Andy Worthington's Blog, page 140

Solitary Confinement is Torture and is Official US Policy: Supermax Film Premieres in London, April 16

No one who has spent any time studying and writing about Guantánamo, as I have, could fail to realize that, although the terrible innovation of Guantánamo is indefinite detention without charge or trial, its orange jumpsuits, and the perceived normality of solitary confinement as standard operating procedure, arrived at the prison directly from America’s domestic prison system — where there are 2.2 million prisoners (and almost 7 million people under correctional supervision (including probation and parole), and up to 100,000 prisoners are subjected to solitary confinement at any one time. Most harrowingly, many thousands of these prisoners are subjected to solitary confinement not as occasional punishment, but as a policy, and have spent years, or even decades without any human contact.

As Kevin Gosztola explained in July 2011, in an article for FireDogLake, “40 states and the federal government have supermax prisons holding upwards of 25,000 inmates. Tens of thousands more are held in solitary confinement in lockdown units within other prisons and jails. There’s no up-to-date nationwide count, but according to best estimates, there are at least 75,000 and perhaps more than 100,000 prisoners in solitary confinement on any given day in America.”

Over the years, I have endeavored to cover the horrors of solitary confinement in America’s prisons. In December 2010, I joined a call for a worldwide ban on the use of solitary confinement, and in 2011 I covered the hunger strikes that began in California’s notorious Pelican Bay facility — see here, here, here and here. I also cross-posted a hugely important article about long-term solitary confinement, “Hellhole,” written by Atul Gawande for the New Yorker in 2009, and in 2012 reported on calls by Professor Juan Méndez, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, for an end to the use of solitary confinement, and an appeal to the UN by Pelican Bay prisoners.

Most recently, solitary confinement and conditions in America’s Supermax prisons have been raised as topics of concern by the families of British citizens facing extradition to the US. While some of these men — both Caucasian — had their extraditions blocked by the racist home secretary Theresa May, two British citizens who did not are Babar Ahmad and Talha Ahsan, extradited last October along with three other men to face extensive pre-trial detention in solitary confinement in Supermax prisons.

The case of Talha Ahsan, a witty and clever poet with Asberger’s Syndrome, has been promoted in a tireless manner by his brother Hamja, who can be seen here in the film “Extradition,” about the cases of Talha and Babar.

This Thursday, April 16, Hamja has organized an event about solitary confinement, entitled, “Extradited to a Future of Torture: The Reality of Solitary Confinement in America,” which is taking place in Room S-2.08, in the King’s Building at King’s College London on the Strand, London WC2R 2LS.

The event begins at  6pm, and entry is free, although those attending need to book here via Eventbrite. The Facebook page for the event is here.

This event is hosted by International State Crimes Initiative (ISCI) and Dickson Poon School of Law, and features the UK premiere of “The Worst of the Worst,” a new documentary film by Valerie Kaur of Yale Visual Law. The film focuses on Northern Correctional Institution, the Supermax prison in Connecticut where Babar Ahmed and Talha Ahsan were extradited in 2012. A trailer is here.

Before the screening, Tessa Murphy of Amnesty International, the lead author of “The Edge of Endurance,” Amnesty’s special report on isolation in US Supermax prisons in California — in Secure Housing Units (SHUs) — will introduce the issue of solitary confinement as a human rights concern.

Also speaking are special guests from America, James Ridgeway and Jean Casella, whose website Solitary Watch is required reading for anyone concerned about solitary confinement. They will give a presentation about Supermax prisons and solitary confinement in America.

After the screening, Hamja Ahsan will read from Talha’s new Supermax prison writings and answer questions about his brother’s conditions of confinement. See the Free Talha website for further information.

I will be attending the event, and I’m very much looking forward to meeting James and Jean, whose article announcing their UK visit is here. I hope also to see some of you there if you can make it.

Below, for further information about Talha’s case, is a recent BBC Asian Network interview, and also please read this comprehensive article in the New Statesman about Talha’s case by Ian Patel of the International State Crimes Initiative at King’s College London.

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.

Photos: A Year of Protest – The NHS, Disabled Rights, Guantánamo, Bradley Manning and the Occupy Movement

A Year of Protest – The NHS, Disabled Rights, Guantánamo, Bradley Manning and the Occupy Movement, a set on Flickr.

A year ago yesterday, I embarked on a huge and ongoing project — to photograph the whole of London by bike. A year and a day later, I have taken around 13,000 photos, and have published nearly 1,700 on Flickr. As it happens, my time has been so consumed of late with my ongoing campaign to close Guantánamo — where the prison-wide hunger strike, now in its fourth month, has finally awoken the world to the ongoing horrors of the prison — that I have not had time recently to publish photos from this project, although I have continued to take photos on an almost daily basis. I am currently organising the photos by area — largely, in fact, by postcode — as I work out how best to show them and to market them, but to mark the anniversary I will soon be posting a selection of photos from the first year of the project – and if anyone has any good ideas abut how to take tis project forward, then please don’t hesitate to get in touch with me.

In the meantime, I realised that today — May 12 — is the first anniversary of an event organised by the worldwide Occupy movement (inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York), and that I had photographed the event that took place in London, and so, to coincide with that anniversary, I’ve put together a selection off photos from the various political campaigns and protests I’ve been involved in over the last year.

I include two photos from the Occupy protest on May 12 last year (previously only published on my website, here and here), which involved a gathering at St. Paul’s Cathedral, where the main Occupy London camp had been located from October 2011 until its eviction on February 28, 2012, followed by a march through the City to the Bank of England.

Also included is a photo from a set in August, taken at a protest in London against Atos Healthcare, the multinational corporation responsible for conducting disability reviews for the government, which are demonstrably intended to find disabled people fit for work, when they are not.

From October, there’s a photo from the TUC-backed protest, “A Future That Works” — a great gathering of a wide array of people opposed to the Tories’ malevolent and ideologically motivated “age of austerity,” which I recorded in two photo sets (see here and here), and also reported on here and here.

There are also photos from a number of protests against the plans to severely downgrade Lewisham Hospital, which were announced at the end of October and approved by health secretary Jeremy Hunt at the end of January. See the sets here, here, here, here, here, here and here), and see here for my archive of articles.

Involving a betrayal of the NHS by its own senior management, the plans led to the creation of a phenomenal protest movement in the London Borough of Lewisham, where, in January, 25,000 people attended a march and rally opposed to the plans. If they go ahead, 9 out of 10 mothers in the borough of 270,000 people will be unable to give birth in their home borough, and the three-quarters of a million residents of three boroughs — Lewisham, Greenwich and Bexley — will be obliged to share one A&E Department, in Woolwich.

I’m glad to report that the movement to resist the plans for Lewisham continues, with two judicial reviews underway (also see here), but serious threats to the NHS also exist in the rest of London, and nationally.

Photos from the wider campaign to save the NHS are also included in this retrospective — in February, a protest in Hammersmith, and a House of Commons meeting to launch the “Defend London’s NHS” campaign, which is holding a major protest in London on May 18, and protests outside Parliament in March and April (see here, here and here). Also see my articles, “Defend London’s NHS: MPs, Doctors and Activists Describe An Unprecedented Threat to the NHS,” “The Destruction of the NHS in North West London,” “Save the NHS: Photos and Report from the Lobby of Parliament on March 26 to Scrap the New Regulations Enforcing NHS Privatisation” and “This was the Week the NHS Died, and No One Cares.”

Also featured in this retrospective set, of course, are photos from my ongoing campaign to secure the closure of the repulsive “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, which has been the main focus of my work for the last seven years. Included are photos from my US visit in January, to mark the 11th anniversary of the prison’s opening (see the sets here, here and here, and my archive of articles and media here), and photos from protests in London for Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (see the sets here, here and here, and my archive of articles here). Please note that there will be events worldwide in support of the hunger strikers next Saturday, May 18, to mark the 100th day of the hunger strike. See the website of the London Guantánamo Campaign for more information. The London protest will be taking place outside the US Embassy from 2-4 pm.

And finally, the last two photos in the set (of Vivienne Westwood and Julian Assange) come from an event I took part in last Wednesday, May 8, in central London. This was a panel discussion in the Century Club, on Shaftesbury Avenue in London’s West End, entitled, “WikiLeaks: The Bradley Manning Story,” and it was taking place because the trial by court-martial of Pfc. Manning, who allegedly leaked hundreds of thousands of pages of classified US documents to WikiLeaks, while serving as an intelligence analyst in Iraq, begins on June 3, 2013, almost three years after he was first arrested. See my archive of articles here, and the Bradley Manning Support Network, which is holding an international day of action on June 1.

I was part of the panel discussion, along with Chase Madar, a US attorney and the author of “The Passion of Bradley Manning,” and Ben Griffin, a former SAS soldier and conscientious objector, who is now a spokesperson for Veterans for Peace UK. I was invited to take part because, in April 2011, I was a media partner for WikiLeaks’ release of classified military files relating to the Guantánamo prisoners. The packed-out event also featured Julian Assange speaking by video link from the Ecuadorian Embassy, and two guest speakers — Peter Tatchell as well as Vivienne Westwood.

