Andy Worthington's Blog, page 127

Andy Worthington Attends Amnesty Film Screening About Guantánamo in Canterbury, and a Day for Shaker Aamer in Battersea, Nov. 13 and 23

I just wanted to let you know about a couple of Guantánamo events I’m taking part in, for anyone in London and the south east over the next few weeks, which are listed below. The first, on Wednesday November 13, is a screening by the Canterbury Amnesty Group of “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” the documentary film that I co-directed with the filmmaker Polly Nash, and the second, on Saturday November 23, is a day of action for Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison — who is also featured in the film — in Battersea, in south London, where his wife and children have been awaiting his return for 12 years.

Originally released in 2009, it remains relevant, in the first instance because it tells the story — which I first told in my book The Guantánamo Files, and have been writing about ever since — of how innocent men and boys ended up at Guantánamo with Taliban supporters and a handful of terrorists, in large part because the US was offering substantial bounty payments to its Afghan and Pakistani allies, and how a torture program was then introduced to secure evidence from these men, which, ever since, has been used by the US government to justify the men’s detention, even though most of it is worthless.

Another reason the film remains relevant is because it features the story of Shaker Aamer, who is still held, even though he was first cleared for release in the spring of 2007, two and a half years before the release of “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” and was then cleared again under President Obama in January 2010, after the year-long deliberations of the inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force, which the president established shortly after taking office in January 2009.

He is one of 84 cleared prisoners still held, in part because of obstacles raised by Congress, and in part because of President Obama’s unwillingness to spend political capital overriding Congress, but what is unclear in his case is why the British government has been unable to secure his release, despite ministers repeatedly promising that they have been calling for him to be freed.

I have been covering Shaker’s story assiduously — most recently during the prison-wide hunger strike that ran for many months earlier this year, as can be read here, here, here and here — and most recently, Shaker’s voice was heard in a rare news report from the prison by a major US news network, in this case, CBS’s “60 Minutes,” presented by Lesley Stahl, in which, as was recently explained by the US lawyer Tom Wilner, my colleague in the “Close Guantánamo” campaign:

During Ms. Stahl’s walk-and-talk through a cell block at Guantánamo, one of the detainees dramatically yelled out: “Please, we are tired. Either you leave us to die in peace – or tell the world the truth. Let the world hear what’s happening.” CBS didn’t identify that prisoner, and apparently didn’t try to learn why he said what he did.

The prisoner was Shaker Aamer, a Saudi citizen and, before his incarceration, a permanent resident of Britain. He was cleared for release not only by the special task force four years ago, but even earlier by the Bush Administration. He has been imprisoned at Guantánamo now for almost 12 years, more than half of that time after he had been cleared. That is the real tragedy of Guantánamo — not how we try those few who will be charged, but why we continue to hold the many others who will never be charged and have been cleared. The press should do a story on that.

Tom is exactly right, and while there’s still little willingness in the US in general to recognise how important it is to push for the release of Shaker and the other 83 men cleared for release, and also to push for the closure of the prison, the role of the UK government remains important, as Shaker’s wife explained last week. “Attended a meeting today with the Foreign Secretary William Hague in the Foreign & Commonwealth Office with my father Saeed Siddique and daughter Johina Aamer,” she wrote on Facebook, adding, “Discussed about my husband Shaker Aamer and his release from Guantánamo.” She also said that the meeting “went well,” adding, “we pray and hope that the result is well too,” although she added, ” this is not the first time we attended meetings like this.”

It is my hope that those involved in the events in the next few weeks will be able to help to put pressure on the British government by writing to William Hague to call for Shaker’s return.

Please see below for further information about the two events. both of which are free (although donations are welcome) and open to the general public:

Wednesday November 13, 7pm: Screening of “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” followed by discussion with Andy Worthington, Joy Hurcombe and others

Simon Langton Girls School, Old Dover Road, Canterbury CT1 3EW.

This screening, by the Canterbury Amnesty Group, of the documentary film co-directed by filmmaker Polly Nash and journalist Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files, will be followed by a Q&A session with Andy, Joy Hurcombe, the chair of the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign, Richard Norman, Professor of  Moral Philosophy at the University of Kent, and Namir Shabibia of Reprieve, the London-based legal action charity whose lawyers represent 15 men still held at Guantánamo.

For further information, please contact Huw Kyffin.

Saturday November 23, 12 noon to 5pm: March and Rally for Shaker Aamer -  End his twelve years of torture and abuse, with John McDonnell MP, Andy Worthington, Joy Hurcombe and others

The marchers will assemble at Northcote Baptist Church, 53 Wakehurst Road, London SW11 6DB at 12 noon, and march to the rally at Lower Town Hall, Battersea Arts Centre, Lavender Hill, London SW11 5TN, for 2.15pm.

This event is organised by the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign, relentless campaigners for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, whose family awaits his return in south London. It has been called to mark the 12th anniversary of Shaker’s capture by bounty hunters in Afghanistan,

The speakers, at the rally from 2.15pm onwards, are: John McDonnell MP; Jean Lambert MEP; Andy Worthington, campaigning journalist; Joy Hurcombe, Chair of the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign; Imam Suliman Ghani of Tooting Mosque; Yvonne Ridley of Cageprisoners; the journalist Victoria Brittain; the campaigner Dr. David Nicholl; Aisha Maniar of the London Guantánamo Campaign; Hamja Ahsan, the brother of the extradited UK citizen Talha Ahsan; Daniel Blaney of CND and Steve Bell of the Stop The War Coalition.

The SSAC notes, “The events will be marking the time when Shaker was abducted in Afghanistan — we call for an end to his twelve years of torture and abuse, for a full debate to take place in the House of Commons chamber, for the UK Government to demand and secure Shaker’s return to his family in London, and for the US to immediately release Shaker back to the UK.”

For further information, please contact Ray Silk of the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign.

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

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

Will the End of War in Afghanistan Spur Obama to Close 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.

The short answer to the question, “Will the End of War in Afghanistan Spur Obama to Close Guantánamo?” is probably no, for reasons I will explain below, although it is, of course, significant to numerous interested parties that the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan next year provides an opportunity for new discussions about the ongoing detention of 164 prisoners at Guantánamo, and, probably, new legal challenges on their behalf.

On October 18, the Washington Post discussed these issues in an article entitled, “Afghan war’s approaching end throws legal status of Guantánamo detainees into doubt,” in which Karen DeYoung suggested, “The approaching end of the US war in Afghanistan could help President Obama move toward what he has said he wanted to do since his first day in office: close the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.”

The article described how officials in the Obama administration were “examining whether the withdrawal of US troops at the end of 2014 could open the door” for some of the remaining 164 prisoners “to challenge the legal authority of the United States to continue to imprison them.”

In September, one prisoner, Fawzi al-Odah, who is one of the last two Kuwaiti prisoners still held in Guantánamo, filed a petition with the District Court in Washington D.C., arguing, as Lyle Denniston described it for SCOTUSblog, al-Odah “is making a new plea for his release — just as soon as the US completes its withdrawal from the war in Afghanistan.” At that point, the lawyers for al-Odah argued, “the US government will no longer have a legal basis for holding him.”

Al-Odah’s habeas petition “contended that the Supreme Court has allowed detention of prisoners captured in Afghanistan or Pakistan only as long as ‘armed hostilities’ continue for US forces in that region,” as the Supreme Court affirmed in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld in June 2004. Denniston added, “With the Obama administration’s planned end of those operations by the end of December 2014, the document contended, al-Odah must be sent home to Kuwait.”

In the Washington Post, meanwhile, Karen DeYoung noted that, in particular, officials “believe the war’s declared end could force a reckoning” over the fate of the 17 Afghan prisoners who are still held, and quoted Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, the chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantánamo, who recently stated in an interview, “In the words of the Supreme Court, the authority to detain — if you’re detaining based on someone being a belligerent — can unravel as hot wars end. And I think that’s a real question.”

The Washington Post correctly noted that the justification for holding men at Guantánamo is the Authorization for Use of Military Force against those who “planned, authorized, committed or aided” the 9/11 attacks, and those who “might launch new attacks,” as the Post put it, which was passed by Congress in the days following the attacks. The Post also noted that, in a major speech on national security issues in May, President Obama stated that he “would like to do away with the Authorization for the Use of Military Force,” as the Post described it, “and replace it with more targeted versions to allow action against new al-Qaeda related groups in the Middle East and Africa and other threats as they arise.” In May, he specifically spoke of his goal being to ”refine, and ultimately repeal” the existing authority.

As the Post noted, repealing the 2001 AUMF “could allow other detainees imprisoned under its terms to re-file habeas corpus petitions that the government had successfully quashed.” One senior administration official, speaking anonymously, explained, “If that were to go away, you really don’t have that legal hook for continued detention. I think you would have some very interesting constitutional questions.”

Why it is not true that Congress is preventing the president from releasing Guantánamo prisoners

These are interesting points, but here at “Close Guantánamo” we are concerned by some of the inaccuracies in DeYoung’s article. In particular, when discussing the 164 men still held, she wrote that President Obama has been “[b]locked by Congress from releasing or transferring many of the remaining 164 detainees.”

As my colleague Tom Wilner explains, this is a myth. As he describes it, in “Missing the Point at Guantánamo,” an article published this week on the Warscapes website:

Congress had passed legislation effectively blocking the president from transferring detainees to their home or other countries, but it then amended the law two years ago allowing the president to waive those restrictions. As Carl Levin, the Chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, pointed out, that amendment “provides a clear route for the transfer of detainees to third countries.” The president has simply not used it.

Why the remaining Afghan prisoners are not all “Taliban members captured on the battlefield”

Another error concerns the Afghan prisoners, described, casually, as being “Afghan Taliban members captured on the battlefield,” when this is clearly not the case. Although just 17 Afghans remain at Guantánamo, out of the 218 or so held in total since the prison opened, not all of these men can fairly be described as being Afghan Taliban members” or as having been “captured on the battlefield,” as we have discussed in a number of prisoner profiles — see here and here, and also here.

