdown of troops there, as John Bellinger, who served as a legal adviser in the Bush administration, explained in one of the most sensible analyses of the prisoner release. “[I]t is likely that the US would be required, as a matter of international law, to release them shortly after the end of 2014, when US combat operations cease in Afghanistan,” Bellinger wrote.

I hope you have time to listen to both shows, and to share them if you find them useful.

Scott described his show as follows:

Andy Worthington, an investigative journalist, author, and filmmaker, discusses his article “What We Should Really Be Talking About With the Bowe Bergdahl Controversy;” why Obama is getting flak for releasing Taliban officials from Guantanamo (who are POW’s, not terrorists); and the fate of the remaining prisoners.

On Peter’s show, we had more time to discuss topics beyond the immediate controversy — including the ongoing hunger strikes and force-feeding, and Peter followed our discussion by speaking to Jon B. Eisenberg, one of the lawyers for Abu Wa’el Dhiab, a Syrian prisoner, long cleared for release, who embarked on a hunger strike in despair at ever being released, and then found himself brutally force-fed. Dhiab has been challenging the government in court, as I explained in my recent articles, “Breakthrough on Guantánamo: Judge Orders US Government to Stop Force-Feeding Syrian Prisoner and to Preserve Video Evidence,” “For First Time, US Judge Orders Government to Release Videotapes of Force-Feeding to Guantánamo Prisoner’s Lawyers,” and “Judge Reluctantly Allows US to Resume Force-Feeding Guantánamo Hunger Striker.”

This is how Peter described the show:

As political leaders attack Obama for swap of Taliban prisoners and ignore important related issues, we talk with journalist Andy Worthington about the Bergdahl trade and lawyer Jon Eisenberg about the legal battle over force-feeding Gitmo hunger strikers.

Worthington has provided detailed coverage of Guantánamo at his website, and is the author of The Guantánamo Files. We talk about the recent attention to Gitmo caused by the swap of 5 Taliban prisoners for American POW Bowe Bergdahl, the rank hypocrisy and opportunism of politicians who supported a swap for Bergdahl until Obama executed it, and their micro-management of the prison while ignoring Obama’s recent change to the Afghan exit plan and his assertion of authority to order people killed by drone strikes. We discuss the newly-exposed rift over Guantánamo releases between the White House and Pentagon chief Chuck Hagel, and he pointedly notes that Obama has failed to use the discretion available to him despite restrictions imposed by Congress. Worthington adds important background information on the 5 Taliban leaders — particularly that there is no evidence that any of them were involved in attacks on Americans.

At the 43-minute mark, we talk with Eisenberg about the hunger strikers at Guantánamo – now renamed in Orwellian fashion as “non-religious fasters” — and the legal issues raised by brutal force-feeding. He is on the legal team of Syrian prisoner Abu [Wa'el] Dhiab, who has been held for 12 years without charge or trial, and was cleared for release in 2009. As Worthington reports, Dhiab is one of the 6 inmates offered a home in Uruguay, but Eisenberg is not permitted to confirm that under the Kafka[esque] rules of the Gitmo bar. Eisenberg details the grisly process of forced extraction from prison cells and the repeated insertion of nasal tubes, a very painful process; he also describes gratuitous infliction of pain reported by his clients.

In May, federal judge Gladys Kessler issued a restraining order halting Dhiab’s cell extraction and forced feeding, but dissolved it a week later over fears that he would die. From her rulings, it is clear that Kessler is quite anguished by the case, and ired by the Pentagon’s refusal to use more humane methods.

Eisenberg had not heard the Worthington interview when we spoke, so it is interesting that he, too, singled out President Obama for failing to use his authority to order an end to the inhumane treatment of the hunger strikers.

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 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.

On Democracy Now! Andy Worthington Discusses the Cynical Hysteria About the Guantánamo Prisoners Released in Exchange for Bowe Bergdahl

[image error]I was delighted to be invited onto Democracy Now! today to discuss the ongoing hysteria in the US about the Obama administration’s decision to release five Taliban prisoners at Guantánamo in exchange for the sole US prisoner of war in Afghanistan, Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.

