Andy Worthington's Blog, page 66

Two More Guantánamo Prisoners, Including Hambali, Recommended for Ongoing Imprisonment by Review Boards

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The Periodic Review Boards at Guantánamo, which have been reviewing the cases of all the men still held who are not approved for release or facing trials (currently, exactly half of the 60 men still held), have recently made public their decisions in two of the five remaining cases for which decisions had not already been taken. The review boards, which began in November 2013, consist 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,  and are similar to parole boards, assessing whether prisoners show contrition for their alleged crimes, whether they can demonstrate that they do not hold any ill-will towards the US, and whether they can establish a credible scenario for a peaceful life after Guantánamo.

The decisions — to approve the ongoing imprisonment of two men, Guleed Hassan Ahmed and Hambali — mean that, of the 64 cases considered, 34 have ended with recommendations for release (and 21 of those men have been freed), while 27 have led to recommendations that the men in question should continue to be imprisoned without charge or trial — but with regular reviews of their cases continuing to take place, for which the men and their lawyers can continue to provide information that they think will help to secure a recommendation for the release. For further information, see my definitive Periodic Review Board list on the Close Guantánamo website.

This is a success rate for the prisoners of 56%, although there is, it should be noted, a distinct difference in the results of the PRBs based on the two types of prisoners put forward for the reviews.

41 of the 64 men who went before the PRBs had been described by the previous review process, 2009’s Guantánamo Review Task Force, as being “too dangerous to release.” This was clearly an example of unacceptable caution on the part of the task force, as 28 of these men have now been approved for release. Just eleven have had their ongoing imprisonment upheld, and two others are awaiting decisions. The success rate for the “too dangerous to release” prisoners is therefore 72%.

The other 23 men were recommended for prosecution by the task force, until the basis for prosecution largely collapsed under judicial scrutiny in 2012 and 2013, when appeals court judges correct dismissed some of the handful of convictions secured in Guantánamo’s troubled military commissions trial system, on the basis that the war crimes in question — primarily, providing material support for terrorism — had been invented by Congress and were not legitimate.

Of these 23 men, just six have had their release approved, 16 others have had their ongoing imprisonment approved, and one other man — the notorious torture victim Abu Zubaydah — is awaiting a decision. This is a much lower proportion of recommendations for release (just 26%), but it still means that six men — long regarded as so significant that they were recommended for trials — have been approved for release.

Guleed Hassan Ahmed has his ongoing imprisonment approved

Of the two men whose ongoing imprisonment was recently approved by Periodic Review Boards, the first is Guleed Hassan Ahmed aka Gouled Hassan Dourad (ISN 10023), a Somali prisoner who arrived at the prison in September 2006 from CIA “black sites,” along with 13 other men including the alleged 9/11 architect, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. All were described as “high-value detainees,” but that designation has not entirely stood up under scrutiny. Although six of the HVDs have been put forward for trials, one was successfully transferred for prosecution in the US, and another has reached a plea deal at Guantánamo, the other six have not been put forward for trials, although Guleed Ahmed is the only one who was not even recommended for prosecution by Obama’s task force in 2009, which, as I described it at the time of his PRB in August, “suggest[ed] that the government does not really have much of a case against him.”

In their Final Determination approving his ongoing imprisonment on September 29, 2016, the board members determined, by consensus, that “continued law of war detention of the detainee remains necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States,” and noted that they had “considered [his] long history with al-Qa’ida as well as providing logistical and operational support to al-Qa’ida in East Africa (AQEA) leaders, including casing Camp Lemonier in Djibouti, the target of an AQEA plot.”

In addition, the board members complained that he had “minimized his role in assisting AQEA,” and noted “the lack of specificity and credibility in [his] responses to questions regarding a change in mindset, and [his] lack of candor regarding periods of noncompliant behavior and anti-US statements while in detention.”

Nevertheless, the board members also recognized the fact that he has a “large family” with an “ability to support him,” and were also approving of “his presentation of reasonable thoughts on a plan for supporting himself,” and they added that “[t]he Board looks forward to reviewing [his] file in six months and encourages him to be more candid about his past and current mindset” — a suggestion, I believe, that he has a chance of persuading the board to approve his release if he engages more in demonstrating that he genuinely does not pose a threat the US.

In response to the decision, the New York-based Center for Constitutional rights issued the following complaint, which I find understandable, because Guleed Ahmed was not even represented by his lawyers at his PRB — a situation which, as the PRBs’ history has demonstrated, does nothing to help support a recommendation for release:

The Board made the wrong decision. We are disappointed but not surprised. Guled’s hearing was beset by problems and grossly unfair. He did not have adequate time to prepare for the hearing and appeared before the Board without counsel. He should not have been brought to Guantánamo 10 years ago, and his continued detention only serves as another opportunity for the Obama administration to avoid accountability for what happened in the CIA torture program. Indeed, we know from other cases that the Board routinely relies on evidence obtained by torture, including evidence rejected by the federal courts. This process was fundamentally flawed.

CCR added, “We look forward to filing a habeas petition to force the government to release Guled,” although it is difficult to see how a habeas petition would have  a better chance of success, as the habeas litigation was thoroughly undermined by the appeals court in Washington, D.C. from 2009 to 2011, with the result that no prisoner has won a habeas petition in the courts since the summer of 2010.

Hambali’s ongoing imprisonment is approved

The second prisoner to have his ongoing imprisonment approved by a PRB is Hambali (ISN 10019), an Indonesian who was born Encep Nurjaman, but is also known as Riduan Isamuddin. His review took place on August 18, and his Final Determination was dated September 19, although, as with Guleed Ahmed, no clue was given as to why it took so long to announce the results.

As the US authorities described him for his PRB, every indication is that Hambali was “an operational mastermind in the Southeast Asia-based Islamic extremist group Jemaah Islamiyah (JI),” who “served as the main interface between JI and al-Qa’ida from 2000 until his capture in mid-2003,” and the only real surprise in his being put forward for a PRB is that he has not been put forward for a trial instead — if not in the military commissions, then perhaps in Australia, where most of the victims of the October 2002 Bali bombing, widely attributed to Hambali, were from.

In their final determination, the board members “considered [Hambali’s] lengthy history as a jihadist, working as a facilitator, attending al-Qa’ida training, and engaging in extremist support in Afghanistan and Southeast Asia, as well as [his] significant role in major terrorist attacks and plotting. “

The board members also “noted that [he] was not willing to accept any responsibility nor demonstrate any remorse for any of the activities or operations to which he has been connected, and the lack of supporting evidence of a change in mindset,” adding, “in fact, the Board noted [his] claimed change of mindset is contradicted by other reporting.” The board members also “considered [his] testimony to be elusive and non-credible, including half-truths and clear attempts to minimize and conceal his pre-detention activities.”

This is a pretty damning analysis of Hambali’s unsuitability for release, but in response, his civilian attorney, Ohio federal public defender Carlos Warner, told the Miami Herald that the review process was “a sham.” He explained that, as the Miami Herald put it, “he was forbidden to ‘participate in the hearing in a meaningful way.’” because he “was unable to get to Guantánamo for the video-teleconference hearing, transmitted between the captive at the base and the board not far from the Pentagon in Virginia.” His assessment of the board’s decision-making was as follows: “The Department of Defense has demonstrated that it is only interested in processing cases in a predetermined fashion without a full and fair hearing.”

I think Warner may be right that, in some cases — specifically, the majority of the “high-value detainees” — the authorities know in advance that they will not be approving the prisoners’ release, but in Hambali’s case, and others, I do think this is not because there is a clear case for their release, but rather there appears to be a compelling case for their prosecution.

If trials are not possible because of the torture to which these men were subjected, then it is one of the abiding problems of the Bush administration’s brutal “war on terror,” and, moreover, one which will continue to haunt anyone concerned with justice, as opposed to the vengeance that, it is clear to see with hindsight, actually drove much of the US’s approach to counter-terrorism in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

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.

Good News! The Updates to My Six-Part Definitive Guantánamo Prisoner List Are Now Complete

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

 

On October 5, I announced that I had just updated the first four parts of the six-part definitive Guantánamo Prisoner List that I first created in March 2009, and have updated five times since. At the time, I stated that I would be updating the final two parts with the next few days, but although I updated Part 5 recently, it has taken me until now to get round to updating Part 6, which includes the 14 “high-value detainees” brought to Guantánamo in September 2006, the  ten “medium-value detainees” who arrived from  CIA “black sites” earlier, in September 2004, the handful of men brought to Guantánamo in 2007-08, and a selection of largely random Afghans.

So I’m pleased to be able to report that all six parts are now complete — providing links to the 2000 articles about Guantánamo and the men held there that I have written since May 2007, plus references to the men’s stories in my book The Guantánamo Files, published in 2007. I have also added new photos, so that there are now nearly 200 photos accompanying the men’s stories — mostly from the classified military files released by WikiLeaks in 2011, on which I worked as a media partner.

See Part 1  (covering ISN numbers 1-133), Part 2  (ISNs 134-268, including Adnan Latif, who died in 2012, and Shaker Aamer), Part 3  (ISNs 269-496), Part 4  (ISNs 497-661 , including Moazzam Begg ), Part 5  (ISNs 662-928,  including Abu Wa’el Dhiab, Omar Deghayes, Mohamedou Ould Slahi and Omar Khadr ) and Part 6  (ISNs 929-10029, including the “high-value detainees”).

Please also note that this update to the definitive Guantánamo prisoner list — like so much of my work — is only possible with your support. I have no institutional or media backing for this work, so if you can support me at all, please do. I’m currently still trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my work on Guantánamo for the rest of the year if you can help. Please click on the ‘Donate’ button above to make a donation via PayPal (and see here for further information).

As I stated when I first published the prisoner list:

It is my hope that this project will provide an invaluable research tool for those seeking to understand how it came to pass that the government of the United States turned its back on domestic and international law, establishing torture as official US policy, and holding men without charge or trial neither as prisoners of war, protected by the Geneva Conventions, nor as criminal suspects to be put forward for trial in a federal court, but as “illegal enemy combatants.”

I also hope that it provides a compelling explanation of how that same government, under the leadership of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, established a prison in which the overwhelming majority of those held — at least 93 percent of the 779 men and boys imprisoned in total — were either completely innocent people, seized as a result of dubious intelligence or sold for bounty payments, or Taliban foot soldiers, recruited to fight an inter-Muslim civil war that began long before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and that had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or international terrorism.

