Andy Worthington's Blog, page 72

Fighting Injustice: Andy Worthington’s Band The Four Fathers Release New EP

Today, London-based band The Four Fathers release the Fighting Injustice EP online, via Bandcamp, in two versions: one for the UK and one for the US.

The EP features three reworked songs from the band’s debut album, ‘Love and War’, released last summer, written by lead singer Andy Worthington, a journalist and human rights and social justice activist, who has spent the last ten years focusing primarily on the US prison at Guantánamo Bay Cuba.

Please feel free to listen to the EPs below — and please support us by buying them, or by buying individual tracks, if you like them. Later this month we will be in the studio making the first recordings for our second album, to be released in 2017.

Fighting Injustice EP (UK version) by The Four Fathers

Fighting Injustice EP (US version) by The Four Fathers

The EP’s headline song, ‘Fighting Injustice’, is a live favourite, an anthemic roots reggae song opposing austerity and greed, remixed for the EP and with a newly recorded guitar part by Richard Clare.

The EP also features a reworked version of ‘Song for Shaker Aamer’, the band’s best-known song. Originally recorded in 2014, and featured in the campaign video for the We Stand With Shaker campaign that Andy launched with the activist Joanne McInnes to secure the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, Andy rewrote the lyrics following Shaker’s release last October, and recorded the new lyrics with Richard on backing vocals at the EP recording session in May.

The final reworked song is ‘Tory Bullshit Blues’, the band’s galloping rock and roll cry for socialism as an alternative to the iniquities of 21st century capitalism, with its roots in the Thatcher years, and with its apposite commentary — after the EU referendum last week — on the misplaced scapegoating of immigrants for the crimes committed by the bankers who crashed the global economy in 2008.

For the US version of the Fighting Injustice EP, Andy rewrote some of the lyrics for ‘Tory Bullshit Blues’ to reflect the US political situation, replacing Margaret Thatcher with Ronald Reagan, and Nigel Farage with Donald Trump, and renaming the song ‘Neo-Liberal Bullshit Blues.’

The EPs cost £2.50 ($3.25) and can be downloaded via Bandcamp. The tracks are also available individually for £1 ($1.30).

For further information, or to book The Four Fathers, please contact the band via Andy Worthington.

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.

Not Giving Up: Photos from the March for Europe in London, Saturday July 2, 2016

See my photos on Flickr here.

On Saturday July 2, I attended a March for Europe, and took the photos in my latest album on Flickr. The march took place in central London, attracting around 50,000 people, calling for Britain to remain in the EU, supporting the pan-European community that it has allowed to come into existence, opposing racism and xenophobia, and calling for MPs to refuse to pass the legislation that is needed for our departure to actually take place, rather than, as at present, being the preferred course of action of a slim majority of the 72.2% of the electorate who actually bothered to vote.

The march took place just eight days after a shocked Britain woke up to discover that, after the most ill-advised referendum in UK history, those voting to leave the EU had secured more votes than those who wanted to stay in. Those attending were just a fraction of the 16,141,241 people who voted to remain in the EU, but the march was an important sign of hugely important dissent that, I fervently hope, will not go away.

We need to maintain pressure on our MPs not to accept the result — not out of any anti-democratic sentiment, but because: 1) leaving the EU would be disastrous for our economy and our standing in the world; 2) isolationism has already led to a rise in racism and xenophobia, apparently normalised by the result; 3) the referendum should never have been called, and was only called because of the narrow party political concerns of David Cameron, and not because of any need for it; 4) the Leave campaign’s efforts to secure victory, with the collusion of large parts of the media, involved telling voters disgraceful lies, and Boris Johnson, who did so much to ensure its success, didn’t even believe in it, and only supported it in the hope of furthering his own political aims; 5) most importantly, Parliament has to endorse it before it can happen, and MPs’ obligation is to vote in the best interests of the country, not to rubber-stamp the result of a unjustifiable referendum; and 6) as some lawyers are arguing, the process of triggering our departure from the EU, if enacted, would be unlawful.

Because the result was advisory, it is not legally binding. It needs Parliament to endorse it, and Parliament should clearly do no such thing. 75% of MPs support us remaining in the EU, and, as Geoffrey Robertson QC stated in ‘How to stop Brexit: get your MP to vote it down,’ an important article for the Guardian last week, “‘Sovereignty’ — a much misunderstood word in the campaign — resides in Britain with the ‘Queen in parliament’, that is with MPs alone who can make or break laws and peers who can block them. Before Brexit can be triggered, parliament must repeal the 1972 European Communities Act by which it voted to take us into the European Union — and MPs have every right, and indeed a duty if they think it best for Britain, to vote to stay.” Please also see the withering criticism of his colleagues for creating this disaster by veteran Tory Michael Heseltine here and here.

I’m also persuaded by the argument made by law professor and former Foreign Office advisor Philip Allott, who has stated that the Brexit decision may be “unlawful.” Allott wrote in the Guardian, “In the light of the current law, it is possible that a court might take the view that it is arbitrary and unreasonable and disproportionate, in the legal sense of those words, to base the vastly important decision to withdraw from the EU on the opinion expressed by a bare majority of people taking part in a referendum provided for in an act of parliament — but an act of parliament that makes no provision for the legal effect of that referendum — thereby ignoring the opinion expressed by a very large minority.”

Please also see ‘UK government faces pre-emptive legal action over Brexit decision’ in the Guardian today, announcing that solicitors at prominent law firm Mishcon de Reya are “taking pre-emptive legal action against the government, following the EU referendum result, to try to ensure article 50 is not triggered without an act of parliament.” The Guardian added that the legal action “relies upon the ambiguous wording of article 50,” setting out what must happen for states to leave the EU — a process that has not yet happened, and for which the UK would be breaking new ground. The first clause states, “Any member state may decide to withdraw from the Union in accordance with its own constitutional requirements,” and the problem, as identified by the lawyers, is that “[o]ne of the grounds of a likely challenge to the referendum is that it is merely advisory and the royal prerogative cannot be used to undermine parliamentary statute.”

Kasra Nouroozi, a partner at Mishcon de Reya, said, “We must ensure that the government follows the correct process to have legal certainty and protect the UK constitution and the sovereignty of parliament in these unprecedented circumstances. The result of the referendum is not in doubt, but we need a process that follows UK law to enact it. The outcome of the referendum itself is not legally binding and for the current or future prime minister to invoke article 50 without the approval of parliament is unlawful. We must make sure this is done properly for the benefit of all UK citizens. Article 50 simply cannot be invoked without a full debate and vote in parliament. Everyone in Britain needs the government to apply the correct constitutional process and allow parliament to fulfil its democratic duty, which is to take into account the results of the referendum along with other factors and make the ultimate decision.”

If you’re interested in ongoing moves to prevent us from leaving the EU, please sign the petition to the government, ‘Let Parliament decide whether or not we remain a member of the European Union,’ which currently has just over 10,000 signatures.

And if you’re in London, or nearby, please come to ‘Stand Together: London Park Picnic Against Brexit,’ on Saturday (July 9), in Green Park, near Hyde Park Corner, where the intention is to hold not only a picnic but also a General Assembly, to discuss post-Brexit tactics.

Please also check out this letter asking the House of Commons to appoint an independent judicial committee, comprised of senior Commonwealth judges, to review the scale and impact of lies and distortions in the run-up to the referendum, for which signatories are still being sought.

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,’ is available for download or on CD via Bandcamp — also see here). 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.

The Last Russian in Guantánamo and an Alleged Saudi Bomb-Maker Seek Release Via Periodic Review Boards

Last week, two more Periodic Review Boards took place — the 48th and 49th — for the last Russian prisoner held at Guantánamo, Ravil Mingazov, and for Ghassan al-Sharbi, a Saudi. Both men were seized in Faisalabad on March 28, 2002, on the day that Abu Zubaydah, regarded as a “high-value detainee,” was seized. The CIA’s post-9/11 torture program was initially developed for Zubaydah, who was regarded as a senior figure in Al-Qaeda, even though it has since become apparent that he was not a member of Al-Qaeda, and had no prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks.

Nevertheless, Abu Zubaydah remains hidden in Guantánamo, still not charged with a crime, and those seized on the same night as him — either in the same house, or in another house that the US government has worked hard to associate with him —  have faced an uphill struggle trying to convince the authorities that they are not of any particular significance, and that it is safe for them to be released.

In May, three men seized in the house with Abu Zubaydah, Jabran Al Qahtani (ISN 696), a Saudi, Saeed Bakhouche aka Abdelrazak Ali (ISN 685), an Algerian, and Sufyian Barhoumi (ISN 694), another Algerian, all had reviews, although no decisions have yet been taken about whether or not they should be released. Ghassan al-Sharbi (ISN 682) is another of the men seized with Zubaydah, and his review took place last Thursday (June 23), although he did not attend this hearing, or cooperate with the military personnel assigned to help him prepare for it, so it is certain that he will not be approved for release.

