Andy Worthington's Blog, page 7

Biden Administration Announces “Robust” Review of Guantánamo, and “Intention” to Close the Prison

President Biden, and a screenshot of the Gitmo Clock website run by the Close Guantánamo campaign, founded by Andy Worthington and Tom Wilner in 2012, showing how long the prison has been open today, Feb. 15, 2021.Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

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

On Friday (Feb. 12), campaigners hoping that the Biden administration will commit to the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay were further reassured when White House press secretary Jen Psaki, “[a]sked whether Biden would shut” the prison “by the time his presidency ends,” as Reuters described it, told reporters, “That certainly is our goal and our intention.”

“There will be a robust interagency policy,” Psaki added, also noting that “[t]here are many players from different agencies who need to be part of this policy discussion about the steps forward.”

The comments were the first to be made publicly by administration officials since defense secretary Gen. Lloyd Austin told the Senate in written testimony during his confirmation hearing, “I believe it is time for the detention facility at Guantánamo to close its doors,” although, as the Associated Press noted, “The announcement of a closure plan was not unexpected. Biden had said as a candidate he supported closing the detention center.”

Following up, Emily Horne, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, told Reuters, “We are undertaking an NSC process to assess the current state of play that the Biden administration has inherited from the previous administration, in line with our broader goal of closing Guantánamo,” adding, “The NSC will work closely with the Departments of Defense, State, and Justice to make progress toward closing the GTMO facility, and also in close consultation with Congress.”

However, “[s]ignaling that deliberations are still at an early stage,” as Reuters described it, Horne also said that “a number of key policy roles still need to be filled,” in the relevant government departments, adding, “We need to have the right people seated to do this important work.”

Reuters noted that “two people familiar with the matter” had told them that “[a]ides involved in internal discussions are considering an executive action to be signed by Biden in coming weeks or months,” signaling what the news agency described as “a new effort to remove what human rights advocates have called a stain on America’s global image” — although narrowing criticism simply to “human rights advocates” rather tends to underplay the extent to which Guantánamo, as a place of, largely, indefinite detention without charge or trial, is actually an affront to everyone who believes in the rule of law.

For the New York Times, however, veteran Guantánamo reporter Carol Rosenberg suggested that the “executive order” idea, which came from a “leaked Biden administration transition plan,” has apparently been abandoned in favor of the NSA-led process.

Rosenberg noted how, in a recent interview, Representative Adam Smith, the Democratic chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, and a proponent of the prison’s closure, said that, “rather than seek to close it by executive order, the administration should ‘build the argument and the case that this is the right policy’ in order to change the law.”

He added that he “thought politicians might be more receptive to the idea of moving the last few prisoners to the United States” because Guantánamo “is not a cost-effective place to detain 40 individuals,” costing at least $13 million a year for each of the 40 men still held.

Nevertheless, closing Guantánamo, as Rosenberg describes it, “has become a political flash point, with supporters of keeping the prison open accusing supporters of closing it of being soft on terrorism or being willing to bring accused terrorists onto American soil.” She noted, however, that Smith “bristled at the suggestion,” pointing out that the 40 prisoners at Guantánamo are no “more dangerous than the hundreds of terrorists, not to mention sociopathic murderers and pedophiles and child killers and all manner of evil who we safely incarcerate in the United States of America.”

Republican obstruction

Despite this, Republicans have a long history of opposing efforts by the Democrats to close Guantánamo. Under Barack Obama, when Joe Biden was Vice President, they responded to his executive order promising to close Guantánamo by “outlawing the transfer of any detainee to the United States for any reason — not for trial, imprisonment or medical treatment,” as Carol Rosenberg described it.

Reuters pointed out that the federal government “is still barred by law from transferring any inmates to prisons on the US mainland,” and that, “Even with his own Democratic party now controlling Congress, their majorities are so slim that Biden would face a tough challenge securing legislative changes because some Democrats might also oppose them.”

Some progress can, however, be made initially without Congress. As Reuters described it, “A revived Guantánamo strategy is expected to focus initially on further decreasing the number of prisoners by repatriating them or finding other countries to accept them, according to the people familiar with the matter.” This will probably involve re-establishing the State Department post of the Envoy for Guantánamo Closure, which was “created by Obama but eliminated by Trump, to resume negotiations with other governments on detainee transfers.”

In addition, the parole-type Periodic Review Board process, which led to the release of 36 prisoners under Obama, can and should be vigorously revived under Biden. Although it nominally continued under Trump, its panels of military and intelligence officials failed to recommend a single prisoner for release until just months before Trump’s departure, with most hearings boycotted by the prisoners, who had concluded that, under Trump, the entire process had become a sham.

However, opposition remains in Congress. After Gen. Austin told the Senate that the new administration would seek the closure of Guantánamo, his comments, as Reuters described it, “drew a letter of rebuke signed by seven Republican House members, all military veterans.”

Representative Mike Waltz, one of the signatories, claimed in a tweet, “If we release these GITMO detainees, they’ll become rockstars in the Islamist Extremist world, posing an even greater threat to America and the world.”

Furthermore, after Friday’s announcement, Sen. John Cornyn, a Republican from Texas, said, “The Democrats’ obsession with bringing terrorists into Americans’ backyards is bizarre, misguided, and dangerous. Just like with President Obama, Republicans will fight it tooth and nail.”

While these comments are ludicrous, they are an important reminder of the fanatical opposition to the closure of Guantánamo that exists in some Republican circles, and whatever the Biden administration plans, it will need to be committed.

Guantánamo can be closed

Here at “Close Guantánamo,” we will continue to point out that, 19 years since the prison at Guantánamo opened, it is outrageous and indefensible that six of the 40 men still held are still held despite having been approved for release by high-level government review processes, and that 22 others are specifically and unjustly held indefinitely without charge or trial, and we believe that President Biden and his administration should make the release of as many of these men as possible a priority.

For the others, facing charges in the military commission trial system, justice needs to vibe delivered in a forum that, unlike the commissions, is not caught up endlessly in a struggle by the prosecutors to hide all evidence of the men’s torture in CIA “black sites,” and who seem not to notice that that struggle undermines all efforts at justice.

Closing the prison may look difficult, but it is important for the Biden administration to remember that it is possible. And as we have been pointing out — and will continue to point out — no president should want the responsibility of marking the 20th anniversary of the opening of a shamefully lawless place like Guantánamo, and yet that anniversary is just eleven months away.

