Andy Worthington's Blog, page 42

Photos: Telling Trump to Close Guantánamo – The White House protest, Jan. 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 of the Trump administration.

 

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On January 11, 2018, for the eighth year running, I joined protestors in Washington, D.C., calling on the US government to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, a shameful example of indefinite detention without charge or trial run by a country that claims to respect the rule of law, on the 16th anniversary of its opening. This was the first anniversary that Guantánamo has been under the control of Donald Trump, and there was a passion and an anger at the gathering, replacing the disappointment that was the hallmark of most of the Obama years.

I posted my thoughts about the day in a previous article, Telling Donald Trump to Close Guantánamo: My Report on an Inspiring 24 Hours of Protest and Resistance in Washington, D.C. on the 16th Anniversary of the Prison’s Opening, so this update is really more of an opportunity for you to see what went on in front of the White House — the placards and banners, some of the wonderful people involved, and, sadly, the heavy-handed police presence when five protestors tried to carry a banner towards the White House calling for the release of the 41 men still held “along with the thousands imprisoned in immigration detention centers and the millions of victims of hyper-incarceration in the US”, as one of the five, Brian Terrell, described it in an article afterwards.

As he put it, “To approach the White House, we needed to cross under yellow police line tape and were immediately arrested by uniformed Secret Service police. I have been attending protests at the White House since Jimmy Carter lived there and with each succeeding administration, the space allowed for political discourse has been reduced and the once protected free speech of citizens increasingly criminalized there. Under Trump, half the width of the formerly public sidewalk in front of the White House is fenced off, the inner perimeter now patrolled by officers armed with automatic weapons. Pennsylvania Avenue, long ago closed to vehicular traffic, is now closed off to pedestrians at the hint of a demonstration. This public forum, a place of protest and advocacy for more than a century, the place where the vote for women and benefits for veterans were won, has been strangled to the point where no dissent is tolerated there.”

The increased police presence was indeed a sign of a less tolerant presidency, something we have seen for the last 12 months as Donald Trump, flexing his Islamophobia and racism at Guantánamo by refusing to contemplate releasing anyone, even though five of the men still held were approved for release by high-level government review processes under President Obama, shamefully extends that racism to the whole country, via increased deportation dragnets, and internationally via repeated iterations of his vile and groundlessly racist travel ban.

For many years now, Guantánamo campaigners have been seeking to bring together different groups of campaigners — those opposing the US’s industrial-scale domestic prison system, for example, with its racist bias and its epidemic of solitary confinement, and, in recent years, the Black Lives Matter movement.

Sadly, the need for opposition is not going to go away anytime soon, with Trump at the head of a dangerously right-wing Republican government, but all we can hope for, in an effort to stay positive, is that new alliances can be forged, all of which continue to lead us to a hoped-for place — where there are enough of us to properly realize that we outnumber those who mean us harm, through their wars, their guns, their deportations, their courts and their prisons, whether on the mainland or on a naval base in Cuba.

I hope you enjoy the photos, and will share them if you do. Please also consider joining the new photo campaign I’ve launched via Close Guantánamo, counting how many days Guantánamo has been open, and urging Donald Trump to close it without further delay.

Also see the album here:

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, 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 the Donald Trump No! Please Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2017), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, 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.

As Guantánamo Enters Its 17th Year of Operations, Lawyers Hit Trump with Lawsuit Stating That His Blanket Refusal to Release Anyone Amounts to Arbitrary Detention

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 of the Trump administration, including my current visit to the US.

 

January 11 was the 16th anniversary of the opening of the prison at Guantánamo, and as campaigners (myself included) were making their way to the White House to prepare for the annual protest against the prison’s continued existence — the first under Donald Trump — and, in my case, to launch the new poster campaign counting how many days Guantánamo has been open, and urging Donald Trump to close it, lawyers with the Center for Constitutional Rights and Reprieve were launching a new lawsuit at the National Press Club prior to joining the protesters.

The lawsuit was brought on behalf of eleven prisoners, and, as CCR’s press release states, it “argues that Trump’s proclamation against releasing anyone from Guantánamo, regardless of their circumstances, which has borne out for the first full year of the Trump presidency, is arbitrary and unlawful and amounts to ‘perpetual detention for detention’s sake.’”

CCR Senior Staff Attorney Pardiss Kebriaei said, “It’s clear that a man who thinks we should water-board terror suspects even if it doesn’t work, because ‘they deserve it, anyway’ has no qualms about keeping every last detainee in Guantanamo, so long as he holds the jailhouse key.”

CCR’s press release also stated, “The filing argues that continued detention is unconstitutional because any legitimate rationale for initially detaining these men has long since expired; detention now, 16 years into Guantánamo’s operation, is based only on Trump’s raw antipathy towards Guantánamo prisoners – all foreign-born Muslim men – and Muslims more broadly,” adding that “Donald Trump’s proclamation that he will not release any detainees during his administration reverses the approach and policies of both President Bush and President Obama, who collectively released nearly 750 men.”

The eleven men are: Tawfiq al-Bihani (ISN 893) aka Tofiq or Toffiq al-Bihani, a Yemeni who was approved for release by Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force in 2010, Abdul Latif Nasser (ISN 244) aka Abdu Latif Nasser, a Moroccan approved for release in 2016 by a Periodic Review Board, a parole-type process, and nine others whose ongoing imprisonment was upheld by their PRBs: Yemenis Zohair al-Sharabi aka Suhail Sharabi (ISN 569), Said Nashir (ISN 841), Sanad al-Kazimi (ISN 1453) and Sharqawi al-Hajj (ISN 1457), Pakistanis Abdul Rabbani (ISN 1460) and Ahmed Rabbani (ISN 1461), the Algerian Saeed Bakhouche (ISN 685), aka Said Bakush, mistakenly known as Abdul Razak or Abdul Razak Ali, Abdul Malik aka Abdul Malik Bajabu (ISN 10025), a Kenyan, and one of the last men to be brought to the prison — inexplicably — in 2007, and Abu Zubaydah (ISN 10016), one of Guantánamo’s better-known prisoners, a stateless Palestinian, for whom the post-9/11 torture program was initially conceived, under the mistaken belief that he was a high-ranking member of al-Qaeda.

In seeking a writ of habeas corpus, the lawyers, who include CCR’s Pardiss Kebriaei and Reprieve’s Shelby Sullivan-Bennis, write of the 11 men, “Many are suffering the devastating psychological and physiological consequences of indefinite detention in a remote prison camp where they have endured conditions devised to break human beings, and where the aura of forever hangs heavier than ever. Given President Donald Trump’s proclamation against releasing any petitioners – driven by executive hubris and raw animus rather than by reason or deliberative national security concerns – these petitioners may never leave Guantánamo alive, absent judicial intervention.”

They add, “Petitioners have participated in habeas corpus litigation that this Court and the higher courts have entertained for years, but this motion, brought by detainees collectively, is different – as it has to be. The two prior presidential administrations released a total of nearly 750 men. They did so by making case-by-case determinations based on an individual detainee’s circumstances in a manner that was purportedly tailored to the executive branch’s interest in national security.”

In contrast, however, Donald Trump “has declared and is carrying out his intention to keep all remaining detainees in Guantánamo, regardless of their individual circumstances – presumably even those the executive branch previously determined need no longer be detained. This defiant policy exceeds his authority under the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (‘AUMF’), which permits detention only for the narrow purpose of preventing the return of detainees to the battlefield.” The AUMF, passed the week after the 9/11 attacks, authorized the president to pursue those assessed to have been involved in the 9/11 attacks, as part of al-Qaeda or the Taliban, and in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, in 2004, the Supreme Court affirmed that it justified imprisonment until the end of hostilities — a ruling that I have regarded, over the years, as endorsing the existence of a parallel version of the Geneva Conventions in the US, even though there has never been a viable explanation presented as to why the Geneva Conventions should need a parallel version for the US alone.

The lawyers note that, instead of being justifiable, Trump’s policy is “a symbolic, undifferentiated assertion of this President’s expectation of absolute executive authority and a rejection of the policy framework that has governed Guantánamo detentions for years,” adding, “Not least, it is a demonstration of his antipathy toward this prisoner population, all foreign-born Muslim men, and toward Muslims more broadly, of the kind courts have properly rejected in recent months” — via rulings against Trump’s Muslim travel ban.

Defending the need for habeas corpus, the lawyers note that the Supreme Court has consistently held that the Due Process Clause of the Constitution “places substantive limits on noncriminal detention, regardless of the facts or procedures that may have justified an initial detention decision years earlier,” adding, ”That includes a prohibition on perpetual detention disconnected from any legitimate purpose; and group detention of an additional four or eight years based on executive fiat and animus [under Trump, envisioning a possible second term] is the type of arbitrary executive action due process is designed to check.”

They also state, referring to the five men approved for release, “Continuing detention is particularly arbitrary for those Petitioners whom the executive branch has already cleared for transfer – and thus where detention is concededly without a bona fide purpose.”

Referring to the AUMF, which, in 2004, as noted above the Supreme Court in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld “held may authorize limited military detention,” the lawyers state that it must now be accepted that the AUMF “can no longer support the detention” of Guantánamo prisoners. They explain, “Whatever authorization for detention may have existed in 2004, for the limited law-of-war purpose of preventing Mr. Hamdi’s return to the battlefield in which he was allegedly captured three years prior, Hamdi did not authorize perpetual detention, disconnected from any legitimate purpose, of the kind Petitioners now endure.”

They add that, in addition, as the majority judges in Hamdi predicted, “the traditional law-of-war understanding that may have justified detention in 2004 has ‘unraveled,’ as the ‘practical circumstances’ of the conflict with Al Qaeda have long ceased to resemble any of the conflicts that informed the development of the law of war.”

