Andy Worthington's Blog, page 5

Lee Wolosky, Former Envoy for Guantánamo Closure, Calls on President Biden to Close the Prison

A composite image of former Special Envoy for Guantánamo Closure Lee Woloskwy, and Camp 6 at Guantánamo, photographed in 2010.Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, with the US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email.

It’s now two weeks since the end of the first 100 days of the Biden presidency, when there was a short flurry of mainstream media interest in the prison at Guantánamo Bay, which has been largely ignored by the Biden administration since taking office, except for brief mentions of embarking on a “robust” review of the prison’s operations, and an “intention” to secure its closure.

To mark Biden’s first 100 days, I cross-posted an op-ed written for The Hill by Anthony Lake, national security adviser to President Clinton from 1993 to 1997, and Tom Wilner, who represented the Guantánamo prisoners in their Supreme Court cases in 2004 and 2008, and with whom I co-founded the Close Guantánamo campaign in 2012.

I’m following up on that article with another cross-post, of an op-ed written for the New York Times by Lee Wolosky, the Special Envoy for Guantánamo Closure under President Obama, from July 2015 until the end of Obama’s presidency, who, as Karen Greenberg explained in a 2017 article, “The Forever Prisoners of Guantanamo,” secured “the release to various willing countries of 75 prisoners, nearly 40% of the Gitmo population Obama had inherited.”

Wolosky, who also served on the National Security Council under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, brings a government insider’s perspective to the ongoing national shame of Guantánamo’s continued existence, urging President Biden to close the prison not only as a follow-up to his recent promise “to fully withdraw US troops from Afghanistan,” which he describes as “a significant step” toward “extricating the United States” from “its longest war,” but also to extricate the US from “massive national security architecture defined by the threat of foreign terrorism,” whose scale, he notes, shocked him when he took the Special Envoy post in 2015, having “left the National Security Council’s counterterrorism directorate in the weeks before 9/11.”

As well as recognizing Guantánamo as “a recruitment tool for extremists and a blot on our national character,” Wolosky recalls being “shocked by the bureaucracy of thousands of government employees built around Guantánamo,” in which “[h]undreds of millions of dollars were being spent annually to maintain the facility,” adding that this was “just one small component of the global war on terror.”

Explicitly, he states that “[t]he large, unwieldy federal counterterrorism bureaucracy must be trimmed,” with resources redirected to other threats from abroad, as well as “[t]he increasing threat from domestic extremism,” which “has been far more lethal to Americans in recent years than foreign terrorism.”

Specifically focusing on Guantánamo and the 40 men still held, Wolosky calls for the immediate release of the six men still held who were approved for release by high-level US government review processes, for the 12 men in the military commission trial system to be moved to the US mainland, and for the 22 others — the “forever prisoners” held indefinitely without charge or trial — to also be released, “subject to the negotiation of suitable security arrangements with other countries, including possible foreign prosecution.”

On this latter point, he specifically mentions the case of “the Kenyan detainee Abdul Malik, suspected of committing two terror attacks against Israeli targets in Mombasa, Kenya, in 2002, killing 13 people,” who, he says, “should be prosecuted in Israel or Kenya,” because the alleged attacks “neither targeted Americans nor took place on US soil.”

Malik’s lawyers, at Reprieve, disagree with the US government’s suspicions regarding their client’s alleged involvement in the attacks, but it is reasonable to expect that the military and intelligence services will be looking for ways to prosecute at least a handful of the 22 “forever prisoners” who have not, to date, been charged, despite having been held for between 13 and 19 years.

What is crucial for all parties to understand, however, is that, with the 20th anniversary of the opening of the Guantánamo prison looming, in January 2022, it is no longer acceptable for anyone to continue to be held without being charged, and it is commendable that both Wolosky, and the 24 Senators who recently wrote to Biden urging him to close the prison, recognize that the continued imprisonment of anyone without charge or trial is fundamentally unacceptable.

Wolosky’s call for Guantánamo’s closure ought to carry considerable weight within the administration, precisely because of his former role as the Special Envoy for Guantánamo Closure under Obama. For better or worse, the Envoy’s role was deeply pragmatic, rather than idealistic. The former prisoners whose release he negotiated were not always well-served by their former captors — as has been made abundantly clear in the transfer of former prisoners to the UAE, who have been subjected to ongoing imprisonment in unacceptable conditions rather than being granted the release that they were promised — but while those mistakes should not be repeated by Biden when it comes to resettling prisoners in third countries (primarily, the Yemenis still held, whose repatriation has long been ruled out across the entire political spectrum in the US, because of security concerns), Wolosky’s experience of what is possible is significant.

Wolosky’s op-ed is cross-posted below, and I hope you have time to read it, and will share it if you find it useful.

Biden Has a Chance to Remedy One of Obama’s Biggest Regrets
By Lee Wolosky, New York Times, April 27, 2021

President Biden’s decision to fully withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan is a significant step toward extricating the United States not only from its longest war, but also from a massive national security architecture defined by the threat of foreign terrorism.

He should now take the next step and close the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay. Its costs to America — both reputational and financial — are exorbitant, and the facility remains a recruitment tool for extremists and a blot on our national character.

Over the past 20 years, the United States has spent trillions of dollars fighting foreign terrorism and built a formidable counterterrorism apparatus aimed at that threat. I remember returning to government in 2015 as President Barack Obama’s special envoy for Guantánamo closure, 14 years after I left the National Security Council’s counterterrorism directorate in the weeks before 9/11. I was shocked by the bureaucracy of thousands of government employees built around Guantánamo, just one small component of the global war on terror. Hundreds of millions of dollars were being spent annually to maintain the facility a short distance from our shores.

Mr. Biden must also take a close look at the enormous resource commitment that prevented another 9/11-like attack on the United States and reduced the threat posed by foreign terrorist organizations. The large, unwieldy federal counterterrorism bureaucracy must be trimmed. Resources and diplomatic expertise should be redirected to counter today’s most pressing geostrategic threats, such as those posed by China. The increasing threat from domestic extremism deserves more attention, as well; it has been far more lethal to Americans in recent years than foreign terrorism.

Guantánamo is a remnant of the era now finally ending. The threats to U.S. security surrounding its creation no longer exist, and the remaining detainee population is increasingly geriatric and unlikely to return to the fight. (The oldest detainee is 73 years old.) The facility is crumbling, necessitating therecent relocation of high-value detainees from one building to another.

Mr. Obama has said that his failure to take decisive action to close the facility at the beginning of his first term was one of his most significant regrets. His administration did come close to doing so, transferring out of U.S. custody virtually all the detainees the U.S. government determined were eligible to leave at that time. Yet efforts to close Guantánamo were hampered by a transfer ban, approved by Congress as part of a defense-spending bill and signed by Mr. Obama despite his misgivings. The law purports to restrict the transfer of the facility’s detainees to the U.S. mainland for any purpose. The legislation is of dubious constitutionality because it infringes on the president’s constitutional powers as commander in chief to make operational decisions concerning wartime prisoners as he sees fit — a point Mr. Obama made.

President Biden must order the remaining detainees out of Guantánamo despite the transfer ban. Forty detainees remain, including 12 who are subject to military commission proceedings or have pleaded guilty. The remaining 28 could be transferred out of U.S. custody, subject to the negotiation of suitable security arrangements with other countries, including possible foreign prosecution.

Six detainees have been approved for transfer and should be released from U.S. custody immediately. For the remainder, it’s hard to remember why some of them ended up in U.S. custody, or why they should remain there. Consider the Kenyan detainee Abdul Malik, suspected of committing two terror attacks against Israeli targets in Mombasa, Kenya, in 2002, killing 13 people. These were horrible acts of terrorism, but ones that neither targeted Americans nor took place on U.S. soil. Nonetheless, he has been held at Guantánamo for 14 years. He should be prosecuted in Israel or Kenya. Other detainees are also subject to the criminal jurisdiction of other countries or could serve U.S. sentences abroad. The United States should not be the world’s jailer of first or last resort.

