Andy Worthington's Blog, page 133

Lewisham Hospital Saved! Judge Rules Jeremy Hunt’s Downgrade Plans Unlawful

We won! Congratulations to the tens of thousands of campaigners who have been fighting to save Lewisham Hospital for the last eight months, since plans to severely downgrade services at the hospital were first announced.

Today in the High Court, Mr. Justice Silber, ruling on two judicial reviews submitted by the Save Lewisham Hospital campaign and Lewisham Council, ruled that the health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, had acted unlawfully when he approved proposals by an NHS Special Administrator, Matthew Kershaw, to severely downgrade services at Lewisham Hospital. The ruling is here.

This was a stunning victory for campaigners — myself included — who have fought the proposals for the last nine months, ever since they were announced at the end of October 2012 by Matthew Kershaw, an NHS Special Administrator appointed to deal with the debts of a neighbouring NHS trust, the South London Healthcare Trust, based in the boroughs of Greenwich, Bexley and Bromley, which was losing over £1m a week, partly through ruinous PFI deals.

Kershaw’s plans involved shutting the A&E Department, including children’s A&E, so that the majority of the 110,000 people seen every year in Lewisham would have to go elsewhere — particularly to Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Woolwich, one of the SLHT’s hospitals, which is to merge with Lewisham. The plans also involved the loss of other acute services, cutting maternity services so that only 1 out of every 10 mothers in Lewisham would be able to give birth in the borough, and selling off 60 percent of the hospitals’ buildings and land.

Kershaw was the first appointment under the Unsustainable Providers Regime, legislation initially passed by the Labour government for dealing with NHS trusts facing serious financial problems, but from the beginning it was clear that it was unacceptable to downgrade Lewisham Hospital — run by a solvent NHS trust — as part of the solution to the problems of the SLHT.

That obvious unfairness — plus the downgrade of maternity services and the closure of A&E, requiring a journey to Woolwich that can take up to two hours on public transport at rush hour — led to the creation of a huge grassroots campaign, which involved 15,000 people attending a march and rally in the rain in November, and 25,000 people attending another march and rally in January (and also see here), just before Jeremy Hunt approved Matthew Kershaw’s proposals.

In response, the two judicial reviews were launched. The council’s legal challenge was based on the powerful claim that “the decisions are beyond the powers set out in the Unsustainable Provider Regime. The UPR confers powers on a Trust Special Administrator and on the Secretary of State respectively to make recommendations, and to take action, about the NHS Trust to which the TSA has been appointed, in this case the South London Healthcare NHS Trust. It confers no powers to take action about and NHS Trust, such as Lewisham Healthcare, to which a TSA has not been appointed.”

The Save Lewisham Hospital campaign’s legal challenge focused on four tests that were supposed to have been satisfied for the recommendations to be approved — that there was a clinical evidence base underpinning the proposals; that the changes have the support of the GP commissioners involved; that the changes must genuinely promote choice for their patients; and that the public, patients and local authorities have been genuinely engaged.

In approving the legal challenges, Mr. Justice Silber backed the council’s challenge, and also accepted that one of the four requirements in the Save Lewisham Hospital campaign’s challenge had not been met. As the Independent described it, he “ruled that the administrator had no powers to make decisions affecting Lewisham or any hospital outside SLHT, and Mr. Hunt had breached the provisions of the National Health Services Act 2006 when he approved the plans.”

Mr. Justice Silber also ruled that the TSA and the government had failed to demonstrate that the proposed changes had “the support of the GP commissioners involved,” something made abundantly clear in the powerful submission by Helen Tattersfield, the Chair of the Lewisham Clinical Commissioning Group, which I made available here.

The government has threatened to appeal, but I can’t see how that can be anything other than an empty threat. More worrying is the Independent noting that, although the ruling “has cast serious doubts over the powers of Trust Special Administrators,” the Department of Health is understood to be “examining whether it could change legislation to expand their powers so that they could authorise broader service shake-ups beyond their trust.”

For now, as we celebrate this rare victory over the government, which is inspiring people up and down the country to believe that resistance is not futile, it is important to remember that we now need to be alert to the details of the merger of Lewisham and the Queen Elizabeth, which is going ahead, and also to watch out for what the senior NHS managers who backed Matthew Kershaw’s proposals will do next.

Personally, I believe that serious questions about the competence of these individuals — and their commitment to the NHS — need to be asked, particularly about Dr. Jane Fryer, the medical director of the NHS in south east London, who was Matthew Kershaw’s chief medical advisor, but also about Dr. Andy Mitchell, the medical director of NHS London, who also played a role in supporting the recommendations, and Sir Bruce Keogh, the medical director of the NHS in the whole of England.

As I explained after one of the sham consultations that the TSA held in November and December, “The biggest insult of the night … was when Dr. Jane Fryer brushed aside complaints about the Special Administrator’s lack of a mandate for his planned destruction of Lewisham Hospital by stating that the carve-up of the SLHT had provided a timely opportunity for the reorganisation of NHS services across south east London, which would have happened anyway, but just a little later.” I don’t believe that Dr. Fryer has been held to account for her comments, but I think she should be, and I also believe that she provided an indication of why, without a serious shake-up of NHS management, the plans to destroy Lewisham will return at some point.

For now, however, everyone involved in the campaign that led to this hugely important success in the High Court deserves to take some time to bask in this moment. Victory is 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.

“The Grotesque Injustice of Guantánamo: Insiders’ Accounts” – By Video, Andy Worthington Joins Event in Portland, August 1, 2013

[image error]On Thursday August 1, I’ll be taking part, via teleconferencing, in “The Grotesque Injustice of Guantánamo: An Insiders’ Account,” an event in Portland, Oregon organized by peace activist and Vietnam veteran S. Brian Willson and Laura Sandow, a US Navy veteran, who was serving at Guantánamo when George W. Bush’s “war on terror” prison opened in January 2002.

Brian was the commander of a security unit in Vietnam, and is a trained lawyer and criminologist. He recently participated in a hunger strike in Portland in solidarity with the Guantánamo hunger strikers, and is the author of Blood On The Tracks: The Life and Times of S. Brian Willson (PM Press, 2011).

Laura first asked me to be involved back in June, when she and Brian had decided to put an event together, and her request coincided with the publication of her story in the online comic magazine Symbolia, in a powerful strip written by the journalist Sarah Mirk, based on an interview with Laura, and drawn by Lucy Bellwood. See this Think Progress article for excerpts from Laura’s story, and buy it here. As she explained to me in a recent email, “The more people that understand this atrocity [the prison at Guantánamo Bay], the more likely we are to prevent it from becoming an acceptable course of action for future policy decisions.”

The event is sponsored by Veterans for Peace Chapter 72, and takes place in the Buchan Room at the First Unitarian Church, 1226 SW Salmon Street, Portland, Oregon 97205, beginning at 7pm. Doors open at 6:30 pm, and there is a suggested sliding-scale donation of $5 to $20 for the event, although the organizers stress that no one will be turned away for lack of funds.

Also appearing is Steven T. Wax, chief Federal Public Defender for the District of Oregon, who oversaw a legal team representing a number of the prisoners in Guantánamo, including the Sudanese hospital administrator Adel Hamad, released in 2007. A graduate of Harvard Law School and a former law instructor at Lewis & Clark College, Steven is the author of Kafka Comes to America: Fighting for Justice in the War on Terror (Other Press, 2008), in which he discussed his Guantánamo work, and also the case of the Portland-based lawyer Brandon Mayfield, mistakenly seized in the post-9/11 hysteria, who he represented.

In addition, others speaking by video conference at the event are Medea Benjamin, the co-founder of CodePink, who have long campaigned for the closure of Guantánamo, and John Hickman, associate professor of government at Berry College and the author of Selling Guantánamo: Exploding the Propaganda Surrounding America’s Most Notorious Military Prison (University Press of Florida, 2013). The event will be moderated by Sarah Mirk.

The event is co-sponsored by 18th Avenue Peace House, Alliance for Democracy, Americans United for Palestinian Human Rights, American Iranian Friendship Council, Anarchist Black Cross, Code Pink Portland, Economic Justice Action Group and Peace Action Group of the First Unitarian Church of Portland, Education WithOut Borders, Freedom Socialist Party, Oregon Jericho, Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility, Portland Books to Prisoners, Portland Central American Solidarity Committee/Hands Off Latin America, Portland National Lawyers Guild, Radical Prisoner Support Portland, Recruiter Watch PDX, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom Portland Branch, and KBOO Community Radio 90.7 FM.

