Andy Worthington's Blog, page 143

A Rainy Easter: Photos of Chesil Beach in Dorset

A Rainy Easter: Chesil Beach in Dorset, a set on Flickr.

My apologies, to those of you who have been following my photographic projects, for the unexplained hiatus over the last few weeks. To explain briefly, I ran into two problems.

Firstly, I found myself rather overwhelmed by the number of photos I’ve taken of London since last July — over 10,000 in total, of which I’ve only managed to publish around 1,700 here. I decided that I needed to stand back from my project to record the whole of London by bike, which I began last May, and to take stock of what I have achieved so far. As a result, I have begun organising my photos by area, with the intention of organising some exhibitions and also publishing some photos in various forms, which I’ll let you know about as soon as they materialise.

Secondly, over the last few weeks the main focus of my work — the unending horror of the prison at Guantánamo — has resurfaced as an international news story, after far too long a period in which the global media appeared to have forgotten that, despite his promise to close the prison, President Obama continues to run a monstrous experimental prison where men are held indefinitely, despite never having been charged or tried. A prison-wide hunger strike got Guantánamo back in the news, and I fervently hope that President Obama can be prevailed upon to act — by, for example, freeing the 86 of the remaining 166 prisoners still held, who were cleared for release many years ago — before any of them die.

Reporting on the hunger strike continues to take up much of my time, but I hope to resume publishing photos of London soon, and in the meantime I hope you enjoy these photos from a short family holiday that I took last week in Dorset, on the Isle of Portland, by the extraordinary natural phenomenon that is Chesil Beach, a shingle beach (technically a barrier beach), which is 18 miles long (29km), 660 feet wide (200m) and 50 feet (15m) high. Part of what is known as the Jurassic Coast, it is also a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The weather was mostly pretty awful, but the sights of the Dorset coast are so wonderful that it didn’t matter. We were staying in a lovely little place right by Chesil Beach, where, for a few days, we were free to leave the world behind — quite a relief, it must be said, as the British establishment and the wretched, desperate Tories did their utmost to claim that anyone who dared to criticise Margaret Thatcher, the monstrous butcher of Britain, after her death last Monday is some sort of traitor, when the truth is that admiring her is a sure sign of a dangerous heartlessness.

I hope you enjoy the photos. More will be along soon!

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.

Can We Have A Discussion About Releasing the Majority of the Guantánamo Prisoners?

With the prison-wide hunger strike at Guantánamo now entering its third month, conditions at the prison have come under sustained scrutiny for the first time in many years, and media outlets, both domestic and international, have learned, or have been reminded that 166 men remain at the prison.

These men remain imprisoned despite President Obama’s promise to close Guantánamo, which he made when he first took office in January 2009, and despite the fact that over half of them — 86 in total — were cleared for release from the prison in 2009 by an inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force, established by the President to decide who should be freed and who should continue to be held.

For those of us who understand that Guantánamo will poison America’s moral standing as long as it remains open, the awakening or reawakening of interest in the prison — and the prisoners — is progress, although there is still some way to go before President Obama or lawmakers understand that they need to release prisoners, or face the very real prospect that everyone still held at Guantánamo will remain there until they die, even though the overwhelming majority have never been charged with any crime, and never will be.

Two-thirds of the 86 prisoners cleared for release are Yemenis, but after a Nigerian man, recruited in Yemen, tried and failed to blow up a plane bound for the US on Christmas Day 2009, with a bomb in his underwear, President Obama imposed a blanket ban on releasing any of the cleared Yemenis, which still stands to this day. His reluctance was then reinforced and amplified by lawmakers, who passed legislation insisting that no prisoners should be released to any country they regarded as dangerous, or where there had been a claim that even a single prisoner had been a recidivist.

Alleged incidents of recidivism — returning to the battlefield — have become a rallying cry for mainly Republican lawmakers since President Obama took office, as a result of successive claims — primarily originating in the Pentagon and never adequately backed up by any information that can be independently verified as evidence — alleging that a significant proportion of released prisoners had become recidivists.

The perceived threat from Yemen — and the dubious claims about recidivism — need to be challenged if a case is to be made for releasing prisoners from Guantánamo, but mainstream commentators have persistently shied away from confronting the President or Congress on these obstacles to the closure of Guantánamo.

So it was somewhat heartening, last week, to see that Rosa Brooks, law professor and former policy advisor to the Obama administration, wrote an article for Foreign Policy entitled, “Let Them Go” — posted elsewhere as “Why not let Guantánamo prisoners go?” — which directly confronted these questions.

After noting, “The fear that detainees at Guantánamo or Afghanistan might ‘return to the battlefield’ if released remains an ongoing feature of debates about US detention policy,” Brooks conceded that this concern “isn’t entirely frivolous,” because some former prisoners “have taken up arms against the United States after gaining their freedom,” but then directly confronted the refusal to move beyond these concerns, by stating, “here’s my heretical thought: So what? Or, more precisely: Isn’t it time to recognize that the dangers associated with releasing detainees might be outweighed by the dangers of continuing to hold them?”

This is a hugely important point, reinforced by Brooks when she writes, “we should weigh the dangers of releasing detainees against the long-term threat posed by our own detention policies. There’s ample reason to believe that US detention policies have incited anti-American sentiment around the globe.”

To be fair to the Obama administration, this is the position that the President and his advisors have always maintained, but Brooks, crucially, ties it specifically to the actions needed to make it mean anything at all beyond empty posturing — the need to release prisoners, and the need to challenge the claims about recidivism that have been so damaging.

She writes that “fears about detainee recidivism are overblown,” because “most previously released Guantánamo detainees have not ‘returned to the battlefield’ — and of those who have, few appear to have posed a direct or severe threat to the United States.”

Brooks is to be congratulated for puncturing the hysteria about recidivism that has been manufactured by those who want to keep Guantánamo open for their own malignant reasons, and her comments should also be regarded as extending to President Obama’s unacceptable, fear-filled ban on releasing Yemenis whose release was recommended by his own task force, on the basis of the actions of one man, a failed plane bomber, thereby consigning them to indefinite detention on the basis of their nationality alone.

Further demonstrating the sincerity of her intentions, Brooks notes ruefully that the government “seems generally averse to engaging in the serious cost-benefit analysis of our detention policies I have suggested,” but points out that “there is another potential basis for reconsidering our collective fear that released detainees will return to the battlefield: We have the ability to significantly mitigate the risk posed by released detainees. We can, for instance, closely monitor released detainees, using a wide range of surveillance technologies.”

Rather facetiously, it seems to me, she concludes by saying that all the remaining prisoners should be freed, each given $10,000 and thanked by John Brennan “for everything they’ve done to help the United States eliminate al-Qaida and its associates.”

That, however, fails to detract from the overall power of her message — that recidivism claims have been monstrously overblown, and that acknowledging the damage that Guantánamo does to America’s safety and reputation means nothing without prisoners actually being released.

It is also worth noting that the spur for her article seems to have been the latest news from Afghanistan, where, on March 25, the US formally transferred control of Afghanistan’s Parwan Detention Facility (formerly known as Bagram) to the government of Afghanistan.

As she explains, “The transfer of the facility, which holds some 4,000 people, had been delayed due to US fears that Afghan authorities would release many of the detainees — who would end up ‘returning to the battlefield.’ But as a US official told the New York Times, there’s ‘a shift that’s going on in how the US is looking at what’s important … We have to look at the larger picture: What’s the US strategic interest here?’”

In Afghanistan, therefore, the US has had to “weigh the potential costs associated with releasing Afghan prisoners against the potential costs of not releasing them,” and has largely concluded that the former is less costly, although there are a few exceptions. As Rosa Brooks describes it, “the fear of recidivism hasn’t fully receded,” because the US “continues to detain several dozen Afghan nationals deemed to pose ‘enduring security threats,’ along with a similar number of non-Afghan detainees.”

What will happen to these men is unknown, although the planned end of America’s combat presence in Afghanistan by December 2014 will presumably mean that some further explanation will be required at that point. At that date, the majority of the Guantánamo prisoners will also expect to be included in the discussions, unless, before that time, the government concludes that, at Guantánamo as at Parwan, the cost of not releasing prisoners is more damaging than the cost of releasing them.

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 new “Close Guantánamo campaign”, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

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

United Nations and New York Times Call for Closure of Guantánamo and End to Indefinite Detention

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

The ongoing hunger strike at Guantánamo is now in its third month, and shows no sign of coming to an end. As stories have emerged from the prisoners, via their lawyers, we have learned that it was inspired by deteriorating conditions at the prison, and by the prisoners’ despair at ever being released.

Their despair, sadly, is understandable.

Although 86 of the remaining 166 prisoners were cleared for release at least three years ago by an inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force established by President Obama, they are still held because of cynical Congressional obstruction, and weakness on the part of President Obama — in particular through his failure to close the prison, as he promised when he took office, and because of a ban he imposed in January 2010 on releasing any cleared Yemenis, who make up two-thirds of the cleared prisoners, which he issued in the wake of a failed bomb plot involving a Nigerian man recruited in Yemen.

In addition, the other 80 prisoners also have legitimate grievances against the Obama administration and Congress. 46 were designated for indefinite detention without charge or trial by the Task Force, on the outrageous and unjustifiable basis that they are too dangerous to release, even though insufficient evidence exists to put them on trial. This means that the so-called evidence is fundamentally untrustworthy, but two years ago President Obama issued an executive order authorizing their indefinite detention, which he tried to make palatable by promising periodic reviews of the men’s cases. These, however, have not materialized.

The rest of the men were recommended for trials by the Task Force, but they too have largely fallen by the wayside. Just six men are currently facing pre-trial hearings for their planned trials by military commission at Guantánamo, and most of the charges that others would face — providing material support for terrorism, and conspiracy — were dismissed by conservative appeals court judges in recent months, discrediting the commissions but effectively consigning those who would have been put forward for trials to indefinite detention.

Whether by accident or design, therefore, indefinite detention is what unites all the prisoners, and defines President Obama’s stewardship of the wretched facility that he inherited from George W. Bush. It is time for the President to put aside what appears to be his indifference towards securing the closure of the prison, to drop the ban on releasing any cleared Yemenis, to push Congress to work with him regarding the release of other prisoners, and to initiate a genuinely objective analysis of the dangers allegedly posed by the other prisoners, to begin the necessary movement towards the closure of the prison.

Criticism of President Obama by Navi Pillay, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights

To this end, it is heartening that high-level criticism of the President — both internationally and domestically — has increased noticeably in the last week. On April 5, Navi Pillay, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, spoke out.

In a statement, she “urged all branches of the United States Government to work together to close the Guantánamo detention center,” saying that “the continuing indefinite incarceration of many of the detainees amounts to arbitrary detention and is in clear breach of international law.”