This hysteria — in Congress and the media — has involved outrageous claims that Bergdahl should have been abandoned because he was a deserter, even though this claims has never been proven, and that the Taliban prisoners should not have been released (to monitored freedom in Qatar), because they pose a phenomenal threat to the US (there is absolutely no evidence of this).

Some of the cynical opportunists attacking the president are also calling for him to be impeached because he failed to observe a Congressional requirement to give lawmakers a 30-day notification prior to the release of any prisoners (even though the administration has explained why it failed to do so — primarily because of immediate fears for Bergdahl’s life). Depressingly, those attacking the president are also threatening to try to prevent him from releasing any more prisoners from Guantánamo, even though the majority of the men still held have been cleared for release.

I spoke to Amy Goodman and Juan González in the last section of the show, along with Frank Goldsmith, the attorney for Khairullah Khairkhwa, one of the five men, who spoke powerfully about his client. I then had the opportunity to discuss elements of the story that I had written about in my recent articles, “What We Should Really Be Talking About With the Bowe Bergdahl Controversy” (for PolicyMic) and “Missing the Point on the Guantánamo Taliban Prisoner Swap and the Release of Bowe Bergdahl.”

The video of the show is below:

Sadly, the segment was quite short, and I didn’t have time to specifically discuss the plight of the remaining 149 prisoners in Guantánamo, and, in particular, the 78 men still held who have been cleared for release, as briefly mentioned above — 75 who had their release approved in January 2010 by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama appointed when he first took office in 2009, and three approved for release in recent months by Periodic review Boards, established to review the cases of almost all the men who have not been cleared for release.

I do, however, understand Amy and Juan providing a prominent forum for Matthew Farwell, a veteran of the Afghan occupation and now a journalist, who worked with the late Michael Hastings on the definitive profile of Bowe Bergdahl, “America’s Last Prisoner of War,” for Rolling Stone two years ago. Matthew Farwell was interviewed in the first part of the show, and I’m happy to also make the video of his interview available below:

Perhaps if the false hysteria about Bowe Bergdahl and the Taliban prisoners is still thriving next week, I will get the opportunity to speak again about why all decent people should be appalled that the cleared prisoners are in danger of, yet again, being used in a cynical game of political football by lawmakers and their cheerleaders in the media.

I take heart, however, that, in an otherwise dreadful article in the Washington Post today, US officials “stressed that the swap does not set a precedent either for flouting the 30-day notice requirement to Congress or for future releases of prisoners from Guantánamo Bay.”

A senior administration official, who “spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the longer-range process of closing the military prison,” told the Post, “Bergdahl is an exceptional case,” adding, “There are a significant number of transfers in the pipeline, and I think you are going to see progress this year.”

Asked if the current hysteria “would complicate future transfers,” the official told the Post, “The facts and the merits very much support the conclusion that Guantánamo should be closed. The fundamentals of that picture are clear now, just as clear as they were a couple weeks ago.”

I hope that, as a result, there will be more releases soon — and a good start would be the six men who cannot be safely repatriated but who were recently offered a new home in Uruguay by President Mujica. Just last week, defense secretary Chuck Hagel told reporters he would be “making some decisions on those specific individuals here fairly soon.”

Hagel said 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.”

That, unlike the current hysteria, is a realistic statement, and I hope Chuck Hagel works out that releasing the six men — and others whose release has been under discussion for many months before the prisoner exchange — is still of huge importance.

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 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.

Missing the Point on the Guantánamo Taliban Prisoner Swap and the Release of Bowe Bergdahl

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

On Saturday, at the White House, President Obama announced that, in exchange for the release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the sole US prisoner of war in Afghanistan, held for five years by the Taliban-affiliated Haqqani Network, he had released five Taliban prisoners from Guantánamo to Qatar.

Although the announcement was initially greeted positively, the president was soon under pressure from critics claiming that the five men were “battle-hardened Taliban commanders,” as the Washington Post put it, whose release posed a threat to America’s national security.

Some of the critical voices also claimed that Bowe Bergdahl was a deserter who should have been abandoned, and others chided President Obama for failing to notify Congress 30 days before the release of prisoners from Guantánamo, as required by the National Defense Authorization Act.

Who are the five men released from Guantánamo?

