Andy Worthington's Blog, page 124

The Stories of the Two Guantánamo Prisoners Released to Saudi Arabia

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

On Monday December 16, the Pentagon announced that two Guantánamo prisoners — Saad al-Qahtani and Hamoud al-Wady — had been released to Saudi Arabia over the weekend. In the Miami Herald, veteran Guantánamo reporter Carol Rosenberg noted that, ”according to government sources, the Saudi repatriations, carried out in a secret operation Saturday night, were voluntary.”

The Obama administration is to be commended for releasing these two men, as it shows a commitment to the promise to resume releasing prisoners from Guantánamo that President Obama made in May, after a two and a half year period in which just five prisoners were released, even though over half of the 160-plus prisoners held throughout this period were cleared for release in January 2010 by a high-level, inter-agency task force that President Obama established shortly after taking office in 2009. These releases bring the prison’s total population to 160 prisoners, of whom 80 have been cleared for release.

The release of prisoners had largely ground to a halt because Congress had imposed onerous restrictions on the Obama administration, requiring certifications to be made guaranteeing that no released prisoner would be able to take up arms or engage in terrorism against the US — promises that were extremely difficult, if not impossible to make.

It must be noted, however, that a waiver had been included in the legislation, allowing President Obama to bypass Congress if he regarded it as being “in the national security interests of the United States.” However, the president chose not to use the waiver, preferring not to spend political capital on Guantánamo when it would have brought him short-term political discomfort through criticism by Republicans, even though he has repeatedly stated that keeping Guantánamo open harms America’s national security interests.

Nevertheless, after a prison-wide hunger strike awakened — or reawakened — the world’s media to the plight of the Guantánamo prisoners, and international bodies including the UN and the European Parliament criticized Obama’s handling of Guantánamo, there was renewed progress from the administration. The president not only promised to resume releasing prisoners; he also dropped a ban on releasing Yemeni prisoners (who make up two-thirds of the prisoners cleared for release but still held), which he imposed in January 2010, after a failed airline bomb plot that was hatched in Yemen, and appointed two envoys to work towards the release of prisoners and, it is to be hoped, the eventual closure of the prison — Cliff Sloan at the State Department and Paul Lewis at the Pentagon.

Following the release, Paul Lewis issued a prepared statement that stated, “The US has made real progress in responsibly transferring Guantánamo detainees despite the burdensome legislative restrictions that have impeded our efforts.” He added, ”The United States coordinated with the government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to ensure that these transfers took place with appropriate security assurances and in a way that is consistent with our humane treatment policy.” On Monday morning, Cliff Sloan issued his own statement, calling the men’s release “an important step on the road to closing the Guantánamo Bay detention facility.”

In addition, the Senate Armed Services Committee, under the leadership of Sen. Carl Levin, who had been instrumental in securing the waiver in the legislation relating to Guantánamo (the annual National Defense Authorization Act), introduced changes to the legislation making it less arduous to release prisoners, which, it seems, will be authorized by Congress in the very near future.

Crucially, these changes not only show the growing influence of lawmakers who understand that Guantánamo’s continued existence is toxic to the values that America professes to hold; they also reassure the president that he can now count on support from Congress that he was unable to count on before, something that is clearly of great importance to him.

Since President Obama’s promises on Guantánamo in May, six prisoners have now been released. Two Algerians were released in August, and two others were released just two weeks ago, although the administration was criticized by lawyers and human rights activists for the release of these two men — Djamel Ameziane and Belkacem Bensayah — because they did not want to return to the country of their birth, and had legitimate fears that they would face persecution, from the government and/or from militant Islamists, if they did so.

There are no such fears with Saad al-Qahtani and Hamoud al-Wady, who have been waiting for many long years for the administration to resume releases to Saudi Arabia — and, in al-Wady’s case, to send home someone mistakenly listed throughout his imprisonment as a Yemeni, when he is, apparently, a Saudi national.

The story of Saad al-Qahtani

The story of Saad al-Qahtani (ISN 200, also identified as Said Qahtani), who was born in 1978 and is 35 years old today (December 17), was told by his lawyer, Patricia A. Bronte, in “11 Years and Counting: Profiles of Men Detained at Guantánamo,” a document put together by the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, and submitted to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in March this year, as supporting documentation in the case of Djamel Ameziane.

Bronte explained how al-Qahtani, who arrived at Guantánamo on January 16, 2002, just five days after the prison opened, “is bright, engaging, and speaks at least six languages fluently.” She added that, during his nearly 12 years of imprisonment, “he taught himself to speak, read, and write English,” and that his “extraordinary language skills and his ability to mediate disputes between prison staff and other prisoners” made him “a favorite among his guards and interrogators.”

She also described his upbringing, noting that he was brought up by his mother and grandmother in Khamis Mushayt, in the south west of the country, along with his five brothers and sisters, after his father died when he was eight years old. However, both his mother and grandmother died in November 2007. At that time, as Bronte explained, the prisoners “were not allowed to speak with their families by telephone or videoconference,” and, as a result, his mother died without having seen her son or having heard his voice for the last five and a half years of her life.

As Bronte described it, Saad al-Qahtani “is not and has never been a threat to the United States or its allies,” and only traveled to Afghanistan “because he was curious about the Taliban government (recognized by his home country as legitimate), and because he wanted to help the Afghan people, who had endured decades of war.” She added that the only time he fought anyone was “when he intervened to stop Taliban soldiers from beating an Afghan truck driver.”

After the US-led invasion, in October 2001, al-Qahtani, who had no interest in the fighting, “made his way to Pakistan, went to the first police station he could find, and asked for help in returning home,” as Bronte described it, but, instead, he was turned over to US forces, who took him to their brutal prison at Kandahar airport and then on to Guantánamo.

According to Bronte, “Within the first year of his imprisonment, United States and Saudi authorities determined that Saad did not belong in Guantánamo.” Civilian advisors recommended his release in 2008, as did President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force in 2009. Bronte also explained that Saudi government officials told him and his family in the spring and summer of 2012 that his repatriation was imminent, and the guards told him the same thing. However, although he refused to complain about “the harsh and degrading treatment” he endured in Kandahar and at Guantánamo, he had “suffered from depression and insomnia for several years,” and, earlier this year, was “sinking into despondency over the repeatedly broken promises to release him from Guantánamo.”

It may be that al-Qahtani was not freed in 2009 because he had briefly met Abu Zubaydah, the alleged “high-value detainee,” seized in Pakistan in March 2002, for whom the CIA’s torture program was initially developed. As I explained in an article in 2010:

Zubaydah’s case reveals the true horror at the heart of the “war on terror,” because, despite being waterboarded 83 times and held in secret CIA prisons for four and a half years, he was not a senior al-Qaeda operative at all, and was, instead, the mentally troubled gatekeeper of the Khaldan training camp in Afghanistan.

However, although the US authorities have steadily distanced themselves from making grand claims about Zubaydah, al-Qahtani’s brief association with him has probably counted against him in Guantánamo. In his [Combatant Status Review] Tribunal in 2004, he said that he didn’t know that Zubaydah was allegedly involved with al-Qaeda, and asked, “just because somebody stays at someone’s house, who may not be the best person in the world, does that make the people who stayed at that house bad people?”

In his tribunal, where it was stated that he had briefly served as a Taliban guard before fleeing to Pakistan, he pointed out that he was in Afghanistan before 9/11, and told the tribunal members, “Even if you say I am right or wrong, I don’t think I did anything wrong. At the time I didn’t think I did anything wrong, and I still don’t. I didn’t do anything illegal or bad to anyone. I want you to understand this.”

Following his release, Patricia A. Bronte explained, ”He wants to rejoin his family and resume his education, then get a job.” She added, reiterating her earlier analysis of his character and skills, “He should be highly employable, he speaks English and several other languages fluently and is very, very smart and personable.”

