Andy Worthington's Blog, page 131

Tom Wilner: President Obama Could Close Guantánamo Tomorrow If He Wanted To

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

Here at “Close Guantánamo,” we are sad to report that, since the release of two Algerian prisoners two weeks ago, no further prisoners have yet been freed, even though 84 of the remaining 164 prisoners were cleared for release in January 2010 by an inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force established by President Obama when he first took office.

Moreover, some of these men were cleared for release many years before, by military review boards under the Bush administration, and yet they are all still held, because of Congressional obstruction, and because President Obama is unwilling to spend political capital to overcome those obstacles, and do what is necessary to show that America can still believe in justice.

Guantánamo has been back in the news this year, because the prisoners, risking their lives, embarked on a prison-wide hunger strike to show their despair at ever being released or given any form of justice, and the world’s media picked up on it. The pressure forced President Obama to promise, in a major speech on national security issues on May 23, to resume releasing prisoners from Guantánamo, but, as is shown by the GTMO Clock we established to show how long it is since the promise, and how many men have been freed, it is now 114 days, and just two men have been released. In Guantánamo, meanwhile, seven months after the hunger strike began, 18 men are still being force-fed.

As we begin to formulate our campaigns for the fall and winter, in the run-up to the 12th anniversary of the prison’s opening on January 11, 2014, we’re delighted to be posting below a powerful op-ed by the attorney Tom Wilner, who was counsel of record for the Guantánamo prisoners in the case establishing their right to counsel, and in the two Supreme Court decisions confirming their right to habeas corpus. Tom is on the steering committee of “Close Guantánamo,” and he and I established the campaign and website on the 10th anniversary of the prison’s opening, in January 2012.

Tom’s article was published in the Huffington Post, and the version below is slightly edited, to expand a few of his points. Its main message, however, rings out clearly. As Tom notes, “Guantánamo continues to burden U.S. foreign policy, undermining our credibility and providing an excuse for every foreign dictator who abuses human rights.” He points out that President Obama stated in May that Guantánamo “needs to be closed,” and tells the president that he “must have the courage to follow-up his words with action. Further delay is not tolerable.”

- Andy Worthington

Guantánamo: The President Could Close It Tomorrow If He Really Wants to

By Tom Wilner

Guantánamo continues to burden US foreign policy, undermining our credibility and providing an excuse for every foreign dictator who abuses human rights. As the president has said: “GTMO has become a symbol around the world for an America that flouts the rule of law.” He has also said exactly what must be done: “We’ve got to close Guantánamo … It is expensive. It is inefficient. It hurts us in terms of our international standing. It lessens cooperation with our allies on counterterrorism efforts. It is a recruitment tool for extremists. It needs to be closed.”

Great words — but very little action.

There is a myth circulating that, because the president says he wants to close Guantánamo, he would if he could, but he can’t because Congress has stopped him. That is not so. The president has the authority right now in existing legislation to achieve that result by transferring detainees out of Guantánamo.

Congress did amend the National Defense Authorization Act three years ago to prohibit funding for the transfer of any Guantánamo detainee to the U.S. It also prohibited funding for transfers to other countries, unless the Defense Secretary personally certified that the transferred detainee would never engage in terrorist activity. Because no one can give such a personal assurance, that provision effectively blocked transfers. But Congress then amended the law to allow the Secretary to waive that requirement and to transfer detainees to other countries if he finds (1) that the receiving country will take steps to “substantially mitigate” the risk that the detainee will engage in terrorist activity, and (2) that the transfer is in US national security interests.

Those are quite makeable findings. The president has already stated publicly that it is in the US national security interest to transfer all the detainees from Guantánamo. Moreover, many countries have expressed a willingness to accept detainees and have offered to undertake the steps necessary to “substantially mitigate” the risk that the detainee could ever engage in terrorist activity. As Carl Levin, the Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has pointed out, that provision “provides a clear route for the transfer of detainees to third countries.” This week’s announcement of the transfer of two prisoners from Guantánamo to Algeria is welcome news and proves Senator Levin’s point. It can be done.

The president also has another route available. The law allows the administration to transfer detainees pursuant to a court order. Simply by consenting to court orders for the release, for example, of detainees who have already been cleared, the Justice Department could authorize their transfer free from congressional restrictions. Yet, it has never done so.

There is a great cost to this inaction. The Pentagon recently reported that the Guantánamo prison costs US taxpayers almost a half-billion dollars a year — an incredible $3 million-plus per prisoner per year, about 40 times the cost of a US Supermax prison. And we are paying that even though most of these men — 84 of the 164 detainees still there — were cleared for release more than three and a half years ago by a special task force made up of top US security and law enforcement officials. Yet, they remain imprisoned, and we continue to pay. Why?

Beyond its expense and the harm it causes to our reputation and security, Guantánamo is a terrible human tragedy. During my visits there, I have had to inform prisoners that one of their parents or grandparents or a brother or sister had died, and then sit and watch them cry knowing that they had missed their last chance to say goodbye. Even the worst convicted prisoner in the US is allowed family visits. These men are not. And they have never been convicted, or even tried, and most have been cleared.

The fact is that only a small number of the detainees now at Guantánamo are considered to pose a significant threat. Most were picked up soon after 9/11 in and around Afghanistan and sold into captivity by local tribes people for bounties. They were not the leaders, who are known to have escaped, but at most low level foot soldiers, as well as a lot of innocent people swept up by mistake. It was generally recognized by the summer of 2004 that none of the detainees then at Guantánamo was a significant player. As a June 21, 2004 article in the New York Times reported: “In interviews, dozens of high-level military, intelligence and law-enforcement officials in the United States, Europe and the Middle East said that contrary to the repeated assertions of senior administration officials, none of the detainees at the United States Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay ranked as leaders or senior operatives of al-Qaeda.”

It was only after the summer of 2004 that the Bush administration began sending more significant prisoners to Guantánamo from “black sites” far from the conflict in Afghanistan. Ten were sent in September 2004, 14 more — the “high-value detainees,” including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed etc. — in September 2006, and five more in 2007-08, two of whom are regarded as “high-value detainees.” In total, 29 prisoners were transferred to Guantánamo after August 2004. Some have actually been released. One was convicted in US court and is now incarcerated here, and one pled guilty in his trial by military commission. 22 of them are considered potentially as significant threats. These, along with a Saudi who was sent to Guantánamo late in 2003 from a “black site” and has charges filed against him, and three men who have been convicted in trials by military commission — 26 men in total — represent the universe of potentially significant dangerous detainees at Guantánamo. They should be tried and, if convicted, incarcerated. The others should be transferred out.

The president should do this immediately, exercising his existing authority to transfer the 84 men who have already been cleared, and then continue with the majority of the others.

There is always a risk, of course, that a released prisoner will do something bad. Every judge and governor faces that risk in releasing a prisoner. And, if that happens, the person or political party authorizing the release may well face criticism. But fear of criticism cannot stop us from doing what is right. How do you explain to the 84 cleared men that they must remain in prison because it is politically inconvenient to let them out? How do you explain to the world that we must keep Guantánamo open, even though it stains our reputation and compromises our ability to combat terrorism, because we fear political criticism? The president must have the courage to follow-up his words with action. Further delay is not tolerable.

Photo credit: Shrieking Tree / Foter / CC BY-NC-SA.

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.

Ahmed Zuhair, Long-Term Former Hunger Striker at Guantánamo, Speaks

Last week I published an article, “Meet the Guantánamo Prisoner Who Wants to be Prosecuted Rather than Rot in Legal Limbo,” about Sufyian Barhoumi, an Algerian prisoner, following up on an article written by Jess Bravin for the Wall Street Journal and published in July. As I explained at the time, “Throughout the spring and summer, while the prison-wide hunger strike at Guantánamo raged, taking up most of my attention … I missed some other developments, which I intend to revisit over the next few weeks.”

Following up on that promise, this article revisits an Associated Press article by Ben Fox, published in June, which featured an interview with Ahmed Zuhair, a Saudi citizen and former sheep merchant released from Guantánamo in June 2009, whose story I covered in detail three months before his release, in an article entitled, “Guantánamo’s Long-Term Hunger Striker Should Be Sent Home.” This recent article was based on a phone call with Zuhair, who is now 47 years old, for which Fox was accompanied by Ramzi Kassem, a law professor at the City University of New York (CUNY), who represents other men still held, including Shaker Aamer, the last British resident, and Abdelhadi Faraj, a Syrian prisoner.

At the time of his release, Zuhair was one of three hunger strikers who had been on a hunger strike since the summer of 2005, when as many as 200 prisoners engaged in prison-wide hunger strike, and had not given up when the first restraint chairs arrived at the prison in January 2006. Fox noted that he now weighs 190 pounds, but that, in December 2005, he weighed just 108 pounds, and, prior to his release, just 115 pounds.