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

“The Mauritanian” Perfectly Captures the Horrors of Guantánamo and the US Torture Program

The goody bag for the online screening of “The Mauritanian” that I was invited to attend last Friday, February 5, 2021.Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

Last Friday I was privileged to be invited to an online pre-release screening of “The Mauritanian,” the new feature film about former Guantánamo prisoner and torture victim Mohamedou Ould Slahi (aka Salahi), based on his best-selling memoir Guantánamo Diary, which I cannot recommend highly enough.

French actor Tahar Rahim shines as Mohamedou, capturing his nimble mind, and also capturing something of his gentle charisma, admirably supported by his attorneys Nancy Hollander (played by Jodie Foster) and Teri Duncan (actually a composite of two attorneys, played by Shailene Woodley), and with Benedict Cumberbatch appearing as Lt. Col. Stuart Couch, Mohamedou’s military prosecutor, who resigned after discovering his torture, and how the only evidence against him consisted of statements that he made as a result of his torture.

The screenplay was written by Michael Bronner (as M. B. Traven), working with the writing duo of Rory Haines and Sohrab Noshirvani, and the director was Kevin Macdonald, and all involved are to be commended for creating a film that does justice to Mohamedou’s story — and I’m grateful to Nancy Hollander for having specifically included a photo of herself holding up a “Close Guantánamo” poster in the end credits, which I took of her in April 2016 at a Parliamentary meeting for Mohamedou in London.

The trailer is below, via YouTube:

Ever since Guantánamo Diary was published, in January 2015, it was obvious that it was a prime candidate for a feature film that would expose the horror of Guantánamo and the US’s post-9/11 torture program. In common with other Guantánamo prisoners who had written memoirs, Mohamedou was intelligent and articulate, but he also had a sharp sense of humor, and, most remarkably, an extraordinary lack of bitterness about how he had been treated.

His story also touched on key elements of the “war on terror”: how the US authorities kidnapped and tortured individuals based merely on suspicion, and often as a result of dubious confessions made by other individuals detained and subjected to torture; and how, at Guantánamo, the law was largely, if not entirely out of reach, and the authorities’ default position was to hold people indefinitely without charge or trial.

In Mohamedou’s case, he came under suspicion because, as a young man, in the early ’90s, he had traveled to Afghanistan and had sworn allegiance to al-Qaeda, and also because his cousin Mafouz Ould al-Walid (aka Abu Hafs al-Mauritani) had been a spiritual advisor to al-Qaeda, and had called him from a satellite phone traced to Osama bin Laden (what no one on the US side ever mentioned was that Abu Hafs had opposed the 9/11 attacks, and had left al-Qaeda in protest). In addition, while living in Germany, Mohamedou had, on one occasion, met some of the 9/11 hijackers, and later, while living in Canada, had attended a mosque that was also attended by Ahmed Ressam, who was later arrested and imprisoned for having allegedly been involved in a ‘Millennium Plot’ to  bomb Los Angeles International Airport.

Suspicion, however, is not the same as proof, although disgracefully, in the “war on terror,” Mohamedou’s refusal to confess to his invented crimes led the authorities to subject him to a horrendous program of torture, specifically approved by defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, from May to August 2003, when he was subjected to prolonged isolation and sleep deprivation, the use of extreme heat and cold, physical violence and sexual humiliation.

Towards the end of this period, the authorities told hm that his mother was being brought to Guantánamo, where she would be raped, and he was also blindfolded, taken out to sea in a boat, and subjected to a mock execution. Eventually, broken by the torture, Mohamedou signed a false confession, became an informant, and was rewarded by being held with another informant in a facility separate from the rest of the prison’s population, where they were allowed to maintain a small garden, and where, ironically, Mohamedou was allowed to write the account of his experiences that eventually — after years of wrangling with the authorities — became Guantánamo Diary.

And yet, as was explained to Slahi’s editor Larry Siems in an interview in 2013 by Col. Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor of the military commission trial system (who also resigned in protest at the use of torture), the supposed case against Slahi was never backed up by anything resembling evidence. “He reminded me of Forrest Gump,” Col. Davis explained, “in the sense that there were a lot of noteworthy events in the history of al-Qaida and terrorism, and there was Slahi, lurking somewhere in the background. He was in Germany, Canada, different places that look suspicious, and that caused them to believe that he was a big fish, but then when they really invested the effort to look into it, that’s not where they came out.”

In March 2010, in the District Court in Washington, D.C., Judge James Robertson was also unconvinced by the government’s claims, granting Mohamedou’s habeas corpus petition, and stating in his opinion, “Associations alone are not enough … to make detention lawful.”

As I explained at the time:

Although he accepted, as Salahi himself admitted, that “he traveled to Afghanistan in early 1990 to fight jihad against communists and that there he swore bayat to al-Qaeda,” he also, essentially, accepted Salahi’s assertion that “his association with al-Qaeda ended after 1992, and that, even though he remained in contact thereafter with people he knew to be al-Qaeda members, he did nothing for al-Qaeda after that time.” This was in marked contrast to the government’s claim that he “was so connected to al-Qaeda for a decade beginning in 1990 that he must have been ‘part of’ al-Qaeda at the time of his capture.”

As I also explained, the ruling contained important concessions by the government:

The first is that, although Salahi was originally seized in connection with Ahmed Ressam’s thwarted “Millennium Plot,” the government now “does not allege that Salahi participated in the Millennium Plot.” The second — even more extraordinarily, given how Salahi has been sold to the public over the years — is that the government now “acknowledg[es] that Salahi probably did not even know about the 9/11 attacks.”

Despite Mohamedou’s court victory, however, the Obama administration appealed, and his successful habeas petition was vacated in November 2010, and sent back to the lower court to reconsider — although that never happened. 

Instead, he had to wait until June 2016 to be given a chance to persuade a panel of military and intelligence officials — in a parole-type process, the Periodic Review Boards, established by President Obama — that he no longer posed a threat to the US, and that it was safe to release him. In October 2016, almost 14 years after he was first abducted, after voluntarily handing himself in to the Mauritanian authorities, Mohamedou was released to Mauritania, a free man — although he has since struggled to secure a passport, and finds that foreign travel remains a problem.

“The Mauritanian” has a limited theatrical release tomorrow in the US, and will then be released online. I do hope you will be able to watch it, because — to reiterate — it shines a light on the US’s shameful post-9/11 flight from justice, and, crucially, the ways in which kidnapping and torture were based on nothing more than suspicion or hearsay, or on statements made by other tortured individuals (which were, of course, inherently unreliable), and how, at Guantánamo in particular, this evidence-free worldview continues to involve the ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial of the majority of the 40 men still held. I can only hope that the release of “The Mauritanian” will contribute to the prison’s closure.