Noting that “around half of the 166 detainees still being held in detention have been cleared for transfer to either home countries or third countries for resettlement,” and that others “have been designated for further indefinite detention,” she pointed out, “Some of them have been festering in this detention center for more than a decade. This raises serious concerns under international law. It severely undermines the United States’ stance that it is an upholder of human rights, and weakens its position when addressing human rights violations elsewhere.”

Commenting on the hunger strike, Navi Pillay said that “a hunger strike is a desperate act, and one which brings a clear risk of people doing serious lasting harm to themselves. I always urge people to think of alternative, less dangerous, ways to protest about their situation. But given the uncertainty and anxieties surrounding their prolonged and apparently indefinite detention in Guantánamo, it is scarcely surprising that people’s frustrations boil over and they resort to such desperate measures.”

Referring to President Obama’s promise, when he took office, of “placing a high priority on closing Guantánamo and setting in motion a system to safeguard the fundamental rights of the detainees,” she “welcomed a White House spokesman’s reiteration of this commitment [on March 27] citing Congressional legislation as the prime obstacle,” but refused to allow the Obama administration to side-step its responsibilities.

Noting that the “systemic abuse of individuals’ human rights continues year after year,” she said, “We must be clear about this: the United States is in clear breach not just of its own commitments but also of international laws and standards that it is obliged to uphold. When other countries breach these standards, the US — quite rightly — strongly criticizes them for it.”

She added, “As a first step, those who have been cleared for release must be released. This is the most flagrant breach of individual rights, contravening the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Last September’s death of Adnan Latif — the ninth person to die in detention at Guantánamo — was a sobering reminder of the problems with the Guantánamo detention regime under which individuals are detained indefinitely, in most cases without charge or trial. It is time to bring an end to this situation.”

Pillay also said she was “deeply concerned over the continued obstacles the National Defense Authorization Act of 2013 has created for the closure of the detention facility, as well as for the trial of detainees in civilian courts, where warranted, or for their release.” She pointed out that she “has repeatedly maintained that those Guantánamo detainees who are accused of crimes should be tried in civilian courts, particularly as the military commissions — even after improvements made in 2009 — do not meet international fair trial standards.”

She also called on the United States Government to “extend an invitation which would allow full and unfettered access to the United Nations Human Rights Council experts, including the opportunity to meet privately with detainees.” Under President Obama, as with President Bush, all UN requests to visit the prison and meet the prisoners privately have been refused.

Criticism of President Obama by the editors of the New York Times

The same day that Navi Pillay issued her statement, the New York Times also ran an editorial that was severely critical of the Obama administration. Noting that, for the prisoners at Guantánamo, the hunger strike “is again exposing the lawlessness of the system that marooned them there,” the editors proceeded to describe the hunger strike as “a collective act of despair,” noting, “Prisoners on the hunger strike say that they would rather die than remain in the purgatory of indefinite detention. Only three prisoners now at Guantánamo have been found guilty of any crime, yet the others also are locked away, with dwindling hope of ever being released.”

The Times editorial also noted that there have been many hunger strikes since the prison opened in 2002, and mentioned a “major strike” in 2005, which involved more than 200 prisoners, although the editors recognized that “those earlier actions were largely about the brutality of treatment the detainees received,” whereas the protest this time “seems more fundamental.” Echoing Tom Wilner, one of the members of the steering committee of “Close Guantánamo,” in his recent opinion piece for the Washington Post, the Times‘ editors noted that Gen. John Kelly, the Marine commander of  SouthCom, which oversees Guantánamo, told a Congressional hearing last month that the prisoners “had great optimism that Guantánamo would be closed” when President Obama promised that it would be, four years ago, but are now “devastated,” because that promise has been broken and they feel abandoned.

Moving on to analyze specific statistics about Guantánamo, the Times‘ editors note that, for 86 of the 166 men still held, “this is a particular outrage,” because they were “approved for release three years ago by a government task force, which included civilian and military agencies responsible for national security.”

Correctly, the editors point out that “Congress outrageously has limited the president’s options in releasing them, through a statute that makes it very difficult to use federal money to transfer Guantánamo prisoners anywhere,” although the blame that should be apportioned to President Obama himself is rather muted. As the editors explain, “Fifty-six of those approved for release are Yemenis,” but whereas the truth is that President Obama very publicly issued a ban on releasing cleared Yemenis over three years ago, in the wake of a failed airline bomb plot undertaken by a Nigerian man recruited in Yemen, the editors’ line is that “the government” has “said it will not release them to Yemen for the ‘foreseeable future,’ apparently because they might fall under the influence of people antagonistic to the United States.”

Moving on to the 30 others approved for release, the editors noted that, in the last ten years, the Times and NPR have determined that “the government has sent detainees to at least 52 countries,” and that, as a result, it “surely can find countries to take detainees who cannot be returned home.”

The editors also look at the 80 other remaining prisoners, noting that “the three who have been convicted and the 30 or so who are subjects of active cases or investigations can be transferred to a military or civilian prison,” but criticizing the administration for holding the rest “in indefinite detention — a legal limbo in which they are considered by the government to be too dangerous to release and too difficult to prosecute.” The editors add, “Such detention is the essence of what has been wrong with Guantánamo from the start. The cases of these detainees must be reviewed and resolved according to the rule of law.”

This is what we have been arguing for here at “Close Guantánamo,” since it became apparent, in December, that the reviews that President Obama promised for the 46 men he consigned to indefinite detention without charge or trial two years ago have not materialized, and it is a demand that we are not only happy to reiterate, but also to remind the administration that we are willing and able to assist in providing objective analyses of the supposed evidence that is being used to justify these men’s detention.

In conclusion, the New York Times editorial notes that the government “is force-feeding at least 10 of the hunger strikers,” even though international agreements among doctors say that “doctors must respect a striker’s decision if he makes ‘an informed and voluntary refusal’ to eat.” That has never applied at Guantánamo, and, as the editors explain, the Obama administration “justifies the force-feeding of detainees as protecting their safety and welfare.”

Instead, however, “the truly humane response to this crisis,” as the editors explain, “is to free prisoners who have been approved for release, end indefinite detention and close the prison at Guantánamo.”

Ask President Obama to finally fulfill his failed promise to close Guantánamo

We congratulate the editors of the New York Times for their fine editorial, and ask those who agree with it to support the three demands for President Obama that we first formulated in an article in February entitled, “The Relentless Importance of Closing Guantánamo,” in which, as well as addressing the main themes of the editorial, we called for the Obama administration to appoint someone specifically to deal with the closure of Guantánamo, to replace Daniel Fried, the senior State Department official who was the envoy for the closure of Guantánamo until recently, when his office was closed down.

Those interested in this topic might like a recent article for The Hill, by Brent Budowsky, a former aide to Sen. Lloyd Bentsen and Bill Alexander, when he was chief deputy majority whip of the House, who proposed last week that Gen. David Petraeus might be the man for the job.

Below are our demands, and we encourage you to write to the President, and to Secretary of State John Kerry, to demand immediate action before any of the hunger strikers at Guantánamo die.

1: Lift the ban on releasing any of the 56 cleared Yemenis from Guantánamo, imposed in January 2010.

2: Appoint a new person to deal specifically with closing Guantánamo, to find new homes for the cleared prisoners in need of assistance.

3: Take the fight to Congress to stop treating the cleared prisoners as pawns in a cynical game of political maneuvering, and to clear the way for all 86 cleared prisoners to be repatriated or safely rehoused in other countries.

Please help us by writing to President Obama, and to Secretary of State John Kerry:

President Barack Obama

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW

Washington, DC 20500

or email the President.

Secretary of State John Kerry

US Department of State

2201 C Street NW

Washington, DC 20520

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 new “Close Guantánamo campaign”, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

“Indefinite Detention is the Worst Form of Torture”: A Guantánamo Prisoner Speaks

On March 28, 2013, lawyers for Musa’ab al-Madhwani, a Yemeni prisoner at Guantánamo, and a victim of torture at a “black site” in Afghanistan in 2002, prior to his arrival at the prison, submitted an emergency motion to US District Court Judge Thomas F. Hogan, in which they reported what al-Madhwani, held for the last ten and a half years, had told them in a phone call on March 25.

At the time, the emergency motion attracted some media attention because of al-Madhwani’s claims that prisoners were being denied access to drinking water and subjected to freezing cold temperatures in an attempt to break the ongoing hunger strike at Guantánamo. The hunger strike, which I have been covering assiduously, began two months ago, but the US authorities only reluctantly began to acknowledge its existence around three weeks ago, and although their response to al-Madhwani’s claims was an attempt to brush them aside, there are no valid reasons for trusting the authorities instead of al-Madhwani.

Col. John Bogdan, who responded to al-Madhwani’s complaints, oversees the prisoners at Guantánamo, and has explicitly been blamed by them for the deteriorating conditions of their detention, whereas al-Madhwani was described by Judge Hogan as a “model prisoner” over three years ago, when he denied his habeas corpus petition. Because of his perception that government allegations about a tenuous connection between al-Madhwani and al-Qaeda were correct (even though al-Madhwani continues to insist that no such connection existed), Judge Hogan said, as the Washington Post described it, that the government had met its burden in proving the accusations,” although “he did not think Madhwani was dangerous.”

As I explained at the time:

Noting that he has been a “model prisoner” since his arrival at Guantánamo in October 2002, he explained, “There is nothing in the record now that he poses any greater threat than those detainees who have already been released.”

Moreover, Judge Hogan refused to rely on any statements that al-Madhwani had made to interrogators at Guantánamo, ruling that they were “tainted by abusive interrogation techniques,” to which he was subjected in the weeks after his capture, before his arrival at Guantánamo, when he was sent to the “Dark Prison” near Kabul, a facility run by the CIA, which, in numerous accounts by released prisoners, resembled nothing less than a medieval torture dungeon, with the addition of extremely loud music and noise 24 hours a day.

I’m posting below the text of the emergency motion, as I think it is an important contribution to the accounts of the hunger strike, and it does not appear to be available online in any form that is searchable, or from which text can be copied and pasted.

I hope that Musa’ab, whose case I have followed for many years, will one day — sooner rather than later — be freed from the disgraceful conditions in which he has been held for a third of his life, and be allowed to return home to his family in Yemen. As he explains, sadly, in his statement, “Both of my parents have died during the time that I have been in prison in Guantánamo Bay. They were waiting for me to come home and now they are gone. I am afraid that my entire family will be dead before I am released from this prison.”

Statement of Musa’ab al-Madhwani in support of emergency motion for humanitarian and life-saving relief

1. My name is Musa’ab al-Madhwani.

2. I have been in prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba for ten and a half years and I hereby request and authorize my lawyers to report the following circumstances to the court, and to sign this statement on my behalf.