Whether rightly or wrongly, the PRBs function like parole boards (although, of course, the men in question have never been tried, let alone convicted of a crime or sentenced), and as such they require prisoners to show contrition and to persuade the board that they do not hold a grudge against the US, and will embark on peaceful and constructive lives if freed. To date, 24 prisoners have succeeded in persuading the boards to approve their release, while 12 others have failed. 15 decisions have not yet been taken, and 18 other men are awaiting reviews, which the Obama administration has promised will take place before President Obama leaves office.

Ravil Mingazov’s Periodic Review Board

I will discuss al-Sharbi’s case below, but first I want to look at the case of Ravil Mingazov (ISN 702), the Russian who was seized in another house in Faisalabad, the “Issa House,” that the US has tried — largely without success — to portray as a house associated with Al-Qaeda. It appears to have held many students who ended up in Guantánamo, as a US judge affirmed back in 2009, and if it did hold others who were not students and were sent there by Abu Zubaydah, that seems to be because Zubaydah — who was not a member of Al-Qaeda, remember — was actually involved in moving all manner of people — men, women and children, civilians as well as soldiers — out of the war-torn chaos of Afghanistan, and had a connection with the “Issa House,” whereby occasional visitors stayed alongside the students.

Ravil Mingazov appears to have been one of these men. An ethnic Tatar who had fled his homeland because of oppression, leaving his family, he seems to have drifted around Afghanistan and Pakistan, ending up in a Jamaat-al-Tablighi centre in Lahore, from where he took a ride with two other men to a place in Faisalabad where, they were told, those who needed passports to return home would find help. Taken first to Abu Zubaydah’s house, Shabaz Cottage, two of the three, including Mingazov, were then moved to the “Issa House,” where they were seized.

Most of the men seized in that house raid have now been freed (see here, for example, for the story of Fahmi Abdullah Ahmed, freed in January), but Mingazov is an exception, even though, back in May 2010, a judge ordered his release, having found that the government had failed to establish that he was connected to either Al-Qaeda or the Taliban. The government, however, appealed, and the case has, shamefully, not been dealt with in the six years since, leaving MIngazov in a disgraceful state of limbo. See my article from September 2011, The Black Hole of Guantánamo: The Sad Story of Ravil Mingazov, for further information.

Prior to his PRB, the US government presented its case against him in an unclassified summary that was noteworthy for failing to provide anything resembling evidence of any kind of wrongdoing against Mingazov — in particular in the line, “Due to his inability to communicate in any language other than Russian, he probably did not hold any positions of authority in Afghanistan.”

As the summary described it, Mingazov, an ethnic Tatar, “served in the Russian military as a logistics warrant officer from 1989-2000, when he resigned over what he characterized as the Russian Government’s treatment of Muslims.” Those coming the summary suggested that “[h]is feelings on this subject likely led him to seek out extremist groups.” He then allegedly joined the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and “trained in Tajikistan until early 2001, when the group was forced to leave and collectively traveled to Afghanistan.” By mid-2001, it was suggested, he “had probably joined the Tatar Jama’at group, which took a strong position against Russia’s policies towards Muslims.”

Following the one use of the word “probably” above, it was then suggested that, in mid-2001, he “probably attended several training camps in Afghanistan where he learned to make explosives, poisons, and chemical grenades.” It was also noted that he “has admitted to fighting with the Taliban against the Northern Alliance, but said he did not fight against Americans.”

This is the point at which the key line is delivered, revealing that he had no way of communicating with those in whose company he found himself: “Due to his inability to communicate in any language other than Russian, he probably did not hold any positions of authority in Afghanistan.”

He then reportedly “fled to Pakistan in January 2002,” where he stayed at a series of safe houses, described, of course, as “al-Qa’ida affiliated-safehouses,” and then  made his way to Faisalabad, where he was seized.

Securing information about him has evidently proved difficult. The authorities claimed that, “[b]ased on information following his arrest, he was known to have some experience in dealing with different types of explosives,” but also conceded that “[w]e have no information from other detainees on [his] pre-detention activities.”

It was also noted that he “has been mostly compliant with the guard force at Guantánamo, with a relatively low number of infractions compared to other detainees, according to Joint Task Force-Guantánamo (JTF-GTMO) reporting.” However, according to the US authorities, “Despite being open with interviewers about his time in Russia, [he] has provided few and contradictory details about his time in Afghanistan and the circumstances that led to his arrest in an al-Qa’ida-affiliated safehouse” — although I tend to think that is untrue, as the story of how he ended up at the “Issa House” has been reported over the years in a variety of accounts by various prisoners involved, none of which tend to suggest that anything untoward was taking place.

The summary also noted that Mingazov “maintains a strong disdain for the Russian Government and does not want to be repatriated, claiming his treatment in Guantánamo is better than the treatment he received in Russia.” The summary continued, “He probably also fears facing criminal charges that the Russian Government has levied against him.”

The summary also noted that, if he were to be “transferred back to Russia and not charged with a crime,” he “would probably live with his mother in Tatarstan until he becomes self-sufficient, and then seek to leave Russia,” although it seems unlikely that this would be a viable option, given the Russian government’s oppressive treatment of all the other prisoners who returned from Guantánamo many years ago.

Rather confirming that return to Russia will not be possible, because of the manner in which the Russian authorities are likely to treat him, the summary concluded, “Although he does not have any direct connections to known terrorists at large, [his] attitude towards the Russian Government could lead him to seek out individuals with a similar mindset, and he has discussed returning to the fight against Russia.”

Below I’m cross-posting the opening statements made by Mingazov’s personal representative (a member of the US military appointed to help him prepare for his PRB), and by one of his attorneys, Gary Thompson of Reed Smith LLP in Washington, D.C. The representative spoke about how he has “developed close friendships at Guantánamo, due in large part to his calm, friendly demeanor,” and noted how he “desperately wants to re-connect with his only son, now a teenager,” who lives with his ex-wife and in the UK, where they successfully sought political asylum.

Thompson also spoke of his hopes that his client can be reunited with his family in the UK (see the Guardian‘s article about his case), and delivered the following defence of Mingazov’s character that I hope was of use to the board: “I believe and know Ravil to be a kind and peaceful man who, if released, will do no harm to anyone. He will live the rest of his days as a devout and peaceful Muslim, a loving father and family member, a good son to his mother (for her remaining days), a cheerful friend to all those around him, a physically and mentally healthy person, and a productive employee in any number of jobs that he would eagerly take.”

Periodic Review Board Initial Hearing, 21 June 2016

Ravil Mingazov, ISN 702

Personal Representative Opening Statement

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen of the Board. As the Personal Representative for RaviI Mingazov (ISN 702), I would like to thank the Board for allowing me this opportunity to demonstrate how RaviI is no longer a continuing significant threat to the United States.

Ravil is a Russian Tartar [sic], a religious and ethnic minority group from the Tartarstan [sic] region of Russia. He grew up in a loving family and led an active life, ultimately becoming a professional-level ballet dancer prior to being conscripted into the Russian military like most young men. During his time in the Russian military, RaviI never trained for combat duty. Actually, his first two years of service were part of a military ballet troupe. Following this, he served in support roles performing passport control on the border with Mongolia and then managing all food, logistics, and cooking for a base of around fifteen hundred people.

During Ravil’s time in the Russian military, he became increasingly bothered that he was not allowed to observe basic tenets of the Islamic faith while on duty, such as pray[ing] or eat[ing] halal food. His attempt to peacefully engage military and civilian political leadership on this issue started a chain of events that eventually drove him to leave Russia and seek an Islamic country where he and his family could more freely practice their religion. While traveling from Russia to Tajikistan, his young son became very ill, so his wife was forced to return to Russia with their son to seek medical care. The Tajikistan government eventually relocated Ravil and many other foreigners out of the country, leading to his arrival in Afghanistan. RaviI never fit in with any group due to suspicion of his Russian background. He survived by performing menial tasks and moving often. Following the onset of coalition operations, he joined the waves of people fleeing Afghanistan, eventually crossing into Pakistan where he was detained at a guest house.

While at Guantánamo, Ravil has been a compliant detainee who has never taken part in any non-religious fasting, even when most other detainees participated. RaviI took numerous classes in Life Skills, Arabic, and Arabic to English. Despite the language barrier with other detainees, Ravil developed close friendships at Guantánamo, due in large part to his calm, friendly demeanor. RaviI desperately wants to re-connect with his only son, now a teenager with no memory of his father prior to detention. Ravil’s son, ex-wife and other in-laws currently live in the United Kingdom under political asylum and have written numerous letters pledging to support Ravi! upon his release. Ravil holds no grudges against the United States and, in fact, greatly admires the religious freedom that America offers. RaviI is prepared to answer all of your questions truthfully and respectfully in order to demonstrate he is not a continuing significant threat to the United States. Thank you.

