Andy Worthington's Blog, page 56

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

Listen to ‘Dreamers’ here on Bandcamp!

A year ago, I wrote ‘Dreamers’, a song for the 50th birthday of a very good friend, Jen Owen, who I first met 20 years before. I played it for the first time at her birthday party in Stroud, in Gloucestershire, and then recorded it last September with my band The Four Fathers, and we’ve just released it online as the second single from our forthcoming second album, ‘How Much Is A Life Worth?’

‘Dreamers’ reflects on our wilder, younger years, and then progresses to look at how we came to be parents and how “we overcame some demons / And gained some wisdom somehow,” and it’s one of a number of songs I’ve written in which I attempt to grapple with getting older and what that means — something that, I find, very little popular music does, being generally fixated as it is with youth, even when those responsible for its creation have long passed their youthful days.

That said, one of the most poignant musical moments for me over the last few years was when David Bowie returned from long years of musical silence with his 2013 album, ‘The Next Day’, and the absolutely extraordinary ‘Where Are We Now?’ with its palpable sense of mortality, and its refrain about “walking the dead.” And then, in 2016, almost on the eve of Bowie’s death, came ‘Blackstar’, a song that felt like a requiem — as well as being one of the most profound pieces of popular music ever recorded.

Please have a listen to ‘Dreamers’ below, and feel free to buy it, if you like, as a download for just £1 ($1.25):

Dreamers by The Four Fathers

My meagre efforts at tackling the aging process cannot compare with Bowie’s, of course, and in contrast to his ordeal I’m aware that middle age does not hold the same ghosts as the encroaching death that David Bowie was dealing with on the ‘Blackstar’ album, although, as regular readers will know, I have had my own ghosts to contend with over the years.

Nevertheless, I’m proud of my efforts to deal with what age and mortality bring — specifically in my song ‘Sweet Love and Ever After’, from our first album ‘Love and War’, and in ‘Dreamers’ and another song from our forthcoming album, ‘Tell Me Baby’, a ’60s-style garage rocker that will be released over the next few months, and I’m pretty sure that, in the months and years to come, I will continue to explore what it means to get older in a world that is, in some ways, youth-fixated, in other ways fixated on older people, with profound futility, seeking perpetual youth and beauty, and, in other ways, seems incapable of anything other than denial when it comes to dealing with what the reality of death means for our appreciation and understanding of life itself. I hope you’ll come along for the ride.

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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.

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

[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.

 

In trying to catch up on a few stories I’ve missed out on reporting about recently, I’d like to draw readers’ attention to a petition submitted to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on behalf of Mohammad Rahim, a CIA torture victim held at Guantánamo, who was, in fact, the last prisoner to arrive at the prison in March 2008.

The petition was submitted by Major James Valentine, Rahim’s military defence attorney, and the researcher Arnaud Mafille, and it follows previous submissions to the IACHR on behalf of Djamal Ameziane, whose release was requested in April 2012 (and who was eventually released, but not as a direct result of the IACHR ruling), and Moath al-Alwi, whose lawyers submitted a petition on his behalf in February 2015, which led to the IACHR issuing a resolution on March 31, 2015 calling for the US to undertake “the necessary precautionary measures in order to protect the life and personal integrity of Mr. al-Alwi,” on the basis that, “After analyzing the factual and legal arguments put forth by the parties, the Commission  considers that the information presented shows prima facie that Mr. Moath al-Alwi faces a serious and urgent situation, as his life and personal integrity are threatened due to the alleged detention conditions.”

Al-Alwi was, at the time, a hunger striker, and in the petition his lawyers stated that, “During his detainment at Guantánamo, Mr. al-Alwi has been systematically tortured and isolated. He has been denied contact with his family, slandered and stigmatized around the globe. He has been denied an opportunity to develop a trade or skill, to meet a partner or start a family. He has been physically abused, only to have medical treatment withheld.”

Unfortunately, although the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights is a key part of the Organization of American States (OAS), whose mission is “to promote and protect human rights in the American hemisphere,” and whose resolutions are supposed to be binding on the US, which is a member state, the US failed to act on the resolution regarding Moath al-Alwi, who remains held at Guantánamo, with no sign that there has been any improvement in his treatment. In September 2015, when he weighed just 97 pounds, he had a review at Guantánamo — a Periodic Review Board, a high-level parole-type process involving the main government departments and the intelligence agencies — which recommended his ongoing imprisonment, and last November, after he had given up his hunger strike, he had a second review, but was again recommended for ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial, on the basis that, as the board members described it, they were “unable to determine” whether he had “had a change in his extremist mindset.”

The Periodic Review Boards, which began in November 2013, were convened to review the cases of 64 prisoners who had been determined, by a previous review process, 2009’s Guantánamo Review Task Force, as being either “too dangerous to release” (despite a lack of evidence) or as suitable candidates for prosecution (until the trial system at Guantánamo largely fell apart under judicial scrutiny).

As another of the prisoners facing Periodic Review Boards, Mohammad Rahim (aka Muhammad Rahim) had his case reviewed on August 4, 2016 and was approved for ongoing detention on September 19, 2016.

As I explained at the time of his PRB:

Muhammad Rahim, who was born in November or December 1965, was the last prisoner to arrive at Guantánamo, in March 2008, when he was described as “a close associate” of Osama bin Laden. He has been described as a “high-value detainee” — one of only 16 held at the prison — but if this was the case he would surely have been put forward for prosecution, suggesting that, as with so many of the prisoners held at Guantánamo, his significance has been exaggerated.

Little was subsequently heard of Rahim, but at the end of 2012 his attorney, Carlos Warner, a federal public defender for the Northern District of Ohio, released letters that showed a different side to his client than the associate of bin Laden described by the US authorities. In one letter, Rahim wrote, “I like this new song Gangnam Style. I want to do the dance for you but cannot because of my shackles.”

Nevertheless, despite the many examples of Rahim’s sense of humor and his fascination with US culture, as well as supportive testimony from his brother, an asylum seeker in the UK, the board members ended up concluding that he “was a trusted member of al-Qa’ida who worked directly for senior members of al-Qa’ida, including Usama Bin Laden [sic], serving as a translator, courier, facilitator, and operative.” They also claimed that he “had advanced knowledge of many al-Qa’ida attacks, to include 9/11, and progressed to paying for, planning, and participating in the attacks in Afghanistan against US and Coalition targets.”

As I explained at the time, “I must note, in passing, that I find it highly unlikely that an Afghan, however trusted, would have been privy to advance discussions about the 9/11 attacks, which would have required considerable secrecy to ensure their success,” and, as his civilian lawyer, Carlos Warner, explained to the Miami Herald, the board “didn’t get the full picture” because he — Warner — “wasn’t allowed” to participate in his client’s hearing.” Warner said, “He had no knowledge about 9/11 in advance. He is being held because he was in a black site, not because of what he did. if he did those things, why didn’t they charge him?” — all valid comments and questions, with which I concur.

Although an administrative review of Rahim’s case took place last month, it is not expected that he will be approved for release as a result of it. These file reviews take place every six months, and eventually — within three years at the most — he will get another full review, at which he will be able to speak directly, via video link, to the officials who make the decisions about whether or not to approve him for release.

This, however, is a considerable wait for another review in which he can participate, and consequently I find it entirely appropriate that he is appealing to the IACHR to try to put pressure on the US to acknowledge that the circumstances of his imprisonment are not, in any way, in accordance with internationally recognized standards, and to publicize the ongoing limbo in which he finds himself.

Below I’m posting excerpts from the submission, which tell Rahim’s story from his own point of view and that of his lawyers. I hope you have time to read the excerpts, and to share this article if you find them useful.

Sadly, no media outlet whatsoever has deigned to publish anything about Rahim’s petition, despite the fact that his lawyers claim that he “was placed among the ‘high value detainees’ (HVD) at Guantánamo Bay” solely “to conceal the history of his torture by the CIA,” and this sorry situation is made all the more alarming because, on March 21, Donald Trump showed his administration’s disdain for the IACHR by refusing to appear at hearings scheduled to discuss US activities that are of ongoing concern to the IACHR.

Excerpts from the Petition to Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on Behalf of Mohammad Rahim

Background

The United States has never released credible evidence that Mohammad Rahim was a combatant, a terrorist or an important member of Al-Qaeda or the Taliban. By all accounts, he was merely a local Afghan whose ancestral village was located near the mountainous areas in Nangarhar province where Al-Qaeda was operating before December 2001. The worst allegation against Mohammad Rahim is that he served as a Pashto translator, “facilitator,” and guide to the Arabs who belonged to Al-Qaeda. All of the evidence against him is highly secretive, contradictory, lacking in credibility and inherently unreliable as it was coerced during detainee interrogations. It is unknown how much of it was derived from torture.

Mohammad Rahim never belonged to either Al-Qaeda or the Taliban. On the contrary, he was politically loyal to Hezb-I-Islami, whose leader, Hekmaytar, recently signed peace agreements with the government of Afghanistan and has agreed to share in the peaceful governance of the nation.

Mohammad Rahim was the son of a tribal chief in Chaparhar district, Nangarhar province, Afghanistan. Chaprahar district lies between the Tora Bora mountains, which serve as the frontier to Pakistan and contain numerous points of passage between the two countries, and the city of Jalalabad. His family fled to Pakistan as refugees from the Soviets during the 1980s. Two of his older brothers were killed by the Soviets during the occupation.

Mohammad Rahim was raised in Peshawar … where he became a school teacher for the children of Afghan refugees in Pakistan. He taught at both primary school and middle school and the subject he taught included geography, mathematics, languages and religion. In 1984, he was reimbursed five rupees per day from the school and two rupees per day from the International Red Cross.

By 1992, Mohammad Rahim was engaged in traveling back and forth between Jalalabad and Peshawar buying and selling wheat. At some point in 1994, the United Nations and the government in Jalalabad agreed to prohibit the cultivation of poppy. This led to the placement of a U.N. drug control office in Jalalabad. Mohammad Rahim earned a position in the drug control office as a finance officer where he earned approximately 600 rupees per month.

During this time, many Arabs remained in the area outside of Jalalabad following their participation in the U.S. backed defeat of the Soviet occupation. Because of his language skills and intelligence, Mohammad Rahim provided a variety of services to the Arabs including mostly serving as a translator.

When some of the Arabs from Jalalabad moved to Tarnak Farms, the Al-Qaeda compound near Qandahar, Mohammad Rahim accompanied them and continued to serve as a translator and facilitator for the group but he is not alleged to have undergone or administered any type of training at the compound.

After 1998, Mohammad Rahim returned to Chaprahar district where he continued to serve as a translator for the Arabs in Jalalabad. In October of 1999, he moved to Peshawar after learning that his father had developed cancer. He stayed there until his father died in June of 2001. Afterwards, he moved to Kabul where he operated a taxi to earn a living. It was during this time that the attacks of September 11 occurred.

