Andy Worthington's Blog, page 137

Radio: Andy Worthington Defends Bradley Manning and Whistleblowers on Voice of Russia

Last week, as the trial of Bradley Manning finally got underway at Fort Meade in Maryland, nearly three years after the military analyst was first arrested for the biggest leak of classified documents in US history, I was asked to take part in a radio show on Voice of Russia, the radio station whose UK studio is in St. James’s Square in central London.

The show was entitled, “Bradley Manning and the nature of intelligence,” and involved guests in three studios — in Washington D.C, Moscow and London. It was 45 minutes in total, but the London segment has been made available as an audio file, and can be listened to, or downloaded here.

I appeared in London alongside John Gearson, Professor of National Security Studies, and Director of the Centre for Defence Studies at King’s College London, and our host was Hywel Davis.

I was delighted to have the opportunity to speak about the importance of Bradley Manning’s whistleblowing, and to explain why I believe that, although he obviously disobeyed the rules governing the behavior of US military personnel, the attempt to claim that he was “aiding the enemy” is absurd, and the military — and the Obama administration — should, at most, have settled for the 20-year sentence that is the maximum punishment for the crimes to which Manning has already agreed.

I was also glad to have had the opportunity to speak about how the information made available to WikiLeaks was important in a variety of ways — how the Afghan and Iraq war logs were described by the former SAS soldier turned conscientious objector Ben Griffin as the single most important act of anti-war activism ever, how the diplomatic cables helped people in closed regimes understand what their regimes were doing, and, I believe, helped to inspire popular uprisings in the Arab Spring, and also how the classified military files from Guantánamo were and are hugely important, primarily because they revealed the identities of those who had made allegations about their fellow prisoners, and allowed journalists to establish that many of them — including the most prolific of them — were profoundly unreliable.

Unfortunately, the death of Osama bin Laden, which came just one week after the files were released, swept them off the agenda completely, and there has been no opportunity since then for the files — and their worth — to be highlighted in the media. However, if President Obama ever initiates the periodic reviews he promised for the 46 prisoners he designated for indefinite detention without charge or trial in an executive order in March 2011, it would be a perfect opportunity for researchers to provide important input, even though he continues to drag his heels on that promise, as with so many others regarding Guantánamo.

As Bradley Manning’s trial proceeds, with Chris Hedges on Tuesday describing it as “a judicial lynching,” I will be appearing on Thursday on CCTV-America (China Central TV’s US-based English language channel, which launched in February 2012), to discuss the trials and WikiLeaks, and I also hope to find the time to examine the parts of the trial that deal with the Guantánamo files.

In the meantime, I hope you have time to listen to the London segments of the Voice of Russia show from last week. This is how it was described on the website, with reference also to Edward Snowden — the latest whistleblower to rock the US establishment — whose identity had not been revealed at the time of recording:

With the latest US whistleblower Edward Snowden saying his conscience drove him to spill the beans to “protect basic liberties for people around the world”, VoR’s Hywel Davis and his guests explore intelligence, whistleblowing and government secrets in a discussion on the trial of Bradley Manning.

Disillusioned with the US government, Edward Snowden, the ex-CIA employee-turned-whistleblower whose revelations of vast US surveillance programmes have implicated the UK government’s electronic surveillance wing GCHQ, said: “I had been looking for leaders, but I realised that leadership is about being the first to act.”

Bradley Manning — the US army private who admits leaking US secret documents to WikiLeaks — went on trial in the US last week and looks set to be found guilty by his own admission of leaking thousands of secret US diplomatic cables and war logs. But the man accused of causing his country’s worst ever security breach remains an enigma: hero to some, enemy of the state to others.

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.

Join the Anti-Capitalist Week of Action in London Against the G8

I just have time to throw out a quick reminder that tomorrow, Tuesday June 11, there’s a Carnival Against Capitalism taking place in London’s West End, beginning at 12 noon, at the start of a week of action against the G8, which takes place on June 17-18 in Northern Ireland. There are two suggested meeting points — one at Oxford Circus and one at Piccadilly Circus — and this is what Milena Olwan, a social worker, told the Guardian about the protests against the G8, echoing what many people think, as politicians meet, who, at best, are deluded, and at worst, like the Tories, are revelling in the opportunity to impose savage austerity cuts on the most vulnerable members of society.

“The G8 are anti-democratic, unaccountable, and they represent an extinct world order,” she said, adding, They embody the old ways of protectionism, imperialism and greed … [W]e will show them that ordinary people coming together taking action can forge alternatives that do not destroy lives but create a life beyond capitalism.”

This is how the organisers describe the Carnival Against Capitalism:

This action will only be as effective as the people participating in it. We have not negotiated with the police and we will not be controlled. If we look after each other, stay mobile, don’t get caught in kettles and are ready to make quick decisions about what to do next we can make the most of the day.

They also write:

Their London?

London is right at the heart of global capitalism. And the West End of London, including elite areas like Piccadilly, Mayfair and Knightsbridge, is where power and greed are most concentrated. The West End is home to:

Corporations. Many of the world’s most brutal and polluting companies,  including oil and mining giants, arms dealers, and the businesses profiting from cuts and privatisation.
Vulture funds. Global base of the “hedge fund” and “private equity” industries, laundering the world’s blood money to invest in war, food speculation and debt slavery.
Tyrants. Government offices, embassies, cultural and commercial fronts of  colonial powers and murderous regimes.
Playground of the mega-rich. Middle Eastern dictators, Russian mafia oligarchs, and home-grown parasites all see London as a “safe” place to hide and spend their loot.

Our Carnival.

Traditionally, carnival is the time where the people take over the streets, the bosses run and hide, and the world gets turned upside down. It is a time to celebrate our resistance and our dreams, to bring music and colour to the streets. And also to show our strength and our anger.

The powerful feel safe in London so long as they go unchallenged. But the people looting our planet have names and addresses. On #J11 we will party in the streets, point out the hiding places of power, and take back the heart of our city for a day. Our streets. Our world.

Join us.

Like any good carnival, everyone’s invited: this will be an open, inclusive, and lively event. There will be a main route with sound systems and public meeting points. Bring music, costumes, banners, friends, ideas. We also encourage independent actions, and will publish soon a detailed map of the area to help you make your own plans. The Green and Black Cross group will provide experienced medical and legal support.

That detailed map is here, and it is something of a masterpiece, a guide to 100 “hiding places of power in the West End,” including banks, hedge funds, private equity offices, arms dealers, courts and police stations, “Dens of the rich,” and the headquarters of corporations involved in energy, mining, pharmaceuticals, property  and security, as well as representatives of foreign governments, and those involved in PR, communications and the media.

A street party at an undisclosed location will end the day at 5.30pm. For the latest updates join (and share) the Facebook page, and follow @stopg8uk on Twitter or visit the Network 23 website which contains listings of all the week’s events. You can also Tweet using the hashtag #j11.