However, there are problems with all of the criticisms. The claims that the five men were “battle-hardened,” for example, are not accurate. One, Khairullah Khairkhwa, had been the governor of the western province of Herat under the Taliban. In February 2011 President Karzai specifically requested his release, and in March 2011 Hekmat Karzai, the director of the Center for Conflict and Peace Studies, a Kabul-based research and advocacy organization, told Al-Jazeera, “His release will be influential to the peace process,” adding, “Mr. Khairkhwa is well respected amongst the Taliban and was considered a moderate by those who knew him.”

Another of the five, Abdul Haq Wasiq, was described by the US as the Taliban’s deputy chief of intelligence, although his classified military file, released by WikiLeaks in 2011, stated that his job “consisted of directing investigations involving espionage, bribery, internal affairs, and anti-corruption,” and that he “also worked with local police forces to resolve other criminal issues.”

Another man, Mohammed Nabi Omari, was involved with the Taliban in eastern Afghanistan, but seems to have been included in the negotiations not for his general importance to the Taliban, but because he was involved with the pro-Taliban Haqqani Network, the group that had held Bowe Bergdahl.

The two other men, Mullah Norullah Noori and Mullah Mohammed Fazil, are the only two who fit the “battle-hardened” definition. Both had been military commanders in northern Afghanistan, and were allegedly involved in the mass killings of thousands of Shi’ite Muslims (from the Hazara ethnic group) between 1998 and 2001. These are disturbing allegations, of course, but it should be borne in mind that, like most of the senior Taliban figures the US faced after the invasion in October 2001, their energies, however malevolent, had been exclusively focused on their opponents in Afghanistan, and not on the United States.

Misplaced criticism of the prisoner swap

In addition, two other facts have generally been lost in the criticism of President Obama’s actions: firstly, the men were not freed outright in exchange for Bowe Bergdahl, but were transferred to Qatar, where the government has provided assurances that they will not be allowed to travel for a year; and secondly, with President Obama planning a major drawdown of US troops in Afghanistan at the end of the year, it is not unsurprising that moves are being made — like the prisoner swap — that may lead to negotiations taking place between the US and the Taliban. It is easy to forget, looking only at the latest storm in the media, but this prisoner swap did not come out of the blue, and has been discussed for the last two years.

In addition, it is also apparent that the drawdown of troops will probably make the ongoing imprisonment of Taliban members untenable, as was explained by John Bellinger, who served as a legal adviser in the Bush administration. On Lawfare, Bellinger wrote, “it is likely that the US would be required, as a matter of international law, to release them shortly after the end of 2014, when US combat operations cease in Afghanistan. The Administration appears to have reached a defensible, hold-your-nose compromise by arranging, in exchange for the release of Sergeant Bergdahl, for the individuals to be held in Qatar for a year before they return to Afghanistan.”

As for Bowe Bergdahl and the circumstances of his capture, as well as the criticism of the administration’s failure to notify Congress of its plans, both topics were addressed on Sunday by defense secretary Chuck Hagel, who said that the operation to free Bergdahl came after intelligence suggested his “safety and health were both in jeopardy, and in particular his health was deteriorating.”

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

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

What the prisoner swap means for the men still held at Guantánamo

For the men still held at Guantánamo, and particularly for the 78 men (of the remaining 149 prisoners) who have been cleared for release but are still held (75 in January 2010 by President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force, and three in recent months by Periodic Review Boards), the release of the five Taliban prisoners will only reinforce the notion that, to get out of Guantánamo, you need to be perceived as something other than insignificant. Since 2007, they have seen men charged in the military commission trial system be convicted, or accept plea deals, and be sent home, while they remain trapped, with no end in sight to their long ordeal. 58 of these 78 men are Yemenis, still held because of US fears about the security situation in their home country.

President Obama needs to find the courage to break this deadlock, as it is profoundly shocking that the US continues to hold — apparently indefinitely — men it said it no longer wanted to hold.

Others, too, have reason to be upset about the release of the Taliban prisoners — men like Abu Wa’el Dhiab, the Syrian who is on a hunger strike and being force-fed despite being cleared for release. He and other cleared prisoners who cannot be safely repatriated would like President Obama to take up the recent offer by President Mujica of Uruguay to offer them new homes, and it is unclear why this has not yet happened. Also in need of serious action on the president’s part is Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, who was first cleared for release under President Bush in 2007.

