Andy Worthington's Blog, page 120

The Suspicious Arrest of Former Guantánamo Prisoner Moazzam Begg

I received the news yesterday that former Guantánamo prisoner Moazzam Begg had been arrested when I was sent an email from Juliet Spare, a journalist working for the Voice of Russia, asking me for a short interview by phone. Once alerted to it, I checked out the coverage (mainly, at that point, the BBC), and spoke to her for a show that was broadcast yesterday, but is not available online, explaining how, to me, it made no sense that, with three other people, he had been “detained on suspicion of attending a terrorist training camp and facilitating terrorism overseas,” as the BBC put it, for a number of reasons.

First and foremost, while Moazzam was held by the US, from January 2002 to January 2005, there was never any credible evidence that he was involved with terrorism in any way, and this is an analysis that I endorse from my reading of his autobiography, Enemy Combatant, and from my own knowledge of Moazzam, based on meeting him on several occasions over the years at events involving Guantánamo.

Secondly, Moazzam must be one of the most scrutinised Muslims in the UK, so — even without the proviso that he has no track record of being a terrorist sympathiser –  it seems ridiculous to me that he would get involved with anything that could be construed as terrorism, as it would obviously cause him trouble back in the UK. Moazzam has, on a few occasions since his passport was first returned to him after Guantánamo, spoken to me about his annoyance at being permanently harassed when he left or returned to the UK, but, while this was clearly irritating — and a form of harassment — it also meant that he was aware that he was permanently under scrutiny.

The Moazzam I met was, like many former Guantánamo prisoners, working to expose indefinite detention, “black sites,” “extraordinary rendition” and torture, and, with his background of also sympathising with Muslims struggling against oppression, it was no surprise to me that he had traveled to Syria, where, I presumed, he would be trying to find out about imprisonment and torture, especially as, in the early years of the “war on terror,” Syria had been one of a handful of countries — along with Egypt, Jordan and Morocco — where the US had sent prisoners to be tortured by President Assad’s feared mukhabarat.

In 2010, I reported the stories of nine men held and tortured in Syria — including two Canadian citizens, Maher Arar and Abdullah Almalki — for a major United Nations report on secret detention. Furthermore, since Syria’s horrendous civil war began in March 2011, there have been persistent stories of atrocities — on both sides — although, most recently, the UN has released a report about the “unspeakable” suffering of Syria’s children, and three former war have released a harrowing report suggesting that the government has tortured and executed 11,000 people since the uprising began nearly three years ago.

This evening I recorded an interview about Moazzam with the New York-based journalist Amanda Sears, which will be available soon on her website Left Voices. I’ll make it available as soon as it’s posted, but in the meantime, to add to what I wrote above, I’d also like to point out that Moazzam’s arrest comes one year and two months after his last visit to Syria in December 2012, although it clearly follows on from him having his passport taken away from him on his return to the UK from South Africa just two months ago. This struck me as intimidation, and an attempt to put off any Muslim intending to travel to Syria for any reason, and the arrest seems to be more of the same.

It was significant, I thought, that, as the BBC described it, “West Midlands police said naming Mr. Begg did ‘not imply any guilt,’” and also that Det. Supt. Shaun Edwards said the arrests “were pre-planned and intelligence-led. There was no immediate risk to public safety.” What I also found noteworthy, though, was the fact that “electronic equipment” had been “taken away for forensic analysis.” After the revelations of Edward Snowden, I thought the NSA and GCHQ had spying on our computers sown up, but perhaps the arrests were also a pretext to gain access to contact details — people, for example, that Moazzam may have met who the UK, and presumably US intelligence services think may be of interest to them, even though the “war on terror” has generally demonstrated that the intelligence services don’t always know what they’re doing — reminding me that Moazzam once described them to me as the “not so intelligent intelligence services.”

In addition, as was explained in a press release yesterday by Cerie Bullivant, the Media Officer of CAGE (formerly Cageprisoners), for whom Moazzam is the Outreach Director, “Moazzam has been very open about his international travel and his objectives, including importantly exposing British complicity in rendition and torture. The timing of Moazzam‘s arrest given his travel to Syria took place in December 2012 requires a detailed explanation. The timing coincides with the planned release of a CAGE report on Syria and a major news piece that was due to be televised soon. As with David Miranda it seems those who are engaged in exposing abuse of powers are targeted and smeared to prevent disclosure of vital evidence.”

As CAGE also noted:

This latest action is designed to ensure that any travel to Syria is deemed suspicious. It follows a concerted campaign of harassment against Muslim individuals and charities involved in providing humanitarian aid to the victims of the Syrian crisis. Moazzam Begg is just the latest individual drawn by the humanitarian catastrophe in Syria who has been labelled a terrorist .The purpose is to intimidate and vilify the wider Muslim community so that they are prevented from delivering much needed aid to the Syrian people.

Moazzam is an internationally recognised figure on issues relating to due process and human rights. His advocacy on behalf of the Guantanamo Bay detainees has been recognised across the world, resulting in various governments accepting detainees who could not be returned to their countries of origin.

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 four-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.

Save the NHS from the “Hospital Closure Clause” in the Care Bill; Write to Your MP and Attend a Parliamentary Meeting on Feb. 27

[image error]Please, if you care about the future of the NHS, and if you’re British, write to your MP now and ask them to vote against Clause 118 in the Care Bill, which will be voted on early next month, and, if you’re in London, please consider attending a protest outside Parliament this Thursday, February 27 (details below).

Readers will hopefully be aware that, in October 2012, residents of the London Borough of Lewisham launched a major campaign to save Lewisham Hospital from being severely downgraded to pay for the debts of a neighbouring NHS trust, the South London Healthcare Trust (in the neighbouring boroughs of Greenwich, Bexley and Bromley) under legislation known as the Unsustainable Provider Regime.

25,000 of Lewisham’s 270,000 residents took to the streets a little over a year ago, and although heath secretary Jeremy Hunt approved the proposals put forward by Matthew Kershaw, the NHS Special Administrator appointed to deal with the financial problems of the SLHT, the Save Lewisham Hospital campaign and Lewisham Council launched two judicial reviews, which, in July, met with success, when a judge ruled that Jeremy Hunt had acted unlawfully in approving the plans. Hunt appealed, but lost again in October.

The government, however, had already decided that, although the Lewisham campaign was successful, they would prevent any further campaigns from having a chance of success by changing the law. Clause 118 of the Care Bill — known colloquially as the “hospital closure clause” — was drafted as the Care Bill was making its way to the House of Lords, and, as the Save Lewisham Hospital campaign recently explained, it will “expand the powers of a TSA [Trust Special Administrator] to not only take into account the services provided by the failing trust to which he or she is appointed, but also to be able to reconfigure any neighbouring or even quite remotely connected services.”

In other words, as the campaign explained in a recent email, the intention of Clause 118 is to make it legal for the government — and senior NHS managers who have forgotten what the NHS is for — “to close any thriving, solvent hospital whenever they want to.”

As the Save Lewisham Hospital campaign also explained:

The Care Bill is coming back to the report stage debate in the Commons early in March and, to have a chance of defeating Clause 118, those who love our NHS and fear for its future must have as many MPs as possible (of all parties) prepared to vote against it or, at very least, defy any Government whip and abstain.  This is the one and only chance to save the NHS from a truly crippling blow.  The Clause as been called a “hospital closure clause” and would make possible re-configuration of health services with no proper local consultation and on the basis of financial considerations rather than changing clinical needs.

On their website, the Save Lewisham Hospital Campaign further explain:

The Unsustainable Provider Regime by which TSAs are appointed was never intended to be used to reconfigure health services in a wide area, but, should Clause 118 remain part of the Care Bill, it could be used for this purpose.

The prime aim of Clause 118 is cutting expenditure — any input from clinicians is secondary.
It has to be a quick piece of work, with limited opportunity for public consultation. (Normal reconfigurations take years and have all sorts of checks and balances built in because the only specified intention is to make decisions that are in the best interests of health service users and supported by clinical evidence.)
The financial analysis in a TSA’s report is therefore inevitably done hastily and such analysis and alternative operational plans set out may well be full of mistakes. (This proved to be the case in connection with the South London Health Care Trust and threatened closure of services at Lewisham Hospital.)

What is highly deplorable is the way that this was done by an extra Clause added in to a completely different piece of legislation that happened to be passing through the House of Lords. So, whatever your MP’s views on the rights or wrongs of Government policy on the NHS, this amendment to the Care Bill is a case of the “Executive” trying to ride rough-shod over the “Legislature” — and that is reason enough to reject it.

The campaigners are asking people, if possible, not only to write to their MPs (and here’s another method of doing so), but also, if possible, to “phone their office or go to speak to them in person if there is a constituency event or surgery coming up soon.”

Below is suggested text that you may want to use — although it’s always better to write your own words! As the campaigners also note, “Make reference to where you know your MP has spoken out in favour of any NHS provider, refer to your own experiences of using services and/or travel times, just mention a recent event in your constituency or even the weather! And, if you’ve the time, a posted hard copy letter can be even more effective.”

I am worried about what might happen to our NHS if Clause 118 of the Care Bill becomes law.