Mohammad Rahim learned of the September 11th attacks over the radio listening to the BBC. After the attacks, the United States began bombing Kabul and, later, Jalalabad. Mohammad Rahim returned to Chaprahar where he anticipated the arrival of United States ground troops but witnessed only relentless aerial bombing. On or about November, 2001, Arab Al-Qaeda members came to Mohammad Rahim’s ancestral home and requested assistance in guiding the Arabs through the Tora Bora mountain regions. For approximately the following month, Mohammad Rahim assisted in guiding the Arabs to and through the Tora Bora. His primary motive was money and he was paid approximately 25,000 rupees as a result.

One of the Arabs who escaped through the Tora Bora was, allegedly, Osama bin Laden. As a result, the United States intelligence services began an intense effort to capture Mohammad Rahim and anyone who could provide information related to the movements of Osama bin Laden and the other Arabs from Tora Bora.

For the next seven years, Mohammad Rahim lived peacefully in Pakistan with his two wives and children. On or about June 25, 2007, he was captured while walking in an open market with his family. Within days, he was taken to an undisclosed secret detention facility where he was subject to “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EITs) inflicted by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for approximately nine months in violation of U.S. and international law, specifically in violation of the 1984 United Nations Convention against Torture.

Mohammad Rahim was the final detainee admitted into the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program. At the time of his arrest, no reliable intelligence sources indicated that he was an important member of Al-Qaeda or any international terrorist organization.

In March 2002, CIA Headquarters had expanded its scope of detention operations and instructed CIA personnel that it would be appropriate to detain individuals who might not be high-value targets in their own right, but could provide information on high-value targets. Mohammad Rahim was never a target in his own right, but was detained for information he might have.

Accordingly, in order to torture Mohammad Rahim, the interrogators sought specific permission to do so. On July 20, 2007, the Office of Legal Counsel approved his torture. The next day, the CIA initiated the employment of six specifically approved methods of enhanced interrogation: sleep deprivation, dietary manipulation, facial grasp, facial slap, abdominal slap, and the attention grab. The torture continued for approximately nine months. The method of sleep deprivation was executed by shackling Mohammad Rahim in a standing position for extended periods of time. According to the SSCI, the longest period of sleep deprivation was 138.5 hours.

The CIA’s detention and interrogation of Mohammad Rahim resulted in no disseminated intelligence reports. On April 21, 2008, and April 22, 2008, the CIA conducted an internal investigation to learn why, despite months of torture, Mohammad Rahim provided no intelligence – overlooking the obvious conclusion that he did not know what he was alleged to have known.

Following the United States’ failed attempt to extract intelligence from Mohammad Rahim by torture, he was flown to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba where he was placed among the “high value detainees” (HVD) at Guantánamo Bay. The only reason he is kept there is to conceal the history of his torture by the CIA. His character and personality are anomalous compared to the other Camp 7 detainees and he is very much out-of-place there. No reliable evidence has ever indicated that Mohammad Rahim was a fighter or an important member of Al-Qaeda or the Taliban. He was merely a local Afghan whose ancestral village was located near the mountainous areas in Nangarhar province where Al-Qaeda was operating before December 2001. The worst allegation against Mohammad Rahim is that he served as a translator, “facilitator,” and guide to the Arabs in Al-Qaeda. Therefore, his detention in Camp 7 serves only to hide the evidence of the failed torture interrogation methods that were employed against him.

His continued detention at Camp 7 has been secretive and indefinite. He has not been provided a meaningful basis to challenge his detention. On February 9, 2009, his detention was reviewed by a Combatant Status Review Board (CSRB) which recommended that he not be released. Nearly seven years later, on September 16, 2016, a Periodic Review Board (PRB) conducted a second secret hearing which also recommend that he not be released. In both cases, Mohammad Rahim and his assigned counsel were not permitted to know what the evidence or the allegations against him were. On the contrary, the United States government has maintained that a detainee at Guantánamo Bay has “no right to discovery.”

Torture

Mohammad Rahim was beaten, hanged for days at a time, deprived of sleep and starved in a fruitless attempt to gain intelligence related to the activities of people who were far above him in positions of social and organizational authority. A common torture method that was implemented during this time consisted of the interrogator crushing Mohammad Rahim’s testicles while asking questions. For the entire nine month period he was kept in a small, windowless cell where he was chained to either the wall or the ceiling and subject to deafening, ambient noise that masked the sounds of his screams even to his own ears. Except for the torturers and interrogators, his existence was entirely solitary.

Furthermore, the solitary confinement and forced isolation of Mohammad Rahim did not end with his transfer to Guantánamo Bay. Since his arrival at Guantánamo Bay, Mohammad Rahim has been kept in near seclusion within the notorious “Camp 7” at Guantánamo Bay, with fourteen other prisoners who have been characterized as “high value.” The location and conditions of his confinement as well as the rules and the identity of the authorities who control his prison remain highly classified. To date he does not know where his initial nine months of confinement and torture occurred.

Finally, as a direct result of the torture inflicted on Mohammad Rahim by the CIA, he continues to suffer from numerous medical problems for which that the United States refuses to provide treatment or to allow him to seek his own treatment.

Mohammad Rahim’s wrists are visibly mangled from being hanged for long periods of time and he is forced to wear protective sleeves over both wrists to ameliorate the pain.

Mohammad Rahim suffers from serious and painful nerve damage in his back from being hanged for long and repeated periods of time, some exceeding one hundred thirty four hours.

Mohammad Rahim’s ankles are permanently damaged from being shackled and hanged for long and repeated periods of time and swelling to the size of elephant feet, approximately twelve inches in diameter.

Mohammad Rahim cannot eat and digest most types of food due to severe corruption of his digestive faculties as a direct result of the CIA’s implementation of starvation methods, otherwise referred to as “food manipulation,” during his interrogation. He also cannot sleep uninterrupted without the constant discharge of acidic bile directly resulting the periods of starvation and the corruption of his digestive system.

Mohammad Rahim lives in pain as the result of his torture and the United States government refuses to provide him medical treatment. In fact, the United States refuses to even release his own medical records to him and his assigned counsel.

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.

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

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Back in November, I was delighted to take part in a fascinating day-long event in Brockley, the Brockley Festival of Ideas for Change, featuring 16 speakers from the local area discussing pressing issues of our time from a left-of-centre perspective. The day was divided into four sessions, and I’m pleased to note that recordings of the event are now online on the Brockley Society website as follows:

Session 1: Participation and Democracy

Session 2: A Fairer World

Session 3: An Inclusive Society

Session 4: Building a New Economy

I took part in the third session, An Inclusive Society, and the recording of my talk, “Demonising ‘The Other’: Tackling the Rise of Racism and Xenophobia”, begins 14 minute into the recording, after the novelist Gabriel Gbadamosi, discussing “The Creative Community as a Condition of Multicultural Society.”

You can also, if you like, read a transcript of my talk, which I published on my website a week after the event. As I stated in my introduction, I wrote it in a 90-minute burst of concentrated creative energy just beforehand, and “[i]t distils my feelings about the current rise of racism and xenophobia in the UK, the narrow victory for leaving the EU in the referendum in June, and the terrible indifference to the current refugee crisis, which is taking place on a scale that is unprecedented in most of our lives.” I added that “I examine the dangers posed by an ‘us’ and ‘them’ mentality, laying the blame on cynical politicians and our largely corrupt corporate media, whilst also asking how and why, on an individual basis, people are becoming more and more insular, and what, if anything, can be done to counter these dangerous trends.”

I was followed by Rosario Guimba-Stewart, the director of Lewisham Refugee and Migrant Network, who spoke about “Refugees and their Challenges”, and the session ended with author and campaigner Jackie Walker’s talk, “From Life to Action,” a powerful account that was read out by her friend Rosalind Stopps, after she was targeted, unfairly, by supporters of the state of Israel for alleged anti-semitic views in her role as the vice-chair of the Momentum group, from which she was sacked as a result of her persecution. The charge of anti-semitism was untrue — and it’s worth bearing in mind that Jackie is part Jewish, just as it’s also worth noting that similar attacks have been targeted at the Labour Party in general.

I hope that another Festival of Ideas for Change will take place — and not just in Brockley, but elsewhere in the country. After the dreadful events of the last ten months — the EU referendum here, and Donald Trump’s election in the US, and the subsequent emboldening of racism and xenophobia as a result — it is clear that everyone on the left and the centre-left needs to engage wth finding ways to preserve decency, tolerance and an international perspective in the face of the horrible new development of the UK as a depressingly and dangerously backwards-looking and insular country.

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.

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

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 week I published an article, 15 Years of Torture: The Unending Agony of Abu Zubaydah, in CIA “Black Sites” and  Guantánamo, marking the 15th anniversary of the capture, in Pakistan, of Abu Zubaydah (Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn), the gatekeeper of an independent training camp in Afghanistan who was mistakenly regarded by the US authorities as a key player in al-Qaeda and subjected to torture in secret CIA prisons in Thailand, Poland and elsewhere before arriving at Guantánamo with 13 other “high-value detainees” in September 2006.

My article last week ran though the main elements of Abu Zubaydah’s post-capture story — in particular, how he has been severely mentally and physically damaged by his torture, and how, embarrassingly for the US, he was not even who the authorities claimed he was.

As I stated, “We know … that Abu Zubaydah’s torture was profoundly damaging to his mental and physical health, and that he suffers from seizures, and we also know that, ignominiously, the US authorities have walked back from almost all their claims about him. Once mistakenly touted as al-Qaeda’s No. 3, even though the FBI knew that claim was idiotic, it was eventually conceded that he wasn’t a member of al-Qaeda and knew nothing about the 9/11 attacks in advance.”

I also noted how the authorities have worked hard to silence the “high-value detainees” — to try to prevent any discussion of their torture in the CIA’s “black sites” from becoming public. As I put it, “Like all the Guantánamo prisoners, everything that Zubaydah says to his attorneys is presumptively classified, but whereas the lawyers for the prisoners in the general population can apply to have their notes declassified by a Pentagon censorship team, the ‘high-value detainees’ have been almost entirely silenced, unable to tell their stories to the world.”

In response to this ongoing censorship, I promised last week to publish two declarations made by Abu Zubaydah, in 2008 and 2009, which were released last year as part of ongoing legal challenges, and those declarations are published below.

The first — the 2009 declaration — is an eight-page declaration that he provided to his attorney, which was released last summer. As the investigative journalist Jason Leopold explained for Vice News, it was “filed under seal in US District Court in Washington, DC seven years ago in his habeas corpus case,” and was unsealed last summer and prepared for public release in response to a motion filed by investigative journalist Raymond Bonner, “who convinced the federal judge presiding over Abu Zubaydah’s case to unseal dozens of court filings that have been shrouded in secrecy since 2008.”

As Leopold also explained, “The judge who previously oversaw the case, Richard Roberts, failed to rule on nearly every motion” Abu Zubaydah’s attorneys filed since 2009. Judge Roberts “abruptly retired from the bench as chief judge of the US District Court for the District of Columbia” last March, on the same day he was accused of sexual assault over 30 years ago.

