Andy Worthington's Blog, page 60

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

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A week after Donald Trump issued his disgraceful executive order banning visitors from seven mainly Muslim countries (Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen), District Judge James Robart, a senior judge in the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington, appointed by George W. Bush, “granted a temporary restraining order … after hearing arguments from Washington State and Minnesota that the president’s order had unlawfully discriminated against Muslims and caused unreasonable harm,” as the Guardian described it.

In a second article, the Guardian explained that Judge Robart had “declared the entire travel ban unconstitutional,” noting that, although other states are also suing the government, Washington State’s Attorney General Bob Ferguson had “argued the widest case: that the Trump order violated the guarantee of equal protection and the first amendment’s establishment clause, infringed the constitutional right to due process and contravened the federal Immigration and Nationality Act.”

Outside the courtroom, Ferguson said, “We are a nation of laws. Not even the president can violate the constitution. No one is above the law, not even the president. This decision shuts down the executive order immediately — shuts it down. That relief is immediate, happens right now. That’s the bottom line.”

The New York Times reported that Ferguson said his goal was “invalidating the president’s unlawful action nationwide.” The Washington State complaint stated that the ban “is separating Washington families, harming thousands of Washington residents, damaging Washington’s economy, hurting Washington-based companies, and undermining Washington’s sovereign interest in remaining a welcoming place for immigrants and refugees.”

The Times also reported that Judge Robart had “declared in his ruling that ‘there’s no support’ for the administration’s argument that ‘we have to protect the US from individuals’ from the affected countries.”

This is at the heart of the resistance to Trump’s executive order, and it is to be hoped that it is a battle that Trump can’t win, because, to be blunt, there is no emergency that would justify his draconian blanket ban on so many people.

The Guardian spoke to Marci Hamilton, a constitutional lawyer and scholar of religion at the University of Pennsylvania, who specifically took down Trump’s arguments. “A president can override the constitution with emergency powers if there is, in fact, an emergency,” she said. “But that means a lot more than the potential that a few people might arrive over here from certain countries.”

She added, “The 11 September 2001 terrorist attack was an emergency – the president then unilaterally shut down airports and air travel and people couldn’t get into the US for a while.” However, Trump, she pointed out, “hasn’t produced evidence about terrorists from these countries trying to enter America. The CIA tracks terrorists all the time, there’s a system for that.”

Further confirmation that there is no emergency to justify Trump’s actions, which are, instead, a heavy-handed demonstration of a sweeping racist policy, has been the subject of numerous media reports. For example, as the Atlantic reported last week, in an article entitled, ‘Where America’s Terrorists Actually Come From’:

[A]fter sifting through databases, media reports, court documents, and other sources, Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration expert at the libertarian Cato Institute, has arrived at a striking finding: Nationals of the seven countries singled out by Trump have killed zero people in terrorist attacks on U.S. soil between 1975 and 2015.

Zero.

Six Iranians, six Sudanese, two Somalis, two Iraqis, and one Yemeni have been convicted of attempting or executing terrorist attacks on U.S. soil during that time period, according to Nowrasteh’s research. (Nowrasteh focused on plots against the U.S. homeland, which presumably Trump cares most about, rather than other terrorism-related offenses, like supporting a foreign terrorist group or trying to join a jihadist organization overseas.) Zero Libyans and zero Syrians have been convicted of doing the same. “Foreign-born terrorism is a hazard,” Nowrasteh argues, “but it is manageable given the huge economic benefits of immigration and the small costs of terrorism.”

As for refugees, Nowrasteh writes, Trump’s action “is a response to a phantom menace.” Over the last four decades, 20 out of 3.25 million refugees welcomed to the United States have been convicted of attempting or committing terrorism on U.S. soil, and only three Americans have been killed in attacks committed by refugees—all by Cuban refugees in the 1970s.

Zero Americans have been killed by Syrian refugees in a terrorist attack in the United States.

The New York Times also noted that Judge Robart’s order “barred the administration from enforcing its limits on accepting refugees,” a ruling that applies across the country. Trump had imposed a ban on all visitors from the seven proscribed countries for 90 days, and on refugees for 120 days, with Syrian refugees banned permanently, despite the US’s obligations towards refugees. On Saturday, as a result, the State Department said that refugees, including Syrians, “could begin arriving as early as Monday.”

The Guardian noted that the State Department “said it had reversed visa revocations, meaning that tens of thousands of people whose visas were not physically canceled after the issuing of the executive order last week may now travel freely.” On Friday, a Justice Department official said that 100,000 visas had been revoked under the ban. State Department figures put the number at 60,000, but even this lower figure is an extraordinary number of people to be affected by a ban that has no urgent basis.

Nevertheless, in responding to Judge Robart’s order, Donald Trump was enraged. In one tweet, he wrote: “The opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law enforcement away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned!”

In another, he asked, “What is our country coming to when a judge can halt a Homeland Security travel ban and anyone, even with bad intentions, can come into U.S.?”

An hour later, he tweeted, “Because the ban was lifted by a judge, many very bad and dangerous people may be pouring into our country. A terrible decision.”

In response, Sen. Chuck Schumer, the leader of Democrats in the Senate, “castigated the president for his insults toward a federal judge,” as the Guardian described it. Trump’s tweets, Schumer said, show “a disdain for an independent judiciary that doesn’t always bend to his wishes and a continued lack of respect for the constitution”.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, added that Trump “seems intent on precipitating a constitutional crisis.” He added, “The president’s hostility toward the rule of law is not just embarrassing, it’s dangerous,” and called the travel ban an “arbitrary and shameful” attempt to discriminate against Muslims.

Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader in the House of Representatives, said, “No matter how many times the president attacks this judge … it won’t change the fact that this ban is unconstitutional, immoral and dangerous.”

Late on Saturday night, judges dealt another blow to Trump, as the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco refused to endorse a request for an immediate reinstatement of the immigration ban.

The Guardian noted that the Justice Department’s filing “warned that Robart’s ruling posed an immediate harm to the public, thwarted enforcement of an executive order and ‘second-guesses the president’s national security judgment about the quantum of risk posed by the admission of certain classes of (non-citizens) and the best means of minimizing that risk,’” an effort to revisit the fictional “national emergency” scenario that is at the heart of the ban, and one that the three judges in the Ninth Circuit evidently refused to accept.

As the Guardian also noted, the ban’s implementation “has also placed under close scrutiny the role of the authors of the travel ban order – Trump’s strategist Steve Bannon and aide Stephen Miller – as the administration tries to assert its authority on the Washington bureaucracy.”

Both men — both dangerous racists — are worth watching very closely, and to that end the Atlantic has a good story this weekend, ‘How Stephen Miller’s Rise Explains the Trump White House.’ For Bannon, see this detailed article in Time, which features Bannon on its cover, with the headline, ‘The Great Manipulator.’

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.

 

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

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OK, I admit it: I’m thoroughly fed up with the Left in Britain, which largely supported the campaign to leave the EU, and is now facilitating Theresa May’s efforts to destroy our economy by following through on the outcome of the ludicrous referendum last June that saw the Leave campaign win by a small majority.

The referendum was not legally binding; its outcome was advisory, meaning that it should have been taken as the starting point for further discussion, not as an end in itself. In addition, a decision about something as seismically important as leaving the EU shouldn’t have been allowed to be dependent on a simple majority vote. Generally, a referendum on a topic this important would have required a majority to consist of over 50% of all those eligible to vote, or over two-thirds of those who voted, whereas in June’s referendum 27.9% of those eligible to vote (13m people) didn’t bother to vote, and the decision to leave was taken by 37.4% of eligible voters (17.4m people), with 34.7% (16.1m people) voting to stay in the EU.

What has particularly annoyed me today — and the reason I made the poster at the top of this article — is that the Stop the War Coalition today held a protest against Donald Trump’s recently imposed immigration ban and his proposed state visit to the UK — a worthwhile cause, certainly, but one that, noticeably, didn’t involve protesting against Theresa May, even though there is no reason to suppose that she is any less racist and Islamophobic than Donald Trump.

Stop the War, however, is not going to organise a march to criticise Theresa May, because she is in charge of leading us out of the EU, and Stop the War, and most of those who are politically on the left in the UK, support our departure from the EU — even, it seems, if doing so will, as seems probable, be the biggest act of economic suicide in our lifetimes, and even though it can only strengthen anti-immigrant sentiment in the UK, because that was the major driver of people’s discontent last June.

Yes, there was a strong backlash against austerity, and against the Westminster elites who have lost touch with the electorate, but racism, xenophobia and Islamophobia were prominent throughout the campaign, and will only be strengthened if Brexit actually goes ahead, with, I believe, the probability that an isolated Britain would then, like Trump’s America, only become more racist, obsessed with repatriating foreigners, and obsessed with keeping out those regarded as undesirable, through just the sort of ban that Donald Trump has implemented.

So you see my problem, I hope: those protesting today were doing so on behalf of an organisation and movement that is actually helping to facilitate what they’re protesting against.

Trump is a nightmare, of course, and his immigration ban is despicable — as I described it last week, in my article, Trump’s Dystopian America: The Unforgivable First Ten Days, it is a “ban on citizens from seven countries — Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen (at least 134 million people) from entering the US — for an initial period of 90 days, with Syrian refugees banned indefinitely. The ban was so scattershot and chaotic that, incredibly, it also included permanent US residents who were abroad when it took effect, and even dual nationals, born in any of the proscribed countries.”

However, Theresa May is no angel when it comes to immigration, as I explained in July in my article, As Theresa May Becomes Prime Minister, A Look Back at Her Authoritarianism, Islamophobia and Harshness on Immigration. As a hardline Home Secretary for six long years, she was responsible for the vans telling immigrants to go home that she sent around the streets of London, and she became obsessed with sending alleged terrorist suspect Abu Qatada back to Jordan (see here and here), even though that required the UK to turn its back on its international treaty obligations requiring countries that are part of the European Convention on Human Rights, and that are signatories to the UN Convention Against Torture, not to send foreign nationals back to their home countries if they face the risk of torture.