Periodic Review Board

Initial Hearing of June 21 2016

Statement by Gary Thompson

Personal Counsel for Ravil Mingazov (ISN 702)

Dear Members of the Periodic Review Board:

Thank you for accepting this statement from me as Personal Counsel (PC) in this PRB hearing for Guantánamo detainee Ravil Mingazov. I am a private, pro bono attorney from the law firm of Reed Smith LLP in Washington, D.C. (where I serve as the D.C. office managing partner). I have been practicing law for 26 years, always with time for pro bono cases of many kinds. In 2005, my firm accepted several detainee representations for their respective habeas corpus cases. At the time, a former Marine officer (Doug Spaulding) and Army officer (Bernie Casey) took the cases and I was pleased to join them. Since 2007, I have traveled to Guantánamo many times and spent many days meeting with Ravil. With Doug and Bernie now retired, I have become the lead counsel, including as PC in this hearing.

I fully understand and appreciate the issue being considered by this panel – whether RaviI, if released, would be a “threat” to anyone (taking into account security measures by the receiving country). My background allowing me to comment on this matter includes my in-person meetings with RaviI over the last 10 years, letters exchanged, and also calls, Skype, and letters exchanged with Ravil’s mother, former wife, and son. I am also very familiar with all of the evidence concerning Ravil, including as presented in his habeas case (presently still active, on appeal by the government), although of course I do not comment herein on any of that evidence or allegations.

Please appreciate that I have thought and reflected long and hard on the issue over the course of many years, and most recently, during my usual ultra-long-distance runs. This is my considered conclusion: I believe and know Ravil to be a kind and peaceful man who, if released, will do no harm to anyone. He will live the rest of his days as a devout and peaceful Muslim, a loving father and family member, a good son to his mother (for her remaining days), a cheerful friend to all those around him, a physically and mentally healthy person, and a productive employee in any number of jobs that he would eagerly take.

Ravil’s son and other family members now residing in Nottingham, England would receive Ravil with open arms (assuming, we hope, the United Kingdom sees fit to accept an asylum petition). They will give him a bed and use of an apartment, feed him, care for him, help him transition, and help him find gainful employment. The United Kingdom, of course, would provide the highest levels of security assurances.

With respect to Ravi! and his peacefulness, I have come to these conclusions because I have observed his character over many years. Ravil has always greeted us, first and foremost, as his friends. He has never been impatient or hostile with us personally in any way. On the contrary, almost without exception, Ravi! has been kind, cheerful, and humorous — something that is extraordinary to us given his long imprisonment. More, I have never heard Ravil lash out or say anything negative or threatening about anyone — not about any guard, officer, fellow detainee, any American leader, or anyone. When discussing Russian politics, Ravil does so with a keen and deep understanding of the issues, history, and a respect for the struggles of ethnic people who simply want to live and worship in peace. We have spent much time in excellent conversation about history, leaders, philosophy, literature, and other topics. And we also talk at great length about our families, friends, and the simple things of life — the interesting animals and creatures of Guantánamo, the pleasant weather, our mutual like of running and exercising, and our hopes and dreams for the future.

For sure, over the years, we have reviewed, and re-reviewed, every last detail about his past, his whereabouts in 2000-2002, the conditions at GTMO, and the endless labyrinth of his never-ending habeas case in court. Discussing the court case gets tedious, and so we mostly simply talk as friends, increasingly so as the years go by. This is also the case with our longtime translator and all the other counsel Ravil has befriended over the years (especially Doug Spaulding, who has spent the most time with Ravil). So it is not surprising that so many people — family, friends, counsel, fellow detainees — have taken the time to write such positive statements about Ravi!. I hope that these statements taken as a whole, along with Ravil’s statement, will convince you that the PRB clearance standard in this case is very well satisfied.

l plan to be present at the June 21, 2016 PRB hearing, where I would be pleased to discuss these issues further, including any questions that the Panel may have regarding the classified summary.

Ghassan al-Sharbi’s Periodic Review Board

Two days after Ravil Mingazov’s PRB, Ghassan al-Sharbi’s case was also considered by the board, although, as  noted above, he was not present, and as a result it is certain that he will not be approved for release. He did to even meet with his personal representative, who was able only to state, “Mr. Sharbi has not attended any scheduled meeting and therefore, I am unable to describe my first-hand knowledge of him.”

Writing about him back in October 2010, I stated:

Al-Sharbi, who speaks fluent English and graduated in electrical engineering from Embry Riddle Aeronautical University in Arizona, is one of very few Guantánamo prisoners to have publicly declared membership of al-Qaeda. In his tribunal at Guantánamo, he accepted all the allegations against him, which included claims that he received specialized training in the manufacture and use of remote-controlled explosive devices to detonate bombs against Afghan and US forces, that he “was observed chatting and laughing like pals with Osama bin Laden,” and that he was known in Guantánamo as the “electronic builder” and “Abu Zubaydah’s right-hand man.”

Charged in the first incarnation of the Military Commissions, he appeared at a pre-trial hearing on April 27, 2006, and was equally open about his activities, telling the judge, “I came here to tell you I did what I did and I’m willing to pay the price,” “Even if I spend hundreds of years in jail, that would be a matter of honor to me,” and “I fought the United States, I’m going to make it short and easy for you guys: I’m proud of what I did.”

Perhaps surprisingly, al-Sharbi, who was a member of the short-lived Prisoners’ Council in the summer of 2005, along with Shaker Aamer (ISN 239) and four others who have been released, was befriended by Guantánamo’s warden, Col. Mike Bumgarner, despite his avowed allegiance to al-Qaeda, and despite the fact that he later became one of Guantánamo’s most persistent hunger strikers.

In June 2008, he was again put forward for a trial by Military Commission, along with Sufyian Barhoumi, Jabran al-Qahtani and Noor Uthman Muhammed (see below), but the charges were dropped by the Pentagon in October 2008, after their prosecutor, Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, resigned, stating that the trial system was designed to prevent the disclosure of evidence essential to the defense. New charges against all four men were filed in January 2009, in the dying days of the Bush administration, but with the exception of Noor Uthman Muhammed, have not been revived under President Obama, perhaps because, as in the majority of cases involving Abu Zubaydah, the government has stepped back from its discredited claims about his significance.

I later met his military defense lawyer, now retired, and his sister, who assured me that he was not a threat to the US, but whether or not this is true, al-Sharbi has done nothing to persuade the authorities that it would be safe to free him, and, on this point, his refusal to engage with the PRB is a disaster.

For what it’s worth, the government’s unclassified summary painted a picture of him that would seem to ensure that he will have to work very hard at persuading the US authorities to release him if he ever wants to be a free man again.

The US authorities stated that he “attended a US flight school where he associated with two 9/11 hijackers, constructed electric circuitry in Pakistan for improvised explosive devices (IEDs) to attack Coalition Forces, and may have been involved in Homeland attack planning after 9/11.”

“From 1999 to 2000,” the summary continued, “he attended Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Avionic Electrical Engineering. [He] traveled to Afghanistan in the summer of 2001 and trained at the al-Farouq camp. After 9/11, [he] traveled to Pakistan and was selected by a senior al-Qa’ida military commander to receive training on how to manufacture radio-remote controlled IEDs (RCIEDs) with the intent of training other extremists in bomb-making techniques.”

The summary also claimed that, ‘[w]hile in Pakistan, he also attended meetings with al-Qa’ida leaders where they may have discussed attacks against the US, possibly including the plot by Jose Padilla to explode a radiological ‘dirty-bomb.’” However, the big problem with this claim is that Padilla, held and tortured as an “enemy combatant” on the US mainland, and then punitively sentenced for a few phone calls, had never been involved in a “dirty-bomb plot.” As I explained in an article in October 2008:

Speaking in June 2002 [just after Padilla’s capture], Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy to US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, admitted that “there was not an actual plan” to set off a radioactive device in America, that Padilla had not begun trying to acquire materials, and that intelligence officials had stated that his research had not gone beyond surfing the internet.

Turning to al-Sharbi’s behavior in Guantánamo, the summary noted that he “has been mostly non-compliant and hostile with the guards throughout his detention,” and has made “conflicting statements” about “the extent of his affiliation with al-Qa’ida and the training he received.” The summary added, however, that “his behavior and statements indicate that he retains extremist views and believes that quitting jihad is wrong.” He also, it was noted, “espouses a strong dislike for the US and has said that he wants to remain in Guantánamo to continue his jihad against the US military and US Middle East policies,” and “has told interrogators that he will reengage in terrorist activity against the US to defend lslam from the presence of US military forces in Saudi Arabia, and that the US got what it deserved from the terrorist attacks on 9/11.”