Leopold proceeded to explain that the declaration “was attached as an exhibit to a 21-page motion his attorneys filed on September 21, 2009 asking the court to impose sanctions against the government for destroying ‘material evidence’ — nearly 100 interrogation videotapes, at least one of which showed Abu Zubaydah being waterboarded.” Helpfully, Leopold added, “The destruction of the videotapes was the catalyst behind the Senate Intelligence Committee’s decision in 2009 to launch an investigation into the efficacy of the CIA’s torture program. In December 2014, the committee released a 500-page declassified executive summary of its landmark 6,600-page report, which concluded that the torture of Abu Zubaydah and other detainees in the custody of the CIA failed to produce unique and valuable intelligence — and that the torture was far more brutal than the CIA had let on.”

The first declaration, in which Abu Zubaydah recounts the torture to which he was subjected, particularly focuses on how his interrogators came to understand that he was not who they had been led to believe he was.

The second declaration — predating the first — was written in February 2008, and focuses much more specifically on the torture to which Abu Zubyadah was subjected. This second account was published by the New York Times on January 19 this year — President Obama’s last day in office — and was included in documents released to the Times by the ACLU, as part of their ongoing case against James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, the psychologists who designed the CIA’s torture program

Until these two accounts were released, the only account of Abu Zubaydah’s torture, in his own words, came from a leaked ICRC report, based on interviews with the “high-value detainees,” which was compiled and sent to the US government in February 2007, and leaked to the New York Review of Books in April 2009 — and also see this follow-up article. Both are by Mark Danner, whose work was a great inspiration to me as I began working on Guantánamo full-time in 2006. I published Abu Zubaydah’s own account in March 2010, as Abu Zubaydah’s Torture Diary.

Below are the two declarations. I hope you find them useful, and will share this article if you do.

DECLARATION OF ZAYN AL ABIDIN MUHAMMED HUSAYN [July 2009]

Pursuant to § 1746, I hereby declare as follows:

1. I am detained by the Department of Defense in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. I submit this declaration in connection with my petition for habeas corpus and in support of a motion to obtain record s of my interrogations by U.S. government officials in lieu of video recordings of such interrogations that I understand have been destroyed.

2. This declaration describes some of what I said during interrogations, during which time I repeatedly explained that I was not a member of or affiliated with al Qaeda and that I never supported or engaged in any hostilities against the United States. I told my interrogators this information repeatedly, during calm interrogations and even during the extreme duress and violence of my most intense period of torture by the CIA. Any videotapes of such interrogations would have recorded these repeated statements of my innocence. This declaration is not meant to be a comprehensive description of my treatment or my interrogations. Time limitations and logistical difficulties make it difficult for me to do so.

3. After I was wounded and apprehended by the U.S. government in Pakistan in about March 2002 [redacted] and spent time recovering in a hospital. Interrogations by FBI officials started then. After some period of recovery, the FBI moved me to an interrogation room. Here, I endured constant sleep deprivation, was shackled to a chair naked in freezing temperatures for about 2-3 weeks, and bombarded with high-decibel noise, and without solid food. FBI interrogators questioned me for hours each day.

4. They asked me many questions about al Qaeda, which made me think they believed I was a member. As I explained during my CSRT and in my habeas petition, I was not and never was a member of al Qaeda.

5. l was unconnected to al Qaeda, and did not train anyone for operations and did not support violence against the United States or Americans. In fact, people with the CIA later admitted to me that the were wrong to think I was in al Qaeda and apologized to me for my torture.

6. During the early interrogations, the interrogators believed that I was “number 3 in al Qaeda.” This was absurd. I explained repeatedly that I was not a member and opposed violence against civilians. I did give them basic information about what I know of al Qaeda, but thls was information that anyone who spent time in Afghanistan could know. I told the truth to them and gave them whatever information I could give.

7. When I told them I was not in al Qaeda, they said, “don’t go there!” They said, “you are al Qaeda, do not deny it. [redacted] You are number 3.” I continued to explain why they were wrong.

8. They also asked me repeatedly 3 questions: [redacted] I kept telling them I can’t answer these questions. I do not know any answers because I was not involved with al Qaeda or any of its operations.

9. At some point, the FBI officials who had been interrogating me, stopped. I spent about 1 month in isolation, with no contact with interrogators. Still, I was kept naked, underfed, and freezing.

10. One day guards came into my cell with a man who later told me his name was [redacted] I later learned that he was working with the CIA [redacted] I also met a man who worked with [redacted] and who I later began to call [redacted] I believe he was also one of either [redacted] came into my cell screaming obscenities; he slammed me against the concrete wall, hitting my head repeatedly. He said something like, “Are you ready to talk? Now we are going to tell you how real interrogation is done!” Later, they put me (I was still naked) in a big black box made of wood. They kept me confined in the black box for hours in extremely uncomfortable positions without adequate air or food and with the extreme noise of a machine nearby.

11. This began a period of my most painful and cruel period of torture, which seemed to be directed by the men who I called [redacted] This torture included slamming my head and body against a wall while my neck was collared by a towel; nights confined in a large box (about 3 feet wide, 3 feet deep and over 6 feet tall) or hours confined in a small “dog box” (about 2 1/2 feet wide, by 2 1/2 feet long by 2 1/2 feet high); sleep deprivation; denial of food; exposure to cold; hanging by arms; prolonged, shackled standing. These methods were used repeatedly during this time in different combinations. The pain, discomfort and humiliation were incredible. Sometimes I would pass out from the pain and stress.

12. For example, the pain in the small box was unbearable. I was hunched over in a contorted way and my back and knees were in excruciating pain. I began slamming my body and shackled arms against the inside and screaming for help and tried to break the door. The wound in my stomach and leg opened up and I started bleeding, yet I didn’t care: I would do anything to stretch my leg and back for 1 minute.

13. During the walling and in between these torture techniques [redacted] screamed questions at me, like [redacted] Over and over I told them, “I don’t know! I have nothing to tell you! I don’t know al Qaeda or what they are doing!” This was the truth, as they later admitted to me.

14. Other times I would plead, “Tell me what you want me to say, I will say it!” Other times I just said things that were false and that I had no basis to know or believe, simply to get relief from the pain.

15. Another technique the CIA used on me was the waterboard. As best as I can remember, I was waterboarded for a period of six days, but I am not completely certain. As best as I can remember, I would be waterboarded three times in a row, for two sessions per day, over about six days. [Redacted] were present and administered all of the waterboarding sessions.

16. I would be strapped to a board by my arms and legs and by my waist (which was very painful because of my wound). Guards with black costumes, masks and black goggles strapped me in. My mouth and nose and eyes were covered by a cloth. The board – and my body – were placed horizontally. My head was immobilized by a board. Someone poured over the cloth, which entered my mouth and nose. I could hear one water bottle empty out by the gurgling noise it made; I hoped that would end the process, then I heard another bottle start to pour. Water would enter into my lungs. It felt like my whole body was filled with water; even my eyes felt like they were drowning. I experienced the panicked sensation of death and my body convulsed in terror and resistance. I thought, “I will die. I will die.” I lost control of my functions and urinated on myself. At the last possible moment, the board – and my body – would be made vertical. I instantly vomited water violently but at the same time was still panicked and desperate for air.

17. [redacted] would ask, “Are you ready to talk?” I told them, “I told you everything! I don’t know anything!” Again and again, I tried to explain they were wrong about me.

18. On about the fourth day of the waterboarding, [redacted] told me “nobody in Washington believes you” and started the waterboarding again. Also, in between the waterboarding sessions, I would be put in the dog box for hours and spend nights in the large box.

19. In what was the last session of the waterboard, I noticed [redacted] in the room (in addition to [redacted] and the guards), in the moment before the cloth was put over my face. One I saw again a month later and he introduced himself as a doctor. The other I saw the next day – he was a debriefer who interrogated me for a long period after.

20. After the last session of waterboarding, I was put in the big box. After a period of hours, [redacted] took me out, but this time they did not collar me with a towel and slam me against the wall. They told me that Washington still didn’t believe me and that I would be talking to new debriefers/interrogators. I was forced to stand naked, in shackles in front of a woman and a man. When I refused to talk with a woman present, [redacted] beat my head against the wall repeatedly. Eventually, they provided a towel to cover my private parts.

21. These debriefers/interrogators commenced a process of questioning that lasted a shorter period of time than any of the previous debriefings. They questioned me for only one or two hours per day. These debriefers and then their successors interrogated me every day. But after that day, the brutal period of torture stopped.

22. Interrogators did still ask me many of the same questions that the FBI asked. This process continued every day, for only one or two hours each day, until I was transferred to Guantánamo in 2006.

23. For a period of weeks after this most intense time of torture [redacted] would still visit and talk to me in an intimidating manner. By what they said and their manner, I believed they were attempting to remind me that I could be sent to the torture if the CIA ordered it or if the government thought I was not cooperating. Over time, however, they became more civil with me and tried to greet me politely and ask how I was doing. I think they finally realized they were wrong about me, and that they finally accepted the truth about me. In fact, [redacted] told me this later, and [redacted] did too.

24. To take one example, in a conversation with me, [redacted] told me about interrogations of al Qaeda members Khaled Sheik Mohammed [aka Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] and Abdel Rahim al Nashiri. [Redacted] explained that when these men were asked about me, they each explained that I was never a member of al Qaeda. As [redacted] explained it to me, these men seemed to think that the notion that I was a member of al Qaeda was absurd and were surprised the Americans suggested it. To take another example, in a conversation with [redacted] he was bragging to me that the U.S. intelligence operations were so expert at uncovering al Qaeda and deciding who was lying or telling the truth. I joked with him, as we sometimes did when talking about the mistakes in my case, “What about me? What about your fancy satellites and intelligence – and you thought I was al Qaeda.” He sort of smiled to acknowledge my point and nodded his head; he said, “well your case was a mistake.” I had several other conversations with [redacted] in which it was acknowledged that I was not a member of al Qaeda.

25. On a particular day, sometime in 2005, I was visited by [redacted] We got into a political discussion about my beliefs and my desire for a Palestinian homeland, my opposition to violence against civilians and that I had no interest in hurting Americans or fighting against them. He said he understood this. During this conversation he admitted to me that the U.S. was wrong about me. He said he had no problem doing what he did (torture) to Khaled Sheik Mohammed, but he was very sorry about what had been done to me, because I was not the person they once thought I was. At one point during this conversation, [redacted] became emotional and became unable to speak; he removed his glasses and wiped his eyes.

26. Sometime in 2005 at a location I do not know, I was visited by a high level official in the U.S. government. I was told that this person was the head of the program I was in. I met with him on two occasions to discuss my conditions. During the first conversatjon, he said that what happened to me was bad, and took personal responsibility for it, even saying it was a mistake. He said he wished to put these events behind us, and make things better for me now and in the future. He agreed to return my diaries, give me exercise equipment, improve the food and cease body cavity searches.

I swear under penalty of perjury under the laws of the United States of America, that the foregoing is true and correct.