Such is her obsession that it underpins her drive to rid the UK of its human rights obligations altogether, a disgraceful aim that I highlighted in my 2015 article, What Does It Say About the Tories That They Want to Scrap Human Rights Legislation?

These are not her only crimes. In October 2012, she bragged to the Conservative Party Conference about her delight in extraditing a number of Muslims, who were alleged terrorist suspects, to the US for prosecution, including Talha Ahsan, a poet with Asberger’s (who was later sent home by a US judge), while the week after she refused to approve the extradition of another man with Asperger’s, Gary McKinnon, who was white.

She has also been an enthusiast for stripping the citizenship of dual national British citizens she regards as terrorists, without any due process requirements, and, in some cases, then letting the US know where they were so they could be killed by drone strikes.

She was also resistant to Europe’s effort to rehouse refugees during the huge refugee crisis that began in 2015, and she also refused to grant visas to the foreign spouses of UK nationals if the latter do not earn £18,600 a year, which, it should be noted, is more than the national median income for the UK, and roughly the same as the median income in London. She also has a track record of being obsessed with snooping and surveillance, and, after the EU referendum, failed to reassure EU nationals living in the UK that they would be able to stay in the country.

Last week, after Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party leader, imposed an outrageous three-line whip on his MPs in an effort to compel them all to vote with the Tories to support the triggering of Article 50, which starts the two-year process of leaving the EU, just 47 of his MPs rebelled, joining 67 others (primarily from the SNP). The reason for the whip was, I presume, because of elements of Corbyn’s own antipathy towards the EU, but also because the party didn’t want to send a message to its Leave voters that it might disagree with them.

Unfortunately, those who support remaining in Europe have been shamefully dismissed by Corbyn’s actions, just as the Remainers in the Conservative Party have been silenced by Theresa May and her Brexit ministers.

This is disgraceful and unacceptable. 75% of MPs supported remaining in the EU before the referendum, but in last week’s vote the 16.1m of us who voted Remain (48.1% of those who voted) were represented by just 18.6% of MPs.

As a left-wing Remainer, I feel more isolated than I ever have in the UK, and I really hope I don’t have to spend the next two years, before Brexit becomes a reality (unless we stop it, as I believe we can and must!), pointing out the betrayal by the Left as, presumably, more and more creative ways are invented to engage in political protest without actually attacking the root of the UK’s current problems — the racist Theresa May and her racist Brexiteers, who are intent on destroying the UK for their own deluded ideological reasons, and who only pay lip service to a multicultural Britain, and will, if they can, implement their own version of Donald Trump’s ban as soon as they think they can get away with it.

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.

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

Check out our existing recordings here, and get in touch to let us know if you’re interested in our new album, out very soon!

Yesterday, I was very excited to put the final touches to my band The Four Fathers‘ second album, ‘How Much Is A Life Worth?’ The album will be available soon on CD and to download on our Bandcamp account, where our existing recordings are still available — our first album ‘Love and War’, the ‘Fighting Injustice’ EP, featuring remixes of three songs from ‘Love and War’ (US and UK versions), and a single, ‘Close Guantánamo.’ Please feel free to like us on Facebook and to follow us on Twitter.

The album features ten original songs — eight by me, as lead singer and rhythm guitarist, and two by Richard Clare (lead guitar, backing vocals), and we recorded it with Pat Collier at Perry Vale Studios in Forest Hill in three sessions from July to November with Brendan Horstead on drums and percussion, Andrew Fifield on flute and harmonica, and Louis Sills-Clare on bass.

My songs include the title track — our most recent song — comparing how white westerners value their own lives compared to the victims of the west’s post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the refugees fleeing the death and destruction in Syria and elsewhere, and the black men — and children — killed with impunity by the police in the US, where the Black Lives Matter movement has been such a powerful force.

I made a few changes to the vocals yesterday — in particular, changing a line about the refugee crisis, “Europeans are getting more cold-hearted”, to “Westerners are getting more cold-hearted”, to reflect Donald Trump’s completely unacceptable ban on citizens from seven countries — Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen (at least 134 million people) from entering the US — for an initial period of 90 days, but with Syrian refugees banned indefinitely. As I explained in an article last week, Trump’s Dystopian America: The Unforgivable First Ten Days, “The ban was so scattershot and chaotic that, incredibly, it also included permanent US residents who were abroad when it took effect, and even dual nationals, born in any of the proscribed countries.”

In the running order I put together yesterday (which may be subject to change before the album is released), the next two songs, which I also wrote, are ‘Riot’, a brooding, low-slung roots reggae anthem pointing out the dangers of growing inequality in the UK, which has become particularly grave since the global banking crash in 2008 and the cynical age of austerity introduced in its wake by the Tory government, and ‘London’, my love song to the capital, a poppy, punky reggae song spanning my 30 years living here, as greed has taken over, stifling creativity and dissent. Both are amongst our favourite songs to play live, along with favourites from our first album, like ‘Fighting Injustice’, ‘Tory Bullshit Blues‘ and our cover of Bob Dylan’s ‘Masters of War.’

Next is the first of Richard’s two songs, ‘She’s Back’, about Pussy Riot, which has a West Coast 1960s vibe, and then five more songs of mine — ‘Dreamers’, written last year for the 50th birthday of one of my closest friends, ‘Tell Me Baby’, a 1960s garage-style love song, ‘Equal Rights and Justice For All’, a bouncing roots reggae number about habeas corpus, with reference to its origins in England 800 years ago, and how it came to be shamefully discarded in the post-9/11 ‘war on terror’, not just at Guantánamo. and elsewhere in the Bush administration’s network of secret prisons, but also in the UK — although shamefully the UK programme of imprisonment without charge or trial on the basis of secret evidence is much less well-known.

This is followed by a reworked version of ‘Close Guantánamo’, which we released as an online single at the end of last year, when it was featured in a promotional video for the Close Guantánamo campaign that I have been running since 2012. The reworked version features an updated verse about Donald Trump.

My last song is ‘River Run Dry’, an Irish-influenced song about the end of an affair that I wrote in Brixton as a young man, and Richard’s second and last song, ‘When He Is Sane’, a slow slice of psychedelia dealing with mental health issues, rounds off the album.

If I was more organized, I’d have samples of these songs for you to listen to, and I’d already be able to direct you to a page where you can pre-order the album, but as I’m not that organized, I’ll have to ask you instead to send an email if you’d like us to let you know when the album is released. I’m hoping it will be in the next month or so, with a launch gig in London to accompany it.

If you can help in any way, with getting the album out to a wider audience, with gigs, or with opportunities to make videos, then please do get in touch, as we’d love to hear from you.

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

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

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

On Brexit, What a Pathetic, Leaderless Country We Have Become

Please support my work as a freelance investigative journalist and commentator.

 

In America and around the world, the apocalyptic nightmare of Donald Trump and his administration is provoking widespread protest. In the UK, meanwhile, as deluded nationalists led by the Prime Minister Theresa May forge ahead with pushing for our departure from the EU as a result of last June’s narrow victory for the Leave campaign in an advisory referendum in which 27.9% of the electorate couldn’t even be bothered to vote, almost no one is standing up for the 16.1 million people — myself included — who voted for Remain.

It is as if, at a general election, the party that wins gets the right to prevent the opposition from criticising them at all, and also gets to completely ignore everything that those who voted for the opposition believes, when it contradicts what the winning party thinks.

How is this possible? The wretched referendum, whose outcome was not legally binding, was so blunt and inadequate a tool that it failed to specify what leaving the EU would entail, or, indeed, whether that would be acceptable to voters. And yet, under Theresa May and her three Brexiteers — David Davis, Boris Johnson and Liam Fox — no questions about the form Brexit might take — let alone whether it might not be a good idea to accept the result of an advisory referendum that might end up being economically suicidal — was allowed.

With the blackest irony, our leaders, defending a referendum that was supposed to restore sovereignty to the UK, spent months fighting to prevent that. Sovereignty in the UK resides in Parliament, not in the whims of the Prime Minister and her Cabinet,  and yet the increasingly unhinged May and her Brexiteer clowns fought in court to prevent Parliament from having any say, appealing to the Supreme Court when the High Court reminded them what sovereignty means, and losing for a second and final time last week, after wasting nearly three months that could have been productively spent discussing what Brexit actually means.

In response to the Supreme Court ruling, the petulant government then issued a derisory bill, the European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill (HC Bill 132), containing just two clauses and 137 words, scheduling just two days for MPs to discuss it (yesterday and today, culminating in a vote), and three days in the committee and report stages before it goes back to the Lords.

As the Guardian reported, Labour then “tabled seven planned amendments to the bill, one of which would guarantee a ‘meaningful vote in parliament’ on any final deal. Another amendment would be to guarantee the protection of workers’ rights and securing ‘full tariff- and impediment-free access’ to the EU’s single market. The other five amendments are: to ensure the Brexit secretary, David Davis, reports on progress to the Commons at least every two months; guaranteeing the rights of foreign EU nationals living in the UK; obliging regular consultation with the devolved governments; requir[ing] regular impact assessments on the effects of leaving the single market; and [obliging] the government to keep all existing EU tax avoidance and evasion measures. The final amendment is targeted at the government’s threat that if the UK does not get a sufficiently good deal from the EU it will walk away and shift the economy towards low regulation and tax.”

These are sensible amendments, but Jeremy Corbyn then imposed a three-line whip on Labour MPs, insisting that they all vote with the government and pass the bill — presumably because of fears that, otherwise, pro-Brexit Leave voters will be alienated.