Commenting on what would happen if he were to be released, the summary noted that his “electrical engineering degree and a petroleum and minerals degree from King Fahd University. Saudi Arabia, could provide him with a skill set for employment if he is released,” but  the summary’s authors added that, “based on his education and training, we believe [he] is also a technically proficient and skilled bomb maker whose electronics expertise would place him in high demand by extremist organizations, and his past relationship with extremists would provide [him] a path to reengage if he chose to do so.”

It was also noted that, “In addition to refusing to speak with interrogators, [al-Sharbi] refuses to meet with lawyers and foreign delegations regarding his detention hearings and possible transfer, which limits our ability to fully evaluate his future intentions and motivations. Should [he] return to Saudi Arabia, we assess that he would seek support from family members, although we lack insight into the extent to which they would be able to support him financially upon his return.”

Abd al-Salam al-Hilah’s request to be freed is turned down

On June 22, the day between the two PRBs discussed above, a review board turned down a request by Abd al-Salam al-Hilah (aka al-Hela) to be freed, which I wrote about in an article entitled, Yemeni Tribal Chief, Businessman, Intelligence Officer and Torture Victim Seeks Release from Guantánamo Via Periodic Review Board.

Despite his high-profile status in Yemen, the board, in its final determination, stated that, by consensus, they had “determined 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.”

The board members stated that they had “considered [his] extensive and prolonged facilitation of extremist travel, his failure to acknowledge or accept responsibility for past activities, and his deceptive and non-responsive answers to the Board’s questions.” They added that they will welcome seeing his file in six months, and that they hope he will deal “with greater candor about his ties and roles in facilitating extremist activities, so that the Board can better understand his past and current intentions.”

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,’ is available for download or on CD via Bandcamp — also see here). 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.

200 Days Left in the Countdown to Close Guantánamo: Please Send Photos Reminding President Obama on Independence Day

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.

This Sunday, July 3, President Obama will have just 200 days left of his presidency; 200 days, in other words, to fulfill the promise he made, on his second day in office, to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay. On January 22, 2009, he actually promised to close Guantánamo within a year, but although it is now nearly seven and a half years since that promise, it remains important for President Obama’s legacy that he does all he can to fulfill his promise before he leaves office.

Send us your photos!

To mark the occasion, we are asking those who want to see Guantánamo closed to print off a poster reminding President Obama that he has just 200 days left to close Guantánamo, take a photo of yourself with it, and send it to us, to put up on the website here, and also on social media (see our Facebook and Twitter pages), and we will be making sure that we tie in publicity to the values of the US, as celebrated on Independence Day the day after.

We began the Countdown to Close Guantánamo in January, when I appeared on Democracy Now! with music legend Roger Waters, and we have been counting down every 50 days, supporting President Obama, who has stepped up his efforts to close the prison this year, promising to release the men approved for release (29 of the 79 men still held) by the end of summer, and to complete reviews for all the other men, except the ten facing trials, before the end of the year.

These reviews are the Periodic Review Boards, and since 2013 they have been reviewing the cases of all the men not already approved for release and not facing trials. 50 reviews have taken place to date, and just 14 other men are currently awaiting reviews. Of the 50 reviews to date, 36 decisions have been taken, and two-thirds of those — 24 in total— have resulted in prisoners being approved for release. This has been an indictment of the caution of the Guantánamo Review Task Force that reviewed their cases in 2009, and described them as “too dangerous to release,” or as candidates for prosecution.

Can President Obama close Guantánamo?

So with 50 men to deal with — a number that will undoubtedly be reduced as the PRBs continue their assessments — what is President Obama’s plan, with 200 days to go? In February, via the Pentagon, he delivered a plan to Congress, which we discussed here. Containing the promises to release cleared prisoners and to conclude the first round of PRBs, the plan also involved the administration stating, “We’re going to work with Congress to find a secure location in the United States to hold remaining detainees.”

Closing Guantánamo is impossible without some men being moved to the US mainland — those facing trials, and those the administration wants to continue holding under the laws of war — but Congress, which, for many years, has passed legislation preventing Guantánamo prisoners from being brought to US soil under any circumstances, remains unwilling to work with the president.

Some of President Obama’s advisors — including former White House counsel Greg Craig and Cliff Sloan, the former State Department envoy for Guantánamo closure — suggested that, if Congress refused to cooperate, he could close Guantánamo by executive order. However, just two weeks ago, Reuters reported that the Obama administration was “not pursuing the use of an executive order to shutter the Guantánamo Bay military prison after officials concluded that it would not be a viable strategy,” according to “sources familiar with the deliberations.” The sources added that President Obama “could still choose to use his commander-in-chief powers, but the option is not being actively pursued.”

A source familiar with the discussions explained that “White House lawyers and other officials studied the option of overriding the ban but did not develop a strong legal position or an effective political sales pitch in an election year,” as Reuters described it. The source said, “It was just deemed too difficult to get through all of the hurdles that they would need to get through, and the level of support they were likely to receive on it was thought to be too low to generate such controversy, particularly at a sensitive time in an election cycle.”

Reuters also explained that the administration was focusing on getting the number of prisoners down “to such a low number, perhaps 20, that the cost of keeping [the prison] open could prove unpalatable to Congress,” although Republican lawmakers “remain unswayed.” Nevertheless, the administration has a point. The prison cost$445 million to run last year — “more than $5.5 million a year for each of the 80 remaining prisoners.”

In the meantime, lawmakers are trying to make it even more difficult for Guantánamo to be closed, in the House and Senate’s versions of next year’s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), passed on May 18 and June 14 respectively.

As Human Rights Watch explained, “Both versions of the bill contain problematic provisions on Guantánamo, including onerous transfer restrictions, bans on transferring detainees to the US for continued detention or trial, and complete bans on detainee transfers to Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. The Senate version adds a new provision that bans the transfer of detainees to countries where the State Department has issued travel warnings. The House version requires the administration to provide Congress with information on how it plans to handle current and future detainees.”

As we noted in an article in May, the Senate version of the bill also contains a provision that allows prisoners to be temporarily moved to the US mainland for emergency medical treatment, which is commendable, and a proposal to allow some prisoners to “plead guilty to criminal charges in civilian court via video teleconference,” which would also allow them to be “transferred to other countries to serve their sentences,” as the New York Times explained.

Reuters also explained:

The Obama administration has threatened to veto both versions of the bill. It has expressed particularly strong objections to the Guantánamo provisions in the Senate version, noting that State Department travel warnings are designed to “[convey] information to individual tourists and other travelers,” and do not “reflect a country’s ability to mitigate potential risk with regard to transferred [Guantánamo] detainees.”

However, as Reuters also noted, the Obama administration “has repeatedly failed to follow through on threats to veto previous Defense Authorization bills over Guantánamo restrictions. Though Obama did veto the 2016 NDAA last year, he ultimately signed an amended bill into law with no changes to the Guantánamo provisions.”

The Justice Department opposes plea deals

And finally, adding to the pressure on President Obama, last week Reuters reported how, for the last three months, Attorney General Loretta Lynch has been opposing the proposal to allow prisoners to make guilty pleas in federal court by video conference, and “has twice intervened to block administration proposals on the issue, objecting that they would violate longstanding rules of criminal-justice procedure.”

As Reuters proceeded to explain, “In the first case, her last-minute opposition derailed a White House-initiated legislative proposal to allow video guilty pleas after nearly two months of interagency negotiations and law drafting. In the second case, Lynch blocked the administration from publicly supporting a Senate proposal to legalize video guilty pleas.” A senior Obama administration official, who “supports the proposal and asked not to be identified,” as Reuters put it, said, “It’s been a fierce inter-agency tussle.”

Administration officials told Reuters that they were particularly focused on the 30 or so men expected to still be held after the conclusion of the PRBs, and said that “allowing video feeds could reduce that number to somewhere between 10 and 20.” A senior administration official said, “This is the group that gives the president the most heartburn.”

Reuters also noted that Lynch and her deputies at the Justice Department “argued that the laws of criminal procedure do not allow defendants to plead guilty remotely by video conference,” adding, “Even if Congress were to pass the law, Lynch and her aides have told the White House that federal judges may rule that such pleas are in effect involuntary,” because the Guantánamo prisoners “would not have the option of standing trial in a US courtroom.”

Reuters also stated, “A defendant in federal court usually has the option to plead guilty or face a trial by jury,” but in the case of the Guantánamo prisoners, “the only option they would likely face is to plead guilty or remain in indefinite detention.” A person familiar with Lynch’s concerns about the proposal said, “How would a judge assure himself that the plea is truly voluntary when if the plea is not entered, the alternative is you’re still in Gitmo? That’s the wrinkle.”