Zayn Al Abidin Muhammed Husayn

Guantánamo Bay, Cuba

July 23, 2009

Declaration of Zayn Al Abidin Muhammed Husayn, February 2008

I am kindly asking the translator to forgive me for this letter or for the attached story, for unfortunately many parts were stricken let alone the bad handwriting and misspelling. Writing has become nowadays very difficult for me due to the neurological ailment that is affecting my memory.

Thank you and with all my appreciation.

IN THE NAME OF GOD THE BENEFICENT THE MOST MERCIFUL

Praise God and prayers and peace upon all the prophets.

One month or little over a month went by during which no one came to interrogate me or interview me, except for the guards that came once a day. They would restrain me to the medical metal bed and the physician (or the corman) would quickly change the gauze around my wounded thigh. They would then leave a dish of food that consisted of white dry rice with a very little amount of string beans along with a can of water. They would leave me totally naked except for a towel that they threw on my genitals. I was freezing from the intense cold. My nerves were just about to break from the extreme constant noise that was coming from an unseen device.

Following that month, the guards came one day and did what they previously did every day. They left afterward. As soon as I finished eating my food which, out of hunger, I did very quickly, the guards came back again which surprised me, for they had never done it in the past. They ordered me to put my hands between the metal cell’s bars so that they could tie them up. I followed their orders. Yet they told me to enter them in the upper part where the bar was horizontal. By chaining me in this position I wouldn’t be able to lower my hands as I would be able to do if I were tied up to the vertical bars and thus I would be in the hanging position. I knew they were up for some evil trouble, for they usually don’t do that, or didn’t do it in the past except when they would leave me hung in this position for long hours or when they tore my cloths. But that time I was naked with no cloths on to tear. What happened was after they chained me in the previously described position they opened the cell’s door and came inside, (they had covered my face with a black cloth bag before they came inside). They brutally and quickly pulled the towel that was covering my genitals. They unchained my hands from the bars and chained them with shorts chains to the chains that were around my legs which kept me in a bowing position at all times. They brutally dragged me to the cement wall. Then, they removed the hood. I saw a man wearing black cloths, but he was also wearing a military jacket. His face was uncovered. He had no mask nor big glasses, like the other guards usually had.[… ] Maybe he wanted to scare me with his look. There was anger in his face. He spoke with an angry tone and was yelling words that I did not understand at all. And before I made any attempt to understand what he was saying or respond to him he started brutally banging my head and my back against the wall. He talked a little more and then started again brutally banging me. I felt my back was breaking due to the intensity of the banging. He started slapping my face again and again, meanwhile he was yelling. He then pointed to a large black wooden box that looked like a wooden casket. He said: “from now on this is going to be your home”. At this point, the guards lifted up the box that was lying horizontally on the floor and set it in a vertical position. They fixed it to the metal bars.

The guy [… ] dragged me and brutally shoved me inside the box along with a toilet bucket, a can of water and a can of (Ensure). He was still yelling and cussing: “we will give you another chance, but a short one, for you to give it some thinking on whether you are going to talk or not”. He violently closed the door. I heard the sound of the lock. I found myself in total darkness. The only spot I could sit in was on top of the bucket, for the place was very tight. I couldn’t sit down in length or in width. I believe if I were able to raise my hand I would have barely touched the ceiling of this vertical casket box.Yet they made the chains so tight and so short that I could barely move my hands to take care of my bathroom needs or drink some water. Short hours went by after which I could hear the noise of carpentry work activities being performed outside. I had no clue of what was happening until I heard the click of a lock. Some light came in. At first, l couldn’t see anything, yet I felt something was being wrapped around my neck. I suddenly saw another man [… ] He was twisting a thick towel which was wrapped with a plastic tape so it could be given the shape of a noose. He wrapped it around my neck and brutally dragged me. I fell on the floor along with the bucket, with all its content that fell on me. The guards did not intervene. It was he who dragged me on the floor with that noose towel. He brutally dragged me towards the wall. I suddenly realized there was a wooden wall covering most of the original wall. Before he uttered any word he started brutally banging me against that wooden wall. I suddenly felt the same pain I felt when I was being banged against the cement wall. However, when I thought about it later, I believe they didn’t want to leave any trace of beating and banging on my body, for the first one is green and then it immediately turns blue. He kept banging me against the wail. Given the intensity of the banging that was strongly hitting my head I fell down on the floor with each banging. I felt for few instants that I was unable to see anything, let alone the short chains that prevented me from standing tall. And every time I fell he would drag me with the towel which caused bleeding in my neck. When he realized that I had completely collapsed he started talking breathlessly. He was cussing, threatening. With the help of the hand that was not holding the towel he was slapping my face. I tried more than once to defend myself or to avoid the slapping. I felt so humiliated despite the large amount of humiliation I had already been through. Yet it is an involuntary reaction to protect yourself when you get beaten but I was falling on the floor every time I was trying to protect myself. While he was beating me on my face and banging my back he said, while increasing the intensity of beating: “I see you don’t cover your face to avoid the beating. You think you have pride. I will show you now what pride is about”. He started banging my head against the wall with both his hands. The banging was so strong that I felt at some point that my skull was in pieces, or that the artificial bone in my open head was falling apart. I don’t know how to describe that feeling. The feeling was abnormal. I had this abnormal feeling in my skull. It lasted for ever and that guy [… ] was not getting tired from beating me. He then dragged me to another very tiny squared box. With the help of the guards he shoved me inside the box.

It was so painful. As soon as they locked me up inside the box I tried my best to sit up, but in vain, for the box was too short. I tried to take a curled position but to no vain, for it was too tight. It was a serious problem. I spent long countless hours inside. I felt I was going to explode from bending my legs and my back and from being unable to spread them not even for short instants. The very strong pain made me scream unconsciously. The contractions in my muscles and nerves were increasing with every hour, every minute and every second that were passing by, especially in the wounds I already had in my belly and thigh, let alone the pain in my head that was predominantly stronger than any other pain in my body. As to my back it was playing solo the guitar of pain but with no chords, for I couldn’t feel any chords, or nerves or even bones. The tone of the music was dissonant. Suddenly the door opened and a sudden light came inside. I didn’t hear or feel them come nor heard them turn the lock.

When they pulled me outside it took me a long time before I was able to stand on my feet. They were shoving me thinking that I was deliberately refusing to stand up. They didn’t give me any opportunity to do so. They restrained me to a metal bed that had many belts in every direction. I was totally restrained to the point that I was unable to make any movement whatsoever. They restrained me in a lying down position, Obviously, even the wounded thigh was strongly restrained under the gauze. I felt the wounds were opening, although it is a one long open wound that goes all along the left thigh and all you can see is a large piece of red flesh. After they restrained my body, they restrained my head as well with the help of strong plastic cushions on the sides, which made it impossible for me to move it, not even for one centimeter to the left or one centimeter to the right, and obviously neither upward nor downward. At any rate, I didn’t understand the reason for this very strong restraint and found them suddenly putting a black cloth over my head and covered it completely. I suddenly felt water being poured. It shocked me because it was very cold. But the water didn’t stop. So the idea was not to torture me with very cold water in a very cold environment. They could have done that all over my body which would made me startle and shiver. Yet the water that was being continuously poured and flowed over my face was indeed aimed at giving me the feeling of drowning resulting from a feeling of suffocation. And this is exactly what happened. They kept pouring water and concentrating on my nose and my mouth until I really felt I was drowning and my chest was just about to explode from the lack of oxygen. Indeed that was the first time and the first day that I felt I was going to die from drowning. Yet I didn’t know what happened. All I know or remember is that I started vomiting water but also rice and string beans.

They set the bed in a vertical position while I was restrained to it. They removed the hood. And as soon as I emptied my stomach from the water and the food they brought back the bed to the normal horizontal position. I was coughing a lot and I was trying to get some breath. I was breathing with difficulties and I was barely inhaling little carbon dioxide. They stopped me from doing what I was doing and only few minutes went by before they put back the black cloth over my head again. I tried to speak or yell with my head covered: “I don’t know anything” but I suddenly felt the water flowing again. To make a long story short, they performed the same operation three times on that day (the first day). And every time they were deflating the cushion that was holding my head a little bit and so I would feel my head lowered a little bit which made it every time more difficult for me to bear water flowing inside of me. On the third time, they lowered it more and more, (I’m not sure if every time they were increasing the duration of the drowning procedure. It is difficult to say, but that was my feeling.) The suffering was more intense every time they interrupted the operation for few minutes to allow me to breath or vomit and then they would resume again. After the third time on that day (the first day), they kept the hood with all the water on my head and started asking me questions that I was answering with difficulties due to the troubles I had breathing and to the fact that I didn’t know what they were asking me about.

Then, they removed me from the bed and dragged me to the long box; they shoved me inside and locked the door up. I don’t know exactly how much time has elapsed. And I could not believe that I was breathing normally. And I didn’t know how much time had elapsed with me in a fetal position inside the box. My head was lying between one comer of the box and the toilet bucket. And I don’t know how much time had elapsed while I was sleeping or fainted. However, what I felt was that the time was very short. I suddenly felt a strong strike that shook the box from outside followed by several other stronger strikes. The strikes stopped. I had problems readjusting my position to try to sit on the bucket. Yet the chains were making it difficult for me to readjust, for they were too tight and too short, in addition to the fact that they were tied up to the legs. Yet, as soon as I did that, the strikes on the box resumed in the darkness of the box. They shook the box so heavily which made me fall from the bucket. The strikes continued. There were probably ten strikes. Then they stopped. Then every (1/4) quarter of an hour they would bang again ten times, maybe to make sure I am unable to sleep. Yet with the time, the fatigue, the headache and the pain it seemed to me I was able to sleep for a very short time. And I started hearing the bangs as in a dream. They would wake me, I would count them and then fall asleep again; or if I had fallen from the bucket I would readjust again my position.

The same thing that happened in the tiny box happened again. They brusquely opened the door. I didn’t feel them coming or unlocking the box. A light came inside and broke the darkness oft he box. My vision was blurry. And without any introduction, I was dragged to the wooden wall and was asked questions. The individual that was asking me the questions was the guy [… ] He asked me: “do you have an answer?” I said no with my head. And I said: “I don’t know…” but before I could finish my sentence the beating started again and my head and back were brutally banged against the wall. And they did the same arrangement they had done the first day or the previous time, (I am not sure whether a full day had elapsed or at least an entire night). They did the same thing again: the banging against the wall, the little box, the water bed, the long box. Yet this time they increased the degree of harshness and brutality and the amount of time inside the little tight box. They also increased the number of times of water drowning in bed from three to four and some times five. Yet they added new things: 1) keeping me on my feet tied up for long hours, wet with water and urine to the point where I felt my legs, especially the wounded one, were just about to explode from pressure, and my back as well. 2) They kept me lying down on the water bed for long hours. I felt again the same pain and the same feelings that drove me crazy when they used to tie me up to the metal bed the first time I was brought to this location. Yet this time, my head was tied up and restrained in one direction and the wet black cloth was entirely covering my head which added to the pain resulting from the contraction in the neck, the back, the limbs, the joints, the muscles and the nerves. Add to it the difficulties in breathing through a wet cloth. 3) They increased the amount of cold water that was being poured over my naked cold body.

