Andy Worthington's Blog, page 116

Radio: Andy Worthington Discusses Guantánamo with Linda Olson-Osterlund on KBOO FM in Portland

Last Thursday, on the eve of a global day of action on Guantánamo, I spoke to Linda Olson-Osterlund on KBOO FM in Portland, Oregon. Linda and I have spoken many times over the years, and it’s always a pleasure to speak to her. The half-hour show is available here, as an MP3, and the page on the KBOO FM site is here.

The day of action (see my photos of the London protest here, and my report here) was called to mark the first anniversary of President Obama’s promise to resume releasing prisoners, after a 32-month period in which just five men were released from the prison. The release of prisoners almost ground to a halt because Congress raised significant obstacles, which President Obama chose not to overcome, even though a waiver in the legislation allowed him to do so.

Since the promise, President Obama has appointed two envoys to work towards the closure of Guantánamo, and 12 men have been freed from the prison, but much more needs to be done. On the anniversary, half of the men still held — 77 of the 154 men still imprisoned — are still detained even though all of them have been cleared for release. 75 of them were told in January 2010 by President Obama’s high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that the US no longer wanted to hold them, and two others had their release approved in the last few months by Periodic Review Boards.

57 of these men are Yemenis, permanently held, it appears, because of US fears about the security situation in Yemen, but it is time for that stumbling block to be removed, and for the US to understand that releasing people it has said it no longer wants to hold is more important than endlessly obsessing about what might happen after their release.

In the show, Linda and I also spoke about many other aspects of the terrible and seemingly endless story of Guantánamo — the recent favourable court ruling in the case of Abu Wa’el Dhiab, a force-fed hunger striker (but also see here), Uruguay’s offer to take in six men cleared for release who cannot be safely repatriated, including Mr. Dhiab.

Linda and I also spoke extensively about the hunger strike and the force-feeding, and Linda, I’m glad to note, mentioned a recent letter by a Yemeni prisoner, Emad Hassan, which I published here, and we also spoke about the US authorities’ efforts to silence all discussion of the ongoing hunger strike — by subjecting the men to genital groping to dissuade them from meeting or speaking with their lawyers, and, in December, when they stopped reporting the number of hunger strikers.

I do hope you have time to listen to the show, and that, if you find it informative, you’ll share it with your friends and family.

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.

Photos: The “Close Guantánamo” Protest in London, May 23, 2014

Please click here to see my photos of the protest on Flickr.

On Friday (May 23), activists around the world held a global day of action — in 39 towns and cities in the US, and six other cities worldwide — calling for the release of prisoners from Guantánamo, and the closure of the prison. The day was set up by my friends in the US-based campaigning group Witness Against Torture, and I was at the London protest, in Trafalgar Square. This was a silent protest organised by the London Guantánamo Campaign, and I’m pleased to make my photos available. The protest, in front of the National Gallery, was seen by many people, and enthusiastic volunteers handed out leaflets explaining why it was so important.

The London protest was also noteworthy for the presence of a giant inflatable figure of Shaker Aamer, the last British prisoner in Guantánamo, which was an idea of mine, taken up by a supporter who financed the making of it. Shaker continues to be held, despite being cleared for release in 2007, under President Bush, and also under President Obama, and there will be further events calling for his release in the near future, which I’ll be publicising in due course. In the meantime, please sign and share the international petition calling for his release, and read some of my most recent articles about him; specifically, From Guantánamo, Shaker Aamer Says, “Tell the World the Truth,” as CBS Distorts the Reality of “Life at Gitmo”, Gravely Ill, Shaker Aamer Asks US Judge to Order His Release from Guantánamo and Shaker Aamer’s Statements Regarding His Torture and Abuse in Afghanistan and at Guantánamo.

The date for the global day of action was chosen because it was exactly a year since President Obama promised, in a major speech on national security issues, to resume releasing prisoners, after nearly three years in which the release of prisoners had almost ground to a halt.

The president had been prompted into action by a prison-wide hunger strike, which had reminded the world of the plight of the men at Guantánamo, largely abandoned  as a result of cynical Congressional opposition to the release of prisoners, and President Obama’s refusal to overcome that opposition, even though he had the means to do so.

Since his promise to act last year, President Obama has released 12 prisoners (which is progress when compared to the five men released between October 2010 and the day of his speech), but much more work needs to be done. Of the 154 men still held, exactly half — 77 men — have been told that the US no longer wants to hold them, or to put them on trial.

75 of these men were approved for release from the prison in January 2010, when a high-level, inter-agency task force appointed by President Obama, the Guantánamo Review Task Force, delivered its final report on the prisoners, recommending who should be freed, who should be prosecuted, and — alarmingly — who should continue to be held without charge or trial. Two others were approved for release in recent months by Periodic Review Boards, established to review the cases of 71 prisoners who were initially designated for prosecution or for ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial.

57 of these men are Yemenis, and officials in the Obama administration have tried to justify their ongoing imprisonment because they have fears about the security situation in Yemen. That, however, is not an acceptable reason for continuing to hold men for years after they were told the US no longer wanted to hold them.

Below is a video about the Yemenis made by the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents a number of Guantánamo prisoners:

Please also note the story of Abu Wa’el Dhiab, a Syrian who is cleared for release, but who has been on a hunger strike, in despair at ever being released, and is being force-fed. Mr. Dhiab has been challenging the government’s decision to force-feed him, and recently won the right to have his lawyers see videotapes of his force-feeding and his “forcible cell extractions,” as well as his medical records, all of which will hopefully lead to his release, especially as President Mujica of Uruguay has offered new homes to him and five other men who cannot be safely repatriated.

For the day of action, I asked supporters to phone the White House on 202-456-1111 or 202-456-1414 or submit a comment online, and to tell President Obama that he must release all the prisoners cleared for release without further delay, and it’s a message that I continue to endorse and promote. You can, if you wish, specifically mention the Yemenis and/or Abu Wa’el Dhiab and Uruguay’s offer of a new home for him and five other men.

We need to make President Obama aware that continuing to hold men whose release was approved by high-level governmental review boards is unacceptable, and that these 77 men must be freed.

Thank you for your interest.

Note: For photos from a number of the protests in the US and elsewhere, please see Witness Against Torture’s Facebook page.

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.

Judge Reluctantly Allows US to Resume Force-Feeding Guantánamo Hunger Striker

[image error]As I explained last week, the Guantánamo prisoners secured a massive court victory on May 16, when a federal court judge ordered the government to halt the force-feeding of Abu Wa’el Dhiab, a Syrian prisoner. He is one of 77 men still held (out of 154 in total) who have been cleared for release from the prison, and he is on a hunger strike and being force-fed, in large part because of his despair at ever being released, despite being told in January 2010 that the US government no longer wished to hold him.

The judge in question, Judge Gladys Kessler, also ordered the government to preserve video evidence of his force-feeding, to stop him being subjected to “forcible cell extractions” — in which guards in riot gear storm prisoner’s cells and move them to be force-fed if they refuse to go — and to preserve  all evidence of his “forcible cell extractions.”

This was the first time a judge had intervened to hold the government to account for its treatment of prisoners (following a helpful appeals court ruling in February), and on Wednesday Judge Kessler held a meeting with Mr. Dhiab’s lawyers and lawyers from the Justice Department at which she ordered the government to hand over videotapes and Mr. Dhiab’s medical records to his lawyers.

As I described it in a well-received article on Thursday:

As the Guardian described it, the US government “conceded that there are 34 videos showing the forcible feeding” of Abu Wa’el Dhiab,” adding, “The analogue video cassettes are part of a broader set of 136 videos showing Dhiab being forcibly removed from his cell by Guantánamo Bay guards bringing the hunger striker to be fed enterally.”

Judge Kessler ordered these 34 videotapes to be handed over, although, as the Guardian noted, she “did not order the tapes to be released to the public.” Instead, the government “will have to transfer the classified tapes from Guantánamo to a secured facility in the Washington D.C. area for his lawyers to view, after faces and other identifying information of Guantánamo personnel and facilities are censored.”

The Guardian added that the tapes of Dhiab’s feedings “are said to range between 15 minutes to half an hour each, suggesting the government possesses at least eight hours of footage of just one detainee enteral feeding.” They are also “said to be in a microcassette format,” and, as the Guardian described it, Jon B. Eisenberg “said they would have to be digitized for viewing, owing to formatting difficulties impacting declassified playback.” Eisenberg quipped, “Pretend it’s 1955, that’s where the technology is.”

Judge Kessler also ordered the government to produce Mr. Dhiab’s medical records. As Reprieve noted, “These records should allow the court to make a proper assessment of the traumatic impact of force-feeding on Mr. Dhiab’s declining health.” Importantly, as Reprieve also noted, “For the time being, the existing injunction remains in place,” meaning that Mr. Dhiab cannot be force-fed or subjected to “forcible cell extractions.”

Judge Kessler reluctantly drops her restraining order

On Thursday, however, Judge Kessler reluctantly lifted the stay on Mr. Dhiab’s force-feeding. She noted that, at the status hearing on Wednesday, she had “strongly suggested that the Parties come to a compromise about the procedures used to enterally feed” Mr. Dhiab, because his “physical condition was swiftly deteriorating, in large part because he was refusing food and/or water.”

She pointed out that Mr. Dhiab had “indicated his willingness to be enterally fed, if it could be done at the hospital in Guantánamo Bay, if he could be spared the agony of having the feeding tubes inserted and removed for each feeding, and if he could be spared the pain and discomfort of the restraint chair.” She added, “If he could have been enterally fed in that manner, it would have then been possible to litigate his plea to enjoin certain practices used in his force feedings in a civilized and legally appropriate manner.” However, “The Department of Defense refused to make these compromises.”

