Andy Worthington's Blog, page 118

Gravely Ill, Shaker Aamer Asks US Judge to Order His Release from Guantánamo

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

Last Monday, lawyers for Shaker Aamer, 45, the last British resident in the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, asked a federal judge to order his release because he is chronically ill. A detailed analysis of Mr. Aamer’s mental and physical ailments was prepared by an independent psychiatrist, Dr. Emily A. Keram, following a request in October, by Mr. Aamer’s lawyers, for him to receive an independent medical evaluation.

The very fact that the authorities allowed an independent expert to visit Guantánamo to assess Mr. Aamer confirms that he is severely ill, as prisoners are not generally allowed to be seen by external health experts unless they are facing trials. Mr. Aamer, in contrast, is one of 75 of the remaining 154 prisoners who were cleared for release from Guantánamo over four years ago by a high-level, inter-agency task force established by President Obama shortly after he took office in 2009.

As a result, the authorities’ decision to allow an independent expert to assess Mr. Aamer can be seen clearly for what it is — an acute sensitivity on their part to the prospect of prisoners dying, even though, for many of the men, being held for year after year without justice is a fate more cruel than death, as last year’s prison-wide hunger strike showed.

In her submission, based on 25 hours meeting with Mr. Aamer from December 16-20, Dr. Keram, an independent psychiatrist who has previously examined other prisoners facing military commission trials, reported and analyzed what Mr. Aamer had told her about his initial detention by the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan in late 2001, his initial imprisonment by the US — at Bagram and Kandahar in Afghanistan — and his 12 years at Guantánamo, and her conclusions are that he has Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and “additional psychiatric symptoms related to his current confinement that are not included in the diagnostic criteria for PTSD but which also gravely diminish his mental health.”

The detailed list of his mental ailments is alarming, but Dr. Keram also provided an additional psychiatric prognosis, noting that, “In addition to the psychiatric symptoms discussed above, Mr. Aamer has suffered a profound disruption of his life, dignity, and personhood.”

She added: “The length, uncertainly, and stress of Mr. Aamer’s confinement has caused significant disruptions in his underlying sense of self and ability to function. He is profoundly aware of what he has lost. He discussed the struggle he faces if his detention were to continue indefinitely. Additionally, we discussed the struggle he will face, were he to be released, in regaining the ability to function in his family and society. He is aware that it has taken some of the former detainees years to begin to recover to the extent that they have some degree of meaning and productivity in their lives.”

That reference to “the length, uncertainty, and stress” of Mr. Aamer’s imprisonment reminded me of what Christophe Girod, an official with the International Red Cross, said back in October 2003, when the prison had been open less than two years. Girod said, “The open-endedness of the situation and its impact on the mental health of the population has become a major problem,” and it is disturbing to realize how those factors can only have been hideously exacerbated with the passage of 12 years — not just for Shaker Aamer, but for many, if not most or all of the 154 other remaining prisoners.

In her analysis, Dr. Keram continued: “The chronic and severe psychiatric symptoms described above have gravely diminished Mr. Aamer’s mental health. In order to maximize his prognosis, Mr. Aamer requires psychiatric treatment, as well as reintegration into his family and society and minimization [of] his re-exposure to trauma and reminders of trauma.”

Dr. Keram recommended that Mr. Aamer “should receive psychiatric treatment in England in order to obtain meaningful therapeutic benefit,” and also stressed that returning him to Saudi Arabia, the country of his birth — where the US has expressed an interest in returning him, even though he has a British wife and four British children, and was given indefinite leave to remain in the UK prior to his capture — would be disastrous.

As she explained: “The severity of Mr. Aamer’s psychiatric symptoms would worsen were he to be involuntarily repatriated to Saudi Arabia. He reported that should this occur he would not be reunited with his family for many years, if ever. His ongoing separation from his family significantly exacerbates his psychiatric symptoms. Additionally, the impact of a move to Saudi Arabia on his family would likely re-traumatize Mr. Aamer, as his wife and children are unaccustomed to Saudi culture. Finally, Mr. Aamer’s probable further confinement in the Saudi rehabilitation program would likely be re-traumatizing, as its goal would be to re-acclimate him to the norms of Saudi society. Mr. Aamer identifies as a British Muslim and is most comfortable in that culture.”

Dr. Keram also analysed Mr. Aamer’s extensive physical ailments, which include severe edema (swelling caused by fluid retention in the body’s tissues, and also known as dropsy), severe migraines, asthma, chronic urinary retention, otitis media (middle ear infection), tinnitus, GERD (gastroesophageal reflux disease, or acid reflux disease) and constipation.

In reporting the motion filed on behalf of Mr. Aamer, the New York Times helpfully explained that it represented “a new tactic by lawyers seeking the release of Guantánamo detainees by building on a court’s decision last year that a Sudanese detainee should be allowed to leave because of health problems.” The Times continued, “Both the Sudanese case and now Mr. Aamer’s focus on laws and regulations governing the repatriation of prisoners of war that could become increasingly important as the detainee population at Guantánamo ages.”

The New York Times added: “The law of war permits detaining enemy fighters without trial to prevent their return to the battlefield. But it requires repatriating those who are seriously wounded or sick even before an armed conflict is over. A Geneva Conventions article says detainees shall be repatriated if their ‘mental or physical fitness seems to have been gravely diminished’ and they seem unlikely to recover within a year.

The Times continued: “A United States Army regulation says wartime detainees who are ‘eligible’ for repatriation include sick or wounded prisoners ‘whose conditions have become chronic to the extent that prognosis appears to preclude recovery in spite of treatment within one year from inception of disease or date of injury.”

In the motion submitted last Monday, Mr. Aamer’s lawyers argued that he “should be released immediately because his illness has become so chronic that recovery, even with optimal circumstances and care, is precluded within one year, and is likely to take many years or the full course of his remaining natural life.”

The New York Times noted that Mr. Aamer’s condition “appears less severe” than that of the Sudanese prisoner, Ibrahim Idris, who was freed in December after the Justice Department refused, for the first time, to challenge a prisoner’s habeas corpus petition (Mr. Idris’s, in October). Mr. Idris’s lawyers had described him as morbidly obese and schizophrenic, and had argued that his “long-term severe mental illness and physical illnesses make it virtually impossible for him to engage in hostilities were he to be released.”

However, Ramzi Kassem, a law professor at the City University of New York, whose legal clinic represents Mr. Aamer, refuted the Times‘s claim about the gravity of Mr. Aamer’s illness compared to that of Ibrahim Idris. “The law does not require a prisoner’s total and permanent incapacitation,” he said in an interview, adding, “The grave illnesses with which Shaker has now been diagnosed, taken together or separately, meet the legal standard for release under international and domestic law.”

I thoroughly endorse Ramzi Kassem’s analysis, and fervently hope that the judge in his case in the District Court in Washington D.C. — Judge Rosemary Collyer — agrees.

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

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

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

Please Read “Guantánamo Forever,” My Latest Article for Al-Jazeera English

Dear friends and supporters,

I hope you have time to read my latest article for Al-Jazeera, “Guantánamo Forever,” and to like, share and tweet it if you find it useful. It covers the Periodic Review Boards (PRBs) at Guantánamo, convened to assess whether 46 prisoners designated for indefinite detention without charge or trial by the inter-agency task force that President Obama established after taking office in 2009, or 25 others designated for prosecution by the task force, should continue to be held without charge or trial, or whether they should be recommended for release  — even if, ironically, that only means that they get to join the list of 76 other cleared prisoners who are still held. The review boards began in November, and have, to date, reviewed just three of the 71 cases they were set up to review. The fourth, reviewing the case of Ghaleb Al-Bihani, takes place on April 8.

The number of prisoners cleared for release (76) includes the first prisoner to have his case reviewed by a Periodic Review Board, which recommended his release in January, although my Al-Jazeera article is my response to the most recent activity by the review boards — the decision taken on March 5 to continue holding, without charge or trial, a Yemeni prisoner, Abdel Malik al-Rahabi, who has been at Guantánamo for over 12 years, and the review of Ali Ahmad al-Razihi, the third prisoner to have his ongoing detention reviewed, which took place at the end of March.

In the article I explain that the decision to continue holding Abdel Malik al-Rahabi, taken by representatives of the Departments of State, Defense, Justice and Homeland Security, as well as the office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is a disgrace.

The most important reason why the decision is a disgrace is because the information analyzed by the board members is, as I explain in the article, profoundly unreliable, consisting primarily of statements made by prisoners who were subjected to torture in CIA “black sites” — or, in one notorious case, to a specifically tailored torture program in Guantánamo itself — and, in one other case, by a prisoner, now released, who, while regarded by some officials as an important informant, was better known as the most prolifically unreliable witness at Guantánamo, whose unreliability had been noted by other officials. These officials had warned against relying on any information  he provided, and his unreliability had subsequently been cited by judges reviewing prisoners’ habeas corpus petitions.

Please read the article to find out more about these unreliable witnesses, as it is deeply troubling that the representatives of the US government departments who are reviewing the cases of these men show no sign of recognizing the profound unreliability of the supposed evidence — something that, for the most part, the mainstream media has also shown little interest in analyzing, even though the failure to do so helps to maintain the illusion that there is something resembling justice at Guantánamo, when there is not.

Note: Please also see my previous article for Al-Jazeera about the Periodic Review Boards, entitled, “Guantánamo’s secretive review boards,” and also see my other recent articles about the review boards, “Indefinitely Detained Guantánamo Prisoner Asks Review Board to Recommend His Release” and “Guantánamo, Where Unsubstantiated Suspicion of Terrorism Ensures Indefinite Detention, Even After 12 Years.”

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.

The Chaotic History of Guantánamo’s Military Commissions

See the full list here of everyone charged in the military commissions at Guantánamo.

Recently, a friend asked me for information about all the Guantánamo prisoners who have been put forward for military commission trials at Guantánamo, and after undertaking a search online, I realized that I couldn’t find a single place listing all the prisoners who have been charged in the three versions of the commissions that have existed since 2001, or the total number of men charged.

As a result, I decided that it would be useful to do some research and to provide a list of all the men charged — a total of 30, it transpires — as well as providing some updates about the commissions, which I have been covering since 2006, but have not reported on since October. The full list of everyone charged in the military commissions is here, which I’ll be updating on a regular basis, and please read on for a brief history of the commissions and for my analysis of what has taken place in the last few months.

The commissions were dragged out of the history books by Dick Cheney on November 13, 2001, when a Military Order authorizing the creation of the commissions was stealthily issued with almost no oversight, as I explained in an article in June 2007, while the Washington Post was publishing a major series on Cheney by Barton Gellman (the author of Angler, a subsequent book about Cheney) and Jo Becker. Alarmingly, as I explained in that article, the order “stripped foreign terror suspects of access to any courts, authorized their indefinite imprisonment without charge, and also authorized the creation of ‘Military Commissions,’ before which they could be tried using secret evidence,” including evidence derived through the use of torture.

Cheney’s military commissions, which involved various chaotic pre-trial hearings but no trials, lasted until June 28, 2006, when, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, a challenge brought by one of the ten men charged (Salim Hamdan, a Yemeni who had taken a paid job as one of Osama bin Laden’s drivers), the Supreme Court ruled that the commissions lacked “the power to proceed because its structures and procedures violate both the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the four Geneva Conventions signed in 1949.”

Almost immediately, however, the Bush administration responded by negotiating with Congress for a new version of the commissions to be launched, and the result was the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Between February 2007 and December 2008, 27 prisoners were charged in the military commissions (including nine of the ten men previously charged), although only three cases went to trial — David Hicks in March 2007, Salim Hamdan in July 2008, and Ali Hamza al-Bahlul in October 2008. For a brief rundown of most of these stories, see my article from November 2008, “20 Reasons To Shut Down The Guantánamo Trials.”

When President Obama took office in January 2009, he initially suspended the commissions, but in a speech in May 2009 he announced that they were back on the table. He then worked with Congress to revive them, and the result was the Military Commissions Act of 2009. According to an announcement by Attorney General Eric Holder in November 2009, there were supposed to be two types of trials under the Obama administration  — in federal court, for the five men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks, as well as in the military commissions. However, when the administration faced criticism for planning to hold the 9/11 trial in New York, President Obama dropped the plans, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his four co-defendants (all accused of involvement the 9/11 attacks) were once more charged in the military commissions.

Nor were the military commissions free of problems. Senior Obama administration officials had told Congress (see here and here) that certain charges designated as war crimes in the MCA of 2006, and intended for the 2009 version — providing material support for terrorism, and, possibly, conspiracy — were not regarded as war crimes, and would probably be overturned on appeal. Congress failed to take the advice on board, but this was indeed what happened in October 2012, in another victory for Salim Hamdan, when his conviction was overturned, and in January 2013 the conviction of Ali Hamza al-Bahlul was also overturned. The government has appealed, but the effect has been for the military to concede that the total number of prisoners who will face trials by military commission (or have already faced trials) out of the 779 men held since the prison opened, is unlikely to exceed 20. In fact, at current estimates, it will be no more than the 15 already charged and/or convicted.

Delays in the 9/11 trial, challenges in the trial of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri

Since my last article about the commissions (In October 2013), progress has been as painfully slow as usual in the pre-trial stages of the 9/11 trial (for five men including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed), and the trial of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri (accused of masterminding the attack on the USS Cole in 2000). All six men were held for years in CIA “black sites,” were they were subjected to torture — which, of course, makes a fair and open trial improbable, and has led to a protracted game of cat and mouse as the government tries to suppress all mention of torture, while the defense teams try to expose it.