3. Before I was sent to the prison at Guantánamo Bay, I was detained at the Dark Prison and at Bagram Air Base where I was tortured and deprived of food and water.

4. Both of my parents have died during the time that I have been in prison in Guantánamo Bay. They were waiting for me to come home and now they are gone. I am afraid that my entire family will be dead before I am released from this prison.

5. I, and other men here at the prison, feel utterly hopeless. We are being detained indefinitely, without any criminal charges against us, and even the 86 men who have been cleared for realise remain here in the Guantánamo Bay prison.

6. I have not been informed whether the Review Task Force has conditionally approved me for release, or whether I have been designated for indefinite detention. Either way, I have no reason to believe that I will ever leave this prison alive. It feels like death would be a better fate than living in these conditions.

7. I am dying of grief and pain on a daily basis because of this indefinite detention.

8. Our efforts for justice through the American court system have failed, and President Obama has broken his promise to close this prison and end the torture.

9. Indefinite detention is the worst form of torture. I am an innocent man. I have never done anything against the United Sttaes, and I never would. But if anyone believes that I have done anything wrong, I beg them to charge me with a crime, try me, and sentence me. If not, release me. Even a death sentence is better than this. Instead of a swift execution, we are being subjected to a cruel, slow, and cold-blooded death.

10. I am especially disappointed because of America’s claims that it protects the human rights of people around the world. America cannot break this pledge.

11. At the beginning of this year, for no apparent reason, the conditions at the Guantánamo Bay prison became much worse than they have been for years. In many ways, the conditions have become almost as harsh as during the early years when I first arrived at Guantánamo.

12. This degradation of the conditions came as a total shock to us. We were very hopeful after the election that action would be taken to end the policy of indefinite detention, that justice would finally prevail, and that conditions would improve. We have been sorely disappointed.

13. As prisoners, we are totally powerless to improve our situation. Because all dignity has been taken away from us, the only means that we have to express the utter hopelessness of our situation is by participating in a hunger strike.

14. I do not wish to die. But I have no other way to express my hopelessness.

15. I have been on a hunger strike for an extended period, to protest the disrespect shown to the Qur’an by Guantánamo guards and the return of the harsh conditions that existed in the early years of the prison.

16. I have been afraid to tell even my attorneys the details of guards’ harsh treatment of me and other prisoners for fear of punishment. I am afraid that if I tell all of the details of the guards’ conduct, I will be put in even worse conditions.

17. The degraded conditions at the prison have become so extreme that virtually all of the detainees are participating in the hunger strike as a protest to the treatment being inflicted upon us.

18. I am consuming only water, and no food.

19. I have lost approximately 30 pounds since the beginning of the hunger strike. Before the hunger strike, I was told that I weighed 163 pounds. I was most recently weighed last week and I was told that my weight was 130-135 pounds.

20. My clothes fit me much more loosely than they did before the hunger strike. I now use a rubber band to keep my pants from falling down.

21. In order to punish us for participating in the hunger strike, the guards have made conditions even more horrible.

22. For approximately 3 days, guards totally denied me and others within Echo Block access to drinkable water. It’s my understanding that another cell block was also denied access to drinkable water.

23. I spoke with my lawyers on the morning of Monday, March 25, 2013.

24. After I informed my lawyers that the guards have denied us drinkable water, some guards began to provide bottled water to me and the other detainees in my block. But whether or not we are given drinkable water depends entirely on the guard.

25. There is no reason that the guards should withhold water from us.

26. An official here at the camp told us that because of the hunger strike, we have now lost all privileges. They have told us that the drinkable bottled water is a privilege, but drinkable water is necessary to maintain life.

27. When we request drinking water, the guards tell us that we already have water, and point to the taps that are at the back of the toilets in our cells.

28. We have always been told that the tap water at the Guantánamo Bay prison is not drinkable. Not once in the past several years has anyone ever told me to drink tap water, until the past week.

29. I have never seen a guard or interrogator drink the tap water here.

30. I believe that the tap water is not drinkable and will make me sick.

31. I have observed that the lack of drinkable water has already caused some prisoners kidney, urinary, and stomach problems.

32. Because the tap water is not suitable to drink, I now drink only the bare minimum amount of water, when bottled water is denied to me.

33. After drinking water from the tap, I felt nauseated.

34. I experience constant stomach cramps and pains.

35. Because I now drink almost no water, I urinate only 2-3 times a day and it is painful when I urinate.

36. I now only defecate approximately one time per week and it is very painful. I believe that because of the hunger strike I now have the beginnings of a hemorrhoid condition. I have never suffered this condition before.

37. I have experienced headaches throughout my time in Guantánamo Bay, but the frequency and severity of my headaches has increased since the beginning of the hunger strike. I now suffer headaches almost daily. While the headaches used to improve after a few hours, they now last the entire day. I cannot take any medication for these headaches because my stomach is empty.

38. My vision has become blurry and I am having difficulty breathing.

39. I am experiencing chest pain. I am afraid that I will have a heart attack.

40. My bones ache.

41. I am constantly exhausted but afraid to sleep. I force myself to sleep.

42. When I sleep, I experience nightmares on a daily basis. I am petrified. My anxiety and fear have become increasingly debilitating since be beginning of the year when the conditions here became so bad.

43. In addition to denying us drinking water, the guards have punished us and have tried to end the hunger strike by forcing us to live in frigid temperatures.

44. For the past approximately 12 days, prison authorities have maintained the air conditioning at extremely frigid temperatures, much colder than ever before.

45. We have informed the guards that we are freezing. They admit that it is very cold, but they have done nothing to increase the temperature.

46. The air conditioning is on so high that it causes a freezing draft in the area where we are allowed to congregate and to pray.

47. Since we are only provided with thin cotton clothing, and the shirt is short sleeved, we cannot tolerate this cold temperature. The cotton clothing provided to us is insufficient to keep me warm under these super-cooled conditions.

48. I, and the the men, are constantly cold and shivering.

49. I am aware that a delegation from the International Committee of the Red Cross knows about the guards’ denial of drinking water to me and other men. The International Committee of the Red Cross has no power to do anything to improve conditions here, and they will not even disclose publicly what they know about the terrible conditions we suffer.

50. We have been abandoned by President Obama and by the entire world. I believe that President Obama must be unaware of the unbelievably inhumane conditions at the Guantánamo Bay prison, for otherwise he would surely do something to stop this torture.

Respectfully submitted this 28th day of March, 2013.

Musa’ab al-Madhwani

Dictated to and signed on my behalf by my attorney, Mari Newman.

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 new “Close Guantánamo campaign”, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Andy Worthington Talks About the US Authorities’ Brutal Response to the Guantánamo Hunger Strike on Press TV

Since a hunger strike began at Guantánamo two months ago, I have been endeavoring to play my part to keep it in the public eye, because the news of the hunger strike has finally awakened significant interest in the prison, after many years in which almost the whole world had lost interest in the plight of the men still detained at Guantánamo, even though President Obama promised to close it, and then failed to do, and even though over half of the men still held — 86 of the remaining 166 prisoners — were cleared for release by an inter-agency task force established by the President himself, but are still held because of obstructions raised by both the President and Congress.

The hunger strike involves the majority of the prisoners at Guantánamo — around 130 in total — and they are on a hunger strike to protest about conditions at the prison, and the shameful truth of their indefinite detention. The authorities have been gradually acknowledging that the hunger strike exists, after initial denials, but they still only accept that around a quarter of the men are going without food and risking their lives to tell the world how unjustly they are being treated, rather then the three-quarters of the prison’s population that the prisoners themselves claim are involved.

Since news of the strike began, I have written articles here, here, here, here and here (via Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison), and I have also spoken about the hunger strike on RT and Press TV, on the radio with Dennis Bernstein, Peter B. Collins and Michael Slate, and in print in an interview for Revolution newspaper.

A few days ago, I spoke again to Press TV, and the video of that interview is embedded below, along with a transcript of the interview, which Press TV entitled, “Gitmo guards brutally clamp down on hunger strikers.”

Press TV: Andy Worthington, looking at day 58 [of the hunger strike], do you think this is going to make any difference in the plight of these inmates who are on hunger strike at this point for this period of time?

Andy Worthington: Well, I really do hope that we are getting somewhere. Essentially the men had been almost completely forgotten about both within the United States and internationally until they started a hunger strike, and gradually over the last month or so that has become noticed, is being talked about internationally, and my feeling is that there are pressure points being opened up on the Obama administration to get the President to do something.

It is essentially, you know, it is up to him to move in addressing the issues that are troubling the prisoners in the prison, but particularly the bigger picture of moving forward with his failed promise to close Guantánamo, and very specifically I think securing the release of the 86 men who have been cleared for release but are still held, and also to provide reviews for the 46 prisoners who two years ago he designated for indefinite detention without charge or trial — a terrible thing for him to be doing but only remotely acceptable on the basis that he promised that there would be regular periodic reviews of their cases to establish whether they should still be held, and those haven’t happened.

So, you know, he needs to address the very justifiable reasons that the men at Guantánamo are in despair and on a hunger strike.

Press TV: And if you can tell us quickly about what you have been actively involved with since you are from the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, in terms of your campaign, I guess?

Andy Worthington: Well, we have just been trying to publicize the story and to make sure that people keep writing about it, keep sharing it on social media, keep talking about it, keep putting pressure on.

One of the important things that has happened in the last week is that Clive Stafford Smith, the director of the legal action charity Reprieve, one of the lawyers representing Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, issued an affidavit detailing a phone conversation that he had with Shaker Aamer just last weekend, a very detailed explanation of some of the things that are happening in Guantánamo, some of the things that aren’t being reported.

What we really see from that is that within Guantánamo itself we have a kind of very brutal attempt to clamp down on the prisoners, to try and stop them from being on hunger strike, but the truth for the administration is that this is no way to go about things. The men have very legitimate complaints.

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 new “Close Guantánamo campaign”, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As Hunger Strike Continues, Tom Wilner Calls for the Closure of Guantánamo in the Washington Post

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.

As the hunger strike continues at Guantánamo — which we publicized here in two previous articles, “How Long Can the Government Pretend that the Massive Hunger Strike at Guantánamo Doesn’t Exist?” and “Voices from the Hunger Strike in Guantánamo” — we’re delighted to report that Tom Wilner, the co-founder of “Close Guantánamo” with Andy Worthington, had an opinion piece published in the Washington Post last week, which we’re cross-posting below.

Tom, who is on the steering committee of “Close Guantánamo” with Andy, was counsel of record to the Guantánamo prisoners in Rasul v. Bush and Boumediene v. Bush, the two Supreme Court cases that established the prisoners’ right to habeas corpus.

