Andy Worthington's Blog, page 55

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

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So wretched is the mainstream media here in the UK that the results of Thursday’s local elections are being read as an unprecedented triumph for the Tories, and the death knell of the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn, whereas the reality is actually far more nuanced.

However, in conducting research into how people voted, I’ve discovered that finding examples of the number of overall voters, the numbers of those who didn’t vote (70% of elegible voters?), and the percentage swings since the last comparable elections (in 2013) is almost impossible. Without exception, the media has focused solely on the number of seats gained and lost and not on the percentage vote, even though, under our antiquated and disproportionate ”first past the post” system, that sort of analysis always ends up giving a skewed perspective on voting behaviour.

However, based on what I can ascertain from comparing the 2013 results to the estimates of voting in the General Election in five weeks’ time based on the polling on Thursday, the Tories’ gains were principally because they took almost all of UKIP’s votes, and the horror of that, as Ian Dunt made clear in his latest column for Politics.co.uk, Local elections: UKIP aren’t dead – they’re in charge, is that the Tories have become UKIP.

As Dunt explains:

UKIP is dead. But in reality it is more powerful than ever. It has transcended its physical body and its soul has entered the Conservative party. Its spiritual victory required the end of its physical form.

This has been happening for a long time. Theresa May opened the last Conservative party conference by announcing a hard Brexit outside the single market and the customs union. Then the party unveiled plans to phase out foreign doctors, cut down on foreign students, jail landlords unless they check tenants’ residency papers and ‘name and shame’ firms for hiring foreign staff. The prime minister ended the gathering with an attack on “citizens of nowhere”.

Since then, May has cultivated the nativist vote assiduously. She has nurtured the narrative of an enemy within — sometimes the Lords, sometimes Labour or the Lib Dems, sometimes judges, sometimes citizens of nowhere, sometimes journalists or liberal elitists — who are trying to stop Brexit, but who, more than that, are fundamentally incompatible with the reality of what it is to be British and decent and hard-working. She has encouraged talk of ‘the will of the people’, as if the nation spoke with one single voice on all matters — a harking back to a 1950s when everyone came together and thought the same and looked the same. She has promoted the idea of shadowy foreign forces out to undermine the UK. She has traded in a narrative of imagined British victimhood.

This is straight out the UKIP handbook. It is not just the policies she has stolen, but the tone, the storyline, the emotional tenor of how UKIP thinks about itself and its country.

This has proved extremely beneficial to May. She has united the right under Brexit. But that is a domestic recalibration of support. It has no contact with reality. The real danger does not come now, but when that type of vision clashes with the real world. Because the key aspect of UKIP’s policies and their narratives remain: They are wrong and they are mad.

I encourage you to read the whole of this article if you haven’t already — and to buy Dunt’s book, the excellent, Brexit: What the Hell Happens Now? but to return to my analysis of Thursday’s elections, the death of UKIP — and its rebirth as the Tory Party — is the most significant aspect of Thursday’s elections, although it is not one that most of the media has noted in terms of the transfer of votes.

However, a historical analysis makes the swing clear. In 2013, in their best performance ever in local elections — prior to their nearly 4 million votes in the 2015 General Election — UKIP took 22% of the popular vote. That has now slumped to 5%, a 17% drop, with 13% of that swing going to the Tories, who took  25% of the popular vote in 2013, and who, based on Thursday’s results, are projected to take 38% of the votes in the General Election.

In contrast, the losses incurred by both Labour and the Lib Dems, although noticeable, are not as disastrous as the media, in general, are reporting. Labour took 29% of the vote in 2013, and are projected to take 27% of the vote after Thursday’s vote, while the Lib Dems’s share has fallen from 18% to 14%.

As the Guardian pointed out in its editorial today, “the main parties of the right (the Conservatives and UKIP) have broadly the same level of support across the UK, 43%, as the main parties of the left (Labour and the Liberal Democrats) on 45%.”

However, while UKIP voters are helping the Tories become a super-UKIP, a horrible far-right, hard Brexit-fueled caricature of the party that even established right-wingers like Michael Heseltine condemn, the opposition — Labour, the Lib Dems, the Greens, the SNP in Scotland, Plaid Cymru in Wales and others in Northern Ireland — are still, for the most part, failing to understand that now, more than ever before, what is needed to stop the Tories is a progressive alliance, in which all the parties put aside their differences, and work together to defeat the Tories.

Up and down the country, the Tories can be beaten, in seat after seat, if the other parties all come together and to work out who needs to step aside to allow another party to defeat the Tories — mostly Lib Dems standing aside to enable Labour to win, or Labour standing aside to enable the Lib Dems to win, but with other permutations.

What is also needed is a clear recognition that, if the Tories were to be defeated, whatever government took over would need to get rid of the anachronistic and unfair “first past the post” voting system, which, in 2015, saw the Tories gain over 50% of the seats with just 36.8% of the votes, while, as I explained at the time, UKIP — even though I despise them — “got just one seat even though they secured 3,881,129 votes, meaning that it was 113 times harder for them to get a seat than it was for the Tories.”

On both these fronts — the need for a progressive alliance, and the need for proportional representation — what all the Tories’ opponents need to recognise, however hard it may be, is that, currently, not only are they all losers, but the system itself is also discredited, alienating people who can’t be bothered to vote because they recognise that, in most constituencies, a vote for anyone other than the leading party is, very literally, a wasted vote. Why vote when it can make no difference? Under PR, although constituency areas would need to increase in size to accommodate the selection of candidates based on the percentage of votes cast, the  almost incalculably huge benefit would be that no vote is wasted, as every 50,000 votes (or thereabouts) would secure a candidate.

Is any of this change possible? I certainly hope so. There have already been moves to get a progressive alliance going, as I reported in my article, Taking on Theresa May and Her Hard Brexit Dystopia: Open Britain Targets Pro-Brexit MPs, and in comments following its publication, but I do think that those of us who are fearful of a hard Brexit, far-right Tory landslide need to make it clearer than ever to Labour and the Lib Dems that the time of tribalism is over and the leadership of both the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats need to sit down and work out if they want to be perpetual losers in a broken system, or if they want to defeat the Tories and change the system to keep the Tories from ever having an outright majority again.

Surely that’s a no-brainer?

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose debut album ‘Love and War’ and EP ‘Fighting Injustice’ are available here to download or on CD via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and the Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

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

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

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

Please support my work! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration.

 

For some months now, I’ve been meaning to post a handful of articles about former Guantánamo prisoners resettled in third countries, as part of my ongoing efforts not only to tell the stories of the men still held in Guantánamo and to call for the prison’s closure, but also to focus what has happened to released prisoners, especially those resettled in third countries, as part of an ongoing process of encouraging people to reflect on what the United States’ responsibilities ought to be towards men resettled in third countries without any internationally agreed arrangements regarding their status. In recent months, I have written about Mansoor al-Dayfi, a Yemeni released in Serbia, and, earlier this week, Tariq al-Sawah, an Egyptian released in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

In a handful of new articles, I’ll be catching up on some stories that were published last year, but that I didn’t get the opportunity to cover at the time, and the first of these is about Ahmed Abdul Qader, a Yemeni who was given a new home in Estonia in January 2015.

Last spring, Charlie Savage of the New York Times visited Estonia to meet with Qader and to interview him, over a number of days, for a story, “After Yemeni’s 13 Years in Guantánamo, Freedom for the Soul Takes Longer,” which was published in the New York Times at the end of July.

Savage described how he spoke to Qader “in his apartment, strolling through Tallinn’s medieval Old Town, and riding a city bus to Estonia’s Islamic Center,” and he painted a powerful portrait of a young man deprived of almost half his life in Guantánamo, who never had any involvement with terrorism, and who he found trying hard to make a new life for himself in a country with a supportive government, but with few Muslims (and with no other former Guantánamo prisoners), and, of course, with no members of his own family.

As Savage described it, Qader was “about 17,” and “an overweight Yemeni teenager suspected of being a terrorist” when he was taken to Guantánamo in June 2002. “When he left,” he added, “he was past 30, his hair thinning, and about to start a new life in Estonia, a tiny Baltic country he had never heard of before it had decided to resettle a detainee a few months earlier.”

In the Estonian capital, Tallinn, he was provided with “a modestly furnished studio apartment,” but, as Savage described it, “the past, he soon realized, was not so easy to escape. Snow was falling, and he was eager to touch it. He started for the door, then suddenly panicked, fearful that something — he was not sure what — could go wrong if he went outside.”

This fear is commonplace amongst from prisoners, who fear, after years of threats, that they could be picked up and “disappeared” again. As Qader explained, “Any trouble I get myself in now — even an honest mistake — will be a hundred times worse than if any normal person did it.” he added, “I thought that after two months’ release, I’d be back to normal, but I cannot live my life regularly. I try, but it is like part of me is still at Guantánamo.”

As Savage described it, Qader “expressed gratitude to Estonia for taking him in,” and he noted that it is the country’s refugee program that “provides him with the apartment, health care, language classes, a small monthly stipend and a mentor to help him navigate daily life.”

Savage added that Qader “smiled often and spoke with optimism about the future” when they talked, but “also lapsed into despondency about his separation from his family, his lost youth, and his ‘hurt’ when people call him a terrorist.”

He also noted that Qader “portrayed himself as paralyzed by anxiety about what others — the police, potential friends or employers — will assume about him.” As Qader said, “Thirteen years of my life I wasted, and it’s not because of something I did. It’s because something went wrong around me, and I got the blame for it.”

Charlie Savage then ran briefly through Guantánamo’s history, particularly focusing on how “ambiguity” continues to surround the release of men like Qader, “deemed safe enough to transfer, but never proven guilty or innocent,” and the focused on the circumstances surrounding his capture.

As I have explained in detail over the years, Qader was seized with around 16 other men — many of whom “claimed to be religious students” — at a guesthouse in Faisalabad, Pakistan at the end of March 2002, at the same time that another raid led to the capture of Abu Zubaydah, a supposed “high-value detainee,” for whom the Bush administration’s torture program was first developed, even though his supposed significance has evaporated over the years.

In June 2002, he was flown to Guantánamo, and, as Savage noted, he “vividly recall[ed] the ‘long, long, long’ flight to Cuba — limbs immobilized, eyes and ears blocked, destination unknown.” On arrival ,he said, the guards “were often rough.” As Savage explained, an Estonian doctor “is treating him for ligament damage in his knees and shoulder — the result, he said, of treatment like being kicked into the kneeling position or being forced to kneel on concrete with his arms extended.”

When Savage asked what provoked his punishment, Qader sang a lyric from ‘Les Misérables,’ as sung by a prisoner: “Look down, look down / Don’t look ’em in the eye.”