They continue, “The battlefield at issue in Hamdi, which was active in the months after 9/11, is today no more than an amorphous, interminable morass, global in scope, that could justify Petitioners’ lifetime imprisonment if left unchecked. The Hamdi Court acknowledged that the prospect of perpetual detention would indeed be a troubling one, but left the legality of it for another day; that day is today.”

The lawyers conclude their argument with a reference to Boumediene v. Bush, the 2008 case in which the Supreme Court granted the prisoners constitutionally guaranteed habeas rights. In that case, the lawyers, state, the court recognized that habeas had “developed to prevent arbitrary executive imprisonment and was constitutionally guaranteed by the Suspension Clause to prevent cyclical abuses of executive power.”

They add, “The President’s apparent policy to detain for detention’s sake, driven by religious animus, is unlawful. The obligation of the habeas court is clear. Because Petitioners’ detentions violate the Constitution and the AUMF, their habeas petitions should be granted. And, should the President wish to detain Petitioners, the Constitution offers him one valid process to do so.

That process, they state, is that the executive branch may “hand him over to the criminal authorities, whose detention for the purpose of prosecution will be lawful, or else must release him.” The source, ironically, is Justice Antonin Scalia, dissenting from the majority in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld.

I have no idea if this lawsuit will succeed in its aim, but it should, because not only is the ongoing existence of Guantánamo an abomination, but, very specifically, Donald Trump’s refusal to contemplate releasing anyone under any circumstances (except, it seems, Ahmed al-Darbi, who agreed to a plea deal in his military commission in 2014 and will be repatriated to Saudi Arabia for ongoing imprisonment) is indeed, as the lawyers state, making his Guantánamo a place of arbitrary detention — and that has no place in any country that claims to respect the rule of law and to regard itself as civilized.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, 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 the Donald Trump No! Please Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2017), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, 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.

Telling Donald Trump to Close Guantánamo: My Report on an Inspiring 24 Hours of Protest and Resistance in Washington, D.C. on the 16th Anniversary of the Prison’s Opening

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 of the Trump administration, including my current visit to the US.

 

Thursday, Jan. 11 was the 16th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, and to mark the occasion, via the Close Guantánamo campaign I co-founded with the attorney Tom Wilner in 2012, we launched a new initiative: the Gitmo Clock, which counts how long Guantánamo has been open — 5,845 days on the anniversary. We’re encouraging people, throughout the year, to print the clock, take a photo with it, and send it to us, to put up on the website and to share via social media.

I arrived in New York from London on January 8, on my eighth annual visit in January to call for the closure of Guantánamo on and around the anniversary of its opening, and on Wednesday, January 10, I took the bus to Washington, D.C., to attend an event that evening, and to take part in a protest and a panel discussion the day after.

All were wonderful, inspiring occasions, providing an uplifting antidote to the anxiety and misery of life under Donald Trump as the repulsive, dysfunctional head of a disturbingly heartless Republican government.

The event on the evening of January 10, “There is a Man Under that Hood: Closing Guantánamo and Ending Torture in the Age of Trump,” at the Impact Hub in Washington, D.C., was the launch for a wonderful book featuring photos by Justin Norman, the media director for the campaigning group Witness Against Torture, illustrating a spoken word piece by Luke Nephew of the Bronx-based Peace Poets. I was delighted to have been asked to speak at the event, along with Kathy Kelly of Voices for Creative Nonviolence, and Aliya Hussain of the Center for Constitutional Rights, before Luke, Frank Lopez and Enmanuel Candelario of the Peace Poets took to the stage to deliver some of their powerful spoken word pieces, including, of course, “There is a Man Under that Hood,” which you can watch here, recorded at the White House protest three years ago.

After the event, I briefly went back to the church where Witness Against Torture activists stay during their week-long campaign, in which, while fasting and focusing their energies on the plight of those still held at Guantánamo, they also undertake creative actions every day, targeting institutions in the capital that have associations with Guantánamo, or with related issues involving, for example, racism, Islamophobia, and the prison system. Over the years, I’ve come to regard many of the Witness Against Torture activists as friends, and that evening I had a great conversation with some of them, including Ken Jones, Brian Terrell and Martin Gugino, before walking across town to where I was staying, with John and Debby Hanrahan, great supporters of visiting activists with whom I have stayed several times before.

Thursday morning, I was delighted to note, was both sunny and warm, and after a detour back to the church, I made my way to the annual protest outside the White House with Kathy Kelly. Trump’s White House was something of a shock, with an extra barrier erected all round the White House, an increase in the numbers of police present, and also the appearance, for the first time, of numerous individuals emblazoned with the words, in large letters, “Secret Service,” which, to my mind, rather defeated the point.

The impression this gave me was of paranoia on the part of Trump, and a tacit acknowledgement of his unpopularity, but in reality, of course, it was also slightly unnerving, and I was told that the organizers had come into a certain amount of conflict with the authorities as they first arrived to set up the protest.

Nevertheless, when it began, it was a powerful occasion, with many more people in attendance than in previous years, and with, I thought, a concentration of our energies, and a kind of righteous anger because of our collective focus, for the first time, on the repulsive legacy of Donald Trump’s first year in office, in which he has shut the door on Guantánamo, and has also, of course, been appallingly racist, xenophobic and Islamophobic on a persistent basis, from the Muslim travel ban that he launched straight after his inauguration through to the absolutely disgraceful “shithole” comment he made about Africa, Haiti and El Salvador on the same day that we were calling for the closure of Guantánamo.

I was delighted to have been invited to address the crowd first, and when I did so, I was surprised to discover that the disappointment that was the hallmark of the Obama years and been replaced by genuine anger — fury even — at the racist obstruction of Trump, and his disgraceful unsuitability as president. My rousing speech was videoed by Justin, and I hope it will be made available soon, along with videos of some of the many other great speakers who focused our energies so powerfully on the White House and on the need to close Guantánamo once and for all.

As campaigners in orange jumpsuits laid out cups for each of the 41 men still held, and we sang our songs of liberation — particularly “A beautiful sound” by the Peace Poets — it was clear that, unlike last year, when were adrift between Obama and Trump, this year our focus was unerring — on Trump, who now owns Guantánamo — as was our contempt for this dismal president and despicable human being.

See below for an Associated Press video, via YouTube, featuring myself, Pardiss Kebriaei of the Center for Constitutional Rights, and former NCIS agent Mark Fallon, the author of Unjustifiable Means: The Inside Story of How the CIA, Pentagon, and US Government Conspired to Torture.

Afterwards, I made my way just around the corner from the White House to the New America think-tank, where, every year, Tom Wilner, the other co-founder of Close Guantánamo, and I, hold a panel discussion with one or two other guests. This year, for “Guantánamo under Trump,” we were joined by Karen Greenberg, the director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School in New York, who has been with us before.

I was delighted to note that the audience was much bigger than it has been for many years, and that a lively Q&A session followed our presentations. The video of the event is below, via YouTube — please note that it starts at about 11 minutes in — and to my mind the most poignant section was Tom describing his first visit to the prison in five years to meet with Khalid Qassim, whom he is representing, with Reprieve, in an effort to overturn the disgraceful appeals court decisions in 2010 and 2011 that essentially gutted habeas corpus of all meaning for the prisoners.

Tom powerfully described the zombie bureaucracy of the military, which continues to behave as though a prisoner like Qassim — who had been nothing more than a Taliban foot soldier, and who continues to be held because, historically, he resisted his unlawful imprisonment at Guantánamo by behaving badly — are a mortal threat, when he is no such thing. At Guantánamo, when he has been allowed to express himself, he has shown a talent for art, but for me the most telling moment was when Tom explained how thin he is — only half the weight of a normal man, after years of hunger striking to protest his endless imprisonment without charge or trial. As always when skeletal hunger strikers at Guantánamo are mentioned, I cannot but reflect on how shocking it would be to the public if a photo of a prisoner — resembling those held in the Nazis’ concentration camps — were to be leaked.

On Friday, I came back to New York wth Matt Daloisio and Jeremy Varon of Witness Against Torture, and I’m here for a week, returning to the UK after the anniversary of Trump’s inauguration and the — hopefully —widespread protests on the day, revisiting last year’s Women’s Marches.

If you’re in New York, I’d love to see you on Tuesday evening, January 16, at Revolution Books in Harlem, where, in “Guantánamo, Torture, and the Trump Agenda,” I’ll be talking about Guantánamo, reflecting on my 12 years researching and writing about the prison and the men held there, and working to get it closed, and also looking at what we can do this year to try and make the dream of its closure a reality.

I hope to see you there, and, in closing, don’t hesitate to get in touch if you want to interview me, or if you would like to arrange any other kind of event with me — whether it’s a speaking event, or even an opportunity for me to play some of my music relating to Guantánamo, the US torture program, and other issues involving human rights and social justice.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, 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 the Donald Trump No! Please Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2017), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, 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.

Guantánamo Has Been Open 5,845 Days on Jan. 11: Please Join the New Close Guantánamo Campaign – Take a Photo With a Poster And Send It To Us

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 of the Trump administration, including my current visit to the US.

 

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.

Please print off the poster here for 5,845 days on Jan. 11, and send it to us. After Jan. 11, please print the Gitmo Clock, which counts  exactly how many days, hours, minutes and seconds Guantánamo has been open. Send them to us to put up on the website and on social media.

January 11, 2018 is the 16th anniversary of the opening of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, when it will have been open for 5,845 days, and to mark this grim occasion — which ought to be a source of shame for all decent Americans and citizens of the world who respect the rule of law — the Close Guantánamo campaign, set up by journalist Andy Worthington and attorney Tom Wilner exactly six years ago, is launching a new initiative: inviting opponents of Guantánamo’s continued existence to take a photo of themselves holding a poster telling Donald Trump to close the prison, and marking how long it has been open.