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.

I’m Off to WOMAD, Back on Monday: Lee Perry and Seun Kuti on the Bill!

Since 2002, my family and I, along with a crew of friends, including our kids, have been regulars visitors at the WOMAD festival (World of Music Art and Dance), originally in Reading but, since 2007, at Charlton Park in north Wiltshire, where my wife runs children’s workshops, and we get backstage passes to mingle with the great and good of the world music scene.

The festival is a world music lover’s dream, and this year I’m looking forward to seeing my hero, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry (now, astonishingly, 77 years old!), appearing with Max Romeo, with whom, of course, Perry produced the extraordinary “War Ina Babylon” album, in 1976, featuring “War Ina Babylon,” a perennial favourite (and the song that Bob Marley begged to have for himself), which I’m posting below. That album also featured other timeless classics, including “Chase the Devil“:

Also appearing is Seun Kuti, one of the sons of the inimitable Fela Kuti, the Nigerian musician and political activist who waged musical war on the corrupt Nigerian establishment throughout his life. Seun has appeared at WOMAD before, in and I’m looking forward to seeing him again, as he and his band definitely capture the spirit of Fela. See below for his version of Fela’s song “Zombie,” satirizing the corrupt police, filmed at a concert in Brooklyn in 2011:

Have a great weekend, wherever you are. I need a break to recharge my batteries, as I seem to have been working non-stop on Guantánamo since early March, when I first wrote about the prison-wide hunger strike, which has now been ongoing for nearly six months. If you want to do something over the next few days, you can always write to the prisoners, as described in my article, “For Ramadan, Please Write to the Hunger Striking Prisoners at Guantánamo.”

See you on Monday!

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: Andy Worthington Calls for the Release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, Parliament Square, July 18, 2013

Please sign the international petition calling for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer!

Last Thursday, the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign — dedicated to securing the release from Guantánamo of the last British resident in the prison — held its final vigil outside Parliament prior to MPs’ summer recess. The campaigners had been holding lunchtime vigils on weekdays since May, and I was delighted to turn up to show my support. Please see below for a three-minute video in which I explained why the vigil was taking place, which was recorded by a representative of the PCS union.

It is, of course, outrageous that Shaker is still held, as he was cleared for release under President  Bush in 2007, and again under President Obama in January 2010, along with 85 of the other 166 men still held. Opportunistic opposition to the release of prisoners by lawmakers in Congress, and shameful inaction on the part of President Obama are responsible for keeping these 86 men in Guantánamo.

Moreover, there are still no signs that any of the men will be released, even though they have been on a hunger strike to highlight their plight since February, and two months ago President Obama, responding to unparalleled criticism internationally and domestically, promised to resume releasing prisoners.

Please see below for the video, and if you like it, please feel free to share it:

I can scarcely express my disappointment with President Obama, who should not have promised to resume releasing prisoners if he had no intention of doing so, and who will be remembered for his cowardice and hypocrisy unless he is true to his word. Furthermore, in the recently released “Final Dispositions” of President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force (dated January 22, 2010, but only made publicly available on June 17, 2013), it appears that campaigners’ and lawyers’ long-held fears that the US is intent on sending Shaker back to Saudi Arabia, the country of his birth, and not the UK, are true.

The entry for Shaker recommends, “Transfer to [redacted], subject to appropriate security measures, including [redacted],” and it appears that the space for the destination county is the right size for “Saudi Arabia” but not “United Kingdom.” This also corresponds to distressing rumors we have been hearing about for many years.

None of this lets the British government off the hook, as it remains imperative that ministers secure his release here, to be reunited with his British wife and British children, rather than in Saudi Arabia, where he may well be imprisoned and prohibited from being reunited with his family.

The obligation is on the British government, not just because Shaker was given indefinite leave to remain in the UK, and not just because of ministers’ failure to secure his release for the last eleven and half years, but also because the Metropolitan Police have been investigating Shaker’s claim, accepted by a British court in December 2009, that British agents were present while he was abused by US operatives in a prison in Afghanistan shortly after his capture.

When Parliament reconvenes, we will be pressing the government to make clear that they will accept nothing less than Shaker’s return to the UK — and that they will be actively pushing for it, and not accepting whatever nonsense the Americans have come up with.

I do wonder how much longer this disgraceful state of affairs can continue, but while it does, it makes a mockery of claims by either the US or the UK government that they are countries that respect the rule of law. Shaker, as a passionate and eloquent advocate for the rights of the prisoners, may embarrass both governments through his knowledge of what has taken place at Guantánamo and elsewhere in the “war on terror,” but they both need to understand that they will have to live with that.

Shaker Aamer needs to be released, and he needs to be released now.

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.

The Schizophrenic in Guantánamo Whose Lawyers Are Seeking to Have Him Sent Home

The prison at Guantánamo is such an extraordinarily lawless and unjust place that 86 prisoners cleared for release by an inter-agency task force established by President Obama when he took office in 2009 are still held.

Other prisoners recommended for trials languish, year after year, with no hope of justice, and 46 others were specifically recommended for indefinite detention without charge or trial, on the basis that they are too dangerous to release, even though there is insufficient evidence to put them on trial.

That means, of course, that the supposed evidence is fundamentally untrustworthy, a dubious melange of statements extracted through the use of torture and other forms of coercion, and unreliable intelligence reports, but the government refuses to acknowledge that unpalatable truth.

Instead, the men have been obliged to resort to a hunger strike, now in its sixth month, to wake the world up to their plight, and to put pressure on the administration to act. Eight weeks ago, President Obama delivered an eloquent speech about national security, in which he perfectly described how unjust and counter-productive Guantánamo is, and promised to resume releasing prisoners, but he has still not released a single cleared prisoner, and nor has he initiated reviews for the 46 men whose indefinite detention he authorized in March 2011, when he promised to establish Periodic Review Boards (PRBs) to review the men’s cases, to establish whether they continue to be regarded as too dangerous to release.

In an effort to break through this deadlock, the attorney for one particular prisoner has submitted an unusual request to the court in Washington D.C. considering his habeas corpus petition. This potential route out of Guantánamo has also generally been blocked — this time by judges in the appeals court in the capital (the D.C. Circuit Court), where politically motivated judges rewrote the evidentiary rules governing the petitions, angered that dozens of prisoners had their habeas petitions granted by the lower court after the Supreme Court confirmed that they had constitutionally guaranteed habeas rights in June 2008.

However, Jennifer Cowan, the attorney for Ibrahim Idris, a Sudanese prisoner in his early 50s, has asked the court to release her client because he is so mentally ill and so morbidly obese that he cannot be regarded as a threat. In Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, in June 2004, the Supreme Court stated that the law used to hold prisoners at Guantánamo, the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), passed the week after the 9/11 attacks, only allowed the government to hold a prisoner “for the purpose of preventing him from returning to the battlefield.”

However, Idris, as the Miami Herald described him, is “an obese, diabetic, schizophrenic Sudanese man who has mostly lived at Guantánamo’s psychiatric ward since he got to the US terror prison in Cuba on the day it opened.”

As Jennifer Cowan described the situation in her submission to Chief Judge Royce Lamberth:

Petitioner’s long-­term severe mental illness and physical illnesses make it virtually impossible for him to engage in hostilities were he to be released, and both domestic law and international law of war explicitly state that if a detainee is so ill that he cannot return to the battlefield, he should be repatriated. When interpreted in accordance with domestic law and the principles of international law, the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (“AUMF”) does not permit the continued detention of Mr. Idris.

Little was known about Idris until this submission, although it was established last September that he was one of the prisoners cleared for release by the Guantánamo Review Task Force. His Detainee Assessment Brief (DAB), the classified military file released by WikiLeaks in 2011, which was compiled in April 2008, ought to be a source of shame to the authorities. “Detainee has resisted cooperation with interrogators and remains largely unexploited,” the document stated, adding, “He has coached other JTF-GTMO detainees to use resistance techniques while in US custody.”