I understand that this Bill is currently at the Committee Stage but is likely to come back to the House of Commons early in March. I am asking you now to vote against this particular clause when you have an opportunity to do so. Clause 118 was not originally part of the Bill and was simply introduced as it went through the House of Lords when the Government realised that the Lewisham Hospital case would go against it.

I am worried because Clause 118 gives new extensive powers to Trust Special Administrators who are appointed to rescue failing hospital Trusts. It will enable them to make rapid changes to any local hospital (or even close it) whether or not it is part of the failing Trust they are required to deal with. It also means this can be done without proper consultation with local people and local doctors. Clause 118 has been described as a “hospital closure clause”, and could have relevance to any hospital or other health services in the country.

I also think that the way the Secretary of State for Health is making this amendment to the existing law about Trust Special Administrators is rather underhand. It seems to have been designed to make proper Parliamentary debate on the issues and possible unintended consequences difficult. Please unite with your colleagues, and , if possible, those of other parties, and demand of the Government a full discussion of this measure and all its implications. And, when the chance comes, I am asking you to vote against Clause 118.

And finally, for now, here’s the information about Thursday’s protest:

10.30am: Assemble opposite 10 Downing Street prior to the handing in of a 38 Degrees petition against Clause 118, which currently has nearly 150,000 signatures.

11am: Handing in of petition to the Prime Minister.

11.30am: Protest a rally on College Green, opposite Parliament.

12.30pm: Enter Parliament for a Parliamentary meeting at 1pm, where speakers include:

- Andy Burnham, Shadow Health Secretary

- Louise Irvine, Save Lewisham Hospital Campaign & London MEP candidate for National Health Action Party

- Dr. Kailash Chand, Deputy Chair of the BMA

- Dr. David Wrigley, GPC BMA

- Caroline Molloy, Editor of Our NHS at OpenDemocracy

- Dr. Wendy Savage, Chair, Keep Our NHS Public

I hope to see some of you there!

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 four-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.

In Oxford, WikiLeaks Whistleblower Chelsea Manning Given Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence, Edward Snowden Speaks

Chelsea Manning Given Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence, Oxford, Feb. 19, 2014, a set on Flickr.

Last Wednesday (February 19), I was delighted to travel from London to Oxford to attend the presentation of the Sam Adams Associates Award for Integrity in Intelligence to Chelsea Manning — or rather, to Chelsea’s old school friend Aaron Kirkhouse, who received the award on Manning’s behalf. Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley Manning) was, of course, given a 35-year sentence in August for the largest ever leak of classified documents, including the “Collateral Murder” video, featuring US personnel indiscriminately killing civilians and two Reuters reporters in Iraq, 500,000 army reports (the Afghan War logs and the Iraq War logs), 250,000 US diplomatic cables, and the Guantánamo files, released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, on which I worked as a media partner.

I had been invited by Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst and prominent peace activist, who I met for the first time in Berkeley, California in October 2010, as part of Berkeley Says No to Torture Week, and by Todd Pierce, a recently retired military defense attorney, who worked on a number of Guantánamo cases involving men facing military commissions trials, and who has been a friend for many years. Also speaking at the event for Chelsea Manning were Ann Wright, former US Army colonel and former State Department official, who was one of only three US officials to resign over the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and who I had also met in Berkeley in 2010, and two people I had not met before — the former British ambassador Craig Murray, and MI5 whistleblower Annie Machon.

It was a powerful event, presided over by Ray, who made us all feel at home in the Oxford Union, and introduced the various speakers prior to the presentation of the award to Aaron Kirkhouse on Chelsea’s behalf.

Craig Murray reminded the audience that, in Uzbekistan, he had discovered that information obtained through horrendous torture (including boiling prisoners alive in oil) was used by the UK and the US to exaggerate the threat of al-Qaeda in Central Asia, to keep dictators in power, and to ensure continuing access to much sought-after resources. He also explained that it is “very hard to work for government now and be an honest man,” and stated that “you have to step outside the establishment for truth-telling.”

Annie Machon, an MI5 whistleblower with David Shayler, spoke about the “globalised murder program” initiated by our “notional democracies,” and also mentioned the launch of “The Courage Foundation,” a new initiative designed to provide support and financial assistance of whistleblowers.

Todd Pierce spoke about the slide of the US towards fascism, which he demonstrated through a devastating analysis of the flawed legal logic underpinning the military commissions at Guantánamo, and Ann Wright spoke about how much money has been raised for the support of Private Manning to date — $1,500,000 — and how we owe thanks to him, and to Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, for “giving to us the truth about what our governments doing.”

Aaron Kirkhouse read out the following statement by Chelsea Manning, which I hope you have time to read, and to share if you find it useful, and this is followed by a video shown on the night of Edward Snowden — last year’s recipient of the Sam Adams Award — speaking from Russia, which is also posted below.

Chelsea Manning’s acceptance statement of the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence, February 19, 2014

The founders of America — fresh from a war of independence from King George lll — were particularly fearful of concentrating power. James Madison wrote that “the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” (1)

To address these concerns, the founders of America actively took steps when drafting the Constitution and ratifying a Bill of Rights — including protections echoing the Libertarianism of John Locke — to ensure that no person be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

More recently, though, since the rise of the national security apparatus — after a brief hiatus between the fall of the Soviet Union and the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center — the American government has been pursuing an unprecedented amount of secrecy and power consolidation in the Executive branch, under the President and the Cabinet.

When drafting Article III of the American Constitution, the founders were rather leery of accusations of treason, and accorded special protections for those accused of such a capital offense, providing that “[n]o person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.”

For those of you familiar with the American Constitution, you may notice that this provision is under the Article concerning the Judiciary, Article III, and not the Legislative or Executive Articles, I and II respectively. And, historically, when the American government accuses an American of such crimes, it has prosecuted them in a federal criminal court.

In a recent Freedom of Information Act case (2) — a seemingly Orwellian “newspeak” name for a statute that actually exempts categories of documents from release to the public — a federal district court judge ruled against the New York Times and the American Civil Liberties Union. The Times and the ACLU argued that documents regarding the practice of “targeted killing” of American citizens, such as the radical Sunni cleric Anwar Nasser al-Aulaqi were in the public’s interest and were being withheld improperly.

The government first refused to acknowledge the existence of the documents, but later argued that their release could harm national security and were therefore exempt from disclosure. The court, however, felt constrained by the law and “conclud[ed] that the Government [had] not violated the FOIA by refusing to turn over the documents sought in the FOIA requests, and [could not] be compelled … to explain in detail the reasons why [the Government's] actions do not violate the Constitution and laws of the United States.”

However, the judge also wrote candidly about her frustration with her sense that the request “implicate[d] serious issues about the limits on the power of the Executive Branch under the Constitution and laws of the United States,” and that the Presidential “Administration ha[d] engaged in public discussion of the legality of targeted killing, even of [American] citizens, but in cryptic and imprecise ways.” In other words, it wasn’t that she didn’t think that the public didn’t have a right to know — it was that she didn’t feel that she had the “legal” authority to compel disclosure.

This case, like too many others, presents a critical problem that can also be seen in several recent cases, including my court-martial. For instance, I was accused by the Executive branch, and particularly the Department of Defense, of aiding the enemy — a treasonable offense covered under Article III of the Constitution.

Granted, I received due process. I received charges, was arraigned before a military judge for trial, and eventually acquitted. But, the al-Aulaqi case raises a fundamental question: did the American government, and particularly the same President and Department, have the power to unilaterally determine my guilt of such an offense, and execute me at the will of the pilot of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle?

Until documents held by the US Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel were released after significant political pressure in mid-2013, I could not tell you. And, very likely, I do not believe I could speak intelligently of the Administration’s policy on “targeted killing” today either.

There is a problem with this level of secrecy, obfuscation, and classification or protective marking, in that they supposedly protect citizens of their nation; yet, it also breeds a unilateralism that the founders feared, and deliberately tried to prevent when drafting the American Constitution. Now, we have a “disposition matrix,” classified military commissions, and foreign intelligence and surveillance courts — modern Star Chamber equivalents.

I am now accepting this award, through my friend, former school peer, and former small business partner, Aaron, for the release of a video and documents that “sparked a worldwide dialogue about the importance of government accountability for human rights abuses,” [and] it is becoming increasingly clear to me that the dangers of withholding documents, legal interpretations, and court jurisprudence from the public that pertain to the right to “life, liberty, and property” of a state’s citizens is as fundamental and important to protecting against such human rights abuses.

When the public lacks the ability to access what its government is doing, it ceases to be involved in the governing process. There is a distinct difference between citizens, in which people are entitled to rights and privileges protected by and from the state, and subjects, in which people are placed under the absolute authority and control of the state. In essence, this is the difference between tyranny and freedom. To echo a maxim from [Benjamin Franklin]: a society that puts secrecy — in the sense of state secrecy — ahead of transparency and accountability will end up neither secure nor free.

Thank you,

CHELSEA E. MANNING

Footnotes

(1) Federalist Papers, No. 47 (1788).

(2) New York Times v. United States Department of Justice, 915 F. Supp.2d 5O8, (S.D.N.Y.,2013.01.03).

Below is Edward Snowden’s video:

In it, following up on Chelsea Manning’s comments about government secrecy, he stated, “Over-classification, where the government uses the state’s secrets privilege to withhold information from the public that’s not related to national security and is otherwise unjustified, has been a serious problem.”