In his opinion piece, “Get serious about closing Guantánamo,” Tom ran through the reasons why the prisoners are in despair, after eleven years of imprisonment, in almost all cases without charge or trial, and four years after President Obama promised to close the prison, and established an interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force, who recommended that 86 of the remaining 166 prisoners should be released. They are still held, as Tom pointed out, because of Congressional opposition — and also, it should be noted, because of President Obama’s own inaction.

Get serious about closing Guantánamo

By Thomas Wilner, Washington Post Opinions, March 28, 2013

A hunger strike is spreading at the Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, prison camp. The main reason, as the military has acknowledged, is the growing sense of frustration and despair among the detainees. As Gen. John Kelly, the head of U.S. Southern Command, explained to the House Armed Services Committee last week, detainees “had great optimism that Guantánamo would be closed. They were devastated … when the president backed off … He said nothing about it in his inauguration speech … He said nothing about it in his State of the Union speech … He’s not restaffing the office that … looks at closing the facility.”

The hunger strike is the Guantánamo detainees’ cry for attention. Why should Americans care? After all, haven’t members of Congress told the public that the detainees are terrorists who would kill us in our sleep if they got the chance? That is the reason lawmakers have given for enacting legislation that has made it virtually impossible to transfer detainees out of Guantánamo, to the United States or anywhere else. The American people have been led to believe that the detainees are all too dangerous to release or transfer, and that we must keep them at Guantánamo to protect our security.

That line may play well politically, but it is simply not true, and it is costing us dearly.

One hundred and sixty-six men are still held at Guantánamo. Fewer than 20 are “high-value detainees,” men who were transferred to Guantánamo from other locations several years ago and are scheduled to stand trial for war crimes. The others were, at most, low-level functionaries or people swept up and sold for bounties in the confusing initial stages of the fog of war in Afghanistan. Many simply were in the wrong place at the wrong time. In fact, more than half of them — 86 — were cleared for release more than three years ago by a special presidential task force composed of top U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials. Some were cleared even before that, during the Bush administration. Because of congressional restrictions, however, they remain locked up. And unlike prisoners in the United States, these men are held virtually incommunicado, with no opportunity to see their families. Those not initially cleared were promised review hearings almost four years ago, but not one has occurred. They are understandably frustrated.

Even beyond the terrible injustice to them, the United States is paying a very high price for all this. Guantánamo is our nation’s most expensive prison, with an annual operating budget of almost $177 million, more than a million dollars per year for each detainee, and almost $90 million a year just for the 86 prisoners who were cleared for release three-plus years ago. The nearly $300 million spent jailing the latter group the past three years and the annual cost of keeping Guantánamo open amount to a lot of money that could be used to save jobs and services being cut as a result of the so-called sequester. And the costs of keeping Guantánamo open probably will increase. The military has said its Cuban base is in dire need of upgrades and has requested nearly $200 million for capital improvements to keep Guantánamo functioning as a prison. Where is the congressional concern with those costs?

But the cost to our nation is more than economic. Many who have been charged with protecting our national security, including former defense secretary Robert Gates, former national security adviser Dennis Blair, former CIA director David Petraeus and former secretary of state Colin Powell, have pointed out that Guantánamo actually hurts U.S. security. As Sen. John McCain emphasized during his bid for the White House, when he “strongly” favored closing Guantánamo, the prison is a negative symbol that serves as an important recruiting tool for terrorists. President Obama himself has said that Guantánamo has probably “created more terrorists around the world than it ever detained.”

“There is also no question,” Obama said in a May 2009 speech, that Guantánamo has undermined “America’s strongest currency in the world” — our “moral authority.”

It is time to get serious about closing Guantánamo. The president should appoint someone in the White House responsible for coordinating efforts to close this prison, and that person should work closely with the congressional leadership of both parties to get the job done. Pandering to fear for political expediency should no longer be tolerated. As Thomas Jefferson wrote, our government’s policies must be based not “on fears and follies” but on “reason.”

*****

In February, we published an article, “The Relentless Importance of Closing Guantánamo,” in which we issued three demands for President Obama, one of which was the need to appoint someone within the administration to deal specifically with the closure of Guantánamo, as Tom specifically pointed out in his opinion piece.

Below are our demands, and we encourage you to write to the President, and to Secretary of State John Kerry, to demand immediate action before any of the hunger strikers at Guantánamo die.

1: Lift the ban on releasing any of the 56 cleared Yemenis from Guantánamo, imposed in January 2010.

2: Appoint a new person to deal specifically with closing Guantánamo, to find new homes for the cleared prisoners in need of assistance.

3: Take the fight to Congress to stop treating the cleared prisoners as pawns in a cynical game of political maneuvering, and to clear the way for all 86 cleared prisoners to be repatriated or safely rehoused in other countries.

Please help us by writing to President Obama, and to Secretary of State John Kerry:

President Barack Obama

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW

Washington, DC 20500

or email the President.

Secretary of State John Kerry

US Department of State

2201 C Street NW

Washington, DC 20520

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 new “Close Guantánamo campaign”, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Revolution Interview: Andy Worthington Discusses the Guantánamo Hunger Strike and the Prison’s Horrendous History

Last week, Frank Harper, an activist with the campaigning group World Can’t Wait interviewed me by phone (via Skype) for Revolution newspaper. An edited version of the transcript of that interview has been published on Revolution‘s website, and is published in the latest issue of Revolution, cover date April 7.

Below, for readers who want a more detailed analysis of Guantánamo past and present — and, in particular, the prison-wide hunger strike that is about to enter its third month (and which I have written about here, here, here, here and here) — I’m reproducing the full text of the interview, in which I discussed the hunger strike and the reasons for it, as well as, more broadly, the failure of all three branches of the US government to bring anything resembling justice to the 166 prisoners who are still held — the Obama administration and Congress for blocking the release of 86 prisoners cleared for release by the President’s own inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force, and the Supreme Court for failing to overturn the ideologically motivated decision by judges in the court of appeals, in Washington D.C., to gut habeas corpus of all meaning for the prisoners, who were granted habeas rights by the Supreme Court on two occasions under President Bush — in 2004 and 2008.

Revolution Interview with Andy Worthington

Hunger Strike at Guantánamo Bay: “Respect us or kill us”

Revolution Newspaper, April 7, 2013

For almost two months now, prisoners at the US’s Guantánamo torture center have been on a hunger strike. Lawyers for some of the prisoners reported that the strike began because of “unprecedented searches and a new guard force.” In particular, prisoners were angry and anguished at the way the guards handled the prisoners’ Korans.

There are currently 166 prisoners remaining at Guantánamo, over half of whom have been cleared for release for years. Of the 130 prisoners in Camp 6, there are reports from the prisoners through their lawyers that almost all are refusing food. Eleven prisoners are being force-fed by their captors, which means that a prisoner is shackled into a restraint chair with a feeding tube snaked up his nose and into his stomach. Attorneys report that some men have lost 20-30 pounds and that at least two dozen have lost consciousness. It is a very urgent situation. Many of the prisoners have passed the 40th day: According to medical experts, irreversible mental and physiological damage such as hearing loss, blindness, and hemorrhaging can occur after this point.

In a statement provided by a military defense lawyer, Fayiz al-Kandari, a prisoner from Kuwait, said, “Let them kill us, as we have nothing to lose. We died when Obama indefinitely detained us. Respect us or kill us, it’s your choice. The United States must take off its mask and kill us.”

Guantánamo Bay — a US military fortress on Cuba — was turned into a prison camp of the US “war on terror” in January 2002 by the administration of US President George W. Bush. One of the main reasons the Bush administration established the prison at Guantánamo was because they considered it “outside US legal jurisdiction” — meaning that the laws and rights supposedly guaranteed to prisoners, including “prisoners of war,” would not apply. Since then almost 800 men have been imprisoned at Guantánamo, and the word Guantánamo has become synonymous with torture, unjust detention, brutality, and inhumane degradation.

Andy Worthington is an investigative journalist based in London. For the past seven years, Andy has been relentless in exposing the atrocities of the US government at its Guantánamo prison camp, in what it calls its “war on terror”: the endless rounds of torture; the degradation and psychological torment; the body and spirit crushing imprisonment, including solitary confinement; the “rendition” (turning over prisoners captured and held by US military and spy agencies to other countries where they can be tortured out of sight under US direction).

He has exposed the twisted legal arguments the US government has used to justify its outrageously inhumane treatment of people it labels “enemy combatants”, and the ways different branches of the US government, and both the Democratic and the Republican parties have extended, deepened, and consolidated these monstrous policies since their initiation in the administration of George W. Bush.

Worthington’s articles can be found at his website; his book “The Guantánamo Files” can be found at Amazon and at many bookstores, including Revolution Books. He is also the co-director of the film “Outside the Law: Stories From Guantánamo”.

The following interview was conducted on March 28, 2013.

*****

Revolution: What are the essential facts of the hunger strike under way now at Guantánamo; how many people are striking, how long has it been going on, and what can you tell us that you know about what set it off at this point?

Andy Worthington: What I understand is that the hunger strike began nearly two months ago, so in the first week of February, and that what particularly precipitated it was a change in the way that the personnel at Guantánamo were behaving toward the prisoners. So there were very aggressive cell searches, there was the seizure of personal items including privileged correspondence between the prisoners and their clients, and there was also what was regarded as abusive treatment of their copies of the Koran.

So last week I was actually doing an event with a former prisoner, who’s a friend of mine. He said there’s always something within the prison that particularly provokes a hunger strike, and that generally it does involve religious mistreatment, although I think sometimes in the past it had involved sexual abuse of prisoners. So what we’ve got here this time around is a change in the behavior of the guard force, to what the prisoners are saying reminds them of the bad old days at Guantánamo.

And of course, combined with that is the despair that prisoners feel at having been held for over 11 years in most cases under the leadership of a president who promised to close the prison on his second day in office and has failed to do so, and has now shown almost no interest in even addressing the problem of  Guantánamo. So these men very fundamentally feel abandoned by the president of the United States in a way that they did not even feel so abandoned under President Bush after the terrible, terrible first term when it really was a committed program of torture and abuse and renditions.

President Bush faced a lot of international criticism in his second term, and actually part of what that led to was a pretty big program of prisoner releases, whereas the prisoner releases under Obama have almost ground to a halt. The last seven prisoners who have left the prison in the last two years, well, four of them were released, but three of them were dead, three of them left in coffins. So that’s the tally over the last two years. And the men are understandably in despair. Well, you can see from those odds, over the last two years, the chances of you leaving Guantánamo are almost nil; if you are one of those people who’s going to leave, you have a 43% chance of being dead when you get to leave. So it’s a shocking situation.