Alarmingly, his fellow hunger strikers, Abdul Rahman Shalabi and Tarek Baada (aka Tariq Ba’Odah), have not been released, and are still on a hunger strike. They are two of the dozens of prisoners force-fed as part of the prison-wide hunger strike that began in February, as the men still held concluded that they had been abandoned by all three branches of the US government, even though 86 of the 166 men still held at that time had been cleared for release in January 2010 by an inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force. 18 men are still being force-fed, but at the height of the hunger strike, in July, 46 men in total were being force-fed.

The hunger strike, the horrendous nature of force-feeding and the reasons why the men felt such despair that they embarked on a hunger strike in the first place are in danger of being forgotten again, despite attracting the attention of the world’s media throughout the spring and summer. This is largely because of President Obama’s promise, in May, to resume releasing prisoners from Guantánamo, although to date just two men have been released as a result of that promise, and there is no indication that the necessary moves on the president’s part — releasing all of the 84 other cleared prisoners — are forthcoming.

As a result, it seems clear to me that Ahmed Zuhair’s recollections are still relevant, in part because, as Ben Fox explained in his article, “[t]he men undergoing forced-feeding aren’t permitted to speak to journalists,” although a few, of course, managed to speak to their lawyers, and secured mainstream media in the spring and summer — most noticeably Samir Moqbel, a Yemeni, whose account was published as an influential op-ed in the New York Times.

Like an unknown number of the hunger striking prisoners this year, Zuhair resisted the authorities’ attempts to force-feed him, which, as Fox explained, led to the repeated use of  a “forced cell extraction team” to “move him when he refused to walk on his own to where striking detainees were fed.” Zuhair also told Fox that “his nasal passages and back are permanently damaged from the way he was strapped down and fed through a nasogastric tube,” and Fox also noted that, at one point, “he and fellow prisoners smeared themselves with their own feces for five days to keep guards at bay and protest rough treatment.”

In his own words, Zuhair said, “Not once did the thought occur to me to stop my hunger strike. Not once.” He added that, although he didn’t receive much news about Guantánamo these days, “the world should not be surprised that prisoners are back on strike,” as Fox put it. “The men there today are going through the same experience and they are suffering just as much, and so they probably will not stop either,” Zuhair added.

Officials at Guantánamo refuse to use the term “force-feeding,” preferring instead to talk of “enteral feeding.” Navy Capt. Robert Durand, a Guantánamo spokesman, told Fox that the authorities believe that there are “adequate safeguards” in place to make the force-feeding “as pain-free and comfortable as possible,” He added, “It’s not done to inflict pain and it’s not done as punishment. It’s done to preserve life.”

Zuhair, however, was unconvinced. He called the restraint chair the “torture chair” and “said he was left tied down for hours at a time, ostensibly so the liquid nutrient drink Ensure could be digested.” That corresponds with accounts made by prisoners force-fed during the latest hunger strike.

He also noted, in a sworn statement submitted to a US court by Ramzi Kassem, “During each force-feeding, my nose bleeds. The pain from each force-feeding is so excruciating that I am unable to sleep at night because of the pain in my throat.” He also explained that, at one point, the authorities arranged for his mother to call the prison, who “urged him to drop the hunger strike.” Zuhair said, “My family did not know what I was going through at Guantánamo — the humiliation, the torture, the solitary confinement.”

Although Fox noted that it was “difficult to confirm the accounts of either prisoners or military officials,” because journalists “are not allowed to watch the feeding process or interview” the prisoners, Pardiss Kebriaei, an attorney at the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, told him that, during her most recent visit, “several of the men had trouble concentrating, which she attributed in part to being kept isolated in solid-walled cells for most of the day.”

She also told him that one of CCR’s clients, Sabry Mohammed (also known as Sabry Mohammed al-Qurashi), a Yemeni prisoner and one of the 84 men cleared for release, had lost more than 60 pounds in weight. “Sabry Mohammed was a healthy young man before the strike,” she noted in an email. “It was startling this time to see how much he has changed physically.”

Despite the protestations of the authorities regarding their treatment of the hunger strikers, medical professionals refuse to accept their arguments. Fox’s article followed an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine, which I covered here, in which three medical professors wrote, “Military physicians should refuse to participate in any act that unambiguously violates medical ethics,” they write, adding, “Military physicians who refuse to follow orders that violate medical ethics should be actively and strongly supported … Guantánamo has been described as a ‘legal black hole’. As it increasingly also becomes a medical ethics free zone, we believe it’s time for the medical profession to take constructive political action.”

Before this editorial, the American Medical Association (AMA) had written a letter to the Pentagon stating that “force feeding of detainees violates core ethical values of the medical profession,” and shortly after this editorial was published, 153 doctors from the US and around the world condemned the force-feeding of hunger strikers at Guantánamo in a letter to President Obama that was published in the Lancet. In July, the British Medical Association (BMA) followed suit, writing to President Obama “urging him to immediately suspend the role of doctors and nurses in force-feeding prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay and to launch an inquiry into how the ‘unjustifiable’ practice ha[d] been allowed to develop.”

Dr. David L. Katz, working at the Yale University School of Medicine, told Fox that there were “risks to prolonged enteral feeding, including the possibility of getting liquid in the lungs and or damaging the nasal passages, particularly when the person is uncooperative.” He also said that “[t]he effects of prolonged use of liquid nutrition instead of regular food are not really known.”

Fox also noted that Zuhair was held at Guantánamo for seven years, “where he faced an evolving collection of allegations that he had ties to Islamic extremists, all of which he denied.” He was initially seized by the Pakistanis, and Ramzi Kassem told Fox he was “tortured into confessing to having met with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, even though he had never been to that country.”

Kassem also told Fox hat he had sought to have a judge rule on Zuhair’s habeas corpus petition. “We just wanted to go to trial and have the hearing so a judge could rule on whether Ahmed’s detention was legal or not,” he said. However, just after a judge set a court date, for June 2009, “the US put Zuhair on a plane without warning and sent him home,” making him “one of the last prisoners allowed to leave before Congress put up roadblocks” to the release of prisoners.

He then went through the Saudi government’s rehabilitation program, but cannot find work. He told Fox that his stomach and his back were “in constant pain” from the force-feeding, which surely indicates that other men still held will have long-term medical problems as a result of their involvement in hunger strikes, including the prison-wide strike this year, but he saved his last words for the men still held, stating, “I think about the men who are at Guantánamo and I wonder about America’s humanity. I ask myself how much longer this will go on.”

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.

Disgusting Tory Britain: UN Housing Expert Attacked After Telling Government to Axe the Bedroom Tax

Well, what a lovely place Britain is these days. For the last two weeks, Raquel Rolnik, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on housing, has been visiting the UK to “monitor and promote the realisation of the right to adequate housing,” visiting London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Belfast and Manchester, where, as a UN press release explained, “she met with government officials working on housing issues, various human rights commissions, academics and civil society.” She “also carried out site visits, where she heard first-hand testimonies and discussed with individuals, campaigners and local community organisations.”

However, when she dared to criticise the deteriorating state of Britain’s social housing provision, and to call for the “bedroom tax” to be scrapped, she was laid into by senior Tories, and by the right-wing media, in a series of vile and hysterical outbursts that ought to be a disgrace to any country that claims to be civilised.

The “bedroom tax” is a widely reviled policy dreamed up by the millionaires in the Tories’ cabinet, which provides financial penalties for people living in social housing and in receipt of benefits who are deemed to have a spare room. It is forcing many people to move from homes they have lived in for decades, even though there are very few smaller properties to which they can move.

As well as being despicable because it treats people in social housing as sub-humans who don’t deserve the right to regard their homes as homes, the policy also attempts to shift the blame for a lack of social housing onto the poor, rather than admitting that it is the fault of successive governments since Margaret Thatcher, who savagely cut the supply of social housing through her “right to buy” policy, and, more importantly, by her refusal to allow councils to use the money earned to build new social housing, a policy largely maintained by every subsequent government, whether Conservative or Labour.

Ms. Rolnik, who is an academic and a former urban planning minister in Brazil, was described as a “loopy Brazilian leftie with no evidence masquerading as a serious UN official” by the Tory MP for Peterborough Stewart Jackson (who, in May, was being “sued by parliament’s expenses watchdog after refusing to pay £54,000 he is alleged to have made in capital gains on his publicly funded home”), and was also criticised by housing minister Grant Shapps and Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary, who claimed that she had failed to meet with ministers. As the Guardian put it, Shapps said “he had written a formal complaint to the UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon demanding and investigation and claiming Rolnik had not met relevant ministers or officials to discuss the policy. He demanded that she withdraw her report.”

In response, Rolnik told Inside Housing that, although she had visited 11 countries in her role, this was “the first time a government has been so aggressive.” She added, “When I was in the USA, I had a constructive conversation with them accepting some things and arguing with others. They did not react like this.”