On Wednesday June 12, there will be an anti-militarist action in the West End, with protesters meeting at 2pm. For more info visit the Disarm DSEI website.

On Thursday June 13, a solidarity action is planned in support of prisoners in the criminal justice system and migrants in detention centres, although details have not yet been announced.

On Friday June 14 there will be a day of creative direct action at Canary Wharf involving UK Uncut, Occupy and other groups. Meet at Jubilee Plaza outside the west exit of Canary Wharf tube station at 12.30. Join the Facebook page for the latest details or check the website at They Owe Us (Shift the Debt), where the following information is provided:

In response to the combined crises of cuts and climate chaos, and the call for a week of action against the G8, we have come together to organise a gathering of those who want to stop the assault on people and planet. In the penthouse suite of global capitalism, in front of the eyes of the financial elite we will demand that They Owe Us.

Canary Wharf is the epicentre of the economic crash and a stronghold of the 1 per cent. This is the home of many of the big financiers and corporations that are doing the damage, whose interests will be defended at the G8 and whose influence most needs to be curbed.

We plan to appear in Canary Wharf to reclaim and transform a space, bringing beauty and hope to the soulless heart of Capitalism.

A SPACE TO RESIST: We will speak out about the debt that is owed, and celebrate our resistance in speech, music and performance.
A SPACE TO CREATE: We will build a symbol of their debt to us – right under the noses of the banks and corporations that both fund and profit from these crises.
A SPACE TO IMAGINE: We will share the alternatives that we know can be created when we empower people rather than crush them.

And finally, via Johnny Void, who reminded me about this week’s actions on Twitter, here, “to get everyone in the mood [is] a video of the Carnival Against Capitalism held on June 18th, 1999, spotted via urban75“:

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.

Quarterly Fundraiser: Seeking $2500 to Support My Guantánamo Work

Please support my work!

Dear friends and supporters,

Every three months, I ask you, if you can, to make a donation to support my ongoing work on Guantánamo and the 166 men still held there.

All contributions are welcome, whether it’s $25, $100 or $500 — or, of course, the equivalent in pounds sterling or any other currency. Readers can pay via PayPal from anywhere in the world (just click on the “Donate” button above), but if you’re in the UK and want to help without using PayPal, you can send me a cheque (address here — scroll down to the bottom of the page), and if you’re not a PayPal user and want to send a check from the US (or from anywhere else in the world, for that matter), please feel free to do so, but bear in mind that I have to pay a $10/£6.50 processing fee on every transaction. Securely packaged cash is also an option!

Since my last appeal for support, back in March, when 34 of you donated $1500, I have been relentlessly busy on Guantánamo, as the prisoners, abandoned by all three branches of the US government, finally made the mainstream media wake up to the injustice of their indefinite detention through a desperate, prison-wide hunger strike, which is still ongoing.

After far too long in which Guantánamo had slipped into the shadows, it was reassuring that it was back in the media spotlight, and I have been kept extremely busy over the last three months, writing articles, and making TV and radio appearances to keep people’s attention focused on the hunger strike, and on the reasons for it.

Despite all this activity, I very much need your help to continue working as I do, as an independent researcher, writer and activist, as most of my work has been, and continues to be unpaid. Although I receive some income from the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, which I founded last year with the attorney Tom Wilner, another income stream has recently dried up, and I am rather urgently in need of your support to keep working. Even if I were to raise the full $2500 I’m asking for, it would be just $200 a week for the next three months.

I’m sad to report, moreover, that the need for persistent reporting and campaigning on Guantánamo has not diminished. President Obama recently promised to appoint a new official to oversee transfers from Guantanamo, and to resume releasing prisoners, and as a result the media’s spotlight has shifted from Guantánamo, even though the President has not yet done anything to fulfil these promises, and the need to maintain pressure on him is clearly as urgent now as it has been since he failed to fulfill his promise to close the prison within a year of taking office in 2009.

As I continue with my work to keep Guantánamo in the public eye, six years after I began writing about it full-time as an independent freelance journalist, and as I approach my 2000th article, I’d like to thank you for your support, as ever. Without it, I literally would not be able to do what I do.

Andy Worthington

London, June 10, 2013

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

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the four-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, “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 Season of Death at Guantánamo

Seven years ago, late in the evening on June 9, 2006, three prisoners — Ali al-Salami, a Yemeni, and Mani al-Utaybi and Yasser al-Zahrani, both Saudis — died at Guantánamo, in what was described by the authorities as a triple suicide, although that explanation seemed to be extremely dubious at the time, and has not become more convincing with the passage of time.

At the time, the prison’s commander, Rear Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., attracted widespread criticism by declaring that the deaths were an act of war. Speaking of the prisoners, he said, “They are smart, they are creative, they are committed. They have no regard for life, neither ours nor their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.”

I described the deaths in my book The Guantánamo Files, published in 2007, after a fourth death at the prison, of Abdul adman al-Amri, a Saudi, on May 30, 2007 (see here and here), and I wrote my first commemoration of the men’s deaths on the second anniversary of their supposed suicide, followed, in August 2008, with a skeptical analysis of the report of the deaths by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), which took over two years to be made available.

The next year, 2009, the anniversary was overshadowed by the death of a fifth prisoner, Muhammad Salih, another Yemeni.

I call this the season of death because all five men died in a two-week period at the end of May and the start of June, and to this day none of the deaths have been adequately explained. It is also, I believe, significant that all five men had been long-term hunger strikers.

Although doubts had been expressed at the time about the deaths of the three men who died in June 2006, and doubts were also expressed about Muhammed Salih’s death, by his friend, the British resident Binyam Mohamed, who was released just four months before Salih died, it was not until January 2010 that the alleged suicide story was blown wide open when, in Harper’s Magazine, Scott Horton wrote a major feature, based on statements made by soldiers who had been at Guantánamo on the night that Ali al-Salami, Mani al-Utaybi and Yasser al-Zahrani died, who insisted that the triple suicide story had to be false.

The main witness was Army Staff Sgt. Joe Hickman, who had been stationed in one of the watchtowers close to the block where the men allegedly committed suicide. Hickman, a former Marine who had reenlisted in the Army National Guard after the 9/11 attacks, was deployed to Guantánamo in March 2006, with his friend, Specialist Tony Davila.

On arrival, Davila was briefed about the existence of what Horton described as “an unnamed and officially unacknowledged compound” outside the perimeter fence of the main prison, and he explained that one theory about it was that “it was being used by some of the non-uniformed government personnel who frequently showed up in the camps and were widely thought to be CIA agents.”