Those who cannot be transferred out of U.S. custody at this time, including detainees awaiting military commission trials, should be moved to the federal supermax prison in Florence, Colo., or to military bases in the U.S. or abroad. The federal prison system has an unblemished record in securely incarcerating those suspected and convicted of acts of terrorism, and at far less cost than the over $13 million per detainee per year at Guantánamo. (It costs around $78,000 annually to house an inmate in a supermax.)

The United States is finally leaving Afghanistan. We should also finally close Guantánamo. As with ending the war, that will be possible only with the boldest presidential leadership.

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

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

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

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

Fundraiser Marking the 9th Anniversary of My Photo-Journalism Project ‘The State of London’

The most recent photos posted in Andy Worthington’s ongoing photo-journalism project ‘The State of London.’Please click on the ‘Donate’ button below to make a donation to support my photo-journalism project ‘The State of London’.

 

Dear friends and supporters of ‘The State of London’,

Today marks the ninth anniversary of when I first set out consciously on my bike, armed with a small Canon compact camera, to take photos on a daily basis of the changing face of London throughout the 241 square miles of the capital’s 120 postcodes, and the fourth anniversary of when I began posting a photo a day on ‘The State of London’ Facebook page, where I also post an essay to accompany each photo. I also post the daily photos on Twitter.

I’ve now posted 1,431 photos on Facebook, where I now have nearly 4,500 followers, as well as the many other people who keep up with the project on my personal Facebook page, and, as the project has evolved, so too have my abilities as a photographer, especially over the last two years and three months since I upgraded to my current camera, the wonderful Canon PowerShot G7X Mk. II.

Sadly, I’m currently unable to celebrate this particular milestone on my bike, as I have strained a muscle in my right leg and am encouraging myself to remain largely immobile until it has healed, but in general I’ve been out and about most days over the last nine years, and since I began posting daily photos on Facebook, the demands of the project mean that, in addition to the time spent cycling, I also spend one or two hours researching the photo of the day and writing the text to accompany it, posting the photos and responding to comments.

Today, however, to mark this particular anniversary, I’d like to ask you, if you are able, to make a donation to support ‘The State of London’, as I have no financial backing whatsoever, and I rely on you to keep me going.

Obviously, as I stated when I first posted a fundraiser three months ago, this is my choice — and I’ve always been aware that ‘The State of London’ is, perhaps, above all, a labour of love — but if you can make a donation to support ‘The State of London’, I will be very grateful. If I could get £1,000 for the three months to come it would take it from the realms of an absurd hobby into something resembling a valid enterprise in a capitalist society.

If you can make a donation to support ‘The State of London’, please click on the “Donate” button above to make a payment via PayPal. Any amount will be gratefully received — whether it’s £5, £10, £20 or more!

You can also make a recurring payment on a monthly basis by ticking the box marked, “Make this a monthly donation,” and filling in the amount you wish to donate every month. If you are able to do so, a regular, monthly donation would be very much appreciated.

The donation page is set to dollars, because my PayPal page also covers donations to support my ongoing work to secure the closure of US prison at Guantánamo Bay, and many of those supporters are based in the US, but PayPal will convert any amount you wish to pay from any other currency — and you don’t have to have a PayPal account to make a donation.

Readers can pay via PayPal from anywhere in the world, but if you’re in the UK and want to help without using PayPal, you can send a cheque, or cash (to 164A Tressillian Road, London SE4 1XY), or you can make a donation directly into my bank account. Please contact me if this option is of interest.

My thanks to everyone who takes an interest in ‘The State of London’, which, as well as becoming more technically accomplished over the last few years, has also, as noted above, involved me taking more time to provide detailed essays to accompany the photos.

Increasingly, the layers of the city’s history — particularly in the West End and the City — have come to fascinate me, adding to my long-standing, and mostly appalled fascination with the current transformation of the city through large-scale housing and ‘mixed use’ developments. As I have studied these developments — from the Heygate and Aylesbury Estates in Southwark to Woodberry Down in Hackney, and from Nine Elms to Kings Cross, Stratford and the Greenwich peninsula, to name just a few focal points — I have come to realise the extent to which the cynical demolitions of council estates and the GLA-backed establishment of ‘Opportunity Areas’ on former industrial land have enabled predatory developers to remake the capital to the exclusion of most of its residents.

I have also spent nine years happily responding to the seasons, the changing weather, and many of the capital’s great elemental features — its parks, the River Thames and its tributaries, and its canals — as well as chronicling various resistance movements — in recent years, in particular, the Extinction Rebellion protests, the Black Lives Matter movement and the current ‘Kill the Bill’ protests — and in the last year, of course, the arrival of Covid-19 provided me with an opportunity to chronicle a city that has often resembled some sort of post-apocalyptic scenario, in which tourism has largely collapsed, the world of office work and hectic overcrowded commuter journeys has largely evaporated, and the retail and entertainment sectors have been pushed to breaking point.

As “normal life” begins to return — with, hopefully, no more grim surprises ahead — I also hope that the cleaner, quieter capital of the Covid lockdowns — with the environmental lessons it provided via substantially reduced air pollution and emissions, and its break from the deranged hecticness of much of life before the virus hit — won’t be entirely forgotten, but whatever comes I’ll continue to be out on my bike chronicling it (once I’ve recovered from my injury), and I hope that you’ll continue to share the journey with me.

With thanks, as ever, for your support.

Andy Worthington
London
May 11, 2021

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

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

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

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

Abu Zubaydah Files Complaint About Torture and Ongoing Imprisonment at Guantánamo with UN Arbitrary Detention Experts

Abu Zubaydah: illustration by Brigid Barrett from an article in Wired in July 2013. The photo used is from the classified military files from Guantánamo that were released by WikiLeaks in 2011.Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

On Friday, Abu Zubaydah (Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn), a notorious victim of torture in the CIA’s “black site” program, who has been held without charge or trial at Guantánamo since September 2006, submitted a complaint to the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, regarding the lawless nature of his imprisonment and treatment since he was first seized in a house raid in Pakistan in March 2002.

The case has been submitted by Helen Duffy, Abu Zubaydah’s international legal representative since 2010, who represented him in his successful cases before the European Court of Human Rights regarding his “black site” detention in Poland and Lithuania, and the complaint accuses seven countries of having responsibility for his long imprisonment and mistreatment — not only (and primarily) the US, but also Thailand, Poland, Morocco, Lithuania and Afghanistan, the five countries in which he was held in “black sites” over a period of four and a half years, and the UK, which is accused of having “participated in other ways in the ‘global spider’s web’ of complicity in rendition,” primarily via “estimates that UK personnel were involved in approximately 2,000-3,000 interviews of CIA detainees in the aftermath of 9/11”, as indicated by the findings of the UK Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) in 2019.

In a press release, Duffy explains that this is “the first international case brought by Zubaydah against the United States,” and is also “the first time that international legal action is taken against the UK, Afghanistan, Morocco and Thailand for their complicity in the US rendition and secret detention program.” In addition it is “the first time that a case has been brought against all states participating in an individual’s rendition and torture and ongoing unlawful detention at Guantánamo.”

“The application,” as Duffy also explains, “draws together the alarming facts of his case: misinformation propagated about him upon detention, the commitments given by high levels within the US to  detain him ‘incommunicado for the remainder of his life,’ the horrendous torture inflicted on him, and the impossibility for him to defend himself and secure his release.” She adds, “His detention has no lawful basis in international law, it offends all principles of due process, and is, as the European Court of Human Rights said in cases we brought on his behalf against Poland and Lithuania, a ‘flagrant denial of justice’ and ‘anathema to the rule of law.’”