And as I noted when I published the first of the latest updates three weeks ago, because it also “looks likely that Guantánamo will remain open when President Obama leaves office, I hope that it also provides useful information for those still seeking to close Guantánamo, and to bring to an end this bleak chapter in American history.”

Thanks, as ever, for your support.

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.

As Racism Spreads and Economic Woes Increase, Is the Tide Starting to Turn Against Brexit?

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On the face of it, only a little, but beneath the surface all is not right with the Brexit camp, as Britain — or perhaps, particularly, England — has settled into some horrible racist reality that ought to alarm all decent human beings. This week, as child refugees with relatives in the UK were finally allowed into the country after months languishing in the refugee camp in Calais (the so-called “Jungle”) because the government, up to that point, had done nothing, the response of our disgusting right-wing tabloid newspapers — the Mail, the Sun, the Express, the Star — was to claim that they were not children (I was reminded of Donald Rumsfeld and Chief of Staff Richard Myers claiming that the children held at Guantánamo were not children).

Then the disgusting ordinary racists of Britain got involved — the seemingly countless numbers of people empowered since the referendum result to be even more openly racist than previously, and, of course, those who, for many years now, have been exulting in their power to write whatever filth they want on social media, up to and including death threats, and mostly to get away with it.

Two particular targets of the online trolls were the singer Lily Allen, who had been reduced to tears after visiting the Calais refugee camp, and had apologised “on behalf of England”, and footballing hero and Match of the Day presenter Gary Lineker, who so appalled by the media witch hunt and support for it that he tweeted, “The treatment by some towards these young refugees is hideously racist and utterly heartless. What’s happening to our country?” and then faced calls for him be sacked, which he fought back against admirably, His best response, I thought, was, “Getting a bit of a spanking today, but things could be worse: Imagine, just for a second, being a refugee having to flee from your home.”

In another tweet, Ian Dunt of Politics.co.uk summed up the shameful racist position succinctly. “What we’re witnessing in coverage of Lily Allen and Gary Lineker,” he wrote, “is an attempt to make compassion towards refugees socially unacceptable.”

My friend Joanne MacInnes, with whom I co-founded the We Stand With Shaker Campaign, has been visiting Calais regularly and working with others on the refugee crisis — and in particular, the plight of unaccompanied minors in Calais. On Facebook, she wrote:

I worked as a volunteer at the Home Office last Monday with the first coach load of boys. It was a thrill because I knew a few of them from Calais and we were all so excited to see one another and reunite here in the London – the city of their dreams.

Whilst we were in the Home Office, which involved a lot of waiting around, an officer there showed them the first Daily Mail pictures, but at that point the negativity had not started and they were flattered to have been photographed. Some of those who weren’t felt left out. They assumed it was welcoming, because up to that point everyone had been. I’ve not got a contact for those boys, but I shudder to think how they are feeling now. I hope their families have been able to protect them from the worst of this.

They were so vulnerable and emotional and so obviously teenagers (not that I would care if they weren’t, because no matter their age they deserve to live in safety with their families) that it pains me to think they are now having to survive these accusations after their initial euphoria to be here. The Home Office has put up a screen now, so hopefully there will be no more pictures of the children. Can’t believe the press hasn’t been charged for taking them as they would be at a school.

Today, the Observer reports that, as the “Jungle” faces demolition on Monday, a group of 54 girls, mostly from Eritrea, arrived in Britain “under the Dubs amendment, the government pledge to help unaccompanied minors that was announced to parliament in the summer.” The Observer added that they “arrived at the Lunar House immigration centre, in Croydon, south London, just before 7pm on Saturday.” Lord Dubs, the newspaper reminded readers, is “the Labour peer and former child refugee who brought about a political coup by forcing the government to promise to grant sanctuary to vulnerable unaccompanied children.”

The Observer added:

So far, only child refugees who have relatives in the UK have been allowed to enter but sources said a number of teenage Eritrean girls were being brought to Britain under the landmark amendment, which could pave the way for hundreds more child refugees.

The landmark Dubs amendment committed the government to relocate vulnerable lone-child refugees in France, Italy and Greece “as soon as possible” with charities led to believe the figure could reach 3,000. Volunteers estimate there could be up to 500 child refugees currently eligible in the camp, which will be cleared and then destroyed next week, although hundreds of unaccompanied minors will be kept there in converted shipping containers as their claims to enter the UK are processed.

Elsewhere in Brexit Britain, the Observer also reports that “Britain’s biggest banks are preparing to relocate out of the UK in the first few months of 2017 amid growing fears over the impending Brexit negotiations, while smaller banks are making plans to get out before Christmas.”

The claim was made by Anthony Browne, the chief executive of the British Bankers’ Association, in a column entitled, “Brexit politicians are putting us on a fast track to financial jeopardy,” which began:

How do you take your Brexit? Soft or hard? Quick or slow? It might all seem semantics but for the UK and Europe it is the £1.1tn question. That is the amount banks based in the UK are lending to the companies and governments of the EU27, keeping the continent afloat financially. The free trade in financial services that crosses the Channel each year, helping customers and boosting the economies in the UK and Europe, is worth more than £20bn.

Brexit means Brexit and we are all Brexiters now. But if we get it wrong, that £20bn trade in financial services is at risk and the public and political debate is taking us in the wrong direction.

I encourage you to read the whole column for further enlightenment of a worrying kind, as this really is the kind of blow to the government that ought to serve as a wake-up call for Theresa May and her ministers, but then I recall her Thatcher-like intransigence, and I fear that even this — surely the biggest threat conceivable to a power structure devoted to the UK’s financial services sector — may be swatted aside by the PM as we press on inexorably to our self-inflicted economic doom.

And believe me, I have no love whatsoever for our bloated banking sector, which I blame for their greed and their unparalleled contribution to the growing chasm between the rich and the poor — but I fear that if they all leave, prompted by Brexit, it will be a huge blow to the economy, and, most importantly, millions of non-bankers will suffer. A friend who works on engaging deprived teenagers in film and the media has already told me that, since the referendum, the corporate banking sector has refused to discuss renewing the support they give to numerous worthwhile projects like his, because they were all making plans for leaving the UK. The damage, of course, isn’t showing immediately, but will show in April, when the funding for countless worthwhile projects — and the people running them — will fall off a cliff unless the government backs down.

In the meantime, another front against the “hard Brexit” favoured by the government — and the unwillingness of Theresa May and her ministers to consult with Parliament — came in the High Court, where a ground-breaking case seeking to establish that MPs must be allowed to vote before we leave the EU was heard on October 13, 17 and 18.

The full 582-page transcript is here, and while I encourage anyone interested to scrutinise the transcript, with its detailed discussions that were described bone of the lawyers as being of “fundamental constitutional importance” to the government, Parliament and the UK as a whole, the key passage that was seized on by the media was the admission by James Eadie QC, First Treasury Counsel representing the government, that, as the BBC described it, “it was ‘very likely’ that Parliament would be asked to approve the final Brexit settlement – on the basis that it would take the form of a treaty between the UK and the rest of the EU requiring domestic ratification.”

The BBC also pointed out that James Eadie was also “quick to stress that what he described as ‘considerable further parliamentary involvement’ was not a cast-iron guarantee of a binding vote and that either the UK or the EU could decide that it was not necessary.”

Tory MP Neil Carmichael, who supports Open Britain, which is campaigning to preserve the single market, responded to the news, as the Independent described it, by saying that “a vote in two years’ time was no substitute for a say on the terms for starting the exit.”

“It’s an encouraging sign that the Government has agreed to give Parliament a say on the final terms of Brexit,” he said, “but there must be a role of Parliament before the end of the negotiations. The best place to start would be for the Government to commit to a debate and a vote in the House of Commons on the Government’s principles for the upcoming negotiations before they trigger Article 50.”

Even better would be for a majority of those with power and influence to accept that Brexit will be so economically suicidal that shouldn’t go ahead with it — as Polly Toynbee discussed in her column for the Guardian on Thursday, entitled, “The public are already turning against Brexit. When will Theresa May listen?”

Toynbee was writing the eve of Theresa May’s first EU summit — which the Guardian elsewhere described as “awkward” — and she had this to say:

There is only one way out of this. The British people may decide the cost is too high. Before anything has happened yet, they can see how the prospect of hard Brexit is already causing serious damage. The pound plunging by 17% is a national disaster, predicted to fall further: only those who supported Brexit whistle in the dark, pretending it’s good news. It will help a few manufacturers and Bond Street retailers of luxury goods, but our precarious over-dependence on imports means steep price rises ahead in petrol and food are rather more important than cheaper Burberry handbags. We may decry an unbalanced reliance on the finance industry, but wrecking it before building up anything else will leave a chasm in treasury revenues, more cuts, more job losses.

People aren’t stupid. They may want less immigration – but not at any cost. The stupidity was a referendum campaign that boiled everything down to that one issue. But people don’t think just one thing, they have many views and priorities: when the facts change, they tend to change their minds.

The latest Ipsos Mori poll shows a sudden plunge in public confidence over the economy. Only 24% expect the economy to improve while 53% think it will worsen (up from 37% in September). Do they think the effect of Britain voting to leave the EU will make their personal standard of living better or worse? Only 24% say better, while 49% say worse – a big shift, says Ipsos Mori’s Ben Page.

I certainly hope these are signs that the British people are beginning to see sanity — but then I remember the racists discussed at the start of this article, the intransigence of Theresa May and the inadequacies of her ministers, and I recall, sadly, that this continues to be, unfortunately, a really rather horrible time in modern British history.

Note: Please also see “Why sterling’s collapse is not good for the UK economy,” an important article by Robert Skidelsky, professor of political economy at Warwick University, and Andrew Rawnsley’s column, “The crew are cutting each other’s throats on Mrs May’s leaking ship,” about dissent in the ministerial ranks.

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.

Ask Your MP to Tell Boris Johnson to Demand the Release of UK Citizen Andy Tsege, Kidnapped and on Death Row in Ethiopia

Please ask your MP to demand action from Boris Johnson in demanding Andy Tsege’s release.