Why it is not true that there are prisoners at Guantánamo who cannot be tried in federal court, and others who are “too dangerous to release” but are “ineligible for trial”

Another problem with the Post‘s article concerns the claim that, even if the end of the war assists the release of prisoners, the administration “would still need a place to hold those being tried in military commissions, including the alleged 9/11 plotters, and potentially some of the four dozen men deemed too dangerous to release but who are ineligible for trial because evidence against them is inadmissible.”

The point regarding trials is, on the surface, accurate, although it remains to be seen whether the commissions can survive their mauling by appeals court judges last October and in January this year, when conservative judges overturned two of the only convictions in the commissions’ wretched history, ruling that they involved war crimes that were not regarded as war crimes when the legislation approving the commissions was passed. In fact, as anyone paying close attention has known for years, the war crimes were invented by Congress in 2006 after the Supreme Court ruled that the first incarnation of the commissions was illegal, and the Obama administration knew of the problems in 2009, but failed to talk Congress out of passing a third version of the commissions that summer.

This huge blow to the commissions’ credibility led Brig. Gen. Martins to concede, in June this year, that only a maximum of 13 of the prisoners still held would ever face trials, and on November 4 Eric Holder, who had announced in November 2009 that the men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks would be tried in New York, but had then been obliged to drop the trial in the face of cynical political opposition, made a speech in which he made a point of saying that he had been right all along.

Holder said, “I think that what we have seen over these past four years, not to be egocentric about this, but that I was right. I had access to documents, files, recommendations by the military, US attorneys offices in the Eastern District of Virginia as well as the Southern District of New York, and I think the decision that I announced that day was the right one. I think that the facts and events that have occurred since then demonstrate that.”

He added, “We unfortunately did not go down that road for reasons other than those connected to the litigation, I think reasons largely political, I think the opposition was largely political in nature, and I think this is an example of what happens when politics gets into matters that ought to simply be decided by lawyers and by national security experts.”

The bigger problem with the Post‘s claim that the Obama administration “would still need a place to hold those being tried in military commissions … and potentially some of the four dozen men deemed too dangerous to release but who are ineligible for trial because evidence against them is inadmissible,” concerns those four dozen men — or, to be strictly accurate, the 46 men still alive out of the 48 designated for ongoing imprisonment by President Obama’s inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force, two of whom are Fawzi al-Odah and his compatriot, Fayiz al-Kandari, both of whom are not the dangerous prisoners they have been made out to be.

As Tom Wilner also notes:

That line [about prisoners being "too dangerous to release" but "ineligible for trial"] has been repeated time and again by the press, and never examined. It is simply not true. The government’s basis for detaining each of the men at Guantánamo is now publicly available on WikiLeaks. Members of the press can examine the evidence themselves. There are clearly some bad guys down there — generally acknowledged now as fewer than 20. These men can all be tried. The only thing preventing their conviction is the military commission system itself, which is totally untested and ineffective. They would all have been convicted long ago in our federal courts.

An examination of the government’s basis for detaining the other men at Guantánamo shows that the reason they can’t be tried is not because the evidence against them is inadmissible, but simply because it is so flimsy and speculative that it would be laughed out of any federal court in the country. It would be a good thing if the press examined that evidence. And it would be a good thing if it would pay more attention to the continuing injustice at Guantánamo which is so contrary to our nation’s fundamental values and remains such a blemish on our reputation around the world.

Scrap the Authorization for Use of Military Force, yes, but don’t let President Obama off the hook

As the Periodic Review Board process gets underway, in which these 46 men, plus 25 others once deemed eligible for trials, will have their cases reviewed, to see if they should still be held, it remains apparent that the fate of the majority of the men is in the president’s hands. He needs to release the 84 men cleared for release in January 2010 by his task force, as he promised to resume doing in his major speech in May — although since that date just two men have been released. He also needs to make sure that the aim of the Periodic Review Board is to rigorously examine the so-called evidence against the prisoners, as Tom suggests, because so much of it is hearsay and innuendo, or false statements produced under torture or other forms of duress, or through prisoners being bribed with the promise of better living conditions.

It is apparent that the end of the war in Afghanistan provides an important opportunity for the AUMF to be scrapped. As the Post noted, the AUMF has provided the legal justification not only for military action in Afghanistan, but also for the global program of drone attacks. The Post also noted, correctly, “With no legislative or legal challenge, Obama has also adopted a more expanded interpretation of the law to use force against al-Qaeda ‘associates,’ including groups that did not exist when it was first enacted.”

“As currently interpreted,” the Post continued, “the AUMF has no geographic boundaries and can justify military action anywhere in the world where the administration determines it applies.” Under Obama, it has been used to justify drone strikes in Yemen (including lethal strikes against US citizens) and Somalia, and, just last month, it was cited as the legal authority for the kidnap by US Special Forces of Abu Anas al-Libi in Libya, and another failed operation in Somalia.

Reflecting on the use of the AUMF over the last 12 years, former Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), who voted for it on September 14, 2001, said recently, “I never imagined that the AUMF would still be in effect today. Over time, some would assert, and I agree, that it has taken on a life of its own, and the executive branch has used it in ways that no one who voted for it envisioned.”

However, the Post also noted, “Others have been reluctant to do away with it or narrow its scope, in part because of the potential effect its demise could have on Guantánamo” — where, although the Post failed to explain it, dark forces, particularly amongst Republicans in Congress, are determined to keep the prison open, for misguided, and perhaps even malevolent reasons of their own.

Despite Obama’s fine words about the AUMF, the only proposal to do away with it –an amendment proposed by Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) to repeal it after troops leave Afghanistan in December 2014 — was defeated by 236 votes to 180. Rep. Schiff told the Post that ending the AUMF “forces the issue,” adding, “It doesn’t mean there would have to be some precipitous decision” on Guantánamo, “but the clock would very much be ticking.”

According to this scenario, the clock has not yet even begun ticking on Guantánamo, although after nearly 12 years of monstrous injustice, that is clearly ridiculous. It is good that bringing the AUMF to an end is being discussed, and that the withdrawal of troops will bring new legal challenges, but, as we have persistently made clear here at “Close Guantanamo,” the president has the authority to release the 84 cleared prisoners who are still held, and the majority of the other men need to have the supposed basis for their ongoing imprisonment examined in a very detailed and objective manner.

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: Burning Effigies of Tories and Protesting About Austerity and PFI at the Bonfire of Cuts in Lewisham

[image error]

Burning Effigies of Tories at the Bonfire of Cuts in Lewisham, a set on Flickr.

On November 5, 2013 — Bonfire Night — I photographed effigies of members of the cabinet of the Tory-led coalition government — including David Cameron, George Osborne and others, as well as key Lib Dems and Labour politicians — as they were burned by activists in a brazier in the centre of Lewisham, in south east London. The caricatures were drawn by a member of the political group People Before Profit.

The activists in Lewisham were part of a day of action across the UK, in which numerous protestors held Bonfires of Austerity, initiated by the People’s Assembly Against Austerity, an anti-austerity coalition of activists, union members and MPs, to protest about the wretched Tory-led coalition government’s continued assault on the very fabric of the state, and on the most vulnerable members of society — particularly, the poor, the ill, the unemployed and the disabled.

The borough of Lewisham, where I live, is famous for successfully resisting the government’s plans to severely downgrade services at the local hospital, and on Bonfire Night activists marched from Catford to an open space in the centre of Lewisham (by the main roundabout, and affectionately known as “the grassy knoll”), where they burned effigies of David Cameron, George Osborne, Theresa May, Jeremy Hunt, Michael Gove, Iain Duncan Smith and Boris Johnson. The protestors also burned effigies of the Lib Dems Nick Clegg and Vince Cable, key members of the disastrous coalition government, and Labour’s Gordon Brown and Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor.

In many cases, those chosen to burn on Bonfire Night, when it is traditional to burn effigies of unpopular figures, had some involvement in the Private Finance Initiative (PFI), popularised by New Labour, whereby major projects for society as a whole — the building of schools and hospitals, for example — is farmed out to private companies, who make outrageous profits from the deals. In particular, Gordon Brown was included as “the architect of the PFI catastrophe,” and Ed Balls was included because, outrageously, he defended PFI as “good value for taxpayers’ money” in April this year.

PFI is no such thing, as Ed Balls should know. However, instead of having politicians who defend the need for pubic investment in projects that are of benefit to all — schools and hospitals, for example — all our politicians are enslaved by a corporate mentality, and are committed to handing over more and more of our common resources to private companies, who are not only unaccountable, but are also driven by profit, and not by the need for universal services.

The privatisation programme that Margaret Thatcher embarked upon, in which our utilities and social housing were privatised (and to which John Major later added the railways) literally robbed us of assets that were for the common good. The Tory-led coalition government has now added Royal Mail to that ignominious list, and, moreover, have made it clear that their mission is to destroy the state almost entirely, so that only their own salaries and a few other concerns will remain in public hands, and everything else will be privatised.

In a monstrous sleight of hand that reflects very badly on the British people’s ability to perceive when they are being played (and are, moreover, being played by a bunch of rich crooks), the Tories have been engaged, for the last four years, in painting the poor, the unemployed and the disabled as somehow being to blame for our financial problems, even though the truth is that it was caused by bankers in cahoots with politicians, and by corporate tax avoiders and tax evaders, the kind of people queuing up to profit, with taxpayers’ assistance, in taking over public sector occupations, maximising profits and driving down the quality of services.

In south east London, the cost of New Labour’s embrace of PFI can clearly be seen in the financial failures of the South London Hospital Trust, where two new hospitals, which cost £210 million to build, will have raked in £2.5 billion for the private companies who own them (Barclays, Innisfree and Taylor Woodrow) at the end of a 25-year period — unless someone in power decides that such profiteering ought to be illegal. Those debts contributed to the collapse of the trust, and the plans to make Lewisham Hospital, unconnected to the SLHT, pay for the failures of its neighbour — and its PFI albatross — by having its A&E closed down, its maternity services and other acute services decimated, and half its buildings sold.

That disaster has been averted — or at least delayed — but the costs of PFI continue to cripple other parts of the NHS, up and down the country, and continue to allow unqualified business people, at taxpayers’ expense, to run an ever-increasing number of schools.

What we need are politicians prepared to stand up to the lies that the public sector is bad, and the private sector good. In reality, the opposite is almost entirely true when it comes to public services, as doctors, nurses and teachers, for example, are motivated by something in addition to their salaries — something called “the public good,” which self-serving politicians and profit-maximising corporations have forgotten about.