In December, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, one of the five alleged 9/11 co-conspirators, was ejected twice from the courtroom for interruptions — in the first instance shouting, “This is torture! You have to stop the sleep deprivation and the noises.” This led to questions about his mental competency, but these had not been addressed by January 31 this year, because he refused to talk to a mental health board whose members told the judge that they therefore didn’t know if he was fit to stand trial. As a result, the judge, Army Col. James L. Pohl, was obliged to put off the next round of hearings, scheduled for February, when the only hearings that took place were for al-Nashiri.

The hearings were immediately derailed when al-Nashiri threatened to sack his civilian lawyer, Rick Kammen. Two days later, he apologized, telling Judge Pohl, “I believe we are here in a unique and very strange court,” and complaining that “his lawyers go to secret pretrial hearings and are forbidden to tell him ‘what happened during those closed, classified sessions,’” as the Miami Herald described it.

After this, lawyers sparred over the use of hearsay evidence, held a secret meeting with the judge regarding CIA “black sites,” sought to have the death penalty dismissed in the case of a conviction because of the use of secret evidence which al-Nashiri cannot see, and held another secret meeting with the judge to discuss the use of classified information. At the end of it all, Judge Pohl set a date of December 4 for the trial to begin — although it remains to be seen if that date will hold.

Ahmed al-Darbi’s plea deal

In the last two months, however, the most significant development has been the announcement of a plea deal accepted by Ahmed al-Darbi, a Saudi prisoner, charged in the second and third versions of the commissions, who was seized in Azerbaijan in June 2002 and held in a CIA “black site” in Afghanistan prior to his arrival at Guantánamo. A declaration by al-Darbi about his torture is here.

As the New York Times reported, On February 20, al-Darbi pleaded guilty before a military commission to charges relating to his involvement in an Al-Qaeda attack in 2002 on a French oil tanker, the MV Limburg, off the coast of Yemen, when one crew member died. According to the plea deal, he “will spend at least three and a half more years at Guantánamo before he is sentenced,” and will then probably be transferred to Saudi Arabia to serve out the remainder of a sentence that is expected to be between nine to 15 years, “depending on his behavior in custody,” as the New York Times described it.

In exchange for this sentence (which, with the 12 years he has already spent in custody, will amount to between 21 and 27 years in custody in total), al-Darbi has agreed to cooperate with prosecutors, and is expected to testify against Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who is currently facing pre-trial hearings, and is accused of masterminding another attack on a ship, in this case the USS Cole, which was attacked in 2000, with the loss of 17 US lives.

“In a twist,” as the New York Times described it, al-Darbi “was already at Guantánamo by the time the MV Limburg was attacked.” The judge, Air Force Col. Mark Allred, acknowledged that, but said it made no difference. “Obviously you were not there, you were somewhere else,” he said. “But the actual perpetrators were there, and you are liable for their actions as a principal.”

The New York Times also noted that, in accepting a plea deal, al-Darbi had “traded away an opportunity to argue that a French vessel in Yemen in 2002 was beyond the scope of the American armed conflict with Al-Qaeda, and that if so, he could be prosecuted only in a civilian criminal trial, not an American military tribunal.” This could have been a significant challenge — and is one being undertaken by Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri — but it is, I believe, understandable that al-Darbi chose a plea deal instead, as it has proven to be the most reliable way of leaving Guantánamo, in marked contrast to the ongoing plight of the 75 men approved for release by an an inter-agency task force over four years ago, but still held, or the 69 others not scheduled to face trials, who are awaiting review boards to tell them if they too should be approved for release.

The contentious addition of conspiracy to the charges against Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi

The week before Ahmed al-Darbi’s plea deal, the only other significant development of late was an announcement about the most recent prisoner to be charged, Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, who was brought to Guantánamo from an unidentified CIA facility in April 2007, and is regarded as a “high-value detainee.”

Al-Iraqi is one of only six prisoners brought to Guantánamo since 14 “high-value detainees” (including the five 9/11 co-defendants and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri) were brought to the prison from the CIA’s “black site” in September 2006. An alleged high-level link between Al-Qaeda and insurgents in Iraq, he was charged last June, but on February 3 prosecutors added a charge of conspiracy to the existing charges.

This was a contentious move because, when the D.C. Circuit Court overturned the conviction against Ali Hamza al-Bahlul in January 2013, the judges specifically overturned not only the charge of providing material support for terrorism, but also conspiracy, “on the grounds that the charge was not recognized under the international laws of war,” as the New York Times explained.

The Times added, “The Obama administration has appealed, but if the ruling stands, it sharply undermines the utility of tribunals — as opposed to civilian courts — to sentence people to prison who participated in terrorist groups but are not personally linked to any specific attack.”

To my mind, it seems premature — or perhaps arrogant — of prosecutors to file a conspiracy charge when it has been struck down by the D.C. Circuit Court (which does not have a reputation as a liberal court). In addition, al-Iraqi will no doubt want to challenge whether the commissions are able to try conduct that took place before the passage of the Military Commissions Act in 2006.

Given al-Bahlul’s successful appeal, striking down conspiracy in his case, I can only wonder if, because al-Iraqi didn’t arrive at Guantánamo until April 2007, prosecutors hope to charge him with crimes that took place between the passage of the 2006 MCA and his capture, although that seems like a small window of opportunity, as well as being unreliable, as conspiracy remains a dubious charge in a war crimes forum.

The irony, of course, is that last week Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, a Kuwaiti who briefly acted as a spokesman for Al-Qaeda immediately after the 9/11 attacks, and was then held under a form of house arrest for 10 years by the Iranian government, was found guilty in a federal court in New York on charges that include conspiracy, for which he may well receive a life sentence. As a result, anyone paying close attention and seeking severe punishment for those who were allegedly involved with Al-Qaeda would, it seems to me, be better off pushing for the commissions to be scrapped — again — and for those who can genuinely be accused of crimes to be tried in federal courts on the US mainland instead.

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.

The UK’s Unacceptable Obsession with Stripping British Citizens of Their UK Nationality

In January, Theresa May, the British Home Secretary, secured cross-party support for an alarming last-minute addition to the current Immigration Bill, allowing her to strip foreign-born British citizens of their citizenship, even if it leaves them stateless.

The timing appeared profoundly cynical. May already has the power to strip dual nationals of their citizenship, as a result of legislation passed in 2002 “enabling the Home Secretary to remove the citizenship of any dual nationals who [have] done something ‘seriously prejudicial’ to the UK,” as the Bureau of Investigative Journalism described it in February 2013, but “the power had rarely been used before the current government.”

In December, the Bureau, which has undertaken admirable investigation into the Tory-led mission to strip people of their citizenship, further clarified the situation, pointing out that the existing powers are part of the British Nationality Act, and allow the Home Secretary to “terminate the British citizenship of dual-nationality individuals if she believes their presence in the UK is ‘not conducive to the public good’, or if they have obtained their citizenship through fraud.” The Bureau added, “Deprivation of citizenship orders can be made with no judicial approval in advance, and take immediate effect — the only route for people to argue their case is through legal appeals. In all but two known cases, the orders have been issued while the individual is overseas, leaving them stranded abroad during legal appeals that can take years” — and also, of course, raising serious questions about who is supposedly responsible for them when their British citizenship is removed.

The Bureau has established that 41 individuals have been stripped of their British nationality since 2002, and that 37 of these cases have taken place under Theresa May, since the Tory-led coalition government was formed in May 2010, with 27 of these cases being on the grounds that their presence in the UK is “not conducive to the public good.” In December, the Bureau confirmed that, in 2013, Theresa May “removed the citizenship of 20 individuals — more than in every other year of the Coalition government put together.” As the Bureau suggested in February 2013, it appears that, in two cases, the stripping of UK citizenship led to the men in question subsequently being killed by US drone attacks.

The two men, Bilal al-Berjawi, a British-Lebanese citizen who grew up in London, and Mohamed Sakr, a British-Egyptian citizen who was born in the UK, travelled to Somalia in 2009, where they allegedly became involved with the militant group al-Shabaab. Theresa May stripped both men of their British nationalities in 2010, and, as the Bureau described it:

In June 2011 Mr. Berjawi was wounded in the first known US drone strike in Somalia and [in 2012] was killed by a drone strike – within hours of calling his wife in London to congratulate her on the birth of their first son. His family have claimed that US forces were able to pinpoint his location by monitoring the call he made to his wife in the UK. Mr. Sakr, too, was killed in a US airstrike in February 2012 … Mr. Sakr’s former UK solicitor said there appeared to be a link between the Home Secretary removing citizenships and subsequent US actions. “It appears that the process of deprivation of citizenship made it easier for the US to then designate Mr. Sakr as an enemy combatant, to whom the UK owes no responsibility whatsoever,” Saghir Hussain said.

Ian Macdonald QC, the president of the Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association, who has long opposed the disturbing trend towards secrecy and unaccountability in Britain’s post-9/11 anti-terror laws, added that depriving people of their citizenship “means that the British government can completely wash their hands if the security services give information to the Americans who use their drones to track someone and kill them.” He also described the citizenship orders as “sinister,” and said of the government, “They’re using executive powers and I think they’re using them quite wrongly. It’s not open government; it’s closed, and it needs to be exposed.”

Another case exposed by the Bureau involves a man stranded in Pakistan, who says he is under threat from the Taliban and unable to find work to support his wife and three children His story was published on March 17, entitled, “‘My British citizenship was everything to me. Now I am nobody’ — A former British citizen speaks out.”

In another case, as Helena Kennedy QC noted in an article for the Bureau on March 20, another dual nationality UK citizen, Mahdi Hashi, “was picked up by Djibouti’s secret police, whom he told he was British. After calls, the agents told him the British authorities said he was no longer a British citizen. He had no other passport and was therefore rendered stateless. This meant he had no access to consular advice as to his rights; no representations were made that he should be brought before a court. As a result he was interrogated at length with no legal protection, handed over to American agents, further interrogated and then hooded and flown to the US without any extradition proceedings.” For more on Mahdi Hashi’s case, see this article in the Nation by Aviva Stahl, and you can listen to Aviva Stahl, in a recent radio interview with Rania Khalek and Kevin Gosztola here.

In December, a former senior Foreign Office official told the Bureau that “the steep rise in cases is at least partly due to the large number of British nationals travelling to Syria to participate in the civil war there,” as the Bureau described it. The former official said, “This [deprivation of citizenship] is happening. There are somewhere between 40 and 240 Brits in Syria and we are probably not quick as we should be to strip their citizenship.” The former official also “described the practice of revoking the citizenship of British nationals fighting in Syria as ‘an open secret’ in Foreign Office circles.”

In January, May presented her addition to the bill as, in the Guardian‘s words, “a last-ditch bid to reduce a damaging Tory rebellion in the Commons” after the Tory MP Dominic Raab had tabled an amendment seeking to change the law so that, as the BBC put it, “foreign criminals can no longer use Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights — a right to a family life — to escape deportation.”

May correctly told MPs that Raab’s amendment was “incompatible” with the European Convention on Human Rights, but the timing of the decision to add the citizen-stripping clause — Clause 60 — to the bill instead, which, disturbingly, passed by 297 votes to 34, was deeply suspicious. As the Bureau of Investigative Journalism noted earlier this month, May had announced her plans via the Times on November 12, 2013, in response to a ruling by the UK Supreme Court that “the Home Office had illegally revoked the UK citizenship of an Iraqi-born man, Hilal al-Jedda, because he held no other nationality.” (May subsequently issued another stripping al-Jedda’s citizenship for a second time).

The Bureau also noted on December 23 that May had already “held at least one confidential meeting with Coalition MPs to discuss the plans, including inserting an amendment into the Immigration Bill allowing her to remove the nationality of those who have acquired British citizenship, even if it will make them stateless, if they have done something ‘seriously prejudicial to the vital interests’ of the UK.”

In response to Theresa May’s dreadful innovations, Helena Kennedy QC wrote an article for the Bureau, in which she condemned the government for its disdain for the law following the Supreme Court’s Hilal al-Jedda ruling. She wrote, “The Government does not take well to judgments saying it has done something contrary to law,” and also pointed out:

The proposal to allow the Home Secretary to deprive a naturalised citizen of his or her citizenship not only risks damaging the UK’s international relations but also risks breaching a whole swathe of international obligations. The reason the government gives is that they want to prevent terrorism, but deprivation of citizenship is not a viable alternative to the responsible prosecution of alleged criminal conduct.

Citizenship is not a privilege; it is a protected legal status. The US, Germany and many other states would not dream of removing citizenship under any circumstances. The answer to conduct we deem criminal is to prosecute it.

Deprivation with all its consequences in the modern world is equivalent to a penal sanction of the most serious kind – but imposed without a criminal trial, without conviction, without close and open examination of the evidence and without the opportunity to defend yourself. All of this is contrary to due process — a fundamental human right.

Kennedy’s comment were in marked contrast to the position taken by the Home Office in December, when approached by the Bureau. On that occasion, the Home Office declined to comment on the reasons for the rise in deprivation of citizenship orders but said, “Citizenship is a privilege, not a right, and the Home Secretary will remove British citizenship from individuals where she feels it is conducive to the public good to do so.”

