Andy Worthington's Blog, page 142

Guantánamo Authorities Respond to Hunger Strike with Violence; Red Cross Complains

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.

In response to the prison-wide hunger strike at Guantánamo, the authorities last weekend stormed into Camp 6, the block where the majority of the prisoners are held, and hauled most of the prisoners off to solitary confinement.

The authorities attempted to justify their actions — but failed to understand that the men who are endangering their lives by embarking on a hunger strike are doing so not to upset the authorities for no reason, or to challenge their authority needlessly, but because they despair of ever being released.

Even though 86 of the 166 men still held were cleared for release by an inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force established by President Obama in 2009, the US government has turned its back on them. Although two-thirds of the cleared prisoners are Yemenis, President Obama issued a blanket ban on releasing any Yemenis after the failed underwear bomb plot on Christmas Day 2009 (perpetrated by a Nigerian man recruited in Yemen).

Congress has also raised obstacles preventing the release of prisoners, and the court of appeals in Washington D.C. — the D.C. Circuit Court — has also issued rulings preventing the release of prisoners for reasons that have much more to do with ideology and paranoia than with the facts.

The men are effectively stranded at Guantánamo, and will die there unless action is taken immediately by President Obama to bring this intolerable situation to an end.

Instead, however, President Obama has said nothing, and has left it to military officials to attempt to airbrush the prisoners’ profound grievances out of existence, portraying the hunger strike as a question of restoring order against a hostile force.

As the New York Times explained last Wednesday, after a briefing at Guantánamo for a handful of media organizations (following a ban on reporters’ visits for several weeks), military officials described conditions in the prison in the weeks leading up to the raid as “chaotic, with detainees breaking rules with impunity, blocking cameras and windows, shouting at guards, splashing them with urine and poking sticks at them through the fencing. They said prisoners refused to go into their cells and shut their doors for a daily two-hour lockdown, and it was deemed too dangerous for guards to enter the common area to remove a troublemaker when many prisoners were freely roaming.”

The officials told the Times that the pre-dawn raid on April 13, on Camp 6 — where the majority of the prisoners had been living in relative freedom, allowed most of the time to mingle in the block’s communal areas — “was an effort by guards to force prisoners living in communal housing to move to individual cells.” The raid, they said, began at 5:10 a.m. and lasted about five hours, and only began after representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross had finished visiting. That was dressed up as coincidental, although it was clearly no such thing.

Moving vulnerable men who are in despair about their plight to solitary confinement is particularly cruel, although the Times failed to mention this. Instead, it was noted that the officials said that, “in its early stages, detainees wielding broomsticks hit two guards on their helmets during a brief melee that resulted in injuries to five detainees.” They added, however, that “the majority of the detainees did not offer any resistance, going to their cells as instructed or lying in the common area to be handcuffed.” Rear Adm. John W. Smith Jr., the commander of the Guantánamo Joint Task Force, specifically said that he had ordered the raid “because guards could not see into the facility to ensure the safety of the detainees.”

That, however, is a poor cover story for what, in reality, was obviously a dispute about order and control.

The military showed reporters around Camp 6, where, as the Times noted, the prisoners were “now under lockdown.” During the tour, prison guards “could be seen sitting at metal tables in the common areas and walking the two-tiered cell blocks, peering into the closed cells.” In addition, “In a central control room, guards watched monitors showing several dozen detainees inside their cells.” Officials explained that, prior to the raid, the prisoners “had covered up 147 out of 160 surveillance cameras,” although no video or photographic evidence was provided, and Adm. Smith said that no filming had taken place.

Col. John Bogdan, the commander of Joint Task Force Guantánamo’s Detention Group — blamed by the prisoners for starting the hunger strike through aggressive cell searches and abusive treatment of the prisoners’ Korans — told the press that the guards had “trained for the raid for three weeks.” According to this account, the prisoners, armed with “about two dozen metal sticks and wooden staffs taken from brooms and mops, a metal bar taken from exercise equipment, and long staffs made from crushed bottles wrapped in tape,” fought with guards, leading to two guards being hit and four non-lethal rounds being shot by the guards. What was not explained was how the prisoners were supposed to have been able to gather so many sticks and staffs without anyone noticing.

Capt. Richard Stoltz, the commander of the prison medical group, said that the two guards were not hurt. Of the prisoners, one “was hit with rubber pellets in his ‘left flank,’ and two of them were later removed from his skin.” Three others “had minor injuries to their forearm, chest and elbow.” A fifth prisoner, alarmingly, “began banging his own head into the wall of his cell, and he was treated with three sutures.”

He was not the only prisoner driven to self-harm. The officials stated that two others “tried to commit suicide by hanging themselves” — one on the night before the raid, and the other after it.

Here at “Close Guantánamo,” we remain deeply concerned that the Obama administration has done nothing to resolve the hunger strike without violence, and has done nothing to free any of the 86 men cleared for release, even though the hunger strike has now been underway for two and half months.

We share the concerns aired by Navi Pillay, the United Nations Human Rights Commissioner, and also the complaints aired on April 11 by Peter Maurer, the President of the International Committee of the Red Cross, the prison visitors whose access to the majority of prisoners worldwide is supposed to be dependent on their discretion.

Throughout the Bush administration, senior Red Cross figures occasionally broke with protocol and openly criticized the administration, as in October 2003, when Christophe Girod, the head of the office in Washington D.C., said, “The open-endedness of the situation and its impact on the mental health of the population has become a major problem.”

To date, however, President Obama has avoided serious censure, although it is now well-deserved, as he now thoroughly owns Guantánamo, and has thoroughly abandoned the men still held there.

As Reuters described it, Peter Maurer “expressed opposition to the force-feeding of prisoners staging a mass hunger strike at the Guantánamo prison camp and said he urged US President Barack Obama to do more to resolve the ‘untenable’ legal plight of inmates held there.”

Maurer “made his case in talks with Obama and other top US officials in Washington,” while a team of ICRC representatives was in Guantánamo, and his words were clearly meant to shake President Obama out of his torpor regarding Guantánamo.

As Reuters proceeded to explain, he said at a press conference that the hunger strike “was a ‘symptom’ of the prisoners’ legal plight,” and explained, “The issue of Guantánamo is politically blocked in this country.” He also said that his message to President Obama and his advisers was that “they should put all their energy” into reaching a solution regarding Guantánamo.

Maurer also “said he had pressed Obama, senior administration officials and US lawmakers to work harder to address the Guantánamo prisoners’ legal predicament,” adding that “the main issues include delays in promised regular reviews of prisoners’ cases and hold-ups in transfer to their home countries of those deemed no longer a security risk.”

These remain key demands for everyone concerned with closing Guantánamo, echoing complaints we have long made here at “Close Guantánamo,” and which we formalized in February, and have reiterated many times since.

See below for details:

- Contact the White House and tell President Obama, “Please release the 86 prisoners cleared for release by your inter-agency task force, and initiative objective reviews for the 46 others that you designated for indefinite detention without charge or trial in an executive order two years ago.” Call 202-456-1111 or submit a comment online. Please also tell President Obama, “Please appoint a White House official to direct the closure of Guantánamo, and direct the Secretary of Defense to use his authority under the law to release men who will not be charged. Please also lift your own blanket ban on sending home the cleared Yemeni prisoners.”

- Contact Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and tell him, “Please use your authority under the law to resume transferring the 86 men cleared for release by President Obama’s inter-agency task force. The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA 2013) gives you the authority to certify men or issue waivers so they can be released from Guantánamo, and you must use this authority without further delay.” Call Secretary Hagel at the Department of Defense on 703-571-3343 or submit a comment online.

Please note: The photo at the top of this article is by Rambledove, on Flickr, and is part of Witness Against Torture’s Flickr stream.

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.

Calling for Shaker Aamer’s Release from Guantánamo: Parliamentary Debate and Protest on April 24

The case of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, is one that has taken up much of my time since the other British residents were released in 2007 and 2009, and I feel I have got to know him through his accounts from the prison — some made available to me last year via Ramzi Kassem, one of his lawyers (see here, here and here), and, this year, since the prison-wide hunger strike began, through the accounts of phone calls with Shaker made by Clive Stafford Smith, another of his lawyers, and the director of Reprieve, the London-based legal action charity (see here and here). These feelings were reinforced last month when I met his wife and his four children at an event in Tooting Islamic Centre with Jane Ellison MP and Jean Lambert MEP.

I am delighted that the e-petition calling for the British government to take renewed action to secure Shaker’s return from Guantánamo secured 100,000 signatures last week, making it eligible for a Parliamentary debate — and I’d like to publicly thank the many, many people who worked tirelessly to secure that result. Shaker’s ongoing detention is an indictment of the indifference of the US government and the British government, because he was cleared for release under President Bush in 2007, and again in 2009 under President Obama, but is still held.

The Parliamentary debate is taking place tomorrow, Wednesday April 24, in Westminster Hall, in the Houses of Parliament, and members of the public are allowed to attend. Please do go along if you can. The debate is from 9.30 to 11am, but you will need to make sure that you have time to clear security, so an 8.30 arrival is advisable.

Afterwards, the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign will be holding a demonstration in Parliament Square, from 11.30 to 2pm.

I’ll be attending, and I hope to see some of you there, but if you can’t, please do take the time to show solidarity with Shaker Aamer by signing the international petition, on the Care 2 Petition Site, and by reading and sharing Shaker’s latest words from Guantánamo, which were published on Sunday in the Observer, and which I’m cross-posting below.

