Andy Worthington's Blog, page 49

EXCLUSIVE: Fears for Long-Term Hunger Striker at Guantánamo: Lawyers Urge Court to Order Independent Medical Examination

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On Wednesday, in a story that has not been reported elsewhere, the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) filed an emergency motion asking for an independent medical examination and medical records for Sharqawi al-Hajj, a Yemeni held without charge or trial at Guantánamo since September 2004, who, as CCR put it, “was held in secret detention and brutally tortured for over two years” before his arrival at Guantánamo.

CCR submitted an emergency motion after al-Hajj, who recently embarked on a hunger strike, and refused to submit to being force-fed, “lost consciousness and required emergency hospitalization.”

In the most chilling line in their press release about the emergency motion, CCR noted, “As of a recent phone call with his attorneys, Al Hajj was still on hunger strike and weighed 104 pounds.”

As CCR explained, “His hunger strike compounds long-standing concerns about his health. Prior to his detention, Al Hajj was diagnosed with the Hepatitis B virus, an infection affecting the liver that can be life-threatening, and experiences chronic, potentially ominous related symptoms, including jaundice, extreme weakness and fatigue, and severe abdominal pain.”

In a medical declaration submitted in support of the emergency motion, Dr. Jess Ghannam, a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Global Health Sciences in the School of Medicine at the University of California-San Francisco (UCSF), assessed that al-Hajj could be on the verge of “total bodily collapse.”

Dr. Ghannam stated:

In his habeas pleadings, he [al-Hajj] recounts and describes a consistent pattern of torture – both severe physical and mental abuse – before arriving at Guantánamo. His descriptions of torture are consistent with my review of the literature and from my own direct examination of detainees with the same trajectory before arriving at Guantánamo. I have described a condition, referred to a “Guantánamo Syndrome,” where individuals subjected to severe torture in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Jordan develop a wide range of significant medical and psychiatric symptoms and conditions that are debilitating and disabling. The symptoms include sleep difficulties, cognitive difficulties, gastro-intestinal difficulties, chronic pain, chronic headaches, fatigue, and general physical impairment. These symptoms are present in individuals who are not on hunger strikes and can cause severe physical and neuropsychological damage. In the midst of a hunger strike, these symptoms can lead to total bodily collapse and medically irreparable harm. It is my opinion, with reasonable medical probability, that Mr. Hajj may very well be on the precipice of total bodily collapse.

An attorney with CCR visited al-Hajj in Guantánamo last month, and witnessed his deteriorating condition.

However, Pardiss Kebriaei, a senior staff attorney at CCR, issued a statement in which she expressed no expectation that the government would act. She stated:

As it has virtually every time we have sounded an alarm about detainees, the government will deny there’s anything wrong, as if captivity for over 15 years with still no end in sight, on top of the documented torture these men have been through, is healthy, legal, and, moral.

She added:

The human experiment at Guantánamo – where the government tests how far it can go, first with torture and now with hopeless, perpetual detention, before breaking human beings – must end. Since the Trump administration will do nothing to respect human rights and the precarious health of our client, the courts must order it to.

In a further description of al-Hajj’s case, CCR noted that he “was arrested in Pakistan in 2002 [in a house raid in February 2002] and rendered by the United States to secret prisons, where he was interrogated under threats of electrocution and physical violence, subjected to regular beatings, and forced to endure complete darkness and continuous loud music.”

CCR added that his brutal treatment was “detailed in a ruling by the district court in Washington, D.C. striking statements from certain of his interrogations as tainted by torture.” That was in 2011, but prior to that his torture had been acknowledged by a judge considering the habeas corpus petition of another prisoner, Uthman Abdul Rahim Mohammed Uthman, in February 2010. Ruling on the eligibility of statements made by al-Hajj and Sanad al-Kazimi, another prisoner held in “black sites” before being sent to Guantánamo, Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. stated, “The Court will not rely on the statements of Hajj or Kazimi because there is unrebutted evidence in the record that, at the time of the interrogations at which they made the statements, both men had recently been tortured.”

In recent years, al-Hajj had his case reviewed by a Periodic Review Board, a parole-type process set up by President Obama. Although 38 out of 64 men had their release recommended by the PRB process, al-Hajj was not one of them. Following a PRB in March 2016, at which he was described by the US authorities as “a career jihadist who acted as a prominent financial and travel facilitator for al-Qa’ida members before and after the 9/11 attacks,” he was approved for ongoing detention on April 14, 2016. A second review took place In February 2017, but his ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial was approved in March. As CCR noted, “His next full review by the PRB will be in 2020.”

The question, now, however – beyond whether it is acceptable to hold someone for 18 years without charge or trial (which it clearly isn’t) – is whether al-Hajj will live that long.

Note: For more information about the case, see the CCR case page, where you can also find CCR’s emergency motion, a declaration by Pardiss Kebriaei and another medical declaration, by Dr. Robert L. Cohen.

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 Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), 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.

11 Years After CIA Torture Victims Arrived at Guantánamo, Whistleblowers Joseph Hickman and John Kiriakou on How Torture “Became Legal” After 9/11

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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.

Exactly eleven years ago, on September 6, 2006, George W. Bush, who had previously denied holding prisoners in secret prisons run by the CIA, admitted that the secret prisons did exist, but stated in a press conference that the men held in them had just been moved to Guantánamo, where they would face military commission trials.

To date, just one man has been successfully prosecuted — Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a minor player in the 1998 bombings of two US embassies in Africa, who was only successfully prosecuted because he was moved to the US mainland and given a federal court trial. In response, Republican lawmakers petulantly passed legislation preventing such a success from happening again, leaving the other men to be caught in seemingly endless pre-trial military commission hearings, or imprisoned indefinitely without charge or trial. Seven men — including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other men changed in connection with the 9/11 attacks — are in the former category, while another man (Majid Khan) agreed to a plea deal in 2012, but is still awaiting sentencing, and five others — including Abu Zubaydah, a logistician mistakenly regarded as a high-ranking terrorist leader, for whom the torture program was first developed — continue to be held without charge or trial, and largely incommunicado, with no sign of when, if ever, their limbo will come to an end.

Last year, I wrote an article about the “high-value detainees” on the 10th anniversary of their arrival at Guantánamo, entitled, Tortured “High-Value Detainees” Arrived at Guantánamo Exactly Ten Years Ago, But Still There Is No Justice, and this year I’m taking the opportunity to cross-post an excerpt from a recently published book, The Convenient Terrorist, by Joseph Hickman and John Kiriakou, published by Skyhorse Publishing, Inc., and available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and IndieBound. The excerpt was first published on Salon.

The authors know what they are talking about. Hickman was a guard at Guantánamo, in charge of the towers, from which, on the night of June 9, 2006, he witnessed an unusual movement of vehicles that prompted him to severely doubt the claim, made later that night, that three prisoners had committed suicide. Hickman’s story was first exposed publicly in Harper’s Magazine in January 2010, and in 2015 a book based on his experiences, Murder At Camp Delta, was published. Kiriakou, meanwhile, was a CIA analyst and case officer, and was imprisoned for nearly two years for whistleblowing, having disclosed the identity of a fellow CIA officer to a journalist, even though the journalist did not publish the officer’s name.

Hickman and Kiriakou’s article is timely and fascinating. They explain how “[p]reparations for implementing a torture program … pre-dated Abu Zubaydah’s capture [in March 2002] by many months,” something that I have long argued, but lacked the evidence to prove. They also run through the development of the program — including the key role played by James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, psychologists who had worked for the US military in the SERE program (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape), training US personnel to resist torture if captured by a hostile enemy. For a total of $81m, Mitchell and Jessen reverse-engineered the SERE program for use on alleged terrorists, even though, as Hickman and Kiriakou point out, Senate investigators working for the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report into the CIA torture program, of which the executive summary was published in December 2014, “noted that neither Jessen nor Mitchell had any firsthand experience as interrogators,” and “nor did either have specialized knowledge of Al Qaeda, a background in terrorism, or any relevant regional, cultural, or linguistic expertise.” both men recently avoided a trial by reaching a financial settlement with two of their victims, and the family of a third, who died in US custody in Afghanistan in 2002, and there are hopes that, as a result, further calls for accountability might also be successful.

Hickman and Kiriakou also write of the role played by “torture memo” author John Yoo, and his boss Jay Bybee, and run through the techniques approved by Yoo and Bybee, which, they explain, are “specifically prohibited” by US law. They also write about how the FBI refused to be involved, and Kiriakou adds his own explanation of how, when he learned what was required of him under this new regime, he also refused to be involved, although others were not so principled. As he and Hickman note, “More than a dozen CIA officers accepted the invitation to be trained in the new techniques. This dozen became the core cadre of ‘interrogators,’ a designation the CIA had never had before.”

I hope you have time to read the article below, and will share it if you find it useful.

The road to torture: How the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” became legal after 9/11

By Joseph Hickman and John Kiriakou, Salon, September 4, 2017

The CIA’s torture techniques — 10 in total — increased in severity as one went down the list.

The FBI allows agents to take one of two approaches when conducting an interrogation. The Informed Interrogation Approach calls for the interrogator to become as fully informed on issues important to the subject as possible, and then to establish a rapport with the target. Under this approach, the interrogator builds trust over a period of time until the subject begins to supply useful information. In contrast, the Coercive Interrogation Approach — sometimes called the Coercive Interrogation Technique — calls for interrogators to employ force and pain, and to create a feeling of helplessness and isolation which will make the subject more likely to talk to his interrogator.

But the FBI would not be the only ones interrogating Abu Zubaydah.

Investigators for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found that the CIA, at the time of the 9/11 attacks, had in place “longstanding formal standards for conducting interrogations.” These standards did not include torture or “enhanced techniques” of any kind. Indeed, according to the 2012 Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture:

In January 1989, the CIA informed the Committee that “inhumane physical or psychological techniques are counterproductive because they do not produce intelligence and will probably result in false answers.” Testimony of the CIA deputy director for operations in 1988 (Richard Stolz) denounced coercive interrogation techniques, stating, “[p]hysical abuse or other degrading treatment was rejected, not only because it is wrong, but because it has historically proven to be ineffective.” By October 2001, CIA policy was to comply with the Department of the Army Field Manual “Intelligence Interrogation.” A CIA Directorate of Operations Handbook from October 2001 states that the CIA does not engage in “human rights violations,” which it defined as: “Torture, cruel, inhuman, degrading treatment or punishment, or prolonged detention without charges or trial.” The handbook further stated that “[i]t is CIA policy to neither participate directly in nor encourage interrogation which involves the use of force, mental or physical torture, extremely demeaning indignities or exposure to inhumane treatment of any kind as an aid to interrogation.”