As a result, Judge Kessler noted:

The Court is now faced with an anguishing Hobson’s choice: reissue another Temporary Restraining Order (‘TRO’) despite the very real probability that Mr. Dhiab will die, because he has indicated a continuing desire to refuse to eat and/or drink liquids, or refuse to issue the TRO and allow the medical personnel on the scene to take the medical actions to keep Mr. Dhiab alive, but at the possible cost of great pain and suffering.

She added:

The Court is in no position to make the complex medical decisions necessary to keep Mr. Dhiab alive. Thanks to the intransigence of the Department of Defense, Mr. Dhiab may well suffer unnecessary pain from certain enteral feeding practices and forcible cell extractions. However, the Court simply cannot let Mr. Dhiab die.

The Court does, however, remind all personnel that they should abide by their own Standard Operating Protocols, and that the standard for enteral feeding is whether Mr. Dhiab is actually facing an “imminent risk of death or great bodily injury.”

Judge Kessler’s June 16 deadline for the production of videotapes, medical records and other documents

Judge Kessler also stated that, the day after, she would “issue a scheduling order” to “facilitate the speedy exchange of discovery such that the Court can reach the merits of Mr. Dhiab’s Application,” and in that order she told the government to “produce Petitioner’s medical records from April 9, 2013 to December 31, 2013,” and to “produce all videotapes made between April 9, 2013, and February 19, 2014, that record both Petitioner’s Forcible Cell Extraction and subsequent enteral feeding” by June 10.

She also ordered he government to “file a list of all current Standard Operating Procedures/Protocols directly addressing enteral feeding and/or the use of a restraint chair at Guantanamo Bay” by the same date, as well as ordering officials to “keep the Court fully apprised as to Petitioner’s medical condition,” and she scheduled a status conference for June 16, at 10am, “to address any outstanding discovery issues and set a date for a Motion Hearing.”

As Reprieve explained in a press release, the Motion Hearing will determine “[t]he wider issue of whether force-feeding at Guantánamo is illegal … once the tapes and other key evidence have been reviewed.” For now, however, “he will continue to be subjected to force-feeding while the case is underway.”

During a phone call with his lawyers on Thursday, Mr Dhiab “said he would be willing to be subjected to artificial nutrition if it were done humanely, at the prison’s hospital or with minimal painful intubation, as was the case during the first mass hunger strike at the prison in 2005 and 2006,” largely echoing what Judge Kessler had noted.

Ironically, Judge Kessler’s scheduling order took place exactly a year after President Obama promised to resume releasing prisoners from Guantánamo, when, in a major speech on national security issues, delivering during the prison-wide hunger strike that reawakened indignation around the world at the continued existence of Guantánamo, he stated, “Look at the current situation, where we are force-feeding detainees who are holding a hunger strike … Is that who we are? Is that something that our founders foresaw? Is that the America we want to leave to our children? Our sense of justice is stronger than that.”

Despite the fine words, Abu Wa’el Dhiab is on a hunger strike and being force-fed because, although he has been cleared for release, he is in despair because of the president’s failure to release him.

In response to the latest developments in the case, Jon B. Eisenberg said, “I am stunned that the Department of Defense refused to agree to the reasonable compromise Mr. Dhiab proposed, but the real responsibility lies at the door of President Obama, who utters lofty words but fails to stop the terrible things that are happening at Guantánamo Bay on his watch. Mr. Dhiab is about to suffer some awful abuse, but I have faith in his capacity to endure it.”

Cori Crider, Reprieve’s Strategic Director, said, “The government’s refusal to make a basic commitment to treat Mr. Dhiab with decency tells you all you need to know about what is really going on at Gitmo. And where is the White House in all this? It’s been a year since the President Obama said force-feeding detainees was not ‘who we are’ and pledged a fresh push to close the prison. Well, is he, the commander-in-chief of the people, abusing Mr. Dhiab, or is he not? He could put my cleared client on a plane today if he had the will to do it.”

I couldn’t agree more, and, following the day of action on Guantánamo on Friday, when protests were held across America and around the world, calling for renewed commitment on the president’s part to freeing cleared prisoners and closing the prison, I urge readers to call the White House on 202-456-1111 or 202-456-1414 — or to submit a comment online — asking President Obama to send Abu Wa’el Dhiab and five other men cleared for release to Uruguay, where President Mujica has offered them a new home, and to release, as soon as possible, all of the 77 prisoners that his own reviewing bodies have said should no longer be held indefinitely or put forward for trials.

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.

For First Time, US Judge Orders Government to Release Videotapes of Force-Feeding to Guantánamo Prisoner’s Lawyers

[image error]Yesterday, for the first time in Guantánamo’s long and ignoble history, a federal court judge ordered the US government to hand over videotapes recording a prisoner being forcibly dragged from his cell by a riot team, and then being force-fed.

The prisoner in question, Abu Wa’el Dhiab, is a Syrian, cleared for release from the prison in 2009 by President Obama’s high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force, along with 74 other men who are still held. In despair at ever being released, because of Congressional obstructions and President Obama’s unwillingness to bypass Congress, even though a waiver in the legislation allowed him to do so, Mr. Dhiab was one of the many prisoners who embarked on a prison-wide hunger strike last year, and was soon subjected to force-feeding, a horribly painful process condemned by medical professionals.

Last Friday, Abu Wa’el Dhiab secured a momentous victory when District Judge Gladys Kessler ordered the government to stop force-feeding him and to stop him being subjected to “forcible cell extractions,” and also ordered the government to preserve all videotapes recording his “forcible cell extractions” and his force-feeding. The motion on behalf of Abu Wa’el Dhiab only came about when one of his lawyers, Jon B. Eisenberg, found out through persistent questioning of a Justice Department official that the videotapes existed, and, with his fellow lawyers at the legal action charity Reprieve, submitted an emergency motion.

Last Friday, Judge Kessler scheduled another hearing for yesterday (May 21) to give the government  time to say when it would be able to turn over Mr. Dhiab’s medical records and the videotapes.

As the Guardian described it, the US government “conceded that there are 34 videos showing the forcible feeding” of Abu Wa’el Dhiab,” adding, “The analogue video cassettes are part of a broader set of 136 videos showing Dhiab being forcibly removed from his cell by Guantánamo Bay guards bringing the hunger striker to be fed enterally.”

Judge Kessler ordered these 34 videotapes to be handed over, although, as the Guardian noted, she “did not order the tapes to be released to the public.” Instead, the government “will have to transfer the classified tapes from Guantánamo to a secured facility in the Washington D.C. area for his lawyers to view, after faces and other identifying information of Guantánamo personnel and facilities are censored.”

The Guardian added that the tapes of Dhiab’s feedings “are said to range between 15 minutes to half an hour each, suggesting the government possesses at least eight hours of footage of just one detainee enteral feeding.” They are also “said to be in a microcassette format,” and, as the Guardian described it, Jon B. Eisenberg “said they would have to be digitized for viewing, owing to formatting difficulties impacting declassified playback.” Eisenberg quipped, “Pretend it’s 1955, that’s where the technology is.”

Judge Kessler also ordered the government to produce Mr. Dhiab’s medical records. As Reprieve noted, “These records should allow the court to make a proper assessment of the traumatic impact of force-feeding on Mr. Dhiab’s declining health.” Importantly, as Reprieve also noted, “For the time being, the existing injunction remains in place,” meaning that Mr. Dhiab cannot be force-fed or subjected to “forcible cell extractions.”

No wonder, then, that two other hunger strikers, Emad Hassan and Ahmad Rabbani, submitted motions this week asking for the videotapes of their force-feeding to be preserved.

It is to be hoped that many more prisoners now embark on this course of action, and that the embarrassment of dealing with the repercussions of these disgraceful policies at Guantánamo persuades President Obama to take decisive action — in the first instance, by releasing the men who are cleared for release, like Mr. Dhiab, as soon as possible.

In his case, the irony is that he is one of six prisoners who have already been offered a new home in Uruguay by President Mujica, an offer that President Obama should accept without further delay.

Responding to Judge Kessler’s ruling yesterday, Cori Crider, Reprieve’s Strategic Director, said, “Mr. Dhiab has been cleared for transfer from Guantánamo Bay for several years now, and yet promises of his imminent release have come to nothing, so it is not surprising that he has gone on a peaceful hunger strike in desperation. It is very encouraging that the rule of law is finally coming to Guantánamo, so that perhaps Mr. Dhiab’s situation can be resolved. While the photographic evidence of his abuse is secret, it will at least allow the judge to see what is happening to him.”

Further revelations about Abu Wa’el Dhiab’s treatment – in April, and threats following last Friday’s ruling

The day before Judge Kessler ordered the government to hand over the videotapes to Mr. Dhiab’s lawyers, Cori Crider and Cortney Busch of Reprieve submitted two additional declarations providing further information about their client.

Cortney Busch, Reprieve’s Operations Manager, received her declassified notes from a visit on April 30, when she found Mr. Dhiab “very thin” and  looking unwell. He told her that he had resumed his hunger strike “because of the delay in releasing him.”

Mr. Dhiab also explained how the staff responsible for force-feeding the prisoners were involved in what he described as “a ‘vicious’ policy of permitting the detainees’ weight to yo-yo: over-feeding prisoners to the point of discomfort, suddenly ceasing the feeding, then resuming feedings if a prisoner loses consciousness on the block.” This, he noted accurately, was “even more unpleasant and dangerous than a consistent regime of feedings.”

Mr. Dhiab also explained how Ahmad Rabbani, one of the two men who followed his success in court last Friday with their own court submissions this week, had been the victim of “very disturbing force-feeding practices,” through which he “had developed a bad chest infection and had been vomiting blood.”

In the second submission, Cori Crider, Reprieve’s Strategic Director, explained how, in a call with Mr. Dhiab following his court victory last Friday, he stated that, within hours of the ruling, he had been threatened with a “forcible cell extraction” by  an army sergeant, and further explained that he was fearful of the riot squad that administers the FCEs (the ERF team, generally understood to mean the “Emergency Response Force” or the “Emergency Reaction Force,” although the prisoners refer to it as the “Extreme Reaction Force”).