Shaker Aamer: ‘I want to hug my children and watch them as they grow’

The Observer, April 21, 2013

In these poignant words from Guantánamo, Shaker Aamer reveals exclusively to the Observer the pain of being separated from his family for 12 years.

As of today, I’ve spent more than 11 years in Guantánamo Bay. To be precise, it’s been 4,084 long days and nights. I’ve never been charged with any crime. I’ve never been allowed to see the evidence that the US once pretended they had against me. It’s all secret, even the statements they tortured out of me.

In 2007, roughly halfway through my ordeal, I was cleared for release by the Bush administration. In 2009, under Obama, all six of the US frontline intelligence agencies combined to clear me again. But I’m still here.

Every day in Guantánamo is torture — as was the time they held me before that, in Bagram and Kandahar air force bases, in Afghanistan. It’s not really the individual acts of abuse (the strappado — that’s the process refined by the Spanish Inquisition where they hang you from your wrists so your shoulders begin to dislocate, the sleep deprivation, and the kicks and punches); it’s the combined experience. My favourite book here (I’ve read it over and over) has been Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell: torture is for torture, and the system is for the system.

More than a decade of my life has been stolen from me, for no good reason. I resent that; of course I do. I have missed the birth of my youngest son, and some of the most wonderful years with all my four children. I love being a father, and I always worked to do it as best I can.

So obviously I want to go home to London. Of course I do. But I am never going to beg. If I have to die here, I want my children to know that I died for a principle, without bowing to my abusers. I have been on hunger strike for more than 60 days now. I have lost nearly a quarter of my body weight. I barely notice all of my medical ailments any more — the back pain from the beatings I have taken, the rheumatism from the frigid air conditioning, the asthma exacerbated by the toxic sprays they use to abuse us. There is an endless list. And now, 24/7 (as the Americans say), I have the ache of hunger.

Have you ever tried going without food for 24 hours? Today, I am on my 68th day. But a man in my block has been on strike since 2005. Can you imagine it? He’s only alive today because the Americans force-feed him, preventing him from making that ultimate statement of principle, the same one they have on their New Hampshire licence plates: “Give me freedom, or give me death.”

In truth, while I am horrified by the suffering around me, I am also encouraged. There is more solidarity among the prisoners than ever before. The military is not being honest about the number of men on strike: most of us are refusing to eat. The military responds with violence, as if that will break us; it draws us all together.

Now they are sending in the goon squad (the Forcible Cell Extraction, or FCE, team) to beat me up every time I ask for something, whether it is my medicine, a bottle of water or the right to shower. That only reinforces my resolve. And my lawyer tells me there are people out there who care, that more than 100,000 people back home in Britain have signed a petition demanding that parliament should debate my case.

I hope I do not die in this awful place. I want to hug my children and watch them as they grow. But if it is God’s will that I should die here, I want to die with dignity. I hope, if the worst comes to the worst, that my children will understand that I cared for the rights of those suffering around me almost as much as I care for them.

*****

Please support Shaker Aamer if you can. This injustice must be brought to an end — before Shaker dies, and before any of the other prisoners die. President Obama has 86 men that he needs to release immediately, and Shaker is only one of them, but for those in the UK who are opposed to the existence of Guantánamo, putting pressure on the British government is a process that can achieve the desired result if we continue to attract support for Shaker. As well as signing the international petition, please write urgent emails calling for the return of Shaker Aamer from Guantánamo to foreign secretary William Hague and to Alistair Burt, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office.

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.

Save the NHS: Urge the Lords to Fight Privatisation, Plus Updates from Lewisham

Wednesday April 24 may be the day that the NHS dies — or that it lives on. On April 1, largely unnoticed by the people of England, the most popular institution in the land, the NHS (the National Health Service), was privatised by the Tory-led government, in regulations relating to Article 75 of the Health and Social Care Act, which force competition on almost all NHS business.

If they are not reversed, the regulations will lead to private companies swiftly and effectively dismantling the NHS, cherry-picking services they can easily make profits out of, and cowing the newly appointed Clinical Commissioning Groups (the GPs responsible for 80 percent of the NHS budget), who will be afraid of ruinously expensive legal challenges if they dare to take on the private sector.

This is a disaster of colossal proportions, and yet it has barely been reported by the mainstream media, although medical websites and blogs, and campaigners — myself included — have been covering it since the regulations first surfaced in February.

On Wednesday April 24, the House of Lords has a historic opportunity to derail the regulations. Please email members of the House of Lords today or tomorrow to urge them to vote against the regulations. The Save Lewisham Hospital campaign has put together a detailed list of Lords here, including details of how to contact them by email. If an email is not listed, click on the peer’s name to go to their website, where emails are listed, as well as phone numbers — which is another good way of getting in touch with them, with less than 48 hours to go.

As the Save Lewisham Hospital campaign notes:

All are important to write to, but Lib Dems and Crossbenchers (unaligned peers) can have the biggest effect on the outcome of the debate or a vote. Remember that Labour members need to know your views too; and we hear of Conservatives who genuinely believe in the NHS and will act honourably, especially if they know they have support from the public. It is really worth writing to several peers if you can — to make maximum impact.

On Wednesday there will also be a lobby of Parliament, which I encourage everyone who cares about the NHS to attend. The lobby of the House of Lords will begin at 12 noon on Wednesday April 24 on St. Stephen’s Green opposite the Houses of Parliament (and the nearest tube is Westminster).

The Lords vote is the big news of the week, but there is also an event of importance taking place in the London Borough of Lewisham — where a battle to save the hospital that serves the 270,000 resident sof Lewisham (the same population as Brighton, Hull or Newcastle) has been ongoing since October, and where campaigners have secured huge turnouts for protests, and continue to demand that maternity and A&E services remain in the borough of Lewisham, and are not shut down, so that 90 percent of the mothers in Lewisham will have to give birth elsewhere, and there will be just one A&E Department — in Woolwich — for the 750,000 people in the three boroughs of Lewisham, Greenwich and Bexley (see my archive of articles and photos here and here.

On Thursday April 25, beginning at 7pm, there will be a public meeting in the Great Hall at Goldsmith’s College in New Cross, featuring speakers including Professor Colin Leys, an expert on the NHS and the co-author of The Plot Against the NHS, Dr. John Lister (of Health Emergency), Dr. Louise Irvine, the chair of the Save Lewisham Hospital campaign, Rachel Maskell (Unite), and Pat Smith of the Labour Party, whose rallying speech for the NHS at the Labour conference in October is here.

Other events are forthcoming — the Hunt for Hunt, a trip to health secretary Jeremy Hunt’s Surrey constituency on Saturday June 15, the Lewisham People’s Commission of Enquiry into the government’s plans to downgrade Lewisham Hospital, on Saturday June 29 at the Broadway Theatre in Catford. Chaired by Michael Mansfield QC, it will “examine crucial evidence about the planned downgrades from a range of groups, including clinicians, GPs, patients and other agencies such as the Council and local businesses.”

There is also a London-wide demonstration in support of the NHS taking place on Saturday May 18, beginning at 12 noon in Jubilee Gardens (by the London Eye), followed by a march to the Department of Health and Parliament (sign up on the Facebook page here).

These are important dates for your diary, but for now it is imperative that those who care for the NHS lobby the Lords to resist the Section 75 regulations, and that those in Lewisham show support for the ongoing campaign to prevent Lewisham Hospital from being disembowelled by turning up to Goldsmith’s on Thursday for the public meeting.

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.

Guantánamo Hunger Strike: Clive Stafford Smith’s Harrowing Account of His Call with Younus Chekhouri

As the prison-wide hunger strike continues at Guantánamo, and even the authorities are admitting that 84 of the remaining 166 prisoners are on hunger strike (edging ever closer to the figure of 130 cited by the prisoners themselves), it remains imperative that those of us who are committed to the closure of the prison continue to publicize the hunger strike, and to maintain pressure on the administration to resolve it — by releasing the 86 prisoners cleared for release, and by initiating objective reviews of 46 others designated for indefinite detention without charge or trial in a executive order issued by President Obama two years ago.

To maintain pressure on the Obama administration, it is crucial that the prisoners’ stories are told, as has been happening over the last few weeks with reports following phone conversations between the prisoners and their lawyers — in the cases of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (see here and here), and also with Samir Moqbel, whose testimony was presented as an op-ed in the New York Times.

These men are all represented by lawyers at Reprieve, the London-based legal action charity founded by Clive Stafford Smith, and below I’m posting Clive’s account of his conversation by phone with another of Reprieve’s client, Younus Chekhouri, a Moroccan whose 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 found his testimony from Guantánamo, in the tribunals and review boards that took place under President  Bush, to be both compelling and credible, and below I include the description of him that I included in a series of articles about the remaining prisoners in Guantánamo back in 2010. What I only found out from Clive’s recent conversation, however, is that Younis is a Sufi — a fact which, on its own, should have told the US authorities that he was not who they thought he was, as Sufi Muslims had no involvement with either military activities of the Taliban or the international terrorism of al-Qaeda.

This is my commentary from 2010:

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.”