So with both the bigger picture and the more everyday picture of what’s happening at Guantánamo, these are the reasons that the men are so upset and so despairing. My understanding from what the prisoners have been saying is that the majority of the prisoners in Camp Six are on a hunger strike. Now there are 166 men left at Guantánamo; 130 of those men are in Camp Six (this is the last of the camps to be built for the general population at Guantánamo, where the majority of the prisoners are held), and the attorneys have heard from the prisoners that the majority of those men are on a hunger strike.

The last I saw, this week the US government was acknowledging that 31 men were on a hunger strike, but just two weeks ago they were saying that no one was on a hunger strike apart from five or six long-term hunger strikers; and those figures have gradually been creeping up. And I would say those figures have gradually been creeping up because the government, the administration, the military, were forced into a position of having to acknowledge a hunger strike because their attempts to pretend that there wasn’t one weren’t being believed. And various parts of the media started to take an interest in the story, started to report it, at which point I think it became apparent that blanket denial wasn’t going to work any longer.

Revolution: It does seem like the government’s been disputing every basic fact about the strike since it’s begun, including the number of people and including the condition of the strikers, which for some people, as you’ve just noted, has been going on for quite a while. What is the condition of the people who’ve been on strike all this time? It seems like it must be extremely desperate and dire.

Andy Worthington: Well, let’s look at it this way: there are the five or six long-term hunger strikers, and I know that one of these guys has been on a hunger strike since 2005. I can’t imagine how he’s still alive, frankly. Just the punishment for his body of twice a day being strapped to a chair and having a tube put up his nose and into his stomach, for nearly eight years; that’s horrendous. I can’t really get my head around that at all. I don’t know how long the other long-term hunger strikers have been on a hunger strike but it’s obviously going to be a matter of years in their cases as well.

As for the guys who started their hunger strike seven weeks ago, the stories that came out via the lawyers are that we’re looking at prisoners losing between twenty and thirty pounds of their body weight. With the exception of a few obese prisoners that there are at Guantánamo, and a few well-fed prisoners, I would say that the thing to remember about Guantánamo is that the normal status of the average prisoner is not somebody who’s carrying a lot of extra weight by any means. My feeling is that the average weight in Guantánamo would probably be more accurately put at something like 120 to 140 pounds. We’ve seen prisoners slip to the horribly dangerous point where they’re weighing 100 pounds or less. I’ve tried to imagine grown men weighing just 100 pounds and trying to think if I can see that anywhere in everyday life, and of course you can’t really see that in everyday life, it would be somebody who’s dangerously ill or anorexic. It’s a horrible predicament. As experts have been saying this week, once you reach the six or seven week period of hunger striking, that’s when people on a hunger strike are seriously at risk of death or serious organ damage.

Revolution: I was hoping you could tell us a little bit about this category and concept of indefinite detention that the US has been using to hold men seemingly for life without any justification in either US or international law and I’m sure must be the source of a lot of the despair you spoke of among the prisoners themselves. What is the legal status of the people there?

Andy Worthington: It’s a good question really because I don’t think this is something that is known enough within the United States. These are not conventional prisoners. These are not people who to my mind are legally held, although the underpinning of their detention is the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), which Congress passed the week after the 9/11 attacks, and which authorized the president to go after anyone that he felt was associated with Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, 9/11. The Supreme Court in 2004 in a ruling confirmed that the president had the authority to detain these people until the end of hostilities, and that’s the very thin legal underpinning for holding these men.

It turns out that no one’s been able to challenge the AUMF, no one’s been able to challenge the definition of how long these hostilities last for, because nobody’s letting those things be discussed. So what we have are men who have been deprived of their liberty, who possibly could be held for the whole of their lives, and who haven’t really been given any opportunity to challenge the basis of their detention. Now the administration would say they have; these are men who secured habeas corpus rights through a decision made by the Supreme Court. And that is true, in the sense that they got habeas corpus rights in 2004, Congress took them away, the Supreme Court gave them back in 2008. Now for two years, admittedly, from when the Supreme Court made that decision, over three dozen of the prisoners at Guantanamo had their habeas corpus petitions granted in the district court in Washington, DC, which was adjudicating their cases; a majority of those men were released.

So over two dozen of those men were released as a result of court orders for their release. And then what happened was that ideologically motivated, conservative judges in the court of appeals, the D.C. Circuit Court, decided that they couldn’t stand the lower court actually telling the government that their evidence was worthless and ordering the release of prisoners from Guantánamo. So they changed the rules. They said the court has to believe everything the government says, has to behave as though that is the truth, unless the prisoners and their attorneys can prove otherwise.

What the evidence consists of in so many cases is battlefield reports that shouldn’t really be trusted as facts, and a whole array of interrogation reports that are not trustworthy, because the circumstances under which the prisoners were interrogated left a lot to be desired. So the D.C. Circuit Court made sure that the legal avenue for leaving Guantánamo has been completely shut off. Since they made these changes to the rules, not a single prisoner has won a habeas corpus petition. And in fact, a number of successful decisions were appealed; they also were overturned. The judges in the D.C. Circuit Court have gutted habeas corpus of all meaning for the Guantánamo prisoners, and for two years in a row, the Supreme Court has been given the option to tell the D.C. Circuit Court that they want to be responsible for the conditions of detention and the rules that apply — and they have failed to do so.

So there is no legal avenue out of Guantánamo. It would be unfair for anybody to say that the prisoners have any kind of rights, because those rights have been completely done away with by the D.C. Circuit Court. So they’re kind of back to square one. There’s no way out for them, unless the President decides to do something.

What we’ve seen over the last few years is a lack of action on President Obama’s part, and then we’ve seen I think a politically motivated and very cynical decision in Congress to impose restrictions on who the president can release. We’ve had a ban from President Obama on releasing any cleared Yemeni prisoners, as a result of the failed underwear bomb plot in December 2009, which originated in Yemen, and there are 86 cleared prisoners who were approved for transfer out of Guantánamo by the task force that President Obama set up in his first year in office—the interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force—and two-thirds of those men are Yemeni. So the president himself has imposed a ban on releasing prisoners that his own advisors told him the United States didn’t want to hold any longer. Every avenue has been closed.

Revolution: I think the so-called legal proceedings in Guantánamo have just been a sadistic mockery, in reality. This unseen censor that’s been, it seems like, a recent addition to the proceedings down there, where even the judge didn’t know that he was being monitored, testimony about torture and other things that some “invisible hand” regards as being too sensitive for admission into the public record is just erased somehow from the [record of the] proceedings, some “white noise” or something, I don’t know exactly. It’s just some surreal demented nightmare of what a trial should be. I don’t think hardly anybody knows about this. Could you let our readers know what this development is?

Andy Worthington: For many years now, every few months there will be pre-trial hearings, in the cases primarily of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other men who are accused of masterminding and being involved in the 9/11 attacks; this was the trial that was supposed to take place in federal court, but the Obama administration backed down when criticized, and moved the planned trial back to Guantánamo. Now the military commissions — their history is really not a very good one. It was driven by Dick Cheney bringing them back from oblivion at the start of the “war on terror.” The Supreme Court kicked them out as illegal in 2006, and Congress then brought them back to life twice, once under Bush and again under Obama.

Two things plague them really. A lot of the things they were set up to try aren’t actual war crimes; they were only invented as war crimes by Congress, so they’ve run into problems on that front — and recently the D.C. Circuit Court, the court dominated by right-wingers, nevertheless delivered two devastating rulings (see here and here) dismissing two of the only convictions achieved in the commissions’ history because the alleged crimes — material support for terrorism and conspiracy — are not war crimes.

The military commissions are also plagued with obsessive secrecy on the part of the authorities because the men being tried there, particularly in this high profile trial, the 9/11 trial, they were specifically the victims of the torture program that was initiated by the Bush Administration involving secret prisons and torture, all of which is desperately illegal, however much Justice Department lawyer and Berkeley law professor John Yoo wrote the memos telling them that it was OK. The authorities or various parts of the establishment are absolutely obsessed with making sure that nothing about what happened to these men comes out in court. I don’t know how they intend to have a trial with any kind of fairness when they’re trying to make sure that a lot of the important things are never, ever talked about.

But I honestly don’t know how this could possibly end happily because the problem is that one of the Obama administration’s biggest roles on national security has been to defend anyone connected with the Bush administration from any investigation about their involvement with torture and rendition and all of these horrible and illegal things that took place. I don’t how you can try people who have been tortured without somehow acknowledging that. But this is going to go on for years and years. There’s not going to be any easy resolution to it. But the obvious thing about the commissions whenever you look at them is that they persistently run into these dark farcical operational problems. It used to happen all the time under Bush as well and now it’s happening under Obama, a broken system that doesn’t work and that constantly throws up things that are just embarrassing, like the hidden spy in the recent hearing, who even the judge didn’t know about.

Revolution: As you said, Obama in many ways is actually worse than Bush in what he’s done in not only defending these people that you referred to, but I would say, extending and consolidating the policies that were initiated in the Bush years. One of the things that seems to have happened recently is an attempt to cut these strikers off from the outside world, is the shutting off of flights to Guantánamo that effectively prevents, or at least it makes it very difficult for their lawyers to see them, on a regular basis, and at the same time, Congress has actually voted funding an expansion of Guantánamo.

Andy Worthington: Well, overall I would just say briefly that Obama has resisted all efforts to send new prisoners to Guantánamo, and there is also not much suggestion that he has a global network of torture prisons like the Bush administration did, although certainly there are very dubious things happening in a few places. But primarily his biggest crimes, I think, are the drone program, which clearly is immoral and illegal but the United States doesn’t want to acknowledge that, and his obsessive defense of the crimes committed by the Bush administration.

And at Guantánamo his biggest crime, as well as not releasing cleared prisoners, has been that, through an executive order two years ago, he designated 46 of them — 48 of them actually, but two died — for indefinite detention on the basis that they were regarded as too dangerous to release, but that there wasn’t enough evidence to put them on trial. That means that there are fundamental problems with the purported evidence. And so he actually is responsible, personally, for having said that the United States will continue to imprison indefinitely, as a matter of policy, 46 men at Guantánamo. Now it happens that through his inaction and through the obstructions raised by Congress, everyone is effectively indefinitely detained at Guantánamo. That’s the really shocking thing about clearing people for release and then not releasing them. Why bother? What message does that send to the people that you told were going home, that actually the truth is, well, you’re not going home. That’s a horrible, horrible thing to do.

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 new “Close Guantánamo campaign”, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

The Tories’ Cruelty Is Laid Bare as Multiple Welfare Cuts Bite

[image error]Ever since the Tories came to power in May 2010, aided by the Liberal Democrats, who, sadly, demonstrated that everything they professed to believe in could be discarded if it meant being in government, the very fabric of civil society in the UK has been faced with extinction. This is a country that has developed a welfare safety net to protect the most vulnerable members of society and those who have fallen on hard times, and one that has guaranteed healthcare for its entire population, through the NHS, paid for through general taxation, but the Tories are determined to destroy it, and far too many people have been fooled by their poisonous persecution of the poor and disabled, and their ideologically motivated “age of austerity,” which continues to ruin any chance of economic recovery, while plunging millions of people further into serious poverty.