The story of Hamoud al-Wady

Less is known about the second man to be freed, Hamoud al-Wady (ISN 574, also identified as Hamood Abdulla Hamood), who is 48 years old, although, as I explained in an article in 2010, he stated in Guantánamo that he went to Afghanistan for jihad because he swore that he would do so if his wife bore him a child, but once he was in Afghanistan he said that the “picture about the fight in my head” — which he conceived as a fight between Muslims and Communists, as it had been in the conflict between North and South Yemen — was incorrect, and his supposed enemies were all Muslims.

He said that he then undertook humanitarian work with an Arab who explained that “not everybody comes to Afghanistan for fighting,” and then fled to Pakistan after the US-led invasion began, staying at the house of a Pakistani whose phone number he had been given in Afghanistan, where he was arrested. “I did not plan to go to that particular house,” he explained. “I had only the telephone number and I did not know if it belonged to a house or something else, a shop, for example.”

Some indication of quite how long generally insignificant prisoners have been deprived of their liberty at Guantánamo can be gleaned from an Associated Press report in September 2007 about the reviews that took place at the prison in 2006. This was the second round of military reviews known as the Administrative Review Boards (ARBs), which followed the first reviews, the Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs), in 2004-05.

In that article, written after the AP secured the transcripts of the ARBs through a Freedom of Information Act request, it was noted that al-Wady, who was mistakenly described as an Afghan, told his panel, “I am entering the fifth year. I want to see American justice. Where is it?” In response, the AP noted that the military officer heading the panel merely told him that the review board was his opportunity to “clear up some of the allegations that have been presented to us.”

Al-Wady and al-Qahtani were in their 12th year of detention by the time their release finally came. But while the Obama administration is to be commended, there are still 80 other men in a similar situation, and two-thirds of those men are Yemenis. If any of these men have strong connections to Saudi Arabia, it may be acceptable for them to be freed there, but if not they need to be returned home to Yemen — and, for that, President Obama needs to find more courage than he has summoned up to date.

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.

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009, and the 75 prisoners released from February 2009 to the start of December 2013, whose stories are covered in more detail than is available anywhere else –- either in print or on the Internet –- although many of them, of course, are also covered in The Guantánamo Files: June 2007 –- 2 Tunisians, 4 Yemenis (here, here and here); July 2007 –- 16 Saudis; August 2007 –- 1 Bahraini, 5 Afghans; September 2007 –- 16 Saudis; September 2007 –- 1 Mauritanian; September 2007 –- 1 Libyan, 1 Yemeni, 6 Afghans; November 2007 –- 3 Jordanians, 8 Afghans; November 2007 –- 14 Saudis; December 2007 –- 2 Sudanese; December 2007 –- 13 Afghans (here and here); December 2007 –- 3 British residents; December 2007 –- 10 Saudis; May 2008 –- 3 Sudanese, 1 Moroccan, 5 Afghans (here, here and here); July 2008 –- 2 Algerians; July 2008 –- 1 Qatari, 1 United Arab Emirati, 1 Afghan; August 2008 –- 2 Algerians; September 2008 –- 1 Pakistani, 2 Afghans (here and here); September 2008 –- 1 Sudanese, 1 Algerian; November 2008 –- 1 Kazakh, 1 Somali, 1 Tajik; November 2008 –- 2 Algerians; November 2008 –- 1 Yemeni (Salim Hamdan) repatriated to serve out the last month of his sentence; December 2008 –- 3 Bosnian Algerians; January 2009 –- 1 Afghan, 1 Algerian, 4 Iraqis; ; February 2009 — 1 British resident (Binyam Mohamed); May 2009 —1 Bosnian Algerian (Lakhdar Boumediene); June 2009 — 1 Chadian (Mohammed El-Gharani), 4 Uighurs to Bermuda, 1 Iraqi, 3 Saudis (here and here); August 2009 — 1 Afghan (Mohamed Jawad), 2 Syrians to Portugal; September 2009 — 1 Yemeni, 2 Uzbeks to Ireland (here and here); October 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti, 1 prisoner of undisclosed nationality to Belgium; October 2009 — 6 Uighurs to Palau; November 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian to France, 1 unidentified Palestinian to Hungary, 2 Tunisians to Italian custody; December 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti (Fouad al-Rabiah); December 2009 — 2 Somalis, 4 Afghans, 6 Yemenis; January 2010 — 2 Algerians, 1 Uzbek to Switzerland, 1 Egyptian, 1 Azerbaijani and 1 Tunisian to Slovakia; February 2010 — 1 Egyptian, 1 Libyan, 1 Tunisian to Albania, 1 Palestinian to Spain; March 2010 — 1 Libyan, 2 unidentified prisoners to Georgia, 2 Uighurs to Switzerland; May 2010 — 1 Syrian to Bulgaria, 1 Yemeni to Spain; July 2010 — 1 Yemeni (Mohammed Hassan Odaini); July 2010 — 1 Algerian, 1 Syrian to Cape Verde, 1 Uzbek to Latvia, 1 unidentified Afghan to Spain; September 2010 — 1 Palestinian, 1 Syrian to Germany; January 2011 – 1 Algerian; April 2012 – 2 Uighurs to El Salvador; July 2012 — 1 Sudanese; September 2012 — 1 Canadian (Omar Khadr) to ongoing imprisonment in Canada; August 2013 — 2 Algerians; December 2013 — 2 Algerians.

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

[image error]In an important op-ed for the Detroit Free Press, Maj. Gen. Mike Lehnert of the Marines, the first commander of Guantánamo, has called for the closure of the prison. Maj. Gen. Lehnert built the open air cages of Camp X-Ray, the “war on terror” prison’s first incarnation, in just four days prior to the arrival of the first prisoners on January 11, 2002.

As I explained in my book The Guantánamo Files, Lehnert initially bought into the hyperbole and propaganda about the prisoners, stating, soon after the prison opened, “These represent the worst elements of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. We asked for the worst guys first.” However, he soon changed his mind. In early February 2002, he provided an important insight into how, contrary to what senior Bush administration officials were saying in public, the uncomfortable truth was they they had no idea who most of the prisoners were. “A large number claim to be Taliban, a smaller number we have been able to confirm as al-Qaeda, and a rather large number in the middle we have not been able to determine their status,” he said, adding, “Many of the detainees are not forthcoming. Many have been interviewed as many as four times, each time providing a different name and different information.”

Unfortunately, the Bush administration responded not by acknowledging that it had, with a handful of exceptions, bought and rounded up civilians and low-level Taliban conscripts, but by aggressively interrogating the men over many years and, in many cases, introducing a torture program involving prolonged sleep deprivation, isolation, humiliation, the use of loud music and noise, and the exploitation of phobias. This produced copious amounts of information, as was revealed when WikiLeaks released classified military files relating to the prisoners in April 2011, but much of it was fundamentally unreliable.

The torture program mainly took place under Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, who took over as Guantánamo’s commander in November 2002, replacing Maj. Gen. Michael E. Dunlavey (in charge of interrogations) and Brig. Gen. Rick Baccus (in charge of the guard force) who took over from Lehnert in March 2002. In a revelatory article by Greg Miller in the Los Angeles Times in December 2002, sources explained that Dunlavey had “traveled to Afghanistan in the spring to complain that too many ‘Mickey Mouse’ detainees” were being sent to Guantánamo, although he was also involved in the negotiations that led to the introduction of a torture program at Guantánamo for Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Saudi regarded as the intended 20th hijacker for the 9/11 attacks.

Lehnert, on the other hand, recognized the importance of humane treatment for the prisoners from the beginning, and reiterated this in his op-ed, where he described his “insistence on humane treatment,” also writing that, when the guards tried to tell him that “the terrorists wouldn’t treat us this well,” his answer “was always the same: ‘If we treat them as they would treat us, we become them.’”