I hope you find Clive’s account enlightening, and I urge you to share it if you do. To reiterate, it is only by waking the world up to the fact that the men in Guantánamo are human beings that we will secure the necessary outrage that will force President Obama to act. On that front, I think Younus’s story, with its harrowing details, and its powerful demonstrations of Younus’s own humanity and kindness, is of great importance.

Clive Stafford Smith’s Statement Recounting His Phone Conversation with Younus Chekhouri, March 29, 2013

On Tuesday, April 9, 2013, at approximately 11am EST, I spent sixty minutes on an unclassified phonecall with my client Younus Chekkouri, whose Internment Serial Number is 197. We spent most of the phonecall on the subject of the hunger strike.

When I use quotes, that is my best reconstruction of what Younus reported being said, but it is clearly not verbatim. I regret that I have not, given the time constraints, been able to check my notes and my memory with my client, but I am confident that my notes are as accurate as I could reasonably manage. However, the telephone line was very bad and it was difficult to hear my client on a number of occasions.

Younus is one of the most compliant prisoners in Guantánamo Bay. He is a Sufi and as such is averse to violence. I have seen his detention record while in Guantánamo, as of the disclosures made in his habeas case, and he had (as I recall) only one disciplinary in almost a decade, and that was for something fairly frivolous where it seemed that a particularly harsh guard had it in for him. (Some of my clients have had scores of disciplinaries for a broad range of violations.)

Younus has been very, very depressed. He has been cleared for a long time and desperately misses his wife and family — but he has always preached restraint for the seven years I have known him. It is all the more surprising, and worrying, that he has taken part in this hunger strike for two months now.

Younus was on the block where the problems originally began, on February 6, 2013. Indeed, I saw him that day, since I was in Guantánamo Bay for a visit. The issue involved searching of the Qur’ans. This has been an issue over many years, though it had been essentially resolved as long as seven years ago by an agreement not to search the Qur’ans.

As Younus relayed to me, the detainees reject wholeheartedly the notion that the Qur’ans were used to hide pills. Indeed, he described the number of places where the detainees could hide pills if that was what they really wanted to do; he also described the manner in which the authorities can ensure that prisoners take their medications, checking in their mouths to ensure that the pills have been swallowed.

Younus stated that this was just a well-worn and unwise pretext for trying to impose control on the prisoners. He relayed how the ICRC [International Committee of the Red Cross] had confirmed to him and others that this was a pretext being used by the US authorities, and that it was not based in fact. There is an Islamic advisor (he gave me the name, but I do not include it here as I have no desire to get the man in trouble by naming him in a public document) who has been telling the JTF-GTMO authorities how best to manipulate the prisoners’ beliefs (about whom, more below).

As before, the prisoners offered either to comply with the search methods that have been used before (where US officials do not handle the Qur’ans, and use metal detectors if they have any question about it being used to hide weapons) or simply give up their Qur’ans. The US authorities refuse to allow them to hand in their Qur’ans, apparently from fear that it will make them look bad that the prisoners do not have Qur’ans (it is hard to imagine a different reason for refusing such an offer).

However, unfortunately the original complaint about the desecration or disrespect of the Qur’an has now exploded into something far broader, seemingly in response to the aggressive reaction by the US authorities to the original complaints. Younus reported that he had been one of the prisoners originally seeking to avoid a confrontation, and to resolve the issues. But the response was harsh and immediate.

Younus came back to his cell after a search to find that it “looked like Hurricane Katrina had just been through.” The soldiers had taken most of Younus’ ‘comfort items’, including his books, as well a large number of his legal papers. They had been silly as well: they took only one of his shoes, leaving him just one. He had nothing that he had not been legally given, and taking it away seemed very wrong and very unfair.

The prisoners on the block started their hunger strike soon after, though they continued for a few days to eat things that they already had. The hunger strike proper did not begin for a few days, when all of that had run out, and they had even finished eating the food that had long since expired (some was two years out of date, some of it had been hoarded for feeding to the banana rats).

Younus has lost about 30 lbs.

He may not be listed as an official hunger striker as he has been accepting liquid nutrient, Ensure. But he is not taking that, it is for another striker, who is a fellow prisoner who he holds in very high regard. His friend (who he did not name, as we were not meant to discuss the names of other prisoners on the call) had dropped to 120 lbs, and almost died. The man’s face changed from red to blue. He refused to go to the clinic. Younus worried so much about him that he (Younus) requested Ensure and made his friend drink it, in order to make him a bit better. This is just one example of many ways in which the authorities have their figures wrong about prisoners, and who is or is not on strike.

Younus estimated that eighty percent of the prisoners in Camp VI are on hunger strike. The people who are not doing it are primarily the infirm prisoners — he was allowed to mention the name of Saifullah Paracha (ISN 1094), another prisoner who I have met in Guantánamo. Saifullah is 65 years old and in bad health, with a heart condition. [also see here and here for other articles about him].

Younus reported that in the early days of the hunger strike, those who were recognized as strikers were taken to Camp V, so many people are there. But even of those who remain in Camp VI, he said, eighty percent are involved in the strike. While he cannot say for sure how many in Camp V are on strike, he estimated that overall well over 100 prisoners are taking part.

Younus is drinking water but there have been problems. The water was severely restricted and his block (which is, again, perhaps the most compliant) only got it back because one of the prisoners’ lawyers made a fuss about it in the media. Younus understands that other blocks (and Camp V) are treated differently, and some still have very little access to water.

Younus is eating only Metamucil at the moment, only periodically, as he has been given it as a putative cure for his cholesterol problems. “When I eat it, it feels like the best food in the entire world. I am addicted to the small pieces of Metamucil,” he reported. (This concerns me, although I am not a doctor, since I understand that taking a fiber supplement can decrease the absorption of minerals by decreasing the transit time, lowering the concentration of minerals by accumulating more fecal matter, and can also cause the minerals to become trapped in the feces, leaving the body without absorption. This could affect individuals who may not be meeting, or barely attaining, their body’s mineral or nutrient needs. See Kies, Purified Psyllium Seed Fiber, Human Gastrointestinal Tract Function, and Nutritional status of Humans, Unconventional Sources of Dietary Fiber, ACS Symposium Series 214, at 61–70 (1983).)

He has taken some powdered juice, but is having problems making tea as the guards do not let them have cups any more — so they have to do with plastic containers to heat up water in the microwave for tea. Younus is concerned that the long term use of the same plastic containers in this way will cause cancer.

Younus reported all the same physical problems that I have documented over several years — pain in the feet, the knee, the back, his testicles, and his throat. But he says that all of this is subsumed by the fact that he has pain everywhere since he is starving the whole time. “Really, now it is just pain everywhere. I don’t want to die in Guantánamo.”

Younus said that he now wakes up in the middle of the night, starving, and he remembers his dreams, where he has imagined that he is faced with large piles of wonderful food. It is torture.

Younus wrote a sign on the window of his block: “Dial 911 — I’m starving.” He wrote another that simply said SOS. But nobody paid attention.

As the treatment spiraled down, for the first time, Younus seriously thought about harming himself.

Younus states that he has a message for President Obama: “The nightmare has started again. For some time, things had got a bit better here, some of the guards were acting like human beings. Even if we were treated like sheep, at least we were not always mistreated. But now it has changed again. And now 86 of us have been cleared for release and we are still here. Let us leave Guantánamo with clear hearts, and without hatred. Hatred is evil, and it harms the person who is hating as well as the person who is hated.”

When I asked why this change of treatment had taken place, Younus opined that it seemed to be advice that was coming from the supposed Islamic expert on how to break Muslims. “There is one man who is giving Islamic advice, who pretends he is a Muslim, and thinks he understands our minds, our diverse culture, our souls, everything.” Apparently the leadership in Guantánamo is back to trying to break them, as they might break an animal or abuse a child, thinking that this is the way to treat prisoners, even people who have long since been cleared for release.

Younus does not want to be on this hunger strike, but he feels that he has no choice. He asks only that he be treated with respect, and that the prisoners who are cleared be allowed to leave — to go back to their families, to have hope, and to live their dreams.

Younus did not want to finish without thanking the people around the world, including those in America, who have shown support for their human rights. He asked that I express his gratitude to those who had not forgotten him and the other prisoners.

While I would obviously prefer that Younus should be permitted to testify to the facts that he related to me himself, the foregoing is as accurate an account as I am able to produce from my notes of my conversation with him about the current state of the hunger strike in Guantánamo Bay, and the unfortunate response by the authorities to 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.

Radio: Andy Worthington Discusses the Guantánamo Hunger Strike with Dennis Bernstein and Michael Slate

The hunger strike in Guantánamo, which is now in its 74th day, continues to draw attention, although it is important that everyone who cares about it keeps publicizing the story — and keeps reminding the mainstream media to keep reporting it — or it will be lost in the hysteria emanating from the Boston bombings, which right-wingers, of course, are using to replenish their Islamophobia — one aim of which will be to shut down discussion of Guantánamo, in order to keep the prison open.

As my contribution to keeping the story alive, I’ve been publishing articles about the hunger strike on an almost daily basis, and have also been taking part in as many media appearances as possible. On Monday, after the military had clamped down on the hunger strike with violence last weekend, firing non-lethal rounds and moving the majority of the prisoners into solitary, I received several invitations to take part in TV and radio shows, but all but two fizzled out when the Boston bombing occurred. One of the two was a Canadian radio station, and the other was with Dennis Bernstein on Flashpoints, on KPFA in Berkeley, California.