Duffy adds that the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention is being asked to find that, firstly, “the US is obliged to release Abu Zubaydah”; secondly, that “other states must take all measures in their power, including offers of relocation, etc. to secure release and rehabilitation” (of particular significance because Zubaydah is a stateless Palestinian); thirdly, that “his detention at Guantanamo with no prospect of release is arbitrary, torture and violates his right to life”; and, fourthly, that “all states must ensure transparency, reparation and accountability for ‘war on terror’ violations that Abu Zubaydah’s case epitomizes, to learn lessons and prevent repetition.”

As Duffy also explains, “The timing is significant.” With the Biden administration having promised a “robust” review of Guantánamo, and its intention to close the prison, and with Biden himself stating his aim “to reposition the US as a country supporting [the] rule of law and human rights,” and with the 20th anniversary of the start of the “war on terror” looming (as well as the 20th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, in January 2022), the case is a test of the willingness of the US — and its allies — to finally address the long injustice of Abu Zubaydah’s treatment.

As Duffy notes, “How all states, including the US, respond to this urgent call and to the UN body will be a measure of their real commitment to human rights and to distancing themselves from abusive counter-terrorism.”

Duffy adds that, although the case focuses on Abu Zubaydah, it also has repercussions for all of the men still held at Guantánamo “in legal limbo,” and she also explains that Abu Zubaydah and other prisoners are currently showing their  “desperation” through a “massive hunger strike” that is currently “underway at Guantánamo” — a situation that has not, to date, surfaced in any mainstream media reports about the prison, over 100 days into Joe Biden’s presidency.

Meanwhile, in the US courts

In the US, meanwhile, efforts to hold accountable those responsible for Abu Zubaydah’s torture have failed to pass the first test under President Biden.

Back in September 2019, in what I described at the time as “an ongoing case in which lawyers for Abu Zubaydah are seeking to compel the architects of the torture program, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, to answer questions relating to an ongoing criminal investigation in Poland regarding the officials who established and operated the Polish ‘black site’ that was one of the locations for the torture of Abu Zubaydah,” the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a previous District Court ruling shielding Mitchell and Jessen from scrutiny on the basis that allowing any testimony to proceed would reveal “state secrets” — a shameful position, to hide wrongdoing, that the US government has been using in torture-related cases since the Bush years, and which continued under Obama, most notoriously in the Jeppesen case in 2010.

The ruling was also noteworthy as the first time an appellate court stepped back from the usual US euphemism for torture — “enhanced interrogation techniques” — and stated openly, “To use colloquial terms … Abu Zubaydah was tortured.”

Furthermore, as Cornell University law professor Joseph Margulies, who represented Abu Zubaydah for more than a decade, told the San Francisco Chronicle, it was also “the first time a court has acknowledged that the government was simply mistaken about Abu Zubaydah, the poster child for the torture program.” The judges noted that, although Abu Zubaydah “was thought to be a high-level member of Al-Qa’ida with detailed knowledge of terrorist plans,” the  Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Study on the CIA’s detention and interrogation program, whose executive summary was released in December 2014, “later revealed this characterization to be erroneous.”

Instead of allowing the ruling to stand, however, the Justice Department — under Trump, taking a position subsequently unchallenged under Biden — has appealed to the Supreme Court to defend their shameful “state secrets” position, even after the full Ninth Circuit panel of judges refused to rehear the case last July.

As Judge Richard A. Paez wrote at the time, “Given the overwhelming, publicly available evidence that Abu Zubaydah was detained at a black site in Poland, it is difficult to take seriously the suggestion that media outlets are untrustworthy and that the standards applied by other judicial bodies are inadequate. Good grief, the president of Poland publicly acknowledged in 2012 that, during his presidency, Abu Zubaydah was detained in Poland by the CIA.”

Given the right-wing leanings of the Supreme Court established under Donald Trump — the most enduring legacy of his four years in office — it is unwise to expect that Abu Zubaydah will receive a fair hearing in the highest court in the US, which makes it all the more important that those of us who care about accountability for torture, and bringing to an end the shame of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, keep a close eye on the deliberations of the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, who, I expect, will in due course deliver a withering rebuke to the lawlessness of the US and the six other countries named in Abu Zubaydah’s complaint.

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

Radio: I Discuss the Prospects for Guantánamo’s Closure Under Joe Biden with Scott Horton

The Scott Horton Show, and Andy Worthington calling for the closure of Guantánamo outside the White House on Jan. 11, 2020.Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

On Friday, I was delighted to discuss the prospects for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay under Joe Biden with the indefatigable Scott Horton, who always, flatteringly, refers to me as “the heroic Andy Worthington.” Scott and I have spoken on many dozens of occasions since 2007, and you can find our latest interview here as an MP3 or below via YouTube.

“Indefatigable” has to be the most apt description of Horton, who has conducted over 5,500 interviews since 2003, and has also found the time to write two books, 2017’s “Fools Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan,” and the recently published “Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism.”

Nearly 20 years into Guantánamo’s existence, we ran briefly through the failures of George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump to close the prison — with several minutes spent discussing the Obama years — before bringing the story up to date with Joe Biden, the fourth president to be in charge of the prison.

The show is available below via YouTube:

As I explained, I do think that now, under Biden, we’re in new territory, as revealed by a recent letter to Biden from 24 Democratic Senators, who called on him to release all the prisoners who have not been charged — currently 28 of the 40 men still held. This is an important step in repudiating the policy of indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial that has been the heart of detention policy at Guantánamo since Obama’s presidency, when the two high-level government review processes that he established both fell into trap of regarding the prisoners through an institutionally over-cautious lens, leading to men being held, apparently forever, not because of what they did before their capture, but because of their attitude since they were brought to Guantánamo.

Scott and I also spoke about the recent tenth anniversary of WikiLeaks’ release of classified military files from Guantánamo, leaked by Chelsea Manning, on which I worked as a media partner, and which I recently wrote about here, and I also provided a breakdown of the 40 men still held, and their status, and briefly told some of their stories, emphasizing how everyone concerned with the closure of Guantánamo needs to focus on the 28 men who have never been charged, and to call for their release.

This is how Scott described the show: “Scott interviews Andy Worthington about Guantánamo Bay, America’s secret black site prison, where 40 men are still being held, some of them without ever having been charged with a crime. President Obama famously campaigned on closing Guantánamo, but ultimately was unable (or unwilling) to do so. President Trump, too, allowed the atrocious human rights abuses to continue throughout his administration. Worthington is optimistic about the possibility of change, but if the American people continue to turn a blind eye to this issue, things may simply carry on indefinitely.”

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

Clinton Advisor Anthony Lake and Close Guantánamo Co-Founder Tom Wilner Call on President Biden to Close the Prison

Anthony Lake, national security adviser to President Clinton from 1993 to 1997 (photo via Unicef), and Close Guantánamo co-founder Tom Wilner, photographed calling for the closure of Guantánamo in Washington, D.C. on January 11, 2012 (photo via Shrieking Tree).Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, with the US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email.

In a recent op-ed for The Hill, Anthony Lake, national security adviser to President Clinton from 1993 to 1997, and Close Guantánamo co-founder Tom Wilner, who was counsel of record to Guantánamo detainees in the two Supreme Court cases establishing their right to habeas corpus and in the case establishing their right to legal counsel, made a powerful case for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, which we’re pleased to be cross-posting below.

Thursday marked the end of the first 100 days of Joe Biden’s presidency, and while we’re aware that the new administration has had a huge workload to deal with after four ruinous years of the Trump presidency, and with the unprecedented challenge of dealing with Covid-19, it remains imperative that the scandal of the prison at Guantánamo is dealt with sooner rather than later, because its continued existence is an affront to all of the US’s cherished notions of itself as a country that respects the rule of law.

Using, as a springboard, the recent release of the movie “The Mauritanian,” which tells the story of former Guantánamo prisoner, torture victim and best-selling author Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Lake and Wilner run through the reasons why Guantánamo’s continued existence is so shameful and counter-productive — a hugely expensive offshore prison where the US “detains men indefinitely, without charge or trial or the basic protections of due process of law,” whose continued existence also damages US national security by inflaming tensions within the Muslim world.