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

111 Organizations, Including Close Guantánamo, Sign A Letter to President Biden Urging Him to Close the Prison and End Indefinite Detention

President Biden and the entrance to Camp 6 at Guantánamo.Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

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

We’re delighted that, two days ago, a letter we signed urging President Biden to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, and to bring to an end the process of indefinite detention without charge or trial that has typified its aberrations over the last 19 years, was delivered to the White House, signed, in total, by 111 organizations.

We’re grateful to the Center for Constitutional Rights and the Center for Victims of Torture for initiating the letter, and to everyone who signed on, from old friends and colleagues including Amnesty International USA, CODEPINK, Reprieve US, Sept. 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows and Witness Against Torture, to other organizations that are new to us.

As CCR and CVT explained in a press release, “The letter is signed by organizations ranging from those working to end anti-Muslim discrimination and torture to immigrant rights organizations and organizations working broadly on civil rights, civil liberties, and racial justice at the national and local level.”

The letter aptly describes Guantánamo as “the iconic example of the post-9/11 abandonment of the rule of law,” and “the most expensive prison in the world,” noting that, while the prison “continues to cause escalating and profound damage to the men who still languish there,” it also “continues to fuel and justify bigotry, stereotyping, and stigma” both at home and abroad, as exemplified, under Donald Trump, by his proposal to send undocumented immigrants to Guantánamo to be held as “enemy combatants,” by “his odious Muslim Ban, each iteration of which was explicitly promulgated under the false pretense of protecting the nation from terrorism,” and by the “militarized federal response to protests against the extrajudicial killings of George Floyd and other Black people.”

In conclusion, the letter urges President Biden “to act without delay, and in a just manner that considers the harm done to the men who have been imprisoned without charge or fair trials for nearly twenty years.”

Publicizing the letter, Scott Roehm, Washington director at the Center for Victims of Torture, said, “The president has supported closing Guantánamo since his days as a senator, and now he has the power to do it. This isn’t an intractable problem, but it’s also not one that lends itself to perfect solutions. If the president is determined to close the prison, he can, and in relatively short order. Unless and until he does, Guantánamo’s corrosive impact — both literally and for what it represents — will continue to deepen and spread.”

Aliya Hussain, Advocacy Program Manager at the Center for Constitutional Rights, added, “There is wide-ranging public support for President Biden to close Guantánamo. He must take bold and decisive action, and we will hold him accountable until he does.”

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

Letter to President Biden urging the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay by 111 NGOs

February 2, 2021

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

Dear President Biden:

We are a diverse group of non-governmental organizations working at both the local and national level and on issues including immigrants’ rights, racial justice, and combatting anti-Muslim discrimination. We write to urge you to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and to end indefinite military detention.

Among a broad range of human rights violations perpetrated against predominantly Muslim communities, Guantánamo — designed specifically to evade legal constraints, and where Bush administration officials incubated torture — is the iconic example of the post-9/11 abandonment of the rule of law. Nearly eight hundred Muslim men and boys were held at Guantánamo after 2002, all but a handful without charge or trial. Forty remain, at the astronomical cost of $540 million per year, making Guantánamo the most expensive prison in the world.

Guantánamo embodies the fact that, for nearly two decades following the September 11, 2001 attacks, the United States government has viewed communities of color — citizens and non-citizens alike — through a security threat lens, to devastating consequences. This is not a problem of the past. Guantánamo continues to cause escalating and profound damage to the men who still languish there, and the approach it exemplifies continues to fuel and justify bigotry, stereotyping, and stigma. Guantánamo entrenches racial divisions and racism more broadly, and risks facilitating additional rights violations.

For example, President Trump proposed sending undocumented immigrants to Guantánamo to be held as “enemy combatants.” He further built upon the discriminatory animus, policies, and practices that Guantánamo represents through his odious Muslim Ban, each iteration of which was explicitly promulgated under the false pretense of protecting the nation from terrorism. And the Trump administration’s militarized federal response to protests against the extrajudicial killings of George Floyd and other Black people was fueled by the war-based post-9/11 security architecture and mindset that Guantánamo epitomizes.

It is long past time for both a sea change in the United States’ approach to national and human security, and a meaningful reckoning with the full scope of damage that the post-9/11 approach has caused. Closing Guantánamo and ending indefinite detention of those held there is a necessary step towards those ends. We urge you to act without delay, and in a just manner that considers the harm done to the men who have been imprisoned without charge or fair trials for nearly twenty years.

Please contact Aliya Hussain at the Center for Constitutional Rights (ahussain@ccrjustice.org) and Scott Roehm at the Center for Victims of Torture (sroehm@cvt.org) with any questions or to discuss.

Sincerely,

Action Center on Race & the Economy
Adalah Justice Project
Advocate Visitors with Immigrants in Detention
American Civil Liberties Union
American Friends Service Committee
American Friends Service Committee, Colorado
American Muslim Empowerment Network (AMEN)
Amnesty International USA
Asian Americans Advancing Justice – Asian Law Caucus
Bellevue Program for Survivors of Torture
Birmingham Interfaith Human Rights Committee
Black LGBTQ+ Migrant Project
Borderlands for Equity
Bridges Faith Initiative
Capital District Coalition Against Islamophobia, Albany, NY
Center for Constitutional Rights
Center for Gender & Refugee Studies
Center for International Policy
Center for Victims of Torture
Central American Martyrs Center
Central Jersey Coalition Against Endless War
Centro de Trabajadores Unidos – IWP
Chicago Religious Leadership Network on Latin America – CRLN
CLEAR project (Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility)
Cleveland Catholic Worker, Ohio
Cleveland Jobs with Justice
Close Guantánamo
Coalition for Civil Freedoms
CODEPINK
Defending Rights & Dissent
Demand Progress Education Fund
Denver Justice and Peace Committee
Detention Watch Network
EarthSong
Going Beyond Sustainability
Government Information Watch
Holy Spirit Missionary Sisters, USA-JPIC
Hope House
Human Rights First
Immigrant Advocacy Project
Immigrant Defense Project
Interfaith Community for Detained Immigrants
International Refugee Assistance Project
InterReligious Task Force on Central America (IRTF Cleveland)
Islamophobia Studies Center
Jews Against Anti-Muslim Racism
Justice for Muslims Collective
Kairos Community, NY
Lincoln Park Presbyterian Church
Louisiana Advocates for Immigrants in Detention
MADRE
MoveOn
Muslim Advocates
Muslim Justice League
Muslim Solidarity Committee
Muslim Solidarity Committee, Albany, NY
Muslims For Liberty
Muslims for Social Justice
National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers
National Immigrant Justice Center
National Immigration Project (NIPNLG)
National Network for Immigrant & Refugee Rights
National Religious Campaign Against Torture
Network in Solidarity with the People of Guatemala (NISGUA)
No More Guantanamos
NorCal Resist
North Carolina Stop Torture Now
Northern Illinois Justice for Our Neighbors
NWI Resistance
Oak Grove Church of God
Open Society Foundations
Pakistan Association of New York Capital District
Palestinian Rights Committee, Upper Hudson Peace Action
Peace Action
Peace Action: The New School
Peacemakers of Schoharie County, NY
Physicians for Human Rights
Project SALAM, Albany, NY
Project South
Provincial Council Clerics of St. Viator (Viatorians)
Reformed Church of Highland Park, NJ
Refugee Council USA
Reprieve US
Reviving the Islamic Sisterhood for Empowerment
Rural Awakening
School of the Americas Watch (SOA Watch)
School of the Americas Watch, Illinois Chapter
Sept. 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows
South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT)
Southwest Asylum & Migration Institute (SAMI)
T’ruah
Tea Project
The Advocates for Human Rights
The Feminist Front (FF)
Tsuru for Solidarity
Transformations CDC
UC Davis Immigration Law Clinic
United Stateless
US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR)
USC Gould International Human Rights Clinic
Veterans For Peace
Veterans For Peace, Chapter 10
Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Inc.
Washington Office on Latin America
Win Without War
Witness Against Torture
Witness at the Border
Witness for Peace Southeast
Women Against War
Yemeni Alliance Committee
Yemeni American Merchants Association