Earlier this year, I had the pleasure of meeting Yemi Hailemariam, the partner of Andy Tsege (Andargachew Tsege), a prominent opponent of the Ethiopian government, who, as I explained when Yemi subsequently stood for a photo for the Countdown to Close Guantánamo, “was kidnapped” in Yemen “and rendered to Ethiopia on the command of the Ethiopian government” in June 2014, as his lawyers at Reprieve explained, adding that he was “held in secret detention and in solitary confinement for over a year, without access to any form of due process. He has been paraded on Ethiopian TV looking ill and gaunt. He was given an in absentia death sentence in 2009. He could be executed at any time.” Andy is pictured above, with Yemi and their three children.

I noted the above when I posted Yemi’s photo, back in May, at a time when the British government, with Phillip Hammond as foreign secretary, had refused to act decisively on Andy’s behalf. Since then, of course, David Cameron has resigned following the EU referendum debacle, Theresa May has become our new and unelected Prime Minister, and Hammond has become home secretary, with May surprising everyone by appointing Boris Johnson as foreign secretary, a man with a history of racist comments about countries and people he is now supposed to be presenting himself to as a responsible and statesman-like figure.

No one who has seen the footage of John Kerry wincing as Johnson was grilled by journalists at one of his first outings as foreign secretary (a joint US-UK press conference) can be in any doubt that Johnson is ill-suited to the role, but he is now responsible for Britain’s position with regard to Andy Tsege, and answerable to the more than 130,000 people who have signed a 38 Degrees petition calling for Andy to be freed.

To take action for Andy, please email your MP via Reprieve’s website, and ask them to please put pressure on Boris Johnson to act.

On October 18, his lawyers at Reprieve, and four other organisations — Article 19, the Ethiopia Human Rights Project, Fair Trials International and Redress — sent the following letter to Boris Johnson in response to an open letter by the foreign secretary on August 26. Full of inadequate responses to the lawyers’ demands, this letter and its failings are dissected by Reprieve here, in an article entitled, “7 reasons why Boris Johnson is wrong not to call for British father’s release from Ethiopian death row.”

The NGOs’ letter also came about in response to Johnson’s failure to answer questions about Andy’s situation in Parliament. As Reprieve described it in a press release, “The letter comes after Mr. Johnson was accused on Tuesday of evading questions on the issue in the House of Commons. Asked by MPs why he had not yet called for Mr. Tsege’s release, the Foreign Secretary failed to respond, saying that ‘ongoing legal action’ prevented him from doing so. Mr. Johnson appeared to be referring to an application for judicial review brought by Mr. Tsege’s family which concluded last month, with no appeal sought.” However, “[e]arlier this year, former Prime Minister David Cameron answered questions in Parliament on the case some weeks after the legal case was initiated.”

Reprieve’s press release also noted that, “In June this year, the Ethiopian government promised the former Foreign Secretary, Philip Hammond, that Mr. Tsege would be given ‘legal access’ – however, to date, Mr. Tsege has yet to be allowed to contact a lawyer.”

Reprieve added:

Ethiopian courts have been used in recent years to imprison and sentence to death political dissidents, protestors, journalists and bloggers. The Ethiopian authorities have previously told Foreign Office officials that Mr. Tsege is unable to appeal his death sentence. Today’s letter from the human rights organizations warns that Mr. Tsege faces little prospect of due process in Ethiopia.

Mr. Tsege’s family in London are unable to contact him. This week, there were concerns that the British government’s limited consular access to him could be under threat, after Ethiopia announced a ‘state of emergency’ that reportedly includes restrictions on the movement of diplomats in the country.

Just yesterday, AFP reported that the Ethiopian authorities “have arrested more than 1,500 people since declaring a state of emergency less than two weeks ago, according to a statement published by state-controlled news agency Fana.”

Maya Foa, one of  Reprieve’s directors, said, “Andy Tsege’s ordeal at the hands of the Ethiopian government is nothing short of an outrage. His family in London are desperately worried about him, and MPs are rightly asking why Boris Johnson won’t request his return. It’s appalling that the Foreign Secretary is unwilling to explain himself to Parliament. As we’ve written to Mr. Johnson, the Ethiopian government has shown zero interest in delivering on its weak promises on Andy’s case – and the current crackdown is yet more evidence that Ethiopia’s ruling party has little mercy for its critics. Boris Johnson must start listening to our concerns, and urgently request Andy’s return to Britain.”

Below is the letter the NGOs wrote to Boris Johnson calling for him to act on Andy’s behalf without further delay:

The Rt Honourable Boris Johnson MP

Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs

King Charles Street

London SW1A 2AH

TO: boris.johnson.mp@parliament.uk; fcocorrespondence@fco.gov.uk

Urgent request that the UK reconsider its refusal to call for Andy Tsege’s release

Dear Secretary of State,

Our organisations are writing in response to your recent open letter on the case of British father-of-three Andy Tsege. [i]

At time of writing Mr. Tsege has been illegally held on Ethiopia’s death row for more than two years under a death sentence imposed upon him in absentia, having been kidnapped in an international airport in June 2014 and rendered to a prison widely referred to as “Ethiopia’s gulag”. [ii]

We urge you to reconsider your refusal to call for Ethiopia to return Mr. Tsege to his home in the UK and your decision instead to limit your efforts in the case to asking that he be allowed to see a lawyer. We believe this approach is misplaced and potentially counter-productive. Mr .Tsege is, after all, not a criminal, but himself a victim of crime.

Your emphasis on securing Mr. Tsege a lawyer ignores the fact that both the Ethiopian Prime Minister and Foreign Minister have confirmed that “there is no appeal process” available to Mr. Tsege, and that it is “not possible” for him to appeal his in absentia death sentence. [iii]

The FCO’s approach is further undermined by Ethiopia’s failure to deliver on a promise to your predecessor five months ago that Mr. Tsege would be granted legal access. [iv] Since then prison authorities have yet to even pass Mr. Tsege pen and paper with which to request legal advice.

Should Mr. Tsege at some point in the future be allowed to write a letter to a lawyer, he would find this of little use: Reprieve has now contacted all 20 lawyers on the FCO’s own list of proposed lawyers in Ethiopia and 19 out of 20 did not respond or did not even have valid contact details.

By focusing solely on the request that Mr. Tsege be granted a lawyer, the FCO is neglecting to address Mr. Tsege’s illegal kidnap, illegal transfer to Ethiopia, and illegal in absentia death sentence – grave abuses which have led the UN’s Working Group on Arbitrary Detention to call for Mr. Tsege’s immediate release. [v] Worse still, the approach risks lending credibility to a sham legal process that will only prolong Mr. Tsege’s ordeal.

Mr. Tsege was sentenced to death in 2009 in proceedings described by the US State Department as “lacking in basic elements of due process” [vi], which he was not even invited to attend.[vii] The African Commission is currently reviewing the complete lack of due process that Andy is facing. It strains credulity to think that at this stage a lawyer could help Mr. Tsege navigate the same corrupted justice system.

Your letter claims that “Britain does not interfere in the legal systems of other countries”, but in fact the UK has frequently requested and secured the release of British nationals who have been arbitrarily detained. Lee Po in China [viii] and Karl Andree in Saudi Arabia [ix] are just two recent examples.

Given the catalogue of abuses Mr. Tsege has suffered, and the reality that he will not and cannot obtain legal relief in Ethiopia, we urge you to take a similar approach to his case, and call for his immediate release and return to his family.

Please do not hesitate to contact me should you wish to discuss this matter further.

Maya Foa, Director, Reprieve

Henry Maina, East Africa Director, Article 19

Soleyana S. Gebremichael, Coordinator, Ethiopia Human Rights Project

Jago Russel, Chief Executive, Fair Trials International

Dr. Carla Ferstman, Director, Redress

[i] FCO Correspondence on Andargachew Tsege, British national currently detained in Ethiopia: open letter to supporters published on the website of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) on 26th August 2016. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/andargachew-tsege-british-national-currently-detained-in-ethiopia-open-letter-to-supporters

[ii] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/25/opinion/letter-from-ethiopias-gulag.html

[iii] Note of a meeting between the Secretary of State for International Development and the Prime Minister of Ethiopia, 16 July 2015, disclosed to Ms Hailemariam on 29 January 2016 pursuant to a Subject Access Request under the Data Protection Act 1998; Note of a meeting with the Foreign Minister of Ethiopia, Dr Tedros Adhanom, 21 July 2015, disclosed to Ms Hailemariam on 29 January 2016 pursuant to a Subject Access Request under the Data Protection Act 1998.

[iv] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/foreign-secretary-secures-legal-representation-for-briton-detained-in-ethiopia

[v] Opinion adopted by the UN Human Rights Council Working Group on Arbitrary Detention at its 72nd meeting, 20-29 April 2015. In March 2016, the UN Special Rapporteur similarly concluded that Ethiopia had violated the Convention Against Torture in sentencing Mr Tsege to death “without due process”. Report of UN Special Rapporteur on Torture to Human Rights Council (March 2016), para 148.

[vi] ‘Scenesetter for Codel Meeks visit to Ethiopia: February 16-17, 2010’, cable from US Embassy Addis Ababa, 8 February 2010, published by WikiLeaks: https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/10ADDISABABA244_a.html

[vii] ‘Attempted coup or opposition round up’, cable from US Embassy Addis Ababa, 27 April 2009, published by WikiLeaks: https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/10ADDISABABA244_a.html

[viii] House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee: ‘The FCO’s administration and funding of its human rights work overseas: Government Response to the Committee’s Fourth Report of Session 2015-16, published 10 July 2016. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201617/cmselect/cmfaff/545/545.pdf

[ix] Foreign Secretary, Philip Hammond MP’s statement on the return of Karl Adree to the UK, 11 November 2015: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/foreign-secretary-statement-on-the-return-of-karl-andree-to-the-uk

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.

How Guantánamo’s Periodic Review Boards Exposed Woefully Distorted Intelligence Assessments

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.

Over the last three years, I’ve been monitoring the Periodic Review Boards, the most recent review process at the prison, set up to give some semblance of justice to the cases of men held year after year without charge or trial, and subjected to varying forms of abuse and, in some cases, torture. See our definitive Periodic Review Board list here.

The first two review processes — the Combatant Status Review Tribunals and the Administrative Review Boards — took place under President Bush. Consisting of panels of three military officers, they were essentially designed to rubber-stamp the men’s designation, on capture, as “enemy combatants” who could be held indefinitely without charge or trial. The prisoners were allowed to be present for the unclassified section of the hearings, but were not allowed to hear classified material, and often had no idea where the allegations against them had arisen.