Yet the rules that had worked so well in the past didn’t seem to fit the world of late 2001, at least according to the CIA leadership. By November 2001, CIA Director George Tenet had ordered his attorneys and senior officers of the Agency’s Counterterrorism Center to draft new protocols for interrogation that would allow for harsher approaches than the Agency had ever allowed before.

In a classified memo entitled “Hostile Interrogations: Legal Considerations for CIA Officers,” dated November 21, 2001, “the Israeli example” is cited as a possible basis for arguing before courts and the American people that “torture was necessary to prevent imminent, significant, physical harm to persons, where there is no other available means to prevent the harm.”

But the CIA was already on record with the Senate Intelligence Committee as saying that torture didn’t work. Committee investigators wrote, “Despite the CIA’s previous statements that coercive physical and psychological interrogation techniques ‘result in false answers’ and have ‘proven to be ineffective.’” Nonetheless, by the end of November 2001, CIA attorneys began circulating a draft memorandum suggesting “novel” legal defenses for CIA officers who might, in the future, engage in torture. According to Senate investigators, “The memorandum stated that the ‘CIA could argue that the torture was necessary to prevent imminent, significant, physical harm to persons, where there is no other available means to prevent the harm,’ adding that ‘states may be very unwilling to call the US to task for torture when it resulted in saving thousands of lives.’”

Still, it wasn’t up to the CIA’s leadership to decide when and if torture should be employed. That remained a policy decision, and it would have to have the support of the Principals’ Committee, chaired by the President, and including the Vice President, the National Security Advisor, the Attorney General, and the Secretaries of State and Defense — in addition to the CIA Director.

In January 2002, according to Senate investigators, the principals began debating whether to apply Geneva Convention protections to captured prisoners from Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Director Tenet sent a letter to President Bush urging “that the CIA be exempt from any application of these protections,” arguing that application of Geneva would significantly hamper the ability of the CIA to obtain critical threat information necessary to save American lives. On February 1, 2002 — approximately two months prior to the detention of the CIA’s first prisoner — a CIA attorney wrote that if CIA detainees were covered by Geneva there would be “few alternatives to simply asking questions.” The attorney concluded that, if that were the case, “then the optic becomes how legally defensible is a particular act that probably violates the convention, but ultimately saves lives.”

Preparations for implementing a torture program thus pre-dated Abu Zubaydah’s capture by many months. Senior CIA officers had already bought into the use of “Ticking Time Bomb” scenarios, in which it was argued that captured terrorists had to be tortured to reveal the locations of operations still underway that might result in the deaths of innocent people. However, as FBI agent and interrogator Ali Soufan would later testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, these scenarios never actually arise. But that didn’t stop the CIA’s senior-most officials from creating a list of torture techniques, euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” to be used on high-profile prisoners.

According to the CIA’s inspector general at the time, “the capture of senior Al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah on 27 March 2002 presented the Agency with the opportunity to obtain actionable intelligence on future threats to the United States from the most senior Al Qaeda member in US custody at the time. This accelerated CIA’s development of an interrogation program.”

That development took the form of two CIA contract psychologists, Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell. Jessen and Mitchell had been psychologists with the US Air Force Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) school, where military personnel are exposed to the kinds of intense and hostile interrogation techniques to which they might be subjected if they were to be shot down and fall into enemy hands. The two founded a consulting company in 2005 to offer the CIA, apparently through a friend who worked in the CIA’s Office of Technical Services, a “reverse-engineered” version of SERE training that could be carried out on prisoners to force them to talk. Senate investigators noted that neither Jessen nor Mitchell had any firsthand experience as interrogators, “nor did either have specialized knowledge of Al Qaeda, a background in terrorism, or any relevant regional, cultural, or linguistic expertise. Jessen had reviewed research on ‘learned helplessness,’ in which individuals might become passive and depressed in response to adverse or uncontrollable events. He theorized that inducing such a state could encourage a detainee to cooperate and provide information.” Yet it was Jessen and Mitchell who first suggested a list of ten coercive techniques that would be used on prisoners.

CIA officers then sent this list of techniques to the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) for clearance. OLC attorney John Yoo drafted a series of memos approving each of the proposed techniques as legal. OLC director and assistant attorney general Jay Bybee signed the memos in early August 2002 after clearing them with attorneys on the National Security Council. Vice President Richard Cheney later confirmed that he “and others” had “signed off” on the torture techniques. For the first time in US history, it was now legal to torture prisoners.

The CIA’s torture techniques — ten in total — increased in severity as one went down the list. They were largely modeled on techniques used by Chinese communists against captured American servicemen during the Korean War, according to Senator Carl Levin, former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. As outlined in the CIA Inspector General’s Report, they included Attention Grasp; Walling; Facial Hold; Facial Slap or Insult Slap; Cramped Confinement; Insect Placement; Wall Standing; Stress Positioning; Sleep Deprivation; and Waterboarding:

The attention grasp consists of grasping the detainee with both hands, with one hand on each side of the collar opening, in a controlled and quick motion. In the same motion as the grasp, the detainee is drawn toward the interrogator.

During the walling technique, the detainee is pulled forward and then quickly and firmly pushed into a flexible false wall so that his shoulder blades hit the wall. His head and neck are supported with a rolled towel to prevent whiplash.

The facial hold is used to hold the detainee’s head immobile. The interrogator places an open palm on either side of the detainee’s face and the interrogator’s fingertips are kept well away from the detainee’s eyes.

With the facial or insult slap, the fingers are slightly spread apart. The interrogator’s hand makes contact with the area between the tip of the detainee’s chin and the bottom of the corresponding earlobe.

In cramped confinement, the detainee is placed in a confined space, typically a small or large box, which is usually dark. Confinement in the smaller space lasts no more than two hours and in the larger space it can last up to eighteen hours.

Insects placed in a confinement box involve placing a harmless insect in the box with the detainee. [Authors’ Note: This was to enhance the mental strain on prisoners like Abu Zubaydah, who had an irrational fear of insects.]

During wall standing, the detainee may stand about four to five feet from a wall with his feet spread approximately to his shoulder width. His arms are stretched out in front of him and his fingers rest on the wall to support all of his body weight. The detainee is not allowed to reposition his hands or feet.

The application of stress positions may include having the detainee sit on the floor with his legs extended straight out in front of him with his arms raised above his head or kneeling on the floor while leaning back at a 45 degree angle.

Sleep deprivation will not exceed eleven days at a time.

The application of the waterboard technique involves binding the detainee to a bench with his feet elevated above his head. The detainee’s head is immobilized and an interrogator places a cloth over the detainee’s mouth and nose while pouring water onto the cloth in a controlled manner. Airflow is restricted for twenty to forty seconds and the technique produces the sensation of drowning and suffocation.

The problem with these techniques is that — the opinions of John Yoo and Jay Bybee notwithstanding — they were specifically prohibited by law. The Federal Torture Act, 18 US Code § 2340, clearly defines torture:

[T]orture means an act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control;

“Severe mental pain or suffering” means the prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from —

the intentional infliction of threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering;

the administration or application, or threatened administration or application, of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality;

the threat of imminent death; or

the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering, or the administration or application of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or personality; and

“United States” means the several States of the United States, the District of Columbia, and the commonwealths, territories, and possessions of the United States.

The remainder of the Act could not be any clearer:

Offense. —

Whoever outside the United States commits or attempts to commit torture shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both, and if death results to any person from conduct prohibited by this subsection, shall be punished by death or imprisoned for any term of years or for life.

Jurisdiction. — There is jurisdiction over the activity prohibited in subsection (a) if —

the alleged offender is a national of the United States; or

the alleged offender is present in the United States, irrespective of the nationality of the victim or alleged offender.

Conspiracy. —

A person who conspires to commit an offense under this section shall be subject to the same penalties (other than the penalty of death) as the penalties prescribed for the offense, the commission of which was the object of the conspiracy.

The ten approved methods seem to meet the criteria for torture even when applied exactly as described. Yet the CIA officers involved did not always adhere strictly to the techniques. At least two prisoners were killed by CIA officers (or persons acting on behalf of the CIA) during interrogations. These instances — and many more near misses — often involved variations on the ten approved methods.

It wasn’t just US law that prohibited what the CIA was doing. The United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment — of which the United States was the primary author and an original signatory — specifically bans anything approaching “enhanced interrogation” techniques. As Article 1 of the convention states:

torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent of acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.

There was precedent for punishing Americans involved in torture, and specifically for involvement in waterboarding. On January 21, 1968, the Washington Post ran a front-page photograph of an American soldier waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner. On the day that the photo was published, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara ordered an investigation, and the soldier eventually was court martialed and convicted of torturing a prisoner.

The government had found waterboarding to be an inappropriate form of torture as recently as 1968. No law had been changed since. The Bush Administration merely pretended — thirty-four years later — that this and other precedents did not exist.

President George W. Bush approved the torture of Abu Zubaydah in writing on August 1, 2002. However, it turned out that there was already a backstory, and the torture had already begun, apparently in anticipation of the President’s approval.

The CIA had flown Abu Zubaydah from Pakistan to his “onward location,” a secret prison in a foreign country, codenamed Detention Site Green, in late March 2002. He was too severely wounded to be questioned initially, however, and the Johns Hopkins physician had set up shop on the scene to care for his charge. The CIA medical team decided after his arrival that they could not handle the severity of his injuries, and Abu Zubaydah was again moved to a hospital for treatment. FBI Agent Ali Soufan recalled before the Senate Judiciary Committee: “At the hospital, we continued our questioning as much as possible, while taking into account his medical condition and the need to know all information he might have on existing threats.”