Conclusion

As all of the above makes clear, closing Guantánamo remains an uphill struggle, but those of us who care about the need for it to be closed — to bring to an end this disgraceful chapter in US history — must not give up on exerting pressure to get it closed once and for all.

We look forward to seeing your photos!

If you want to do more, please feel free to call the White House on 202-456-1111 or 202-456-1414 or submit a comment online.

You can also encourage your Senators and Representatives to support President Obama’s efforts to close the prison. Find your Senators here, and your Representatives here.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose debut album, ‘Love and War,’ is available for download or on CD via Bandcamp — also see here). 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.

Yemeni Freed from Guantánamo in Montenegro; 29 Cleared Prisoners Remain

Last Wednesday, Abd al-Malik Wahab al-Rahabi (aka Abdel Malik Wahab al-Rahabi), a Yemeni prisoner held at Guantánamo since the day the prison opened on January 11, 2002, became the 690th prisoner to be released, when he was given a new home in Montenegro. He was the second prisoner to be resettled in the Balkan nation, following another Yemeni in January.

Al-Rahabi is also the 10th prisoner to be freed after being approved for release by a Periodic Review Board, a review process set up in 2013 to review the cases of men described as “too dangerous to release” or recommended for prosecution by the previous review process, the Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established shortly after taking office in January 2009. 36 decisions have been taken to date, and two-thirds of those — 24 — have ended up with recommendations for release, a rather damning indictment of the task force’s extreme caution and/or mistaken analyses of the prisoners’ significance.

The task force described 48 men as “too dangerous to release,” despite conceding that there was insufficient evidence to put them on trial (which, in other words, was not evidence at all, but a collection of dubious statements made by the prisoners themselves), and the men recommended for prosecution has their proposed charges dropped after appeals court judges, embarrassingly, threw out some of the few convictions secured in Guantánamo’s permanently troubled military commission trial system, because the war crimes for which they had been convicted had been invented by Congress.

Al-Rahabi’s case was first reviewed on January 28, 2014,and he was approved for ongoing detention on March 5, 2014, but when his case was reviewed again, on November 5, 2014 (see documents here), he was approved for release. This was on December 5, 2014, and he has languished there ever since. See my definitive Periodic Review Board list for all the other prisoners approved for release but, sadly, still held, although the Obama administration has promised to release them — and the 15 other prisoners approved for release by the task force in its final report in January 2010.

Reporting on al-Rahabi’s release, Carol Rosenberg of the Miami Herald explained that the government of Montenegro issued a statement that it took in al-Rahabi as a humanitarian gesture, and that both he and the man freed in January — Abdul Aziz al-Suadi — “were applicants for asylum at no cost to ‘Montenegrin taxpayers.’” The statement added that both men “will eventually be free to choose the country they want to live in.”

The US government will not repatriate Yemeni prisoners, because of security fears about their homeland, and, when he was approved for release, the review board “recommended that he be sent to a country where his wife and now teenaged daughter could join him,” as the Miami Herald put it.

His attorney, David Remes, said, “He’s been waiting for 14 years to reunite with his wife and the daughter he’s never met. We are glad he’s been released at last.”

Remes added that al-Rahabi “has seen his daughter, Aisha, in occasional Skype video chats in his years at Guantánamo but last saw her in person when she was three months old in 2001.”

Al-Rahabi, who was regarded as one of the “Dirty Thirty,” a group of men dubiously described as Al-Qaeda bodyguards, had been “a committed hunger striker during the 2013 protests, so much so that Navy medics kept him on a force-feeding list,” as the Miami Herald described it.

With al-Rahabi’s release, 79 men are left at Guantánamo — the 29 approved for release, mentioned above, just ten facing, or having faced trials, and 40 others awaiting PRBs or the results of PRBs.

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,’ is available for download or on CD via Bandcamp — also see here). 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 157 prisoners released from February 2009 to April 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, a Palestinian and a 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.

Life in the UK After the EU Referendum: Waking Up Repeatedly at a Funeral That Never Ends

Three days into this disaster, and the fallout is so immense that it colours everything. Bereaved-looking people are everywhere, talking about their disbelief, unable to process it. I had a migraine on Friday, and I don’t normally even get headaches. Many people are reporting similar symptoms — of colossal stress, of an unprocessable shock. Every time we distract ourselves for a moment from the awful reality — that we’ve left the EU and that everything is now in freefall; not just our economy, but basically every certainty we had before Friday morning — we wake up again to the horror of it all, like having endless deja vu at a funeral without end, like being in a real-life version of  film in which aliens have taken over, even though they look just like us.

My funereal encounters are taking place in London, where a majority of those who could be bothered to vote — 60% — called for us to remain in the EU. I live in Lewisham, where the portion of Remain votes was even higher — 70% — so I can presume that I am not surrounded by the deluded, or by those with hideously misplaced anger, however justifiable that anger may be, although I accept that even that is difficult. I have been ambushed in recent weeks by the odd middle class, educated person my age (circa 50) supporting the Leave campaign, and I can’t help but be instinctively suspicious of older white people.

However, I also know it’s not just a white issue. About two years I was in a queue in a service station in Brixton, and I struck up a conversation with a black man about my age, who seemed to me to be a Windrush descendant. I started some small talk, leaning it leftwards as soon as I could, as is my wont, and thinking he would agree with me, until he started talking about how it was all the fault of the immigrants. Since that encounter and others, I have grown to be wary of casually chatting with my fellow citizens on the street.

But if London is largely the same country it was before the referendum, albeit in profound shock, the same cannot be said of these large swathes of the country where the Leave voters outnumbered those calling for us to Remain, and where a legion of stories are already emerging of racism taken to the next step — of people being openly abused in the street, and told to go home. Social media, meanwhile, is a cesspit of racist, xenophobic and Islamophobic filth. The genie that is out of the bottle is a nasty, brutish creature, a 21st century revival of those who, 85 years ago in Germany, began to see Adolf Hitler as their saviour.

And Nigel Farage, who secured 3.9 million votes in the 2015 General Election, after the mainstream media slavishly covered his every utterance as though he was the Prime Minister, has bounced back from his subsequent disappearance — again, with the mainstream media disgracefully attending him every step of the way. How many more of the 17.4 million million people who voted to leave might now vote for UKIP if another opportunity arose — enabling, like Hitler, the rise of fascists in Parliament.

So as we survey the wreckage of Britain today, what can be done by those of us who comprehend that the ties that bind us — that bound us — to the EU, and that confirmed a web of interconnected relationships within Europe, and outside its borders, built up over four decades, are — or were — immense, and yet almost none of that was discussed during the puerile bunfight of the referendum campaign? I’m an educated and reasonably well-informed person, but even I couldn’t begin to tell you how much legislation and funding has been put in place over that time that affects every aspect of British life and the British economy, but over the last few weeks I managed to think about a few of them, and I have ended up believing that the important information discussed in the referendum was rather like the Bush administration’s planning for the Iraq invasion. When the State Department gave Donald Rumsfeld a massive report on what would be involved in nation-building, he chucked it in the bin and replaced it with a single sheet of paper that read, “They will greet us with flowers.” Just last week, a friend alerted me to the possibly fatal impact of leaving the EU on Britain’s university sector, which has been massively encouraged to seek out EU students as the Tories cut their funding, foreign students whose costs are — were — subsidised by the EU, but I heard nothing about that during the campaign.

Those of us who care about human rights have long been dismayed by the Tories’ intention of dismantling our human rights legislation — something that almost all Tories agree on. This is based on a mendacious but well-publicised campaign to suggest that the EU prevents us from sending home alleged terror suspects we don’t like, for generally unspecified reasons, when that is patently untrue. The legislation, in the European Convention on Human Rights, drafted after the Second World War (and which, incidentally, included a prominent role by the British Conservative MP and lawyer Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, who had been a prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials), cannot be undone unless we withdraw from the Council of Europe — which, of course, we may well do now, as EU membership is only possible when countries are CoE members, and now we’re not, we’ll be free to join that bastion of extremism, Belarus, as the only other country in Europe that has done away with human rights legislation.

In addition, of course, the EU has also contributed significantly to other rights appreciated by people across the UK. Check out this article — noting how the EU has been responsible for curbing excessive working hours, protecting pregnant women at work, harmonising equality laws, protecting people’s personal data, combatting disability discrimination, acting against gender and age discrimination and fighting for the rights of minorities, and also check out the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights.

A friend of mine recently lamented that no one in the arts sector had paid attention to the huge significance of EU funding, and, of course, the Leave campaign constantly lied that EU money to the poorer parts of the country would be replaced  — a joke when delivered by politicians who are absolutely devoted to the destruction of all subsidies for anyone except the rich, but one that seems to have worked. For further information, I recommend the sad and almost surreal story of Ebbw Vale in South Wales, which has received massive financial support from the EU, but which voted to leave, pretty much cutting its own throat in doing so.