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

Seven Authors, All Former Guantánamo Prisoners, Urge President Biden to Close the Prison Before its 20th Anniversary

The books of the seven authors and former Guantánamo prisoners who have just written an open letter to President Biden, urging him to close the prison, which was published in the New York Review of Books.Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

As the Biden administration settles in, and we await news of its plans for Guantánamo — after defense secretary Gen. Lloyd Austin told the Senate during his confirmation hearing, “I believe it is time for the detention facility at Guantánamo to close its doors” — it’s good to see the need for Guantánamo to be closed being discussed in the New York Review of Books by seven former prisoners who have all written books about their experiences.

The seven authors are Mansoor Adayfi, whose memoir Don’t Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo is being published this August, Moazzam Begg (Enemy Combatant, 2006), Lakhdar Boumediene (Witnesses of the Unseen: Seven Years in Guantanamo, 2017), Sami Al Hajj (Prisoner 345: My Six Years in Guantánamo, 2018), Ahmed Errachidi (The General: The Ordinary Man Who Challenged Guantánamo, 2013), Mohamedou Ould Slahi (Guantánamo Diary, 2015) and Moussa Zemmouri (Onschuldig in Guantánamo, 2010).

I’ve read all of the above — with the exceptions of Moussa Zemmouri’s book, which hasn’t been translated into English, and Mansoor Adayfi’s, which hasn’t been published yet  — and what I know from all of them is how eloquent the authors are, and how keenly they experienced and articulated the injustices of Guantánamo.

As a result, it is unsurprising that their appeal to Joe Biden is both powerful and articulate, and ought to play a part in helping the new president — to add to the many ways in which he has already distanced his administration from that of Donald Trump — to do so in one other important way: by closing Guantánamo before it reaches the 20th anniversary of its opening next January.

I’m cross-posting the letter below, and if you’re a US citizen or resident and would like to add to the former prisoners’ message to President Biden, you can do so via the White House contact page here.

An Open Letter to President Biden About Guantánamo
By Mansoor Adayfi, Moazzam Begg, Lakhdar Boumediene, Sami Al Hajj, Ahmed Errachidi, et al., New York Review of Books, January 29, 2021

President Bush opened it. President Obama promised to close it, but failed to do so. President Trump promised to keep it open. Now, it is your turn to decide.

We write to you as former prisoners of the United States held without charge or trial at the military detention facility at Guantánamo Bay who have written books about our experiences.

First, we welcome your presidential orders to reverse many unjust and problematic decisions made by your predecessor. We appreciate your repeal of the “Muslim ban,” which will now allow nationals from the Muslim-majority countries previously targeted into the United States, therefore bringing relief to families torn apart by this order.

Despite some positive developments, including the repeal of the Muslim ban, there is another deeply flawed and unjust process that has continued through five US presidential administrations spanning two decades: Guantánamo Bay prison. Guantánamo Bay has existed for over nineteen years and was built to house an exclusively Muslim male population.

We understand that your faith is important to you and helps to guide your vision of social justice. During our incarceration, we often reflected on the story of the Prophet Joseph (Yusuf) in the Quran and his years of wrongful imprisonment. It’s the same story in the Bible and one that reminds us that justice is not only divine, but timeless. That is why we are writing to you.

Although most of us were released under President Bush, everyone was hopeful that President Obama would follow through with his executive order to close Guantánamo in 2009. While some of us were released under Obama, however, it became clear during his tenure as president that ending imprisonment at Guantánamo was not a promise he could fulfill.

Many of us were abducted from our homes, in front of our families, and sold for bounties to the US by nations that cared little for the rule of law. We were rendered to countries where we were physically and psychologically tortured in addition to suffering racial and religious discrimination in US custody — even before we arrived at Guantánamo.

Some of us had children who were born in our absence and grew up without fathers. Others experienced the pain of learning that our close relatives died back home waiting in vain for news of our return. Waiting in vain for justice.

Most of the prisoners currently or presently detained at Guantánamo have never been to the United States. This means that our image of your country has been shaped by our experiences at Guantánamo — in other words, we have only been witnesses to its dark side.

Considering the violence that has happened at Guantánamo, we are sure that after more than nineteen years, you agree that imprisoning people indefinitely without trial while subjecting them to torture, cruelty and degrading treatment, with no meaningful access to families or proper legal systems, is the height of injustice. That is why imprisonment at Guantánamo must end.

There are only forty prisoners left in Guantánamo. We are told that the cost of each prisoner is $13 million per annum. That means that the United States spends $520 million a year on imprisoning men who will never be charged or convicted in a US court. Aside from the moral, legal, and public relations disaster that is Guantánamo, some of this money could be easily spent on programs to resettle prisoners and help them to rebuild their lives.

President Bush opened it. President Obama promised to close it, but failed to do so. President Trump promised to keep it open. It is now your turn to shape your legacy with regards to Guantánamo.