Every few months, Qader said, he “was brought to a trailer and questioned,” telling interrogators that, “after completing the ninth grade in Yemen in 1999, he had traveled to Pakistan intending to study religion and computers, and to do charitable relief work.” He claimed that, “With the financial support of his father, he traveled around, staying for several months at a time in different guesthouses.” He also crossed into Afghanistan, where, he said, “he met several Taliban members who invited him to an area north of Kabul behind the front lines in their war against the Northern Alliance,” where he stayed for “about 10 months.”

As Savage described it, “Reports summarizing his early interrogations say he was ‘issued’ a rifle and ‘trained’ to use it, but Qader, claimed that translators “had put an exaggerated gloss on his words.” He told Savage that “a Taliban member spent a few minutes showing him how to hold and shoot a rifle, and he never ‘owned’ one.” He also “insisted, then and now, that he never fought or enlisted with any group, and in late 2001, he returned to Pakistan, where he was eventually arrested.”

Crucially, in January 2003, an interrogator, writing about Qader’s case, stated, “As unusual as this source’s story sounds, I don’t think he is hiding the truth.”

However as so often at Guantánamo, “when the interrogators showed his photograph to other detainees, some claimed he was involved with Al Qaeda,” allegations that fall away when scrutinized, as most of those making the allegations have, over the years, been unambiguously identified as unreliable witnesses. Of more relevance was his behavior in Guantánamo, and in the 2008 file released by WikiLeaks he was described as “noncompliant and hostile to the guard force.” However, as he explained to Savage, “in 2007, believing certain guards treated him unfairly, he ‘pushed back’ by refusing for a while to obey orders, like to leave a yard when his outdoors time was up.”

Speaking of his time at Guantánamo, Qader said that his initial “bewilderment” at being there “gave way to routine,” and Savage added that conditions “gradually improved,” as well as noting that, “[b]y reading books and talking to guards, he learned English.”

In 2009, he was approved for release by the Guantánamo Review Task Force, a high-level, inter-agency review process established by President Obama. Savage noted that, “according to someone who read its report,” the task force “concluded he had not conducted or facilitated any terrorist activity against the United States or its allies.”

However, after a failed attempt by an al-Qaeda recruit to detonate a bomb on a Detroit-bound plane in December 2009, all releases to Yemen were halted, and an effort to secure his release via a habeas corpus petition also failed. As Savage described it, “The moratorium spurred the Justice Department to appeal government losses in habeas corpus lawsuits, and in 2010, an appeals court instructed judges to interpret ambiguous evidence more toward the government.”

Victories by prisoners came to an end, after successful habeas petitions in over three dozen cases, and Qader’s petition, brought by Wesley Powell, a New York lawyer, was turned down in October 2011.

After that, Qader said, he “lived on a cellblock for the most compliant and westernized detainees — those who liked watching American movies despite actresses with uncovered heads,” and when the prison-wide hunger strike took place in 2013, “they did not participate, he said, although he had sometimes participated in earlier such protests.”

By 2014 the Obama administration finally “stopped waiting for Yemen to stabilize and began pressing other countries to resettle stranded Yemenis,” as Charlie Savage described it, leading to Estonia’s offer to take Qader. Jeffrey Levine, the US ambassador to Estonia at the time, said, “Estonia understood the value in demonstrating its reliability as a friend and ally and was willing to help us.”

Ian Moss, the chief of staff in the State Department office involving in negotiating the transfer of prisoners out of Guantánamo, recalled when Qader was interviewed by Estonian officials. Asked when he was born (he says his date of birth is November 1984, though some US some files say 1983), he replied, instead, “My birthday will be the day I leave Guantánamo.”

On arrival in Estonia, Qader recalled that he initially “processed everything in his new country ‘like a newborn,’” although the timing of his release was unfortunate — just a week after a terrorist attack in Paris and with anti-immigrant sentiment mounting as the Syrian refugee crisis unfolded, and Europeans began to turn their back on the charitable impulses their religions expected them to hold. Qader said he remembered thinking, “I will never be free until I get my name cleared. I will always be ‘that guy who was in Guantánamo.’”

However, he decided instead “to keep a low profile, declining interviews and telling few people about his past.” That first summer, he was given an apprenticeship by a shop in Tallinn, and, to his surprise, the owner later told him “how he came to suspect that the refugee” he gave a job to “was the Guantánamo detainee he had read about in the news media.” The man said he had looked up his file online, but “concluded that its terrorism accusations were ‘all bullshit.’” One day, he told Qader he was “famous.” Qader said he “acknowledged who he was, expecting to be told to leave,’ but instead the owner “invited him to visit his mother on an Estonian island.” Qader said he was “apprehensive about leaving Tallinn,” and “hesitated for days,” but eventually made the visit.

Savage noted, however, that not every Estonian had welcomed Qader. In the fall of 2015, “a drunken neighbor began hassling him about being a foreigner,” and when the situation escalated, when “the neighbor threatened him with a gun and put garbage at his door,” he was obliged to call the police. Fortunately, the harassment ceased, but two police officers then turned up and questioned him, “asking where he came from” and how he had money. When he explained, he said, “they conferred in Estonian; he understood the word ‘Cuba.’” Although they told him “not to worry,” Qader “said he could not sleep for four days.”

Now, he said, when he “contemplates the future,” he “feels like a man holding a ‘small candle.’” He said, “People tell me ‘don’t look back, look forward,’ but the problem is when I look forward, it is dark. That is what scares me the most.”

As Savage noted, at the time of his visit the Estonian government had “recently extended his residency permit by two years,” although he was still struggling to adapt. Estonia’s population of 1.3 million people “includes only a few thousand Muslims and fewer Arabs,” halal food is hard to come by, and Qader, understandably, was “interpret[ing] stares on the bus as hostile.” He told Savage he “would like to return home,” but “feared that Yemeni or American security forces might mistakenly decide he was working with terrorists and jail him again — or kill him with a drone.”

Asked what he thought about the US, Qader told Charlie Savage that “he understood why, after Sept. 11, it would detain him,” but added that the US “should have freed him after a year or two.” Holding him for so long, he said, “hurt me very bad.”

As Savage put it, he emphasized that he is “not out for revenge,” but “begged” US officials “to consider helping him move on by clearing his name.” As he described it, “Now you let me go. Thank you very much. No hard feelings. But just let me go for real. Say, ‘This guy, we hold him this long and we were mistaken, we’re sorry,’ and show people the truth.”

To my mind, that is an entirely reasonable request. However, lawyers advising the US government would never agree, as admitting responsibility for any kind of wrongful detention would open the floodgates to compensation claims. Whether consciously or not, Lee Wolosky, the State Department’s special envoy for the closing of Guantánamo in President Obama’s last few years in office, told Savage that “no apology is warranted” for Qader’s imprisonment. “The United States was correct to pick him up when and where we did and to detain him for a period of years,” he said, adding, “We were also right ultimately to release him subject to security assurances.”

At the time of Charlie Savage’s visit, Qader was still alone in Estonia. He described how the Estonian government “will permit family visits, but obtaining travel documents has proved difficult.” He added that Qader’s father, “who had a heart attack after finding out he was at Guantánamo, calls him daily, and his mother has taught him to cook over Skype.”

He also got married. In 2015, his family “helped arrange for him to become engaged to one of his sisters’ friends.” and “they were married in December by a Yemeni judge over Skype.” Qader said they “talk daily,” although at the time his wife had not managed to join him, even though Estonia “permits spouses to join refugees.”

Savage also noted how, in theory, “he could visit nearby European countries — he is supposed to consult Estonian officials first — but he has not dared leave,” because of the fears he mentioned above. Although he feels “[c]omforted by the thought that the Estonian government is monitoring him,” he said, “he fears that if he travels abroad and a bomb goes off nearby, he might be unable to prove his innocence and would be scapegoated and imprisoned again.”

In any case, as Savage concluded, Qader “knows some things are up to him.” He said he had “heard a story about elephants who died in a circus fire,” who “were tied with a flimsy rope but had been trained in chains as babies, learning not to try to break free.” As he said, “When this story hit me, I was thinking, ‘I don’t want to be locked inside my own Guantánamo.’ I promised myself that I have to break free from myself. And I told my wife, ‘I will take you to Paris.’” He added that “his wife, who has never left Yemen, replied that when she finally reached Estonia: ‘I will explore the world with you. I will hold you to your word.’”

In following up on this story, I spoke to Qader’s attorney, Wesley Powell, who gave me a number of pieces of very good news. Firstly, Qader had recently been allowed to visit Egypt for a month to meet up with his parents and other relatives. Furthermore, his wife has now joined him in Estonia, so perhaps that visit to Paris will now finally come true.

As Powell explained to me, the Estonian government has been very supportive of Qader, who, he believes, was a perfect candidate for resettlement — westernized, non-extreme, and able to fit in because of being short-haired and clean-shaven. He told me Qader had complete freedom of movement within Estonia, and had also begun to avail himself of the opportunities to travel abroad — beyond the visit to Egypt, which, to my surprise, proceeded without a hitch. I had feared that the taint of Guantánamo, which clings so many former prisoners, would have made a visit difficult, but Powell told me that, as an officially accepted refugee, he had been treated as an Estonian citizen would have been. Powell also explained that, since Savage’s visit, he had found the courage to visit Norway by boat, and as a result I now expect, one day, to receive a postcard from Paris, from Ahmed Abdul Qader and his wife.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose debut album ‘Love and War’ and EP ‘Fighting Injustice’ are available here to download or on CD via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and the Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

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

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

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

Please support my work! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration.

 

As part of my ongoing coverage of Guantánamo, I try, wherever possible, to keep track of the stories of former prisoners, especially those who were resettled in third countries, either because the US government refused to send them home, or because it was considered unsafe to do so — or, in the case of Palestine, because the Israeli government would not allow them to be repatriated, even if the US government wanted to.

Many of those resettled in third countries are Yemenis, and third countries had to be found for them because, since the start of 2010, the entire US establishment has regarded the situation in Yemen as too unstable from a security perspective to allow any Yemenis to be repatriated. Amongst those for whom repatriation was regarded as too dangerous are the Uighurs, 22 men from China’s Xinjiang province, historically oppressed by the Chinese government, who were found new homes around the world between 2006 and 2013, and a handful of men from other countries including Egypt, Libya, Syria and Tunisia.

In March, for Middle East Eye, the journalist Lidia Kurasinska wrote an article about Tariq al-Sawah, an Egyptian, who had been resettled in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in the capital, Sarajevo, in January 2016. Before his capture in Afghanistan in late 2001, al-Sawah had been living in Bosnia, where he had been granted citizenship, and had married a Bosnian woman, with whom he had a child, so this was not a random resettlement based solely on whichever country could be persuaded, through a combination of cash and favors, to give a former prisoner a home.