The third review process, which did not involve any interaction with the prisoners themselves, took place in 2009, under President Obama. The Guantánamo Review Task Force was a high-level, inter-agency process in which the cases of the 240 men who were held when President Obama took office were examined, and decisions taken about whether to release them, to put them on trial, or to continue holding them without charge or trial. In its final report, in January 2010, the task force approved 156 men for release and 36 for prosecution, and designated 48 others for ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial, on the basis that they were allegedly “too dangerous to release,” even while acknowledging that insufficient evidence existed to put them on trial.

This latter designation was profoundly troubling, of course, not just because it involved President Obama explicitly supporting imprisonment without charge or trial, but also because of the basis for their designation as “too dangerous to release.” If insufficient evidence existed to put them on trial, that was because the evidence was actually inadequate, and did not rise to the level of evidence, because it consisted, in many cases, of statements made by the prisoners themselves, about themselves or their fellow prisoners, which were often made under circumstances that were not conducive to truth-telling — under torture or other forms of abuse, or even being bribed with better living conditions.

Other dubious information evidently came from US military and intelligence reports, and from Guantánamo itself came assessments of their purported dangerousness based on their behavior during their imprisonment.

And yet, these assessments have proven to be wildly inaccurate. Of the 48 men described as “too dangerous to release,” 41 have faced PRBs, and 28 have been approved for release. Just ten have had their ongoing imprisonment upheld, and three others are awaiting decisions.

23 other PRBs have taken place for men initially recommended for prosecution, who were made eligible for PRBs when the basis for prosecutions largely collapsed in 2012 and 2013. Just eight convictions have been secured in the military commission trial system set up for the Guantánamo prisoners, and four of those decisions were overturned, when appeals court judges ruled that the war crimes for which the men had been convicted were not legitimate and had been invented by Congress.

In these cases, the task force’s caution appears to have been more justified, as 15 of the 23 have had their ongoing imprisonment approved. Two others are awaiting decisions, but that still means that six men — long regarded as so significant that they were recommended for trials — have instead been approved for release. Nevertheless, the decisions to continue holding prisoners remain contentious — in part because the PRBs are a parole-type process, designed to seek out contrition and peaceful and constructive post-Guantánamo plans, even though parole is a process for men who have been tried and convicted of crimes, but also because of the validity of ongoing doubts in some cases, and the blunt truth that anyone against whom allegations of terrorism can be levelled should be put on trial and not held indefinitely without being charged or tried.

As the PRBs have taken place, we have been watching and writing about the examples of extreme, misplaced caution, and the severe inadequacies in the intelligence-gathering process — the six men seized in Karachi in September 2002 and regarded as an Al-Qaeda cell, for example, who were finally told that the US government no longer believed that such a cell had ever existed (five of the six have now been approved for release and two have been freed, and the sixth is awaiting a decision); an Afghan (Abdul Zahir) alleged to have been a chemical and biological weapons maker, who was finally revealed as a case of mistaken identity; and a Yemeni (Mustafa al-Shamiri) regarded as a senior al-Qaida military trainer, who was also eventually revealed to have been a case of mistaken identity.

These are just the most noticeable examples, but throughout the PRBs distortion and exaggeration about the significance of prisoners has been widespread.

The Miami Herald’s recent report

In a recent article for the Miami Herald, “New Guantánamo intelligence upends old ‘worst of the worst’ assumptions,” Carol Rosenberg, who has been writing about Guantánamo since the prison opened, examined these cases, and others, like the so-called “Dirty 30,” purported bodyguards for Osama bin Laden who, it has long been clear, had their role massively exaggerated.

I wrote about the distortions in the descriptions of the “Dirty 30” way back in April 2009, in an article for FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting) entitled, “Dangerous Revisionism Over Guantánamo,” responding to a November 2008 New York Times front-page article which opened, as I described it, with “an unqualified opening line that could have been written by the Pentagon”: “They were called the Dirty 30—bodyguards for Osama bin Laden captured early in the Afghanistan war.”

Rosenberg began her article with the Afghan poisoner who wasn’t — Abdul Zahir, who was one of ten prisoners put forward for a trial by military commission in the trials’ first incarnation under President Bush. “US Rangers captured him and some ‘suspicious items’ in a July 11, 2002, raid on his home on suspicion of ‘involvement with chemical/biological weapons activity,’” Rosenberg wrote. Zahir was accused of being an al-Qaida conspirator named Abdul Bari, which was a name he had also used, but it was also an extremely common name. When he was approved for release in July, it was, as Rosenberg noted, in large part because an intelligence assessment had concluded that he “was probably misidentified as the individual who had ties to al-Qaida weapons facilitation.”

Air Force Lt. Col. Sterling Thomas, who had been his defense attorney since 2010 — as part of his ongoing but unfulfilled eligibility for a military commissions trial — told Rosenberg, “They had the wrong guy the whole time. Abdul Zahir shared a name with a terrorist that they thought they were looking for. He unfortunately was further condemned by the fact that United States forces couldn’t distinguish between bomb-making materials and the salt, sugar and petroleum jelly he had nearby when he was wrongly arrested.”

The State Department, Rosenberg noted, is currently “pursuing a plan to resettle or repatriate him.”

In a number of interviews, Rosenberg spoke to intelligence sources — including people who served at Guantánamo in what she described as “the wobbly world of early war-on-terror intelligence gathering and analysis,” in which “a suspicion built on circumstances of capture gelled into allegations of membership in a terror cell that on reflection more than a decade later probably didn’t exist.” Her sources “blamed bad intelligence on a combination of urgency to produce, ignorance about al-Qaida and Afghanistan at the prison’s inception and inexperience in the art of investigation and analysis.”

Mark Fallon is one of the experts who spoke to Rosenberg. A veteran NCIS agent, from 2002 to 2004 he was the deputy commander of the Criminal Investigation Task Force, which sought prosecutions for alleged terrorists held at Guantánamo, and he is the author of Unjustifiable Means: The Inside Story of How the CIA, Pentagon, and US Government Conspired to Torture, to be published in January 2017.

“It was clear early on that the intelligence was grossly wrong,” Fallon said, pointing out that most of the prisoners at Guantánamo “weren’t battlefield captives.” As Rosenberg described it, he called many “bounty babies” — “men captured by Afghan warlords or Pakistani security forces and sent to Guantánamo ‘on the sketchiest bit of intelligence with nothing to corroborate.’”

A Seton Hall Law School investigation in 2006 established, drawing on the Pentagon’s own records, that “[o]nly 5% of the detainees were captured by United States forces,” while “86% of the detainees were arrested by either Pakistan or the Northern Alliance and turned over to United States custody.” Moreover, many of those handed over were in fact sold, as the US was making bounty payments averaging $5000 a head to their Afghan and Pakistani allies for al-Qaeda or Taliban suspects — or those who could be presented as such. In his 2006 autobiography, In the Line of Fire, no less a figure than Pakistan’s President Musharraf bragged that, in return for handing over 369 terror suspects to the US, “We have earned bounty payments totaling millions of dollars.”

Once these men got to Guantánamo, as Rosenberg described Fallon’s assessment, “the task of discerning tidbit from truth was complicated by an Army leadership unskilled in military intelligence,” who argued that “you couldn’t coddle the enemy.”

This was the period of the most extreme and wide-ranging torture at Guantánamo — applied to at least one in six of the men held, when the authorities used “manipulation of temperatures, sleep, diet and solitary confinement to get a captive talking at a time when Fallon’s team was advocating rapport building.” As he explained, “Sleep deprivation only muddles memories,” but as it was used widely the interrogators using coercion ended up with “a lot of false information based on some pretty poor interrogations being done partly by military interrogators in that time frame.”

He added that it was “no surprise that early prisoner profiles are imploding under Periodic Review Board scrutiny.” As he explained, “That’s why people are so successful doing cold case homicide cases. People make decisions based on what they knew then. I don’t want to say that the facts changed. The facts grew. When you’re working cases, cases evolve. As you get additional facts, you interpret it differently.”

One analyst who worked at Guantánamo in its early years for the Joint Intelligence Group, which coordinates interrogation operations at the prison, spoke about how the JIG was “looking for anything you can pin on these guys.” The soldier-turned-civilian contractor, who spoke anonymously, said that analysts “weren’t making things up.” As he explained, “We were working overtime trying to figure out who we had, learning this culture as we go along.” His unit, he revealed, “was isolated, started off knowing more about Russia and Bosnia than Afghanistan and al-Qaida and was under pressure to help stop the next terror attack.”

“Everybody’s drinking the Kool-Aid. You see conspiracies everywhere,” he said, adding that the intelligence unit was “picking up on one or two things and holding on to it tightly like it was gospel.”

One result, as Carol Rosenberg explained, was how “being captured with a cheap Casio watch on your wrist made you a terrorist.”

As she described it, “Analysts were told that an al-Qaida bomb-making course gave its graduates Casio F-91W or A159W models as gifts. Separately, it was understood that those models could be used as detonation devices. So possession of one became ‘an indicator of al-Qaida training in the manufacture of improvised explosive devices,’ according to a 2006 intelligence unit Matrix of Threat Indicators for Enemy Combatants’” released by WikiLeaks in 2011. I worked with WikiLeaks as a media partner on the release of these files, and discussed this document at the time.

The analyst called the Casio watch scenario “[a]bsolutely ridiculous,” and “an awfully big leap,” especially because, as Rosenberg added, “a footnote in the very same matrix explained that ‘approximately one-third’ of Guantánamo prisoners who were captured with that ubiquitous model of watch ‘have known connections to explosives.’ Meaning two-thirds did not.”

Fallon, discussing the problems with the intelligence-gathering, said, “They would take any tidbit of information and use that. It’s what the psychologists call confirmation bias. If you are predisposed that that person never leaves Guantánamo, you make judgments and conclusions on those facts based on that predisposition. We were looking for corroborated information, not just a tidbit. That’s why you do investigations, not just interrogations, to corroborate that information.”

Fallon added that there was also “pressure to defend the use of Guantánamo” as a whole. Army Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the commander of the prison from 2002-04, who had no experience of interrogation, spoke endlessly about securing “actionable intelligence” at Guantánamo, and so “[t]he rush to justify the place as gathering ‘actionable intelligence’ … did not ‘allow for more sober thoughtful analysis.’”