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.

Close Guantánamo: President Obama, Drop Your Ban on Releasing Yemenis

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.

Also please sign and share the petition on Change.org urging renewed action from President Obama to close Guantánamo, which now has nearly 200,000 signatures!

As the prison-wide hunger strike at Guantánamo begins its fourth month, we at “Close Guantánamo” are concerned that men will die unless President Obama follows up on his fine words last week with actions to match his understanding of why the prison’s continued existence is so wrong. As he said, it is “critical for us to understand that Guantánamo is not necessary to keep America safe. It is expensive. It is inefficient. It hurts us in terms of our international standing. It lessens cooperation with our allies on counter-terrorism efforts. It is a recruitment tool for extremists. It needs to be closed.”

To close Guantánamo, as we have been urging, the President needs to do three particular things:

To appoint a high-level official to deal specifically with the prison’s closure;
To drop his ban on releasing the Yemenis who make up two-thirds of the 86 prisoners cleared for release by the President ‘s own inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force, which he imposed in January 2010 after the arrest of the Yemen-trained would-be plane bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab;
Either to tackle Congress regarding the imposition of obstacles preventing the release of prisoners, or to use the waiver in the legislation (the National Defense Authorization Act) that allows him to bypass Congress if he regards it as being in America’s best interests.

Bringing the appalling injustice of Guantánamo to an end is, we believe, very much in America’s best interests.

In reviewing the current situation, we are encouraged that the petition to President Obama, calling for the closure of Guantánamo, which was launched just last week by our colleague Col. Morris Davis, has already secured over 180,000 signatures. That petition specifically asks the President to address the pressing issues we have also identified, namely:

Direct Secretary of Defense Charles Hagel to use his authority to issue the certifications or national security waivers required by the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA 2013) to effect transfers from Guantánamo.
Appoint an individual within your Administration to lead the effort to close Guantánamo.
Announce a concrete and specific plan to close the facility. As a first step and a clear signal that this is the beginning of a new chapter in Guantánamo’s legacy, you should immediately release Shaker Aamer and Djamel Ameziane.

With regard to the waivers, we believe that what is also required is for President Obama to specifically drop the ban he imposed in January 2010 on releasing the cleared Yemenis prisoners, who, as a result, are indefinitely detained on the basis of their nationality alone, a sorry excuse for justice if ever there was one.

Sen. Feinstein calls for the release of the cleared prisoners, including the Yemenis

We are greatly encouraged that, two weeks ago, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who also chairs of the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote a letter to President Obama’s national security adviser, Tom Donilon, in which she specifically called for renewed action to secure the release of the 86 cleared prisoners, and specifically referred to the need to remove the obstacle preventing the release of the 56 cleared Yemenis — the President’s own ban.

In her letter, Sen, Feinstein wrote:

I write to ask that the Administration renew its efforts to transfer out the 86 detainees at Guantánamo Bay who were cleared for transfer by the Executive Branch’s interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force over three years ago.

As you know, despite commendable efforts across the Executive Branch over the past four years to transfer or prosecute most of the remaining 166 detainees, progress has largely stalled on closing the Guantánamo facility. The fact that so many detainees have now been held at Guantánamo for over a decade and their belief that there is still no end in sight for them is a reason there is a growing problem of more and more detainees on a hunger strike. This week, monitors from the International Committee of the Red Cross who travelled to Guantánamo recently told my staff that the level of desperation among the detainees is “unprecedented” in their view.

I would like to ask that the Administration review the status of the 86 detainees who were cleared for transfer in the past and let me know if there are suitable places to continue to hold or resettle these detainees either in their home countries or third countries.

Part of this review will require reassessing the security situation on the ground in Yemen because is my understanding that 56 of the 86 detainees cleared for transfer are Yemeni. After the attempted bombing of Northwest Flight 253 on Christmas Day 2009, then Vice Chairman “Kit” Bond and I wrote to the President asking him to halt transfers of Yemeni detainees at Guantánamo “until the situation in Yemen is stabilized.” Although AQAP [Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula] still has a strong presence in Yemen, I believe it would be prudent to re-visit the decision to halt transfers to Yemen and assess whether President Hadi’s government, with appropriate assistance, would be able to securely hold detainees in Sana’a. Do you believe that we can work with Yemen develop an appropriate framework for the return of all 56 Yemenis previously recommended for transfer?

If so, I would like to offer my assistance to help the Administration transition each of the 86 “cleared” detainees.

Sen. Feinstein also noted that “efforts to transfer these 86 detainees can only be successful if the Administration has someone in charge of resettlement of detainees,” and urged the Administration to appoint a senior official “with the specific responsibility to achieve the conditions necessary to close Guantánamo,” but it is her proposal regarding the cleared prisoners — and specifically the Yemenis — that has a particular resonance, as it has been almost a taboo subject since the ban was first imposed in January 2010.

As the New York Times noted in its report on Sen. Feinstein’s letter, Yemen’s president, Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, “has been a strong foe of Al-Qaeda since taking office in 2012,” and Feinstein’s stance was also praised by NGOs including Human Rights First.

Reports from Yemen

Several media outlets followed up on Sen. Feinstein’s letter with useful reports from Yemen. Reuters, for example, focused on the story of Abdulrahman al-Shabati (identified in Guantánamo as Abdul Rahman Muhammad, ISN 224), who was cleared for release under President Bush in January 2007, and again under President Obama in 2009. He was just 18 years old when he was seized in Pakistan in December 201, where, he said, he had traveled to study.

Reuters reported that his daughter Awdah “has never seen her father” except “via video link.” She was born after he was seized  and sent to Guantánamo. He is now one of the 100 to 130 prisoners involved in the hunger strike. His brother Mohammed, a Yemeni Defense Ministry employee, said, “The last time we spoke to him was eight days ago. He looked thinner, his health seems to have deteriorated since we last saw him.” He added that Awdah, “speaking to her father from a Red Cross office in the capital Sanaa, asked him about his health then burst into tears.”

His brother added that it was impossible for the family to get a straight story about him. “The Yemeni government says the U.S. government does not want to hand them over and the Americans say Yemen does not want to take them,” he said, adding, “We no longer believe anyone.”

Reuters’ reporter also spoke to Bandar al-Qatta’a about his brother Mansour (ISN 566, also cleared for release). He said that his brother “had joined the hunger strike because he lost hope of being freed after a decade in jail without trial,” as Reuters put it. In his own words, Bandar, “a Saudi-born Yemeni who campaigns for the inmates,” said, “We hope human conscience will move to help us secure their release. Those people have never been convicted of any crime.”

Yemeni government officials told Reuters that “talks with the US government over the fate of the prisoners are making progress.” Rajeh Badi, an aide to Yemeni Prime Minister Mohammed Basindwa, said that “work was underway on an $11 million centre to hold the prisoners while they undergo a rehabilitation program,” as Reuters put it. Following up on reports that the US had wanted Yemenis to be sent to Qatar or Saudi Arabia, he said, “We object to sending Yemeni prisoners anywhere but to their home country. The government will be responsible for caring for them and rehabilitating them.”

Following Reuters’ report, McClatchy also spoke to Abdulrahman al-Shabati’s family, noting that his parents had recently “traveled from their home 60 miles outside Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, to protest outside the US Embassy.”

McClatchy also interviewed Hooria Mashhour, Yemen’s minister of human rights, who “cast the ongoing hunger strike as the catalyst for seeking to visit Guantánamo,” but also spoke of the necessity for the prison to be closed, and for President Obama to “either send the detainees home or have them face criminal charges,” as McClatchy put it. As she said, “For them to spend such a long time without trial is simply lawless.” She added, “At the very least, we want the release of the detainees who have been cleared — those who have already been determined to present no threat to the US.”

Mashhour also said that her government was “aware that the repatriation of detainees would ultimately prove a massive undertaking, requiring a large-scale rehabilitation program, aimed at reintegrating the returnees into Yemeni society,” adding that “such a program also would have to reckon with any psychological effects of a decade-long imprisonment,” as Reuters described it. As Mashhour herself described it, “Of course we will need money, we will need logistical support; of course we are committed to doing what’s necessary. But also, the American government has a duty to support us.”

McClatchy also noted that Yemen’s president, Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, “who generally enjoys close relations with the United States,” had “directed rare criticism at the Obama administration.”

The President ‘s words were powerful. In a TV interview, he said, “We believe that keeping someone in prison for over 10 years without due process is clear-cut tyranny. The United States is fond of talking democracy and human rights. But when we were discussing the prisoner issue with the American attorney general, he had nothing to say.”

For their part, Shabati’s family said that “they just want to see him back in Yemen.” His mother said, “No one can understand the suffering we’ve felt. We know we’ll be pained by the wounds from this injustice for the rest of our lives.”