Some weeks later, Abu Zubaydah had recovered enough to be interrogated. As Soufan told the Senate Judiciary Committee:

Immediately after Abu Zubaydah was captured, a fellow FBI agent and I were flown to meet him at an undisclosed location. We were both very familiar with Abu Zubaydah and have successfully interrogated Al Qaeda terrorists. We started interrogating him, supported by CIA officials who were stationed at the location, and within the first hour of the interrogation, using the Informed Interrogation Approach, we gained important actionable intelligence. The information was so important that, as I learned later from open sources, it went to CIA Director George Tenet, who was so impressed that he initially ordered us to be congratulated.

Traditional FBI techniques were working. Those techniques instructed agents to “know your subject, establish a rapport with him, and engage him in conversation.” This was happening, and it was yielding results. Soufan told the Senate Judiciary Committee that when Abu Zubaydah returned to the secret site from the hospital: “We were once again very successful and elicited information regarding the role of Khalid Shaikh Muhammad as the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, and lots of other information that remains classified. It is important to remember that before this, we had no idea of KSM’s role in 9/11 or his importance in the Al Qaeda leadership structure. All this happened before the CTC team (the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center) arrived.”

This was pivotal information. The CIA had had no idea that Khalid Shaikh Muhammad had been the mastermind of the September 11 attacks. They knew only that an individual named “Mukhtar” had been in charge at the time. Muhammad was on the FBI’s most wanted list because he had been indicted in 1996 for his role in a plot to detonate explosives on twelve US airliners flying over the Pacific. On April 10, 2002, during an interrogation conducted by Soufan, Abu Zubaydah identified a photograph of Muhammad as “Mukhtar” and said, correctly, that he was a relative of Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, who was in a US prison after having detonated a bomb at the World Trade Center in 1993.

According to Senate investigators in the Senate torture report released in December 2014, “Abu Zubaydah told the FBI officers that Mukhtar trained the 9/11 hijackers and also provided additional information on KSM’s background, to include that KSM spoke fluent English, was approximately 34 years old, and was responsible for Al Qaeda operations outside Afghanistan.” It was the FBI and Soufan that collected this critical information. There was no CIA involvement. But interestingly, Senate investigators noted, “Subsequent representations on the success of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program consistently describe Abu Zubaydah’s identification of KSM’s role in the September 11, 2001 attacks, as well as his identification of KSM’s alias (Mukhtar), as being ‘important’ and ‘vital’ information.” The CIA was taking credit for the FBI’s success.

Actionable intelligence notwithstanding, the CTC team’s arrival presaged a sea change in the treatment of Abu Zubaydah.

Unbeknownst to Soufan and his FBI colleagues, a decision had been made in Washington that would change everything. The President had signed the order allowing Abu Zubaydah’s torture to begin, and the CTC team already on its way to the site included untrained interrogators and also Jessen and Mitchell, who had created the torture program by reverse-engineering the SERE training.

As Soufan told the Senate Judiciary Committee:

A few days after we started interrogating Abu Zubaydah, the CTC interrogation team finally arrived from DC with a contractor who was instructing them on how they should conduct the interrogations, and we (the FBI) were removed. Immediately, on the instructions of the contractor, harsh techniques were introduced, starting with nudity.

The new techniques did not produce results as Abu Zubaydah shut down and stopped talking. At that time, nudity and low-level sleep deprivation (between 24 and 48 hours) was being used. After a few days of getting no information, and after repeated inquiries from DC asking why all of a sudden no information was being transmitted, when before there had been a steady stream, we were again given control of the interrogation.

Soufan soon returned to his Informed Interrogation Approach. Abu Zubaydah, again clothed and with a good night’s sleep, started talking. He gave the FBI details on Jose Padilla, the so-called “dirty bomber” whom Abu Zubaydah said was planning to detonate a radiological bomb. Thanks to this information, Padilla was arrested in Chicago, charged with criminal conspiracy, convicted, and eventually sentenced to twenty-one years in a federal prison.

But that wasn’t good enough for the CIA, and the contractor again began using torture techniques, this time employing constant loud noise and temperature manipulation, in addition to nudity and sleep deprivation. Soufan and a fellow FBI agent objected to this, but were overruled. A CIA psychologist who had objected earlier left the site in protest.108 The harsher techniques failed — again — and Soufan was once more asked to reengage with Abu Zubaydah. He had been traumatized by the torture techniques, but, eventually, Abu Zubaydah began speaking with Soufan.

While this was happening, Soufan sent formal objections to both FBI Headquarters and CIA Headquarters. In a cable to his leadership, he said that the CIA psychologist:

believe[s] AZ is offering “throw away information” and holding back from providing threat information. (It should be note [sic] that we have obtained critical information regarding AZ thus far and have now got him speaking about threat information, albeit from his hospital bed and not [an] appropriate interview environment for full follow-up (due to his health). Suddenly the psychiatric team here wants AZ to only interact with their [CIA officer] as being the best way to get the threat information … We offered several compromise solutions … all suggestions were immediately declined without further discussion … This again is quite odd as all information obtained from AZ has come from FBI lead interviewers and questioning … I have spent an un-calculable [sic] amount of hours at [Abu Zubaydah’s] bedside assisting with medical help, holding his hand and comforting him through various medical procedures, even assisting him in going [to] the bathroom … We have built tremendous [rapport] with AZ and now that we are on the eve of “regular” interviews to get threat information, we have been “written out of future interviews.”

The CIA tactics had shifted once more. Rather than sitting across a table from Soufan, Abu Zubaydah was now interrogated by CIA officers wearing all black uniforms — which included boots, gloves, balaclavas, and goggles — to keep Abu Zubaydah from identifying the officers, as well as to prevent him from “seeing the guards as individuals who he may attempt to establish a relationship or dialogue with.” Meanwhile, Abu Zubaydah was kept naked, deprived of sleep, and after being returned to Detention Site Green from the hospital, kept in a small white room with no windows and four halogen lights.

The CIA-FBI pissing match was coming to a head. The contractor again insisted on taking over, and he asked CIA Headquarters for permission to put Abu Zubaydah into what was called a “confinement box.” Accordingly, Soufan again protested to his superiors at the FBI. He refused to further assist in interrogating Abu Zubaydah. FBI Director Robert Mueller agreed with Soufan’s assessment — that the CIA’s techniques constituted torture — and ordered that all FBI personnel return to the US.

By the summer of 2002, the CIA was fully in control of Abu Zubaydah’s fate. In June 2002, the CIA team decided to put Abu Zubaydah into isolation (solitary confinement) where he remained for forty-seven days. This isolation ended on August 4, 2002, after the President signed the memorandum allowing torture.

The problem for the CIA was that Abu Zubaydah was not providing actionable intelligence on Al Qaeda’s next attack. This was because he simply didn’t know any further information. But the “good cops” were out, while Jessen, Mitchell, and the “bad cops” were in. The CIA saw Abu Zubaydah’s inability to provide the information as “unwillingness,” and deemed him “uncooperative.”

It was this determination that Abu Zubaydah was only being uncooperative that convinced CIA Headquarters to employ increasingly severe forms of interrogation upon their subject. As US Senate investigators subsequently found, in July of 2002 the CIA’s leadership held several meetings specifically to discuss the use of “novel interrogation methods” on Abu Zubaydah. These were the “enhanced interrogation techniques” that had previously been cleared by the Justice Department.

It was during this period, at the end of July 2002, that a senior officer at the Counterterrorism Center approached John Kiriakou and asked if he wanted to be “certified in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques.”

“What’s that mean?” Kiriakou asked in the moment.

“It means we’re going to start getting rough with these guys!” was the immediate response.

The CTC officer quickly explained the new techniques that were in the offing.

“That sounds an awful lot like torture,” Kiriakou said.

But then he added that he would take a couple of hours to think about it.

Kiriakou made an appointment to see a very senior CIA officer with whom he’d had a friendly relationship for a decade. That same afternoon he went to the seventh floor, the CIA’s executive level, for the meeting. A moment after sitting down, he told the senior officer about the approach from CTC.

“What do you think?” he asked.

The response was not what he’d been expecting.

“First let’s call it what it is,” the senior officer said. “It’s torture. They can use any euphemism they want, but it’s still torture. And torture is a slippery slope. Eventually, somebody is going to go overboard and they’re going to kill a prisoner. When that happens, there’s going to be a Congressional investigation. Then there’s going to be a Justice Department investigation. And in the end, somebody’s going to go to prison. Do you want to go to prison?”

Kiriakou didn’t.

Kiriakou walked back down to CTC, found the officer, and said bluntly: “This is a torture program. I don’t want to be associated with it.”

But others did.

More than a dozen CIA officers accepted the invitation to be trained in the new techniques. This dozen became the core cadre of “interrogators,” a designation the CIA had never had before.

Yet prior to the actual torture beginning, the CIA found it had more paperwork to take care of. Following the July meetings, the CTC General Counsel and other CIA legal officials sent a letter to Attorney General John Ashcroft asking for a formal declination letter. This would be a letter from the Justice Department specifically declining to prosecute any CIA officer, or any person working on behalf of the CIA, “who may employ methods in the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah that otherwise might subject those individuals to prosecution.” The letter would also specify that “the interrogation team had concluded that the use of more aggressive methods is required to persuade Abu Zubaydah to provide the critical information we need to safeguard the lives of innumerable innocent men, women, and children within the United States and abroad.” It concluded, tellingly, that these “aggressive methods” would otherwise be prohibited by the torture statute.

The CIA knew that what they were planning to do was torture. They admitted as much in this letter. That was why they were asking for a “Get out of Jail Free” card for their torturers.

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 Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), 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.

My Band The Four Fathers Release New Single, ‘She’s Back’, About Pussy Riot, As Maria Alyokhina Releases Memoir, ‘Riot Days’

Today, my band The Four Fathers are releasing ‘She’s Back’, our new online single from our forthcoming album, ‘How Much Is A Life Worth?’, which we’ll be releasing on CD soon, hopefully within the next month.