Helena Kennedy is correct, of course, but sadly most MPs failed to recognise the importance of proper legal safeguards for all citizens, and, last week, although there was a heated debate, the House of Lords failed to remove Clause 60 from the legislation, despite criticism by lawyers,  by some MPs and by the Joint Committee on Human Rights, which issued a report on February 26 that, as the Bureau put it, “questioned the timing of Theresa May’s amendment on statelessness and said that the new power ran a ‘very great risk of breaching the UK’s obligations’ to other nations if Britons were to be made stateless while overseas.”

The clause passed despite the legal action charity Reprieve pointing out that the measures would “leave an estimated 3.4 million British citizens vulnerable to being arbitrarily made stateless in England and Wales alone, according to figures from the 2011 census,” and noting that, in 1958, the US Supreme Court denounced the stripping of citizenship as “a form of punishment more primitive than torture.”

As Reprieve described it, “Such a measure was held by the United States Supreme Court in the 1950s to constitute cruel and unusual punishment, and that the ‘use of denationalization as a punishment [means] the total destruction of the individual’s status in organized society. It is a form of punishment more primitive than torture, for it destroys for the individual the political existence that was centuries in the development…In short, [s/he] has lost the right to have rights.’”

As Helena Kennedy also explained, “Deprivation of citizenship is another way of avoiding the old-fashioned process of putting people on trial if they are suspected of doing wrong. It is a way of short-cutting the rule of law. Hannah Arendt said that statelessness deprives people of ‘the right to have rights’. It is a policy that has been used by the worst tyrannical regimes. It was why so many people wandered the world stateless after the Second World War and why in 1961 the UK with other nations signed up to the UN Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness. This intended change in the law will be a source of shame to us in the years to come. It must be opposed by us all.”

I will be posting a transcript of the House of Lords debate very soon, but the only hope now, legislatively, is that many of the Lords’ concerns will be “discussed at a meeting ahead of report stage,” as Alice Ross of the Bureau explained in an article compiling her live tweets of the debate. I hope at that point there will be further publicity, and further opportunities for this dreadful development to be challenged and, eventually, overturned.

Note: For further information on Clause 60, see Liberty’s briefing here.

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

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

Sulaiman Abu Ghaith’s Unexpected Testimony in New York Terrorism Trial

On Wednesday, Sulaiman Abu Ghaith (also identified as Sulaiman Abu Ghayth), the Kuwaiti cleric who is on trial in New York accused of terrorism, surprised the court by taking to the witness stand to defend himself.

Abu Ghaith, 48, who was held for over ten years under a form of house arrest in Iran before being freed in Turkey, and, via Jordan, ending up in US custody last year, appeared in broadcasts from Afghanistan immediately after the 9/11 attacks as a spokesman for Al-Qaeda.

He is charged with conspiracy to kill United States nationals, conspiracy to provide material support and resources to terrorists, and providing material support and resources to terrorists — charges that include the claim that he had knowledge of Al-Qaeda’s operations, including plots involving shoe bombs (for which a British man, Richard Reid, was arrested, tried and convicted in 2002). As the New York Times described it, the government “said in court papers that as part of his role in the conspiracy and the support he provided to Al Qaeda, Mr. Abu Ghaith spoke on behalf of the terrorist group, ‘embraced its war against America,’ and sought to recruit others to join in that conspiracy.”

Abu Ghaith denies any knowledge of Al-Qaeda’s operations, and on Wednesday, just before the defence rested its case, he “offered an extraordinarily intimate look at [Osama] Bin Laden at the time [of the 9/11 attacks], taking jurors inside his cave in Afghanistan,” as the New York Times put it.

In his testimony, in which he was questioned by his lawyer, Stanley Cohen, Abu Ghaith explained how he had traveled to Afghanistan in June 2001 because of what he described as “a serious desire to get to know the new Islamic government in Afghanistan” — in other words, the Taliban — and described how he was invited to meet bin Laden in Kandahar. At a second meeting, he said, bin Laden “said in your capacity as a sheikh, an imam, and a teacher, we want you to give some lectures and speeches. And to teach at a religious school … that we have.”

Abu Ghaith described the school, in Kandahar, as the Religious Institute (although it was generally known as the Institute of Islamic Studies), whose director was Abu Hafs al-Mauritani, a spiritual advisor to Al-Qaeda, who fell out with bin Laden over the 9/11 attacks, which he opposed.

Abu Ghaith didn’t speak or teach at the school, but, at bin Laden’s request, he did speak at two training camps, and, in response to questioning by Cohen about how bin Laden described the camps, he said, “It was a preparation camp, because as we know in sharia, in the Islamic law, everybody needs to be prepared. Like in any nation need to prepare themselves to be ready.”

Abu Ghaith then returned to Kuwait briefly to collect his wife and his seven children and bring them back to Kandahar, where Abu Hafs found him opportunities to speak at a mosque and where he also met bin Laden again. After some time, however, he became worried that the healthcare facilities were insufficient in Afghanistan for his wife, who was pregnant, and so he arranged for her and the children to leave for Pakistan, and then to return to Kuwait.

Abu Ghaith arrived back in Afghanistan (presumably from Pakistan) on September 7, 2001, just four days before the 9/11 attacks. Cohen asked him about his role at this time:

Q. By the way, from the first time you met Usama Bin Laden through September 8, had he asked you to be a spokesperson for Al Qaeda?

A.  No.

Q.  Did anyone ask you to be a spokesperson for Al Qaeda during that time?

A.  No.

Q.  Did you volunteer to be a spokesperson for Al Qaeda?

A.  When I spoke that title or that position was not there.

Questioned about 9/11, Abu Ghaith explained that he was in Kabul on the day, at the house of a friend called Adil, and that he learned about the attacks “[f]rom the media, from the TV.” Cohen asked him, “Prior to 9/11 did you have any idea that that attack was going to occur?” and he replied, “No. Specifically, no, I didn’t have any idea” — although he later conceded, under cross-examination, that he had heard, in the training camps, that “something” might happen. Michael Ferrara, a prosecutor, asked him, “You knew something big was coming from Al-Qaeda?” and he replied, “Yes.”

Questioned by Stanley Cohen, Abu Ghaith said that, on the evening of September 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden sent someone to ask him to meet with him. They traveled by car, for two or three hours, into the mountains. Cohen asked him, “Why did you go see Usama Bin Laden after you heard about 9/11?” and he replied, “I went to see him.  I didn’t — I didn’t know the subject which he wanted to see me for, so I went as, as usual. Whenever he asked to see me, I went.” He added that he had met bin Laden six or seven times before 9/11.

Asked to describe what happened when he met bin Laden on this occasion, Abu Ghaith said:

I arrived to that area at night, I believe. I found Usama Bin Laden with another group, a guard, security guard, the number of which was about 20 to 25 people. I found him in a cave inside a mountain in a rough terrain, rough mountain terrain with some villages, some small villages and some bedouins who lived there. Naturally, I greeted him.

He said, Come in, sit down.

He said, Did you learn about what happened?

I said, What do you mean?

He said, The attacks on the United States.

I said, Yes.

He said, We are the ones who did it. What do you expect to happen?

I said, Why are you asking me this question? I don’t know anything about these events.

He said, Well, since you saw, you learned about that huge event, what do you expect to happen?

I said, I am not a military analyst in order to predict.

He said, Well, what’s your take on this as a person in his 30s and have some experience of life?

I said, I don’t have any military expertise to tell you what’s going to happen.

I said, Politically, I said, America, if it was proven that you were the one who did this, will not settle until it accomplishes two things: To kill you and topple the state of Taliban.

He said, You are being too pessimistic.

I said, You asked my opinion, and this is my opinion.

The day after, Abu Ghaith said that, after breakfast, he saw bin Laden having a meeting in a cave with Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al-Qaeda’s second-in-command, and Abu Hafs al-Masri (aka Mohammed Atef), Al-Qaeda’s military chief, who was killed in November 2001. “I was not invited to join that meeting,” he said, adding, “I was outside. They sat about half an hour talking. Then he [bin Laden] asked, he called me in.” He continued:

And he said to me: Now, after these events, it’s no secret or it’s not hard it’s a no-brainer to predict what is going to happen. What you expected may actually happen. And I want to deliver a message to the world. And Dr. Ayman also wants to deliver a message. I want you to deliver that message or to address the world.

I said, Well, I am new in this field. I don’t have any experience or any knowledge about the subject. I don’t have any ability to form ideas around that subject.

He said, I am going to give you some points and you build around them that speech.

I said, If you would kindly spare me that mission, it will be better.

He said, No, I insist that you speak. This is your job. You are an imam, you are a speaker, and you will only discuss the religious aspect, which you are familiar with.

I don’t want to hide that I had some convictions that the nature of any conflict, whenever there is an oppression or injustice inflicted on someone that there could be possible reactions. Those reactions could be unpredictable.

Under some of these convictions, I accepted to speak.

Around two hours later, in front of the cave, Abu Ghaith made the speech that was recorded and issued on video. In court, this exchange took place with his lawyer:

Q. Did anyone give you a statement to read as part of that video or any words to use in that video?

A. Other than the bullet points that Usama Bin Laden had given me to build the speech around, no.

Q. When you say bullet points, what do you mean, sir?

A. The points around which I built the speech. He said mention some of the Koranic verses and some hadith, that justify why those attacks happened, the nature of the conflict. These were the points around which I built that speech.

Afterwards, Abu Ghaith said that he spent two to three weeks staying with bin Laden and his entourage, because “the situation at that time after [9/11], the events were very tense and the roadways were extremely dangerous. I did not have any personal means of transportation to move, so I was forced to stay with him with the rest of the group.”

He was also asked about subsequent videos that were made, including one in which he spoke of a “storm of aeroplanes,” and in response to questioning from Cohen, he confirmed that the phrase came from bin Laden, and added, “All the videos which I filmed were the thoughts and the points made by Sheikh Usama” — a point that I thought was particular telling.

After his time with bin Laden, Abu Ghaith said they all went to Kabul, but then split up, and he stayed somewhere he had stayed previously, although he met with bin Laden again and made three more videos. Then, after no more than a week, he said that the situation in Kabul became insecure, and, like many other people, he then went to Jalalabad, and was eventually smuggled into Pakistan on a 16-hour route through the mountains. There, he said, he briefly met Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who he had also met once in Afghanistan, although the meeting only involved “[c]asual talk.”

In connection with the videos Abu Ghaith was involved in making, the following exchange with Cohen also took place:

Q. By the way, when you made these videos, was it your intent to recruit anyone?

A. There’s no one who was capable of recruiting anyone except Usama Bin Laden. My intention was not to recruit anyone.

Q. What specifically was your intention?

A. My intention was to deliver a message, a message that I believed that oppression, if it befalls any nation, any people, any category of people, that category must revolt at some point. People do not accept oppression. They cannot take it. And what happened was a result, as I understand, a natural result for the oppression that befell Muslims. I wanted to proclaim the message that Muslims had to bear responsibility and defend themselves.

Abu Ghaith also responded to questioning about shoe bombs, stating that he had not heard about any plots, and had not heard about or met Richard Reid.

In further questioning, Abu Ghaith explained that, after his arrival in Pakistan, he was then taken to Karachi, and on to Iran, where he was at liberty for five months until the Iranian authorities seized him, and placed him under a form of arrest for over ten years.

As the New York Times put it, “Until Mr. Abu Ghaith took the stand, his lawyers had given no indication that they were going to have their client testify.” As I explained in an article last week, Abu Ghaith’s lawyers had submitted to the court written responses to questions that had been given to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed at Guantánamo, and had been hoping to have permission for Mohammed himself to testify from Guantánamo, but the judge, Lewis Kaplan, would not allow his testimony, ruling that the defense had largely failed to establish that Mohammed “has personal knowledge of anything important to this matter.”

The jury is currently deliberating in Sulaiman Abu Ghaith’s case, and I will provide an update when they deliver their verdict. In the meantime, as Daphne Eviatar explained in an article for the Huffington Post, “Although the government claims only that [Abu Ghaith] made a handful of speeches for al Qaeda between May 2001 and 2002, it seeks to hold him responsible for the deaths of all Americans Al Qaeda orchestrated between 1998 and 2013.” She added, “At a conference with the lawyers on Thursday after the defense rested its case, Judge Lewis Kaplan, who’s presided over this trial with a heavy hand since it started earlier this month, confirmed that that’s exactly how he will charge the jury on Monday.”

Although one of Abu Ghaith’s lawyers, Zoe Dolan, had attempted to get the judge to amend the proposed conspiracy charge so that Abu Ghaith couldn’t be held liable for everything Al-Qaeda did over a 15-year period, Judge Kaplan stated that, under US law, even if the jury decides Abu Ghaith only joined the Al Qaeda conspiracy on September 12, “the defendant still will be held responsible for any acts that happened before he joined the conspiracy.”

As Eviatar stated, “Although I’m a lawyer and I’ve studied criminal justice, the breadth of U.S. conspiracy law still astonishes me every time I hear about it. Its effect, in this case, is to make a Kuwaiti preacher who made a handful of speeches for Al Qaeda over a few short months in Afghanistan personally responsible for the deaths of thousands of people killed long before he ever came on the scene. There’s no question that if the jury finds he joined the Al Qaeda conspiracy, he’ll spend the rest of his life in prison.”

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.

Guantánamo, Where Unsubstantiated Suspicion of Terrorism Ensures Indefinite Detention, Even After 12 Years

Please support my work!