The Obama administration’s continuing and unacceptable inertia

In the latest news, the Miami Herald reported that, despite President Obama’s speech last week, officials made it clear that his January 2010 moratorium on releasing Yemenis was still in place. The State Department acknowledged that 26 of the Yemenis still at Guantánamo had been cleared for release, and that 30 others could be released if the government could take “appropriate measures to reduce the risks associated with their return.”

In another report, the Miami Herald explained that, last Wednesday, White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters, “The moratorium remains in place.”

A State Department official, speaking anonymously, expanded on Carney’s words,  explaining that “work on resettling Guantánamo detainees continued even after the department reassigned [Daniel] Fried,” President Obama’s former envoy on Guantánamo, whose office was closed at the start of the year. The official said that “a small number of staff members still work solely on Guantánamo issues, pulling experts as needed from other departments for ‘a broader enterprise.’” He added that President Obama’s “renewed focus” on the prison “could lead to a more robust operation — and soon,” as the Miami Herald described it.

“There is high-level attention to this issue and, given that focus, it would be reasonable to assume someone would be put in the position in the very near future,” the official said, noting that, under Fried, 71 prisoners were freed in 28 different countries, including 42 who were rehoused in third countries, because it was unsafe for them to return home. The official conceded that “repatriation to Yemen remains difficult because of the country’s unstable security environment,” although he added that the government does “recognize and is encouraged by the progress that’s been made by Yemen to address its security situation.” Speaking of the moratorium, he said, “We’re continually reviewing it.”

That is not enough, of course, as the release of the cleared Yemenis is essential if there is to be any meaningful movement towards closing Guantánamo. Last Wednesday, Jay Carney told reporters, “We have to work with Congress and try to convince members of Congress that the overriding interest here, in terms of our national security, as well as our budget, is to close Guantánamo Bay.”

This may be the case, but if Congress is unwilling to assist the President, he must not be afraid to use his waiver — and he must not be afraid to release the Yemenis that his own task force recommended for release back in 2009. The time for inertia is over.

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, Younus Chekhouri Speaks About the Prison Clampdown: “Everyone is Traumatized by What Happened”

Three weeks ago, as part of my ongoing coverage of the prison-wide hunger strike at Guantánamo, which is now in its fourth month, I published an account by Clive Stafford Smith, the director of the London-based legal action charity Reprieve, with one of the men that Reprieve’s lawyers represent in Guantánamo — Younus Chekhouri (also identified as Younous Chekkouri), a Moroccan, a Sufi Muslim, and one of the 86 prisoners cleared for release from Guantánamo as a result of the deliberations of a task force appointed by President Obama in 2009.

As I explained at the time, Younus’s story “has long fascinated me, as he has always been one of the most peaceful prisoners in Guantánamo, and has always categorically refuted all the allegations against him that relate to terrorism and military activity.” I also explained how “I found his testimony from Guantánamo, in the tribunals and review boards that took place under President Bush, to be both compelling and credible.”

Below is the description of him that I included in a series of articles about the remaining prisoners in Guantánamo back in 2010, which I posted previously but am posting again because it explains who he is, rather than who the US authorities thought he was:

Chekhouri is accused of being a founder member of the Moroccan Islamic Fighting Group (or GICM, the Groupe Islamique Combattant Marocain), who had a training camp near Kabul, but he has always maintained that he traveled to Afghanistan in 2001, with his Algerian wife, after six years in Pakistan, where he had first traveled in search of work and education, and has stated that they lived on the outskirts of Kabul, working for a charity that ran a guest house and helped young Moroccan immigrants, and had no involvement whatsoever in the country’s conflicts. He has also repeatedly explained that he was profoundly disillusioned by the fighting amongst Muslims that has plagued Afghanistan’s recent history, and he has also expressed his implacable opposition to the havoc wreaked on the country by Osama bin Laden, describing him as “a crazy person,” and adding that “what he does is bad for Islam.”

Below I’m publishing an account by one of Reprieve’s lawyers of a phone call with Younus that took place on April 18, shortly after a violent early morning raid on April 13 that was initiated by the authorities — ostensibly to break the hunger strike, but in fact to restore order in the prison with no regard for why the prisoners are on a hunger strike: not to cause trouble for its own sake, but because all of them, even the men cleared for release, despair of ever being released, having been abandoned by all three branches of the US government.

The raid took place in Camp 6, where the majority of the prisoners are held, and where they had been able to spend much of their time living communally until the raid, when they were locked up in solitary confinement — an act of enormous cruelty  given the men’s desperation.

Younus’s words shed new light on the raid, which I previously reported here, and, as Clive Stafford Smith stated when a short version of Younus’s account was made available last week, “We all should have learned the danger of a secret prison from the Soviets. Unfortunately the US military has been dissembling again. The prisoners did not start this. The US military went in there with guns literally blazing at 5.10am in the morning, as detainees prepared for morning prayer, immediately after the Red Cross left the base, so there would be no independent observers. Sad to say, torture and abuse continue in Guantánamo Bay and the US is throwing away yet more of its dwindling moral authority.”

As ever, if you appreciate Younus’s story, please publicize it as widely as possible. Despite President Obama’s fine words about the horrors of Guantánamo last week, he made no promises about what he would do to free cleared prisoners and initiate reviews for the other 80 men, or what he would do to revisit his promise to close the prison, beyond vague promises to call on Congress to work with him.

We need to keep Guantánamo in the public eye, and to remind people that the men held are human beings and not mere statistics, or “the worst of the worst” as the Bush administration called them when the prison opened.

If you have not done so, please also sign and share the petition to President Obama on Change.org, launched by Col. Morris Davis, which has secured over 185,000 signatures in just over a week!

Notes from a phone call with Younus Chekhouri, April 18, 2013

“What has happened here now is real nightmare. Nobody dreamed that what has happened would happen. After our peaceful demonstration, on Sunday morning the guards came in with guns. They used shotguns and three people were injured. Used gun with small bullets.”

“The guards came in, closed all of our cells, [removed us from our cells and] told us to get on the ground. We lay there on our belly for three hours or more. They took everything. Cells empty, nothing left. They moved us into another empty block and after a while they gave us blanket and that is all. They said it’s punishment.”

“History repeats itself, like it was seven years ago. [All we can have now are] blankets and clothes [on our backs]. [The cell I am in now] is really cold.”

Younus said he is now in pain as a result of having to sleep on the concrete floor: “Pain starts immediately when I’m on the floor. Pain in my neck, pain in my chest. No pillow. Punishment for everybody. Punishment because we hide cameras in cell and so this is what happened. They took everything, left cell empty.”

Younus is still not eating. He has Ensure and Metamucil but that is it. He said others who are worse off than him are getting nothing at all.

When asked to give a chronology of how things happened on Sunday, Younus said: “I was sleeping on Sunday. At almost 5am guards came in with shotguns. There was no confrontation that prompted it. When I woke up I heard them using guns on the detainees in the block next door. The detainees didn’t have anything. The guards used force to control some of the detainees, to force them out of the cells. Used tear gas [as well]. 5-6 ERF team would come in and throw detainees to the floor.” [Note: ERF is a reference to the Extreme Reaction Force, an armoured five-man team responsible for punishing infringements of the rules -- or perceived infringements of the rules].

“[For hours on Sunday morning the detainees were forced to lay on their stomachs]. We had no right to move, no right to go to the bathroom.”

They shackled detainees’ hands and feet and moved them into individual isolation cells. “Finally at night they gave blankets. It was very cold in the empty cells.”

In terms of the number of guards that “invaded” the block: “More than 50 came in on my block and there were only 13 detainees on my block. Nobody [no detainees] thought to fight. What do we have to fight with? [Plus] we were outnumbered. Guards were scary, they were ready to use guns, use force. It was very scary.”

More about how Younus was awoken on Sunday: “Sunday I was sleeping. I heard people yelling outside, so I came outside of cell. Then I saw guards closing outside doors and the guards with guns. They used tear gas to keep detainees away. Heard sound of gun next door. Said three were injured: one on belly, one on hand, one on body. They were taken to hospital. Not sure how they are doing. Everyone is traumatized by what happened.”

“To be treated this way after 11 years is not right. They are using the same rules as first day of opening Gitmo.”

“Water now is privilege. There is no right to have water and they tell you that they can cut it at any time. I suffer all day. We don’t know when this will end. They said this is just the beginning. We were calling for things to get better, but things are worse.”

Younus is still in Camp 6, but in isolation.

“Nightmare has started again. I feel distress, anxiety, disease, anger. In the future no one knows what could happen, what to expect now that this has happened. Camp 6 now isolation. Everyone in his cell. Only 2 detainees can have rec at a time. Same rules as when Camp 6 was opened for first time in 2007. It’s like we are starting again from the beginning, like a game.”

