Andy Worthington's Blog, page 3

URGENT ACTION REQUIRED for Six Former Guantánamo Prisoners Repatriated to Yemen from the UAE

The six men who have just been repatriated to Yemen, where their safety and liberty cannot be guaranteed, from the UAE, where they were imprisoned, rather than being integrated into Emirati society as promised, after their transfer from Guantánamo in November 2015 and August 2016. Top row, from L to R: Khalid al-Qadasi (ISN 163), Sulaiman al-Nahdi (ISN 511) and Saeed Jarabh (ISN 235). Bottom row, L to R: Jamil Nassir (ISN 728), Mohammed al-Adahi (ISN 033) and Mohammed Khusruf (ISN 509). Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

In a shocking development, the government of the UAE (United Arab Emirates) has repatriated six former Guantánamo prisoners — out of 18 Yemenis in total who were sent to the UAE between November 2015 and January 2017 — even though the security situation in Yemen is horrendous, because of the ongoing civil war, and their safety cannot be guaranteed.

The six men, whose stories I reported here and here, when they were transferred in November 2015 and August 2016, are Khalid al-Qadasi (ISN 163), Sulaiman al-Nahdi (ISN 511), Saeed Jarabh (ISN 235), Jamil Nassir (ISN 728), Mohammed al-Adahi (ISN 033) and Mohammed Khusruf (ISN 509). Jarabh, the youngest, was born in 1976, and is now 44 or 45 years old, while the eldest are al-Adahi, born in 1962, who is 58 or 59 years old, and Khusruf, reportedly born in February 1950, which would make him 71.

When they were first sent to the UAE, the Yemenis — and four Afghans and a Russian who were also transferred with them — were told that they would be integrated into Emirati society after spending time in a rehabilitation center, but instead they found themselves indefinitely detained in abusive conditions in secret prisons, even though they had all been unanimously approved for release either by the Guantánamo Review Task Force, or by Periodic Review Boards, the two high-level US government review processes for the Guantánamo prisoners that were established under President Obama, which assessed that they did not pose a threat to the US.

The alarming story of their betrayal and mistreatment first surfaced via the Washington Post in May 2018, which I reported in an article at the time. I subsequently became involved in discussions in the UK about what might be done for Ravil Mingazov, the Russian, whose family had successfully sought asylum and were living in London, where I met his son, who told me of his father’s despair, and of sporadic phone calls cut off whenever his father tried to discuss his situation. However, the consensus of opinion was that the UAE would respond badly to public criticism, and it was better to continue to try exerting pressure on the Emirati authorities behind the scenes.

At the end of 2019, three of the Afghans were repatriated as part of Afghan peace negotiations, but there was still no news about the fate of the 20 others. In summer 2020, the United Nations ran out of patience, sending a letter to the Emirati authorities decrying the treatment of Mingazov, who was threatened with repatriation to Russia, where he faced torture or other ill-treatment, and again condemning the UAE in October, when proposals first emerged regarding the enforced repatriation of the Yemenis.

Just three weeks ago, the UN’s human rights experts again condemned the Emirati authorities, after reports suggested that Mingazov’s enforced repatriation was imminent, and also reiterated their concerns about the other prisoners still held in what they described as “indefinite detention at an undisclosed location, without charge or trial, with extremely restricted family contact, no legal representation and recurrent periods of prolonged solitary confinement.”

Now, however, with Mingazov’s fate still hanging in the balance, six of the Yemenis have been repatriated, without any official announcement taking place. The American Center for Justice, based in Michigan, noted in a press release on July 25 that they had arrived in the city of Mukalla, with the other 12 Yemenis scheduled to arrive in the near future.

It might seem reassuring that the Yemenis have finally been freed from the Emirati prison and returned to their home country, but there is, sadly, nothing to celebrate. On arrival, the men were transferred to the custody of the Yemeni intelligence services, and their families were called, and invited to come to the prison to discuss their relatives’ cases, but there is no guarantee that they will be freed, and, in some cases, their relatives can’t afford to travel to Mukalla, the capital of Hadhramaut, or it is not safe to do so, as much of the country, including the capital Sana’a, is under the control of the Houthis opposed to the government led by President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi.

Missing in all of the above is the US government, even though the State Department is clearly aware of the disgraceful situation in the UAE. As the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, explained during a question and answer session with young people during a recent visit to France, “if … you’re considering sending somebody from Guantánamo to another country in order to close Guantánamo, we must have a guarantee that the rights of these people will be protected in that country.” That, he added, “is not easy.”

Nevertheless, it is imperative that the men sent to Yemen are not abandoned by the US government, as they were when they were so shamefully betrayed in the UAE.

The American Center for Justice called on the Yemeni government “to receive the detainees, protect them, provide safe shelters, job opportunities, provide health care and all the requirements of a decent life, hand them over to their families, and continue full care for them to help them integrate into society and practice their normal lives.” This is an admirable roll call of demands, but it means nothing if the US government isn’t prepared to act to ensure the safety of the men who have just arrived in Yemen from the UAE.

If you’re based in the US, contacting the State Department is a start, but it would also be extremely helpful if campaigners are able to organize a protest outside the State Department, based in the Harry S. Truman Building at 2201 C Street NW, to demand that the US government does all it can to protect these men and to provide them with the safety, security and financial support they need to rebuild their lives now that they have escaped the hell of their abusive imprisonment in the UAE.

I’m also wondering if it might be possible to set up a fundraising appeal to raise money for the families who are unable to get to Mukalla from their homes in other parts of the country. Do get in touch if you have suggestions, or want to be involved.

POSTSCRIPT: I’ve just had some good news. Three of the men are back with their families after 14/15 years imprisoned in Guantanamo and 4/5 years imprisoned in the UAE. I can’t imagine how joyful that must be for them. However, the security situation in Yemen is still perilous, they have no support for building a new life, and the other three men are still held in Mukalla, with 12 more to follow. It remains important, I believe, for people to urge the State Department to act on their behalf.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

Video: I Discuss the Possible Closure of the Prison at Guantánamo Bay on RT America

A screenshot of Andy Worthington being interviewed on RT America on July 20, 2021.Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

On Tuesday evening, I was pleased to be asked by RT America for an interview regarding the prospects of the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay after the release of Abdul Latif Nasser, the first release from the prison under Joe Biden, since he was inaugurated as president six months ago, and the first release for over three years.

Speaking to Scottie Nell Hughes, I explained how the closure of Guantánamo ought to now be within sight, with just 39 men still held, and only twelve of those men facing trials, or having gone through the trial process. Of the 27 others, ten — like Nasser — have also been approved for release, while the 17 others have never been charged, and have been aptly described as America’s “forever prisoners,” a label that no country that claims to respect the rule of law should want clinging to them.

Fortunately, as I also explained, 19 and a half years since Guantánamo opened, there is now a widespread acceptance within the US mainstream political culture that it is unacceptable to continue endlessly holding men who have never been charged with a crime, and, by the government’s own admissions over the years, never will be.

As a result, if President Biden is serious about closing Guantánamo, the ten men already approved for release will be freed as soon as possible, and arrangements will also need to be made to free the 17 “forever prisoners,” unless any of them can be charged — although, as I added, that seems unlikely because, if credible charges existed, there is no reason why they would not have already been charged.

The video is below, via YouTube, and I hope you have time to watch it, and will share it if you find it useful. My interview was at the start of the show, but do keep watching for an interview straight after me with longtime peace activist David Swanson.

When it comes to approving the “forever prisoners” for release, President Biden has two options. The first is for them to be recommended for release by Periodic Review Boards, a review process set up under President Obama, which recently approved five other “forever prisoners” for release, or they can have their release ordered by a court, although on this point, as I will be explaining in a forthcoming article, and as I also discussed last month, the Biden administration — as was the case under George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump — shows no willingness to rein in the Civil Division of the Justice Department, which has persistently defended the imprisonment of prisoners at Guantánamo, however weak the case against them may be.

As for the 12 men facing trials, it is abundantly clear by now that the military commission trial system, first established to try men accused of war crimes in 2001, ruled illegal by the Supreme Court in 2006, but revived again in 2006 and in 2009 under Obama, is not fit for purpose, and the men charged should be moved, instead, to federal courts on the US mainland, which have a proven track record of successfully prosecuting terrorism-related crimes, so that Guantánamo can finally be closed.

How much of this will come to pass is as still unknown, of course, but it certainly ought to be possible, especially because, as I noted above, the casual acceptance of Guantánamo’s central injustice — holding men forever without charge or trial — seems finally to have become unfashionable.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

Biden Frees First Prisoner from Guantánamo: Abdul Latif Nasser, Approved for Release Five Years Ago

Abdul Latif Nasser, in a photo taken at Guantánamo in recent years.Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

In great news from Guantánamo, the Department of Defense announced today that Abdul Latif Nasser (aka Nasir), the last Moroccan national in the prison at Guantánamo Bay, has been repatriated. I’ve been writing about Nasser’s case since I first began researching and writing about Guantánamo over 15 years ago, and in recent years his story has frequently featured in the media, not least via a six-part Radiolab series last year.

Nasser, 56, was approved for release five years and eight days ago, after a Periodic Review Board, a review process set up under President Obama, established that, to use the PRB’s own studiously careful terminology, “law of war detention of Abdul Latif Nasir no longer remained necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the national security of the United States.” As a result, as the DoD’s news release explained, the board — which “consists of one senior career official from the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Justice, and State, along with the Joint Staff and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence” — authorized his “repatriation to his native country of Morocco, subject to security and humane treatment assurances.”

Nasser’s release from Guantánamo should have been straightforward, but the paperwork between the US and the Moroccan government wasn’t completed until 22 days before Obama left office, and, because legislation passed by Congress stipulated that lawmakers had to be informed 30 days before a prisoner release, he missed being freed by just eight days.