As I explained in my analysis of Horton’s article at the time:

Hickman and Davila became fascinated by the compound — known to the soldiers as “Camp No” (as in, “No, it doesn’t exist”) — and Hickman was on duty in a tower on the prison’s perimeter on the night the three men died, when he noticed that “a white van, dubbed the ‘paddy wagon,’ that Navy guards used to transport heavily manacled prisoners, one at a time, into and out of Camp Delta, [which] had no rear windows and contained a dog cage large enough to hold a single prisoner,” had called three times at Camp 1, where the men were held, and had then taken them out to “Camp No.” All three were in “Camp No” by 8 pm.

At 11.30, the van returned, apparently dropping something off at the clinic, and within half an hour the whole prison “lit up.” As Horton explained:

Hickman headed to the clinic, which appeared to be the center of activity, to learn the reason for the commotion. He asked a distraught medical corpsman what had happened. She said three dead prisoners had been delivered to the clinic. Hickman recalled her saying that they had died because they had rags stuffed down their throats, and that one of them was severely bruised. Davila told me he spoke to Navy guards who said the men had died as the result of having rags stuffed down their throats.

Despite the compelling narrative of a cover-up — which was also backed up by “Death in Camp Delta,” a detailed report produced by researchers at the Seton Hall Law School in New Jersey — the US government shut the door on an investigation.

On the fourth anniversary of the deaths, I wrote a follow-up article, “Murders at Guantánamo: The Cover-Up Continues,” and I have tried to publicize it ever since, as the families tried and failed to secure justice in the US courts (see here and here) and when my friend, the Norwegian film director Erling Borgen, made a documentary about the deaths, also called “Death in Camp Delta,” which I reviewed here.

Since then, another friend, the psychologist Jeff Kaye, discovered the autopsy reports for Abdul Rahman al-Amri and Muhammad Salih, the prisoners who died in 2007 and 2009, and wrote a skeptical article about their alleged suicides for Truthout, and, last September, there was another disputed suicide — of Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, a mentally troubled Yemeni who had reported hoarded medication, in order to kill himself by taking an overdose, even though this appears to have been impossible given the obsessive scrutiny to which the prisoners are subjected.

As a prison-wide hunger strike rages at Guantánamo, which is now in its fifth month, the anniversaries of the deaths of the long-term hunger strikers in 2006, 2007 and 2009 continue to provide a disturbing reminder of how troubling the US authorities response to long-term hunger strikers has been in the past, and how the remaining prisoners at Guantánamo — 41 of whom are now being force-fed — must not be forgotten.

17 days ago, President Obama promised to resume releasing prisoners from Guantánamo — a process that has largely been blocked by Congressional obstructions for the last two years. He needs to do so, and he needs to begin immediately, to address the despair felt by the hunger strikers (103 of the remaining 166 men, according to the US authorities, and 130, according to the prisoners themselves), and to make sure that no more men die while deprived of justice in a prison that he described, in his speech 17 days ago, as “a facility that should never have been opened.”

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.

“Dirty Wars”: An Immensely Powerful Anti-War Film, Uncovering Obama’s Global “War on Terror”

[image error]On May 13, I was privileged to be invited to a London preview of “Dirty Wars,” the new documentary film, directed by Richard Rowley and focusing on the journalist Jeremy Scahill’s investigations into America’s global “war on terrorism” — not historically, but right here, right now under President Obama.

In particular, the film, which opens in the US this weekend, and is accurately described by the New York Times as “pessimistic, grimly outraged and utterly riveting,” follows Scahill, who wrote it with David Riker, and is also the narrator, as he uncovers the existence of the shadowy organization JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command, established by 1980, which is at the heart of the “dirty wars” being waged in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere.

I had seen rushes with representatives of the Center for Constitutional Rights at the London base of the Bertha Foundation, one of the backers of the film, last year, and I remembered the powerful sequences in Afghanistan, where Scahill found out about JSOC after meeting the survivors of a raid in Gardez by US forces in 2010 in which two pregnant women had been killed, and there had then been a cover-up.This involved US soldiers returning to the scene of their crime to remove bullets from the corpses — something difficult to forget once informed about.

The Afghan sequences — although involving JSOC rather than the military or other Special Forces — reminded me of the numerous similar raids based on chronically unreliable information, which have persistently led to the slaughter of civilians throughout the entire Afghan occupation — now nearing 12 years — or have led to the capture of people unrelated to insurgency, who ended up in Bagram, or, in the early years of the occupation, were sent to Guantánamo. Shockingly, Scahill discovers, during the course of his investigations that, in just one week in Afghanistan, there were 1,700 night raids similar to the one noted above.

The trailer for the film is below:

The powerful sequences in Afghanistan that I saw last year remain in the film, and are followed by visits to Yemen, where Scahill delves into the chilling story of Anwar al-Awlaki, the US citizen killed in a drone attack, and his 16-year old son Abdulrahman, killed in another attack — “not for who he was, but for who he might one day become,” as Scahill notes — and spends time with Anwar al-Awlaki’s distraught father.

In Yemen, it is disturbing to note how provocative and counterproductive US actions have been, in a troublingly undeclared war in which, as in Afghanistan, their every action appears to be counter-productive, either involving the slaughter of civilians, through attacks based on woefully inadequate intelligence, or the inflammatory and cold-blooded murder of Anwar al-Awlaki and his son.

Once Scahill reaches Somalia, and the chaos of permanent war and warlords, in which US involvement is even more inexplicable, it becomes horribly apparent, as he says at the conclusion of the film, “The world has become America’s battlefield, and we can go everywhere.”

As the New York Times explained in its review of the film, we learn that JSOC “operates not only in Afghanistan but also in countries on which no war has been declared. Algeria, Indonesia, Jordan and Thailand are mentioned.”

Disturbingly, we also see JSOC emerge from the shadows, as their commander, Vice Adm. William H. McRaven, discovered by Scahill involved in paying hush money to the family of the pregnant women who died in Gardez, later is praised as a national hero as JSOC lead the mission to kill Osama bin Laden.

I urge you, if you can, to see “Dirty Wars”, which, as I noted above, opens in US cinemas this weekend (and in the UK later this year), and or even to organize a screening yourself.

This is how it is described on the website:

“Dirty Wars” follows investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill, author of the international bestseller Blackwater, into the heart of America’s covert wars, from Afghanistan to Yemen, Somalia and beyond.

Part political thriller and part detective story, “Dirty Wars” is a gripping journey into one of the most important and underreported stories of our time.

What begins as a report into a US night raid gone terribly wrong in a remote corner of Afghanistan quickly turns into a global investigation of the secretive and powerful Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).

As Scahill digs deeper into the activities of JSOC, he is pulled into a world of covert operations unknown to the public and carried out across the globe by men who do not exist on paper and will never appear before Congress. In military jargon, JSOC teams “find, fix, and finish” their targets, who are selected through a secret process. No target is off limits for the “kill list,” including US citizens.