The anonymous analyst also noted that fear of recidivism — of prisoners returning to the battlefield — “infected” the assessment process and added that some analysts were aware that the prisoners’ treatment could also have had negative results. “If this guy wasn’t an enemy before, he is now,” as he put it.

In her article, Carol Rosenberg discussed the recidivism reports, released by US government departments — initially, the Pentagon, and more recently the Director of National Intelligence — that have had a profoundly negative impact on securing the release of prisoners from Guantánamo throughout Obama’s presidency. She cited the most recent report claiming that 17.6 percent of former prisoners have taken part in terrorist or insurgent activities after their release, but as no details are ever provided for these claims, it is impossible to take them at face value — although, as I have been reporting for many years, that has never stopped the mainstream media from repeating them uncritically.

Turning to the assessments of the Guantánamo Review Task Force, Rosenberg spoke to Matt Olsen, the task force’s director, who “went on to run the National Counterterrorism Center that today prepares prisoner profiles for the parole-style board.” Olsen told her that, even in 2009, the task force members “struggled at times to definitively identify detainees because of the multiple names they used,” and he added that there were “a few pretty complicated cases.”

Reaching “beyond Defense Department analysis to include material from the CIA and other agencies,” Olsen explained, the task force uncovered labels, like the “worst of the worst,” adding that some of them were “‘myths’ that would be debunked.”

He also explained, “We started looking at the detainees and we realized these guys were not all the same. There were important differences among the detainees, the role they played and threat they posed. We had to dig into terms like ‘associated with al-Qaida,’ for example, to understand exactly what that meant from a threat perspective and whether those links were strong or tenuous.”

One example of the task force’s extreme caution was the case of Mustafa al-Shamiri, assessed in his 2008 military file released by WikiLeaks as “a ‘high risk’ captive of consequence, a senior al-Qaida training camp trainer and guesthouse logistician.” He was declared “too dangerous to release” by the task force, but in January this year his PRB declared that the earlier intelligence in his case was “discredited,” and that he had been confused with someone with a similar name. Although cleared for release, al-Shamiri is still at Guantánamo, awaiting a third country that will take him in, as the entire US establishment refuses to allow any Yemenis to be repatriated, citing security concerns.

Seeking to discover “who got it wrong, and when,” Rosenberg spoke to Cully Stimson, the Pentagon’s deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs in 2006 and 2007, who recalled that “the intelligence was at times puzzling enough that he’d go to Guantánamo to study material in the JIG’s evidence locker,” where “[s]helves of the prefab building in the Detention Center Zone were stacked with material that arrived on the cargo planes carrying the captives from Afghanistan — from wallets and wristwatches to notebooks and family photos.”

A former prosecutor and defense lawyer, Stimson’s job “included recommending to then-Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England whether to release” certain prisoners. He said that he was involved in “delving deeper than written reports to try to distinguish tip from truth in a captive’s file.”

Discussing releases based on updated intelligence, Stimson told Rosenberg, “The skeptical side of me says the scales are tipped in the favor of transfer and they’re going to do what they need to do bureaucratically to get it done. I would hate to think that people are shading or suppressing raw intelligence to the contrary. At the same time what I don’t know is if additional information has been developed over time that would lead a reasonable person to that conclusion. If that’s the case, then it is what it is.”

The former analyst, however, pointed out that there was a widespread awareness of possible errors in the early years. He said he “recalled analysts writing assessments in a secure facility poking fun at one another,” asking, for example, “How’s your kingpin over there?” But he also explained that “it was hard to be the spoiler who poked holes in a previous analyst’s pronouncements.”

Mark Fallon also explained another key point — that, in Afghanistan, soldiers were required to send prisoners to Guantánamo with “no effective screening mechanisms,” something I have been writing about ever since I first began researching Guantánamo in 2006. As I explained in 2011, “as former interrogator Chris Mackey (a pseudonym) explained in his book The Interrogators, the US high command, based in Camp Doha, Kuwait, stipulated that every prisoner who ended up in US custody had to be transferred to Guantánamo — and that there were no exceptions.”

Fallon explained that this situation meant that analysts “had to start from scratch trying to figure out who the US held in the cages at Camp X-Ray,” as Rosenberg described it. As Fallon put it, “Guantánamo became more of a dumping ground rather than a place, at least from my position, that we were told was supposed to be a facility for high-value targets for either intelligence or prosecution.”

For the “Dirty 30,” the evolution of the threat they supposedly posed arose because, as Carol Rosenberg described it, “The intelligence unit was sorting files, and somebody tasked with finding bodyguards noticed the common capture of 30 men delivered by Pakistani security forces and so labeled them. But by the time the files leaked, in 2011, a review of prison and court records shows, the Bush administration had repatriated 10 of them, including a Moroccan profiled as a leader of the Dirty 30 in July 2003. Updated, unclassified profiles cast doubt on whether some still were bodyguards — or that aspect of the assessment has simply vanished.”

She also noted how the leaked 2006 “Matrix of Threat Indicators” had taken as “an act of faith” the existence of the “Karachi 6” terror cell, and yet, in December 2015, the intelligence community “debunked the idea of the Karachi 6 in a series of intelligence profiles,” stating that “it is more likely the six Yemenis were elements of a large pool of Yemeni fighters that senior al-Qaida planners considered potentially available to support future operations.”

In other cases, Rosenberg concluded, the PRBs have “disclosed new information that may have eluded the prison’s intelligence unit.” This is currently the case with additional material that is being looked at in the cases of five men whose ongoing imprisonment has already been recommended, and who may, as a result, be recommended for release, but it also happened in the case of Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Saudi suspected of being the intended 20th hijacker on 9/11, who was subjected to a specific torture program in Guantánamo. Al-Qahtani’s PRB revealed a previously unknown — or previously undisclosed — history of severe mental illness back in Saudi Arabia, although this information did not lead to a recommendation for his release.

With the population of Guantánamo down to just 60 men, it is important to credit the role the PRBs have played, with 20 men released as a result of the board’s deliberations, and 14 others awaiting release. However it remains disheartening that, nearly 15 years since Guantánamo opened, we are still discovering the extent to which thoroughly unreliable information has been used to continue holding men described as the “worst of the worst” when, in so many cases, that was simply not true at all.

Note: The photo at the top of this article is an edit of an image put together for the Miami Herald‘s guide to the Periodic Review Boards. Top row from left: Mohammed Ghanem (Yemen, approved for release), Haji Hamidullah (Afghanistan, freed), Abdul Rahman Shalabi (Saudi Arabia, freed), Ayyub Ali Salih (Yemen, freed). Middle Row​: Yassin Qasim (Yemen, approved for ongoing imprisonment), Abdu Ali al-Hajj Sharqawi (Yemen, approved for ongoing imprisonment), Mohamedou Ould Slahi (Mauritania, freed), Mansoor al-Zahari aka al-Dayfi (Yemen, freed). Bottom, from left, Ravil Mingazov (Russia, approved for release), Abu Zubaydah (Palestine, not decided yet), Salman Rabei’i (Yemen, approved for ongoing imprisonment), Abdul Latif Nasir (Morocco, approved for release).

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.

‘Enshrined Injustice: Guantánamo, Torture and the Military Commissions’ – Nov. 2 London Event with Alka Pradhan, Andy Worthington, Carla Ferstmann

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

Here’s one for your diaries, Londoners. On Wednesday November 2, I’m part of a panel discussion — ‘Enshrined Injustice: Guantánamo, Torture, and the Military Commissions’ — taking place at the University of Westminster in central London. The event is free, but please register here on the Eventbrite page.

It’s hosted by Sam Raphael, co-director of The Rendition Project (with Ruth Blakeley at the University of Kent), and the special guest, visiting from the US, is Alka Pradhan, one of the lawyers for Ammar al-Baluchi, a “high-value detainee” at Guantánamo, and one of five men facing a trial for involvement in the 9/11 attacks. Other speakers are Carla Ferstman, the director of REDRESS, and myself, as an independent journalist who has spent over ten years researching and writing about Guantánamo and the post-9/11 torture program, and working to get the prison closed down.

I’ve recently been renewing my focus on the military commissions, via a number of articles on my site (see Not Fit for Purpose: The Ongoing Failure of Guantánamo’s Military Commissions and Guantánamo’s Military Commissions: More Chaos in the Cases of Abd Al-Rahim Al-Nashiri and Majid Khan), on the Close Guantánamo website, and in an op-ed for Al-Jazeera, Guantánamo torture victims should be allowed UN visit, which partly drew on a letter from Ammar al-Baluchi to Juan Méndez, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, asking for him to be allowed to visit the “high-value detainees” at Guantánamo.

Yesterday, however, as the Associated Press reported, Méndez (whose term as Rapporteur ends on October 31, when he will be replaced by Swiss lawyer Nils Melter) said he “expects he will end his six-year term without visiting” Guantánamo. He pointed out that “he was invited to visit Guantánamo in 2012 but on conditions that he could not accept,” and added that he “has been unable to appeal those terms.” Specifically, he said, “The terms that I was offered was basically a tour of parts of the facility, but not all. A briefing by the authorities but specifically that I could not talk to any inmate there. So I’m insisting that that’s a non-starter.” (For comparison, the AP also noted that, “In the continental US, only New York City’s Rikers Island prison allowed him to visit on his terms.”)

As the countdown continues to the end of the Obama presidency (with just 92 days left today), a number of questions remain regarding Barack Obama’s legacy in relation to one particular promise that he made on his second day in office — to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay.

President Obama initially promised to close the prison within a year. That deadline came and went, but nearly seven years after, and with just three months left in office, can he close it before his successor takes over, and what will happen to the remaining prisoners? 60 men are still held, and 20 of those men have been approved for release, but of the remaining 40, just ten are facing — or have faced — trials.

What will happen to the 30 men not facing trials, and will the ten men in the trial system ever receive justice? The attempts to prosecute them involve military commissions rather than federal courts, even though the commissions have proven spectacularly unfit for purpose. Procedurally untested, they are also locked into a struggle that strikes to the heart of the lawlessness of the “war on terror,” with, on the one hand, prosecutors (representing the government) seeking to suppress all mention of the fact that these men were tortured, often for many years, in CIA “black sites,” while the defence teams are committed to exposing the truth about what their clients experienced, without which there cannot even be the suggestion that the trials can be fair.