He then languished at the prison for another four years, under Donald Trump, when only one prisoner was released — a Saudi who had agreed a plea deal in his military commission trial, which stipulated that he had to be returned to continued imprisonment in his home country.

Tomorrow marks six months since Joe Biden’s inauguration, and while it is to his administration’s credit that Nasser has finally been freed, it should, in all honesty, have happened sooner.

I’m delighted that Nasser is finally going to be reunited with his family, and will hopefully be at liberty to resume life as a free man, although the Associated Press noted that, on his return, “the public prosecutor at the Court of Appeal in Rabat said the National Division of the Judicial Police in Casablanca had been instructed to open an investigation into Nasser ‘on suspicion of committing terrorist acts.’” As the AP noted, the announcement “didn’t specify” what those “terrorist acts” were supposed to have been, but Nasser’s Guantánamo file claimed that he had been “a member of a nonviolent but illegal Moroccan Sufi Islam group in the 1980s.”

Nasser’s attorney in Morocco, Khalil Idrissi, said that the “judicial authorities should not ‘take measures that prolong his torment and suffering, especially since he lived through the hell of Guantánamo.’” He added that he “hoped the investigation into Nasser would not ‘continue to deprive him of his freedom’ so he could finally ‘meet his family again,’” and also said that the years Nasser spent in Guantánamo “were unjustified and outside the law, and what he suffered remains a stain of disgrace on the forehead of the American system.”

As well as keeping an eye on Abdul Latif Nasser’s freedom, now that he has finally been released from Guantánamo, we should also not forget that ten other men still held at Guantánamo — out of the 39 men in total who are now still held — have also been approved for release: five in recent months, under President Biden, one at the end of Trump’s presidency, one in 2016, and three in 2010 under Obama’s first review process, the Guantánamo Review Task Force, two of whom, by all accounts, have refused all efforts to facilitate their release, a situation that must raise concerns about their state of mind.

Of the other 29 men still held, just 12 are facing trials, or have been through the trial process, leaving 17 others as “forever prisoners,” held indefinitely without charge or trial. As numerous critics of the prison’s continued existence have explained in recent months — most prominently, 24 Democratic Senators who wrote a letter to Biden in April — it is unacceptable that anyone held without charge or trial should continue to be held, and, as a result, the Biden administration also needs to authorize the release of these men — through PRBs, if, as seems sadly apparent, the Civil Division of the Justice Department is as intent on defending continued imprisonment without charge or trial at Guantánamo as it has been throughout the presidencies of George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

How the Law Failed at Guantánamo

The isolated prison cells of Camp 5 at Guantánamo, where the “high value detainees,” brought to the prison from CIA “black sites” in September 2006, were recently transferred, after their previous cell block, Camp 7, was judged to be unfit for purpose.Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

Just five days ago, on July 11, the prison at Guantánamo Bay marked another sad and unjustifiable milestone in its long history — nineteen and a half years since it first opened on January 11, 2002.

From the beginning, Guantánamo was a project of executive overreach — of the US government, under George W. Bush, deciding, after the 9/11 attacks, that the normal rules governing the imprisonment of combatants during wartime should be swept aside. The men who arrived at Guantánamo were deprived of the protections of the Geneva Conventions, and were designated as “unlawful enemy combatants,” who, the Bush administration claimed, could be held indefinitely. For those who were to be charged with crimes, the Bush administration revived the military commission trial system, last used for German saboteurs in the Second World War, deciding that acts of terrorism — and even some actions that were a normal part of war, such as engaging in firefights — were war crimes. The result was that soldiers came to be regarded as terrorists, and alleged terrorists came to be regarded as warriors, with the former denied all notions of justice, and the latter provided only with a legal forum that was intended to lead to their execution after cursory trials.

The mess that ensued has still not been adequately addressed. Nearly two and a half years after Guantánamo opened, the Supreme Court took the unusual step of granting habeas corpus rights to wartime prisoners, having recognized that the men held had no way whatsoever to challenge the basis of their imprisonment if, as many of them claimed, they had been seized by mistake. That ruling, Rasul v. Bush, allowed lawyers into the prison, to begin preparing habeas corpus cases, but on the same day, in another ruling, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, the Supreme Court essentially approved Guantánamo as the venue for the exercise of a parallel version of the wartime detention policies of the Geneva Conventions, ruling that prisoners could be held until the end of hostilities — an unwise move, given that the Bush administration regarded its “war on terror” as a global war that ignored geographical context, and could last for generations.

Separately, the CIA had been empowered to muddy the waters still further by holding suspected “high-value” prisoners in “black sites,” secret prisons foisted on compliant regimes around the world, where they were subjected to torture programs that, in defiance of international and domestic law, had been approved by lawyers working in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), the legal body charged with providing objective legal opinions to the executive branch. A third Supreme Court ruling in June 2006, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, overturned the military commissions as unlawful, while also reminding the Bush administration that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions — prohibiting the use of torture and “cruel, humiliating and degrading treatment” — applied to all prisoners under US control. The “black sites” subsequently closed, and 14 “high value detainees” were brought to Guantánamo, where a revived version of the commissions, approved by Congress, was supposed to provide a fairer forum for their subsequent prosecutions.

The Supreme Court’s fourth and — to date — final ruling regarding Guantánamo came in June 2008, in Boumediene v. Bush, as a result of Congress responding to Rasul v. Bush, four years earlier, by passing legislation designed to prevent the prisoners from exercising their habeas rights. The Court ruled that Congress had acted unconstitutionally, and granted the prisoners constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights.

Fast forward to 2021, and, sadly, Guantánamo largely remains a lawless place. Boumediene v. Bush led to a two-year period in which judges were able to objectively review the government’s purported evidence against the prisoners, deciding, in 38 cases, that the government had failed to demonstrate, even with a low evidentiary standard, that the men in question had any meaningful connection to either al-Qaeda or the Taliban, and ordering their release. Shamefully, politically motivated appeals court judges subsequently changed the rules, overturning six of those decisions, and eventually shutting down habeas corpus for the prisoners by ordering judges to regard all the government’s evidence — however risible — as presumptively accurate, and in the years since the Supreme Court has turned down numerous opportunities to take back control.

As for the military commissions, 12 prisoners have been through the process — two via trials, and six via plea deals — although many of these were overturned on appeal, on the predicted basis that Congress had invented the war crimes for which they were convicted. Meanwhile, the “high-value” trials — including those of five men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks — are mired in seemingly endless pre-trial hearings, as the government tries to suppress all mention of the torture to which the men were subjected, while the defense teams insist that exposing that torture is the only way that anything resembling fair trials can proceed.

These are my thoughts nineteen and a half years since the opening of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, and they were meant to provide an introduction to an important article that was recently published in the Atlantic, written by Benjamin Farley, an attorney with the defense team for Ammar al Baluchi, one of the five men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks. Farley’s article is entitled, “The Fairy Tale America Likes to Tell Itself,” and I’m cross-posting it below, because it provides a powerful insider account of how the law has failed at Guantánamo, and, importantly, what President Biden can do about it, if he is sincere in his desire to see Guantánamo closed.

I hope you have time to read Farley’s article in its entirety, as it reaches places and provides details that my own efforts cannot accomplish, and I hope that President Biden will listen to his conclusions about what now needs to be done to restore the rule of law. Firstly, he urges the closure of Guantánamo, and the immediate release of the 28 men still held , out of 40 in total, who have not been charged. Secondly, he calls for plea deals to be negotiated for the ten men currently facing trials. Thirdly, he calls for the full Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s report on rendition and interrogation (the CIA torture report) to be released, and, fourthly, and innovatively, he calls on the Biden administration to avoid any possible reprise of the calamitous mistakes of the last two decades by “conven[ing] an international conference that aims to articulate the laws of war applicable to non-international armed conflicts.”

The Fairy Tale America Likes to Tell Itself
By Benjamin R. Farley, The Atlantic, June 29, 2021

The country believes that its policies are like a pendulum, swinging back and forth over a moderate middle ground. But since 9/11, that pendulum has been stuck.

Many Americans like to tell themselves a story about the choices the country makes in times of national crisis. We see our country’s policies as a pendulum. We may overreact at first, temporarily sacrificing principles and rights to meet the emergency at hand. But eventually the crisis recedes, and in restoring our commitment to foundational principles and the rule of law, we push the pendulum back toward equilibrium.

This story is comforting; it makes sense of America’s reactions to crises throughout the country’s history. Indeed, I’ve repeatedly used this story to explain America’s post-9/11 policies even as I’ve played a small part in it. From 2013 to 2017, I was an adviser to the special envoy in the State Department’s Guantánamo-closure office. Since 2017, I have served as an attorney in the Department of Defense’s Military Commissions Defense Organization, on the team that represents Ammar al Baluchi— one of the men at Guantánamo facing the death penalty before the 9/11 military commission. But what I write here represents my own views, and not those of the Department of Defense. Unfortunately, the story I have told of post-9/11 overreaction and excess rectified by American institutions looks more and more like a fairy tale —albeit one that the Biden administration might yet redeem as truth.

Our pendulum swung in the aftermath of one of the most devastating terrorist acts in history, when then-President George W. Bush adopted a set of extraordinary policies inextricably linked with the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Those post-9/11 policies constituted a significant departure from American law and values. Bush authorized the CIA to kidnap and detain individuals believed to be linked to al-Qaeda at secret dungeons around the world. At those locations — “black sites” — the United States imprisoned men incommunicado and practiced torture in violation of both a universal prohibition and America’s own vocal repudiation of the tactic. So-called enhanced interrogation included, among other abhorrent tactics, hooding, forced nudity, hallucination-inducing sleep deprivation, and concussion-inducing beatings, as well as war crimes that the United States had previously prosecuted, such as waterboarding. In some cases, U.S. personnel treated men such as my client as “training props,” tormenting them without even trying to gather intelligence. At least 26 of the 119 men who the United States has acknowledged were imprisoned as part of its so-called Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation program should not have been, according to the program’s own standards. One black site was even co-located with the offshore prison camp Bush established at Guantánamo Bay, where nearly 800 men have been detained — supposedly under the laws of war but largely without the protections that body of law provides.