She also refuted Shapps’ claims, stating, “I have met officials from many departments, and the details of these meetings are all listed within my report.” Inside Housing reported that it was “understood that as well as meetings with Eric Pickles, secretary of state at the department of communities and local government and under secretary Don Foster,” she “also met with several other officials including the head of housing policy at the department for work and pensions.”

Raquel Rolnik’s analysis

So what had Rolnik done to earn such appalling treatment from the Tory bully-boys? In a statement on September 11, preceding a full report to the UN Human Rights Council next March, she “expressed serious concern about a deterioration in the enjoyment of the right to adequate housing in the United Kingdom,” and “warned against the combined impact of various official measures, recent and past, that ‘have eroded and continue to erode one of the world’s finest systems of affordable housing.’”

She added, “The UK has had a long history of providing affordable and good quality housing, and it should take pride in having placed this human right at the centre of its policy priorities.” She also stated, “For generations, being poor in the UK didn’t necessarily equate to being homeless, or to living badly housed and in permanent threat of eviction.”

“Unfortunately,” she remarked, “the system has been weakened by a series of measures over the years, notably by having privileged homeownership over other forms of tenure.” She added that, “Most recently several reforms to the welfare system topped with cuts in grants for housing provision ‘appear to compromise the realisation of the right to adequate housing and other related human rights.’”

Turning to the bedroom tax, she stated, “The so-called bedroom tax has already had impacts on some of the most vulnerable members of society. During these days of my visit, the dramatic testimonies of people with disabilities, grandmothers who are carers for their families, and others affected by this policy, clearly point to a measure that appears to have been taken without the human component in mind.”

As the UN press release noted, she “acknowledged that times of economic crisis allow for difficult policy decisions to be made,” but warned that “international human rights standards on the right to adequate housing clearly call on governments to avoid jeopardizing the protection of the most vulnerable in the face of fiscal pressures.”

Rolnik also stated, “I am also concerned about the conditions of private renters, as the reduction in the social housing stock and the credit downturn has forced a higher percentage of the population, notably young people, to the private sector, with substantial impact on affordability, location and tenure security.”

Ordinary decent human beings would find nothing to complain about in Ms. Rolnik’s analysis. The “bedroom tax” is a unforgivably vile policy, for its dehumanisation of people in social housing, its pointlessness, as people who are forced to downsize to properties that don’t exist will end up costing more to rehouse, and — to me — the almost unbearable cruelty of rich ministers obsessing and delighting in obsessing about how to further impoverish the poor. It deserves to be scrapped, as does the government’s blanket benefit cap; the cruel and inept Iain Duncan Smith’s universal credit fiasco; the whole workfare scandal, part of a malignant policy of treating the unemployed as shirkers, when there is still only one job for every five people without jobs; and, of course, the government’s systematic and persistent assault on the disabled.

I hope to find time to write more about these issues over the coming months, as I am aware that I have not covered them as thoroughly as I would have liked for the last six months or so, as Guantánamo once more took up centre stage in my life, even though my anger and disgust at this government’s cruelty is undiminished.

Below I’m cross-posting the latest article from the Guardian by Amelia Gentleman, the 2012 George Orwell Prize winner, whose coverage of social issues since the Tories began their war on the state in 2010 is unparalleled in the mainstream media.

Her article follows Raquel Rolnik on part of her visit, and includes the rapporteur’s powerful observation that “[s]ocial housing is almost a lottery today.” The article is also largely self-explanatory, although I should stress that when a spokesperson for the Department of Work and Pensions tries to claim that the bedroom tax “will help us get to grips with the housing benefit bill which has grown to £24bn this year,” he or she is either profoundly deluded or lying through his or her teeth. It will not save any money, as those made homeless will have to be rehoused, at greater expense, but, more importantly, the great lie is that tenants in social housing have more than the most meagre of roles in that colossal housing benefit bill.

The reason that the housing benefit bill has grown to £24bn is because of the historic lack of investment in social housing that I mentioned above, which has now been ongoing for over 30 years, and the greed of the housing market in general, in which an ever-increasing house price bubble, fostered by banks and the government (and especially by George Osborne’s idiotic “Help to Buy” loans), as well as by countless clamouring greedy British citizens and foreign investors, has made getting a mortgage beyond the reach of more and more people, who are forced into private rented housing, where greed is also driving rents ever upward, and there are no checks whatsoever on what landlords can charge — or for that matter, whether what people are getting for being throughly ripped off is actually habitable.

As always, the government and most of the media ignore the fact that much of the welfare bill is not used by the unemployed, but is to help support working people who are simply not paid enough to live by their employers. However, it is the greed of private landlords that is the main key to understanding the idiocy of the government, and how nothing will bring the bills down until the whole rotten housing bubble is lanced like a boil, and we think about having an economy that is not based increasingly on property, and on the endless and ever-increasing exploitation of those with less money by those with more.

To me, genuinely affordable housing is a right, and the country I currently find myself living in — with its monstrous swaggering greed and its seeming acceptance that more and more people will be forced to work longer and longer hours just to pay the over-inflated rent, or the over-inflated mortgage if they can get on the property ladder — is harsh, callous and immoral, and, in the long run, counter-productive for the health of society as a whole.

A society addicted to a second supposedly endless housing bubble (after the last one, which was so rudely interrupted by a total global meltdown caused by the criminals in the financial sector who have not been held accountable for their crimes) is, it seems to me, technically deranged. We are seeing an insanely selfish policy shift cultivated by callous and desperate people who have ceased to believe in a present or a future for society as a whole, and who care only — and I mean only — about themselves and the narrow group of similarly minded people with whom they identify.

As I mentioned, I hope to be writing more about these topics soon, but in the meantime please find Amelia Gentleman’s latest article below.

UK’s bedroom tax and housing crisis threaten human rights, says UN expert

By Amelia Gentleman, The Guardian, September 11, 2013

Housing in the UK, from a human rights perspective, is deteriorating, argues Raquel Rolnik. ‘Social housing is almost a lottery today’

Carol Robertson has already made plans for how to cope with losing £13 a week because of the new spare room subsidy, and she set them out in detail for the UN housing investigator when they met at an Edinburgh food bank last week. Mostly she thinks she will have to cut the amount she spends on electricity as the nights draw in. “It sounds preposterous, but I think people will save on the electricity and use candles. I won’t put my lights on; I will just buy candles,” she told the UN rapporteur on adequate housing, Raquel Rolnik, pointing out that she did not feel this was a very safe alternative. “There will be fires …”

In the warehouse, where volunteers were sorting crates of potatoes and pots of lemon and coconut yoghurt, abandoned by the food industry, for distribution to the city’s poor, Rolnik listened as Robertson explained how the introduction of the bedroom tax was already causing substantial hardship to her and to her neighbours.

Because she wanted to remain in the two-bedroom flat where she has lived for 37 years, and where she brought up her two children, Robertson has decided to pay the £13.02 spare room supplement, introduced by the government in April to push people out of council and housing association properties that are deemed too large for them.

As a result, she is left with £26 a week to live on, after her rent, including the bedroom tax, is paid. Her next-door neighbour, who is also paying the supplement, is left with £4. “Lots of people [in the block] are suffering, but we are helping each other out,” she said.

She chose not to have central heating connected to her home when it was installed in the council block recently. “I knew I couldn’t afford it. If I get cold, I just put on my jumper.” She started volunteering at the Cyrenians Good Food programme, a local food bank, not least because she receives enough food for one meal to take back with her for each shift she works, which helps with her reduced budget. She does not want to leave the home where she brought up her son and her daughter. “If I moved to somewhere smaller I wouldn’t know anyone there. Anyway, there aren’t any smaller properties for us to move to in Edinburgh, so we have to pay the difference,” she said.

This interview with Robertson was one of several that helped crystallise the UN rapporteur’s concern about the spare-room subsidy, pushing it to the top of her agenda on what was meant to be a wide-ranging study of Britain’s housing crisis over the past two weeks. She will declare that the government should abolish the policy on Wednesday morning, as she makes her findings public.

Appointed to report on human rights problems globally, the UN’s special rapporteurs are more frequently found investigating allegations of human rights violations in crisis zones. But during her tenure, Rolnik, a Brazilian architect and urban planner, has been particularly interested in studying how the global financial crisis has affected housing, and has visited both developed and developing countries on fact-finding trips.

She was vocal in her criticisms of the US government for “ignoring” a surge in homelessness after the economic crisis in 2009. She is likely to be equally tough in her criticisms of the British government when she publishes her preliminary conclusions from her tour on Wednesday, given her conviction that the UK’s previously good record on social housing is rapidly worsening. The causes of the decline stretch back decades, and predate the current administration’s austerity policy, but she argues that welfare reform is making an already difficult situation worse. “You had already problems with affordability, with waiting lists, with security of tenure, and then on top of that you have welfare reform,” she said.