My interview with Dennis is available here, just three weeks after our last discussion about Guantánamo, and I was pleased to be joined by Candace Gorman, the Chicago-based attorney who represents two Guantánamo prisoners — one still held, and the other freed in 2010 — and Stephanie Tang of the World Can’t Wait. Both are friends, and between us, and with Dennis’s informed interest in the topic, I believe we thoroughly analyzed the dreadful situation that is still unfolding at Guantánamo, and pointed out the urgent necessity for President Obama to take action.

At the very least, President Obama needs to secure the release of the 86 prisoners (out of 166 in total) who were cleared for release by his own inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force, and to grant immediate and objective reviews to the 46 other prisoners who, two years ago, the President disgracefully designated for indefinite detention without charge or trial, on the unacceptable basis that they were too dangerous to release, even though insufficient evidence exists to put them on trial. At the time, when President Obama issued an executive order authorizing these men’s indefinite detention, he promised them periodic reviews of their cases, but those have not materialized, and are not even on the horizon, which is a disgrace.

On Friday, with Boston still dominating almost all news outlets, and its steady drip-drip of black propaganda poisoning or strangling the focus on Guantánamo that had been building powerfully over the previous six weeks, I was delighted to be asked by Michael Slate to appear again on his show is on KPFK 90.7 FM, in Los Angeles, just two weeks after we last spoke. Like Dennis, Michael has regularly spoken to me over the years, and is also a well-informed and articulate host.

My interview with Michael is here, as an MP3 (and also see here), and I was pleased to be joined by Omar Farah of the Center for Constitutional Rights, who represents a number of Guantánamo prisoners, including Mohammed al-Hamiri, a Yemeni, profiled here, and also, as he mentioned in the show, Fahed Ghazi, another Yemeni whose eloquence he praised, and who, he said, would be able to explain his case much better than him, if the government allowed the prisoners to speak freely.

Michael’s description of the show is below, but two of the things we discussed deserve particular attention: firstly, how the tide has been turning against Guantánamo because of attorneys getting their own stories out to the public, in their own words — most noticeably, through Shaker Aamer’s story, here and here, and the op-ed by Samir Moqbel in the New York Times last week, which has been enormously influential.

The second major point, which I made quite forcefully, I believe, was to point out how the pressure needs to be relentlessly focused on President Obama, who pretends that the obstacles to closing the prison are all the fault of Congress, when he himself is responsible for an unprincipled ban on releasing any of the cleared Yemeni prisoners (who make up two-thirds of the cleared prisoners), and it is his obligation, as the President of the United States, to make the case that Guantánamo needs to be closed for legal, moral and ethical reasons, as well as for the sake of America’s national security.

When President Bush set up the abomination that is Guantánamo, he at least pretended that there was some purpose to it — as an interrogation center where the prisoners literally had no rights. Now, however, Guantánamo has no purpose whatsoever. Its existence is merely a testament to the power of black propaganda and Presidential inertia, and those of us who care must continue to shout this from the rooftops.

This is Michael’s description of the show. I hope you have time to listen to both shows, with two of the most clued-up and important broadcasters operating in America today:

Prisoners at the US torture camp at Guantánamo continue their hunger strike against their inhumane conditions, an action which began February 6. Last weekend, the world heard the news of a brutal attack on the frail hunger strikers, with US soldiers firing rubber bullets as part of forcing prisoners into solitary confinement cells. Omar Farah of the Center for Constitutional Rights will join us to give an update on the strike, the attack on the prisoners and efforts to spread solidarity. Omar Farah is a staff attorney for the Guantánamo Global Justice Initiative, and has represented prisoners in numerous court cases since 2008.

Also joining us will be Andy Worthington, journalist and author of The Guantánamo Files. He recently published a description of the conditions of the hunger strikers at Guantánamo that Shaker Aamer gave to his attorney, Clive Stafford Smith, in a phone conversation on March 29. In 2007 and again in 2009, Shaker Aamer was cleared for release by the US government, like most of those imprisoned. Yet they are still being held. To get involved, visit CloseGuantanamo.org.

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.

“It’s Going to End in Men Dying”: Carlos Warner, Guantánamo Attorney, Discusses the Hunger Strike

As the hunger strike continues to rage at Guantánamo, with at least 130 of the remaining 166 prisoners involved, I’m delighted to have the opportunity to cross-post an interview with Carlos Warner, an attorney with the Office of the Federal Defender for the Northern District of Ohio, who represents ten prisoners at Guantánamo — including a number of Yemeni prisoners, a “high-value detainee,” one of the last five Tunisians in Guantánamo, the only Kenyan, and Fayiz al-Kandari, one of the last two Kuwaitis in the prison.

The interview was conducted by my friend The Talking Dog, a New-York based independent journalist who has conducted dozens of interviews with lawyers, journalists and former prisoners over the last eight years — which someone should publish as a book, at some point!

I am enormously grateful to The Talking Dog for putting me up on my generally annual visits to New York to campaign for the closure of Guantánamo, which began as a result of the friendship that we struck up after he interviewed me, back in September 2007, just as my book The Guantánamo Files was being published, and I hope you have time to read and publicize this interview. The hunger strike began because of aggression by the guards and the perceived abuse of the prisoners’ Korans, but as time has gone on, it has become a sustained protest against the men’s indefinite detention, and the fact that, having been abandoned by President Obama, they may die at the prison, even though 86 of them were cleared for release by the interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established just after taking office in 2009.

TD Blog Interview with Carlos Warner

The Talking Dog, April 4, 2013

Carlos Warner is an attorney with the Office of the Federal Defender for the Northern District of Ohio, and represents approximately twelve men currently detained at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. On April 1, 2013, I had the privilege of interviewing him by telephone. What follows are my interview notes, as corrected by Mr. Warner.

The Talking Dog: Where were you on September 11th, 2001?

Carlos Warner: I was in my office in Cleveland. I had a friend in the FBI visiting from New York. He commandeered my office and he set up a mini-command centre. There were 3 or 4 agents in my office during the hours after the attack. We watched in horror together on a small television we found in the office. The city was evacuated; rumors abounded that there was an attack planned or underway in just about every large American city, including Cleveland.

In our case, Flight 93 happened to fly right over Cleveland — so there was heightened fear. I looked outside my office and I remember seeing an endless string of planes lined up in the sky to land and I expected that one of these planes might crash into the City. Because of the panic, the areas around Cleveland were completely gridlocked — nothing moved for hours. Instead of fighting the gridlock, I went out for a run with two other public defenders Walter Camino and Jack Greene through an abandoned city; it was surreal on many levels.

The Talking Dog: Please identify your present GTMO-detained client or clients by name, nationality, and age, and anything else of interest about them, or about what you know about events at Guantánamo, particularly the hunger strike?

Carlos Warner: We represent eleven men still there, plus the Kuwaiti Fayiz al-Kandari, whose case is complete, although Fayiz has requested that I represent him.

The majority of our clients were assigned to us by the Court through “next friend petitions” dating from 2007 and 2008; almost all of those clients were Yemeni. Over the years we were assigned other clients as well, including a Kenyan, Abdulmalik and a Tunisian, Adel Hakeemy who was recently rumored to have attempted suicide. I also represent a “high value detainee” — Mohammed Rahim. Our present clients are as follows:

1. Abdul Al Rahman Al Ziahri AKA Abdurahman LNU v. Obama, et al.

09-cv-745 (formerly 05-cv-2386), ISN 441; Judge Richard J. Leon (RJL)

2. Monsoor Muhammed Ali Qattaa v. Obama, et al., 08-cv-1233, ISN 566

Judge Ellen Huvelle (ESH)

[cleared for release]

3. Abdulkhaliq Ahmed Al-Baidhani v. Obama, et. al., 04-cv-1194, ISN 553

Judge Thomas Hogan (TFH)

[cleared for release]

4. Muhammed Rahim v. Obama, et al, 09-cv-1385, ISN 10029, Judge Paul Friedman (PLF)

5. Mohammed Abdulmalik v. Obama, et al, 08-cv-1440, ISN 10025

Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly

6. Nadir Omar Abdullah Bin Sa’adoun Alsa’ary aka Ahmed Omar v. Obama, et al

09-cv-745, ISN 30, Judge Richard J. Leon (RJL) as of 6/16/10

7. Jamil Ahmed Saeed v. Bush, et al, 05-cv-2386, ISN 728

Judge Royce Lamberth (RCL)

8. Abdulah Alhamiri v. Bush, et al. (dismissed), 08-cv-1231, ISN 48

Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly

[released July 2008]

9. Khalid Saad Mohammed v. Obama, et al. (Released 6-15-09), 08-cv-1230

ISN 335, Judge Rosemary Collyer (RMC)

10. Idris Ahamed Abdu Qader Idris AKA Edress LNU v. Obama, et al. (dismissed)

09-cv-745 (formerly 05-cv-2386), ISN 35, Judge Royce Lamberth (RCL)

[cleared for release]

11. Muieen Adeen Jamal Adeen Abd Al Fusal Abd Al Sattar v. Obama, et al. (dismissed)

08-cv-1236, ISN 309, Judge John Bates (JDB)

[cleared for release]

12. Adel Al Hakeemy v. Obama, et al (dismissed), 05-cv-429, ISN 168

Judge Richard Leon (RJL)

[cleared for release]

The Talking Dog: Please tell me the status of the pending habeas cases.