Quite why the concerns of Remain voters should so thoroughly dismissed was not explained by Jeremy Corbyn, but it has, understandably, led to rebellions by shadow ministers and MPs.

Lest we forget, although 17.4 million people voted for Brexit (37.4% of eligible voters), and 16.1 million voted against it (34.7% of eligible voters) — and another 13 million (27.9% of eligible voters) didn’t vote at all — those results are not reflected in the views held by MPs.

As we went into the referendum, 479 out of 637 MPs who had declared an intention were voting Remain — almost exactly 75%, with just 12 MPs’ opinions unknown.

Of the Tories, 185 supported Remain, while just 138 supported Leave. For Labour, 218 supported Remain, while just ten supported Leave. And all 54 SNP MPs supported Remain, as did all eight Liberal Democrats, and 22 of the 24 other MPs from other parties, including Caroline Lucas of the Green Party.

And yet, since June 23, Remain voters have found themselves almost entirely sidelined in discussions about Brexit, in the media and also in Parliament, despite the fact that this is the most significant decision in the lifetimes of anyone born after the UK joined the EU in 1973, despite the fact that it is hugely significant whether leaving the EU means leaving the single market (which we were not asked about), or leaving the customs union (which, again, we were not asked about), in order to allegedly control our borders, and even though doing so might well be the single most devastating act of economic suicide committed by any country in living memory.

Against our valid fears of an economic apocalypse, all we have been given in response is the would-be tyranny of Theresa May, seeking to exclude Parliament from its sovereign role, and aggressive Leavers complaining, monotonously, that “you lost, get over it,” as though disentangling ourselves from 43 years of laws and treaties is a simple binary choice, and not, as I recently described it, “like deliberately cutting a living body in half but then having only a few minutes to conduct the major surgery required to not let the patient die.”

When not snapping at us, the Leavers have also demonstrated a hopelessly sunny and deluded optimism, adopted by people up to and including David Davis, whose behaviour suggests that they believe that upbeat jingoism and nationalism and obsessive British pride and self-obsession is a reflection of reality rather than a hopelessly outdated delusion from the inhabitants of an island nation and former imperial power with a deluded sense of its own importance, which is proposing cutting itself off from a club that numerous other countries would dearly love to be a member of.

And yet, as the vote on Article 50 approaches, the 16.1 million of us who voted Remain are still barely represented. In December, just 89 of the 479 MPs who supported Remain last June voted against a non-binding but symbolically significant proposal to allow Theresa May to trigger Article 50 by the end of March — 23 Labour, 5 Lib Dems, 51 SNP, Green MP Caroline Lucas, Ken Clarke of the Conservatives and eight others — and, two months on, those who voted Remain are no closer to being adequately represented.

Tory Remainers are so far largely refusing to break ranks — although one can only hope they find their spine when the two years of negotiations that follow the triggering of Article 50 begin — because, presumably, their constituents will not take kindly to having their wishes betrayed, as Zac Goldsmith learned in Richmond in December. Raphael Behr had an article in the Guardian yesterday about the silent Tory rebels, but every indication is that none but Ken Clarke will rebel now, and that, as in December, only around 90 MPs will vote against the bill to trigger article 50; in other words, despite the 16.1 million of us who voted Remain getting 48.1% of the vote, and despite 75% of MPs having supported Remain, just 14% of MPs will represent the wishes of the 48.1%. When the SNP MPs are taken out of that equation, the situation is even more scandalously unrepresentative, with only around 6% of English, Welsh and Northern Irish MPs prepared to stand by the 14.5 million Remain voters in the three countries — and 94% of MPs supporting the 16.4 million who voted to Leave. This massive representational imbalance — and the accompanying disdain for Remain voters from their own MPs — must surely be remedied over the next two years or there will be hell to pay at the ballot box in 2020.

As Polly Toynbee wrote in a Guardian article yesterday, ‘Labour MPs owe a duty to the country – not Corbyn’s absurd three-line whip’:

It is the first duty – the patriotic duty – of elected politicians to protect citizens from danger and promote their wellbeing, as they see it. Yet out of cowardice or political self-interest most will vote this week for what they think will profoundly and permanently damage their electors.

A quarter of MPs will joyfully vote us out of the EU, because these Europhobes sincerely believe this wayward self-destruction is in the national interest. But three times more MPs never supported Brexit, knowing it to be an error looking more damaging by the day. Still, they will vote for it all the same. Ignoring Edmund Burke’s instruction to act as representatives and leaders, instead they will cravenly follow what a small majority thought one day in June.

They “respect” the result of the referendum, they repeat nervously. Why? It was a consultative vote that failed to define Brexit on what terms, with what sacrifices or at what price. So foolishly certain were both main parties that they would swing a remain result, they agreed a referendum without setting a threshold beyond a bare majority. They added no mechanism for agreeing an unknowable Brexit deal at the end of negotiations. MPs should now salvage and repair some of that negligence.

Focusing specifically on pro-EU Labour MPs in constituencies where a majority of voters supported leave, Toynbee added:

What a dismal spectacle to see life-long pro-Europeans in Brexit-voting constituencies crumpling to “respect the will of the people” for fear of losing their seats. Those who rebel are virtually all in remain seats, where that “respect” is simpler.

Labour MPs caught in that dilemma plead their working-class voters’ indignation at immigration, suppressed wages, over-run public services – even though many of these seats have few migrants: relatively few are like the much-quoted Boston or Barking. These MPs defend themselves by sneering at “metropolitans” who, they say, don’t understand north-eastern or Midland seats.

I would reply to them that they have a deeper duty to their voters than obeying how they voted that day. MPs’ duty is to lead and defend their people from Brexit’s reduced living standards. Make the case. Stand by what you believe and explain why Brexit will harm them, their children and their grandchildren. Talk about why a stable alliance in which we have an equal voice is stronger than the haphazard chance of trade deals with the likes of US, China or the Gulf – none the size of our EU trade.

Nor is this primarily a class question: the old are more to blame for Brexit. But as older cohorts drop off the perch, Labour MPs should stand up for the new young voters reaching the register. They say economics can’t win the EU argument alone – though if brutal Brexit predictions turn horribly real, that will change. If emotional patriotism matters most, then our sovereignty is safer with Europe, not demeaning our sovereign in a golden carriage ride down the Mall with Trump. Our status in the world is stronger as a leading EU member than alone, striking dishonourable deals with dictators. Shunning Trump and re-embracing Europe best reflects British values, who we are, what we believe and what binds us to democracies like ours: it’s not too late.

Based on my analysis of the disaster that Brexit will be for our economy — in part confirmed by Ian Dunt’s excellent and highly recommended book, Brexit: What The Hell Happens Now? — I’d love to see a majority of MPs vote against the proposal to trigger Article 50 by the end of March, because, to be frank, I want to see Brexit stopped — to save my country from returning to the 1860s or becoming an international tax haven with no money for public services — but I doubt that will happen, leaving myself and the rest of the 16.1 million to count on MPs fighting to secure the least damaging Brexit deal possible in the two years of negotiations following the triggering of Article 50 — with a particular focus on the importance of the single market and the customs union, and with the understanding that, if it becomes apparent during negotiations that it will be an unprecedented economic disaster, MPs can and must stop it.

Exact details of how constituencies voted have been hard to come by, but Chris Hanretty, a Reader in Politics at the University of East Anglia, published estimates after the referendum suggesting that around 230 of Parliament’s 650 constituencies voted Remain, and that the majority for Leave was only between 0.1% and 7% in the next 100 seats, taking us to a majority of the country’s 650 seats. These figures suggest to me that, if the true, catastrophic cost of Brexit can be exposed following the triggering of Article 50 (a task that, presumably, must fall to MPs because so much of our media is biased in favour of the Leave campaign), it is not inconceivable that Brexit can be stopped.

Numerous polls since the referendum (see here, here, here and here) indicate that the Leavers’ majority has already been overturned, and I would argue that the only reasonable response to this, given the enormity of what is at stake, is for there to be another referendum based on the details of leaving the EU, not the simple desire to do so, or for MPs, when they get to vote on the details of our planned departure, presumably in 2019, to refuse to endorse them, before the UK sinks under the weight of its hubristic and dangerously unwarranted self-regard.

Note: The illustration at the top of this article is by the illustrator Nate Kitch. See his website for more.

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 Donald Trump and Guantánamo with Brian Becker on Sputnik Radio’s “Loud and Clear”

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 first two months of the Trump administration.

 

I’ve been so busy recently that I’ve overlooked, until now, my last media appearance in the US, during my recent tour to call for the closure of Guantánamo. The show was Loud & Clear, an hour-long Sputnik Radio show presented by Brian Becker, which is available here as an MP3.

The show began with an interview with CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou, who was jailed under President Obama for exposing details of the CIA torture program, and who was representing 20 US intelligence, diplomatic and military veterans, who, as Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), “signed a statement calling on President Obama to present the proof of allegations that Russia was responsible for hacking during the election.”

As Donald Trump attempts, on as many fronts as possible to remake America in his image, this story now seems like something from another age, as does Guantánamo under President Obama. My segment with Brian starts at 18:40 and ends at 36:00, and I ran through why I was in the US, and Obama’s legacy — his eloquent explanations for why Guantánamo should be closed, but also his failure to prioritize Guantánamo sufficiently so that when Congress raised cynical obstructions to prevent the prison’s closure, he refused to challenge lawmakers as robustly as he should have done, moving so slowly that he ended up releasing men approved for release the day before he left office, and, of course, failed to close the prison, leaving 41 men still held — five approved for release, just ten facing trials, and 26 others eligible for Periodic Review Boards, the latest review process, established in 2013.