Regular readers will, we are sure, know exactly why it is so important for Guantánamo to be closed, but if you’re new to the site — and we hope some of you are — the reason it needs to be closed is because the men held at the prison (41 now, but 779 in total over the last 16 years) were almost all the victims of a horrendous experiment in detention — held not as criminal suspects, to be charged swiftly and prosecuted in federal court, nor as prisoners of war protected by the Geneva Conventions, who can be held unmolested until the end of hostilities.

Instead, the Bush administration decided that the Guantánamo prisoners had no rights whatsoever. Guantánamo — the site of an existing US naval base, in Cuba —was chosen because it was presumed to be beyond the reach of the US courts. As such, hidden from outside scrutiny, they were open to being abused when, as it transpired, most of them had no useful information to impart. What made this situation even more shocking is that many of them had no useful information because they were insignificant. The truth only later emerged — and is still generally unknown — that there was no effective screening in Afghanistan, where all the prisoners were processed, before their arrival at Guantánamo, and, in addition, the majority of the prisoners were not “captured on the battlefield” by US forces, as the Bush administration alleged, but were handed over or sold by their Afghan and Pakistani allies, with the US paying bounties averaging $5,000 a head for prisoners who could be packaged up as being members of al-Qaeda or the Taliban. They were then tortured or otherwise abused in an effort to get them to provide useful intelligence, even though most of them had no such information.

The torture and abuse of prisoners was widespread until the prisoners won a Supreme Court victory in June 2004, and were granted habeas corpus rights, when lawyers were allowed to visit and begin representing them, but their habeas rights were then cynically taken away by Congress, and only restored again by the Supreme Court in June 2008. There then followed the only period in Guantánamo’s history when the law applied. Dozens of prisoners had their release ordered by judges, who reviewed their cases, and concluded that the government had failed to make a case that they were involved in any meaningful sense with al-Qaeda or the Taliban, before appeals curt judges cynically rewrote the rules, demanding a presumption of accuracy for the government’s often shockingly inadequate evidence, which had the effect of gutting habeas corpus of all meaning for the remaining prisoners.

In the meantime, President Obama, who promised to close the prison (within a year) when he took office in January 2009, set up a high-level review process to assess the prisoners’ cases, the Guantánamo Review Task Force, which concluded that 156 men should be freed, 36 should be tried and 48 should continue to be held indefinitely without charge or trial. He then set up a parole-type review process for the 48 “forever prisoners,” the Periodic Review Boards, which led to a further 38 prisoners being approved for release before he left office, but failed to fulfill his promise to close the facility in its entirety, leaving 41 men in the control of Donald Trump.

Trump, in contrast, has released no one, and shows no sign of wanting to do so, even though five of the remaining 41 prisoners were approved for release under President Obama, and even though there is no acceptable justification for continuing to hold the remaining “forever prisoners” — currently, 26 men — forever. And even the remaining prisoners, who are facing trials, are deprived of justice, as the military commission system is so broken that it is incapable of delivering justice. We must be thankful that Trump’s wild claim that he would send new prisoners to Guantánamo has not come true, but it remains as important as ever that the prison is closed for good.

As we begin our new initiative, the poster for January 11 — 5,845 days — is here, and we invite you to print it off, take a photo with it, and send it to us. We’ve set up a new page on our website, where we’ll post all the photos, and we’ll also share them on social media.

After January 11 (Day 5,845), we invite you to print off your own poster marking how many days the prison has been open via the Gitmo Clock website, which we’ve just revived. The clock counts, in real time, exactly how many days, hours, minute and seconds Guantánamo has been open, and when you open the page and press “print” you will get a unique snapshot of exactly how long it has been open for your photo. Feel free to take a many photos as you want and send them to us, with, if you wish, a message for Donald Trump, and if you wish, your memories of what you were doing when the prison opened on January 11, 2002.

We ran two incarnations of the Gitmo Clock under President Obama — the first, in 2013, counting how many days it was since his promise to resume releasing prisoners, after a long period when, obstructed by Congress, he had stopped releasing anyone, despite many dozens of men having long been approved for release. The Gitmo Clock’s second incarnation came as we counted down to the end of Obama’s presidency in 2016. We have also run two photo campaigns before — the Countdown to Close Guantánamo in 2016, also for Obama’s last year, when we counted down the days remaining of his presidency via posters, and, last year, the Donald Trump No! Please Close Guantánamo campaign.

This, however, is the first time we have counted how many days in total Guantánamo has been open, and we hope the terrible truth about exactly how long it has been open will inspire you to take part.

We’ll be running the campaign throughout this year, and into 2019, if the prison is still open, and we invite you to mark a few dates in your diary.

On March 7, Guantánamo will have been open for 5,900 days, and the poster for that is here.

On June 15, Guantánamo will have been open for 6,000 days, and the poster for that is here.

On September 23, Guantánamo will have been open for 6,100 days, and the poster for that is here.

And on January 1, 2019, Guantánamo will have been open for 6,200 days, and the poster for that is here.

For every other day, as mentioned above, visiting the Gitmo Clock and pressing “print” will capture a snapshot of the terrible truth about Guantánamo’s apparently endless existence.

We hope you’ll join us in this new initiative!

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, 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 the Donald Trump No! Please Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2017), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, 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.

No More Guantánamo! Rights Groups Meet at White House to Demand the Closure of the Prison on the 16th Anniversary of Its Opening

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 of the Trump administration.

 

16 years after the prison at Guantánamo Bay opened, to hold without any rights whatsoever prisoners seized in the “war on terror” that was declared by George W. Bush after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, rights groups are meeting outside the White House, as they do every year on Jan. 11, the anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, to call for the prison’s closure. See the Facebook page here.

In a press release, the groups describe how their rally has been called “to demand the closure of the detention camp, end indefinite detention of the detainees, and reject the use of torture by the US government.”

As I explained in an article a few days ago, promoting my current visit to the US (I arrived in New York yesterday), the prison at Guantánamo is “a profound injustice, established in the heat of vengeance after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001,” and it ought to be “a source of shame to all decent Americans every day that it remains open.”

As I also explained:

A majority of Americans, unfortunately, don’t understand how important it is to rely on established and internationally accepted procedures when depriving people of their liberty. Those imprisoned should either be criminal suspects, charged as swiftly as possible and put on trial in a federal court, or prisoners of war, protected by the Geneva Conventions, and held unmolested until the end of hostilities. At Guantánamo, however, the men held were deprived of all rights, and held as “unlawful enemy combatants” — “for the express purpose of denying them the rights that combatants normally receive,” as Human Rights First has explained in a briefing.

This would be bad enough, but the very basis for holding the men has always been a disgrace — although one, sadly, that has never received the mainstream coverage it cries out for. Contrary to claims that the men and boys held at Guantánamo were “the worst of the worst,” who were all captured on the battlefield, most were captured not by the US, but by their Afghan and Pakistani allies, who didn’t find them on the battlefield, and who often sold them to the US, which was paying bounties averaging $5000 a head for anyone who could be portrayed as a member of al-Qaeda or the Taliban.

In Guantánamo, when this collection of foot soldiers and “Mickey Mouse” detainees — in the words of Maj. Gen. Michael E. Dunlavey, the commander of Guantánamo in 2002 — arrived at the prison, the authorities soon resorted to torture and abuse in an effort to extract useful information from them, and the formerly classified military files that were released by WikiLeaks in 2011 (on which I worked as a media partner) revealed the shocking truth about the so-called evidence used to justify the detention of most of the 779 prisoners held by the US military at Guantánamo since 2002. Much of it came from other prisoners, who were repeatedly shown photos of their fellow prisoners, in what was termed “the family album,” and who, whether through torture, abuse, exhaustion, or bribery, told copious lies about their fellow prisoners — another scandal that is nowhere near as well known as it should be.

The groups taking part in Thursday’s rally include Amnesty International USA, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Close Guantánamo, CODEPINK: Women for Peace, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Defending Rights and Dissent, the Justice for Muslims Collective, the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, No More Guantánamos, Reprieve, September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition, Veterans For Peace, Voices for Creative Nonviolence, Witness Against Torture, and the World Can’t Wait.

Quotes from the participating groups are below:

Tom Wilner, the co-founder of Close Guantánamo, and counsel of record to the Guantánamo detainees in their Supreme Court cases in 2004 and 2008, said, “For much of the world, America is not a place but an ideal — an ideal of democracy and personal freedom protected by the rule of law. Guantánamo, a prison set up sixteen years ago today to detain people outside the law and without charge or trial, violates that ideal. It undermines our nation’s credibility and hurts us every day it remains open. We should work together to protect the American ideal and close that lawless prison!”

Daphne Eviatar, director of security with human rights at Amnesty International USA, said, “It is shocking that 16 years after the Guantánamo prison was opened, the United States still maintains a center to detain prisoners indefinitely without charge or trial. Some of the 41 remaining detainees have been cleared for transfer for years. The laws of war never envisioned the sort of endless conflict the U.S. government is waging. The Guantánamo detainees must either be charged and transferred to the United States for fair trials, or sent home or to another country where they’ll be safe. To continue to imprison these men, many of whom the US also tortured, is unconscionable.”

Aliya Hussain, advocacy program manager at the Center for Constitutional Rights, said, “As the prison enters its 17th year of operation, we risk Guantánamo and all that it symbolizes becoming even more entrenched in the American landscape. Donald Trump not only boasts a desire to expand the prison, but has demonstrated his hostility towards Muslims and impetuous policy-making in the name of national security. Whether Guantánamo closes or expands depends upon those who oppose this president. We must look to the courts and the people to serve as checks on the political branches, to challenge indefinite detention and the anti-Muslim bigotry that fuels it, and to keep Guantánamo in the public consciousness until it is closed once and for all.”