In fact, as Carol Rosenberg explained in the Miami Herald, far from coaching others, “his fellow prisoners don’t want him around,” because “he behaves bizarrely — wears his underwear on his head, whispers to himself, is delusional.”

The 14-page petition is backed by medical reports from the prison, and constitutes a sad indictment of a detention system that cannot deal fairly and appropriately with a severely mentally and physical ill prisoner. In page after page of the brief and the medical reports, the government’s myopic narrative — that he was at the Battle of Tora Bora in Afghanistan, the showdown between the US and al-Qaeda and the Taliban in December 2001 — is countered by the recognition by mental health professionals that Idris’s thought processes are “grossly disorganized,” as an Army psychiatrist explained in 2009, and that he operates “in a delusional reality system, with little foundation in his real-world circumstances.”

As Jennifer Cowan explained to the Miami Herald, “If you’re so sick that you can’t return to the battlefield, there’s no basis for holding you.” She added that Idris “has multiple illnesses. He has mental illnesses, which are severe, physical illness that’s long-standing, and nobody thinks he’s going to recover from any of those. It’s not like he has a cold.”

The saddest part of this whole sorry tale is that the Army psychiatrist stated that Idris “was diagnosed as having a mental illness within weeks of getting to Guantánamo,” and yet no effort was made to repatriate him, even as other Sudanese prisoners were sent home — by George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

The time is long overdue for Idris to be returned to his family, but on past evidence it is unlikely that the government — and specifically the Civil Division of the Justice Department, which deals with the prisoners’ court cases, and has an unbroken record, from Bush to Obama, of aggressively contesting everything relating to the their habeas corpus petitions — will agree, and that, of course, is another source shame to add to the countless others that Guantánamo embodies.

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.

As published exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation.

EXCLUSIVE: The Last Days in the Life of Adnan Latif, Who Died in Guantánamo Last Year

This article, published simultaneously here and on the “Close Guantánamo” website, contains exclusive information from the unclassified notes of a visit to Abdelhadi Faraj — a Syrian prisoner, and one of 86 men cleared for release from Guantánamo but still held — by his attorney, Ramzi Kassem, in October 2012. During that visit, Faraj spoke about the death of Adnan Latif, the Yemeni prisoner who died at Guantánamo last September, and the notes from that visit, made available to me via Ramzi and his team at CUNY (the City University of New York) are compared and contrasted with the military’s own account, as described in a report released to the journalist Jason Leopold through FOIA legislation at the start of July 2013.

Ten months ago, on September 9, 2012, Adnan Latif, a Yemeni prisoner in Guantánamo, died in his cell. While no one at the time knew the circumstances of his death, it was clear that, however he had died, it was the fault of all three branches of the US government – of President Obama and his administration, of Congress, and of the Supreme Court and the court of appeals in Washington D.C. (the D.C. Circuit Court).

Latif, who had severe mental health problems, had been cleared for release in 2006 by a military review board under George W. Bush, and again by the inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force, established by President Obama shortly after taking office in January 2009. He also had his habeas corpus petition granted by a District Court judge in July 2010, but the Obama administration appealed that ruling, and the D.C. Circuit Court overturned it in November 2011. In 2012, when Latif appealed to the Supreme Court, the highest court in the land refused to accept his case (or those of six other prisoners), and three months later he was dead.

Two weeks ago, in response to a FOIA request submitted by the journalist Jason Leopold, the military released its report into Latif’s death, which found that the prison guards and medical personnel responsible for him had failed to follow the prison’s rules in dealing with him, and that Latif himself had “hoarded medications and ingested them shortly before he was found unresponsive in his cell.”

However, not everyone finds this explanation convincing.

The report added that doctors at Guantánamo had diagnosed Latif with “Bipolar Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder with antisocial traits,” and had described one of his mental breakdowns as “manic with psychotic features, possibly affected by Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI).” The report also stated, “In layman’s terms, all of these diagnoses translate into an individual that would be unstable in mood, personality and relationships. The diagnosis also means that the individual would be difficult to live or work with and would be prone to impulsivity and to harm self or others, generally living life from one crisis to another.”

In a footnote, it was also noted that the diagnoses of Latif’s condition had “evolved over the course of his detention,” suggesting, as Leopold described it, that “his indefinite detention may have contributed to the deterioration of his mental health.”

I think that latter point is absolutely beyond doubt, and is an indictment of the failures of those who could have released him — primarily President Obama, who imposed an unacceptable blanket ban on releasing Yemenis in 2010, after it was revealed that a foiled airline bomb plot had been hatched in Yemen; Congress, where lawmakers also imposed their own unreasonable ban on releasing Yemenis in the National Defense Authorization Acts in 2011 and 2012; and the courts mentioned above.

In a detailed analysis of the report, published on July 3, Jason Leopold pieced together the last few months of Latif’s life, which I am supplementing with information I was given by Ramzi Kassem, a law professor at CUNY (the City University of New York), who represents a number of prisoners in Guantánamo, including Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison.

Last year, Ramzi Kassem gave me exclusive access to notes from his meetings with Shaker Aamer, which were published here and on the “Close Guantánamo” website (see here, here and here), and he has now allowed me to have access to notes from a meeting with another of his clients, Abdelhadi Faraj, on October 29, 2012, less than two months after Adnan Latif’s death, in which Faraj specifically discussed Adnan’s death.

Abdelhadi Faraj (aka Abdulhadi Faraj) is a Syrian who, like Adnan, was cleared for release by the Guantánamo Review Task Force (along with 85 other men), and is now taking part in the prison-wide hunger strike, in which he is one of 46 men being force-fed. In the notes from October last year, he explained that he was with Adnan in Camp VI during Ramadan, which, last year, began on July 20. He said that Adnan “had been repeatedly asking for certain medications but it was to no avail,” adding, “As a protest gesture, he covered up the camera in his cell with wet tissues but still there was no response to his request for medications, so, frustrated, he went out to the recreation yard.”

In the yard, Adnan saw Faraj and explained the situation to him. He also “asked Faraj to act as an interpreter, using his limited English,” to tell an Assistant Watch Commander (AWC), who was going up to the watch tower overlooking the rec yard, that he wanted to request an interpreter.

The AWC explained that “he could not get him an interpreter out in the yard,” and that “he had to go request the interpreter from the commander on the cellblock.” At that point, Faraj explained, “Adnan got frustrated, lost his temper, dug up a rock from the yard, and threw it towards the watchtower, breaking one of the large searchlights.” When the AWC came out of the tower booth to see what was happening, Adnan “pelted him with small stones.”

At this point, a number of soldiers “came pouring into the yard.” Faraj “calmed them down, and tried to defuse the situation,” but in the meantime, “Adnan dug up another rock and threw it, breaking the other watchtower’s searchlight.”

More guards then came into the yard, “wielding a large tear gas canister.” The officer in charge also came out with the riot squad. This was a reference to the IRF (Immediate Reaction Force), also known as the ERF (Extreme Reaction Force) or, according to the military report, the QRF (Quick Reaction Force), a group of armored guards who punish all infringements of the rules — and perceived infringements of the rules — with brutality.

Faraj “tried to talk down the soldiers” and tried to talk down Adnan as well, but it was too late. The riot squad “took Adnan inside, to one of the small meeting rooms in the camp that were once used for attorney-client meetings,” where, Faraj heard, “a psychologist talked to him.”

That incident in the rec yard was the last time Faraj ever saw Adnan.

This took place towards the end of July, according to the military report, when Latif was apparently involved in “multiple incidents” of aggression, including the “rock throwing incident” described by Faraj. As Jason Leopold described it, “the military report blamed Latif’s refusal to take medications during his fast for Ramadan for precipitating the events,” which appears to directly contradict Faraj’s statement that Latif “had been repeatedly asking for certain medications but it was to no avail.”

Although Faraj never saw Adnan again, he did hear about what subsequently happened to him. He said that he was moved out of Camp VI “to the Behavioral Health Unit and then to the hospital.” Faraj added, “He stayed in those places for approximately six weeks, before being moved to the punishment camp,” where “he barely lasted a day.”

In fact the sequence appears to have been slightly more complicated — although it ended with the visit to Camp V (or, as Faraj called it, “the punishment camp”), where Adnan died. However, he had apparently also been there for a few days in August as well.