Al-Sawah’s release had been recommended, in February 2015, by a Periodic Review Board, a parole-type process introduced by President Obama, which began reviewing the cases of 64 men in November 2013, and concluded the first round of those reviews in September 2016. That recommendation reversed the US government’s earlier position — that he should face a trial by military commission on “charges of conspiring with known members of al-Qaeda and providing material support for terrorism,” as Lidia Kurasinska described it.

The charges were eventually dismissed, in 2012, but the decision to charge him in the first place was, frankly, idiotic, as al-Sawah was regarded as a helpful informant, and, as a result, had been housed separate from the other prisoners, and given a somewhat easier life, along with the Mauritanian Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who used his time to write the memoir that eventually became his best-selling book, Guantánamo Diary.

Al-Sawah had become seriously ill at Guantánamo. His weight more than doubled — to 420 pounds — and, as his classified military file, released by Wikileaks in 2011, explained, he was “closely watched for significant and chronic problems” that included high cholesterol, diabetes and liver disease, so I was particularly interested to see if his health had improved after his release, and also to ascertain if he was being looked after by the Bosnian authorities.

Unfortunately, as Lidia Kurasinska’s article — “Life after Guantánamo: Egyptian ex-detainee stuck in Bosnia limbo” — made clear, he was “stuck in a legal no-man’s land.” As she explained, “Slowly strolling through a housing estate on the outskirts of Sarajevo, al-Sawah cut “a sombre figure.”

“They didn’t even say sorry,” he told her. “They just dropped me off at Sarajevo airport after 14 years, and all I had with me was a t-shirt. I live in limbo. Even though Sarajevo is a big city, I don’t have any papers, and I can’t get a job and take care of myself.”

He also told her about his suffering in Guantánamo, explaining how he was “shackled 24 hours a day and kept in solitary confinement despite suffering from poor health and depression.”

He explained that life was “a constant economic struggle,” and that he “survives by living off donations from local mosques and charities.”

Kurasinska added that “an agreement made between the Bosnian state and the US government promised him shelter and financial assistance from the Bosnian government,” but “the living allowance of $125 a month he recently started receiving is too meager to live on by Bosnian standards.”

He also claimed that the US government “had offered him $200,000 in compensation before his release from Guantánamo,” but that he has not received any money, a claim reiterated by Jelena Sesar, Amnesty International’s researcher for the Balkans and the EU, who said, “We understand that the US government promised financial and legal assistance as a part of Mr al-Sawah’s resettlement, but that assistance never materialized.” Kurasinska also noted that the US State Department “did not confirm or deny whether any support package had been put in place.”

Speaking about how he came to be imprisoned in Guantánamo, al-Sawah told Kurasinska that “he travelled to the Balkans in the early 1990s as the region was engulfed in a war caused by the break-up of Yugoslavia,” and “initially worked for the media office at the International Islamic Relief Organisation, known locally as IGASA, in Zagreb, Croatia.” From there, he said, “he moved to Bosnia and worked as a truck driver distributing humanitarian aid before joining the Bosnian army and serving in the 1992-95 war.”

When the war ended, with the 1995 Dayton agreement, al-Sawah said that he “settled alongside other former foreign fighters and aid workers in the central Bosnian village of Bocinja.” As Kurasinska noted, “Many of the new arrivals, of whom the vast majority were of North African and Middle Eastern origin, married local women and started families.”

This is also what al-Sawah did, and his daughter “is now a teenager attending high school in Bosnia.” Although Kurasinska didn’t make it clear in her article, one of his US lawyers, federal defender Mary Petras, told me that he “was living with his daughter when he was first released,” and confirmed to me that “their financial circumstances were dire.”

Reminiscing with Kurasinska about “how good his life was in Bosnia during the post-war period,“ al-Sawah said, “We had land and chickens.”

Kurasinska added, “The exact number of former foreign fighters who stayed in Bosnia following the ceasefire is estimated at anywhere from 700 to more than 1,000.” She also noted thatmany of them, like al-Sawah, “were given Bosnian citizenship as a reward for their service in the army,” although their presence “was later frowned upon by the Bosnian government who said they were endorsing a radical form of Islam.” As she put it, “The Bosnian government did not want to be seen as a refuge for Islamic militants and caved in under diplomatic pressure from its international partners to deport the community.” As she also notes, the Dayton agreement “stipulated that all forces of foreign origin were to withdraw from Bosnia,” and “[e]ven though many of the men had started families and held Bosnian citizenship, they were still considered a security threat.”

I think Kurasinska rather understates the extent to which foreign pressure was put on Bosnia, as the Northwestern Journal of International Human Rights article linked to above makes clear. It is entitled, “Revoking Citizenship in the Name of Counterterrorism: The Citizenship Review Commission Violates Human Rights in Bosnia and Herzegovina.”

However, she does note that, after 9/11, the US “reportedly intensified pressure on the tiny Balkan country to hand over men it deemed a security threat,” mentioning the case of the Algerian Six, the six men who were kidnapped by US forces and taken to Guantánamo after an investigation by the Bosnian authorities — instigated because of pressure exerted by the US — found nothing to warrant their arrest. Two of the six, Lakhdar Boumediene and Mustafa Ait Idir, have just had a book of their experiences published, Witnesses of the Unseen: Seven Years in Guantánamo, which I wholeheartedly recommend.

Back in 2000, when Tariq al-Sawah heard rumors that Bosnia was “about to commence deportations,” he “left for Afghanistan, rather than Egypt,” and “was not the only one who headed for Kabul,” as Kurasinska explained, adding, “Having served in the Bosnian army during the war, many believed going back to their countries of origin carried a risk of prosecution and imprisonment,” which, with Egypt, was certainly true.

Turning to al-Sawah’s life in Afghanistan, Kurasinska noted that he “was reluctant to elaborate on his choice of destination and the nature of the activities he engaged in,” but also noted that his Wikileaks file explains how he became engaged in bomb-making, a period of his life which, of course, he renounced in Guantánamo.

Al-Sawah also told her about his suffering in Guantánamo, explaining how he was “shackled 24 hours a day and kept in solitary confinement despite suffering from poor health and depression.”

Turning to his situation now, Kurasinska noted that, while he was in Guantánamo, his “Bosnian citizenship was revoked and thus he is currently living in a state of limbo.” She added that “Bosnia’s citizen revocation process drew widespread criticism as it allowed no appeal and subjected the individuals concerned to immediate deportation, at times due to minor bureaucratic omissions.”

As a result, alhough Bosnia “agreed to take back Sawah in the deal struck with the US government, it is limited to subsidiary protection only, allowing him to stay in the country with limited rights.” When she asked him “whether he still holds Egyptian citizenship or if he receives any support from Egypt,” he “said he no longer has any links to the country” and confirmed he “is trying to rebuild his life in Bosnia, where his daughter lives.”

However, he is clearly dissatisfied with “the lack of substantial support from Bosnia and his desperation at the legal state of uncertainty he is living in,” although “his most bitter complaints are reserved for the US government.”

Jelena Sesar of Amnesty International stated, “Amnesty International strongly believes that the US government has the primary responsibility for resolving the problem it has created at Guantánamo.” She added that the US “must work with host countries to ensure that detainees are successfully resettled after their transfer from Guantánamo, and that their human rights are respected. This includes financial assistance to aid successful integration, including for housing, transportation, medical and social support, ensuring access to educational and employment opportunities so that former detainees can learn a trade and/or earn a living wage. This is particularly important for countries such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, which are struggling to address the needs of their own vulnerable populations.”

Kurasinska also noted that, “Despite numerous requests for comment, Bosnia’s Ministry of Security, the body responsible for handling Sawah’s case, refused to respond to any questions regarding his status in the country.” She also noted that a US State Department official told her that they “cannot discuss the specific assurances” they receive from foreign governments, but that they include requirements for threat mitigation and “ensur[ing] humane treatment.”

Unfortunately for Tariq al-Sawah, it is not entirely clear to me that ensuring humane treatment has been a priority for the US government — and now, of course, under Donald Trump, the situation seems only to be worse, as Trump has not even appointed replacements for the two envoys in the Pentagon and State Department who, under President Obama, were not only responsible for making safe arrangements regarding the release of prisoners, but also, afterwards, monitored their resettlement and their transition to civilian life.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose debut album ‘Love and War’ and EP ‘Fighting Injustice’ are available here to download or on CD via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and the Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

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

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

 

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

[image error]Please support my work! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration.

 

I’ve recently been going through my (nearly) ten-year archive of articles about Guantánamo and related issues, in an effort to work out what to include in a forthcoming book compiling the best of my writing about Guantánamo. One of the duller aspects of this work has been to fix broken links, in particular to radio shows and videos of TV appearances and other live events, but along the way I was reminded of a exhilarating, if rather exhausting trip that I made to Berkeley in October 2010 — my first ever visit to the West Coast of the US — for Berkeley Says No To Torture Week.

The week of events was put together by the World Can’t Wait, the National Lawyers Guild (San Francisco), Progressive Democrats of America, Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute, National Accountability Action Network, Code Pink, FireJohnYoo.org, Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists Social Justice Committee and the Rev. Kurt Kuhwald, and Berkeley was chosen as the venue because John Yoo, the author of the Bush administration’s notorious “torture memos,” is law professor at Berkeley, even though, under George W. Bush, when he was a lawyer in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which is supposed to provide the executive branch with impartial legal advice, he attempted to redefine torture so that the CIA could use it on “high-value detainees” in the “war on terror.”

Berkeley City Council had adopted a Resolution to hold a week of public educational events to educate the community about torture in September 2010, and Debra Sweet of the World Can’t Wait then arranged my visit, which involved me taking part in what I remember as several events a day during that week, culminating in a performance of “Reckoning With Torture,” which I’m cross-posting below, via YouTube:

“Reckoning With Torture” involves readings of official documents that reveal the scope of America’s post-9/11 torture program. The ACLU and PEN American Center staged the first “Reckoning With Torture” at The Cooper Union in New York  in September 2009, and in March 2010 a second performance was staged in Washington, D.C., and more recent details of performances can be found on a dedicated website here.

In Berkeley, on October 15, 2010, those taking part in the performance included myself, retired CIA officer and peace activist Ray McGovern, the actress, author and activist Mimi Kennedy, Pamela Merchant of the Center for Justice & Accountability, Marjorie Cohn of the National Lawyers Guild, Renee Saucedo of La Raza Centro Legal, the journalist Jason Leopold, Peter Selz of Berkeley Art Museum, activist and musician Shahid Buttar, the psychologist and activist Jeffrey Kaye, Devorah Major, the poet laureate of San Francisco, and Col. Ann Wright, peace activist and former US State Department official.

I hope you enjoy this blast from the past.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose debut album ‘Love and War’ and EP ‘Fighting Injustice’ are available here to download or on CD via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and the Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

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

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

100 Days of Trump: Join Us in Telling Him to Close Guantánamo

Please support my work! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration.