We then spoke about Donald Trump, who I described as “a dreadful, unqualified, unprincipled man … who has no sound grasp of what is required of a president,” and I spoke about how, although I was relieved to hear Gen. James “Mad Dog” Mattis, Trump’s defence secretary, talk about how he had no interest in torture, Mattis has also spoken about how prisoners — like those at Guantánamo — can and should be held until the end of hostilities. I was very concerned to make the point that, although prisoners can indeed be held until the end of hostilities, that is only acceptable under the Geneva Conventions, which is not the basis for the endless imprisonment without charge or trial of men at Guantánamo, because, since 9/11, the Geneva Conventions have gone AWOL.

I also spoke about my belief that a new war authorization would be required to send new prisoners to Guantánamo, and I hope I’m correct, and that no new authorization will be forthcoming, but if the last week is anything to go by then, unfortunately, anything is possible. As I explained, there is no reason to send people to Guantánamo unless you want to start torturing people again and hiding evidence of that — and I can only hope that wiser heads will be able to prevail if Trump and his advisors start seriously thinking about torture.

At the end of the interview, I also mentioned how we must not forget that, although Obama made Guantánamo a legacy issue, by refusing to send anyone new there, he didn’t exactly turn his back on the Bush administration’s global kidnapping and rendition program; rather, he replaced it with drone killings, which, like Bush’s innovations, are also an indefensible innovation — technology-enabled assassinations in countries with which the US is not even at war, used even to kill US citizens. And just ten days into his presidency, Trump has already engaged in drone killings, including the murder of Anwar al-Awlaki’s eight-year old daughter, Nawar.

The last interviewee was Helen Yaffe, Economic History Fellow at the London School of Economics, discussing how, “[o]n the eve of Donald Trump becoming president, Cuba and the US have been scrambling to sign a series of accords that would make it more difficult for [Trump] to roll back moves toward normalizing relations.”

I hope you have time to listen to the show, and to share it if you like what I had to say. With so much going on in Trump’s dystopian vision of America, after just 12 days in office, Guantánamo is likely to fall off the radar, unless Trump issues an executive order on the prison, and on torture, following up on the draft order that was leaked last week. I promise, however, to try to keep the Guantánamo story alive, both here and on the Close Guantánamo website, whilst also continuing to monitor and resist his dangerous rogue presidency.

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.

Disgraceful: Trump Sacks Acting US Attorney General Sally Yates, Who Refused to Support His Vile Immigration Ban

Please support my work! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my work over the first two months of the Trump administration.

 

Heroes abound in opposition to Donald Trump’s America — the lawyers filing habeas corpus petitions in airports, the citizens filling the streets with their voices and their indignation in huge numbers of cities across the land, and a handful of individuals whose objections have directly challenged the worst of his policies in his first turbulent ten days in office.

One is Judge Ann Donnelly, the federal court judge in Brooklyn who, on Saturday morning, issued a stay on the forced deportation of those on flights or in US airports who had been targeted by Trump’s outrageous immigration ban, barring entry to the US for anyone from Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen for three months, and banning all Syrian refugees permanently (in defiance of the US’s refugee treaty obligations), and also, with utter contempt for their rights, banning re-entry to any permanent US resident from any of these countries who happened to have been abroad when the ban came into effect, as well as anyone with dual nationality (where one nationality includes any of the proscribed countries), including US citizens.

The ban has drawn widespread criticism and has sparked huge protests, and it is clear that it is absolutely unacceptable, as its claimed basis — to protect the US from terrorists — has no basis in reality, as just two US citizens a year from these seven countries are killed by immigrants who could be described as terrorists, compared to 21 a year killed by toddlers with guns, and 11,737 a year shot and killed by other Americans.

It is, therefore, a purely racist move by the president, who has repeatedly shown that he is a racist, and whose two chief advisors, the white supremacist Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, are also profoundly racist and are intent on reshaping America according to their dangerous prejudices and hostility towards anyone who is not white, Christian or Jewish.

The second hero of the growing official, establishment resistance to Trump is Acting Attorney General Sally Yates, who has been fired by Trump “after she told justice department lawyers not to defend his executive order banning entry for people from seven Muslim-majority countries,” as the Guardian described it.

Yates, appointed by Barack Obama, who was in charge of the Justice Department because Congress has not yet confirmed Trump’s nominee, the bigoted Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, “had control over the justice department’s immigration litigation office, which has handled the federal complaints filed against Trump’s order since his bombshell policy was announced on Friday,” as the Guardian put it.

In a powerful and accurate letter to Justice Department lawyers, she wrote, “I am responsible for ensuring that the positions we take in court remain consistent with this institution’s solemn obligation to always seek justice and stand for what is right. At present I am not convinced that the defense of the executive order is consistent with these responsibilities nor am I convinced that the executive order is lawful.”

A White House statement that looks like it was written by Trump himself claimed that Sally Yates had “betrayed the Department of Justice by refusing to enforce a legal order designed to protect the citizens of the United States,” and described Ms. Yates as “an Obama administration appointee who is weak on borders and very weak on illegal immigration.”

The statement added, “It is time to get serious about protecting our country. Calling for tougher vetting for individuals travelling from seven dangerous places is not extreme. It is reasonable and necessary to protect our country.” The statement also made a point of claiming that Sessions’ nomination was “being wrongly held up by Democrat senators for strictly political reasons.”

Yates has already been replaced by the pliant Dana Boente, US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia, who has revoked her predecessor’s guidance to DoJ lawyers, but all Trump’s immature bombast, and that of his dwindling band of supporters, cannot disguise the fact that Yates will be seen by many more people as a hero.

In response to the sacking, Zac Petkanas, a senior adviser to the Democratic National Committee, said, “Donald Trump can try to silence heroic patriots like Sally Yates who dare to speak truth to power about his illegal anti-Muslim ban that emboldens terrorists around the globe. But he cannot silence the growing voices of an American people now wide awake to his tyrannical presidency.”

Some commentators, as the Guardian described it, “compared the firing to the 1973 “Saturday night massacre” when Richard Nixon sacked the special Watergate prosecutor, Archibald Cox, prompting the resignation of Elliot Richardson as attorney general.”

Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University, told Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, “I think it’s historic. It certainly reminded me immediately of the Saturday night massacre. There are many differences but one is how quickly this has happened in the Trump presidency. It’s as if history is being collapsed into a black hole and everything is happening faster than the speed of light.”

He added that “the executive order really challenges who we are as Americans and violates important parts of the constitution” and noted there had been protests from the ground up. I think it’s an important turning point in our history and tonight is part of that extraordinary moment we are living through.”

The most powerful criticism came from the Vermont Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy, a ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who said, “Federal courts have already found President Trump’s immigration order is very likely unconstitutional, and tonight acting attorney general Yates concluded that it was not legally defensible. She was fired for recognizing that her oath is to the Constitution and not to President Trump. His accusation that she has ‘betrayed the Department of Justice’ is wrong and it is dangerous. President Trump has now put his cabinet on notice: if you adhere to your oath of office to defend the Constitution, you risk your job. Equally troubling is that his nominee for attorney general, Senator Jeff Sessions, has shown no indication that he has the independence to put the Constitution before the president. The Senate at its best can be the conscience of the nation. Senators must oppose Senator Sessions.”

“Remarkably,” as the Guardian described it, during her Senate confirmation hearings as Deputy Attorney General under Obama, Sally Yates was asked “what she would say to a president who wanted to do something unlawful” by none other than Jeff Sessions, who “prefaced his question” by telling Yates, “You have to watch out, because people will be asking you to do things you just need to say no about. Do you think the attorney general has a responsibility to say no to the president, if he asks for something that is improper? … If the views the president wants to execute are unlawful, should the attorney general or the deputy attorney general say no?”

Yates told Sessions definitively, “Senator, I believe the attorney general or the deputy attorney general has an obligation to follow the law and the Constitution, and to give their independent legal advice to the president.”

She has now been sacked for doing just that, and there is no word from Jeff Sessions about how she was just doing what she was supposed to do — upholding the Constitution against a rogue president.

In the growing resistance to Donald Trump, Sally Yates is a hero.

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.

Trump’s Dystopian America: The Unforgivable First Ten Days

Please support my work! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my work over the first two months of the Trump administration.

 

Ten days ago, reality as we knew it seemed to disappear with Donald Trump’s inauguration, and the bleak, insular, threatening speech at its heart, which bore all the hallmarks of the miserable white supremacist world view of his most trusted advisor, Steve Bannon, a man who needs constantly exposing as the genuinely malevolent force behind Trump’s throne.

I was in New York City at the time of the inauguration, staying in a house in Brooklyn. My hosts had gone out to work, and I was alone as the realization that no last minute miracle had spared us from Trump truly sank in. I was chilled, and spent the day in a fog of anxiety, as did tens of millions of other Americans.

The following day, the Women’s March played a hugely important role in establishing the resistance to Trump. Millions of women (and supportive men), inspired by opposition to Trump’s misogyny, marched in Washington, D.C., in New York and in other cities across the US and around the world. I wrote about the inspiring New York event here, and my photos are here.

That evening, I returned to the UK, but what was apparent to me from my two weeks in the US (from Jan. 9-21, scheduled in particular to coincide with the 15th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo) was how a figure as divisive as Trump ought, at the very least, to be capable of inspiring a huge new people’s movement against him, uniting all those opposed to his bigotry, his misogyny, his corrupt business dealings — the list could go on and on.

I stand by this assessment, but since last weekend Trump has marked his first week in office with a tsunami of horrendous executive orders, almost too many to keep up with, which have both confirmed the need for unity in everyone who opposes him, whilst almost making it impossible to focus on everything important that is being so  fundamentally undermined.

Trump’s first week executive actions included ordering the dismantling of Obamacare, reviving the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, and ordering the Mexican wall to built. In addition, a draft executive order, not yet issued, was leaked, which promised to revoke President Obama’s executive orders ordering the closure of Guantánamo and a ban on the use of torture and CIA “black sites.”