‘She’s Back’ was written by guitarist Richard Clare, first aired in 2015, and recorded in a session last year for the new album. It’s about Pussy Riot, politicized performance artists from Russia, who use punk music to get across their messages, which have involved feminism, LGBT rights and the corruption of Vladimir Putin. We recorded it in July 2016, with Richard on lead vocals and 12-string guitar, me on rhythm guitar and backing vocals, Brendan Horstead on drums, Andrew Fifield on flute and Louis Sills-Clare on bass.

The song is below, on Bandcamp, where you can listen to it, and, if you wish, download it for just £1 ($1.30). We hope you like it!

She’s Back by The Four Fathers

Formed in 2011, Pussy Riot gained international notoriety in 2012 after five members of the group staged a punk rock performance — a ‘Punk Prayer’ — inside Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior, which was aimed at the church’s support for Putin during his election campaign.

Three of the five were subsequently arrested, in March 2012 —  Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina and Yekaterina Samutsevich — and were put on trial in July. In August, they were convicted of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred”, and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment. Samutsevich’s sentence was suspended on appeal in October, but Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina had their sentences upheld, and were imprisoned for 21 months, only finally being released on December 23, 2013.

Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina subsequently appeared as Pussy Riot members during the Winter Olympics in Sochi, where, as Tolokonnikova reported, Cossacks employed as security guards “attacked us, beat us with whips and abundantly sprayed us with pepper gas”. In March 2014, Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina were “seriously assaulted at a fast food outlet by local youths in Nizhny Novgorod.” Last month, Alyokhina was briefly detained, in Yakutsk in eastern Siberia, with another Pussy Riot member, Olga Borisova, after a protest against the imprisonment of film-maker Oleg Sentsov. As the Guardian described it, “the pair unfurled a ‘Free Sentsov’ banner on a road bridge, along with plumes of coloured smoke.”

Richard states that the song was “inspired by an interview with Nadezhda Tolokonnikova about her time in a gulag and her aims and feelings after release.” Her first major interview after her release seems to have been with Der Spiegel, the week after her release, in which, under the heading, ‘I Want Justice’, she spoke of her imprisonment as follows:

I spent most of the time at a penal colony in Mordovia. This is what my day was like there: Wake up at 5:45 a.m., 12 minutes of early-morning exercise, followed by breakfast and forced labor as a seamstress. Being allowed to go to the bathroom or smoke a cigarette depended on the guards’ mood. Lunch was greasy and of poor quality. The workday ended at 7 p.m., when there was roll call in the prison yard. After that, we were sometimes required to shovel snow or do other cleanup work. Then we waited in line to wash up a little, and finally we went to bed.

Asked if she was treated decently, she said:

No. It was terrible. They tried everything to break me and silence me. The collective punishments were the worst, almost unbearable. Because of a small gesture, or when I asked the camp management to observe the law, 100 people were assigned to a punishment unit, where beatings were customary. I was treated better than others, simply because there was so much public attention. In my case, they did adhere to the eight-hour workday required by law. The other women were often forced to slave away for up to 16 hours a day.

In September 2014, Tolokonnikova spoke to Amelia Gentleman of the Guardian, when she had “set up a prison-reform project and launched a news agency website, Mediazona.” The prison reform project, set up with Alyokhina, is Zona Prava (Justice Zone), described as “a campaigning charity aimed at improving conditions in Russia’s jails.”

In October 2016, as the Guardian described it, Pussy Riot “released a song celebrating the vagina, in an unashamed feminist riposte to Donald Trump and his boast that when he meets beautiful women he ‘grabs them by the pussy.’” The song, ‘Straight Outta Vagina’, was written by Tolokonnikova, and recorded in the US, and that same month they also released another anti-Trump song, ‘Make America Great Again.’

Bringing the story up to date, Maria Alyokhina has a memoir out next week, ‘Riot Days’, reviewed by the Guardian last week, and described as “a punk version of history and a work of art in itself, a statement against corruption and patriarchy.” In an interview at the weekend, asked about Donald Trump, she said, “Political art is simply essential for life in the United States right now. It’s not just about Trump. It’s about Nazi groups that are calling for people to be judged according to racial characteristics and so on. If you call someone dangerous then it means you are scared of them. You shouldn’t be scared, you need to act.” She added, as the Guardian described it, that “[p]eople everywhere should be wary of putting too much faith in politicians,” who, as Alyokhina said, need to be “poked in the backside.” She also said, “Politics is not something that exists in one or another White House. It is our lives. The political process is happening all the time.”

She also made a few other good comments about activism, both of which reflect my own experiences: firstly, “Every day a person makes choices. It doesn’t happen that you suddenly understand something and become a different person just like that. It’s daily toil,” and, secondly, “I am not the sort of person who sits around waiting for some sort of end. You have to keep acting whatever the conditions. I fight against indifference and apathy … and for freedom and choice.”

Please also feel free to follow The Four Fathers on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, and email us if you want to be on our mailing list, or if you can offer us any gigs!

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 Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), 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.

Radio: I Discuss My Contention That We Should Take a Break from Constant Phone and Internet Use with Chris Cook on Gorilla Radio

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Regular readers will know that I just got back from a fortnight’s holiday in Sicily with my family, and that, after the second week, in which I was offline for the whole time, I returned to the UK and published my immediate thoughts about the benefits of sometimes switching off from the whole internet and mobile phone world in an article entitled, Switch Off Your Devices and Have a Week Off: Why Headspace, Silence and Human Interaction is Good for Us.

After publishing it, I was very pleasantly surprised when Chris Cook of Gorilla Radio, based in Canada, got in touch to ask me if I’d be interested in appearing on his weekly show to discuss it, and I happily agreed. Chris and I have spoken many times before, but always about Guantánamo, so I was delighted to be able to talk about another topic that interests me.

The one-hour show is available here (and here as an MP3) and my interview with Chris begins around 35 minutes in, after an interview William Laurance, an Australian research professor, who has been studying the impact of cars on wildlife, and is the author of an article entitled, Curbing an Onslaught of 2 Billion Cars.

In my analysis of the benefits of balancing our online presence with time off, I acknowledged that I work as an online journalist and commentator, and have no desire to put myself out of a job (or what passes for a job), but I was pleased to be able to express some of my doubts about possible downsides to our relationship with the internet and particularly with smart phones  — hand-held devices that would once have required an entire room to power them, but which are now ubiquitous, even though their advent is so recent that definitive assessments of their long-term impact don’t currently exist.

As well as worrying about the atomizing effects of mobile technology and the internet, I also have concerns about how all this technology also accompanies an increasingly mechanized world, the dangers posed by artificial intelligence (introduced in a guest post recently by my friend Tom Pettinger), and how fundamentally alarming it is that so many creative people are now required to make their work available for free, a shifting business model in which, often, the only people who are making a profit run, work for, or are shareholders of the giant tech companies who are eating up more and more of the world in a generally unchecked manner. People should be more questioning, I think, of the giant corporations at the heart of this supposed Brave New World — like Apple, Google and Amazon, but also other Silicon Valley success stories like Uber and Airbnb. For more on this, check out We need to nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon. Here’s why by academic Nick Srnicek in the Guardian two days ago, Secrets of Silicon Valley on the BBC, and, from July, The billion-dollar palaces of Apple, Facebook and Google in the Observer.

In my article, I was particularly interested in seeing if people have any enthusiasm for the notion of us switching off all our devices every now and then — a week here and there, perhaps one day a week when we all agree to switch off and return to the kind of social interactions that used to exist — and I remain fascinated by that idea, although I’ve had little feedback about it.

Do feel free to let me know what you think about any of the above.

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 Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), 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.

Donald Trump Is Still Trying to Work Out How to Expand the Use of Guantánamo Rather Than Closing It for Good

Please support my work! 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.

 

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.

In a dispiriting sign of counter-productive obstinacy on the part of the Trump administration, the New York Times recently reported that, according to Trump administration officials who are “familiar with internal deliberations,” the administration is “making a fresh attempt at drafting an executive order on handling terrorism detainees.” As Charlie Savage and Adam Goldman described it, these efforts “reviv[e] a struggle to navigate legal and geopolitical obstacles” to expand the use of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, which opened over 15 and a half years ago.

Drafts of proposed executive orders relating to Guantánamo had been leaked in Trump’s first week in office, although, as the Times noted, “Congress and military and intelligence officials pushed back against ideas in early drafts, like reopening the CIA’s overseas ‘black site’ prisons where the Bush administration tortured terrorism suspects.” As a result, the White House “dropped that and several other ideas, but as the drafts were watered down, momentum to finish the job faltered.”

Alarmingly, however, Savage and Goldman noted that the Trump administration officials they spoke to told them that Trump “had been expected to sign a detention policy order three weeks ago,” and that the plan only “changed after he fired his first chief of staff, Reince Priebus, on July 28 and replaced him with John F. Kelly,” a retired Marine Corps general who was the commander of US Southern Command, which oversees prison operations at Guantánamo, from November 2012 to January 2016.

Kelly had clashed with Obama administration officials about Guantánamo, and as the Washington Post noted in July, the relationship between him and the Obama White House “had become so strained that, in the weeks before he retired, multiple administration officials went to the media and accused Kelly and other military leaders of endeavoring to undermine [Obama’s] Guantánamo closure plan.”

Despite this, the officials said that “on July 31 — Mr. Kelly’s first day — the National Security Council announced that the White House wanted a new round of interagency deliberations” before issuing a new executive order. The Times reported that the message “came during a secure video teleconference with counterterrorism strategy and legal officials at military, diplomatic and intelligence agencies,” with the agencies “asked to consider three potential versions of the order and make recommendations” by the middle of August.

The Times explained that the first of the three versions “was the version that Mr. Trump was preparing to sign three weeks ago,” which “would reverse a January 2009 order by President Barack Obama that directed the government to close the prison, and make clear that the Trump administration’s policy was instead to keep it open indefinitely.” According to an official who spoke to the Times, this first version “would also say that Guantánamo could be used to hold accused members of Al Qaeda or the Islamic State,” even though transferring Islamic State suspects to Guantánamo “would defy warnings by national security and legal officials about creating legal risks for the broader military campaign underway in Iraq and Syria.”