The author and academic Karen Greenberg explained more about the early days of Guantánamo under Maj. Gen. Lehnert in an article for the Washington Post in 2009 to accompany the publication of her book about Lehnert’s command, The Least Worst Place: Guantánamo’s First 100 Days:

In the absence of new policy guidance about how to treat the detainees, Lehnert told me that he felt he had no choice but to rely on the regulations already in place, ones in which the military was well schooled: the Uniform Code of Military Justice, other US laws and, above all, the Geneva Conventions. The detainees, no matter what their official status, were essentially to be considered enemy prisoners of war, a status that mandated basic standards of humane treatment. One lawyer for the Judge Advocate General Corps, Lt. Col. Tim Miller, told me that he used the enemy-POW guidelines as his “working manual.” A corrections specialist, Staff Sgt. Anthony Gallegos, called Washington’s orders “shady,” which he told me gave his colleagues no choice but to “go with the Geneva Conventions.”

Under Lehnert, the International Committee of the Red Cross was also called in, (by Col. Manuel Supervielle, the head JAG at Southern Command), much to the annoyance of senior Bush administration officials. As Greenberg described it, “It was a pivotal moment in the history of Guantánamo. Once Supervielle’s call had been made, the civilian policymakers around Rumsfeld could not undo what the uniformed military had done — although, according to Supervielle, an irritated team of lawyers, including Pentagon general counsel William J. “Jim” Haynes II, asked the Southern Command lawyer days later whether there was “a way to back out of it now.”

Greenberg added, “The ICRC arrived at Guantánamo on Jan. 17, 2002 — six days after the detainees did. Thus began what amounted to a period of subtle defiance of Washington’s lack of direction.”

In his op-ed, cross-posted below, Maj. Gen. Lehnert explained how he had become aware of the general insignificance of the prisoners. “Even in the earliest days of Guantánamo, I became more and more convinced that many of the detainees should never have been sent in the first place,” he wrote, adding, “They had little intelligence value, and there was insufficient evidence linking them to war crimes. That remains the case today for many, if not most, of the detainees.”

This is indeed true. As Maj. Gen. Lehnert also explained, although “a handful” of the prisoners “should be transferred to the US for prosecution or incarceration,” the majority “have been cleared for transfer by our defense and intelligence agencies.” As Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, the chief prosecutor of Guantánamo’s military commissions, conceded earlier this year, a maximum 13 of the remaining 162 prisoners are likely to face prosecution, and 82 of the remaining prisoners were cleared for release in January 2010 by a high-level, inter-agency task force that President Obama established shortly after taking office.

These 82 men are still held primarily because, for three years, Congress has passed legislation that has placed an onerous burden on the president and his administration — a certification process whereby they would have to promise that any released prisoner would be unable to engage in terrorist activities or take up arms against the US. However, President Obama also played a major role in the deadlock. In January 2010, he unfairly banned the release of any cleared Yemenis (who make up two-thirds of the cleared prisoners) after a failed airline bomb plot hatched in Yemen, and he only lifted that ban in May this year. In addition, although a waiver exists in the legislation that allows him to bypass Congress if he regards it as being “in the national security interests of the United States,” he has chosen not to do so.

Maj. Gen. Lehnert also explained that “the entire detention and interrogation strategy was wrong,” adding that “it validates every negative perception of the United States.” Crucially, he also mentioned the current legislation designed to ease the restrictions on the release of prisoners. These new proposals originated in the Senate Armed Services Committee, under the leadership of Sen. Carl Levin, and were passed by the Senate last month. The House of Representatives, however, had passed a restrictive version of the legislation back in June, and so a compromise had to be thrashed out in committee. As a result, the onerous restrictions on the release of prisoners have been eased, but a ban remains in  place on bringing prisoners to the US, even though the administration wants to bring prisoners to the US for trial and for ongoing detention.

Guantánamo can only be closed if this happens, but for now it is essential that the legislation is passed. As Maj. Gen. Lehnert described it, the revised legislation “appears to have compromise language that would give the president some additional flexibility to transfer detainees to their home or third countries, though it maintains an unwise and unnecessary ban on transferring detainees to the United States.” As he pointed out elsewhere, the law preventing transfers to the US “needs to be revisited.”

To my mind the most crucial message in Lehnert’s op-ed is when he tackles those people (primarily in Congress and the right-wing media) who insist that prisoners mustn’t be released because of the fears of recidivism — fears that, as I and other reputable sources have repeatedly pointed out, have been grossly exaggerated. This is what President Obama did when he refused to release cleared Yemenis after a foiled bomb plot, and — whether for cynical reasons or because of genuinely misplaced fears — it also drives lawmakers, but, as Lehnert stated, “The act of releasing a prisoner is about risk management. We cannot promise conclusively that any detainee who is released will not plan an attack against us, just as we cannot promise that any US criminal released back into society will never commit another crime.”

He added, “In determining whether we should release detainees who have no charges brought against them, I would argue that our Constitution and the rule of law conclusively trump any additional risk that selective release of detainees may entail. It is time that the American people and our politicians accepted a level of risk in the defense of our constitutional values, just as our service men and women have gone into harm’s way time after time to defend our constitution. If we make a mockery of our values, it calls us to question what we are really fighting for.”

My thanks to Maj. Gen Lehnert for his powerful words, and his reminder that professed values only mean something if they are upheld with the appropriate actions.

Maj. Gen. Lehnert’s op-ed is below:

Michael Lehnert: Here’s why It’s long past time that we close Guantánamo

Detroit Free Press, December 12, 2013

In 2002, I led the first Joint Task Force to Guantánamo and established the detention facility. Today, I believe it is time to close Guantánamo.

In the coming week, Congress will lay the foundation for whether and to what extent Guantánamo can be closed. The annual defense bill appears to have compromise language that would give the president some additional flexibility to transfer detainees to their home or third countries, though it maintains an unwise and unnecessary ban on transferring detainees to the United States.

Still, this is a step forward toward closing our nation’s most notorious prison — a prison that should never have been opened.

Our nation created Guantánamo because we were legitimately angry and frightened by an unprovoked attack on our soil on Sept. 11, 2001. We thought that the detainees would provide a treasure trove of information and intelligence.

I was ordered to construct the first 100 cells at Guantánamo within 96 hours. The first group of 20 prisoners arrived seven days after the order was given. We were told that the prisoners were the “worst of the worst,” a common refrain for every set of detainees sent to Guantánamo. The U.S. has held 779 men at the detention facility over the past 12 years. There are currently 162 men there, most of them cleared for transfer, but stuck by politics.

Even in the earliest days of Guantánamo, I became more and more convinced that many of the detainees should never have been sent in the first place. They had little intelligence value, and there was insufficient evidence linking them to war crimes. That remains the case today for many, if not most, of the detainees.

In retrospect, the entire detention and interrogation strategy was wrong. We squandered the goodwill of the world after we were attacked by our actions in Guantánamo, both in terms of detention and torture. Our decision to keep Guantánamo open has helped our enemies because it validates every negative perception of the United States.

The majority of the remaining detainees at Guantánamo have been cleared for transfer by our defense and intelligence agencies.

The act of releasing a prisoner is about risk management. We cannot promise conclusively that any detainee who is released will not plan an attack against us, just as we cannot promise that any U.S. criminal released back into society will never commit another crime.

There are a handful of detainees at Guantánamo who should be transferred to the U.S. for prosecution or incarceration. Such transfers remain prohibited under current law, but that law needs to be revisited.

In determining whether we should release detainees who have no charges brought against them, I would argue that our Constitution and the rule of law conclusively trump any additional risk that selective release of detainees may entail. It is time that the American people and our politicians accepted a level of risk in the defense of our constitutional values, just as our service men and women have gone into harm’s way time after time to defend our constitution. If we make a mockery of our values, it calls us to question what we are really fighting for.

When I was the Joint Task Force Commander in Guantánamo, I spent many nights visiting the facility and talking to the guards. I did this because I wanted to be sure that my guidance for humane treatment was being carried out. Many of my young Marines and soldiers were clearly troubled by my insistence on humane treatment, pointing out that “the terrorists wouldn’t treat us this well.” My answer to each of these young service members was always the same: “If we treat them as they would treat us, we become them.”