The military report claims that, on August 2, Adnan was involved in another “incident,” this time in the Behavioral Health Unit recreation yard, which resulted in a visit from the QRF, and the administration of three emergency injections. A week later, when he seemed to be calmer, he was moved to the DH (Detainee Hospital), where it was noted that he “did extremely well”, and “was getting a lot of support from other detainees at that point.”

A major change seems to have occurred between August 23 and 26, when Adnan was “moved twice” for unspecified “operational reasons” — firstly, on August 23, to Camp V, the maximum-security block described by Faraj as “the punishment camp,” and then back to the Detainee Hospital on August 26. One person interviewed by the military noted that, during this period, Adnan “was drafting many dark poems.”

According to the report, on September 6, there were discussions about moving Adnan back to Camp V on September 10 or 11. Adnan was told about the move, and was apparently happy for it to go ahead, but later that day he “began spontaneously yelling and kicking, and threw his portable urinal thereby splashing a guard.”

The next day, someone whose name was redacted “asked the Senior Medical Officer” and someone else whose name and role were redacted “whether there was a medical or psychiatric reason that ISN 156 [Latif] could not serve his discipline time” — presumably, for his outburst the day before.

One of these individuals said to the other “that she viewed ISN 156′s recent behavior as willful, and that there was no medical or reason that ISN 156 could not serve his discipline time.” it was also noted that Col. Bogdan, in charge of detention operations, “indicated that based on that, he decided to send ISN 156 to Camp V for discipline.”

Told that he was going immediately to Camp V, Adnan became “increasingly agitated” over the next few hours, and tried to delay his departure. Another prisoner, whose name was redacted, was also being moved, and tried to calm Adnan. It was noted that he “had been accompanying ISN 156 through the camps in recent moves,” and “was considered a close friend of ISN 156 and one of the few people who could calm him.”

Adnan “wanted to know what specific tier they were going to at Camp V.” Camp control indicated that “they did not have that information,” but reassured him that he  and the other man “would be kept together.”

In a footnote, the report explained, “Several of the cells at Camp V are designed for single cell detention, distinct from the communal cells on Camp Delta (communal) block, where it was originally envisioned ISN 156 would be transferred. The single cells are used to house detainees on discipline who meet certain criteria of the detainee disciplinary matrix.”

It was also noted:

Camp V houses several categories of detainees on its five blocks. One block is for communal, compliant detainees. Another block contains convicted detainees, and another block is used for single cell detention for those detainees in a disciplinary status. There was considerable discussion regarding where ISN 156 would be housed at Camp V. [Redacted] indicated, for example, that ISN 156 had “a lot of bad memories” of Alpha Block — events that occurred during earlier rotations including splashing, self-harm, and Forced Cell Extractions (FCEs).

Accordingly, [redacted] recommended against housing [Latif] in Alpha Block. However, “because there were issues involving another detainee in Camp V, ([redacted], who in the past had encouraged detainees to commit suicide) on Charlie Block, [redacted] discussed the matter with [redacted]. They agreed to allow the guard force to determine the best location for ISN 156. The guards placed ISN 156 on Alpha Block.

Although Latif’s friend was across the way from him, this was clearly going to be extremely difficult for him, and it is no surprise that Abdelhadi Faraj stated that, after his move, “he barely lasted a day.”

In fact, as the report explains, Adnan himself had said just before he was moved, “something along the lines of ‘when I die, it will be on you’ and ‘you know that you have killed me sending me [to Camp V].’”

To make matters worse, the report also notes that “another unidentified member of the military “recalled that earlier in the day, around 1400, a [redacted] analyst from the [redacted] arrived with a Force Protection Report indicating that [redacted] was saying that ISN 156 was suicidal and was going to kill himself.” This individual “recalled asking the analyst whether he knew what method ISN 156 intended to use to kill himself. The analyst indicated that he did not know, and followed up the exchange with an email.”

That email was apparently forwarded to Col. Bogdan, but he claimed he did not see it until after Adnan’s death.

By 6pm, Adnan was in Alpha Block on Camp V and “causing a racket,” according to the report. Officials came and spoke to him, but at 10pm he “was still jumping around, now with a towel tied around his neck that he was using as a cape and smearing honey on his face.”

Eventually, however, he calmed down, and appeared to be asleep by midnight. One of the guards stated that he “did not recall seeing ISN 156 ‘lift his head or move all night’ but did recall seeing ISN 156 breathing. [He] noted that in his experience, it was “odd” that ISN 156 would have slept that long, as he was usually a very active sleeper. [He] noted that he had ‘never seen ISN 156 sleep that much,’ pointing out that ISN 156 usually slept for only a few hours at a time, and even then, continued to move all over his cell in his sleep.”

That, of course, should have triggered some sort of response, if, of course, it is true. According to Abdelhadi Faraj, however, other prisoners told him that “they heard Adnan’s last words around four in the morning.” Moreover, in contrast to the official story, which involves Adnan hoarding medication and killing himself, he “was asking for medication.”

Ramzi Kassem’s account of his meeting with Faraj concluded, “From that point until the afternoon, not a sound was heard from Adnan’s cell. At that point, another prisoner (Shaker) asked the guards to check on him and that is when they found him inert.”

Faraj added, “Adnan never left that isolation room in the punishment camp: not for exercise, food, or the restroom. He was under constant observation in that room. The door was transparent, there was a camera, and guards were watching.”

As Ramzi Kassem stated, Abdulhadi believes that the “only possible explanation” for Adnan’s death is that “it was internal, something the authorities gave him, either a drug overdose, or a misdosing of medication issued.”

Whether by design or neglect, this appears to be true. Certainly, as we learn more of this story, in broken pieces, the notion that Adnan hoarded medication, during his many moves in the six weeks before his death, continues to sound implausible, and although it is clear that the rules regarding the treatment of prisoners — and especially of disturbed individuals like Adnan — were repeatedly ignored, that is not enough to dispel the dark shadows that still engulf Adnan’s death.

A report by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service has not yet been completed, but 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. 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.

My thanks to Ramzi Kassem, and to his students at CUNY, Sarika Saxena and Fabiana Araujo, for making the notes of the meeting with Abdelhadi Faraj available to me.

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.

From Guantánamo, Hunger Striker Abdelhadi Faraj Describes the Agony of Force-Feeding

Although I’ve been very busy for the last few months with a steady stream of articles about Guantánamo and the ongoing hunger strike, I haven’t been able to keep track of everything that has been made available. In terms of publicity, this is an improvement on the years before the hunger strike reminded the world’s media about the ongoing existence of the prison, when stories about Guantánamo often slowed to the merest of trickles, and everyone involved in campaigning to close the prison and to represent the men still held there was, I think it is fair to say, becoming despondent and exhausted.

However, it is also profoundly depressing that it took a prison-wide hunger strike to wake people up to the ongoing injustice of Guantánamo, where 86 cleared men are still held (cleared for release in January 2010 by President Obama’s inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force), and 80 others are, for the most part, held indefinitely without charge or trial. And it is just as depressing to note that, despite making a powerful speech eight weeks ago, and promising to resume releasing prisoners, President Obama has so far failed to release anyone.

With Ramadan underway, there has been a slight dip in the total number of prisoners on the hunger strike — 80, according to the US military, down from 106, although there has been a slight increase in the number of prisoners being force-fed — from 45 to 46.

Yesterday, a judge turned down a motion submitted on behalf of three prisoners — Shaker Aamer, the last British resident, and Ahmed Belbacha and Nabil Hadjarab, two Algerians — asking the court to order the government to stop force-feeding prisoners, and giving them medication without their consent, following a similar ruling last week in the case of another prisoner, Abu Wa’el Dhiab, a Syrian. All four are hunger strikers, and amongst the 86 men cleared for release but still held.

In last week’s ruling, Judge Gladys Kessler (a Bill Clinton appointee) did not seem entirely happy that judges in the court of appeals had tied her hands regarding jurisdiction over the prisoners, because of a previous ruling in 2009. She also acknowledged that medical authorities describe force-feeding as torture, and made a point of telling President Obama that he has the authority and power to deal with the hunger strike, and the force-feeding, as Commander in Chief.