On Monday, April 1, multiple welfare cuts hit hundreds of thousands of the poorest and most vulnerable members of society, and although two newspapers led with the news on their front pages — the Guardian (“The day Britain changed”) and the Daily Mirror (“D-Day for Savage Con-Dem Cuts”) — there is no sign that the British people, in general, have woken up to the full ramifications of what is being done in their name.

From the beginning of the Tories’ attack on the state, the government and large parts of the media have successfully lied about the unemployed and the disabled being scroungers and shirkers, creating a climate of mean-spiritedness and hatred amongst my fellow citizens that I have found to be both shocking and disgraceful, because the blunt truth, which anyone could find out if they could be bothered, is that there are around 2,500,000 people unemployed but only 500,000 job vacancies.

That fact should be imprinted on everyone’s foreheads before the blame game begins, but what is also hugely important to realise, but which is almost entirely ignored, is that the benefit system is not primarily supporting the unemployed, but is  propping up a corrupt system in which low-paid workers are not paid enough to live on, and the cost of living — including housing more than any other component — is one in which the government does nothing to check rampant profiteering by individuals and corporations.

From the beginning, it was apparent to me that punishing people for not having jobs, while actively creating unemployment, as the Tories did with public sector job cuts after they took office, was cruel, in a way that, in the only other period comparable to this one — the 1980s — Margaret Thatcher at least recognised that kicking people for being unemployed at a time when the government was actively creating unemployment was a step too far, and largely allowed those on the dole to scrape by unmolested.

Now, however, there appear to be no lines that the Tories will not cross. Having been caught out by a judge regarding their workfare scam — forcing the unemployed to work for their benefits, for corporations that can afford to pay them, or charities that should know better — the Tories quickly passed an emergency law preventing them from having to recompense the victims of their policy to savagely undermine the minimum wage — and, disgracefully, were backed by the Labour Party, who abstained in the crucial vote.

Even that, however, is exceeded in the cruelty stakes by the Tories’ disgusting treatment of the disabled, in which, having established targets for the amount of money they wanted to save, they hired the corporate butchers of Atos Healthcare to conduct fundamentally unfair reviews aimed at establishing that those who are mentally and/or physically disabled — however severely — are in fact fit for work, so that the financial support that has made life tolerable for hundreds of thousands of disabled people can be withdrawn. I have sporadically covered the government’s callous treatment of the disabled in a number of articles, most recently in “Call Time on This Wretched Government and Its Assault on the Disabled,” “The End of Decency: Tories to Make Disabled People Work Unpaid for Their Benefits.” “The Death of Empathy in Cruel, Heartless Britain” and “End the Tory Butchers’ Assault on the Disabled: For New Year, Please Sign the War on Welfare Petition.”

As noted above, the assault on the poor, the weak, the unemployed and the disabled reached an important stage on April 1, when a number of disturbing welfare cuts came into effect, in addition to the legislation intended to privatise the majority of NHS services, which is still being resisted in the House of Lords, as well as savage cuts to legal aid, and the scrapping of the 50p tax rate for the highest earners, introduced by Gordon Brown. According to Labour, this cut will mean that 13,000 millionaires will get a £100,000 tax cut, just as the poorest people in society are having money taken away from them.

In a rundown of these changes, the Guardian, in one of a refreshingly large series of articles about welfare reform (or, as we should be calling it, the war on welfare), highlighted the introduction of the welfare benefit cap, the introduction of the bedroom tax, changes to the way in which benefits are calculated, changes to council tax benefit, and the end of Disability Living Allowance.

The welfare benefit cap

On the welfare benefit cap, the Guardian wrote, “The most popular of the welfare reforms will begin on 15 April in the London boroughs of Bromley, Croydon, Enfield and Haringey. The intention is that no welfare claimants will receive in total more than the average annual household income after tax and national insurance — estimated at £26,000. Other councils will start to introduce it from 15 July and it will be fully up and running by the end of September. Some estimate 80,000 households will be made homeless.”

Missing in all the arguments about spongers and scroungers has been any mention at all of the fact that most of the benefit consists of housing benefit, all of which goes to the landlords and not to the benefit claimants. This makes up the lion’s share of the payments, in a market run on greed alone, and without any legislation to moderate what landlords can charge, or how they treat their properties, or their tenants, and it is depressing that so many people have failed to note who receives the housing benefit, and how greedy and exploitative they are. Personally, I am permanently shocked when I think about the numbers of people who may be obliged to move from where they live, uprooting their children from school, and leaving friends and family, through no fault of their own. In London, it is the first indication that the Tories are committed to a programme of social cleansing,  and I can only hope that other towns and cities around the country, who are supposed to take in those expelled from London, will refuse to accept their role as intended ghettoes.

The bedroom tax

Added to the housing benefit cap is the bedroom tax, a disgusting way of treating those in social housing as second-class citizens, without the right to regard their homes as homes, and of punishing those in receipt of benefits for the fact that, from Margaret Thatcher onwards, when social housing was first sold off to tenants, there has been chronic under-investment in the creation of new social housing.

Under the bedroom tax, those deemed to have a spare room “will lose 14% of their housing benefit and those with two or more spare bedrooms will lose 25%.” The fact that those implementing the policy are millionaires with an abundance of spare rooms is a cruel irony lost on the Tories, who are so marinaded in their class-based cruelty that they have no notion of how cruel they appear to those whose moral compasses are still functioning, and it is to be hoped that the bedroom tax will be a key component in the demise of this bunch of sadists, as the poll tax was for Margaret Thatcher.

The stated aim of the bedroom tax is to make people on benefits downsize, but in most cases there are no properties available for them to downsize to, and many of the one million households affected may well be obliged to give up their homes and either become homeless or become part of the far more costly private rental market. As the Guardian noted, “Critics say it is an inefficient policy as in the north of England, families with a spare room outnumber overcrowded families by three to one, so thousands will be hit with the tax when there is no local need for them to move.” The Guardian also noted, “Two-thirds of the people hit by the bedroom tax are disabled,” and stated that the intended savings will be £465m a year, and “as many as 660,000 people in social housing will lose an average of £728 a year.”

For some powerful articles about the ruinous impact of the bedroom tax, please see Amelia Gentleman’s Guardian article, “The human cost of the bedroom tax,” John Harris’ Guardian article, “The spare bedroom tax: a mess of contradiction and impossibility,” and this article by a Community Housing provider in Wales. All are very powerful, and a thorough indictment of both the individual cruelties involved in the tax (relating to those who use the “spare rooms,” like disabled people, and the visiting children of separated parents, for example), and the bigger picture of the government’s malevolence towards those in social housing, and in difficult circumstances.

Changes to the way benefit is calculated

“For the first time in history,” as the Guardian explained, “welfare benefits and tax credits will not rise in line with inflation and will instead for the next three years rise by 1%. Had there been no change benefits would have risen by 2.2%.” These changes are intended to “sav[e] £505m in the first year, rising to £2.3 bn in 2015-16. Nearly 9.5 million families will be affected, including 7 million in work, by £165 a year,” adding to the cuts that many families will also be experiencing though the bedroom tax and the overall welfare benefit cap.

Changes to council tax benefit

Adding further strain to the incomes of those in receipt of benefits — the low-paid as well as the unemployed, remember — council tax benefit, previously administered by the Department for Work and Pensions, has been transferred to local councils along with, crucially, a ten percent reduction in funding. As the Guardian noted, “Council tax benefit is claimed by 5.9 million low-income families in the UK,” adding, “The new onus on councils has come at a time when local government funding, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, has fallen by 26.8% in two years in real terms. A Guardian survey of 81 councils last week found many claiming they face difficult cuts, with almost half saying they were reducing spending on care services for adults. This also comes at a time when 2.4m households will see a council tax rise.”

Last month, in an article for the Guardian, Richard Vize analysed what will almost certainly happen at the council level if, as intended, the poorest members of society are expected to pay part of their council tax. Vize noted, “The prospect of a return to routine non-payment of local tax thanks to cuts in council tax benefit is a major reverse for councils. In the 1980s, the poll tax rebellion made it socially acceptable to avoid payment, whether through poverty or political conviction. Tax collection rates plummeted while collection costs soared, inflicting serious damage on councils’ finances. After the poll tax was abolished, it took many years for collection rates to recover. Now, the spectre of non-payment has returned.”

He added, “Local authorities believe that up to 84% of people on low incomes will refuse to pay council tax, with benefit changes meaning poor people face an average annual bill of £247 from April. If the government had conducted any intelligent analysis of the impact of this change, it would have realised that levying a tax of barely £5 a week on people who will struggle to pay it is a recipe for spending a lot of money to collect very little. No wonder councils are building up their reserves.”

The end of Disability Living Allowance

As well as still facing the callous reviews intended to find disabled people fit for work, whether they are or not, disabled people now face another blow — the scrapping of Disability Living Allowance, and its replacement with the Personal Independence Payment (PIP), which, according to the Department for Work and Pensions, is, in the Guardian‘s words, “not based on your condition, but on how your condition affects you, so narrowing the gateway to the PIP. It will contain two elements: a daily living component and a mobility component. If you score sufficient points, a claim can be made. Assessments will be face-to-face rather than based on written submissions, starting in Bootle benefits centre, handling claims across the north-west and north-east.”

For further information about the abolition of DLA and its replacement with PIP, see this Guardian article by Jane Young of the We Are Spartacus group of disabled activists, and the detailed We Are Spartacus report. “Emergency Stop,” which analyses “the economic and social impact of the Personal Independence Payment regulations.” In it, We Are Spartacus “call on the Government to ‘go back to the drawing board’ on proposals to replace disability living allowance (DLA), after it buried last-minute changes to criteria which will see thousands more disabled people with mobility difficulties lose out than expected.”

The changes on the ground: a report from Tottenham

In another Guardian article about the changes, political editor Patrick Wintour travelled to Tottenham, to attend a meeting convened by the Labour MP David Lammy for “about 900 families in Lammy’s north London constituency – one of the most deprived in the country – [who] will be hit by the household benefit cap, which limits the total weekly amount each unemployed household can receive in benefits to £500.” Only around 200 families turned up, showing, I believe, the shocking scale of ignorance about the changes. Although Wintour noted that many of them were “mothers with young children in tow,” and that there was “palpable anxiety, and an undercurrent of anger,” Lammy told Wintour, “The first some of them knew of the imminent cut to their income was when they opened his letter.”