It is time to close Guantánamo. Our departure from Afghanistan is a perfect point in history to close the facility.

Maj. Gen. Michael Lehnert, USMC (Ret.), was the first commander of the U.S. detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. He lives in Traverse City.

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.

Hunger Strike Resumes at Guantánamo, as Shaker Aamer Loses 30 Pounds in Weight

In alarming news from Guantánamo, Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, has stated that the prisoners have renewed the hunger strike that, earlier this year, involved at least two-thirds of the remaining prisoners, and reawakened the world’s media to the ongoing injustice of Guantánamo.

The hunger strike provided evidence of the men’s despair, after eleven years’ imprisonment without charge or trial, in an experimental prison where they are still in a legal limbo, held neither as criminal suspects nor as prisoners of war. Their despair was heightened by the fact that 82 of them were cleared for release in January 2010 — nearly four years ago — by a high-level Presidential task force, and yet they are still held, and 80 others are, for the most part, detained without charge or trial, and with no sign of when, if ever, they might either be tried or released. As I explained in a recent article for Al-Jazeera, long-promised reviews for most of these 80 men have recently begun, but the process is both slow and uncertain.

In a recent phone call with Clive Stafford Smith, the director of Reprieve, the legal action charity whose lawyers represent 15 men still at Guantánamo, Shaker “revealed there are now 29 Guantánamo hunger strikers, including him, of whom 19 are being force-fed,” as the Observer described it on Sunday.

“The hunger strike is back on,” Shaker said, adding, “The number is increasing almost every day.” He also explained that he has been on the new hunger strike for almost a month and has lost 30 pounds in weight. On November 8 he weighed 188 pounds, and he now weighs 158 pounds.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the US military announced last Monday, December 2, that it was no longer releasing figures to journalists of those refusing food — a process tracked diligently throughout the year by the Miami Herald. At the time, there were 15 men on hunger strike, all of whom were being force-fed.

The Observer responded to the news that the number of hunger strikers would no longer be made public by opining — accurately, I believe — that “the US authorities, stung by adverse global publicity from the hunger strike during the summer, appear to be introducing policies designed to bury the news about the latest protest.”

Shaker also indicated that the US authorities were trying to hide the renewed hunger strike. He told Clive Stafford Smith, “Nobody has come to talk to me, nobody is asking what I am doing, there have been no visits from the BHU [Behavioural Health Unit]. Normally they come, so they are trying to keep this under wraps and pretend nothing is happening this time.”

As the Observer described it, however, Shaker is in such poor health that he “does not have the strength to endure a prolonged hunger strike.” Two of his legal teams — at Reprieve and City University of New York School of Law — recently submitted a motion calling for him to be allowed an independent medical evaluation because of his health problems (also see declarations by Clive Stafford Smith, and by Ramzi Kassem of CUNY), and these were evidently taken seriously enough by the authorities that an independent medical assessment was allowed.

As the Observer explained, the assessment revealed that Shaker’s many ailments include “rotting teeth, poor eyesight, tinnitus, arthritis, swelling in his leg, kidney pains, heart problems, ringworm, irritable bowel syndrome and an enlarged prostate, although no tests have been undertaken to ascertain whether it is cancerous.” That list alone makes me feel ill, and angry, and ashamed that Shaker is still held.

Shaker said, “I haven’t seen a doctor for almost two years and they refuse to give me proper vitamins and supplements to help me with my health.”

He also explained how he expected to be force-fed soon. “According to their rules,” he said, “they should start to force-feed me at 154 [pounds]. That will mean being strapped into the chair twice a day, then the 110cm tube up my nose, the liquid forced into me, and the tube hauled back out. I’ve been through it before. It’s horrid … If I have to, I will try to endure. But they are ignoring me. If it’s anything like before, they might make me go down to 130 [pounds]. I won’t pretend I am not afraid of what might happen then. I might lose my heart, or my kidney. I don’t want to go as a vegetable, or even in a coffin.”

Clive Stafford Smith also revealed that William Hague had written to Shaker, “promising,” as the Observer put it, that “he is doing all he can to bring him home.” This is a familiar line, although Clive Stafford Smith didn’t doubt William Hague’s sincerity. He told the Observer, “Shaker was absolutely thrilled with the letter from Hague, it shows how a certain amount of personal commitment by someone in power can help someone who has been downtrodden in such a ghastly way. It reflects very strongly that the government is working hard for Shaker, but underlines that some elements are not playing it straight. If there were no opposition to his release, he’d come home tomorrow.”

That opposition, as Clive Stafford Smith also made clear, appears to be the British security services. As the Observer described it, Reprieve believes they are “the stumbling block to [Shaker's] release,” with both MI5 and MI6 accused of making “defamatory statements” that have contributed to his long imprisonment without charge or trial — nearly seven years since he was first cleared for release under President Bush — and his torture, which was accepted by a judge in 2009, and led, earlier this year, to a three-day visit to Guantánamo by Metropolitan Police officers, who interviewed him about British complicity in his torture.

As we approach the 12th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo (on January 11, 2014), and the 12th anniversary of Shaker’s arrival at  Guantánamo (on February 14), it is clear that sustained pressure on the British government is still needed, that pressure on President Obama is also needed (as Congress finally moves towards helping him to resume releasing prisoners), and that here in the UK we also need to find new and creative ways of highlighting the hypocrisy of the security services.

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

Please sign the petition to save our hospitals!

Just over 13 months ago, residents of the London Borough of Lewisham launched a campaign against proposals — by senior NHS managers — to severely downgrade services at Lewisham Hospital. To pay for the debts of a neighbouring NHS trust, the South London Healthcare Trust, which had nothing to do with Lewisham (and were, in part, because of ruinously expensive PFI deals for two new hospitals), Matthew Kershaw, an NHS Special Administrator, appointed by the outgoing health secretary Andrew Lansley, proposed closing Lewisham’s A&E Department, which would have had a catastrophic effect on all other acute services. Lewisham’s acclaimed children’s A&E Department would have closed, and nine out of ten mothers in a borough of 270,000 people would have been unable to give birth at Lewisham Hospital, in case there were any complications. The A&E chosen to replace Lewisham — at Queen Elizabeth Hiospital in Woolwich, one of the SLHT’s financially troubled hospitals — is miles away, and would be required to serve not just the population of Greenwich and Lewisham, but Bexley as well, a total of three quarters of a million people.

Through a campaign led by a wonderful team of activists, local residents and medical personnel, and 25,000 people prepared to march through the streets of Lewisham in January this year, the Save Lewisham Hospital Campaign — and Lewisham Council — eventually won. Although Jeremy Hunt, the current health secretary, approved Kershaw’s proposals in January, the campaigners and the council launched two judicial reviews, on the basis that the legislation used to deal with the indebted trust, the Unsustainable Providers Regime, didn’t allow the government to draw neighbouring hospitals into plans for dealing with failed NHS trusts.

The Lewisham campaigners secured a powerful victory in the judicial reviews, in July, but Hunt then appealed, losing again in October. This should have been the end of the story, but the ghoulish Hunt is back for a third time, this time with what is being called the “hospital closure clause” — Clause 118 of the current Care Bill, which is being debated by parliament next week.

Louise Irvine, a GP in Deptford, and the chair of the Save Lewisham Hospital Campaign, launched a petition on December 2, through 38 Degrees, entitled, “Jeremy Hunt: Axe the Hospital Closure,” which has over 123,000 signatures. Please sign it if you care about the NHS and the future of our hospitals, and please share it as widely as possible.

As Louise explained in the petition:

After losing in court, Jeremy Hunt’s trying to sneak a change into a law to allow him “to dismantle hospital services arbitrarily.” Even the very best hospitals wouldn’t be safe. This sinister clause is hidden within a much bigger piece of law — presumably he’s hoping that it will go through unnoticed.