Yesterday, however, Judge Rosemary Collyer (a George W. Bush appointee) had no interest in criticizing anyone but the prisoners and their lawyers. In her opinion, she wrote that, although the prisoners had framed their motion as one intended to stop force-feeding, their “real complaint is that the United States is not allowing them to commit suicide by starvation.” She added, “The right to due process under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments does not include a right to commit suicide and a right to assistance in doing so.” She also wrote that there was “nothing so shocking or inhumane in the treatment” that it could be regarded as raising a constitutional concern.

In response, Jon Eisenberg, one of the prisoners’ lawyers, said Judge Collyer was wrong to claim that the prisoners were “demanding a right to commit suicide,” as the Associated Press described it.

“She has misunderstood the purpose of the hunger strike. It’s not to commit suicide, it’s to protest indefinite detention,” Eisenberg said, adding that her opinion regarding force-feeding — that it was not “inhumane” — was not backed up by experts. “Human rights advocates, medical ethicists and religious leaders say otherwise,” he said.

Judge Collyer’s ruling — and her dismissive attitude to the force-feeding — reminded me of a letter by Abdelhadi Faraj (aka Abdulhadi Faraj), another Syrian prisoner, which was published two weeks ago in the Huffington Post. Mr. Faraj (originally identified by the authorities as Abu Omar al-Hamawe) is one of the 86 men cleared for release but still held, and is in need of a new home because of the perilous situation in Syria. Moreover, he is one of four men captured together, who were all cleared for release, although only one of them was freed — a man named Maasoum Mouhammed, who was given a new home in Bulgaria in May 2010. He is also one of the hunger strikers, and, moreover, is one of the 46 men being force-fed.

The letter, with its harrowing descriptions of force-feeding, and of abuse by some military personnel was translated from the Arabic by Abdelhadi Faraj’s attorney, Ramzi Kassem, and I’m cross-posting it below for those who missed it the first time around.

A Letter From Guantánamo

By Abdelhadi Faraj, Huffington Post, July 2, 2013

This is my call to the outside world from behind these rusty bars, in this monstrous cell. Does the world know what is happening in this prison?

Despite the long years we the prisoners have spent in this place from 2002 to 2013, the American government does not seem interested in solving the problem. The past few months have been among the harshest lived by the prisoners here. During the Bush years, solutions seemed possible. Under Obama, it seems like there is no will to solve the problem.

I once lived communally with the other prisoners in Camp Six. Now we are all in solitary confinement here, with only two hours of recreation a day. Some prisoners are too weak and sick to ever leave their cells as a result of the hunger strike and the US military’s reaction to it.

The military here has used brute force against the hunger strikers. They have beaten us and used rubber-coated bullets and tear gas against us. They have confiscated everything from our cells, from toothbrushes to blankets and books. They have confined us to cold, windowless cells, beyond the reach of the sun’s rays or a fresh breeze. Sometimes, we don’t even know if it’s day or night out.

It isn’t unusual for prison guards here to search prisoners’ genital parts and their rectum ten times in a single day.

Daily, I am forced into a restraint chair, my arms, legs and chest tied down tight. Big guards grab my head with both hands. I feel like my skull is being crushed. Then, so-called nurses violently push a thick tube down my nostril. Blood rushes out of my nose and mouth. The nurses turn on the feeding solution full throttle. I cannot begin to describe the pain that causes.

Recently, a nurse brutally yanked out the force-feeding tube, threw it on my shoulder, and left the cell, leaving me tied down to the chair. Later, the nurse returned to the cell, took the tube off my shoulder and began to reinsert it into my nose. I asked him to cleanse and purify the tube first but he refused.

When I later tried to complain to another nurse about the incident, the other nurse threatened to force the feeding tube up my rear, not down my nose, if I didn’t suspend my hunger strike.

And when I tried taking the matter to a senior medical officer, he told me that they would strap me to a bed and make me urinate through a catheter forced into my penis if I kept up my peaceful protest.

I used to think I was the only one coping with severe joint pain, a weakened memory, having a hard time concentrating, and feeling constantly distracted as a result of all this. But I’ve since discovered that many hunger strikers struggle with the same symptoms. Without realizing it, some of the hunger strikers even speak to themselves out loud when they’re alone.

But we also know that there are peaceful protests in solidarity with our plight in many countries. Even in America itself, there are protests demanding that the US government close this prison that has hurt America’s reputation. And international criticism mounts daily.

We the hunger strikers continue to demand our rights. President Obama can begin by releasing those of us who have been cleared for release years ago, followed by the prisoners who have not been charged with any crime after eleven years in captivity.

Despite the difficulties, the hard conditions, and the challenges created by the US government, those of us on hunger strike will continue protesting until our demands for justice are met.

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: “Is Guantánamo Forever?” – Andy Worthington on “Inside Out” with Susan Modaress

On Friday, I was delighted to talk to Susan Modaress, for the show “Inside Out” on Press TV. Susan interviewed me while I was in New York City in January 2011, for protests on the ninth anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, which are available here.

The 22-minute show, “Is Guantánamo Forever?” (available below via YouTube) centred on a Skype interview with me and an interview with Karen Greenberg, the Director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University’s School of Law, and I hope you have time to watch it.

Susan and I began by discussing the hunger strike — how it began, and why the 166 men still held are in such despair that they have been refusing food for over five months and are risking their lives.

Their despair, of course, is because 86 of them were cleared for release three and a half years ago by the inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force, but are still held, and the 80 others were either recommended for trials that have largely failed to materialize, or were recommended for indefinite detention without charge or trial, on the basis that they were too dangerous to release, even though insufficient evidence exists to put them on trial.

As I explained, this means, of course, that the supposed evidence is actually profoundly unreliable, involving information extracted through the use of torture or other forms of abuse, or through bribing the prisoners with “comfort items” — food, entertainment, and much more. It’s also clear that prisoners with mental health problems were pressurized to make statements about their fellow prisoners that were, of course, fundamentally untrustworthy.

I also spoke about the many reasons why President Obama failed to fulfill the promise to close Guantánamo that he made on his second day in office — Obama’s own failures, including the ban on releasing Yemenis he imposed after the failed underwear bomb plot on Christmas Day 2009, which was hatched in Yemen, and the Congressional restrictions that have done so much to tie his hands — although a waiver exists that he can use to bypass Congress if he regards it as being “in the national security interests of the United States,” which he has not used over the last year and a half, and, in particular, that he has not used since he made his fine speech on May 23 promising to resume releasing prisoners.

Susan also spoke about the motion recently submitted by four prisoners, calling for the courts to order the government to stop force-feeding prisoners, and forcing them to take medication, which was reluctantly turned down last week by District Judge Gladys Kessler, because of a precedent established by a US court in 2009. Nevertheless, Judge Kessler pointed out that health professionals describe force-feeding as torture, and pointedly urged President Obama to act, as the Commander in Chief. I wrote about the motion here, and about the ruling here, and also published poignant testimony by three of the prisoners, Nabil Hadjarab, Ahmed Belbacha and Abu Wa’el Dhiab. For testimony by the fourth man, Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, see here, here, here, here and here.

Towards the end of the show, Karen Greenberg spoke about the need for President Obama to restore the rule of law and provide closure for 9/11, which I thought was very powerful.

My thanks to Susan, and I hope we get the chance to talk again in the not too distant future.

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.

Bradley Manning Trial: No Secrets in WikiLeaks’ Guantánamo Files, Just Evidence of Colossal Incompetence

Last week, just before the defense rested its case in the trial of Pfc. Bradley Manning, I was delighted that my book The Guantánamo Files was cited as a significant source of reliable information about the prisoners in Guantánamo — more reliable, in fact, than the information contained in the previously classified military files (the Detainee Assessment Briefs) leaked by Manning and released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, on which I worked as a media partner.

The trial began at the start of June, but on February 28, Manning accepted responsibility for the largest leak of classified documents in US history — including the “Collateral Murder” video, featuring US personnel indiscriminately killing civilians and two Reuters reporters in Iraq, 500,000 army reports (the Afghan War logs and the Iraq War logs), 250,000 US diplomatic cables, and the Guantánamo files.

When Manning accepted responsibility for the leaks, the Guardian described it as follows: “In a highly unusual move for a defendant in such a serious criminal prosecution, Manning pleaded guilty to 10 lesser charges out of his own volition – not as part of a plea bargain with the prosecution.” The Guardian added that the charges to which Manning pleaded guilty “carry a two-year maximum sentence each, committing Manning to a possible upper limit of 20 years in military prison,” but pointed out that he “pleaded not guilty to 12 counts which relate to the major offences of which he is accused by the US government. Specifically, he denied he had been involved in ‘aiding the enemy’ — the idea that he knowingly gave help to al-Qaida and caused secret intelligence to be published on the internet, aware that by doing so it would become available to the enemy.”