Drawn into the stories and lives of the people he meets along the way, Scahill is forced to confront the painful consequences of a war spinning out of control, as well as his own role as a journalist.

We encounter two parallel casts of characters. The CIA agents, Special Forces operators, military generals, and US-backed warlords who populate the dark side of American wars go on camera and on the record, some for the first time. We also see and hear directly from survivors of night raids and drone strikes, including the family of the first American citizen marked for death and being hunted by his own government.

“Dirty Wars” takes viewers to remote corners of the globe to see first-hand wars fought in their name and offers a behind-the-scenes look at a high-stakes investigation. We are left with haunting questions about freedom and democracy, war and justice.

“Haunting questions about freedom and democracy, war and justice” is one way of putting it. Personally, after seeing familiar examples of homicidally inept operations in Afghanistan, and then seeing how America has created an enemy in Yemen, in drone strikes that have killed civilians and have also involved assassinating US citizens, and are engaged in alliances with extremely dubious warlords in Somalia, I reacted with genuine horror when Jeremy explained how, for JSOC, the entire world is now a battlefield, and the inept, unaccountable and counter-productive operations that are now America’s way of waging war are taking place in an unknown number of countries.

At that point, I realized that, to deal with everything that is going on, the film would last for days, and would have to take us to places where, unlike Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, few journalists, if any, have yet uncovered the full extent of what is going on.

Most of all, the horror I felt at this point was a profound opposition to war — not a novel feeling for me, as a lifelong pacifist, but a powerful indictment of how, under President Obama, being opposed to war — modern, dirty wars conducted in a senseless manner below the radar — is imperative for anyone with a modicum of common sense and humanity.

Note: Jeremy Scahill is also the author of Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield, published in the UK by Serpent’s Tail.

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.

Ahmed Ould Abdel Aziz: The Mauritanian Teacher Still Awaiting Release from Guantánamo

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

On Friday, the hopes of those of us campaigning for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba were briefly raised when it was reported that the last two Mauritanian prisoners at Guantánamo had been released, along with another Mauritanian held in Afghanistan. It later turned out that only the latter was returned to his home country.

This is, of course, distressing news for the families of the two men still in Guantánamo — and especially for the family of one of the men, Ahmed Ould Abdel Aziz, because he is one of 56 prisoners told in January 2010, after deliberations by an inter-agency task force established by President Obama, that the US no longer wanted to continue holding him, and would be arranging for his return to his home country.

That document told him he had been “cleared for transfer out of Guantánamo,” and informed him, “The US government intends to transfer you as soon as possible.”

While we wait for President Obama to fulfill the promise he made on May 23 to resume the release of prisoners from Guantánamo — a promise that he made in a major speech on national security at the National Defense University at Fort McNair — we would like to share with you some comments we have just received about Ahmed Ould Abdel Aziz from his Denver legal team, John Holland, Anna Holland Edwards and Erica Grossman, which, we believe, provides a powerful insight into this cultured and intelligent man, who, like many of the prisoners at Guantánamo, has a son he has never seen, who was born after his capture in a house raid in Pakistan in June 2002.

We very much hope that, as the President and his administration resume the release of prisoners from Guantánamo, as promised, Ahmed will be returned home in the near future, to be reunited with his wife, and, finally, to be able to be a father to his son.

A profile of Ahmed Ould Abdel Aziz

By John Holland, Anna Holland Edwards and Erica Grossman

I vividly remember seeing Ahmed holding the letter notifying him of his clearance. He was so grateful. He was so hopeful. That clearance is approaching 4 years old now.

Ahmed has not been accused of committing any crime. He has never been accused of hurting anyone. As a young man he made his living in Kandahar by teaching Arabic and Islam to children. He has still never seen or spoken to his son, as his wife was pregnant at the time of his arrest and sale for a bounty. In fact, we brought the first pictures of his son to him.

More than anything on earth, Ahmed wants to be with his wife and his son. He wants to help her raise him during the remaining formative years of his life.

In our encounters, Ahmed has been a man of conscience and religious principle. As a younger intelligent person who was in Afghanistan to teach the Koran and Arabic, he had the curiosities of youth. But he was not connected to 9/11. He is not a violent man nor one who believes in blind obedience or fealty. He has been cleared for release by the Presidential Inter Agency Review Team.

Ahmed is an educated and cultured man. He speaks several languages fluently including French, English and Arabic. He is very engaging, likable and has a very sharp wit. He is also an inveterate reader with widespread interests ranging from literature, to physics, to all forms of religious thought, to developments in space, politics, inventions and nature.

I asked him how he persevered with all he has suffered while imprisoned. He said in response that he endures because he “resides in the immortality of my soul.”

In one of our earliest visits he remarkably told us there was an unrepresented young man, Mohammed Al Amin, who, whatever else we did, we must help. This young man was released in 2007 with the joint help and cooperation of both our and the Mauritanian government.

We were briefly thrilled this weekend at the prospect that our client who has been cleared for release for years had actually been released.

That unfortunately proved to not yet be the case. Ahmed unjustly remains held without charge despite having been cleared. As he has long observed about this continuing situation: “We are living in a grave here.”

The United States obviously can readily arrange to return detainees back to Mauritania and anywhere else if it wants to — as it has just shown by reportedly sending a military plane with a detainee from Bagram back to Mauritania. Ahmed has been held many years longer than the man just sent back to Mauritania for legal proceedings.  We are sad that though cleared for release for years he was not the one who was transferred. He remains in Guantánamo, still never having met his son.

We remain hopeful that President Obama’s speech will translate into just transfer actions soon, and that Mr. Aziz will soon be reunited with his family, along with the many others who have also been cleared.

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.

Further Calls for the Closure of Guantánamo from the United Nations and the European Parliament

[image error]Since the prison-wide hunger strike at Guantánamo began, four months ago, it has been reassuring to see international organizations, the mainstream media and nearly a million members of the public (through various petitions) queuing up to criticize President Obama, and to urge him to address the reasons for the hunger strike, to resume the release of prisoners — especially of the 86 men (out of 166 in total), who were cleared for release by an inter-agency task force he established in 2009, and to revive his long-abandoned promise to close the prison once and for all.

It took the desperation of the prisoners to reach this point, even though their abandonment by all three branches of the US government has been evident since 2010, when President Obama failed to fulfill his promise to close the prison within a year, when Congress ramped up its opposition to the President’s plans, and when judges in the court of appeals in Washington D.C. passed rulings that prevented any prisoner from being released through the courts, by rewriting the rules governing their habeas corpus petitions, and ordering the judges examining their habeas petitions to regard every claim put forward by the government — however ludicrous — as accurate.

Once the news of the hunger strike began to seep out of Guantánamo, the pressure on President Obama led to him finally addressing the problems highlighted by the many critics of his inaction, first in a news conference at the White House, and then, on May 23, in a major speech on national security issues at the National Defense University, in which he said, “I am appointing a new, senior envoy at the State Department and Defense Department whose sole responsibility will be to achieve the transfer of detainees to third countries. 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.”