All of these moves threaten to backfire. Obamacare has improved access to affordable medical care for tens of millions of Americans, including, crucially, many who voted for Trump, and it ought to blow up in his face. In addition, when it comes to the environment, Trump has probably ensured that renewed protest in the native Americans’ ancestral lands in Dakota will be bigger than ever, and on torture the leak drew widespread condemnation in the US and around the world.

But then, on Friday — just after all our desperate Prime Minister Theresa May dashed to the White House to visit Trump in the vain hope of securing a favorable trade deal to offset the self-inflicted economic suicide of Brexit (while most other world leaders were biding their time, in no hurry to meet such a bullying aberration to the norms of power) — Trump delivered his most devastating executive order to date: an outrageous ban on citizens from seven countries — Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen (at least 134 million people) from entering the US — for an initial period of 90 days, with Syrian refugees were banned indefinitely. The ban was so scattershot and chaotic that, incredibly, it also included permanent US residents who were abroad when it took effect, and even dual nationals, born in any of the proscribed countries.

The ban took immediate effect, with devastating results. At US airports, hundreds of people were detained pending deportation, and around the world untold numbers of dual national citizens, green card holders, visitors and refugees from the targeted nations were prevented from flying to the US.

Lawyer and protestors were swift to respond, rushing to airports to make their voices heard, and, in the cases of the lawyers, including the ACLU and others, to begin the urgent work of challenging the ban. By Saturday morning, a US federal court judge, Ann Donnelly in Brooklyn, “ordered an emergency stay, blocking the deportation of any individual currently being held in airports across the United States,” as the Guardian put it.

“I think the government hasn’t had a full chance to think about this,” Judge Donnelly told a packed courtroom, as she granted the stay in the case of two Iraqi refugees detained at JFK – “Hameed Khalid Darweesh, who had worked for the US government for a decade, and Haider Sameer Abdulkhaleq Alshawi, who arrived in the country to join his wife, a US contractor.”

A follow-up hearing was scheduled for February 21, but in the meantime lawyers are preparing for another fight if any of those affected — “at least 100-200 people currently being held in airports across the country,” according to ACLU head Anthony Romero — are held in immigration detention facilities until the Feb. 21 hearing, rather than being released.

Unfortunately, the judge’s stay only applies to “those who were ‘on American soil’ – i.e. those who had been mid-flight or had landed while the executive order was being signed by the president,” as Romero described it. Around the world, countless others from the seven countries banned by Trump — including green card holders and dual nationality citizens — were left unable to return to the US.

This sweeping, punitive, racist policy was implemented so swiftly that attorneys for the government were largely in the dark. In Brooklyn, one told the court, “Things have unfolded with such speed, that we haven’t had time to review the legal situation yet.”

And yet, the impact of the chaotic ban is horrendously widespread, and no one can estimate in how many cases it is also life-threatening. The Guardian explained how, “[a]lerted by the ACLU to the fact that a Syrian woman with a valid US green card had been detained upon arrival into the United States and had been placed on a plane due to take off ‘back to Syria’ within 30 minutes,” Judge Donnelly issued a stay on her being sent back, having pressed government lawyers in vain to confirm whether they “could give assurances that the woman would suffer no ‘irreparable harm’ upon her arrival in Syria” (they couldn’t).

As I wrote on Facebook, “And so, just ten days into Donald Trump’s presidency, we can see clearly what happens when incoherent populist racism is given form by a simplistic bigoted clown who surrounds himself with white supremacists, would-be fascists and the most unsavoury far-right elements of the Republican Party. One dominant question is now forming in the minds of all decent people, which clearly won’t go away: How do we get rid of Donald Trump?”

In an editorial today, the is asking the same questions. “Donald Trump has been president of the United States for 10 days,” the editorial began. “Many were prepared to give Mr Trump a chance. But even they must conclude he has been in office 10 days too long.”

Writing of the immigration ban, the Guardian’s editors described it as “a cruel, stupid and bigoted act, designed to hurt and divide,” adding that it was “also cowardly, as bullies’ actions sometimes are,” and noting that the ban also “avoids predominantly Muslim countries such as Pakistan and Afghanistan with deep terrorist connections, and ones such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the Emirates in which Mr. Trump has business interests.”

The editorial continued:

The United States is a nation of laws, of immigrants and of freedoms. Much of the world still looks to it as a beacon. Mr Trump’s order violates all three identities, and douses the beacon. The order has been stayed by a judge in New York. But the stay is temporary. Mr Trump is not going to stop there. His instinct, to which on past intemperate experience he is likely to succumb, will be to react with further cruelty, stupidity and bigotry […]

The executive order has backfired. The reaction against it in the US has been inspiring. The legal action sends a vital message about due process. So do the rallies and welcoming demonstrations at airports, which appear to be as spontaneous as anything can be in the modern world. The big challenge for the US now is political. Will anti-Trump Republicans stand up for law, justice and order, or will they bow the knee? Will Democrats mount an effective opposition? This is a stand up and be counted moment for all, and both things need to happen. Both sides should remember the concentration camp survivor Martin Niemöller’s words about the Nazis. “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out … Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak for me.”

The Guardian also, correctly, took aim at Theresa May, pointing out that she was “played for a sucker” by Trump, and that, in response to the ongoing petition against Trump’s proposed state visit in summer, which already has over 1,400,000 signatures, and is gaining around 50,000 new signatures every hour, she “needs to recognise that the Trump state visit must be put on hold or truncated into a political visit.” The editorial concluded, “A line has been crossed in Washington. The public gets it. Sir Mo [Farah, one of those banned from visiting the US for the next 90 days] gets it. The prime minister needs to get it too. She needs to speak and act for Britain, alongside France, Canada, Germany and other allies. Britain must not be, or be seen as, a lackey of possibly the worst leader the US has ever elected.”

In the US, meanwhile, the struggle to take down Trump continues. Absurdly, as the graphic to the left shows (which, I note, Kim Kardashian tweeted yesterday to her 49.8m followers), Trump’s deluded, bellicose rationale for the ban — that the US is threatened by terrorist refugees from the countries subjected to the ban — has so basis whatsoever in reality. Two people a year in the US have been killed by “Islamic jihadist terrorists” in the last ten years, compared to 21 a year killed by armed toddlers, 69 a year killed by lawnmowers, and, of course, 11,737 a year killed by other Americans.

And yet, early on Sunday morning, Trump tweeted, “Our country needs strong borders and extreme vetting, NOW. Look what is happening all over Europe and, indeed, the world — a horrible mess!” and later that morning sent out another tweet stating, ”Christians in the Middle-East have been executed in large numbers. We cannot allow this horror to continue!” By the afternoon, he had issued a statement, but he was refusing to back down in any way. “America is a proud nation of immigrants and we will continue to show compassion to those fleeing oppression, but we will do so while protecting our own citizens and border,” he said, adding, “To be clear, this is not a Muslim ban, as the media is falsely reporting. This is not about religion — this is about terror and keeping our country safe.”

Wrong on all counts, Trump also faced criticism from two senior Republicans, Sen. John McCain, the chair of the influential Senate Armed Services Committee, and Sen. Lindsey Graham, an aggressive defender of America’s national security, who issued the following statement:

Our government has a responsibility to defend our borders, but we must do so in a way that makes us safer and upholds all that is decent and exceptional about our nation.

It is clear from the confusion at our airports across the nation that President Trump’s executive order was not properly vetted. We are particularly concerned by reports that this order went into effect with little to no consultation with the Departments of State, Defense, Justice, and Homeland Security.

Such a hasty process risks harmful results. We should not stop green-card holders from returning to the country they call home. We should not stop those who have served as interpreters for our military and diplomats from seeking refuge in the country they risked their lives to help. And we should not turn our backs on those refugees who have been shown through extensive vetting to pose no demonstrable threat to our nation, and who have suffered unspeakable horrors, most of them women and children.

Ultimately, we fear this executive order will become a self-inflicted wound in the fight against terrorism. At this very moment, American troops are fighting side-by-side with our Iraqi partners to defeat ISIL. But this executive order bans Iraqi pilots from coming to military bases in Arizona to fight our common enemies. Our most important allies in the fight against ISIL are the vast majority of Muslims who reject its apocalyptic ideology of hatred. This executive order sends a signal, intended or not, that America does not want Muslims coming into our country. That is why we fear this executive order may do more to help terrorist recruitment than improve our security.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) also pledged that the Democrats, who it should be noted, have largely been silent on this most disgraceful of policies, “will propose legislation to overturn Trump’s executive order,” as Politico described it, and “16 state attorneys general, including those from California and New York, spoke out against the executive order and warned that they will ‘use all of the tools of our offices to fight this unconstitutional order and preserve our nation’s national security and core values.’”

Trump was not moved, tweeting, absurdly, that McCain and Graham were “looking to start World War III,” but there is no way the immigration ban can be regarded as anything other than a massive, self-inflicted wound, however much his racist core supporters believe in it.

By Sunday night, as Politico reported, “Conflicting interpretations spurred Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly to clarify that green card holders were … exempt from Trump’s broad order,” but today the fallout from this thoroughly unacceptable and lamentably poorly-executed ban has, I hope, penetrated so deeply into countless ordinary people’s perceptions of the reality of the Trump administration that his days are numbered.

I certainly hope so, as the kind of anxiety and uncertainty that Trump is unleashing against millions of people, and the chaos he is causing worldwide to America’s reputation, surely cannot be allowed to continue for the next four years.

Note: See Mark Bryan’s website for ‘The Nightmare’, his poster of Donald Trump as a Kraken, posted at the top of this article, which is also available as a poster.

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.

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

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 first two months of the Trump administration.