What makes it worse is a period I was not aware of. They told me later that it was (5) times or (5) days. However, I felt it was more and longer. This period would end with me losing sometimes control over my urination. I clearly noticed it the first time I was tied up to the bed that was placed in a vertical position and I would vomit what I had inside my stomach after the drowning operation before they bring me back to the previous position. I noticed that I was vomiting, there were tears in my eyes, my nose was leaking and even my genital organ was involuntarily discharging. This has become a normal routine after every drowning operation and I noticed that it was fully discharging more than once while I was standing on my feet and tied up for hours.

As soon as this period was over I would start feeling a weird headache that was new to me that was followed me like my shadow; the shadow rather \illegible\ sometimes, but this headache would become lighter sometimes but never disappeared. Actually it would become even stronger to the point that I felt sometimes like I wanted to hit my head against the wall. This headache is different from headaches caused by hunger or cold or low vision or lots of thinking or even by an ailment or physical weakness. These types of headaches could be sometimes very strong but this one is different and distinctively strong. Sometimes I was unable to distinguish one type of headache from another. That period was over and my hand started to shake lightly as soon as I start thinking a lot or get angry or become tense. This is very similar to the shaking I noticed years ago after I was wounded in my head (in 1992) and lost my memory. I would even say that it is the same loss of control I had over my right fingers that lasted for some time after that old head injury. The same thing started to happen to me again during that period.

At any rate, the torture continued using the same methods during the period of drowning that was not limited to water but also urine, in addition to the heavy vomiting that was breaking my head in two and tearing apart my stomach — that was already wounded. The long closed wound that goes through my belly and appears a little under the chest and go through \illegible\ seemed as if it opened internally during every episode of vomiting or after drowning or during long standings or even by just sitting down.

The humiliations, the terrorizing, the hunger, the pain, the tension, the nervousness and the sleep deprivation lasted for some time until one day they did all these things to me but with more intensity and for longer periods of time before they brought me back to the big box and they started banging on it with me inside to prevent me at least from sleeping. Before they did that they said to me: “we have two individuals that came from Washington to talk to you and they know about you more than you know about yourself, at least for now. They will ask you questions and the more truthful you will be with them the more you will be able to save yourself from worse troubles.” I didn’t really realized what he said. I was still lying down on the floor surrounded by the large number of guards with their black cloths. When he did not get any response from me except for another series of vomiting episodes, he gave them the order to readjust my position, made me stand on my feet and clean the floor with the same black hood they covered my head with while I was standing for long hours, just to humiliate me and disgrace me. And indeed they cleaned the floor with the black hood and then put it on my head. A short time went by and few minutes later I heard foot steps and other individuals came in. The hood was lifted and I saw two other individuals: a man and a woman in civilian cloths. lt took minutes before I realized that I was completely naked in front of a woman. For moral and religious reasons I rushed and covered my genitals with my hands with expressions of anger on my face. The guy […] said to me: “don’t start getting angry again otherwise we’ll start again from zero. Understood?” He said this while shoving me several times to the wall and then he put me in a standing position. At this point, the woman started reading questions from a piece of paper she was holding.

And out of embarrassment or tension she read several questions at once and her friend told her: “ask one question at a time”; which she did. I told her: “I will answer the questions while looking at this man”, and I pointed towards her friend, adding: “it is not appropriate for me to look at you while I am naked”. Suddenly, the guy [… ] brutally shoved me several times to the wall and said: “you still have pride, right?” I tried to clarify and say that it was not a matter of pride but rather a matter of good manners regardless of the circumstances and regardless of the fact that this woman is an enemy and regardless of the fact that she is part of the team that is torturing and humiliating me in such an rude and inconsiderate manner. But my words were like putting fuel on fire and they made him immaturely angry. At any rate, after several questions were posed to me and that I had already answered a million times, even prior to the recent intense episode of torture, the two individuals left and the guards brought me back to the long box and locked the door up.

That time or that night they didn’t bang on the box from outside. I believe they were using rods or batons for the banging. Thus, I slept that night for a long time though interrupted given the hard sitting position. Well, how could I sleep with all the nightmares and the pain that became so impossible for me to know its sources.

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.

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

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.

 

On Friday, in the appeals court in Washington, D.C., judges appear to have brought to an unsatisfactory end a four-year struggle to make public videotapes of prisoners at Guantánamo — and specifically Jihad Dhiab (aka Diyab), a Syrian, also known as Abu Wa’el Dhiab — being force-fed and violently extracted from their cells.

The case, as explained in a detailed timeline on the website of Reprieve, began in June 2013, during the prison-wide hunger strike that year, which attracted international opposition to President Obama’s lack of activity in releasing prisoners and working towards fulfilling the promise to close the prison that he made on his second day in office in January 2009.

I also covered the case extensively at the time — see my archive here, here, here and here (which included Dhiab’s release to Uruguay and subsequent struggle to adapt to his new life), ending with an appeal court ruling in May 2015, when the D.C. Circuit Court refused to accept an appeal by the government arguing against the release of the videotapes, and a rebuke to the government in July 2015, by Judge Gladys Kessler in the federal court, who had initially ordered the release of the tapes, and who “ordered the government to stop wasting time with ‘frivolous’ appeals against her rulings,” and to release the tapes.

Judge Kessler had set a deadline of August 31, 2015 for the government to comply, but, as I noted in a subsequent footnote, the government obliged only by releasing to  the court “redacted versions of eight videotapes” showing force-feeding, not the 32 videotapes in total that were being fought over.

As the Guardian explained at the time:

Attorneys in the case have viewed the tapes, but said that classification restrictions prevent them from discussing the substance of their contents. They are said to show Dhiab being forcibly removed from his cell using a so-called “tackle-and-shackle” technique, as well as being fed through a tube inserted through his nose into his stomach while his limbs and head are restrained.

Cori Crider, an attorney for Dhiab through the human-rights group Reprieve, called the behavior depicted on the videotapes “a national scandal”.

Crider said: “If the American people could see the force-feeding tapes I’ve watched, they would understand that abuse in Guantánamo is not just in the ‘bad old days’ of the past, but continues right up to the present.”

The Guardian also noted that, although eight “sanitized” video had been provided to the court, the government “continue[d] to resist their release to the public” via a lawsuit filed by 16 media organizations. The Guardian additionally noted that, in a July filing, Guantánamo’s commander at the time, Rear Adm. Richard Butler had claimed that, if the tapes were released, their content could “be provided to detainees, allowing them to manipulate the system, disrupt good order and discipline within the camps, and enable them to test, undermine and then threaten physical and personnel security,” and would also “facilitate the enemy’s ability to conduct information operations and could be used to increase anti-American sentiment, thereby placing the lives of US service members at risk” — a cumbersome and rather self-defeating argument, as the biggest element creating anti-American sentiment is Guantánamo itself, with its detention without charge or trial, its history of torture, and, more recently, its inhumane force-feeding.

I then lost track of the story, but as Reprieve’s timeline explained, on January 21, 2016, the Obama administration filed another appeal to suppress the release of the force-feeding tapes, and the latest decision by a three-judge panel in the Circuit Court followed arguments in September 2016.

As Charlie Savage explained for the New York Times, the coalition of 16 news organizations, including the Times, had first petitioned the court to unseal the videotapes in June 2014, and in October 2014 Judge Kessler had first ruled that the government must disclose them, but on Friday a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit, in the first major legal decision about Guantánamo under Donald Trump, “overturned her ruling.”

The panel — George H.W. Bush appointee Judge A. Raymond Randolph, Reagan appointee Judge Stephen F. Williams, and Clinton appointee Judge Judith Rogers — held that “even if the public has a qualified constitutional right to have access to classified evidence in such a lawsuit — a question about which the judges disagreed — disclosing the videotapes would create national security risks trumping that right.”

The Times added that the news organizations “had argued that it was in the public interest to see how the government was treating the men whom the United States is holding in open-ended detention without trial and force-feeding to keep alive.”

The government, however, “argued that the videos could be used in propaganda to incite violence against Americans and to recruit terrorists,” echoing the dubious claims made by former Guantánamo commander Rear Adm. Richard Butler two years ago. Nevertheless, Judge Randolph agreed with the government, noting that “images are more provocative than written or verbal descriptions,” and adding, “Extremists have used Guantánamo Bay imagery in their propaganda and in carrying out attacks on Americans. For example, the Islamic State beheaded American journalists wearing orange jumpsuits commonly associated with Guantánamo Bay detainees.”

Again, I have to say that closing Guantánamo and preventing force-feeding would be a better way of preventing extremism than banning the release of videotapes showing torture.

However, wheeling out further tired old arguments, the government “also argued that if detainees knew that such videotapes had become public, they might act out during force-feeding sessions in hopes that the episodes would also be taped,” adding a claim that, “if militants could study the guards’ techniques as shown on the videos, they might develop countermeasures.”

Unfortunately, although Judge Kessler “had rejected the Obama administration’s arguments that the disclosure would jeopardize national security as ‘unacceptably vague, speculative,’ lacking specificity or ‘just plain implausible,’” and had fought tenaciously for the prisoners’ rights for two years, the appeals court judges “ruled that she had erred.”

David A. Schulz, a lawyer representing the media coalition, said his clients had not yet decided whether to appeal. As he described it, “The only thing that all three judges agreed upon is that the government had demonstrated a compelling interest in keeping the videotape evidence secret. This is troubling given the conclusion of the district judge, after careful review of the actual videotape evidence, that the American public had a right to see what that evidence documented of alleged abuse.”

Jon B. Eisenberg, who had represented Dhiab, said, “It’s a loss to the American people that they will never see the shocking images of force-feeding at Guantánamo Bay that a handful of lawyers have seen behind closed doors.”

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.

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

[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 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.

Yesterday, March 30, marked 70 days since Donald Trump became president, and we hope you’ll join us in our photo campaign. On the day of Trump’s inauguration, we set up a page on the Close Guantánamo website featuring photos of supporters holding posters asking Donald Trump to close the prison, and, to join us, please print off a poster, take a photo with it, and send it to us.

Since Trump took office, there have been disturbing suggestions of new activities regarding Guantánamo, although nothing has yet come to fruition. A week after his inauguration, as I wrote about in an article entitled, Donald Trump Proposes to Keep Guantánamo Open, to Prevent Further Releases, and to Reintroduce Torture and “Black Sites”, a draft executive order was leaked, revealing that he intended not only to keep Guantánamo open, but also to send new prisoners there, and to “suspend any existing transfer efforts pending a new review as to whether any such transfers are in the national security interests of the United States.”

Trump also intended to reinstate torture and the use of CIA “black sites,” but immediately faced a huge backlash from the intelligence agencies, from lawmakers, and even from his own appointment as defense secretary, retired general James Mattis. In early February, another draft executive order was leaked, in which all mention of torture and “black sites” was dropped, and the focus shifted to a proposal to bring Islamic State prisoners to Guantánamo.