A big petition can help stop this happening. When the bill is next debated, we can prove that thousands of us are coming together against these plans. Every signature helps sound the alarm. Every signature is a blow to Jeremy Hunt’s reputation, an extra voice against him getting new powers to shut hospitals.

Jeremy Hunt saw the public outcry the last time the government changed the law to damage the NHS. He saw his predecessor, Andrew Lansley, lose his job. The last thing Jeremy Hunt will want to see is 38 Degrees members coming together again to stand up for NHS.

On OpenDemocracy, Louise and Caroline Molloy explained more about Clause 118. They wrote:

The government is trying to quickly change the law to make it much easier and faster to close local hospitals and A&Es without any proper consultation of local people.

The law change will be debated … on in the Commons on December 16th as part of the Care Bill, which has already been through the Lords. Clause 118, the hospital closure clause, would allow any hospital to be closed down, or lose its A&E, maternity or other services, with hardly any local consultation. MPs must ensure this dreadful Clause does not become law.

Currently the law allows such undemocratic and fast-track closures to happen only at hospitals that are in such serious financial or clinical difficulties that they are taken into ‘Administration’.

But the hospital closure clause would change the law. It allows fast-track closures — or privatisations — to happen to any hospital, however high quality, popular and solvent, if it has a more struggling hospital nearby. And given the cuts currently being inflicted on the NHS, there will be few hospitals in the country that aren’t somewhere near a struggling hospital.

As Louise and Caroline mentioned, MPs will be debating the Care Bill on Monday, so before that, as well a signing and sharing the petition, please ask your MP to vote against Clause 118 via WriteToThem. You can also ask them to sign up to the Early Day Motion, “Closure of NHS Services,” if they haven’t already. Disgracefully, just 37 MPs have signed it.

Louise has just sent out a message about Monday’s vote, involving the petition (to date) being handed in at the Department of Health on Whitehall, which is a good opportunity to secure some publicity.

As she explains:

The second reading of the Care Bill, to which the clause is attached, is taking place on Monday 16th December. We want to alert MPs to the existence of clause 118 and urge them to vote against it when the opportunity arises — this may be later in the parliamentary course of the Care Bill.

MPs need to understand the importance of this clause for the future of NHS services in their localities: that it will remove any vestige of democratic influence by the community, local councils or local clinicians about what happens to their local hospitals — regardless of how good a service they provide for local people.

So we’ve decided to do an “interim hand-in” of the petition on Monday. Come and join us on Monday at 1pm outside the Department of Health at Westminster! Lewisham Hospital campaigners will be there with campaigners from other hospitals under threat. We will make a splash and generate some press coverage to raise awareness of the clause amongst the public and MPs.

We will continue the petition and do further lobbying and a final petition hand in close to any crunch vote on Clause 118.

If you’re in London, I hope to see you there, but for now, please sign and share the petition, contact your MPs, and, for a musical interlude, check out “A Bridge Over You,” the Christmas single by Lewisham & Greenwich NHS Choir, a choir of doctors, nurses, therapists and many other professionals from across the NHS workforce who came together for the BBC series “Sing While You Work” with Gareth Malone. The video is below, and the single (in which Simon & Garfunkel meet Coldplay) can be downloaded here. Proceeds will be shared between Macmillan Cancer Support and local healthcare charities.

Note: Here are the MPs who care — this is a list of the 37 MPs who have signed up to the Early Day Motion, “Closure of NHS Services,” put forward by the Green MP Caroline Lucas. MPs who have not signed up (see a list of all MPs here) deserve to be told that, if the hospitals in their constituencies come under threat, they will be to blame. This is currently the case with all Lib Dem and Tory MPs, and most of Labour’s 257 MPs (although please be aware that ministers and shadow ministers are unable to sign up to EDMs). To reiterate, the list below is of the MPs who have signed up to the EDM, and have shown that they do care abut the NHS:

Heidi Alexander (Lab, Lewisham East), David Anderson (Lab, Blaydon), Hugh Bayley (Lab, York Central), Ronnie Campbell (Lab, Blyth Valley), Martin Caton (Lab, Gower), Tom Clarke (Lab, Coatbridge Chryston and Bellshill), Jeremy Corbyn (Lab, Islington North), Geraint Davies (Lab, Swansea West), Jim Dobbin (Lab, Heywood and Middleton), Frank Dobson (Lab, Holborn and St Pancras), Jim Dowd (Lab, Lewisham West and Penge), Paul Flynn (Lab, Newport West), George Galloway (Respect, Bradford West), Roger Godsiff (Lab, Birmingham Hall Green), Fabian Hamilton (Lab, Leeds North East), Stephen Hepburn (Lab, Jarrow), Kate Hoey (Lab, Vauxhall), Kelvin Hopkins (Lab, Luton North), Glenda Jackson (Lab, Hampstead and Kilburn), David Lammy (Lab, Tottenham), Andrew Love (Lab, Edmonton), Caroline Lucas (Green, Brighton Pavilion), Gordon Marsden (Lab, Blackpool South), John McDonnell (Lab, Hayes and Harlington), Jim McGovern (Lab, Dundee West), Alan Meale (Lab, Mansfield), Ian Mearns (Lab, Gateshead), Linda Riordan (Lab, Halifax), Margaret Ritchie (Social Democratic and Labour Party, South Down), Joan Ruddock (Lab, Lewisham Deptford), Virendra Sharma (Lab, Ealing Southall), Dennis Skinner (Lab, Bolsover), Andy Slaughter (Lab, Hammersmith), Graham Stringer (Lab, Blackley and Broughton), Valerie Vaz (Lab, Walsall South), Tom Watson (Lab, West Bromwich East), Mike Wood (Batley and Spen).

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.

Fundraiser Day 3: Still Seeking $2000 to Support My Guantánamo Work

Please support my work!

Dear friends and supporters,

It’s the third day of my quarterly fundraiser, in which I ask you, if you can, to support my work on Guantánamo and related issues as a freelance investigative journalist. If you can help out at all, please click on the “Donate” button above to donate via PayPal.

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

Although I receive some support for my work on the “Close Guantánamo” campaign and website, most of what I do is unpaid — or, to be more accurate, is reader-supported. A donation of $25 (£15) is just $2 (or £1) a week for the next three months, which, I hope, isn’t too much to ask to help me to continue to write the five articles I publish on average every week.

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

My work on Guantánamo, torture and other crimes of the “war on terror” involves me working as a researcher, writer, public speaker and activist, and I promise, with your support, to keep working on all these fronts as much as possible, to keep educating people, and to keep exerting as much pressure as possible on the Obama administration and on Congress to release cleared prisoners from Guantánamo (82 of the remaining 162 prisoners), to deliver justice to the other 80 prisoners, and, finally, to close the prison, as President Obama promised when he first took office in 2009. Every day Guantánamo remains open it corrodes America’s ability to regard itself as a nation that believes in the rule of law, and in fairness and justice.

With thanks, as always, for your support,

Andy Worthington

London

December 11, 2013

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.

Read My Latest Article for Al-Jazeera About the Problems with Guantánamo’s New Review Boards

Dear friends and supporters,

I do hope you have time to read my latest article for Al-Jazeera, “Guantánamo’s secretive review boards,” and to share it if you find it worthwhile. It was posted yesterday, and I’m glad to note that it has been in the top ten most viewed articles.

It deals with the Periodic Review Boards at Guantánamo, established to review the cases of the majority of the prisoners who have not been cleared for release. Of the 162 men still held, 82 were cleared for release by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established shortly after taking office, while the other 80 were either recommended for ongoing detention without charge or trial, or for prosecution.

In March 2011, President Obama issued an executive order authorizing the ongoing detention without charge or trial of 48 men based on the task force’s recommendations, on the unacceptable basis that they were too dangerous to release but that insufficient evidence existed to put them on trial — which meant, of course, that what purported to be evidence was no such thing, and consisted largely of dubious statements by the prisoners, produced in circumstances that were not conducive to truth-telling.