Younus would like to “thank everyone who can save me from this hell. I have German connection. I would be grateful for them to help me be free. I am in a helpless place, I have lost hope in the democracy of the United States. I thought my torture had ended, but what is happening now is horrible. I feel like a slave in Gitmo. Thank anyone who can do anything to help people in Gitmo. I really need your help. My wish is that nice people around the world can help.”

On conditions now in camp 6: Younus is sleeping on “concrete, hard floor, very cold. Knees, head, body hurts. No pillows, hard to sleep. My shoes are my pillows. Pains in back. Cannot move, cannot pray, cannot get to toilet because I am in pain.”

“My dream is one day I will leave this place.” Younus seemed very anxious because of what happened Sunday and said that he’s “afraid that I will be punished and they will take everything I have now.” A blanket is all he has.

They have gone “back to 2002-2003.” Younus believes they did this so that detainees would “stop complaining or requesting things to be better.” He said they said: “You have no right to ask for your release and better treatment.”

Younus knew they were using the detainees blocking the cameras as a so-called justification for the raid because “when they invaded the block, they told us get on floor, lay on belly, don’t cover camera. Now using old rules, start practicing old rules. When you ask why, they say it’s because people were hiding cameras. They say they don’t know when things will get better.”

“No one [guards] will give answers why this [Sunday’s raid and loss of everything] has happened. Will it stay forever, or short time? No one says anything, just that this is punishment for hiding cameras. No way to negotiate now, we just have to obey.”

“People are old, sick and they cannot deal with this.” He said in many ways it’s worse now than when these same tactics were used 11 years ago because the men have aged and have been through hell in Gitmo all these years. “Unfair that they are back to treating us like animals.”

Younus has “now lost 35 lbs. Going down. Taking Ensure but weight is still going down.” He will continue to take Ensure himself because he “doesn’t want tubes in nose.”

Again, before the call ended, Younus wanted to “please say thank you to everyone out there.”

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.

25 Former Prisoners Urge President Obama to Close Guantánamo

As the prison-wide hunger strike continues at Guantánamo, the danger — following President Obama’s news conference last week, when he finally deigned to talk about Guantánamo — is that the mainstream media will think, as they did in 2009, that merely talking about the prison in a critical manner is equivalent to closing it.

The truth, four years on, is that the situation at Guantánamo is so horrendous that no prisoners are being released, even though 86 of the remaining 166 men were cleared for release by an inter-agency task force, appointed by President Obama, which issued its final report over three years ago.

56 of those prisoners — who include 26 Yemenis — are identified here. 30 others, whose names are not included, are also Yemenis, whose release was made contingent on a perceived improvement in the security situation in Yemen. The task force gave no indication of how this decision would be made, and who would take it, but in the event all the Yemenis had their release blocked by President Obama, following a failed bomb attempt by a Nigerian man recruited in Yemen, on Christmas Day 2009.

That ban, officials said last week, remains in place, prompting David Cole, in the New York Review of Books, to write on May 2:

The administration … says that it is concerned about the Yemeni government’s ability to prevent individuals from joining militant groups that may want to attack the United States. But if these men have been cleared for release, then the military has determined that their detention is no longer warranted by security concerns. Is it moral or legal to hold these men simply because their home country is unstable? Shouldn’t the onus be on us to uphold their right to freedom, and then provide whatever assistance we deem necessary to reduce any risk to an acceptable level?

The answer to that question is a resounding yes, but President Obama must also take immediate action to free the other 30 men cleared for release — either in the US, if they cannot be safely returned home, and no third countries are prepared to take them, or by returning them home as swiftly as possible, as in the cases of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident, whose family awaits his return in London, and the last five Tunisians.

To do so, President Obama needs to overcome Congressional opposition, in the form of onerous restrictions on the release of prisoners in the National Defense Authorization Act, but if lawmakers fail to cooperate, he can — and must — use a waiver in that legislation, allowing him to bypass Congress and free prisoners if he regards it as being “in the national security interests of the United States.”

In the hope of contributing to the necessity for keeping the injustice of Guantánamo in the public eye, and keeping the pressure on President Obama to do what needs to be done, rather than what is politically comfortable (doing nothing), I’m posting below an open letter to President Obama written by 25 former prisoners and published on Sunday in the Observer.

I also urge readers, if they have not already done so, to sign and circulate the petition to President Obama on Change.org, urging the President to renew his efforts to free prisoners and close the prison, which was launched last week by Col. Morris Davis, and which currently has over 180,000 signatures.

Open letter from former Guantánamo prisoners

The Observer, May 5, 2013

Former inmates of the notorious prison say Barack Obama must made good on his claim to want it closed

The hunger strike by our former fellow prisoners at the Guantánamo prison camp should have already been the spur for President Obama to end this shameful saga, which has so lowered US prestige in the world.

It is now in its third month and around two-thirds of the 166 prisoners there are taking part. They are sick and weakened by 11 years of inhumane treatment and have chosen this painful way to gain the world’s attention. Eighty-six of these men have been cleared for release by this administration’s senior task force. Who can justify their continuing imprisonment? This must be ended by President Obama.

Since the opening of the prison camp, numerous prisoners held at Guantánamo have sporadically taken part in hunger strikes to protest their arbitrary imprisonment, treatment and conditions. This, however, is the first time the overwhelming majority of the prisoners are taking part — and for such an extended period.

It will, in a few months, be 12 years since the first prisoners were sent to Guantánamo by the Bush administration to avoid fair treatment and fair trials. At first the world was shocked by the images of shackled kneeling men in orange jumpsuits wearing face masks, blacked out eye-goggles and industrial ear muffs — in order to prevent them from seeing, hearing and speaking. Then they were mostly forgotten.

However, over time their voices did get heard as recurrent and corroborative stories of torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment came out when some of the men who endured it were released. Of the 779 prisoners once held at Guantánamo, 612 have been released — without charge, or apology. We are among these men and it is through our testimony — and that of the prisoners left behind, via their legal teams — that the voices of those who know the evil of Guantánamo are finally being heard.

Last week, a report by the Constitution Project’s Task Force on Detainee Treatment, which included two former senior US generals, and a Republican former congressman and lawyer, Asa Hutchinson, who served as administrator of the Drug Enforcement Agency from 2001 before being appointed in January 2003 as Undersecretary in the biggest division of the Department of Homeland Security, described the practice of torture by the US administration as “indisputable”. The report also stated bluntly that the treatment and indefinite detention of the Guantánamo prisoners was “abhorrent and intolerable” and called for the prison camp to be closed by next year. Despite these findings the US administration continues to employ tactics that include:

The abuse of the prisoners’ religious rights, such as the desecration of the Qur’an
The use of chemical sprays and rubber bullets to “quell unrest”
Regular and humiliating strip searches
Extremely long periods in total isolation
Interference in privileged client/attorney relationships
Lack of meaningful communication with relatives
Arbitrary imprisonment without charge or trial

The present hunger strikes are a result of the culmination of over a decade of systematic human rights violations and the closing of every legal avenue for release. The appalling methods of force-feeding several of the prisoners in a crude attempt at keeping them alive, by strapping down their arms, legs and heads to a chair and forcing a tube through their nostrils and forcing down liquid food into their stomachs, demonstrates the absence of any morals and principles the US administration may claim to have regarding these men.

President Obama claimed he wanted to close Guantánamo and promised to do so. Four years after his initial promise, he has again acknowledged that Guantanamo is not necessary and must close. Speaking on 30 April 2013, the US president reaffirmed his commitment as it was, “not necessary to keep America safe, it is expensive, it is inefficient … it is a recruitment tool for extremists; it needs to be closed.”

We hope that on this occasion, such words are not mere empty rhetoric, but a promise to be realised.

We make the following recommendations:
For the American medical profession to stop its complicity with abusive forced feeding techniques.For conditions of confinement for detainees to be improved immediately.
That all detainees who have not been charged should be released and
That the military commissions process should be ended and all those charged should be tried in line with the Geneva Conventions.

Signed, former prisoners,

Moazzam Begg, UK

Sami Al- Hajj, Qatar

Omar Deghayes, UK

Jamal al-Hartih, UK

Ruhal Ahmed, UK

Richard Belmar, UK

Bisher al-Rawi, UK

Farhad Mohammed, Afghanistan

Waleed Hajj, Sudan

Moussa Zemmouri, Belgium

Adel Noori, Palau

Abu Bakker Qassim, Albania

Adel el-Gazzar; Egypt

Rafiq al-Hami, Tunisia

Salah al-Balushi, Bahrain

Sa’d al-Azami, Kuwait

Asif Iqbal, UK

Shafiq Rasul, UK

Feroz Abbasi, UK

Jamil el-Banna, UK

Murat Kurnaz, Germany

Sabir Lahmar, France

Lahcen Ikassrien, Spain

Imad Kanouni, France

Mourad Benchellali, France

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.

Voices from Guantánamo: Obaidullah, an Afghan, Says “There is No Hope that We Will Ever Leave Here”

As the prison-wide hunger strike continues at Guantánamo, having reached the three-month mark on Sunday, it is more important than ever that the voices of the prisoners continue to be heard, to maintain the pressure on the Obama administration to act.