Another question the panel will discuss, arising out of these topics, is whether there will ever be accountability for those who authorized, instigated and undertook the many crimes of the “war on terror” — the torture, rendition and arbitrary detention that have done so much to blacken America’s name.

As we reach the end of Obama’s presidency — with all the uncertainty of who will succeed him — I hope that those concerned about the continued existence of Guantánamo and nearly 15 years of the “war on terror” will remember that we need to focus on the three issues outlined above: the ongoing need for Guantánamo to be closed, and for indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial to be brought to an end, with men accused of crimes put on trial, and soldiers held as prisoners of war according to the Geneva Conventions; the ongoing need for men to be tried in a forum capable of delivering justice, and not one dedicated to hiding evidence of torture; and the ongoing need for those who conceived, instigated and implemented the post-9/11 policies of extraordinary rendition, torture and indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial to be held accountable for their actions.

I hope you can join us for this event. The full details are below, and there is a map on the Eventbrite page.

Wednesday November 2, 2016: 6-8pm: Enshrined Injustice: Guantánamo, Torture, and the Military Commissions

Room 2.05C, University of Westminster, 4-12 Little Titchfield Street, London W1W 7BY

A panel discussion with Alka Pradhan, Human Rights Counsel at the Guantánamo Bay Military Commissions, Andy Worthington, freelance investigative journalist and Carla Ferstmann, Director, REDRESS. Moderated by Sam Raphael.

Below is Sam’s text introducing the events, and below that more detailed biographies of the speakers:

Enshrined Injustice: Guantánamo, Torture, and the Military Commissions

The Centre for the Study of Democracy at the University of Westminster invites you to a panel discussion on the present and future of the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, and the use of torture upon those who continue to be held by the US Government.

It has now been almost 15 years since the prison at Guantánamo was opened, with over 150 men being rendered to the site in January 2002. Over 600 others were added to the prison population by 2008, with the prison becoming a clear symbol of abuses at the heart of President Bush’s “war on terror”.

Despite President Obama’s calls to close the prison, it remains open to this day. Of the 60 men still detained, 20 have now been cleared for release. The rest are either facing trial through the Military Commission System — a hugely controversial military justice system which provides limited rights to defendants — or else continue to be held indefinitely. 25 have been designated as “forever prisoners”, and will certainly remain detained beyond Obama’s term in office.

Torture remains at the heart of Guantánamo, whether through the introduction of evidence which was gathered under torture by the CIA, or the routine use of torture to discipline those held at the base. Understandings the relationship between the use of torture and the detention of terror suspects as part of the “war on terror” remains an urgent task, as does continuing to press for accountability for those who designed and oversaw the torture programme.

The discussion will be chaired by Dr Sam Raphael, Senior Lecturer at the University of Westminster and Co-Director of The Rendition Project. Speakers on the panel will include:

Alka Pradhan , Human Rights Counsel at the Guantánamo Bay Military Commissions

Alka Pradhan represents Ammar al-Baluchi, one of the 9/11 accused and a former CIA secret prisoner, at the Guantánamo Bay Military Commissions. She was previously Counter-Terrorism Counsel at Reprieve US, where she represented a number of Guantánamo Bay detainees in litigation involving habeas corpus claims and conditions of detention. She also conducted advocacy and litigation on behalf of civilian victims of the targeted killing (drone) program in Yemen and Pakistan, and has advised the US government on compliance with international legal obligations.

Andy Worthington , freelance investigative journalist

Andy has been specialising in Guantánamo — and working to close the prison — for the last ten years. He co-founded the ongoing Close Guantánamo campaign, and the We Stand With Shaker campaign, which, in 2014-15, was part of a successful campaign to secure the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison.

Carla Ferstman, Director, REDRESS

REDRESS is a human rights organisation that helps torture survivors obtain justice and reparation. It works with survivors to help restore their dignity and to make torturers accountable. Carla Ferstman joined REDRESS in 2001 as its Legal Director and became the Director in 2005. Prior to joining REDRESS, she worked with the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in post-genocide Rwanda, with Amnesty International’s International Secretariat as a legal researcher on trials in Central Africa and as Executive Legal Advisor to Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Commission for Real Property Claims of Displaced Persons and Refugees (CRPC).

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.

Afghan Money Exchanger Approved for Release from Guantánamo; Former Child Prisoner and Pakistani Have Ongoing Imprisonment Upheld

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

From November 2013 until last month, reviews — Periodic Review Boards — took place for 64 Guantánamo prisoners who had been assessed as “too dangerous to release” or eligible for prosecution by the previous review process, conducted by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established shortly after first taking office in January 2009.

The PRBs — 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 — have so far delivered 57 decisions, approving 34 men for release, while upholding the ongoing imprisonment of 25 others. Five decisions have yet to be taken in the process, which is similar to parole, although with one obvious difference— none of the men at Guantánamo have been tried or convicted. Like parole, however, the PRBs require them to show remorse, and to demonstrate that they would establish peaceful and constructive lives if released.

The success rate in the PRBs to date — 58% — confirms that the decisions in 2009 demonstrated unnecessary caution on the part of the officials who made up the Guantánamo Review Task Force. For further details, see the definitive Periodic Review Board list that I wrote for the Close Guantánamo website that I established in January 2012 with the US attorney Tom Wilner.

Haji Wali Mohammed approved for release

On October 17, it was revealed by the Periodic Review Secretariat that Haji Wali Mohammed aka Muhammed (ISN 560), an Afghan money exchanger, had been approved for release. The decision took place on September 26, but for some reason it was not announced at the time.

His review took place on August 25, and as I noted at the time, his ongoing imprisonment had never seemed to make sense. Mohammed had lost a significant amount of the Taliban’s money when a deal went wrong, and had been blamed by them. There was obviously no love lost between them. As I explained ten years ago in my book The Guantánamo Files, based on a Bush-era review at Guantánamo:

Explaining that he did not know bin Laden and had no time for the Taliban, who had ruined his life, he said, “We were businessmen, their ways and our ways were different. That’s why they didn’t like us and we didn’t like them. Because a businessman does not have a beard and listens to music in his car, and he watches television and they didn’t like that.”

Significantly, the US authorities also seemed to recognize that Mohammed “might not have been the bigshot they had spent years pretending he was,” as I described it, with no confirmation that he had anything to do with Osama bin Laden, for reasons that involved “incomplete reporting, multiple individuals with [his] name — Haji Wali Mohammad — and lack of post-capture reflections.” It was also noted that he had been “highly compliant” at Guantánamo.

In approving his release, the board members recognized that, although he “presents some level of threat in light of his past activities, skills and associations,” the threat he presents “can be adequately mitigated” in light of the fact that his “business connections and associations with al-Qaeda and the Taliban pre-date 9/11 and appear to have ended,’ that he “does not appear to be motivated by extremist ideologies,” and because of his “relatively compliant behavior and cooperative attitude toward JTF-GTMO staff.”

In conclusion, the board members recommended his transfer “with the appropriate security assurances, as negotiated by the Special Envoys and agreed to by relevant USG departments and agencies, preferably to a country with reintegration support and the capacity to implement robust security measures, including monitoring and travel restrictions.”

Former child prisoner Hassan bin Attash has his imprisonment upheld

On October 11, the board delivered its decision in the case of Hassan bin Attash (ISN 1456), born in Saudi Arabia to Yemeni parents. As I stated at the time of his PRB, he “appears to have been just 17 years old when he was seized in a house raid in Pakistan and sent to Jordan to be tortured” prior to being sent to Guantánamo, where he has been held for 12 years without charge or trial, although the US alleges that he was 20 at the time.

Bin Attash is the brother of one of the men facing a trial for their involvement in the 9/11 attacks, and was seized in Karachi on September 11, 2002, the first anniversary of the attacks, with Ramzi bin al-Shibh, another of the men facing a trial. Nevertheless, whatever his alleged wrongdoing, he has never been treated as he should have been as a juvenile, because juveniles (those under 18 when their alleged crimes took place) are supposed to be rehabilitated rather than punished, and kept separate from adult prisoners, according to the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict, to which the US is signatory, and which came into force the year bin Attash was seized. The Optional Protocol stipulates that juvenile prisoners “require special protection,” and specifically recognizes “the special needs of those children who are particularly vulnerable to recruitment or use in hostilities”, requiring its signatories to promote “the physical and psychosocial rehabilitation and social reintegration of children who are victims of armed conflict.”

In bin Attash’s case, the Periodic Review Board members approved his ongoing imprisonment because they “considered [his] history with al-Qa’ida, to include serving as an explosives specialist and an aide to several senior al-Qa’ida members, as well as supporting numerous plots against the US and other Western targets in Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Middle East, and North Africa.”

Additionally, they did not find him “credible” because, they stated, he “denied making any statements threatening guards or expressing his belief that Westerners are his enemies,” he “remains intent on reengaging after detention,” and he “refused to acknowledge that he was affected by his extremist upbringing and indoctrination at an early age.”

The board members also concluded that he “downplayed his knowledge regarding what was happening during his extensive time in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” which, they stated, “is not credible given the significant amount of time he spent in Afghanistan,” and they ended by stating that they were “unable to assess [his] current mindset due to his refusal to be candid in response to numerous lines of questioning.”

In the Miami Herald, Carol Rosenberg added that the bin Attash brothers “have never seen each other” at Guantánamo, as their lawyers have explained, because the elder brother, Walid, is held in Camp 7, reserved for the “high-value detainees,” while Hassan is held in Camp 6, where prisoners are allowed to mingle freely.

Pakistani Ahmed Rabbani has his imprisonment upheld

In another decision, taken on October 3 but not announced until October 17, Ahmed Rabbani (ISN 1461), identified as Mohammed Ahmad Rabbani, also had his imprisonment upheld. A long-term hunger striker, he was regarded as “a financial and travel facilitator for prominent al-Qa’ida leaders Khalid Shaykh Muhammad (KU-10024) and USS Cole mastermind Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri from 1997 until his arrest in September 2002,” with his brother Abdul Rahim, whose ongoing imprisonment was upheld in August, after a review in July.

At Ahmed Rabbani’s review, on September 1, his lawyer, Shelby Sullivan-Bennis of Reprieve, attempted to persuade the board that he was a case of mistaken identity, as the CIA had seized him and his brother thinking on elf them was someone else, but even though this was true it doesn’t address the brothers’ actual role, and, i any case, the parole-style PRBs are generally much more interested in contrition than they are in disputed facts.