He added, “In the last year the White House told us that 95 million records have been created classified and withheld from the public in the year 2012. That’s more than any other year on record and shows a trend where the government is withholding more secrets than ever.”

As the Independent described it, he “paid tribute to Manning for releasing documents that revealed the type of information that the US government tried to prevent the public knowing,” and asked, “How can we vote without evidence of the true costs of the wars in which we are involved? Instances of public corruption, official corruption, in nations that we support and ally ourselves with, or even national participation in torture programmes, rendition programmes and unambiguous war crimes. All of these were represented in the Manning brief.”

He also stated, “The foundation of democracy is the consent of the governed. After all, we cannot consent to programmes and policies about which we are never informed. The decline of democracy begins when the domain of government expands beyond the borders of its public’s knowledge.”

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 four-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.

Ask Your MP to Vote Against the Tories’ Brutal Treatment of the Disabled, as ATOS Resign from Conducting Disability Assessments

It’s been some time since I wrote about this wretched government’s vile assault on the disabled, through the rigged assessments (the Work Capability Assessments) administered by the multinational company Atos Healthcare, and designed to find as many mentally and physically disabled people as possible “fit for work” so their support can be cut. See some of my previous articles – Doctors Urge Government to Scrap Callous Disability Tests, Where is the Shame and Anger as the UK Government’s Unbridled Assault on the Disabled Continues?, Photos of the Paralympics Demonstration Against Atos Healthcare in London, Call Time on This Wretched Government and Its Assault on the Disabled, The Tories’ Cruelty Is Laid Bare as Multiple Welfare Cuts Bite and Photos: The 10,000 Cuts and Counting Protest in Parliament Square, September 28, 2013.

Nevertheless, not a day has gone by without me thinking about the horrors of life under the Tories — and their assault not just on the disabled but also on the unemployed and the underpaid — and being close to despair at how my fellow citizens, in significant numbers, have embraced the filthy lies spewing from the lying lips of ministers and the merchants of hatred and division in the tabloid newspapers.

In response to this assault, campaigners launched an e-petition in December 2012,  which became known as the WOW petition (war on welfare), and which called for a cumulative impact assessment of all cuts and changes affecting sick and disabled people, their families and carers, and an immediate end to the Work Capability Assessment, as voted for by the British Medical Association in June 2012.

E-petitions need to secure 100,000 signatures within a year to make them eligible for a Parliamentary debate, and the target was reached with a week to spare.

The Parliamentary debate will be taking place on Thursday February 27, and, prior to the debate, the WOW petition campaigners are encouraging supporters to do the following:

Write to — or email — your local MP (you can find the details by using our Write to your MP tool) and we’ve produced a couple of suggested template letters here (outline) and here (detailed).

If you’re in London or willing and able to visit, campaigners will be watching the debate live, and will lobby MPs in the Central Lobby from 10.30am until the debate starts. There will also be a vigil outside the House of Commons next to Old Palace Yard, from 10.30am. I intend to be there.

The vote comes just ten days after the Guardian revealed that a leaked financial review from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) stated that “ministers across government are working together to build up competition to [Atos] by commissioning other private firms to add ‘further capacity’ to the assessment system. The DWP will then enable ‘these providers to take over the whole contract’ from Atos after the present agreement expires in 2015.”

On Friday, the Press Association followed up on the story, claiming that Atos was “seeking an early exit from its contract,” blaming death threats to its staff — which was almost unbelievably ironic, given that Atos’ assessments have led to numerous well-chronicled deaths, of some of the most vulnerable members of society, which is unforgivable.

Although this is good news, problems will remain until the entire assessment process is scrapped and re-thought intelligently and sensitively, as various other incompetent guns for hire — G4S, A4E, Serco, Capita — are queuing up to take over.

Although not speaking directly about the disabled, Archbishop Vincent Nichols, the head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, who is about to be made a cardinal by Pope Francis, addressed the horrors of austerity in an interview with BBC Radio 4′s Today programme, and expanded on his comments to the Daily Telegraph when he criticised the government’s welfare reforms as “punitive.”

Archbishop Nichols said, “The voices that I hear express anger and despair … Something is going seriously wrong when, in a country as affluent as ours, people are left in that destitute situation and depend solely on the handouts of the charity of food banks.”

He added, “The moral challenge roots back to the principle that we have to regard and treat every single person with respect.”

To mark the news of Atos’ imminent removal as assessors of the disabled, two organisations who have worked tirelessly to oppose the reviews — Disabled People Against Cuts and the Black Triangle Campaign — issued a statement that I’m cross-posting below (with minor editorial changes of my own), as it is powerful, and also contains numerous links to articles demonstrating the horrors of Atos’s reign as the enormously well-paid facilitators of the government’s murderous disdain for the disabled.

DPAC & Black Triangle: Joint Statement on the Bizarre ATOS Exit Strategy

February 22, 2014

Several years of campaigning have paid off in making more and more people realise that ATOS, the Work Capability Assessment (WCA) and Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) policies imposed by the ConDems are completely toxic, inhuman and abhorrent.

DPAC have been leading campaigns against ATOS, the WCA and DWP since 2010 including: visits to Triton Square (shiny headquarters of ATOS), feeding into the Channel 4 program ‘Dispatches: Britain on the Sick’ which revealed the horrendous system of getting as many people removed from support as possible, exposure of the devastation and misery, and the highly successful ATOS games in 2012 which saw ATOS shares drop in value and an increase in media attention against them. DPAC have occupied Caxton House (home of the DWP) and gathered outside the entrance of the DWP on many occasions, most recently in the 7 days of action ‘Reclaiming our Futures’.

Our sister group Black Triangle have fought tirelessly with us. Black Triangle has worked with us for over 3 years fighting and exposing continuous wrong doing and working on publicising regulations that can be used by GPs to prevent further harm to thousands of disabled people under the WCA regime. This month also saw a UK wide protest outside local ATOS centres organised by local groups. We’ve all been clear that it is the WCA itself that needs to be scrapped immediately.

The bizarre exit strategy ATOS have developed in identifying apparent physical threats on Facebook despite the growing lists of real deaths caused by the WCA regime is an outrageous insult to all those that have died and all those that have lost family members through this regime. It is an insult to those left without their homes, without money and needing to go to foodbanks. It is an insult to every person who has suffered worsening physical and mental health through this inhuman regime.

ATOS attempting to pull out of its contact represents only a partial victory. The alphabet corporations (G4S, A4E, SERCO, CAPITA) are already lining up to take over the multi-million profits and the mantle of the new Grim Reapers. The misery imposed by this Government and the DWP will continue as long as its heinous policies continue.

Goodbye to ATOS — but the WCA must also end. The reign of terror by this unelected Coalition Government which has awarded itself pay rises, cut taxes for those earning over £150,000 while piling punishment, poverty, misery and premature death on everyone else in its policies of rich against poor must end.

Make no mistake — We will continue to demonstrate against ATOS, now delivering the complete failure of PIP [the Personal Independence Payment, the replacement for Disability Living Allowance that has been severely criticised by disability campaigners] in which claims are being delayed by up to a year. We will demonstrate against any other company that takes over the WCA contract. We will continue to demand the immediate removal of the WCA, and the removal of this Government.

DPAC and Black Triangle demand:

That the WCA be ended with immediate effect to be replaced with a rigorous and safe system that does not cause avoidable harm to disabled people, those with chronic health issues, terminal illnesses or long term health issues. It is the WCA – the assessment itself – that is fundamentally flawed and must end now as called for by the British Medical Association (BMA), and the Royal College of Nursing.
That the UK Government at Westminster and the opposition follow the Scottish Government’s pledge that private for-profit companies are removed entirely from having anything to do with the assessment of disabled people. This area of public policy belongs firmly within the NHS and the public sector.
That all support and commend the initiative being led by Black Triangle in union with DPAC to work together with the BMA to ensure that GPs are able to flag up a substantial risk of harm to disabled people, those with chronic health issues, terminal illnesses or long term health issues at the very outset of the WCA process. The complete lack of any such mechanism to assess and flag up complex risk under the current regime has given rise to countless tragedies which could thereby have been avoided.
That the PIP contract be removed from ATOS with immediate effect-they have shown errors beyond incompetence affecting thousands of disabled people, leading to waits of up to a year and leaving people without income or food.