Josie Setzler of Witness Against Torture said, “On January 11, we gather to bear witness to a tragic and ongoing history. After 16 years, the U.S. detention camp at Guantánamo remains a living symbol of U.S. torture and human rights abuses and a place of misery for the 41 Muslim men it still houses. We refuse to turn our eyes away. To our government we say: try the men under the rule of law or release them. Close Guantánamo, shut down indefinite detention, and put an end to Islamophobia.”

Leonce Byimana, executive director of Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition (TASSC), said, “We have just heard reports from Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, that torture is continuing at Guantánamo Bay. As an organization that serves survivors of torture from all over the world, TASSC hears horrible stories every day about individuals subjected to physical and mental torture by oppressive governments. We believe that torture is illegal and immoral under any circumstance whatsoever, regardless of the offenses anyone is accused of, and that its ongoing use in Guantánamo must be stopped immediately.”

Rev. Ron Stief of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture said, “People of faith believe that this nation has a moral responsibility to respect the dignity of all people. Imprisoning people, many of whom were tortured, without trial at Guantánamo is a violation of human dignity and common decency. In 2018, 16 years after the first prisoner was sent to Guantánamo, we can do the right thing by trying or releasing the forty-one people still imprisoned there and closing the prison for good.”

Dr. Maha Hilal, co-director of the Justice for Muslims Collective, said, “The existence of Guantánamo Bay prison epitomizes what institutional and structural Islamophobia looks like in practice. For sixteen years, the prison has been allowed to operate on false legal pretenses and no accountability whatsoever. This has not only damaged the lives of prisoners who have been released, but also means that those who remain behind the prison’s walls have little to no hope of justice. As one of the most glaring spectacles of how the War on Terror has targeted Muslims, Guantánamo Bay prison must be closed and torture ended to restore some semblance of justice — not selective or differential justice, but justice in its totality.”

Colleen Kelly of September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows said, “End the military commissions and transfer trials to federal court. End torture in all its varied forms and pseudonyms. End indefinite detention and restore rule of law. End Guantánamo.”

Sue Udry, the executive director of Defending Rights & Dissent, said, “Guantánamo Bay prison is a living symbol of America’s refusal to live up to the promise of our Constitution. Although President Trump has made clear his disinterest in human rights, due process, and the rule of law, we call on him to choose justice over inhumanity and close the prison immediately.”

Nihad Awad, the national executive director at the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said, “Americans who believe in the rule of law and the U.S. Constitution cannot stand idly by while our government indefinitely detains 41 men — many of whom have families and children — at Guantánamo without charge or trial. The major test of any nation’s commitment to the rule of law and due process is how well it protects the human rights and dignity of not only its citizens, but also of foreign prisoners in its custody. President Obama failed in his signature promise to close this prison. President Trump threatens to keep Guantánamo open and fill it up again. Now is the time for advocates of justice to seek the closure of this prison.”

Debra Sweet of the World Can’t Wait said, “Donald Trump threatens to ‘fill up’ the U.S. torture camp at Guantánamo, saying ‘we have to get much less politically correct.’ We, along with much of the world, look at the U.S. government’s 16 years of unjust imprisonment of more than 700 men, the unspeakable abuse and death inflicted as well as the harm to humanity in general and strongly and loudly say NO.  Close Guantánamo now!”

Nancy Talanian of No More Guantánamos said, “Every American needs to know that the Geneva Conventions and U.S. laws forbid torture and indefinite detention not only because they damage the victims, but also because they endanger Americans and others around the world.  No More Guantánamos is proud to join with other organizations working to end inhuman treatment and detention for the good of the detainees, our country, and the world.”

Kathy Kelly of Voices for Creative Nonviolence said, “As is true of any U.S. prison or foreign military base, Guantánamo is a monument to our society’s deep roots of racism. Trapped in the uniforms issued by war makers, prisoners in Guantánamo are horribly dehumanized. We must build solidarity with people similarly confined and raise our voices on behalf of ending torture, abolishing war and establishing restorative justice.”

Shelby Sullivan Bennis of Reprieve said, “It is shameful that sixteen years after the opening of Guantánamo, we are still holding people without charge or trial — in many cases, on the basis of faulty ‘intelligence’ extracted through torture. Guantánamo has been a national security disaster, and a violation of America’s most valuable principles concerning human treatment and the rule of law. If our current President really wants to make America great again, he should make 2018 the year that we close this legal black hole.”

Amber Ginsburg and Aaron Hughes of the Tea Project said, “Guantánamo is framed as exceptional, an extreme category of detention, but 16 years in, can we really say that this is still true? Our own police, jails and prisons and the military are directly linked through training and hierarchies of command. In early 2002 Richard Zuley of the Chicago Police, who is now known for using excessive force that yielded false confessions, began working in Guantánamo to train guards in enhanced interrogation techniques — extended shacking, temperature extremes, isolation and fabricated stories of family members — all tactics used in both Chicago and Guantánamo. It is time to follow trails of accountability and remember those people deeply impacted by these failed polices and the individuals still living through the hell of extra legal detention and torture.”

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, 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 the Donald Trump No! Please Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2017), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, 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.

Please Write to the Guantánamo Prisoners, Forgotten Under Donald Trump

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 of the Trump administration.

 

Back in June 2010, prompted by two Muslim activist friends in the UK, who had initiated a project to get people to write to the prisoners still held in the prison at Guantánamo Bay, I followed their lead, publishing an article similarly urging people to write to the men still held — 186 at the time. I then repeated the process in June 2011, and then every six months or so until July 2015, with two further calls in 2016, the last being in the dying weeks of the Obama presidency.

Over a year later, and with just four days remaining until the 16th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, I thought this was a good time to call for the first time for a letter-writing campaign under Donald Trump, who, of course, will have been in office for a year on January 20. Trump started his presidency threatening to send new prisoners to Guantánamo, but although he has not made good on his unacceptable, belligerent threat, he has, nevertheless, effectively sealed Guantánamo shut, refusing to contemplate releasing any of the prisoners still held, even those previously approved for release but still held.

At the time of my last appeal, 59 men were still held, but another 18 were freed by Obama before he left office, leaving 41 men held under Donald Trump. Five of these men were approved for release by high-level government review processes during Obama’s presidency, and just ten of them are facing or have faced trials, with the other 26 continuing to be officially held indefinitely without charge or trial, subject to a review process, the Periodic Review Boards, that led to 38 of their fellow prisoners being approved for release (of whom 36 were released) in Obama’s last years on office, but which has, in their case, failed to remove them from the legal limbo in which they continue to languish.

In the list below, I have divided the remaining 41 prisoners into those approved for release (5), those whose ongoing imprisonment has been approved by Periodic Review Boards (26), and those charged or tried in the military commissions system (10).

Please note that I have largely kept the spelling used by the US authorities in the “Final Dispositions” of the Guantánamo Review Task Force, which was released through FOIA legislation in June 2013. Even though these names are often inaccurate, they are the names by which the men are officially known in Guantánamo — although, primarily, it should be noted, those held are not referred to by any name at all, but are instead identified solely by their prisoner numbers (ISNs, which stands for “internment serial numbers”).

Writing to the prisoners

If you are an Arabic speaker, or speak any other languages spoken by the prisoners besides English, feel free to write in those languages. Do please note that any messages that can be construed as political should be avoided, as they may lead to the letters not making it past the Pentagon’s censors, but be aware that your messages may not get through anyway — although please don’t let that put you off.

When writing to the prisoners please ensure you include their full name and ISN (internment serial number) below (these are the numbers before their names).

Please address all letters to:

Detainee Name

Detainee ISN

U.S. Naval Station

Guantánamo Bay

Washington, D.C. 20355

United States of America

Please also include a return address on the envelope.

The 5 prisoners approved for release by high-level government review processes under President Obama

ISN 038 Ridah Bin Saleh al Yazidi (Tunisia)

ISN 244 Abdul Latif Nasir (Morocco)

ISN 309 Muieen A Deen Jamal A Deen Abd al Fusal Abd al Sattar (UAE)

ISN 694 Sufyian Barhoumi (Algeria)

ISN 893 Tawfiq Nasir Awad Al-Bihani (Yemen)

The 26 prisoners whose ongoing imprisonment was approved by Periodic Review Boards

ISN 027 Uthman Abd al-Rahim Muhammad Uthman (Yemen)

ISN 028 Moath Hamza Ahmed al-Alwi (Yemen)

ISN 063 Mohamed Mani Ahmad al Kahtani (Saudi Arabia)

ISN 242 Khalid Ahmed Qasim (Yemen)

ISN 569 Suhayl Abdul Anam al Sharabi (Yemen)

ISN 682 Abdullah Al Sharbi (Saudi Arabia)

ISN 685 Said bin Brahim bin Umran Bakush (Algeria) aka Abdelrazak Ali

ISN 708 Ismael Ali Faraj Ali Bakush (Libya)

ISN 841 Said Salih Said Nashir (Yemen)

ISN 1017 Omar Mohammed Ali al-Rammah (Yemen)

ISN 1094 Saifullah Paracha (Pakistan)

ISN 1453 Sanad Al Kazimi (Yemen)

ISN 1456 Hassan Bin Attash (Saudi Arabia)

ISN 1457 Sharqawi Abdu Ali Al Hajj (Yemen)

ISN 1460 Abdul Rabbani (Pakistan)

ISN 1461 Mohammed Rabbani (Pakistan) aka Ahmad Rabbani

ISN 1463 Abd al-Salam al-Hilah (Yemen)

ISN 10016 Zayn al-Ibidin Muhammed Husayn aka Abu Zubaydah

ISN 10017 Mustafa Faraj Muhammed Masud al-Jadid al-Usaybi (Libya) aka Abu Faraj al-Libi

ISN 10019 Encep Nurjaman (Hambali) (Indonesia)

ISN 10021 Mohd Farik bin Amin (Malaysia)

ISN 10022 Bashir bin Lap (Malaysia)

ISN 10023 Guleed Hassan Ahmed (Somalia)

ISN 10025 Mohammed Abdul Malik Bajabu (Kenya)

ISN 3148 Haroon al-Afghani (Afghanistan)

ISN 10029 Muhammad Rahim (Afghanistan)

The 10 prisoners charged or tried

ISN 039 Ali Hamza al-Bahlul (Yemen)

ISN 768 Ahmed Al-Darbi (Saudi Arabia)

ISN 10011 Mustafa Ahmad al Hawsawi (Saudi Arabia)

ISN 10013 Ramzi Bin Al Shibh (Yemen)

ISN 10014 Walid Mohammed Bin Attash (Yemen)

ISN 10015 Mohammed al Nashiri (Saudi Arabia) aka Abd al-Rahim al Nashiri

ISN 10018 Ali abd al Aziz Ali (Pakistan)

ISN 10020 Majid Khan (Pakistan)

ISN 10024 Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (Kuwait)

ISN 10026 Nashwan abd al-Razzaq abd al-Baqi (Hadi) (Iraq)

Note: For further information about the prisoners, see my six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list (Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five and Part Six).