Carlos Warner: We have a mix of men cleared for transfer or release and some who are not. In my view, there is no meaningful habeas corpus review. It’s an empty vessel for the men. “Habeas Corpus” only allows for me to visit them. The District Court is not to blame, it’s the Circuit Court that has actively dismantled meaningful habeas corpus review. The Supreme Court has passively watched meaningful review disappear. I view my charge as to obtain the release of my clients from Guantánamo — even though I am technically assigned as habeas counsel.

The Talking Dog: Can you please tell me the last time you visited your clients at Guantánamo, and can you describe the circumstances of your visit. If you could, can you contrast that visit with what you found at earlier visits, including the condition of your clients, the restrictions on you as counsel and on your clients during your visit, the condition in which you found your clients, and anything else you believe relevant.

Carlos Warner: I believe I’ve been to Guantánamo more than thirty times. And I’ve been there twice since the hunger strike began on February 6th, I’ve had notes cleared discussing the strike on both occasions. I was last down the week of March 18th. I’ve stated this many times — seeing him (Fayiz) was a stark and incredible sight; I can only describe him as near death. He lost between a quarter and a third of his body weight. He couldn’t stand, his cheeks were sunken. He had labored breathing. Fayiz appeared to be nearing death when I saw him. I made the focus of my meeting pleading with him to take honey. I told him I could not help him if he was dead. He was polite and kind in refusing nourishment.

The Talking Dog: Can you tell me if your clients are participating in the present hunger strike, and whether they have participated in prior hunger strikes?

Carlos Warner: Besides Fayiz, we believe that all, or almost all, of our clients are on hunger strike. This estimate is based upon the various reports we are getting from the camps.

The reports we received as of yesterday (March 31, 2013) are that 130 out of the 166 or so total prisoners are on hunger strike. We believe that the 16 “high value detainees” are not on hunger strike. We believe that two prisoners in Camp 6 are not striking. Then, there are a number of individuals either in the hospital or in different camps who are unknown, plus a few in the psychiatric ward.

All of the reports we are getting out of Camps 5 and 6 explain that the entire population is on strike, which takes us to approximately 130 men.

The Talking Dog: What’s the source of these reports — attorneys? Journalists?

Carlos Warner: Our reports are from attorneys although I pay close attention to reports in the media. Every attorney has made a concerted effort to talk to their clients, and the reports we have been getting from counsel have been uniform in their accuracy. The big open question was Camp 5. We have now had a number of reports out of Camp 5. Clive Stafford Smith spoke to Shaker Aamer recently [and also see here], and that conversation confirmed again that all of Camp 5 is on strike. 130 is our count, and it could be more, up to 135, 136.

This strike is unprecedented in scale and duration. Guantánamo has never experienced anything like this. I no longer pay attention to the military numbers. We have a huge problem in Guantánamo and I am focused on getting the clients to eat again.

The Talking Dog: Can you give me the “Cliff Notes” version of what triggered this hunger strike and how it has progressed?

Carlos Warner: What I’m telling you is all declassified by the Department of Defense. It seems to have been triggered on February 6, 2013, by a particularly aggressive shakedown search. At GTMO, the Army took over management from the Navy some time last year, in terms of day to day management of the prison. The Army appointed a Colonel who had served in Iraq, who decided to “lay down the law” at the camp. One thing he chose to do is use more aggressive searches of the men and their belongings. Another example of the aggressive stance of the new command was the shooting in early January. This sort of aggressive interaction was previously unheard of at GTMO; but apparently it’s the new normal for the new regime. It sparked the fire that is fueled by the desperation of indefinite detention.

And so on February 6, 2013, during the complete prison shakedown, the guards took everything away from the prisoners, all “comfort items” — the iso-mats (yoga mats that the prisoners sleep on), family pictures and family and legal mail, supposedly “just to check it out.” And the guards, or specifically Muslim interpreters, with soldiers looking on, went through the prisoners’ Korans supposedly searching for contraband.

I met with Fayiz on February 13th, and he told me about the situation at that time. At that time, prisoners told the military that they would prefer not to have the Korans at all rather than have the military engage in this behavior, which the prisoners perceived as an affront. The men indicated they would not eat again in response to these recent events.

The last hunger strike took place in ’06/’07, and was in response to similar shakedowns and also the purported suicide of several detainees. The men were allowed to surrender their Korans during that time. The demand has remained consistent: if the prisoners are permitted to surrender their Korans, the hunger strike would end. Period. The military has now refused to allow the men to voluntarily surrender the Koran. I cannot imagine the logic behind this decision. I have come to realize logic is a precious commodity in GTMO.

As I see it, and as I’ve tried to convey to my own clients, they don’t need the hunger strike for attention; after all, if they kill themselves what’s the point? I and my colleagues can win this fight because we’re motivated and correct — and we don’t need or want our clients to die in the process. However, the men are committed to this and their solidarity is growing. If the conflict stays in the current direction, it’s going to end in men dying.

The Talking Dog: Does the Department of Defense know this, and if the answer is yes, what has the response been?

Carlos Warner: All of what I have told you has been conveyed to the Department of Defense; they are aware of this. We have received no response, at all. In the press they have called the surrender of the Koran an “unacceptable solution.” Again, logic is a precious commodity and it is wholly lacking in the DoD’s position on this conflict.

The Talking Dog: Can you comment on media coverage, in particular, of events at Guantánamo in calendar year 2013, and previously, and in particular, with respect to your own clients and representation?

Carlos Warner: The media is a fickle animal. I get that. I think about the 86 innocent men (so found by a unanimous inter-agency task force) every day. Our problem is that GTMO has slipped to the distant background. One reason is that the Administration has no pressure on it is that the Left is satisfied with President Obama’s pat answer of “it’s Congress’s fault” and the Right is satisfied with the idea of holding innocent men at GTMO under the auspices of the war on terror. Neither the Left or Right fully comprehend that the majority of men in Guantánamo are innocent and should be released. The public still believes GTMO holds the worst of the worst. This falsehood must be attacked at every opportunity for those of us who have the ability to do so.

We as legal representatives are at best a loosely associated bunch … and so there has been no organized coverage. We have a difficult time agreeing on the format of an agenda let alone the agenda itself. I am willing to accept responsibility for this. GTMO has always been a political and diplomatic problem and we as counsel should attack the problem in a selfless and unified manner.

The bottom line is no one leaves GTMO until pressure is applied to the President. The status quo will result in all of the men remaining there at least until this President leaves office. The public, of course, has absolutely no conception that we are holding so many innocent men because it doesn’t help the President or the Right to publicize that fact of innocent people being wrongfully detained. The general public simply views GTMO as something that it is not.

The Talking Dog: Is there anything else I should have asked you, or anything else the public needs to know about GTMO, indefinite detention and related issues and what’s going on there?

Carlos Warner: Indefinite detention applies to everyone at GTMO now. That’s what’s driving the hunger strike. Now, is this a problem without a solution? Certainly not. With the President’s support, we could have many innocent men repatriated in 6 to 7 months. There is already $40 million rehabilitation center in Kuwait built specifically for returning GTMO detainees. This center was built under the supervision of the United States for this specific purpose. There is a similar facility in Saudi Arabia. Both are ready and available. Indeed, today (April 1, 2013) the government of Yemen said that it wants its own detainees returned.

Our President must reaffirm what he said he would do in 2009. My President is the philosophical and moral opposite to Dick Cheney and his Neocon Clan. President Obama once announced that Guantánamo “set back the moral authority that is America’s strongest currency in the world.”

President Obama spoke in front of a copy of the Constitution when he said: ”I can tell you that the wrong answer is to pretend like this problem will go away if we maintain an unsustainable status quo,” Obama said. “As president, I refuse to allow this problem to fester. Our security interests won’t permit it. Our courts won’t allow it. And neither should our conscience.” He must reaffirm this pledge now.

This is his choice — there is no legal or political impediment to closing Guantánamo. It’s not a question of politics, its a question of morals, values and the will to do what’s right. I choose to believe my President will do what is right.

The Talking Dog: I join all of my readers in thanking Mr. Warner for that eye-opening interview.

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.

Fog, Prison and the Sea: Photos of the Isle of Portland at Night

Fog, Prison and the Sea: The Isle of Portland at Night, a set on Flickr.

Last week, I was in Dorset for a four-day holiday with my family, staying in a rather magical, liminal place — Chiswell, a little village on the eastern end of Chesil Beach, on the Isle of Portland.

Chesil Beach is one of the great natural features of the UK, a shingle beach (technically a barrier beach), which is 18 miles long (29 km), 660 feet wide (200 m) and 50 feet (15 m) high, and staying there was a wonderful break from the frenetic, jangling polyrhythms of modern life, one in which the beach, the sea, the sky — and the changing weather patterns — were completely riveting, and pretty much all that was needed for a glimpse of the kind of stripped-down, old-school existence that those of us old enough to recall the pre-mobile, pre-computer age ought to remember, although many seem to have forgotten.

We were staying in a converted former chapel and former fishermen’s store, where the men used to sit around mending nets, as boys ran errands, hoping to be chosen to go out to sea. The cottage is right by the shoreline, and in my first set I posted photos from our first day, on and around the beach and the seashore. Later, we drove to Weymouth for fish and chips, and then, with a wonderfully atmospheric fog descending, we drove back to Portland and up the steep road to the summit, where we encountered the Verne Citadel, a former fortress that is now a prison, which loomed out of the fog like Azkaban in the Harry Potter books. We then drove on to Portland Bill, where the famous lighthouse was illuminating the night, while huge waves crashed endlessly offshore in the blue hour before darkness fell, and returned to Chiswell and its neighbour, Fortuneswell, both illuminated with what appeared be hundreds of tiny lights.