The president only sweetened his outrageous decision to issue an executive order authorizing indefinite detention by promising that these men would receive periodic reviews, to establish whether they should continue to be held. Shamefully, however, the review boards were not established until this summer (over three years later), and the first hearing only took place two weeks ago, of a Yemeni named Mahmud al-Mujahid (aka Mahmoud al-Mujahid), who, like many of the remaining prisoners, has spent over a third of his life at Guantánamo. 33 years old, he was first seized crossing from Afghanistan to Pakistan in December 2001, when he was just 21. Ludicrously, the notion that he was in Afghanistan to support the Taliban — as many of the prisoners were, if they were not charity workers, missionaries or refugees –was replaced, in Guantánamo, with an absurd claim that he had been a bodyguard of Osama bin Laden, a claim made in a number of deeply unreliable statements by his fellow prisoners.

The review boards have barely been touched upon in the mainstream media, with the exception of the indefatigable Carol Rosenberg in the Miami Herald, and I hope you have the opportunity to read my article, as it contains new information about them, which, unfortunately, does not augur well for those still held — primarily, that the review process for the 46 survivors of the president’s executive order (after two died), plus 25 others who had been slated for prosecution until the military commission trial system began unravelling, is moving so slowly that it will take many years for all the men’s cases to be reviewed, even if — as is not yet clear — there is a willingness on the part of the authorities to critically examine whether the men do actually constitute any kind of threat.

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.

President Obama Forcibly Repatriates Two Algerians from Guantánamo

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

Here at “Close Guantánamo,” we are disappointed to hear that Djamel Ameziane and Belkacem Bensayah, two Algerian prisoners at Guantánamo — amongst 84 men who have long been cleared for release — were repatriated last week. We are disappointed because both men did not wish to return home, as they fear ill-treatment by the government and threats from Islamist militants, and yet sustained efforts were not made to find new homes for them. We are also disappointed that other cleared prisoners, who do not fear repatriation, continue to be held.

Lawyers at the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, who represent Djamel Ameziane, have been fighting his enforced repatriation for years, taking his case to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), which, last year, issued a damning verdict on the US government’s detention policies at Guantánamo. Ameziane’s lawyers also devoted a considerable amount of time to seeking a third country that would offer him a new home instead. However, as the New York Times noted in a powerful editorial criticizing the Obama administration for repatriating Ameziane and Bensayah:

The Obama administration continued to block his release to anywhere but Algeria, even after Luxembourg expressed interest in resettling him. During a 2009 hearing, Federal District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle told government lawyers she was “appalled” at the situation.

“I don’t know why in the world the only thing that the government can see here is Algeria,” she said. “I think it’s our duty to try to do something about these people down there and not just say, OK, go to where you came from.”

As I explained in an article last week after the Wall Street Journal first reported the plans to repatriate the two men, Djamel Ameziane, 46, a Berber, fled Algeria more than 20 years ago, to avoid the bloody civil war that engulfed his homeland, and tried to settle in Austria and Canada. However, although he worked successfully as a chef, he ran up against hostile immigration policies in both countries. Like many essentially stateless refugees in the years before the 9/11 attacks, he ended up in Afghanistan because the country welcomed Muslims and he had nowhere else to go.

Ameziane was seized after 9/11 like many other innocent men in Afghanistan or Pakistan. Many of these men were actually sold to the US by their Afghan and Pakistani allies. who were enticed by bounty payments of $5,000 a head for foreigners who could be passed off as al-Qaeda or Taliban members.

As the New York Times explained in its editorial, Ameziane filed a habeas corpus petition seeking his release in 2005, “but the case was postponed indefinitely, even though the government never alleged that he was engaged in terrorist activities.” The Times also noted that in late 2008 the Bush administration “admitted that there were no longer any ‘military rationales’ for detaining him and cleared him for transfer.” He was also cleared for release in January 2010 by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established shortly after taking office in January 2009 — the task force that cleared 82 of the other prisoners still held.

Belkacem Bensayah, 51, had been living in Bosnia, where he had married a Bosnian woman, and had two daughters. In October 2001, he and five others were targeted by the US authorities in connection with an alleged plot to blow up the US embassy in Sarajevo. This turned out to be groundless allegation, but the Bush administration forced the Bosnian government to arrest and investigate the men. After the Bosnian authorities had investigated the man and turned up no evidence of a plot, US agents kidnapped them as they were freed, in January 2002, and flew them to Guantánamo.

In November 2008, five of the six men had their habeas corpus petitions granted by a US judge, although Bensayah’s habeas petition was turned down on the basis of allegations by the US that were later abandoned. The appeals court in Washington D.C. later granted his appeal, and ordered the lower court to reconsider his habeas petition, but in the meantime he too had been cleared for release by President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force, although the US authorities had no desire to send him back to Bosnia.

Robert Kirsch, one of his lawyers, told Jess Bravin of the Wall Street Journal that Bensayah wanted to be “returned to Bosnia, where his wife and daughters are citizens and still live, or some third country where he could be reunited with his family,” and not to Algeria. However, a US official responded by telling Bravin that “Washington’s preference is to repatriate detainees to the country where they are citizens,” which might be a useful general rule, but is not one that should be applied to men who have good reasons for not wanting to be repatriated.

As the New York Times editorial concluded, “In a speech in May, Mr. Obama rightly observed that Guantánamo ‘has become a symbol around the world for an America that flouts the rule of law.’ He does not help matters by forcibly returning detainees to countries where they reasonably fear for their safety.”

Responding to the news, lawyers for the men expressed dismay. Wells Dixon of the Center for Constitutional Rights, who has spent years trying to find a new home for Djamel Ameziane, told the New York Times, “I think that these guys are numbers on a spreadsheet for the State Department. I think the State Department doesn’t care if it ruins their lives.” CCR Executive Director Vince Warren said, “At a time when Congress is moving toward easing restrictions on detainee transfers, the Obama Administration is moving in the wrong direction. Djamel Ameziane’s forced transfer is a serious political and diplomatic misstep that underscores the sad reality that the administration has no serious plan to close Guantánamo.”

CCR added that Ameziane “has a pending application for resettlement in Canada, where he has family members who are citizens, and is sponsored by the Anglican Diocese of Montreal,” and also noted Luxembourg’s offer to resettle him, adding that other countries “have expressed similar interest including very recently.” As CCR’s news release explained, “He could be living a quiet, free life in Europe or Canada, but instead is now in secret detention in Algiers.”

Mark Fleming, one of Belkacem Bensayah’s lawyers, said, “Mr. Bensayah was adamant that he would rather stay at Guantánamo than return to Algeria, not only because he wanted to be reunited with his family in Bosnia after 12 years apart, which now seems increasingly difficult — if not impossible — but he also feared he would be a target for actual extremists in Algeria.”

Fleming added that Bensayah’s legal team had tried to get Bosnia to take him back, because his wife and daughters still live there, but the Bosnian government has revoked his citizenship, and was not interested in reinstating it. As the New York Times described it, he said the US “should have tried harder to get another European country to take him.”

In addition, Robert Kirsch told the Los Angeles Times that “US officials inquired years ago about sending him to Europe so he could reunite with his wife and two daughters,” but added that the US government had “not tried again recently.” He also explained that Bensayah is from southern Algeria, where the security situation is poor, meaning that there is a risk for him in his home village. He also noted that, when the Pentagon announced his repatriation, their news release transposed his first and last names. “He is still just a number to them,” he said.

In its article after the men’s repatriation, the New York Times also noted that Ian Moss, a spokesman at the State Department for Guantánamo transfer issues, “defended the decision to repatriate the two men against their will.” He said the US “had previously repatriated 14 other Algerians,” and was “satisfied that the Algerian government would continue to abide by lawful procedures and uphold its obligations under domestic and international law in managing the return of former Guantánamo detainees.”