She met government ministers, council officials, housing developers and charity workers, but much of her report is based on interviews with individuals asked to recount in detail how housing policy has affected their lives. She heard from many other council property tenants encountering similar difficulties during her visit to Manchester, where she attended a rally organised on Saturday in protest at the bedroom tax. “I saw the human face of it,” she said.

She was concerned by how individuals who were already on a low income would be able to make the extra payments that would allow them to stay in their homes. “You struggle already to pay for your fuel, your food, with the low payments; but then on top of that if you stay in your home you are going to have a deduction in your housing benefit,” she said.

A case such as Robertson’s, where a person was forced to cut down on heating and electricity in order to pay for accommodation, represented a violation of the right to adequate housing, she said. She was uncertain about whether her report on UK housing and the bedroom tax would have an impact on legal challenges to the bedroom tax. “In many countries, despite the fact that the country has signed and ratified [the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and also the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights], the judicial authorities do not necessarily take that into account. But judges should take that into account.”

Orla Doyle, part of the Cyrenians’ homelessness prevention service, said staff were only just beginning to appreciate the consequences of the introduction of the policy, as tenants who had chosen to stay in their home realised how difficult it was going to be to find the extra money. “People thought they would be able to afford it, but it turns out they can’t,” she told Rolnik.

“It is outrageous the choices that people have to make between heating and feeding themselves. The mental health impact of these situations is under-reported,” another volunteer at the food bank said.The Department for Work and Pensions was both defensive and dismissive in its statement on Rolnik’s findings, reiterating that the bedroom tax was a “useful and important” policy and rejecting the report as insubstantial, “drawn from anecdotal evidence and conversations after a handful of meetings”.

“These changes will help us get to grips with the housing benefit bill which has grown to £24bn this year, and make better use of our housing stock. We’ve given councils £190m to support vulnerable residents who may need extra help,” a DWP spokesman said. The Department for Communities and Local Government also appeared to downplay the significance of her trip, commenting that Eric Pickles had “briefly” met Rolnik for a 15-minute conversation.

The rapporteur’s visit has already triggered hostility from some Conservative MPs, who questioned whether the UN had a role in commenting on British housing and highlighting Rolnik’s previously stated philosophical scepticism about Britain’s “obsessive” approach to home ownership and the right to buy policy. The Tory MP for Dover, Charlie Elphicke, said in a statement distributed by Conservative party headquarters: “Hard-working taxpayers have to make tough choices of their own about what sort of property they can afford to live in, and they should not be paying for what is effectively a benefit subsidy for empty rooms.”

But Rolnik said the government had been helpful when she first requested to make the inspection last year and had been happy to extend a formal invitation to her to carry out her work.

The rapporteur was struck by the impact the policy has on people with disabilities whose homes had been converted to suit their needs. “I saw a lot of cases of people with disabilities, who have their whole world around them adapted to help them have an independent life, having to move,” she said. “People are asking: ‘How can I pay to move? I don’t have a penny to pay for the move.’”

Rolnik believes the UK is in the grips of a housing crisis. “What are the indicators of that crisis? Problems of affordability, not just for low-income people; middle-income people are also complaining a lot about the price of their mortgages and rent. There is the very high, and rising, cost of renting. There is overcrowding, and the impact of short-term tenancies being offered,” she said. Her report will compare standards in the UK against the country’s own previous record, rather than looking at the relative merits of housing here and in Sierra Leone, for example.

“The UK has set up very high standards for social housing. A third of households in the 1960s were housed in social housing; there was a massive postwar production of social housing and a lot of it well located,” she said.

But housing in Britain, from a human rights perspective, is deteriorating, she argued. “Retrogression is what you talk about in human rights when you go backwards, and that is what we are seeing now. You were much more likely in the 1970s to be able to access social housing than today when it is very difficult, almost a lottery; today in England you have 17% in social housing,” she said.

She was also critical of a “change in status” of social housing “so that it is now seen as something only for the vulnerable, only for the ones that failed to be professionals, able to buy their homes, only for those who live on benefit. It is stigmatised.”

She was also critical of the government for its large investment in housing market stimulus schemes. “The real housing shortage is affordable housing, and the schemes that are being proposed, like the help to buy or the mortgage to rent scheme, they will not provide affordable housing. The bulk of it won’t be affordable,” she argued. She will recommend better regulation of the rental sector as part of the report.

Rolnik, a former minister for urban planning in Brazil’s centre-left Workers’ party, is politically astute and aware that the recommendations take her into highly charged political territory. Asked if she thought the government would adopt her proposals, she laughed and said, “of course”, before conceding that at the very least she would like her report to “raise public awareness of what’s going on”.

Note: Raquel Rolnik’s full end-of-mission statement after her UK visit is here. In it, she also noted severe problems with land speculation. She stated that “several documents and assessments acknowledge that land with permits has increasingly become the asset in itself, rather than an asset for the social well-being of the community. Similarly, it is also of concern that there is no property tax on land, including dormant or vacant land for years. Land value, including in the financial circuits, has escalated in the last decades, yet it is still mostly regarded as a private matter, hence for-profit. I would recommend that the government sets a regulatory framework to avoid this kind of speculation”.

“Similarly,” she added, “selling public land to private developers for the best price can mean that a valuable public resource is not being used as a means to increase the availability of housing for those who need it, in times of housing stress. A significant part of the existing social housing stock in UK was built on local council and other public land. In times of pressure on affordable housing, the mobilization of public land can be an important tool, so I recommend that the government releases public sector land only for social and affordable housing to be built”.

Rolnik also said that she had also received “multiple testimonies on the shortage of sufficient, adequate and safe sites for Gypsy and Traveller communities across the United Kingdom, many of whom feel this is part of the stigma and discrimination they regularly face from governments and society as a whole,” adding, “it is fair to say that leaving local authorities to make their own decisions with no accountability and national process to reconcile the Gypsy and Traveller communities with settled communities remains a source of concern.”

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

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

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

Read My First Article for Al-Jazeera Calling for an End to the Injustice of Guantánamo and Bagram

Dear friends, I do hope you have time to read my first article for Al-Jazeera English, “It’s time to end the injustice of Guantánamo and Bagram,” in which, the day after the 12th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I run through the story of America’s dreadful innovations in the wake of the attacks — with particular reference to Guantánamo, where 164 men remain, and Bagram in Afghanistan, where 67 non-Afghan prisoners are still held, despite the handover of the majority of the prisoners to the Afghan authorities.

In the article I point out how, by discarding the Geneva Conventions after 9/11, the Bush administration embraced indefinite detention without charge or trial, and also opened the floodgates to the use of torture. The latter was eventually curtailed (as official policy, at least), but the indefinite detention continues under President Obama, both at Guantánamo and Bagram, which is unacceptable policy under any circumstances.

I also point out how another baleful legacy of the Bush administration’s lawless policies is the largely worthless information masquerading as evidence, which is used to justify the ongoing imprisonment of the men at Bagram, and around half of the remaining men at Guantánamo. As I explain in the article:

[T]he Bush administration set about justifying the unjustifiable at Guantánamo, in its Afghan prisons and in the “black sites” run by or on behalf of the CIA, through interrogations in which torture and other forms of coercion were used, along with bribery (offering prisoners comfort items, ranging from food and cigarettes to DVDs and even their own gardens) or simply grinding prisoners down through relentless interrogations, until they began telling their interrogators what they wanted to hear. In one particular case, a single prisoner made false or untrustworthy allegations against at least 120 of his fellow prisoners.

The result, predictably, was an intelligence operation of extraordinary worthlessness, composed, to an alarming degree, of false statements made by prisoners about their fellow prisoners, although that has never been officially admitted.

It should also be noted that, although this worthless intelligence continues to exert a baleful influence on around half the prisoners still at Guantánamo, the other half of the remaining 164 prisoners should be beyond its malevolent reach, as they were cleared for release in January 2010 by an inter-agency task force that President Obama established when he first took office. However, they are still held because of Congressional restrictions, and the president’s own unwillingness to spend political capital pushing for their release — an unacceptable situation that is highlighted on the GMTO Clock website that I established in August, and which will also be a major part of the campaigning for the closure of Guantánamo that will be building up from now to the 13th anniversary of the prison’s opening in January.

If you like my article for Al-Jazeera, please like it, share it, tweet it, and also feel free to comment on it.

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

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

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

Save Lewisham Hospital: Events to Celebrate the Campaign’s Victory Over Jeremy Hunt

For campaigners in Lewisham, in south east London — and for defenders of the NHS across the country –  it has been a summer of celebration, since a great victory was declared in the High Court on July 31, and I draw your attention to three events taking place over the next few weeks — a victory parade and party, a fundraising night of dancing, and a trip to Manchester to protest outside the Conservative Party Conference.