The second version, according to the official who spoke to the Times, “would add language that says the secretary of defense, Jim Mattis, may bring newly captured terrorism suspects to the prison … explicitly grant[ing] an authority that is merely implicit or ambiguous in the first version,” while the third version “would direct Mr. Mattis to establish criteria about which new detainees should be brought to the prison,” and “would also make clear that new arrivals would be given periodic reviews by a six-agency parole-like board that recommends whether to keep holding or to transfer detainees” — and which have been in operation for the existing Guantánamo prisoners since 2013.

Another official described as being “familiar with internal deliberations” said that Trump was “unlikely to sign any detention order for several weeks because the changes may be wrapped into a broader counterterrorism policy review that is underway.” It was also noted that a spokesman for the National Security Council “declined to comment.”

The proposals are no less troubling now than they were when first floated in January, and it is to be hoped that an executive order reviving Guantánamo doesn’t materialize. As the Times noted, to date the administration “has brought no new detainees to Guantánamo, despite Mr. Trump’s campaign vow to fill the prison back up,” and this is clearly a situation that is encouraging for legal experts, who have expressed profound and repeated doubts about the legality of bringing any new prisoners to Guantánamo, as well as pointing out that federal courts remain the only reliable venue for prosecutions, and for any country with which the US wishes to have a constructive relationship.

As the Times explained, “European and Middle Eastern allies will not transfer detainees to the United States without a promise they will not be sent to Guantánamo,” noting that, last month, “Spain transferred custody of a terrorism suspect, Ali Charaf Damache, whom the Trump administration brought to federal court in Philadelphia for a civilian trial,” while, in the case of an al-Qaeda suspect known as Abu Khaybar, “held in Yemen by an unidentified Middle Eastern ally,” the administration’s efforts to secure his transfer have floundered because, according to current and former law enforcement officials, those holding him, “while willing to transfer [him], will not do so if his destination would be Guantánamo.”

A Washington Post editorial condemning Trump’s plans

In an editorial on Sunday, the Washington Post weighed in with unambiguous criticism of Trump’s plans. In Bringing new detainees to Guantánamo would be a grave mistake, the Post’s editors reminded readers — and the administration — that, after the executive order was leaked in January, “Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis and CIA Director Mike Pompeo disavowed the draft after it was leaked to the press, and the order — which also called for a policy review on the possible reopening of secret CIA prisons around the globe — was never signed.”

Noting that “the administration is trying again,” with an interagency group “drafting a policy that would reverse President Barack Obama’s decree calling for the closure of the prison and authorize Mr. Mattis to bring suspected terrorists to Guantánamo,” the Post’s editors stated, bluntly and accurately, “This would be a grave mistake.”

The editors proceeded to welcome the fact that “none of the policies currently under consideration float a return to the use of CIA prisons — a practice which did great damage to the United States’ international reputation after 9/11” — but pointed out that, “even absent this provision, an executive order authorizing newly captured prisoners to be detained at Guantánamo would risk alienating US allies.” Here at “Close Guantánamo,” we also believe it would have been reassuring to see the editors add that what has been happening at Guantánamo since 2002 is also an affront to values the US claims to hold dear.

In further explanation of their position, the Post’s editors stated, “Domestically, detaining ISIS fighters at the prison would be an invitation to years of risky litigation over the scope of government authority in the battle against the Islamic State,” adding that “short-sighted congressional restrictions on transferring detainees out of Guantánamo, along with a system for trying detainees by military commission that has proved painfully slow and mired in legal confusion, could consign any new detainees to custody without trial for decades.” As the editors added, “The military judge in the case against the 9/11 attackers has yet to even set a trial date.”

The Post’s editors also noted, accurately, that, in contrast to the mess at Guantánamo, the government “has had relative success in prosecuting terrorism suspects in federal court,” proceeding to explain that, in July, “the Trump administration itself extradited a suspected al Qaeda recruiter from Spain to face criminal charges — Ali Charaf Damache, a dual Algerian and Irish citizen, who was  brought to a federal court in Philadelphia.

The Post’s editors also noted another, more troubling case as an “indication of the viability of criminal prosecutions,” referring to the case of Ahmed Abu Khattala, “the accused ringleader of the 2012 attacks on an American compound in Libya,” who was interrogated aboard a ship sailing to the United States for three days following his capture in 2014. Just two weeks ago, a federal judge ruled in the government’s favor in the case. The arrangement, as the Post’s editors described it, “allowed government interrogators [from the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group, set up under President Obama, and consisting of military, intelligence and law enforcement officials] to question Mr. Khattala to gain intelligence before advising him of his right to remain silent, then inform him of his rights and restart the questioning with a new team of officials [from the FBI] in order to build a criminal case against him.” As the editors proceeded to explain, “In holding that prosecutors could use Mr. Khattala’s statements after being read his rights, the court showed that criminal trials need not preclude the intelligence gathering that can be valuable for preventing attacks.”

The editors added, “To be sure, this system is far from perfect,” acknowledging that the judge in Mr. Khattala’s case “hinted that the government may face restrictions on its ability to conduct lengthy interrogations at sea,” but not mentioning how the system of interrogation without rights, followed by a second interrogation by a so-called “clean team” of FBI agents, echoed what took place at the “black sites” and Guantánamo with the so-called “high-value detainees,” to the dismay of many lawyers and legal experts (and ourselves).

Despite our caveats about aspects of the US’s detention policy under Obama, as well as under Trump, we agree wholeheartedly with the Post’s editors’ observation that these cases “demonstrate that the United States can fight terrorism without compounding the tragic mistakes of Guantánamo Bay,” and that “Mr. Trump would be wise to pay attention.”

We hope Donald Trump and his officials are listening.

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 Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), 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.

Switch Off Your Devices and Have a Week Off: Why Headspace, Silence and Human Interaction is Good for Us

Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist and commentator.

 

I’m just back from a fortnight’s holiday with my family in Sicily, and am also just back online after a week with no internet access at all, which was a wonderfully refreshing experience.

Don’t get me wrong. I make a living — or what passes for a living — mostly online, and I know more than many how the internet can enable individuals to become truly independent media sources and activists, and how we can reach out across the world in a way that was never possible before the advent of the world wide web. It’s what I’ve been doing for the last eleven years, and will continue to do so long as there are appreciate people out there who are prepared to support me in what I do.

However, the permanently connected world is not without its pitfalls — and I’m not just thinking about fake news, bigotry, and the horrendous rise of cyber-bullies and cyber-misogynists. Every year, when I switch off, I return to a time when there was space in our lives — space to think, to reflect, even to be bored, which can be a constructive experience. It’s somewhere I try to get to regularly in my everyday life, cycling around London taking photos, with no mobile phone connecting me to the online world (or able to track my every move), but I always return to my laptop, to the blizzard of emails, notifications, status updates and more from the absurdly large number of people who purport to be my “friends,” but who, in reality, are a relatively small number of friends and acquaintances vastly outnumbered by people I don’t know at all.

In the online world, seeking attention, we are encouraged to ignore how often our words and our thoughts disappear into the ether, and yet how much we are encouraged to keep on chasing interest and approval via likes and follows, like hamsters in a wheel that only gets smaller and faster-moving the more we go round in it. I’m still avoiding being tied to a mobile phone, in part because of an absurd, old-school desire to be “free”, but also because I genuinely find their use to be alarming — like an extension of people’s bodies, statuses and likes checked relentlessly like nervous tics, attention spans shrunk to almost nothing, intellectual capacity reduced to 140 characters or less.

I have no serious desire to be a Luddite — although I do find myself frequently fantasizing about how pleasant it would be to generally return to an analogue, pre-digital age — but every year, when I do switch off from the internet for a week or so, I come back with the belief that we should all switch off our devices more regularly than we do — if we do at all. I am convinced our brains need room to breathe, and that our relationships with each other cannot be sustained if we constantly have half an eye on the little device in our pockets that tells us in so many ways that it is our best friend, when, in reality, it can often be smothering and damaging to our well-being.

I’ll be interested to know what you think. What, for example, would you think about a campaign that encouraged us all to switch off our devices one day a week? Is it something that is even imaginable, or is the grip of the powerful hand-held computer so powerful that we can no longer imagine any amount of time spent without them?

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 Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), 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.

The First 100 Days of My Photo Project, ‘The State of London’

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Back in May, I launched the first manifestation of a photo project I’ve been undertaking for the last five years — ‘The State of London’, which involves me photographing London on bike rides that I undertake every day, from small local circuits from my home in south east London to long journeys to the other side of town and back.

In the years since I began this project, in May 2012, I’ve visited all 120 London postcodes (the EC, WC, N, E, SE, SW, W and NW postcodes), and have also made additional visits to some of Greater London’s outer boroughs. A few years ago, I had a website made, with an interactive map allowing me to post photos by postcode. I hope to start using the website soon, which will also feature original essays about the capital, its history and its current state, and I’ll also soon be setting up a Twitter page, but for now the Facebook page is the place to visit to see glimpses of what I’ve been up to, and I hope that you’ll “like” it and start following what I do, if you haven’t already.

I’ve lived in London for all of my adult life, since I finished university in 1985, but it wasn’t until 2012 that I realized that huge swathes of the city were unknown to me, and that I wanted to visit all the places I’d never visited, as well as revisiting other places I’d got to know over the years. The trigger was me getting ill in 2011, giving up smoking, and realizing that I needed to get fit, and the photo project was the perfect solution. When I began, I soon realized that even the parts of London closest to me, in south east London were in many ways unknown territory, and, with a blanket ban on bicycles on trains in place in the run-up to the 2012 Olympic Games, I had to cycle through south east London to get anywhere else in London, and, as a result of these journeys and of my shorter bike rides close to home, I eventually got to know almost every street in south east London — and have also photograph many of them at some time or other.

I can’t claim to know the rest of London as well — or to have photographed it anywhere near as much — although central London (the West End and the City), east London (especially via the Greenwich Foot Tunnel, the Regent’s Canal and the Limehouse Cut, and, further east, the Woolwich Ferry) and south west London have all generally been within reach, and it’s generally only the far north and west that I’ve rarely visited.