It was all like some sort of strange dream, in which the supposedly mundane becomes enchanted, and I hope to have captured something of it in this set of photos, posted as a contrast to the set I published yesterday, of Margaret Thatcher’s funeral in London (and see the commentary here).

There’ll be more Dorset photos along soon, and I also hope that I’ll soon have time to resume posting photos of London as part of my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike, which I began almost a year ago. To date, I have posted around 1,700 photos from this project, although I have over 10,000 more awaiting publication here, and also in other forms — hopefully through books and exhibitions. Watch this space for further information!

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.

“Kindness is Better than Greed”: Photos, and a Response to Margaret Thatcher on the Day of Her Funeral

“Kindness is Better than Greed”: A Response to Margaret Thatcher on the Day of Her Funeral, a set on Flickr.

To paraphrase William Shakespeare, I came to bury Margaret Thatcher, not to praise her. However, due to a hospital appointment, I missed the procession and only arrived at St. Paul’s Cathedral after the funeral service, when the guests were leaving, although I was in time to take a few photos as reminders of the day when the woman was laid to rest who, during my lifetime, did more than any other individual to wreck the country that is my home.

My most fervent hope is that I will live to see Margaret Thatcher’s legacy overturned, and for a caring, inclusive society to replace the one based on greed, selfishness and cruelty that was her malignant gift to the people of Britain.

Since her death last week, I have largely avoided the sickening attempts by the Tories to use it for political gain, although I was absolutely delighted that their insistence on providing a lavish funeral at taxpayers’ expense backfired, because only 25 percent of the public thought that a state funeral was appropriate, and 60 percent opposed it.

I have no time for anyone praising Margaret Thatcher for anything, and I have been thinking about this on and off for the last nine days, avoiding the praise from the rich and powerful people who benefited enormously from her leadership, and the craven supplication of the many establishment liberals who should know better, but who, it turns out, also bought into the agenda of selfishness and greed that, of course, was enthusiastically embraced by New Labour in 1997.

For 34 years, since Thatcher came to power, selfishness has replaced the common good, and greed has become the only reference point for the value of existence. Much of this — most of it, in fact — was facilitated by Margaret Thatcher, even though it has been enthusiastically continued by all her successors — John Major, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and David Cameron and George Osborne.

I remember a time when there was more to life than greed, and much of that was in the world that Margaret Thatcher devoted her energies to destroying. This world contained industries that had helped to shape Britain as a world power — coal mining, steel and shipbuilding — and communities across the country that depended on these industries. Supporters of Thatcher claim that the destruction (which started with the miners in 1984) was necessary because the unions were engaged in a war with the state, and while there is some truth to this, the damage caused by killing off Britain’s industries rather than finding a way of negotiating with the unions was destructive on a totally unjustifiable scale, a bonfire of our assets, and a death sentence for communities around the country — and millions of people — that have never recovered.

That is unforgivable, but it was just one small part of her crimes. I chronicled her war on the travellers, festival-goers and green activists in my book The Battle of the Beanfield (also see here), and I also mentioned her war on the women of Greenham Common, who were opposed to Britain becoming an outpost for American nuclear weapons in my book Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion.

In addition, of course, Thatcher sold off council houses, a move that some people regard as empowering, although there was never any need for people given an affordable home to rent, for life, to get into the property-owning world. The sell-off not only ended up fuelling a rise in house prices (with ex-council houses as the new entry level for first-time buyers), but was also part of an attempt to discredit social housing as a valid form of housing, which Thatcher reinforced, to devastating effect, by banning councils from building any new homes — a policy that her successors also continued, including New Labour, whose love of the housing market disgracefully engineered an epidemic of almost uncontrolled greed that defined Casino Britain from 1997 to 2008.

Moreover, Thatcher was also responsible for selling off Britain’s privatised utilities, transferring power to the rich and powerful, while fooling people into thinking that a quick profit as shareholders was a fair exchange for being fleeced for the rest of their lives by private companies and corporations — many of whom, of course, were foreign and took their profits abroad, as did the companies that started an orgy of outsourcing, in search of easy profit, during the Thatcher years. In addition, she attempted to introduce a tax on existence, regardless of the individual’s income, via the Poll Tax (the “Community Charge”), which backfired horribly, and, through widespread non-payment, the jailing of little old ladies and the infamous Poll Tax Riot of March 31, 1990, led partly to her political demise later that year after eleven and a half grindingly long years in power.

Furthermore, Thatcher’s deregulation of Britain’s financial markets, in 1986, opened the doors on a feeding frenzy of greed that led directly to the global economic crash of 2008 — with help from the deregulation of the banks by Blair and Brown and President Clinton between 1997 and 1999 — and this baleful legacy is one that is particularly crippling right now for the ordinary people of Britain, as the true villains go unpunished, and our current malignant politicians — Thatcher’s heirs — seek suicidally to destroy the state to protect the true criminals — the ones initially liberated by Thatcher — from being held accountable.

The ordinary people of Britain — and particularly those who are poor, ill, unemployed or disabled — are being savaged by cuts imposed for malignant ideological reasons by Thatcher’s brutal successors David Cameron, George Osborne and the rest of their heartless colleagues, and in London, moreover, these problems are exacerbated by the capital’s continued existence as a swollen housing bubble, driven by speculators and foreign investors.

There is more, much more to despise about Margaret Thatcher — her war in the Falklands, her monstrous support for the mass-murdering scumbag Pinochet, her love of the racist South African regime, her hatred of gay people, but this was only meant to be a send-off for the wretched woman, and not a full-blown treatise.

Goodbye, Margaret. I always took it personally, and you always absolutely epitomised everything I loathe about Little England and the hardhearted, greedy bigots who love to inflict misery on their fellow citizens. You will not be missed.

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.

“People Are Dying Here,” Shaker Aamer Reports from Guantánamo, As Petition Calling for His Release Secures 100,000 Signatures

Please write urgent emails calling for the return of Shaker Aamer from Guantánamo to foreign secretary William Hague and to Alistair Burt, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office. Supporters are also encouraged to sign the international petition for Shaker on the Care 2 Petition Site.

Last Friday was a great day for campaigning in the UK, as the hard work of numerous activists resulted in success for an e-petition to the British government that was launched a year ago. The petition, which called on the British government to “undertake urgent new initiatives to achieve the immediate transfer of Shaker Aamer to the UK from continuing indefinite detention in Guantánamo Bay,” secured 100,000 signatures, making it eligible for a Parliamentary debate. Shaker is the last British resident still held in Guantánamo, and has been held for over 11 years, while his family waits patiently for his return in south London.

On the e-petition (which currently has over 110,000 signatures, and can be signed until April 20), the government department dealing with it notes, “As this e-petition has received more than 100 000 signatures, on 15 April 2013 the Leader of the House of Commons passed this petition to the House of Commons Backbench Business Committee to consider for debate.” Further information about the Committee, including how they handle e-petitions, can be found here.

It is to be hoped that the government will not try to worm their way out of discussing Shaker’s case in Parliament, as it is intolerable that he has not yet been returned to his family, given that he was cleared for release under President Bush in 2007, and again under President Obama in 2009.

The government’s permanent excuse — that it is up to the Americans — has never been acceptable, given the close relationship between both countries, and right now it is even more unacceptable than ever, not just because of the show of support for Shaker from 100,000 British people, but also because of the prison-wide hunger strike in Guantánamo, now in its third month, in which Shaker is involved.

Last week, I publicised Shaker’s plight in an article entitled, “From Guantánamo, Shaker Aamer Tells His Lawyer Disturbing Truths About the Hunger Strike,” in which I posted an account of a phone conversation with Shaker by Clive Stafford Smith, one of his attorneys (and the director of the London-based legal action charity Reprieve), and at the weekend, I’m relieved to report, the Guardian and the Independent both picked up on Shaker’s story, publishing articles drawing on Shaker’s latest statement via Clive — although the circumstances in which they featured Shaker’s story are alarming, as he is evidently suffering the more the hunger strike continues, and his health has deteriorated in just the last two weeks.

The full text of the statement is below.

Clive Stafford Smith’s Statement Recounting His Phone Conversation with Shaker Aamer, April 11, 2013

On Thursday, April 11, 2013, at approximately 9am EST, I spent sixty minutes on an unclassified phonecall with my client Shaker Aamer, whose Internment Serial Number is 239. We spent most of the phonecall on the subject of the hungerstrike.

Shaker gave me an account of much of what is happening. However, we were only allowed to talk for sixty minutes, and it would have taken much longer to conclude what he had to say.

Shaker said he was very willing to appear as a witness before Judge Hogan [on Monday April 5, in the District Court in Washington D.C., where he was hearing an emergency appeal for relief, in which another prisoner, Musa'ab al-Madhwani, asserted that the guards are displaying 'deliberate indifference' to the medical needs of strikers by denying them clean water to drink -- an appeal that the judge turned down].