No action has yet taken place to demonstrate that the President has any sense of urgency when it comes to fulfilling his promises, and it is crucial, therefore, that pressure continues to be exerted.

On May 27, Navi Pillay, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, followed up on her criticism of the Obama administration in April (which I wrote about here), when she said that the prison at Guantánamo Bay was in “clear breach of international law,” by discussing Guantánamo in her Opening Statement at the 23rd session of the Human Rights Council in Geneva. After referring to “the objective of the global struggle against terrorism” as being “the defence of the rule of law and a society characterized by values of freedom, equality, dignity and justice,” she complained that, “time and again, my Office has received allegations of very grave violations of human rights that have taken place in the context of counter-terrorist and counter-insurgency operations. Such practices are self-defeating. Measures that violate human rights do not uproot terrorism: they nurture it.”

She then explained:

The United States’ failure to shut down the Guantánamo detention centre has been an example of the struggle against terrorism failing to uphold human rights, among them the right to a fair trial. Allegedly, more than half of the 166 detainees still being held in detention have been cleared for transfer to either home countries or third countries for resettlement, yet they remain in detention at Guantánamo Bay. Others reportedly have been designated for indefinite detention.

The continuing indefinite detention of many of these individuals amounts to arbitrary detention, in breach of international law, and the injustice embodied in this detention centre has become an ideal recruitment tool for terrorists. I have repeatedly urged the Government of the United States of America to close Guantánamo Bay in compliance with its obligations under international human rights law. I therefore acknowledge President Obama’s statement last Thursday outlining practical steps towards closing the detention facility, such as the lifting of the moratorium on transferring relevant detainees to Yemen. I encourage the United States to ensure that all such measures are carried out in compliance with its obligations under international human rights law. In the meantime, so long as Guantánamo remains open, the authorities must make every effort to ensure full respect for the human rights of detainees, including those who choose to go on hunger strike.

Another organization criticizing President Obama for failing to fulfill his promise to close Guantánamo is the European Parliament. On May 22, the day before President Obama delivered his major speech on national security, I posted the text of a European Parliament resolution on Guantánamo that was due to be debated just hours before President Obama’s speech. The text adopted by the European Parliament after the various member countries debated the topic is quite different from the version I posted two weeks ago, so I’m posting that below.

My friend Anna, who managed to locate it on the European Parliament’s website, sent me the link and noted that, although it was of course good news that the resolution was adopted, “unfortunately quite a few points have been deleted, such as (among others) European countries accepting released prisoners.” This was something I had noted in the original, and I am sorry to see it removed, as countries are still needed to take cleared prisoners who can’t be safely repatriated, but I understand that it was not something that all member states were interested in promising.

I do, however, hope that some member states are interested in offering homes to some of these men — the last three Uighurs, for example, as well as four Syrians, and probably a handful of others.

For now, however, it is at least reassuring that the European Parliament expressed  “its regret that the commitment of the US President to close Guantánamo by January 2010 has not yet been implemented,” and reiterated its call for the US “to close Guantánamo,” and “to prohibit in any circumstances the use of torture, ill-treatment and indefinite detention without trial.”

Below is the full text of the resolution that was adopted on May 23:

European Parliament resolution of 23 May 2013 on Guantánamo: hunger strike by prisoners (2013/2654(RSP))

The European Parliament,

–  having regard to its previous resolutions on Guantánamo,

–  having regard to its resolution of 18 April 2012 on the Annual Report on Human Rights in the World and the European Union’s policy on the matter, including implications for the EU’s strategic human rights policy,

–  having regard to the international, European and national instruments on human rights and fundamental freedoms and on the prohibition of arbitrary detention, enforced disappearances and torture, such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) of 16 December 1966 and the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment of 10 December 1984 and the relevant protocols thereto,

–  having regard to the Joint Statement of the European Union and its Member States and the United States of America on the Closure of the Guantánamo Bay Detention Facility and Future Counterterrorism Cooperation, based on Shared Values, International Law, and Respect for the Rule of Law and Human Rights of 15 June 2009,

–  having regard to the Statement on the Guantánamo detention regime by UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, on 5 April 2013, saying that ‘the continuing indefinite incarceration of many of the detainees amounts to arbitrary detention and is in clear breach of international law’,

–  having regard to the principles of the United Nations Charter and to the Universal Declaration on Human Rights,

–  having regard to Rule 122 of its Rules of Procedure;

A. whereas a large part of the 166 remaining prisoners at Guantánamo Bay have engaged in hunger strikes to protest about current conditions at the detention facility;

B. whereas 86 of the remaining prisoners have been cleared for release but are still being held indefinitely;

C. whereas the European Union and the United States share fundamental values of freedom, democracy, respect for international law, the rule of law and human rights;

D. whereas at least 10 detainees participating in the hunger strike have been force fed in order to stay alive; whereas international agreements among doctors require respect of an individual’s informed and voluntary decision to participate in a hunger strike;

E. whereas the European Union and the United States of America share the common value of freedom of religion; whereas there have been numerous reports stating the mistreatment of Korans belonging to the detainees by American military personnel during cell searches;

F. whereas the EU-US joint statement of June 15, 2009 notes the commitment of President Obama to order the closure of the Guantánamo Bay detention facility by January 22, 2010 and welcomes the ‘other steps to be taken, including the intensive review of its detention, transfer trial and interrogation policies in the fight against terrorism and increased transparency about past practices in regard to these policies’;

G. whereas the US is closing its only civilian flight into Guantánamo leaving the only flight available a military flight requiring individuals to receive permission from the Pentagon to board, thus limiting the access of the press, lawyers, and human rights workers;

1. Notes the close transatlantic relationship based on shared core values and respect for basic, universal and non-negotiable human rights, such as the right to a fair trial and the ban on arbitrary detention; welcomes the close transatlantic cooperation on a wide range of international human rights issues;

2. Calls on US authorities to treat detainees with respect for their inherent dignity to uphold their human rights and fundamental freedoms;

3. Expresses concern for the well-being of the detainees on hunger strike as well as for the detainees being force fed and calls on the US be respectful of their rights and decisions;

4. Urges the US to reconsider the closing of its only civilian flight into Guantánamo Bay which would limit the access of the press and civil society members;

5. Urges the US to oversee proper care of and respect for religious material while still following mandatory search procedures;

6. Underlines that prisoners still detained should be entitled to regular review of the lawfulness of their detention  in line with the article 9 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights which says that ‘anyone who is deprived of his liberty by arrest or detention shall be entitled to take proceedings before a court, in order that that court may decide without delay on the lawfulness of his detention and order his release if the detention is not lawful’;