In Ahmed Rabbani’s case, the board members considered his “lengthy and continuous association with al-Qa-ida, beginning with training in Afghanistan in 1994,” and “also noted that [he] was a financial and travel facilitator over an extended period of time” for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.

Furthermore, the board members considered what they regarded as his “lack of candor, his evasive and non-responsive answers to the Board’s questions, and his multiple contradictory statements which mad wit difficult for the Board to assess his mindset.”

In conclusion, the board members “noted [his] refusal to take responsibility or appreciate the implications of his pre-detention activities, [his] lengthy history of highly non-complaint behavior during detention, [his] strong expressions of support for terrorist activities, and the lack of evidence of a change in [his] mindset.”

Further reviews — including for the Pakistani businessman Saifullah Paracha

For Hassan bin Attash, Ahmed Rabbani and the 22 other prisoners recommend for ongoing imprisonment by the PRBs, their initial reviews are not the end of the story. All have purely administrative reviews (file reviews) every six months, which reconsider their cases, and to which their lawyers can submit information. Every three years, they are entitled to an additional full review, but in some cases the file reviews also recommend that full reviews take place sooner.

This has happened with four men whose ongoing imprisonment was recommended by PRBs, but who subsequently ended up being granted full reviews, which subsequently approved their release (and all four have been freed). In addition, in June, Moath al-Alwi (aka Muaz al-Alawi, ISN 028), was granted a full review that will take place on October 20, and three other men have had full reviews recommended in the last month — Salman Yahya Hassan Mohammad Rabei’i (ISN 508), whose review is taking place on November 1, Yassim Qasim Mohammed Ismail Qasim (ISN 522), whose review is taking place on November 8, and Mohammed Al-Ansi (ISN 29) whose review is taking place on March 1, 2017 (although no explanation was given as to why his review is not taking place sooner).

In all these cases the review board members stated 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.”

The recognition that additional information raises “a significant question” about whether or not the prisoners in question should continue to be held is obviously very significant — especially as the four men reviewed to date have subsequently had their releases recommended, and on October 10 the board members — for the same reasons — also approved a full review in the case of Saifullah Paracha, although no date has yet been set for the review.

I am glad to see that this full review is taking place, because, as I wrote when Paracha’s ongoing imprisonment was recommended, in April:

I have never found the case against Paracha — that he worked with Al-Qaeda in a plot or plots relating to the US — to be convincing, as he lived and worked as a successful businessman in the US from 1970-86, appears to be socially liberal, and has been a model prisoner at Guantánamo, where he has helped numerous younger prisoners engage with the various review processes established over the years. When his PRB took place, the authorities described him as as “very compliant” with the prison guards, with “moderate views and acceptance of Western norms.”

I also hope that, in due, course, Paracha and the four other men granted further full reviews will be granted their release, as I can see no good reason for anyone to continue to be held at Guantánamo unless there are demonstrably serious allegations against them — and, preferably, of course, they should as a result be put on trial.

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.

Mohamedou Ould Slahi Released from Guantánamo, Thanks Those Who Stood By Him

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

Today, the population of the prison at Guantánamo Bay stands at just 60 men, after Mohamedou Ould Slahi, torture victim and best-selling author, was released, and sent back home to Mauritania.

It is just under 15 years since the Mauritanian authorities seized Slahi, at the request of the US. As he later put it, in the English he learned with a particular relish during his captivity, “my country turned me over, short-cutting all kinds of due process, like a candy bar to the United States.”

A Zelig-like figure, who had been around al-Qaeda, but only involved in it in the early 1990s, when he fought with al-Qaida against the Soviet-installed government of Afghanistan, Slahi (who later renounced al-Qaeda) was related to al-Qaeda’s spiritual advisor, Abu Hafs (a man who, it should be noted, did not approve of the 9/11 attacks), and, while living in Germany, had met some of the 9/11 hijackers. At the time, they had wanted to go to Chechnya to fight, but he advised them that it was better to go to Afghanistan to undertake training instead.

However, he had no involvement with terrorism, as a US judge concluded when ruling on his habeas corpus petition in 2010. The government appealed, a politically biased appeals court backed that appeal, and Slahi slipped into a legal limbo that only came to an end in July this year, when a Periodic Review Board — the most recent of several review processes that have punctuated Guantánamo’s long and generally lawless history — approved him for release after a review in June.

The Bush administration, however, had regarded Slahi as significant, based on the kind of hunch that, in the early years of the “war on terror,” led to men being rendered to torture based on nothing more than suspicions. Slahi was sent first to Jordan, one of a handful of countries that acted as proxy torturers for the US, and in Guantánamo, with the suspicions still unalloyed, he was subjected to a specific torture program approved by defense secretary Donal Rumsfeld.

He finally broke when he was taken out on a boat, and threats were made that his mother would be found and brought to Guantánamo, where, the insinuation was, she would be raped. He then became what the authorities regarded as a useful informant (although I don’t actually believe he had much to tell), and was housed separately from the other prisoners (with another informant, an Egyptian freed earlier this year), and allowed to have a small garden — and to write.

His sweet revenge on those who tortured him was to write a memoir that, after a long struggle, was eventually published, in heavily redacted form, in January 2015, as Guantánamo Diary. Translated into numerous languages, for publication in over two dozen countries, it has become an international bestseller, and although the US administration never mentioned it, the book’s success, and its powerful revelations about the depravity of the US’s post-9/11 torture program, must have been a profound embarrassment.

As the ACLU noted in a press release following Slahi’s return home, “More than 100,000 people signed petitions by the ACLU, Change.org, and MoveOn calling for his release. His plight gathered high-profile supporters, including Maggie Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, and Roger Waters.” The ACLU added, “In the UK, members of Parliament concerned with his case urged the British government to call on the US to release Slahi,” and I was pleased to attend a Parliamentary meeting called by Tom Brake MP, at which Slahi’s brother Yahdih came over from Germany, where he lives, and where I took a handful of photos of other distinguished guests.

On his release, Slahi said, as the ACLU reported, “I feel grateful and indebted to the people who have stood by me. I have come to learn that goodness is transnational, trans-cultural, and trans-ethnic. I’m thrilled to reunite with my family.”

Nancy Hollander, one of his attorneys, who has represented him for many years, said, “We are thrilled that our client’s nightmare is finally ending. After all these years, he wants nothing more than to be with his family and rebuild his life. We’re so grateful to everyone who helped make this day a reality.”

Hina Shamsi, another of his attorneys and director of the ACLU’s National Security Project, said, “We are overjoyed for Mohamedou and his family, and his release brings the US one man closer to ending the travesty that is Guantánamo. Dozens of other men still remain trapped in Guantánamo. With time running out, President Obama must double down and not just close the prison, but end the unlawful practice of indefinite detention that it represents.”

I couldn’t agree more — and if you want to help to maintain pressure on President Obama to close Guantánamo before he leave office, please join us in the Countdown to Close Guantánamo, which Nancy Hollander and Yahdih Ould Slahi showed their support for earlier this year.

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 176 prisoners released from February 2009 to August 2016 (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).

Britain’s Ongoing Brexit Woes: Nero Had Nothing on Deluded Theresa May and Her Inadequate Ministers

Nearly four months on from the EU referendum, and Britain is in meltdown — and yet the Tory government and its unelected leader, Theresa May, continue to behave as though nothing is wrong, while what springs to my mind is the Emperor Nero, fiddling while Rome burned.

You can see how delusional the Tory leadership’s state of mind is from a few facts from last week: the pound slumping in value to a 168-year low, and the Treasury — yes, the economic heart of the government itself — pointing out that “Britain will lose up to £66 billion a year if it pursues the so-called ‘hard Brexit’ option of leaving the single market and EU customs union,” as the Independent described it, adding, “Government figures suggest the UK’s gross domestic product (GDP) could fall by as much as 9.5 per cent if it leaves the EU and reverts to World Trade Organisation rules.”

I examined the folly of the “hard Brexit” option — and the alarming racism evident at the Conservative Party conference — in an article last week, Theresa May and the Conservative Party’s Alarming White Fascist Aspirations.

The good news — a straw to cling to in a hurricane of wilful ignorance and blind optimism — is that MPs from across the political spectrum have finally woken up to the need to tackle May and her ministers for their stupidity and their arrogance.

The threat posed by a number of high-profile Tory rebels — Remain supporters, like three-quarters of Britain’s MPs — who have been creating a cross-party alliance to avoid a “hard Brexit” and to have MPs properly consulted on plans for leaving the EU, was such that May “promised a series of debates in the House of Commons before article 50 is triggered, while stopping short of promising a vote on the terms,” as the Guardian explained.

The motion for a debate was tabled by Labour, and reluctantly agreed to by Theresa May, who, as the Guardian put it, “had been facing her first government defeat over the motion … as a number of Conservatives indicated they were prepared to vote with Labour to demand greater public debate over the Brexit negotiating strategy.”

Emily Thornberry, the shadow foreign secretary, called it “a significant U-turn” and said that Labour “would force the government to be accountable over Brexit,’ in the Guardian’s words. On the Today programme on BBC Radio 4, she said that the opposition would not let ministers “go into a locked room and come out with some plan that they want to keep secret”.

As the Guardian also noted, “Thornberry and Keir Starmer, the shadow Brexit secretary, are demanding answers to at least 170 questions about leaving the EU on everything from single market membership to the impact on the NHS.”

May also came under pressure from Jeremy Corbyn, who, at Prime Minister’s Questions, asked, “Is the prime minister really willing to risk a shambolic Tory Brexit, just to appease the people behind her?” — a reference to her backbenchers.

Corbyn also said, “This is a government that drew up no plans for Brexit, that now has no strategy for negotiating Brexit, and offers no clarity, no transparency, and no chance of scrutiny of the process for developing a strategy. The jobs and incomes of millions of people are at stake, the pound is plummeting, businesses are worrying and the government has no answers. The prime minister says she won’t give a running commentary. But isn’t it time the government stopped running away from the looming threat to jobs and businesses in this country, and the living standards of millions of people?”

In the debate on Wednesday, seven former ministers — including Claire Perry, a former Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport, and pro-EU Tory grandee and former Chancellor Ken Clarke — savaged the government.