Right now, however, those who must be feeling a sense of abandonment the most keenly are the Afghans left behind, whose stories I discussed in two articles in 2012, when the prisoner swap was first mooted, “The ‘Taliban Five’ and the Forgotten Afghan Prisoners in Guantánamo,” and “US in Talks to Return the 17 Afghan Prisoners in Guantánamo.”

Four of these men were cleared for release by the task force in 2010, including two men profiled here at “Close Guantánamo” — Shawali Khan and Abdul Ghani. Eight other Afghans are still held who have not been cleared for release, although some of them are also the victims of exaggeration and misplaced intelligence, like Obaidullah, for example, whose wrongful imprisonment we highlighted in 2012.

I hope that the media and politicians soon move on from their untenable positions regarding the release of prisoners from Guantánamo, and that the plight of the cleared prisoners who are still held will be noticed. I also hope that time is running out for those who believe that Guantánamo is a place where they can hold people forever without due process, and that John Bellinger is correct to point out that, with the drawdown of US troops at the end of the year, it will no longer be acceptable under international law for Taliban prisoners to continue to be held.

Even if arguments can be made for continuing to hold prisoners allegedly involved with Al-Qaeda, this, realistically, should mean that the justification for holding almost all the men still held at Guantánamo will evaporate in December.

President Obama may have begun to address this with the prisoner swap. Now he needs to move swiftly to release the 78 cleared prisoners, and to work out how few of the remaining prisoners can legitimately be held when the military excuse for detention comes to an end — and how to tell Congress.

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 and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

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

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009, and the 83 prisoners released from February 2009 to March 2014, whose stories are covered in more detail than is available anywhere else –- either in print or on the Internet –- although many of them, of course, are also covered in The Guantánamo Files: June 2007 –- 2 Tunisians, 4 Yemenis (here, here and here); July 2007 –- 16 Saudis; August 2007 –- 1 Bahraini, 5 Afghans; September 2007 –- 16 Saudis; September 2007 –- 1 Mauritanian; September 2007 –- 1 Libyan, 1 Yemeni, 6 Afghans; November 2007 –- 3 Jordanians, 8 Afghans; November 2007 –- 14 Saudis; December 2007 –- 2 Sudanese; December 2007 –- 13 Afghans (here and here); December 2007 –- 3 British residents; December 2007 –- 10 Saudis; May 2008 –- 3 Sudanese, 1 Moroccan, 5 Afghans (here, here and here); July 2008 –- 2 Algerians; July 2008 –- 1 Qatari, 1 United Arab Emirati, 1 Afghan; August 2008 –- 2 Algerians; September 2008 –- 1 Pakistani, 2 Afghans (here and here); September 2008 –- 1 Sudanese, 1 Algerian; November 2008 –- 1 Kazakh, 1 Somali, 1 Tajik; November 2008 –- 2 Algerians; November 2008 –- 1 Yemeni (Salim Hamdan) repatriated to serve out the last month of his sentence; December 2008 –- 3 Bosnian Algerians; January 2009 –- 1 Afghan, 1 Algerian, 4 Iraqis; February 2009 — 1 British resident (Binyam Mohamed); May 2009 —1 Bosnian Algerian (Lakhdar Boumediene); June 2009 — 1 Chadian (Mohammed El-Gharani), 4 Uighurs to Bermuda, 1 Iraqi, 3 Saudis (here and here); August 2009 — 1 Afghan (Mohamed Jawad), 2 Syrians to Portugal; September 2009 — 1 Yemeni, 2 Uzbeks to Ireland (here and here); October 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti, 1 prisoner of undisclosed nationality to Belgium; October 2009 – 6 Uighurs to Palau; November 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian to France, 1 unidentified Palestinian to Hungary, 2 Tunisians to Italian custody; December 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti (Fouad al-Rabiah); December 2009 — 2 Somalis, 4 Afghans, 6 Yemenis; January 2010 — 2 Algerians, 1 Uzbek to Switzerland, 1 Egyptian, 1 Azerbaijani and 1 Tunisian to Slovakia; February 2010 — 1 Egyptian, 1 Libyan, 1 Tunisian to Albania, 1 Palestinian to Spain; March 2010 — 1 Libyan, 2 unidentified prisoners to Georgia, 2 Uighurs to Switzerland; May 2010 — 1 Syrian to Bulgaria, 1 Yemeni to Spain; July 2010 — 1 Yemeni (Mohammed Hassan Odaini); July 2010 — 1 Algerian, 1 Syrian to Cape Verde, 1 Uzbek to Latvia, 1 unidentified Afghan to Spain; September 2010 — 1 Palestinian, 1 Syrian to Germany; January 2011 – 1 Algerian; April 2012 – 2 Uighurs to El Salvador; July 2012 — 1 Sudanese; September 2012 — 1 Canadian (Omar Khadr) to ongoing imprisonment in Canada; August 2013 — 2 Algerians; December 2013 — 2 Algerians, 2 Saudis, 2 Sudanese, 3 Uighurs to Slovakia; March 2014 — 1 Algerian (Ahmed Belbacha).