For meaningful action to be taken, President Obama needs to find ways to release the 86 men (out of 166 prisoners in total) who were cleared for release by the sober and responsible inter-agency task force he appointed to review the prisoners’ cases in 2009.

Two-thirds of these men are Yemenis, so the President needs to drop his ban on releasing any of these men, which he imposed in response to hysteria following the foiled Christmas bomb plot in 2009, when a Nigerian man recruited in Yemen tried and failed to bomb a plane bound for the US with a device in his underwear.

As I wrote in response to President Obama’s discussion of Guantánamo at a news conference last week, he can choose to tackle Congress — as he said he would — and to tell lawmakers that they need to drop the obstructions they have raised to prevent the release of prisoners over the last two years — in the National Defense Authorization Act. However, if Congress refuses to engage with him, he needs to use the waiver in the NDAA, which allows him to bypass Congress if he and the defense secretary regard it as being in America’s best interests.

Releasing men already cleared for release from the abominable open tomb that is Guantánamo — where all the prisoners are suffering indefinite detention without charge or trial, whether cleared for release or not — needs to happen as soon as possible, before some poor soul in Guantánamo dies. That, I am compelled to say, would most emphatically not be in America’s best interests.

However, President Obama also needs to do more — to appoint an official to deal specifically with the closure of Guantánamo, who can take charge of revisiting the President’s failed promise to close the prison in 2009, and to initiate objective reviews of the cases of the majority of the other 80 prisoners, to ascertain whether they should still be held.

Note: Please sign the petition to President Obama, calling for the closure of Guantánamo, if you have not done so already, as these demands are central to the demands in the petition.

In the last month, we have heard directly from Samir Moqbel, a Yemeni, in the New York Times, in a hugely influential opinion first-person account, and also, in the Observer, from Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison. Detailed accounts from Shaker Aamer (see here and here), and from Younus Chekhouri, a Moroccan, have also emerged via Clive Stafford Smith, the director of the London-based legal action charity Reprieve, and other accounts have come from a Yemeni prisoner named Musa’ab al-Madhwani, from David Remes, who represents a number of Yemenis, and from Carlos Warner and Barry Wingard, lawyers for Fayiz al-Kandari, one of the last two Kuwaitis in the prison.

Just a few days ago, another first-hand account of the hunger strike, the reasons for it, and conditions in the prison, was released by lawyers for Obaidullah, an Afghan prisoner (one of 17 Afghans still held), whose case has long interested me. I was delighted, last year, to have had the opportunity to make available the findings of an investigation into his story, conducted by US military investigators, which demolished the already thin case against Obaidullah.

The weakness of the case against him had always been apparent to me, but not, sadly, to the US authorities. In September 2008, he was put forward for a trial by military commission under George W. Bush, and in September 2010 he had his habeas corpus petition denied  by a judge in the District Court in Washington D.C., despite the lack of evidence against him.

As I noted at the time, in an article in the New York Times, Charlie Savage wrote:

It is an accident of timing that Mr. Obaidullah is at Guantánamo. One American official who was formerly involved in decisions about Afghanistan detainees said that such a “run of the mill” suspect would not have been moved to Cuba had he been captured a few years later; he probably would have been turned over to the Afghan justice system, or released if village elders took responsibility for him.

Nevertheless, Obaidullah is one of the 80 prisoners designated for a trial or for indefinite detention by President Obama’s task force. He is probably in the latter category, containing 46 men in total, whose continuing imprisonment was formalized in an executive order issued by President Obama in March 2011, although the identities of those men have never been publicly revealed — and, shockingly, the periodic reviews of their cases that the men were promised when the President issued his executive order have never materialized, a situation that, to my mind, reveals nothing less than disdain for the prisoners from the administration.

Obaidullah’s account, submitted as a declaration to a US court as part of a failed attempt to persuade a judge to intervene on behalf of the prisoners, was discussed in an article in the Los Angeles Times on May 4, and was subsequently picked up by a number of other media outlets, although the full text was not made available. I’m posting it below, because I regard it as another significant contribution to the record being put together by the prisoners regarding the hunger strike, and the prisoners’ despair at being abandoned by all three branches of the US government — and, until recently, by the majority of the mainstream media.

The Los Angles Times described Obaidullah’s account as “the most extensive yet by a detainee about conditions at the military prison and what prompted the hunger strike,” adding that he explained that the trigger was “US soldiers rifling through the pages of many Korans and handling them roughly.”

More poignant, however, are Obaidullah’s descriptions of his fellow prisoners, as, for example, when he writes, “I have seen men who are on the verge of death being taken away to be force-fed. I have also seen some men coughing up blood, being hospitalized, losing consciousness, becoming weak and fatigued, and being moved to Camp 5 for observation.”

Also of particular relevance is Obaidullah’s despair. Having never embarked on a hunger strike before, this time he states that “the latest actions in the camps have dehumanized me, so I have been moved to take action,” adding, “Eleven years of my life have been taken from me, and now by the latest actions of the authorities, they have also taken my dignity and disrespected my religion.”

As he also explains, “our strike continues because conditions have gotten worse, not better, and there is no hope that we will ever leave here.”

Obaidullah’s declaration from Guantánamo, March 27, 2013

Obaidullah, son of Mir Nawaz Khan, declare as follows:

1. I am currently being detained in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and have been since October 2002. My ISN number is 762. I understand English and what is written in this declaration. I have personal knowledge of the facts stated herein.

2. I have been on a hunger strike for 50 days since approximately February 6, 2013. I have not taken any food from the guards since February 6 in protest to events of that week, and what has happened at the camp since then. That week, camp authorities asked all of the detainees in our block in camp 6 to step outside of the cells while a “shake-down” of the entire block was conducted by U.S. soldiers. While we were all outside of the cell blocks, soldiers went into our cells, and searched what little personal belongings we have. This kind of very intrusive search had not been conducted for at least 4 or 5 years, since the early years at Guantánamo under President Bush. The searches were unexpected, sudden, and disrespectful. To my knowledge there was no incident which provoked the searches.

3. During the invasive searches, the soldiers confiscated detainees’ personal items including blankets, sheets, towels, mats, razors, toothbrushes, books, family photos, religious CDs, and letters, including legal mail and legal documents [and] special books and things allowed under the law of the camp.

4. I personally had the following items taken from me: blanket, sheet, towel, photos, medically necessary items, some of my legal documents, mail from my attorneys and family photos, documents from my family. This has been especially distressing for me because I have done nothing to provoke the authorities to take my belongings and comfort items that gave me a small sense of humanity.

5. Most disturbing, was the way in which the soldiers disrespected our Qur’ans. While the soldiers conducted their searches, I and other detainees saw U.S. soldiers rifling through the pages of many Qur’ans and handling them roughly. This constitutes desecration. It has not been searched in five years.

6. I had not participated in hunger strikes, or organized protests in the past. I have been patiently challenging my imprisonment in U.S. civil courts. But the latest actions in the camps have dehumanized me, so I have been moved to take action. Eleven years of my life have been taken from me, and now by the latest actions of the authorities, they have also taken my dignity and disrespected my religion. Our Qur’an is not a security issue and the soldiers have never found anything in Qur’ans since the beginning of GTMO.

7. The February shake-down which caused our strike, was the beginning of many other changes at the camp. The guards then also started being very disrespectful during our prayer time by knocking on our doors while we prayed, laughing or talking loudly, and opening and closing doors. We had not had a problem with having our prayer time disrespected or interrupted in many years and it has become a problem after our hunger strike. They also restricted our exercise and started to relocate prisoners to different camps.

8. All of these actions showed me and the other prisoners, that camp authorities were treating us the way we were treated in the years under President Bush. In protest to the dehumanizing searches, confiscation of our personal items and the desecration of the holy Qur’an, I and the men at Camp 6 and some at Camp 5, waged a hunger strike on February 6, 2013. But our strike continues because conditions have gotten worse, not better, and there is no hope that we will ever leave here.

9. As our conditions and treatment got worse, many more prisoners joined the strike. Now, almost all of the prisoners in the camp are hunger striking except for the more older prisoners in Camp 5 and 6. There are so many men here who were declared innocent by the U.S. as long as 5 years ago, but they are also now living under these more harsh conditions just because the U.S. does not know where to send them. This is not right because the U.S. has said they have done nothing wrong, but they are still treated like prisoners.

10. The strike has led authorities to treat all of us more harshly even as our health is deteriorating. For the last 30 days, the authorities have sometimes lowered the temperature in Camp 6 so that it is freezing. Also, last week, for 1 day, the authorities shut off water to the camps between the hours of 11am to 8pm. Before the hunger strike, we were alloted 7 hours daily at the “Super Rec” facility. This is the large recreation facility where we could play soccer for example. After the hunger strike began, the authorities do not permit Camp 6 prisoners any time at the Super Rec.