To date, although we have had reassurances from within the administration that a “robust” review of Guantánamo will take place, and that its deliberations will be completed before the end of Biden’s four-year term, Lake and Wilner rightly complain that the process “should not take nearly that long.” Of the 40 men still held at Guantánamo, only 12 have been charged with crimes, and they, the authors state, should be transferred to the US mainland to face federal court trials — because, unlike the broken military commission system at Guantánamo, federal courts have a proven track record of successfully prosecuting those accused of terrorism, which they have been doing throughout Guantánamo’s long and lawless existence.

Lake and Wilner also call on the other 28 men to be freed “unless it can be shown that doing so poses a serious and imminent risk to our national security.” The authors suggest that defense secretary Lloyd Austin “should be directed to appoint independent and impartial fact-finders (e.g., retired military judges, retired federal or state court judges or experienced members of the bar) to make that finding,” although it should be noted, of course, that to bring to an end the shameful policy of indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial, anyone identified as posing “a serious and imminent risk to our national security” would also need to be charged and tried in federal court.

However, the fact that none of these men have been charged to date — despite being held for between 13 and 19 years without charge or trial — indicates that the US authorities have been unable to construct a credible case against them.

Nor, indeed, are these potentially challenging individuals particularly numerous. Of the 28 men still held who have not been charged, six were unanimously approved for release by high-level US government review processes under President Obama (and one under Donald Trump), and many others are either the victims of extreme and unacceptable caution on the part of the authorities (held not because of what they are alleged to have done before their capture, but because of their behavior at Guantánamo), or have had their significance routinely and systematically exaggerated, or are even cases of mistaken identity.

The op-ed is posted below, and we hope you have time to read it, and that you’ll share it if you find it useful.

Closing Guantánamo is long overdue
By Anthony Lake and Thomas Wilner, The Hill, April 25, 2021

The movie “The Mauritanian” tells the story of Mohamedou Slahi, a man taken from his home in Mauritania shortly after 9/11 and transported halfway around the world to prison in Guantánamo. There he was tortured and detained for more than 14 years, despite the absence of evidence of wrongdoing and two lie detector tests confirming his innocence. The night he was arrested was the last time he saw his mother and older brother, both of whom died while he was in captivity. His story is not dissimilar to hundreds of other Guantánamo detainees.

We don’t hear much about the Guantánamo Bay detention center these days. It was a hot-button issue 12 years ago. Both Barack Obama and John McCain had called the prison “un-American” during their presidential campaigns, and Obama signed an order in his first days in the White House promising to close the prison within a year. But that never happened, and now, 12 years later, Guantánamo remains open and largely ignored. Perhaps the new film can rekindle some outrage that our nation still operates an offshore prison where it detains men indefinitely, without charge or trial or the basic protections of due process of law.

More than a stain on our nation, the prison burdens our taxpayers and damages our national security.

Our enemies continue to use it effectively to recruit disciples to their cause. And to keep it open, we spend well over half a billion dollars a year, almost $15 million for each of the prisoners there, more than 170 times what it would cost to detain them in a maximum-security prison in the United States.

Despite the cost, Guantánamo has failed miserably, delivering justice neither to the victims of 9/11 and their families or to hundreds of prisoners. Almost 20 years after 9/11, none of the major perpetrators of that horrible crime has been brought to justice. The most important cases remain stuck in pre-trial proceedings before special Guantánamo military commissions, and are still years away from trial. That is an outrage.

President Biden is absolutely right in reaffirming the commitment to close the prison. He has established a commission to study the issue and has given it up to four years to report to him.

It should not take nearly that long.

Only 40 prisoners remain at Guantánamo, after more than 700 were transferred out by Presidents Bush and Obama. Only 12 of those remaining — less than a third — are accused of engaging in or materially supporting terrorist activities.

These men should be transferred to the United States for trial before our federal courts. They inflicted their evil in this country — murdering innocent American citizens — and this is where they should face justice. Our federal courts are fully capable of doing that. Since 9/11, more than 650 terrorist suspects have been successfully prosecuted in U.S. federal courts. Trying and punishing these men here does not threaten our national security. U.S. prisons currently hold more than 400 prisoners convicted of terrorist-related crimes, and no prison or locality has faced a terrorist threat as a result.

The other 28 prisoners still at Guantánamo are not accused of engaging in or supporting terrorist acts. Rather, the government claims that these men fought against U.S. and allied troops in Afghanistan almost 20 years ago and they are being detained essentially as prisoners of war. Even were those allegations true — and the detainees never have had the opportunity to contest them through a due process hearing — and even if they provided justification for detaining these men originally, how do we justify continuing to detain them two decades later?

These men should be repatriated promptly unless it can be shown that doing so poses a serious and imminent risk to our national security.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin should be directed to appoint independent and impartial fact-finders (e.g., retired military judges, retired federal or state court judges or experienced members of the bar) to make that finding.

And at long last, the Guantánamo prison, with justice, could be closed.

Sometimes it takes an outsider to remind us who we are or ought to be. Mohamedou Slahi, the Mauritanian, does that for us. Movingly, he forgave his captors for their abuses, explaining at the end of the movie that the same Arabic word means “freedom” and “forgiveness.” He has gained his freedom by forgiving.

As he recently wrote, “The world truly relies on the ‘good’ America, the America dedicated to fairness and justice. We badly need the model of the United States again as a nation dedicated to those principles.”

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

A Call to Free Julian Assange on the 10th Anniversary of WikiLeaks’ Release of the Guantánamo Files

A composite image of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, in British custody, and the logo for “The Guantánamo Files,” released ten years ago today.Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

Ten years ago today, I was working with WikiLeaks as a media partner — working with the Washington Post, McClatchy Newspapers, the Daily Telegraph, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, El Pais, Aftonbladet, La Repubblica and L’Espresso — on the release of “The Guantánamo Files,” classified military documents from Guantánamo that were the last of the major leaks of classified US government documents by Chelsea Manning, following the releases in 2010 of the “Collateral Murder” video, the Afghan and Iraq war logs, and the Cablegate releases.

All the journalists and publishers involved are at liberty to continue their work — and even Chelsea Manning, given a 35-year sentence after a trial in 2013, was freed after President Obama commuted her sentence just before leaving office — and yet Julian Assange remains imprisoned in HMP Belmarsh, a maximum-security prison in south east London, even though, in January, Judge Vanessa Baraitser, the British judge presiding over hearings regarding his proposed extradition to the US, prevented his extradition on the basis that, given the state of his mental health, and the oppressive brutality of US supermax prisons, the US would be unable to prevent him committing suicide if he were to be extradited.

That ought to have been the end of the story, but instead of being freed to be reunited with his partner Stella Moris, and his two young sons, Judge Baraitser refused to grant him bail, and the US refused to drop their extradition request, announcing that they would appeal, and continuing to do so despite Joe Biden being inaugurated as president. This is a black mark against Biden, whose administration should have concluded, as the Obama administration did (when he was Vice President), that it was impossible to prosecute Assange without fatally undermining press freedom. As Trevor Timm of the Freedom of the Press Foundation stated in April 2019, “Despite Barack Obama’s extremely disappointing record on press freedom, his justice department ultimately ended up making the right call when they decided that it was too dangerous to prosecute WikiLeaks without putting news organizations such as the New York Times and the Guardian at risk.”

The WikiLeaks revelations

All of the documents leaked by Chelsea Manning and released by Wikileaks in 2010 and 2011 were a revelation. The “Collateral Murder” video, with its footage of the crew of a US Apache helicopter killing eleven unarmed civilians in Iraq in July 2007, including two people working for Reuters, provided clear evidence of war crimes, as did the Afghan and Iraq war logs, as the journalist Patrick Cockburn explained in a statement he made during Assange’s extradition hearings last September, and as numerous other sources have confirmed. The diplomatic cables were also full of astonishing revelations about the conduct of US foreign policy, while “The Guantánamo Files,” as I explained at the time of their release, provide “the anatomy of a colossal crime perpetrated by the US government on 779 prisoners who, for the most part, are not and never have been the terrorists the government would like us to believe they are.”