As Wintour noted, “More than half such families will lose between £50 and £100 a week in housing benefit as a result of the benefit cap … Those who face smaller losses may be able to scrape together the shortfall and keep their tenancy, but at the cost of buying food or heating their home. Others will be unable to pay their rent, and will end up in arrears, then homeless or forced to move out of London to low-rent areas of the country.”

Wintour also explained, “Families can sidestep the cap if they find a job that offers 16 hours a week for single parents, or 24 hours for couples. But jobs are scarce in Tottenham, and as one mother points out, even if work is found, childcare is expensive.” Acknowledging “a ‘real fear’ about homelessness among his poorest constituents,” Lammy told Wintour, “The local authority will have to think very hard about its responsibilities. We cannot evict people on to the streets with no alternative: this is not America.”

Perhaps not, but we are not far away from it.

As Patrick Wintour also noted, providing exact figures of how much will be taken from those who only just have more than nothing at present:

The household benefit cap is just one of nine changes coming in this month, laying bare the sheer enormity and complexity of the coalition’s welfare reforms. Others include the bedroom tax (typical weekly loss per household, £14), the abolition in many areas of the country of council tax benefit (£3 a week), and the 1% cap on benefit increases (£3 a week). Six of these changes will take £2.3bn from the pockets of the poorest households in 2013-14, according to the charity Child Poverty Action group (CPAG).

He added:

That figure does not include the replacement of disability living allowance with personal independence payments, to be phased in over three years from April. By 2016, an estimated 500,000 will lose this benefit, squeezing an estimated £1bn a year out of the incomes of disabled people. Disabled people will be disproportionately affected by the wider changes, with tens of thousands being hit simultaneously by up to six different welfare cuts.

Also to come, of course, is the introduction in October of universal credit, Iain Duncan Smith’s attempt to “merge a string of unemployment benefits and tax credits into a single payment for working-age people,” as the Guardian put it. Although Duncan Smith claims that “universal credit will simplify the system, making it easier for people on benefits to make the leap into work” — even though the jobs don’t exist — “about 450,000 disabled people will lose financially, according to Disability Rights UK, while 400,000 of the poorest households — such as single parent households with children — will be worse off by 2015, according to the Chartered Institute of Housing.”

As Patrick Wintour also noted:

Social analysts are concerned that deprivation levels are going back to those of 30 years ago, with the poorest families worse off than they were under Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. Debt and food poverty are growing, homelessness is increasing, and demand on food banks is soaring — a sign of more people falling through the welfare net. The social impact of this impoverishment of Britain’s poorest families — with more than 60% of such households in work — will unravel recent achievements in tackling poverty, say campaigners. According to Alison Garnham, chief executive of the CPAG, the coalition “is on course to leave behind the worst child poverty record of any government for a generation.”

With Labour ignoring, or spurning, on a daily basis, the opportunity to stand up for the poorest and weakest members of society, and for the importance of the state provision of services, leaving that job to the churches, I wonder when — or even if — there will be a massive revulsion against the Tories’ cruelty to make people wake up, take to the streets and demand change.

I hope so, or this will increasingly become a country in which it is difficult for decent people to live.

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 new “Close Guantánamo campaign”, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

From Guantánamo, Shaker Aamer Tells His Lawyer Disturbing Truths About the Hunger Strike

As part of my coverage of the huge, ongoing hunger strike at Guantánamo, I’m delighted to make available the full text of a statement (actually an affidavit) made by Clive Stafford Smith, the director of the London-based legal action charity Reprieve, based on a phone conversation that Clive had on March 29 with Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, whose story has been a focus of my work for many years. See here, here and here for reports made available to me by Shaker last year, and see here for an e-petition to the British government calling for renewed action to secure Shaker’s release — and here for an international petition.

As I have been reporting for many weeks (see here, here, here, here and here), the hunger strike began two months ago, in response to the renewed ill-treatment of the prisoners and their despair at ever being released, after President Obama promised to close the prison and then failed to do so, even though 86 of the remaining 166 prisoners — including Shaker — were cleared for release, at least three years ago, by an inter-agency task force that the President established shortly after taking office in 2009.

Shaker’s testimony, via Clive (and available here via Reprieve), adds important, and disturbing new information about the hunger strike, and the behavior of the authorities, as well as providing numbers — Shaker told Clive that there are “130 prisoners total on hunger strike in the whole prison,” and that, “Of the 66 prisoners in Camp V, 45 are recognized as being on strike, though more actually are doing it.”

Clive Stafford Smith’s Statement Recounting His Phone Conversation with Shaker Aamer, March 29, 2013

I am an attorney licenced to practice law in the State of Louisiana, as well as the United States Supreme Court and various other inferior US courts. I have been licenced to practice law since 1984.

I am currently the director of the London-based legal action charity, Reprieve. I am a dual US-UK national. I have been representing prisoners in Guantánamo Bay since 2002, when I was working in Louisiana. I continue to represent a number of prisoners there.

On Friday, March 29, 2013, at approximately 11am EST, I spent ninety minutes on an unclassified phone call with my client Shaker Aamer, whose Internment Serial Number is 239. We spent most of the phone call on the subject of the hunger strike.

Shaker gave me a detailed chronology of what is happening. I set forth my notes on our conversation on this subject below. When I use quotes, that is my best reconstruction of what Shaker 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.

I should note that I concentrated on matters that took place after my last call with Shaker, which took place on March 1, 2013.

February 6th: The incident with the Qur’ans began the current problems at the prison.

February 7th: The hunger striking began.

February 15th: They came to Shaker’s block in Camp V. (Note that I am generally not allowed to identify cell locations on a call such as this.) They FCE’d him (this means that they conducted a ‘Forcible Cell Extraction’, which is the current euphemism for sending in what has been known as the ERF, sometimes called the Emergency Reaction Force). They FCE’d the two others there also. They FCE’d all three men during prayer time. All three were injured in the FCE assault. One of the three was rendered unconscious and was taken to the hospital, where Shaker understands that he remained unconscious for four days. He is still in the hospital today.

March 12th: They came again to Shaker and FCE’d him during prayer time.

March 15th: The sleep deprivation began. The guards on the night shift began a concerted effort to make sleep difficult.

March 18th: The sleep deprivation got much worse. Shaker was moved to another block, with another person who has been a striker for many years. Shaker was placed in the first cell on the block which is designated for disabled prisoners, and has not been used for several years. It is only a few feet from where the guards use the toilet, shower, eat and so forth.

The female psych who calls herself ‘Helena’ came to see Shaker. He had just been moved to the noisy cell, and she asked him whether he planned to “harm himself.” He does not talk to those among the psychs who are only taking part in the abuse, so he did not initially respond to her. However, she went on to say that guards had reported that he wanted to harm himself. Shaker did reply then, as he did not want this excuse to be on the record for further abuse of him. “I have a wife and kids and I expect to be released sometime in the near future as I have been cleared for more than five years. It is not me who wants to harm me, but the Administration that is harming me.”

Shaker lodged a complaint with her about being in the new cell, as it is made for a disabled person (“I am not disabled yet”), and is too noisy for sleep. He pointed out that if the guards were genuinely concerned about him self-harming, there was an observation cell half way down the block with a plexiglass door where they could monitor him 24 hours a day, and where he might be able to get some sleep.

‘Helena’ said to Shaker that this was “not my business.” Shaker replied that it clearly was — he was being abused and denied sleep. She has not returned since that time.

March 19th: Adel Hakeemy (ISN 168) from Tunisia, also a Reprieve client, attempted suicide. He was being held where Shaker “used to be” (I understood this to be Camp V Echo, which is the most abusive of all the cell blocks in the camp — Shaker has detailed the mistreatment unique to this block in our earlier conversations). Hakeemy was taken to hospital and only returned on March 28th. He has been brought back to Camp V Echo again, which is obviously the worst thing they could do with a detainee who has been self-harming. Shaker asked that we get something done about this as soon as possible.

Shaker lodged an official complaint with the OIC [officer in charge] about the sleep deprivation. He pointed out that he suffers from tinnitus and that they have known for many years that he is a very light sleeper and has sleeping problems. There are 12 empty cells in the block, so he could be moved to any of them and the noise problems would be at least reduced. However, as of March 29th, there has been no response to his complaint.

Shaker reports that there is a new “Code Matrix” being used in the camp (i.e., Code Yellow means that someone has collapsed from the hunger strike, Code Snowball means that someone is committing self-harm, Code Orange Crush is where there is a open door for some unauthorized reason, and Code Matrix is apparently what they are using to avoid cameras and FCE teams). The evil impact of these codes is that the guards rush in and assault people without the normal cameras that are used with the FCE team (which, in theory at least, record what is done to the detainee).

One prisoner was subjected to the new Code Matrix for being “in possession of a bottle of water” and was beaten up without cameras.

There is also a new practice that has been brought in which involves using a dog leash on the detainees. Normally, they would have the hand and leg shackles (which are still in use) and the hands would be held by a guard from behind as they walk (or, more generally, push) the detainee along. But now they are attaching a cloth dog leash to the waist chain, clipping it on as they might an animal. A Sergeant tried to make Shaker a victim of a Code Matrix today when Shaker refused to have a dog leash, and be treated like an animal. However, in the end they backed off and went for the FCE team.

The authorities have begun a concerted campaign to FCE prisoners in a more abusive way. Shaker had been conducting the non-violent protest that he has done for many months (sitting in the Rec yard and asking to stay there for a week as a protest against the fact and conditions of his confinement; on this day, Shaker added the demand that he should be moved out of the noisy cell as well). This non-violent protest is essentially the only protest available to Shaker. For the months gone by, the FCE has been done the regular way, but they have now started a new method, which is being applied to all prisoners except those being taken to hospital.

The new FCE method is as follows: they no longer use the board, but they have six large people who come into the area where the detainee is and shackle his feet, and his hands behind his back. They then lift him up “like a potato sack” and simply carry him to where he is being taken (in Shaker’s case, through six or seven doors, about 150 yards to his cell). This is excruciatingly painful, particularly because of Shaker’s long-term back injuries (which were originally caused by mistreatment by the US in Bagram Air Force Base).

Two Generals came to visit Camp V. (Shaker believes, but cannot be sure, that one was Gen. John F. Kelly, currently head of Southcom.) There was an entourage with them. Just before they arrived, an ambulance pulled up outside the camp, with doctors, nurses and a stretcher. They were in civilian clothes. They had all sorts of equipment, including an oxygen tank.

They loaded a man with a light beard who was not a detainee on the stretcher. He had no cuffs, but was just strapped down to the stretcher so that he would not fall off. They carried him out to the ambulance in full view of the generals, and drove off towards the hospital. This was all an act for the generals to try to impress them with how good everything was. (Shaker believes that, if challenged, the authorities would state that this was a normal thing — perhaps a training operation.)