We’ll celebrate Atos’ realisation that the WCA contract has always been poisonous, but we won’t rest or stay quiet. Atos’ absence from the WCA regime will not allow us forget the evil we have endured:

Suicides (Atos, the Coalition and DWP all share responsibility)

Fear of fitness to work tests driving disabled patients to suicide, say 6% of GPs

The tragedy of Alice, How the Work Capability Assessment costs lives

Former bodybuilder from Willington who can barely walk contemplated suicide after nurse ruled him fit to work

Benefits withdrawal led to man’s suicide

Benefits row dad takes his own life and is found dead in his flat by his fiancee

Sneinton man overdoses after benefits stopped

Heartbroken dad reveals agony as decision to axe his son’s benefits is overturned.. weeks after his boy killed himself

Benefit Cuts Caused Disabled Yorkshire Man Nicholas Barker To Take His Life, Rules Coroner

Back problems led to fatal dose

Benefits man found hanged, inquest heard

Author’s suicide ‘due to slash in benefits’

Woman who drowned in drain was upset about health check

Norwich man killed himself ‘over back-to-work fears’

Inquest hears of Cumbrian dad’s health benefits worries

Fears over benefits led to tragedy

Benefits withdrawal led to man’s suicide

Unemployed Gravesend man hanged himself after sickness benefits were cut

Grandfather Shaun Pilkington Found Dead After Receiving Letter Saying Benefits Will Be Stopped

Disabled Kinver man killed himself after being left “almost destitute” when his state benefits were axed

Bristol woman ‘killed herself after benefits were stopped’

The terrible effects of Atos’ decisions

John McDonnell MP speaking up for Atos Healthcare victims

BBC South East Today 13th December 2013 on the WCA

Cancer killed my husband, but Atos took his dignity a long time before his death

Islington Council passes vote of no confidence in disabled assessing company Atos

Grieving son blasts benefit cuts: My dad looked like a concentration camp prisoner before he died

Amy Jones, Woman With Cerebral Palsy, Given Prognosis By ATOS That Her Disability ‘Expected To Improve’

Atos fit-to-work assessments branded ‘farcical’ as nearly half of people with progressive diseases like Parkinson’s told they’ll RECOVER

Disabled benefits claimants test: Atos reports found ‘unacceptably poor’

Atos assessors told to keep disability benefit approvals low, film suggests

Linda Wootton: Double heart and lung transplant dies nine days after she has benefits stopped

Blind in one eye, partially deaf and facing major spinal surgery but Thalidomide mother is STILL found fit to work

Atos scandal: Man found fit to work despite peeling bones

‘This brutal new system’: a GP’s take on Atos and work capability assessments

Atos told incontinent woman to ‘wear nappy’

Get ready for work: what woman who needs constant care was told

The appeal rate

The success of appeals against Atos’ decisions is around 40% when claimants appeal without any support, and up to 70% when claimants are supported by trained advocates. See the Citizens Advice Scotland report, “Unfit for Purpose.”

Setting targets

In secret filming for Channel 4′s “Dispatches” show, a trainer quoted the targets set for Atos  – just 13% of claimants were expected to keep ESA: Atos Secret Filming – Excerpt from Channel 4 Dispatches programme Britain on the Sick

Tax avoidance

Atos have £3bn pounds in public contracts, yet pay no tax here: Atos and G4S pay no corporation tax despite profiting from billions pounds worth of public sector contracts, as auditors warn of ‘crisis of confidence’ over private contractors

Whistleblowers

Greg Wood: Claimants ‘tricked’ out of benefits, says Jobcentre whistleblower and Whistleblower former Atos doctor talks to BBC News (May 2013)

Joyce Drummond: ATOS assessor ‘forced to judge disabled fit for work’

Failures to assess mental health requirements

The complete failure around people presenting with mental health diagnosis:

Work assessments unfair on mentally ill, says court

How are those with mental health problems treated by Atos?

Why can’t we find out more about Atos mental function champions?

Neglect of claimants

Man having heart attack during assessment and getting marked as walking out: Sick benefits claimant has HEART ATTACK during Jobcentre test – and Government axe his payments

Claimant in wheelchair left upstairs in fire drill: Disabled man abandoned on the second floor of building during Atos fire alarm evacuation

Claimants left out in the cold: Disabled and ill left in cold after Atos blunder – Derbyshire Times

Atos called the police regarding welfare advisors

Police called after welfare experts offer advice to disabled ahead of Atos sickness benefit assessments

Atos claimed to be working with groups they weren’t

Labour calls for urgent investigation over ‘misleading’ Atos bid information

Atos boss accused of ‘living in a parallel universe’ after claiming hated benefits assessor is popular with public – Mirror Online

Goodbye, ATOS. We’ll be back …

POSTSCRIPT February 23: The WOW Petition has now signed on to the statement, as have Inclusion London and Pat’s Petition.

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 four-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.

A Love Letter from Guantánamo

I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012 with US attorney Tom Wilner, where it was published as “Younus Chekhouri’s Love Letter to His Wife from Guantánamo.” 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.

Younus Chekhouri (also identified as Younous Chekkouri), who will be 46 in May, is one of the last two Moroccan prisoners in Guantánamo, and his story has fascinated me ever since I began researching the prisoners’ stories for my book The Guantánamo Files back in 2006.

In Guantánamo, Younus has always maintained that, in the mid-1990s, he traveled to Pakistan with his Algerian wife Abla, in search of work and education, and then spent time in Yemen and Syria. In 2001, the couple moved to Afghanistan, where they lived on the outskirts of Kabul, working for a charity that ran a guest house and helped young Moroccan immigrants. After the 9/11 attacks and the US-led invasion, Younus sent Abla to safety in Pakistan, but was himself captured and sold to US forces.

In contrast to Younus’s own account, the US authorities accused him of running a military training camp near Kabul, even though he has repeatedly explained that he was profoundly disillusioned by the fighting amongst Muslims that has plagued Afghanistan’s recent history. The US authorities also described him as a “close associate” of Osama bin Laden, but he has repeatedly expressed his implacable opposition to the havoc wreaked on the country by bin Laden, describing him as “a crazy person,” and adding that “what he does is bad for Islam.”

In addition, Younus has always been one of the most peaceful prisoners in Guantánamo, and, as I discovered last year, when he took part in the prison-wide hunger strike that did so much to remind the world of Guantánamo’s existence, he is a Sufi Muslim, something that makes it even more improbable that he would have been running a training camp. For further information, please read Reprieve director Clive Stafford Smith’s account of a conversation with Younus during the early months of the hunger strike, and Younus’s own detailed account.

Moreover, discrediting the US authorities’ claim still further, in January 2010 he was one of 156 prisoners cleared for release by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force established by President Obama soon after he took office in January 2009. 80 of those men have now been released from Guantánamo, but Younus is one of 76 cleared prisoners still held, awaiting a new home, and hoping, since Congress eased restrictions on releasing prisoners that had almost brought the release of prisoners to an end for three years, from October 2010 to July 2013, that he will finally be freed in the near future, to rejoin his wife Abla.

Below is a letter that Younus wrote to Abla for Valentine’s Day which was originally posted on the website Medium.

Happy Valentine’s, from Gitmo

By Younous Chekkouri, Medium, February 14, 2014

Imprisoned in Guantánamo Bay, detainee Younous Chekkouri thinks of his beloved wife Abla

Today is Valentine’s Day, 2014. I cannot believe how many days I have spent away from the most precious thing I have in this world — my wife, Abla. My heart beats day and night with the name of my beloved.

We were very young when we fell in love, after destiny decided to introduce us in Turkey. Together we have travelled all over the world. We lived the life of migrant birds, needing only each other. That was before I was kidnapped, and the years of torture began; I was left to rot here in Guantánamo Bay. Life now has no taste.

Abla and I are only able to speak once every three or four months  —  it’s a complicated process that involves her coordinating with the Red Cross (ICRC). I know this is not easy for her because it takes a lot of time, and I know she’s busy; she teaches in order to support herself. I wish I didn’t have to cause her all this trouble.

Life now has no taste

I remember that one time she went to the ICRC office, she picked up a poetry book of her choosing, and afterwards she told me about one of her favourite romantic poems from the book; Ibn Hazm’s “Tokens of Love”. Months later and by very happy accident, I was able to find the same book on the library cart that comes around the cell blocks for those of us who remain here in the prison. I wrote back to her with one of my favourite poems from the collection; it was only my favourite because it made me think of her smiling face.

I stare up at the ceiling of my cell. I so miss the sky, the stars and the moon. I remember once when we were together, looking up at a full moon shining like a pearl in the night sky, I turned to her and said, “Darling, you know that you are more beautiful than the moon when you smile”. “You liar!” she retorted and we both burst out laughing.

Destiny is a very strange thing

12 years of agony. I live like a frightened child or an animal waiting for the unknown. I pray from my heart that my sadness and anxiety will come to an end. I pray to see my wife again, and to be able to tell her everything that I have kept bottled up in my heart for more than a decade.

I dare not believe that I will ever see my sweetheart again. There is only one face that comes to me in my dreams. It is her face, the one who has been crying day and night, waiting for me to hug her and say, “Don’t worry my love, it was all a nightmare and now it’s over”.

In every letter I write to her, I tell her that we will never be apart again. I don’t know if she believes me or not, but I imagine her eyes shining and her lips parting in her magical smile. I do know that neither of us ever imagined we would be in this situation. Destiny is a very strange thing.

I want only to feel human again

President Obama and his wife have adorable children, whose future they guard jealously. I’m sure the President’s greatest fear is that he will be apart from his wife or children. Well, I have just the same feeling because I’m human just like them.

I do not blame President Obama though for these long years, I don’t blame anyone. I want no vengeance for the 12 years I have spent in Guantánamo, never having committed any crime. I want only to feel human again, to hug my soulmate and tell her that we will never again be apart.

So I’ll spend another Valentine’s Day away from the only thing that matters to me, my Abla. I wish you all a very happy day with your loved ones. For me, it is just another day. I’ll wait until the night when I can hold my sweetheart once again, if only in my dreams.