 

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

On Saturday, Donald Trump will have been in office for 100 days, and all but his most deranged and devoted supporters must surely conclude that this has been the most shambolic and disappointing first 100 days of any presidency — as reflected in his historically low approval ratings. As we approach 100 days, Trump’s approval rating is just 44%, 11 points lower than Bill Clinton after 100 days, and 19 points lower than Barack Obama at the 100-day mark.

Trump’s sweeping and indefensible travel ban remains one of the low points of his presidency, an effort to target, by religion, seven Muslim-majority countries for a ban on all travel to the US, on the basis of a supposed terrorist threat that, to be blunt, doesn’t exist at all. Unfortunately, however, the racism of the travel ban continues to bleed into other aspects of Trump’s policies — his obsession with a wall between the US and Mexico, for example, and, for us at Close Guantánamo, his enthusiasm for keeping Guantánamo open and for sending new prisoners there.

In his first week in office, a leaked draft executive order found Trump threatening the worst possible scenario for Guantánamo and the US’s counter-terrorism policies — reviving torture and CIA “black sites,” and bringing new prisoners to Guantánamo. On torture, a barrage of criticism, including from prominent Republicans, including his own defence secretary  and others at the CIA, persuaded him to back down, but on Guantánamo a second leaked draft executive order found him still intending to bring new prisoners — Islamic State prisoners — to Guantánamo.

Since then, everything has gone quiet. We can presume that wiser voices than his persuaded him that he doesn’t have the authority to bring Islamic State prisoners to Guantánamo, as he would need a new Authorization for Use of Military Force, and seeking one might reveal how his bellicosity is not backed up with common sense. In any case, the federal courts have proven extremely adept at prosecuting terrorists for the last 15 years — even while George W. Bush was pushing Guantánamo as the centerpiece of a “new paradigm” in warfare, in his so-called “war on terror.”

Nevertheless, although there are no new developments regarding Guantánamo, for which we must be grateful, Trump has effectively shut the door on the prison, even though he as not opened it up to let in anyone new. 41 men are still held, but only ten of them are facing, or have faced trials, while the rest continue to be held indefinitely without charge or trial — a betrayal of US values, as it has been every day since Guantánamo opened over 15 years ago.

To make matters worse, five of these 31 men were unanimously approved for release under President Obama by high-level government review processes involving the major government departments and the intelligence agencies — three in 2009, by the Guantánamo Review Task Force, and two last year by Periodic Review Boards, a parole-type process that began in 2013, and which we have spent much of the last three years covering.

64 men went before Periodic Review Boards, and 38 were approved for release, with all but these two men freed. The 26 other men held without charge are those whose ongoing imprisonment was approved by the PRBs, although their cases continue to be reviewed — in administrative file reviews every six months, and in full reviews up to three years after their initial reviews.

Again, we must be thankful that the PRBs have not been stopped, as seven Republican Senators urged Trump to do shortly after he took office, and, although the process is flawed — relying on classified information, and requiring the prisoners to show contrition, even if they maintain that they never did anything wrong — it ended up being the only way out of the prison for numerous largely insignificant prisoners otherwise stranded at Guantánamo because of the prison’s fundamental lawlessness and the cynicism or hysteria of Republican lawmakers who spent the whole of Obama’s presidency working to keep it open.

No one has yet been approved for release under Trump, but, if anyone does, there appears to be no active mechanism in place to arrange their release, just as the five men approved for release under Obama but still held when he left office have no means for release. Under Obama, two envoys were appointed, in the Pentagon and the State Department, to work on prisoners’ resettlement, and monitoring them after their release, but as Vice News reported recently, with the posts unfilled, there is no one in Trump’s administration monitoring former prisoners to make sure they don’t become security threats.

To mark Trump’s 100th day in office, we hope you will join us in printing off a poster urging him to close Guantánamo, taking a photo with it and sending it to us. We have already published dozens of photos on the website and on Facebook, and many were also featured in our latest promotional video, which we made available in February, and which features Close Guantánamo co-founder Andy Worthington’s band The Four Fathers singing their song, “Close Guantánamo,” first issued last year but now with an added verse about Trump and his “dystopian ways.”

We look forward to hearing from you!

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose debut album ‘Love and War’ and EP ‘Fighting Injustice’ are available here to download or on CD via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and the Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

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

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

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

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

 

For Theresa May, the decision to call a snap election last week, on June 8 (which I wrote about in an article entitled, Theresa May: An Unstoppable Undemocratic Disaster in a Dismal Brexit Britain Without Adequate Opposition) will hopefully backfire on her, despite her having an almost unprecedented lead in the polls. Some people are already complaining about there being yet another election — following the last General Election just two years ago, and the EU referendum last year — partly because of an understandable election fatigue, but also, for some, because May has so brazenly broken her promise not to hold a General Election and break the five-year fixed Parliament law that David Cameron introduced, which she, of course, backed. The discerning also realise that this election was cynically called to cover up the expenses scandal from the 2015 General Election, doggedly uncovered by Michael Crick and Channel 4 News.

Theresa May also hopes to wipe out the Labour Party, and for voters to give her a specific mandate to pursue her “hard Brexit” obsession, as she was not voted in as Prime Minister, of course. However, on this she may have miscalculated, as the election finally provides an opportunity for the 16.1 million people who voted Remain — and Leave voters who didn’t want an economically ruinous “hard Brexit” — to fight back against the suicidal arrogance with which Theresa May has been pushing for as hard a Brexit as possible, removing us from the single market and the customs union, despite the huge —perhaps incalculable — damage that will do to our economy, and despite the fact that leaving the EU is unlikely to significantly reduce immigration, even though that appears to have been what motivated Leave voters the most — along with misguided notions of sovereignty, as though a deluded, misty-eyed, backwards-looking isolation is either desirable or practical in the 21st century.

Since the referendum, the 16.1 million of us who voted Remain have been treated with complete contempt by Theresa May and her government, who seek to silence all debate. The courts had to compel her to allow MPs to have any say at all on the Brexit negotiations, and she then bullied them into refusing any of the amendments tabled by Labour and other parties, and pressurised the House of Lords not to stand by the amendments they passed after MPs failed to do — primarily involving guaranteeing EU citizens the right to stay in the UK and not to be “bargaining chips,” and guaranteeing Parliament a meaningful vote on the final Brexit deal. Meanwhile, the attack-dog media that backs her, and constantly urges her further and further to the right, laid into the judges and the Lords for being “enemies of the people,” and constantly treat anyone questioning anything about Brexit as traitors.

While the Labour Party has, understandably, been thrown into confusion by the Brexit vote, with many pro-Remain MPs in constituencies that voted Leave (part of a general trend, it should be noted, as three-quarters of all MPs supported remaining in the EU), the opposite case of the Tories has received virtually no attention — the dozens of Tory MPs, mostly in London and the south, and often in largely wealthy constituencies, whose voters backed Remain by significant majorities, but who, until now, have completely failed to address their constituents’ concerns and to make even the slightest murmur of dissent against Theresa May. The Tories, no doubt, are counting on Remain voters not to dissent, but in many places the Lib Dems are well-placed to take advantage of this discrepancy, especially as, in many cases, these constituencies only swung to the Tories in 2015 during the Lib Dems’ spectacular post-coalition government collapse.

Leading the charge to do damage to the Brexit tyranny is Gina Miller, who took the government to court to demand that Parliament had a say in negotiations, and who, as the Guardian explains today, “has raised £300,000 in crowdfunding to directly support up to 100 pro-Europe candidates in [a] tactical voting election initiative.” Read her launch speech here. I’ll be reporting more about Miller’s “Best for Britain” organisation as that story develops.

Also involved in tackling Brexit is Open Britain, the organisation that arose from the ashes of the Stronger In campaign. Two days ago, Open Britain, along with two other grassroots pro-EU organisations, European Movement and Britain for Europe, produced a hit list of 20 MPs they are targeting in the General Election. Most are held by pro-Brexit MPs. These are almost all Tories, although one DUP MP and a Labour aberration, Vauxhall’s Kate Hoey, are also included. The organisation also included a list of 20 MPs — including Labour, Liberal Democrat and Conservatives — “who have been powerful advocates of the closest possible relationship with the EU27,” and whose constituencies they want to defend, and the plan is to utilise their combined 600,000 supporters for this “20/20 key seat strategy.”

As the Guardian explained, “The pressure group believes the disconnect between the politicians and their voters over the issue of Europe provides the chance to eat into or even overturn large majorities. The ultimate aim is to limit the number of proponents of hard Brexit in Parliament.” As James McGrory, the co-executive director of Open Britain, explained, “Open Britain has over half a million supporters and lots of them have asked what’s the best thing they can do in the election. This is what we’re telling them – one of the best ways they can help is by campaigning against those who favour Brexit at any cost.”

Stephen Dorrell, the former Tory MP who chairs European Movement, said, “This election is about something much bigger than party politics – it is about our future relationship with the rest of Europe. Pro-Europeans need to stand up and be counted between now and 8 June. The supporters of our organisations want to be know where they can make a difference in this campaign and we are providing the tools for them to be able to.”

Below I provide an annotated list of the 20 MPs on the “hit list,” and below that a list of the 20 MPs Open Britain and its allies seek to defend. I also encourage people to specifically look at research about where the Lib Dems might win seats, primarily from the Tories, and two articles about this in the New Statesman, 30 MPs at risk from a Lib Dem surge, and The constituencies where the Liberal Democrats can take on the Tories.

Last week, the Daily Telegraph explained that those targeted include Tania Mathias, “whose Twickenham constituency overwhelmingly backed staying in the EU at last year’s referendum.” I know Tania, from her support for the campaign to get Shaker Aamer released from Guantánamo, and her support of other worthwhile causes, and I also note that she was one of just three Tory rebels — along with Ken Clarke and Andrew Tyrie — to call for EU nationals to be guaranteed the right to stay in the UK during the Brexit vote in February, although only Clarke, with 52 Labour MPs and 52 SNP MPs and 16 others, voted against triggering Article 50. However, as the Telegraph’s article also noted, “According to Lib Dem party analysis just one in three voters in Twickenham wanted Brexit — something the Tories are now promising to deliver at this election,” and “Vince Cable, the former business secretary, will seek to reclaim the Twickenham seat from the Conservatives, which he lost in the last election.”

The Telegraph also noted that the Lib Dems will be hoping to oust Anne Main, the MP for St Albans and Ben Howlett, MP for Bath, along with Nicola Blackwood, also targeted by Open Britain, and added that all three “are going into the election supporting Brexit despite a minority of their constituents voting for Brexit at the EU referendum.” Other MPs targeted, as the New Statesman explained, are the Tories Maria Caulfield in Lewes, Luke Hall in Thornbury and Yate, James Berry in Kingston and Surbiton, Marcus Fysh in Yeovil, Derek Thomas in St Ives, Kevin Foster in Torbay, Paul Scully in Sutton and Cheam, Will Quince in Colchester, Mary Robinson in Cheadle, Alex Chalk in Cheltenham, Peter Heaton-Jones in North Devon, James Heappey in Wells, Scott Mann in North Cornwall, Anne-Marie Trevelyan in Berwick-upon-Tweed, Flick Drummond in Portsmouth South. Some of the above are also being targeted by Open Britain and its allies.