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, 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 the Donald Trump No! Please Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2017), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, 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.

16 Years of Guantánamo: My Eighth Successive January Visit to the US to Call for the Closure of the Prison on the Anniversary of Its Opening

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 of the Trump administration, and my imminent visit to the US, discussed below.

 

On Monday, I fly into New York from London for what will be my eighth successive January visit to the US to call for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay. Despite the generally inhospitable climate and the unpleasantness of the cause, it has always been exciting to visit, as I have met and got to know the people who should be running the US — the campaigners, principled lawyers and ordinary citizens who have made a stand against the existence of the prison, recognizing it as a profound injustice, established in the heat of vengeance after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which is a source of shame to all decent Americans every day that it remains open.

A majority of Americans, unfortunately, don’t understand how important it is to rely on established and internationally accepted procedures when depriving people of their liberty. Those imprisoned should either be criminal suspects, charged as swiftly as possible and put on trial in a federal court, or prisoners of war, protected by the Geneva Conventions, and held unmolested until the end of hostilities. At Guantánamo, however, the men held were deprived of all rights, and held as “unlawful enemy combatants” — “for the express purpose of denying them the rights that combatants normally receive,” as Human Rights First has explained in a briefing.

This would be bad enough, but the very basis for holding the men has always been a disgrace — although one, sadly, that has never received the mainstream coverage it cries out for. Contrary to claims that the men and boys held at Guantánamo were “the worst of the worst,” who were all captured on the battlefield, most were captured not by the US, but by their Afghan and Pakistani allies, who didn’t find them on the battlefield, and who often sold them to the US, which was paying bounties averaging $5000 a head for anyone who could be portrayed as a member of al-Qaeda or the Taliban.

In Guantánamo, when this collection of foot soldiers and “Mickey Mouse” detainees — in the words of Maj. Gen. Michael E. Dunlavey, the commander of Guantánamo in 2002 — arrived at the prison, the authorities soon resorted to torture and abuse in an effort to extract useful information from them, and the formerly classified military files that were released by WikiLeaks in 2011 (on which I worked as a media partner) revealed the shocking truth about the so-called evidence used to justify the detention of most of the 779 prisoners held by the US military at Guantánamo since 2002. Much of it came from other prisoners, who were repeatedly shown photos of their fellow prisoners, in what was termed “the family album,” and who, whether through torture, abuse, exhaustion, or bribery, told copious lies about their fellow prisoners — another scandal that is nowhere near as well known as it should be.

My annual visits are part of an ongoing effort to secure the closure of Guantánamo, focused on a protest outside the White House on the anniversary of the prison’s opening, and also including other events — a panel discussion at New America, a US policy think-tank, other events in Washington, D.C., events in New York City, and, sometimes, in other parts of the US.

The White House protests are staged by a coalition of rights groups and lawyers, including Amnesty International, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Witness Against Torture and Close Guantánamo, the campaign and website I set up with the attorney Tom Wilner in 2012, and they take place outside the White House every year except when there is an inauguration, when the White House is off-limits, as it was in 2012 and last year. The Facebook page for this year’s protest, beginning at 11.30am, is here, and I’ll be speaking as usual, an enjoying the opportunity to spend three minutes spelling out to the occupant of the White House why exactly it is so disgraceful that the prison is still open.

This year the protest will be outside the White House, and it is, of course, a significant occasion, as this is the first year that the anniversary of the opening of the prison takes place under Donald Trump, who has been a poisonous president when it comes to Guantánamo, as he has been on so many fronts over the last 12 months.

The New America events first came about because Peter Bergen of New America and I were friends at college in Oxford in the 1980s, and every year I have undertaken panel discussions with Tom Wilner and other guests — Col. Morris Davis, Congressman Jim Moran, Karen Greenberg and Rosa Brooks — and this year we’re delighted to welcome back Karen, the director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School. The New America page for the panel discussion, “Guantánamo Under Trump,” which begins at 2.30pm, is here.

I’m also speaking at “There is a Man Under that Hood: Closing Guantánamo and Ending Torture in the Age of Trump,”,an event the evening before the anniversary, organized by Witness Against Torture and the Peace Poets, spoken word artists from the Bronx, which is primarily a launch event for a book featuring a spoken word piece by the Peace Poets’ Luke Nephew accompanied by photos from various protests over the years taken by by Justin Norman, WAT’s designer.

After the anniversary, I’ll be returning to New York, where I’ll be staying until Jan. 21, and where I’ll be taking part in other events, including a speaking event at Revolution Books in Harlem on Tuesday January 16 that has just been confirmed. Details to follow, but I expect it will be something like a 7pm start.

Please do get in touch if you would like to interview me, or if you’d like me to take part in any other event — speaking about Guantánamo, of course, but also, if you wish, providing me with an opportunity to play some of the songs I’ve written for my band The Four Fathers that are particularly relevant to the struggle for justice at Guantánamo (including a celebration of habeas corpus), the struggle to hold accountable those responsible for the abuses of the “war on terror,’ including torture, and the struggle to prevent the kind of institutional racism that has led to the creation of the Black Lives Matter movement, and that is implacably opposed to Donald Trump’s racist immigration ban.

Staying until Jan. 21 will also allow me to take part in protests against Trump on the first anniversary of his inauguration on January 20. I wish I could say that there have been protests as big as the Women’s Marches that took place the day after Trump’s inauguration last year, when, for example, in New York, where I was, at least 500,000 people marched to oppose the new president, but sadly the initial promise of that day of protest was not repeated, and most of the last year has been a nerve-jangling spectator sport, as millions of decent Americans wait every day to see what new nonsense he will come up with in this undignified new age when the president makes his recklessly unmediated opinions known via Twitter.

That’s it for now. I look forward to seeing some of you over the next two weeks.

Peace.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, 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 the Donald Trump No! Please Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2017), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, 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.

Andy Worthington: An Archive of Guantánamo Articles and Other Writing – Part 22, January to June 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 of the Trump administration.

 

This article is the 22nd in an ongoing series of articles listing all my work in chronological order. It’s a project I began in January 2010, when I put together the first chronological lists of all my articles, in the hope that doing so would make it as easy as possible for readers and researchers to navigate my work — the nearly 2,950 articles I have published since I first began publishing articles here in May 2007, which, otherwise, are not available in chronological order in any readily accessible form.

I receive no institutional funding for my work, and so, if you appreciate what I do as a reader-funded journalist and activist, please consider making a donation via the Paypal ‘Donate’ button above. Any amount, however large or small, will be very gratefully received — and if you are able to become a regular monthly sustainer, that would be particularly appreciated. To do so, please tick the box marked, “Make this a monthly donation,” and fill in the amount you wish to donate every month.

As I note every time I put together a chronological list of my articles, my mission, as it has been since my research in 2006-07, for my book The Guantánamo Files, first revealed the scale of the injustice at Guantánamo, continues to revolve around four main aims — to humanize the prisoners by telling their stories; to expose the many lies told about them to supposedly justify their detention; to push for the prison’s closure and the absolute repudiation of indefinite detention without charge or trial as US policy; and to call for those who initiated, implemented and supported indefinite detention and torture to be held accountable for their actions.

The period covered by this 22nd list, from January to June 2017, began with a last futile push to get President Obama to close the prison before he left office, and then plunged immediately into the darkness of Donald Trump’s presidency. I was in the US at the time, for my annual visit to call for the closure of the prison on and around the anniversary of its opening (on January 11), and while I was delighted to take part in the huge protest tin New York City the day after his inauguration, the bad news ultimately outweighed the significance of the opposition — his outrageous Muslim travel ban, of example, which I covered closely.

Trying to keep Guantánamo in the public eye was difficult, with so much else to worry about, but I tried my best to keep people aware — via dozens of articles here and on the Close Guantánamo website, which i set up in 2012 with the attorney Tom Wilner, a column for Al-Jazeera about the five men approved for release but still held, and photo campaign via Close Guantánamo, in which people sent in photos of themselves with posters calling for Trump to close the prison.

The frustrating situation in the US, with respect to Guantánamo, was partly responsible for an increase in my UK-based work — via the protest music of my band The Four Fathers, for example, and the release of new songs including ‘Riot’, a warning to the government about the effects of austerity and greed, and ‘London’, about how greed and a housing bubble have negatively transformed the capital over the last 30 years.

I also stopped everything I was doing in June, when the terrible and entirely preventable Grenfell Tower fire happened in west London, and the shock waves from this disaster have led me to focus increasingly on the disdain with which those in social housing are treated by those responsible for their safety.