Note: See here for a letter from Younus to Cori Crider of Reprieve that he wrote last May, during the prison-wide hunger strike.

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 four-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

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

Photos of the Shaker Aamer Protest in London on February 14, and His Latest Words from Guantánamo

On February 14, 2014, the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign held a protest outside MI6 headquarters on Albert Embankment in London. The photo to the left here is part of a set of photos I took on the day. See the full set on Flickr here.

The protest was called to mark the 12th anniversary of Shaker Aamer‘s arrival at Guantánamo, and the 12th birthday of his youngest child, who, of course, he has never seen. Shaker is the last British resident in Guantánamo, who has a British wife and four British children, and had been given indefinite leave to remain in the UK prior to travelling to Afghanistan with his family, to undertake humanitarian aid, in 2001, shortly before the 9/11 attacks and the US-led invasion that led to his capture by bounty hunters, who then sold him to the US military.

Crucially, he was cleared for release by a military review board under the Bush administration in 2007, and again in January 2010 by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established shortly after taking office in 2009. His continued imprisonment is, therefore, completely unacceptable and unjustifiable, and it reflects very badly on both the US and UK governments — the former for not having released him to be reunited with his family, which should be a straightforward matter, and the latter for not having made his release and return to the UK an absolute priority.

I spoke at the demonstration, as did Joy Hurcombe, the chair of the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign, and others, and I urge you, if you wish to take further action, to please sign and share the international petition calling for Shaker Aamer’s release from Guantánamo, and, if you’re in the UK, to write to your MP to ask them to demand his immediate release, and his return to the UK. You can contact your MP here.

Below, expressing what is happening to him more eloquently that I can manage, is Shaker Aamer’s latest message from Guantánamo, made available by Clive Stafford Smith, the founder and director of Reprieve, who is one of his lawyers. This article was originally published on the Huffington Post, and, as well as describing eloquently what it means to be held indefinitely without charge or trial, Shaker also reports that there are now 35 hunger strikers, 18 of whom are being force-fed, and also reports rumors about plans for a large number of Yemeni prisoners to be returned to Yemen for trials, or to be put through a rehabilitation center, or to be released outright.

77 of the remaining 155 prisoners have been cleared for release by the US authorities (all but one since 2010), and 56 of those men are Yemenis, whose release was blocked between January 2010 and May 2013 because, in December 2009, a Nigerian man recruited in Yemen tried and failed to blow up a US-bound plane with a bomb in his underwear, and in the resultant backlash the Yemenis at Guantánamo became pawns in a political game, and had their release prevented by President Obama and by Congress. I hope Shaker is right about the plans for the Yemenis, and that this particular injustice will be brought to an end — and I also hope, of course, that he too will be released soon. Every day that he remains at Guantánamo is an indictment of both Britain and America, and their claims to respect justice and the rule of law.

A Bitter Valentine’s Day

By Shaker Aamer, Huffington Post, February 14, 2014

It’s 14 February. In Britain it will be Valentine’s Day. In 2002, it was the day I arrived in Guantánamo Bay, and the day my youngest child was born — Faris, whom I have never been allowed to touch.

Yesterday, my fellow detainee Emad Hassan did not take his legal call, for the same reason every time he misses a phone call or a meeting. They intimidate him by telling him before he goes, “we’ll do a full body search” — the “scrotum groping search” as they call it. So Emad goes with them to the Camp 5 exit where they plan to do the search, and when he sees them ready to carry out a full body search, he tells them that he refuses the humiliation, and demands to go back to his cell.

Indeed, the authorities don’t want someone like Emad to let the world know what has happened to him. Recently, he encountered the worst doctor here in Guantánamo — the “Doctor of the Dark Side”. I told him to write as much as he can about it and send it out, but it takes time for him to write in English, and it takes time for the letters to get through the censors.

I am on my hunger strike. Last night, I took one cup of coffee and added two creamers. As a consequence, all this morning I had bad diarrhoea and went to the toilet more than six times in half an hour. That is why I am writing now. I can’t go to sleep, plus it is nice to write something about this place on the first day of my New Year.

There are 35 hunger strikers now. Eighteen of them are being tube-fed. These brothers go and return from feedings by the FCE [Forcible Cell Extraction] team. They even are weighed by the FCE team, but it’s impossible to take someone’s weight whilst he is shaking so hard on the digital scale and tied to a board. But this means there are 11 or 12 soldiers required every time they have to be moved, as many as five or six times a day.

It is exactly 8:00AM and the National Anthem is playing so loudly. There are big rumours going around, and we hope they are true. It is said that the Government dropped the charges against 12 Yemenis and that only two Yemenis will be prosecuted ([Walid] Bin Attash and [Abd al-Rahim al-] Nashiri). The eligible ones will go to Yemen in three groups: only those who have conditions will be kept in the planned rehabilitation centre; those who have no conditions will be free; and the third group will be those who are to be prosecuted in Yemen, serving their jail sentence in Yemen.

What else … How do I feel with another year of my life gone unjustly and another year started? Truly, I feel numb. I can’t even think about it. Years are passing like months and months like weeks. Weeks pass like days and days like hours. Hours feel like minutes, minutes seconds, and seconds pass like years. And it goes around in a strange circle that makes no sense. It all takes an age, and yet an age of my life seems to pass too fast. On and on and on.

I live in the dark, knowing nothing. Here I am, cleared for release for seven years, more than half my time here. What, why, when, how, where? These questions have no answers, only total darkness.

I feel lonely and lost. Not knowing my future is the worst torture. I am living just to die. I am confused about everything and everyone. It is not enough for them to leave us alone with all this pain we are suffering. It is not enough for us to live only with our memories, which bring more pain. Dead people are better off than us. They are living a new way of life, knowing that they are dead and facing the consequences of their past actions.

But our suffering is endless — and with it, our loved ones’ suffering is endless. We are not dead but they forget us after awhile, because they cannot see us or feel us and know how we truly are.

Yet still they do more harm to us: humiliating and insulting us, degrading us, anything to make us more miserable. Welcome to the Hell on Earth, welcome to Guantánamo. Welcome to the year 1984, the year 2014.

I have no doubt justice will prevail and the light of the truth will shine all over the world. What is happening to us and others is a small price for justice, peace, and happiness which will cover the whole world soon. Always, after total darkness, the sun rises again. I hope to see the sun of justice, peace, and happiness with my own eyes. It will be a great day.

If I don’t get to see that sun, please remember that I have endured all this in the name of justice.

Shaker Aamer

Alone in Guantánamo

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 four-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 Guantánamo Experiment: A Harrowing Letter by Yemeni Prisoner Emad Hassan

155 men are still held at Guantánamo, and yet, despite the fact that most of these prisoners have been held for 12 years without charge or trial, many of them are completely unknown to the general public.

A case in point is Emad Hassan, a Yemeni prisoner whose representation has recently been taken on by Reprieve, the London-based legal action charity whose founder and director is Clive Stafford Smith. Reprieve recently received a letter from  Emad, after it was unclassified by the Pentagon censorship board that evaluates all correspondence between prisoners and their lawyers — and the hand-written notes of any meetings that take place — and decides whether it can be made available to the public.

When the cleared letter was released, Reprieve secured publication of it in the Middle East Monitor, where it was published to mark the 12th opening of the prison on January 11. In the hope of securing a wider audience for Emad’s words, I’m cross-posting it below, not only to let people know about Emad’s particular story — to humanize another of the men so cynically dismissed as “the worst of the worst” by the Bush administration — but also because of his detailed description of how hunger strikers at Guantánamo are being abused by the authorities.

First, though, allow me to introduce Emad, who is one of the 55 Yemeni prisoners in Guantánamo who were cleared for release in 2010 by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established when he took office in January 2009. After a Nigerian man, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried and failed to blow up a plane bound for Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, with a bomb in his underwear, and after it was discovered that he had been recruited in Yemen, President Obama imposed a ban on releasing any Yemenis from Guantánamo, despite the recommendation of his task force. This ban stood until May last year, when, in response to the prison-wide hunger strike at Guantánamo that began last February and attracted worldwide criticism of President Obama’s inaction, the president responded by finally dropping the ban, although no Yemenis have been released in the last nine months.

The Yemenis’ release was also blocked by Congress, which imposed general restrictions on the release of prisoners, particularly from 2010 onwards. These restrictions were only finally eased in December, in amended legislation that was  introduced by the Senate Armed Services Committee, under the leadership of Sen. Carl Levin, but although these changes are important, it should be noted that, all along, President Obama had the power to override Congress if he regarded it as being “in the national security interests of the United States,” and, as he has repeatedly demonstrated in his eloquent speeches, it is demonstrably clear that the ongoing existence of Guantánamo is not “in the national security interests of the United States.”

Emad Hassan, then, is one of the Yemenis who needs to be released to break this absurd and unjust refusal of the US government to release Yemenis that its own Presidential task force said should be released, but who is he?

I have previously written about him, in my book The Guantánamo Files, and also as one of 15 prisoners seized in a house raid in Faisalabad, Pakistan, on the same night that another house raid led to the capture of Abu Zubaydah, who was mistakenly identified as a senior figure in al-Qaeda, and for whom the CIA’s torture program was specifically developed.