As I explain in my analysis below, it certainly seems to me that in many constituencies either Labour or the Lib Dems should stand down and support the other party to stand a chance of wiping out the Tories, but unfortunately I see few signs that the Tories’ opponents are mature enough to realise that they should be able to put aside all their differences to defeat the common enemy. I’m very pleased to see Gina Miller leading a quickly-growing campaign urging tactical voting, and I think it’s important for Open Britain to pick up on this too.

Nevertheless, the Open Britain campaign has already demonstrated the need for anti-Brexit campaigners to speak out, as Tory members of the campaign, Nicky Morgan, Anna Soubry and Dominic Grieve, have had to come off the fence, resigning from the group rather than indulging in any meaningful dissent with their own party. The three “released a joint statement saying it was ‘untenable’ for them to support Open Britain any more after the group released an ‘attack list’ of MPs to target.”

Other questions remain to be answered: chiefly, whether Labour’s woes can be reversed now that its EU spokesman Keir Starmer has laid out the party’s proposals, and what will happen to UKIP, 4 million votes strong in the 2015 election, but now a party in disarray. Above all, however, it’s my belief that what this election reveals above all, as every election does with more and more compelling evidence, is that the “first past the post” system that Britain clings to is profoundly unfair and is alienating more and more people each time there is an election. With so many votes wasted in an absurd “winner takes it all” scenario, there is no compelling reason that can be given to the 15,733,706 people who didn’t vote in 2015 (compared to the 11,334,920 who voted for the Tories, and the 9,344,328 who voted Labour) to change their mind. With proportional representation, however, every time 47,000 people vote for a party, a candidate is elected. The specific borders of constituencies would have to change to reflect this, but I can see no other way of ensuring that the biggest party is no longer the one that doesn’t vote, or, indeed, to get rid of the blatant unfairness whereby, in 2015, the Tories, with 24.4% of the eligible electorate and 36.8% of those who could be bothered to vote, won 50.9% of the seats.

The Open Britain “hit list” of 20 MPs

1. Kate Hoey (Labour, Vauxhall)

The prominent Leave campaigner got 25,778 voters in 2015, and has a majority of 12,708, but an estimated 78% of voters supported Remain. In 2015, the Tories came second with 13,070 votes. The Greens had 3,658 votes, the Lib Dems 3,312. Ideally, either the Green or Lib Dem candidate needs not to stand, to maximise support against Hoey, and her Tory rival, although the Guardian reports that it is the Lib Dem candidate George Turner who will be supported by Open Britain and its allies.

2. Lady Victoria Borwick (Conservative, Kensington)

Tory Leave supporter got 18,199 votes in 2015, and has a majority of 7,361, but an estimated 69% of voters supported Remain. In 2015 Labour came second with 10,838 votes, with the Lib Dems on 1,962 votes. Perhaps they should stand down in favour of Labour?

3. David Burrowes (Conservative, Enfield Southgate)

Tory Leave supporter got 22,624 votes in 2015, and has a majority of 4,753, but an estimated 62% of voters supported Remain. In 2015 Labour came second with 17,871 votes. This ought to be a feasible swing.

4. Nicola Blackwood (Conservative, Oxford West and Abingdon)

Although Blackwood was a Remain supporter, and 62% of her constituents supported Remain, she is not believed to have stood up for them. In 2015, she got 26,153 votes, a majority of 9,582. The Lib Dems came second with 16,571 votes, Labour came third with 7,274. Perhaps they should stand down in favour of the Lib Dems?

5. Theresa Villiers (Conservative, Chipping Barnet)

Tory Leave supporter got 25,759 votes in 2015, a majority of 7,656, but an estimated 59% of voters supported Remain. Labour came 2nd with 18,103 votes.

6. James Berry (Conservative, Kingston and Surbiton)

Although Berry was a Remain supporter, and 59% of his constituents supported Remain, he is not believed to have stood up for them. In 2015, he got 23,249 votes, a majority of just 2,834. The Lib Dems came second with 20,415 votes, Labour came third with 8,574. They could stand down in favour of the Lib Dems, but the Lib Dems may be able to get a sufficient swing anyway under former Lib Dem cabinet minister Ed Davey.

7. Charlotte Leslie (Conservative, Bristol North West)

Tory Leave supporter got 22,767 votes in 2015, a majority of 4,944, but an estimated 61% of voters supported Remain. Labour came 2nd with 17,823 votes.

8. Matthew Offord (Conservative, Hendon)

Tory Leave supporter got 24,328 votes in 2015, a majority of 3,724, but an estimated 58% of voters supported Remain. Labour came 2nd with 20,604 votes.

9. Maria Caulfield (Conservative, Lewes)

Tory Leave supporter got 19,206 votes in 2015, a majority of just 1,083, and an estimated 53% of voters supported Remain. The Lib Dems came 2nd with 18,123 votes.

10. Steve Baker (Conservative, Wycombe)

Tory Leave supporter got 26,444 votes in 2015, a majority of 14,856, but an estimated 51% of voters supported Remain. Labour came 2nd with 11,588 votes, but that’s a long way behind, and I would be surprised if if was winnable.

11. Iain Duncan Smith (Conservative, Chingford and Woodford Green)

Former minister got 20,999 votes in 2015, a majority of 8,386, in a constituency estimated to be almost equally split between Leave and Remain. Labour came 2nd with 12,613 votes, but that’s some way behind. If I had my way, however, I would promote a concerted campaign against him as a prominent liar in the Leave campaign, and an all-round wretched human being, responsible for extraordinary misery when he was in charge of welfare.

12. Byron Davies (Conservative, Gower)

Although Davies was a Remain supporter, and 51% of his constituents supported Remain, he is not believed to have stood up for them, and, in particular, has a majority of just 27 votes. In 2015, he secured 15,862 votes while Labour received 15,835, and Labour should be able to win this seat back.

13. Paul Scully (Conservative, Sutton and Cheam)

Tory Leave supporter got 20,732 votes in 2015, a majority of 3,921, in a constituency estimated to have voted Leave by 51%. However, the Lib Dems came 2nd with 16,811 votes, so a swing is possible. Labour came 3rd on 5,546, so in theory Labour could stand down in favour of the Lib Dems.

14. Gavin Robinson (DUP, Belfast East)

Leave supporter got 19,575 votes in 2015, a majority of 2,597, in a constituency estimated to have voted Leave by 51%. The Alliance candidate came 2nd with 16,978 votes.

15. William Wragg (Conservative, Hazel Grove)

Tory Leave supporter got 17,882 votes in 2015, a majority of 6,552, in a constituency estimated to have voted Leave by 52%. The Lib Dems came 2nd with 11,330 votes, and Labour came 3rd on 7,584, so in theory Labour could stand down in favour of the Lib Dems.

16. Christopher Davies (Conservative, Brecon and Radnorshire)

Tory Leave supporter got 16,453 votes in 2015, a majority of 5,102, in a constituency estimated to have voted Leave by 52%. The Lib Dems came 2nd with 11,351 votes, and Labour came 3rd on 5,904, so in theory they could stand down in favour of the Lib Dems.

17. Luke Hall (Conservative, Thornbury and Yate)

Hall was a Remain supporter, although 52% of his constituents are estimated to have voted Leave. In 2015, he got 19,924 votes, but that is a majority of just 1,495, as the Lib Dems got 18,429 votes, and are hoping for a swing.

18. James Heappey (Conservative, Wells)

Heappey was a Remain supporter, although 54% of his constituents are estimated to have voted Leave. In 2015, he got 26,247 votes, a majority of 7,585. The Lib Dems came 2nd with 18,662 votes, and are evidently hoping for a major swing.

19. Derek Thomas (Conservative, St. Ives)

Tory Leave supporter got 18,491 votes in 2015, a majority of just 2,469, in a constituency estimated to have voted Leave by 55%. The Lib Dems came 2nd with 16,022 votes, and believe they can win St. Ives back.

20. Caroline Ansell (Conservative, Eastbourne)

Tory Leave supporter got 20,934 votes in 2015, a majority of just 733, in a constituency estimated to have voted Leave by 58%. The Lib Dems came 2nd with 20,201 votes, so a swing is possible.

20 pro-EU MPs to be defended

1. Ian Murray (Labour, Edinburgh South)

Murray got 19,293 votes in 2015, a majority of just 2,637, in a constituency estimated to have voted Remain by 78%. The SNP came second with 16,656 votes, but, to be honest, if it fell to the SNP it would continue to be anti-Brexit.

2. Caroline Lucas (Green, Brighton Pavilion)

The incredibly hardworking Caroline Lucas, Britain’s sole Green MP because of our unfair voting system, got 22,871 votes in 2015, a majority of 7,967, in a constituency estimated to have voted Remain by 74%. I don’t see any problems with her retaining her seat.

3. Peter Kyle (Labour, Hove) 

Kyle got 22,082 votes in 2015, a majority of just 1,236, in a constituency estimated to have voted Remain by 67%. The Tories came 2nd with 20,846.

4. Nick Clegg (Liberal Democrat, Sheffield Hallam)

The former Lib Dem leader got 22,215 votes in 2015, a majority of just 2,353, in a constituency estimated to have voted Remain by 66%. Labour came 2nd with 19,862.

5. Ben Bradshaw (Labour, Exeter)

Bradshaw got 25,062 votes in 2015, a majority of 7,183, in a constituency estimated to have voted Remain by 55%. The Tories came 2nd with 17,879.

6. Alison McGovern (Labour, Wirral South)

McGovern got 20,165 votes in 2015, a majority of 4,599, in a constituency estimated to have voted Remain by 53%. The Tories came 2nd with 15,566.

7. Lilian Greenwood (Labour, Nottingham South)

Greenwood got 20,697 votes in 2015, a majority of 6,936, in a constituency estimated to have voted Remain by 53%. The Tories came 2nd with 13,761.

8. Alan Whitehead (Labour, Southampton Test)

Whitehead got 18,017 votes in 2015, a majority of 3,810, in a constituency estimated to have voted Remain by 51%. The Tories came 2nd with 14,207.

9. Liz Kendall (Labour, Leicester West)

Kendall got 16,051 votes in 2015, a majority of 7,203, in a constituency estimated to have voted Leave by 51%. The Tories came 2nd with 8,848.