11. I have seen men who are on the verge of death being taken away to be force-fed. I have also seen some men coughing up blood, being hospitalized, losing consciousness, becoming weak and fatigued, and being moved to Camp 5 for observation.

12. Personally, I have lost a lot of weight. I am down from 167 pounds to 125 pounds. I am weak, and I have pain in waist, dizziness, I cannot sleep well, I feel hopeless, I can’t exercise, my muscles become weaker. In last 50 days I have thrown up 5 times.

13. Despite the difficulties in continuing the strike, and the health effects I am experiencing and witnessing, we plan to remain on strike until we are treated with dignity, the guards stop trying to enforce old rules, our prayer and religion is respected, and our Qur’ans are handled with the care and sanctity required. I am losing all hope because I have been imprisoned at Guantánamo for almost eleven years now and still do not know my fate.

I declare under penalty of perjury under the laws of the United States of America that the foregoing is true and correct.

Signed this 27th day of March 2013, in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Obaidullah

Andy Worthington is 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. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the “Close Guantánamo campaign”, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning: Andy Worthington Speaks at a London Event with Chase Madar and Ben Griffin, May 8, 2013

It’s almost three years since Pfc. Bradley Manning, who had been working as an intelligence analyst in Iraq, was arrested by the US military and imprisoned in Kuwait for allegedly making available — to the campaigning organization WikiLeaks — the largest collection of classified documents ever leaked to the public, including the “Collateral Murder” video, featuring US personnel indiscriminately killing civilians in Iraq, 500,000 army reports (the Afghan War logs and the Iraq War logs), 250,000 US diplomatic cables, and the classified military files relating to the Guantánamo prisoners, which were released in April 2011, and on which I worked as a media partner (see here for the first 34 parts of my 70-part, million-word series analyzing the Guantánamo files).

In July 2010, Manning was transferred to the Marine Corps Brig, Quantico, Virginia, where the conditions of his confinement began to cause international concern. I first wrote about his case in December 2010, when he was being held in solitary confinement, in an article entitled, “Is Bradley Manning Being Held as Some Sort of “Enemy Combatant”?” and I followed his story into 2011, and his transfer to less contentious conditions of confinement in Fort Leavenworth on April 20, just five days before WikiLeaks released the Guantánamo files.

In the last two years, I have largely deferred to other writers, researchers and activists, dedicated to Bradley Manning’s story, to cover developments in his case, particularly relating to a series of pre-trial hearings. His trial begins on June 3 (preceded by an international day of action on June 1), and I’m delighted to have the opportunity to revisit his story this Wednesday, May 8, at an event in London organized by Naomi Colvin and Katia Michaels, at which I am honoured to be sharing a stage with Chase Madar, the author of The Passion of Bradley Manning, and Ben Griffin, a former SAS soldier and conscientious objector.

The details of the event, which is free and open to anyone, are below. Please note that organizer Naomi Colvin has explained that you need to reserve a place on the Facebook page, stating, “Marking yourself as attending on this Facebook event is enough to secure a place — it’s all free but RSVP.”

Wednesday May 8, 2013, 7pm: WikiLeaks: The Bradley Manning Story

Century Club, 61-63 Shaftesbury Avenue, London W1D 6LG

Panel discussion With Chase Madar, Ben Griffin and Andy Worthington.

Chase Madar is a US attorney, and the author of The Passion of Bradley Manning, Ben Griffin is a former SAS soldier, and is now a spokesperson for Veterans for Peace UK, and Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, the author of The Guantánamo Files, and the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign. In April 2011, he was a media partner of WikiLeaks for the release of the classified military files relating to the Guantánamo prisoners.

The panel discussion will be moderated by Jolyon Rubinstein (of (BBC’s “The Revolution Will be Televised”).

Other guests are Vivienne Westwood and Peter Tatchell.

See the Facebook page here.

This is the organizers’ description of the event on the Facebook page:

After more than three years in military confinement, WikiLeaks whistleblower, Private Bradley Manning is finally due to go on trial in June. A criminal to the US military but hero to many, the 25 year old has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize three years in a row. He now faces court-martial for the largest security breach in US history.

We will discuss the issues raised by this case. Two years on, what have the WikiLeaks disclosures really told us about journalism, diplomacy and warfare? And what are the ramifications of the legal case itself?

I hope to see some of you at the Century Club on Wednesday to answer these questions.

Andy Worthington is 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. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the “Close Guantánamo campaign”, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Eloquent But Unconvincing: President Obama’s Response to the Guantánamo Hunger Strike

On Tuesday, President Obama gave his first detailed response to the prison-wide hunger strike that has been raging at Guantánamo for twelve weeks, responding to a question posed at a news conference by CBS News correspondent Bill Plante, who asked, “As you’re probably aware, there’s a growing hunger strike at Guantánamo Bay among prisoners. Is it any surprise really that they would prefer death rather than have no end in sight to their confinement?”

The question, presumably, was allowed because the President had decided that he could no longer avoid discussing the hunger strike that, at any moment, could result in the death of one of the many men starving themselves to focus the world’s attention on their plight. According to the government, 100 men of the remaining 166 prisoners are on a hunger strike, although the prisoners say the true number is 130.

Precipitated by the deployment of a new and aggressive guard force at Guantánamo, who manhandled the prisoners’ Korans during searches of the men’s cells that were of unusual intensity, the hunger strike began on February 6 and rapidly became a focal point for the prisoners’ despair at having been abandoned by all three branches of the US government, and by the mainstream media.

Although 86 of the remaining prisoners were cleared for release from Guantánamo by an inter-agency task force that President Obama established when he took office in January 2009 (when he promised to close Guantánamo within a year), they are still held because of obstructions raised by the President himself, and by Congress.

Two-thirds of the cleared prisoners are Yemenis, but the President issued a ban on the release of Yemenis from Guantánamo after a failed bomb plot on a Detroit-bound plane on Christmas Day 2009, undertaken by a Nigerian man who was recruited in Yemen. This disgraceful decision was followed by Congress imposing severe restrictions on the release of any prisoners, requiring that, if anyone is to be released, the Secretary of Defense must certify that they will be unable to engage in anti-American activities. This is a certification that appears to be impossible to make, unless freed men are to be immediately and permanently imprisoned on their return home — or on their resettlement in a third country.

On Tuesday, however, when confronted with his failures, President Obama chose to sidestep them, blaming Congress instead. He did, however, deliver an eloquent analysis of why the prison at Guantánamo Bay is such an abomination.

Specifically, he said, “I think it is critical for us to understand that Guantánamo is not necessary to keep America safe. It is expensive. It is inefficient. It hurts us in terms of our international standing. It lessens cooperation with our allies on counter-terrorism efforts. It is a recruitment tool for extremists. It needs to be closed.”

He also decried “the notion that we’re going to continue to keep over a hundred individuals in a no-man’s land, in perpetuity, even when we’ve wound down the war in Iraq, we’re winding down the war in Afghanistan, we’re having success defeating al-Qaeda core [and] when we’ve transferred detention authority in Afghanistan,” further criticizing “the idea that we would still [detain] forever a group of individuals who have not been tried.” That, he said, “is contrary to who we are, it is contrary to our interests, and it needs to stop.”

He also defended federal court trials, and the domestic prison system as an alternative to Guantánamo, noting that, for those tried and convicted of offences relating to terrorism, who are serving sentences in federal prisons on the US mainland, “Justice has been served. It’s been done in a way that’s consistent with our Constitution, consistent with due process, consistent with the rule of law, consistent with our traditions.” As a result, he said, “we can handle this.”

He added, “I understand that, in the immediate aftermath of  9/11, with the traumas that had taken place, why for a lot of Americans the notion was somehow that we had to create a special facility like Guantánamo and we couldn’t handle this in a normal, conventional fashion. I understand that reaction. But we’re now over a decade out. We should be wiser. We should have more experience in how we prosecute terrorists. And this is a lingering problem that is not going to get better. It’s going to get worse. It’s going to fester.”

This is all true, but the President refused to accept his own responsibility for the fact that Guantánamo, on his watch, has become a place where indefinite detention without charge or trial is enshrined far more thoroughly than it was under President Bush. Instead, he stated, simply but incorrectly, “Congress determined that they would not let us close it.”

President Obama also neglected to mention that it was he who revived the military commissions, and he who backed down on federal court trials when the administration was criticized for Attorney General Eric Holder’s announcement, in November 2009, that the men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks would be tried in New York.

The President also toyed with a kind of self-pity when he added that closing Guantánamo is “a hard case to make, because, you know, I think for a lot of Americans the notion is: out of sight, out of mind.” He added, “it’s easy to demagogue the issue. That’s what happened the first time this came up” — as though his own inaction and obstruction was not a huge problem in and of itself.