Publication of the files, which had originally been intended to be sometime in May 2011, had suddenly been brought forward because WikiLeaks had heard that the Guardian and the New York Times, previous media partners of WikiLeaks, who had fallen out with Assange, and who had obtained the files by other means, were planning to publish them, and so, over the course of several hours on the evening of April 24, 2011, I wrote an introduction to the files that accompanied the launch of their publication.

With hindsight, that article, WikiLeaks Reveals Secret Guantánamo Files, Exposes Detention Policy as a Construct of Lies, was one of the most significant articles I’ve ever written, as it summed up why the files — covering 759 of the 779 men held by the US military since the prison opened on January 11, 2002 — were so important, most significantly because they provided the names of those who made false or dubious allegations against their fellow prisoners, revealing the extent to which unreliable witnesses were relied upon by the US to justify holding men at Guantánamo who were either innocent, and were seized by mistake, or were simply foot soldiers, with no command responsibility whatsoever.

The files also revealed threat assessments, which were fundamentally exaggerated. Because no one in the US military or the intelligence services wanted to admit to mistakes having been made, prisoners who posed no risk whatsoever were described as ”low risk,” and, by extension, “low risk” prisoners were labeled “medium risk,” while “medium risk” prisoners — and the handful of prisoners who could perhaps genuinely be described as “high risk” — were all lumped together as “high risk.”

The files also provided risk assessments based on prisoners’ behavior since their arrival at Guantánamo, establishing that many men were held (and some still are) not because of anything they did before they were seized, but because of their resistance to their brutal and unjust treatment in Guantánamo. Also included were health assessments, establishing that even the US authorities acknowledged that, as the Guardian described it, “[a]lmost 100 Guantánamo prisoners were classified … as having psychiatric illnesses including severe depression, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.”

Unfortunately, within a week of the release of “The Guantánamo Files,” the Obama administration decided that it was imperative to kill Osama bin Laden in a Wild West raid on the compound where he had been living in Pakistan, a move whose timing was, to put it mildly, suspicious, especially as, immediately afterwards, dark forces within the US started promoting the completely untrue notion that it was torture in the CIA’s “black site” program — and the existence of Guantánamo — that had led to the US locating bin Laden.

Following the release of “The Guantánamo Files,” I spent the rest of 2011 largely engaged in a detailed analysis of the files, writing 422 prisoner profiles in 34 articles, in which I dissected the information in those prisoners’ files, demonstrating why, in most cases, it was so fundamentally unreliable. It was a process similar to what I had done in 2006, when I had been the only person to conduct a detailed analysis of 8,000 pages of documents released by the Pentagon after losing a Freedom of Information lawsuit, for my book The Guantánamo Files — and much of my subsequent work — and I remain very proud of my analysis of the files released by WikiLeaks, and am only disappointed that, through a combination of exhaustion and a lack of funding, I was unable to complete my analysis.

I hope, however, that what I completed helps not only to expose the colossal injustice of Guantánamo, but also more than justifies the leak of the documents, for which, shamefully, Julian Assange is still being persecuted.

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

24 Senators Send a Letter to President Biden Urging Him to Close Guantánamo

Campaigners calling for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay outside the Supreme Court on Jan. 11, 2017, the 15th anniversary of the prison’s opening (Photo: Susan Melkisethian via Flickr).Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, with the US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email.

In the long struggle to try to secure the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, there has rarely been adequate support from lawmakers, so it was extremely reassuring, on April 16, to see that 24 Democratic Senators — almost half of the Democrats in the Senate — have written a letter to President Biden urging him to close the prison once and for all.

Led by Senate Majority Whip and Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin, and including Patrick Leahy, Dianne Feinstein, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, the 24 Senators not only urged President Biden to close the prison, but also provided detailed proposals for how that can be achieved.

These proposals involve re-establishing the Office of the Special Envoy for Guantánamo Closure at the State Department, which we discussed in an article just last week, and also appointing a “senior White House official” to be “accountable for the closure process.”

Regarding the 40 men still held, the Senators point out that, “Once re-appointed, the Envoy should immediately begin the work of repatriating or resettling the six men who are already cleared for transfer, as well as preparing for the transfer of any remaining detainees who will not be charged with crimes.”

We discussed the six men approved for release last week, calling for them to be granted their freedom as swiftly as possible, but we are delighted to see that the Senators have also insisted that anyone who is not going to be charged with a crime must also be freed, as I also discussed in a previous article.

This is particularly significant for the 22 men in this category, who have long been described by the media with shocking accuracy as “forever prisoners,” and it is reassuring that the Senators also recognize that, “If the Justice Department were not to oppose habeas petitions in appropriate cases, those detainees could be transferred more easily pursuant to court orders.”

In addition, the Senators are to be commended for seeking to break the deadlock regarding the men facing trials in the broken military commission trial system — currently ten of those still held — by urging President Biden “to direct the Justice Department to explore pursuing plea agreements remotely, via video conference, with detainees for whom there are federal charges available and against whom the Department has sufficient untainted evidence to bring such charges.”

The full letter is posted below, and I hope that you have time to read it, and that you’ll share it widely if you appreciate this very important position taken by the Senators.

Letter to President Biden from 24 Senators, Urging Him to Close the Prison at Guantánamo Bay

United States Senate

April 16, 2021

President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, D.C. 20500

Dear President Biden:

We applaud your pledge to “put universal rights and strengthening democracy at the center of our efforts to meet the challenges of the 21st century.” One critical step toward doing so is finally closing the detention facility at U.S. Naval Station Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. As a symbol of lawlessness and human rights abuses, the detention facility continues to harm U.S. national security by serving as a propaganda tool for America’s enemies and continues to hinder counterterrorism efforts and cooperation with allies.

The detention facility was established in 2002 to detain individuals suspected of involvement in the terrorist attacks on our country on 9/11. For nearly two decades, the offshore prison has damaged America’s reputation, fueled anti-Muslim bigotry, and weakened the United States’ ability to counterterrorism and fight for human rights and the rule of law around the world. In addition to the $540 million in wasted taxpayer dollars each year to maintain and operate the facility, the prison also comes at the price of justice for the victims of 9/11 and their families, who are still waiting for trials to begin.

We welcome the recent announcement that the White House is leading an interagency review on closing the prison. Only 40 men remain in detention at Guantánamo — all of them aging and many with complex health problems. Six of those men have been approved for transfer by the executive branch, in some cases for over a decade. After years of indefinite detention without charge or trial; a history of torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment; and multiple attempts at a thoroughly failed and discredited military commission process, it is past time to close Guantánamo’s detention facility and end indefinite detention.

With sufficient political will and swift action, your administration can finish the job that Presidents George W. Bush and Obama began.

Strong and effective leadership from the White House will be necessary. A senior White House official should be accountable for the closure process, including ensuring interagency cooperation and resolving any disputes that may arise. Because indefinite detention at Guantánamo is at its core a human rights problem — one that demands solutions rooted in diplomacy and that uphold U.S. human rights and humanitarian law obligations — the National Security Council’s human rights directorate should play a leading role in both the review you have ordered as well as throughout the closure process.

Also critical is immediately re-establishing the Special Envoy for Guantánamo Closure at the State Department, and rebuilding appropriate closure infrastructure at the Defense Department. Diplomacy is essential to the closure process, which is why President Obama established the Envoy’s office. The State Department must lead in identifying transfer countries and negotiating transfer agreements, but President Trump discarded that capacity when he eliminated the Envoy’s position. Once re-appointed, the Envoy should immediately begin the work of repatriating or resettling the six men who are already cleared for transfer, as well as preparing for the transfer of any remaining detainees who will not be charged with crimes.