Again, Trump faced criticism, this time primarily from legal experts, who warned that the existing legislation covering the imprisonment of men at Guantánamo — the Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed just after the 9/11 attacks — would probably be insufficient to cover IS prisoners, and, in any case, there was no compelling reason to bring new prisoners to Guantánamo, because, throughout the last 15 years, even when Guantánamo was being set up and trumpeted by the Bush administration as an important innovation, US federal courts had established that they are perfectly capable of dealing with the cases of anyone accused of terrorism — unlike, it should be added, the military commissions at Guantánamo, which have failed to establish any credibility and are permanently plagued with irreconcilable problems that are incompatible with justice.

While we wait to see if an executive order will be issued, or if Trump has been convinced that Guantánamo is actually a legacy issue, as President Obama realized, in spite of his inability to close it, we have heard little from the 41 men still held. Ten are facing (or have faced) military commission trials, and pre-trial hearings are ongoing in the cases of the five men charged in connection with the 9/11 attacks, and in the case of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, accused of masterminding the attack on the USS Cole in 2000. However, of the 31 other men, almost nothing has been heard.

26 of the 31 are still part of the parole-type Periodic Review Board process, which began in November 2013, and, for the next three years, reviewed the cases of 64 men previously regarded (with evidently undue caution) as “too dangerous to release” or as eligible for prosecution, approving 38 men for release. Although the first rounds of the PRBs were completed in September, further reviews continue for those men recommended for ongoing imprisonment, via administrative file reviews (every six months), and, less frequently, full reviews, in which the prisoners, by video-conference, are questioned by government officials. On February 9, eleven notoriously right-wing Republican Senators wrote to Donald Trump to urge him to suspend the PRBs, but, we are pleased to note, he has not acted on that request.

The other five men still held have all been approved for release from the prison, but are still held, which is unforgivable regardless of whoever the president is. Three were approved for release in 2009 by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama set up shortly after taking office for the first time, and the other two were recommended for release by PRBs.

Below, we’re cross-posting a recent article by Clive Stafford Smith, the founder of international human rights group Reprieve, who has just returned from Guantánamo, where he saw four of his clients. All have had their cases reviewed by the Periodic Review Boards, and one, Abdul Latif Nasser (aka Nasir), a Moroccan, is one of the men unfortunate enough to have been approved for release, but to still be held. The other three are Ahmad Rabbani, Haroon al-Afghani and Khalid Qassim (aka Qasim), whose ongoing imprisonment has been upheld by the PRBs, although al-Afghani had a second full review just three days ago.

Stafford Smith briefly runs through his client’s stories, and notes how “uniformly polite and helpful” the guards were, reinforcing what I was told this week by another attorney — that Rear Adm. Edward Cashman, the new commander of Joint Task Force Guantánamo (JTF-GTMO), is making life as easy as possible for the remaining prisoners, either because he wants to avoid a backlash by the prisoners against their perception that, under Trump, their chances of release have once more diminished, or because he recognizes, at some level, that Guantánamo has run its course.

Stafford Smith ends his article by urging Donald Trump to recognize, if nothing else, that the $11 million a year it costs to keep each prisoner at Guantánamo is an insane waste of money, and “more than 100 times more than the costliest prison in the U.S.” and we too hope that, if Trump’s outrageous proposals to revive Guantánamo have indeed been shelved, it will become possible to persuade him that his best option is to close it once and for all.

– Andy Worthington

Groundhog Day In Guantánamo Bay

By Clive Stafford Smith, Huffington Post, March 27, 2017

It is Groundhog Day in Guantánamo Bay. I visited four of Reprieve’s clients last week. One was Abdul Latif Nasser, who was cleared for release to his native Morocco last year, after six US intelligence agencies determined he was no threat to anyone. He narrowly missed the plane home when the Obama Administration failed to organize his transfer before Donald Trump took office; the new president promises to keep the prison open, and end any releases. Understandably, Abdul Latif seemed downhearted.

Then there was Ahmed Rabbani, a Karachi taxi driver who was mistaken 15 years ago for a big time terrorist called Hassan Ghul. He spent 545 days in the CIA secret prison programme before making it to Guantánamo. The US Senate Report classifies him as one of the rare prisoners “who was subject to [torture] techniques without the approval of CIA headquarters.” (I struggle to understand why it might have been better if American authorities had authorized it.)

Or there is Haroon al Afghani, the last Afghan among the 24, who is alleged to have played a minor role with a group that vehemently opposed the Al Qaida interlopers, and who now play a role in the US-backed government. Or Khalid Qassim who (as he would say of himself) is simply nobody, from Yemen. And so it goes on and on. The original 762 “low value” detainees were identified by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as the “worst of the worst” terrorists in the world. Far from it. Even after distilling them to just 24, they are a motley crew.

I first came to Guantánamo in 2004. Thirteen years on, it remains surreal. The sign near the prison camp still boasts in massive letters, along nine drums of concrete, that we are “Honor Bound” to defend freedom. There is no solitary confinement — only “single cell operations.” The military on the base continue to use fake names as if revealing their true identity will attract ISIS into middle America — this time, I was shepherded around by Wookie, Jack Sparrow, King Kong and others.

But the officers were uniformly polite and helpful, trying hard to keep busy. With more than two thousand soldiers, there are 50 for each detainee. The annual cost is estimated to be $454 million, a shade over $11 million per prisoner per year. By way of contrast, this is more than 100 times more than the costliest prison in the U.S. — a Colorado Supermax, which is a snip at $78,000. Each of my clients offers his own take on better ways of spending his millions.

In short, if Donald Trump had any interest in a sensible budget, he would begin by cutting out this monumental waste of money. It is a shame that President Obama failed to fulfil his promise to close the prison, but this should not lessen our own commitment to make sure it happens.

Note: The image at the top of this article is by the photographer Eugene Richards, from his series taken at Guantánamo in 2013.

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.

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

 

In the eleven years since I first began working on Guantánamo full-time, researching its history and the stories of the men held there, writing about them and working to get the prison closed down, one date has been burned into my mind: March 28, 2002, when Abu Zubaydah (Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn), an alleged “high-value detainee,” was seized in a house raid in Faisalabad, Pakistan. That night dozens of prisoners were seized in a number of house raids in Faisalabad, and some were taken to CIA “black sites” or sent abroad on behalf of the CIA to torture facilities in other countries, run by their own torturers. Most ended up, after a few months, in Guantánamo, and most — through not all — have now been released, but not Abu Zubaydah.

He, instead, was sent to a CIA “black site” in Thailand, where he was the first prisoner subjected to the CIA’s vile post-9/11 torture program, revealed most clearly to date in the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report about the program, published in December 2014. Although the executive summary was heavily redacted, and the full report has never been made public, it remains the most powerful official indictment of the torture program, which, it is clear, should never have been embarked upon in the first place.

After Thailand, where he was subjected to waterboarding (an ancient form of water torture) on 83 occasions, Abu Zubaydah was sent to Poland, and, after other flights to other locations (a “black site” in Guantánamo, briefly), and others in Morocco, Lithuania, and — probably — Afghanistan, he ended up back at Guantánamo, though not covertly, in September 2006, when President Bush announced to the world that he and 13 other “high-value detainees” had been removed from the CIA “black sites” whose existence he had previously denied, but which, he now admitted, had existed but had just been shut down.

And yet, ten and a half years after his arrival at Guantánamo, Abu Zubaydah has never been charged with a crime, and languishes in a limbo that, although not as evidently constituting torture as the program to which he was subjected in the “black sites,” is still a form of torture — open-ended imprisonment, without charge or trial, with no family visits allowed, and no adequate external monitoring of his health. Like all the Guantánamo prisoners, everything that Zubaydah says to his attorneys is presumptively classified, but whereas the lawyers for the prisoners in the general population can apply to have their notes declassified by a Pentagon censorship team, the “high-value detainees” have been almost entirely silenced, unable to tell their stories to the world.

We know, however, that Abu Zubaydah’s torture was profoundly damaging to his mental and physical health, and that he suffers from seizures, and we also know that, ignominiously, the US authorities have walked back from almost all their claims about him. Once mistakenly touted as al-Qaeda’s No. 3, even though the FBI knew that claim was idiotic, it was eventually conceded that he wasn’t a member of al-Qaeda and knew nothing about the 9/11 attacks in advance.

I have been writing about Abu Zubaydah for eleven years, first in my book The Guantánamo Files, published in 2007, and then in a number of articles, particularly from 2008 to 2010. I also wrote about him, and as many of the other CIA prisoners as I could find reference to, in a detailed section dealing with the US actions post-9/11 of a report for the UN about secret detention, which was published in 2010.

In 2011, Abu Zubaydah was recognized as a “victim” in an investigation by a prosecutor in Poland, and this led, in 2014, to the European Court of Human Rights delivering a powerful condemnation of the US torture program and of Poland’s role hosting a CIA “black site,” and, in 2015, to the court granting him damages of  €130,000 ($148,000), although the US government continued to behave as though it had nothing to do with it, consistently refusing to cooperate, or even to comment on the limited accountability that was being displayed in Europe.

Last year, I cross-posted a major article on Abu Zubaydah written by the academic Rebecca Gordon (in April), and also mentioned a lawsuit filed at the same time by the journalist Raymond Bonner, as announced by Politico.

Bonner’s case led, in July, to the release of an eight-page declaration that Zubaydah provided to his attorneys in 2009, which Jason Leopold wrote about for Vice News — and I’ll be cross-posting that declaration tomorrow. In the meantime, however, Leopold — the so-called “FOIA terrorist” — had also secured CIA files dealing with the CIA’s “black sites,” which he wrote about in an article entitled, “Barbaric Conditions That Led to a Detainee’s Death Are Laid Bare in CIA Reports.” Following up on the release of these documents, the Guardian focused on a document attributed to the chief of the CIA’s Office of Medical Services (OMS). As the article stated:

[W]riting in “retrospect”, OMS concluded that Abu Zubaydah “probably reached the point of cooperation even prior to the August [2002] institution of ‘enhanced’ measures – a development missed because of the narrow focus of questioning”.

That OMS conclusion bolsters the account of a former FBI official, Ali Soufan, who interrogated Abu Zubaydah in a secret Thai prison that spring. Soufan would later testify and write in a book, The Black Banners, that the CIA interfered with and ultimately scotched a promising and less-coercive interrogation of Abu Zubaydah – one that the landmark 2014 Senate inquiry found yielded intelligence on al-Qaida.

“Nothing changed in my statement. A lot changed in their statements. Now you know why my statement was the only statement under oath,” Soufan told the Guardian. “From day one, I mentioned that CIA people who were there were as upset as me and left [the interrogation] before me.”

Joe Margulies, an attorney for Abu Zubaydah, said the document “confirms what we’ve been saying all along and shows what happens when amateurs are given authority over the nation’s security. Mitchell and Jessen were so certain they knew the answer before they asked the question that they couldn’t hear the truth even as Abu Zubaydah gurgled it from the board.”