Last week, in a decision that I believe can only be regarded objectively as a travesty of justice, a Periodic Review Board (PRB) at Guantánamo — consisting of representatives of six government departments and intelligence agencies — recommended that a Yemeni prisoner, Abdel Malik al-Rahabi (aka Abd al-Malik al-Rahabi), should continue to be held. The board concluded that his ongoing imprisonment “remains necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States.”

In contrast, this is how al-Rahabi began his statement to the PRB on January 28:

My family and I deeply thank the board for taking a new look at my case. I feel hope and trust in the system. It’s hard to keep up hope for the future after twelve years. But what you are doing gives me new hope. I also thank my personal representatives and my private counsel, and I thank President Obama. I will summarize my written statement since it has already been submitted to the board.

I have been compliant in the camp facilities and other detainees trust me. I have taken the opportunities for education and personal growth. I have been preparing myself for the life after Guantánamo.

When I return to Yemen, I want to resume my education. My father, who is a tailor, has a job for me in his shop. I have a wife who longs for me and 13-year-old daughter who badly needs me. She’s a light — she is the light of my life.

Being apart from Ayesha has been the hardest part of my detention. In our calls, she says I want you to take me to the park; I want you to help me with my homework. She sends me five or six letters at a time. I will never again leave Ayesha without her father, my wife without her husband, my parents without their son. I want to make up for the twelve years I have been away.

The PRBs were first proposed in March 2011, when President Obama issued an executive order authorizing the ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial of 48 Guantánamo prisoners. These men had been recommended for ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established shortly after taking office in 2009, on the dubious basis that they were too dangerous to release, but that insufficient evidence existed to put them on trial.

Disgracefully, although President Obama promised regular reviews for these men when he issued the executive order, it took over two and a half years for the first PRB to be convened. In the meantime, two of the 48 men had died, but 25 others — originally designated for prosecution by the task force — were added to the PRB list, making 71 men in total.

The first PRB, in October, led to a recommendation that the prisoner in question, Mahmoud al-Mujahid, a Yemeni, should be released — although the irony, of course, is that he merely joined 55 of his compatriots, who were cleared for release by the task force in January 2010, but are still held because of unreasonable fears about the security situation in Yemen.

In al-Rahabi’s case, although the Board “took into consideration [his] strong family support awaiting his return, including housing, employment opportunities, and a wife and daughter ready to support him,” they worried about other alleged problems — described as his “significant ties to al-Qa’ida, including his past role as a bodyguard for Usama Bin Ladin [sic] and a prior relationship with the current amir of al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula.” The board added, “Further, his experience fighting on the frontlines, possible selection for a hijacking plot, and significant training raise concern for the Board,” and also stated, “The detainee’s planned return to Ibb, assessed to have a marginal security environment, and ties to a relative who is a possible extremist, raises concerns about his susceptibility to reengagement.”

This would indeed be a worry, if any of it was true. Unfortunately, however, it has never been established objectively that there is any truth to the allegations. The most significant claim is that al-Rahabi was a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden, part of a group of men described as the “Dirty 30″ — all alleged bin Laden bodyguards, captured crossing the border from Afghanistan to Pakistan in December 2001.

See if you think this is plausible: al-Rahabi, who was born in 1979, would have been just 22 years old when he was seized. Is it really likely that, having arrived in Afghanistan in the summer of 2000, this young man rose to become a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden in such a short amount of time? In his classified military file, released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, witnesses queued up to accuse him, but all are suspicious — Sanad al-Kazimi, Sharqawi Abdu Ali al-Hajj, Ahmed al-Darbi, Mohammed al-Qahtani, Hassan bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi (a “high-value detainee”), who were all tortured, and Yasim Basardah, the most notorious liar at Guantánamo.

Moreover, the “high-value detainee” Walid bin Attash claimed that al-Rahabi was “a designated suicide operative,” who, in 1999, “trained for an aborted al-Qaida operation in Southeast Asia to hijack US airliners and crash them into US military facilities in Asia in coordination with 11 September 2001,” for which all the planned operatives swore bayat (an oath of allegiance) to Osama bin Laden. However, there is no evidence that al-Rahabi was in Afghanistan in 1999.

Even more ridiculous is a claim by Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi (Ali Muhammad Abdul Aziz al-Fakhri), the leader of the independent Khaldan training camp, who was held in a variety of CIA “black sites” before being returned to Libya under Colonel Gaddafi, where he died in prison under suspicious circumstances in 2009. Al-Libi reported that al-Rahabi arrived in Afghanistan in 1995, when he was just 16, staying until 1996.

It may be that these allegations are more trustworthy than my analysis suggests, but I doubt it, as they are typical of prisoners who were tortured, or, in Yasim Basardah’s case, provided false allegations against a shockingly large number of his fellow prisoners to improve his own living conditions at Guantánamo, prior to his release in 2010.

The fact that, over 12 years after his arrival at Guantánamo, al-Rahabi is still being judged as “a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States,” based on information that has never been subjected to any kind of objective scrutiny, is thoroughly unjust, and shows how little regard for the truth the Obama administration and the Periodic Review Board members have — or, to put it another way, how much regard they have for the hugely unreliable collection of lies and hearsay masquerading as evidence in the files on the prisoners put together at Guantánamo.

Al-Rahabi’s case will apparently be considered again in six months, when I hope the board takes a less credulous approach to his perceived dangerousness, but I doubt this will happen, as there seems to be no impetus for the board, or the administration in general, to take a realistic view of the prisoners, rather than one full of distortion, innuendo and outright lies.

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.

Gitmo Clock Marks 300 Days Since Obama’s Promise to Resume Releasing Guantánamo Prisoners; Just 12 Men Freed

[image error]Please visit, like, share and tweet the Gitmo Clock, which I established last year (via the “Close Guantanamo” campaign) to mark how many days it is since President Obama’s promise to resume releasing cleared prisoners from Guantánamo, and how many have been freed.

Today (March 19, 2014), it is 300 days since President Obama promised to resume releasing prisoners from Guantánamo, in a major speech on national security issues last May, and I’m asking you to promote the Gitmo Clock, which I established last year with the designer Justin Norman, to show how many days it is since the promise, and how many prisoners have been released (just 12). At this rate, it will take over five years for all the cleared prisoners at Guantánamo to be released.

When President Obama made his promise, he was responding to widespread criticism triggered by the prisoners themselves, who, in February, had embarked on a major hunger strike — involving nearly two-thirds of the remaining prisoners — and his promise came after a period of two years and eight months in which just five men had been released from Guantánamo.

What was particularly appalling about the release of prisoners being reduced to a trickle was that over half of the men — 86 of the remaining 166 prisoners at the time — had been approved for release from the prison in January 2010 by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established shortly after taking office in 2009 — and some of these men had previously been cleared for release by military review boards under President Bush, primarily in 2006 and 2007.

Congress had raised obstacles designed to prevent the release of prisoners, which had made it difficult for the Obama administration to release prisoners, but President Obama had the power to bypass Congress, through a waiver in the legislation, but had chosen not to use it. In addition, he had himself imposed a moratorium on releasing Yemeni prisoners — who make up two-thirds of the cleared prisoners — after it was revealed that a foiled bomb plot involving a plane on Christmas Day 2009 had been hatched in Yemen.

When he made his promise last May, President Obama also dropped his ban on releasing Yemenis and promised to appoint two envoys to help with the closure of Guantánamo. Those envoys have now been appointed — Cliff Sloan in the State Department and Paul Lewis in the Pentagon — and they have been helping with the release of the 12 prisoners who have left the prison since President Obama made his promise. In addition, in December, Congress eased its restrictions on the release of prisoners.

However, despite the president’s promise there are still 75 prisoners at Guantánamo who were cleared for release by the task force over four years ago, and 55 of these men are Yemenis. If President Obama wants his promise to be taken seriously, he needs to overcome the US establishment’s long-standing reluctance to release cleared Yemenis, because of fears about the security situation in Yemen. As the president said last year, “I think it is critical for us to understand that Guantánamo is not necessary to keep America safe. It is expensive. It is inefficient. It hurts us in terms of our international standing. It lessens cooperation with our allies on counterterrorism efforts. It is a recruitment tool for extremists. It needs to be closed.”

What you can do now

In conclusion, then, please visit, like, share and tweet the Gitmo Clock, and, if you would like to do more, you can:

- Call the White House and ask President Obama to release all the men cleared for release, and to make sure that reviews for the other men are fair and objective. Call 202-456-1111 or 202-456-1414 or submit a comment online.

- Call the Department of Defense and ask Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to issue certifications for other cleared prisoners: 703-571-3343.

Please also feel free to write to the prisoners at Guantánamo.

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.

From Guantánamo, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s Declaration in the New York Trial of Sulaiman Abu Ghaith

On Sunday night, I received a fascinating document from the lawyers for Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, who is on trial in New York — a 14-page statement by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, written in response to questions the lawyers submitted to him at Guantánamo, where he has been held since September 2006, following three and half years in “black sites” run by the CIA, where, notoriously, he was subjected on 183 occasions to waterboarding, an ancient torture technique that is a form of controlled drowning. I am posting a transcript of the statement below, as I believe it is significant, and it is, of course, rare to hear directly from any of the “high-value detainees” held at Guantánamo, because every word they speak or write is presumptively classified, and the authorities generally refuse to unclassify a single word.

Abu Ghaith (also identified as Sulaiman Abu Ghayth) is charged with conspiracy to kill United States nationals, conspiracy to provide material support and resources to terrorists, and providing material support and resources to terrorists, primarily for his alleged role as a spokesperson for Al-Qaeda immediately after the 9/11 attacks. Following the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, he fled to Iran, where he was held under a form of house arrest — and where he met and married one of Osama bin Laden’s daughters, who was also held under house arrest — until January 2013, when he was released to Turkey.

It was at this point that the US authorities became aware of his release from Iranian custody. At the request of the US, he was briefly detained, but soon released because he had not committed any crime on Turkish soil. The Turkish government then apparently decided to deport him to Kuwait, but on a stop-over in Amman, Jordan, he was arrested by Jordanian officials and turned over to US officials, who subsequently extradited him to the United States.

Abu Ghaith’s lawyers are seeking to have Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (also identified as Khalid Shaikh Mohammad) testify by video link from Guantánamo. As they explain in a motion calling for this to be allowed, “The materiality of Mr. Mohammad’s testimony goes well beyond ‘unsubstantiated speculation,’ is highly relevant to the central issues of the matter before this Court, and is exculpatory. Although the defense has long believed that Mr. Mohammad’s testimony to be material and exculpatory with respect to Mr. Abu Ghayth, his responses … remove all doubt.”

As the lawyers point out, Mohammed’s responses address a number of “topics currently at issue in the trial of Mr. Abu Ghayth,” perhaps the most significant being his alleged “Knowledge of al Qaeda Military Operations, Including the ‘Shoe Bomb’ Plots,” to which KSM stated that Abu Ghaith “did not play any military role [in al Qaeda] and to the best of my knowledge he did not receive any military training at any of the training camps for the Mujahideen in Afghanistan,” and also stated that “those commissioned with playing a role in the media,” like Abu Ghaith, “such as reporting on letters or speeches, do not know the extent of them or what is behind them.”

It remains to be seen whether Judge Lewis Kaplan, the judge in Abu Ghaith’s case, will allow the defense’s motion, but it seems to me that he should. As the most significant Al-Qaeda figure in US custody, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed clearly understood the workings of the organization, and is able to state, with authority, what Abu Ghaith knew and didn’t know, and why it makes no sense to charge him with anything involving leadership or the planning or execution of terrorist activities.

As Abu Ghaith’s lawyers explain, “Mr. Mohammad’s testimony does not consist of hearsay. [H]e will offer direct and first-hand observations of the times, places, and events underlying these charges and testify to his knowledge of Mr. Abu Ghayth, Mr. Abu Ghayth’s lack of participation in any conspiracy to kill United States nationals or to provide material support to terrorists, and other material issues.”

Of particular interest in Mohammed’s testimony, it seems to me, are (1) his paranoia, in which he suspects that the US government has had “a hand in these questions because they correspond precisely with the way the CIA and the FBI posed questions,” (2) his brief history of the last 35 years in Afghanistan, in which he highlights western hypocrisy with regard to the Mujahideen, who were transformed from freedom fighters to terrorists, (3) his description and explanation of the “war of attrition” waged by Al-Qaeda on the US, and (4) his description of Al-Qaeda’s aims with regard to the US (one that seems to have been very successful); primarily their “strategic goals of exhausting our enemy’s efforts, capabilities, and financial assets to the greatest extent possible.” As he explains, “Every state of emergency declared and every change of alert level that inflicts specific procedures on the military and civilian sectors costs the country millions of dollars. It is enough that the US government has incurred losses upwards of a trillion dollars in the wars it has waged in the aftermath of 9/11, the bleeding of which continues to this day.”

Another key element of the document is (5) Mohammed’s mention of lists, which was discussed by Marcy Wheeler in an article on Sunday. As she explained, “One of the key pieces of evidence the government used against many Gitmo detainees — and Abu Ghaith — was the list of names found on various computers captured in raids.” Mohammed wrote that “there was not a single, fixed system for dispersing funds, especially the expenses and financial guarantees distributed by Al-Qaeda and its beneficiaries,” adding, “There were tables and charts and lists of names of the families who received aid and these lists did not delineate the affiliation of the person on record.”