Note: For further information about the outrageous profiteering in the South London Healthcare Trust PFI deal, see the article in the Independent last July entitled, “The funding timebomb that crippled an NHS healthcare trust.” For information about Innisfree, and a powerful critique of PFI, see “Private Finance Initiative: hospitals will bring taxpayers 60 years of pain,” a January 2011 article by Andrew Gilligan in the Daily Telegraph. Also see this Daily Mail article by John Ware of the BBC’s Panorama.

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.

Third Victim of CIA Torture in Poland Granted Victim Status, as European Court of Human Rights Prepares to Hear Evidence

[image error]It’s almost exactly eight years since Dana Priest of the Washington Post first broke the story, on November 2, 2005, that, “according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents,” the CIA had been “hiding and interrogating some of its most important al-Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe … part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba.”

The Post bowed to pressure from the Bush administration not to reveal the name of any of the countries in Eastern Europe, but just days later, on November 7, 2005, Human Rights Watch announced that the facilities were in Poland — on the grounds of an intelligence training facility near the village of Stare Kiejkuty, in the north east of the country — and Romania. In June 2007, Council of Europe special investigator Dick Marty issued a detailed report about Europe’s role in the US rendition and torture program in which he stated that he had “enough evidence to state” that there definitely had been CIA prisons in Poland and Romania. It later emerged, in December 2009, that a third European torture prison was in Lithuania, but to this day no one in the Bush administration or the CIA has been held accountable for America’s post-9/11 torture program.

Since the stories of the secret prisons first emerged, only Poland has shown any willingness to tackle the revelations with anything approaching the rigor they deserve. The Romanian government has refused to even acknowledge the existence of its prison, despite a detailed investigation exposing its existence, conducted by the Associated Press and Germany’s ARD Panorama, and although the Lithuanian government opened an official investigation, it was closed in 2011 when the government claimed that there was insufficient evidence, also citing restrictions imposed by its statute of limitations.

Just last week, Lithuanian prosecutors “declined to investigate fresh claims” that Mustafa al-Hawsawi, one of five prisoners facing a trial by military commission at Guantánamo for their alleged involvement in the 9/11 attacks, was held in a CIA “black site” in Lithuania between 2004 and 2006, stating that the claims “were nothing new and had been ruled out in a previous pre-trial investigation”, as AFP described it. The other prisoner who has attempted to secure justice in Lithuania is Abu Zubaydah, another alleged “high-value detainee” now held at Guantánamo, who has not been charged (essentially because there is no case against him).

In Poland, however, where an investigation into the “black site” that existed in the north of the country in 2002-03 began five years ago, in March 2008, attempts to shut down the investigation — by or on behalf of the leaders at the time — have failed, and the Prosecutor General continues to seek the truth.

As I explained in an article in March 2012:

In 2008, following investigations by the Council of Europe and the European Parliament, a Polish prosecutor began “investigating the possible abuse of power by Polish public officials with regard to a CIA black site,” although the investigation only became widely noted in September 2010, when lawyers working with the Open Society Justice Initiative “filed an application demanding that the Appellate Prosecutor in Warsaw investigate and prosecute the people responsible for Guantánamo prisoner Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri’s transfer, detention, and torture on Polish soil.”

Al-Nashiri (another “high-value detainee” held and tortured in Thailand prior to his arrival in Poland) was granted victim status in October 2010, and in December 2010, following this success, INTERIGHTS, the international center for human rights, working with the legal action charity Reprieve, the Polish lawyer Bartlomiej Jankowski, and Abu Zubaydah’s US lawyers Joe Margulies and Brent Mickum “filed two applications for Zubaydah providing official notification of crimes committed against him while he was held by the CIA in Poland, and requesting that Abu Zubaydah be formally recognised as a victim in the ongoing investigation into abuse of office by Polish officials, and any criminal investigations that may follow.”

In January 2011, Abu Zubaydah was also recognized as a victim, and although the trail has largely gone cold over the last year, it came back to life on March 27, the day before the 10th anniversary of Zubaydah’s capture, when the Polish media announced that Zbigniew Siemiatkowski, who was the chief of Poland’s intelligence services from 2002 to 2004, when the CIA prison was operating, has been accused, by the Warsaw Prosecutor Waledmar Tyl, of “exceeding his powers and breaching international law, with specific charges that he was involved in the ‘unlawful deprivation of liberty’” of prisoners and their physical punishment.

Siemiatkowski, predictably, announced his intention not to cooperate — as, of course, the United States has all along — but, undeterred, lawyers have continued to push for former prisoners to be granted victim status, and last week the Polish authorities granted victim status (“injured person” status) to a third man, now held at Guantánamo, who was previously held in Poland. That man is Walid bin Attash, a Yemeni, who is also one of the five men in the 9/11 trial.

In a press release, Julia Hall of Amnesty International stated that the Polish government “must have the political courage to tell the truth about the CIA secret site and what happened there.” The press release also noted, “By granting ‘injured person’ status to a torture survivor currently detained at Guantánamo Bay, the Polish authorities are a step closer to revealing the truth about their involvement in the US-led secret detention and rendition programme in Poland.”

Amnesty International also “believes that the injured person status assignment is a key development, as Poland’s investigation of the CIA ‘black site’ has largely been conducted in secret since it began in 2008, with Polish prosecutors refusing to disclose almost any information related to the investigation or make its findings public.” In the press release it is also noted, “Under Polish law an ‘injured person’ may review files as well as make a complaint concerning refusal to disclose documents. Such a person also has the right to challenge delays in the proceedings.”

Mariusz Paplaczyk, who represents bin Attash, stated, “This is a breakthrough. Information about granting ‘injured person’ status in the Polish investigation is extremely important to my client.”

In its press release, Amnesty International also noted that its representatives, and those of other human rights organisations, were attending a meeting at the United Nations in Geneva, while the Polish authorities were submitting a report to the UN Committee against Torture about their human rights record. Amnesty noted, “The CIA secret site investigation and its progress were key concerns at the session,” adding, “UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay also raised them in a recent visit to Poland.”

Poland seeks a secret hearing at the European Court of Human Rights

While bin Attash was being granted victim status, the Polish government asked the European Court of Human Rights to “exclude the media and the public from a court hearing” in Strasbourg about the Polish “black site,” as Reuters described it.

The ECHR has scheduled a public hearing for December 3 to hear arguments in the cases of Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, and, as Reuters described it, “It will be the first time the allegations have been tested in open court.”

The request for a private hearing was criticized by Adam Bodnar, the Vice President of the Warsaw-based Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, who has spent many years working to uncover the truth about Poland’s “black site.” As Reuters described it, the Helsinki Foundation “has uncovered evidence of Polish cooperation with the CIA.” In Reuters’ words, Bodnar “accuses the state of trying to conceal its involvement in the CIA’s ‘extraordinary rendition’ programme behind a veil of secrecy.”

The Polish Foreign Ministry refused to provide a comment to Reuters, referring all inquiries to the court. Reuters noted that, in the past, the Polish government has “cited national security concerns to explain why it wanted parts of the court process to be kept confidential.” Bodnar, however, said that “much of the evidence about the alleged CIA jail was already in the public domain, so there was no point treating it as secret,” as Reuters put it.

“We should have the right to review this case in public,” Bodnar said, adding, “I do not see a reason for [the] confidentiality of proceedings.”

Note: For further information, please read Amnesty International’s 63-page report, “Unlock the truth: Poland’s involvement in CIA secret detention,” published in June 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.

Bonfires of Austerity: Anti-Tory Protests Across the UK on November 5, 2013

On November 5, activists across the UK will be holding Bonfires of Austerity to protest about the wretched Tory-led coalition government’s continued assault on the very fabric of the state, and on the most vulnerable members of society — particularly, the poor, the ill, the unemployed and the disabled.

The British establishment has traditionally celebrated Guy Fawkes Night on November 5, marking the anniversary of the foiled plot by Guy Fawkes and others to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605, although nowadays, I’m glad to note, the anti-Catholic aspect of the festivities has largely disappeared, and the day is more generally known as Bonfire Night (even though bonfires are generally frowned upon in dull, modern-day, health and safety obsessed England).

Thankfully, the spirit of dissent lives on, and this year protests across the country have been initiated by the People’s Assembly Against Austerity, a movement of political activists, union members and the handful of enlightened MPs who exist in Parliament. The movement was launched with a letter published in the Guardian in February, with signatories including Tony Benn, Len McCluskey, Mark Serwotka, John Pilger, Ken Loach and the late Iain Banks, followed by a press conference in March, where speakers included Caroline Lucas MP, journalist Owen Jones, comedian Mark Steel and disabled activist Francesca Martinez, and a meeting attended by over 4,000 people in Westminster Central Hall in June, following meetings and rallies across the country, at which a statement was issued that began as follows:

We face a choice that will shape our society for decades to come. It is a choice faced by ordinary people in every part of the globe.

We can defend education, health and welfare provision funded from general taxation and available to all, or we can surrender the gains that have improved the lives of millions of people for over more than 50 years.

We do not accept that government’s austerity programme is necessary. The banks and the major corporations should be taxed at a rate which can provide the necessary resources. Austerity does not work: it is a failure in its own terms resulting in neither deficit reduction nor growth. It is not just: the government takes money from the pockets of those who did not cause the crisis and rewards those who did. It is immoral: our children face a bleaker future if our services and living standards are devastated. It is undemocratic: at the last election a majority voted against the return of a Tory government. The Con-Dem coalition has delivered us into the grip of the Tories’ whose political project is the destruction of a universal welfare state.

Following the June event, local groups have continued to form and hold meetings across the UK, so if you’re in the UK tomorrow, and want to take part, there will be ‘Bonfire of Austerity’ events in 40 towns and cities, including a mass occupation of Westminster Bridge in London where campaigners will ceremonially burn their energy bills. See the Facebook page here, and see here for the Peoples’ Assembly Facebook page People are asked to meet at Jubilee Gardens in Waterloo at 6pm, to subsequently block Westminster Bridge. The organisers add, “Bring your energy bills: we will be burning our energy bills on the bridge to highlight the massive rise in energy prices which have left people choosing between heating and eating.” There will be fireworks and energy bills will be burned at 7pm.