This was central to the case put forward by the prosecution, which spent two weeks, and called 80 witnesses, in an attempt to portray Manning as, essentially, a traitor — an argument that, I hope, they failed to make adequately, as it is ridiculous.

If the prosecution succeeds, Manning faces a maximum sentence of 149 years in military custody, but as he said in February, his intention all along was to “spark a debate” about the behavior of the US government and the military — something that many millions of people (myself included) have regarded as hugely important, revealing the horrors of war, what Manning regarded as the dangerous opacity of US diplomacy, and, of course, the revelations about Guantánamo contained in the Detainee Assessment Briefs.

As Manning said in February, “We were obsessed with capturing and killing human targets on lists and ignoring goals and missions. I believed if the public, particularly the American public, could see this it could spark a debate on the military and our foreign policy in general [that] might cause society to reconsider the need to engage in counter-terrorism while ignoring the human situation of the people we engaged with every day.”

Speaking of the 250,000 US diplomatic cables, Manning said that he was convinced they they would embarrass but not damage the US, and the same, I believe, is true of the Guantánamo files.

As I stated just before his trial began, at the start of June:

Bradley’s key statement on the Guantánamo files is when he says, “the more I became educated on the topic, it seemed that we found ourselves holding an increasing number of individuals indefinitely that we believed or knew to be innocent, low-level foot soldiers that did not have useful intelligence and would’ve been released if they were held in theater.”

I added that this was “absolutely the case,” but I also made a point of noting that, although, as Manning noted, they were only “intended to provide general background information on each detainee — not a detailed assessment,” what was crucially important about the release of the files was that “they provide the names of the men making the statements about their fellow prisoners, which were not available previously, providing a compelling insight into the full range of unreliable witnesses, to the extent that pages and pages of information that, on the surface, might look acceptable, are revealed under scrutiny to be completely worthless.”

Last Wednesday, testifying for the defense, Col. Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor of the military commissions at Guantánamo, who resigned in 2007 in protest at the Bush administration’s plans to use information derived through the use of torture, and has since become a powerful opponent of the many injustices of the prison, specifically addressed Manning’s release of the Guantánamo files.

As the Guardian described it, Col. Davis “told the court that he had compared a sample of the detainee files leaked by Manning to WikiLeaks against public information that was freely available at the time of the disclosure,” and “said he found considerable overlap and repetition, and even passages in the official detainee assessments that were almost verbatim copies of publicly-available material.”

“A lot of the information was repetitive of comparable open-source information that was available in print,” Davis said. “You could read the open-source information and sit down and write a substantial version of what was in the DAB.”

The Guardian added that the purpose of Col. Davis’s testimony was to “rebut the allegation” that Manning had communicated classified information “with reason to believe such information could be used to the injury of the US or to the advantage of any foreign nation.”

Manning has specifically been charged in relation to five of the files released in 2011 (which, it appears, include those relating to several released British prisoners, and possibly Shaker Aamer, who is still held) and Col. Davis explained that he had compared the five leaked files with “information released by the government itself, including Pentagon publications from 2006-07 on the combatant status of the detainees” — the 8,000 pages that formed the basis of my work, and are extremely important, although, as I note above, they generally lack the specific names available in the DABs.

Davis also said that he had “checked against information provided in newspaper articles, a docu-drama called The Road to Guantánamo and a book, The Guantánamo Files, that was published three years before the WikiLeaks disclosures. He said he had concluded that ‘if you watch the movie, read the book and the articles, you would know more about them than if you read the detainee assessment briefs.’”

Manning’s defence lawyer, David Coombs, asked Col. Davis if the information in the DABs “could have been useful to enemy groups” — a question relating to the charge of “aiding the enemy” that Manning faces, to which Davis replied that “his review found that the Guantánamo files did not contain intelligence on sources or military methods that would have had potential value to the enemy.”

As he said, “As far as providing sensitive information, it doesn’t do that — it is just background information. We described them as ‘baseball cards’ – it was just who the individual was, a ‘Who’s John Smith?’-type description of the individual.”

I was delighted to be cited by Col. Davis, and I believe that the main thrust of his argument is indeed accurate, but what it misses is the extent to which the information in the files ought to be a profound embarrassment to the US, as the parade of unreliable witnesses in the pages of the files reveals the prison as nothing less than a factory of torture and coercion devoted to extracting false statements from prisoners to be used to make a case against their fellow prisoners, or to make a case against themselves.

I hope, in the near future, to resume my detailed analysis of the files, as the painful truth is that many of the 166 men still held — including the majority of the 80 men recommended for indefinite detention without charge or trial or for prosecution by the inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force, appointed by President Obama, which reviewed all the men’s cases in 2009 — are held on the basis of the profoundly unreliable information exposed in the Guantánamo files. In contrast to the prosecution’s claims, the only damage this information can do the US involves embarrassment.

As I mentioned in the heading to this article, the Guantánamo files that Bradley Manning helped to bring to the world’s attention reveal, primarily, that the mill of torture and coercion established by George W. Bush is not just a place where the crimes of torture and indefinite detention have been committed by the Bush administration — and now by Obama — but is also a place where its intelligence gathering procedures can — and should — be generally described as an almost unparalleled example of colossal incompetence.

POSTSCRIPT: On July 10, the final day of testimony for the defense, the final witness was the Harvard law professor Yochai Benkler, who, as the Guardian described it, “delivered blistering testimony in which he portrayed WikiLeaks as a legitimate web-based journalistic organisation. He also warned the judge presiding in the case, Colonel Denise Lind, that if the ‘aiding the enemy’ charge was interpreted broadly to suggest that handing information to a website that could be read by anyone with access to the internet was the equivalent of handing to the enemy, then that serious criminal accusation could be levelled against all media outlets that published on the web.”

Benkler, the co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, appeared as an expert on the future of journalism in the digital age. He “dismissed any connection between WikiLeaks and terrorist organisations and damned as ‘a relatively mediocre effort’ a counter-intelligence report titled ‘Wikileaks.org — An Online Reference to Foreign Intelligence Services, Insurgents, or Terrorist Groups?’”

The Guardian added, “Although the US government has leant heavily on that report in making its case against the army private, telling the court that there had been forensic evidence that Manning had accessed the document on several occasions. But Benkler said that the report did the opposite of what the government intended — it showed WikiLeaks in the light of a journalistic organization: ‘In many places it describes WikiLeaks staff as writers or editors,’ he said.”

Benkler also told the court that, according to his reading of the Pentagon report, “there is little doubt that [WikiLeaks] is a journalistic, hard-hitting journalistic investigative organisation.”

*****

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.

For Ramadan, Please Write to the Hunger Striking Prisoners at Guantánamo

Every six months, I urge readers to send letters to the prisoners in Guantánamo, and, as this is the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which began July 8, there is no better time to write to the 166 men still held, the majority of whom have been on a hunger strike for over five months, protesting about conditions at the prison, and the failure of all three branches of the US government to free them or put them on trial.

In the last three years, just ten prisoners have been released, even though 86 of the men still held were cleared for release by the sober and responsible inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force, consisting of around 60 members of the major government departments and the intelligence agencies. Established by President Obama when he took office in 2009, the task force spent a year reviewing the men’s cases before reaching their decisions about who to release, who to prosecute, and, disturbingly, who to hold indefinitely without charge or trial on the basis that they are “too dangerous to release,” even though insufficient evidence exists to put them on trial. In the real world, what this means is that the supposed evidence is no such thing, and is, instead, a collection of extremely unreliable statements made by the prisoners themselves, and, more particularly, their fellow prisoners, as well as other intelligence reports of a dubious nature.

The Guantánamo Review Task Force’s report was published in January 2010, but it was not until last month that a document explaining which prisoners had been placed into which categories was released through FOIA legislation. I analyzed that document here, and noted which prisoners had been placed in which categories in the prisoner list on the CloseGuantánamo.org website.