Perry said, “I am extremely concerned about what has happened to sterling and interest rates since the prime minister’s comments at the party conference last week,” adding, in a riposte to the giddy and groundless enthusiasm of Brexit Secretary David Davis, “The problem that [Davis] is not acknowledging is that many people in this country do not think that there is a policy to put the national interest first; they think that there is a policy to put people’s narrow ideological interests first. He should be setting out clearly how we will protect British jobs and businesses and putting ideology in the past, where it belongs.”

Ken Clarke, meanwhile, “said no foreign companies would invest until there was more clarity about the UK’s future relationship with the outside world,” as the Guardian described it, adding that Theresa May’s conference speech “potentially signalling an exit from the single market and customs union had caused a ‘reaction in the markets that was only too obvious,’” and that “has continued ever since with continued pronunciations of uncertainty that are holding things back very badly.”

In a key comment, he said, “The pound has devalued to an extent that would have caused a political crisis 30 years ago when I first came here, and not for the first time.”

Keir Starmer, for Labour, said it was “frankly astonishing” that the government had no intention of allowing MPs to vote on the terms of our departure from the EU. “I’ve stood here and accepted there’s a mandate for exit,” he said, adding, however, “There is no mandate for the terms. It has never been put to the country. It has not even been put to the secretary of state’s political party and it has not been put to this house. Where is the mandate on the terms?”

Former Attorney General Dominic Grieve, another high-profile Tory critic, said, as the Guardian described it, that “there were likely to be economic risks and a ‘legal nightmare’ caused by Brexit, as he argued there was a longstanding convention that major treaty changes must be approved by parliament rather than royal prerogative.”

Even Nicky Morgan, the former education secretary who had earned the unflattering nickname of Thicky Moron amongst teachers and parents, attacked the government. She “said she resented the implication from newspapers, ministers and ‘briefers and spinners at the heart of this government’ that she was trying to block Brexit,” and she “pledged to work even harder at holding the government to account over its role in leaving the EU.” She added that “she was ‘deeply concerned’ that the cabinet had not been consulted on when article 50 would be triggered and spoke of her ‘heartbreak’ that one of her constituents would find it difficult to carry on living in the UK as an EU citizen.”

Another prominent Tory critic was Anna Soubry, the former Minister for Small Business, who said the country “was facing difficult times and spoke of a small UK firm that was in danger of going under, and others that had told her EU workers were returning to their countries of origin,” in the Guardian’s words. As she put it, “We should be holding our heads in shame that this is a feeling that people have.”

There were also passionate speeches from two former party leaders, Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg, as can be seen in this video of the debate put together by Open Britain, the campaign for the UK to remain in the single market that has arisen out of the ashes of the Stronger In campaign that argued for the UK to remain in the EU.

Last week there was also a very specific challenge on one particular issue regarding the proposals for leaving the EU. Open Britain noted that 52 Labour MPs have challenged Liam Fox, the disgraced former Secretary of State for Defence, who is now the Secretary of State for International Trade, “to demonstrate that the benefits of leaving the Customs Union are outweighed by the costs.” In a letter to Fox, organised by Open Britain, Keir Starmer, Alan Johnson and 50 other Labour MPs have demanded that he “‘produce a rigorous and publicly available cost-benefit analysis’ before pursuing his ‘personal preference’ of leaving.”

Backing up the MP’s disquiet, which, I hope, will not diminish in the weeks and months to come, the legal challenge against the government’s plans, which I most recently wrote about here, reached the courts on Thursday, when three of Britain’s most senior judges – the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, the Master of the Rolls, Sir Terence Etherton, and Lord Justice Sales – heard arguments by lawyers representing a number of individuals seeking to establish that “the government does not have legal authority to use royal prerogative powers to trigger Brexit without parliamentary approval,” as the Guardian described it.

The Guardian also explained that, “In opening arguments over who should initiate the UK’s departure from the EU, Lord Pannick QC, who represents the lead challenger in the claim, Gina Miller, said formal notification by ministers alone would undermine parliament and ‘deprive people of their statutory rights.’” He added that triggering our departure “leads to the removal of a whole series of important rights whatever Parliament may think about it later.”

Lord Pannick also stated that “[p]rerogative powers may not be used by the minister [David Davis, the Brexit secretary] to remove rights established by the act of parliament,” and pointed out that the case raises questions of “fundamental constitutional importance [about] the limits of the power of the executive.”

Dominic Chambers QC, who represents the second claimant, Dier dos Santos, told the court, “The referendum did not replace the [UK’s] system of parliamentary representative democracy.”

As the Guardian described it, he said that, “For the government to trigger article 50 … it would be setting itself up as a ‘de facto legislature,’” and he proceeded to explain that it would involve the executive essentially saying to Parliament, “without consulting you we have set in train an unstoppable process of leaving the EU.” He added, “This is a case about what is legally required, not what is legally expedient.”

The case continues on Monday, when the government’s lawyers will present their arguments, but in the meantime, anyone wanting to examine an informed and alarming worst-case scenario about Britain’s economic decline should a “hard Brexit” go ahead is advised to read “The markets have taught Theresa May a hard lesson on sovereignty” by Martin Wolf in FT last week.

After painting a picture of the British economy potentially collapsing, teaching the government about “the limits of sovereignty in an open economy,” Wolf noted that, in response to this scenario:

The views of Philip Hammond, chancellor of the exchequer, who reminded his party last week that the British people did not vote on June 23 “to become poorer, or less secure”, might then count for more, and those of the Brexiters in the cabinet for less. In a crisis, the unthinkable becomes thinkable. Triggering Article 50 without parliamentary approval might be impossible. It surely ought to be impossible. By a thin margin the country voted for some kind of Brexit. But the government has no mandate for the rather extreme version it is choosing. Moreover, Brexiters insist that their goal is to restore parliamentary sovereignty. Why then does the government plan to ignore parliament when these decisions are taken?

This last question, I believe, strikes to the heart of the arrogance of Theresa May and her trio of pro-Leave Brexiters — David Davis, Liam Fox and Boris Johnson. How can they “insist that their goal is to restore parliamentary sovereignty,” but then “ignore parliament when these decisions are taken”?

The obvious solution is to allow MPs to vote, and to discuss openly the potentially disastrous effects not only of “a hard Brexit,” but also, I believe of any kind of Brexit at all, a course of action that remains potentially suicidal, that should never have been allowed in the first place, and that ought not to take place if, as Martin Wolf suggested last week, the end result will be almost unimaginably disastrous. As he noted at the end of his article:

What drove Leavers was, we are also told, “the principle that decisions about the UK should be taken in the UK”. The currency markets demonstrate the emptiness of that principle. Britain’s EU partners are about to do the same. The premise of the Leave campaign was false: a host of decisions that affect the UK will always be taken outside it. But this truth is unlikely to stop the train towards a complete Brexit from departing on its timetabled journey. Stopping it would take a miracle, or rather a crisis. Is that likely? No. Is it possible? Yes.

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.

Sun. Oct. 16: Love and Politics – New London Gig for Andy Worthington’s Band The Four Fathers

Check out our music on Bandcamp.

This Sunday, October 16, my band The Four Fathers will be playing our first gig since summer, when we had a run of gigs in south east London — and a spot at Molly’s Bar at the WOMAD world music festival in Wiltshire.

We’re playing at the Arts Cafe, in Manor Park, in Lewisham, London SE13, a community cafe run by Fred Schmid (a jazz saxophonist) and his partner Banu, following up on a gig there in July. The Facebook page is here. It’s a wonderful space, beside the River Quaggy, which burbles past on its way to the centre of Lewisham, where it meets the Ravensbourne and feeds into the Thames at Deptford.

No one has definitively defined our sound yet, but we think it would be fair to describe it as a mix of pastoral rock and punky roots reggae. Certainly, no one who knows my work would be surprised that, as the lead singer and main songwriter, I bring my indignation about injustice from my work as a journalist and human rights activist into my music.

Many of our songs are pointedly political — about Guantánamo, which I’ve been writing about and campaigning to close for over ten years, about the horrors of torture and the importance of habeas corpus, and about other injustices that I find impossible to ignore as a politically engaged, left of centre commentator and activist, committed to the common good and appalled by the Tories’ cynical efforts to destroy the state provision of services, to privatise everything, and to remove the safety nets that, for generations, have attempted to ensure that abject, absolute, grinding poverty is not accepted or acceptable.

So if you come on Sunday you’ll see and hear us playing my crowd pleasing anthem ‘Fighting Injustice’, about the need to fight rampant privatisation and greed, and some powerful new political songs, including ‘London’, about the soul-destroying effects of greed and gentrification from the 1980s to the present day, ‘Equal Rights and Justice For All’, which deals with the importance of habeas corpus, and ‘Close Guantánamo’, a new song about Guantánamo calling for the prison to be closed before President Obama leaves office in just three months’ time, and for him to fulfill the promise to close the prison that he made on his second day in office nearly eight years ago. ‘Close Guantánamo’ will soon be featured in a video promoting the campaign of the same name, which I co-founded in 2012 — and, coincidentally, I recently made an exclusive video with former prisoner Shaker Aamer (the subject of another Guantánamo-themed song, ‘Song for Shaker Aamer’) as part of the ‘Countdown to Close Guantánamo’ initiative that we’ve been running all year, in which Shaker urged President Obama to close the prison before he leaves office.

We’ll also be playing guitarist Richard Clare’s psychedelic-tinged song, ‘When He Is Sane,’ about mental illness — and some songs dealing with love, friendship and loss: ‘Dreamers’, written for a friend’s 50th birthday this year, and ‘River Run Dry,’ a song about the end of a relationship, which I wrote 30 years ago. We’ll also play some covers — our folky, groovy take on Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive’ and two Bob Dylan songs, ‘Masters of War’ and ‘Forever Young.’

The gig is free, although we will be passing a hat around for much appreciated donations, and we’ll also have copies of our first album, ‘Love and War’, available on CD. Over the last few months we’ve been recording our second album, which we hope to release in the new year.

So if you’re around, we hope to see you, and in the meantime — or if you’re busy, or if you’re many, many miles away — do check out our music on Bandcamp, where you can also buy our album on download, and our ‘Fighting Injustice’ EP.

And if anyone’s interested in representing us, or in releasing our music, do get in touch. We think we’re worth it!

Similarly, do get in touch if you can offer us any gigs to play, or if you’re involved in political events, and want a band whose members understand that protest music is a key part of what music is and should be, and not something to be discouraged or ignored.

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.