Almost five years into the “Global War on Terror,” the pendulum appeared set to swing back to equilibrium when the Supreme Court handed down Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. That decision rejected the Bush administration’s extreme interpretation of the laws of war — which regulate the conduct of warfare, including the treatment of captured enemies, and endeavor to make it more humane — and promised a return to long-professed American principles and the rule of law. Yet, in the 15 years since, Congress, the executive branch, and federal courts have neutered that decision and arrested the pendulum’s course. Today, 40 aging and infirm men — many of whom were victims of American torture or cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment —remain in U.S. custody at Guantánamo Bay in a detention regime that conforms little better to the laws of war now than it did in 2006.

From the outset, the United States has asserted that the laws of war authorize the imprisonment of men at Guantánamo for the duration of its war with al-Qaeda. The Bush administration implausibly concluded that the novelty of that war exempted it from applying law-of-war protections, particularly the Geneva Conventions, to the detention that it claimed the war justified. Contrary to the laws of war, the Bush administration transported detainees to a location far removed from its battlefield with al-Qaeda. It refused to treat those men as prisoners of war and failed to convene tribunals to determine their appropriate status under the law. It refused to apply Common Article 3, which would have barred the torture of America’s detainees, as well as their cruel or inhuman treatment. It tortured at least two detainees in military (as opposed to CIA) custody at Guantánamo. And it purported to establish military commissions — traditional American law-of-war tribunals — that not only lacked meaningful fair-trial guarantees but failed to adhere to necessary requirements of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Notwithstanding these deviations from law and principle, the United States was untroubled by its unusual detention regime at Guantánamo because it reasoned that its activities there were beyond the reach of the Constitution and American courts. Indeed, a Bush-administration official described Guantánamo as the legal equivalent of outer space because of Cuba’s theoretical, residual sovereignty over the United States’ de facto perpetual leasehold there.

Then, on June 29, 2006, the Supreme Court decided Hamdan, leading many legal onlookers to think that the pendulum might finally be pushed back by the imposition of law and judicial oversight on what was happening in Guantánamo. In Hamdan, the second of three major Guantánamo cases decided from 2004 to 2008, the Supreme Court ruled that President Bush had overstepped his authority in ordering military tribunals for Guantánamo detainees that deviated radically from the Geneva Conventions and the UCMJ. Hamdan appeared to dictate that the detention regime at Guantánamo would thereafter conform to the laws of war. Torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment would be prohibited. Justice could be meted out only by regularly constituted tribunals that satisfied internationally recognized fair-trial guarantees. And, with the Court’s seminal Boumediene v. Bush decision in 2008, Guantánamo detainees were guaranteed the ability to seek judicial review in U.S. federal courts of both the legality and the conditions of their detention at Guantánamo, seemingly enshrining the law of war’s force there.

Unfortunately, in the 15 years following Hamdan, the promise of that decision — and that of Boumediene — has proved, like a fairy tale, too good to be true. Just two months after the Court handed down Hamdan, the United States transferred 14 victims of its torture program to Guantánamo. Although these men were now supposedly in military custody, the CIA retained operational control over them. Although they were now ostensibly law-of-war detainees, they continued to be deprived of meaningful access to their families. Although they were transferred to Guantánamo expressly to face (fair) trial by military commission — and although the Supreme Court had already guaranteed their access to legal representation — the United States continued to prevent them from meeting or speaking with attorneys for at least a year. And, although any fair trial necessarily precludes the use of torture-derived evidence, the United States continued to rely on the proceeds of torture by using FBI agents who had been intimately involved in the torture program to gather supposedly “clean” evidence for use at trial. In fact, the fruits of those torture-tainted interrogations remain the basis of U.S. prosecutions at Guantánamo that limp along to this day. One military judge has even authorized the prosecution to use, in pre-trial proceedings, statements extracted by torture at black sites, as if those statements were ordinary hearsay.

In the years since Boumediene, aggressive litigation positions advanced by the United States in Guantánamo habeas corpus proceedings, combined with a deferential federal appellate court, made judicial review of detention little more than a dead letter. The D.C. Circuit established a standard of wartime detention so expansive that it embraces not only men who fought the United States but some who never bore arms against the U.S. and even men whom al-Qaeda rejected. It is a standard so broad that the United States appears to believe it countenances the ongoing detention of a member of Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin, a group that capitulated to the U.S. five years ago and subsequently became an American ally.

During this same period, Congress wrote much of the law of war out of law-of-war detention at Guantánamo Bay. Through the 2006 Military Commissions Act and the 2009 Military Commissions Act, Congress barred the men detained at Guantánamo from relying on the Geneva Conventions to set the parameters of their detention. Congress also amended the War Crimes Act to insulate U.S. personnel from liability for violations of the laws of war, including outrages upon personal dignity and breaches of due-process protections.

For its part, despite repeatedly claiming that detention at Guantánamo is “informed by the principles of the laws of war,” the executive branch — across the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations — emasculated the regulatory power of those laws by cherry-picking its authorities while discarding its obligations at Guantánamo. For example, the United States confused distinct legal categories and disparate legal regimes, asserting that its Guantánamo prisoners are detainable for the duration of its war with al-Qaeda, as if they were soldiers under the Third Geneva Convention, even as it established a detention review process that looks like the one applicable to civilians under the Fourth Geneva Convention. Yet, in doing so, the United States failed to adhere even to the partly U.S.-authored Copenhagen Principles by insisting that such review is discretionary and prohibiting it from reconsidering the underlying detainability of U.S. prisoners. Worse, the United States’ years-long, continued detention of men whom it no longer believes it must imprison is inconsistent with the foundational law-of-war principle of military necessity that approves detention as a battlefield expedient in the first place.

Similarly, the executive branch refuses to apply fundamental, humanitarian law-of-war principles at Guantánamo. As recently as January 11 of this year, in an effort to evade a federal court order, the executive branch claimed to retroactively exempt Guantánamo alone from U.S. detention regulations that would otherwise require a mixed medical commission to determine whether a victim of American torture is so ill that he must be released. Exacerbating that failing, the United States likewise refuses to provide its Guantánamo detainees with access to health care equal to the care available to the men and women who guard them, embracing a perverse justification for this deprivation: Guantánamo, it says, is more like the remote battlefields on the other side of the world than a peaceful base fewer than 500 miles off the coast of Florida. That policy has likely already resulted in the permanent debilitation of at least one prisoner.

Nevertheless, on this anniversary of Hamdan, a new administration imbued with the lessons of the Obama years provides reason — if ever so slight — to hope that America will resurrect its values and restore our pendulum’s equilibrium. Although much of the damage wrought by the United States’ post-9/11 excesses cannot be undone — those tortured cannot be untortured; those debilitated cannot be healed — it can be mitigated in a way that helps restore America’s global leadership. That mitigation requires the United States to take four steps that would, in President Joe Biden’s words, restore America’s commitment to “upholding universal rights, respecting the rule of law, and treating every person with dignity.” Together, these steps would save our story from its fate as a fairy tale.

First, the Biden administration must finally close the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay in order to end its aberrant experiment there. President Biden and senior members of his administration have already committed to doing just that. The president should appoint a senior administration official to quickly and responsibly repatriate or resettle the 28 Guantánamo detainees who are neither being prosecuted before nor awaiting sentencing by military commissions. In transferring those detainees, the Biden administration should acknowledge the victims of American torture and ensure that, upon their release from U.S. custody, those victims receive at least appropriate medical care for their complex injuries.

Second, the Biden administration should demonstrate its commitment to the rule of law by immediately entering into plea negotiations to resolve the cases of the 10 men with pending Guantánamo military-commission trials. Such negotiations almost certainly mean that the United States will not, ultimately, execute the alleged perpetrators of the 9/11 and other terrorist acts. But that is both appropriate and proportionate. Neither the United States nor any other government should be allowed to execute victims of its own torture — and it certainly should not be allowed to do so on the basis of evidence derived from that torture. Disallowing the death penalty for victims of torture will meaningfully deter future U.S. leaders who are enticed by a crisis to discard American law and values to address that crisis. Plea agreements also offer the quickest path to achieving a modicum of justice for the United States, the American people, and the victims of terrorism by finally assigning individual responsibility for terror, an outcome long denied by the interminable, broken military commissions.

Third, the Biden administration should declassify the full Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s report on rendition and interrogation. It should also make the complete, unredacted version of that report available to the attorneys who possess requisite security clearances and represent Guantánamo detainees on trial before military commissions. Those attorneys require access to the full report in order to adequately serve their clients, and access to it will ensure that those clients receive sentences that correctly reflect both the scale of their crimes and the wanton, illegal brutality they suffered. Anything less would serve only to extend the United States’ decades-long denial of a fair trial for alleged criminals who are also victims of American torture.

Finally, to restore America’s historical, global law-of-war leadership, the Biden administration should convene an international conference that aims to articulate the laws of war applicable to non-international armed conflicts. This conference would fill the gaps in regulation of armed conflicts such as the U.S. war with al-Qaeda. It would demonstrate America’s recommitment to the rule of law by establishing a legal framework that clearly defines the rights, duties, and obligations of participants in those conflicts. In so doing, it would restrain parties to future such conflicts, limiting their ability to engage in the law avoidance that marked much of America’s post-9/11 excess.

If taken, these steps would help mitigate, and meaningfully impede the recurrence of, the harms inflicted since the 9/11 attacks. These steps would also restore our standing in the international community as a country committed to universal values and the rule of law. And they would, at long last, vindicate our pendular story.