At your inauguration, you told the world: “We will be judged, you and I, by how we resolve these cascading crises of our era. We will rise to the occasion.” It is therefore our suggestion that the following steps are taken to close Guantánamo:

1. All those cleared for release are immediately repatriated to their home countries, as long as they are safe from arbitrary imprisonment and persecution.

2. The office for the special envoy is reopened and suitable countries are sought to restart the resettlement process for those unable to return to their homes.

3. Appropriate measures are taken to ensure that former prisoners are granted the means to start a meaningful life in the new country and are afforded protections from violations of those measures by the receiving state.

4. The concept of “forever prisoners” is rescinded, and those not facing charges under the military commissions are repatriated or resettled (as above) following appropriate security arrangements.

5. Repatriation/resettlement should not take place by force, and prisoners are not resettled where they will face arbitrary imprisonment once again.

6. Periodic Review Board reports should be superseded by the imperative to close Guantánamo and not obstruct the above measures.

7. The military commissions should be scrapped, and those facing charges should have their cases tried in accordance with the law.

8. Where appropriate and practicable, mechanisms are put in place whereby those convicted of crimes can serve their sentences closer to home.

Guantánamo causes deep distrust in what America says and stands for. Prisoners from forty-nine different countries once occupied Guantánamo’s cells. Those prisoners look to America as a nation of laws and freedoms and see little of either.

For two decades, the world has observed Guantánamo and noted that it is a bipartisan project, carried out by both Republicans and Democrats. That is what you must contend with and change.

Despite the abuses, after detention, many of us befriended and welcomed into our homes former US soldiers who guarded us. We’ve always believed there was another way.

During your tenure as vice president, America freed senior Taliban leaders from Guantánamo. Today, they head negotiations with top US officials to bring about peace in Afghanistan. During your inauguration speech you said, “Every disagreement doesn’t have to be a cause for total war.” We agree. In fact, as Obama once said, Guantánamo “should never have opened.” We believe you can close Guantánamo before its looming twentieth anniversary.

It is our sincere hope that you do.

Mansoor Adayfi (author, Yemen)
Moazzam Begg (author, UK)
Lakhdar Boumediene (author, France)
Sami Al Hajj (author, Qatar)
Ahmed Errachidi (author, Morocco)
Mohamedou Ould Slahi (author, Mauritania)
Moussa Zemmouri (author, Belgium)

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

Gen. Lloyd Austin, Biden’s Defense Secretary, Says it’s “Time for Guantánamo to Close its Doors,” as DoD Announces New Military Commission Charges

Gen. Lloyd Austin at his Senate confirmation hearing as defense secretary in President Biden’s administration, Jan. 19, 2021, and a photo of Camp 6 at Guantánamo.

 

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

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

In a flurry of activity on his first day in office, President Biden issued 17 executive orders, undoing some of the worst policy disasters of his predecessor, Donald Trump — including rejoining the Paris climate accord, stopping the US’s withdrawal from the World Health Organization, reversing Trump’s Muslim travel ban, and canceling the much-criticized Keystone XL pipeline.

Yesterday, in what the Guardian described as “a sweeping new set of climate executive orders,” he instructed the US government “to pause and review all oil and gas drilling on federal land, eliminate fossil fuel subsidies and transform the government’s vast fleet of cars and trucks into electric vehicles.”

Missing in all this commendable activity, sadly, is anything relating to the prison at Guantánamo Bay. As Vice President, Joe Biden was with President Obama 12 years ago, on January 22, 2009, when he issued Executive Order 13492, promising to close Guantánamo, which was undone by Trump in Executive Order 13823 — the absurdly-named “Protecting America Through Lawful Detention of Terrorists” — on January 30, 2018.

Trump’s executive order still stands, which is disappointing, of course, although commentators have understood that issuing a new executive order for the closure of Guantánamo could easily provoke troublesome Republican opposition — although, with the Democrats having a majority in the Senate and the House, that isn’t as damaging as it could be.

Despite these disappointments, however, we expect that there will be action from the administration on Guantánamo, and a good indicator of this came when, prior to his confirmation as defense secretary, Joe Biden’s nominee, Gen. Lloyd Austin, told the Senate in written testimony, “I believe it is time for the detention facility at Guantánamo to close its doors,” adding, as the Associated Press described it, that “he would work with others in the administration to develop a ‘path forward’ to closure.”

Nevertheless, at the same time, Guantánamo-watchers were taken by surprise when, on January 21, a senior legal official in the Pentagon “approved non-capital charges that include conspiracy, murder and terrorism” against three “high-value detainees” — Encep Nurjaman, an Indonesian known as Hambali, and two Malaysians, Mohammed Nazir bin Lep and Mohammed Farik bin Amin — “who have been in US custody for 17 years for their alleged roles in the deadly bombing of Bali nightclubs in 2002 and a year later of the JW Marriott Hotel in Jakarta.”

As the Associated Press noted, “The timing of the charges, which had been submitted under Donald Trump but not finalized, caught lawyers for the men by surprise and would seem to be in conflict with President Joe Biden’s intention to close the detention centre.”

Maj. James Valentine of the Marine Corps, the appointed military attorney for Hambali, said, “The timing here is obvious, one day after the inauguration. This was done in a state of panic before the new administration could get settled.”

This obviously isn’t reassuring, and we can only hope that the new administration doesn’t waver when it comes to taking the necessary steps towards the closure of Guantánamo over the coming months, starting with the appointment of a senior official to deal with prisoner transfers and the prison’s closure, as we continue to remind them how long this wretched place has been open, and how unforgivable it would be for it to be open on the 20th anniversary of its opening, on January 11, 2022.

* * * * *

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 music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from eight years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

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

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

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

Video: Mohamedou Ould Salahi and I Discuss the Closure of Guantánamo with Lewes Amnesty Group on Jan. 11, 2021

A screenshot of former Guantánamo prisoner Mohamedou Ould Salahi speaking to Lewes Amnesty Group on January 11, 2021, the 19th anniversary of the prison’s opening.Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

On January 11, the 19th anniversary of the opening of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, I was pleased to take part in a couple of events, to make up for my inability, because of Covid, to visit the US to campaign for the prison’s closure, as I have been doing every year since 2011.

To mark the occasion, I was interviewed by Kevin Gosztola of Shadowproof, for a video that is available here, and earlier I had taken part in an online meeting organized by the Lewes Amnesty Group, a very active group, dating back to the days when campaigners across south east England, and beyond, including campaigners in Lewes, fought to secure the release from Guantánamo of Brighton resident Omar Deghayes (who was released in 2007), and Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, who was finally released in 2015 after a huge campaign that involved MPs, the media, celebrities and two particular groups, the long-running Save Shaker Aamer campaign, and We Stand With Shaker, which I set up with campaigner Joanne MacInnes in 2014, and which involved getting MPs and celebrities to stand with a giant inflatable figure of Shaker, to demand his release.