I set forth my notes on our conversation on this subject below. When I use quotes, that is a direct or very close reconstruction of what Shaker actually said. My notes are much more accurate in this account than others, as I set up the phone so I could type almost verbatim notes. Despite this I regret that I have not, given the time constraints, been able to check my notes and my memory with my client, but I am confident that my notes are as accurate as I could reasonably manage.

Shaker began by telling me that nobody told him about the impending call. He was woken up shortly before nine am and hustled over. As a result, he did not have the materials he needed.

Shaker was not allowed writing implements for some time, so he was unable to take notes of things, but another prisoner on his block has been taking notes for him where necessary. “I was going to bring it all with me. My brother across the hall has been registering all the things when I have had no pen, no paper, no books, no medical materials …”

Shaker did get paper yesterday [April 10] for the first time in a while, but did not know that there was a call today (he was not given the 24 hours notice that he is meant to get). So he had not done up notes, and did not have the chance to get what the other detainee had done for him.

The authorities are making it harder for prisoners to work with their lawyers. In addition to failing to follow their own procedures in telling the detainees in advance when they are getting calls, “they have brought a new humiliation transportation van.” Shaker describes how the bench is high and ceiling is low so that you have to crouch near your knee to get in there. The whole van is blacked out so he can see nothing. “It is for midgets. The only human being who could sit in there is someone who is four feet tall.” Shaker states that this is bad for the guards as well, as they are big people. The van has freezing air conditioning and neon lights.

Shaker is being punished as a consequence of his calls with his lawyers. “Each phonecall [from a lawyer] is a curse,” Shaker said. “I receive harsh treatment that day. As soon as I came back various things change. They hear what I am saying to you and use that against me to make things worse. That is the sad thing about the phonecalls.”

Shaker reported being FCE’d (subjected to a Forcible Cell Extraction) for almost everything now. “On [April] the 8th, there were 20 FCE’s in the whole of Camp V, and three of them were me.”

Shaker was FCE’d when he demanded his legal materials back. “After my last call with you, my lawyer, they took everything. I took rec that day as I had not been there for a while. When I came back in everything had been thrown in the cell, like garbage. Papers were all over the floor.” They had taken everything in Shaker’s cell, his legal materials, his other documents, “even my kids’ drawings. They ripped them off the wall.”

“They took all my medical stuff.” The guards took his two isomats, his pillow, his ‘donut’ that the doctors ordered for him to sit on his hemorroids, his back brace and so forth.

“I was complaining. The guard said it was not him [who did it]. I tried to collect the papers together, but lots of things were missing. I complained to the SJA who said ‘I will see what I can do.’ Then they FCE’d me and brought some things back to me.”

When supposedly everything had been returned, Shaker noticed pages missing from his legal documents and so forth. “The SJA came back and said: ‘They [the guards] say they took nothing.’ The SJA asked what was missing. How can I tell precisely what they took? There were 3000 pages.” However, Shaker went on to describe how pages were missing on numbered documents (it would go 1, 2 and then be missing 3 and so forth).

Shaker is being FCE’d for water. “For three days now if I say I want more water — they FCE me just to give me water. The first day I got FCE’d three times and Code Yellow two times [when Shaker fell down unconscious]. Not even General Miller did this during ‘Miller Time.’”

They are FCE’ing Shaker for essentially everything. Yesterday [April 10] is an example. “They FCE’d me at 2pm to bring in lunch.” This, even though Shaker was on hunger strike and was not going to eat it.

“I asked for thiamine and 60ml honey [and other medications], as the doctor said it was necessary. They FCE’d me. The Corpsman came in. ‘You FCE’d me for medication?’ [Shaker demanded.] The Corpsman said, ‘That’s the only way they will let you have it.’”

“They would not take the lunch away. They left it until dinner time.” This is apparently torturous for Shaker since he is on hunger strike and they are just trying to make him have food in his cell for hours.

Shaker asked for water. “They would not bring water until dinner time.”

Then: “They FCE’d me last night at 9.45pm to bring the dinner inside, even though I was not eating.”

Shaker has had almost no water for 24 hours as they would not bring water. “The nurse registered this. I made a declaration to the nurse.” Shaker reports that she has no number; the guards, corpsmen and nurses now use what appear to be pseudonyms which Shaker thinks are Shakespearean names. This makes it impossible for him to identify them.

Shaker reports that nurses and corpsmen are saying they can do nothing about water as that is for the guards. Shaker told them he is a trained nurse, and showed them the froth on his saliva, and asked: “What does it mean?” They told him to drink from a sink. They said it is potable. Shaker won’t drink it. “Look at the color of the water.”

[Note: I told Shaker that I have a recent photograph of one of the sinks at Guantánamo -- where lawyers stay, rather than in the camps -- which says clearly above it:

“Non-Potable Water

Please do not consume

Safe for washing”

I will enclose it with this declaration.]

Shaker said he would sue them all when he gets out. However, they are not intimidated by this because he is unable to identify them. [Note that the agreement from several years ago was that the staff would wear numbers for precisely this reason -- so that the prisoners could bring complaints against those who violate their rights.]

Shaker reports that he has only been able to drink a sip of water since last evening.

Shaker has been refusing blood tests, the heart EKG, and so forth. He would have to accept being FCE’d to have this kind of testing at the moment anyway.

The guards told Shaker that they would FCE him if he wants to go to Rec.

“I have not showered for more than 9 days. They say they are busy. I will have to do it from the toilet as I was forced to one time before.”

Shaker is losing weight faster now than before. “In 11 days, I have lost more weight than before and I am around 150 lbs.” Shaker believes that the stress from being FCE’d so much is making him drop weight fast.

Shaker reports that he is not able to get medical attention without being beaten up. “239! Do you need medical attention, 239?” says the corpsman.

“I ask for water; you bring me FCE,” Shaker replies. “I ask you for food; you bring me FCE. I ask you for rec; you bring me FCE. I ask you for medication; you bring me FCE.”

Every time the FCE team (or even the medical Code Yellow team) come into his cell Shaker is getting injured. “I am getting scared because one of the guards stepped on my foot yesterday. I have bruises all over. The guy yesterday did not do it intentionally, they came running, it is a cell for disabled people, it is very tight. They fall on me, as I lie on the floor.”

“I have bruises on my legs, knee, my arms where they carry me, as there is still no board. If we were on Skype you could see them. I think I bruise more easily now because I am not eating.”

I asked Shaker how he feels through all this FCE mistreatment. “There is the tramp to the door, they smack the door … even if you are used to it, your adrenaline rushes, your heart starts beating. I know that something is going to happen to me, it’s scary. It is like a car race going 180 miles an hour, with a wall in front of you, you know that the brake might not work, you panic.”

“I can’t read. I am dizzy and I fall down all the time. I do not call them, as it is humiliating. When they call Code Yellow, they step on your fingers, your hands, they scratch you, even then you are living in fear when they say they are treating you. Yesterday they tied me on the board and they threw me in a cell because the medical people were busy. So they only took me to another cell. You are lucky if you get a medical space.”

Shaker reports that Code Yellows (when a prisoner collapses or passes out) in Camp V are now running at 10 to 15 times a day.

“My back and my neck are getting worse day by day. I don’t want the end of this torture here to be paralyzed. I want to carry my kids when I get home; I don’t want my kids to have to wash me. I don’t want to be the third one paralyzed in this place.”

I asked Shaker what effect it was having on him mentally to be hungry all the time. He described the hunger in general terms and then got more specific. “I try to go to sleep early in the night. Then you feel as if you have just died. I wake up at 5am to prepare for prayers. I have not had any rest, I feel I just went to sleep and was immediately woken up. I pray around 5.30am and then try to go back to sleep. I stay trying to sleep until they wake me up again just before 9am.”

Shaker noted that he is still in the very noisy cell next to the guards [as described in detail in my declaration concerning my last conversation with him]. The guards have orders to do this. “I know the guards who try to be human beings, and they tell me that they cannot do anything.”

There are other ways in which Shaker and others are being kept from sleeping [in addition to what he described in my last conversation with him]. “Nobody has an earpiece any more. We live in the radio traffic now, with constant loud commands coming over the radios, loud and clear all over the camp [Camp V]. This did not happen during Miller Time.”

“For a whole week one female guard bothered us during the prayer. Before prayer we ask them to shut their radios, and so forth. But they carry on talking, pushing things around. But there is nothing left to us but our prayers.”

Shaker reports that the physical conditions are bad, perhaps exacerbated by the weak conditions of the prisoners on hunger strike. “In the night people are dying from cold. In the day they are dying from the heat. People cry from the heat and the humidity. I could not put the prayer schedule on the wall because it was so damp. It is systematic torture.”

Shaker is not yet being force fed. He reports that the Administration are not doing force feeding to a number of people who have lost a lot of weight. Some people who are no more than 100 or 104 lbs are not being fed. “One detainee has lost 55 lbs, more than 25 percent of his weight, and they told him that he is now looking good.”

Shaker would like to send several messages to President Obama:

“If you are an honest man, send the same team as you sent down as a committee [to assess who should be cleared] to meet the detainees now and see what is really happening. The people visiting are mostly from the Department of Defense, and they are all seeing something like a movie [to make things look good]. No prisoners can talk to the visitors.”
“You need to hand over the 86 people who have been cleared.”
“You need to send a team from the UN. If you are not scared of what they will see, get someone to come in. Or send someone from your closest ally — England. They will be shocked and horrified to see the situation.”
“In the end this place has no solution except close it down, or transfer it to the UN and let them run this place. Or send all of us to the Hague for trial in the International Criminal Court. Say, ‘239 agrees to go to the ICC in the Hague’. They will laugh [at the Hague] because they know I am not a criminal.”