My Article for PolicyMic: Engineered Outrage About the Bowe Bergdahl/Taliban Prisoner Swap Ignores the Men Still Held at Guantánamo

Dear friends and supporters,

If you have a few minutes to spare, I hope you’ll read “What We Should Really Be Talking About With the Bowe Bergdahl Controversy,” my first article for PolicyMic, looking at how the largely cynical attacks on President Obama for his prisoner swap at the weekend (in which five Taliban prisoners at Guantánamo were released in Qatar in exchange for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the sole US prisoner of war in Afghanistan) is obscuring the plight of the men still held at Guantánamo — and, specifically, the 78 men (out of 149 in total) who have been cleared for release.

All but three of these men were 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. The three others were cleared for release in recent months by Periodic Review Boards, and yet all are still held, because, in Guantánamo’s disgusting, topsy-turvy world, in which the administration, Congress and the judiciary have all, in various ways, failed the prisoners, it is, in many ways, easier to be released from Guantánamo if you are regarded as somehow “significant,” than if you are palpably insignificant and cleared for release.

Responsible media, pundits and lawmakers should be pushing for all the cleared prisoners to be freed as soon as possible, and yet, disgracefully, what we have instead is an all-out assault on President Obama and his administration, which smacks of opportunism and prevents the focus of attention from being on the cleared prisoners in Guantánamo, who, yet again, will find it difficult not to conclude that they have been abandoned, and that their lives are insignificant to the US government and the American people.

I hope you have the time to read my article, and that you will like it, share it and retweet it if you find it useful.

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

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

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

Radio: Andy Worthington Discusses Obama’s Failure to Close Guantánamo on the Scott Horton Show

On Thursday, just after President Obama had spoken about Guantánamo, for the first time since the global protests on May 23 (the first anniversary of his promise to resume releasing prisoners after two year and eight months in which just five men had been released), the ever-indignant radio host Scott Horton asked if I was free to talk.

As one of the first radio hosts to take an interest in my work (back in August 2007), Scott is someone I always like to talk to, especially as we hadn’t spoken since February, and there was much to discuss. Our half-hour interview is available here, or see here for the link to the show on Scott’s own website. For the first time we used Skype for the interview, and I have to say that the sound quality is wonderfully clear.

President Obama had spoken about Guantánamo in a speech about America’s foreign policy at the US Military Academy at West Point, in which he said, “I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being. But what makes us exceptional is not our ability to flout international norms and the rule of law; it’s our willingness to affirm them through our actions. That’s why I will continue to push to close GTMO — because American values and legal traditions don’t permit the indefinite detention of people beyond our borders.”

One of the things that Scott and I talked about was whether or not the president meant to imply that American values and legal traditions do permit the indefinite detention of people within America’s borders — through the National Defense Authorization Act, for example — or whether that was just an unfortunate choice of phrase.

The protests on May 23 — a global day of action initiated by the US-based activists of Witness Against Torture — marked the anniversary of a major speech on national security by President Obama, prompted by a prison-wide hunger strike and the widespread indignation it triggered in world leaders, NGOs, the global media and the million ordinary people who signed petitions calling for the prison’s closure.