This is not strictly true, as Aziz Abdul Naji, who was forcibly repatriated in 2010, was imprisoned upon his return, and was tried and convicted in January 2012 of “belonging to a terrorist group abroad,” and given a a three-year prison sentence.

Moss also told the New York Times that “resettling Mr. Ameziane in another country was not a ‘viable’ option,” but did not explain why, and I believe that, in fact, the only reason Ameziane was forcibly repatriated was because the US — like the UK — has a long-standing willingness to repatriate Algerians who have ended up being accused of terrorism — however groundless those claims may be — and it is also apparent that both the US and the UK want to keep the Algerian regime sweet because of Algeria’s plentiful supply of gas and oil.

Describing what will happen now, Wells Dixon told Politico, “My understanding is [Ameziane] will remain in secret detention for perhaps about two weeks, maybe even longer, and after that likely be subject to some kind of a trial for unspecified offenses. It’s that trial where he’s really going to face a serious risk of persecution. The Algerian judicial system is not independent from the state security services.”

President Obama’s national security adviser, Susan E. Rice, also spoke about the two men’s repatriation on Wednesday as part of President Obama’s renewed efforts to close Guantánamo, and said, “We expect to announce more transfers in the near future.”

With 162 men remaining at Guantánamo, 82 of whom were cleared for release by the Guantánamo Review Task Force, it is to be hoped that future releases will be of people who want to be repatriated, or for whom suitable third countries are found if they cannot be safely repatriated. Before the men’s repatriation, Andrea Prasow of Human Rights Watch stressed that it was unacceptable that, “while the US moves to forcibly repatriate the Algerians, cleared detainees from other countries haven’t been released,” and as I explained in my article last week:

That is certainly true, and it needs to be asked why some of these other men — including Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, for example — are not freed instead of the unwilling Algerians. Other prisoners long cleared for release — five Tunisians; the Mauritanian Ahmed Ould Abdel Aziz; Salem Gherebi, a Libyan; Saad Qahtani, a Saudi; and Ibrahim Idris, a severely mentally ill Sudanese prisoner — also need to be freed.

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.

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009, and the 73 prisoners released from February 2009 to August 2013, whose stories are covered in more detail than is available anywhere else –- either in print or on the Internet –- although many of them, of course, are also covered in The Guantánamo Files: June 2007 –- 2 Tunisians, 4 Yemenis (here, here and here); July 2007 –- 16 Saudis; August 2007 –- 1 Bahraini, 5 Afghans; September 2007 –- 16 Saudis; September 2007 –- 1 Mauritanian; September 2007 –- 1 Libyan, 1 Yemeni, 6 Afghans; November 2007 –- 3 Jordanians, 8 Afghans; November 2007 –- 14 Saudis; December 2007 –- 2 Sudanese; December 2007 –- 13 Afghans (here and here); December 2007 –- 3 British residents; December 2007 –- 10 Saudis; May 2008 –- 3 Sudanese, 1 Moroccan, 5 Afghans (here, here and here); July 2008 –- 2 Algerians; July 2008 –- 1 Qatari, 1 United Arab Emirati, 1 Afghan; August 2008 –- 2 Algerians; September 2008 –- 1 Pakistani, 2 Afghans (here and here); September 2008 –- 1 Sudanese, 1 Algerian; November 2008 –- 1 Kazakh, 1 Somali, 1 Tajik; November 2008 –- 2 Algerians; November 2008 –- 1 Yemeni (Salim Hamdan) repatriated to serve out the last month of his sentence; December 2008 –- 3 Bosnian Algerians; January 2009 –- 1 Afghan, 1 Algerian, 4 Iraqis; ; February 2009 — 1 British resident (Binyam Mohamed); May 2009 —1 Bosnian Algerian (Lakhdar Boumediene); June 2009 — 1 Chadian (Mohammed El-Gharani), 4 Uighurs to Bermuda, 1 Iraqi, 3 Saudis (here and here); August 2009 — 1 Afghan (Mohamed Jawad), 2 Syrians to Portugal; September 2009 — 1 Yemeni, 2 Uzbeks to Ireland (here and here); October 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti, 1 prisoner of undisclosed nationality to Belgium; October 2009 — 6 Uighurs to Palau; November 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian to France, 1 unidentified Palestinian to Hungary, 2 Tunisians to Italian custody; December 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti (Fouad al-Rabiah); December 2009 — 2 Somalis, 4 Afghans, 6 Yemenis; January 2010 — 2 Algerians, 1 Uzbek to Switzerland, 1 Egyptian, 1 Azerbaijani and 1 Tunisian to Slovakia; February 2010 — 1 Egyptian, 1 Libyan, 1 Tunisian to Albania, 1 Palestinian to Spain; March 2010 — 1 Libyan, 2 unidentified prisoners to Georgia, 2 Uighurs to Switzerland; May 2010 — 1 Syrian to Bulgaria, 1 Yemeni to Spain; July 2010 — 1 Yemeni (Mohammed Hassan Odaini); July 2010 — 1 Algerian, 1 Syrian to Cape Verde, 1 Uzbek to Latvia, 1 unidentified Afghan to Spain; September 2010 — 1 Palestinian, 1 Syrian to Germany; January 2011 – 1 Algerian; April 2012 – 2 Uighurs to El Salvador; July 2012 — 1 Sudanese; September 2012 — 1 Canadian (Omar Khadr) to ongoing imprisonment in Canada; August 2013 — 2 Algerians.

Quarterly Fundraiser: Please Help Me Raise $2500 for my Work on Guantánamo

Please support my work!

Dear friends and supporters,

Can you help to support my work on Guantánamo as a researcher, writer, public speaker and activist? Every three months, I ask you to make a donation to support my work. Please click on the link above if you can help out.

Without your support — and your support alone — I would not be able to undertake most of my work; and that means the majority of the 60-plus articles I’ve written and published since my last fundraiser in September, as well as the personal appearances, the TV and radio interviews, and the maintenance of this website and various social media sites associated with it.

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

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

$25 (£15) is just $2 (or £1) a week for the next three months. I do hope that this isn’t too much to ask to help me to continue to write the five articles I publish on average every week. Although I do receive some support for my work on the “Close Guantánamo” campaign and website, most of what I do is unpaid — or, to be more accurate, is reader-supported.

So if you appreciate my work on Guantánamo and related issues — or my writing and campaigning and photography in the UK, against the Tory-led government’s cynical austerity program, and, in particular, in support of the NHS — please donate to keep me working.

The 162 men still held Guantánamo continue to need our support. Although the prison-wide hunger strike earlier this year woke up the mainstream media to the ongoing injustice of Guantánamo, and helped to lead to renewed pressure on President Obama to resume releasing prisoners, and to overcome obstacles raised by Congress, little progress has been made since the president delivered a major speech on national security issues in May.

I promise to keep pushing for the release of the 82 prisoners cleared for release in 2010 but still held, and for justice for the other 80 men, as well as calling for Guantánamo to be closed, and I will be visiting the US next month for protests and events around January 11, which, sadly, is the 12th anniversary of the prison’s opening. I also plan to update my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and to resume my analysis of the classified military files about the Guantánamo prisoners, released by WikiLeaks in 2011, and your donations will help me to make these projects happen.

With thanks, as always, for your support,

Andy Worthington

London

December 9, 2013

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.

Radio: Andy Worthington Discusses the European Court of Human Rights’ Hearing About Poland’s CIA Torture Prison on Voice of Russia

[image error]On Monday and Tuesday, as I explained in a subsequent article, “an important step took place in the quest for those who ordered and undertook torture in the Bush administration’s ‘war on terror’ to be held accountable for their actions,” when a ground-breaking hearing took place in Strasbourg. For the first time since the start of the “war on terror” and the abuses that, in particular, took place between 2002 and 2006, the European Court of Human Rights listened to evidence about the role of the Polish authorities in the extraordinary rendition, secret detention and torture of two men currently held in the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.