Crucially, Mr. Dhiab also explained how the videotapes of the “forcible cell extractions and the force-feeding may well not include the worst treatment, as the filming is selective rather than consistent.

In conclusion, Cori Crider noted that he “made a simple plea for good sense,” stating, “All I want is to get out of this place. For how much longer will I have to be in this situation? The suffering, the torture, being away from my kids and my family? How much longer will I be here?” He added, “Five years ago, Obama said he was going to close this place and let the cleared people out. Meanwhile I have lost much of my life here, as well as my loved ones. Why are they doing this to us? I have no problem with America. For how long are they going to make me suffer?”

These are powerful words on the eve of the global day of action tomorrow (May 23), when, throughout the US and around the world, people will be calling for the closure of Guantánamo. To ask President Obama to release Abu Wa’el Dhiab and all the other cleared prisoners (77 in total), please call the White House on 202-456-1111 or 202-456-1414. You can also submit a comment online.

Cortney Busch’s declaration, May 20, 2014

1. I am the Operations Manager and a security-cleared paralegal with legal action charity Reprieve. I have been visiting Reprieve’s clients in Guantánamo since August 2010.

2. I make this declaration based on my most recent visit with the Petitioner on 30 April 2014; I received the cleared notes from that visit today.

3. The following description is drawn directly from this visit. Quotations represent my best reconstruction of what Mr. Dhiab said, although they are not verbatim.

4. Mr. Dhiab was very thin when I saw him and looked unwell. He stated that he had not been out for recreation or even a shower for nearly seven months.

5. He reported that he had resumed hunger striking because of the delay in releasing him. He had suspended his strike for a brief period when it appeared to him that release might be imminent, but said he found the continuing limbo too difficult to bear: “All I want to know is my situation. Am I going to leave or not?” He mentioned previous instances when he had been told he would be released and, in the event, was not.

6. Mr. Dhiab is suffering considerable health complications apparently as a result of his previous long-term under striking and force-feeding, to include serious pain in his kidneys and blood in his urine.

7. He also states that the ‘Forcible Cell Extraction’ (FCE) team have continued to assault him for ‘movements’ without reason or provocation, and continued to do so even after the temporary suspension of his hunger strike.

8. He also reported what he described as a ‘vicious’ policy of permitting the detainees’ weight to yo-yo: over-feeding prisoners to the point of discomfort, suddenly ceasing the feeding, then resuming feedings if a prisoner loses consciousness on the block. This, he says, is even more unpleasant and dangerous than a consistent regime of feedings.

Other prisoners

9. Mr. Dhiab also mentioned very disturbing force-feeding practices for another petitioner, Ahmed Rabbani. Mr. Dhiab reported that the day before our visit (that is, on April 29, 2014) another detainee, Ahmed Rabbani (ISN 1461) started to bleed immediately when JTF-GTMO medical staff tried to intubate him, and that they tried to do so three times but were ultimately unsuccessful. This led to extremely painful swelling in his nose and throat. As a result of the feeding tube being incorrectly inserted, Mr. Rabbani had developed a bad chest infection and had been vomiting blood over the previous few days.

10. Mr. Dhiab said Mr. Rabbani was regularly being ‘FCE’d’ to be force-fed, and that last Sunday he was vomiting blood. he believes this will have been caught on camera because Mr. Rabbani had vomited blood on himself as the FCE team came to take him to the force feeding chair. Mr. Rabbani then lost consciousness.

11. He compared the current situation facing hunger strikers unfavourably with some aspects of feeding during the Bush administration. Under Bush, he remembered, if you bled during the force-feeding, the process would typically be suspended for three days and then resumed. He also mentioned that one of the doctors at JTF-GTMO brought some sort of ‘form’ for Mr. Rabbani for his signature. He did not know the precise language of the form Mr. Rabbani was asked to sign, but the import of it was, in essence, “we will not force-feed you if you refuse, but if you die you release us of responsibility.” Mr. Dhiab did not know if Mr. Rabbani signed the form.

Cori Crider’s declaration, May 20, 2014

1. This is a supplemental declaration regarding my call with Petitioner on May 19, 2014. Quotations represent my best reconstruction of what the client said but are not verbatim. In the compressed time available I have been unable to confirm every detail of the following account with Petitioner, but I believe these notes to be an accurate reflection of our call.

Resumption of strike and threatened force-feeding

2. Mr. Dhiab has resumed hunger striking. He said that last week between Tuesday and Thursday (May 13-15, 2014), JTF-GTMO medical staff — both doctors and nurses — approached him in his cell and said that if he did not begin to consume nutrients he would once again be force-fed.

3. He described great pain, saying “I could barely sleep for the pain in my kidneys.”

4. Medical staff also told him that, if he refused to eat, the ‘Forcible Cell Extraction’ (FCE) team would be deployed to take him to feedings.

5. He said one of the nurses was very explicit about the consequences of refusing nutrition: “She told me you have one of two options. Either you eat, or we are going to send you to force-feeding through the FCE.” Mr. Dhiab did not know her rank, but indicated the nurse was an African-American woman of average height, working the night shift last week.

6. On Friday, he said the medical staff did not approach him.

Threatened Forcible Cell Extraction on Friday

7. Petitioner observed that there has recently been overuse of the FCE team: “Now they have started to FCE a lot of people. They seem to be hauling people from their cells for any minor reason. One such trivial reason would be, for example, to inspect the room.”

8. Petitioner indicated he had not been moved by the FCE team since Friday. But he added that on Friday night, after the final prayer of the day but before midnight, an army sergeant came to his cell to harass and intimidate him about a possible FCE.

9. Petitioner recounted the following exchange with the sergeant:

The sergeant came to my cell and asked “Why are you refusing to eat? Do you wanna eat by the FCE?”

“I don’t care,” I said.

He said “Okay, see you during the FCE time.”

“Are you from the ERF team?” I asked.

“I am in charge of the team,” he said.

10. Petitioner also indicated that this individual was ‘working’ with the FCE team that evening and would not have come to his cell as part of the ordinary block police patrol or some other routine visit. Petitioner could discern no other purpose to the sergeant’s visit to his cell than to deliver this threat.

11. Petitioner estimates that this man was between 37 and 40, African- American, tall and of medium build. “I have seen him before, and usually we have a good relationship,” he said. When I asked whether he was then surprised that this person had seemingly made a special effort to approach and harass him, he said he was not, and that sad to say, “people change on you from one day to the next here.”

12. Petitioner was very intimidated by this soldier’s threat to use the team, largely because of past experience:

The ERF team hurt you all the time. I especially remember they badly hurt my rib in the past — once in 2009, and another time this year. I have had great pain in both the left and right sides of my chest because of this. It also seems like every time they ERF me and give me a blood test they find blood in my urine. I have severe pain in my lower back/thigh and also in my neck, I believe all from the ERF. I have continuous pain in the head.

“After the torture I have been through many times,” he said, “I have sometimes wished to die because of them.”

Videos

13. Petitioner described the videotaping of FCEs as incomplete and manipulated by Respondents.

14. “They video you when they force you onto the chair and when they pull you off the chair,” he said, “but they do not always do it during feedings.”

15. He said that on several occasions he has requested for the camera to be switched on, to no avail: “When they torture me on the chair, I tell them ‘you should videotape this,’ but at that point they refuse to run the tape. Then, when I start to resist because I am in so much pain, they turn the camera on.”

16. He has particularly tried to persuade them to film during especially painful intubation sessions:

When they [the FCE team] push me in the chair, they then hold each of my limb: one on each arm, one on each leg, and another on the head. Sometimes the way the MP holds the head chokes me, and with all the nerves in the nose the tube passing the nose is like torture. Then, especially when the MP is holding the neck, when they try to force the tube through the throat it often catches and they cannot push it through. At times like these, I ask them to videotape. And they refuse.

17. Then, he said, once the pain has reached a point where he cannot tolerate it and begins to move in response, filming typically starts:

But then, of course, the pain makes you move around. I move my head when they poke me with the tube. I can’t help it. It hurts too much. Then they hold my head, and it only gets worse. After that I start to resist because I have severe pain in my throat. In this moment the head ERF guy shouts ‘DON’T RESIST! DON’T RESIST!’ And then they start taping.

The same thing happens at the end of the feeding: when they move me off the chair and they put pressure on my back and kidneys, I tell them ‘I have pain! I am suffering!’ So after a point, to relieve the suffering, I try to resist, and again they shout ‘Don’t resist!’ and again they start the tape. I don’t want to fight, but I am in such pain.

Many times I have said to them “you are not dealing with a stone, you are dealing with a human being. Why not deal with me like a human being, not a block?”

If I wanted to resist them from the start, I would have resisted when they entered my cell, when I was not chained, not later, when I am just in incredible pain and can only think of doing anything to stop it.

18. He also tries to persuade the FCE team to stop hurting him first:

I try to tell them about my pain before I resist — of course I hope they will avoid hurting me. I tell them they are putting pressure on my back, my kidney and my neck and I am suffering. Several times I have tried to tell them I was in pain but they just kept doing it, and after a point I am in such pain I have no choice but to resist.

19. In general Petitioner was emphatic that, however bad the footage of his FCEs and force-feedings ultimately appears, the unfilmed periods are in truth far worse:

From the time they enter the room to the time they get me off the chair to the time they chain me to the chair, anyone should be smart enough to recognize that there are periods with no videotaping. Why is this?

Sometimes the MPs block the camera so that all you see is not me, suffering, but the soldiers blocking the camera with their bodies.

Other really painful things will not be caught on camera. Many times in the chair they squeeze my leg. The camera can’t really show their squeezing of the leg. When I scream from pain, I start to move, and they say ‘he’s going to resist’, and they start to yell ‘STOP RESISTING! STOP RESISTING!’