I also continued to focus on the malignant outcome of the EU referendum in June 2016, and the unexpected general Election, when, surprisingly, Theresa May revealed herself to be a spectacularly incompetent public figure, while Jeremy Corbyn found increasing support.

I also launched a new project, ‘The State of London’, publishing a photo a day on Facebook from the photo archive I’ve built up since 2012, when I first began cycling around the whole of London, on a daily basis, taking photos while getting fit and getting to know the city that has been my home for over 30 years, but which I have never previously explored across all of its 120 boroughs.

I hope this project is of interest to you — and I’ll be following up soon with the next part, covering July to December.

An archive of Guantánamo and Donald Trump articles: Part 22, January to June 2017

January 2017

1. Guantánamo anniversary: Rights Groups, Including Close Guantánamo, Issue Statement in the Run-Up to the 15th Anniversary of the Opening of Guantánamo

2. Prisoners released from Guantánamo: Who Are the Four Guantánamo Prisoners Freed in Saudi Arabia, Leaving 55 Men Still Held?

3. Guantánamo anniversary, US visit: Andy Worthington Visits the US for the 15th Anniversary of the Opening of Guantánamo, and for Donald Trump’s Troubling Inauguration

4. Guantánamo media: Teaching Trump About Gitmo (New York Daily News op-ed, with Tom Wilner)

5. Shaker Aamer: Shaker Aamer Interview on 15th Anniversary of Guantánamo Opening: US Government “Lied to Their Own People to Let Their Soldiers Accept Torturing Us”

6. Video, Guantánamo anniversary, US visit: Video: Discussing Guantánamo on the 15th Anniversary of the Prison’s Opening – Andy Worthington, Tom Wilner, Jim Moran and Rosa Brooks at New America

7. Video, Guantánamo anniversary, US visit: Video: Andy Worthington Laments Obama’s Failure to Close Guantánamo – and Fears What Trump Will Do – Outside the Supreme Court on Jan. 11

8. Photos, Guantánamo anniversary, US visit: Photos: The Close Guantánamo Protest Outside the Supreme Court, Jan. 11, 2017

9. Chelsea Manning: Obama Commutes Chelsea Manning’s 35-Year Sentence; Whistleblower Who Leaked Hugely Important Guantánamo Files Will Be Freed in May 2017, Not 2045

10. Prisoners released from Guantánamo: Who Are the Ten Guantánamo Prisoners Released in Oman, Leaving 45 Men Still Held, Including Nine Approved for Release?

11. Guantánamo campaigns, Donald Trump: As Trump Becomes President, New Close Guantánamo Poster and Photo Campaign Launches: “Donald Trump No! Please Close Guantánamo!”

12. Photos, US protest, Donald Trump: Photos: 500,000 Women (and Men) March Against Donald Trump in New York, Jan. 21, 2017

13. Video, Guantánamo anniversary, US visit: Video: Andy Worthington and Ramzi Kassem Discuss Trump, Obama, Guantánamo and Torture at Revolution Books in Harlem

14. Prisoners released from Guantánamo: Who Are The Last Four Men Freed from Guantánamo Under President Obama and Sent to the UAE and Saudi Arabia?

15. Donald Trump, Guantánamo: Donald Trump Proposes to Keep Guantánamo Open, to Prevent Further Releases, and to Reintroduce Torture and “Black Sites”

16. Donald Trump, Muslim ban: Trump’s Dystopian America: The Unforgivable First Ten Days

17. Donald Trump, Muslim ban: Disgraceful: Trump Sacks Acting US Attorney General Sally Yates, Who Refused to Support His Vile Immigration Ban

18. Radio, Guantánamo: Radio: Andy Worthington Discusses Donald Trump and Guantánamo with Brian Becker on Sputnik Radio’s “Loud and Clear”

February 2017

19. Donald Trump, Muslim ban: Heroes of the Resistance: Judge James Robart, Who Has Suspended Donald Trump’s Unacceptable Immigration Ban, and Washington State AG Bob Ferguson

20. Radio, Guantánamo: Radio: Andy Worthington Discusses Life in Trump’s America and the Future of Guantánamo with Chris Cook on Gorilla Radio

21. Donald Trump, Guantánamo: Donald Trump Reportedly Close to Finalizing Executive Order Approving Imprisonment of Islamic State Prisoners at Guantánamo

22. Donald Trump, Muslim ban: As 9th Circuit Judges Uphold Stay on Donald Trump’s Disgraceful Immigration Ban, 29 Experts from The Constitution Project Condemn Spate of Executive Orders

23. Guantánamo campaigns, Donald Trump: Check Out the “Donald Trump No!” Photos on the Close Guantánamo Website, and Please Join Us!

24. Donald Trump, Muslim ban: Court Rules That Donald Trump’s Disgraceful Immigration Ban Discriminates Against Muslims

25. Donald Trump, Guantánamo: Case of Al-Qaeda Suspect Captured in Yemen Seen As Test of Trump’s Plan to Send New Prisoners to Guantánamo

26. Guantánamo, Periodic Review Boards: Review Boards Approve Ongoing Imprisonment of Three More Prisoners at Guantánamo, Even As Lawmakers Urge Donald Trump to Scrap Them

27. Video, protest music, Guantánamo campaigns: New Close Guantánamo Video and Updated Campaign Song By Andy Worthington’s Band The Four Fathers

28. Life after Guantánamo: The Anguish of Hedi Hammami, A Tunisian Released from Guantánamo in 2010, But Persecuted in His Homeland

March 2017

29. Life after Guantánamo: Life After Guantánamo: Yemeni Released in Serbia Struggles to Cope with Loneliness and Harassment

30. Donald Trump, Muslim ban: Donald Trump’s New Immigration Ban Is Still Unconstitutional, Barring Muslims From Six Countries Despite No Evidence That They Pose a Security Threat

31. Donald Trump, Guantánamo: Donald Trump’s Latest Outrageous Guantánamo Lie

32. Video, Life after Guantánamo, Mohamedou Ould Slahi: Video: On CBS’s 60 Minutes, Former Guantánamo Prisoner, Torture Victim and Best-Selling Author Mohamedou Ould Slahi Tells His Story

33. Donald Trump, Muslim ban: Another Legal Hero in the Struggle Against Trump’s Bigotry: Hawaii’s Judge Derrick Watson Issues Nationwide Restraining Order on Immigration Ban

34. Guantánamo media: Karen Greenberg on Why America, and Its Values, Remain Imprisoned at Guantánamo As Long As The Prison Stays Open

35. Donald Trump, Guantánamo: Paul Lewis, Former Envoy for Guantánamo Closure Under Obama, Urges Donald Trump to Close Guantánamo

36. Radio, Guantánamo: Radio: Andy Worthington Discusses the Limbo of Guantánamo under Trump and Obama’s Failure to Close the Prison with Scott Horton

37. Abu Zubaydah, Guantánamo, torture: 15 Years of Torture: The Unending Agony of Abu Zubaydah, in CIA “Black Sites” and  Guantánamo

38. Donald Trump, Guantánamo: It’s Groundhog Day: Lawyer Clive Stafford Smith Reports from Guantánamo After 70 Days of Trump’s Presidency

April 2017

39. Guantánamo, hunger strikes: After Four-Year Legal Struggle, Judges Support Government Claims That Videotapes of Force-Feeding at Guantánamo Must Remain Secret

40. Abu Zubaydah, Guantánamo, torture: Convincing the US He Wasn’t Part of Al-Qaeda: Abu Zubaydah’s 2008 and 2009 Declarations Regarding His Torture

41. Guantánamo, torture: US Military Lawyer Submits Petition to Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on Behalf of Mohammad Rahim, CIA Torture Victim Held at Guantánamo

42. Deaths at Guantánamo: Death at Guantánamo: Psychologist and Author Jeffrey Kaye Speaks to the Talking Dog

43. Guantánamo, Donald Trump: Shutting the Door on Guantánamo: The Significance of Donald Trump’s Failure to Appoint New Guantánamo Envoys

44. Guantánamo, military commissions: Guantánamo Lawyer Michel Paradis: Military Commissions are Based on Legal Apartheid

45. Torture: North Carolina Citizens’ Group Launches Investigation of CIA’s Bush-Era Rendition and Torture Program

46. Guantánamo campaigns, Donald Trump: 100 Days of Trump: Join Us in Telling Him to Close Guantánamo

47. Video, torture: Blast from the Past: “Reckoning with Torture,” Video of Andy Worthington, Mimi Kennedy, Ray McGovern and Others in Berkeley in 2010

May 2017

48. Life after Guantánamo: Life After Guantánamo: Egyptian in Bosnia, Stranded in Legal Limbo, Seeks Clarification of His Rights

49. Life after Guantánamo: Life After Guantánamo: Yemeni Freed in Estonia Says, “Part of Me is Still at Guantánamo”

50. Guantánamo, Periodic Review Boards, Donald Trump: Under Trump, Periodic Review Boards Continue at Guantánamo, But At A Glacial Pace

51. Chelsea Manning: Prior to Chelsea Manning’s Release on Wednesday, Here’s What She Wrote to President Obama

52. Abu Zubaydah, Guantánamo, military commissions: Abu Zubaydah Will Not Testify at Guantánamo Military Court Because the US Government Has “Stacked the Deck” Against Him

53. Video, Guantánamo: Video: “Zone of Non-Being: Guantánamo,” Featuring Andy Worthington, Omar Deghayes, Clive Stafford Smith, Michael Ratner

54. Guantánamo campaigns: Witness Against Torture Launch “Forever Human Beings,” a 41-Day Campaign for the 41 “Forever Prisoners” Still Held at Guantánamo

55. Life after Guantánamo: Guantánamo’s Difficult Diaspora: Former Prisoner Hussein Al-Merfedy, in Slovakia, Still Feels in a Cage