Benjamin R. Farley is a trial attorney and law-of-war counsel at the U.S. Department of Defense, Military Commissions Defense Organization, where he represents Ammar al Baluchi, one of the five men facing the death penalty before the 9/11 military commission at Guantánamo Bay.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

The Hell That is Boris Johnson’s Broken, Brexit-Deluded, Covid-Ravaged England

Boris Johnson leaves a media briefing in Downing Street on December 24, 2020.Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

For the last two months, my physical world has shrunk immensely. For nine years I cycled almost every day, capturing the changing face of London on bike rides that have taken me to the furthest postcodes of Europe’s largest city, and that, since the first Covid lockdown in March 2020, involved me cycling most days into central London — the City and the West End — to capture what began as apocalyptic emptiness, to which, by degrees, human activity eventually returned, but on nothing like the scale that it was before Covid hit. I post a photo a day from those bike rides — with accompanying essays — on my Facebook page ‘The State of London’, and also on Twitter.

Two months ago, however, I sprained my leg quite badly — crossing an unexpected line when what I thought was healthy activity turned out to be something that, instead, signified that my body’s resilience was finite, and that I was wearing it out.

Since then, I’ve barely left my immediate neighbourhood. For most of the last two months, I felt fortunate if I was able to hobble to the bottom of the street I live in in Brockley, in south east London. The worst of it is now over, as the muscle I sprained has finally healed, but in the process of compensating my knee itself is now bruised and painful, and although I can walk further — up to and and around my local park, Hilly Fields, and around the streets nearest to me, I haven’t been able to venture further afield, except on a few occasions when my wife has driven me somewhere.

Throughout this whole period, I’ve had only a handful of social interactions, beyond my immediate family, because we were in a version of lockdown in which social mingling wasn’t wildly encouraged. On the few occasions I have socialised, it has been sweeter than I remember when we all used to take it for granted — a gig with my band The Four Fathers at the end of May, a few dinners, drinks or brunches with friends.

I’ve grown accustomed to being largely housebound. I’ve been doing more writing, and, in any case, I have a book to work on, based on ‘The State of London’, for publication next year, that won’t write itself. In addition, the weather, over the last few months, has sometimes been unseasonably cold, and has frequently involved more rainfall than is usual, so I haven’t been generally missing out on those long sunny journeys when London shines. Mostly, however, I haven’t felt like I’ve been missing out because the world outside my shrunken radius of activity — and Boris Johnson’s England, in particular — doesn’t seem like a particularly welcoming place.

Brexit, Covid and the worst government ever

We are governed, at present, by the most corrupt, inept and self-serving government I’ve had the misfortune to endure in my 58 years on this earth. Led by the uniquely unqualified Boris Johnson, the very definition of an incoherent narcissist (especially now that Donald Trump has been pushed off the world stage), Johnson and his Cabinet have absolutely no meaningful substance, as they are all in their jobs because of their deluded belief in the benefits of Britain leaving the EU.

These are benefits that are patently non-existent to anyone actually paying attention, rather than extolling the illusory virtues of cutting ourselves off from our nearest neighbours, with whom half of all our business used to be conducted in a frictionless manner that was the envy of all those excluded from its benefits.

The ravages of Covid — and this wretched government’s appalling mismanagement of our response to it — has largely hidden the ongoing disaster of Brexit, and its crippling effect on our economy, as businesses that used to sell their products and services in the EU find themselves largely unable to do so because of “red tape” that is loftily dismissed as “teething problems” by lying ministers, when it is really much more fundamental and permanent, and as workers from the EU, who used to do all manner of jobs that British people were either unwilling or unable to do, have all returned to their home countries, never to return.

In March, it was reported that “UK exports of goods to the EU plunged by 40.7% in January”, which was “the biggest monthly decline in British trade for more than 20 years”, and in April Al-Jazeera reported that “[b]anks have moved or are moving more than 900 billion pounds ($1.2 trillion) in assets from Britain to the EU, while insurers and asset managers have transferred more than 100 billion pounds ($138bn) in assets and funds, reducing the UK tax base.” In terms of worker shortages, just yesterday the Guardian reported that “Britain’s employers are struggling with the worst staff shortages since the late 1990s, amid the rush to reopen from lockdown and a sharp drop in overseas workers due to Covid and Brexit.”

This alone ought to be enough to condemn this government to the most chronic unpopularity, but that is not the case. Buoyed by their own right-wing media, and by the spinelessness of most of what passes for the liberal media, they continue to hold a lead in the polls, appealing to the third of the population that voted Brexit, or that constitutes their fundamental base of support, and that, with our unfair “first past the post” system, and the apathy of the third of the registered electorate (between 28% and 38%) that never votes, keeps them in power.

Worse still, Johnson’s ministers are not just fantasists, believing in the illusory benefits of Brexit; some are crooks, benefitting from it (and from Covid) financially, while others are the very definition of the “nasty party” that the Tories used to be known as, and with good reason. Guarding the UK’s borders is Priti Patel, an immigrant who hates immigrants, and is determined to keep out everyone who isn’t British (except those with money, of course), and who also hates those who dare to protest against the government, or who dare to live a different lifestyle (the Gypsies and Travellers that the Tories have been hunting down since the 1980s).

In the giddy world of Brexit delusion, one fantasy the likes of Patel seek is the one that unmoors the UK from any EU-wide or international standards of behaviour regarding refugees, human rights, labour laws, and much, much more. Never in living memory has there been a government that even dreamt of tearing up all the rule books in such a giddy and irresponsible manner, and yet now, since Johnson’s rise to power, the bigots and bullies believe that they can literally do whatever they want, and with Johnson himself setting a supremely sleazy example of a leader who believes that he should be able to do whatever he wants, and that with power there should be no accountability whatsoever.

And now, as if all of the above wasn’t enough, Johnson and his ministers are hell-bent on dropping all Covid restrictions and forcing the return of “business as usual” — as it was before Covid hit. With Covid infections rising steeply — far more so than in mainland Europe — this is a hugely risky policy, but it is in line with right-wing Tories’ beliefs from the very beginning of the pandemic: that the economy is more important than people’s lives. The government is gambling that the huge NHS rollout of vaccines — at a rate far higher than our European neighbours — will keep deaths down to what they regard as an “acceptable” level — perhaps 20,000 deaths a year, or 400 deaths a week — but ministers actually have no way of knowing how many deaths will result from a countrywide policy of dropping as many restrictions as possible.

As well as appeasing the most hardline parts of the business community — who want all their workers to return to their offices, for example, rather than accepting a new balance of part-time office work and part-time remote work from home — the government’s drive also seems clearly designed to appeal to those who will keep it in power, as can be seen in the huge disparities between the treatment of the sporting industry and the treatment of those involved in culture.

Culture and sport

Brexit had already revealed that, in pursuit of Priti Patel’s dream of keeping as many foreigners as possible out of the UK, negotiations with the EU on behalf of the UK’s highly profitable music industry showed complete indifference to the requirement of artists to be able to freely tour European countries without incurring prohibitive costs in terms of visas and other obstacles.

Musicians’ most high-profile defender is Elton John, who told the Observer last month, “I’m livid about what the government did when Brexit happened. They made no provision for the entertainment business, and not just for musicians, actors and film directors, but for the crews, the dancers, the people who earn a living by going to Europe.” Angered by his unsuccessful attempts to lobby politicians, he responded to a question about why he had met such resistance, by stating, “The government are philistines. We’ve got used to governments – especially the British government – just telling us lies every day, and I don’t feel OK with that.”

He added, powerfully, “Look what they did with the NHS. After all that those people did during Covid, they give them a 1% increase. I find that extraordinary. It makes me so angry. I’m 74 years of age and I just don’t get this unfairness and this ridiculous ability to lie through your teeth every f*cking minute of the day.”

To add to this sacrificial slaughter of the arts, the government has also done nothing to support the UK’s summer music festivals — despite them being another huge generator of income — and their refusal to provide insurance means that most festivals have now been cancelled.

When it comes to sport, however, the government has done all it can to open up events, and it’s hard not to conclude that, at some level, the arts sector, easily dismissed as being left-wing, is regarded as a threat, whereas the sports sector — and its supporters — are not. Announcing the cancellation of the WOMAD world music festival just two weeks ago, organisers commented on “the irony that the Silverstone Grand Prix — a five-day camping event attended by 140,000 people — could take place, yet music festivals could not.”

Such is the government’s disdain for the arts that even Andrew Lloyd Webber, the theatre impresario whose shows have contributed so much to the economy, finds himself abandoned by a government that doesn’t really care if theatres can re-open or not. As Oliver Dowden, the culture secretary, apparently explained to Lloyd Webber, the Cabinet views theatre as something that is “‘nice-to-have’ rather than essential.”

The Euro 2020 championships provide the starkest example of this disparity between sport and culture, as the government seeks to capitalise on allowing people the “freedom” to celebrate wildly, as though Covid no longer exists, in terms of popular support, and with Johnson seeking to seal his role as the saviour of sporting freedom by declaring a new national holiday if England manage to beat Italy in the final on Sunday.

In Britain’s new propaganda-soaked reality, it doesn’t matter that Boris Johnson doesn’t like football, and that his history of racism stands in complete contrast to the multi-racial, inclusive national team that Gareth Southgate has put together. In the government’s fake reality, it doesn’t matter either that, without free movement, most of England’s players would’t even be here at all.

None of it matters because this is the England of ‘Get Brexit Done’, where reality has no place, and where a minority of the population, soaked in their delusional notions of a proud and plucky nation standing alone against those who would do business with us, or who would like to come here to work hard and contribute to society and the economy, are pandered to by a government that is using these delusions solely to cling to power. Brexit is an irredeemable disaster, but the government doesn’t care. All they want is to stay in power, shutting down immigration, shutting down trade, grinding dissent under an iron boot, persecuting nomadic people as though this is Germany in the 1930s, and ignoring the most salient fact of all: that “business as usual”, pre-Covid, was helping to hurtle us towards irreversible environmental catastrophe, and that no amount of marketing spin can disguise that reality.