In response, Wheeler noted, “I suspect KSM is partly blowing smoke here, and he’s not talking about the specific list at issue in this trial. But I also suspect there’s some truth to what he says, and that the government has been overstating the value of these lists in large numbers of terrorism trials and, more importantly, Gitmo habeas cases.” This is something that I have persistently noted as true from my own analysis of the allegations against the prisoners — from those released publicly in 2006 to the classified military files released by WikiLeaks in 2011 — and I think it is important that Mohammed chose to include it in his statement.

See below for Mohammed’s full statement.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s statement in response to questions submitted by lawyers for Sulaiman Abu Ghayth

In the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful

Praise be to Allah

To Whom It may Concern

I received the set of questions from the lawyer for Sulaiman Abu Ghayth (Allah preserve him) consisting of 34 pages and 451 questions. It reminded me of the interrogations at the Black Sites and the questions from the dirty team at Guantánamo.

I will not answer all of the questions because I have doubts about the goal behind some of them. Because of time constraints, the impending trial, and the fact that these questions — like all interrogation questions — are similar to one another and repeat the same question in a different way, I won’t constrain myself to the same format. My answers will be in paragraph form instead, covering most of the subjects.

I want to help my brother, Sheikh Sulaiman Abu Ghayth (Allah preserve him) but — as I have mentioned before to my attorney — only if the request comes from him and not from the lawyer. My answers are according to the best of my knowledge and beliefs about him.

I want to inform Sheikh Sulaiman Abu Ghayth’s lawyer that I suspect the U.S. government has a hand in these questions because they correspond precisely with the way the CIA and the FBI posed questions. I may be right or wrong in this assumption, but I feel that most of the questions do not serve the interests of his client or anyone for that matter; yet they are primarily directed to me. Therefore, he should know in advance that I will not agree to give any video or audio recorded testimony at the request of the government or the defense. These answers should suffice.

There are extensive areas about which I have no knowledge because of the nature of my work with Al-Qaeda during which I held many different positions during different periods of time and under different conditions. Therefore, my answers in these areas will be based upon my general knowledge.

For instance, in the case of all the questions about the training camps, I do not have any information on them during this period because I was appointed by Sheikh Osama bin Laden (Allah have mercy upon him) as head of operations abroad, meaning all the jihadist operations conducted outside of Afghanistan. It was administrative work consisting of receiving trained operators from the military officials such as Sheikh Abu Hafs Al-Masri or Sheikh Osama bin Laden (Allah have mercy upon them) without getting involved in training matters. The candidates for operations were sent to me and I had other means of training them apart from the well-known camps. I did not need the camps to prepare my men because of the nature of the special operations that were conducted outside Afghanistan.

My personal acquaintance with Sheikh Sulaiman Abu Ghayth

- He was an imam and the Friday sermon speaker at one of the mosques in Kuwait (to the best of my knowledge).

- He is a pious man and has memorized the Holy Qur’an in its entirety.

- Generally speaking, the Mujahideen respected all the Imams or Sheikhs and afforded them opportunities to give lectures at any time.

- I first came to know him through audiocassette tapes of Friday sermon prayers. These cassette tapes were widely distributed among the people and in Islamic libraries.

- He did not play any military role and to the best of my knowledge he did not receive any military training at any of the training camps for the Mujahideen in Afghanistan.

- I do not recall that I ever met him or saw him at a training camp considering my limited visits to the training camps during that period of time.

- He did not know me by any name other than the one I was using in Afghanistan (Mukhtar Al-Balushi) so he never knew my real name: Khalid Al-Shaikh or Khalid Shaikh Mohammad. I think that Sheikh Sulaiman Abu Ghayth (Allah preserve him) learned my real name through the media after my arrest, just as I learned real name of Abu Hafs Al-Masri (Allah have mercy upon him) through the media after he was killed. Allah only knows.

The relationship between Al-Qaeda and the government of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.

Al-Qaeda and the Arab Mujahideen who sacrificed their blood, souls, and money for the victory of the Afghan people were part of the people who partnered with them to defeat and expel the Russian forces in the previous war. The Mujahideen, regardless of their ethnic or organisational affiliation had their own activities, whether it be involvement with the military, charitable institutes, or relief organizations.

At that time, during that particular war, the U.S. government was against the Russian force for political and strategic reasons of their own. Thus they gave their proxies in the Arabian Peninsula countries the green light to flood the Afghan Mujahideen with money, resources, and Arab fighters; and they also opened the doors for merchants and businessmen to donate money without conditions or restrictions. The selfishness and stubbornness of Uncle Sam pushed the U.S. government to flood their agent, the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (lSI), with millions or billions of dollars in order to defeat the Russian Army by supporting the Afghan Mujahideen. This indirect support was the principle cause of the development of the non-Afghan groups and organizations in Afghanistan and their ability to achieve what they desired without any security pressures imposed by U.S. allies such as Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and other countries around the world. They never supported the non-Afghan groups directly with money or weapons, but by allowing absolute freedom for young people to spend their own money and take advantage of the open land contributed to attaining these achievements. In the end, Uncle Sam destroyed his own country by his own hand with his stupid foreign policy.

It was in this climate of complete inattention from the West that the groups in Afghanistan were able to develop their capabilities. The countries in the West were busy settling scores with the Russians and licking their chops over Mujahideen victories, and for the most part remained completely blind to what was happening in the camps and on the non-Afghan Mujahideen front.

When the Mujahideen prevailed and the Russians withdrew, the Americans awoke from their state of inattention; but it was too late. The American media had not yet used terms such as “foreign fighters” or “Afghan Arabs” or “terrorists” or even “the Afghan resistance”, rather the fixed term in the Western media policy at that time was “Mujahideen”. CNN, BBC, Reuters, France Press were all united in using the term “Jihad” to describe the Afghan resistance and “Mujahideen” to describe the fighters, whether Afghan or Arab, and the term “martyrs” for those among them who were killed.

All of this was to impart international legitimacy on the Western and Islamic support for the Mujahideen in an effort to limit the expansion of the Red Bear and prevent it from obtaining a warm-water port. At the time, Jihadist speeches were accepted and even supported and applauded by the West because they mirrored their strategic interests. Speeches by Sheikh Abdullah Azam or Sheikh Tamim Al-Adnani or addresses by Sheikh Osama bin Laden (Allah have mercy upon them) were accepted by the West. Every one of them was able to move freely from north to south and from east to west in the country.

If Sheikh Sulaiman Abu Ghayth (Allah preserve him) had given speeches at this time and collect money and incited people in mosques in New York or Brooklyn to go join the Jihad in Afghanistan to kill the Russians and the Afghan soldiers, no one would have prevented him or arrested him. In fact, they would have described him as a Mujahid and called him a hero. However, he was not part of that fabric and did not participate in Jihad at that time.

Western hypocrisy became apparent when these same Arab Mujahideen started supporting their Muslim brothers in Chechnya against Russian occupation or when they set off to Bosnia to help their Bosnian brothers prevail against the savage brutality of Serbian attacks.

It was then that the term changed from “Mujahid” to “terrorist” and from “Jihad” to “terrorism”. It was as if the Russians who occupied Afghanistan were not the same Russians who occupied Chechnya or support for the Bosnians was not the same as support for the Afghans. It was as if the charges of conspiracy, material support to terrorism, and killing civilians did not apply to killing Russians and Afghan soldiers and incurring civilian casualties in Afghanistan; but after the Russian defeat, they became charges affixed to anyone who practiced the same Jihad or self-defense or defense of the oppressed in a place or manner incompatible with Western strategic interests.

When the West under U.S. leadership had achieved its goals in Afghanistan, and the Russians had withdrawn leaving the Mujahideen victorious, they left behind them a mass of warring Afghan factions and focused on clearing the Arabs out of the area. Thus began a campaign of mass arrests and deportations to Pakistan.

But it was too late because some of the organizations had become a part of the Afghan people. As for Afghanistan itself, the West did not support the Afghan organizations in order to bring about peace, prosperity, and security in Afghanistan. The U.S. proxies in the lSI under American control foiled every attempt to reconcile or integrate the various Afghan organizations. Every time they saw a strong leader or an organization, they supported him in order to split his organization off from the others. They split the group Hezb Al-Islami Hekmatyar into two parties — one by the same name and one by the name Hezb Al-Islami Younis Khalis and so on.

All of that was done to ensure that even if the Mujahideen prevailed and expelled the Russians they would be left powerless and Afghanistan would remain dependent on Pakistan, India, Iran, or Tajikistan, just as the West desired. But when the pillaging, looting, killing, rape, and gang violence spread and security in Afghanistan disappeared, the people were compelled to revolt, and an appropriate movement for change emerged from the south of Kandahar. Thus the Taliban movement came on the scene and spread like wildfire. They did not meet any resistance from anyone as each Afghan province fell to them one after the other. The people welcomed them, having grown weary and desperate from the deteriorated security situation; and it was only a few months before they entered Kabul and declared an Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.

Security finally prevailed in the cities of Kabul, Kandahar, Jalalabad, etc. to the extent that they become even more secure than American cities such as Chicago, New York, Dallas, and Los Angeles. The peace in which the people lived became almost engraved in the heart of each Afghan person and will never leave the memory of the Afghan people or the history of Afghanistan until judgment day. By the admission of the United Nations, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan was able to stop drug cultivation in the entire country for the first time in over 200 years.

A traveler could travel from the south of the country from Jalalabad to Kabul then go west to Kandahar and turn north to Herat without being robbed. Moreover, shops and crowded markets did not close their doors during prayer times. A storeowner could safely leave his store open to go perform his prayers in the mosque, and he would come back knowing that nothing would be missing from his merchandise. Sometimes, he would find money left on the table by someone who purchased something and left. Such stories had spread in the Islamic world while the hypocrite West besieged Afghanistan from every side, preventing the Afghan airline from flying, and putting pressure on Pakistan to halt support and close the roads.

Even with all that, the price of cars in Afghanistan was three times cheaper than what they cost in Pakistan, and the fuel was much cheaper as well. The curiosity of some sheikhs, scholars, and other Muslims grew, prompting them to come to Afghanistan and confirm for themselves the glowing stories they had heard about the great turning point in the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan from a state of bandits, crime, killing, and narcotics to a state of security and peace.

That was a momentous turning point in the history of the Islamic movements since the fall of the Islamic Caliphate. It constituted a turnaround in which Islamic Sharia law would rule, far removed from subordination to colonial powers and without appeasing or making concessions to the secularists in the country. With total success in removing the differences between different nationalities and ethnicities, Afghanistan, under the leadership of the Emir of the Believers, Mullah Omar (Allah preserve him) was the first Islamic state that treated all Muslim men equally, whether they be Chinese, Indian, Chechnyan, Arabs, or Westerners. This prompted some Muslin scholars, preachers, and regular Muslims to travel to Afghanistan to confirm what was being told about this unique experience and to learn from it. Moreover, some moved with their families to live there and to escape the religious persecution they faced in their countries. They wanted to live in peace and observe their religious practices. An example of this was the Uighurs and people from Myanmar. Many also came from Iraq to escape Saddam, along with numerous people from other countries. Some even came from the West with their families to live in peace in a land governed by Islam.

Even though the existence of Jihadist groups and their camps predated the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the government did not bother them or their camps because they were associated with the Ministry of Defense and aided the state against the Northern Alliance. This is how complications arose for some analysts. Is every non-Afghan Arab Muslim a member of Al-Qaida? Or has everyone in Guantanamo fought against the Americans? The U.S. government intentionally fosters these misconceptions in order to achieve its goal. Many dignitaries visited Afghanistan including Sheikh Abdullah Al-Turki, the Saudi Minister of Islamic Endowments; Sheikh Yusif Al-Qardawi, head of the Islamic Scholars Association; the Grand Mufti of Egypt at the time, Sheikh Farid Wasil; the head of the Sharia courts in Qatar, Sheikh Thaqil Al-Shammari; Dr. Ali Al-Qaradaghi; the thinker Fahmi Huwaidi, and other scholars from Pakistan such as Al-Mawlawi Nizam Al-Deen Shamzi; the head of the Pakistani Council for Observing the Crescent, Al-Mawlawi Abdallah Ghazi; and his son, Al-Mawlawi Abd-Al-Rashid Ghazi. There were other types of visit from Emirs from the United Arab Emirates to practice the sport of falconry. They would travel to Kandahar in their private jets.

Some visitors of every type met members of the government of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and some even visited the Mujahideen camps if they were considered trustworthy from a security point of view. That does not mean that anyone who visited a Mujahideen camp or gave a lecture was a member of the group or agreed with their ideology. During the school vacations in the Arab peninsula, Kandahar would be filled with visitors, but that doesn’t mean that anyone who gave a lecture in the Mujahideen guesthouses planned military operations. It was commonplace for visiting scholars at these camps to give religious lectures warning them against radicalization, unlawful killing, and “takfir” — the act of declaring someone an infidel. Such visitors would return back to their countries after their vacations were over.

The Media and Abu Ghaith

Sheikh Osama bin Laden (Allah have mercy upon him) appointed me to serve as head of the As-Sahab Foundation for Media Publication, the media front for Al-Qaeda, for a period of time.

Al-Qaeda’s media policy in its war against the enemy occupiers is clear and appropriate to the nature of the war. It is a war of attrition since we are not confronting our enemies in conventional warfare due to the lack of balance between the two sides and the asymmetrical nature of the conflict.