Almost nothing of significance was mentioned in the campaign. David Cameron, the coward and narcissist, now consigned to a dustbin of political failure that is so abject that it contains few predecessors (think Neville Chamberlain, Anthony Eden, and then reflect that they may be small fry compared to the scale of Cameron’s disaster), called a referendum he didn’t want simply to placate the far right of his own party and UKIP, and then arrogantly thought Remain would win, and ran a tragically poor campaign that has resulted in his political annihilation.

In contrast, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, two other dangerous narcissists, went even further. Although Cameron (and Osborne, and others in the Tory Remain campaign) looked pretty stupid every time they tried to defend Europe, having bashed the EU repeatedly for years, Johnson and Gove saw an opportunity to further their careers by leading the Leave campaign without even believing in it, enabling them to position themselves as successors to Cameron who, unlike the PM, had listened to the people’s concerns.

As Nick Cohen explained in his article, There are liars and then there’s Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, “The media do not damn themselves, so I am speaking out of turn when I say that if you think rule by professional politicians is bad wait until journalist politicians take over. Johnson and Gove are the worst journalist politicians you can imagine: pundits who have prospered by treating public life as a game.”

He added:

The Leave campaign has no plan. And that is not just because there was a shamefully under-explored division between the bulk of Brexit voters who wanted the strong welfare state and solid communities of their youth and the leaders of the campaign who wanted Britain to become an offshore tax haven. Vote Leave did not know how to resolve difficulties with Scotland, Ireland, the refugee camp at Calais, and a thousand other problems, and did not want to know either.

As he also noted:

[N]ot since Suez has the nation’s fate been decided by politicians who knowingly made a straight, shameless, incontrovertible lie the first plank of their campaign. Vote Leave assured the electorate it would reclaim a supposed £350m Brussels takes from us each week. They knew it was a lie. Between them, they promised to spend £111bn on the NHS, cuts to VAT and council tax, higher pensions, a better transport system and replacements for the EU subsidies to the arts, science, farmers and deprived regions … [E]xperts said that, far from being rich, we would face a £40bn hole in our public finances.

And now, having unexpectedly won, neither Johnson nor Gove seems to want to have anything to do with the poisoned chalice that they have secured. Cameron, a coward and narcissist to the end, immediately resigned, refusing to trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, which states that “[a]ny member state may decide to withdraw from the union in accordance with its own constitutional requirements,” leaving that task to his successors, whoever they may be.

And as a reader called Teebs explained in a much-cited comment on the Guardian’s website yesterday:

If Boris Johnson looked downbeat yesterday, that is because he realises that he has lost. Perhaps many Brexiters do not realise it yet, but they have actually lost, and it is all down to one man: David Cameron.

With one fell swoop yesterday at 9:15 am, Cameron effectively annulled the referendum result, and simultaneously destroyed the political careers of Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and leading Brexiters who cost him so much anguish, not to mention his premiership. How?

Throughout the campaign, Cameron had repeatedly said that a vote for leave would lead to triggering Article 50 straight away. Whether implicitly or explicitly, the image was clear: he would be giving that notice under Article 50 the morning after a vote to leave. Whether that was scaremongering or not is a bit moot now but, in the midst of the sentimental nautical references of his speech yesterday, he quietly abandoned that position and handed the responsibility over to his successor.

And as the day wore on, the enormity of that step started to sink in: the markets, Sterling, Scotland, the Irish border, the Gibraltar border, the frontier at Calais, the need to continue compliance with all EU regulations for a free market, re-issuing passports, Brits abroad, EU citizens in Britain, the mountain of legislation to be torn up and rewritten … the list grew and grew.

The referendum result is not binding. It is advisory. Parliament is not bound to commit itself in that same direction. The Conservative party election that Cameron triggered will now have one question looming over it: will you, if elected as party leader, trigger the notice under Article 50? Who will want to have the responsibility of all those ramifications and consequences on his/her head and shoulders?

Boris Johnson knew this yesterday, when he emerged subdued from his home and was even more subdued at the press conference. He has been out-maneouvered and check-mated. If he runs for leadership of the party, and then fails to follow through on triggering Article 50, then he is finished. If he does not run and effectively abandons the field, then he is finished. If he runs, wins and pulls the UK out of the EU, then it will all be over — Scotland will break away, there will be upheaval in Ireland, a recession … broken trade agreements. Then he is also finished. Boris Johnson knows all of this. When he acts like the dumb blond it is just that: an act.

The Brexit leaders now have a result that they cannot use. For them, leadership of the Tory party has become a poison chalice. When Boris Johnson said there was no need to trigger Article 50 straight away, what he really meant to say was “never”. When Michael Gove went on and on about “informal negotiations” … why? why not the formal ones straight away? … he also meant not triggering the formal departure. They both know what a formal demarche would mean: an irreversible step that neither of them is prepared to take.

All that remains is for someone to have the guts to stand up and say that Brexit is unachievable in reality without an enormous amount of pain and destruction, that cannot be borne. And David Cameron has put the onus of making that statement on the heads of the people who led the Brexit campaign.

Not all of the above is true — I’m not convinced, crucially, that finding someone who has “the guts to stand up and say that Brexit is unachievable in reality without an enormous amount of pain and destruction” is sufficient to overturn the result — but it is important, I think, to recognise that implementing Article 50 is definitely a poisoned chalice, and that all the woes and insanely complicated bureaucracy that will follow — as Teebs put it so well, dealing with “the markets, Sterling, Scotland, the Irish border, the Gibraltar border, the frontier at Calais, the need to continue compliance with all EU regulations for a free market, re-issuing passports, Brits abroad, EU citizens in Britain, the mountain of legislation to be torn up and rewritten” — will become the responsibility of Cameron’s successor, of someone who was a strong advocate for the Leave campaign.

Personally, I’d like to have seen Cameron refuse to accept the referendum result, and then fall on his sword, with MPs also refusing to accept the result that a clear majority of them don’t support (and perhaps MPs collectively are who Teebs was thinking of), followed by a General Election, but that may just be my desperation speaking — the desperation of wanting to wake from this endless nightmare that shouldn’t have happened, and that wouldn’t have happened without the incompetence, arrogance and mendacity of Cameron, Johnson, Gove and every single senior Tory who backed one or other of these senseless positions.

But instead of the media reporting on the above — or on the waking nightmare currently experienced by a majority of the 16.1 million people who voted Remain, or on the increase in racism since the result of the referendum was announced on Friday — what do get instead, as the very fabric of reality is torn asunder and nothing that is left is solid or reliable?

Well, instead of the above we are told that the only story that counts is of Blairite Labour MPs’ revolt against Jeremy Corbyn — MPs who, in case you’d forgotten, were so unimpressive to Labour voters last summer that they contributed to Jeremy’s landslide victory, although the main factor in Jeremy’s victory was that his lifelong socialism struck a resounding chord with voters whose party used to be a socialist party, and who were fed up with losing another General Election after a lacklustre campaign in which the Labour Party leadership failed to show conviction about almost anything, so desperate were they not to upset Tory voters who didn’t vote for them anyway.

To watch the news this morning as I did — from the BBC, the Biased Broadcasting Corporation — was to be told that Jeremy Corbyn was to blame for the referendum that was pointlessly called and lost by Cameron, and won by the most colossal hypocrites in history, led by the almost unbelievably self-serving Boris Johnson, and the creeping and creepy proto-fascist Nigel Farage.

Are we really supposed to believe that a Blairite Labour Party, almost indistinguishable from the Tories, would have changed the minds of millions of alienated voters, obsessed with obstinately deluded and simplistic notions about immigration and the role of the EU, and, with unerring accuracy, in contrast, convinced that Westminster is full of remote MPs who serve only themselves?

The alienated can only be won back by reversing the widespread depoliticisation that began under Thatcher and that has almost wiped out class consciousness and solidarity, and that, I contend, can only be achieved by some form of socialism — something that Jeremy Corbyn, and his Chancellor, the wonderful John McDonnell, and his team of left-wing economic experts, have been busy demonstrating as viable, even though the mainstream media has almost entirely ignored them.

Jeremy Corbyn is a rarity amongst politicians — a genuinely nice person who cares deeply about everyone suffering injustice. I concede that he lacks a certain energy and a demonstration of passion, but if an argument can be made that he should be replaced (and I’m really not convinced that it can be), then the only person who should replace him, if Labour is to stand a chance of challenging British voters’ alienation and/or right-wing drift, is someone who shares all his values, but is younger and more energetic. This revolt, in contrast, only plays only into the hands of the Tory establishment, just when the spotlight of disgust should be shining relentlessly on them, is, yet again, another disgraceful betrayal by the mainstream media — of those who regard themselves as “objective” — of their proper role, which is to challenge dangerous hypocrisy and extremism in politics, and not to act as stenographers for right-wing Labour Party failures, breathtakingly self-serving Tory hypocrites like Boris Johnson, and proto-fascists like Nigel Farage.