 

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

On Wednesday our worst fears on Guantánamo and torture were confirmed, when the New York Times published a leaked draft executive order, “Detention and Interrogation of Enemy Combatants,” indicating that Donald Trump wants to keep Guantánamo open, wants to send new prisoners there, and wants 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, it seems, wants to reinstate torture and the use of CIA “black sites.”

Specifically, the draft executive order proposes revoking the two executive orders, 13492 and 13491, that President Obama issued on his second day in office in January 2009 — the first ordering the closure of Guantánamo, and the second to close CIA “black sites,” to grant the International Committee of the Red Cross access to all prisoners, and to ensure that interrogators only use techniques approved in the Army Field Manual.

The draft executive order also proposes to “resurrect a 2007 executive order issued by President Bush,” as the New York Times put it, which “responded to a 2006 Supreme Court ruling about the Geneva Conventions that had put CIA interrogators at risk of prosecution for war crimes, leading to a temporary halt of the agency’s ‘enhanced’ interrogations program.”

Lies about “recidivism”

The draft executive order also reinstates the military’s rather shameful official claim that the prison is “legal, safe and humane,” and, moreover, repeats lies about the recidivism rate of former prisoners that have no place in official government documents. Since 2009, statements issued by the military and more recently by the Director of National Intelligence, have made unsubstantiated claims about the number of recidivists released from Guantánamo (the term technically means those who have relapsed into criminal behavior after their release from detention, but in the cases of the Guantánamo prisoners the term itself is misleading, as no process was undertaken to establish whether any of these men had committed crimes in the first place).

Nevertheless, the key aspect of the recidivism problem is that these unsubstantiated figures are used with scandalous disregard for the truth by mainstream media outlets, and are also contested by other analysts. The claims, published every six months, break down those regarded as recidivists into those who are “confirmed” of reengaging and those who are “suspected” of doing so, and yet the media regularly adds both figures together, even though designations of those “suspected” of recidivism often involve only one source, with no way of knowing if that single source is reliable. This disregard for the truth is also evident in the draft executive order, which claims that “[o]ver 30 percent of detainees released from Guantánamo have returned to armed conflict.” In fact, the latest DNI report, in September 2016, suggested that those “confirmed of reengaging” was 17.6%, while those “suspected of reengaging” was 12.4% — a total of 30%, not “[o]ver 30%.” In addition, as the Constitution Project has pointed out, it is also important to remember that an “overwhelming majority” of those regarded as “confirmed of reengaging” were transferred during the Bush administration, whereas President Obama engaged in much more strict criteria regarding releases.

Above all, however, other analysts maintain that the DNI’s figures are exaggerated — and, of course, there is no way of independently verifying the figures because the DNI won’t release them. However, the author and journalist Peter Bergen at New America in Washington, D.C. has, for many years, been running analyses of the publicly available recidivism figures, and has persistently come up with lower figures. In 2013, for example, when the DNI had a “confirmed” figure of 16.1 percent, New America came up with 4 percent, with similar discrepancies between the “suspected” figures — 11.9 percent from the DNI, 4.7% from New America.

* * * * *

The leak of the new president’s plans came on a day filled with other woes — an actual executive order authorizing the creation of the Mexican wall that Trump obsessed about on the campaign trial, and another aimed at severely restricting immigration, with a total ban on any arrivals to the US from Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.

No torture

Nevertheless, Trump’s enthusiasm for torture led to serious criticism — see this Guardian article, for example, featuring damning criticism from retired Air Force Colonel Steve Kleinman, who heads the research advisory committee to the High Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG), described by the Guardian as “a secretive group from the FBI, CIA and military with a mandate to interrogate high-level terror suspects without torture.”

Kleinman said, “If the US was to make it once again the policy of the country to coerce, and to detain at length in an extrajudicial fashion, the costs would be beyond substantial – they’d be potentially existential. We’ve seen how [torture] promotes violent extremism, how it degrades alliances. We’ve seen how it only serves to provide information that policymakers want to support [desired policies], not what they need.” He added, “A lot of these people who weigh in heavily on interrogation have no idea how little they know, [and do so] because of what they see on television.”

Kleinman also said, “There is, at best, anecdotal evidence to support torture,” adding, “There is, on the other hand, a robust body of scientific literature and field testing that demonstrates the efficacy of a relationship-based, rapport-based, cognitive-based approach to interrogation, as well as a robust literature that would suggest torture immediately undermines a source’s ability to be a reliable reporter of information: memory is undermined, judgment is undermined, decision-making is undermined, time-references are undermined. And this is only from a purely operational perspective; we can’t take the morality out of strategy.”

In addition, of course, the failures of torture were explicitly spelled out in the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report into the CIA torture program, published in December 2014, and it is to be hoped that, collectively, the CIA and other interrogators — if they still have misplaced brief in the efficacy of torture — understand that they were very fortunate to evade prosecution for their actions.

Trump himself remains bullish about torture, but he at least promised to take advice from his colleagues. In an interview with ABC News, he reiterated his belief that torture works, and that the US should “fight fire with fire,” saying, “I’ve spoken in recent days with people at the highest level of intelligence, and I’ve asked them: ‘Does torture work?’ And the answer was ‘Yes, absolutely’” — a statement that, it should be noted, probably bears no relation to the truth.

As the Guardian noted, Trump “said he would defer to the incoming CIA director, Mike Pompeo, and the defense secretary, James Mattis, on the issue,” and although Pompeo has previously expressed support for torture, he has recently backed down. Mattis, meanwhile, is vehemently opposed to its use. Both men were grilled extensively on these issues by Sen. John McCain, who survived torture himself, and is, as the Guardian put it, the “co-author of a 2015 law barring the security agencies from using interrogation techniques that surpass the prohibitions in the army field manual, pledged defiance over a return to torture.” McCain, who is the chair of the influential Senate Armed Services Committee, said, “The president can sign whatever executive orders he likes. But the law is the law. We are not bringing back torture in the United States of America.” Moreover, he said he secured “explicit guarantees from Pompeo and Mattis during their Senate confirmation proceedings to follow the interrogations law and the army field manual,” and stated, “I am confident these leaders will be true to their word.”

Cynics would only add that interrogation techniques that constitute torture survive in Appendix M of the Army Field Manual, and that there is no reason for torture to be reintroduced by any other route, but Trump and those close to him were clearly thinking beyond the Army Field Manual and back to the terrible days of the Bush administration’s disgraceful global torture program when they compiled the draft executive order, and it is to be hoped that the widespread resistance to torture that surfaced after the draft was leaked will deter Trump and his people from entertaining any more foolish notions that a full-scale torture program should resurrected. As ever with this president and his advisors, however, vigilance must be maintained.

* * * * *

However, even as protestors mobilized across the country in support of Mexicans, Muslims and immigrants in general, following the executive orders about the Mexican wall, immigration and refugees, there was, unfortunately, much less focus on Guantánamo in the media.

Close Guantánamo

Keeping Guantánamo open, of course, is not a drastic move, as President Obama failed to close it despite promising to do so for eight years. However, the proposal to suspend all transfer processes until a new review is conducted is profoundly unfair for the five men still held who have been approved for release by high-level, inter-agency US government review processes, and the 26 others for whom reviews — the Periodic Review Boards — are still ongoing. Established in 2013, and akin to parole boards, the PRBs have, to date, approved 38 out of 64 prisoners for release, and all but three have been freed. Reviews, however, are ongoing, with the prospect that at least a handful of other men will be approved for release, perhaps leaving around 20 men still regarded as too dangerous to release alongside the ten men currently facing (or having faced) trials.

The circumstances surrounding the ongoing imprisonment of the men is far from perfect, as the military commission trial system is fundamentally dysfunctional and not fit for purpose, and the claim that men can continue to be held indefinitely without charge or trial remains an affront to the values that the US claims to respect, which, with regard to imprisonment, should involve those deprived of their liberty either being charged with crimes and tried in federal court, or held as prisoners of war until the end of hostilities and protected by the Geneva Conventions — with, it must be said, an opportunity to seek judicial redress if their captors claim that there is no end to the hostilities because they are, apparently, detained in a war without end.

However, throughout the Obama administration, the prison was at least treated as a legacy issue — albeit a thorny one — and every proposal by Republican lawmakers that new prisoners should be sent to Guantánamo, for example, was resisted, with valid arguments being made that the correct venue for those accused of terrorism was to be tried in federal court.

Unfortunately, in the draft executive order for Donald Trump, proposals are made not only for the ongoing imprisonment and trials of “alien enemy combatants” at Guantánamo, but also for “the detention and trial of newly captured alien enemy combatants.” it is clear from another section, listing those with whom the US “remains engaged in a global armed conflict,” that the authors of the draft executive order regard those enemies as “al Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated forces, including … members of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and with those who fight on behalf of or provide substantial support to or harbor such groups in furtherance of hostilities against the United States, its citizens, or its coalition partners.”

Nevertheless, it is not clear that those drafting the executive order are aware that the conditions for imprisonment at Guantánamo — as laid out in the Authorization for Use of Military Force that Congress passed in the days after the 9/11 attacks — relate specifically to 9/11, and those allegedly involved with al-Qaeda, the Taliban or associated forces. In other words, it seems probable that, although Obama stretched the limits of authorization by including ISIS in his remit for drone strikes, it is probable that a new authorization would be required to detain Islamic State members at Guantánamo.

It is not impossible, with a Republican-controlled Congress, to imagine this happening, but the question would have to be why, when by far the best place for terrorists to be dealt with is in federal court. Even throughout the hysteria of the early days of Guantánamo, when the Bush administration was busy peddling its lies about the prison holding “the worst of the worst,” federal court trials were taking place for anyone accused of terrorism who was not unfortunate enough to have ended up in the legal black hole of Guantánamo or the CIA’s “black sites,” and those trials, of course, continued successfully under President Obama.