The enemy occupier of the Islamic World is a super power with millions of soldiers and a budget of billions while we are a small organization whose members are limited in numbers and capabilities. There is no comparison between the two sides, so it is obvious that we would have to resort to a long war of attrition to which the military and media alike contribute.

Anyone who reviews the history of our publications and compares them to the events that happened before, during, and after September 11th knows this very well. The U.S. government canceled some joint military maneuvers in Jordan and closed some embassies in the period of time before 9/11 as a result of some media publications, some leaked news, the release of some simple clips of a speech by Osama bin Laden, and the publication of the video “Destroying the Destroyer” at that time as well as the appearance of pictures of Mujahideen camps and their military training.

All this was not in vain because, while the enemy has capabilities that we do not possess, we have the same mental capacity Allah gave to all; and while they use their muscles, we use our minds. Sheikh Osama (Allah have mercy upon him) was very wise in every order he gave us; all of this was part of our media policy to achieve our strategic goals of exhausting our enemy’s efforts, capabilities, and financial assets to the greatest extent possible. Every state of emergency declared and every change of alert level that inflicts specific procedures on the military and civilian sectors costs the country millions of dollars. It is enough that the U.S. government has incurred losses upwards of a trillion dollars in the wars it has waged in the aftermath of 9/11, the bleeding of which continues to this day.

As for the question about whether every person tasked with making statements knows the purpose behind them, the definitive answer is that those commissioned with playing a role in the media, such as reporting on letters or speeches, do not know the extent of them or what is behind them or that this is only a war of attrition. The operations which the leadership intends to undertake and the plans for them are known only to the leader of the operation and the military and security officials involved; those carrying out the operations are not privy to the specific plans until the goal or time of the operation approaches for fear that the operation will be botched or miscarried.

Perhaps there is another reason for a person to be tasked regardless of his affiliation and that is the rhetorical ability of the person or the strength and discipline of his speech or his literary fortitude — especially if he is an eloquent, spellbinding speaker. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why Sheikh Sulaiman Abu Ghayth was commissioned for this mission.

List of Names

There were a number of lists of recorded names in addition to cards, IDs, and charts located in different places, either houses or other places around Pakistan and Afghanistan.

You should know that most of the Arab families had alternate sources of income. Some of them practiced business while others did full-time work to support the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan whether it be as teachers, engineers, Mujahideen, or those who cooperated with the Ministry of Defense.

There were wealthy philanthropists who would send donations through various means according to the number of groups in a given area of Afghanistan. There were Arab communities of non-Afghans in Jalalabad, Khost, Kabul, Herat, Kandahar, and so on; so there was not a single, fixed system for dispersing funds, especially the expenses and financial guarantees distributed by Al-Qaeda to its beneficiaries. It did not limit its members, families, and sympathizers, rather it gave freely to all needy families, regardless of their loyalties or affiliation, for two reasons: one, because it was a religious obligation ordering them to consider all the needy equally and fairly and without discriminating between them; and two, because it was a requirement for many donors to not limit funding to any particular category of people but to give to all those who needed it. There were tables and charts and lists of names of families who received aid and these lists did not delineate the affiliation of the person on record. At one point the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan was trying to keep track of the number of Arabs and arrivals from abroad, so there were permits and cards to facilitate their legal dealings. Many of the Arab brothers had lost their legal papers, travel visas, and all their official documents; so some of the groups tried to make lists of names of everyone who wanted to obtain Afghan ID cards without distinguishing between groups, or for anyone who needed one.

“Brevity” Cards

One of the problems the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan suffered from as a result of the oppressive sanctions imposed by the U.S. and its regional allies was that it did not have an effective wired communication network while a mobile phone network was completely non-existent.

Thus, many Arab families and others would resort to using wireless radios or walkie-talkies. Since wireless radio networks are open to all, it was necessary to arrange a schedule and codes to organise most of those using these devices whether they be Arabs or Afghanis in order to prevent overlapping signals and interference and to facilitate communications, as well as save power on these devices considering all the different channels being used during times of heavy communication.

Accordingly, these cards were put into use because they included most of the important facilitates such as hospitals, workshops, schools, or other codes written on the chart along with a list of people who use them. This was not limited to Al-Qaeda or Arabs. One studying the cards would find that they are not related to Al-Qaeda members alone, but also contain names of Taliban members and others.

When the Americans bombed the city of Kandahar and the number of killed and wounded was mounting, it became necessary to add appropriate terms in light of the bombings. In Kandahar there was no front line of battle since the U.S. forces contented themselves with intense air strikes and wireless communication networks were used to transport the injured and evacuate families from homes that had been bombed. Thus, it was necessary to adopt appropriate codes for those situations.

Leaving Afghanistan

When the U.S. invasion commenced in October of 2001 and the number of people killed or injured began to rise, and when the Emir of the Believers, the president of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (Allah preserve him), decided to preserve the blood of civilians from the worst of the attacks, the order came for all Arab families to leave the country entirely. The defense strategy of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan changed and a guerilla war began against the occupying crusader forces in the country. They did this in order to prevent mass civilian casualties due to the intense air strikes in the cities.

So the non-Afghan families began to leave Afghanistan and I personally oversaw all the families leaving Kandahar for Pakistani Baluchistan. There were many different families from all the Afghan provinces and each area had a specific exit route. All the Arab families were dispersed throughout Jalalabad, Herat, Khost, Kandahar, and other cities and there was no fixed system for removing the families; however high priority and concern was given to the aged and the newly arrived, die to their unfamiliarity with the language and the country which prompted the Sheikhs to make specific and general provisions for them. Sheikh Sulaiman Abu Ghayth was not included in the list of families from Kandahar because his family was not with him; they were in Kuwait.

Bayat

Bayat is an oath taken by a member in the introductory phase obligating him to hear and obey [the one to whom he has sworn] as long as the orders do not contradict Islamic principles.

There is no specific rite or ceremony to swear bayat. The swearer has only to extend his hand to Sheikh Osama bin Laden and say a few words expressing his willingness to be obedient and undertake migration and jihad for the sake of Allah.

There is no one in Al-Qaeda whose mission it is to give speeches pushing people to swear bayat. I myself was one of the ones who worked with the Sheikh, was responsible for media production, and attended Shura meetings with him but did not swear bayat to him. He never once spoke to me about swearing bayat because he knew me well and trusted me. Then one day I swore bayat to him on my own without anyone pushing me to do so. Swearing bayat to the president of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the leader of the faithful, Mullah Omar was mandatory; whereas swearing bayat to Sheikh Osama bin Laden was not.

The United States tries to fabricate charges against innocent people, saying they swore bayat or incited others to do so. Swearing bayat does not mean that a person is placed on a list to carry out an operation; even the cook has sworn bayat.

As for the question of whether I saw Sheikh Sulaiman Abu Ghaith giving lectures or participating in activities to push Arab Mujahideen to swear bayat to Sheikh Osama bin Laden, the answer is no. To tell the truth, I do not even know if Sheikh Sulaiman Abu Ghaith personally swore bayat to Sheikh Osama bin Laden or not.

Sheikh Sulaiman Abu Ghayth and the Shoe Bomb Operation

I personally never spoke with Sheikh Sulaiman Abu Ghayth about the Shoe Bomb Operation. As I mentioned before on page two, Sheikh Sulaiman Abu Ghayth was not a military man and had nothing to do with military operations. Also, as I mentioned on page seven, those tasked with giving statements to the media do not necessarily know all the details of an operation and are sometimes even unaware of the very existence of the operation. I do not recall ever seeing Sheikh Sulaiman Abu Ghayth with my brother Abdul-Jabbar (Richard Reid, Allah preserve him).

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.

Andy Worthington Joins Dennis Edney, Omar Khadr’s Lawyer, for Amnesty International Event in London, March 18, 2014

Dennis Edney, Omar Khadr’s long-term Canadian civilian lawyer, has been in the UK since last week, on a tour organised by the London Guantánamo Campaign, so I’m posting details of his speaking events for anyone who has not yet heard him talk, and also to notify readers, supporters of Omar Khadr and opponents of  Guantánamo that I’ll be joining Dennis at an event in Amnesty International’s Human Rights Action Centre in Shoreditch tomorrow evening. To support Dennis’s ongoing and extensive legal costs, please visit this page, and to support the costs of the UK tour, please see here.

Regular readers will know that I have been covering Omar’s story since I first began working on Guantánamo eight years ago. I wrote about him in my book The Guantánamo Files, and when I began writing articles on a full-time basis, in June 2007, Omar’s was one of the first cases that I addressed, when he was charged in the second version of the Bush administration’s troubled military commissions, after the first version was thrown out by the US Supreme Court for violating the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Geneva Conventions — and, specifically, Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibits torture and humiliating and degrading treatment, and requires any trials to be in “a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.”

Omar, of course, never received such protections, even when the commissions were revived with Congressional approval, or when, under President Obama, they were brought back for a second time. In the end, to be assured of ever leaving Guantánamo, he accepted a plea deal in October 2010, admitting to war crimes that had been invented by Congress, and, moreover, providing a permanent stain on the reputation of President obama, who not only allowed a plea deal based on invented war crimes to take place, but did so to a former child prisoner (just 15 when he was seized after a firefight in Afghanistan in July 2002), even though, according to the the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict, to which both the US and Canada are signatories, juvenile prisoners (those under 18 when their alleged crimes take place) must be rehabilitated rather than punished.

According to the terms of his illegitimate plea deal, Omar was supposed to spend one more year in Guantánamo, followed by seven more years of prison in Canada. However, it took nearly two years for the Canadian government to arrange his return, and since then the Harper administration has fought long and hard to keep Omar in maximum-security detention, even though there is no justifiable reason for doing so. The prison authorities have only recently relented, and Omar has now been moved to a medium-security facility, where he can begin to take the necessary steps towards applying for parole.

In the meantime, please come and hear Dennis Edney speak if you’re in London, or nearby. He has six more events this week prior to his return to Canada, including the one on Tuesday evening, at Amnesty International’s Human Rights Action Centre in Shoreditch, at which I have also been asked to speak. As the London Guantánamo Campaign explains, “The tour ends on 20 March. All of these events are open to the public and free to attend. Don’t miss out on this unique opportunity.”

The list of events is below:

Monday March 17, 2014, 2-4pm: “Omar Khadr: Guantánamo’s Child: A Travesty of Justice,” with Dennis Edney

Birkbeck College, Room B20, Malet Street, Bloomsbury, London, WC1E 7HX

This event is organised by a coalition of student societies at Birkbeck College. See the Facebook page here.

Monday March 17, 2014, 7-8.30pm: Dennis Edney talks about Omar Khadr

Housmans, 5 Caledonian Road, London N1 9DX

This event is organised by Veterans for Peace UK. Also see the Facebook page here.

Tuesday March 18, 2014, 12.30-2.30pm: “Defending Guantánamo’s Youngest Inmate: Security, International Law and Human Rights,” with Dennis Edney

Clement House, Room CLM 3.02, The London School of Economics and Political Science, 99-101 Aldwych, London WC2B 4JF

This event is organised by the LSE SU Grimshaw International Relations Club. See the Facebook page here. See a map here.

Tuesday March 18, 2014, 4.30-5.30pm: QM Amnesty Presents: Guantánamo lawyer Dennis Edney on Omar Khadr

Queen’s Building, Rm W206, Queen Mary’s University of London, Mile End Rd, London E1 4NS

This event is organised by QM Amnesty. See the Facebook page here.

Tuesday March 18, 2014, 7-9pm: “Defending Guantánamo’s youngest prisoner,” with Dennis Edney and Andy Worthington

Human Rights Action Centre, 25 New Inn Yard, London EC2A 3EA

This event is organised by Amnesty International UK. See the Amnesty International page here.

Thursday March 20, 2014, 7.30pm, March meeting: Q&A with Dennis Edney

Liberal Synagogue in St John’s Wood, 28 St. John’s Wood Road, NW8 7HA

This event is organised by Amnesty St John’s Wood. See the Amnesty International page here.

For further information, please email the London Guantánamo Campaign or call Aisha Maniar on 07809 757176.

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.

Nine Years of Hunger Strikes and Force-Feeding at Guantánamo: A Declaration in Support of Emad Hassan by Clive Stafford Smith

Last week, I wrote an article, “Guantánamo Prisoner Force-Fed Since 2007 Launches Historic Legal Challenge,” about Emad Hassan, a Yemeni prisoner who is challenging the US authorities’ self-declared right to force-feed him, following a ruling in February by the appeals court in Washington D.C., allowing legal challenges to go ahead and reversing rulings made by lower court judges last summer, who believed that their hands were tied by Bush-era legislation preventing any legal challenges to the running of Guantánamo.

Emad Hassan is one of the most persistent hunger strikers at Guantánamo, and has been on a permanent hunger strike — which has also involved him being force-fed — since 2007. The irony is that, throughout most of this whole period he could have been a free man, as he — along with 74 other men, out of the 154 still held — was cleared for release from Guantánamo by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama appointed shortly after taking office in January 2009.

That he is held at all is a disgrace, but Yemenis make up 55 of the 75 cleared prisoners, and are held because of concerns about the security situation in their homeland. This is bad enough, given that this is a form of “guilt by nationality” that makes a mockery of establishing a task force review process that is supposed to lead to the release of prisoners, but when it also transpires that some of these men — like Emad — are being force-fed instead of being freed, we are in a place of such dark and surreal injustice that it appears to have no parallel.