In the speech, President Obama promised to appoint two new envoys — in the Pentagon and the State Department — to help with the closure of Guantánamo, dropped a ban on releasing Yemeni prisoners that he had imposed after it was revealed that a failed airline bomb plot in December 2009 had been hatched in Yemen, and promised to resume releasing prisoners who had been cleared for release by a high-level, inter-agency task force that he appointed shortly after taking office in January 2009.

At the time of his speech, 86 prisoners cleared for release were still held, and since then, although 17 men have been released — including 11 of the 86 men cleared for release, another man who agreed to a fixed sentence as part of a plea deal in his trial by military commission, and five men in a prisoner swap at the weekend (which I’ll be writing about very soon) — 75 other prisoners cleared for release by the task force are still held, plus three other men cleared for release since last year’s speech by Periodic Review Boards, convened to assess whether the majority of the rest of the prisoners — those not cleared for release by the task force — should be added to the list of those the US says it no longer wants to hold.

Of these 78 men, 58 are Yemenis, and although President Obama appointed the two envoys he promised to appoint, he has not yet released a single Yemeni. The last Yemeni to leave the prison alive was in July 2010, while another died in September 2012, despite having been repeatedly approved for release.

As I keep pointing out, releasing the Yemenis is essential, not only to show a respect for justice on the part of President Obama, but also to move towards his long-delayed promise to close the prison.

Scott and I talked about these issues, and many others, including whether or not President Obama will close Guantánamo before the end of his presidency, the Periodic Review Boards, the failure of the military commissions, and the Bush administration’s deliberate and long-lasting effort to confuse soldiers and terrorists, and I hope you have time to listen to the show, and to share it if you find it useful.

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

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

It’s 29 Years Since the Battle of the Beanfield, and the World Has Changed Immeasurably

[image error] Buy my book The Battle of the Beanfield here.

29 years ago, on June 1, 1985, a convoy of around 450 men, women and children — travellers, anarchists, free festival goers and green activists — were ambushed by 1,400 police from six counties and the Ministry of Defence, and decommissioned with a violence that has rarely been paralleled in modern British history.

The convoy was en route to Stonehenge, to set up what would have been the 11th annual free festival in the fields opposite Britain’s most famous ancient monument, but the savage decommissioning of the travellers’ vehicles, their mass arrest, and the raising of a military-style exclusion zone around Stonehenge put paid to that prospect.

The exclusion zone was raised every June for the next 13 years, until the law lords ruled it illegal in 1999, and since then English Heritage have allowed unfettered access to the stones on the summer solstice, with up to 30,000 revellers — everyone from pagan priests to teenage party-goers — availing themselves of the “Managed Open Access” policy.

The irony — not lost on the survivors of the free festival — is that, in the festival years, only a few hundred of the tens of thousands of people who visited the festival every June actually crossed the road from the festival grounds to the stones, whereas now, after the long years of exclusion, all the authorities have managed to achieve is to stage, in the stone circle itself, a far bigger party than the festivals’ organisers could ever have dreamed of.

While there may be some humour in this situation, there is nothing funny about what happened to the travellers’ movement as a whole. In the aftermath of the Beanfield, Margaret Thatcher’s government passed legislation — the Public Order Act of 1986 — which began the criminalisation of large unlicensed public gatherings  and the elimination of the travellers’ movement — the new nomadic culture that had arisen in the late 1970s as a response to the mass unemployment of the time and that had grown spectacularly under Margaret Thatcher, as she laid waste to the British state to pursue her malignant dream of a country run solely for profit by the private sector.

The counter-culture wasn’t wiped out immediately. Unexpectedly, rave culture appeared in the late ’80s, creating a mass movement of dissent, and other developments  — the road protest movement and Reclaim the Streets, for example — also seized the popular imagination, feeding into the anti-globalisation movement that took off globally at the end of the 1990s.

Nevertheless, the government refused to accept widespread dissent — either as part of a genuinely open society, or, more importantly, as a considered response to the problems of capitalism, especially after the fall of Communism, and the establishment’s mistaken belief that this somehow vindicated capitalism as the world’s only viable economic model.

In response to rave culture, the government of John Major passed the Criminal Justice Act of 1994, which built on the repressive tendencies of the Public Order Act to outlaw unlicensed gatherings of more than a few people, to criminalise trespass and to do away with the requirements to provide sites for gypsies and other travellers.