The featured guest of the Lewes Amnesty Group’s meeting was former prisoner Mohamedou Ould Salahi, the author of the best-selling Guantánamo Diary (UK edition here), and a survivor of US torture in Jordan, Afghanistan and Guantánamo, whose story has been adapted by Hollywood for a new feature film, ‘The Mauritanian,’ which will be released next month.

Mohamedou had unexpectedly joined us for an online meeting in summer, and it was an honour that he accepted the Lewes Amnesty Group’s invitation to take part in this anniversary event. As anyone who has had any kind of engagement with Mohamedou since his release in 2016 can confirm, his gentleness, positivity and lack of rancour are extraordinary, and genuinely inspiring. As one of the participants said, “thank you for your brilliance, radiance and giving us hope.”

The video of the meeting, via YouTube, is available below, and I hope that you’ll watch it, and that you’ll share it if you find it useful.

There was much more in the meeting than I have mentioned, including, towards the end, discussions about how Amnesty members and others can engage in meaningful action in the UK; initially, I hope, via the establishment of an All-Party Parliamentary Group on Guantánamo, because, with Donald Trump now gone, the Biden administration will, as was the case with previous administrations until the aberration of Trump’s presidency, be susceptible to criticism from its allies. Do get in touch if you’re in the UK, and this is something that is of interest to you.

My thanks also to Hugh Sandeman for so admirably chairing the meeting, and to Sara Birch and David Burke of the Lewes Amnesty Group for organizing it.

And finally, if you have the time, check out Amnesty International’s new report, ‘Right the Wrong: Decision Time on Guantánamo,’ issued to mark the 19th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, which was introduced at the meeting by Lise Rossi, AIUK’s North America Country Coordinator.

* * * * *

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 music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from eight years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

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

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

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

Video: Guantánamo Attorney Shelby Sullivan-Bennis and I Discuss the Prison’s Ongoing Horrors for Revolution Books Online

A screenshot from “America’s Torture Colony: 19 Years of Guantánamo … It Must Be Closed NOW!”, an online event hosted by Revolution Books, featuring Andy Worthington and Shelby Sullivan-Bennis, and host Raymond Lotta.Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

Yesterday, I was delighted to take part in a two-hour online discussion about Guantánamo, with the attorney Shelby Sullivan-Bennis, which was hosted by Revolution Books in New York, and live streamed on YouTube and Facebook.

Before the arrival of Covid, the Revolution Books event was one of the regular highlights of my annual visits to the US (every January from 2011 to 2020), to mark the anniversary of the prison’s opening on January 11, 2002 — and last year, Shelby joined me for the first time, in what was a highly-charged event, as we had just spent the day deep in discussion about Guantánamo, at an exhibition of art by the prisoners, at CUNY Law School in Queens, which Shelby had played a major part in organizing.

This year, of course, all live events on and around the anniversary were called off, and I wasn’t able to visit the US at all, but the Zoom event that replaced the in-store presentation was still a very powerful and emotional event, and while nothing quite compares to being in a room with an audience and interacting with them (and even going out for dinner in Harlem afterwards!), Zoom allows people to join an event from all round the world, and, as yesterday demonstrated, doesn’t necessarily hamper the ability to get a message across.

The video is below, via YouTube:

The video starts with an introduction by Raymond Lotta of Revolution Books, and I gave a summary of the current situation at Guantánamo, and a brief account of its history under George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, starting at 4:30. Shelby then took over, introducing her work and discussing some of her clients, at 18:00.

After Shelby spoke, Raymond was back at 28:00, and asked me to provide further background on Guantánamo throughout its history, which I did from 30:50 to 50:00. Raymond then opened up the discussion to further questions from viewers, with Shelby responding at length to a question about hunger strikes that helped to shed light on the fundamental cruelty and inhumanity of Guantánamo.

I don’t want to provide more of a breakdown of the event, because I really hope you have time to watch it — or to listen to it while doing something else. I think it was a powerful journey through the long, unforgivable and still ongoing story of Guantánamo, suffused with anger, indignation, sorrow and pain, especially, I have to say, from Shelby, who brings the horror of what is being done to the men still held at Guantánamo, like a wound, into her life in the US only to find that, 19 years after Guantánamo opened, the media and the American people have largely lost interest, if they were ever engaged in the first place.

Please help us make people remember, or to pay attention in the first place, in this first year of the Biden administration, as we approach an anniversary that really shouldn’t be allowed to happen — the 20th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, on January 11, 2022.

* * * * *

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 music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from eight years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

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

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

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

Close Guantánamo: Lawyers Decry Broken Military Commission System and Status of “Forever Prisoners” in Washington Post Op-Ed

Campaigners calling for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay outside the US Congress on Monday January 11, 2021, the 19th anniversary of the opening of the prison. (Photo by Alli Jarrar of Amnesty International). Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

As the 19th anniversary of the the opening of the prison at Guantánamo Bay recedes, and the inauguration of Joe Biden hoves into view, it remains crucial that all of us who oppose the continued existence of Guantánamo continue to discuss the 40 men still held there, the inadequacy of the status of all of them (six approved for release but still held, nine charged or tried in a broken trial system, and 25 consigned to oblivion as “forever prisoners”), and to demand its closure.

On the anniversary, along with the various online events and interviews, Newsweek distinguished itself by being the only mainstream US media outlet to focus on the anniversary, publishing a powerful op-ed by former prisoner, torture victim and best-selling author Mohamedou Ould Salahi, which I posted the day after on the Close Guantánamo website.

The only other mainstream media coverage I’ve found came the day after the anniversary in the Washington Post, where two attorneys with the Military Commissions Defense Organization, civilian defense counsel Brian Bouffard, and Aaron Shepard, a lieutenant commander in the US Navy JAG Corps, wrote what really ought to be an epitaph for Guantánamo’s broken military commission trial system, and for the rotten policy of indefinite detention without charge or trial that is the main hallmark of Guantánamo’s unforgivable exceptionalism, as the prison begins its 20th year of operations. The op-ed is cross-posted below.