In support of Emad’s claim, declarations were made by Clive Stafford Smith, the founder and director of Reprieve, and also by the psychiatrist Stephen Xenakis, a retired Brigadier General and Army medical corps officer with 28 years of active service, and by Steven Miles, Professor of Medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School. I encourage your read the experts’ opinions, but in the hope of shedding further light on the specific details of Emad’s seven years of being on a hunger strike and being force-fed, I am posting below Clive Stafford Smith’s declaration.

Be warned: it is not always an easy read, as it is clear that, since a prison-wide hunger strike in 2005, the authorities have spent time and effort working out how to   make the force-feeding process as painful and humiliating as possible in an effort to make prisoners give up their hunger strikes. Last year, when another prison-wide hunger strike erupted, similar tactics were undertaken again. As Stafford Smith notes, “after the experience of the mass hunger strike in 2013, the military authorities are going to considerable lengths to punish prisoners who take up the hunger strike now.”

I will leave you to discover the details, some of which I discussed briefly in my earlier article, but what I didn’t cover in that article was the mention of how Emad believes that the restraint chairs imported in January 2006 — which he refers to as the “torture chairs” — contributed directly to the suicides of the three men who died in June 2006 (who were all long-term hunger strikers, force-fed until their deaths), and the suicide of Adnan Latif in September 2012. As Stafford Smith described it, according to Emad, “the gratuitously painful process [of force-feeding] initiated in late 2005 or early 2006 … has contributed substantially to at least four suicides in Guantánamo.”

If you find this declaration useful, please share it. The least we can do this year is to try and shame the Obama administration into releasing the cleared prisoners — something that I believe is possible if they happen to be force-fed hunger strikers, as that entire process is not one that shows the administration, or the authorities at Guantánamo itself, in a good light.

Declaration of Clive Stafford Smith [in support of Emad Hassan's application for a preliminary injection to prevent his force-feeding]

1. My name is Clive Stafford Smith. I am an attorney licensed to practice law in the State of Louisiana, as well as in the United States Supreme Court and various inferior federal courts. I have been licensed in Louisiana since 1984.

2. I am the founder and Director of Reprieve, a not-for-profit human rights organization based in London.

3. I am counsel to Mr. Hassan Abdullah Hassan listed in this action as Imad Abdullah Hassan, and known to me more familiarly as Emad. I make this declaration in support of the above-captioned matter. I do not mean for this declaration to be in any way comprehensive of the mistreatment or injury Mr. Hassan has suffered during his hunger strike and subsequent force-feeding at Guantánamo Bay.

4. It should be noted that I have not had the opportunity for Mr. Hassan to review this declaration for its accuracy.  While I try to take notes as accurately as possible when we speak, I sometimes do not get my notes back from the Privilege Review Team (PRT) for several days or even weeks after I visit Guantánamo Bay, which makes it difficult to remember the precise context of our discussion. When I speak with Mr. Hassan on the telephone, we have even more limited time.

5. I am writing this declaration some three weeks after my last meeting with Mr. Hassan. If there should ultimately be any inconsistencies between this declaration and one that Mr. Hassan subsequently executes, the latter should be considered more authoritative.  If I become aware of inconsistencies, I will amend or supplement this affidavit promptly.

6. With these caveats, I am confident that the broad facts set forth in this declaration are accurate.

7. Mr. Hassan was born in Aden, Yemen on June 26, 1979. He is an intelligent man who has learned quite good English while in US detention.

8. Mr. Hassan wishes to file a motion challenging the force feeding process that has been applied against him, and others.

Brief background to Mr. Hassan’s arrival in Guantánamo Bay

9. While Mr. Hassan feels that he has a duty peacefully to protest the treatment of all prisoners in Guantánamo Bay, he is also motivated by the injustice that has been, and continues to be, inflicted upon him personally. Therefore, a brief statement of the manner of his transport to Guantánamo Bay and his treatment there is significant to understand his motivations.

10. In June 2001, Mr. Hassan travelled from his home in Yemen to Pakistan in order to attend university at Faisalabad. He wished to study so as to be able to help his country, Yemen, where people do not often receive higher education.

11. In February 2002, following the September 11 attacks on the United States, Mr. Hassan was rounded up with many other Arab men by the Pakistani security forces, and handed over to Americans for a bounty payment.

12. I am aware of no reliable evidence that Mr. Hassan was ever even in Afghanistan until the U.S. took him there against his will.

13. Mr. Hassan was detained in Bagram and Kandahar before arriving in Guantánamo Bay in June 2002.

14. Mr. Hassan has undergone what can only be described as torture, or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, on a number of occasions since his detention. This has included, in my view, the manner in which he has sometimes been force fed against his will.

15. Mr. Hassan has been cleared for release since 2009.

16. Mr. Hassan is approaching his thirty-fifth birthday. He has been held without trial by the U.S. for roughly twelve years, since he was just twenty-two. He has missed the opportunity to pursue his education, he has been unable to get married and raise a family and he has generally been denied all of his rights and freedoms for one third of his life, and almost all of his adult life.

Reasons for striking

17. Mr. Hassan informs me that he is on a hunger strike because — similar to President Obama — he believes that it is wrong for the US to detain prisoners, without charge or trial in Guantánamo.

18. His hunger strike is a peaceful protest, based in part upon the example of a number of people who he respects, including Mahatma Gandhi.

Hunger strike and force-feeding

19. Before Mr. Hassan arrived in Guantánamo, his average weight was somewhere around 119 pounds. He is 5’3” tall. He had no medical problems except for a degree of asthma as a child.

20. Mr. Hassan did not have any intestinal problems before he was taken to Guantánamo.

Variations among the staff

21. Mr. Hassan is emphatic that not all the staff take part, or wish to take part, in what he describes as “the torture.”

22. In 2005, for example, he describes one doctor who took detainees’ medical problems seriously and followed medical procedures to diagnose or assess his patients. Mr. Hassan met with that doctor twice. Once, this doctor visited Mr. Hassan’s cell and told him that he (the doctor) was being ordered to participate in what he referred to as “the crime” of force feeding and that he would not participate if he had the choice.  The doctor apologized to Mr. Hassan for his pain and suffering.

23. Mr. Hassan reports that a number of the staff apologize for the manner in which he is force fed. For example, more recently, one of the NCOs said, “I don’t make the rules. I am only a sergeant.”

24. A military person who is very abusive may change, too. Mr. Hassan tells the story of a guard who “changed 180 degrees.”. Originally, everyone had to be alert when the guard would come onto the block, as he was someone who would summon the FCE [Forced Cell Extraction] team or impose punishment for any minor thing. If a prisoner left a small amount of rubbish in his cell, or even just stared at the guard, it would be, “Discipline! Seven days!” The guard made it clear that he felt that by being super tough he would gain promotion.

25. However, Mr. Hassan was taken to hospital over Ramadan, and when he came back after a month he found that the guard had totally changed. He was a different person. He would take food from one prisoner to another, rather than waste it. He would make copies of the news received by one prisoner, so that the others could share it. He would even accept the offer of a small piece of chocolate from a prisoner — something that he would previously have rejected with great suspicion. As a result of this change, no prisoner gave him any trouble: he showed the prisoners respect, so they showed him respect in turn.

26. In short, Mr. Hassan insists that not all the guards are the same, and he does not wish to tar everyone with the same brush. That said, though, he lays the blame for his torturous experience on the authorities who have gone out of their way to torture him, and to inflict cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment (CIDT) on him.

2005-2006 Hunger strike

27. Mr. Hassan took part in a short hunger strike in June and July 2005, which he had ended when the Colonel [Mike Bumgarner, at the time the warden of Guantánamo] agreed to comply in various ways with the Geneva Conventions, including allowing the prisoner council.

28. Mr. Hassan then began his first major hunger strike around August 8, 2005, precipitated by the JTF-GTMO authorities reneging on their promise to allow the council.

29. He continued this strike for around nine months, until February 6, 2006.

30. The force feeding began for him around August 25, 2005. He was initially force fed in the detainee hospital. There were, at that time, some 32 prisoners on strike who faced force feeding.

31. The process used included the following:

a. The feeding tube was inserted and left in for a month because, as the SMO (senior medical officer) explained to the detainees, it was not safe to put in and take out as this could cause medical complications, and could hurt the aesophagus and the stomach.

b. The feeding took place in the detainee hospital for the medical safety of the prisoners.

c. Tubes that were best suited to the detainee were used for feeding. Mr Hassan was generally given a Number 8 tube.

32. Around November 2005, six of the hunger strikers (including Mr. Hassan) began to be treated in a different way. This was an experimental process that was done to them in a gratuitously unpleasant way. The process included the following:

a. The detainees were strapped to hospital beds for feeding.

b. Larger size tubes were used. These tubes were too big to go into the men’s nostrils without undue pain.

c. The tubes were also pulled out more often. This process caused blood to flow like cutting a vein.

d. At this time, a funnel was used to channel the liquid into the tube.

33. This procedure appeared to Mr. Hassan and others to be a form of Waterboarding. Indeed, one detainee (Hisham) could not breath when the authorities did this to him. When it was done to Hisham again the next night, he passed out and was taken to the main hospital where he was in critical condition. He was on oxygen and a heart monitor. One of the JTF-GTMO staff informed Mr. Hassan and others, “He is in God’s hands.” Fortunately, after two days he was stable.

34. This force feeding experiment was terminated after this life-threatening incident.

35. Around December 2005, Papa Block was turned into a hospital and the men being force fed were split up, with roughly 18 in P Block and 14 in the Hospital.

Torturous methods for making it less ‘convenient’ to go on a peaceful hunger strike

36. Some time in late 2005 or early 2006, the military decided that they would use other means to try to put an end to the peaceful hunger strikes.

37. The detainees were told that they were to stop the hunger strike, and agree to eat, or new methods would be used on them that they would not like.

38. It is common knowledge among the detainees that the Guantánamo authorities have varied the manner of the force feeding process because they want — in the word of one American general — to make it less “convenient” for the prisoners to go on hunger strike.

39. The techniques used to make it more painful are varied.

40. One, they began pulling the tube out after each feeding and forcing it back in for the next feeding. This took place twice a day.

41. Two, they would use larger tubes. While they had generally used a Number 8 tube on Mr. Hassan, they started using Number 14 tubes, which barely fit in his nostril.

42. Three, they began using what came to be known as the “Torture Chair”. Mr. Hassan believes he was the first detainee who was fed on the Torture Chair; his hands, legs, waist, shoulders, and head were strapped down tightly.

43. The first time it happened, he was shocked and he fought to resist.  He was able to shake his head until the staff used the pressure points under his jaw and behind his ears to keep him still.  They also pushed his fingers back, and pulled at his nostrils.

44. At this time, there were no cameras used during the force feeding process, so there was no record made of these torturous forms of abuse.

45. The next day — the second day of his ‘Torture Chair’ experience — the JTF-GTMO staff forcibly gave him a sedative to keep him from resisting.

46. Four, on the Torture Chair the men were also given an anti-constipation drug which would cause them to defecate on themselves while still being fed. They were not given clean clothes. Mr. Hassan says that he finds it difficult to talk about this even today, several years later. “I could not think someone who called himself human did this to me,” he said to me on February 5, 2014.

47. People with haemorrhoids would leave blood on the chair and the linens would not always be changed before the next feeding. In Mr. Hassan’s words, “The staff showed us no mercy.”

48. Five, they began forcing much more liquid into the prisoners. They began feedings with 1500ml of formula called Two-Cal — four cans in the morning and four in the night, each time mixed with 700ml of water. Once each force feeding was finished, they filled the feeding bag with 50ml of an anti-constipation medication and 450ml of water. This method would accelerate the stomach function and made the men defecate on themselves in the feeding chair. Then the staff added another 700ml of water. When Mr. Hassan dared to ask why they were prolonging his suffering, a medical professional answered sarcastically, “to wash the feeding bag.”

49. The amount and speed of the force feeding has varied over time and with the detainee. Mr. Hassan is currently facing a regime that is applied in various forms to only five prisoners, as mentioned below. However, I represent a number of other prisoners who are on hunger strike at this time, and I spoke in the last week to another individual who informed me about his current force feeding. He currently receives two cans of Ensure at each feed. The Ensure is 8 fl oz (236 ml) each, and when they prepare it they add water to it, normally between 200 and 300 ml with each can. Therefore, the nutrient part of the force-feeding includes up to about 1100 ml of liquid. If he is then given the anti-constipation medicine (which he may be given) that would add another 500 ml of liquid. This may then be flushed through with a final draught of water as mentioned above, with the whole process (involving perhaps nearly 2300 ml) taking roughly 20 minutes, and rarely more than 30 minutes. This detainee has repeatedly requested that the process should be slowed down, over two hours, as is done with some prisoners, but his plea has fallen on deaf ears.

50. Six, they sped the process up. This process was completed in 30-45 minutes, which is much faster than before, and much more painful because of the speed. After this, Mr. Hassan and the other strikers would be left in the chair for upwards of two hours. This was particularly difficult.  Finally the staff would pull the tube out of the nose again, ready to force it back in for the next session.

51. If Mr. Hassan vomited on himself at any time during the procedure, what he terms “the atrocity” would start all over again. He would not usually be allowed to wash the vomit off before it began again.