To further clarify which prisoners are in which category, the list of prisoners you can write to, posted below, is divided into those cleared for release (86), those recommended for indefinite detention (46), and those recommended for prosecution (33). Please note that I have kept the spelling used by the US authorities in the “Final Dispositions” of the Guantánamo Review Task Force.

I dedicate this particular campaign to Adnan Latif, a Yemeni who was one of the Yemenis cleared for release, but who was not freed, because of bans on releasing cleared Yemenis that were imposed by both President Obama and Congress. Latif died at Guantánamo, reportedly by committing suicide, last September. President Obama has since dropped his ban, imposed after a Nigerian, recruited in Yemen, tried and failed to blow up a plane bound for the US on Christmas Day 2009 with a bomb in his underwear. Congress’s ban still stands, however, although President Obama can use a waiver in the legislation imposed by Congress, allowing him to bypass lawmakers and release prisoners if he regards it as being “in the national security interests of the United States.”

That time, of course, is now.

The letter-writing campaign was started two and a half years ago by two Facebook friends, Shahrina J. Ahmed and Mahfuja Bint Ammu, and it has been repeated every six months (see here, here, here and here).

If you are an Arabic speaker, or speak any other languages spoken by the prisoners besides English, feel free to write in those languages. Do please note that any messages that can be construed as political should be avoided, as they may lead to the letters not making it past the Pentagon’s censors, but be aware that your messages may not get through anyway — although please don’t let that put you off (see the note at the bottom of this article to explain why letters might be returned without explanation).

If you want any more encouragement about the significance for prisoners of receiving letters, then please watch the short film below — part of Amnesty International’s ongoing letter-writing campaign– featuring my friend, the former prisoner Omar Deghayes, showing letters he received in Guantánamo and explaining how much they meant to him — and to his fellow prisoners. This was filmed as part of an interview with Omar that is featured in the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (directed by Polly Nash and myself), and available on DVD here — or here for the US.

When writing to the prisoners, please ensure you include their full name and ISN (internment serial number) below (these are the numbers before their names, i.e. Shaker Aamer is ISN 239)

Please address all letters to:

Detainee Name

Detainee ISN

Guantánamo Bay

P.O. Box 160

Washington, D.C. 20053

United States of America

Please also include a return address on the envelope.

The 86 prisoners cleared for release

The general phrase used by the task force to describe the recommendations for 56 of these men was “Transfer to a country outside the United States that will implement appropriate security measures.” Their identities were first revealed last September. See below for the 30 others.

The 30 non-Yemeni prisoners cleared for release

036 Ibrahim Othman Ibrahim Idris (Sudan)

038 Ridah Bin Saleh al Yazidi (Tunisia)

168 Adel Al Hakeemy (Tunisia)

174 Hasham Bin Ali Omar Sliti (Tunisia)

189 Salem Abdu Salam Ghereby (Libya)

197 Younis Abdurrahman Chekkouri (Morocco)

200 Saad Muhammad Husayn Qahtani (Saudi Arabia)

238 Nabil Said Hadjarab (Algeria)

239 Shaker Aamer (UK-Saudi Arabia)

257 Imar Hamzayavich Abdulayev (Tajikistan)

275 Yousef Abbas (China)

280 Saidullah Khalik (China)

282 Hajiakbar Abdul Ghuper (China)

288 Mutia Sadiq Ahmad Sayyab (Algeria)

290 Ahmed Bin Saleh Bel Bacha (Algeria)

309 Mjuayn Al-Din Jamal Al-Din Abd Al Fadhil Abd Al-Sattar (UAE)

310 Djamel Saiid Ali Ameziane (Algeria)

326 Ahmed Adnan Ahjam (Syria)

327 Ali Hussein Muhammed Shaban (Syria)

329 Abd Al Hadi Omar Mahmoud Faraj (Syria)

502 Abdul Bin Mohammed Abis Ourgy (Tunisia)

684 Mohammed Tahanmatan (Palestine)

722 Jihad Deyab (Syria)

757 Ahmed Abdel Aziz (Mauritania)

894 Abdullah Bin Ali Al Lufti (Tunisia)

899 Shawali Khan (Afghanistan)

928 Khi Ali Gul (Afghanistan)

934 Abdul Ghani (Afghanistan)

1103 Mohammed Zahir (Afghanistan)

10001 Bensayah Belkacem (Algeria)

The 26 Yemeni prisoners cleared for release

034 Al Khadr Abdallah Muhammad Al Yafi (Yemen)

035 Idris Ahmad Abd Al Qadir Idris (Yemen)

152 Asim Thahit Abdullah Al-Khalaqi (Yemen)

153 Fayiz Ahmad Yahia Suleiman (Yemen)

163 Khalid Abd Al Jabbar Muhammad Uthman Al Qadasi (Yemen)

170 Sharaf Ahmad Muhammad Mas’ud (Yemen)

224 Abd Al-Rahman Abdullah Ali Shabati (Yemen)

249 Muhammed Abdullah Al Hamiri (Yemen)

254 Muhammad Ali Husayn Khanayna (Yemen)

255 Said Muhammad Salih Hatim (Yemen)

259 Fadhel Hussein Saleh Hentif (Yemen)

511 Sulaiman Awath Sulaiman Bin Agell Al Nahdi (Yemen)

553 Abdul Khaled Al-Baydani (Yemen)

554 Fahmi Salem Said Al-Asani (Yemen)

564 Jalal Salam Awad Awad (Yemen)

566 Mansour Mohamed Mutaya Ali (Yemen)

570 Sabri Muhammad Ibrahim al-Qurashi (Yemen)

572 Salah Mohammad Salih al-Dhabi (Yemen)

574 Hamood Abdulla Hamood (Yemen)

575 Saa’d Nasser Moqbil al-Azani (Yemen)

680 Emad Abdallah Hassan (Yemen)

686 Abdel Ghaib Ahmad Hakim (Yemen)

689 Mohammed Ahmed Salam (Yemen)

690 Abdul Al Qader Ahmed Hassain (Yemen)

691 Muhammad Ali Salem Al Zarnuki (Yemen)

1015 Husayn Salim Muhammad Matari Yafai (Yemen)

The 30 Yemeni prisoners cleared for release but designated for “conditional detention”

These men were cleared for release by the task force, although the task force members conjured up a new category for them, “conditional detention,” which it described as being “based on the current security environment in that country.” The task force added, “They are not approved for repatriation to Yemen at this time, but may be transferred to third countries, or repatriated to Yemen in the future if the current moratorium on transfers to Yemen is lifted and other security conditions are met.”

026 Fahed Abdullah Ahmad Ghazi (Yemen)

030 Ahmed Umar Abdullah al-Hikimi (Yemen)

033 Mohammed Al-Adahi (Yemen)

040 Abdel Qadir Al-Mudafari (Yemen)

043 Samir Naji Al Hasan Moqbil (Yemen)

088 Adham Mohamed Ali Awad (Yemen)

091 Abdel Al Saleh (Yemen)

115 Abdul Rahman Mohammed Saleh (Yemen)

117 Mukhtar Anaje (Yemen)

165 Adil Said Haj Ubayd (Yemen)

167 Ali Yahya Mahdi (Yemen)

171 Abu Bakr ibn Ali Muhammad al Ahdal (Yemen)

178 Tariq Ali Abdullah Ba Odah (Yemen)

202 Mahmoud Omar Muhammad Bin Atef (Yemen)

223 Abd al-Rahman Sulayman (Yemen)

233 Abd al-Razaq Muhammed Salih (Yemen)

240 Abdallah Yahya Yusif Al Shibli (Yemen)

251 Muhammad Said Salim Bin Salman (Yemen)

321 Ahmed Yaslam Said Kuman (Yemen)

440 Muhammad Ali Abdallah Muhammad Bwazir (Yemen)

461 Abd al Rahman al-Qyati (Yemen)

498 Mohammed Ahmen Said Haider (Yemen)

506 Mohammed Khalid Salih al-Dhuby (Yemen)

509 Mohammed Nasir Yahi Khussrof (Yemen)

549 Umar Said Salim Al-Dini (Yemen)

550 Walid Said bin Said Zaid (Yemen)

578 Abdul al-Aziz Abduh Abdullah Ali Al Suwaydi (Yemen)

688 Fahmi Abdullah Ahmed al-Tawlaqi (Yemen)

728 Abdul Muhammad Nassir al-Muhajari (Yemen)

893 Tawfiq Nasir Awad Al-Bihani (Yemen)

The 46 prisoners recommended for continued detention

Of the 46 prisoners recommended for continued detention, the 33 men below were recommended for “Continued detention pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force (2001), as informed by principles of the laws of war.” All were promised reviews of their cases (by the Periodic Review Board) when their detention without charge or trial was authorised by President Obama in an executive order in March 2011, but as I explained here, those reviews, shamefully, have not yet begun, two years and four months later.