As the anti-globalisation movement grew, governments responded with ever greater repression. In Genoa, in 2001, Italian police murdered a protestor, and in the UK the police came up with a new response to protest — kettling, the systematic imprisonment of large groups of protestors behind unbreakable police lines, for many hours, with food, drink and access to toilets denied.

Then, whether fortuitously or not, came 9/11 and the “war on terror,” which provided a perfect excuse for the West’s increasingly authoritarian governments to further clamp down on civil liberties and human rights, and to promote permanent war and a permanent climate of fear as a powerful but deeply cynical way of controlling entire populations.

Where once there had been some tolerance, and some give and take from the establishment, now inflexible governments sought to suppress all dissent except the most anodyne kind. In the UK, Tony Blair than went one step further, swatting aside the largest protest in British history — the two million-strong march in February 2003, against the war in Iraq, as though two million of us were nothing more than a single fly.

In doing so, he gained the undying, implacable opposition — even hatred — of many of those two million people, although some, of course, concluded only that all protest is futile. Furthermore, as Blair’s other drive, undertaken with his Chancellor, Gordon Brown — to eradicate socialism from the UK, to further Thatcher’s dream of a corporate state, and to turn the provision of housing into a casino of greed — became entrenched in the first decade of New Labour rule, the dissenting voices of the counter-culture were increasingly silenced.

As materialism, narcissism and self-obsession became the drivers of society, the impulses of the counter-culture — the voices of communality, the iconoclasts, the would-be land reformers and the environmentally conscious — became sidelined.

In 2011 and 2012, the Occupy movement represented a brief reawakening of many of these impulses, but after a brief flurry of mainstream interest in its otherwise marginalised demands — for land reform, socialism, and governments interested in creating employment rather than merely pimping for bankers, the super-rich and corporations — it was eventually suppressed.

Now, of course, with the shameful, embarrassing and, in many ways, profoundly troubling rise of populist, white, right-wing movements of bigots, xenophobes and racists blaming immigrants and the European Union for the crimes committed by and on behalf of the banks, corporations and the super-rich (step forward UKIP in the UK), the revival of a popular left-wing movement — or, probably more pertinently, the creation of a brand-new socialist movement — looks, disturbingly, to be further away than ever.

Echoes of fascism and fears of fascism are never far away when this type of darkness takes hold, and while I and many, many other people wonder when people will wake up in significant numbers, and if there is a way of creating solidarity that we haven’t thought of, I lament today, as I do every year on June 1, for the lost dissent of the counter-culture of the 1960s, 70s and 80s, and the increasingly harried and endangered right to think differently, and to swim against the prevailing cultural tide.

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 and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

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

Please Read “Waiting for Progress on Guantánamo,” My Latest Article for Al-Jazeera

Dear friends and supporters,

I hope you have time to read my latest article for Al-Jazeera, “Waiting for Progress on Guantánamo,” and to like, share and tweet it if you find it useful. Written to mark the first anniversary of President Obama’s promise to resume releasing prisoners from Guantánamo (on May 23, when a global day of action was held to call for renewed action from the president), it provides a round-up of progress — or the lack of it — in the last year.

As I note, although President Obama appointed envoys in the Pentagon and the State Department to work on the release of prisoners and the closure of the prison, and 12 men have been freed since last August, 78 of the prisoners, out of 154 in total who are still held, have been approved for release — 75 in January 2010 by President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force, and three others in recent months by Periodic Review Boards, established to review the cases of the majority of the men have not been cleared for release, including one man, Ghaleb al-Bihani, whose release was approved just yesterday.

The basic message, a year on from the president’s promise, is that – after several years in which Congress raised serious obstacles to the release of prisoners — lawmakers eased those restrictions in December, and the president now has no more excuses, and must release the cleared prisoners as soon as possible, or be judged as a man who failed to keep his word.

Moreover, unless he releases prisoners as soon as possible he will not only be known as the president who normalized indefinite detention without charge or trial, but who did so with a vicious twist — two review processes that purported to approve the release of prisoners, but failed to lead to their release, an outcome that would make the cruellest of dictators blush.

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 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.