Shaker instructed me to write a letter immediately to the British government concerning his treatment. He said he is going to refuse everything, if he is required to be beaten up by the FCE team to get it. “I am not taking more water or medication if they FCE me each time. I will take it if they want to give it to me correctly and fairly. But I would rather die one time, than die fifty times.”

Shaker coughed really badly twice during our phonecall — he reports that he now has a chest infection that is making his other medical complaints worse. Also, on two occasions Shaker started laughing hysterically, which prompted my concern. At the end of our conversation, he appeared to be crying, or very close to crying, which is very unusual for Shaker, for he is a proud man who does not like to show weakness. However, it was clear that he genuinely fears dying in Guantánamo now, and he made me promise to deliver a message to his wife if the worst comes to the worst, and he does not see her again.

“It’s hard to keep calm. They are killing us, so it is hard to keep calm. It is hard to understand what they are doing or why.”

“No matter how much I show you I am tough, in reality I am dying inside. If you want us to die, leave us alone. But they do not want us to die, and they do not want us to live like a human being. What is worse than that?”

“I might die this time. I cannot give you numbers and names, but people are dying here. I cannot give you the details.” He said that when he has paper he will try to write this down and send it to me in a letter [though this can take weeks to get to me].

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.

A Voice from Guantánamo: Samir Moqbel, a Hunger Striker Brutally Force-Fed Every Day

With the prison-wide hunger strike at Guantánamo now in its third month, it is encouraging that so much of the mainstream media is paying close attention to the story, maintaining pressure on the Obama administration to do something about it — most obviously by securing the release of the 86 men (out of 166 in total), who were cleared for release by an inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established when he took office in 2009, just after he had issued his executive order promising to close the prison within a year.

Despite that promise, the men have actually been abandoned by all three branches of the US government. President Obama bears huge responsibility, for having imposed a blanket ban, three years ago, on releasing any cleared Yemenis, in the wake of a failed bomb plot that originated in Yemen, and Congress has also imposed almost insurmountable restrictions on the release of prisoners.

The hunger strike seems to have pricked the conscience of the mainstream media, who, for the most part, had lost interest in Guantánamo and the men abandoned by President Obama and used as pawns in a cynical political game by Congress, and I’m relieved that this is the case, because I believe that only sustained pressure — both domestic and international — can persuade President Obama and lawmakers to wake up to the horrors of their indifference and their cynicism.

Yesterday, the New York Times published an op-ed by Samir Moqbel, one of the 166 prisoners still held, who has been on a hunger strike since it began, and is currently being force-fed. Samir was able to tell his story because he was allowed to talk on the phone to his lawyers — at the London-based legal action charity, Reprieve — and the normal censorship rules that apply to the lawyers’ written notes, do not apply to phone calls.

Samir’s story has been attracting significant attention since its publication, and I’m cross-posting it below not only because of its importance in and of itself, but also because of Samir’s particular circumstances. Although 86 prisoners have been cleared for release, only 56 have been identified. Samir, however, isn’t one of the 56, even though anyone looking at his story objectively would realise that he is completely insignificant.

As I explained when I told his story two and half years ago:

Moqbel (also identified as Samir Mukbel) stated that he was tricked by a friend, who told him he would find a job in Afghanistan. “He told me I would like it in Afghanistan and I could live a better life than in Yemen,” he said in a hearing at Guantánamo. “I thought Afghanistan was a rich country but when I got there I found out different … it was all destroyed with poverty and destruction. I found there was no basis for getting a job there.” His lawyers at Reprieve explained that he “is the eldest son of seven brothers and five sisters, and as the eldest son, is the family breadwinner,” and added that he was enticed by the false prospect of “more jobs and better salaries” in Afghanistan because, at the time, he “was working in a factory in Yemen earning just $50 a month.”

In Guantánamo, in response to allegations that he was a bodyguard for bin Laden, and that he fought with the Taliban in various locations, he stated, “These accusations make you laugh. These accusations are like a movie. Me, a bodyguard for bin Laden, then do operations against Americans and Afghanis and make trips in Afghanistan? I don’t believe any human being could do all these things … This is me? I have watched a lot of American movies like Rambo and Superman, but I believe that I am better than them. I went to Pakistan and Afghanistan a month before the Americans got there … How can a person do all these operations in only a month?”

Samir is probably one of 30 Yemeni prisoners assigned to “conditional detention” by President Obama’s task force, on the basis that they should only be released when the security situation in Yemen improves, even though no indication was given as to how this decision would be made.

I’ve always found that this invented category was an unacceptable basis for holding these 30 men, although since then, of course, all the other cleared Yemenis — and, in fact, almost everyone still held in Guantánamo — has ended up indefinitely detained, whether by accident or design.

I fervently hope that the mainstream media, who have finally remembered Guantánamo, also fully comprehend how unacceptable this situation is, and that they continue to publicize the horrors of the indefinite detention to which the prisoners have been condemned, which will last until their deaths unless President Obama and Congress take action.

Samir Moqbel’s story is one that needs to be publicized, as widely as possible, to exert significant pressure on President Obama and on lawmakers, to get them to do what is needed to bring this intolerable situation to an end, by releasing prisoners, and not, as happened over the weekend, by resorting to violence to try to break the strike.

Gitmo Is Killing Me

By Samir Naji al-Hasan Moqbel, New York Times, April 14, 2013

One man here weighs just 77 pounds. Another, 98. Last thing I knew, I weighed 132, but that was a month ago.

I’ve been on a hunger strike since Feb. 10 and have lost well over 30 pounds. I will not eat until they restore my dignity.

I’ve been detained at Guantánamo for 11 years and three months. I have never been charged with any crime. I have never received a trial.

I could have been home years ago — no one seriously thinks I am a threat — but still I am here. Years ago the military said I was a “guard” for Osama bin Laden, but this was nonsense, like something out of the American movies I used to watch. They don’t even seem to believe it anymore. But they don’t seem to care how long I sit here, either.

When I was at home in Yemen, in 2000, a childhood friend told me that in Afghanistan I could do better than the $50 a month I earned in a factory, and support my family. I’d never really traveled, and knew nothing about Afghanistan, but I gave it a try.

I was wrong to trust him. There was no work. I wanted to leave, but had no money to fly home. After the American invasion in 2001, I fled to Pakistan like everyone else. The Pakistanis arrested me when I asked to see someone from the Yemeni Embassy. I was then sent to Kandahar, and put on the first plane to Gitmo.

Last month, on March 15, I was sick in the prison hospital and refused to be fed. A team from the E.R.F. (Extreme Reaction Force), a squad of eight military police officers in riot gear, burst in. They tied my hands and feet to the bed. They forcibly inserted an IV into my hand. I spent 26 hours in this state, tied to the bed. During this time I was not permitted to go to the toilet. They inserted a catheter, which was painful, degrading and unnecessary. I was not even permitted to pray.

I will never forget the first time they passed the feeding tube up my nose. I can’t describe how painful it is to be force-fed this way. As it was thrust in, it made me feel like throwing up. I wanted to vomit, but I couldn’t. There was agony in my chest, throat and stomach. I had never experienced such pain before. I would not wish this cruel punishment upon anyone.

I am still being force-fed. Two times a day they tie me to a chair in my cell. My arms, legs and head are strapped down. I never know when they will come. Sometimes they come during the night, as late as 11 p.m., when I’m sleeping.

There are so many of us on hunger strike now that there aren’t enough qualified medical staff members to carry out the force-feedings; nothing is happening at regular intervals. They are feeding people around the clock just to keep up.

During one force-feeding the nurse pushed the tube about 18 inches into my stomach, hurting me more than usual, because she was doing things so hastily. I called the interpreter to ask the doctor if the procedure was being done correctly or not.

It was so painful that I begged them to stop feeding me. The nurse refused to stop feeding me. As they were finishing, some of the “food” spilled on my clothes. I asked them to change my clothes, but the guard refused to allow me to hold on to this last shred of my dignity.

When they come to force me into the chair, if I refuse to be tied up, they call the E.R.F. team. So I have a choice. Either I can exercise my right to protest my detention, and be beaten up, or I can submit to painful force-feeding.

The only reason I am still here is that President Obama refuses to send any detainees back to Yemen. This makes no sense. I am a human being, not a passport, and I deserve to be treated like one.

I do not want to die here, but until President Obama and Yemen’s president do something, that is what I risk every day.

Where is my government? I will submit to any “security measures” they want in order to go home, even though they are totally unnecessary.

I will agree to whatever it takes in order to be free. I am now 35. All I want is to see my family again and to start a family of my own.

The situation is desperate now. All of the detainees here are suffering deeply. At least 40 people here are on a hunger strike. People are fainting with exhaustion every day. I have vomited blood.

And there is no end in sight to our imprisonment. Denying ourselves food and risking death every day is the choice we have made.

I just hope that because of the pain we are suffering, the eyes of the world will once again look to Guantánamo before it is too late.

Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel, a prisoner at Guantánamo Bay since 2002, told this story, through an Arabic interpreter, to his lawyers at the legal charity Reprieve in an unclassified telephone call.

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.