10. Owen Smith (Labour, Pontypridd)

Smith got 15,554 votes in 2015, a majority of 8,985, in a constituency estimated to have voted Remain by 53%. The Tories came 2nd with 6,569.

11. Wes Streeting (Labour, Ilford North)

Streeting got 21,463 votes in 2015, a majority of just 589, in a constituency estimated to have voted Leave by 53%. The Tories came 2nd with 20,874, so this seems to be a vulnerable seat.

12. Tom Brake (Liberal Democrat, Carshalton and Wallington)

Brake got 16,603 votes in 2015, a majority of just 1,150, in a constituency estimated to have voted Leave by 56%. The Tories came 2nd with 15,093, so this seems to be a vulnerable seat.

13. Catherine McKinnell (Labour, Newcastle upon Tyne North)

McKinnnell got 20,689 votes in 2015, a majority of 10,153, in a constituency estimated to have voted Leave by 57%. The Tories came 2nd with 10,536.

14. Norman Lamb (Liberal Democrat, North Norfolk)

Lamb got 19,299 votes in 2015, a majority of 4,043, in a constituency estimated to have voted Leave by 58%. The Tories came 2nd with 15,256.

15. Phil Wilson (Labour, Sedgefield)

Wilson got 18,275 votes in 2015, a majority of 6,843, in a constituency estimated to have voted Leave by 59%. The Tories came 2nd with 11,432.

16. Helen Goodman (Labour, Bishop Auckland)

Goodman got 16,307 votes in 2015, a majority of 3,508, in a constituency estimated to have voted Leave by 61%. The Tories came 2nd with 12,799.

17. Angela Smith (Labour, Penistone and Stocksbridge)

Smith got 19,691 votes in 2015, a majority of 6,723, in a constituency estimated to have voted Leave by 61%. The Tories came 2nd with 12,968.

18. Mary Creagh (Labour, Wakefield)

Creagh got 17,301 votes in 2015, a majority of just 2,613, in a constituency estimated to have voted Leave by 63%. The Tories came 2nd with 14,688, so this seems to be a vulnerable seat.

19. Pat McFadden (Labour, Wolverhampton South East)

McFadden got 18,531 votes in 2015, a majority of just 10,767, in a constituency estimated to have voted Leave by 68%. The Tories came 2nd with 7,764.

A 20th MP who was supported in the initial publicity, but has now been removed, presumably as a result of the Tories’ split with Open Britain, was Neil Carmichael (Conservative, Stroud), who campaigned to remain in a constituency estimated to have voted Remain by 54%. However, this wasn’t a decision I agreed with, as I would rather see Labour regain Stroud, which they held from 1997 to 2010.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose debut album ‘Love and War’ and EP ‘Fighting Injustice’ are available here to download or on CD via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and the Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

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

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

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

Please support my work! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration.

 

Last month, the Associated Press picked up on an important anti-torture initiative in North Carolina, which, in turn, was picked up by the New York Times. and, in the UK, the Independent. I didn’t have the opportunity to mention it at the time, so I’m doing so now, as I want to play my part in trying to get it to a wider audience.

The Times ran the article under the headline, “Citizens’ Group Aims to Investigate CIA Rendition Program,” explaining how, on Wednesday March 15 in Raleigh, North Carolina, the North Carolina Commission of Inquiry on Torture — a group of academics, retired military officers and ministers — announced plans “to hold public hearings in North Carolina to highlight a government program they hope won’t be repeated: the secret CIA interrogation sites where suspected terrorists might be tortured.”

As their website describes it, the NCCIT was “set up to investigate and encourage public debate about the role that North Carolina played in facilitating the US torture program carried out between 2001 [and] 2009. This non-governmental inquiry responds to the lack of recognition by North Carolina’s publicly elected officials and the US government of citizens’ need to know how their tax dollars and state assets were used to support unlawful detention, torture, and rendition.”

As the AP described it, the Commission “has no power to compel testimony, but members plan to collect records and talk to witnesses before describing their findings” at an open hearing in Raleigh on November 30 and December 1, at which, as Dr. Christina Cowger, chair of the inquiry’s board, told me, there will be “testimony from local, national, and international witnesses, including experts on the RDI [rendition, detention and interrogation] program, law, ethics, interrogation, torture, and foreign policy; one or more RDI survivors; and local residents affected by the CIA’s use of North Carolina in the RDI program.” The Independent stated that the inquiry “does not have access to classified information, but new documents may be acquired through the Freedom of Information Act,” and also pointed out that the commission’s full report will be completed in 2018.

As the Independent also noted, Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to to Secretary of State Colin Powell and a retired Army colonel, who is one of ten commissioners for the group (and who I interviewed in 2009), said, “This is a very important effort. We might even shame Washington into some action or discourage the present administration from returning to torture and rendition.” On a conference call, he added that he hoped that this local effort would have “national ramifications.”

The Independent also explained that, at a briefing for reporters when the Commission was launched, Jennifer Daskal, another of the commissioners, who teaches law at American University in Washington, D.C. and is a former official in President Obama’s Justice Department, “explained that the inquiry was ‘important’ due to the ‘relative lack of significant accountability’ for CIA wrongdoing so far and ‘particularly important’ in light of President Donald Trump’s willingness to consider reviving CIA torture.” The executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report into the CIA’s torture program was published in December 2014, but no one has been held accountable, even though, as the AP described it, the report concluded that the CIA “understated the brutality of the techniques used on detainees and overstated the value of the information they produced.”

The AP also described how Jennifer Daskal said that the CIA torture program and related programs “have long-term consequences and they don’t just disappear from the American consciousness.” She added, “We’re just a small number of commissioners but I think we reflect a much broader, bipartisan group of individuals across America who are quite concerned about what happened and want to make sure that we don’t ever do so again.”

Another member of the Commission, former Arizona Secretary of State Richard Mahoney, who now directs North Carolina State University’s School of Public and International Affairs, made a point of stating that the group rejects the opinions of those “who believe national security controversies should only concern federal government officials,” as the AP put it. Mahoney said, “I think holding the federal government and its instrumentalities accountable at the local and state level is a critical step in the right direction.”

Other Commissioners include David Crane, a professor at Syracuse University College of Law and founding chief prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and the co-chair, with Jennifer Daskal, is Frank Goldsmith, who has represented Guantánamo prisoners.

As the AP also noted, the Commission “is an outgrowth of a decade of effort by a Raleigh-area group to draw attention to Aero Contractors Limited, a private air carrier tied to the CIA rendition program that is headquartered at the Johnston County airport about 30 miles south of Raleigh.”

As has been reported since 2005, by the New York Times amongst other outlets, Aero Contractors’ pilots “flew rendition flights to CIA interrogation sites for about five years after 9/11,” although “[a] lawsuit by German citizen Khaled el-Masri,” who “was mistakenly kidnapped and tortured at a CIA site in Afghanistan, against Aero Contractors and other companies he blamed for his rendition, was dismissed by a Virginia federal judge in 2006 on the grounds that the case could disclose US state secrets.” El-Masri was finally awards damages for his ordeal — but not in the US. In December 2012, the European Court of Human Rights ordered Macedonia to pay him 60,000 Euros ($80,000) — not enough for what he went through, but an acknowledgement nonetheless, unlike the US’s persistent stonewalling.

As the Independent noted, the Commission estimates that “at least thirty-four individuals were transported by the CIA front company, Aero Contractors, including a number of Britons.” After Aero Contactors’ involvement in the CIA torture program was first revealed, local activists pressed for an official investigation. However, “despite repeated meetings with state officials, including North Carolina’s Attorney General, no action was taken.” Christina Cowger said “they were ‘taking their cue’ from President Obama, who had decided in 2009 not to prosecute Bush officials,” adding that their “lack of cooperation led to the formation” of the Commission.

As the Independent also noted, Christina Cowger stated that the inquiry “may also help resolve some unanswered questions about the rendition program,” explaining that it is “still unknown which prisoners were on some of the flights, for example, and the commission could provide answers.”

The Independent also noted a UK angle, stating that the Commission might “illuminate the part played by foreign states, such as Britain,” because “[s]ome of the detainees rendered by Aero Contractors were British, including Binyam Mohamed, who was flown to Morocco in 2002 and tortured with UK complicity.” The author of the article, Rupert Stone, added, “There have also been rumours that the CIA detained captives on the British territory of Diego Garcia. Lawrence Wilkerson made headlines in 2015 when he told me that CIA prisoners had been held and grilled on the island. But the UK government has not yet conducted a thorough inquiry into rendition. The Carolina commission may shine some much-needed daylight on the UK’s role.”

David Crane said, “Certainly the UK will be brought into this,” and Stone added that “[o]ther nations which held detainees transported by Aero Contractors, such as Morocco and Poland, will also be examined.” he added that the inquiry “may help lift the lid on how many countries participated in the program. It was believed that 54 were involved, but new research shows that 15 more countries, including France and Japan, cooperated.”

Christina Cowger told Rupert Stone that Aero Contractors still operates in North Carolina and has “only increased in size”. Stone added, “It is unclear if the company continues to work for the CIA, but Cowger won’t rule it out.” As she said, “It’s perfectly possible they’re carrying out covert activities.”

Stone also noted that “President Obama did not end rendition when he took office in 2009, and the inquiry may examine his record, too,” adding that “[t]he Trump administration, which appears to have endorsed the practice, may also come under scrutiny.”

He added that the inquiry “is unlikely to result in any criminal investigations, given the history of impunity for CIA torture so far,” but pointed out that David Crane told him that “disclosures of new information could fuel litigation and serve as a ‘catalyst for further action.” Jonathan Freeman, another commissioner and a fellow at the Truman National Security Project, said that he hoped the inquiry would create a “transparent process” and effect “a change in policy, even on a subtle level,” but he acknowledged, as Stone put it, that “the going might be tough, especially with Trump in the White House.” As Freeman said, “We’ll be fighting an uphill battle. There’s always resistance to these kinds of things.”

Note: The photo at the top of this article is from a news report about a protest against Aero Contractors in January 2013 by North Carolina Stop Torture Now, whose work led to the creation of the North Carolina Commission of Inquiry on Torture. Please also listen to Jennifer Daskal discussing the Commission on NPR here.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose debut album ‘Love and War’ and EP ‘Fighting Injustice’ are available here to download or on CD via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and the Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

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

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

Guantánamo Lawyer Michel Paradis: Military Commissions are Based on Legal Apartheid

Please support my work! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration.

 

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

Here at Close Guantánamo, we have been campaigning since our founding over five years ago to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, because, as we explain in our mission statement, “Guantánamo harms our nation every day it stays open, and it continues to serve as a potent symbol for terrorist recruitment. Guantánamo also undermines our bedrock commitment to the rule of law, making that fundamental principle less secure for all Americans.”