In addition, the President inaccurately stated that “there are a number of the folks who are currently in Guantánamo who the courts have said could be returned to their country of origin or potentially a third country,” when, in fact, only three of the prisoners still held — three Uighurs, from Xinjiang province in China — had their release ordered by a court in 2008. Much more significant — and truthful — is the fact that they and the 83 others were approved for release by the President ‘s own task force.

Despite these evasions and distractions, it would be unfair not to allow the President the opportunity to fulfil his promise to engage with Congress, as it might be fruitful. As he said, “I’m going to … examine every option that we have administratively to try to deal with this issue, but ultimately we’re also going to need some help from Congress, and I’m going to ask some folks over there who care about fighting terrorism but also care about who we are as a people to step up and help me on it.”

Even so, it is clear that what the President didn’t mention in his news conference is at least as important as what he did talk about. He needs, for example, to acknowledge that it was he who put in place the initial prohibition against releasing cleared Yemenis, and he needs to very publicly drop his ban and acknowledge that clearing men for release but then holding them on the basis of their nationality alone is unacceptable. Last week, Sen. Dianne Feinstein provided some assistance on this point, writing to Tom Donilon, President Obama’s national security adviser, to urge that the ban be lifted.

Taking this message to Congress would put lawmakers on the spot, but if they refuse to back down, the President needs to use the waiver included in the legislation preventing the release of prisoners, the National Defense Authorization Act, whereby the President and the Secretary of Defense can certify prisoners for release without Congressional approval, if they conclude that it is in the best interests of the country.

This is not a route to be chosen lightly, but it exists in the legislation, and it needs to be used to resume the release of prisoners if other discussions come to nothing. Just four prisoners have been released since Congress first imposed restrictions 16 months ago — two Uighurs through the court order back in 2008, and two others because of plea deals negotiated in their military commission trials at Guantánamo.

It is also probable that the President needs to appoint someone to deal specifically with the closure of Guantánamo — not to replace Daniel Fried of the State Department, who was tasked with resettlement and whose office was closed earlier this year, but to replace Greg Craig. The White House Counsel during Obama’s first year in office, Craig drove the proposals to close Guantánamo, but was then let down by the President and by certain key advisers who saw Guantánamo not as an abomination but, cynically, as a waste of political capital.

The best that can be said of President Obama’s performance on Tuesday is that the words he uttered can be used to hammer home to him the ongoing injustice of the prison, if he tries, as he has before, to lose interest in it. Mostly, though, what is needed is action — action to persuade Congress to drop its restriction on the release of prisoners, and action and honesty by President Obama himself: on his Yemeni ban, on the need to appoint someone to deal with the closure of Guantanamo on a full-time basis, and, if necessary, on releasing prisoners through the waiver in the NDAA.

He also, as an urgent matter, needs to initiate review boards for 46 other prisoners who he consigned to indefinite detention without charge or trial in an executive order in March 2011, on the basis that they are regarded as too dangerous to release, even though insufficient evidence exists to put them on trial. That is, and was an unacceptable decision to take, but the only proviso that tempered it ever so slightly was the President’s promise to initiate periodic reviews of the men’s cases, which, over two years later, have not taken place.

In conclusion, action is not only needed, it is needed urgently, before prisoners die. Sending Shaker Aamer, the last British resident, back to his family in the UK would be a sensible start. After all, no lawmaker could realistically claim that the UK, America’s “special friend” and its staunchest ally in the “war on terror,” is unable to guarantee the safety of the US on his release. As a result, Shaker could — and should –  be on a plane home to his family in London tomorrow, to be followed in the weeks that follow with dozens more of the cleared prisoners, to be sent, to name just a few examples, to Tunisia and Afghanistan.

Inertia — like the use of fine words alone — is no longer an option.

Andy Worthington is 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. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the “Close Guantánamo campaign”, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

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

Radio: Andy Worthington Discusses the Guantánamo Hunger Strike with Scott Horton, Dennis Bernstein and Pippa Jones

With the prison-wide hunger strike at Guantánamo nearing its 100th day (on Sunday), and even President Obama finally breaking his silence at a news conference on Tuesday — condemning the ongoing existence of the prison, but offering little in the way of solutions — I have been very busy with media appearances, as the mainstream media has woken up to the chronic injustice of Guantánamo in a convincing manner that — dare I say it — shows no sign of going away, as has the general public.

If you haven’t already signed it, please sign the petition calling for President Obama to close Guantánamo, which was launched this week by Col. Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor of the military commissions, who resigned in protest at the Bush administration’s use of torture. In just a few days, the petition has already secured over 125,000 signatures, showing a depth of concern for the ongoing injustice of Guantánamo that has been imaginable for the last few years.

This is entirely appropriate, of course, as 166 men languish in Guantánamo, abandoned by all three branches of the US government — President Obama and his administration, Congress and the courts — including the 86 who were cleared for release at least three years ago by an inter-agency task force established the President Obama himself.

With the widespread media attention, I took part in three BBC programmes on Tuesday — on BBC World News, the international TV channel, with George Alagiah; and twice on the BBC World Service, on Newsday and World Have Your Say, and in the last week I have also spoken to two old friends and colleagues in the US — Scott Horton and Dennis Bernstein — as well as speaking to Pippa Jones, a Spanish-based British radio presenter who has her own show on iTalkFM, an English language radio channel “broadcasting topical news, interviews and music across the Costa del Sol and Costa Blanca.”

My 40-minute interview with Scott Horton, who I have spoken to countless times in the last six years, is available here as an MP3, and this is how he described the show:

Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files, discusses his article “The Prisoners Speak: Reports from the Hunger Strike in Guantánamo;” the likelihood that the remaining prisoners will be held until they die, without charge or trial; Obama’s continuing pretense about closing Guantánamo; and the hunger strike’s success at bringing media attention to the situation.

Last night, I also spoke — again — to Dennis Bernstein, on his Flashpoints show on KPFA 94.1 FM in Berkeley, California. Dennis and I have spoken many times before — and twice since the hunger strike began (see here and here) — and it was great to be able to bring him and his listeners up to date on the hunger strike, and, in particular, the meaning — or lack of it — of President Obama’s decision to finally address the ongoing horrors of Guantánamo, and the need for renewed action to free prisoners and to finally close the prison, at his news conference on Tuesday.

My 15 minutes with Dennis, recorded late last night UK time, is available here as an MP3 (beginning at 11 minutes and 30 seconds), and it was a pleasure to talk to him, as ever. The page for the show is here.

Earlier in the week, I also spoke to Pippa Jones, who had previously interviewed the US attorney Tom Wilner. Tom represented the Guantánamo prisoners in their successful habeas corpus cases before the Supreme Court in 2004 and 2008, and is my colleague in the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, which we established together last January on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo.

Below is the interview with Pippa, which she made available on YouTube, and below that is Pippa’s earlier interview with Tom:

Andy Worthington is 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. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the “Close Guantánamo campaign”, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Editorials Call for the Closure of Guantánamo in the New York Times, Washington Post and Guardian

[image error]As the prison-wide hunger strike in Guantánamo continues (sign the petition calling for its closure here!), nearly three months since the majority of the 166 prisoners still held began refusing food, it is abundantly clear that, after several years in which, frankly, almost everyone had forgotten about Guantánamo or had given up on it, the prison — and the remaining 166 prisoners — are now back in the news and showing no signs of being as easily dismissed as they were three years ago, when everyone went silent after President Obama’s promise to close the prison within a year fizzled out dismally.

The need to exert concerted pressure on the Obama administration is more important than ever, because, until the prisoners appealed to the world by putting their lives on the line, President Obama had been content to abandon them, and had been encouraged to do so by Congress, where lawmakers had blocked all his attempts to close the prison, and had ended up imposing restrictions, in the National Defense Authorization Acts passed at the end of 2011 and 2012, that made it almost impossible to release any prisoners.

In the last week, the editors of the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Guardian have all published powerful editorials calling for the closure of Guantánamo, which I’m cross-posting below. The first, on April 26, was the New York Times editorial, which delivered crushing words to President Bush as he sought to reclaim his legacy with the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum about his prison which “should never have been opened,” and which “became the embodiment of his dangerous expansion of executive power and the lawless detentions, secret prisons and torture that went along with them.”

The Times was rather lenient towards President Obama’s role in keeping the prison open, but the same could not be said of the Washington Post‘s editorial on May 1, just after President Obama finally broke his silence on the hunger strike at a news conference. Check out the opening paragraph for the Post‘s refusal to allow the President to evade responsibility for the fact that Guantánamo is still open, and 86 prisoners, cleared by his own inter-agency task force over three years ago, are still held:

President Obama was eloquent Tuesday in describing why the situation at the Guantánamo Bay prison is “unsustainable.” He was justified in blaming Congress for frustrating his effort to close the facility. But he was disingenuous in failing to acknowledge that his own actions — or his own inaction — have substantially contributed to an impasse that has prompted more than half of Guantánamo’s inmates to undertake a hunger strike.