Most of the men in the house in which Hassan was seized have maintained, throughout their long imprisonment, that it was a student house, providing accommodation to young men studying at the nearby Salafia University. Moreover, in May 2009, in the District Court in Washington D.C., as I explained in an article entitled, “Judge Condemns ‘Mosaic’ Of Guantánamo Intelligence, And Unreliable Witnesses“:

Judge Gladys Kessler, ruling on the habeas corpus petition of one of the men, Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed, savaged the government for drawing on the testimony of witnesses whose unreliability was acknowledged by the authorities, and for attempting to create a “mosaic” of intelligence that was thoroughly unconvincing, and she also made a point of stating, “It is likely, based on evidence in the record, that at least a majority of the [redacted] guests were indeed students, living at a guest house that was located close to a university.”

Many of the men seized in the house raid have since been released (see here, here, here and here).

As I also explained in an article in 2010:

In Guantánamo, Hassan has repeatedly stated that he never set foot in Afghanistan (until the US took him there after his capture), and that he was near the end of a seven-month trip to the university to study the Koran when he was seized. He has also explained that, while in Pakistani custody, “the person who was in charge came and told us we didn’t have anything to worry about,” and that “our sheet was clean.”

As I also explained, it may be that Hassan “aroused the wrath of the authorities in Guantánamo because of his refusal to accept the conditions in which he and the other prisoners are held,” and noted:

In 2006, one of his lawyers, Douglas Cox, explained how he was “regarded as a leader by other detainees,” and how he “went on a hunger strike. A few months into it, military doctors started force-feeding him by inserting a tube through his nose. The process was so painful that Hassan felt he couldn’t take it anymore. He didn’t want to quit, though, because he thought he would be letting down the other detainees.” Weight records released by the Pentagon show that, although Hassan only weighted 113 pounds on arrival at Guantánamo, his weight dropped at one point in December 2005 to a skeletal 85 pounds (PDF).

What I didn’t know, until recently, when I spoke to Clive Stafford Smith about Emad Hassan, and read Reprieve’s profile of him, is that he has been on a persistent hunger strike since 2007 (I identified two other long-term hunger strikers here).

As Reprieve explained:

Hunger strikes are a universally regarded form of peaceful protest. Yet the Guantánamo authorities do not share this view – they have compared their response to strikers to adapting to new warfare tactics. Strikers are punished for their disobedience, violently removed from their cells, strapped to a chair and have tubes shoved up their noses through which a nutritional supplement is pumped. This has led to dire health problems for Emad. He has severe pancreatitis and one of his nasal passages has completely closed up. In his own words:

“Sometimes I sit in the chair and vomit. Nobody says anything. Even if they turned their backs I would understand. I’m looking for humans. All I ask for is basic human rights.”

I also learned from Reprieve that Emad had initially traveled from Yemen to Pakistan to study “as he was not able to access specialised higher education in Yemen.” Reprieve described him as “an intellectual with a passion for poetry, ranging from the great Sufi poets like Rumi, to English poets such as Wilfred Owen.”

As Reprieve also explained, during an interrogation that followed his capture, Emad “was asked if he knew Al-Qaeda and he responded: ‘Yes, I know Al Qa’idah well.” He was talking about a small village near where he grew up in Yemen. But this didn’t matter.”

As Reprieve also noted, since December the prison authorities have “stopped providing any information on hunger strikers in a bid to stop attention to their cause,” although Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, recently reported that 35 men are currently on a hunger strike, and 17 of them are being force-fed.

Emad is one of them. As Reprieve explained, he “would like nothing more than to be released, as promised, back to the arms of his loving family. But because the US considers Yemen to be a dangerous a place to send former Guantánamo detainees, he is being punished for his nationality. Emad has said that he will continue on his peaceful protest until he and his fellow cleared men can go home where they belong.”

It is time for the cleared Yemenis — the 55 cleared for release by the task force, and a 56th man, recently cleared for release by a Periodic Review Board — to be sent home, without further delays and obstruction.

Emad Hassan’s letter is posted below:

The Guantánamo Experiment: A letter from Emad Hassan to mark the 12th anniversary of the opening of the prison

Middle East Monitor, January 10, 2014

Here we are in Guantánamo as we come to the 12th anniversary of this terrible place. The treatment here is often described by the public relations officer as next door to perfect. Indeed, now I am into my seventh year of being force fed, it’s quite a Club Med holiday camp!

We heard some good news about President Obama wanting to send people home, but we do not want to hang our hopes on it. Hope is like a mirage; you can see it, but can’t touch it.

It does not really need to be said, but it is a grave violation of professional ethics for doctors to participate in torture or cruel treatment. Surely health care professionals should not condone any deliberate infliction of pain and suffering on detainees? This would seem to be a fairly basic proposition.

Yet who is better than a doctor to cause excruciating pain without damaging the body? There is a wide divergence here between the morality of a doctor’s role and the reality of his actions. It is very, very sad. When a surgeon no longer uses his scalpel to cure a disease, he becomes no better than a butcher.

In 2005, when the doctors were still human beings, the hunger strikers didn’t worry about their health because there was level of trust with the medical team. One of the doctors refused to go along with force feeding, because he believed that his medical ethics were more important than the order of a military colonel. But then things changed. The military only recruited doctors who agreed, before they arrived here, that a military order was more important than morality. The new wave of doctors allowed the military officers to instruct them on how to conduct the medical procedure of force feeding.

As a child, I was taught to disdain German doctors for what they did in World War II, experimenting on prisoners. Yet here the doctors now experiment to try to find the best way to force us to bend to the military’s will: is it more effective for them to make the force feeding process more painful, by forcing the liquid down my nose faster and by pulling the 110 centimeter tube out of my nostril after every feed? Or, is it more effective to refuse my request for a blanket to keep me warm, now that my weight has fallen so low? They experiment all the time, and this is virgin territory for experimental science, since no other doctor would be allowed to force feed a prisoner at all.

But in recent days, sad to say, I have seen the truly ugly faces of those doctors, nurses, and other medical staffers. I have been subjected to a novel regime for 36 days. This new system is not an occasionally “uncomfortable procedure,” as the public relations has described it. No, it has been a HORRIFIC, BARBAROUS TORTURE. I am not even sure I can find the words to tell you truly what it is like …

It is difficult to take it anymore. First they force the 110 centimeter tube in me. They cannot do it in the right nostril any more, as that is now firmly closed up. So they have to force it up the left nostril. It is very painful these days, but that is no bar to medical practice. They used to leave the tube in so that we did not have to undergo this pain, but then a general said they wanted to make our peaceful protest less “convenient,” so they came up with the less “convenient” system of pulling the tube out each time.

That has been a technique since 2006, so it is nothing new. But the latest experiment is different. Now they begin with 1500cc of formula called TwoCal — four cans in the morning and four in the night, served up each time with 700cc of water. Once I finish each ‘meal,’ they fill the feed bag with 50cc of an anti-constipation medication and 450cc of water. As this scientific study shows — at least in the experience of this guinea pig, your correspondent — this method accelerates the stomach function and makes the hunger striker defecate on himself in the chair.

When this stage is complete, they add another 700cc of water — why? Have I not suffered enough? When I dared to ask this question, the medical professional answered sarcastically, “to wash the feeding bag.” This process is completed in 30-45 minutes, which is much faster than before, but then why allow the detainee to be fed slowly when you could cause much more pain by speeding up the process? Yet it is not over quickly, as they leave you in the torture chair for two hours, suffering. Then they pull the tube out of your nose again, ready to force it back in for the next session.

If I vomit on myself at any time during the procedure, they start the atrocity all over again, though they don’t necessarily let me wash off before it begins.

And that’s exactly what has been happening to me every day, twice daily. Except for last night — which will long burn alive in my memory. But I will write about it in the next message, God willing.

As you enjoy your holiday season, please spare a thought for those of us who continue to hold the embers, trying to keep the flame alive in Guantánamo Bay — even as the doctors try to break our peaceful hunger strike protest. And remember, if you will, that all we ask for is what President Obama keeps promising: freedom or a fair trial.

December 16th 2013

Emad Hassan (ISN 680, cleared for several 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 four-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.

Progress in Canada: Former Guantánamo Prisoner Omar Khadr Moved to Medium-Security Prison

For the first time since his return to Canada from Guantánamo in September 2012, Omar Khadr, the Canadian citizen and former child prisoner of the US, has been downgraded from a high-security risk to a medium-security risk. The move punctures the prevailing rhetoric — from the government, and in the right-wing press — that Khadr is a dangerous individual.

This lamentable rhetoric is the product of three particular factors: racism and/or Islamophobia; a hypocritical refusal to recognize the rights of child prisoners, despite a Supreme Court judgment that was severely critical of the government; and a deliberate refusal to recognise that Khadr’s plea deal at a military commission trial in Guantánamo had nothing to do with justice and guilt, and was agreed to solely to secure his release from Guantánamo, and his return home to Canada, where he was born 27 years ago.