When the soldiers touch me I tell them I have a damaged rib. The camera will not capture the pressure on my rib that makes me scream and move. They purposely make you feel pain. When I feel pain I shift, and when I move, they say ‘you are resisting’, and the whole ordeal begins again. Many times when I warn them not to put pressure on my rib or my kidney they only do it more.

When I complain they say ‘we are protecting your life, we are protecting your health’. What kind of concern about my life and health is this, if they put me through such pain I am unable to sleep? I am peacefully demonstrating. Why are you torturing me? I did not resist you to begin with.

20. “I feel as if I die several times a day,” he added.

21. Towards the end of the call he made a simple plea for good sense:

All I want is to get out of this place. For how much longer will I have to be in this situation? The suffering, the torture, being away from my kids and my family? How much longer will I be here?

Five years ago, Obama said he was going to close this place and let the cleared people out. Meanwhile I have lost much of my life here, as well as my loved ones. Why are they doing this to us? I have no problem with America. For how long are they going to make me suffer?

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.

Two More Guantánamo Hunger Strikers Ask Judges to Order Government to Preserve Video Evidence of Force-Feeding

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 Friday, as I reported here, there was wonderful news from the District Court in Washington D.C., as Judge Gladys Kessler responded to an emergency motion submitted by a Syrian prisoner in Guantánamo, Abu Wa’el Dhiab, who is on a hunger strike and is being force-fed, and ordered the government to stop force-feeding him, and to preserve all videotapes showing his force-feeding.

The existence of the videos only came to light last week, in correspondence between the Justice Department and Jon B. Eisenberg, one of Abu Wa’el Dhiab’s lawyers. In court documents, the lawyers described how the admission that videotapes exist came about “only under persistent questioning by Petitioners’ counsel during a protracted email exchange.”

As well as recording the prisoners’ force-feeding, the videos also record the “forcible cell extractions” (FCEs) undertaken by a team of guards in riot gear who violently move prisoners who refuse to leave their cells. Judge Kessler also ordered the government to preserve all videos of the “forcible cell extractions,”and also ordered the government to stop the FCEs.

The halt to the force-feeding and the FCEs is only until today (May 21), when Judge Kessler scheduled another hearing at which the government “should be prepared to say when it can turn over Mr. [Dhiab’s] medical records and the videotapes,” as the New York Times described it, but its importance should not be underrated. A report on that hearing will follow shortly.

This is the first time that a judge has directly intervened in the government’s treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo. Last summer, Judge Kessler was one of two judges obliged to turn down a motion from Abu Wa’el Dhiab and three other men asking for their force-feeding to be halted, because of a prior ruling that appeared to prevent judges from interfering in the treatment of prisoners. However, that ruling was overturned in February by the appeals court (the D.C. Circuit Court), paving the way for Friday’s momentous ruling.

Following Friday’s ruling, two more hunger-striking prisoners have submitted motions to the District Court asking judges to order videotapes of their force-feeding to be preserved. On Monday, via the legal action charity Reprieve and Jon B. Eisenberg, Emad Hassan, a Yemeni, and Ahmad Rabbani (aka Mohammed Ahmad Ghulam Rabbani), a Pakistani, asked for videos of their force-feeding to be preserved.

See Emad Hassan’s motion here, in which the lawyers explained that he sought a similar order to that issued by Judge Kessler in Abu Wa’el Dhiab’s case, but “expanded to include photographs as well as videotapes.”

A similar motion was submitted on Ahmad Rabbani’s behalf (see here), and also see Emad Hassan’s motion seeking “an order requiring disclosure of still-secret protocols and SOPs [standard operating procedures] governing force-feeding and use of restraint chairs at Guantánamo Bay.”

Emad Hassan is the prisoner who won the appeals court ruling in February, in which judges ruled that hunger-striking prisoners can challenge their force-feeding in a federal court — and, more generally, ruled that judges have “the power to oversee complaints” by prisoners “about the conditions of their confinement,” as the New York Times described it.

In addition, Emad Hassan has been on a hunger strike since 2007, and has been force-fed for all that time, even though he was cleared for release in 2009. He is still held because of Congressional obstructions (only eased in December) and fears about the security situation in Yemen, which are disgraceful. 55 of the 75 prisoners cleared for release by President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force but still held are Yemenis, and it is long past time that the US’s security concerns are no longer allowed to trump the need for these men to resume their lives.

For more on Emad Hassan, see “The Guantánamo Experiment: A Harrowing Letter by Yemeni Prisoner Emad Hassan” and “Long-Term Guantánamo Hunger Striker Emad Hassan Describes the Torture of Force-Feeding.”

Less is publicly known about Ahmad Rabbani, a father of three who was held in CIA “black sites” (aka torture prisons) prior to his transfer to Guantánamo, with nine other men held in secret prisons, in September 2004. He was not cleared for release by the task force, but was, instead, recommended for prosecution. However, in April 2013 he was determined to be eligible for a Periodic Review Board, a process established last year to review the cases of 71 men — 46 who had been designated for ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial by the task force, and 25 others who had been recommended for prosecution.

Last May, during last year’s prison-wide hunger strike, Ahmad Rabbani said that he had lost 60 pounds since the hunger strike began, and weighed just 107 pounds. “I vomit and cough blood,” he said, adding, “I have often thought of smashing my head against the wall and cracking it because of [severe pain].”

As Reprieve explained in a press release following the submission of the motions on behalf of Emad Hassan and Ahmad Rabbani:

[The] motions request the additional preservation and maintenance of videotapes and photographs relating to the treatment of Rabbani and Hassan, while Hassan also seeks disclosure of new, secret protocols for force-feeding hunger strikers. The motions state that the Department of Defense’s response to the petition so far has “left open the possibility that evidence had in fact been destroyed and suggests that the Department of Defense did not even know and had not yet made any effort to determine whether evidence had in fact been destroyed.”

Cori Crider, Reprieve’s Strategic Director, said, “Inconvenient evidence has a bad habit of turning up ‘lost’ at the base, especially tapes just like these. This means there is no excuse for any ‘dog ate my homework’ moments when our clients’ challenge to force-feeding comes up in court.”

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.

Uruguay’s President Mujica Confirms Offer of New Home for Six Guantánamo Prisoners

Back in March, President José Mujica of Uruguay announced that he had been approached by the Obama administration regarding the resettlement of Guantánamo prisoners, cleared for release from the prison in 2009 by President Obama’s high-level Guantánamo Review Task Force, who cannot be safely repatriated, and was willing to offer new homes to five men. The BBC reported that the 78-year old president told local media, “The US president wants to solve this problem so he’s asking several countries to host them and I told him I will. They are welcome to come here.” He also told Montevideo’s El Espectador Radio that the men in question were four Syrians and a Palestinian.

Subsequently, the Global Post published an article identifying the men, after working out, from a publicly available list of the prisoners cleared for release (see my article here, for example) that there is only one Palestinian still held at Guantánamo, who has long been cleared for release, and four Syrians who have also been cleared for release.

The Palestinian is Mohammed Taha Mattan (aka Mohammed Tahamuttan, ISN 684), who, like the handful of other Pelestinians held at Guantánamo and subsequently released, is essentially stateless, as he can only return with the blessing of the Israeli government, which has no intention of allowing any former Guantánamo prisoner to return home. I most recently profiled his case here, mentioning how he was not only cleared for release by President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force in 2009 (like 74 other men still held, including the four Syrians), but had also been cleared for release under President Bush in October 2007. I also mentioned how, sadly, he was one of three prisoners that the German government was planning to accept in 2010, but was the only one left behind in Guantánamo when, for political reasons, a decision was taken to accept just two men instead.

The Syrians are Abdelhadi Faraj (aka Abdulhadi Faraj, ISN 329), Ali Hussein al-Shaaban (ISN 327), Ahmed Adnan Ahjam (ISN 326) and Abu Wa’el Dhiab (ISN 722). The first three were captured together crossing from Afghanistan to Pakistan in December 2001, along with another man, Maasoum Mouhammed, who was given a new home in Bulgaria in May 2010. Last year, Abdelhadi Faraj took part in the prison-wide hunger strike, and his account of that can be found here, and in February 2013 Ali Hussein al-Shaaban’s lawyer, Michael E. Mone Jr., wrote a brief article about his client’s plight for the Boston Globe. Also see here for an interview with David Marshall, the lawyer for Ahmed Adnan Ahjam, conducted in 2013 by The Talking Dog.

Of particular relevance, right now, is Abu Wa’el Dhiab, who has just had a powerful court ruling in his favor issued by the District Court in Washington D.C. The father of four, who is confined to a wheelchair as a result of his deteriorating health during his 12 years in US custody, is one of four prisoners who, last summer, while being force-fed as part of the prison-wide hunger strike in Guantánamo, challenged the government’s right to force-feed them.

Because of a legal precedent relating to the Guantánamo prisoners, the judge in his case, Judge Gladys Kessler, was obliged to turn down his request, but in February the court of appeals (the D.C. Circuit Court) overturned that ruling, and on Friday Judge Kessler revisited his case after his lawyers discovered the existence of videotapes recording his force-feeding and “forcible cell extractions,” and submitted an emergency motion asking the court to preserve the videos.

In her ruling, Judge Kessler not only ordered the government to preserve the videos; she also ordered the government to suspend Abu Wa’el Dhiab’s force-feeding, and to stop the “forcible cell extractions,” at least until Wednesday, when she scheduled another hearing at which the government “should be prepared to say when it can turn over Mr. [Dhiab’s] medical records and the videotapes,” as the New York Times described it.

As I explained in my article analyzing the ruling and its significance:

Just days before the court ruling, President Mujica met President Obama in Washington D.C. and, in an interview with the Washington Post, stated that his country was still willing to take six men who cannot be safely repatriated, but added that the Obama administration needs to take action soon. “It can’t be too long,” President Mujica said. “I only have a few months of government left.”