The Post‘s editorial specifically noted President Obama’s own ban on releasing Yemenis, and his disdainful failure to initiate reviews for the 46 men he consigned to indefinite detention without charge or trial in a executive order two years ago, as well as spelling out succinctly how one option he has, which he failed to mention, is a waiver in the legislation passed by Congress (which, it must be remembered, he signed into law) that makes it all but impossible to free any prisoners. As the Post put it, “Congress granted the Defense Department waiver authority that could have allowed transfers to resume, but the administration has not followed through.” The editors also called on President Obama to free prisoners whose release could and should be straightforward — one clear example being Shaker Aamer, the last British resident.

Finally, the Guardian, also on May 1, called on both the President and Congress to wake up from their slumber — whether one fired by laziness or malevolence — and work to close the prison once and for all. The Guardian‘s closing words, I thought,  were particularly powerful:

A country that fails to try those accused of planning or committing terrorists acts in its civilian courts is a society that admits defeat. A country that detains people without charge because it knows that any charges would be thrown out of a proper court is no different, in its behaviour to these inmates, from dictatorships which scorn the rule of law.

It has taken a mass hunger strike and the arrival of 40 navy nurses to bring this issue to a head. The situation inside the prison is unsustainable, and it is long past time for all of America’s politicians to admit it.

The Guantánamo Stain

New York Times editorial, April 26, 2013

All five living presidents gathered in Texas Thursday for a feel-good moment at the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum, which is supposed to symbolize the legacy that Mr. Bush has been trying to polish. President Obama called it a “special day for our democracy.” Mr. Bush spoke about having made “the tough decisions” to protect America. They all had a nice chuckle when President Bill Clinton joked about former presidents using their libraries to rewrite history.

But there is another building, far from Dallas on land leased from Cuba, that symbolizes Mr. Bush’s legacy in a darker, truer way: the military penal complex at Guantánamo Bay where Mr. Bush imprisoned hundreds of men after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, a vast majority guilty of no crime.

It became the embodiment of his dangerous expansion of executive power and the lawless detentions, secret prisons and torture that went along with them. It is now also a reminder of Mr. Obama’s failure to close the prison as he promised when he took office, and of the malicious interference by Congress in any effort to justly try and punish the Guantánamo inmates.

There are still 166 men there — virtually all of them held without charges, some for more than a decade. More than half have been cleared for release but are still imprisoned because of a law that requires individual Pentagon waivers. The administration eliminated the State Department post charged with working with other countries to transfer the prisoners so those waivers might be issued.

Of the rest, some are said to have committed serious crimes, including terrorism, but the military tribunals created by Mr. Bush are dysfunctional and not credible, despite Mr. Obama’s improvements. Congress long ago banned the transfer of prisoners to the federal criminal justice system where they belong and are far more likely to receive fair trials and long sentences if convicted.

Only six are facing active charges. Nearly 50 more are deemed too dangerous for release but not suitable for trial because they are not linked to any specific attack or because the evidence against them is tainted by torture.

The result of this purgatory of isolation was inevitable. Charlie Savage wrote in The Times on Thursday about a protest that ended in a raid on Camp Six, where the most cooperative prisoners are held. A hunger strike in its third month includes an estimated 93 prisoners, twice as many as were participating before the raid. American soldiers have been reduced to force-feeding prisoners who are strapped to chairs with a tube down their throats.

That prison should never have been opened. It was nothing more than Mr. Bush’s attempt to evade accountability by placing prisoners in another country. The courts rejected that ploy, but Mr. Bush never bothered to fix the problem. Now, shockingly, the Pentagon is actually considering spending $200 million for improvements and expansions clearly aimed at a permanent operation.

Polls show that Americans are increasingly indifferent to the prison. We received a fair amount of criticism recently for publishing on our Op-Ed page a first-person account from one of the Guantánamo hunger strikers.

But whatever Mr. Bush says about how comfortable he is with his “tough” choices, the country must recognize the steep price being paid for what is essentially a political prison. Just as hunger strikes at the infamous Maze Prison in Northern Ireland indelibly stained Britain’s human rights record, so Guantánamo stains America’s.

President Obama must make closing Guantánamo a priority

Washington Post editorial, May 1, 2013

President Obama was eloquent Tuesday in describing why the situation at the Guantánamo Bay prison is “unsustainable.” He was justified in blaming Congress for frustrating his effort to close the facility. But he was disingenuous in failing to acknowledge that his own actions — or his own inaction — have substantially contributed to an impasse that has prompted more than half of Guantánamo’s inmates to undertake a hunger strike.

One hundred and sixty-six terrorism suspects remain at Guantánamo, of whom 86 have been cleared for transfer to their home nations. After overseeing more than 70 repatriations or other prisoner transfers during the first years of his administration, Mr. Obama suspended those to Yemen after the attempted Christmas Day bombing of an airliner in 2010; in 2011 and 2012 he signed defense bills imposing all-but-unmeetable conditions on any other transfers.

This year, Congress granted the Defense Department waiver authority that could have allowed transfers to resume, but the administration has not followed through. Instead, the State Department reassigned the senior ambassador who had been seeking to arrange repatriations.

Moreover, the Pentagon has failed to set up a promised new system for reviewing the cases of prisoners that Mr. Obama ordered established more than a year ago — which means that Guantánamo inmates are receiving less review of their cases than they did during the Bush administration. It’s little wonder that many have grown desperate enough to try starving themselves to death.

At his press conference, Mr. Obama promised to “go back at” the Guantanamo issue and said he would seek help from Congress. For the prison to close, lawmakers would have to lift a ban on transferring prisoners to the United States. But it was good that Mr. Obama also pledged to “examine every option that we have administratively” — because there are steps he could take without Congress.

The first would be to arrange for the transfer of some of the 27 non-Yemeni prisoners who have been cleared for transfer; there are also three Uighurs who have been cleared but who cannot be returned to China. One Saudi citizen, , is a former British resident whose return Britain has requested; there are also Algerians and Moroccans. While there are legitimate concerns that detainees could return to terrorist activity, in many cases the risk is reasonable. Mr. Obama should also insist on implementation of his plan for periodic review boards for inmates not yet cleared for transfer.

The administration, meanwhile, should begin working with Yemen’s new president on creating conditions for the return of the 56 Yemenis cleared for transfer, a step called for last week by Senate intelligence committee chairman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.). Even with good will, this would take time and resources; Yemen remains an active base for al-Qaeda. But a start should be made at identifying or constructing secure facilities and creating programs to manage Yemeni repatriates.

What is needed above all is genuine political commitment from Mr. Obama. Having vowed to close Guantanamo, he backed away from the project in the face of political resistance. That resistance may be, as he argued yesterday, unreasonable; but it won’t be overcome if the president doesn’t make it a priority.

Guantánamo Bay: an indelible stain

The Guardian editorial, May 1, 2013

Of all the victims of the political dysfunction in Washington, of a Congress determined to thwart the White House at all costs, the 166 inmates of Guantánamo Bay are surely the most ill-treated. The reason they are still there, four years after Barack Obama first promised to close the prison, has little to do with problems over their release or transfer, although those still exist. They are there largely because Congress has cut off the funds to move those accused to detention in the US and imposed conditions which make transfer out of the US all the more difficult — a hurdle signed into law, it also has to be remembered, by Mr Obama earlier this year. This means that 86 of the 166 still detained, who have been approved for transfer out of US custody, have been stuck in this hellhole for the last two and a half years.

These decisions have human consequences. There is growing desperation among the camp’s inmates, 100 of whom are now on hunger strike. As the Observer revealed in a recent interview, the British resident Shaker Aamer does not now think he will make it out of the prison alive. Britain has officially maintained that it is committed to extracting Mr Aamer. His lawyers fear that darker motives are at work, as Mr Aamer is alone in having been cleared for release to one country — Saudi Arabia, where he faces an unsafe trial and long imprisonment. Britain might be less than keen on seeking Mr Aamer’s return, as he alleges that a UK intelligence agent was present while he was being beaten. His case exemplifies the huge ambivalence which all of America’s allies still share in closing this chapter in the dirty war on terror. The only damage that a free Mr Aamer can cause is reputational. He is already suing MI5 and MI6 for defamation.

In the process, public confidence in all these institutions continues to suffer. Even though his own standing has taken several knocks as a result of bending in the political wind, Mr Obama was right yesterday to say that he will try, again, to close the prison. Guantánamo still stains every country that colludes in its continued existence, including the UK and its security services. Indeed it weakens co-operation with allies. And it still serves as a recruitment tool for extremists. A country that fails to try those accused of planning or committing terrorists acts in its civilian courts is a society that admits defeat. A country that detains people without charge because it knows that any charges would be thrown out of a proper court is no different, in its behaviour to these inmates, from dictatorships which scorn the rule of law.

It has taken a mass hunger strike and the arrival of 40 navy nurses to bring this issue to a head. The situation inside the prison is unsustainable, and it is long past time for all of America’s politicians to admit it.

Andy Worthington is 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. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the “Close Guantánamo campaign”, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.