In practical terms, most of our opposition to Guantánamo’s existence has focused on the injustice of indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial. During President Obama’s last five years in office, we persistently encouraged him to release the men unanimously approved for release by high-level, inter-agency government review processes, including the Periodic Review Boards. These began in November 2013, but their deliberations ended up dominating much of the discussion about Guantánamo in his last year in office.

However, we also recognize that, while failing to charge prisoners with crimes and to put them on trial, or to treat them as soldiers and to hold them according to the Geneva Conventions, is an inexcusable derogation from internationally accepted norms regarding imprisonment, the situation for those facing trials at Guantánamo is, fundamentally, no better. Just ten of the 41 men still held are facing, or have faced trials in the military commission system launched under George W. Bush in 2001, revived by Congress in 2006 after the Supreme Court ruled it illegal, and — ill-advisedly — revived again under President Obama in 2009, but the system remains unfit for purpose, and a betrayal of US values.

We have spent some time covering the commissions here — most recently in Chief Defense Counsel of Guantánamo’s Military Commissions Calls Them a “Poisoned Chalice,” a Betrayal of the Constitution and the Law, a cross-post, with my commentary, of the text of a powerful speech delivered at a national security conference at Georgetown University by the commissions’ Chief Defense Counsel, Brig. Gen. John G. Baker, and in another article entitled, In Contentious Split Decision, Appeals Court Upholds Guantánamo Prisoner Ali Hamza Al-Bahlul’s Conspiracy Conviction, and I have also covered the commissions for Al-Jazeera, in an article entitled, Guantánamo torture victims should be allowed UN visit, and on my website, in an article entitled, Not Fit for Purpose: The Ongoing Failure of Guantánamo’s Military Commissions.

Below, we’re delighted to be cross-posting a new — and devastating — analysis of the commissions’ irredeemable lawlessness by Michel Paradis, a senior attorney for the Department of Defense, who has represented several Guantánamo prisoners over many years. The impetus for Paradis’ article — in America: The Jesuit Magazine — was the filing of two cases before the Supreme Court, but his overview of the system, which he describes as a form of legal apartheid, is timeless. As he states, the commissions “are notoriously flawed. Despite costing more than a billion dollars so far, they have yet to produce a single conviction that is not tainted by legal doubt,” and they “are also an embarrassment to American standards of due process,” because “[l]ax rules of evidence allow for the admission of everything from ‘hearsay’ (legal jargon for rumors) to evidence derived from torture.”

As Paradis also states, “all of this is possible only because the Military Commissions Act, the law creating these tribunals, limits their jurisdiction to the trial of noncitizens — and only noncitizens. That means there are 43 million people residing in the United States who are subject to this law. But the terrorists responsible for the massacres at San Bernardino, the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Fla., and Fort Hood, as well as the Boston Marathon bombing, are not. Those attacks were all perpetrated by citizens who must be tried in the real court system, where nearly 500 suspected terrorists have been successfully prosecuted since Sept. 11, 2001.”

Unfortunately, it appears that the Supreme Court will not decide whether to proceed with the two cases submitted to it until September, but for those who want to know more about the cases, we recommend a recent National Security Law Podcast in which Steve Vladeck of Just Security and Bobby Chesney of Lawfare look at the two cases: of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri (currently involved in interminable pre-trial proceedings), whose submission “could give the Court a chance to determine whether an armed conflict existed with al Qaeda prior to 9/11,” and of Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, originally convicted in 2008, but whose conviction has partly been overturned on appeal, whose case “could give the Court a chance to settle, at long last, whether the commissions can adjudicate offenses that do not count as violations of the law of armed conflict.” See the Nashiri petition here, and Bahlul is here.

Guantánamo lawyer: Military tribunals are built on American apartheid

By Michel Paradis, America: The Jesuit Magazine, March 29, 2017

The Guantánamo Bay detention camp presents one of the great political, legal and moral dangers of our time. Of the hundreds of men held there over the past decade and a half, 41 remain. Only 10 of those are at some stage of prosecution before the special Guantánamo tribunals, the so-called military commissions. That figure includes five men accused of planning the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

As a senior attorney for the U.S. Department of Defense, I have represented several Guantánamo detainees slotted for trial. I submit that the single greatest danger these tribunals pose is the fact that they are built upon a form of apartheid; the Guantánamo tribunals are a separate and unequal justice system into which noncitizens have been segregated. That creates a precedent that endangers us all.

Two cases going before the Supreme Court in the next few months challenge the constitutionality of the Guantánamo tribunals on various legal grounds. But the most important question the court will have to answer is whether the war on terrorism has made obsolete the constitutional commitment to equality before the law.

The Guantánamo tribunals are notoriously flawed. Despite costing more than a billion dollars so far, they have yet to produce a single conviction that is not tainted by legal doubt. They have been bogged down for a decade by uncertainty over what the law is and the exorbitant expense of maintaining an ad hoc court system on an isolated naval base in Cuba. The alleged perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks are not expected to stand trial until at least 2020, depriving the 3,000 people who died on that day, and their families, of justice for over a generation.

These tribunals are also an embarrassment to American standards of due process. They are subject to routine political interference, are often conducted in secret and are presided over by judges who lack independence. Lax rules of evidence allow for the admission of everything from “hearsay” (legal jargon for rumors) to evidence derived from torture.

I suggest that all of this is possible only because the Military Commissions Act, the law creating these tribunals, limits their jurisdiction to the trial of noncitizens — and only noncitizens. That means there are 43 million people residing in the United States who are subject to this law. But the terrorists responsible for the massacres at San Bernardino, the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Fla., and Fort Hood, as well as the Boston Marathon bombing, are not. Those attacks were all perpetrated by citizens who must be tried in the real court system, where nearly 500 suspected terrorists have been successfully prosecuted since Sept. 11, 2001.

There are many legal reasons that the Supreme Court should strike down this segregation of the justice system. Most important, though, is that for all the dark periods of bigotry and national danger in U.S. history, this is the first time that we have retreated from the constitutional commitment to equal justice under law that has governed this country since the end of slavery. In fact, in every previous use of military tribunals, including those used to try Nazis during the height of World War II, citizen war criminals were tried on equal terms with noncitizens. The only countries that made the distinction now being made in Guantánamo were Germany and Japan. And after the war, the United States Army prosecuted the German and Japanese judges and lawyers involved in these trials for denying the most fundamental fair trial guarantee: the application of the Golden Rule.

In his poem on the rise of the Third Reich, Martin Neimöller warned us that illiberalism accretes from the outside in. It is rarely sudden. It relies on precedent. “First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a Socialist,” he wrote, as he confesses to keeping silent as they then came for the trade unionists and then the Jews. “Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.”

The Guantánamo tribunals have become a laboratory for the bare minimum of due process that the public can be convinced to accept. Each aberration, each shortcut on the rules of evidence, on torture or on judicial independence becomes a precedent. When Guantánamo was opened, the Bush administration intended it to be “the legal equivalent of outer-space.” But the truth is that it is only a few hundred miles from the American shore.

The Guantánamo tribunals perpetuate a naïve prejudice that the rule of law is a luxury, a waste of time or a privilege belonging to “us” and not to “them.” This paradigm is dangerous because the rule of law that we depend upon to protect us, to enforce our contracts and to secure our rights is a fragile thing. It depends on a shared confidence in the norms that give judges, courts and law their power to protect us from “them.” As the Rev. Niemöller reminds us, we are foolish if we think that being quiet in the face of injustice will keep us safe and on the inside; that we will remain with the “us.” What we do to the least of our brothers and sisters eventually becomes the rule for us all.

Note: The illustration at the top of this article is by the wonderful Molly Crabapple, from the first of four articles she wrote and drew for Vice News in 2013 after visits to Guantánamo. See the others here, here and here.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose debut album ‘Love and War’ and EP ‘Fighting Injustice’ are available here to download or on CD via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and the Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

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

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

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

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Since Theresa May triggered Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty three weeks ago, starting the two-year process of the UK leaving the EU, based on a slim majority in a referendum whose outcome was not legally binding, I have withdrawn into a protective shell, unable to cope with her deluded dictatorial arrogance, the pointlessness of the MPs who have persistently refused to challenge her in any way, with the spinelessness or corruption of most of the mainstream media, and with the racism and xenophobia and pathetic Little Englander nationalism unleashed by Brexit.

In these three weeks, I’ve been interested to note, I’ve met many other people who have felt the same, and who, like me, are refusing to watch the news any more — not just because it’s depressing to have to keep watching May and her fellow pro-Brexit ministers attempting to justify their idiocy, but also because of the bias of those bringing the news to us — the horribly corrupt BBC above all, with right-wing mouthpieces like the dreadful Laura Kuennsberg pretending to be journalists rather than stenographers for those in power, and with programmes like Question Time persistently giving far too much airtime to right-wing panel members and audiences.

Those of us who are so sickened that we’ve switched off are, of course, all Remainers, and we all know — not believe, know — that Brexit is an unprecedented disaster, that racism and xenophobia are out in the open now, poisoning our streets, and, along with our now-broken reputation for tolerance, we also know that far too many of our fellow citizens are flag-waving fantasists, longing for a golden age that never was, but that, in their minds, actually existed and, crucially, involved no foreigners. We also know that our economy is already in a self-inflicted decline, as the everyday cost of living is already noticeably more expensive than it was last June, a situation that can only get worse. We also despair that May and the Tories are so popular, and despair of the plight that Labour has dug itself into, with an unelectable leader, however worthy he is.

I’ve spent some of the last three weeks wondering if this detachment would lead to new ways of challenging the runaway Juggernaut that is Theresa May and her bloodless zombie enthusiasm for as destructive a break with Europe as is possible, or if we, the 48%, the 16.1 million UK citizens who voted to remain in the EU, would have to end up reluctantly retreating from politics as so many of us did in the 1980s.

I still don’t know the answer to that question, but as I returned from nearly a week away — with friends in Stroud, for 24 hours, and then, for four days, in a cottage in the Brecon Beacons, when the horror of having to look at May’s undead face or to listen to a tide of everyday bigots had been almost completely forgotten — I suddenly discovered that May had now added “total hypocrite” to the long roll-call of her failings, calling a General Election on June 8, even though she has no excuse to do so under the laws her own party brought in after the 2010 election to guarantee fixed five-year terms for parliaments, and even though, since running for leader last June, she has persistently said that she would not call an election.

As the Guardian explained, in a wonderfully hard-hitting editorial:

Britain does not need, and its people are not demanding, this general election. There is no crisis in the government. Mrs May is not losing votes in the Commons. The House of Lords is not defying her. No legislation is at risk. There is no war and no economic crisis. Brexit is two years away. The press are not clamouring for an early election.