We also urge you to make use of our federal court system in ways that are consistent with current law but that have been underutilized by previous administrations. For example, detainees’ habeas cases provide an opportunity to expedite foreign transfers. If the Justice Department were not to oppose habeas petitions in appropriate cases, those detainees could be transferred more easily pursuant to court orders.

Article III courts can also be utilized more directly at Guantánamo itself. Given the current statutory prohibition on transfers to the United States, we urge you to direct the Justice Department to explore pursuing plea agreements remotely, via video conference, with detainees for whom there are federal charges available and against whom the Department has sufficient untainted evidence to bring such charges. In the event that a detainee is sentenced to a period of incarceration beyond time already served at Guantánamo, your administration could negotiate with foreign governments to allow the remaining time to be completed in the transfer country subject to the terms of the plea agreement.

Finally, in service of both closing the Guantánamo detention facility and upholding the United States’ human rights obligations, we urge you to reverse erroneous and troubling legal positions taken by the Trump Administration regarding the application of relevant international and domestic legal protections to Guantánamo, including in particular the position that the Constitution’s Due Process Clause does not apply to the men detained there.

After the unprecedented damage of the last four years to America’s standing in the world, closing the Guantánamo detention facility is more important than ever for sending a message about what we stand for as a nation. We urge you to act swiftly to ensure that message is loud and clear.

Sincerely,

RICHARD J. DURBIN
United States Senator
PATRICK LEAHY
United States Senator
DIANNE FEINSTEIN
United States Senator
PATTY MURRAY
United States Senator
SHELDON WHITEHOUSE
United States Senator
ELIZABETH WARREN
United States Senator
KRISTEN GILLIBRAND
United States Senator
MAZIE K. HIRONO
United States Senator
EDWARD J. MARKEY
United States Senator
BERNARD SANDERS
United States Senator
BRIAN SCHATZ
United States Senator
ALEX PADILLA
United States Senator
GARY C. PETERS
United States Senator
RON WYDEN
United States Senator
CHRIS VAN HOLLEN
United States Senator
BENJAMIN L. CARDIN
United States Senator
CORY A. BOOKER
United States Senator
CHRISTOPHER A. COONS
United States Senator
JEFFREY A. MERKLEY
United States Senator
MARTIN HEINRICH
United States Senator
BEN RAY LUJAN
United States Senator
RICHARD BLUMENTHAL
United States Senator
AMY KLOBUCHAR
United States Senator
TINA SMITH
United States Senator

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

The Shameful Human Cost of Inertia at Joe Biden’s Guantánamo

Lutfi bin Ali, a Tunisian held at Guantánamo, who recently died in Mauritania, having been unable to secure the medical treatment he needed, which he had also been unable to secure in Kazakhstan, the country to which he was first released in 2014.Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, with the US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email.

Today, the prison at Guantánamo Bay has been open for 7,033 days — that’s 19 years and three months — and Joe Biden has been president for 84 days, and yet, apart from some hopeful murmurings from a handful of administration officials regarding a “robust” inter-agency review of the prison, and aspirations for its closure, no concrete proposals have been issued to indicate that any movement is imminent that will break the inertia of Donald Trump’s four lamentable years as commander in chief, when just one prisoner was released, leaving 40 men still held when Biden took office, mostly held indefinitely without charge or trial.

It may be that President Biden is unwilling to discuss Guantánamo in any detail until he has firm plans for dealing with all of the men still held, and if this is the case, then it is, sadly, understandable, because the merest mention of Guantánamo tends to provoke cynical and unbridled opposition from Republicans in Congress — although if this is the case then it only shows the extent to which, as under Barack Obama, political pragmatism — and fear of unprincipled opposition from those who cynically use Guantánamo for cheap political advantage — are considered much more important than telling Americans the truth about the prison:, that every day it remains open, holding men indefinitely without charge or trial, ought to be a source of profound national shame.

Beyond political maneuvering, however, Biden’s inertia also prolongs the grinding injustice experienced on a daily basis by the men still held at Guantánamo — as well as having dangerous, and sometimes life-threatening repercussions for some of the men already released.

Of the 40 men still held, six were unanimously approved for release by high-level, interagency government review processes — three in 2009, two in 2016 and one in the dying days of the Trump administration — and every day that their imprisonment continues is an intolerable affront to any notions of justice that the US, under Joe Biden, claims to uphold. 

While two of these men have, historically, been unwilling to even meet with officials to discuss their release, arrangements for the release of the others ought to be a relatively uncomplicated matter if President Biden were to appoint an official to deal with their release; most obviously, by reviving the Office of the Special Envoy for Guantánamo Closure, created by President Obama but shut down under Donald Trump. 

One of the men, Abdul Latif Nasser, a Moroccan approved for release in 2016, missed being released under Obama by just eight days, and was extensively profiled in a US radio series last year. His release ought to be straightforward. as should be the release of an Algerian, Sufyian Barhoumi, who was also approved for release in 2016, and Tawfiq al-Bihani, born in Saudi Arabia, who was approved for release in 2009, and once came frustratingly close to being put on a plane and sent home, until his release was inexplicably cancelled. The man approved for release in 2020, a Yemeni, Hani Saleh Rashid Abdullah (aka Said Salih Said Nashir), should also be released, although in his case a third country would need to be found that would be prepared to accept him, as the entire US establishment refuses to allow any Yemenis to be repatriated, given the security situation in their home country.

Under Obama, the three men who held the role of Special Envoy for Guantánamo Closure in the State Department — Daniel Fried, Cliff Sloan and Lee Wolosky — negotiated transfers out of Guantánamo for the majority of the nearly 200 men who were released from the prison during Obama’s presidency. The largest group of men by nationality were Yemenis, but Congress also prevented repatriations to other countries, including Afghanistan, and the transfers negotiated involved Gulf countries, parts of the former Soviet Union, countries in Europe, and even a few locations further afield, in Central and South America, for example.

Sadly, while some of these resettlements have been successful, with those transferred integrating successfully and establishing new lives, many others have not. With a Congressional ban in place preventing the release of any prisoners to the US mainland, the US government was more concerned with resettling men than it was with establishing how well those men would be treated. 

Men released have, sadly, faced persecution, isolation and neglect. A particularly horrible example involves 23 men who were sent to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) between November 2015 and January 2017, who have found themselves detained in abusive conditions ever since their resettlement, despite being promised their freedom. Under Trump, there was no one in his administration with responsibility for Guantánamo, and therefore no one to communicate with the UAE regarding these men and their shameful treatment, and this is a position that won’t be remedied until there is, once more, a functioning Special Envoy for Guantánamo Closure.

Former Guantánamo prisoner Omar Khalifa, photographed in Libya. Forcibly repatriated in 2018 from Senegal, where he was resettled in 2016, he was imprisoned for two years by a militia before being release, but has recently been seized and imprisoned again.

The abandonment of Omar Khalifa

Another case in which the absence of an envoy has played a significant role involves two Libyans who were resettled in Senegal in April 2016, on the understanding that they would be able to stay there, but who were repatriated two years later, even though one of the two men would not have accepted the resettlement offer in Senegal if he had known that he would end up being sent back to Libya. Both men subsequently disappeared into militia-run secret prisons for several years, and, again, there was no one to even speak to within the Trump administration because of the closure of the Office of the Special Envoy for Guantánamo Closure.

One of the men was recently released, and is now back with his family, but the other, Omar Khalifa (aka Omar Mohamed Khalifh), who was also recently freed, has now been arrested again. As former prisoner Moazzam Begg wrote last month, “I spent several months imprisoned with him in Bagram. Omar is an amputee and has a prosthetic leg. But, that didn’t stop US soldiers from taking it away as a ‘security risk’ which forced him to crawl just to be able to go to the bathroom or to get some water.”

Moazzam added, “He was eventually freed and allowed to resettle in Senegal — a place he loved and hoped to start a new life. I used to speak to him often about that. His hopes — and stay — were short lived. Two years later, Omar was forcibly detained in Senegal and sent on a flight to Libya where he was imprisoned and abused by a local militia in Tripoli until his release a few months ago. He’s spent two more years in prison — for nothing.”