56. Guantánamo, Periodic Review Boards: Review Boards Approve Ongoing Imprisonment of Saifullah Paracha, Guantánamo’s Oldest Prisoner, and Two Others

57. Guantánamo: Ten Years of Writing About Guantánamo: Please Support My Work!

58. Deaths at Guantánamo: Another Sad, Forgotten Anniversary for Guantánamo’s Dead

59. Guantánamo, Supreme Court: Two Guantánamo Cases Make It to the Supreme Court; Experts Urge Justices to Pay Attention

60. Torture: In Ongoing Court Case, Spotlight On James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, Architects of the Brutal, Pointless CIA Torture Program

61. Torture: On the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, It’s Time for Someone to Leak the Whole of the US Senate Torture Report

62. Torture: Challenging the Nomination of 2005 “Torture Memo” Author Steven Bradbury as a Lawyer in the Trump Administration

63. Guantánamo: Abdul Latif Nasser: Facing life in Guantánamo (for Al-Jazeera)

An archive of articles about British politics, January to June 2017

January to March 2017

1. Obituaries, counter-culture: Reflections on Mortality, on the Death of One of My Oldest Friends, Nick Parsons (1962-2017)

2. Brexit: YES! The Supreme Court Tells Would-Be Tyrant Theresa May That Act of Parliament is Required to Trigger Article 50 and Leave EU; Now MPs Must Fight to Scrap Brexit

3. Brexit: On Brexit, What a Pathetic, Leaderless Country We Have Become

4. Protest music: Andy Worthington’s Band The Four Fathers Complete Mixes for New Album, ‘How Much Is A Life Worth?’

5. Brexit: Why the Left is Betraying Us Over Brexit, and How It Leads to the Hypocrisy of Protesting Against Donald Trump But Not Theresa May

6. Brexit: On Brexit, MPs Give Away Sovereignty, Vote to Allow Theresa May to Do Whatever She Wants

7. Brexit: On Brexit, the British Public Finally Turns on Would-Be Tyrant Theresa May

8. Save the NHS: Save the NHS From Its Would-Be Killers, Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt: Please Join the National Protest in London This Saturday, March 4, 2017

9. Brexit: House of Lords Defends Right of EU Nationals to Stay in the UK Post-Brexit, as the Tyrant Theresa May Vows to Overturn Amendment

10. Photos, Save the NHS: “Wake Up People! Save Our NHS!” Photos from the National March and Rally in London, March 4, 2017

11. Brexit: On Brexit, the House of Lords Do What MPs Wouldn’t Do, and Pass An Amendment Guaranteeing Them A Final, Meaningful Vote on Any Deal to Leave the EU

12. Refugees, racism: Please Join the March Against Racism National Demo in London This Saturday, March 18, 2017

13. Brexit: Worthless MPs Refuse to Challenge Tyrannical Theresa May on Their Own Right to Vote on Final Brexit Deal or on the Rights of EU Nationals in the UK

14. St. Patrick’s Day, Pogues: Rebel Music: Memories of St. Patrick’s Day in London, 1986

15. Save the NHS: My Heartfelt Defence of the Wonderful NHS, Exactly Six Years After My Major Illness

16. Brexit: Unite for Europe: Join the National Demo in London on March 25 to Tell Theresa May That 16 Million Of Us Don’t Accept Her “Hard Brexit” Insanity

17. Terrorism: London Terror Attack: I Endorse Simon Jenkins’ Mature and Responsible Assessment of the Media’s Dangerous and Irresponsible Coverage

18. Photos, Brexit: Photos: Huge Turnout for Unite For Europe March in London, to Tell Theresa May and Isolationist Tories that 16 Million of US Say No to Brexit

19. Brexit: On Brexit, the Observer Pulls No Punches With a Suitably Savage Editorial Just Before Theresa May Triggers Article 50

April to June 2017

20. Racism, Brexit: Listen to Andy Worthington Discuss “Demonising ‘The Other’: Tackling the Rise of Racism and Xenophobia” at Brockley Festival of Ideas for Change

21. Music: Andy Worthington’s Band The Four Fathers Release ‘Dreamers’, New Online Single Written for a Friend’s 50th Birthday

22. Brexit: Theresa May: An Unstoppable Undemocratic Disaster in a Dismal Brexit Britain Without Adequate Opposition

23. Brexit: Taking on Theresa May and Her Hard Brexit Dystopia: Open Britain Targets Pro-Brexit MPs

24. General Election: Local Elections: As UKIP Voters Join the Tories to create Super-UKIP, Labour and Other Parties MUST Unite in a Progressive Resistance

25. Protest music: Andy Worthington’s Band The Four Fathers Release ‘Riot’, New Online Single Tackling Austerity and Inequality

26. London photos: Andy Worthington Celebrates Five Years of Photographing London for His Project, ‘The State of London’

27. Racism, Brexit: Ismail Einashe, British Citizen of Somali Origin, Describes How The Status of Migrants is “Permanently Up for Review” in the New Intolerant UK

28. Counter-culture: DIY Cultures 2017: The Counter-Culture Is Alive and Well at a Zine Fair in Shoreditch

29. Housing crisis: London’s Horrendous Housing Crisis: Slums, Unfettered Greed and the Unacceptable Exploitation of Workers

30. Battle of the Beanfield, Stonehenge, civil liberties: Never Trust the Tories: It’s 32 Years Today Since the Intolerable Brutality of the Battle of the Beanfield

31. General Election: The Spectacular and Unforeseen Collapse of Theresa May and the Tories

32. Protest music, General Election: Video: Andy Worthington’s Band The Four Fathers Play ‘Stand Down Theresa’, An Updated Version of The Beat’s ‘Stand Down Margaret’

33. General Election: On Eve of Election, Theresa May Returns to Her Default Position, That of a Grubby Racist Scaremonger with Contempt for the Law

34. General Election: Corbyn Rises, Theresa May Falls; Hard Brexit Now Looks Untenable

35. Grenfell Tower fire: Deaths Foretold at Grenfell Tower: Let This Be The Moment We The People Say “No More” to the Greed That Killed Residents

36. Photos, Theresa May protest: Photos: The Protest Against Theresa May Outside Downing Street, June 17, 2017

37. Grenfell Tower fire: As Grenfell Tower Death Toll Reaches 79, Calls for an Urgent Public Inquiry in the Face of Systemic Failures of Government, Council and Management

38. Brexit: As Brexit Talks Begin, It’s Clear That We’re Doomed Unless We Ditch the Tories

39. Stonehenge, civil liberties: Summer Solstice 2017: Reflections on Free Festivals and the Pagan Year 33 Years After the Last Stonehenge Festival

40. Protest music, Grenfell Tower fire: After Grenfell, Andy Worthington’s Band The Four Fathers Release New Single, ‘London’, A Savage Portrait of the UK Capital Hollowed Out By Greed

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, 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 the Donald Trump No! Please Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2017), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, 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.

Andy Worthington’s Top Five Enthusiasms for 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 of the Trump administration.

 

Happy New Year to my friends and supporters, and to anyone passing by! If you don’t know me, I’m a reader-funded journalist, activist, photographer and musician, working through these media to inform, educate and entertain, and to address important issues involving human rights and social justice. Below are my main passions, and what I hope to achieve in 2018, and you’re more than welcome to get on board and get involved with any or all of them! Donations to support my work, however large or small, are always welcome, as I very genuinely cannot do what I do without your support.

1. Closing Guantánamo

Regular readers will know that the last twelve years of my life have largely been given over to telling the story of Guantánamo and the men held there, and working to get the prison closed — first via my book The Guantánamo Files, and, since May 2007, via my website, where I have, to date, published 2,154 articles about Guantánamo, and, since January 2012, via the Close Guantánamo campaign and website that I established (with the US attorney Tom Wilner, who represented the prisoners in their Supreme Court cases in 2004 and 2008) on the 10th anniversary of the opening of the prison on January 11, 2012.

Every January, since 2011, I’ve visited the US to call for the closure of Guantánamo on an around the anniversary of the prison’s opening, and I’ll be doing the same this month, flying out to the US next Monday to take part in events in Washington, D.C. on January 10 and 11, including a protest outside the White House, and I look forward to more dates being added soon. If you want an interview, or want to stage an event, do let me know — and if you want a spur to donate to support my work, then it will help with my visit!

2. Playing kicking punky reggae protest music with my band The Four Fathers

My band The Four Fathers play political rock and roots reggae — and we brought 2017 to a close with the release of our second album, ‘How Much Is A Life Worth?’ (available on CD and to download), which contains ten original songs — eight by me, and two by guitarist Richard Clare — with my songs including the title track, asking why white westerners see their lives as more significant than those of foreigners (with reference to 9/11 and the illegal wars that followed it, the current global refugee crisis, and the reason for the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in the US), ‘Riot’, warning the UK government about the dangers of endless austerity and greed, ‘London’, in which I lament how, over the last 30 years, London has gone from wild to dull, and money – and an insane housing bubble – are now horribly dominant, ‘Equal Rights And Justice For All’, a celebration of habeas corpus, and ‘Close Guantánamo’, used as a campaign song for the Close Guantánamo campaign.

Do get in touch if you want to work with us, or can offer us any kind of gigs.

3. Stopping the destruction of social housing in the UK and seeking justice for the Grenfell survivors

In 2017, I was appalled by the entirely preventable fire that consumed Grenfell Tower in west London in June, which highlighted my long-standing interest in social housing (not for profit housing), and led to me meeting filmmaker Nikita Woolfe and being asked to narrate her documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates and residents’ resistance, which had its first screenings in December. I also set up a campaign, ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’, to provide a focus for the various campaigns agains the destruction of council housing and community spaces in the London Borough of Lewisham, where I live (in social housing), and wrote a song, ‘Grenfell’, which a German TV crew recorded The Four Fathers playing at the end of October, and which we released on video in December, marking six months since the Grenfell fire.