Covid and its lockdowns provided us with a moment to re-think our relationship with capitalism, the environment and the wider world, but to a government without vision, seeking to endear itself to those who seek only the gratification of their desires in an insanely materialistic world, it doesn’t matter that we’re running out of time. They have no vision beyond their own appetite for power, and that extraordinarily greedy emptiness can only be a disaster for us all.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

Former Military Commissions Prosecutor Calls for the Closure of Guantánamo

Former Guantánamo military commissions prosecutor Omar Ashmawy, and a court sketch of Salim Hamdan, at his trial in 2008, one of only two military commission cases that have proceeded to full trials since Guantánamo was first established 19 and a half years ago.Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, with the 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.

Since Joe Biden was inaugurated as president in January, there has been a considerable outpouring of high-level demands for the closure of the shameful and disgraceful prison at Guantánamo Bay, which marked the 19th anniversary of its opening just before Biden’s inauguration, as the fatigue of the Trump years, when the White House was occupied by a president with no interest in addressing the horrors of Guantánamo, came to an end.

In January, seven former prisoners (all authors) had a letter published in the New York Review of Books calling for the prison’s closure, followed in February by a letter from 111 human rights organizations, including Close Guantánamo. Most significantly, in April, 24 Democratic Senators, including Dick Durbin, Patrick Leahy and Dianne Feinstein, followed up with their own demand for the prison’s closure, including detailed explanations of how that is possible.

There have also been op-eds by former Bill Clinton advisor Anthony Lake and Close Guantánamo co-founder Tom Wilner, by Lee Wolosky, the former Special Envoy for Guantánamo Closure, by retired Rear Admirals Donald J. Guter and John Hutson, by former CIA analyst Gail Helt, by Valerie Lucznikowska of September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, and by the attorney Benjamin R. Farley, who represents one of the men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks, as part of the DoD’s Military Commissions Defense Organization.

Last week, Omar Ashmawy, a former prosecutor in the military commissions, set up after 9/11 specifically to prosecute a handful of the nearly 800 men held without charge or trial at Guantánamo over the last 19 years, made his own contribution via an op-ed in the Washington Post, which I’m cross-posting below.

Ashmawy’s op-ed begins with a shocking insight into quite how long Guantánamo has been open, and how elusive justice has been. He was, he explains, “one of the prosecutors for the only two litigated U.S. military tribunals since Nuremberg” — the trials 13 years ago, in 2008, of Salim Hamdan, a driver for Osama bin Laden, who was released five months later, and Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, who made promotional videos for al-Qaeda, and was given a life sentence after refusing to mount a defense.

Prior to these trials, one prisoner (David Hicks) negotiated a plea deal, and since then five other cases have proceeded to trial (of Ibrahim al-Qosi, Omar Khadr, Noor Uthman Muhammed, Ahmed al-Darbi and Majid Khan), and have also involved plea deals. However, the last of these was nearly ten years ago, and many of them have been overturned on appeal, on the basis that, as Ashmawy explains, they involved “charging ex-post facto crimes such as ‘material support for terrorism’ that didn’t exist before 9/11, in violation of the U.S. Constitution.”

Ashmawy describes how “drag[ging] the judicial process out for this long — up to nearly 20 years — is absurd and un-American,” and also explains that, during his service, from 2007 to 2009, his entire experience of the commissions confirmed only that it was an irreparably broken system. He calls on President Biden to end this long betrayal of justice by prosecuting those charged with crimes to face federal court trials on the US mainland, and to bring the very existence of the prison at Guantánamo Bay to an end by releasing everyone else.

As he states, “Guantánamo was designed to bypass the Constitution and the U.S. criminal justice system. It failed because that idea is contrary to American principles.” As he also explains, “If we can bring home our troops from Afghanistan by September 2021, we can close Guantánamo by then as well. We must.”

I was a prosecutor at Guantánamo. Close the prison now.
By Omar Ashmawy, Washington Post, June 30, 2021

I was one of the prosecutors for the only two litigated U.S. military tribunals since Nuremberg. These were the trials of Salim Ahmed Hamdan and Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, who were among those detained at Guantánamo Bay Naval Baseafter the attacks of 9/11. While it’s been 12 yearssince I served in Guantánamo, and the number of detainees has dropped dramatically,the realities that must be faced for trials to proceed haven’t changed. Military tribunals are sometimes a necessary consequence of war, but to drag the judicial process out for this long —up to nearly 20 years — is absurd and un-American. It’s an abandonment of our commitment to rule of law and what we consider to be fair jurisprudence.

My entire experience at Guantánamo was a rude awakening. I believed in the system after the first failed effort at prosecuting alleged terrorists was repaired in the Supreme Court case Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, where the court acknowledged the unconstitutionality of the process. I thought our pursuit of justicecould be fair and impartial, and an example to the world. I was wrong. Everything I saw and experienced while serving in that assignment convinced me of that. Nothing I’ve observed since has changed my mind.

For years, leaders across the political, legal and humanitarian spectrum have called for the prison at Guantánamo to be closed.Thus far, the Biden administration has paid only lip service to that idea, except for clearing the potential release of three detainees who are still in custody.Without a comprehensive plan for trying the others — or, themore politically difficult alternative,releasing many of them without trial — closing the facility is impossible. Practically, this would meancoming to terms with the crimes the United States has committed: torture, extraordinary rendition and indefinite, illegal confinement — all of which are antithetical to our concepts of justice and international norms. Can you imagine the outrage if an American were snatched off the streets of Cancún, Mexico, accused of crimes, tortured until they confessed and held formore than 10 yearswithout trial? It would be an act of war.

Except for U.S. v. Hamdan and the case against Bahlul, we have been unable to successfully litigate a tribunal since Sept. 11, 2001. Two decades of failed efforts speak for itself — no tribunal held in Guantánamo after nearly20 years of unlawful confinement could come to a conclusion that the legal or humanitarian community will accept. The recent ruling in U.S. v. Nashiri — saying a jury can’t hear evidence derived from torture, but the same evidence can be introduced to bring an accused person to trial — is too little too late; it’s a Band-Aid that only accentuates the failures of the process.

As an American, a former military officer and an attorney, I am disgusted by what I witnessed during the George W. Bush presidency and continued to observe over the next two administrations. A short list includes the lack of transparency; the fiscally irresponsiblecost of maintaining the prison; the intelligence community’s continued lack of cooperation; the palpable anti-Arab, anti-Muslim sentiment; and charging ex-post facto crimes such as “material support for terrorism” that didn’t exist before 9/11, in violation of the U.S. Constitution.

Legally, the answer is as simple as it is politically difficult. Of the original approximately 780 original detainees, 40 remain —almost all of whom have been detained for 15 years or more — and only seven are facing a military trial. Some prominent voices are calling for the immediate release of the 28 prisoners who have yet to be charged with any crime. That should be done, but it does not go far enough. We should bring the individuals who can be tried to the United States for prosecution in federal courts. Release the rest. Yes, there will be recidivism, but we must address that on the battlefield, not by continuing to abandon our judicial standardsof right and wrong.

To those who fear bringing committed terrorists to prisons on U.S. territory: They are already here. To those who think civilian federal courts can’t handle crimes of international terror: They already have — almost 1,000 cases of international terrorism have been prosecuted by the Justice Department since 9/11, with an 84 percent record of conviction.

Guantánamo was designed to bypass the Constitution and the U.S. criminal justice system. It failed because that idea is contrary to American principles. Putting it more bluntly: When it comes to our foreign enemies, we must kill them or arrest and try them for their crimes. Anything else is a setup for failure. If this administration is committed to ending the forever wars of 9/11, it cannot do so without closing one of the last vestiges of them. If we can bring home our troops from Afghanistan by September 2021, we can close Guantánamo by then as well. We must.

Omar Ashmawy, staff director and chief counsel for the Office of Congressional Ethics, is a retired Air Force major who served as a war crimes prosecutor from 2007 to 2009.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

UN Experts Condemn UAE Plans to Forcibly Repatriate Former Guantánamo Prisoner Ravil Mingazov to Russia, Where He Faces “Substantial Risk of Torture”

Ravil Mingazov, photographed at Guantánamo before his transfer to the UAE in January 2017. Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

Yesterday (July 2), UN human rights experts, including Nils Melzer, the Special Rapporteur on Torture, condemned the United Arab Emirates (UAE) for its proposals to repatriate Ravil Mingazov, a former Guantánamo prisoner who was sent to the UAE from Guantánamo in January 2017, just before President Obama left office.

Despite what the experts describe as “informal assurances guaranteeing his release into Emirati society after undergoing a short-term rehabilitation programme,” Mingazov — and 22 other former prisoners (18 Yemenis and four Afghans), who were sent to the UAE from Guantánamo between November 2015 and January 2017 — found that, on their arrival in the UAE, the assurances evaporated, and they have instead been “subjected to continuous arbitrary detention at an undisclosed location in the UAE, which amounts to enforced disappearance.”

The only exceptions to this continued pattern of “arbitrary detention” and “enforced disappearance” are three of the Afghans, who, after suffering the same disgraceful treatment, were repatriated as a result of peace negotiations in Afghanistan involving the Afghan government and Hezb-e Islami Gulbuddin (HIG), a militant group that had supported al-Qaeda at the time of the US-led invasion of 2001, but that reached a peace deal with the Afghan government in 2016.

The UAE prisoner scandal was first exposed by the Washington Post in May 2018, and I wrote about it at the time in an article entitled, “Guantánamo Scandal: The Released Prisoners Languishing in Secretive Detention in the UAE.” As I also explained, I “never followed up on it publicly, because the consensus amongst lawyers and NGOs seemed to be that the UAE would respond very badly to media criticism, and that it would be much better to try and persuade them to honor their promises to help the former prisoners rather than punishing them via international bodies like the United Nations.”