Details of these events are below, but to provide some background, as I explained at the time of the victory, “Mr. Justice Silber, ruling on two judicial reviews submitted by Lewisham Council and the Save Lewisham Hospital campaign, ruled that health secretary Jeremy Hunt had acted unlawfully when he approved plans to severely downgrade services at Lewisham Hospital, including shutting its A&E Department, so that there would only be one A&E Department for the 750,000 inhabitants of the boroughs of Lewisham, Greenwich and Bexley, and cutting maternity services so severely that nine out of ten mothers in a borough of 270,000 people would have to give birth elsewhere.”

As I also explained:

The judicial reviews were launched when, in January, Jeremy Hunt approved the proposals for Lewisham, which were put forward last October by Matthew Kershaw, an NHS Special Administrator appointed to deal with the financial problems of a neighbouring trust, the South London Healthcare Trust, in the first use of the Unsustainable Providers Regime, legislation for dealing with bankrupt trusts that was introduced by the last Labour government.

Mr. Justice Silber ruled that “neither the recommendations of the TSA [the Trust Special Administrator] nor the decision of the Secretary of State reducing the facilities at LH [Lewisham Hospital] fell within their powers,” and also ruled that Hunt and the TSA had failed to satisfy one of four requirements for the proposals; namely, that the plans had “support from GP Commissioners” — something that was powerfully explained by Dr. Helen Tattersfield, the Chair of the Lewisham Clinical Commissioning Group, in a submission that I posted here.

Despite this victory, the campaign to save Lewisham Hospital is not over. Jeremy Hunt has appealed — although it is difficult to see how the government can prevail in an appeal. As Open Democracy reported on August 22, “If the appeal is successful, no hospital, no matter how successful will be safe from closure in order to top up the finances at a financially-stricken neighbouring Trust.”

However, as Rosa Curling — from the law firm Leigh Day, who represented the Save Lewisham Hospital Campaign during the judicial review — said, “We remain confident that the Court of Appeal will uphold Mr. Justice Silber’s decision and we intend to request an urgent hearing so the ongoing uncertainty facing the Hospital can be brought to an end as a matter of priority.”

More worrying, I believe, is the merger of Lewisham Hospital and the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Woolwich, one of the South London Healthcare Trust’s three hospitals, which is definitely going ahead and is, I understand, still scheduled for October 1.

This was a key part of Matthew Kershaw’s proposals, which tended to get overlooked in the campaign, even though it opened the door to the planned downgrade of Lewisham, and it is, of course, troubling that the merger is going ahead, because Queen Elizabeth remains burdened with a large share of the debt — running at £1 million a day — that led to the SLHT being subjected to the Unsustainable Providers Regime in the first place.

As the Greenwich-based 853 blog explained in an article just after the victory, “what will happen from October is that QEH will be taken under the wing of Lewisham Hospital’s trust. Hopefully, both the Lewisham and Woolwich hospitals will be able to keep their A&Es, but QEH will be able to improve under the skilled management of the Lewisham team.”

That is well put — and the article is also worth reading for the author’s analysis of how poorly Greenwich Council, the home of QEH, campaigned against Matthew Kershaw’s proposals.

It’s also worth pointing out, of course, that numerous experts are aware of the potential problems, as are the senior managers at Lewisham Hospital who accepted the merger. Of particular interest, in addition to Helen Tattersfield’s submission, linked to above, is a report by a team led by Prof. Allyson Pollock, “Blaming the victims: the trust special administrator’s plans for south east London,” which is available here.

The report makes a point of emphasising the extent to which the SLHT’s financial problems arose because of two ruinous PFI deals, for building Queen Elizabeth Hospital and the Princess Royal Hospital in Bromley, which cost £210 million, but, when repaid, will have cost £2.5 billion — outrageous profiteering highlighted in an article in the Independent last July entitled, “The funding timebomb that crippled an NHS healthcare trust.”

While we await further information about how Lewisham Hospital, its services and it staff can be protected once the merger goes ahead, the vent mentioned at the start of this article are listed below, and if you’r anywhere within reach of London or Manchester, I hope to see you at one or all of them.

Saturday 14th September: Save Lewisham Hospital Victory Parade and Party, noon onwards

As the Save Lewisham Hospital campaign explains, “We want everyone who came on our earlier demonstrations to join the celebration of the Save Lewisham Hospital campaign’s first victory — the declaration that Jeremy Hunt’s plans are illegal, and Lewisham Hospital will not be forced to close services! Meet at the roundabout at Lewisham Station, 12pm, 14th September and parade to Ladywell Fields, arriving there at 1pm.  There’ll be local bands, Olympic ceremony performers, children’s sports, rides and activities, food stalls, beer tent, and updates from the campaign. This is a demo with a difference, the chance to enjoy the success we’ve had and demonstrate that we are not going to disappear (particularly since Jeremy Hunt has launched a legal appeal).”

[image error]Friday 27th September: Save Lewisham Hospital — Rivoli Ballroom Fundraiser, 7.30 pm to midnight

Come and celebrate victory — and raise money to challenge Jeremy Hunt’s appeal, at the famous Rivoli Ballroom in Crofton Park. As the Save Lewisham Hospital campaign explains, “The legal battle against Jeremy Hunt will continue because of his decision to appeal, and the campaign needs funds to keep fighting. The Rivoli Ballroom, local bands, DJs, artists and many people in the community have donated their time and effort to put together a fantastic night at the Rivoli Ballroom. There’ll be a raffle of great prizes, donated to the campaign — including an amazing Martin Rowson original cartoon, Eddie Izzard signed items, and Millwall FC goodies.” Book tickets here — £20 if you can afford it, although you can also pay £10 or the concessionary rate of £5.

Sunday 29th September: National Demonstration to Save the NHS, Manchester

Come to Manchester to tell the Tories what you think of their plans to destroy the NHS, and to create a movement of nation solidarity, using the inspiration of Lewisham’s campaign. As Save Lewisham Hospital campaign explains, “The government is on the ropes. They’ve relentlessly attacked the NHS from the safety of their parliament offices, but when they have the Tory Party Conference in Manchester, tens of thousands of people from around the country will get their chance to tell them that the NHS is not for sale. We’re arranging coaches to Manchester, and want to represent Lewisham on a national scale. Get your coach ticket here — £20, or £5 unwaged.

If you want to help with publicity, please contact Kathy Cruise.

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, “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.

Remember Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, Who Died at Guantánamo A Year Ago, Despite Being Cleared for Release

Exactly a year ago, on September 8, 2012, Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, a Yemeni prisoner at Guantánamo, died in circumstances that are still disputed. The US authorities claim that he committed suicide by overdosing on psychiatric medication that he had hoarded, but that has always seemed unlikely, given that the prisoners at Guantánamo are closely monitored, and it has become clear that he was moved around the prison on a number of occasions before his death, making the hoarding of medication even more unlikely.

Despite the inconsistencies in the US authorities’ account of Adnan’s death, it is undisputed that, throughout his ten years at Guantánamo, he had attempted to commit suicide on several occasions. A talented poet, and a father, Adnan also had severe mental health problems, the result of a car crash in Yemen many years before his capture. Adnan always claimed that he had traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan in search of cheap medical treatment for his head wounds, in contrast to the US authorities’ attempts to portray him as a member of al-Qaeda.

Those claims, however, evaporated over the years of Adnan’s long and pointless imprisonment, as he was cleared for release on three occasions, only to discover that decisions to release prisoners meant very little, especially in the case of Yemeni prisoners. At the time of his death, 87 of the remaining 167 prisoners had been cleared for release, by an inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established when he took office in January 2009, but were still held, and 57 of these men were Yemenis.

Congressional opposition and President Obama’s unwillingness to spend political capital on Guantánamo had led to this intolerable situation, but in the Yemenis’ case there was an added obstacle — a moratorium on releasing any Yemeni prisoners, which President Obama had issued in January 2010, in response to the hysteria that had greeted the news that a failed bomb plot in December 2009, in which a Nigerian man had tried and failed to detonate a bomb in his underwear on a flight into Detroit, had been hatched in Yemen.

I explained the extent to which Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif was failed by all three branches of the US government in an article published a week after his death, entitled, “Obama, the Courts and Congress Are All Responsible for the Latest Death at Guantánamo,” in which I wrote:

I felt sick when I heard the news: that the man who died at Guantánamo last weekend was Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, a Yemeni. I had been aware of his case for six years, and had followed it closely. He had been cleared for release under President Bush (in December 2006) and under President Obama (as a result of the Guantánamo Review Task Force’s deliberations in 2009). He had also had his habeas corpus petition granted in a US court, but, disgracefully, he had not been freed.

Instead of being released, Adnan Latif was failed by all three branches of the US government. President Obama was content to allow him to rot in Guantánamo, having announced a moratorium on releasing any Yemenis from Guantánamo after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian recruited in Yemen, tried and failed to blow up a plane in December 2009. That ban was still in place when Latif died, and had been put in place largely because of pressure from Congress.