Khadr was just 15 years old when he was seized by US forces, in a severely wounded state, after a firefight in Afghanistan in July 2002. According to the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict, which came into force in February 2002, and which both the US and Canada then ratified, juvenile prisoners — those under 18 when their alleged crimes take place — “require special protection.” The Optional Protocol specifically recognizes “the special needs of those children who are particularly vulnerable to recruitment or use in hostilities”, and requires its signatories to promote “the physical and psychosocial rehabilitation and social reintegration of children who are victims of armed conflict.”

Neither the US nor Canada respected Omar’s rights as a juvenile prisoner. The US subjected him to abuse, isolated him or held him alongside adult prisoners, and charged him with war crimes invented by Congress, while the Canadian government sent agents to interrogate him when he was just 16. This led to a ruling in the Canadian Supreme Court in 2010 that the visit and the interrogations had violated his rights — and that also featured in a harrowing documentary film, “You Don’t Like the Truth: 4 Days in Guantánamo,” which was made after the footage of the interrogations at Guantánamo was released as part of a court case.

It was a low point in the presidency of Barack Obama when, in October 2010, Khadr, a former child prisoner, accepted a plea deal in his trial by military commission, in exchange for an eight-year sentence — with just one more year to be served in Guantánamo and seven in Canada — in which he admitted that he was guilty of a variety of alleged war crimes, including killing a US soldier with a grenade, even though it was not his responsibility to plead guilty, even though there were profound doubts about whether actually threw the grenade, and even though the “crimes” to which he confessed had been invented by Congress.

What could be worse for a US president who studied law than to oversee the trial of a former child prisoner in which it became a war crime to engage in military conflict with US soldiers in wartime and in an occupied country?

The answer may be that the behavior of the Canadian government has been worse. After violating Khadr’s rights, the Canadian government dragged its heels regarding his release, so that he only returned to Canada in September 2012 (eleven months later than was agreed in his plea deal), and then imprisoned him in a maximum-security prison, bad-mouthed him as a “convicted terrorist,” and resisted efforts to downgrade him and move him to a medium-security facility where efforts to prepare him for civilian life can begin in earnest.

That only came to an end last September. As I noted in an article in December:

In September, on Khadr’s 27th birthday, I reported how Ivan Zinger, the executive director of the independent Office of the Correctional Investigator, wrote in a letter to Anne Kelly, senior deputy commissioner of the Correctional Service of Canada, “The OCI has not found any evidence that Mr. Khadr’s behaviour while incarcerated has been problematic and that he could not be safely managed at a lower security level. I recommend that Mr. Khadr’s security classification be reassessed taking into account all available information and the actual level of risk posed by the offender.” Zinger added that Khadr had “shown no evidence of problematic behaviour while in Canadian custody,” and also stated, “According to a psychological report on file, Khadr interacted well with others and did not present with violent or extremist attitudes.”

Zinger also cited a US military psychiatrist as saying Khadr “showed no signs of aggressive or dangerous behaviour,” and “consistently verbalized his goal to conduct a peaceful, pro-social life as a Canadian citizen,” and noted, “Our office questions the rationale for not using these professional and expert assessments on file.”

In its article about Khadr’s reclassification, the Edmonton Journal noted that, when Khadr was returned to Canada last September, the US authorities described him as a “minimum-security risk based on his behavior in Guantánamo,” and this was also noted by Ivan Zinger.

Nevertheless, in October, in a court in Edmonton, Justice John Rooke, responding to a habeas corpus petition submitted by Khadr in September, issued a ruling ordering him to remain in a maximum security federal prison rather than being moved to a provincial prison, “limiting his chances for parole,” as the Toronto Star described it.

In December, however, Khadr was finally “reclassified as a medium-security risk,” a decision taken by Kelly Hartle, the warden at Edmonton, “reflects a ‘plethora of evidence’ from US authorities and Canada’s prison ombudsman that Khadr never was a maximum-security threat,” as the Edmonton Journal described it.

The Edmonton Journal speculated that Khadr’s move to a medium-security facility would take place early in the New Year, but it has only just happened now. Last Wednesday, one of his lawyers, John Kingman Phillips, explained that he had been moved to Bowden Institution in Alberta province, a medium-security facility, with a minimum-security annex. As AFP put it, accurately, the Canadian government had “resisted the 27-year-old’s transfer from a Canadian federal penitentiary to a more comfortable provincial correctional facility for petty criminals and young offenders, calling it an attempt to lessen his punishment.”

“We are pleased to see Canada finally acknowledge that Omar is not a dangerous individual,” Phillips said in a statement, adding, “We trust that this is the first step by Canada in providing Omar with treatment that is appropriate for someone who is a former child soldier.”

As the Calgary Sun reported, on Friday, after visiting Khadr at Bowden, Phillips said he “was looking very good today.” He also said that the prison move “falls into the ongoing objective of an eventual parole for Khadr,” as the Calgary Sun described it.

“I think the hope is now that there will be more of a recognition that his security level should be dropped down to minimum and he’s hoping to get into some programs and the sort of things that he needs to prepare him to re-enter Canadian society,” he said, adding, “The focus should be on rehabilitation, and that means trying to set it up so he’s got education, he has counselling and that sort of thing and to date he hasn’t had very much of that.”

Phillips also said, “We want him out. We want him to re-integrate into Canadian society.” He added, “If his name wasn’t Khadr, frankly I think we’d be having him go around from campus to campus and place to place talking about what it was like to be a child soldier. Instead we’ve treated him as if he were an adult criminal … and treated him poorly, from Canada’s perspective.”

He also noted that Khadr “is keen on getting his education and bettering himself,” as the Calgary Sun put it. noting, Philips called him “an amazing kid,” and said, “He works very hard and loves to study. He’s a gentle, nice man who for some reason managed to survive some of the worst incarceration conditions in the world and still is a human being.”

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 four-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

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

Radio: Andy Worthington Discusses Guantánamo and Torture with Scott Horton

A few days ago, I was delighted to be interviewed by Scott Horton for his radio show. Scott and I first spoke about six and a half years ago, and have spoken numerous times since. Our latest half-hour interview is here, and I hope you have time to listen to it, and to share it if you find it useful.

This time around, Scott was interested in hearing the latest news from Guantánamo, but had also picked up on my recent article highlighting the fact that, on February 7, it was 12 years since President Bush issued a memo explaining that the Geneva Conventions didn’t apply to Taliban and al-Qaeda prisoners seized in the “war on terror,” a memo that opened the floodgates to the use of torture.

This only officially came to an end after the Supreme Court reminded the Bush administration, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld in June 2006, that all prisoners — with no exceptions — are entitled to the protections of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit “cruel treatment and torture,” and “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.” Even then, although the CIA’s torture program came to an end, torture techniques migrated immediately to the Army Field Manual, which was reissued with the addition of Appendix M, containing those techniques.

In addition, it remains important to remember that, although the specific torture program at Guantánamo that Donald Rumsfeld introduced in the fall of 2002 came to an end when lawyers were allowed access to the prisoners , following the Supreme Court’s ruling granting the prisoners habeas corpus rights in Rasul v. Bush in June 2004, the indefinite detention of the prisoners — who have no idea, when, if ever, they will be released — can, I believe, be described as a form of torture in and of itself, one made even worse by the fact that 76 of the 155 men still held were cleared for release by President Obama’s high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force over four years ago, in January 2010, and yet are still held, because of a lack of political will.

While discussing President Bush’s memo of February 7, 2002, I also spoke about Article 5 competent tribunals, another part of the Geneva Conventions that had been pioneered by the US in previous conflicts. The tribunals are meant to take place if there is any doubt about whether or not those detained are combatants, something that happens readily in situations except those where two nations in uniform face each other on a clearly defined battlefield. In the first Gulf War, the US held nearly 1,200 of these tribunals, and in nearly 900 cases — three-quarters of the tribunals in total — found that civilians had been seized by mistake, and sent them home.

Had these competent tribunals taken place after 9/11, it’s clear that the “Mickey Mouse” detainees that Brig. Gen. Michael Dunlavey, an early commander of Guantánamo complained about, would never have been sent there in the first place, but as it is 155 men — most of whom had no connection whatsoever with terrorism — are still held.

There was more in the show, including me talking about the ongoing hunger strike, and the recent victory by three prisoners, including Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, in the court of appeals in Washington D.C., where judges ordered the lower court, the district court, to revisit its rulings in summer that prisoners at Guantánamo are legally prohibited from challenging any aspect of their conditions of detention.

As I mentioned at the top of this article, I hope you have time to listen to the whole show, and to share it if you find it useful.

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

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the four-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.

In Open Letter, Major Obama Supporters Call for Action to Close Guantánamo as Promised

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

In a sharply-worded open letter to President Obama, 42 prominent figures in the legal community in Illinois — retired lawmakers and judges, as well as working lawyers — have criticized the president for his failure to close the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo, as he promised to do on his second day in office in January 2009.

In an article for Yahoo News, the reporter Liz Goodwin explained how the signatories’ words carried particular weight because they included “[o]ne-time mentors and fundraisers” for the president. Goodwin explain that, in the letter, posted below, “a bipartisan group of Chicago lawyers — many who know Obama personally — argue that the president has all the authority he needs now to transfer prisoners out and has no excuse for inaction.”