Events are also taking place across London, one of which I’ll be attending — in Lewisham, where we have a proud tradition of protest, most recently with plans by the government and senior NHS managers to severely downgrade services at Lewisham Hospital. See the Facebook page here, and see here for the Facebook page for the South East London People’s Assembly.

In Lewisham, there will be a procession from Catford to Lewisham, beginning at 4.30pm, culminating in a bonfire and the burning of effigies of politicians by the main roundabout in Lewisham at 6pm. This is how the event is described on the Carnival Against Cuts website:

4.30pm: “Stations of the Cuts” procession from Catford Town Hall, from where we will wend our way to Eros House to highlight the housing crisis, continuing to Rushey Green Early Years centre to protest about the erosion of Lewisham’s provision for under 5s and the threat to close the remaining seven play clubs.

Next is the Job Centre where we will protest about the workfare scheme and raise the demand for more long-term, skilled employment opportunities in Lewisham through bringing public services back into direct council control, a large scale programme of social housebuilding and council support for manufacturing here in Lewisham.

A couple of hundred yards/metres further north brings us to Lewisham Hospital, threatened with downgrading and privatisation. Tens of thousands of people have been involved in the campaign to save the hospital and in the broader campaign to stop the privatisation of the NHS. There have also been various direct action stunts about the Private Finance Initiative.

Two of Lewisham’s fire stations are under threat from Boris Johnson — at Downham and at New Cross. We will be showing support for the Fire Brigades Union and the public campaign against the cuts as we pass Ladywell Fire Station.

From there we will make our next focus Lewisham’s Libraries — five of which were planned for closure in 2011 and are running a severely reduced service with volunteers under a variety of managements. Only vigorous campaigning two years ago prevented these libraries from being closed altogether and the Labour Council and Conservative government have acted jointly to cut the service by over a third in Lewisham.  We will also commemorate Connexions — one of the first services to be totally axed by the council in 2011. It used to give advice to school leavers and others on finding training courses.

The procession will then continue to The Grassy Knoll, in the shadow of the empty Citibank tower, a reminder of the dominance of banking and the alleged reason for all these cuts. There will be a brazier for you to burn specially printed £1million notes and effigies of your favourite politicians responsible for the many attacks on working people.

A press release for the day’s events across the country states, “Campaigners will highlight the human cost of the government’s cuts programme which has seen many local services decimated, jobs lost, wages frozen and the benefits which supported some of the neediest in our community drastically reduced.”

Peoples’ Assembly co-ordinator Sam Fairbairn said, “This government chose to punish those least responsible for the economic crisis whilst letting the bankers carry on as before. It might be back to boom time in the City of London, but most households round here are struggling with frozen wages and soaring energy bills.”

Journalist and campaigner Owen Jones said, “We’re going through the longest fall in workers’ pay-packets since Queen Victoria sat on the throne. The Big Six energy companies are holding the country to ransom, and driving millions into fuel poverty. The Tories are building a Britain of food banks, legal loan sharks and zero hour contract workers. Millions languish on social housing waiting lists. In years to come, many of us will be asked what we did to stop this horror show. That’s why it’s time to tap into our country’s proud tradition of protest and civil disobedience, and make loud and clear our demand for an alternative to the failure of austerity.”

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.

How Canada Has Hidden the Truth About Omar Khadr: US War Crimes, Institutional Racism and Media Failures

I’m cross-posting below an excellent article about Omar Khadr, the child prisoner held at Guantánamo for ten years, from 2002 to 2012, written by Heather Marsh, a journalist and activist who ran WikiLeaks Central, the WikiLeaks news site, from 2010 to 2012. Omar, who was just 15 years old when he was seized in Afghanistan after a firelight with US Special Forces in July 2002, was returned to Canada in September 2012 as the result of a plea deal negotiated in Guantánamo, in which, in exchange for admitting killing a US soldier with a grenade (which was almost certainly untrue), Omar received an eight-year sentence in October 2010, with one year to be served in Guantánamo, and seven in Canada.

Heather’s article was initially published on her website, between a court hearing that Omar had on September 23, and the ruling on October 18. As I explained in an article after the ruling, in the initial submission in August, and in the hearing in September, his lawyer, Dennis Edney, sought his transfer from a maximum security prison (where he is currently held) to a provincial prison, arguing that an eight-year sentence ought to have been regarded as a youth sentence (because a life sentence is mandatory for an adult murder conviction), and therefore Khadr should not have been sent to a maximum security prison in the first place.

However, in delivering his ruling, Justice John Rooke refused to allow Khadr to be moved. Although he agreed that eight years was not an adult sentence for murder, he accepted eight years as an appropriate punishment for the other four war crimes that Khadr agreed to in his plea deal.

Edney plans to appeal, but in the meantime Heather’s article is a powerful analysis of the lies and distortions used to continue holding Omar, and to erode what would obviously be sympathy for him if he were someone from a different background who was manipulated by his father whilst a juvenile. I was particularly impressed with Heather’s research into the deficiencies in the statements of the witnesses who were present at the time of the firelight and Omar’s capture, and I commend her detailed analysis of bias in the Canadian media, including that bastion of liberalism, the Toronto Star.

I must mention, though, that I have no particular complaint against Michelle Shephard, the journalist who has covered Omar’s story for the Star for many years, and whose reporting has often proved very useful to me. Nevertheless, Heather is correct to identify biased reporting throughout the mainstream media, including in the liberal media. This is something that concerns me about much mainstream reporting here in the UK as well — as seen in much of the BBC’s editorial stance since it was set upon by Tony Blair and Alistair Campbell in the run-up to the illegal invasion of Iraq — although my most regular disappointment with the mainstream liberal media centers on their obsession with so-called “objectivity,” in which, by perpetually trying not to put forward a particular point of view, even about the most horrendous crimes committed by, for example, the US government, those in charge succeed only in playing into the hands of the right-wing media, who have no problem with broadcasting and printing lies and propaganda on a regular basis.

The silence surrounding Omar Khadr

By Heather Marsh, Georgie BC’s Blog, October 8, 2013

Omar Khadr was a Canadian kid caught in a firefight in Afghanistan in 2002. He was captured by the US and tortured at Bagram and Guantánamo for ten years. Eventually, he signed a plea deal admitting guilt in killing Special Forces Sergeant First Class Christopher Speer during the battle. He continues his legal saga in solitary confinement in Canada.

Omar was not supposed to be in the compound on the day he was injured. A family acquaintance had taken 15 year old Omar with him as a translator as he was fluent in four languages. According to multiple sources close to him, Omar says he was the first person wounded in the attack on the compound he was in. He says the others carried him to shelter throughout the hours of fighting until he was shot twice in the back. He survived so long because he was not in the active fighting.

His story, the only firsthand account possible, still has not been heard by the Canadian public or Canadian courts. It can’t be heard at this point because if he says he didn’t throw the grenade the parole board will say he is not taking responsibility for his actions. If he talks about his captivity, the US military will call it recidivism as they have in the past when Guantánamo victims were released and spoke about their experiences.

At Guantánamo, his conversations with other captives, guards and even his lawyers were strictly controlled. His defence counsel Dennis Edney says he was repeatedly dragged off to a cell by guards simply for asking his client, “What’s wrong?” Edney was accompanied to the washroom by guards and if he had been discovered smuggling news to Omar (which he did) he would have faced thirty years in a US prison himself. Omar’s counsel were even prevented from playing dominos and chess during counsel visits. “There was no attorney-client privilege,” says Edney.

Omar refused for eight years to sign a plea deal confessing his guilt to a crime he says he did not commit as he told Edney repeatedly, “What would Canadians think of me?” Edney says he did everything he could to convince Omar to take the plea deal for eight additional years as he was never going to get a fair trial. Omar’s previous US military counsel Colby Vokey said in 2007 he would encourage Khadr to plead guilty to the “JFK assassination,” if it meant he could go home.

Omar told Edney during the August 2010 Guantánamo commission trial, “We’re embarrassing ourselves by being here.” He boycotted the proceedings in July, saying, “How can I ask for justice from a process that does not have it or offer it?” Videos of Omar’s interrogation in a documentary by the same name show him telling his captors, “You don’t like the truth.”

“The whole trial system is a sham. There was a complete lack of due process. It is disturbing and embarrassing what is going on down there,” said Colby.

“But let’s face it, this is all about politics,” said Former Chief Prosecutor Colonel Morris Davis. By Davis’s account, Jim Haynes, the man who oversaw the tribunal process, told him, “Wait a minute, we can’t have acquittals. We’ve been holding these guys for years. How are we going to explain that? We can’t have acquittals. We’ve got to have convictions.”

“The compound could not be secured as there were other Taliban around”

When Omar was captured, we were first told he had killed a US ‘medic’ and he was the only one still alive to do so. This would have been a real war crime under the Geneva Conventions, if it had been done knowingly, the medic was wearing clear insignia and the medic was not active in combat. We know Christopher Speer was an elite commando and a member of the 19th Special Forces Group. The Guantánamo Commission witness known only as OC-1, a member of Speer’s unit, testified that training as a medic was a standard part of the training of the elite Special Forces unit which all members went through. They did not act as medics.

Edney described the testimony of OC-1 to me. “He told the judge, the firefight is what he would refer to as a clusterfuck. He enters the compound, shoots one man in the head, sees Omar with his back to him and facing a wall — Omar is screaming from his injuries from the bombing — and OC-1 shoots him twice in the back. OC-1 then exits the alley. In doing so he hears a grenade being thrown. He does not see who threw it. What is also significant is that he orders everyone to leave the compound as it could not be secured as there were other Taliban around — meaning other individuals could have thrown the grenade.”

From OC-1’s verbal account of not being able to secure the area, it is apparent there were far more people than just Omar still alive and capable of throwing grenades at that point. In 2008 the US military accidentally gave a room full of reporters the original report filed from OC-1 which, while leaving out the testimony of a grenade being thrown after Omar was shot, showed that the US military had falsified the official report and the other man beside him was still alive. There was also forensic wound analysis on US Special Forces Sergeant Speer that indicated friendly fire from a US grenade and OC-1’s report and testimony confirm the US was throwing grenades at the time Speer was killed.