Shaker reports that visitors are coming by the camp every two or three days, as there is a concerted effort to convince people that treatment is fine. In truth, in the daytime it is much quieter, as it is mainly at night that the worst abuses happen.

“The Night Shift are back on ‘Miller Time’ [what Shaker calls the behavior and strategies of General Geoffrey D. Miller, in 2002-03]. They are stomping up and down the tier, talking, singing (one woman in particular), doing the garbage, banging the doors which are hydraulic and make a very loud slamming noise 20 or 30 times a night, dragging chairs around, crashing about with the ice chest. They have brought a big fan back to make noise.”

It is clear to Shaker that there are particular orders for the Night shift to do all this. For example, only the Night Shift does not use the board; the Day Shift still does. Shaker demanded why they were not using the board to carry him after what the doctors had said about his back. He was told that there was no rule requiring them to use the board.

Shaker has a good relationship with some of the guards, and NCOs have told him that they do not want to do it but they have to.

Shaker is also concerned that they are doing all they can to cover up who is committing the worst abuses. The number system was instituted seven years ago or so in order to allow the prisoners to report abusive soldiers. Various strategies are being used to prevent this now. Although he got the number of one person (the 300 lbs man), by and large he cannot get the numbers of FCE teams as they are wearing white coveralls that obscure their numbers. The guards are also changing their numbers and recycling old numbers from the past.

Shaker reports hearsay (it was said by the Colonel to one of the other prisoners — who does not want his name reported for fear of reprisals) that the Colonel said: “I will bring this camp to how it was in the old times. I’ve got kids at home and I know how to deal with kids.” Shaker is worried for the Colonel’s kids, as there may be a need for social services to check on how they are being treated. [The Colonel is, presumably, Army Col. John Bogdan, who took over as the commander of Joint Task Force Guantanamo's Detention Group in June 2012, and is blamed for the aggressive cell searches that triggered the hunger strike].

During the visits by outsiders, even in the day time, there are various strategies being used to cover up what is happening. Normally, Shaker reports, the food that was not used was left outside. Now, it is being put in the insulated containers in the block, to hide the fact that the detainees are refusing to eat it. This may, he thinks, also be done to make the smell of food lure more prisoners to go back to eating. Then all the unused food is thrown in the trash, so that the civilians who make it get the food containers back empty, and again cannot report on how much is not being eaten.

The Colonel has ordered other abusive tactics. Shaker understands (and the detainees believe) that the Colonel was deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan before coming to Guantánamo Bay, and is therefore taking a tough attitude, because that is what they apparently did there. He is only issuing half-isomats (three feet long rather than six) and so forth.

March 20th: Shaker complained to the medical corpsman about his abuse on March 19th, and so today he was carried on a board, since the medical officers said that the new method of FCE’ing was not permissible with Shaker because of his back injury.

March 21st: Today, and at all times since, they have reverted to the new method, and have refused to use the board. Indeed, today they introduced a new abuse on top of this. When the FCE team came in to get him, a particularly large soldier, who weighed about 300 lbs, kneed him in the back and held Shaker down with his full weight on top of him. This caused bruises on his back and hands. Shaker showed these to the corpsman, who said he would write it down and follow it up. However, nobody came to see him about his new injuries and nothing has been done.

March 22nd: This abusive FCE was repeated, with the 300 lb soldier. Again he was bruised by the man, and he took down the soldier’s number. This time, they held his hands and his legs, both crossed over, and the man pushed down until Shaker heard a cracking sound in his own back.

Shaker was not permitted to give me the soldier’s number on an unclassified call.

When Shaker sought medical treatment for this injury, he was offered Tylenol. “This is not a reasonable response for that kind of injury,” he said to me.

March 23rd: Shaker began refusing to go out of his cell, as he is very worried about being paralyzed in the same way as the Egyptian and the Syrian [identity unknown], who were paralyzed by the beatings that they got in Guantánamo Bay. (Note: the Egyptian was Sami al-Laithi, ISN 287, represented by Reprieve, who was paralyzed when beaten in the hospital.)

March 25th: At 14:05 today Shaker was visited by ‘Dr. Cordelia’, who is one of the pleasant medical personnel. She said he was now recognized as a striker, though they had refused to accept that before. She told him the impact of the strike, reading off a piece of paper about how his kidneys might fail, he might go blind, he might cause permanent brain damage, and so forth. She said that he needed Thiamine, medication for his muscle spasms, and nutrients like honey and Ensure.

Since March 25th, Shaker has been visited by a doctor or a nurse every day. However, they are doing nothing. He has lectured them all on how they are violating their medical ethics by taking part in the gratuitous mistreatment of the prisoners, but they have told him that they are following “orders from on high.”

March 29th: 04:00 they did a Code Matrix on one of the skinniest hunger strikers (now 107 lbs) who had a Tupperware box with him. He had tea in the box and they did a Code Matrix call on him. In the end, rather than be beaten up he gave it over to them.

09:15 With his phone call, they did not tell Shaker the night before as the rules require. They told him only at 9:15am that they would be coming immediately for him. As a result he had not been able to prepare to tell counsel about the details of what was going on. However, there was an “operational delay” in the call — which Shaker reported as being a flat tire on the van — which allowed him time to gather his notes up and prepare to speak with counsel.

“Last night was one of the worst,” Shaker reported. A Hispanic female was singing much of the night. The noise from next door in the toilet was constant and loud. Shaker got almost no sleep.

Shaker has lost 32 lbs as of today. This is necessarily an estimate as he is not being accurately weighed, but he considers himself an accurate judge of his own weight after the hunger strikes he has been on. His hand is shaking almost permanently because of the hunger strike.

Shaker has been badly punished for joining the strike. He has been denied various things that were ordered for medical reasons including his second isomat (for his back), his blanket (for arthritis), his knee brace (for his knee injury), his back brace (for his back problems), and the pressure socks that are meant to help with the edema in his feet. He even went ten days without being allowed a toothbrush.

He has also been denied the medically ordered second bottle of water. In Camp V (as compared to Camp VI, where apparently bottled water has been cut off altogether) there is a new rule that they are only allowed one bottle at a time — whether they are using it for coffee, for washing for prayer, or drinking.

All the spices that Shaker had collected were thrown out; apparently there is a policy of throwing out the spices that detainees got through the ICRC.

There is currently a policy of nobody in authority talking to prisoners about their complaints. Shaker has asked to see the OIC, the AOIC, and so forth, but none will come, as the NCO reports them as saying it is not their responsibility.

As of March 29th, Shaker reports that there are 130 prisoners total on hunger strike in the whole prison. Of the 66 prisoners in Camp V, 45 are recognized as being on strike, though more actually are doing it (Shaker was only recently recognized himself). Shaker reports that 15 of them have blood sugar levels below 40 mg/dl. There is one prisoner with a blood sugar level of 17 mg/dl. Seven detainees are in hospital.

The authorities are playing with the prisoners’ weights. They use the big scale now, and they weigh the prisoner with shackles, and often immediately after they have drunk a lot of water. They hide the weight reading from the prisoners, so there is no saying what is written down, though they sometimes say what it is. Shaker reports various ‘miracles’: With one prisoner, who weighed 127 lbs last week and has not eaten in the interim, they said he was 140 lbs.

Shaker understands that one detainee is reportedly 85 lbs; another 107 lbs; and a third 117 lbs.

Shaker estimated that he is 158 lbs, down from around 190 lbs when this began. “You can see the bones in my chest. My body has taken a lot of shock.” He is taking two or three spoons of honey a day to try to ameliorate the worst impact of the strike on himself, as his body had suffered a great deal of damage over the past eleven years.

Between six and ten detainees are ‘falling down’ every day. They are told that this is because their blood sugar levels are between 20 and 40 (mg/dl). If this happens, they are being strapped to the board, and told that they have to take a mixture of honey and water. They may be left on the board for several hours until they agree to take the honey and water. They are using this method rather than the tube and the chair.

Prisoners are being mistreated in gratuitous ways, in addition to the mistreatment of Hakeemy (ISN 168). For example, the paralyzed Syrian has been denied his wheel chair for 6 weeks now. He is being isolated in Camp V Echo and he is there without his chair.

Notwithstanding this, Shaker reports that the detainees are more together than ever they have been, as they are determined to fight the abuse they are suffering through a non-violent hunger strike.

While I would obviously prefer that Shaker Aamer 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 new “Close Guantánamo campaign”, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Andy Worthington Discusses the Guantánamo Hunger Strike, and America’s Chronic Injustice, on the Michael Slate Show

The world is, I hope, waking up to the truth that something terrible is happening at Guantánamo — a prison-wide hunger strike, involving as many as 130 of the remaining 166 prisoners, which began nearly two months ago, but was denied by the US authorities until just two weeks ago, although the numbers conceded by the military fail to match those cited by the prisoners themselves, via their lawyers.

From the five or six long-term hunger strikers initially acknowledged, the numbers went up to 14, and have been steadily increasing so that, today, the Pentagon claimed that “39 men are consistently refusing food,” as the Washington Post reported, also noting, “Of those, 11 are being force fed.” The men are on a hunger strike because of complaints about their treatment under the current command at the prison, but also — and primarily, I believe — because of their understanding that they have been completely abandoned by President Obama, even though he promised to close the prison (within a year) when he took office in 2009, and even though 86 of the remaining prisoners were cleared for release from the prison by an inter-agency task force that the President established in 2009.

On Friday, I spoke to Michael Slate, the veteran radio host whose informative and hard-hitting show is on KPFK 90.7 FM, in Los Angeles. The show is available here, as an MP3, and my interview begins at just after 23 minutes and lasts for 17 minutes. It follows another important interview, with Annette Dickerson, the Director of Education and Outreach at the Center for Constitutional Rights, discussing a  disgraceful milestone: the 5,000,000th person to be subjected to the New York Police Department’s “stop and frisk” policy.

After running through the story of the hunger strike with Michael, I was pleased to have the opportunity to explain how the focus for what I hope will be a state of increasing awareness and discomfort in America at what is happening at Guantánamo needs to be on President Obama and on Congress — on the President because, as well as lacking political courage, he imposed a disgracefully unfair ban on releasing any of the cleared Yemenis, who make up two-thirds of the prisoners cleared for release, in the wake of a failed bomb plot in 2009 that was masterminded in Yemen — and on Congress because lawmakers have also imposed unjustifiable restrictions on the release of prisoners.

I do hope you have time to listen to the show, as it was, I believe, a powerful and informative interview. I’ll be writing more about the hunger strike tomorrow, but for now, if you want to know more, please see my recent articles, “Voices from the Hunger Strike in Guantánamo” and “Prison-Wide Hunger Strike Still Rages at Guantánamo.”

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 new “Close Guantánamo campaign”, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.