In August, Abu Zubaydah went before a Periodic Review Board, established to review the cases of 64 men considered “too dangerous to release,” or recommended for prosecution by a task force that President Obama set up in 2010, and I wrote about the review in an article entitled, Torture Victim Abu Zubaydah, Seen For the First Time in 14 Years, Seeks Release from Guantánamo. However, the authorities refused to fully acknowledge the comprehensive manner in which the alleged basis for Abu Zubaydah’s imprisonment had collapsed, and approved his ongoing imprisonment two months later, prompting another of his attorneys, Brent Mickum, to tell Jason Leopold, “We always expected that it would always come down exactly as it has. We never believed we had a chance.”

Mickum’s comments echoed those of Joe Margulies, who, at the time of his PRB, said it was “just a formality, a ritual,” adding, “Abu Zubaydah will not be released.” Between the review and its decision, Margulies wrote a hard-hitting op-ed for Time, entitled, A Man Wrongly Tortured for 9/11 Remains in Guantánamo, in which he stated:

It is one thing to be tortured, still another to be tortured and silenced, and something worse altogether to be tortured, silenced and forgotten. Like Dante’s Hell, Abu Zubaydah descends from one torment to another, each worse than the last.

Margulies also wrote, regarding the Senate Intelligence report’s conclusions about Abu Zubaydah:

From its meticulous review, the Committee concluded the Agency was, to put it gently, mistaken. Zubaydah was never a member of al-Qaeda, let alone one of its high ranking officers. He had no connection either to the attacks of 9/11 or to al Qaeda’s terror. This, of course, is precisely what Zubaydah told his torturers over and over, perhaps as he was strapped once more to that water-soaked board, stuffed again into that coffin built just for him or hung again from the hooks in the ceiling at the black site outside Bangkok.

After noting that, since arriving at Guantánamo, Zubaydah “has never appeared in a court of any kind, whether military or civilian, kangaroo or conventional,” Margulies added that, “if the United States has its way, he never will. As his torture began, his interrogators sought and received ‘assurances’ that he would ‘remain in isolation and incommunicado for the remainder of his life.’”

As Margulies also explained, “We have no illusion that Abu Zubaydah will be cleared by this Alice-in-Wonderland tribunal. The unbridgeable gulf between patriotic myth and tortured reality embarrasses the United States, which has never been good at atoning for its mistakes — at least, not so long as they can still speak. We have tried to impart all this to our client, but we can never be sure how much he understands. He still has shrapnel lodged deep in his brain from when he was fighting the communists in Afghanistan, back when Ronald Reagan and other brave hearts thought it was a good and honorable thing to be a mujahid, whom Reagan repeatedly described as ‘Afghanistan’s freedom fighters.’ And of course, Zubaydah’s mental and physical state suffered a great deal at the hands of the CIA.”

In November, I wrote about — and cross-posted — some letters from Zubaydah to one of his attorneys, Amanda Jacobsen, which, I believe, helped to humanize him, and then, in January, on the last day of the Obama presidency, the New York Times published details of CIA cables that had been released as part of an ACLU case against the CIA on behalf of a number of former “black site” prisoners. Tomorrow I’ll be cross-posting another account by Zubaydah himself, from 2008, which was included in the documents, but for now I’ll just note the sad conclusion to the Times article:

On Aug. 18, 2002, after 15 days during which Mr. Zubaydah was repeatedly waterboarded, kept for hours in small boxes, pushed into walls and threatened, the interrogators sent a cable to headquarters stating their conclusions. The prisoner “has not provided significant actionable info beyond previously provided details,” they wrote.

Last month, further information about Zubaydah’s case was revealed in an article for ProPublica, CIA Cables Detail Its New Deputy Director’s Role in Torture, written by Raymond Bonner, who noted how Gina Haspel, President Trump’s choice for the CIA’s deputy director, had “drafted an order to destroy” 92 videotapes containing evidence of Abu Zubaydah’s torture, which had been “locked in a CIA safe at the American embassy in Thailand.” ProPublica also wrote about the CIA cables and Zubaydah’s own testimony here.

And yet, despite the drip-drip of revelations, Abu Zubaydah remains in Guantánamo, still silenced and still largely forgotten. Tomorrow, officials from the major government departments and the intelligence agencies will conduct a file review of his case as part of the Periodic Review Board process. The result has not yet been announced, but it is extremely unlikely that they will change their mind. File reviews will continue every six months until he receives a second full review — in 2019, unless Donald Trump decides to scrap the PRBs.

Last week, Zubaydah was supposed to appear as a witness in the stumbling pre-trial hearings for the five men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks, but his attorneys are unwell, and his appearance has been postponed until May. If it happens, it will be only the second opportunity in 15 years (after his PRB) for journalists to see him, but who knows if it will happen? Last June, as Carol Rosenberg reported for the Miami Herald, he “ma[de] it to [the] door of [the] Guantánamo war court but d[id] not step inside,” because his Navy lawyer, Navy Cmdr. Patrick Flor, appointed to represent him if he is ever charged, “announced in court that he would object to any questions that could incriminate his client, prompting lawyers to postpone the testimony.”

Afterwards, as Rosenberg explained, “Flor said his client was disappointed but it was too risky. Guantánamo captives aren’t typically shackled at the war court and Abu Zubaydah was to take his first steps without ankle chains in 14 years.”

He added, “I would like my client to see the light of day in front of a microphone. He’ll no longer be forgotten.”

Some of us out here in the wider world are also waiting for that day, as, of course, are his attorneys, the only people with whom he has been able to build any kind of rapport over the last ten and half years at Guantánamo.

As Joe Margulies wrote to me when I asked him for a comment on this sad anniversary, “I suppose my comment will not fit nicely onto a bumper sticker. Our challenge is the challenge for everyone who represents those who are both damned and forgotten. The truth about Abu Zubaydah cannot penetrate because those who listen do not care, and those who care do not listen.”

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.

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

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It’s nine months since normal life in Britain came to an abrupt end after the EU referendum, when, by a narrow majority, 37.4% of the eligible voters in the UK voted to leave the EU (while 34.7% voted to remain, and 27.9% didn’t vote). Never mind that the outcome of the referendum was only advisory; never mind that everyone agrees that events involving cataclysmic constitutional change should never be decided by less than a two-thirds or 60% majority — the Tories, most of the rest of Britain’s political class, and the media all behaved as though the “will of the people” — the will of the 37.4% — had to be obeyed.

After a leadership bloodbath, in which David Cameron resigned, and the Leave campaign’s leaders, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, were also revealed as toxic, home secretary Theresa May, nominated by just 199 MPs, became the Prime Minister, and set about becoming nothing less than a tyrant. Although Leave voters had tended to insist that their vote was about restoring sovereignty to the UK, when it came down to it they seemed not to care that sovereignty in the UK resides with Parliament, and not the PM and/or her ministers, and were content to let May insist that she alone — with the assistance of her three Brexit ministers, the hapless David Davis, the dangerously right-wing Liam Fox, and the clown Boris Johnson, recalled from the dead — should decide everything about how Brexit would take place without consulting with Parliament at all. When concerned citizens took May to court and won, the Daily Mail called the judges “enemies of the people,” and far too many Leave voters agreed, showed their true, violent colours.

However, when it came to acknowledging Parliament’s role, May continued to treat MPs with contempt. After appealing, and losing again in the Supreme Court, she and her ministers issued a tiny Brexit bill, and then told MPs to vote for it, disempowering themselves despite the judges’ best efforts to empower them. Rational and/or morally necessary amendments to the bill — guaranteeing EU citizens the right to stay in the UK, for example, and guaranteeing Parliament a final say on the final deal, two years from now — were defeated, with Tory MPs in seats that voted Remain whipped into silence, and Jeremy Corbyn attempting to whip all his MPs to follow suit. When the Lords reinstated the amendments, MPs voted them down again.

The humiliation complete, May is triggering Article 50 of the 2009 Lisbon treaty on Wednesday, beginning a two-year process of the UK leaving the EU, despite it being, very probably, the single most suicidal act by a nation state in living memory. And although 16.1 million people voted to remain in the EU, we have been almost entirely silenced since the referendum, with the corporate British media continuing to push the anti-European agenda it aggressively pursued in the run-up to the referendum, the BBC revealing regular pro-Brexit bias, and most pro-European MPs (three-quarters of them, before the referendum) self-silenced.

For honest, impassioned criticism, the 16.1 million of us who voted to Remain have had to rely on the likes of Tony Blair, Alastair Campbell, Nick Clegg, John Major, Michael Heseltine and Ken Clarke, with all the baggage that all of them, except Ken Clarke and John Major, bring with them — Blair and Campbell the unindicted war criminals and sellers-out of Labour’s history, Clegg the facilitator of the Tory-led coalition that attacked everyone vulnerable in the UK with a hideous austerity programme, and Heseltine — a cheerleader for the EU in the Lords — an old henchman of Margaret Thatcher.

I’m not sure there is a “better late than never” category in the Brexit coverage, as it seems nothing can stop Theresa May, but in the next two years all of us who care about preventing the disaster that Brexit will need to be as aware as possible of the damage it will cause, if it is not prevented, and will need to find every way possible to prevent it from happening

To that end, I recommend everyone to read Ian Dunt’s magnificent — and terrifying — book, Brexit: What the Hell Happens Now? and also to read his article, ‘Everything you need to know about Theresa May’s Article 50 nightmare in five minutes.’ I also recommended looking at how the Parliamentary Labour Party may finally have found its spine, via Keir Starmer and his article, ‘Theresa May wants a Brexiteer’s Brexit. She won’t get it without a fight’ — and see Ian Dunt’s commentary here — but I also wholeheartedly congratulate the Observer for publishing a suitably savage editorial on Sunday, which I’m cross-posting below because it is so accurate and so important.

The Observer view on triggering article 50

Observer editorial, March 26, 2017

As Britain hurtles towards the precipice, truth and democracy are in short supply.

Like sheep, the British people, regardless of whether they support Brexit, are being herded off a cliff, duped and misled by the most irresponsible, least trustworthy government in living memory. The moment when article 50 is triggered, signalling Britain’s irreversible decision to quit the EU, approaches inexorably. This week, on Black Wednesday, the UK will throw into jeopardy the achievements of 60 years of unparalleled European peace, security and prosperity from which it has greatly benefited. And for what?

The ultra-hard Tory Brexit break with Europe that is now seen as the most likely outcome when the two-year negotiation concludes is the peacetime equivalent of the ignominious retreat from Dunkirk. It is a national catastrophe by any measure. It is a historic error. And Theresa May, figuratively waving the cross of St George atop the white cliffs of Dover like a tone-deaf parody of Vera Lynn, will be remembered as the principal author of the debacle. This is not liberation, as Ukip argues, nor even a fresh start. It is a reckless, foolhardy leap into the unknown and the prelude, perhaps, to what the existentialist writer Albert Camus described in La chute – a fall from grace, in every conceivable sense.