OC-1 also testified that his actions in the compound were completed in under a minute. Quite a feat if he had been a medic.

OC-1 testified that Sergeant Layne Morris was injured by pebbles spitting back from the rock wall they were stationed behind. Morris himself said, “I thought, dang, my rifle just exploded on me.” Morris successfully sued Omar’s father for damages of $102.6 million in 2006, along with Speer’s widow. He claimed he was partially blinded in one eye by shrapnel from the grenade which killed Speer even though he was airlifted out with a bleeding nose hours before Speer was killed. Morris retired at 40 and has since been a media favourite for providing testimony against Omar, a child and man he never met.

Omar’s cellmate Omar Deghayes had his eye gouged out by a Guantánamo guard during an interrogation, but has never received compensation. Neither has Omar ever received compensation for his ongoing injuries.

“Our definition of sexy was something like Khadr”

Information on Omar’s case has been kept under intense lockdown since he was captured. He was not allowed to speak to his family for five years. He did not have even a US military lawyer for over two years. When he did talk to his family, a Foreign Affairs official had to be present and ensure “Absolutely NO ATTORNEYS can be present or the call will be refused.” The calls had to be in English despite other detainees being allowed to speak in Arabic. He was forbidden a pen in his room when other detainees were allowed them.

The leaked Guantánamo files showed us in the first line of Omar’s file that the primary interest the US had in him was they didn’t like his dad’s friend. Osama bin Laden was an acquaintance of Omar’s dad from back in the days when the US considered bin Laden a ‘good guy’, when al Qaeda were backed by the US to fight the Russians. Omar’s continued detention was recommended as “Detainee continues to provide valuable information on his father’s associates.”

In 2003, the year after Omar’s capture, Canada suddenly acquired a Ministry of Public Safety which appears to trump both the Canadian courts and the Ministry of Justice in issuing decrees over Omar’s future. We probably should ask how we are ensuring public safety now if not through justice.

This Orwellian Ministry was not much help when a Canadian murdered and ate someone, posted a video of it to our heavily surveilled Internet and then passed through four heavily surveilled international airports before being caught by a German citizen. The Ministry is however, interrupting our prison systems with an unprecedented order stopping Omar from speaking to reporters, overriding our parole boards with statements on Omar’s ineligibility for parole and vowing to fight ‘vigorously’ any attempt to move Omar from solitary confinement in federal prison.

The Ministry has also made a statement that sounds very much like it would not recognize a successful appeal by Omar in a US appeal court, despite the fact that they recognized his conviction by a Guantánamo commission. In case the message wasn’t clear, Prime Minister Harper echoed the Minister’s warnings on the day of Omar’s hearing to be transferred to a provincial prison in what can only be seen as attempted political interference in the judicial system.

The Canadian government has appealed Omar’s right to see the evidence against him all the way up to the Supreme Court. They refused to allow his interrogation videos to be released because Canadians might have “paroxysms of moral outrage, a Canadian specialty.” The Minister of Public Safety demanded Omar’s psychiatrist interviews from the US but refused to release them. Someone leaked them for us. After all the legal battles we still have seen only about fourteen pages of the thousands Canada has in his interrogation file. Considering what has already been revealed, Canadians really need to see what else is in there.

Canada, unlike every other western country, refused to request repatriation or humane treatment of their citizen. They were offered the opportunity to try Omar in a Canadian court and they refused because they said he would never be convicted in a Canadian court. This we learned from the US state cables (thank you, Chelsea Manning).

The US was left with the task of inventing a court and some crimes to apply retroactively. They destroyed evidence, disallowed defence witnesses, used evidence obtained under torture and hired the best discredited witness money could buy. All of this to get Omar labeled with a guilty verdict and out of Guantánamo as the only person charged with murder despite the 6,735 US military killed in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Five years after Omar’s capture, the first incarnation of the Guantánamo trials began. Omar was selected, out of all the possible contenders, to represent the so-called ‘worst of the worst’ at Guantánamo and stand trial. There was no question his case would have appeal, Chief Prosecutor Colonel Morris Davis said. “Our definition of sexy was something like Khadr. People understand murder.”

Most people didn’t understand it wasn’t a real murder charge, which would have been tried in a civilian court. Murder is unlawful killing; in war it is legal, protected as “combatant’s privilege.” Most people’s sex lives don’t involve trying a tortured child on a trumped up charge that carried the death penalty either.

Khadr’s case appeared personal for some members of the US military and not just from loyalty to their own. The persistent rumours (and evidence) of Speer’s death by friendly fire may have contributed to the need for deflection, but the highly sympathetic presence of his widow was another definite factor. She had spent the trial period in close social contact with all members of the jury, a fact mentioned by most in attendance but not reported in the news. She also gave lengthy testimony at his trial on the impact of Speer’s death on her family, referring to Omar as forever a murderer and “someone who is so unworthy”. Most observers described the testimony as “heart wrenching” or similar and it received extensive media coverage.

There was also lengthy victim impact testimony from members of the US military, referred to by Canada’s media as “warrior brothers of the US soldier killed by Mr. Khadr.” In the end, the jury sentenced Omar to forty years on top of the eight he had already served without knowing he had signed a plea deal. For a sentence greater than ten years, six of the seven jurors must have agreed to it. Speer’s widow gave a fist pumping cheer when she heard the sentence, which was fifteen years more than the prosecution had asked for. The Speer family have been the beneficiaries of several fundraising campaigns since the trial.

“Serious legal consequences”

In 2011, Edney, Omar’s most outspoken advocate and legal counsel, was planning on bringing a challenge to Omar’s verdict. In April 2011 we had a taped conversation which we agreed to resume when he returned from seeing Omar at Guantánamo. Edney was concerned that if the full information in the interview was printed at that time, he would not be allowed on the plane to Guantánamo as had happened in the past. When he returned from Guantánamo he was fired by Omar, who told several sources he was given misinformation to encourage him to do so. Omar’s new counsel had a gag order on Edney.

Those new lawyers took five and a half months past the date Omar was eligible for transfer to file an application for Ottawa to transfer him and another three months to ask for a review of the delay in transferring. On July 3, 2012, two of my full taped conversations with Edney were leaked to the online website Cryptome. Within minutes of Cryptome posting the link on Twitter, I received an email asking me to phone Omar’s new counsel. This efficiency and speed from the firm that brought Omar home eleven months late was breathtaking.

When I spoke to counsel Brydie Bethell she demanded repeatedly to know who had authorized the leak, apparently not being familiar with the nature of leaks. She stated that both Edney and I could face “serious legal consequences”, presumably for having a conversation about Omar over a year earlier, long before Edney’s gag order. She said it would “hurt Omar’s cause” if I were to speak of his case, and that I “certainly wasn’t entitled” to know how it could.

This has been a typical reaction from many officially mandated to help Omar’s case. With a few notable exceptions, the advice is for all concerned to sit down, shut up, and let ‘justice’ run its tedious course. Most of our politicians, media and NGO’s have obediently complied for over eleven years.

Omar went on a hunger strike in Guantánamo to protest the lack of progress in his transfer, according to several sources close to him. If he hadn’t, and the US had not continued to pressure Canada, there is no reason to believe he would be in Canada today. He re-hired Edney when he was brought home.

“A right-wing terrorist group”

Most people consider Sun media and the Toronto Star to be the extreme ends of the spectrum of Canadian media coverage on Omar with everyone else falling between. If that were true (and it largely is) a decade long faux debate over Omar’s return is being used to drum the identical very narrow negative message about Omar from every outlet. Even the debate itself is interesting, with outlets from the Sun to state media CBC inferring that media polls are the method we use to decide citizenship rights in Canada.

The Free Omar Khadr campaign has started a spreadsheet charting coverage of Omar Khadr for the last eleven years. The spreadsheet so far includes all of the Star coverage since the trial week, beginning in October 25, 2010.

I wrote in July 2012:

The ‘trial’ was held with the most widely derided court and procedures since the Salem witch trials and a newly created ‘military commission’ instead of either of the two legitimate US courts (civilian or military), but the word ‘convicted’ occurs uncontested 34 times in 24 articles. The crimes Omar Khadr was charged with include ones which the US calls war crimes. None of the rest of the world, including Canada, recognize the impossible ‘murder in violation of the laws of war’ as a war crime in Khadr’s case or any of the others as war crimes, and they could not be legitimately applied to Khadr’s case anyway since they were invented in 2006 and he was captured in 2002. Nevertheless, the words ‘war crime(s)/criminal’ occur 40 times in 24 articles as factual detail of the case.

The highly suspect plea deal which Omar signed after eight years of torture as his only path out of a legal black hole has been rubbed in his face by the Star 40 times, in the words ‘pleaded guilty/admitted/confessed’, presented without qualifiers. Despite there being absolutely no evidence to point to Khadr killing anyone, and a great deal of evidence that shows it would have been impossible for him to throw the grenade, the words ‘murder/killer’ are used against him 50 times, more than two times per article. In 24 articles, the word ‘jihad’ was worked in eight times, ‘al Qaeda’ 25, and ‘terrorist’ or ‘terrorism’ (the word terror was not included in the count) 30 times.

Most other outlets over the years have had a very similar message. While articles like this and reports on Speer’s widow and children are constant, there has not been one mainstream Canadian media article about Omar’s medical condition in over eleven years except a dry mention when it delayed a court hearing. While a random al Qaeda story was mined salaciously by the Star for a remote link with Khadrs, no article was written regarding the United Nations Committee Against Torture criticizing the Canadian government for delaying Omar’s return to Canada and recommending that Canada (presumably including the largest circulation newspaper) raise awareness of the Convention against Torture requirements amongst judges and members of the public.

Sun Media, established in 1996, takes the same message and drums for a variety of extreme and illegal remedies. The appeal it makes to mentally unstable elements of the population cannot be ignored, particularly when it posts the address of Omar’s grandparents and tells its viewers that they may soon be housing ‘the little terrorist Omar Khadr’ as he is constantly referred to by Sun commentators. To say their coverage of Omar over the years has been an attempt to instigate violence is a gross understatement but they continue unchallenged. As of last June, Canada no longer has a provision against hate speech in our Human Rights Act. The Star as well posted this article (since modified) originally with a picture of Omar’s sister’s door bell with name and apartment number.