Bouffard and Shepard noted how the commissions have spectacularly failed to deliver justice, with only one of the limited number of convictions secured over the last 19 years — just eight in total — surviving intact a process of appeals and reversals. In addition, they highlight the scandal of “the five men accused of plotting the 9/11 attacks, who were first charged in 2008 but whose trial still has not begun,” largely because of the difficulties of retaining judges and officials overseeing the broken system, and, of course, the seemingly unresolvable tension between the defense teams’ insistence that no trial can be fair unless the men’s torture is openly discussed, and the prosecutors’ obsession with keeping it all secret.

I was reminded of a discussion I had last January, in Washington, D.C., with someone who had spent many years working on the commissions, in which the realization dawned on me that, after years in which the US obsessively insisted on not forgetting the 9/11 attacks, holding a national day of mourning every year, to fuel its ongoing sense of seemingly unquenchable vengeance, we are now in position where not only has justice failed to be delivered, but an entire generation of young Americans is growing up without even knowing what 9/11 was — in large part because the failure to convict any of the men responsible has rendered it invisible.

Significantly, Bouffard and Shepard also discussed the particular plight of the “forever prisoners,” those regarded as too dangerous to release, but who will never be charged. This was an unacceptable position when it was first put forward eleven years ago, in the report of the Guantánamo Review Task Force, a high-level government review process set up by President Obama, which recommended 156 prisoners for release, 36 for trial, and 48 as “forever prisoners.”

Parole-type reviews — the Periodic Review Boards — were set up for these men, and by the time they started, in 2013, some of the men initially recommended for prosecution had migrated to this group, so that 64 men were reviewed. The 25 “forever prisoners” are the only ones whose release was not recommended by the PRBs, and they include men regarded as a threat because of how they have behaved since they were brought to Guantánamo, rather than anything they allegedly did beforehand, apparent cases of mistaken identity or of exaggerated significance, as well as a number of men allegedly involved with terrorism, but without those allegations ever having been tested in a court of law.

Bouffard and Shepard represent one of these men — Mohammed Nazir Bin Lep, a Malaysian seized in Thailand in 2003, tortured in CIA “black sites,” and then dumped at Guantánamo in September 2006, along with other alleged “high-value detainees.” Bin Lep isn’t accused of being involved in any kind of attack on the US; instead, he is alleged to have transferred money for a terrorist group in south east Asia. And yet, as Bouffard and Shepard explain, “despite holding him for more than 17 years, at a cost of nearly a quarter-billion dollars, our government still refuses to bring Bin Lep to trial. At this point, key witnesses are dead, evidence is lost forever, and his chance to fairly defend himself has evaporated.”

As they ask pointedly towards the end of their article, “what’s the endgame for detainees who will never see trial? Do we hold them indefinitely, regardless of how flimsy their connection may be to attacks upon the United States?”

The answer, surely, has to be no. After 19 years, it is surely time for the men still held to be either charged or released — and I hope this is a position that is expressed to the Biden administration, as urgently as possible, after Joe Biden is inaugurated as president on Wednesday.

There’s no justice in Guantánamo Bay. For America’s sake, that must change.
By Brian Bouffard and Aaron Shepard, Washington Post, January 12, 2021

Just months after the tragic attacks on 9/11, the United States began transferring prisoners from detention centers and black sites around the world to a remote prison in Cuba. Nineteen years later, the detention center at Guantánamo Bay is still operating.

The original justification for the Military Commissions at Guantánamo was to bring accused terrorists to justice while simultaneously preserving national security. But in the two decades since 9/11, after accounting for all of the appeals and reversals by higher courts, the Commissions have produced only one final conviction.

Conversely, in that time, our civilian justice system has convicted nearly 700 individuals on terrorism-related charges. At this point, it should be abundantly clear that justice will never come at — or to — Guantánamo.

This clarity is perhaps best demonstrated in the case of the five men accused of plotting the 9/11 attacks, who were first charged in 2008 but whose trial still has not begun. Covid-19 bears some recent blame for this, but it’s certainly not responsible for the government repeatedly appointing new Commissions leadership; the intricacies of death penalty litigation and unreliable, torture-derived evidence; or the appointment of four new judges in the past eight months, with a fifth soon to come after the most recent one was disqualified.

But the deficiencies of the Military Commissions go deeper. Most nefarious is the effect on those imprisoned without trial, a violation of every norm and custom under our constitutional system.

We represent one of these men who has never had the chance to defend himself. Mohammed Nazir Bin Lep is a 44-year-old Malaysian who was arrested in Thailand in 2003. Our government severely tortured him for three years and then shut him away in Guantánamo. He wasn’t involved in any attack on the United States; instead, he was allegedly affiliated with a Southeast Asian group that committed attacks in Indonesia. Though no one alleges that he planned, carried out or even knew anything about these attacks, he was charged with allegedly transferring money that the government believes — but hasn’t proved — helped fund those attacks.

Yet despite holding him for more than 17 years, at a cost of nearly a quarter-billion dollars, our government still refuses to bring Bin Lep to trial. At this point, key witnesses are dead, evidence is lost forever, and his chance to fairly defend himself has evaporated. The government has denied access to his medical records, and has yet to grant him a legally required evaluation for the mental and physical damage caused by torture. Furthermore, while the government decided to prosecute him at least 10 years ago, Bin Lep was denied legal assistance for a trial until 2019. If not for the evenhanded intervention of a federal judge, this misbegotten legal process would have degenerated even further.

We expect many Americans won’t raise an eyebrow at this or might think the details are mere legal technicalities. But Guantánamo exists in a shadowy legal gray zone, and only sunlight can illuminate the questions it raises about our fundamental values and commitment to the rule of law. For instance, what’s the endgame for detainees who will never see trial? Do we hold them indefinitely, regardless of how flimsy their connection may be to attacks upon the United States? And if the government creates laws and processes aimed at fairness, does it actually have to follow them, or can it simply ignore them when it’s convenient?

These questions demand answers, which is why we filed a petition asking a federal judge to answer them. Were this a normal case within our civilian justice system, our petition wouldn’t be necessary, because Bin Lep’s treatment is a clear violation of the Sixth Amendment [the right to a public trial without unnecessary delay]. But even though the government has withheld basic constitutional and human rights protections from Bin Lep and his fellow prisoners, this has not accelerated the pace of justice. Decades later, victims and their families are no nearer to closure, the system faces rightful condemnation at home and abroad, and American taxpayers are still footing a bill of more than $500 million per year. Pragmatic concerns aside, what moral high ground have we surrendered by allowing the Commissions to bypass our principles? What does it say about us when we conjure excuse after excuse to ignore our values?