By the summer of 2020, however, it seemed, as I wrote in an article last October,  that “everyone’s patience ha[d] run out.” As I explained, “The UN started the ball rolling in July, sending a letter to the Emirati authorities decrying the treatment of 20 of the men transferred to the UAE from Guantánamo,” including Mingazov, whose proposed repatriation had already been flagged up. In October, the UN experts again condemned the UAE for proposals to repatriate the Yemenis, stating that “their forced return put their lives at risk and violated international human rights and humanitarian law.”

This latest intervention by the UN experts comes in response to fears of Mingazov’s “imminent forced repatriation,” to face “substantial risk of torture and ill-treatment upon his return,” based, as they note, “on his religious beliefs.”

When Mingazov was approved for release from Guantánamo in 2016, his wife, son and other family members, who had resettled in the UK, unsuccessfully sought his release to the UK. I met his son a few years ago, and it was clear that the conditions in which his father was being held were completely unacceptable. He spoke of brief phone calls, which were abruptly terminated whenever his father tried to mention the deplorable conditions in which he was held. As the Guardian explains today, however, those conditions have not improved.

Nick Beales, who runs Reprieve’s secret prisons project, explained, “Ravil has been on hunger strike, and we’re aware that he’s being tortured, whilst detained in the UAE as well. He’s been held in solitary confinement for extended periods, and he’s suffered physical abuse at the hands of the guards detaining him.”

His sister-in-law, Sevil Kurbanova, who also lives in the UK, said, “All this time he has not once been allowed to see a doctor. There are no books, no Red Cross, he has nothing. Even when they are fasting they are not given a full cup of water or tea at night — just a quarter cup.”

Kurbanova also explained that, last month, “Russian officials visited Mingazov’s mother in Tatarstan to ask for documentation to help prepare new travel documents for him, signalling that he would be repatriated imminently.”

As the experts stated, in response to this latest development, “Any repatriation process happening without full respect for procedural guarantees, including an individualized risk assessment, would violate the absolute prohibition of refoulement.” They added that “[n]o official information has been shared with Mr. Mingazov or his family regarding the planned repatriation.”

The experts also reiterated their concerns about the other prisoners still held in what they described as “indefinite detention at an undisclosed location, without charge or trial, with extremely restricted family contact, no legal representation and recurrent periods of prolonged solitary confinement.” As they stated, “We repeat our call to the Emirati Government, to observe its international human rights obligations and refrain from forcibly repatriating detainees to their countries of origin where they may incur a risk of torture and ill-treatment. The Government should also stop violating the rights of detainees resettled in the UAE and order their immediate release and reunification with their families.”

Noticeably missing from discussions about the fate of the men sent to the UAE from Guantánamo is the government that sent them there in the first place — the US. For four years, current and former Guantánamo prisoners alike were shamefully abandoned by Donald Trump, but with Joe Biden now in the White House, it is his unswervable responsibility to deal with this humanitarian disaster in the UAE, by immediately appointing a Special Envoy for Guantánamo Closure (a State Department position set up by Barack Obama, but shut down under Trump) to negotiate with the Emirati government.

In recent months, as Periodic Review Boards at Guantánamo have approved five men for release, the need for the role of the Envoy to be revived has become a pressing concern, as the role is absolutely crucial to securing the release of the men still held who have been approved for release (eleven in total, out of the 40 men still held). As the UAE prisoner scandal shows, however, it is not just those still held at Guantánamo who need the assistance of the US government to secure their release; it is also men whose resettlement in other countries, because they could not safely be repatriated, has ended up with them facing even more egregious human rights abuses than they suffered when they were at Guantánamo.

President Biden — and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken — must take action on behalf of these men, and they must act now.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

The Bleak Legacy of Donald Rumsfeld: Guantánamo, Torture and Two Failed and Astonishingly Destructive Wars

Former US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who has died at the age of 88, and a grimly iconic photo of prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

If there was any justice in this world, Donald Rumsfeld, the former US defense secretary from 2001 to 2006 under George W. Bush, who has died at the age of 88, would have been held accountable for his crimes against humanity at Guantánamo, in Afghanistan and in Iraq; instead, he apparently passed away peacefully surrounded by his family in Taos, New Mexico.

In response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Rumsfeld directed the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, when the Geneva Conventions regarding the treatment of prisoners in wartime were shamefully jettisoned, and he was also responsible for the establishment of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, which opened on January 11, 2002.

At Kandahar and Bagram — and at numerous other prisons across Afghanistan — all those who came into US custody were regarded as “enemy combatants,” who could be held without any rights whatsoever. The torture and abuse of prisoners was widespread, and numerous prisoners were killed in US custody, as I reported in When Torture Kills: Ten Murders In US Prisons In Afghanistan, an article I published 12 years ago today.

In addition, the military under Rumsfeld were told not to hold competent tribunals under Article 5 of the Geneva Conventions, which were designed to assess, close to the time and place of capture, whether those detained had been civilians caught by mistake. Competent tribunals had been held in previous US wars, and in the First Iraq War of 1991, to provide just one example, the military held 1,196 of these tribunals, and in 886 cases (74%) concluded that the men in question had been seized by mistake, and sent them home.

In Afghanistan, however, an interrogator at the time noted that every Arab who came into US custody had to be sent to Guantánamo, and that most Afghan prisoners were also sent to Guantánamo too, until the interrogators worked out a way to keep men who were evidently innocent and seized by mistake off the record books so that they could be freed. The result, as Gregg Miller explained for the Los Angeles Times in December 2002, was that “Maj. Gen. Michael E. Dunlavey, the operational commander at Guantánamo Bay until October [2002], traveled to Afghanistan in the spring [of 2002] to complain that too many “Mickey Mouse” detainees were being sent to the already crowded facility.”

In a press conference shortly after Guantánamo opened, Rumsfeld coyly described it as the “least worst place” for a prison, evading his responsibility for establishing a prison in a location that was specifically chosen to be beyond the reach of the US courts. In December 2002, ignoring the complaints about “Mickey Mouse” prisoners, he specifically approved the use of torture techniques at Guantánamo, which included forced standing, in painful short-shackled stress positions, for a period of four hours, adding a hand-written note that read, “However, I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?”

Rumsfeld’s approval of torture techniques justified a program that was applied to a significant proportion of the prison’s population (at least a hundred men), and also fed into the specific torture of a prisoner mistakenly regarded as being of particular significance — Mohammed al-Qahtani, who was reportedly intended to be the 20th hijacker on 9/11, and who was subjected to seven weeks of sleep deprivation and horribly abusive interrogations from November 2002 (two weeks before Rumsfeld’s approval) until January 2003.

In August 2003, Rumsfeld followed up by approving a specific torture program for another prisoner regarded as particularly significant — Mohamedou Ould Slahi, wrongly suspected of having aided the 9/11 hijackers, who, after weeks of brutal interrogations, ended up being taken out in a boat, violently beaten and threatened with death. Slahi’s extraordinary account of his experiences, Guantánamo Diary, was written while he was still held at the prison, and was published in 2015, although Slahi himself had to wait nearly two more years for his eventual release.

Rumsfeld is also notorious for his extreme reluctance to acknowledge that, amongst the 779 prisoners held by the US military at Guantánamo, some were children or juveniles — those under the age of 18 when their alleged crimes took place — who, according to the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict, which came into force on February 12, 2002, a month after Guantánamo opened, and was subsequently ratified by the US, “require special protection” — to be rehabilitated rather than punished, and, if imprisoned, to be held separately from adult prisoners.

“This constant refrain of ‘the juveniles,’ as though there’s a hundred children in there — these are not children,” Rumsfeld said at a press conference in May 2003, after the story first broke that juveniles were being held at Guantánamo. In the end, three Afghan boys were held separately prior to their release, but as I have established over the years, at least another 20 prisoners were also juveniles when they were seized — including the Canadian citizen Omar Khadr — and yet none of them received treatment that was any different from the abuse that was endemic in the prison.

Iraq

In terms of the sheer loss of life, however, nothing can compare to Rumsfeld’s responsibility for the Iraq War, in which at least 200,000 civilians died. Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld’s deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, had been pushing for regime change in Iraq since the end of the First Iraq War in 1991, and their aims were promoted via the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a neocon think-tank established in 1997, in which they, and other subsequent members of the administration of George W. Bush, were all members.

On the day of the 9/11 attacks, both Rumsfeld and Cheney sought to use the attacks to invade not just Afghanistan, but Iraq as well, and while I hold Dick Cheney responsible for using the lie, tortured out of CIA “black site” prisoner Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, that Saddam Hussein had been providing training to al-Qaeda in the use of chemical and biological weapons, which was subsequently used to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq in March 2003, Rumsfeld was in charge of the military occupation, and its disastrously simplistic notion that the US would be welcomed as conquering heroes for overthrowing Saddam Hussein.

Rumsfeld was also in charge of the US military’s treatment of prisoners in Iraq, including the torture and abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib that surfaced via photos in April 2004. He later claimed that the Abu Ghraib scandal was his darkest hour as defense secretary, but that is obviously nonsensical, as the torture of prisoners was specifically encouraged by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the commander of Guantánamo from November 2002, when the widespread program of torture and abuse mentioned above was implemented, leading to Miller’s visit to Abu Ghraib in August 2003 to provide advice about how to secure “more productive” interrogations of prisoners. He subsequently produced a report in which he recommended “GTMO-izing” their approach, and using prison guards to “soften up” prisoners for interrogation.

Rumsfeld was also in charge of Camp Bucca, where many Abu Ghraib prisoners were sent after the scandal was exposed. However, torture, abuse and unexplained prisoner deaths were widespread at Camp Bucca, and it played a crucial role in the development of Daesh (Islamic State), which subsequently emerged as a brutal successor to al-Qaeda, and one which, it seems pretty clear, might not have taken off at all had it not been for the US war on Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq.