Both men were held at a secret prison at Stare Kiejkuty in the northeast of the country, between December 2002, when they were moved from a previous CIA “black site” in Thailand, until October 2003, when they were moved for five months to “Strawberry Fields,” a secret facility in Guantánamo, until the Bush administration realized that the Supreme Court was about to grant the Guantánamo prisoners habeas corpus rights, thereby allowing lawyers to visit and to shatter the secrecy that was necessary for torture abuse to take place unchallenged. They were then shunted around other “black sites” in Romania, Lithuania and Morocco, until they were returned to Guantánamo in September 2006, with 12 other “high-value detainees” held in “black sites” for several years.

Writing about the hearing, Crofton Black, an investigator with Reprieve, one of the organizations representing Abu Zubaydah, stated that the court had “heard overwhelming and uncontested evidence that the CIA was running a secret torture prison on Polish soil, with the Polish government’s knowledge.” As I wrote in my article, “although I am prepared for disappointment, I certainly hope that the European Court of Human Rights will find that the Polish authorities acted unlawfully in hosting a CIA ‘black site’ on their territory.”

On Thursday, I was delighted to be asked to talk about the case by Yekaterina Kudashkina of the Voice of Russia, for the “Burning Point” show, and the 15-minute show is available here.

Below is an excerpt from the interview, which I hope provides some useful insight into what I discussed with Yekaterina in our interview. I hope you have a quarter of an hour to spare to listen to the whole program, and to share it with others..

Andy Worthington: The first thing we need to understand is that people have been seeking accountability for what happened in the war on terror for many years now. And what we are talking about is the US engaging in the torture of individuals, which is illegal.

And according to the UN Convention against Torture, which almost everybody has signed up to, including the Americans, when countries find out that torture has taken place, they must take steps to prosecute the people responsible. The US has abdicated all its responsibilities for that. President Bush obviously had no desire to prosecute himself. But most importantly, President Obama has refused to hold anybody accountable for what took place.

So, in the absence of there being any accountability in the US, efforts have been made to seek accountability in other countries. And clearly the people who are in the most vulnerable position, as far as calls for accountability go, are those handful of countries that hosted CIA black sites, where the US agents were torturing prisoners.

The case of Poland is partly about trying to hold the Polish Government accountable for their complicity in the prison that was on their soil, but also partly because there appears to be no other way of getting close to holding the Americans accountable for what they did.

Also featured on the show was Tomoyuki Hashimoto, Lecturer of International Relations at the University of New York in Tirana and a PhD student at the University of Oxford, who stated that, although he couldn’t “see any political movement in terms of why the lawyers for Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri made their claim, “I see a very good intention and a very interesting political motivation of why the court accepted it. I think the court wants to hear these general human rights issues in the world, and this is the best case they can have.”

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.

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

If you’re in London, or anywhere near, and you care about the ongoing injustices of Guantánamo, then please come to a Parliamentary meeting for Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo Bay, on Tuesday December 10, which is Human Rights Day. Established by the UN in 1950, Human Rights Day marks the anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was approved on December 10, 1948.

Please also sign the international petition calling for his release, on the Care 2 Petition site.

Shaker, whose voice was recently recorded at Guantánamo by a CBS news crew, is one of 82 prisoners in Guantánamo who have long been cleared for release but are still held, and his continued imprisonment remains thoroughly unacceptable, because, although Congress has raised obstacles to the release of prisoners to countries they regard as dangerous, there is no conceivable way that the UK — America’s staunchest ally in the “war on terror” — could be regarded as an unsafe destination. Furthermore, the release yesterday of two Algerian prisoners who did not want to be repatriated, because they fear for their safety in their home country, which has a dubious human rights record, is not only a deeply troubling outcome for them, but also adds insult to injury where Shaker is concerned.

On the 65th anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Parliamentary meeting, organised by John McDonnell MP, one of the few genuinely principled MPs in Parliament, is entitled, “Why is Shaker Aamer still in Guantanamo? What about his human rights?” and is taking place from 7-9pm in Committee Room 10 in the House of Commons, London WC1A 0AA.

Speakers, in addition to John McDonnell, are the journalists Andy Worthington, Yvonne Ridley and Victoria Brittain; and Joy Hurcombe, the chair of the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign. The Green MP Caroline Lucas hoping to come, and Jane Ellison, the Conservative MP for Battersea — and Shaker’s constituency MP — has also been invited.

The Parliamentary meeting, following on the from the march and rally for Shaker that the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign recently held in Battersea, provides another opportunity to keep the spotlight on the British government, regarding ministers’ failure to secure Shaker’s release from Guantánamo. Although the government has repeatedly stated that it is working hard to secure Shaker’s release — and David Cameron apparently raised his case with President Obama during a recent G8 summit — it remains perplexing that he is still held, as the UK ought to be able to secure his return if it was made enough of an issue.

I hope to see some of you at the House of Commons on Tuesday, and in the meantime please read Shaker’s latest words from Guantánamo, as published in the Huffington Post, based on a recent phone call between Shaker and one of his lawyers, Clive Stafford Smith, the director of the legal action charity Reprieve, whose lawyers represent 15 prisoners still held at Guantánamo.

Will They Ever Let Us Back to Our Families?

By Shaker Aamer, Huffington Post, November 29, 2013

I have a very strong sense of family values, which makes my life in Guantánamo Bay a thousand times worse than it might be. I have four beautiful children who I have not seen for twelve years. My youngest, Faris, was born on February 14, 2002, which was the day I arrived in this terrible place. So I have never touched him, never even hugged him.

I believe that hugging kids is like a jar that you are filling with love. You need to hug them as much as you possibly can when they are young.

When I am in my cell I try to meditate. I try to imagine I am on a beach. In my imagination I go to the UK. As I circle around the sky above London, I look out for my house. Finally I locate it there in Battersea, and I swoop down to sit outside the window. There I sit, quietly watching my kids. Sometimes, I find myself talking to my wife. I feel as if it is real, and it gives me real solace. I want my family to know I am strong because they are strong. And always remember: no regrets, no regrets, no regrets.

I worry for other people in this prison. I know that Prime Minister David Cameron has specifically asked President Barack Obama to let me come home to my family. If two of the most powerful countries in the world can’t do it, what hope is there for other detainees?

I do not understand why they won’t let me go, and nobody is willing to give me any kind of an explanation. I do not spend too much time looking for an apology for everything that has happened to me here. It is all political. They won’t admit mistakes. It is all about covering up.

I know I will leave here one day, perhaps soon. I have long been cleared, for six years now. But what of the other men here? Again, I worry about the 80 people who have not been cleared more than I do about myself and the other 83 who have. Some might get a trial of sorts, but scores never will. They say it’s because they can’t use the evidence against them in court. Even if we believe this excuse, we might well ask why the evidence is inadmissible — is it because they tortured the men? If so, then a thousand years of experience tells us that the statements are certainly unreliable, and probably false.

But let’s pretend for a moment that the torture statements made by these men are true: the US should look at the worst that each person is meant to have done, assume they did it even if they did not, and then ask whether they deserve more than twelve years of abuse in this terrible prison.

We might consider twelve years in a terrible prison, for an unidentified crime, imposed without a trial, as harsh under the most despotic regime. Surely, even for the 40 or 50 people who have not been cleared, but will never be tried, America has exacted its pound of flesh?

Note: For further information about next Tuesday’s Parliamentary meeting, please contact Ray Silk of the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign on 07756 493877. And if you’re coming on Tuesday make sure that you allow up to half an hour to go through security at the St. Stephen’s Gate entrance to the House of Commons. Please also note that the SSAC’s weekly vigils for Shaker, which take place in Parliament Square, opposite the Houses of Parliament, will continue on Wednesday December 11 and Wednesday December 18 from 1-3pm.

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.