Also to blame are the D.C. Circuit Court and the Supreme Court. Latif had his habeas corpus petition granted in July 2010, but then the D.C. Circuit Court moved the goalposts, ordering the lower court judges to give the government’s alleged evidence — however obviously inadequate — the presumption of accuracy. Latif’s case came before the D.C. Circuit Court in October 2011, when two of the three judges — Judges Janice Rogers Brown and Karen LeCraft Henderson — reversed his successful habeas petition, and only Judge David Tatel dissented, noting that there was no reason for his colleagues to assume that the government’s intelligence report about Latif, made at the time of his capture, was accurate, as it was “produced in the fog of war, by a clandestine method that we know almost nothing about.” In addition, Judge Tatel noted that it was “hard to see what is left of the Supreme Court’s command,” in 2008′s Boumediene v. Bush ruling, granting the prisoners constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights, that the habeas review process be “meaningful.”

Despite this, when the Supreme Court had the opportunity to take back control of the Guantánamo prisoners’ habeas petitions in June […], through a number of appeals, including one by Latif, they refused.

I have written a number of other articles about Adnan since his death, most recently an article published in July, entitled, “EXCLUSIVE: The Last Days in the Life of Adnan Latif, Who Died in Guantánamo Last Year,” in which I explored the inconsistencies in the official account, drawing on the US military’s report into his death, obtained through FOIA legislation by my colleague Jason Leopold, and on unclassified notes from a meeting in Guantánamo between Abdelhadi Faraj, a Syrian prisoner, and his lawyer, Ramzi Kassem, who made the notes available to me exclusively.

In that article, I accepted the military’s own conclusions that, as I put it, “the rules regarding the treatment of prisoners — and especially of disturbed individuals like Adnan — were repeatedly ignored,” and also noted that the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) has not yet completed its own investigation into Adnan’s death, but as I also explained, drawing on my experiences covering the six other deaths at Guantánamo described contentiously as suicides, “the NCIS has a record of producing inadequate reports following alleged suicides at Guantánamo, and it is clear that what is actually needed is an independent investigation.”

As I also explained, “Adnan Latif deserves nothing less, but it is extremely unlikely that it will ever happen, because transparency and accountability are still words that are not even remotely associated with the running of the dreadful ‘war on terror’ prison at Guantánamo Bay, whose continued existence ought to be a source of enduring shame for all decent Americans.”

When Adnan died, I made a promise to try and ensure that his death would not be in vain, and would not lead to other prisoners who, like him, had been cleared for release but were still held, dying at the prison from which they were supposed to have been freed.

His death is an indelible black mark on any claim that America believes in justice and fairness, but, distressingly, little effort has been made to make sure that other cleared prisoners do not die at the prison. In February, despairing at ever being released or given any form of justice, the majority of the surviving prisoners embarked on a prison-wide hunger strike, endangering their lives to awaken the world to their plight.

The hunger strike, which led to renewed outrage about Guantánamo, finally prompted President Obama into action. In May, he delivered a major speech on national security issues in which he stated, “I am lifting the moratorium on detainee transfers to Yemen, so we can review them on a case by case basis. To the greatest extent possible, we will transfer detainees who have been cleared to go to other countries.”

Despite this, however, just two prisoners — both Algerians — have been released. President Obama is lucky that no one has died as a result of the hunger strike, which is still ongoing, with 20 men currently being force-fed twice a day, but that should not be the basis of his policy decisions.

The president needs to understand that establishing a review process that clears prisoners for release but then continuing to hold them for years — and possibly for the rest of their lives –  is unacceptable under any circumstances. The 84 other cleared prisoners who are still held must be released as soon as possible.

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, “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.

Meet the Guantánamo Prisoner Who Wants to be Prosecuted Rather than Rot in Legal Limbo

Throughout the spring and summer, while the prison-wide hunger strike at Guantánamo raged, taking up most of my attention, as I reported prisoners’ accounts, and campaigned to get President Obama to release the 86 prisoners cleared for release in January 2010 by his own inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force, I missed some other developments, which I intend to revisit over the next few weeks, beginning with an article by Jess Bravin for the Wall Street Journal in July.

Bravin, the Supreme Court correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and the author of the acclaimed book The Terror Courts: Rough Justice at Guantanamo Bay, wrote an article entitled, “Guantánamo Detainee Begs to Be Charged as Legal Limbo Worsens,” which perfectly captured the Alice in Wonderland-style absurdity of the prison, eleven and half years after it opened, with the remaining 164 prisoners no closer to securing justice than they were when George W. Bush set up the prison, which, at the time, was intended to be a place where they could be held without any rights whatsoever.

Highlighting one aspect of this ongoing injustice, Bravin looked at the case of Sufyian Barhoumi, identified in his article as Sufiyan Barhoumi, who, as he described it, “has decided to plead guilty to war crimes, throw himself on the mercy of the court and serve whatever sentence a US military commission deems just.” As Bravin added, however, “There’s just one problem: The Pentagon refuses to charge him.”

Barhoumi is one of 63 prisoners who have had their cases ruled on by judges in the District Court in Washington D.C. since the Supreme Court ruled in June 2008 that they had constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights, and is one of 25 whose habeas petitions were not granted by the judges involved — although the appeals court later intervened to reverse or vacate some of the 38 victories for the prisoners, eventually rewriting the rules so that no more prisoners could have their habeas petitions granted.

Barhoumi’s habeas petition was turned down in September 2009, and his appeal was denied in June 2010, which I reported at length in an article at the time, entitled, “In Abu Zubaydah’s Case, Court Relies on Propaganda and Lies.” An Algerian, he was seized on March 28, 2002, in a house raid in Faisalabad, Pakistan, that led to the capture of Abu Zubaydah, the gatekeeper of a training camp in Afghanistan who was mistakenly regarded as a senior figure in al-Qaeda and was the first victim of the Bush administration’s torture program for so-called “high-value detainees,” even though he was not a member of al-Qaeda at all.

Bravin’s focus on Barhoumi’s case was timely, because of two recent — and surprising — decisions in the appeals court in Washington D.C., overturning two of the only convictions secured in the military commission trials at Guantánamo since they were revived by Vice President Dick Cheney in the wake of the 9/11 attacks (of Salim Hamdan, a Yemeni who had worked as one of Osama bin Laden’s drivers in Afghanistan, and Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, a Yemeni who had made a propaganda video for al-Qaeda). As Bravin explained, “Federal judges in Washington reversed the military commissions’ convictions of detainees Salim Hamdan and Ali Hamza al-Bahlul because the charges prosecutors filed — conspiracy and material support for terrorism — weren’t war crimes.”

As Bravin continued to explain, “Those two charges were the only ones prosecutors believed they could prove against more than a dozen detainees, including Mr. Barhoumi.” The Obama administration has appealed, but as Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, the chief prosecutor of the military commissions, explained in June, “the maximum number of prisoners that the US military intends to prosecute, or has already prosecuted, is 20 — or just 2.5 percent of the 779 men held at the prison since it opened in January 2002,” as I stated in an article at the time — down from the 36 recommended for trials by Obama’s task force, plus the three prosecuted under George W. Bush.

With seven men already prosecuted, and eight currently charged or facing trials, that leaves a maximum of five other men who can conceivably be tried, and it is uncertain if one of those five will be Sufyian Barhoumi. Highlighting the absurdity of the predicament facing the men recommended for prosecution by the task force, Barhoumi is one of 23 men not charged, but listed as being recommended for prosecution, in an official document that was released, through FOIA legislation, in June this year, meaning that 18 of those men are likely to find themselves in the same limbo as Barhoumi.

As Bravin proceeded to explain, “Guantánamo prosecutors routinely filed conspiracy and material support charges because they are easier to prove than tying suspects to a particular attack.”

Capt. Justin Swick, Barhoumi’s military defense attorney, told Bravin, “For years, your ticket out of Guantánamo was being found guilty,” noting that Salim Hamdan was repatriated five months after his conviction for material support in August 2008. Capt. Swick added, “Now there’s nothing to be found guilty of.”

Analyzing this disgraceful situation, Bravin noted, “Elsewhere in the American justice system, suspects go free unless prosecutors file charges. In Guantánamo, the opposite is true: Detainees who aren’t charged and are presumed innocent under the Military Commissions Act of specific war crimes nevertheless face indefinite detention because the Pentagon has classified them as enemy combatants.”

He also stated that Barhoumi’s lawyers had explained to him that prosecutors “won’t file charges unless Mr. Barhoumi first testifies against other detainees.” Another military defense lawyer, Lt. Col. Richard Reiter, said, “They are going to exploit their ability to hold him under indefinite detention and try and force him into cooperation. I would classify it as an abuse of prosecutorial discretion.”