In addition, it is worth noting that, although Trump promised on the campaign trial to send US citizens to Guantánamo, to be prosecuted in military commissions, that is not mentioned in the draft executive order, because Americans have constitutional protections, and those do not apply at Guantánamo, where only foreign citizens can he held. As Jonathan Hafetz, a professor at Seton Hall Law School, told CNN in August, after Trump’s wild claim was first made, “To bring anyone from the US — citizen or not — to Guantánamo and put them in military detention would be unprecedented. Even the Bush administration, in its most sweeping views of executive power, didn’t transfer [terror suspects arrested in the US] to Guantánamo.”

In conclusion, then, as noted above, eternal vigilance is required with Trump and his advisors, but the only specific area in which those concerned with the closure of Guantánamo need to be particularly focused on is the proposal to prevent the release of the five men still held who are approved for release, and the threat that the Periodic Review Boards may not continue for the 26 other men who are eligible for reviews every six months. To be frank, however, with so many men released in Obama’s last year, the population of Guantánamo is close to what the Obama administration itself regarded as an “irreducible minimum” of men who should not be released, even though, shamefully, 15 years after the prison opened, no one in a position of power and authority has any idea of how to deliver anything resembling justice to these allegedly dangerous individuals, or their alleged victims.

Donald Trump should learn from this how the primary lesson of Guantánamo is that breaking laws and treaties is nothing short of disastrous for everyone involved, and should finish what President Obama started, and close Guantánamo once and for all.

Note: For further information about the draft executive order, see this additional New York Times article. And if you’re in the US and are concerned about the torture proposals, please visit this Roots Action page and ask your Senators and Representatives which side they are on.

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.

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

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

 

With Donald Trump promising, in a draft executive order leaked to the New York Times, to keep Guantánamo open, to stop all releases until after a new review process has reported back to him, and to reintroduce torture and “black sites,” the last few days of the Obama administration now seem like ancient history, but it was just last Thursday — Obama’s last day in office — that the last four prisoners on his watch were released from Guantánamo, and sent to the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

The releases unfortunately leave five men approved for release still held at the prison, along with ten men facing (or having faced) trials, and 26 others eligible for ongoing Periodic Review Boards, unless Donald Trump scraps them. Three of the five approved for release had those decisions taken back in 2009, while the other two were approved for release last year, but it is worrying for all of them that Donald Trump has no interest in the fact that the decisions about them were taken unanimously by high-level US government review processes.

The fact that these five men approved for release are still held — and that 41 men in total are still at the prison — is a profound disappointment, to put it mildly, and Trump’s bellicose attitude already makes it apparent that President Obama’s failure to fulfill his promise to close Guantánamo once and for all cannot be considered an abstract failure, as it plays directly into Donald Trump’s hands. Had Obama prioritized closing Guantánamo much earlier in his presidency, and taken on Congress with the required forcefulness, it would have been closed, and Donald Trump would, I believe, have faced an impossible uphill struggle to reopen it.

So who are the four men who managed to escape from Guantánamo before Trump shut the prison door?

All were approved for release last year by the Periodic Review Boards — consisting of representatives of the Departments of State, Defense, Justice and Homeland Security, as well as the office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — which were established in 2013 to review the cases of 64 men regarded as “too dangerous to release” or as candidates for prosecution by the previous review process, the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established shortly after taking office for the first time in 2009. Those recommendations were very obviously over-cautious, as the PRBs — which function like parole boards, assessing contrition and viable post-release scenarios — approved 38 of the 64 for release, and the ongoing process (unless it is scrapped) may well approve more prisoners for release based on subsequent reviews, on the basis that the perceived threat levels posed by men who have never been charged or tried with any crime may not be unchanging.

The first of the four, sent to the UAE, was Ravil Mingazov (ISN 702, Russia), an ethnic Tatar born in 1967 in Ust-Bolsheretskiy, in Kamchatka Oblast, in the far east of the Soviet Union, who had fled his homeland because of religious oppression. A former ballet dancer, who became a logistics warrant officer in the Russian military, “he seems to have drifted around Afghanistan and Pakistan, ending up in a Jamaat-al-Tablighi centre in Lahore, from where he took a ride with two other men to a place in Faisalabad where, they were told, those who needed passports to return home would find help,” as I explained at the time of his PRB in June.

He was then taken briefly to the house of Abu Zubaydah, for whom the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program was initially developed, and was then moved to another house, the “Issa House,” which mostly housed students, where he was seized on March 28, 2002, in a raid that took place on the same night that Abu Zubaydah’s house was raided. Mingazov’s long imprisonment was based mainly on his spurious connection to Abu Zubaydah, who was initially regarded as a senior figure in Al-Qaeda, even though it has since become apparent that he was not a member of Al-Qaeda, and had no prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks — although he is still held almost incommunicado, as though he is still who the US initially and mistakenly thought he was.

Mingazov had his release ordered by a US judge May 2010, but shamefully the Obama administration appealed that decision, and the case was not dealt with in the six and a half years years after the appeal was made, leaving Mingazov in a disgraceful state of limbo.

He was finally approved for release — again — by his PRB in July, but could not, of course, be safely returned to Russia. His lawyers sought to persuade the British government to allow him rejoin his wife and son in Nottingham, where they had successfully sought asylum. That application was first submitted towards the end of 2015, before Mingazov was approved for release, but the British government appeared to have no interest in helping him, and efforts by MPs to raise his case with the Home Office, which I was involved in, had come to nothing by the time of his release. I can only hope that some way can be found for him to be reunited with his son in future.

Responding to the news of his release, Gary Thompson, a partner at Reed Smith in Washington, D.C., who worked on his case for many years with a team of attorneys including former Reed Smith partners Doug Spaulding and Bernie Casey (a former US Marine and Army Ranger who originally took the case), said, “We are overjoyed for Ravil and his family. Reed Smith was honored to step up to the unique challenges presented by the civil and human rights issues posed by Guantánamo.  The firm took on six detainee clients and all six have now been released – with Ravil being the last detainee transferred by President Obama.”

Reed Smith associate Kristin Davis added, “Finally, we have a day to celebrate. After so many years, so much work, and so many trips to Guantánamo, we are ecstatic that Ravil is free.”

The second man to be freed in the UAE was Haji Wali Mohammed (ISN 560, Afghanistan), for whom a third country had to be found that would offer him a home because of a ban on repatriating Afghans from Guantánamo that Congress had enacted in recent years because of hysterical recidivism claims. He had his case reviewed in August 2016 and was approved for release in September.

Born in 1965 or 1966, he had been a money exchanger, and, as I explained in my book The Guantánamo Files, he “was captured at his home in Peshawar, on 24 January 2002.” As I also explained, he was “[m]arried with two wives and ten children, [and] was born in Afghanistan, but his family fled to Pakistan in 1978 and lived in refugee camps for the next ten years until he established himself as a successful moneychanger and moved to Peshawar in 1988. All was well until 1995, when he first lost a significant amount of money, and in 1998, after entering into a business deal with the Bank of Afghanistan that also failed, he ended up being blamed by the Taliban, who made him responsible for the whole debt — around one million dollars — even though he only had a 25 percent stake in the deal.”

At his PRB, as I explained, “the US authorities seemed to recognize that Mohammed might not have been the bigshot they had spent years pretending he was,” and, in particular, claims that he was involved with Osama bin Laden largely evaporated.

The military’s summary of his case noted that “[e]fforts to link [Mohammed] to Bin Ladin [sic] are complicated by several factors, including incomplete reporting, multiple individuals with [his] name — Haji Wali Mohammad — and lack of post-capture reflections,” and, as I stated, “As a result, it is, I think, acceptable to conclude that Mohammed actually had no connection with Osama bin Laden at all.”

The third man to be released in the UAE is Yassin Qasim Mohammed Ismail (ISN 522, Yemen), known to the US authorities as Yassim Qasim Mohammed Ismail Qasim and born in 1979, according to the US authorities, but 1982 according to his lawyer. As I explained in an article last month, when he was finally approved for release, he was a low-level foot soldier for the Taliban, but “had his habeas corpus petition turned down in April 2010, a decision that was upheld on appeal a year later, [although] to be honest there was nothing about his case to suggest that he actually constituted any kind of threat to the US.”

Ismail then had his case reviewed by a PRB in February 2016 and he was approved for ongoing detention in March. However, on September 1, he had a file review — an administrative review that takes place every six months for those whose PRBs have recommended their ongoing imprisonment — at which it was decided that, “After reviewing relevant new information related to the detainee as well as information considered during the full review, the Board, by consensus, determined that a significant question is raised as to whether the detainee’s continued detention is warranted and therefore an additional full review should be conducted.”

That review took place on November 8, 2016, and he was approved for release on December 8, 2016, just seven weeks before he landed in the UAE, a situation that must surely make him reflect that, after nearly 15 years in Guantánamo, he finally ended up very lucky indeed.

The last man, returned to Saudi Arabia, is Jabran al-Qahtani (ISN 696, Saudi Arabia), whose case was reviewed on May 19, 2016. He was finally approved for release on November 21, 2016, although the probability was that he would face prosecution in Saudi Arabia.

Born in 1977, according to the US authorities, al-Qahtani was seized in the house raid that led to the capture of Abu Zubaydah. A graduate in electrical engineering from King Saud University in Saudi Arabia, he is is one of 28 prisoners put forward for a trial by military commission under George W. Bush. He was charged in 2008, with two other men facing PRBs — Ghassan al-Sharbi (whose ongoing imprisonment was approved in July 2016) and Sufyian Barhoumi, whose release was approved in August, although he was not released before Obama left office — and Noor Uthman Muhammed, a Sudanese prisoner who accepted a plea deal in his military commission trial and was sent home in December 2013, although the charges against all but Noor Uthman Muhammed were later dropped.