As I also explained, “It is to be hoped that, in response to this development, President Obama will take steps to hasten Abu Wa’el Dhiab’s release” — to Uruguay, with the four other men identified in March, and another man, a Tunisian, mentioned by the Washington Post.

President Mujica’s commendable respect for human rights

So who is President Mujica and why does he care about the plight of the Guantánamo prisoners? The answer, to those who have been watching the re-emergence of socialist politics in South America in recent years, is that he can empathize with them, as a “former commander of a leftist urban guerrilla group [the Tupamaros] who spent 14 years in prison,” in the words of a recent profile of him in the Wall Street Journal.

A former agriculture minister who was elected in 2009, Mr. Mujica and his wife, Lucia Topolansky, who is a senator, “gave up on living in the presidential palace,” and instead live in a humble house that Mr. Mujica “purchased shortly after his release from prison,” as the Wall Street Journal described it, adding, “Here, he grows chrysanthemums, squash and tomatoes, while chickens strut along a gravel road.”

Speaking of his offer to rehouse six Guantánamo prisoners, Mr. Mujica told the Wall Street Journal that Uruguay “would take up to six prisoners” from Guantánamo, “as long as Washington agreed they would be free to live freely.”

“We are never going to be the jailor for the United States,” the president said. “But we are prepared to take in the people over there, and allow them to live in our country, like any citizen.”

He added, as the newspaper described it, that “he both wanted to help Mr. Obama close down the detention center and provide a new horizon for the Syrian and Palestinian men his country would resettle.” It was also noted that “[o]ffering to take detainees, like some other of Mr. Mujica’s policies, haven’t sat well with all Uruguayans, but he said he had made the decision based on humanitarian grounds.”

Responding to this, President Mujica said, “One shouldn’t always be bound by public opinion. Sometimes you have to help people open their minds and be generous. It’s possible that in the beginning they don’t understand, but they will over time.”

The Wall Street Journal also noted that Uruguay’s government “has held talks with the Obama administration, and Mr. Mujica said Uruguayan intelligence agents have met with the detainees his country would receive,” and who “would be permitted to bring their families to Uruguay.” He also called the men’s imprisonment “useless.”

Soon after the Wall Street Journal article, the Christian Science Monitor examined the plight of the cleared prisoners in Guantánamo who need a new home, speaking to Polly Rossdale of Reprieve, the London-based legal action charity whose lawyers represent 13 men still held at Guantánamo. Rossdale noted that there are 12 men who need to be resettled in a third country because they cannot be returned home safely.

The Christian Science Monitor also noted the significance of the decision by President Obama, in May 2009, to turn down a plan by his legal counsel Greg Craig to resettle two Uighurs (Muslims from China’s oppressed Xinjiang province) in northern Virginia,” which the president dropped after Republicans threatened to use it to make him appear weak on terrorism. The Christian Science Monitor incorrectly stated that “the move was stymied by the US Congress,” although the online newspaper was correct to state that lawmakers had “since blocked the transfer of detainees to the US,” although a waiver always existed that President Obama could have used to bypass Congress if he had wanted to, and last December Congress was prevailed up on to ease its restrictions on the release of prisoners.

Since the capitulation on the Uighurs, however, it has been “incredibly difficult to get a third country to accept a detainee,” as Michael Mone Jr. told the Christian Science Monitor. The online newspaper added that Mr. Mone “successfully relocated an Uzbek detainee to Ireland in 2009, but not without a prolonged fight,” and then “reached out unsuccessfully to several nations, and to human rights organizations in Chile, Argentina, and Brazil.”

As he explained, “Even though countries were willing to criticize the Bush administration for the obscenity of Guantánamo, the problem was that none would stick its neck out and take a detainee when the US was not willing to do the same.”

The Christian Science Monitor also noted that regional analysts explained that  President Mujica’s offer on Guantánamo “consolidates Uruguay’s reputation as a liberal and open nation.”

Julio Burdman, a professor of international relations and geopolitics in Buenos Aires, said, “Uruguay has always tried to stand out as a liberal bastion,” citing “the century-long separation between the state and the Catholic Church; the oldest mandatory pension system in Latin America; and recent laws that legalized gay marriage and abortion.”

As the Christian Science Monitor also noted:

Uruguay also has a long tradition of offering asylum. It gave refuge to Argentines who fled political conflict there several decades ago, and in 1999 the US transferred 12 Cuban prisoners held at the naval base in Guantánamo to Uruguay. The State Department website highlights Uruguay’s role as a “consensus builder and mediator in international contexts.”

The online newspaper also remarked on President Mujica’s personal identification with the Guantánamo prisoners, noting that his 14 years in prison included “more than a decade in solitary confinement,” and citing a quote he recently gave to the Associated Press about the men in Guantánamo. “They are a human wreck; they’re physically and mentally destroyed because of what they’ve been through.”

As Michael Mone said, “I think he gets it. I think he understands.”

The meeting with President Obama

Reporting on President Mujica’s meeting with President Obama last Monday, the Buenos Aires Herald noted that the Uruguayan president said of Guantánamo that, if the US is willing “to put an end to that embarrassment, the least we can do is try and help.” He also called the prison at Guantánamo Bay “an embarrassment to humanity,” adding, “There are people who have been jailed without a process, without charges and we cannot ignore this kind of thing, even if some people won’t understand.”

President Mujica also said that President Obama told him he is “committed to closing the prison before leaving the government,” and denied claims that the US “had asked Uruguay to [make sure] that the former inmates don’t leave Uruguayan territory.” In the Uruguayan president’s analysis, his US counterpart “has the intelligence of not asking what he won’t get.”

In its recent report, the Washington Post explained that human rights activists “said they hope the offer will spur other nations to open their doors to more of the 154 prisoners remaining at Guantánamo.” Andrea Prasow of Human Rights Watch said, “This Uruguay deal is the kind of momentum other countries need to see.”

In his interview with the Post, President Mujica said, “I always thought it was really good that Obama wanted to resolve this.” Reiterating that Guantánamo is a disgrace for the US, “which on the one hand wants to wave the flag of human rights, and assumes the right to criticize the whole world, and then has this well of shame,” he also revisited his own personal experience of prison. “I know prisons from the inside,” he said, and, as the Post added:

He recalled that his only companions during many of those years were mice, ants and spiders. At one point, he befriended a tiny frog in his cell, providing it a cup of water in which to swim. “When you have a lot of solitude, any living thing becomes a companion,” he said.

President Mujica also stated that, when the US ambassador to Uruguay asked him to accept prisoners, he “immediately accepted.” He added that he “did not bargain for anything” in exchange for offering to take the prisoners.

As the Post noted, however, “moving the prisoners is not so simple,” because, “Although the US government has approved their release, the State and Defense departments have to agree to their relocation to a new country. Among other things, they have to ensure that the receiving nation will take steps to prevent the transferred detainees from becoming a security threat.”

And on this point, of course, President Mujica’s attitude will not please some US lawmakers. As the Post noted, he “said that the prisoners will be considered normal refugees, and that his government does not intend to monitor them.”

As Mujica himself put it, “We are not the jailers of the United States government, or the United States Senate. We are offering solidarity on a question that we see as one of human rights.”

Fortunately, Andrea Prasow was able to explain that ,although some countries have restricted the travel of former priosners, others have not.

The Post also spoke to Michael Mone, who said he “was not allowed to confirm whether [Ali Hussein al-] Shaaban was part of the Uruguay deal,” but who “said Shaaban had been reading about Uruguay in an encyclopedia at the camp, and is learning Spanish.” He added, “He would be so grateful to the government and people of Uruguay” if he were to be resettled there, adding that he “has no interest in traveling anywhere” afterwards.

I hope that President Obama doesn’t pass on this excellent opportunity to secure the release of six of the 77 cleared prisoners he is still holding, whose ongoing imprisonment ought to be a source of constant shame.

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.

Breakthrough on Guantánamo: Judge Orders US Government to Stop Force-Feeding Syrian Prisoner and to Preserve Video Evidence

In a hugely important ruling in the US District Court in Washington D.C., relating to the treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Judge Gladys Kessler has ordered the government to suspend the force-feeding of a hunger-striking prisoner, and to preserve video evidence of his force-feeding.

The prisoner, Abu Wa’el Dhiab, a father of four, is a Syrian national, who is confined to a wheelchair as a result of his deteriorating health during his 12 years in US custody. Significantly, he was cleared for release by President Obama’s high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force in 2009, but is still held, along with 74 other men cleared for release by the task force. The majority of these men are Yemenis, who have not been freed because of US concerns about the security situation in Yemen, but in Dhiab’s case, he is still held because of the civil war in his home country, and the need for a third country to be found to take him in.

The fact that he is on a hunger strike, in despair at his abandonment in Guantánamo, and is being force-fed in response ought to be a source of profound shame for the administration, although it is worth noting that he is not the only prisoner cleared for release who was involved in the prison-wide hunger strike last year, and is still on a hunger strike now.

In her order, issued on Friday, Judge Kessler also stated that the government must preserve all videotaped evidence of Abu Wa’el Dhiab’s force-feedings and “forcible cell extractions,” in which, as his lawyers at the London-based legal action charity Reprieve explained, “a team of guards in riot gear storms a prisoner’s cell to move him by force to feedings if he refuses to go.”

The existence of the videotapes was unknown until last week, when Jon B. Eisenberg, Abu Wa’el Dhiab’s US-based attorney, found out about their existence in an email exchange with a lawyer in the Justice Department. In response, as Jason Leopold explained for Al-Jazeera, Dhiab’s attorneys “filed an emergency motion asking that Kessler order the government to preserve the videos,” a motion that was opposed by the government.

Judge Kessler also ordered the government to stop the “forcible cell extractions,” at least until Wednesday, when she scheduled another hearing at which the government “should be prepared to say when it can turn over Mr. [Dhiab’s] medical records and the videotapes,” as the New York Times described it.