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,’ is available for download or on CD via Bandcamp — also see here). 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.

UK Votes to Leave the EU: A Triumph of Racism and Massively Counter-Productive Political Vandalism

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For Review Board, Revelations That Tortured Guantánamo Prisoner Mohammed Al-Qahtani Was Profoundly Mentally Ill Before Capture

I wrote the following article — as “Tortured Guantánamo Prisoner Mohammed Al-Qahtani Was Profoundly Mentally Ill Before His Capture” — for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, with the US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email.

Last week, a Periodic Review Board at Guantánamo raised a number of uncomfortable questions for the US authorities: what do you do with a prisoner allegedly involved with Al-Qaeda, but who you have tortured? And what do you do if it then transpires that, before you captured and tortured this man, he already had a history of severe mental health problems?

The prisoner in question is Mohammed al-Qahtani, the 47th prisoner to face a PRB, since they were set up in 2013 to review the cases of all the prisoners not already approved for release or facing trials. Tortured for 50 days straight at the end of 2002, he was “subjected to constant interrogations marked by extreme sleep deprivation, low temperatures, stress positions and forced nudity as well as being threatened with a military dog,” and “had to be hospitalized twice with a dangerously low heart rate,” as the Washington Post described it last week.

It was also in the Washington Post, in January 2009, that, for the first, and, to date, only time, a senior Pentagon official, Susan Crawford, the convenor of Guantánamo’s military commissions, admitted that a prisoner in US custody had been tortured. “We tortured Qahtani. His treatment met the legal definition of torture,” Crawford said, adding that that was why she didn’t refer his case for prosecution, even though he had been charged in February 2008 with five other men who are still facing prosecution for the 9/11 attacks.

If al-Qahtani was not to be prosecuted, then it is legitimate to ask on what basis he continued to be held — something that the PRB is belatedly getting round to asking. However, complicating matters further for the US authorities, his lawyers succeeded in getting an independent psychiatrist, Dr. Emily Keram, to be allowed to visit Guantánamo recently to assess al-Qahtani, and what she found — evidence of severe mental health problems predating his capture, and that can only have been exacerbated by his torture in US hands — would seem to suggest that, if he is not to be prosecuted — if, indeed, he is mentally unfit to stand trial — then he should not continue to be held under the laws of war that the US draws on to justify holding prisoners without charge or trial at Guantánamo, and should be returned to his home country.

As the Washington Post described it before al-Qahtani’s PRB, “Saudi Arabia has agreed to resettle him, according to a Saudi Interior Ministry document,” and his lawyers were intending to argue that his “preexisting mental illness and the abuse he experienced at Guantánamo Bay should favor his release, as the prison is unable to provide adequate medical and psychiatric care.”

In its coverage of al-Qahtani’s PRB, the Post began with two startling examples of the mental health problems that plagued him before he ever encountered members of Al-Qaeda. Their article began: “Long before Mohammed al-Qahtani was suspected of planning to participate in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as the 20th hijacker, Saudi police found him naked in a garbage dumpster in Riyadh.” it continued: “In another psychotic episode that took place in Mecca in 2000, Qahtani was involuntarily committed to a hospital after trying to hurl himself into the street. Doctors at the time said he was delusional and suicidal, according to medical and psychiatric records.”

As Ramzi Kassem, a law professor at the City University of New York, whose legal clinic represents al-Qahtani along with Shayana Kadidal at the Center for Constitutional Rights, explained, “Mohammed was already mentally ill long before the time when he was alleged to have attempted anything. That fact calls into serious question the fairness of holding him responsible for any actions during that period of his life.”

In her analysis, Emily Keram, who spent 39 hours with al-Qahtani and an interpreter in May, described how he “has schizophrenia, major depression and persistent skin lesions,” and “will likely require lifelong mental health care.” In her evaluation, presented to the PRB and obtained by the Post, she concluded that he “cannot receive effective treatment for his current mental health conditions while he remains in US custody.” She explained that he had told her that “he had suffered a head injury after being ejected from a car when he was 8 and was injured twice more in car accidents,” and, in her evaluation, she concluded that he “developed psychotic symptoms in childhood that worsened as he grew older.” In Mecca, for example, “he was admitted to the psychiatric unit of the King Adbul Aziz Hospital and treated with antipsychotic medication and a sedative.” He also “told doctors that he wanted to kill himself,” and was assessed as being “delusional.”

Dr. Keram concluded that his “psychological and cognitive deficits” made him “vulnerable to ma­nipu­la­tion and coercion,” which, of course, is exactly what happened when he traveled to Afghanistan in 2000, where, according to the US military, “he received training at an al-Qaeda camp before meeting and swearing loyalty to Osama bin Laden,” who then “singled him out to participate in the 9/11 attacks.”

Dr. Keram also explained how, during the time of al-Qahtani’s torture at Guantánamo, he “thought he was dead and believed that he saw ghosts,” but “an imaginary bird reassured him he was still alive,” as the Post put it. Dr. Keram noted, “My interview of him was extremely disruptive to his sense of identity and induced deep feelings of anxiety and shame. He often wept. Over the days of our interview he reported experiencing increase in the intensity of frequency of PTSD symptoms.”

He also told Dr. Keram that, in the Post’s words, “he had two options when he was being tortured: compliance or suicide. Because he couldn’t kill himself, he told his interrogators what they wanted to hear.” As a result, Dr. Keram pointed out that “those statements were neither reliable nor credible.”

The Post also noted that, in 2008, al-Qahtani had told an administrative review board that he was a “different person now than he was in the summer of 2001,” and “stated he would not have participated in a mission that involved killing women and children.” That same year, however, military officials wrote that he was in good health and, “although publicly released records allege [he] was subject to harsh interrogation techniques in the early stages of detention, [his] admission of involvement in UBL’s [bin Laden’s] special mission to the US appear to be true and are corroborated in reporting from other sources.”

The US case against Mohammed al-Qahtani

In its unclassified summary for al-Qahtani’s PRB, the US authorities ran through his story with only a few doubts newly interjected (and italicized below). On August 4, 2001, they wrote, he “attempted to enter the United States … after almost certainly having been selected by senior al-Qa’ida members to be the 20th hijacker for the 9/11 attacks.” The authorities added that he “probably understood that he was intended to be used as part of a suicide operation, but he was probably unaware of the specifics of the attack.” However, he was denied entry “by Immigration and Naturalization Service officers who found the circumstances of his travel and his conduct to be suspicious.”

Previously, around September 2000, according to the summary, he had traveled to Afghanistan for the first time, meeting and swearing allegiance to bin Laden, “who told [him] he would be assigned a special mission,” and who directed him to meet with Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, who, it is alleged, “trained [him] on operational communications and told him to return to Saudi Arabia to obtain a new passport and visas for the US and UK.” He then traveled to the UAE and “met with al-Qa’ida financial and travel facilitator Mustafa al-Hawsawi, who also facilitated the travel of four 9/11 hijackers into the US.” Al-Hawsawi allegedly “provided [him] with money and a one-way ticket to Orlando, Florida,” where he was supposed to meet Mohamed Atta, “the tactical leader and hijacker-pilot of 9/11,” who “was almost certainly waiting at the Orlando International Airport for [his] arrival.” However, he “failed to clear immigration and was deported back to the UAE.”

He then returned to Pakistan and Afghanistan, “separately informing Mohammad and Bin Ladin [sic] about his failure to enter the US,” before traveling to Kabul “to fight on the frontlines against the Northern Alliance.” After the US-led invasion, he reportedly “fled to the mountains of Tora Bora and briefly rejoined Bin Ladin and his bodyguards before [his] capture.”

In Guantánamo, it was noted, he “has been mostly compliant with the guard staff,” although “he has not cooperated with his interrogators, repeatedly trying to disassociate himself from al-Qa’ida and using cover stories to account for his travels.” Those compiling the summary explained that “[h]is repeated denials of terrorism involvement limit our insight into his motivation for joining al-Qa’ida or his current mindset,” adding, “He is not known to have made any statements in the past 10 years renouncing the group or its ideology” — something he would need to do to stand any chance of persuading the review board to recommend his release (but see below for his lawyers’ assertions that this is indeed what he has done).

The summary also noted that al-Qahtani “has consistently said he wishes to be repatriated to Saudi Arabia to be reunited with his parents and siblings,” adding that his family has been supportive throughout his detention, “judging from their frequent correspondence and efforts to secure his release.” It was also noted that, helpfully, “None of his family members are known to have been involved in terrorism, although they probably are in contact with other former Guantánamo Bay detainees.”