Defense lawyers also stated, as Bravin put it, that “they believe prosecutors are desperate for live courtroom testimony against Mr. Zubaydah — something considered far more credible than hearsay statements taken by interrogators and other evidence that could be undermined by controversial CIA practices.”

Through his attorneys, Barhoumi himself responded to questions posed by Brevin. “I want to tell my story, but they put up obstacles,” he said, adding, “I don’t have a black heart against America.”

Capt. Swick, telling Barhoumi’s back story, told Bravin that, “like many North Africans, Mr. Barhoumi crossed the Mediterranean in the 1990s to seek his fortune in Europe. Opportunities were elusive, and in 1999 he left Britain for Chechnya, intending to join the Muslim insurgency against Russian rule.” He then “followed the jihadist trail to Afghanistan to attend training camps, where he lost four fingers and mangled his left thumb while practicing with explosives.”

Barhoumi explained the circumstances to a military review board during the Bush administration. “It was a small bomb buried, a mine,” he said. “While digging, I pressed it accidentally.”

After the 9/11 attacks, and the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, Barhoumi fled to Pakistan. He said that “he had been in Faisalabad around 10 days when the safe house was raided by Pakistani authorities, who captured about 20 Arabs and turned them over to the US,” as the Wall Street Journal explained. Barhoumi said that he “was in the wrong place” at the wrong time, adding that “he had never seen Mr. Zubaydah before arriving at the safe house, and barely after that.”

Under George W. Bush, Barhoumi was accused of conspiracy, allegedly for “training two other occupants of the Faisalabad house in remote-control explosive triggers,” but that case collapsed when, in June 2006, the Supreme Court ruled that the commissions were illegal.

When they were ill-advisedly revived under President Obama, Barhoumi almost secured a plea deal that would have led to him receiving a 20-year sentence, defense lawyers explained, but the deal “fell apart on a dispute over whether Mr. Barhoumi should get credit for the years he has already spent in prison.”

In the wake of the appeals court rulings dismissing the convictions of Salim Hamdan and Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, the charges against Barhoumi were dropped. As noted previously, the Obama administration has appealed, but, as Bravin pointed out, “it could be years before the issue is ultimately resolved.” Capt. Swick explained that Barhoumi’s defense team was informed on January 31 that the charges had been dropped.

He added that the news “dismayed” Barhoumi, who, after meeting with his lawyers, “decided to invite the prosecutors to file any charge they wished, and he would plead guilty. At sentencing, prosecutors could argue for any sentence up to life imprisonment, and Mr. Barhoumi could seek a lesser penalty.”

Capt. Swick also explained, “He would address them directly in English, which he’s learned since he has been here, explain the mistakes that he made and his plans for the future.”

Capt. Swick also explained that, in February, the defense team met with prosecutors to propose the plan. However, just eleven days later, the disappointing response was delivered. There would be “no charges unless Mr. Barhoumi testified in court against other detainees.”

On Barhoumi’s behalf, Capt. Swick refused. As he explained, his client is “willing to work with this system and plead guilty because it is his only alternative to indefinite detention without trial, but he won’t help convict someone else in a system he believes is illegitimate.”

Responding to the realization that he was trapped, with no apparent way to get out of Guantánamo at all, Barhoumi, who has been described as “highly compliant” by the authorities, joined the hunger strike that has been raging since February. Capt. Swick said that when he had visited Barhoumi in May, he “had lost about 50 pounds,” and was “subsisting on honey, tea and liquid supplements.” Like the other hunger strikers, he had been “placed in solitary confinement” and was allowed just “two hours a day outside his cell.”

And like all the prisoners, whether the 84 cleared for release but still held, or the others recommended for trials that are not happening, or for ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial, Barhoumi evidently concluded that, whatever category he was supposed to be in, the reality is that everyone still held at Guantánamo is actually trapped in a living tomb, a disgraceful situation that must be brought to an end.

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, “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.

Video: Al-Jazeera’s Powerful and Important Documentary, “Life After Guantánamo”

[image error]After seven and a half years of researching and writing about the prisoners held in the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, it’s always refreshing to hear from former prisoners — and, in many cases, to see their faces and hear their voices for the very first time.

The highlights of “Life After Guantánamo,” Al-Jazeera America’s newly released documentary about Guantánamo (available below, via YouTube) are interviews with two released Yemeni prisoners, Mohammed Hassan Odaini (freed in July 2010), and Farouq Ali Ahmed (freed in December 2009). I told the story of Ahmed, the victim of two notoriously false allegations made by other prisoners, in an article following his release, and I told the story of Odaini, an innocent student seized in a house raid in Pakistan in March 2002, in a series of articles between May 2010, when he had his habeas corpus petition granted, and his release 48 days later (see here, here and here).

At the time, it was clear to me that both men were palpably innocent, and seeing and hearing them now only confirms it. Both are charming and articulate, working, married, and expecting their first children, and, importantly, neither man even remotely fulfils American fears that released Yemenis will “return to the battlefield.”

This outrageous smear originated under the Bush administration, when only 15 of the 115 or so Yemenis held at Guantánamo were released, even through deals were eventually made to repatriate the majority of the Saudi prisoners, whose stories, numbers and circumstances were more or less the same. Under Obama, an inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force appeared to recognize this injustice, approving the release of around two-thirds of the remaining Yemeni prisoners, along with dozens of prisoners from other countries.

Unfortunately, just seven cleared Yemeni prisoners were released under President Obama before a failed bomb plot, involving a Nigerian man recruited in Yemen, and a plane bound for Detroit, led to a hysterical backlash against releasing Yemeni prisoners. Since then, just one Yemeni — Mohammed Hassan Odaini — has been released. This remains the case, even though, in May this year, President Obama dropped a ban on releasing Yemenis that he imposed following the failed bomb plot, stating, in a major speech on national security, “I am lifting the moratorium on detainee transfers to Yemen, so we can review them on a case by case basis.”

Even though President Obama has just released two Algerian prisoners, overcoming obstacles raised by Congress that have prevented the release of prisoners for the last few years, he has not, to date, released any Yemenis, and the program is to be congratulated for highlighting what can only be regarded as the ongoing and unacceptable injustice of continuing to hold men cleared for release — and the Yemenis in particular.

Just to make the facts clear, 84 of the remaining 164 prisoners were cleared for release by the task force, and 56 of them are Yemenis.

As well as featuring interviews with Mohammed Hassan Odaini and Farouq Ali Ahmed (and surprising Donald Rumsfeld at his summer house), the program, presented by Wab Kinew, also deals with the tragedy of Adnan Latif, a cleared Yemeni prisoner who died at Guantánamo almost exactly a year ago (on September 9, 2012), and also looks at the stories of two men still held, Hayil al-Maythali (aka al-Mithali) and Abdulsalam al-Hila (aka al-Hela). Despite a lack of evidence establishing that either man constitutes a threat to the US, they have not been cleared for release, and, in fact, they were both recommended for continued detention by the task force, in a document that was only made available in June this year.

The program looked at the campaigns to release them in Yemen, pointing out how much popular support there is for freeing them, in contrast to the poisonous black propaganda still emanating from the US, and overall I felt that the program did a great job of providing important information both for those of us engaged in the ongoing struggle to close Guantánamo, and for those coming to it for the first time. I hope you have the time to watch it, and to share it widely.

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, “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.

Who Are the Two Guantánamo Prisoners Released in Algeria?

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 portrait on the left is by the artist Molly Crabapple, who has been visiting Guantánamo this year, and is one of seven portraits, with accompanying text, commissioned and published this week by Creative Time Reports and also published by the Daily Beast. 

Last week, President Obama released the first two prisoners from Guantánamo since he promised to resume releasing cleared prisoners in a major speech on May 23. That speech was prompted by high-level domestic and international criticism, which, in turn, arose in response to a prison-wide hunger strike that the prisoners embarked upon in February, in despair at ever being freed or receiving justice.

The release of these two prisoners, both Algerians, is to be applauded, as President Obama has been so paralyzed by inertia for the last few years that only five prisoners were freed between October 2010 and July 2013 (either through court orders or through plea deals in their military commission trials) and the last prisoners to be freed as a result of the president’s own intentions were released three years ago, in September 2010, when two men who could not be safely repatriated were released in Germany.

Since then, Congress has raised serious obstacles to the release of prisoners, and the administration was required to certify to lawmakers that it was safe to release the men. As the Miami Herald reported after their release last week, “Last month, the White House announced that Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, for the first time, had certified the release under requirements imposed by Congress’ current National Defense Authorization Act with the approval of Secretary of State John Kerry and the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.”

Although the president and his administration are to be applauded, that applause will be short-lived if it is not followed by further releases. The two men who were released, Nabil Hadjarab and Mutia Sayyab, were cleared for release in January 2010 by the inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force, established by President Obama when he took office in January 2009, and, crucially, 84 of the remaining 164 prisoners were also cleared for release by the task force but are still held.