7. Reiterates its indignation and outrage at all mass terrorist attacks, and its solidarity with the victims of such attacks and its sympathy for the pain and suffering of their families, friends and relatives; reiterates, however, that the fight against terrorism cannot be waged at the expense of established basic shared values, such as respect for human rights and the rule of law;

8. Expresses its regret that the commitment of the US President to close Guantánamo by January 2010 has not yet been implemented; Reiterates its call to the US authorities to review the military commissions system to ensure fair trials, to close Guantánamo, to prohibit in any circumstances the use of torture, ill-treatment and indefinite detention without trial;

9. Views with regret the US President’s decision of 7 March 2011 to sign the executive order on detention and the revocation of the ban on military tribunals; is convinced that normal criminal trials under civilian jurisdiction are the best way to resolve the status of Guantánamo detainees; insists that detainees in US custody should be charged promptly and tried in accordance with international standards of the rule of law or else released; emphasises, in this context, that the same standards concerning fair trials should apply to all, without discrimination;

10. Instructs its President to forward this resolution to the Convening Authority for Military Commissions, the US Secretary of State, the US President, the US Congress and Senate, the Vice-President of the Commission/High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, the Council, the Commission, the governments and parliaments of the EU Member States, the UN Secretary-General, the President of the UN General Assembly and the governments of the UN member states.

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.

Don’t Forget the Hunger Strike at Guantánamo

It is now 119 days since the prison-wide hunger strike began at Guantánamo, and 12 days since President Obama delivered a powerful speech at the National Defense University, in which he promised to resume releasing prisoners. The process of releasing prisoners — based on the deliberations of an inter-agency task force established by President Obama in 2009, which concluded that 86 of the remaining 166 prisoners should be released — has been largely derailed, since August 2010, by Congressional opposition, but must resume if President Obama is not to be judged as the President who, while promising to close the prison, in fact kept it open, normalizing indefinite detention.

The obstacles raised by Congress consist primarily of a ban on the release of prisoners to any country where even a single individual has allegedly engaged in “recidivism” (returning to the battlefield), and a demand that the secretary of defense must certify that, if released to a country that is not banned, a prisoner will not, in future, engage in terrorism. Practically, however, the men are still held because of President Obama’s refusal to deal with this either by confronting Congress or by using a waiver in the legislation that allows him and the secretary of defense to bypass Congress and release prisoners if he regards it as being “in the national security interests of the United States.”

Monitoring the hunger strike — and pointing out that President Obama must keep his promises — are both hugely important, especially as the media, and people in general, may well lose interest after President Obama’s speech, and believe that, because he has made promises, those promises will inevitably come true.

For the latter imperative — making sure that President Obama keeps his promises — I’m currently working on a new campaign with a number of NGOs and activist groups, and for the former, the Guardian published a useful article last Thursday, entitled, “Guantánamo Bay hunger strike worsens,” and followed up with an open letter from 13 prisoners demanding independent medical access to the prison to assess their situation.

As the Guardian explained, the hunger strike “has worsened” since President Obama’s speech. The paper noted, “On the eve of Obama’s address, there were 103 prisoners on hunger strike, with 31 being force-fed by military authorities and one in hospital. Since then, not a single prisoner has stopped their strike, and now 36 of the detainees are being force-fed to keep them alive, with five of them being hospitalised.” On Sunday, that number had risen to 37.

Carlos Warner, who represents a number of prisoners, including Fayiz al-Kandari, one of the last two Kuwaitis, said, “The numbers of strikers are not moving downwards. Nothing has changed.” Others, as the Guardian put it, “said they feared the media spotlight would move on from the issue, despite the fact that nothing concrete has yet emerged from Obama’s speech.”

Omar Farah, a staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, said, “The hunger strike is the only reason we are talking about Guantánamo. It would be a terrible mistake by the administration to think that they have dealt with this with one speech.”

The Guardian added, “lawyers and human rights activists have said that they need to see firm steps taken after the speech,” and also stated, “If this latest push fails, some observers say, the impact on the hunger striking prisoners’ morale could be catastrophic.” Clive Stafford Smith, the director of the London-based legal action charity Reprieve, whose lawyers currently represent 15 prisoners, including Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, said, “In many ways, the most dangerous thing for these prisoners is to offer them hope.”

Clive Stafford Smith, and other attorneys, also complained about the “intense body searches of prisoners seeking to make phone calls,” which, Stafford Smith said, “appeared designed to intimidate inmates from communicating with the outside world,” as the Guardian put it. Stafford Smith reported that Shaker Aamer had told him, last Friday, “To describe you the humiliation … they tossed me around like a burger. Flat on my back. They started dressing me with small-size underwear.”

The Guardian also noted that Stafford Smith “reported that of the last six phone calls he had tried to place to clients, four of them had been rejected because detainees had not wanted to go through the process.” Carlos Warner also told the Guardian that “he had had recent difficulty communicating with his clients.”

As part of the “intense body searches,” other prisoners have spoken about their genitals being touched during searches, and some have added that “they have been subject to body cavity searches.” Abu Wa’el Dhiab, a Syrian prisoner represented by lawyers at Reprieve, who is one of the 86 men cleared for release but still held, said, “Our private parts are checked and they know is a sensitive matter for us and our religion.”

Abu Wa’el has now “filed legal papers alleging a deliberate policy of using the searches as a method of intimidation,” as the Guardian described it. He stated, “The primary manner in which this has been done has been by instituting a new search protocol that exploits the prisoners’ well-known phobias when it comes to anything that might be construed as sexual contact.”

The military denied the claims, with spokesman Col. Samuel House stating, “We conduct detention operations in a safe, humane, legal and transparent manner. Any allegations that we are conducting strip searches and cavity searches as a condition of legal phone calls are nonsense,” However, it is hard to square this with what the Guardian accurately described as “harrowing accounts of the reality of the mass force-feeding that is now being carried out on dozens of the protesters by a military medical team rushed to Cuba to deal with the crisis.”

Samir Moqbel, a Yemeni whose case gained prominence when an op-ed he wrote was featured in the New York Times, told his lawyers at Reprieve, “Sometimes the person on hunger strike vomits as a result of this, which is painful. This happened to me several times when the [feeding] tube goes down from the nose to the throat and strikes the tongue.”

Another prisoner who spoke about the pain caused by the hunger strike is Ahmed Ghulam Rabbani, one of two brothers held in “black sites” prior to their arrival at Guantánamo in September 2004, who is also represented by lawyers at Reprieve. He said that he has lost 60lbs since the hunger strike began, and now weighs just 107lbs. “I vomit and cough blood,” he said, adding, “I have often thought of smashing my head against the wall and cracking it because of [severe pain].”

The force-feeding is causing such distress to the prisoners that 13 of wrote an open letter to the authorities on May 30, calling for independent medical professionals be allowed into Guantánamo to treat them.