Canadian media also makes a point of reporting, and in the case of Sun Media promoting, a group presented as average Canadian citizens against Omar Khadr’s return. Despite this opposition being openly created by the Jewish Defense League who have a “multi faith coalition” with the Hindu Advocacy Group, and the Christian Heritage Party, they are never mentioned by name except by Sun media. Tom Flanagan, former advisor to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, traces the roots of the current Conservative Party in power in Canada to the Christian Heritage Party.

The JDL is the Canadian chapter of a US group which is on the FBI terrorist watch list. In 1994, a US member killed 29 Palestinians at prayer, and in 2011 the RCMP launched an investigation against at least nine members of the Canadian JDL with regard to an anonymous tip that they were plotting to bomb the Palestine House in Mississauga. They are supporters of the English Defence League and the wannabe Canadian Defence League, which appears to be made up of the same people. On September 11, 2012, community activists gathered at the home of Omar’s family after JDL bikers promised to assemble there and “send a message” to the Khadr family, instigated by Sun media who had earlier published the address. The bikers eventually rode away after they met the crowd at the door.

It is hard to imagine Golden Dawn or neo-Nazis in Europe lobbying against a Muslim man and harassing his family and the media not pointing out that the harassers are members of far right extremist groups, especially in the case of the JDL, classified “a right-wing terrorist group” by the FBI in 2001. The Toronto Star pointed out JDL’s terrorist designation recently, and JDL protested what they called the paper’s “anti-Israeli bias” in 2010, but the Toronto Star consistently reports anti-Khadr protesters without mentioning the affiliation.

Comments on any articles about Khadr in Canadian media are very quickly flooded with negative comments which are voted up. The Harper government is no stranger to astroturfing and manipulation of public perception of the Khadr case has preoccupied this government as shown in the US state cables. Media manipulation is also a primary goal of the JDL.

“You killed yours; we starved ours to death”

There are real, internationally recognized war crimes in Omar Khadr’s case. Shooting a blinded child twice in the back is one. Torture of a prisoner of war is another, in which Canada was complicit. The investigations into Canada’s actions in this case have been blocked for more than eleven years.

Omar completely lost the sight in one eye in the firefight. He has since come close to losing the vision remaining in the second eye. Faced with his one remaining eye containing shrapnel, the US military chose to shine bright lights into it while interrogating him. Canada simply refused to give him sunglasses for eight years while he sat first in the Cuban sun then in 24 hours a day of fluorescent lighting. The US forced him through a corrupt show trial; Canada has locked him in solitary and refuses to allow him to be interviewed.

There is an apocryphal story in which a US diplomat said to Canada’s former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, “You treated your Indians a lot better than we treated ours.”

Trudeau replied, “Yes, you killed yours; we starved ours to death.”

Apocryphal or not, it is hard not to remember in the case of Omar Khadr.

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.

Appeal Court Victory for Lewisham Hospital – But Tories Respond with New Legislation to Close Dozens of Hospitals

On Tuesday, the year-long struggle to save Lewisham Hospital from butchers in the government — and in the senior management of the NHS — ended in victory for campaigners, when the Court of Appeal turned down an appeal by health secretary Jeremy Hunt. The government sought to overturn the High Court’s ruling, in July, that Hunt had acted unlawfully when he approved plans for Lewisham put forward last October by Matthew Kershaw, an NHS Special Administrator.

Appointed under legislation for dealing with NHS trusts in severe financial difficulties (the Unsustainable Providers Regime), Kershaw had proposed closing A&E and other frontline services and selling off over half of Lewisham Hospital’s buildings and land as part of a package of proposals to address the financial problems of a neighbouring NHS trust, the South London Healthcare Trust, which has three hospitals in south east London. The result would have been just one A&E Department for the 750,000 inhabitants of the boroughs of Lewisham, Greenwich and Bexley, and a disgraceful scenario in which 90 percent of the mothers in Lewisham (a borough with a population of 270,000) would have been unable to give birth in their home borough.

Responding to the news, Tony O’Sullivan, the Director of Services for Children and Young People at Lewisham, and a member of the Save Lewisham Hospital campaign, said, “This is a complete victory.” Referring to ministers and the Special Administrator, O’Sullivan added, “We always said they were acting unlawfully and undemocratically in using an emergency process to bypass meaningful consultation and destroy an excellent hospital.”

Rosa Curling of Leigh Day, who represented the Save Lewisham Hospital campaign, which applied for a judicial review along with Lewisham Council, said, “We are absolutely delighted with the Court of Appeal’s decision. This expensive waste of time for the government should serve as a wake up call that they cannot ride roughshod over the needs of the people.” She added, “The decision to dismiss the appeal also reaffirms the need for judicial review, a legal process by which the unlawful decisions of public bodies, including the government, can be challenged by the public.”

As the Guardian described it, Andy Burnham, the shadow health secretary, “described the decision as a humiliation for Hunt and said it raised major questions about his judgment.” He said the health secretary “had squandered thousands of pounds’ worth of taxpayers’ money ‘trying to protect his own pride and defend the indefensible’” by appealing against the High Court’s ruling in July, and “call[ed] for a commitment from Hunt that he would not try again to downgrade the hospital’s A&E services.”

Burnham said that Hunt was “diminished by this ruling and has let down the NHS.” He added, “The court has done an important public service today in standing up to an arrogant and high-handed government and a secretary of state who is trying to close A&Es across London in the middle of the worst A&E crisis in living memory.”

Although this is a victory that is well worth celebrating, the government’s response has been to add an outrageous last-minute amendment to the Care Bill for 2013-14, which, as Lewisham campaigner Jos Bell explained in an article for OpenDemocracy on October 17, will, “if it succeeds in making its way intact through the Lords and the Commons … mean quite simply that absolutely no English hospital will be safe.”

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

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

As Jos Bell explained, “an extension from 30 to 40 days does not make it any less fast-track, compared to the years and extensive local consultation that normal hospital closures take. Nor is it clear which areas will then be all too briefly ‘consulted’ — or if the government will pay any attention to this then severely curtailed ‘consultation’, something Lewisham residents know all too well.”

Molloy also explained that, when health minister Earl Howe introduced the amendment in the Commons earlier this month, he admitted that it “drastically reduced ‘the statutory obligations of commissioners to involve and consult patients and the public in planning and making service changes’ and extended to even successful trusts an ’accelerated process’ with ‘no provision for referral to local authority scrutiny’ or need to have regard to the views of local people and clinicians.”

Dr. David Nicholl, a consultant neurologist in Birmingham, who is on the council of the Royal College of Physicians, told Molloy that he could “see that this legislation has the potential to threaten any hospital, with minimal consultation.” As she put it, he “urged other medical professionals to raise concerns with their Royal Colleges,” and added, “it is vital any reconfigurations are clinically led. This judgment has shown that the special administrator approach is totally the wrong one.”

Molloy also noted that the Royal College of Physicians has raised concerns over the clause, writing in the Health Service Journal, “Any decisions affecting the broader health economy should be clinically-led, should be driven by the best interests of patients and should involve the wider health community from the beginning”.

Molloy also spoke to Vicky Penner of the Save Lewisham Hospital campaign, who, noting that the government’s proposals amounted to “unlimited geographical power without proper consultation,” which “means that no hospital in the country will be safe,” also stated, “It seems that if the Government cannot win in Court, they will bully their plans through Parliament, showing their utter contempt for normal people and democracy.”

The Care Bill — and the deadly amendment — will return to the House of Commons in November, and those who care about the future of the NHS are urged to contact their MPs to ask them to vote against the amendment.

In addition, as Jos Bell noted (and as I have written about repeatedly), the blame for the ongoing plans to inflict savage cuts on the NHS rests not just with the government, but is also the responsibility of senior NHS managers. She wrote, “Should we expect resistance from the Foundation Trusts themselves and the NHS establishment? Perhaps not. A letter penned just a couple of weeks earlier, by the NHS Confederation and the Foundation Trust Network, encourages Jeremy Hunt to take this very action and offers their expertise in writing an amendment.” She added that, to say that many people “have found this more shocking than the actions of the by now rather predictable government would be an understatement.”

In relation to particular plans for hospital downgrades, Caroline Molloy noted that 20 NHS trusts in total — responsible for over 60 hospitals — “are already so crippled by financial cuts and PFI debts that they have been identified as next in line for the Special Administration process.”

She added that, if the amendment is passed, these hospitals’ financial problems “could be used to justify closing NHS hospitals that belong to other Trusts nearby.” She also added an important point about the role that will almost certainly be played by PFI deals in any future proposals for hospital closures, drawing on the experience of the South London Healthcare Trust, which was burdened with outrageous PFI deals for two of its three hospitals. As she described it, “There are fears that the government intends to sacrifice successful hospitals without PFI debts, to keep the money flowing to the private investors behind the PFI deals, as they tried to do in Lewisham.”

While working to prevent the hospital closure amendment from being passed, campaigners for the NHS also need to keep an eye on the PFI problems up and down the country, which still threaten to lead to massive cuts in services for the many to protect the outrageous profits of the few.

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.

Torture: The Elephant in the Room at Guantánamo’s Military Commissions

For seven and a half years now, I have watched as the United States has tried and failed to make its trial system at Guantánamo — the military commissions — function in a way that has any kind of legitimacy.

That, however, is impossible, because the trials involve made-up war crimes, invented by Congress, and, as we see on a regular basis when pre-trial hearings are held in the cases of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) and four other men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks, because there is an unresolvable tension at the heart of the most serious trials — those involving the “high-value detainees,” like KSM and his co-defendants, and also Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, another “high-value detainee” charged with involvement in the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, all of whom were held — and tortured — in secret “black sites” run by the CIA in countries including Thailand and Poland.

This tension was highlighted in “You Can’t Gag Somebody and Then Want to Kill Them,” an article for the Huffington Post last week by Katherine Hawkins, a researcher and lawyer who recently worked as the Investigator for the Constitution Project’s Task Force on Detainee Treatment, whose powerful report I discussed here.