And yet, as the Guardian added, it is now happening “solely because Mrs May sees Conservative partisan advantage in making it happen.” As the editorial proceeded to explain, “As U-turns go, it is an absolute screecher. The smell of rubber on the Downing Street black top is acrid and foul. Judgments about Mrs May will never be quite the same, and deservedly so. She has built her authority by being, and by appearing to be, a leader who plays straight, gets on with the job and takes politics seriously … But now there is a new dimension to Mrs May. She is now a party political leader whose words can’t be trusted at face value as much, and for whom politics is, after all, a game. The Tory party may win, if opinion polls can be believed, because Mrs May is trusted far more than Mr Corbyn. But the loss to wider politics ought to be severe. The damage inflicted by the hypocrisy of the apparently sincere is more serious than the damage inflicted by the transparently untrustworthy.”

The Guardian’s editorial added:

Some of Mrs May’s reasons for calling the election are particularly unacceptable. To say, as she did, that a poll is needed because “division at Westminster” is causing “damaging uncertainty and instability” sails troublingly close to being a Thames Valley version of the sort of thing that President Erdoğan might say in Turkey. Division in parliament is necessary and inherent, above all on something as momentous as the Brexit terms. Brexit reflects life-influencing divisions in the country. Mrs May’s decision and language illustrate the damage that referendums do to parliamentary democracy.

The election is also an invitation to voters to buy Mrs May’s Brexit terms sight unseen. She said … that she wants support “for the decisions I must take”. But we do not know what those decisions will be. They depend on negotiations that have barely begun with some EU partners who face elections of their own, as well as on events. All this will involve give and take. Mrs May is seeking a mandate to do something of which not even she knows the main planks, the details and the trade-offs. She wants to get parliament off her back in making the Brexit terms. This election must ensure that this does not happen.

Many things may change over the coming weeks. At this early stage the danger is that the 2017 election may be less a contest about who should govern and more a contest about how much power the voters are willing to entrust to Mrs May. The Tory manifesto will have to be watched like a hawk; it will be an unusually crucial document. This is a premature election which the country does not need, the people do not want and Mrs May does not require in order to do her job effectively. Above all else, this election must not write her a blank cheque over Europe.

The Guardian also shone a light on what happened yesterday when MPs voted on May’s decision. Just a third of MPs could have derailed it by voting against it, but in the end only 13 MPs did, with 522 others voting to allow it, including the SNP and the Liberal Democrats, who both hope to gain from it, and probably will (in the former case, strengthening the chances of a second independence referendum, and in the latter, creating the very real possibility that Tory MPs in constituencies that voted Remain will turn to — or revert to — the Lib Dems), and the Labour Party also going along with it, even though it could well be a disaster for them. As the Guardian noted, however, the Labour Party, currently, is too intimidated and fatalistic to have seen the importance of resistance.

What happens next? Well, who knows? I reluctantly sense that I will have to wake up from my slumber and engage, but how, exactly, has yet to become apparent. As Ian Dunt, the author of the very necessary book, Brexit: What the Hell Happens Now? has explained, “May has called a referendum on Jeremy Corbyn and is going to pretend the result is a mandate for her Brexit strategy.”

Ian Dunt has also written another useful article, How the general election could go against Theresa May, which I recommend, and Gina Miller, who launched the successful lawsuit last year against Theresa May’s dictatorial insistence that she could trigger Article 50 without Parliament, is crowdfunding funds to launch a new organisation, ‘Best for Britain’, next week, which is planning “the country’s biggest tactical voting drive ever [to] stop Extreme Brexit.” As the funding website states, “We are launching a tactical vote campaign, aiming to ensure the final vote on the Brexit deal is a real one; one that is best for Britain. We need to prevent MPs and the people being forced into an Extreme Brexit that is not in Britain’s best interests. We will support candidates who campaign for a real final vote on Brexit, including rejecting any deal that leaves Britain worse off.”

In addition, a Facebook group has already been set up to encourage tactical voting in the local elections taking place on May 4, which, presumably, will now be expanding its operations to include the General Election on June 8, and I look forward to as much tactical voting as possible to try and damage the Tories as much as possible. I also look forward to significant pro-European Tories — like Lord Heseltine, who regards Brexit as the most idiotic peacetime policy in his lifetime — refusing to be silenced as May attempts to stifle any vestiges of internal dissent — and, as noted above, I look forward to Tory MPs in pro-Remain constituencies losing their seats across the south east and the south west of England if they fail to support their constituents’ wishes.

Mostly, though, this most cynical of elections is in many ways unknown territory, with UKIP, who secured 3.8 million votes in the 2015 General Election, now falling apart as a party, and the probability that the biggest winner this time around will, yet again, be the biggest party of all — the non-voting party, those who, put off by corrupt and/or remote politicians, and by the lack of representation in our ridiculous first-past-the-post system, don’t vote at all. And in 2015, lest we forget, just 66.2% of the 46,354,197 people eligible to vote actually bothered to do so. That’s 15,656,672 people — or, to go by the turnout in the referendum, the 27.8% of registered voters (12,948,018 people), who didn’t vote, making “the will of the people” that Theresa May and her ministers bang on about incessantly, with the full support of the right-wing media, the will of just 37.4% of the electorate. That’s way more than the 2015 General Election, when only 24.9% of registered electors voted for the Tories, who, nevertheless, took 50.9% of the seats, but it falls far short of providing anything like a mandate for all of the horrors that the Tories have been inflicting on us over the last seven years, and that, with Brexit, looks set to damage us permanently unless we can find a way to defeat them, and to discredit their malignant view of what Britain is, and what its place is in the world.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose debut album ‘Love and War’ and EP ‘Fighting Injustice’ are available here to download or on CD via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and the Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

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

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

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

Please support my work! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration.

 

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

Last week, Vice News ran a noteworthy article, Trump hasn’t appointed anyone to keep track of released Guantánamo detainees, highlighting how the Trump administration’s lack of interest in understanding the nature of the prison at Guantánamo Bay is actually endangering national security.

As Alex Thompson reported, although Donald Trump “has vowed to take the detention center at Guantánamo Bay and fill it with ‘some bad dudes,’ … he hasn’t yet filled the top two positions in the federal government specifically tasked with overseeing the over 700 former detainees who’ve already been released to ensure they do not become security threats.”

Under President Obama, the job of monitoring former prisoners and “coordinating their transitions to civilian life” was largely fulfilled by “two small special envoy offices”: “one at the Department of Defense that reviews detainees considered for release and then tracks the intelligence community’s reports on them, and one at the State Department that helps coordinate communication between detainees and their lawyers, host-country governments, US embassies, and the Department of Defense.”

As Thompson noted, Trump has not appointed a leader for either office, to replace Lee Wolosky at the State Department and Paul Lewis at the Pentagon, and, according to current and former State Department officials who spoke to him, “multiple members of the approximately 10-person office at the State Department have been at least temporarily reassigned,” although a representative of the State Department’s envoy office “maintained that, for now, the office has sufficient capacity to deal with released detainees.”

Nevertheless, Azmat Khan, a fellow at New America in Washington, D.C. (formerly the New America Foundation), who studies issues relating to counter-terrorism, told Thompson that the Trump administration is “losing critical intelligence” about where former prisoners “are now and how they are doing,” and Wells Dixon, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has been at the forefront of the legal struggle against the lawlessness of Guantánamo since the prison opened in January 2002, explained, “Having somebody in place at the State Department is important to help with [released prisoners] reintegrating. That is important for the national security of the United States.”

Just 41 men are left at Guantánamo out of the 779 men held by the military since the prison opened. Nine died, and one was transferred to the US mainland for a trial, meaning that 728 have been released — 532 under George W. Bush, and the other 196 under President Obama. Where possible, prisoners have been repatriated, but when this has not been feasible — because of fears of ill-treatment in their homelands, or, as with Yemen, because of concerns across the entire US establishment regarding the security situation — third countries have had to be found that have been prepared to offer former prisoners new homes.

Of the men released, most, as Alex Thompson noted, “have begun quiet lives” in their homelands or in third countries prepared to offer them a new home, although some have gone on to take up arms against the US, as the Office of the Director of National Intelligence indicates in a report published twice a year.

Here at Close Guantánamo we have long taken exception to the types of figures bandied about by the DNI without a shred of supporting documentation, and whereas the latest report suggests that 121 former prisoners have reengaged (16.9%), we are more convinced by reporting from New America, which, in 2013, put the reengagement rate at just 4%.

While we dispute the figures, however, and also cannot discuss recidivism without expressing our dismay at the sensationalist manner in which most mainstream media outlets deal with the DNI reports, it is clear that the reengagement rate was much lower under Obama than under Bush — of the alleged 121 cases, only 8 (4.4%) were under Obama, while the other 113 (21.2%) were under Bush — and part of that is undoubtedly because of the role played by the envoys.

Speaking of the two envoy offices, Azmat Khan stated that, “Having that position filled was extraordinarily helpful for released detainees’ lawyers and to make sure the released detainees were being held in safe areas.” She added, as Alex Thompson described it, that “congressional political pressure also made the Obama administration much more cautious than the Bush administration had been,” although, incidentally, this was also “one of the reasons the detention facility remains open.”

Lee Wolosky, who was the special envoy for Guantánamo Closure at the State Department from 2015 until Trump took office, told Thompson that the Obama administration “worked hard to ensure a smooth transition for released detainees so that they could live a life ‘without temptation’ to go to the battlefield.” As Wolosky put it, “There needs to be some mechanism to monitor these people because monitoring security assurances helped us avoid problems.”

Thompson proceeded to explain that the State Department “negotiates with host countries to ensure that released detainees get access to things like employment, health care, and housing to ensure a smoother transition to civilian life,” and that, in addition, “they negotiate security agreements between the U.S. and host countries to restrict travel, arrange surveillance, and ensure the sharing of intelligence information.”

Paul Lewis, who was the Defense Department’s special envoy for Guantánamo Closure from 2013 until Trump took office (and whose recent thoughts on the need to close Guantánamo were posted here), agreed with his State Department counterpart. “Even if the president doesn’t want to close Gitmo,” he said, “his administration still has a responsibility to monitor released detainees.”

Nevertheless, as Thompson also noted, it appears “extremely unlikely” that Donald Trump “will fill the envoy positions,” because he “has yet to fill the vast majority of nearly 4,000 political positions throughout the federal government — he’s called many of them ‘unnecessary’ — and he’s proposing a 28 percent cut at the State Department,” to add to his stated enthusiasm for keeping Guantánamo open, rather than appointing new officials to jobs that contain the words “Guantánamo Closure” in their titles.

And yet, as with so much to do with Trump’s disregard for the administrative machinery of government, there is no indication whatsoever that his blasé or disdainful attitude will make government more efficient and more helpful for the American people, or, in the case of Guantánamo, that abandoning any direct monitoring of, and assistance for former prisoners will do anything to make the US safer.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose debut album ‘Love and War’ and EP ‘Fighting Injustice’ are available here to download or on CD via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and the Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

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

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