Those 84 prisoners also need to be released, as swiftly as possible, either to their home countries, or to third countries of it is unsafe for them to be repatriated, and if third countries cannot be found then they must be given new homes in the US.

In the weeks and months to come, we at “Close Guantánamo” intend to maintain the pressure on President Obama to release these 84 men, but in the meantime we believe it is important to tell the stories of the two men who were released, as one of the lies used by lawmakers and right-wing pundits in an attempt to justify their opposition to the release of prisoners is that they are all dangerous men who, given half a chance, will return to the battlefield. This has never been true, and it is clear that the sober and responsible officials of the task force only approved prisoners for release if they concluded that they did not pose a threat to the US. Moreover, the stories of Nabil Hadjarab and Mutia Sayyab make this clear.

We have previously covered Nabil’s story here on “Close Guantánamo,” in a profile published in May 2012 entitled, “Nabil Habjarab, the “Sweet Kid” in Guantánamo, Was Cleared in 2007 But Is Still Held,” and in July I publicized his account of the hunger strike, the first in which he had taken part. Now 32 years old, he was just 21 years old when he was first seized.

As I explained in the profile last year, Nabil’s father, Said, served in the French army, and then ran a café in Lyon and had seven children. He then remarried, and Nabil is the only child from that second marriage. Nabil lived in France until he was nine years old, but then his father then took him back to Algeria, although he spent every summer in France with his uncle Ahmad. Disaster struck in 1994, when Nabil’s father died of cancer, and he was taken in by an abusive aunt.

Nabil’s lifeline was his uncle Ahmed, who sent him money, treating him as though he was one of his own children, and when he turned 21 Nabil returned to France and his uncle’s family, hoping to secure French residency.

However, fearful that he would be deported while waiting for his paperwork to be processed, Nabil made a fateful decision to travel to the UK, and from there to Afghanistan, where he stayed with an Algerian man in Kabul, and then fled to Jalalabad after the US-led invasion began. He then tried to reach the Pakistani border, but was wounded in a US bombing raid and ended up in a hospital in Jalalabad. From there he was sold to US forces, as were many of the men and boys who ended up, pointlessly, in Guantánamo. As one of the guards in Guantánamo explained, Nabil was no soldier and no terrorist; instead, he was “a brilliant artist, a keen footballer, and a sweet kid.”

First cleared for release by a military review board under President Bush in April 2007, Nabil had to wait nearly six and a half years to be freed. Responding to the news, Cori Crider, his attorney and the Strategic Director at Reprieve, the London-based legal action charity, said, “After a dozen years of needless detention and abuse in US custody, Nabil is embarking on the greatest adventure of his adult life — freedom. He arrives in Algeria weakened from his hunger strike, but with high hopes for the future. He is grateful to the Algerians for accepting him, although he dreams one day of rejoining his family who await him in France. We hope to be able to see him very shortly to help him and the authorities smooth his transition to a free life.”

Less is known about 37-year old Mutia Sayyab (identified at Guantánamo as Motai Saib), although he too was cleared for release twice — first under George W. Bush, in February 2008, and then under Barack Obama in January 2010.

Like Nabil, he had been living in Jalalabad prior to his capture, and had traveled to Afghanistan via France and London. As I explained in a short profile of him three years ago, the only allegation against him in the publicly available documents at the time was that he had been accused of “receiving small arms training” near Jalalabad, something that was unexceptional in Afghanistan. The classified military file released by WikiLeaks in April 2011 failed to provide any serious allegations against him, and what is perhaps most pertinent is a section explaining how a man he met in France “told [him] about Afghanistan, how well people lived there, and a visa was not needed for travel,” implying that, like many others who found life in Europe difficult, he was sold Afghanistan as a dream destination.

Speaking to the Miami Herald, his attorney, Buz Eisenberg, said of his client, “His No. 1 priority was getting out of Guantánamo,” adding that “he was perfectly happy going home to Algeria.” He also said, as the Miami Herald described it, that he “was a hunger striker who avoided tube feedings by occasionally eating bread, fruit and yogurt and drinking a can of Ensure,” and that he is “a single man who prior to his capture had worked as a trained chef in Syria and France.”

In a statement, Eisenberg called Sayyab “a poster boy for all that is wrong about Guantánamo Bay,” and an “unwitting and undeserving victim of a misguided response to terrorism.” He described him as “innocent of any conduct remotely related to terror, and in fact abhors and deplores such conduct,” adding, “He has nevertheless been beaten, forced to live in isolation, and stripped of his inalienable right to freedom.”

He also said the United States should pay his client compensation for the lost “11½ years of his young life” and to help him “readjust to life as a free Algerian citizen.”

It remains to be seen how Nabil and Mutia will be treated in Algeria, as it is customary for prisoners to be held incommunicado for 12 days by the Department of Intelligence and Security (DRS), as permitted under Algerian law. Of the eleven Algerians previously released from Guantánamo, a pattern is discernible — the majority of the men have put forward for trials, but have not been convicted, a long-winded and no doubt deeply stressful experience, but one that does not involve a new prison sentence. However, in the case of Abdul Aziz Naji, returned in July 2010, this did not happen, and in January 2012 Naji, an amputee, received a three-year sentence after a profoundly unfair trial.

At the time, I wrote an article entitled, “Why Algeria Is Not A Safe Country for the Repatriation of Guantánamo Prisoners,” and although it is clear that both Nabil and Mutia returned voluntarily, it is understandable why the remaining cleared Algerian prisoners — Ahmed Belbacha and Djamel Ameziane — do not want to be repatriated. Both fear persecution, and Belbacha, who lived and worked in the UK prior to his own ill-advised trip to Afghanistan, has particular reason to be fearful, as, in November 2009, he received a 20-year sentence in absentia, based, it seems, solely on his well-publicized unwillingness to be returned to the country of his birth.

Like the other 82 cleared prisoners who are still held, these men need to be freed as soon as possible, and if Cliff Sloan, President Obama’s recently appointed envoy for Guantánamo, cannot find a third country to take them, then they must be given new homes in the US. Further delays in releasing all 84 of the cleared prisoners — two-thirds of whom are Yemenis — are completely unacceptable.

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, “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.

GTMO Clock: 100 Days Since President Obama Promised to Resume Releasing Prisoners from Guantánamo, Just Two Men Freed

[image error]Getting men released from Guantánamo has become more difficult than getting blood out of a stone, even though over half of the 164 men still held were approved for release in January 2010 by President Obama’s high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force.

Please visit, like, share and tweet the GTMO Clock website , which I launched a month ago, and which shows that it is now 100 days since President Obama promised to resume releasing prisoners from Guantánamo, in a major speech on national security issues on May 23, but, to date, just two men have been released.

President Obama only made his promise because he had been provoked into action by a barrage of domestic and international criticism, which was in turn prompted by the prisoners embarking on a prison-wide hunger strike in February, to raise awareness of their ongoing and unacceptable imprisonment without charge or trial.

The difficulty in releasing prisoners has arisen in part because of severe obstacles raised by Congress, and in part because of President Obama’s unwillingness to spend political capital overcoming these obstacles.

As a result, just five prisoners were released between October 2010 and July 2013 — three after having their habeas corpus petitions granted by the courts (before the court of appeals in Washington D.C. stepped in to prevent successful habeas petitions taking place), and two as a result of plea deals arranged as a result of being put forward for trials by military commission.

President Obama has now brought that disgraceful situation to an end, by releasing two cleared prisoners — Nabil Hadjarab, 34 and Mutia Sayyab, 37 (aka Motai Saib) — to Algeria. The transfers were publicly announced by the Pentagon last Thursday, and are the first fruits of the promise to resume releasing prisoners that President Obama made on May 23.

The president — and his new envoy on Guantanamo, Cliff Sloan — are to be commended for securing the release of these two men, but the sad and unacceptable truth is that 84 other cleared prisoners remain, and they too need to be released as soon as possible, either to their home countries, to third countries if it is unsafe for them to be repatriated, or to the US if no third countries can be found.

The president secured the release of Nabil Hadjarab and Mutia Sayyab by working with the Secretary of Defense to overcome the obstacles raised by Congress. This involved certifying to Congress that it is in America’s national interest not to continue holding men cleared for release over three and half years ago, and that the government has taken the necessary steps to ensure that these men will be unable to engage in terrorist activities against the US.

These are ludicrous hoops that the president and his administration must jump through because of Congress, and insulting and outrageous in their inference that any of the cleared prisoners intend harm to the US, but Congress has persistently refused to back down from its cynical and unprincipled position, and the certifications must be made again — and as swiftly as possible — in the cases of other men cleared for release. Further inertia, of the kind that President Obama evidently prefers, is simply unacceptable.

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, “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.