As Hawkins explained, in the military commissions, “the US government has two conflicting objectives. The prosecution is trying to execute six former high value CIA detainees for their role in September 11 and the bombing of the USS Cole. It is also trying to conceal the details of defendants’ torture in CIA custody, and its lasting medical and psychological effects.”

She added:

This is a problem, because the defendants’ torture is the most crucial factor weighing against a death sentence. Cheryl Bormann, the lawyer for defendant Walid bin Attash, argued in court Wednesday that “[y]ou can’t gag somebody and then want to kill them … As a death-penalty lawyer, and under the Eighth Amendment, I’m required to investigate every aspect of mitigation.” But “[e]verywhere I turn in investigating this issue, we hit a brick wall. And we hit a brick wall in large part because of the classification regime that we operate under.” Borman said, “[i]f you really want to have a fair trial and execute them, then you have to ungag them.”

At issue is a protective order issued on December 20, 2012 by the chief judge of the commissions, Col. James L. Pohl, accepting prosecutors’ call for unclassified discovery materials to be the subject of a protective order, because it “contains information that, if disseminated without authority, could pose a threat to public safety and national security and could implicate the privacy interests of the Accused and third parties.”

However, lawyers for the prisoners argue that the protective order violates the UN Convention Against Torture, specifically through Judge Pohl’s acceptance, as Katherine Hawkins put it, that “the defendants’ ‘observations and experiences’ of torture at CIA black sites are classified.” The men’s lawyers point out that the ban “violates the Convention Against Torture’s requirement that victims of torture have ‘a right to complain’ to authorities in the countries where they are tortured, and makes the commission into ‘a co-conspirator in hiding evidence of war crimes.’”

This is a powerful point, although the authorities’ obsessive desire for self-protection when it comes to dealing with accountability for torture, of course, is the reason that the gag order was implemented in the first place.

As Hawkins points out, it is not just the men’s lawyers who object to the protective order. She writes:

The ACLU has called the restrictions on detainees’ testimony “chillingly Orwellian.” Earlier this year, the Constitution Project’s bipartisan, independent Task Force on Detainee Treatment … found that the military commissions’ censorship of detainees’ descriptions of their own torture could not be justified on grounds of national security, and violated “the public’s First Amendment right of access to those proceedings, the detainees’ right to counsel, and counsel’s First Amendment rights.”

She also noted that the European Parliament has recently passed a resolution calling on the US “to stop using draconian protective orders which prevent lawyers acting for Guantánamo Bay detainees from disclosing information regarding any detail of their secret detention in Europe.”

At the heart of the secrecy is the CIA’s desire to protect itself — or the Obama administration’s desire to help the CIA protect itself — which has been ongoing since, early in his presidency, in April 2009, Barack Obama briefly showed an interest in transparency and accountability, and, as Hawkins put it, “declassified four Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinions that described in graphic detail the brutal techniques that the CIA used against captives after September 11, because in his judgment their release was ‘required by the rule of law.’”

The administration was clearly warned that further intrusions were inadvisable after that hugely important release of documents, and that “requirement” involving the rule of law has never been mentioned again. Nowadays, as Hawkins describes it, “the administration takes the position that the release of the OLC memos only declassified the CIA’s use of torturous interrogation techniques ‘in the abstract.’” When it comes to details of any individual prisoner’s treatment in CIA custody, everything remains classified.

The CIA pretends that any disclosures about what was involved in the interrogations of these men would “provide future terrorists with a guidebook on how to evade such questioning,” and “provide ready-made ammunition for al-Qa’ida propaganda,” conveniently ignoring that the problem is not to do with interrogations and secrets, but with the use of torture, and accountability for those who break the law in authorizing it and implementing it — from President Bush down.

However, as a result of the arguments, as Hawkins notes, the courts routinely deny Freedom of Information Act requests for CIA documents about the torture program, and have “denied torture victims’ ability to sue for damages.” She provides a salient example — the CIA Office of the Inspector General’s “98-page report on the homicide of Manadel al-Jamadi, the CIA ‘ghost detainee’ detainee whose corpse is shown in several of the Abu Ghraib photographs.” As she explains, “The CIA successfully argued that every single sentence of that report, and eleven other OIG reports on abuses in its detention and interrogation program, is classified.”

In addition, Hawkins notes, “Every lawsuit filed in US court by victims of CIA “rendition” to torture has been dismissed on national security grounds — including suits brought by detainees now widely acknowledged to have been completely innocent” — and, of course, in 2010, when, after years of investigation, OLC investigators wanted to censure John Yoo, the author of the “torture memos” and his boss Jay Bybee, for “professional misconduct,” the Obama administration allowed a veteran DoJ fixer to override the conclusions of their report, conceding instead that they had merely exercised “poor judgement” — a conclusion that carried no punishment.

As so to Guantánamo now, and the inescapable truth that, to do their job, the lawyers for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other men tortured in CIA “black sites” must push for transparency, and for their clients to have their voices heard, however much prosecutors try to resist. As Hawkins noted, one of the prosecutors, Clay Trivett, “argued that the defendants’ attempt to disclose the details of their torture was a form of ‘graymail,’ and that the military commission lacked jurisdiction to enforce the Convention Against Torture or override executive classification decisions.” He added that the defense team “would have an opportunity to present relevant evidence of their clients’ treatment during the mitigation phase of the case (in secret, presumably).”

That, of course, only triggered the defense to reiterate that the pursuit of justice and the silencing of the defendants are incompatible. As Maj. Jason Wright, the military defense attorney for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, explained, “the same government agency that tortured Mr. Mohammed is seeking to silence Mr. Mohammed.”

In addition, Cheryl Bormann, Walid bin Attash’s attorney, “noted that the CIA had allowed former employee Jose Rodriguez to publish detailed factual claims about individual detainees’ interrogations, even as it censored defendants’ statements about their own treatment.”

Throughout the week’s hearings, the focus repeatedly returned to torture. On Wednesday, James Connell, the lawyer for Ammar al-Baluchi (aka Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali), a nephew of KSM and one of the five co-defendants in the 9/11 trial, said that his client “suffered a head injury in CIA custody that caused memory loss and delusions,” as the Miami Herald described it, a fact that has not been publicly disclosed before.

On Friday, 14 lawyers for the five men in the 9/11 trial made public a letter they had written to President Obama replaying the same themes. As Deutsche Welle described it, they argued that the secrecy surrounding the CIA’s Rendition, Detention and Interrogation program (RDI) was “being used cover up evidence of torture and is therefore preventing their clients from receiving a fair trial.”

The lawyers wrote, “Quite simply, the classification of the RDI program is suppressing evidence, suppressing the truth, and ultimately will suppress any real justice.”

As Deutsche Welle also noted, the 9/11 trial “had been slated to begin September 14. However, on Friday, it was pushed to 2015, with issues such as treatment of the defendants and complaints of attorney-client privilege violations [which I covered here] delaying proceedings.”

As the long and unjust process grinds on, it is interesting that Katherine Hawkins noted, at the start of the week, that “[t]he only point that the prosecution, defense, and Judge James Pohl agreed on was that President Obama had the authority to resolve these issues.” As Judge Pohl stated, “If the President of the United States wants to declassify this information, he certainly can and we would not be having this discussion.”

Obama, however, is not interested. When Hawkins emailed National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden to ask “what the White House role was in resolving classification disputes in military commissions, and whether anyone in the administration could override the CIA’s classification decisions,” Hayden replied that the White House “does not play a role in determining the classification of filings at the military commissions, or the classification of information presented orally at commission hearings. I’d refer you to DoD, who is responsible for the military commissions process.”

“Responsible” may be too strong a word, as no one is taking responsibility for the problems apparent throughout last week’s pre-trial hearing — that you can’t prosecute prisoners tortured by the US in secret facilities run by the CIA while gagging those same prisoners. That conflict needs to be brought to an end — through transparency, and not through more secrecy.

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.

Will Appeals Court Judges Rule that Force-Feeding at Guantánamo Must Stop?

Last week, a panel of three appeals court judges in Washington D.C. (in the D.C. Circuit Court) heard an appeal from three Guantánamo prisoners — including the last British resident, Shaker Aamer — asking them to order the government to end the force-feeding of prisoners, and two of the three judges “asked sceptical questions of a government lawyer who argued that the courts have no jurisdiction” over conditions at Guantánamo, as Reuters described it.

At the height of the prison-wide hunger strike at Guantánamo this year, at least 106 of the remaining 164 prisoners were on a hunger strike, and 46 of those men were being force-fed. That total has now fallen to 15, but twice a day those 15 men are tied into restraint chairs, while liquid nutrient is pumped into their stomachs via a tube inserted through their nose, a painful and abusive process denounced by the World Medical Association and the United Nations.

In summer, two District Court judges turned down motions challenging the force-feeding of prisoners, ruling that they didn’t have jurisdiction in the case because of previous rulings involving Guantánamo and hunger strikes, because, when Congress passed the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, the legislation specifically prevented prisoners from suing over their living conditions.

As I noted at the time, one of the judges, Gladys Kessler, was, nevertheless, severely critical of the government’s position. She referred to force-feeding as a “painful, humiliating and degrading process,” and also pointedly criticized President Obama’s inaction, noting, “The president of the United States, as commander in chief, has the authority — and power — to directly address the issue of force-feeding of the detainees at Guantánamo Bay.”

The other judge, Rosemary M. Collyer, endorsed the government’s position, claiming that there was “nothing so shocking or inhumane in the treatment” that it would raise a constitutional concern.

Last Friday, Judge David Tatel and Judge Thomas Griffith were the judges who “asked sceptical questions.” Reuters reported that, while they “stopped short of agreeing that forced feeding is inhumane, they suggested that Guantánamo detainees might be able to get around” the conditions in the DTA, which “bars them from suing over living conditions in extreme cases that might include forced feeding.”

Although a decision is not imminent, Reuters noted that the judges’ scepticism “appeared to be a fresh challenge to the administration’s control over how it treats Guantánamo detainees.”

Reuters also noted that the majority of US judges who have been asked to look at the question of force-feeding in prisons “have concluded that the measure may violate the rights of inmates to control their bodies and to privacy,” even though those are “rights rooted in the US Constitution and in common law,” but they have refused to act on these concerns because they have “found that the needs of operating a prison are more important.”