As Moazzam also explained, “Once again, after his release, Omar attempted to restart his life and had planned on getting married but he was imprisoned once more a couple of weeks ago and remains in custody.”

He added, “The USA, Senegal and Libyan militias all colluded in the unrelenting abuse of this disabled torture survivor who’d been held in prison without charge for 16 years. No shame, no remorse, no compassion, no justice. I pray he’s freed soon and able to pick up his life despite the evil he’s been subjected to. I hope his remarkable lack of bitterness burns his captors, exposes them and causes them to reform.” 

The death of Lutfi bin Ali

In another case, that of Lutfi bin Ali, a Tunisian, who was resettled in Kazakhstan in December 2014, US neglect contributed to his recent death. Bin Ali had been recognized as having major health problems while at Guantánamo, where it was noted that he “had a mechanical heart valve placed in 1999,” and that he had “chronic problems with his heart (atrial fibrillation),” as well as “a history of kidney stones, latent tuberculosis, depression and high blood pressure.” It was also noted that he had  “chronic anti-coagulation” issues, for which he was on blood thinners.

Despite this, when sent to Kazakhstan, with four other men (one of whom, who also had severe medical issues, died soon after), bin Ali faced suspicion and intrusion in his life from the Kazakh authorities, who also demonstrated an inability and unwillingness to deal adequately with his health issues. With the support of his lawyers, he managed to relocate to Mauritania, but as Maha Hilal explained in an article last week for Business Insider, “Mauritania proved inadequate to the task of dealing with his heart disease — never mind the fact that there was no one who could pay for the care he needed.”

Lutfi bin Ali died on March 7, and as former prisoner Mansoor Adayfi explained, “For the last few months he was begging the ICRC [International Committee of the Red Cross] and Tunisian government to provide him with a travel document so he could go back to his home country to treat his heart condition but his request was denied. They knew through his medical reports that he needed emergency surgery, but they turned a blind eye knowing that he didn’t have much time. 14 years at Guantánamo, 2 years in Kazakhstan where he was mistreated and was denied proper medical treatment … He was denied a travel document which could have saved his life, ended up dying leaving a griefed wife, and without seeing his family. This is our life after Guantánamo.”

Shamefully, it is too late for the US to remedy its disgraceful abandonment of Lutfi bin Ali, but his death really ought to be a reminder that President Biden needs to appoint someone to deal with Guantánamo issues, and he needs to do it sooner rather than later.

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

US Military Closes Camp 7, Guantánamo’s “High-Value Detainee” Prison Block, Moves Men to Camp 5

A Google Earth image of the secretive Camp 7 at Guantánamo Bay.Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

In news from Guantánamo, the US military announced yesterday that it had shut Camp 7, the secretive prison block where Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other so-called “high-value detainees” have been held since their arrival at Guantánamo from CIA “black sites” in September 2006, and had moved the prisoners to Camp 5.

Modeled on a maximum security prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, Camp 5, which cost $17.5 million, opened in 2004, and its solid-walled, isolated cells were used to hold prisoners regarded as non-compliant. As the prison’s population shrank, however, it was closed — in September 2016 — and its remaining prisoners transferred to Camp 6, which opened in 2006, and includes a communal area.

Camp 7, meanwhile, which cost $17 million, was also built in 2004. Two storeys tall, it was modeled on a maximum-security prison in Bunker Hill, Indiana, and, as Carol Rosenberg explained in the New York Times yesterday, had “a modest detainee health clinic and a psychiatric ward with a padded cell, but none of the hospice or end-of-life care capacity once envisioned by Pentagon planners.”

Rosenberg added that it was “designed to keep prisoners confined to their cells except when guards move[d] an individual to showers, outdoor cages that serve[d] as recreation yards or another cell where a single captive [could] sit in a recliner, one ankle shackled to a bolt on the floor, and watch television.”

As she also explained, “By segregating the prisoners, under the watch of a special guard unit called Task Force Platinum, the intelligence agencies could strictly monitor and control their communications and prevent them from divulging what had happened to them. Defense lawyers who were eventually granted access to the men were bound by security clearances to keep their conversations classified, including in court filings that accused government agents of state-sponsored torture.”

She also explained that “Camp 7 was long one of Guantánamo’s most clandestine sites. The Pentagon refused to disclose its cost, which contractor built it and when. Reporters were not permitted to see it, lawyers were required to obtain a court order to visit and its location was considered classified, although sources pointed to it on a satellite map of the base.”

Conditions at Camp 7 were robustly criticized in a letter in February 2012, to William K. Lietzau, the senior official responsible for detainee policy at the Pentagon, which was written by lawyers for six of the “high-value detainees” — Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ammar al-Baluchi, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, Ramzi bin al-Shibh and Walid bin Attash (all accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks), and Abu Faraj al-Libi, seized in Pakistan in May 2005, who has not been charged with a crime.

In the New York Times, Charlie Savage noted that the letter contended that “conditions at Camp 7 fall short of the minimum guarantees of humane treatment under the Geneva Conventions”, adding that the lawyers “asked for the letter to be treated as a report of a possible ‘violation of the law of war,’” which would require its allegation to be investigated.

Despite this, Camp 7 continued to be used for the “high-value detainees,” and it was not until Donald Trump’s presidency that a “plan to consolidate the prisoners was devised,’ because of Camp 7’s continuing structural failures. As Rosenberg described it, “Raw sewage sloshed through the tiers, the power sometimes went out and some cell doors would not close at the site. The situation worsened over the summer amid the coronavirus pandemic because it was difficult to bring in contractors and spare parts.”

The military described the move from Camp 7 to Camp 5 as, in Rosenberg’s words, “a consolidation of detention operations that could cut costs and reduce the troop presence” at Guantánamo, and Maj. Gregory J. McElwain, a spokesman for US Southern Command, which oversees the prison, called it a “fiscally responsible decision” whose planning “involved all relevant organizations to include the intelligence community.”

Even James Connell, one of the defense lawyers for Ammar al-Baluchi, who is normally — and completely understandably — critical of the conditions in which his client is held, said that the move “sounds like a solution to the crumbling Camp 7.”

Rosenberg proceeded to explain that “Camp 7 functioned under a 2006 memorandum of agreement between Donald H. Rumsfeld and Michael V. Hayden, the defense secretary and the CIA director at the time,” although she added that it “was not immediately known on Sunday whether a new agreement was reached or the old one was dissolved.”

What is also not known is what conditions the “high-value detainees” will be held in in Camp 5. The former “black site” prisoners were kept in isolation in their early years in Camp 7. As Rosenberg explained, “Each was allowed to speak with only one other prisoner through a tarp during recreation time, in conversations that were recorded for intelligence purposes.”

She added that their lawyers “described the conditions as mind-numbing until recent years, when the commanders permitted the prisoners to eat and pray together under strict surveillance,” and also allowed them access to “a cell where they could prepare food.”

As Rosenberg also explained, “It is unknown whether the military will emulate that communal lifestyle in the prisoners’ new surroundings,” but it is fundamentally necessary for them to do so, because the men moved to Camp 5 are either caught up in seemingly interminable pre-trial hearings in their military commission trials (because of the CIA’s obsession with trying to keep their torture secret), or are held indefinitely without charge or trial as “forever prisoners.”

And while it is obviously appropriate for Camp 7 to have been closed, and for the men to have been moved, it does nothing to address the fundamental injustice of either prosecuting them in a broken trial system that is incapable of delivering justice,  as is the case with ten of them (the 9/11 five, mentioned above, plus Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, and Hambali and two alleged accomplices), or of continuing to hold them indefinitely without charge or trial, as is the case with six others (the stateless Palestinian Abu Zubaydah, for whom the torture program was developed, in the mistaken belief that he was a senior member of al-Qaeda, Abu Faraj al-Libi, mentioned above, as well as a Somalian, a Kenyan and two Afghans).