As I mark Donald Rumsfeld’s death today, I certainly don’t mean to have focused attention on his mistakes, and his crimes, to the exclusion of all the other senior officials in the Bush administration, and their lawyers, who still deserve to be held accountable — a list that includes George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, their lawyers Alberto Gonzales and David Addington, Rumsfeld’s lawyer William J. Haynes III, and many, many others.

However, to the best of my knowledge, Rumsfeld is the first who we can no longer even dream will one day be called upon to try and justify his actions in a court empowered to punish those responsible for crimes against humanity; those crimes that the US government and its representatives have inflicted on Afghanistan, Iraq, in Guantánamo and in numerous other prisons since the “war on terror” began nearly 20 years ago.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

On UN Torture Day, Please Remember the 40 Torture Victims Still Held at Guantánamo

Witness Against Torture campaigners make a stand against torture outside the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. on January 11, 2017, the 15th anniversary of the opening of the prison at Guantánamo Bay.Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

Today, June 26, is the UN International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, which was first established 23 years ago, on June 26, 1998, to mark the 11th anniversary of the day that, in 1987, the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment came into effect.

The long struggle against the use of torture began nearly 40 years before, on December 10, 1948, when, as the UN explains, “the international community condemned torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations General Assembly.”

Created in response to the horrors of the Second World War, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights represented an aspiration for a better world, which “set out, for the first time, fundamental human rights to be universally protected.” Now translated into over 500 languages, it is “widely recognized”, as the UN also explains, “as having inspired, and paved the way for, the adoption of more than seventy human rights treaties, applied today on a permanent basis at global and regional levels,” including the Convention Against Torture.

Nevertheless, the long years between the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the creation of the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment remind us of how entrenched torture is as one of the dark secrets of numerous regimes around the world.

162 countries have now ratified the UN Convention Against Torture, and yet torture has not, by any means, been eradicated. and one of the most prominent places where its pernicious influence still lingers is at the US’s “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, where 40 men are still held.

On January 11 this year, marking the 19th anniversary of the opening of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, the UN’s human rights experts stated, unequivocally, that “Guantánamo is a place of arbitrariness and abuse, a site where torture and ill-treatment was rampant and remains institutionalized, where the rule of law is effectively suspended, and where justice is denied.” The experts added, “The very existence of this facility is a disgrace for the United States and the international community as a whole,” also noting that “Guantánamo should have been closed a long time ago.”

As they also explained, “We must not forget these detainees, who have been subjected to torture or [are] victims of comparable trauma, and still languish in Guantánamo, in a virtual legal limbo, outside the reach of the constitutional judicial system of the United States.”

They added, “The prolonged and indefinite detention of individuals, who have not been convicted of any crime by a competent and independent judicial authority operating under due process of law, is arbitrary and constitutes a form of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or even torture.”

The points made by the experts continue to have resonance nearly six months later, as Guantánamo marks its 7,107th day of operations today.

Of the 40 men still held, 24 were specifically held and tortured in CIA “black sites,” as revealed in the unclassified summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Study of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program, which was released in December 2014, and which revealed the names of 119 prisoners held by the CIA. Further analysis was provided by the UK-based Rendition Project in July 2019.

However, while the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report spelled out, in excruciating detail, many of the ways in which these men were tortured in CIA custody, we must not overlook the fact that. as the UN experts explained in January, the prison at Guantánamo Bay is a place “where torture and ill-treatment was rampant and remains institutionalized.”

The majority of the 16 men still held who were not specifically held in CIA “black sites” were at Guantánamo during the brutal early days of the prison’s history — particularly under Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who was the commander of Joint Task Force Guantánamo (JTF-GTMO) for two years, from November 2002 until late 2004, when the use of torture was rampant, as Miller sought to “break” prisoners to get them to confess to non-existent crimes, and when two specific torture plans were approved for Mohammed al-Qahtani, who is still held, and Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who was released in 2016.

In addition, as, over the years, prisoners have responded to the brutality and lawlessness of their imprisonment through hunger strikes — the only way, throughout history, that prisoners thoroughly deprived of their rights have been able to take back control over their bodies — the authorities’ response, involving painful force-feeding, in some cases over the course of many years, has also alarmed critics, who have aptly described it as a form of torture.

Just as significant, however, as highlighted by the UN’s experts in January, is the impact of “[t]he prolonged and indefinite detention of individuals, who have not been convicted of any crime by a competent and independent judicial authority operating under due process of law,” which, as they noted pointedly, “is arbitrary and constitutes a form of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or even torture.”

Of the 40 men still held, 28 have not been charged with a crime, and are suffering from the “prolonged and indefinite detention” identified by the UN experts, while, for the 12 others, the broken nature of the legal system chosen for their trials — the military commissions — is also of grave concern. As the experts stated in January, “Military Commissions are still undergoing pre-trial proceedings on motions to suppress evidence resulting from torture,”, and, “as fresh trials are not expected to commence anytime soon, proceedings are likely to last several years, leaving the defendants incarcerated indefinitely.”

7,107 days since the prison at Guantánamo Bay opened, I can only join the UN experts in insisting, as they demanded in January, that the US authorities  “prosecute, in full compliance with human rights law, the individuals held at Guantánamo Bay or, alternatively, immediately release or repatriate them while respecting the principle of non-refoulement” (not sending people to places where they are at risk of torture). I also commend their assertion that “the US must uphold its international legal obligations, conduct prompt and impartial investigations of alleged human rights violations and provide redress and rehabilitation to those who have  endured prolonged arbitrary detention or any form of torture or ill-treatment.”

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

Who Are the Two “Forever Prisoners” Approved for Release from Guantánamo by Periodic Review Boards?

Guantánamo protests over the years: on the left, Abdulsalam al-Hela’s children call for his release from Guantánamo in Yemen in 2005, and, on the right, Sharqawi al-Hajj’s attorney, Pardiss Kebriaei, calls for his release outside the White House on January 11, 2018.Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

In extraordinary news from Guantánamo, two more “forever prisoners” — the Yemeni tribal leader Abdulsalam al-Hela, 53, and Sharqawi al-Hajj, 47, another Yemeni, and a long-term hunger striker — have been approved for release by Periodic Review Boards, the parole-type system established under President Obama, to add to the three approved for release in May.

Eleven of the 40 men still held have now been approved for release — the five under Biden, one under Trump, the only two of the 38 men approved for release by the PRBs under Obama who didn’t manage to escape the prison before he left office, and three other men, still languishing in Guantánamo despite being approved for release by Obama’s first review process, the Guantánamo Review Task Force, in 2010.

No one who cares about the need for Guantánamo to be closed should be in any doubt about the significance of these decisions.

Both men arrived at Guantánamo from CIA “black sites” in September 2004, and were both regarded as being of significance when the Guantánamo Review Task Force published its report about what President Obama should do with the 240 prisoners he inherited from George W. Bush in January 2010. At that time, as was finally revealed when the Task Force’s “Dispositions” were released in June 2013, Sharqawi al-Hajj was one of 36 men “[r]eferred for prosecution,” while al-Hela was one of 48 others recommended for “[c]ontinued detention pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force (2001), as informed by principles of the laws of war, subject to further review by the Principals prior to the detainee’s transfer to a detention facility in the United States.”

To establish some historical context, this was when Obama still hoped to close Guantánamo, but only by moving those “[r]eferred for prosecution” and those recommended for “[c]ontinued detention” — 84 men in total — to the US mainland, a plan that was scuppered by Congress, which enacted legislation, still renewed every year, preventing the president from establishing a facility to replace Guantánamo on US soil. Moreover, when the PRBs began in 2014, they included not only those recommended for “[c]ontinued detention,” but also many of those initially “[r]eferred for prosecution,” as the credibility of the military commissions collapsed after several appeals concluded that the US had been prosecuting people for “war crimes” that had actually been invented by Congress. Plans to prosecute al-Hajj were dropped at this time.

Two of the three men approved for release last month had also arrived at Guantánamo in September 2004 after being held in CIA “black sites” — Saifullah Paracha and Abdul Rahim Ghulam Rabbani — and had also been “[r]eferred for prosecution” (until those plans were also dropped in 2014), while the third man, Uthman Abd al-Rahim Uthman, had not been held by the CIA, and had also been approved for “[c]ontinued detention.”

However, whereas all five decisions are significant because of the length of time that the US authorities regarded these men as ineligible for release — revealing a noticeable change in position by the Biden administration from all his predecessors, including Obama — doubts had long been expressed about the significance of Saifullah Paracha, and assessments of Rabbani had suggested that he was nothing more than “a simple man,” as his lawyers explained, but until last week the US authorities had steadfastly refused to back down when it came to the purported significance of Abdulsalam al-Hela and Sharqawi al-Haj.

Abdulsalam al-Hela

Abdulsalam al-Hela, a Yemeni tribal leader and businessman, was working for the Yemeni government when he was kidnapped in Egypt in September 2002, on a business trip. After somewhere between 590 and 599 days in CIA “black sites,” he was transferred to Guantánamo, where the case against him ossified into an apparently unshakeable belief that he “was a prominent extremist facilitator who used his position within the Yemeni Political Security Organization to provide refuge and logistical support to al-Qa’ida and other extremist groups,” as the detainee profile for his most recent PRB explained.

Al-Hela’s first PRB took place in May 2016, and led to a recommendation for his ongoing imprisonment a month later. A second review took place in June 2018, and a decision to continue holding him followed a month later. For his most recent review, in March this year, his personal representative, a military representative appointed to liaise with him, provided a ringing endorsement of him as a God-fearing man who “never had any intention to harm the United States, its allies, or then people of Western democracies.” His attorney, Beth Jacob, also spoke on his behalf, although her testimony was not included in the PRB’s publicly released documents. However, Jacob spoke powerfully about him at his PRB in 2018, and I can only imagine that what she said then — and presumably reiterated in March — contributed significantly to the decision to approve him for release.