52. Because of his weakened state, Mr. Hassan must be fed slowly.  If he is fed faster, he vomits up what has just been pumped into his stomach and suffers severe gastric pain.

53. If a detainee refused to go to the Chair, he would be compelled to go to his feeding session with the FCE team. This takes 30 minutes, leaving only one and a half hours left for the feeding.

54. All of this happened to Mr. Hassan and other prisoners every day, twice daily.

55. Early on in this new and more abusive phase, the military authorities took Mr. Hassan and two others to another block so that others would see what was being done to them. This was obviously done as a deterrent to scare others into not hunger striking.

56. Also the medical staff had stated that Mr. Hassan’s left nostril should not be used for the force feeding. However, the JTF-GTMO staff who were doing the force feeding ignored this and used the left nostril.

57. One morning, Mr. Hassan was taken in a van to meet his lawyers. He found himself vomiting in the transportation vehicle. It was such a terrible experience that he decided to stop his hunger strike. It was more than Mr. Hassan could take. He ate dinner, and the escorts told the block guards that he ate dinner so there was no reason to force feed him. The block guards informed the nurse.

58. It was, Mr. Hassan reports, as if the nurse did not hear the words. The nurse said, “Put him on the chair!” Mr. Hassan spent five hours on the feeding chair, and a number of cans of liquid were emptied into his stomach between the hours of 7:00 PM and midnight. The guards then took him back to his cell.

59. A guard told Mr. Hassan a doctor would see him. He had not seen a doctor for a long time. This doctor arrived as Mr. Hassan was being strapped to the feeding chair and asked him whether he would end his hunger strike. Mr. Hassan told the doctor that he had wanted to see a doctor for a long time due to his ill health and stomach problems, but the doctor cut Mr. Hassan off and asked again if he would end the strike. Mr. Hassan did not reply.

60. The doctor then began pushing a size 14 tube into his nose, a process that took about ten minutes. The doctor continued asking whether he would end his hunger strike. It was extremely painful, and at one point one of the guards pointed at the blood on the tube. Finally, the doctor forcefully pushed the tube in, and the tube hit the back of Mr. Hassan’s nose. Mr. Hassan was determined not to scream, but his eyes were running.  Mr. Hassan says that is it difficult to describe what he endured in those moments, either physically or mentally.

61. The new abusive force feeding method in early 2006 went on for many days.  At one point, Mr. Hassan asked the nurses if they were enjoying this, and they laughed as if he were joking, and said “yes.”

62. Mr. Hassan told them that one day they would face judgment. This had no effect on them. Indeed, there was one nurse in particular who seemed to enjoy the pain that he was inflicting.

63. One of the hunger striking detainees was moaning while he was going through this process. The guards told the detainee to be quiet. The sadistic nurse said, “Let him moan.”

64. A female guard questioned him about how he seemed to take pleasure in this, and he replied, “It’s none of your business.”

65. For a while this went on as if it were a formal experiment. The detainees were under 24 hour surveillance, and the JTF-GTMO staff were taking close notes.

66. The JTF-GTMO staff added an additional element of sleep deprivation. They would come to the detainees’ cells and knock on the cell window every five minutes or so. If the detainee did not respond, they would come into the cell.

67. The air conditioning was turned up and the detainees were deprived of a blanket. This was particularly difficult for the hunger strikers, as they inevitably felt the cold more than someone who was eating.

68. Mr. Hassan has explained to me that the pain of the new Torture Chair regime was the reason why many of the hunger strikers stopped their protest at this time.  Mr. Hassan himself resisted the pain for 37 days during that strike.

69. Only a few other detainees withstood it for this long, including the three men who ended up committing suicide in 2006. It seems that this experience led to them committing suicide. “I did not consider suicide,” Mr. Hassan told me on February 5, 2014. “Others did talk about this. I do not blame them for it, though I do not believe in doing it myself.”

70. Mr. Hassan describes what sound like hallucinatory episodes during this process. “As you spin a glass at speed, it becomes a blur of colors,” he told me on February 5, 2014. “That is what I would see.”

71. At about this time, Mr. Hassan’s weight fell to around 78 lbs. This was the lowest weight he has recorded thus far.

72. After roughly two weeks of this process, Mr. Hassan developed pancreatitis. Indeed, since that time, as a result of his force feeding, he has suffered from pancreatitis on more than one occasion. Pancreatitis is a life threatening condition.

73. On this first occasion, Mr. Hassan was taken to the big hospital for five days or so. He was placed on an IV, and was given some kind of drug that he assumes was an antibiotic. He cannot know for sure, and he does not know what drug it was, as the medical staff refused to tell him (the patient) what the drug was that they were giving him.

74. For about three days, he could not sleep for the pain that he was going through. The pain he suffered then was unlike any other pain he had ever experienced. He understood from some of the staff that he came close to dying from this infection.

75. Mr. Hassan spent another seven days in the detainee hospital. When he was 29 days into the new, even more abusive procedures, they punished him by taking him to Oscar Block and they started force feeding him again.

76. Mr. Hassan reports that at this time a sympathetic nurse tried to persuade him to give up his protest. “680, you have to stop now. They will send you back to Oscar, and do the same to you as before.”

77. This is what happened. By then there were eight strikers in Oscar Block who were under a strict punishment regime. They were not allowed to talk to each other, upon pain of discipline. The JTF-GTMO authorities used loud fans to prevent any talking. The detainees were refused the right to communal prayer so long as they were on hunger strike. The guards would bang the cells all day and all night to prevent sleep. The air conditioning was turned to very cold again.

78. Mr. Hassan did manage to get a message to the other strikers. “They will not stop. They will keep on torturing you.”

79. Mr. Hassan ended this hunger strike on February 6, 2006. His decision to end the strike was not voluntary, but was caused by his abusive treatment at the hands of the JTF-GTMO authorities.

Mr. Hassan’s non-violent hunger strike protest from 2007 to the Present Day

80. In July 2006, Mr. Hassan was taken to Romeo Block with Ahmed Errachidi, a Moroccan detainee [released in 2007] who had lived in the United Kingdom where he had been committed to a mental hospital due to his bipolar disorder. Along with Mr. Errachidi, Mr. Hassan was accused of trying to talk other detainees into another peaceful protest at their treatment.

81. Mr. Hassan again stopped eating for a time. However, the JTF-GTMO authorities sent their ‘cultural advisor’ to him to persuade him to eat again, telling him that he would end up back in hospital.

82. Other prisoners told Mr. Hassan of the new force feeding procedures that had been introduced since February 2006. It continued to be as abusive as before but now the prisoner would be left in the Chair for two hours.

83. Mr. Hassan was given a disgusting form of food in Romeo, a mashed up loaf of indeterminate food. He did not know what it was. He did eat some of it at the time, though.

84. Mr. Hassan once again began hunger striking in 2007.

85. Mr. Hassan has been on hunger strike continually since that time. At this point, Mr. Hassan has been on what has been a continuous hunger strike for almost seven years.

86. Throughout the past seven years, Mr. Hassan has suffered with chronic pancreatitis and multiple hospitalizations stemming from the force feeding techniques.

87. Mr. Hassan has suffered from pain that has been caused by particular variations in the hunger strike procedure. For example, his illness has included attacks brought on by use of the nutritional supplement Jevity, which contains high levels of fat — a trigger for pancreatitis.

88. Pulling out the tube now is much harder on Mr. Hassan than before. One nostril is sometimes totally closed, and he has sinus problems in the other. For example, one evening it was particularly difficult to get it into the right nostril. There was a new nurse as well; the tube went the wrong way (coming out into his mouth), which was very painful.

89. The force feeding regime has not got any less torturous since the introduction of the gratuitously painful process initiated in late 2005 or early 2006. This process has contributed substantially to at least four suicides in Guantánamo.

90. The fourth was Adnan Latif. Mr. Hassan knew him well, and had been in the same cell block as him. Mr. Hassan had been teaching him English. Mr. Latif was intelligent and wanted to learn to better himself. He was particularly depressed because he missed his kids so much. His son had been only about four years old when Mr. Latif was taken from him, and Mr. Latif used to gaze at his photograph every day. A mental health doctor told the JTF-GTMO authorities not to take him to Camp V for punishment, but this advice was ignored and Mr. Latif committed suicide.

Doctors’ complicity in torture / CIDT

91. Mr. Hassan insists that the doctors at Guantánamo do not protect his health or interests. He has related to me that the doctors’ only object appears to be to find ways to make the detainees bend to the military’s will.

92. They systematically make the force feeding process gratuitously painful, by forcing the liquid down the men’s noses faster, by speeding up the flow of liquid, by using a bigger tube, and by pulling the 110 centimeter tube out of his nostril after every feed and then forcing it back in.

93. Mr. Hassan is indignant at some of the Guantánamo doctors’ refusal to tell him — the patient — what medications he is being required to take.

The abuse of FCE on hunger strikers

94. Various of the hunger strikers are subjected to the FCE team to go to force feeding. They are genuinely being forced to be fed, and this involves the team of roughly a dozen military personnel. Some five of them rush into the detainee’s cell, force him to the ground, shackle him, beating him in the process and dragging him out of the cell to take him to the force feeding area.

95. The FCE team had been using a ‘board’ to take the prisoner there. However, recently the FCE team has had new procedures and has carried the prisoner – which is much more painful on the person being carried.

96. There had been a kind of informal agreement that while the prisoners do not wish to go voluntarily for something that is clearly involuntary (force feeding), they will not have to undergo being beaten up in order to make that point. However, the JTF-GTMO authorities now often ignore this, and order the prisoner to undergo the full, worst treatment, in order to show the prisoners how the peaceful hunger strike should not be “convenient.”

97. For example, recently ISN 722 ([Abu Wa'el Dhiab, a Syrian prisoner] who is in a wheel chair, and whose health is very bad) was recently going to the Torture Chair, and was willing to simply go with the FCE team voluntarily. However, they refused to allow this, and rushed into his cell, pinning him to the floor. They were shouting “stop resisting!” while they did this, and while they shackled him, before dragging him off to the Chair.

98. Currently, according to the Assistant Officer in Charge (AOIC) on February 3, 2014, if the detainee allows the FCE team to take him to the Chair ‘walking’ he will be allowed Rec[reation time]. If, on the other hand, he does not agree to this, he will face additional punishment by having his Rec taken away.

A New Punishment regime for going on a peaceful Hunger Strike

99. Particularly after the experience of the mass hunger strike in 2013, the military authorities are going to considerable lengths to punish prisoners who take up the hunger strike now. This punishment comes on top of the gratuitously painful practices that were being used to make hunger striking less “convenient.”

100. If a detainee is found to be on strike in Camp VI, that detainee is transferred to Camp V, which is the punishment camp for those who are not considered sufficiently ‘compliant’ with the wishes of the JTF-GTMO authorities.

101. More specifically, the recent practice has been to take the detainee to Camp V Echo, which is the most unpleasant cell block in the whole prison. The cells in Camp V Echo are almost all steel — the bed, the floor, the walls, the ceiling and the door. The cells can be very cold, which is much harder to bear when you are on hunger strike.

102. There is no toilet, only a hole in the ground, which is close to the wall and therefore makes it particularly difficult to squat to use it. When one is on hunger strike, it is likely that the bowels will not be operating properly. This can make using the toilet difficult under any circumstances, but particularly so when forced to use a toilet that is difficult to use at the best of times.

103. Mr. Hassan and others state that there is much more that could be said about Camp V Echo. It is, they say, a terrible place.

104. Once they spend a few days in Camp V Echo, the new hunger strikers are generally moved to another block in Camp V, and they will stay there until they agree to come off their strike.

105. It is clear to the detainees that the experience, first, of Camp V Echo, and then of Camp V generally is intended to coerce the hunger strikers to give up their peaceful protest.

Special rules for half a dozen Detainees

106. The last time I saw him, Mr. Hassan was around 85 pounds. His health is very bad.

107. There are five of the hunger striking detainees who are treated differently from the others. Mr. Hassan (ISN 680) is one of them. The others are 042 [Abdul Rahman Shalabi], 171 [Abu Bakr Alahdal], 178 [Tareq Baada], and 682 [Ghassan al-Sharbi].

108. The authorities do not require Mr. Hassan to go by FCE to be force fed, although there are currently — as of my last conversation with him — some nine hunger strikers who were being taken to force feeding by FCE.

109. For a while, Mr. Hassan would be fed only once per day. Every night around 10:00 PM, he would be fed for four hours, 10:00 PM to 2:00 AM. He was sometimes allowed to sit on the soft chair instead of the tortuous feeding chair because he was unable to sit on the feeding chair for more than two hours.

The use of the drug Reglan

110. For many months, the JTF-GTMO staff gave Mr. Hassan Reglan for his nausea.  It was not a medication that he wanted because he felt that it made him feel crazy.

111. He relates that during this time, he would sit on his bed, legs folded, thinking that he was talking to the nurse, but he actually found that he was talking to himself.

112. Mr. Hassan also describes numbness in the lower part of his body while being on Reglan.

113. Treatment with Reglan for more than twelve weeks is contra-indicated. Mr. Hassan believes that he was on Reglan from 2005 until late 2007, although he was not always told when it was being given to him so this is only his best guess at the extent of his exposure to the drug.

I declare under penalty of perjury under the laws of the United States of America the foregoing is true and correct.

Clive Stafford Smith

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).

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