Goodwin added, “Signatories include Chicago civil rights attorney Judson Miner, who gave Obama his first job out of law school, and Steven Cohen, a top bundler who raised more than $650,000 for the president during his two campaigns. Judge Abner Mikva, who offered a young Obama a clerkship and later became his mentor, also signed the letter. Some Republicans also joined, including former Illinois Gov. Jim Thompson.”

In the letter, the lawmakers, judges and lawyers point out that almost half the prisoners still held at Guantánamo were cleared for release by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama appointed shortly after taking office. The task force published its recommendations in January 2010. Since that time, 80 cleared prisoners have been released, but 76 remain, out of the 155 men still held.

55 of these men are Yemenis, but, in response to an airline bomb plot on Christmas Day 2009 that was hatched in Yemen, President Obama issued a moratorium on releasing Yemeni prisoners in January 2010, “due to fears that jihadi groups were taking hold in the country and that it would be an unstable environment,” as Liz Goodwin explained.

A 77th man, another Yemeni, was recently cleared for release by a Periodic Review Board, convened to assess the cases of 46 prisoners who were recommended for indefinite detention by the task force, on the basis that they are allegedly too dangerous to release, even though insufficient evidence exists to put them on trial (which means, of course, that the supposed evidence itself is profoundly untrustworthy). The PRBs will also look at the cases of 25 other men who had been recommended for prosecution, but who will not now be tried because of court rulings determining that most of the charges were not internationally recognized war crimes, and had, in fact, been invented by Congress.

The signatories to the letter call for these 77 men to be released immediately. For the last few years, onerous restrictions imposed by Congress led to a situation whereby very few prisoners were released. President Obama had the power to bypass Congress, through a waiver in the legislation, but chose not to use it. However, in December, Congress eased its restrictions on releasing prisoners, and, with President Obama having ended his moratorium on releasing Yemenis, in a major speech on national security last May, there are now no more obstacles preventing the prisoners’ release.

The signatories to the letter told the president, “As you know, half of the prisoners still at Guantánamo … were cleared for transfer over four years ago by your Joint Task Force, yet they remain at Guantanamo Bay!”

They added, “They should be returned to their homes and families immediately.” They also called for the Periodic Review Boards to be held as swiftly as possible (just two have taken place since they began in November)  and stated, “Those cleared at these hearings should be promptly released. Those not cleared should be charged and tried as soon as possible, and dealt with appropriately. Our country does not condone indefinite detention without trial.”

One of the signatories to the letter, Tom Sullivan, a prominent attorney in Chicago — and an Obama supporter — said, as Yahoo News put it, that he “became ‘bitterly disappointed’ with how little action Obama took to close the prison.”

“We want him to take the action that he keeps — in his beautiful speeches — insisting he’s going to take,” Sullivan said. “After a while you listen to enough of these speeches, and they’re so wonderful and you see no action — you begin to wonder what the heck is going on.”

The letter is posted below:

An Open Letter to President Obama: Close Guantánamo Bay

VIA US MAIL AND E-MAIL

President Barack Obama

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

NW Washington, DC 20500

Dear Mr. President:

Some of us are Democrats, some Republicans, and some independents. Like you, we are Illinois lawyers who believe strongly that adherence to the Rule of Law is critical to our national reputation and values, and that we can effectively combat terrorism and, at the same time, maintain fidelity to the Rule of Law. As you have stated, it is particularly important that we adhere to our principles not only when it is easy, but when it is most difficult to do so.

January 11 marked the twelfth anniversary of the opening of the Guantánamo prison. There should be no thirteenth anniversary. All steps must be taken to close that prison as soon as possible. That is not a partisan goal; Colin Powell, Henry Kissinger, Robert Gates, John McCain and Richard Lugar, as well as many other prominent Republicans, have called for the closing of Guantánamo. As you have said: “GITMO has become a symbol around the world for an America that flouts the Rule of Law.”

You have stated exactly what must be done: “[W]e’ve got to close Guantánamo … 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.” We strongly support your commitment to close the Guantánamo prison, and we are encouraged by the news that seven prisoners have been released over the past several months.

Mr. President, Congress has passed the legislation you requested easing the former restrictions on transferring detainees to other countries; you now have all the authority you need to close Guantánamo. As Senator Carl Levin stated, the legislation “provides a clear route for the transfer of detainees to third countries.” Many countries have already offered to take them. The legislation also allows the administration, without congressional restrictions, to transfer prisoners by consenting to court orders authorizing their transfer, a clear and simple route for the many who have already been cleared.

As you know, half of the prisoners still at Guantánamo — seventy-seven of the 155 there — were cleared for transfer over four years ago by your Joint Task Force, yet they remain at Guantánamo Bay!

They should be returned to their homes and families immediately. The others have been promised hearings before newly appointed boards, but few have been held. These hearings should proceed immediately. Those cleared at these hearings should be promptly released. Those not cleared should be charged and tried as soon as possible, and dealt with appropriately. Our country does not condone indefinite detention without trial.

To summarize: for more than eleven years, most of these men have been deprived of their liberty without trials. This is a tragedy for them and their loved ones and a rallying cry for our enemies.

We ask you to use your existing authority to close Guantánamo.

Sincerely,

-Hon. Abner J. Mikva, Member of Congress (1969-1973, 1975-1979); Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia (1979-1994; Chief Judge, 1991-1994); Counsel to the President (1994-1995)

-Hon. James R. Thompson, United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois (1971- 1975); Governor of the State of Illinois (1977-1991); Winston & Strawn

-Hon. George N. Leighton, Judge of the Circuit Court of Cook County (1964-1969), Judge, Illinois Appellate Court (1969-1976); Judge, United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois (1976-1987)

-Hon. Benjamin K. Miller, Justice, Illinois Supreme Court (1984-2001); Jenner & Block LLP

-Dan K. Webb, United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois (1981-1985), Winston & Strawn

-Anton R. Valukas, United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois (1985-1989), Jenner & Block LLP

-Thomas P. Sullivan, United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, (1977-1981); Jenner & Block LLP

-Tyrone C. Fahner, Attorney General of the State of Illinois (1980-1983); Mayer Brown LLP

-Hon. Adlai Stevenson III, United States Senator (1970-1981); Chairman, Adlai Stevenson Center on Democracy

-Hon. Carol Moseley Braun, United States Senator (1993-1999), Ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa (1999-2001); Founder, Good Foods Organic

-John R. Schmidt, Associate Attorney General of the United States Department of Justice (1994- 1997); Mayer Brown LLP

-Hon. Warren Wolfson, Judge, Circuit Court of Cook County (1975-1994); Judge, Illinois Appellate Court (1994-2009); DePaul Law School (Acting Dean 2009-2011)

-Martin J. Oberman, Member, Chicago City Council (1975-1987); Law Offices of Martin J. Oberman

-Judson H. Miner, Corporation Counsel of the City of Chicago (1986-1989); Miner Barnhill & Galland, PC

-Robert A. Helman, Mayer Brown LLP

-Scott Turow, author; Dentons

-Lowell E. Sachnoff, ReedSmith LLP

-Ronald S. Safer, Schiff Hardin LLP

-Todd A. Smith, Power Rogers & Smith, PC

-Daniel E. Reidy, Jones Day

-William F. Conlon, Sidley Austin LLP

-Vincent J. Connelly, Mayer Brown LLP

-Fay Clayton, Robinson Curley & Clayton, PC

-Ronald S. Miller, Miller Shakman & Beem LLP

-Randolph N. Stone, University of Chicago Law School

-Patricia A. Bronte, Stowell & Friedman, Ltd.

-Jeffrey D. Colman, Jenner & Block LLP

-Gary A. Isaac, Mayer Brown LLP

-Charles F. (Chuck) Smith, Skadden Arps LLP

-David J. Bradford, Jenner & Block LLP

-Kimball R. Anderson, Winston & Strawn

-Robert L. Graham, Jenner & Block LLP

-Sidney N. (Skip) Herman, Bartlit Beck Herman Palenchar & Scott LLP

-Steven H. Cohen, Cohen Law Offices

-Daniel M. Feeney, Miller Shakman & Beem LLP

-Charles H.R. Peters, Schiff Hardin LLP

-Jeffrey I. Cummings, Miner Barnhill & Galland, PC

-Cynthia A. (Cindy) Wilson, Northwestern University School of Law

-Matthew J. O’Hara, Hinshaw & Culbertson LLP

-J. Andrew Moss, ReedSmith LLP

-Leonard C. Goodman

-Nancy C. Loeb, Northwestern Law School

Note from senders: Institutional names are included to identify counsel and not to reflect that the institutions or law firms support the views in this letter. Responses may be made to Thomas P. Sullivan. Contact him by e-mail, by telephone on 312-923-2928, or send mail to Jenner & Block LLP, 353 North Clark Street, Chicago, IL 60654.

What you can do now

Call the White House and follow up on the letter. Ask President Obama to release all the cleared prisoners without further delay, and to use his existing authority to close Guantánamo. Call 202-456-1111 or 202-456-1414 or submit a comment online.

Note: The photo at the top of this article is from the occupation, by Witness Against Torture activists, of the National Museum of American History in Washington D.C. on January 11, 2014, the 12th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo. Please see here for my photo set on Flickr of the day of action in the capital, outside the White House and in the museum.

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 four-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.