I began the project as reportage rather than as a fine art project, deliberately using a compact camera — a Canon IXUS 115 HS for the first year, and a Canon SX270 HS ever since — which has often been an advantage (in bad weather, for example, and when I want to avoid the unwelcome attention of security guards in places where public space has been privatized), although I intend, at some point, to get a DSLR camera, to branch out into some fine art projects involving parts of the city that I particularly love — and some of the constantly changing light and weather that I also love, and that affects, sometimes profoundly, how the capital appears.

I have learnt many things from my project — how we are not meant to be in buildings all the time, how we are waterproof (I cycle every day, whatever the weather), and how liberating it is to be off-grid and off-line (I don’t have a mobile phone, so when I’m out and about I’m also incommunicado). In the early days, I often used to get lost, as I travel without a map (or much of a plan), and that can also be quite a giddy, liberating feeling. It happens less these days, but it does still occur.

My feelings about London tend to be very mixed — as can be seen from my song, ‘London’, performed with my band The Four Fathers, in which I lament how the wildness of the 80s and 90s has given way to an almost total obsession with money and greed, siphoning the joy out of life, commodifying everything, and making London, for the first time in living memory, somewhere in which increasingly large numbers of people cannot afford to live, a situation that is both horribly unjust (as those who bought before the artificial housing bubbles of the last 20 years have been made disproportionately rich at the expense of others), and counter-productive, as key workers and the creative people who are often the last point of resistance to capitalism consuming itself and everything it encounters with dullness are forced to move out. This may well be good for other towns and cities, but it is a loss for London, and one that the capital can ill afford culturally.

‘London’ is posted below, and I hope you have the time and the inclination to listen to it —and to buy it as a download if you like it:

London by The Four Fathers

While my cycle trips have shown me the endless power and presence of the river, the glory of the capital’s hills, its hidden corners and abandoned places that resonate with me in particular, a panoply of light and colours and moods, and the buzz and colour of ethnically diverse neighbourhoods, in contrast to the general inertia of the city’s rich quarters, it is also rare that I am not confronted at some point by examples of the greed that has been steadily strangling the life of the city over the last 20 years, and that has gone into hideous overdrive since the Tories took power in 2010.

Overpriced towers rise up everywhere, their existence fuelled by a seemingly never-ending orgy of foreign investment, serviced by public school pimps, and, more shockingly, the councils and housing organizations who used to provide social housing, but are now part of the same programme of social cleansing, all determined to remove anyone from London who cannot pay tens of thousands of pounds a year for the alleged privilege of living in the human equivalent of a factory farm cage.

I touch on some of these issues in my photos and the accompanying text, and will never forget how the entirely preventable Grenfell Tower disaster in June exemplified how unfettered greed can lead to social tenants losing their lives — as, I suspect, an underlying narrative that will never go away, however much the sun may shine, and my eyes are drawn to other examples of beauty and grace in the capital.

After all, everything is political — even the decision not to be — and although forms and textures can appeal to us purely on aesthetic grounds, there is little in our lives that does not also reveal where power lies — and that, it seems to me, is especially true of the built environment.

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 Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), 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.

The Absurdity of Guantánamo: As US Prepares to Release Ahmed Al-Darbi in Plea Deal, Less Significant Prisoners Remain Trapped Forever

Please support my work! 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.

 

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.

In the long and cruel history of Guantánamo, a major source of stress for the prisoners has been, from the beginning, the seemingly inexplicable release of prisoners who constituted some sort of a threat to the US, while completely insignificant prisoners have languished with no hope of release.

In the early days, this was because shrewd Afghan and Pakistani prisoners connected to the Taliban fooled their captors, who were too arrogant and dismissive of their allies in the region to seek advice before releasing men who later took up arms against them. Later, in the cases of some released Saudis, it came about because the House of Saud demanded the release of its nationals, and the US bowed to its demands, and in other cases that we don’t even know about it may be prudent to consider that men who were turned into double agents at a secret facility within Guantánamo were released as part of their recruitment — although how often those double agents turned out to betray their former captors is unknown.

Under President Obama, an absurd point was reached in 2010, when, after Congress imposed onerous restrictions on the release of prisoners, the only men freed were those whose release had been ordered by a judge (as part of the short-lived success of the prisoners’ habeas petitions, before politicized appeals court judges shut down the whole process) or as a result of rulings or plea deals in their military commission trials. Just five men were freed in a nearly three-year period from 2010 to 2013 — with former child prisoner Omar Khadr, low level al-Qaeda assistant Ibrahim al-Qosi, and military trainer Noor Uthman Muhammed all released via plea deals — as President Obama sat on his hands, and refused to challenge Congress, even though a waiver in the legislation allowed him to bypass lawmakers if he wished.

Throughout this period, over eighty men in total whose release had been approved by a high-level, inter-agency review process (the Guantánamo Review Task Force) that President Obama established shortly after first taking office in 2009, languished with no prospect of release, and eventually the prisoners embarked on a prison-wide hunger strike to protest about what they correctly perceived as the unending injustice of Guantánamo, where, whatever decision had been taken in their cases, they were never released. One noticeable complaint at this time was made by Sufyian Barhoumi, an Algerian prisoner, who asked a judge to order the government to prosecute him for something — anything— so he might get to be released.

As a result of the hunger strike, and widespread international outrage about Guantánamo for the first time in his presidency, Barack Obama resumed releasing prisoners in the summer of 2013, ensuring that, by the end of his presidency, although he had failed to close Guantánamo as he promised on his second day in office in 2009, just 41 men were still held — five approved for release (ironically including Sufyian Barhoumi), ten facing, or having faced trials, and 26 others whose ongoing imprisonment had been approved by Obama’s second review process, the Periodic Review Boards, a parole-type process that approved 38 men for release between 2014 and 2016 who had previously been described as having been “too dangerous to release.”

Since taking office in January this year, Donald Trump has done very little at Guantánamo. His ridiculous plans to revive torture and bring new prisoners to Guantánamo have so far come to nothing, the Periodic Review Boards continue (although no one has been recommended for release since he took office), and the pre-trial hearings for the seven men facing military commissions, which began under Obama, are also ongoing, even though, by any objective measure, the commissions are a hopelessly broken system, in which only eight cases have concluded, and with most of those convictions being overturned on appeal.

In June, an eighth man was added to this roster, when the “high-value detainee” Hambali was charged — although Spencer Ackerman reported for the Daily Beast that a Trump official had told him anonymously that “charging Hambali was ‘short-sighted’ and ‘indicative of a lack of understanding of the complications of US detention policy,’ particularly without a broader policy framework for the Hambali case,” adding, “It’s kicking off a procedure that will take an indefinite period of time. This system doesn’t work.”

Ahmed al-Darbi and his plea deal

Now, however, Donald Trump faces a problem he hadn’t anticipated, and a return to the tangible unfairness of years past, as the US authorities take testimony from another prisoner who, according to the terms of a plea deal agreed in 2014, will, as a result, be repatriated to Saudi Arabia to serve the rest of his sentence there.

The prisoner in question is Ahmed al-Darbi, who, last week, gave a deposition in the case of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who is facing the death penalty for his alleged role in the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, in which 17 US sailors died. As Carol Rosenberg described it for the Miami Herald, al-Darbi admitted in his plea deal “to getting supplies and helping al-Qaida militants plot suicide bombings of ships in the Arabian Sea,” adding, “In exchange for the plea, he is due to return to his native Saudi Arabia next year to serve out the remainder of an at-most 15-year prison sentence.”

As Rosenberg also noted, “The Obama administration struck the testimony-for-release deal, and war court prosecutors say they are confident that Defense Secretary Jim Mattis will honor it.” Not to honor the deal would be a dangerous precedent, and one which has never been attempted, even though the Bush administration maintained, outrageously, that it could continue to hold convicted Guantánamo prisoners after their sentences were served.

Air Force Col. Vance Spath, the judge in al-Nashiri’s case, also ruled that “the public would not be allowed to watch” as al-Darbi gave his deposition, to the annoyance of his defense attorney, Rick Kammen, who, as Rosenberg put it, “wanted Darbi to testify in open court.”

Kammen said, “The tragedy of all of this is that the public won’t see as it unfolds,” adding, as Rosenberg described it, that he “predicted that, at the pace of progress toward trial, the public might only get to read a transcript, or see portions of the video, ‘if there’s a trial, which may be as far away as four or five years.’”

As Rosenberg noted, “Judge Spath has said in court he hopes to at least start jury selection in 2018,” but it remains incontrovertible that “progress toward trial has been slow, in part because of a continuing dispute between defense and prosecution attorneys over access to evidence.”

Last Monday, Judge Spath notified the lawyers in al-Nashiri’s case that “virtually any questions could be asked of Darbi in the closed deposition, which continues later this year with defense attorneys cross-examining him in a separate session.” As Rosenberg explained, “at the trial phase, if Darbi is gone from Guantánamo,” it will be the judge who will “decide which portions, if any, of the videotape can be shown to the jury.”

She added that “Darbi’s time-capsule testimony is being taken across at least two months, and in two cases. He’ll do another deposition Aug. 14-18 in the non-capital war crimes case against an alleged al-Qaida military commander, Abd al Hadi al Iraqi.” In contrast to al-Nashiri’s case, however, al-Hadi’s judge, Marine Col. Peter Rubin, “has agreed with defense attorneys to let the public watch.”

Whilst all of the above is of interest to those concerned with the tortuous approach to justice in the military commissions, it ought to be clear to the Trump administration that the countdown to al-Darbi’s release back to Saudi Arabia — even though it is to be followed by continued imprisonment — will not reassure anyone that Trump’s stewardship of Guantánamo is even vaguely acceptable, 15 and a half years after the prison opened.

This is because five men approved for release by high-level government review processes under President Obama are still held, with no sign on Trump’s part that he has any intention whatsoever of releasing them, and many of the 26 men recommended for ongoing imprisonment by Periodic Review Boards can, rightly, point out that they are less significant than al-Darbi, and yet they are supposed to quietly remain at Guantánamo without charge or trial for the rest of their lives without making any complaint.

Is there any way on earth that this can be regarded as fair?

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 Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), 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.

Judge Confirms That Trial of James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, Architects of CIA Torture Program, Will Go Ahead

Please support my work! 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.