The full text of the letter is posted below:

From: Detainee(s) on hunger strike in Naval Base, Guantánamo Bay

An open letter to my military doctor: allow independent medical access

Dear Doctor,

I do not wish to die, but I am prepared to run the risk that I may end up doing so, because I am protesting the fact that I have been locked up for more than a decade, without a trial, subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment and denied access to justice. I have no other way to get my message across. You know the authorities have taken everything from me.

For this reason, I am respectfully requesting that independent medical professionals be allowed into Guantánamo to treat me, and that they be given full access to my medical records, in order to determine the best treatment for me.

You claim to be acting according to your duties as a physician to save my life. This is against my expressed wish. As you should know, I am competent to make my own decisions about medical treatment. When I try to refuse the treatments you offer, you force them upon me, sometimes violently. For those reasons, you are in violation of the ethics of your profession, as the American Medical Association and World Medical Association have made clear.

My decision to go on hunger strike and to endure semi-starvation for over 100 days was not entered into lightly. I am doing it because it is literally the only method I have to make the outside world pay attention. Your response to my carefully considered decision cannot logically lead to the conclusion that your only goal is to save my life — your actions over recent months do not support such an inference.

For those of us being force-fed against our will, the process of having a tube repeatedly forced up our noses and down our throats in order to keep us in a state of semi-starvation is extremely painful and the conditions under which it is done are abusive. If you truly had my best medical interests at heart, you could have talked to me like a human being about my choices, instead of treating me in a way that feels like I am being punished for something.

You must know that your professional overreaction to my participation in the hunger strike has been condemned by no lesser an authority than the United Nations; the Special Rapporteur on Health has stated unequivocally that “health care personnel may not apply undue pressure of any sort on individuals who have opted for the extreme recourse of a hunger strike, nor is it acceptable to use threats of forced feeding or other types of physical or psychological coercion against individuals who have voluntarily decided to go on a hunger strike.”

In any regard, I cannot trust your advice, because you are responsible to your superior military officers who require you to treat me by means unacceptable to me, and you put your duty to them above your duty to me as a doctor. Your dual loyalties make trusting you impossible.

For these reasons, our present doctor-patient relationship cannot contribute to resolving the threats to my health that this hunger strike is engendering. You may be able to keep me alive for a long time in a permanently debilitated state. But with so many of us on hunger strike, you are attempting a treatment experiment on an unprecedented scale. And you cannot be certain that human error will not creep in and result in one or more of us dying.

Your superiors, up to and including President Obama, their Commander-in-Chief, recognize that my death or that of another hunger striker here would have serious undesirable consequences. You have been ordered to guarantee — with absolute certainty — my survival, but it is beyond your (or perhaps any doctor’s) ability to do that.

I have some sympathy for your impossible position. Whether you continue in the military or return to civilian practice, you will have to live with what you have done and not done here at Guantánamo for the rest of your life. Going forward, you can make a difference. You can choose to stop actively contributing to the abusive conditions I am currently enduring.

I am asking you only to raise with your superiors my urgent request that I be allowed access to examination by and independent medical advice from a doctor or doctors chosen by my lawyers, in confidence, and that those doctors to be supplied with my full medical notes in advance of their visit.

This is the least you can do to uphold the minimum of your oath to “do no harm.”

Yours sincerely,

The Detainees on Hunger Strike at Guantánamo Bay Naval Base

Those signing it, or having attorneys sign on their behalf, are:

Shaker Aamer (UK, ISN 239), Ahmed Belbacha (Algeria, ISN 290), Younus Chekhouri (Morocco, ISN 197), Abu Wa’el Dhiab (Syria, ISN 722), Mohammed Ghanem (Yemen, ISN 44), Nabil Hadjarab (Algeria, ISN 238), Adel al-Hakeemy (Tunisia, ISN 168), Mohammed Hidar (Yemen, ISN 498), Sanad al-Kazimi (Yemen, ISN 1453), Samir Moqbel (Yemen, ISN 43), Abdullatif Nasser (Morocco, ISN 244), Mohammed Nabi Omari (Afghanistan, ISN 832) and Abdul Haq Wasiq (Afghanistan, ISN 4).

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.

My Exchange with Guantánamo Spokesperson Who Called Me An “Activist” and Not A “Real Journalist”

In the early morning on Saturday June 1, drawing on reports published in in the Arabic- and French-speaking media in Mauritania, I published a story based on those reports, which, in turn, drew on comments made by a human rights representative in Mauritania, who stated that the last two Mauritanian prisoners in Guantánamo had been released, along with a man held in Bagram in Afghanistan.

It turned out that the Mauritanian source was mistaken, and later that day, after Agence France-Presse (AFP) and the Associated Press had also reported the story, the Pentagon stated, “All 166 detainees who have been at the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay remain at the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay. There have been no transfers out of Guantánamo since Omar Khadr was transferred to Canada in October.”

While I was monitoring the various reports and denials relating to the story, I responded, at 7.12 pm GMT yesterday, to a comment from a reader on my website about how the US government and the US military don’t always tell the truth by writing, “It now seems clear that only the prisoner from Bagram was returned to Mauritania, but I have no time for Pentagon spokespeople smugly explaining how there are still 166 men in Guantánamo, and no one has been released since last October. There’s no reason for anyone to be even vaguely proud of that fact.”

My comment led Ron Flanders of Southcom to send me a comment at 1.54 am GMT on June 3, which I’m cross-posting below, along with my reply, as Mr. Flanders singled me out for criticism for not consulting with the authorities prior to publishing my story, and made some allegations about my status as a journalist — and some statements about the truthfulness of Pentagon spokespeople when it comes to Guantánamo that are, I believe, worth publicizing.

Mr. Flanders wrote:

There was nothing smug in the Pentagon spokesperson’s quote about the 166 detainees. He was asked a question by a reporter about the story online about two Mauritanians being released. He answered the question. It’s not his fault someone irresponsibly reported that two detainees had been released from Guantánamo without bothering to call and make a basic fact-check.

I understand there’s a difference between an activist and a real journalist, but it’s not helpful to anyone when errors such as this are made. Please feel free to call us and double-check the next time you hear rumors about a Guantánamo detainee. You will get an honest answer, as Mr. Leopold and Ms. Rosenberg did this time.

Here’s my reply, which I’m publishing here, directly, rather than sending to Mr. Flanders at Southcom, as I think his comments deserve as wide an audience as possible:

No offense, Ron, but the US military at Guantánamo doesn’t have a great reputation for telling the truth over the last eleven years and nearly five months that the prison has been open. Next you’ll be telling me that you run a “humane” and “transparent” facility where the prisoners — sorry, “detainees’ — are so well looked after that it’s inexplicable that they’ve been on a hunger strike for nearly four months. The truth is that Guantánamo is a legal, moral and ethical abomination, and its continued existence corrodes any notion America might have of itself as a beacon of hope, justice or fairness.