The 33 prisoners recommended for continued detention (without possible transfer to imprisonment in the US)

ISN 004 Abdul Haq Wasiq (Afghanistan)

ISN 006 Mullah Norullah Noori (Afghanistan)

ISN 007 Mullah Mohammed Fazl (Afghanistan)

ISN 028 Moath Hamza Ahmed al-Alwi (Yemen)

ISN 031 Mahmud Abd Al Aziz Al Mujahid (Yemen)

ISN 037 Abdel Malik Ahmed Abdel Wahab al Rahabi (Yemen)

ISN 041 Majid Mahmud Abdu Ahmed (Yemen)

ISN 042 Abd al Rahman Shalbi Isa Uwaydah (Saudi Arabia)

ISN 044 Muhammed Rajab Sadiq Abu Ghanim (Yemen)

ISN 128 Ghaleb Nassar al Bihani (Yemen)

ISN 131 Salem Ahmad Hadi Bin Kanad (Yemen)

ISN 195 Mohammed Abd al Rahman al Shumrant [Shumrani] (Saudi Arabia)

ISN 232 Fawzi Khalid Abdullah Fahad al Odah (Kuwait)

ISN 242 Khalid Ahmed Qasim (Yemen)

ISN 244 Abdul Latif Nasir (Morocco)

ISN 324 Mashur Abdullah Muqbil Ahmed al-Sabri (Yemen)

ISN 434 Mustafa Abd al-Qawi Abd al-Aziz al-Shamiri (Yemen)

ISN 441 Abdul Rahman Ahmed (Yemen)

ISN 508 Salman Yahya Hassan Mohammad Rabei’i (Yemen)

ISN 552 Faez Mohammed Ahmed al-Kandari (Kuwait)

ISN 579 Khairullah Said Wali Khairkhwa (Afghanistan)

ISN 695 Omar Khalif Mohammed Abu Baker Mahjour Umar (Libya)

ISN 708 Ismael Ali Faraj Ali Bakush (Libya)

ISN 713 Mohammed al Zahrani (Saudi Arabia)

ISN 832 Mohammad Nabi Omari (Afghanistan)

ISN 836 Ayub Murshid Ali Salih (Yemen)

ISN 837 Bashir Nasir Ali al-Marwalah (Yemen)

ISN 838 Shawqi Awad Balzuhair (Yemen)

ISN 839 Musab Omar Ali al-Mudwani (Yemen)

ISN 840 Hail Aziz Ahmed al-Maythali (Yemen)

ISN 841 Said Salih Said Nashir (Yemen)

ISN 1045 Mohammed Kamin (Afghanistan)

ISN 10025 Mohammed Abdul Malik Bajabu (Kenya)

The 13 men below were recommended for “Continued detention pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force (2001), as informed by principles of the laws of war, subject to further review by the Principals prior to the detainee’s transfer to a detention facility in the United States.” This is a reference to the Obama administration’s plans to bring prisoners to a facility on the US mainland, so that Guantánamo could be closed. These plans were blocked by Congress, but it is unclear why the task force only designated these 13 men for possible transfer to the US because, if the 33 others were to continue being held at Guantánamo, it would be impossible to close the prison.

The 13 prisoners recommended for continued detention (with possible transfer to imprisonment in the US)

ISN 027 Uthman Abd al-Rahim Muhammad Uthman (Yemen)

ISN 029 Mohammed al-Ansi (Yemen)

ISN 045 Ali Ahmad al-Rahizi (Yemen)

ISN 235 Saeed Ahmed Mohammed Abdullah Sarem Jarabh (Yemen)

ISN 522 Yassim Qasim Mohammed Ismail Qasim (Yemen)

ISN 560 Haji Wali Muhammed (Afghanistan)

ISN 576 Zahar Omar Hamis bin Hamdoun (Yemen)

ISN 975 Karim Bostan (Afghanistan)

ISN 1017 Omar Mohammed Ali al-Rammah (Yemen)

ISN 1119 Ahmid al Razak (Afghanistan)

ISN 1463 Abd al-Salam al-Hilah (Yemen)

ISN 10023 Guleed Hassan Ahmed (Somalia)

ISN 10029 Muhammad Rahim (Afghanistan)

The 33 prisoners recommended for prosecution

The task force recommended 36 prisoners for prosecution. Two (Ibrahim al-Qosi and Omar Khadr) accepted plea deals in their military commissions at Guantánamo, and were then released, and one other, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, was transferred to the US for a federal court trial (before Congress banned the transfer of prisoners to the US mainland for any reason, even trials), at which he received a life sentence. Of the 33, only 12 at most are ever likely to be tried, according to a statement made last month by Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, the chief prosecutor of the military commissions. Eight have already been charged (see below), which means that, of the 23 listed below, only four at most will ever be charged. The other 19, therefore, also need to have access to the Periodic Review Boards promised for the 46 men designated for indefinite detention but not yet implemented.

The 23 prisoners recommended for prosecution but not charged

ISN 063 Mohamed Mani Ahmad al Kahtani (Saudi Arabia)

ISN 535 Tariq Mahmoud Ahmed Al Sawah (Egypt)

ISN 569 Suhayl Abdul Anam al Sharabi (Yemen)

ISN 682 Abdullah Al Sharbi (Saudi Arabia)

ISN 685 Said bin Brahim bin Umran Bakush (Algeria)

ISN 694 Sufyian Barhoumi (Algeria)

ISN 696 Jabran Al Qahtani (Saudi Arabia)

ISN 702 Ravil Mingazov (Russia)

ISN 753 Abdul Sahir (Afghanistan)

ISN 760 Mohamedou Ould Slahi (Mauritania)

ISN 762 Obaidullah (Afghanistan)

ISN 1094 Saifullah Paracha (Pakistan)

ISN 1453 Sanad Al Kazimi (Yemen)

ISN 1456 Hassan Bin Attash (Saudi Arabia)

ISN 1457 Sharqawi Abdu Ali Al Hajj (Yemen)

ISN 1460 Abdul Rabbani (Pakistan)

ISN 1461 Mohammed Rabbani (Pakistan)

ISN 10016 Zayn al-Ibidin Muhammed Husayn aka Abu Zubaydah (Palestine)

ISN 10017 Mustafa Faraj Muhammed Masud al-Jadid al-Usaybi (Libya)

ISN 10019 Encep Nurjaman (Hambali) (Indonesia)

ISN 10021 Mohd Farik bin Amin (Malaysia)

ISN 10022 Bashir bin Lap (Malaysia)

ISN 3148 Haroon al-Afghani (Afghanistan)

The eight prisoners already charged

ISN 768 Ahmed Al-Darbi (Saudi Arabia)

ISN 10011 Mustafa Ahmad al Hawsawi (Saudi Arabia)

ISN 10013 Ramzi Bin Al Shibh (Yemen)

ISN 10014 Walid Mohammed Bin Attash (Yemen)

ISN 10015 Mohammed al Nashiri (Saudi Arabia)

ISN 10018 Ali abd al Aziz Ali (Pakistan)

ISN 10024 Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (Kuwait)

ISN 10026 Nashwan abd al-Razzaq abd al-Baqi (Hadi) (Iraq)

The two prisoners already convicted via plea deal

ISN 707 Noor Uthman Muhammed (Sudan)

ISN 10020 Majid Khan (Pakistan)

One other prisoner convicted under President Bush

Ali Hamza al-Bahlul was not included in the task force’s deliberations, as he had been tried and convicted in a one-sided trial by military commission in October 2008, at which he refused to mount a defense. His conviction was dismissed by an appeals court in January this year, although the government has appealed.

ISN 039 Ali Hamza al-Bahlul (Yemen)

Note: For further information on the prisoners, see my four-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list (Part One, Part Two, Part Three and Part Four).

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.