 

Great news from Washington State, as Judge Justin Quackenbush, a federal court judge, has ruled that a “civil lawsuit brought by three victims of the CIA’s torture program against the two psychologists who created it will go to court on 5 September” after finding that “more than a year of discovery had yielded sufficient evidence to support the plaintiffs’ claims,” as Larry Siems, the editor of Mohamedou Ould Shahi’s acclaimed prison memoir, Guantánamo Diary, explained in an article for the Guardian.

The decision was expected, as Judge Quackenbush had allowed the case to proceed last April, a highly important decision that I wrote about at the time in an article entitled, In Historic Ruling, US Court Allows Lawsuit Against James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, Architects of CIA Torture Program, to Proceed. I also wrote a follow-up article in June this year, In Ongoing Court Case, Spotlight On James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, Architects of the Brutal, Pointless CIA Torture Program, after the New York Times obtained videos of the depositions made by Mitchell and Jessen, in which the two men attempted to defend their positions (the Times also obtained the depositions of two former CIA officials and of the plaintiffs, as well as newly declassified CIA documents).

As Larry Siems explained following this week’s ruling, “It will now be up to a jury in Spokane, Washington, to decide if the psychologists, who reportedly were paid $75m-$81m under their contract with the CIA to create the so-called enhanced interrogation program, are financially liable for the physical and psychological effects of their torture.”

If you haven’t yet heard it, do check out my band The Four Fathers playing ’81 Million Dollars,’ the song I wrote about my disgust at the news that Mitchell and Jessen were paid $81m for developing and implementing the post-9/11 torture program — which also includes a roll-call of those who should face prosecution, from George W. Bush downwards.

Love and War by The Four Fathers

Of the three plaintiffs, only two are alive — Suleiman Abdullah Salim, a Tanzanian, and Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud, a Libyan, who both “survived their ordeal in a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan in 2003,” as Siems describes it. Both “are now free and living in their home countries.” The third man, Gul Rahman, an Afghan, is represented by his family, because he died as a result of torture in the prison where he was held.

Dror Ladin, one of the ACLU attorneys who filed the lawsuit on behalf of the three men in October 2015, responded to Judge Quackenbush’s ruling by stating, “This is a historic day for our clients and all who seek accountability for torture. The court’s ruling means that for the first time, individuals responsible for the brutal and unlawful CIA torture program will face meaningful legal accountability for what they did. Our clients have waited a long time for justice.”

As Larry Siems proceeded to explain, “This is the first lawsuit brought by victims of torture in the CIA’s secret prisons even to reach the pretrial discovery phase. In previous cases, the Bush and then Obama administrations intervened to persuade courts to dismiss the suits, arguing state secrets were at risk if proceedings continued,” as in the Jeppesen case, against a Boeing subsidiary who flew torture flights for the CIA, which was shamefully shut down on the basis of the state secrets doctrine in 2010, under President Obama.

However, the publication in December 2014 of the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s four-year report about the CIA torture program “revealed many details the government had long suppressed, including the names of the 39 men who endured Mitchell and Jessen’s ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ in a prison code-named Cobalt and other secret CIA facilities,” and details of their torture.

As the report confirmed, Suleiman Abdullah Salim and Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud “were among those who had been subjected to torments including shackling in painful stress positions, walling, water dousing and confinement in closed, claustrophic boxes,” while Rahman “had been stripped, doused with water, and shackled to a concrete floor on a freezing night and died of hypothermia.” The details of the men’s torture had been publicized before the Senate report was issued (see my report on murders in Afghanistan here, and also see the ACLU’s detailed feature about the case, Out of the Darkness), but its publication made it all but impossible for critics of disclosure to dismiss the facts.

As Larry Siems put it, “With so much information officially confirmed, the Obama administration signalled early that it would not claim state secrets to scuttle the suit” — a long overdue change of position — and in a series of rulings over the past year Judge Quackenbush “has repeatedly rejected moves by Mitchell and Jessen’s attorneys to dismiss the suit, and has ordered an unprecedented level of discovery, including the depositions not only of Mitchell and Jessen but also of Jose Rodriguez, the former director of the CIA’s counterterrorism center, and John Rizzo, the deputy counsel of the agency when the black sites were in operation.”

Siems also explained how, at a final pre-trial hearing on 28 July, Judge Quackenbush “indicated he was satisfied that the claim brought by Rahman’s family should go before a jury, but said he wanted to review ‘the sufficiency of the evidence as it applies to plaintiffs Salim and Ben Soud.’” His ruling this week has made it clear that they too have “submitted strong evidence supporting their claim that Mitchell and Jessen bear responsibility for their torture.”

In a final twist that shows the United States’ ongoing contempt for the victims of its torture program — notwithstanding Barack Obama’s belated recognition that the state secrets doctrine had run its course as an obstacle to accountability — attorneys  for Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud heard the news about the ruling in the Caribbean island of Dominica, where they had gathered (with the government’s lawyers) to take his testimony to present to the jury in September. As Siems explained, “Both Ben Soud and Salim were denied visas to travel to the US earlier this year for depositions, and neither is likely to be allowed to appear in person at the trial proceedings.”

US embassy officials in Kabul did, however, “grant a visa to Obaidullah, the nephew of Rahman, who is representing his family in the lawsuit,” and in his deposition, which he made in New York in January, he “described his family’s anguish at the disappearance of his uncle, and the gradual discovery that he had been kidnapped and tortured to death in a secret CIA prison.” As Siems added, summing up the US government’s continuing indifference to Gul Rahman’s death, “The family still has not received confirmation of his death or been able to recover Rahman’s body.”

As Obaidullah stated in his testimony, explaining what his family is hoping for through the lawsuit, “If they killed him, I wish they would let us know, ‘Here is your dead body.’ Hold it up. At least present the dead body to us.”

Criticism of Mitchell and Jessen’s attempts to defend themselves

Prior to Monday’s ruling, Mitchell and Jessen had caused outrage by “resort[ing] to defense arguments once used by accused Nazi war criminals in order to claim they should not be held liable for torture,” as Kevin Gosztola described it for Shadowproof on July 28:

Ahead of oral argument in Spokane, Washington, on July 28, defense lawyers for Mitchell and Jessen invoked [PDF] the cases of Karl Rasche, a banker who “facilitated large loans to a fund at the personal disposal of Heinrich Himmler,” the head of the S.S., and Joachim Drosihn, who was a gassing technician for the firm that manufactured the poison gas, Zyklon B, used to exterminate Jewish people in concentration camps.

John Kiriakou, the former CIA officer who blew the whistle on the agency’s use of waterboarding in the torture program, reacted, “This just cements their place in history — and not just in history but in infamy.”

“When they have to rely on the defenses of accused Nazi war criminals to defend themselves, [they] can’t go any lower,” Kiriakou added. (In fact, at first, Kiriakou did not take this seriously and thought it was some kind of a joke.)

Reporting on Judge Quackenbush’s ruling this week, Gosztola noted that the judge stated that, “although the CIA may have maintained ultimate control of the program, defendants, being on site, exercised significant control during individual interrogations,” adding, “Defendants have not established they merely acted at the direction of the government, within the scope of their authority, and that such authority was legally and validly conferred.”

Gosztola also noted that Judge Quackenbush “called attention to ‘several unconvincing arguments’ made by Mitchell and Jessen,” stating, “Defendants argue there were other ‘parallel’ interrogation programs, which is contradicted by [former CIA legal counsel] John Rizzo’s testimony that there was only one legally authorized program.”

Judge Quackenbush also stated, “The argument defendants designed the program only for use on HVDs [high value detainees] is unconvincing. Jessen testified the terms ‘evolved over time’ and the term HVD ‘didn’t exist when we started.’ The designation of an individual could change, and [was] thus arbitrary. Plaintiff Salim was designated as ‘low level,’ ‘high level’ and ‘no longer enemy combatant,’” at various times.

Responding to what Kevin Gosztola described as “the argument that ‘there is no connection’ between the torture techniques proposed by Mitchell and Jessen and those applied to plaintiffs,” Judge Quackenbush described this as “factually incorrect,” stating, “Some techniques are identical and others appear to be variations — such as water dousing.”

Gosztola also noted that “[Judge] Quackenbush contended the former detainees are not required to prove Mitchell or Jessen had the motive to harm them. They could possibly be found liable for actions that led to the abusive treatment of Salim and Soud at COBALT [a “black site” in Afghanistan], where they were known to have worked in November 2002 before Salim and Soud arrived.” As the judge put it, “Defendants’ briefing in arguing against ‘substantial assistance’ attempts to minimize their participation, and at times goes to incredible lengths: ‘Defendants’ involvement was limited to suggesting potential [techniques] for Zubaydah, and then providing a detailed list of techniques that had been used at SERE for fifty years.’”

As Judge Quackenbush explained, “This statement is factually inaccurate and misleading. It is not credible to argue defendants were paid $80 million dollars for suggesting some techniques the Air Force SERE program already knew about. It is also undisputed that Defendants did not merely suggest [techniques]. They actually applied [techniques] to Zubaydah, interrogated Rahman, and participated in the program for several years.”

Judge Quackenbush also poured scorn on Mitchell and Jessen’s attempts to “have the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s study of the CIA’s rendition, detention, and interrogation program excluded from trial as ‘hearsay,’” dismissing their contention that the committee “was not qualified to investigate the program” and had “produced an untrustworthy, partisan, and unreliable report.”

In conclusion, then, I can only say: bring on the trial! It promises to be very interesting indeed.

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 Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), 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.

A Dream of Freedom Soured: Former Guantánamo Prisoners in Tunisia Face Ongoing Persecution

Please support my work! 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 February — as part of a ongoing effort to cover the stories of former Guantánamo prisoners, as well as maintaining pressure on the Trump administration to close Guantánamo once and for all — I covered the story of Hedi Hammami, a Tunisian who, on release from Guantánamo in March 2010, was given a new home in Georgia, because, at the time, it was regarded as unsafe for Tunisian prisoners to be repatriated. However, after Tunisia’s dictator, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, was overthrown in the first optimistic flourish of the Arab Spring, in January 2011, Hammami “negotiated his return to Tunisia,” as Carlotta Gall described it in an important article for the New York Times.