One other man, Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, is imprisoned alone after he was given a life sentence after a military commission trial in October 2008, in which he refused to mount a defence, while another, Majid Khan, agreed to a plea deal in 2012, but is still waiting for confirmation of when, as a result, his imprisonment will come to an end.

The 22 other prisoners, held in Camp 6, are “low-value detainees.” Six of them have been approved for release by high-level government review processes, but are still held, while the 16 others are also “forever prisoners,” held indefinitely without charge or trial.

Moving the “high-value detainees” solves the immediate problem of the broken prison block in which they were living, but it does nothing to solve the bigger problem of the broken prison itself. In the review of the prison’s future that Biden administration officials have promised, with the suggestion that the prison’s closure is Biden’s aim, the six men cleared for release need to be freed, and the administration needs to accept that it cannot continue holding indefinitely men it has no intention of putting on trial, and must charge or release the 22 “forever prisoners,” including the six who are also so-called “high-value detainees.”

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

Video: I Discuss the Right to Protest, Guantánamo and the Plight of Julian Assange with Team Assange

A screenshot of Andy Worthington being interviewed by Alison Mason of Team Assange on March 20, 2021, discussing the UK government’s attempts to suppress peaceful protest, Guantánamo and the case of Julian Assange.Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

I’m pleased to be posting a video of an interview I undertook recently with the London-based activists of Team Assange, who have a primary focus on the case of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, but are also concerned with many other issues of social justice in the UK and around the world.

The interview came about after I met some of those involved with Team Assange in Parliament Square as part of the protests that followed the heavy-handed and astonishingly insensitive behaviour of the police at a peaceful vigil on Clapham Common for Sarah Everard, and that also coincided with the second reading, in the House of Commons, of the government’s horrible Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, with its intention of criminalising non-violent protest, and its assault on the rights of Gypsies and Travellers. For my recent articles on these topics, see The Dangerous Authoritarian Threat Posed by Priti Patel to Our Right to Protest and Dissent and Rise Up! How Protest Movements Define the Limits of Covid Lockdowns, and the Perils of Covid Denial.

My interview, with Alison Mason of Team Assange, starts 15 minutes into the one-hour programme, which also features an interview with Action4Assange activist Misty in Washington, D.C., and lasts for 20 minutes. I’ve posted it below, via YouTube, and I hope you have time to watch it, and will share it if you find it useful.

‘Kill the Bill’ and recent police violence in Bristol

Alison and I began by discussing the protests against the police’s treatment of women at the Sarah Everard vigil, and the ‘Kill the Bill’ protests in the days that followed, in which I explained that I hoped that the pressure we can exert on the government to try to prevent the bill being passed will make Priti Patel’s position untenable. I also explained how gratifying it was that the police’s actions at the Sarah Everard vigil had created a palpable sense of unease in Middle England.

Sadly, since then, there appears to have been a deeply cynical effort by the police in Bristol to manufacture a situation that justifies increased police powers, and provides cover for Priti Patel’s planned clampdown on peaceful protest. Last Sunday, police responded to a sit-down protest against the bill outside Bridewell police station in Bristol by deploying riot police, dogs and police horses, which led to police vehicles being set alight, and some of the police station’s windows being smashed.

The violence provided Priti Patel — who has particularly targeted protestors in Bristol since the toppling of the statue of slave trader Edward Colston last year — with the opportunity to condemn the protestors, and with the media widely reporting her comments in an uncritical light.

On Twitter, she wrote, “Thuggery and disorder by a minority will never be tolerated. Our police officers put themselves in harms way to protect us all.” Chief Superintendent Will White of Avon and Somerset police then claimed that “one officer suffered a broken arm and another suffered broken ribs” — claims that were later retracted when they were shown to be false — but since then, undeterred, the police have responded to two further protests, both peaceful, with unprovoked violence that has been genuinely shocking.

As local reporter Matty Edwards has explained, “On Tuesday, hundreds staged a sit-down protest outside City Hall. They wanted to highlight how the bill would target Travellers and van-dwelling communities. Following Sunday’s violence, the protesters said they were determined to make the demonstration peaceful. But riot police broke it up, battering protesters with their shields, batons and fists.”

And then, on Friday evening, police responded to a peaceful sit-down protest with even greater violence. As Matty Edwards described it, at around 10pm “police forcefully advanced into the sitting crowd, hitting them with riot shields and batons. My colleagues filmed protesters being struck repeatedly by riot shields and knocked to the ground.” He added, “Over the weekend, more videos have emerged of police violence from Friday night: a photographer being hit over the head by a riot shield while pushed up against a fence; a protester being pushed face-first into a concrete pillar; another lying on the ground being dragged and beaten with batons.”

In a video I saw, riot police were using the edges of their riot shields to attack protestors who had been knocked to the ground; a misuse of the shields that also, very evidently, constituted unprovoked assaults that would appear to be criminal behaviour.

No one should be in any doubt that something genuinely disturbing is happening in Bristol, where last year’s toppling of the statue of slave trader Edward Colston enraged Priti Patel so much that she included a ten-year prison sentence for anyone thinking of doing it again in her wretched bill. It is hard not to see Patel’s cold, divisive hand behind the Bristol police’s recent aggression, and I hope that as many of us as possible will be on the streets next Saturday, April 3, for ‘Kill the Bill’ protests across the country.

Guantánamo and Julian Assange

To return to my interview with Alison Mason, after discussing protest for around ten minutes, at 24:45 we turned our attention to Guantánamo, and I provided a brief summary of the prison’s disgraceful history, and voiced the hope that there will be progress towards its closure under President Biden. It is, of course, a profound disgrace that, after 19 years, the US is still holding 40 men at Guantánamo, mostly without charge or trial.

Holding anyone indefinitely without charge or trial is unacceptable in any country that claims to respect the rule of law, but  Guantánamo has now been open for so long that a particular aspect of its lawlessness is now becoming what I hope will be a useful campaigning argument: that if — with the exception of the handful of men charged in connection with 9/11 and other acts of terrorism — any of the other men held had been charged with a crime and convicted, they would, by now, have already served their sentence. At Guantánamo, however, where spectral allegations of wrongdoing are never subjected to the rigours of any kind of due process, and all the imprisonments are fundamentally political rather than lawful, it remains possible that men who were never of any real significance — or were cases of mistaken identity — will remain imprisoned until their deaths unless President Biden decides to do something about it.

My mention of mistaken identity prompted Alison to mention Khaled El-Masri, the German citizen who was mistaken for another man with the same name, who was then rendered to a CIA “black site” and tortured, until the US authorities realized what they had done, and released him in Albania, leaving him to find his own way back to Germany.

El-Masri’s story fed into our last discussion, starting at 29:30, about Julian Assange’s extradition hearing, last autumn, at which Khaled El-Masri was prevented from being a witness by the prosecutors, a situation that I also found myself in as I tried to tell the court why the release of the classified military files from Guantánamo, first leaked by Chelsea Manning, and on whose release I worked with WikiLeaks as a media partner, had been so significant.

I discussed how the treatment of Julian, like Guantánamo, reflects the terrorism-related hysteria that has warped notions of justice over the last 20 years, and I was pleased to have the opportunity to mention the largely unknown cases of imprisonment without charge or trial in the UK, on the basis of secret evidence, under Tony Blair, in which a secret court, the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) existed, in which barristers for the men held were able to attend secret sessions, but were then prohibited from discussing anything that had taken place with the men they were supposed to be representing.

At the end of our interview, I expressed my disappointment that President Biden has not dropped the extradition request for Julian, following the logic of President Obama, who concluded that prosecuting him would be too damaging to press freedom, but I also noted how I expected the appeal to fail, because I cannot see how the US government can do anything to address Judge Baraitser’s concerns for Julian’s mental state if imprisoned in a maximum-security prison in the US, concerns that, in January, to everyone’’s surprise, led to her turning down the extradition request — although Julian remains imprisoned in Belmarsh until the appeal process is complete.

* * * * *

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

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

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

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