It did not have to be this way. Like others who favoured Remain, we have reiterated, ad nauseam, our acceptance of the referendum result. But whether you were for or against, what confronts us all now is drastically different from what was on the table last June. The hard Tory Brexit in prospect represents an epic act of self-harm. A more enlightened Conservative prime minister, better attuned to the “one nation” tradition of the party of Disraeli and Macmillan, less in thrall to Little Englanders, and less intimidated by the peculiarly vicious and Manichaean worldview of the Daily Mail, would have taken a more consensual approach. Yet despite her promises when she became prime minister, Theresa May has failed to heal the divisions caused by Brexit.

Far from reuniting a fractured kingdom, she has divided it further, perhaps fatally, as the SNP’s unsettling decision last week to push for a second Scottish independence referendum implies. As Lord Heseltine has suggested, a more imaginative, braver and more consistent leader could have used the referendum result to propel an immediate negotiation with the EU on much-needed reforms. If, at the end of that process, Britain’s demands remained unmet, the divorce could have proceeded or, if a deal were agreed, been put to a second vote. Instead, May, more sheep than shepherd, has feebly allowed herself to be driven ever further towards an extreme, inflexible, take-it-or-leave-it stance for which she has neither mandate nor credible grounds.

The main reason that May and her ministers now say that no deal would be better than a bad deal is that even the most blinkered Brexiters have belatedly realised what an impossible position they have placed the country in. They simply cannot deliver what they promised. Nor will an affronted, alienated Brussels help them do so. Rejigged single market access? Forget it. A bespoke customs union? Not a chance. A free trade deal within two years? In your dreams. It has become crystal clear that none of this is possible while ministers continue to reject freedom of movement and other basic EU principles, including European court of justice jurisdiction. On this, the other 27 countries are united. So now the hard Brexiters say, with astonishingly cynical mendacity, that Britain would be better off going it alone. This approach plays fast and loose with ordinary people’s livelihoods. Yet still, with jingoistic horns and trumpets drowning out the roar of the deep, the stampede towards the cliff’s edge gathers pace.

Every day produces more evidence that this hard Tory Brexit is a disaster in the making. Carmakers and other export manufacturers, fearing swingeing tariffs, are demanding special protections and exemptions or else they leave. Professional bodies, ranging from lawyers to economists, warn of endlessly damaging business consequences. The NHS faces the loss of tens of thousands of qualified doctors and nurses it has no prospect of replacing. Care homes are in a similar plight. Banks, financial institutions and airlines face unavoidable decisions about moving jobs and operations to mainland Europe.

Environmentalists rightly fear the cleaner rivers and cleaner air ensured by EU regulations (red tape to the Europhobes) may soon become a thing of the past. British citizens living and working in Europe fear the chaos that would surely follow all-out rupture; likewise EU citizens living here. Britain’s farmers, like its academics, surely realise by now, if they did not before, that they cannot trust this government to replicate the research funding, subsidies and employment freedoms that EU membership currently bestows. The average British family is now hemmed in by multiple, authoritative predictions of stagnant or falling wages, higher food and fuel prices, an ongoing sterling devaluation, collapsing social care and public services and increased, regressive indirect taxation. Be you a Remainer or a Leaver, you would have to be particularly obtuse not to see that May’s hard Tory Brexit will cost this country and its families more than it can conceivably afford.

The prospective political, diplomatic and reputational cost is every bit as daunting. Take the damage to Britain’s democracy. Last week, parliament was at its best, uniting in defiance of terrorism. The week before, it was at its worst, agreeing to deny itself a meaningful vote on any final deal. The government argued that to do otherwise would tie its hands. This is baloney. David Davis, Liam Fox, Boris Johnson and the other Brexit blowhards know they have no chance of achieving their stated aims, such as a £350m weekly NHS payback. So they pre-emptively reject parliamentary scrutiny, dismiss any criticism as unpatriotic and hope, like the cheap chancers they are, that they will get away with it. They’ve peddled a fake Brexit, full of false promises. The reality is beginning to dawn.

Unconscionably, they and their outliers in the hard Brexit media have attempted to stifle debate and question those who demand proper scrutiny of the most significant political and economic challenge to Britain in decades. They have helped foster a corrosive, mean-spirited, angry and divisive atmosphere that May and her lieutenants are too weak to challenge. Into this swill comes Leave financier-in-chief, Arron Banks, who last week announced he was setting up a “Patriotic Alliance” to attempt to unseat 100 Remain-supporting MPs. The Daily Mail, Katie Hopkins, Arron Banks, Nigel Farage, Paul Nuttall – meet Britain’s new patriots. Except they’re not, because divisiveness and intolerance are not the values of patriots.

There is a criticism of one’s country that is born of hate and a criticism born of love. And they are materially different. One wishes to divide us, the other attempts to bind, cohere and support. It fell last week to Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief negotiator, to throw a cold bucket of reality over the ultra-hard Brexiters’ fantasies. The effect was chilling. Barnier made clear May’s “no deal” option was no option at all. He warned of queues of lorries at Dover, chaos for ordinary citizens and custom controls on trade from day one of the UK’s withdrawal. Barnier also made plain the EU would not even begin to talk about a post-Brexit trade deal until Britain agrees to cough up the estimated £50bn Brussels says it owes in prior commitments. The figure is disputed. But the principle is not. Britain faces a hugely costly settling of accounts, whatever parti pris barristers may advise. For good measure, Barnier insisted the Irish border conundrum and citizens’ rights must be resolved before other Brexit matters can be discussed.

Barnier says the EU wants a deal. And it would be reckless indeed for EU leaders to ignore the factors that produced the Brexit vote, many of which can be observed across the union. The EU itself is becoming uncomfortably aware that as well as a need to show flexibility towards the UK, it also has to demonstrate to its own citizens an awareness of its democratic and policy deficiencies if it is to rekindle the support that has seen it develop since its origins in the Treaty of Rome 60 years ago.

But Barnier’s stance, if unchanged, presages a negotiations humiliation for the government. Yet more threatening for the ultra-hard Brexit brigade and the lie factories of Fleet Street was Barnier’s vow to spell out what leaving the EU really entails for the British people. “We need to tell the truth and we will tell the truth to our citizens about what Brexit means,” Barnier said, his point being that, until now, here and elsewhere, such truths have been deliberately concealed, ignored or distorted. How galling, and how ironic, that the country, the “mother of parliaments” that boastfully styles itself the home of modern representative governance, should need a lesson in open democracy. But needed it is. Truth and common sense are in short supply as Britain charges towards the precipice.

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.

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

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On Saturday March 25, 2017, I joined tens of thousands of supporters of the UK remaining in the EU in Parliament Square, at the rally at the end of the Unite for Europe march that began at Park Lane, and I hope you have time to look at my photos, and to share them if you like them.

The march had been called to mark the 60th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Rome, signed in 1957 by the six founder member states of what became the EU, but it took on an added poignancy because, this Wednesday, Theresa May will trigger Article 50 of the 2009 Lisbon Treaty, officially beginning the two-year process of the UK leaving the EU.

As I have thought ever since the Leave camp secured a small majority in last June’s referendum, the 16.1m of us who voted to stay in the EU need to work relentlessly over the next two years to try and make sure that, if we do leave the EU, we do so in a way that isn’t as economically suicidal as the “hard Brexit” favoured by Theresa May and her chief advisers — David Davis, Boris Johnson and Liam Fox — although my favoured end result, and one I will not waver from seeking relentlessly, is for the Brexit process to be halted when it becomes clear that there is no way for it to take place without destroying our economy.

The march and rally, I have to say, featured a huge number of young people, and was also extremely polite — although I hope that politeness can be shaken up if, as seems probable, Theresa May continues to be obsessed with driving the UK off a cliff.

For anyone wanting to know more, I recommend reading about the Labour Party’s decision to finally find a spine when it comes to Brexit, as reported by the Guardian, and as discussed by Ian Dunt, the author of the invaluable book, Brexit: What the Hell Happens Now? I also heartily recommended Dunt’s article, ‘Everything you need to know about Theresa May’s Article 50 nightmare in five minutes.’

I also recommend the Observer’s fierce editorial from yesterday, which I’ll be cross-posting with further commentary very soon.

Also see the photo set 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.

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

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A few days ago, I was delighted to speak to an old friend with whom I haven’t spoken for over a year — Scott Horton, formerly of Antiwar Radio, who now runs his own website, the Libertarian Institute, where he continues to make and broadcast hard-hitting radio interviews about every aspect imaginable of America’s insane foreign policy, as he has for the last 13 or 14 years, with over 4,000 conducted to date.

Scott and I have spoken many times since I was first interviewed by him in the summer of 2007, but for some reason we hadn’t spoken for 14 months until last week. I’d been going through my archives, updating links and trying to work out which articles to include in a forthcoming collection of the best of my writing about Guantánamo over the last ten years, and I realized we hadn’t spoken for some time, so I sent him an email and he got back to me almost immediately.

Our half-hour interview is here — and here as an MP3 — and I hope you have time to listen to it,and to share it if you find useful. We spoke about Donald Trump and what he has threatened to do regarding Guantánamo — keeping it open and bringing new prisoners there — but as with so much this lamentable imitation of a coherent president says and does, it’s difficult to know quite what he will end up doing. He has already backed down on his ludicrous intention to bring back torture and “black sites,” after all but his own most deranged advisers told him that was not on the cards, but on Guantánamo we will have to wait and see if he is told that federal court trials are preferable to bringing anyone new to Guantánamo, if he gets told that he doesn’t have the authorization to bring ISIS prisoners to Guantánamo, and if, as I hope, someone he listens to tells him that, given how ridiculously expensive Guantánamo is, he really ought to close it and bring the men still held to the US mainland.

However, in the absence of anything coherent from Trump regarding Guantánamo, Scott and spent more of the show talking about Barack Obama’s failure to close the prison, despite promising to do so on his second day in office back in January 2009, and why that was — primarily, I suggested, because he never sufficiently prioritized closing the prison after that bold start, and, when obstructed, tended to sit on his hands until something provoked him into renewed action. The clearest example of this was when Congress raised obstacles to his ability to release prisoners, when he failed to respond until the prisoners themselves, in despair at ever being released and/or given anything resembling justice, started a prison-wide hunger strike in 2013 that woke the world up to what was happening.

On another front, Obama was told, in the first few months of his administration, by a task force he had established to tell him who he was holding and what he should do with them, that 48 men (20% of the men held when he took office) were “too dangerous to release,” even though insufficient evidence existed to put them on trial. This was dubious in the first place, as a lack of evidence indicates untrustworthy information (to be expected as the outcome of a regime dedicated to torture and other forms of abuse), but Obama decided to sidestep criticism from NGOs and those with a quaint respect for the law and due process by promising regular reviews of these men. These, however, didn’t begin until the end of 2013, and then proceeded so slowly that, in his last year they were running two a week just so that they could be completed before he left office.

I hope you have time to listen to the show, and to share it if you find it useful.

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.