As for Pentagon spokespeople telling the truth, I was lied to when I called, many years ago, and asked why there were missing ISN numbers on the prisoner lists released in 2006. I was told that those numbers hadn’t been used. It wasn’t until WikiLeaks released the Guantánamo files in 2011 that I was able to establish that I had been lied to. ISN 212, for example, one of the missing numbers, was repeatedly referred to and named — he was Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who died in Libya in 2009 after being returned there following years in “black sites” run by the CIA or by proxy torturers, and who may have been held at Guantánamo at some point in the secret facility that the CIA had between September 2003 and March 2004, code-named “Strawberry Fields.”

Another area in which Pentagon spokespeople do not have a great reputation for truth-telling is in the comments made about prisoners who have died at Guantánamo, who were never given Article 5 Geneva Convention hearings or trials to establish whether the supposed evidence against them was at all reliable. Nine prisoners, you may recall, have died at the facility — seven of whom allegedly committed suicide — and yet, on several occasions, statements have been made, following prisoners’ deaths, describing them as threats to the US with connections to al-Qaeda and/or the Taliban. These are statements not based on objectively tested evidence, and, moreover, they reek of cowardice and cruelty, aimed at those who can no longer answer back because they have died in Guantánamo waiting, in vain, for justice.

I thought the response was smug, because my definition of smugness, from a spokesperson from Guantánamo, is saying how many people are held, and when the last time was that anyone was released, without adding that it is disgraceful to have to report this, considering that 56 of the 166 men still held — the majority of whom are on a hunger strike to protest about their indefinite detention — were told over three years ago that an inter-agency task force, established by the President, had found that there was no reason for them to be tried or indefinitely detained, and that they would not be spending the rest of their lives in Guantánamo.

I understand that you are feeling smug about snidely referring to me as an “activist” rather than a “real journalist,” and I’m sure that people worldwide will be glad to know that others who are not “real journalists,” and who “irresponsibly reported” the story are Agence France-Presse (AFP), who also published a story based on the statement from Mauritania from the human rights representative, which, it turned out, was mistaken, the Associated Press, who did the same, and the numerous other news outlets who ran the stories by AFP and the AP.

We made a mistake. Don’t target me for it without also acknowledging that the entire history of the Guantánamo prison’s PR machine has been devoted to telling the world lies about the prison, and the men held there, for eleven years.

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

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

Pentagon Denies Reports That Two Guantánamo Prisoners Were Released to Mauritania

I’m sorry to report that claims that two prisoners were released from Guantánamo to Mauritania on Friday have apparently proved to be false. I was alerted to the story by a Mauritanian friend on Facebook on Friday night, and checked out two Arabic news sources that were cited — here and here. These seemed plausible, and so I wrote the first English language report and published it at 4am GMT.

I then found out that the purported release of the men had been announced in a French language news report at 1.11am GMT, and had also been discussed, at 9.33 am, by AFP. The Associated Press ran with the story at around 4pm, under the heading, “Mauritania receives 2 prisoners from Guantánamo, according to support group,” and stated that Hamoud Ould Nabagha, chairman of the Support Committee for Guantánamo prisoners said that Mohamedou Ould Slahi and Ahmed Ould Abdel Aziz, both held at Guantánamo, had been returned, along with El Haj Ould Cheikh El Houssein Youness, who had been held at Bagram in Afghanistan.

Within an hour of that report being published, a revised version appeared, quoting Army Lt. Col. Joseph Todd Breasseale, a US Defense Department spokesman, stating that, as the AP put it, “No detainees have been transferred from Guantánamo since October last year.”

I am extremely saddened to hear that the news has turned out to be untrue, as we need to hear about President Obama fulfilling the promises he made last week to resume the release of prisoners from Guantánamo. The reported release of Mohamedou Ould Slahi was surprising news, as he was not included in the 86 prisoners cleared for release by President Obama’s inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force in 2009, and some Republicans believe him to be significant terror suspect, even though that theory ought to have been laid to rest when Slahi had his habeas corpus petition granted by a US judge in 2010. Slahi’s successful habeas petition was later vacated on appeal by judges in the court of appeals in Washington D.C., but they had their own agenda designed not to deliver justice but to prevent prisoners from ever having their habeas corpus petitions granted.

However, if Slahi’s release was politically unlikely, the release of Ahmed Ould Abdel Aziz was not — and it remains the case today, despite the Pentagon’s smug assertions that its population of 166 prisoners remains intact, and that no one has been released since October, when Omar Khadr was flown back to Canada.

No prisoner has been released as a result of the task force’s deliberations since August 2010, when two men were given new homes in Germany. That is a shameful statistic for President Obama to have to contemplate, and it should be a grim reminder to Pentagon officials too, and to those working at Guantánamo, because, as I noted above, 86 of the 166 men being held were told, over three years ago, that US had no desire to carry on holding them forever, or putting them on trial.

The stories of the majority of these men are, sadly, not well known to the general public, despite my best efforts at making them available over the last seven years. I plan to focus on the stories of some of the cleared men in the months to follow, but for now I’d like to leave you with a few details about Ahmed Ould Abdel Aziz. One of the 86, he should have been released, and his story deserves to be more widely known.

Born in 1970, and seized in June 2002 in a house raid in Pakistan, Ahmed Ould Abdel Aziz is a cultured, educated and witty man, who has now lost a quarter of his life in Guantánamo. He speaks fluent English, as well as French and Arabic, and was cleared for release over three years ago by the inter-agency task force that President Obama established when he took office in 2009. Like many of the prisoners, he has a child, born after his capture, he has never seen.

In October 2008, Reprieve, the legal action charity whose lawyers represent — and have represented — dozens of prisoners at Guantánamo over the years, noted that, at that point, after “over six years’ imprisonment without charge or trial,” he “despair[ed] of ever being released — or of receiving a fair trial.” During a visit, he told Reprieve’s director, Clive Stafford Smith, that he feared for his sanity. He explained what happened to him in the brief time he was allowed out of his cell. “When I am outside”, he said, “I am nonplussed. I begin to forget the nature of my former life.”

As Clive Stafford Smith also noted:

Ahmed is held in the prison’s notorious Camp 6, which is a copy of a maximum-security prison block on the US mainland. The difference, of course, is that the facility on the US mainland contains prisoners who have been tried and convicted of crimes. “This place is a sarcophagus”, Ahmed explained, “designed for preserving mummies or keeping innocent prisoners in total isolation for centuries.”

In parting, then, my reporting of the release of these two prisoners was an honest mistake. What excuse, however, does the Obama administration and the Pentagon have for not releasing Ahmed Ould Abdel Aziz and the 85 other prisoners cleared for release?

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.