Some may find it difficult to care about the men in Guantánamo. But as Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote in 1950, “The safeguards of liberty have frequently been forged in controversies involving not very nice people.” These safeguards against government overreach and abuse are critically important for all of us — the “nice” and the “not very nice” alike. And unless there’s a fundamental shift in our failed approach to justice at Guantánamo, all of our profitless moral compromising will amount to nothing but the loss of our national soul.

* * * * *

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 music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from eight years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

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

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

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

Video: I Talk to Kevin Gosztola About Guantánamo on the 19th Anniversary of Its Opening — and Julian Assange

A screenshot of Andy Worthington’s interview with Kevin Gosztola of Shadowproof on Jan. 11, 2021, the 19th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo.Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

Yesterday, on the 19th anniversary of the opening of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, I was delighted when Kevin Gosztola of Shadowproof got in touch to request an interview to be livestreamed on his YouTube channel.

We spoke for just under an hour, covering Guantánamo for the first 24 minutes, in which I had the opportunity to explain in detail where we are, 19 long and shameful years since the prison opened, and four depressing years since Donald Trump promised there would be no releases from Guantánamo, and, with one exception, was true to his word.

For the 40 men still held at Guantánamo, it is impossible for their situation to be worse under Joe Biden than it was under Trump, and Kevin and I discussed what progress there might be under Biden after he takes office in a week’s time — releasing the six men already approved for release, and, with his control of both the Senate and the House, being able to reverse Republican prohibitions on bringing anyone to the US mainland for any reason — whether for urgent medical treatment that is unavailable at Guantánamo, or to face trials, in the federal court system, as opposed to the broken military commissions at Guantánamo.

The video is below:

Whatever will happen is as yet unknown, but it is clear, as I explained, that the coming months are the time for pressure to be exerted on the Biden administration, with the first requirement being for him to either revive the Office of the Envoy for Guantánamo Closure, created under Obama, or to create a new role for an official tasked with dealing exclusively with Guantánamo.

At 24:45, Kevin and I began discussing WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and his extradition case in the UK, which both of us have been very involved in, with Kevin reporting in great detail on the proceedings, while I was called as a witness, and submitted two statements on Julian’s behalf, based on my work with WikiLeaks as a media partner on the release of classified military files from Guantánamo in 2011.

I talked about how completely unexpected it was when the judge, District Judge Vanessa Baraitser, refused to allow Julian’s extradition to proceed, on the basis of mental health issues, but Kevin and I also discussed how, at the same time, it was depressing that Judge Baraitser turned down Julian’s bail application, and troubling that she supported all of the prosecution’s claims about Julian, completely disregarding the importance of press freedom, and the necessity — to avoid being a dictatorship — of publishers, like WikiLeaks, being able to expose uncomfortable truths about our governments that they would rather keep hidden.

At 43:25, Kevin asked me for a perspective from across the water about the invasion of the Capitol last week by supporters of Donald Trump, in which I was pleased to have the opportunity to state that it seemed very clear from the UK that Donald Trump had directly incited his supporters to engage in insurrectionary — and, in some cases, murderous — behavior at the heart of US government.

The above is just a summary, so I hope you have time to listen to the whole show, which continued, after Kevin and I had finished talking, with another 50 minutes or so of discussion about the invasion of the Capitol and its significance.

* * * * *

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 music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from eight years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

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

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

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

Close Guantánamo: Online Events Marking the 19th Anniversary of the Opening of the Prison on January 11, 2021

Campaigners from Witness Against Torture and other organizations call for the closure of Guantánamo outside the White House on January 11, 2012, the 10th anniversary of the prison’s opening.


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

 

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

For the last ten years, I have traveled to the US from London (since 2012 as the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign, which I co-founded that year with the US attorney Tom Wilner) to take part in events marking the anniversary, on January 11, of the opening of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, with a particular focus on a vigil outside the White House, with representatives of numerous NGOs including Amnesty International, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the National Religious Campaign Against Torture and Witness Against Torture.

This year, sadly, because of Covid, the vigil is only happening online, and my visit has been called off, although I am currently finalizing details of online replacements for events that I usually undertake in person — a panel discussion with our other co-founder Tom Wilner at New America in Washington, D.C., and another at Revolution Books in New York with Guantánamo lawyer Shelby Sullivan-Bennis — as well as some other online discussions. More on these events soon.

For this year’s anniversary, I urge you to join Close Guantánamo’s photo campaign, taking a photo with our poster marking how long Guantánamo has been open on January 11 — 6,941 days — and sending it to us at info@closeguantanamo.org. You can also take a photo with our follow-up poster for January 20, the day of Joe Biden’s inauguration, when the prison will have been open for 6,950 days. We’ll be posting the photos on our website, and sharing them on social media.

Meanwhile, the online replacement for the annual vigil outside the White House, “19 Years of Guantánamo: Remembering the Men Detained,” is taking place on January 11 (that’s next Monday) from 1-2pm EST (6-7pm GMT), with special guest speaker Mansoor Adayfi, a good friend of the Close Guantánamo campaign, who has written articles for us about Saifullah Paracha and Khalid Qassim, two of the “forever prisoners” whose release we will be calling for persistently throughout 2021. RSVP for the event here.

At 6.30pm GMT (1.30pm EST), former Guantánamo prisoner, torture survivor and best-selling author Mohamedou Ould Salahi will be appearing for the first 30 minutes of “Guantánamo End Game?,” a CAGE event, also featuring former prisoner Moazzam Begg and former Bagram prisoner Abdul Basit, the brother of Guantánamo prisoner Muhammad Rahim. Register for the event here.

Then at 7pm GMT (2pm EST), I will be introducing Mohamedou in an Amnesty International event wth the Lewes Amnesty Group, in which Mohamedou will be talking about his experiences — and the forthcoming feature film “The Mauritanian,” which will be released next month. To join this event, please email the Lewes Amnesty Group here.

Mohamedou is also taking part in “Rights or Rightlessness? The Lives of Men Imprisoned at Guantánamo” from 5-6.30pm EST (10-11.30pm GMT), with Baher Azmy, the Legal Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, and Dr. A. Naomi Paik, Associate Professor of Asian American studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Register for the event here.

And finally, if you’re around at 8pm EST (1am GMT), my good friends at Witness Against Torture, who are normally at the heart of the vigil in their hoods and orange jumpsuits, and who fast and hold actions in Washington, D.C. for the week around the anniversary from their base in a church, are holding the first of five “virtual circles” for those who are fasting, and for activists in solidarity. The “Fast for Justice” is taking place from January 11-15, with “virtual circles” every evening at 8pm. RSVP to be sent the Zoom link, and see here for more information about WAT’s actions.

* * * * *

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 music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from eight years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

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

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

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