When the board members approved al-Qahtani for release, they mentioned his “past terrorist-related activities and connections, specifically [his] admission of support for the Taliban, association with two al-Qa’ida leaders, and his training in building electronic circuit boards,” but added that they “found the risk [he] presents can be adequately mitigated by transfer for prosecution and rehabilitation in Saudi Arabia.”

It is not known if Saudi Arabia will prosecute him, or whether he will, instead, be monitored closely and put through the well-established Saudi rehabilitation program — at the Mohammed bin Naif Counselling and Care Center. Noticeably, the board members also expressed their “confidence in the efficacy of the Saudi rehabilitation program, and Saudi Arabia’s ability to implement security assurances after completion of the program,” suggesting that he may evade prosecution unless the Saudi government has a particular axe to grind. See the brief report here about his return to Saudi Arabia.

In articles to follow, I’ll examine the cases of the men still held who have been approved for release, and also provide updates on the Periodic Review Boards. For now, however, I hope you find this article useful, and will share it if you do.

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.

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009 (out of the 532 released by President Bush), and the 192 prisoners released from February 2009 to January 16, 2017 (by President Obama), whose stories are covered in more detail than is available anywhere else –- either in print or on the internet –- although many of them, of course, are also covered in The Guantánamo Files, and for the stories of the other 390 prisoners released by President Bush, see my archive of articles based on the classified military files released by WikiLeaks in 2011: June 2007 –- 2 Tunisians, 4 Yemenis (here, here and here); July 2007 –- 16 Saudis; August 2007 –- 1 Bahraini, 5 Afghans; September 2007 –- 16 Saudis; 1 Mauritanian; 1 Libyan, 1 Yemeni, 6 Afghans; November 2007 –- 3 Jordanians, 8 Afghans; 14 Saudis; December 2007 –- 2 Sudanese; 13 Afghans (here and here); 3 British residents; 10 Saudis; May 2008 –- 3 Sudanese, 1 Moroccan, 5 Afghans (here, here and here); July 2008 –- 2 Algerians; 1 Qatari, 1 United Arab Emirati, 1 Afghan; August 2008 –- 2 Algerians; September 2008 –- 1 Pakistani, 2 Afghans (here and here); 1 Sudanese, 1 Algerian; November 2008 –- 1 Kazakh, 1 Somali, 1 Tajik; 2 Algerians; 1 Yemeni (Salim Hamdan), repatriated to serve out the last month of his sentence; December 2008 –- 3 Bosnian Algerians; January 2009 –- 1 Afghan, 1 Algerian, 4 Iraqis; February 2009 — 1 British resident (Binyam Mohamed); May 2009 —1 Bosnian Algerian (Lakhdar Boumediene); June 2009 — 1 Chadian (Mohammed El-Gharani); 4 Uighurs to Bermuda; 1 Iraqi; 3 Saudis (here and here); August 2009 — 1 Afghan (Mohamed Jawad); 2 Syrians to Portugal; September 2009 — 1 Yemeni; 2 Uzbeks to Ireland (here and here); October 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti, 1 prisoner of undisclosed nationality to Belgium; 6 Uighurs to Palau; November 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian to France, 1 unidentified Palestinian to Hungary, 2 Tunisians to Italian custody; December 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti (Fouad al-Rabiah); 2 Somalis; 4 Afghans; 6 Yemenis; January 2010 — 2 Algerians, 1 Uzbek to Switzerland; 1 Egyptian, 1 Azerbaijani and 1 Tunisian to Slovakia; February 2010 — 1 Egyptian, 1 Libyan, 1 Tunisian to Albania; 1 Palestinian to Spain; March 2010 — 1 Libyan, 2 unidentified prisoners to Georgia, 2 Uighurs to Switzerland; May 2010 — 1 Syrian to Bulgaria, 1 Yemeni to Spain; July 2010 — 1 Yemeni (Mohammed Hassan Odaini); 1 Algerian; 1 Syrian to Cape Verde, 1 Uzbek to Latvia, 1 unidentified Afghan to Spain; September 2010 — 1 Palestinian, 1 Syrian to Germany; January 2011 — 1 Algerian; April 2012 — 2 Uighurs to El Salvador; July 2012 — 1 Sudanese; September 2012 — 1 Canadian (Omar Khadr) to ongoing imprisonment in Canada; August 2013 — 2 Algerians; December 2013 — 2 Algerians; 2 Saudis; 2 Sudanese; 3 Uighurs to Slovakia; March 2014 — 1 Algerian (Ahmed Belbacha); May 2014 — 5 Afghans to Qatar (in a prisoner swap for US PoW Bowe Bergdahl); November 2014 — 1 Kuwaiti (Fawzi al-Odah); 3 Yemenis to Georgia, 1 Yemeni and 1 Tunisian to Slovakia, and 1 Saudi; December 2014 — 4 Syrians, 1 Palestinian and 1 Tunisian to Uruguay; 4 Afghans; 2 Tunisians and 3 Yemenis to Kazakhstan; January 2015 — 4 Yemenis to Oman, 1 Yemeni to Estonia; June 2015 — 6 Yemenis to Oman; September 2015 — 1 Moroccan and 1 Saudi; October 2015 — 1 Mauritanian and 1 British resident (Shaker Aamer); November 2015 — 5 Yemenis to the United Arab Emirates; January 2016 — 2 Yemenis to Ghana; 1 Kuwaiti (Fayiz al-Kandari) and 1 Saudi; 10 Yemenis to Oman; 1 Egyptian to Bosnia and 1 Yemeni to Montenegro; April 2016 — 2 Libyans to Senegal; 9 Yemenis to Saudi Arabia; June 2016 — 1 Yemeni to Montenegro; July 2016 — 1 Tajik and 1 Yemeni to Serbia, 1 Yemeni to Italy; August 2016 — 12 Yemenis and 3 Afghans to the United Arab Emirates (see here and here); October 2016 — 1 Mauritanian (Mohammedou Ould Slahi); December 2016 — 1 Yemeni to Cape Verde; January 2017 — 4 Yemenis to Saudi Arabia; 8 Yemenis and 2 Afghans to Oman.

Video: Andy Worthington and Ramzi Kassem Discuss Trump, Obama, Guantánamo and Torture at Revolution Books in Harlem

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 first two months of the Trump administration.

 

On Sunday I got back from my US tour to coincide with the 15th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, which was on January 11, and I’m posting the video below of a powerful event I took part in during my visit — a panel discussion, on “Trump, Torture and Guantánamo” (and Barack Obama’s legacy) at Revolution Books in Harlem.

I was delighted to take part in the event with another speaker I had invited, Ramzi Kassem, a law professor at City University of New York (CUNY), with whom I have appeared at events many times before (see here, for example), and who, back in 2012, provided me exclusively with unclassified notes of meetings with Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, which I published on my website and on the website of the Close Guantánamo campaign that I co-founded with the attorney Tom Wilner in January 2012, marking the 10th anniversary of the prison’s opening.

Because of the uncertainties surrounding the transition from Barack Obama’s presidency to that of Donald Trump’s, I was involved in fewer events than usual on this visit — my seventh in a row to coincide with the anniversary of Guantánamo’s opening, all of which have been arranged by Debra Sweet of the World Can’t Wait — although everything I took part in was extremely worthwhile. I have previously posted the video of my speech outside the Supreme Court on Jan. 11, and the video of the panel discussion I initiated on Jan. 11 at New America, which also featured Tom Wilner, former Congressman Jim Moran, and Rosa Brooks and Peter Bergen of New America, and I’m pleased to be posting the video below, via Vimeo:

“Trump, Torture, and Guantanamo” from Revolution Books on Vimeo.

My presentation began at 8:50, and ended 23 minutes in, and Ramzi then spoke until 45:30. I then made a brief final statement about the small percentage of men genuinely accused of terrorism (no more than 3% of the 779 men held at Guantánamo by the US military), and asked Ramzi a question about the largely undocumented role of the Justice Department, under Obama as well as George W. Bush, in keeping Guantánamo open, and then we began what turned out to be lively Q&A session. Please note that there is a brief break in the visual recording (although not the audio), from 1:09:45 to 1:12:15, when the cameras were changed.

In my talk, I ran through the prison’s history — and my history of trying to get Guantánamo closed — and emphasized the need for us to maintain pressure on Donald Trump to free the men still held who have been approved for release (19 men at the time of the event, but now just five after releases in President Obama’s last week in office), to keep, and not scrap the Periodic Review Boards, which, in the last three years of Obama’s presidency, approved for release 38 out of 64 men who had previously been described as being “too dangerous to release,” or had been recommended for prosecution. I also believe, of course, that we should push Donald Trump to close the prison once and for all, despite his promise on the campaign trail to keep it open, and his recent tweet calling for more prisoners to be released.

Ramzi’s presentation was very powerful. He began by discussing Shaker Aamer’s case, spoke about the illegitimacy of all the so-called legal processes used to detain men at Guantánamo and to assess their cases, and his incredulity that, 11 years after he first visited Guantánamo, the prison is still open.

Ramzi then spoke about the case of Mammar Ameur, an Algerian he represented, who was seized in Pakistan, where he was working and living with his family when US and Pakistani officials came to abduct his neighbor, and not freed until October 2008.

As well as highlighting the abject failures of intelligence in this case — and in many, many others — Ramzi also spoke about the US’s systemic racism, as it applies not only to Guantánamo, but also to the judicial system on the US mainland, US geopolitical ambitions, and the role of bounty payments in filling Guantánamo with people who had nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.

I hope you have time to watch the video, and to share it if you find it useful. I must reiterate that I found it to be a very powerful event, and I thank Revolution Books for hosting it, as part of a series of events following the Presidential Election — “Refuse Fascism,” which has its own website here, and which has mounted a very public campaign against Trump in the run-up to the inauguration that is still ongoing.

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.