As I explained in an article last July, after Abu Wa’el Dhiab and three other men — Shaker Aamer, the last British prisoner, and two Algerians, who were subsequently released — had asked a judge to order the government to stop their force-feeding and forced medication, he had “run a food import business with his family in Kabul before the 9/11 attacks,” and “is one of the numerous prisoners in Guantánamo, past and present, to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when the US went fishing for Muslim prisoners.”

I added, “Having escaped to Pakistan with his family, he was seized in Lahore, in one of the opportunistic raids that showed the Americans that Pakistan was on their side in the ‘war on terror,’ and that also secured millions of dollars for the Pakistani government, as former President Pervez Musharraf boasted in his autobiography in 2006.”

Last summer, Abu Wa’el Dhiab’s motion asking a judge to order the government to stop his force-feeding was turned down by Judge Kessler, but only because of a prior case from 2009 establishing that “no court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider any other action against the United States or its agents relating to any aspect of the detention, transfer, treatment, trial, or conditions of confinement of an alien who is or was detained by the United States and has been determined by the United States to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant.”

However, Judge Kessler made a point of stating that it was “perfectly clear” that “force-feeding is a painful, humiliating and degrading process.”

She also stated that Abu Wa’el Dhiab had “set out in great detail in his papers what appears to be a consensus that force-feeding of prisoners violates Article 7 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights which prohibits torture or cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment,” and added that, although she was “obligated to dismiss the Application for lack of jurisdiction, and therefore lacks any authority to rule on Petitioner’s request,” there was one individual “who does have the authority to address the issue”; namely, President Obama.

In February, the court of appeals overturned Judge Kessler’s ruling — and another similar ruling from last summer — ruling that hunger-striking prisoners can challenge their force-feeding in a federal court, and, more generally, that judges have “the power to oversee complaints” by prisoners “about the conditions of their confinement,” as the New York Times described it. The TImes added that the appeals court judges specifically noted that the courts “may oversee conditions at the prison as part of a habeas corpus lawsuit.”

In response to Friday’s news, Katherine O’Shea of Reprieve US explained to me in an email that Judge Kessler “clearly thinks our client needs temporary relief; it’s the first time a judge has enjoined abuse of a detainee in connection with the hunger strike.” She added, “In and of itself it’s quite an indictment of Gitmo.”

Cori Crider, Reprieve’s Strategic Director, who has been Abu Wa’el Dhiab’s attorney for many years, said, “This is a major crack in Guantánamo’s years-long effort to oppress prisoners and to exercise total control over information about the prison. Dhiab is cleared for release and should have been returned to his family years ago. He is on hunger strike because he feels he has no other option left. I am glad Judge Kessler has taken this seriously, and we look forward to our full day in court to expose the appalling way Dhiab and others have been treated.”

Jon Eisenberg added, “We are very grateful to Judge Kessler for recognizing the urgent need for judicial relief. The force feeding that has been happening at Guantánamo Bay is a stain on our country and must end.”

It is to be hoped that, in response to this development, President Obama will take steps to hasten Abu Wa’el Dhiab’s release. Although he cannot return home, he is one of six prisoners that President José Mujica of Uruguay stated his willingness to accept in March. Just days before the court ruling, President Mujica met President Obama in Washington D.C. and, in an interview with the Washington Post, stated that his country was still willing to take six men who cannot be safely repatriated, but added that the Obama administration needs to take action soon. “It can’t be too long,” President Mujica said. “I only have a few months of government left.”

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.

Rare Good News for the NHS: Government Accepts Lords Amendment Removing Hospital Closure Clause from Care Bill

Last week there was some rare good news about the NHS, which I’m posting belatedly because I was too busy last week, and also because I want to make sure that my approval is on record. I’m also posting it because, let’s face it, those of us who care about social justice have few victories to cheer about.

The victory in question was the government’s acceptance of an amendment to Clause 119 of the Care BIll — generally known as the “hospital closure clause” — which is designed to prevent neighbouring hospitals to those facing grave financial difficulties from having their services cut without local consultation.

The circumstances in which this would have occurred involved hospitals close to those subjected to the appointment of a special administrator because of severe financial problems — under the Unsustainable Providers Regime that was first launched in south east London in October 2012. In that case, the Trust Special Administrator, Matthew Kershaw, proposed savagely cutting services at Lewisham Hospital to help pay off the debts of a neighbouring, but otherwise unrelated trust, the South London Healthcare Trust, which had hospitals in the boroughs of Greenwich, Bexley and Bromley.

Under Kershaw’s plans, Lewisham’s A&E Department would have closed down, leaving just one hospital, in Woolwich, to deal with the medical emergencies of the 750,000 inhabitants of three London boroughs, Lewisham, Greenwich and Bexley, and many other acute frontline services would also have been axed, so that, for example, 90% of expectant mothers in Lewisham (with a population of 270,000 people) would have been unable to give birth in the borough.

This underhand attempt to make Lewisham pay for another trust’s financial problems prompted widespread outrage in Lewisham, where a huge grassroots campaign developed to save the hospital, which, at one point, saw 25,000 people marching through the borough to express their contempt for the Trust Special Administrator programme.

Despite this, health secretary Jeremy Hunt approved Matthew Kershaw’s plans in January 2013, but the Save Lewisham Hospital Campaign and Lewisham Council then launched judicial reviews, which, in July, concluded that Jeremy Hunt had acted unlawfully when he approved Matthew Kershaw’s plans. Hunt then appealed, but lost the appeal in October.

Almost immediately, however, the government responded, spitefully, by adding a clause to the care bill — Clause 118, later Clause 119 — which would, in future, allow Trust Special Administrators to get away with what they couldn’t get away with in Lewisham. As I explained at the time:

On OpenDemocracy … NHS campaigner Caroline Molloy described the amendment [the clause] as “a plan B that will make it far easier for them to close or downgrade other hospitals across the country in future, without the consent or support of local people or GPs,” adding that, if passed, it will “legalise much more widespread use of fast-track hospital closures.”

Molloy described how it will “allow the government to accept recommendations from Administrators appointed to take over clinically or financially struggling Trusts,” and, crucially, “to cut or downgrade nearby hospitals that are part of other Trusts” — a decision clearly influenced by the successful Lewisham campaign, and designed, cynically, to try and make sure that such resistance can never happen again. She added, “Closure decisions — which could be taken even where these nearby hospitals themselves are successful and popular — will be able to be taken with minimal public consultation — a mere 40 days, compared to the normal two years or more.”

Despite opposition to the clause, MPs voted for it by 297 votes to 239 on March 11. The campaigning group 38 Degrees, which organised a petition signed by 180,000 people — in addition to a petition launched by Louise Irvine, the chair of the Save Lewisham Hospital Campaign, which secured nearly 150,000 signatures — noted that the Liberal Democrat MP and former health minister Paul Burstow had “tabled an amendment which aimed to remove the worst parts of the clause,” and which “was drafted by lawyers funded by 38 Degrees members,” but that Burstow “decided to withdraw his support for the amendment at the last minute after the government offered some concessions.”

Those concessions, however, were not enough to prevent campaigners for the NHS — including 38 Degrees and the Save Lewisham Hospital Campaign — from continuing to oppose the implementation of Clause 119. The focus shifted to the House of Lords, where a vote was scheduled for May 7, and where Baroness Finlay, a doctor and a cross-bench peer, tabled an amendment proposing that, “Where the administrator is considering recommending taking action in relation to another NHS foundation trust or an NHS trust which may become an affected trust, the administrator shall engage with the commissioners of services at any such NHS foundation trust or NHS trust in order to enable those commissioners to make decisions” affecting their own hospital or hospitals.

On May 7, as 38 Degrees announced, there was “[s]ome very, very good news.” As the campaigning group explained, “We did it! The government has accepted our amendment to the hospital closure clause in the House of Lords.”

They added, “The clause was due to be passed today. So the government’s decision to accept — almost word for word — the changes proposed by lawyers funded by 38 Degrees members came right down to the wire — and it was a big surprise.”

David Lock QC, a lawyer with expertise in the NHS, checked the government’s changes and said, “This is a very satisfying outcome. It recognises the compelling logic of the position taken by 38 Degrees members,” as well as other campaigners,  including the Save Lewisham Hospital Campaign.

Responding to the news, Baroness Finlay said, “I am delighted that the Government have recognised the need for equity and the importance of safeguarding good patient services in a population.”

Writing about the government’s decision, Health Service Journal noted that the Finlay amendment “was adopted and re-drafted by the government, before being introduced as its own amendment to the bill,” which pleased Baroness Finlay. “I was delighted that the government wrote their own amendment because they recognised the need for commissioners to be on an equal footing to safeguard essential services,” she said, adding, “It’s excellent that the government has recognised the importance to give parity to all the commissioners of services and that the guidance will be drawn up independently under the Chairmanship of Paul Burstow.”

HSJ also noted that, although the Labour peer Philip Hunt “welcomed the amendment,” he was “concerned that the TSA regime may still be misused.” He told the journal, “We remain concerned that this can still be used in such a way that it’s a back door way to reconfiguration without proper public consultation.”

On OpenDemocracy, Becky Jarvis of 38 Degrees provided a more detailed explanation of what was at stake with Clause 119, and the safeguards provided in the Finlay Amendment.

As she explained:

This new amendment [43A] seeks to address widespread concerns that have been raised by a variety of groups about the original clause. The amendment seeks to alter the “failure regime” when a hospital trust is in financial trouble, to ensure that the local clinical commissioning group (CCG) has an appropriate say in how solutions are arrived at. Under the Finlay amendment, where a Trust Special Administrator (“TSA”) is appointed, the TSA would treat all commissioners of NHS services equally. The present clause penalises important co-operation between commissioners and providers, and gives a veto to the struggling or indebted commissioners. This inequality is indefensible.  Why should successful commissioners, who have worked well with their local NHS trusts and NHS foundation trusts to produce a sustainable set of NHS services, be prejudiced by struggling commissioners and providers in a neighbouring area?