Having met with al-Hela at Guantánamo on numerous occasions, and having also spoken to him regularly on the phone, she explained that what he wants above all is to be reunited with his surviving family members — his wife, and his daughter, who was a baby at the time of his capture, but is now “of marrying age” (she has since got married). His two young sons died in a tragic accident during his imprisonment, and his mother and one of his brothers have also died. As Jacob explained, “These tragedies plus the passage of time have intensified his desire to be with his family, when and wherever he is transferred.” Jacob also spoke about how, after release, he wants only “to devote himself to his family to make up for the long years away from his wife and daughter,” and has mentioned “maybe buying a small building and renting the space to raise the income to support himself and his family.”

This is a far cry from the wealth to which al-Hela was accustomed before his capture,  when he lived “a luxurious life, in a large house with servants,” as a result of being “a natural entrepreneur” from a “well-to-do” family, who began with “construction deals and selling cars when he was still in school,” and then moved on to establish a pharmaceutical company, and to being involved in “development projects that could involve millions of dollars, arranging deals for oil exploration, electric generating, housing projects and the like.”

Because some of his work “involved acting as an intermediary with the government,” and because he had political ambitions and was well-connected as a tribal leader to 10,000 people, he and other Sheikhs were asked by the government to assist with the problem of Arab fighters who had fought against the Soviet Union in the late ‘80s, and had then come to Yemen, “where they lived under the protection of some of the tribes.” As Beth Jacob described it, “The United States asked Yemen to expel these foreigners, and Yemen itself also wanted to deport them,” and al-Hela and other prominent tribal leaders “were asked to convince the Sheikhs for the tribes where these Arab Afghans were living to allow the men to be deported.”

Beth Jacob included letters from prominent Yemeni officials explaining that he was acting for the government, and that he did not have “any connection with any terrorist or extremist organizations and the Yemeni State insures that entirely,” and as she also explained, some of the documents submitted on his behalf “indicat[e] the favors given to him and trust placed in him by President Saleh himself.” As she added, “At that time, Yemen and the United States were allies in the fight against terrorism and extremist organizations,” and so al-Hela’s “actions benefited the United States.”

As she also explained, “Abdul Salam lived openly. He was prosperous, had a family, thriving businesses, an influential public position as a leader of his tribe, and the prospect of a promising political career. He was moderately religious but not an extremist. Photographs of him taken before he was thrown into prison show a man in a business suit, with close-cropped hair and a short beard. He was ambitious for political success. He was proud of his position as head of his family and head of his tribe. He loved his country. The accusations against him make no sense.”

The accusations against him have never made sense, and it is reassuring that, finally, this has been recognized by the US authorities.

Sharqawi al-Hajj

Sharqawi al-Hajj, meanwhile, sometimes identified by his captors as “Riyadh the Facilitator,” was seized with 16 other men in a house raid in Karachi, Pakistan on February 7, 2002, but whereas the others were transferred to Guantánamo (and have since been freed), he was sent to be tortured in Jordan, where he was persistently asked to identify people in photo albums that were shown to him, and then spent between 123 and 129 days in CIA “black sites,” before his eventual transfer to Guantánamo, where the US authorities described him as “a career jihadist who was closely tied to several senior al-Qa’ida members, including Usama bin Ladin and Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, and acted as a prominent financial and travel facilitator for al-Qa’ida operations,” while conceding, however, that “he may not have had foreknowledge of the plots.”

Al-Haj’s first PRB took place in March 2016, and led to a recommendation for his ongoing imprisonment a month later. A second review took place in February 2017, leading to another recommendation for his ongoing imprisonment, and a third took place in February 2019, which be boycotted, along with many other prisoners disillusioned by the failure of the PRBs under Donald Trump to recommend anyone for release. Again, a decision to continue holding him followed a month later.

In the meantime, as his lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights explained in August 2019, he “stated on a recent call with his attorney that he wanted to take his own life,” which CCR described as “follow[ing] a steady and observable deterioration of his physical and mental health that his legal team has been raising the alarm about for two years,” and, soon after, “cut his wrists with a piece of glass” while on another call with his lawyer, stating that he was “sorry for doing this but they treat us like animals,” and adding, “I am not human in their eyes.” In March 2020, he harmed himself again.

For his most recent review, in April this year, his attorney Pardiss Kebriaei, who has been representing him since 2015, spoke eloquently about his mental health issues, and, regarding his proposals for life after Guantánamo if he were to be recommended for release, urged the Board to consider the statement he made in 2017, which still “holds true.” As she put it, “As he stated then, he is not the same person he was in his 20s, and has no interest in behavior that may result in more deprivation. He wants to be away from violence and negative influences, and is convinced that fighting and wars are futile. He never married and wants to. He has participated in classes during his detention and, for example, has English language skills that could serve him in future work. He understands that he would not be returned to Yemen, as does his family, and in fact does not want to return so long as there is conflict. He would accept resettlement in any safe third country.”

Elsewhere in her statement, Kebriaei referred extensively to his mental health issues, noting that, although he “participated earnestly” in the PRB process in 2016 and 2017, and again for a purely administrative file review in early 2018, he “began to withdraw from the PRB process only later in 2018, at a time when it was becoming relatively clear there would be no transfers from Guantánamo under the former [Trump] administration”, and, she added, “I first began reporting hopeless and increasingly suicidal statements by Mr. Al Hajj, which escalated over 2019 and 2020 into actual incidents of self-harm.”

Pardiss Kebriaei’s submission for al-Hajj’s PRB included statements from Katherine Porterfield, a psychologist, as well as the Center for Victims of Torture and Physicians for Human Rights, all expressing grave concerns about how inadequately the authorities at Guantánamo were dealing with his suicidal state of mind. As Kebriaei explained, his suicide attempts have been “alongside repeated hospitalization after prolonged periods of hunger striking, as well as longstanding issues of chronic pain and jaundice-related symptoms of weakness and fatigue that exacerbate his overall condition.” She added, “From the vantage point of his attorneys, Mr, Al Hajj’s detention over the last two and a half years has appeared increasingly like a revolving door of hospitalization, Behavioural Health Unit observation, and disciplinary status for behavior likely relating to his condition, with routine memos by his counsel to JTF-GTMO reporting specific threats of imminent self-harm. The picture has appeared untenable and worsening. As Dr. Porterfield states, his mental functioning will likely continue to worsen under the status quo, to the point of possible irreparable harm.”

She added, “While the government has argued in the context of Mr. Al Hajj’s habeas case that his behavior is motivated by a desire to achieve a change in his conditions and not end his life, as Dr. Porterfield explains, suicide attempts can have multiple motivations and still result in death or severe injury.” As she also stated, “Medical care has at times been accepted by Mr. Al Hajj, who has had positive relationships with some of his providers and spoken of appreciation of their efforts.” However, “his care at Guantánamo has not stemmed his mental deterioration, and likely cannot, if its cause is inextricably linked to his environment.”

Turning to the possible conditions of his departure from Guantánamo, Kebriaei noted that, “Upon release, Mr. Al Hajj would need medical and psychological support, but he would also have other critical core support. While his parents passed away in recent years, his mother just last year, his siblings, all working with families of their own, have submitted a statement for consideration by the Board stating their ability and willingness to offer emotional and financial support to Mr. Al Hajj after his release. CCR would also remain involved, as we have with numerous other resettled clients, from Uruguay to Portugal to Oman, where we have provided wide-ranging support, from liaising with in-country authorities and services to problem-solve and address needs, to providing laptops and foreign-language learning materials to assist with reintegration.”

In conclusion, Kebriaei asked the board “to strictly evaluate whether Mr. Al Hajj’s continuing detention remains necessary and humane after 19 years,” and to “ultimately recommend his transfer to a safe country with appropriate support.”

As with Abdulsalam al-Hela, that recommendation has now, finally, materialized. In both cases, the Boards noted that each man “presents some level of threat in light of his past activities and associations,” but concluded that those risks were mitigated — in al-Hela’s case, through his “lack of training and lack of a leadership role in extremist organizations”, his “candid responses to the Board’s questions regarding his pre-detention actions,” his “credible statements regarding his strong desire to return to his family,” and also his “realistic post-transfer plan and the lack of indication that [he] harbors extremist beliefs or intentions to reengage.” In al-Hajj’s case, the Board considered his “desire to be candid,” his “age at the time of his pre-detention activities and having matured since entering detention,” his “efforts to take advantage of educational activities at Guantánamo, information regarding family and CCR support available to assist [him] if he is transferred,” and also that he “does not currently demonstrate an extremist mindset or appear to be driven to reengage by extremist ideology.”

The pressing need to appoint a Special Envoy for Guantánamo Closure

The next step, of course, is for the Biden administration to actually release these men, and the others approved for release, for which it is imperative that a new Special Envoy for Guantánamo Closure is appointed. For the Yemenis in particular, negotiations are necessary to secure a third country for their release, because of the long-standing refusal of the entire US establishment to consider repatriations to Yemen itself, for security reasons. In al-Hela’s case, the Board recommended “resettlement to a country with family reunification, reintegration support, and the capacity to implement appropriate security measures,” while for al-Hajj they recommended “[r]obust security measures to include monitoring and travel restrictions, [and] resettlement in a country with a strong established rehabilitation program and reintegration plan for transferred detainees.”

I hope we will be hearing soon about the appointment of a Special Envoy, followed swiftly by the release of prisoners, but as al-Hela’s case is also about to be challenged in court, with his lawyers seeking to overturn a ruling last September that he is not entitled to the protections of due process in his habeas corpus proceedings, it is no surprise that Beth Jacob told the New York Times that “his team would continue to fight that decision because a court release order carries more weight than a review board recommendation to arrange a transfer.”

PRB decisions, in fact, carry no legal weight whatsoever, and are purely administrative, but nearly 20 years after Guantánamo opened, it is very much to be hoped that President Biden recognizes how unjust it would be to approve prisoners for release through the PRBs and then not proceed swiftly with their release.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.