In the hearing last Friday, Judge Griffith, as Reuters put it, asked why the court “should accept without evidence the military’s contention that forced feeding is necessary to maintain order.” He asked Daniel Lenerz, one of the Justice Department lawyers, “Is that your trump card? As long as you play that, that’s the end of the inquiry?”

In response, Lenerz said that there were historical precedents allowing prison wardens to ascertain what they believe is necessary to maintain order, and, as Reuters described it, those in charge of a military prison “should have even more deference.”

In court, Jon Eisenberg, representing the prisoners, told the court, “Forced feeding is unethical, it’s inhumane, it’s a violation of international law and it’s a violation of medical ethics.” For Politico, Josh Gerstein added that he had added that the international community views force-feeding as “equivalent to torture.” The authorities, of course, disagree, arguing, despite doctors’ implacable complaints, that the force-feeding is humane, and necessary to save prisoners’ lives. In this, the authorities are ignoring the fact that the men only embarked on a hunger strike in the first place because their lives had become so intolerable in Guantánamo, where 84 of the remaining 164 prisoners were cleared for release in January 2010 by an inter-agency task force appointed by President Obama when he took office in 2009.

Jon Eisenberg also stated, as Politico described it, that he believed the personnel at Guantánamo “have jumped the gun” and “are performing the so-called ‘enteral feeding’ on people far from death’s door.” Eisenberg said, “They’re force feeding these men before their lives are at risk,” explaining that, as Politico put it, “any prisoner could be force fed for skipping nine meals, regardless of the inmate’s weight,” and “any prisoner with high blood pressure could be force fed for after skipping a single meal.” As Eisenberg described it, “I would be a candidate for force feeding.”

This prompted Judge Stephen Williams, the third judge, to tell Eisenberg that he was “asking too much of the courts to have them determine ‘the exact moment the risk of death reaches such a point it’s OK [to conduct] force feeding.’”

Despite Congressional obstructions, the lawyers for the prisoners are challenging the force-feeding regime through a writ of habeas corpus, the ancient legislation preventing arbitrary detention, which the Supreme Court granted the prisoners in 2004 and again in 2008, reversing Congress’s attempt to prevent them from seeking to challenge their detention through habeas corpus.

As Reuters described it, Judge Tatel “appeared open at Friday’s hearing to letting Guantánamo detainees use habeas suits to protest their conditions.” The Associated Press noted that, although Daniel Lenerz “argued that courts don’t have jurisdiction to hear challenges to the conditions at Guantánamo,” Judge Tatel “repeatedly challenged him on that point.”

He said the Supreme Court had “left it an open question” and pointed out that the courts “had allowed at least four similar suits in civilian prisons,” which prompted Daniel Lenerz to state that those lawsuits involved prisoners who were seeking a transfer from one prison to another, rather than seeking changes related to their medical treatment or how they are fed. Lenerz added that Congress “clearly intended to prohibit Guantánamo detainees from challenging the conditions of their detention.”

As Reuters noted, even if the court of appeals allows the lawsuits to proceed, the prisoners still need to convince judges in the appeals court or the lower court that the authorities at Guantánamo have “no penological reason” to force-feed prisoners.

In addition, Judge Tatel explained how this might be difficult because of a “whole series of federal and state court cases” ruling, as Reuters put it, that “civilian prisons had legitimate reasons for forced feeding, primarily to maintain order.”

Despite some positive noises from the court, I would be profoundly surprised if the appeals court rules for the prisoners, overturning the stranglehold of the Detainee Treatment Act, which, disgracefully, established that “no court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider any other action against the United States or its agents relating to any aspect of the detention, transfer, treatment, trial, or conditions of confinement of an alien who is or was detained by the United States and has been determined by the United States to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant or is awaiting such determination.”

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.

Lies and Injustice: Canada’s Ongoing Mistreatment of Omar Khadr

Last week, in a court in Edmonton, Justice John Rooke, responding to a habeas corpus petition submitted in September by former Guantánamo prisoner Omar Khadr, 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.

Khadr, who was a juvenile — just 15 years old — when he was seized in July 2002 after a firefight in Afghanistan, where he had been taken by his father, was held at Guantánamo for eight years, and only left the prison after agreeing to a plea deal in October 2010, in which he accepted five charges — spying, conspiracy, providing material support for terrorism, attempted murder and murder (of a US Special Forces soldier, Sgt. Christopher Speer), even though that last charge was based on an extremely untrustworthy claim that he had thrown the grenade that killed Sgt. Speer. Under the terms of the plea deal, he received an eight-year sentence, with one year to be served in Guantánamo and the remaining seven in Canada.

Eleven months late, in September 2012, Khadr was eventually returned to Canada, where he was imprisoned in the Millhaven Institution, a maximum-security prison near Kingston, Ontario. In May this year, after he received threats from another prisoner, he was moved to another maximum security prison, the Edmonton Institution in Edmonton, Alberta, and in August his lawyer, Dennis Edney, sought his transfer to a provincial prison.

Khadr became eligible for parole this summer, but has not yet applied for it, because, as the Toronto Star noted, “It is rare that an inmate will be granted full parole from a maximum security federal facility.” Edney argued that, as a sentence for murder in Canada, eight years would be regarded as a youth sentence (because a life sentence is mandatory for an adult murder conviction), and therefore Khadr should not have been sent to a maximum security prison.

However, although Justice Rooke agreed that eight years was not an adult sentence, he accepted eight years as an appropriate punishment for the other four war crimes that Khadr agreed to in his plea deal. As he wrote in his ruling, “Mr. Khadr’s sentence could have been a single youth sentence and four adult sentences. However, Mr. Khadr obviously cannot be in both an adult provincial facility for adults and a penitentiary at the same time.” He added, as the Toronto Star put it, that “where there is ambiguity, the law dictates that the inmate should serve an adult sentence.”

Justice Rooke began his ruling by stating that it was “important to understand what this Decision is about and what it is not about.” Explaining that it was “simply and purely” about “statutory interpretation,” he described it as “about the proper interpretation of legislation [the International Transfer of Offenders Act] to determine whether an offender, transferred from another country to Canada, will serve the remainder of the foreign sentence in a provincial correctional facility for adults or a federal penitentiary.”

He added, “This Decision is not about a number of matters. It is not about Mr. Khadr’s background, other than that he is a Canadian citizen. It is not about his age when the offences were committed or since, except only insofar as specifically relevant to the legislation being interpreted. It is not about any of the circumstances pre-dating his transfer to Canada to complete his sentence — specifically, it is not about the appropriateness of his pre-sentence detention or the sentence Mr. Khadr received in the United States.”

Technically, this may be an appropriate legal decision, but it only adds to the disgraceful treatment of Omar Khadr by the Canadian authorities over the last eleven years. The government’s lack of concern for Khadr, and its manipulation of racist and Islamophobic sentiment towards him, has been a disgrace, and the only bodies to emerge with any kind of honor are various Canadian courts, up to and including the Supreme Court, who, before Khadr’s return to Canada, ruled that the government had violated his rights by sending agents to interrogate him at Guantánamo.

Dennis Edney plans to appeal the ruling, but in the meantime the government has once more shown its continuing disregard for the truth, and its relentless instinct for cheap distortions. Responding to the ruling, the new Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney said he “welcomed” it, noting that the government “will continue to vigorously defend against any attempt to lessen his punishment.” In this, he was reiterating what Prime Minister Stephen Harper said in September when Khadr finally had a day in a Canadian courtroom. On that occasion, Harper said, “This is an individual who, as you know, pled guilty to very serious crimes including murder and it is very important that we continue to vigorously defend against any attempts, in court, to lessen his punishment for these heinous acts.”

Responding, in turn, to Steven Blaney’s ill-advised comments, Dennis Edney said that the the Public Safety Minister “should read the ruling before making comments that he will fight any effort to reduce Omar Khadr’s sentence. As the ruling stated it is not about reducing Omar’s sentence but an issue about what type of prison he should be lodged in.”

Lies and distortions, however, continue to typify the government’s attitude to Omar Khadr. As Colin Perkel reported for the Canadian Press in March, the government’s file on Khadr contains “faulty information” — a better description might be “bare-faced lies” — which was included in a key memo drafted for the former Public Safety Minister Vic Toews by Liliane Keryluk, a senior policy analyst working for him.

The memo, which influenced the treatment Toews authorized for Khadr on his repatriation, was drafted in October 2011, and, as Perkel put it, went “even further than American military prosecutors.”

In particular, her memo asserted that “Mr. Khadr engaged US military and coalition personnel with small-arms fire, killing two members of the Afghan militia force. He threw and/or fired grenades at nearby coalition forces, resulting in numerous injuries to them.”

This is patently untrue. As Perkel noted, “Although someone inside the compound where Khadr was staying shot the two Afghans, nowhere in his signed admission, which was drafted by military commission prosecutors, is there any suggestion he personally killed them.” He added, “While his confession does say American soldiers were hurt ‘as a result of Khadr and his conspirators’ actions in the firefight,’ the only grenade prosecutors said he threw was the one that killed Sgt. Christopher Speer.”

Perkel also noted that the memo contained an assertion, later repeated publicly by Vic Toews, that Khadr “conspired with [O]sama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Sheikh Sayeed al-Masri, Saif al-Adel, [and] Ahmed Said Khadr, who is Mr. Khadr’s father,” and also claimed that he had “several known accomplices,” including bin Laden and al-Zawahiri.

As Perkel explained, however, “While Khadr’s father was a bin Laden associate, and their families spent some holiday time together, American prosecutors never claimed the teen had direct operational contact with bin Laden or al Zawahiri, current leader of the Al-Qaeda terrorist organization, or that they were his accomplices.”

As Dennis Edney explained, not for the first time, “There is no evidence whatsoever to support these false allegations.” He added, “Even the Canadian government is aware these accusations are baseless, as it had a representative from DFAIT [the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development] present throughout the sham trial.”

Dennis Edney is correct, of course, but as those of us know who have been studying Omar Khadr’s case for many years, truth and justice are irrelevant to the darker forces responsible for the treatment of prisoners in the “war on terror” that President Bush established eleven years ago, and whose pernicious influence continues to erode the moral authority not just of the United States, but of Canada as well.

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.