The Finlay amendment removes the unfair preferential position of the commissioners of NHS services of the Trust which is in administration. The original clause only gave this right to the CCG in the narrow area of the hospital whose financial difficulties triggered the “failure regime”.

Secondly, it clarifies that if the Trust Special Administration (TSA) recommends changes at a neighbouring Trust which is not in special administration (as happened with Lewisham Hospital), the final decision-maker should be the CCG in the area affected — not the Administrators or the Government. Where the Administrator recommends that changes are made at financially and clinically successful hospitals (i.e. those not in administration), those decisions will continue to be taken by local NHS commissioners. It takes away the right of the Administrator to impose changes at hospitals other than the Trust which is in administration.

If this solution had been in place when the decision to change services at Lewisham was made, proposals to shut the maternity and A&E unit could only have proceeded with the support of Lewisham Clinical Commissioning Group.

Congratulations to everyone who worked on this. As I mentioned above, victories on issues that are crucial for ordinary people — like hospital closures and the axing of services — are rare, so we should take a moment to celebrate — before the next challenge arises.

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.

Long-Term Guantánamo Hunger Striker Emad Hassan Describes the Torture of Force-Feeding

Yesterday, two disturbing letters from Guantánamo were released by Reprieve US, the US branch of the London-based legal action charity whose lawyers represent 15 of the 154 men still held at the prison, and I’m posting them below, because they shed light on what Reprieve described in a press release as the “escalating, brutal punishment of hunger strikers,” who continue to be force-fed, even though the World Medical Association denounced force-feeding in the Declaration of Malta, in 2006, calling it “unjustifiable,” “never ethically acceptable,” and “a form of inhuman and degrading treatment,” if inflicted on a patient — or a prisoner — who is capable of making a rational decision about his refusal to eat.

The letters were written by Emad Hassan, a Yemeni prisoner who has been on a hunger strike — and force-fed — since 2007, even though he was cleared for release by President Obama’s high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force in January 2010. 77 of the men still held have been cleared for release — 75 by the task force, and two in recent months by a Periodic Review Board — and 57 of these men are Yemenis, but they are still held because of US fears about the security situation in Yemen — fears which may be legitimate, but which are an unacceptable basis for continuing to hold men that high-level review boards said should no longer be held.

In February, I made available a harrowing letter written by Emad, and in March he launched a historic legal challenge, becoming “the first Guantánamo Bay prisoner to have his claims of abuse at the military base considered by a US court of law,” as Reprieve described it.

Emad’s legal challenge followed an important ruling in February in the court of appeals in Washington D.C. (the D.C. Circuit Court), in which the court overturned two rulings made in the District Court last summer. In those rulings, judges had turned down challenges to the force-feeding regime, submitted by prisoners including Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, because of legal precedents which purported to establish that Guantánamo prisoners were unable to challenge any aspect of their treatment.

In one letter, Emad explained how one hunger-striking Yemeni prisoner (Abu Bakr Alahdal, one of six long-term hunger strikers, including Emad) weighs just 80 pounds, and has a broken arm. Nevertheless, he was taken to be force-fed by a Forced Cell Extraction team, which Emad described as “Guantánamo’s official riot police” — a group of armoured guards who deal with even the most minor infractions of the rules with extreme violence.

In his second letter, Emad explained how Abu Bakr Alahdal was “vomiting on the torture chair,” because the personnel feeding him — a nurse and corpsman — “refused to stop the feed, or to slow the acceleration of the liquids.”

Emad also explained how “[t]he culmination of six or seven years of force-feeding is now taking its toll.” He wrote how, a few months ago, he was “given a kind of feeding formula,” which, he stated, “made me vomit from 10 pm to 7 am — pieces of fat kept coming out whenever I vomited.”

He also stated that the authorities had also “begun this cruel process” with Abu Bakr Alahdal. “[A]t 6 am,” Emad wrote, “he was holding a cup with vomit in it after six brutal hours of feeding. Every day is like that. If this isn’t torture … surely this is what normal people call it? By normal, I mean the normal people outside the prison, because there is no normality here.”

Emad also noted that the number of hunger strikers “is still hovering around 17,” although Reprieve added that the authorities “stopped releasing official figures towards the end of last year,” after the numbers of those who had been engaged in a prison-wide hunger strike had dropped from its peak in summer, when even the authorities acknowledged that over a hundred prisoners were on a hunger strike. As Reprieve also noted, the prisoners’ access to their lawyers “has been increasingly restricted — reducing the availability of accurate information on the strike.”

Responding to the letters, Emad’s brother, Mohammed Abdallah, said, “Since my brother was rounded up and taken to Guantánamo on false pretenses, despite never having done anything wrong, our family has been devastated without him. When we read his letters describing the dreadful torture and horrific treatment that Guantanamo authorities subject him to it breaks our hearts. There is no reason at all that Emad can’t come home to us in Yemen or anywhere we can see him. Please, President Obama, let him return to us.”

Cori Crider, Reprieve’s Strategic Director, said, “Although the authorities are trying to cover it up, the hunger strike at Gitmo is still going on and the military’s effort to suppress it as savage as ever. We’re fighting this brutality in federal court, but there is one man who has the power to end this pain. Obama must send cleared men like Emad home to their families at once.”

I couldn’t agree more, and I urge everyone who believes that Emad — and other cleared Yemenis — should be put on a plane and sent home tomorrow, to make their voices heard next Friday, May 23, the 1st anniversary of President Obama’s promise to resume releasing prisoners from Guantánamo, and also to call the White House on 202-456-1111 or 202-456-1414 to urge President Obama to act immediately to release Emad and the other cleared Yemeni prisoners. You can also submit a comment online.

Please note that, in the letters, Emad’s references to other prisoners on hunger strike refer to the following men: firstly, those who, like him, are long-term hunger strikers — Abdul Rahman Shalabi (ISN 42), a Saudi identified by Emad as Abdul Al Rahman, or Abdu Al-Rahman Halapi, who has been on hunger strike since 2005; Abu Bakr Alahdal (ISN 171), a Yemeni; Tarek Baada (ISN 178), a Yemeni identified by Emad as Tariq, who, like Emad, has been on hunger strike since 2007; Mohammed Al-Hamiri (ISN 249), a Yemeni identified by Emad as Sanand (Sanad?), who has also long been cleared for release; and Ghassan Al-Sharbi (ISN 682), a Saudi identified by Emad as Gussan, or Gassan Al-Otapee.

Other prisoners mentioned are: Sohail — almost certainly Zohair al-Shorabi (ISN 569, a Yemeni also identified as Suhail Abdo Anam Shorabi: Yasseen — almost certainly Yasin Ismail (ISN 522), another Yemeni; Muaz al-Alawi (ISN 28), another Yemeni identified by Emad as Moath al-Alwi; Ahmad Rabbani (ISN 1460), a Pakistani (also known as Ahmed Ghulam Rabbani, or Abdul Rahim Rabbani); and Khalid, who is Khaled Kassim (ISN 242), another Yemeni.

For more details about most of these men, see my article from last June, “Guantánamo Stories: 19 of the 43 Men Being Force-Fed in the Prison-Wide Hunger Strike.”

Emad Hassan’s first recent letter from Guantánamo

Reprieve team,

Hi guys. Warm greetings to all of the team from my brothers here, and of course from me. Thank you guys for your bravery and patience in a strange situation and in a strange time. This is definitely not an easy place to be. Yet, you have showed the world, your people and us that there are principles and morals, and there are people who still believe in them.

I mentioned in my last letter about the new tactics the doctors are using. They have stopped force feeding some brothers because the doctors said their weights were good. Last night, the doctor asked to meet with those who had stopped being fed. Tariq Ba’awada [Baada], a long-term hunger striker, had his feeding formula changed five days ago from regular Ensure to Two-Cal plus a cup of olive oil added and told to drink it. Tariq refused and has since stopped having anything except for 100 calories per day. He told me last night this was “to help me continue my daily performance.” A nurse came to him and she told him that his formula had changed to what it had been before so he went to be fed last night. His weight when he stopped feeding was 96 lbs., last night, it was down to 92 lbs.

Another brother, his name is Sohail (a Yemeni), lost six pounds in four days. He was told that the doctor will see him today for his feeding.

Yasseen (a Yemeni) has stopped eating and drinking anything for five days. He is with me in same block, in front [of] me. I can see him but I can’t hear him. His voice is so weak, and I really understand his situation. Three times during these five days he has been asked to meet the doctor, but he refused. He ate this morning, yogurt (plain, low fat) for a total of 100 calories, and half a cup of oatmeal and a cup of coffee which helped him be able to pray, read the Quran and talk to us.

Two brothers are still fed by the FCE (Forced Cell Extraction) team. Another two, Abdu al-Rahman Halapi (a long-term striker) and Gassan Al-Otapee (also a long-term striker) have [been] taken to hospital (Abdu al-Rahman) and P.H.U. (Gassan). We don’t know their current situation here, but it won’t be good.

Our situation hasn’t moved forward, but backwards. This is against nature. Everything moves forwards, like the hands of a clock, except for Guantánamo. Our clock is broken!

The hunger strikers’ number is still hovering around 17. But as people started talking about us in the news, the medical team have adopted a new strategy. If someone refuses to be force-fed and complains, the doctor stops feeding them. “Their weight is fine”, he says, “and it won’t be necessary for them to be fed.” Meanwhile, their actual weight is lower than the claimed weight.

One Yemeni brother (Abu Bakr Ibn Ali Muhammad Alahdal) is 80 pounds and he is fed by the Forced Cell Extraction (FCE) team, Guantanamo’s official riot police. Yesterday the FCE team beat him when they came into and out of his cell. He is 80 pounds with one broken arm. He cannot walk, just crawl from his bed to the faucet or toilet once he needs to use it! How can someone with this condition fight 8 armoured guards?