Gall’s article proceeded to reveal, however, how, although his return began positively, with him “benefiting from a national amnesty for political prisoners and a program of compensation that gave him a job in the Ministry of Health,” the tide soon turned, and Tunisia once more became a repressive regime, with Hammami subject to “a constant regimen of police surveillance, raids and harassment” to such an extent that he told Gall that he had recently visited the Red Cross and “asked them to connect me to the US foreign ministry to ask to go back to Guantánamo.”

Six months on, nothing has improved for Hammami. Reporting for the Associated Press, Bouazza Ben Bouazza found him “on the outskirts of Tunis in a rented room he describes as smaller than his Guantánamo cell.” He told Ben Bouazza,  “I was in a small prison and today I find myself in a larger one in Tunisia.”

Ben Bouazza explained how his room “is subject to search at any moment and Hammami himself must check in with police daily. His work as an ambulance driver is tenuous, as is his living situation more generally.” As Hammami explained, “In three years, I’ve moved seven times because of the pressure police put on landlords for renting to someone who was imprisoned in Guantánamo.”

When Hammami met Carlotta Gall, she also met his Algerian wife, with whom he has two children. He told Gall that his wife’s “residency card has been confiscated, which has prevented her from working to supplement his merger salary.” Gall added that his wife “asked not to be named ‘for fear of further police harassment,’” but said that “the family was ‘barely managing’ to get by.”

Speaking to Ben Bouazza, Hammami said that now his “wife and their two children spend much of their time in Algeria to escape the constant stress,” adding that he, however, “is not allowed to travel.”

As he said, echoing what he told Carlotta Gall, “I feel like I’m living in a larger sort of Guantánamo. I want to live free and with dignity, or to go back to a prison without ambiguity. I can’t stand this twilight life. When I am in prison, even in isolation, at least it’s clear in my head and I’m resigned to it. Where I can regain my freedom and dignity, that will be my country. That’s not the case for Tunisia.”

Ben Bouazza also revisited the midnight raid by police that Hammami had told Carlotta Gall about. Rym Ben Ismail, a psychologist who works with former Guantánamo prisoners, told Ben Bouazza, “Hedi called me at 2 in the morning. He was afraid. His wife and daughter were in a state of shock. The next day the entire neighborhood was talking about how police came in, the show of force, with officers who were climbing the balconies.”

Salah Sassi: “Guantánamo is better than this place”

Ben Bouazza also spoke to Salah Sassi, another former prisoner who has not spoken publicly before, noting that he and Hammami “remain close, complaining that constant police harassment has left them few alternatives for companionship.”

Sassi (also identified as Saleh Sassi, and also known in Guantánamo as Sayf bin Abdallah or Saleh bin Hadi Asasi) was cleared for release by a military review board under the Bush administration, and by President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force, set up after Obama first took office in 2009. As I described his story on his release in Albania in February 2010:

A welder and a skilled laborer, he moved to Italy in 1998, hoping to find work and a better life, and settled in Turin, where he secured a work permit and found employment in the construction industry. Apparently persuaded to travel to Afghanistan during a vacation from work, he reportedly spent some time at a mountain outpost north of Kabul, and was later wounded when a truck he was traveling in was shot at. Hospitalized, first in Kabul, and then in Khost, he was transported to the Pakistani border, where he was seized by the Pakistani authorities.

As I also explained:

In Guantánamo, as his lawyers at Reprieve noted, he was often held “in brutal conditions.” The vast majority of his imprisonment was spent in isolation, which caused him to suffer clinical depression. In discussions with his lawyers, he explained that his imprisonment was “a long and unending nightmare.” He was also visited by teams of foreign interrogators — both Italian and Tunisian. In late 2002, Tunisian agents came to Guantánamo and left no doubt about what awaited him if he were to be returned to Tunisia, which included “water torture in the barrel.”

As Ben Bouazza described it, Sassi “was freed the same year as Hammami after the Defense Department concluded he was of limited intelligence value and posed little threat.” He showed the AP journalist “the signed guarantee of good treatment that the Albanians demanded from the Tunisian government before Sassi was finally allowed to return home.”

However, as he described it, “His nine years in American detention still haunt him,” and, like Hammami, he has faced persecution in his homeland, despite the assurances given to the Albanian government.

As Ben Bouazza described it, “Sassi’s problems in Tunisia began within two months, when masked police officers surrounded his neighborhood, bound him and tossed him into a car.” As Sassi explained, “As we were driving, the officers hit me and insulted me, saying ‘You are a terrorist.’”

Ben Bouazza added, “He was freed a few days later, but said the house searches continue without cease. Hope faded of landing work or even developing a relationship with his neighbors. His wife left.”

Sassi told him, “Maybe, as my friend Hedi says, Guantánamo is better than here. There at least it’s clear — I am in prison. But here, I’m in a big prison with people I can’t even deal with.”

In an Associated Press video filmed in his hometown of Tinja, Sassi spoke further about his woes.

Describing his arrest and detention for three days, he said, “They raided my house using dogs. [There was] a large number of masked officials. When they arrived in front of the house they beat me and took me to the security centre and they came into my house. I did not know what happened to my family until I was released.”

In notes accompanying the AP video, it was stated that Sassi “was convicted in absentia by a Tunis court on charges of receiving military training in Afghanistan and having links to [the] militant group al-Qaida,” and “was sentenced to 11 years in prison.” This was a typical story under President Ben Ali, and prisoners released in Tunisia before his overthrow (two were freed in 2007) were imprisoned on false charges, as I explained at the time — see “I’m innocent,” says Guantánamo detainee Lofti Lagha, sentenced to three years’ imprisonment in Tunisia and Out of Guantánamo, and into the fire: conviction of ex-detainee in Tunisia casts doubts on US motives. As a result, a judge intervened to prevent further releases to Tunisia, which was why third countries had to be found for Hedi Hammami and Salah Sassi while Ben Ali was still in power.

Speaking of his return to Tunisia, Sassi stated that, “after the Tunisian revolution he … believ[ed] that the authorities would not restrict his movements and would guarantee his personal rights.” However, reiterating a familiar theme, he said he has gone from “a small prison in Cuba, Guantánamo to a big prison in Tunisia.”

He added, ”In Guantánamo I was a scapegoat, but in Tunisia I am what?”

As he explained to the AP, he “raises poultry and pigeons to earn a living,” but “claims he is regularly stopped at checkpoints, insulted in public, and beaten.” As he concluded, “Guantánamo is better than this place.”

The other Tunisians released from Guantánamo

In total, 12 Tunisians have been held at Guantánamo throughout its disgraceful 15 and a half year history, and, of the 12, only one, Ridah al-Yazidi, is still held. However, as Bouazza Ben Bouazza described it, “the fate of those who have been freed and returned home has hardly proved encouraging, either for the government or the men themselves.”

However, it should be noted that it is uncertain whether that reference to the government is fair. Although Ben Bouazza explained that two released prisoners “went to Syria after being freed from Guantánamo,” and that one, Rafiq al-Hami, “was killed there,” and the other, Lotfi Lagha, “returned and was convicted of terrorism charges,” Rym Ben Ismail, the psychologist, explained that it was the actions of the Tunisian government that drove Rafiq al-Hami to his death.

She explained to Carlotta Gall that one of the former Guantánamo prisoners, who she treated (which was evidently al-Hami), “was harassed so relentlessly by police that he became suicidal and ran off to Syria, where he was killed.” Far from portraying him as a terrorist, however, she said, “He was such a gentle person. By treating these people like this you create a climate of revenge and the sense that they have no place at home.”

I can only concur, having seen videos of al-Hami after his release, which led me to describe him as a “quiet, bookish man with an almost secret smile that his long years of torture could not erase.” I added that “he was clearly never a threat to anyone, and it is salutary to recall that he was actually brutalized not only in Guantánamo, but also in three “black sites” run by the CIA, where, as he explained in a lawsuit in 2009, “his presence and his existence were unknown to everyone except his United States detainers,” and, at various times, he was “stripped naked, threatened with dogs, shackled in painful stress positions for hours, punched, kicked and exposed to extremes of heat and cold.” Do also check out this Tunisia Live report by Nazanine Moshiri.

Most of the Tunisians freed from Guantánamo are “scattered around the world, in the countries that agreed to U.S. requests to take them in,” as Ben Bouazza put it. Another exception is Abdullah al-Hajji (aka Abdullah bin Amor, imprisoned after his return in 2007), but he “is no longer reachable, according to the lawyer Samir Ben Amor, who handles many of the Tunisian cases.”

Ben Amor added that Tunisia today “has returned to the police state that was prevalent under the former regime, with all the same ingredients of repression, injustice and arbitrary actions, [and] with the addition of an impossibility of countering these abuses with legal means.”

In the AP video, Marouen Jeda, Executive Director of the Observatory of Rights and Freedoms in Tunis, confirmed that some of the former Guantánamo prisoners had been “unable to leave their homes for a year and a half, their homes are threatened and those who secure jobs quickly lose them when pressure is put on their employers,” and confirmed that some were so unhappy that they were “seeking to return to a prison that everyone is escaping from.”

Amna Galali, Tunis director of Human Rights Watch, also “condemn[ed] the way the prisoners are being treated.” She said, “These people are continuously harassed by security forces and subject to radical measures based on intangible reasons. They believe that their lives are intolerable in Tunisia.” As the AP reported, “She is calling for education programmes for the security forces and the public to change their attitudes towards former prisoners like Sassi,” because, as she described it, “the Tunisian people deal with them with prejudgments without knowing the reality of the case and its relationship to terrorism.”

As Ben Bouazza also noted, “The United States has given Tunisia millions to help fight terrorism.” However, “[d]espite its efforts to combat extremism, the country is believed to be the single largest source of volunteers for extremist groups fighting in Syria, including Islamic State.” A month ago, when the article was published, it concluded with an observation that Tunisia’s prime minister, Youssef Chahed, was about to visit Washington, D.C. for discussions that were “expected to center largely upon security concerns.”

Perhaps they should also have involved reflections about how repression only creates more enemies, rather than contributing to peace, as the sad story of Rafiq al-Hami seems only to confirm, and as the example of Guantánamo ought also to demonstrate in no uncertain terms.

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 Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), 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.