Check out the video below, via YouTube:

Do get in touch if you want to show ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’ in 2018 (and especially if you’re part of a housing campaign), and also do get in touch if you’re interested in putting on a ‘No Social Cleansing’ gig anywhere in London (to follow up on the Deptford gig I put on in November), and also if you’re interested in helping in any way with our planned recording of ‘Grenfell’ in a studio and its release.

4. Chronicling ‘The State of London’ via photos taken on daily bike rides

Since May 2012, I have been cycling around the 120 postcodes of London, taking photos of now-destroyed sites, endangered buildings, forgotten corners, the river, canals, the play of light, the rain, the night — and the remorseless rise of overpriced towers for the domestic and international super-rich — and in May last year, on the 5th anniversary of the start of the project, I finally began publishing a handful of these photos — a photo a day — on a Facebook page I set up, ‘The State of London.’ I then set up a Twitter page, and in 2018 I hope to set up the as-yet skeletal website, and hopefully have an exhibition and publish some sort of book.

Do follow the pages, and get in touch if you can help.

5. Stopping Brexit, getting rid of the Tories and getting rid of Donald Trump

Perhaps this list seems a bit over-ambitious, but we can only live in hope and try to work to make the world a better place, and right now, for this to happen, the corrosive, destructive power of Britain’s proposed departure form the EU, which I have been writing about in sorrow and anger since June 24, 2016, must be stopped. My hope right now, spelled out in another new and as yet unrecorded song for The Four Fathers, ‘I Want My Country Back (From The People Who Wanted Their Country Back)’, is that Brexit “will destroy whoever makes it real”, and the Tories will wither as the people are allowed to change their minds, and a Labour government, genuinely interested in a new form of socialism, takes over.

And while I’m feeling buoyant in the new year, I also hope that 2018 will be the year that we see the ongoing mental collapse of Donald Trump — although I will settle for the Republicans suffering huge defeats in the mid-term elections in November, and the Democrats find a credible leader who will take them, like the Labour Party, to the left.

It’s January 1, and, at the dawning of a new year, we can but dream, eh?

Peace.

Andy

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, 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 the Donald Trump No! Please Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2017), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, 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.

Guantánamo Lawyer: It is “Entirely Unprecedented” for Trump to “Take the Position That There Will Be No Transfers out of Guantánamo Without Regard to the Facts”

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 of the Trump administration.

 

Just before Christmas, in an article entitled, “Men due to leave Gitmo under Obama seem stuck under Trump,” the Associated Press shone a light on the plight of five men approved for release from Guantánamo by high-level US government review processes under President Obama, but who were not released before Donald Trump took office. I wrote about these men for Al-Jazeera in June, in an article entitled, “Abdul Latif Nasser: Facing life in Guantánamo,” but it was excellent to see an update from the AP, because there has been no progress from Trump, who, while not following up on his ill-considered urges to expand the use of the prison, has effectively sealed it shut, showing no sign that he has any desire to follow up on the decisions to release these five men by freeing them.

In my article in June, I focused in particular on the case of Abdul Latif Nasser, a Moroccan prisoner who was approved for release in July 2016 by a Periodic Review Board, a parole-type process set up in 2013 by President Obama to assess the cases of men previously regarded as legitimate candidates for indefinite detention without charge or trial. They had been regarded as “too dangerous to release” by a previous review process, the Guantánamo Review Task Force, which met once a week throughout 2009, although the officials responsible for the PRBs also conceded that insufficient evidence existed to put them on trial, a tacit admission that the evidence itself was profoundly untrustworthy. This was definitively established by the PRB process between 2013 and 2016, when 64 men had their cases reviewed, 38 were approved for release, and all but Nasser, and an Algerian, Sufyian Barhoumi, were freed.

As I explained in my article in June, Nasser missed being released by just eight days, because the Moroccan government only notified the US that it would accept his repatriation on December 28, 2006, 22 days before Obama left office, but 30 days’ notification is required by Congress before any prisoner can be freed.

Revisiting Nasser’s story, the AP (who described him in their article as Abdellatif Nasser) noted that he “allowed himself to get excited” when he got the news about his PRB success, and “to think about Moroccan food, imagining he would be home in no time.” As he said at the time, “I’ve been here 14 years. A few months more is nothing.”

But, as the AP continued, “his optimism turned out to be misplaced,” and now “he is one of five prisoners who the US cleared to go but whose freedom is in doubt” under Donald Trump.

Shelby Sullivan-Bennis of Reprieve, Nasser’s lawyer, who told him about his pending release, said to the AP, “We had hoped until the last moment that he might still be released. When it didn’t happen we were crushed. That eight-day foible has turned into a potential lifetime of detention.” She added, ”The daily reality of what it means to them is really settling in.”

The AP also mentioned the other men approved for release but still held (in addition to Nasser and Sufyian Barhoumi), who come from Yemen and Tunisia, adding, “Another was born in the United Arab Emirates but has been identified in Pentagon documents as an ethnic Rohingya who is stateless.” I discussed Barhoumi’s case in my article for Al-Jazeera in June, and, revisiting it, the AP noted that “he was expected to go just before Obama left office, but then Defense Secretary Ash Carter did not sign off on the transfer and he had to stay behind despite a last-minute legal appeal filed in a federal court in Washington on behalf of him and Nasser.”

The other three were approved for release in 2009 by the Guantánamo Review Task Force, and they include Tawfiq al-Bihani, a Yemeni whose lawyer, George Clarke, told me that “he was supposed to be settled in Saudi Arabia with nine other men in 2016 but “was pulled at the last minute” for reasons that were not explained. The other two, I noted, “have refused all legal representation and have made it clear that they do not want any attention from the media.” The AP, writing of the three men, noted, “It’s not publicly known why the US has not been able to resettle them. A lawyer appointed to represent the one born in the UAE says the man has never agreed to a meeting.”

Although Donald Trump has not added to the prison’s population despite threatening to do so, his refusal to release anyone marks the darkest period in Guantánamo’s long history when it comes to acknowledging that indefinite detention without charge or trial is an unjustifiable aberration for a nation that claims to respect the rule of law, as the US does. Persistently stung by criticism, George W. Bush began releasing prisoners just four months after Guantánamo opened, in May 2002, and released 532 throughout his presidency. A further 196 men were released by President Obama, and one other prisoner was transferred to the US mainland for a trial (a process that would have continued had Congress not issued a ban on bringing any Guantánamo prisoners to the US mainland for any reason — an unjustifiable ban that remains in place to this day). Nine other prisoners died at Guantánamo, many under dubious circumstances.

Nailing the dangerous significance of Donald Trump’s refusal to contemplate releasing any prisoners from Guantánamo, Pardiss Kebriaei, an attorney with the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents Sufyian Barhoumi, said, ”It is entirely unprecedented for an administration to take the position that there will be no transfers out of Guantánamo without regard to the facts, without regard to individual circumstances.”

41 prisoners are still held at Guantánamo — the five approved for release, ten facing or having faced trials by military commission, and 26 others whose ongoing imprisonment was upheld by the PRBs. Their cases continue to be reviewed, but, as the AP put it, lawyers “are considering filing new legal challenges, arguing that a policy of no releases would mean their confinement can no longer legally be justified as a temporary wartime measure.”

The Trump administration has not officially announced what its Guantánamo policy is, but the AP noted that, before he took office, Trump tweeted, “There should be no further releases from Gitmo. These are extremely dangerous people and should not be allowed back onto the battlefield” — lies and distortions that Tom Wilner and I, the co-founders of Close Guantánamo, took apart at the time in an op-ed for the New York Daily News.

Air Force Maj. Ben Sakrisson, a Pentagon spokesman, failed to provide clarification. He “said detainee case files will still be reviewed on a periodic basis,” but added that the government “is still considering whether or not to transfer detainees.”

The AP also touched on the contentious topic of alleged recidivism amongst former Guantánamo prisoners, citing the latest irresponsible report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which, for many years, has been issuing reports, never backed up by evidence, claiming alarming-sounding recidivism rates. As the AP noted, in its most recent report this summer, the DNI claimed that “about 17 percent of the 728 detainees who have been released are ‘confirmed’ and 12 percent are ‘suspected’ of re-engaging in such activities,” although “the vast majority of those re-engagements occurred with former prisoners who did not go through the security review that was set up under Obama” (in other words, they were under George W. Bush), and “[t]he recidivism rate for those released after those measures were adopted dropped to 4 percent confirmed and 8 percent suspected.”

The AP’s article ended with further reflection on the case of Abdul Latif Nasser, who is now 53 years old, and who, having been a foot soldier for the Taliban in Afghanistan, has ended up at Guantánamo studying “math, computer science and English [and] creating a 2,000-word Arabic-English dictionary,” and, via a military official appointed to represent him at his PRB, told his board members that he ”deeply regrets his actions of the past.”

Shelby Sullivan-Bennis said that, when Nasser “learned he wasn’t going home, he initially stopped taking calls from his lawyers and they feared he might try to kill himself.” She added, however, that more recently “he has tried not to lose hope.”

Another of his attorneys at Reprieve, Clive Stafford-Smith, the organization’s founder, said, after visiting Nasser recently, that he was “worried some in his large extended family won’t recognize him if he does go home.”

“He holds it in,” Stafford Smith said, although he added, “You can see tears welling up in his eyes but he tries to put up a positive front.”

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, 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 the Donald Trump No! Please Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2017), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US). He is also the narrator of a new documentary film, “Concrete Soldiers UK” (2017), about the shameful destruction of social housing in the UK, and in 2017 he also set up the campaign, “No Social Cleansing in Lewisham,” as well as his London photo project, “The State of London.”

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, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, 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.