Another Yemeni brother (Moath Hamza Ahmed al Alwi) is 101 pounds and is also fed by the FCE team. Ahmad Rabbani walks to the feeding, and is brought back by the FCE team. There is a scheme here to avoid blame about the force-feeding. The corpsman comes asking the hunger striker if he wants feeding. If the answer is yes, the escort will come to take him. If the answer is no, he won’t be fed until it’s a critical situation. The FCE team will take him and they will feed him forcefully.

If anyone asks the Senior Medical Officer (SMO) why he force-feeds the hunger strikers, the SMO will say: “There is no force-feeding any more. The detainees chooses to be fed.” Do you see the trick? Also, the medical personnel play with the hunger striker numbers. When the doctor stops feeding four detainees, he decreases the total number of hunger strikers to 13. When their weight goes down and the doctors have to feed him, he cancels three or four others so he can keep the number of hunger strikers low. I am hesitating between refusing the feeding until the doctors decide to force-feed me, and waiting to see what will happen in the next two-three weeks.

I will leave you with peaceful wishes and thank you again.

Yours,

Emad Hassan

Emad Hassan’s second recent letter from Guantánamo

Dear Reprieve team,

A cold greeting from me from the freezing weather in Camp V! By the time this letter reaches you it should be warmer; at least I am wishing it to be!

It has ended before it begun. We were hoping that the new wave SMO and his staff would differ from the last group. Unfortunately our hopes have not been answered as yet. In the last phone call, Clive asked me to describe the procedures that apply to the hunger strikers here.

Well, we have been divided into two groups. First there is “the long term group” which consists of those who have spent a long time on hunger strike. We are six members: Abdul al Rahman (042), Gussan (682), Abu Bakr (171), Sanand (249), Tariq (178) and I. We are treated completely differently to those in the second group.

The second group are the other hunger strikers, who are treated awfully. Even within this group, there are two kinds of treatment. For those who take their feed compliantly, the procedure will be facilitated to be somewhat easier from the beginning to the end. The guards will smile as they take him to the class room (a building which was previously a small school but is now used as the feeding room). The nurse will make sure to greet him when he gets there. The nurse or corpsman will ask if he is comfortable in the feeding chair. The nurse will ask what tube size he prefers (although not all nurses do this). “Which side do you prefer, sir?”, the nurse will ask gently, and will keep asking “is it ok?” as the tube is inserted in.

However, the same nurse will act completely differently with those who are deemed “uncompliant”. No smiling, no greeting, no asking about tube size or which side the poor detainee would like … nothing. It doesn’t end there. They will use any and every thing to make it as excruciating as they can, as much as they can. The doctor, especially, will open the door to hell for those who they see as “uncompliant”.

As I write now, brother 171 is vomiting on the torture chair, having been brought there by the Forced Cell Extraction (FCE) team. The nurse and corpsman have refused to stop the feed, or to slow the acceleration of the liquids.

Brother Khalid (ISN 242) is one of the detainees who has been stopped from feeding. He told me that the reason for this was because he chose to be taken by the FCE team to feed instead of walking. And he proceeded to tell me this story: before he started with the FCE team he spoke with the nurse and asked that she refrain from adding water with the Ensure, because the mixtures made him feel sick. The nurse told the doctor about it, and she was given permission to not add water. After that day, they carried on his feedings without adding water. When Khaled began being FCE’d, the water once again found its way to his feeding bags. Khaled waited until the same nurse came and asked her about the reappearance of water with the feeding formula. She said softly, “it’s the doctors’ orders.” He said he smiled at her and asked: “is this because of the FCE team?” The nurse simply nodded.

I am sick of this hypocrisy. The odd thing is that there are members of staff here (nurses, corpsmen etc.) who are convinced, or at least appear to be convinced, that they are here protecting us (as safety officers). Who is going to protect us from these protectors?

While I was being fed, I showed the nurse the papers of Ethics Abandoned: Medical Professionalism and Detainee Abuse in the “War on Terror”. She was surprised: “Wow, who gave you this?” she said, as if they were papers from a prohibited book.  Once I told her they were from my lawyer, she just kept quiet. Another nurse refused to touch it, as if it could burn her. They know the truth, but refuse to question anything.

Since the beginning of the hunger strike in 2005, Abubakr (171) and I have had no problem with tolerating the feeding. Now, we are known to have small stomachs. The culmination of six or seven years of force-feeding is now taking its toll. A couple of months ago I had been given a kind of feeding formula (Pulmocare, a similar mixture to TwoCal) by mistake. Or so the nurse said — but I don’t believe it. The formula made me vomit from 10 pm to 7 am — pieces of fat kept coming out whenever I vomited. They have not repeated that mistake with me. But they have begun this cruel process with Abubakr — at 6 am he was holding a cup with vomit in it after six brutal hours of feeding. Every day is like that. If this isn’t torture … surely this is what normal people call it? By normal, I mean the normal people outside the prison, because there is no normality here.

I keep asking myself if I could honestly say what Anne Frank said all those years ago in Nazi Germany: “It’s really a wonder I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.” If I could say this … do I dare to say it loudly? This is something few people can do over here.

I asked myself: if she lived through what we are currently living, she would keep her ideals … not that our life is any harder or more dangerous than what she went through. I am sure what she faced was incomparable, but the Nazis were war criminals. They killed, tortured and starved thousands of Jews; because they are criminals they didn’t have any legitimacy for their actions. They have been cursed for it — with anguish that cannot be described. What makes it worse is that the Americans have killed, tortured and starved thousands too: but with a veil of legitimacy. The fact that these actions are somehow accepted is an unforgettable and unforgivable crime.

Nonetheless, I think Anne Frank would keep her ideals in Guantánamo, in spite of the challenges. And that would be the biggest test she would face.

Yours,

Emad Hassan (ISN 680 — cleared for release back home over four years ago)

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.

Close Guantánamo: Take Part in the Global Day of Action on May 23, 2014

[image error]Next Friday, May 23, is a global day of action, “Not Another Broken Promise! Not Another Day in Guantánamo!” organized by the campaigning group Witness Against Torture, with the support of numerous other groups including Close Guantánamo, Amnesty International, Blue Lantern Project, Center for Constitutional Rights, CloseGitmo.net, Code Pink, London Guantánamo Campaign, National Religious Campaign Against Torture, No More Guantánamos, September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, Torture Abolition and Survivor Support Coalition, Veterans for Peace and World Can’t Wait.

25 events in five countries have been arranged so far, and they include events in New York, Washington D.C., Boston, Chicago, London, Munich and Toronto. The full list can be found here, and Andy Worthington, the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, will be speaking at the London protest, which takes place in Trafalgar Square from 12 noon to 2pm. If your hometown isn’t represented, and you want to set up your own event, please contact Witness Against Torture, and see this page for a comprehensive toolkit for those organizing protests.

It’s a year since President Obama’s promise to resume releasing prisoners from Guantánamo

The reason for the global day of action next Friday is because, on May 23, it will be exactly a year since President Obama delivered a major speech on national security issues, in which he promised to resume releasing prisoners from Guantánamo, after a period of nearly three years in which the release of prisoners had almost ground to a halt. Sadly, it took a prison-wide hunger strike — and unprecedented domestic and international interest in the plight of the prisoners — for the president to promise action.

Congress had imposed restrictions on the release of prisoners, requiring the administration to certify that, if released, prisoners would be unable to engage in terrorism — a certification that was, essentially, impossible to make. However, although a waiver existed in the legislation, allowing President Obama to bypass Congress if he regarded it as being “in the national security interests of the United States,” the president chose not to use it.

What made this so unacceptable was the fact that 86 of the 166 prisoners still held in Guantánamo when President Obama made his speech and delivered his promise last May had been cleared for release in January 2010 by a high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force, appointed by President Obama shortly after he took office in 2009. The task force reviewed the cases of all the prisoners held when the Obama presidency began, and recommended them for release, for prosecution or for ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial.

Two-thirds of these prisoners were Yemenis, and another obstacle was raised to prevent their release after a airline bomb plot, hatched in Yemen, was foiled in December 2009, and, in response, President Obama issued a moratorium on releasing any Yemenis. The president only lifted that ban in his speech last May, but it had never been fair, as it constituted a blanket form of “guilt by nationality,” and there is no way that establishing a review process and then not releasing prisoners recommended for release can be regarded as anything other than a desperately cruel measure that would shame a dictatorship.

Since President Obama made his promise last May, he has appointed two envoys to assist with the closure of Guantánamo — Cliff Sloan in the State Department and Paul Lewis in the Pentagon — and 12 prisoners have been released. This is commendable, but it is just a start. 77 cleared prisoners are still held — 75 cleared for release by the task force, and two cleared for release by the new Periodic Review Boards established last year — and as long as these men are held, in such significant numbers, there can be no complacency regarding Guantánamo and the still urgent need for the prison to be closed and for this dark chapter in America’s history to be brought to an end.

It is particularly important for the Yemenis — who make up 57 of these 77 men — to be released, and to be released immediately. Not a single Yemeni has been released since President Obama dropped his ban a year ago, and it is disgraceful that everyone in a position of power and responsibility in the US seems to believe that having fears about the security situation in Yemen justifies holding men forever, despite a presidential task force — and, in two recent cases, high-level Periodic Review Boards —  concluding that they should be released.

What you can do now

- Please call the White House on 202-456-1111 or 202-456-1414 to urge President Obama to act immediately to release the cleared Yemeni prisoners. You can also submit a comment online.

- Call Cliff Sloan at the State Department on 202-647-4000 to demand action on the release of prisoners. Tell him you’re disappointed that only 12 men have been released since President Obama’s speech last May.

Note: This article was published simultaneously here and on the website of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign.

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.