The case made by al-Qahtani’s lawyers and his personal representative

Below, I’m making available the opening statement made by al-Qahtani’s personal representative (a military official appointed to help prisoners prepare for their PRBs), and a detailed statement prepared by his lawyers, Ramzi Kassem and Shayana Kadidal. The representative was “favorably impressed by Mohamed’s candor,” and noted that he had “proven forthright and honest,” and the lawyers provided a detailed analysis of the significance of Dr. Keram’s findings. In particular, I note how Dr. Keram explained that a key factor “precluding effective treatment of Mr. al-Qahtani’s mental illnesses” at Guantánamo “is his lack of trust in medical and mental health personnel” at the prison, “owing to their predecessors’ involvement in his interrogations and torture.” Dr. Keram also found that, “given the unique role of family in Mr. al-Qahtani’s previous episodes of psychiatric illness, it is imperative that his family members actively participate in his treatment.”

As the lawyers also explain — crucially, for a parole-type hearing — al-Qahtani “bears no ill will towards the United States or any other country or government,” as can, in part, be seen by “his record of compliance as a prisoner at Guantánamo and in his good relations with the guard force.” The lawyers added, “In numerous conversations with us over the years, Mr. al-Qahtani has also made it abundantly clear that he does not support al-Qaida’s ideology or its methods, and that he abhors wanton acts of violence against civilians, irrespective of their nationality or religion.”

Whilst also acknowledging that they “have no reason to believe that the U.S. government knew of Mr. al-Qahtani’s debilitating mental illnesses at the time it took him into its custody, or that it deliberately exploited those ailments in its interrogations of Mr. al-Qahtani,” the lawyers also note that it remains true that “our government apprehended a severely mentally disabled man, brought him to Guantánamo, and intentionally and systematically tortured him there,” and they urge the board to transfer him for secure treatment in Saudi Arabia.

I am inclined to agree with them — because al-Qahtani does not seem ever to have been psychologically coherent enough to have been responsible for his actions, and was, instead, manipulated by Al-Qaeda, like other mentally ill individuals, because the US evidently cannot provide him with the necessary care, and because of his remorse, which strikes me as convincing. I have no idea, however, whether the review board will agree.

Periodic Review Board Initial Full Hearing, 16 June 2016

Mohamed Mani Ahmad Al-Kahtani, ISN 063

Personal Representative Opening Statement

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen of the Board. I am the Personal Representative of Mr. Mohamed Mani Ahmad al Kahtani. I will be assisting Mohamed this morning with his case, aided by Mr. Ramzi Kassem.

Mohamed has been overjoyed and eager to participate in the Periodic Review Process. He has maintained a record of perfect attendance for meetings with me and his Private Counsel.

I was favorably impressed by Mohamed’s candor. He has proven forthright and honest in his interactions with me.

Mohamed has proven to be engaging and extremely polite throughout his interactions and discussions with me. He is quick with a smile and exudes a warm personality.

Later, Mohamed will discuss both his past life and his desire for a better life for himself in the future. He wishes to be transferred to live his life with his family and parents. Mohamed also wishes to be married and start his own family. He is open to transfer to any country.

I am confident that Mohamed’s desire to pursue a better way of life if transferred from Guantánamo is genuine. I remain convinced that he does not pose a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States.

Thank you for your time and attention. I am pleased to answer any questions you have throughout this proceeding.

June 6, 2016

Statement by Private Counsel for Mohammed al-Qahtani (ISN 063)

Periodic Review Board Hearing Scheduled June 16, 2016

Esteemed Periodic Review Board Members,

We serve as pro bono counsel to Mohammed al-Qahtani (ISN 063). The Center for Constitutional Rights has represented Mr. al-Qahtani since 2005. Professor Ramzi Kassem has represented Mr. al-Qahtani since 2010. We write to provide additional information to inform your decision as to whether Mr. al-Qahtani’s continued imprisonment at Guantánamo Bay is “necessary to protect against a significant threat to the security of the United States.”

It is well known that Mohammed al-Qahtani was tortured in U.S. custody at Guantánamo. In fact, Mr. al-Qahtani is the only prisoner whose torture has been formally acknowledged by a senior U.S. government official. In 2009, Susan J. Crawford, then the Convening Authority in charge of the U.S. Department of Defense’s Military Commissions, explained that she had refused to authorize Mr. al-Qahtani’s capital trial by military commission in 2008 because “we tortured Qahtani.” The torture left Mr. al-Qahtani in a “life-threatening condition,” again by Crawford’s admission. He was hospitalized twice during his interrogation at Guantánamo because he was on the brink of heart failure and death.

What is not well known, however, is that long before Mr. al-Qahtani was taken into U.S. custody, he suffered from a number of severe psychiatric disabilities. As the expert witness in this matter, Dr. Emily A. Keram, attests in her separate report, Mr. al-Qahtani suffered from schizophrenia, major depression, and possibly neurocognitive disorder due to traumatic brain injury. He was mentally ill not only prior to his imprisonment and torture at Guantánamo but also long before the period of time when he was alleged to have participated in criminal acts. Dr. Keram’s report is based on extensive conversations with Mr. al-Qahtani at Guantánamo, on a telephonic interview with his family in Saudi Arabia, and on her review of records of an involuntary psychiatric hospitalization in 2000 that were independently obtained by his legal team.

Mr. al-Qahtani developed psychotic symptoms in his childhood, which worsened as he grew into his teens and twenties. His mental troubles trace back to a string of traumatic brain injuries, beginning with one sustained in a car accident when he was only eight years old. His family recalled “episodes of extreme behavioral dyscontrol” over the years, including one when the Riyadh police contacted the family because they had found Mr. al-Qahtani naked in a garbage dumpster, spells of “auditory hallucinations,” and an incident where Mr. al-Qahtani threw a new cellular phone out of a moving car because he believed it was affecting his emotional state.

These symptoms persisted and, in late-May of 2000, Mr. al-Qahtani was involuntarily committed in Mecca for “an acute psychotic break.” Medical records from the hospitalization reviewed by Dr. Keram reveal that Mr. al-Qahtani was involuntarily committed to the psychiatric unit of a hospital for a period of days after local police arrested him as he was attempting to throw himself onto moving traffic. According to the hospital medical records, Mr. al-Qahtani expressed suicidal wishes, and was given antipsychotic medication and sedatives. As a result of this episode, counsel learned, Mr. al-Qahtani lost his job as a civilian driver at the Armed Forces Hospital in the Saudi city of Kharj.

Perhaps most importantly, Dr. Keram concluded that Mr. al-Qahtani’s pre-existing mental illnesses likely impaired his capacity for independent and voluntary decision-making well before the United States took him into custody, and left him “profoundly susceptible to manipulation by others.” These findings call into serious question the extent to which it would be fair to hold Mr. al-Qahtani responsible for any alleged actions during that period of his life. They also cast doubt on any claims that Mr. al-Qahtani would have been entrusted with sensitive information about secret plots.

Moreover, Dr. Keram found that “Mr. al-Qahtani’s pre-existing psychotic, mood, and cognitive disorders made him particularly vulnerable to […] the conditions of confinement and interrogation” his U.S. captors inflicted on him at Guantánamo under the guise of the “First Special Interrogation Plan.” In fact, according to Dr. Keram, the combination of solitary confinement, sleep deprivation, extreme temperature and noise exposure, stress positions, forced nudity, body cavity searches, sexual assault and humiliation, beatings, strangling, threats of rendition, and water-boarding, amounting to “severely cruel, degrading, humiliating, and inhumane treatment” that Mr. al-Qahtani endured would have profoundly disrupted and left long-lasting effects on a person’s sense of self and cognitive functioning “even in the absence of pre-existing psychiatric illness.”

Applied to Mr. al-Qahtani, the torture and conditions of his confinement at Guantánamo were nothing short of devastating, exacerbating his pre-existing psychological ailments. Besides taxing him physically to the point that he was on the brink of death and had to be hospitalized twice, they caused psychotic symptoms that included repeated hallucinations involving ghosts and a talking bird. Mr. al-Qahtani also often soiled himself, cried uncontrollably, and conversed with himself and with others who were not present. It appears to be in significant part the undeniable impact that torture and imprisonment at Guantánamo had on Mr. al-Qahtani’s health that drove the Convening Authority for the U.S. Department of Defense’s Military Commissions, Susan Crawford, to drop the charges against him.

Today, Mr. al-Qahtani’s condition is exactly as one would expect for a man who suffered from severe psychiatric illness before being subjected to a systematic and brutal program of physical and psychological torture. “In addition to Mr. al-Qahtani’s pre-existing psychiatric diagnoses,” which have not subsided, Dr. Keram concludes, “he has developed posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)” resulting from his torture, interrogation, and imprisonment. As a doctor with the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs who has treated patients with PTSD secondary to both combat stress and Prisoner of War confinement for the past 14 years, Dr. Keram found that Mr. al-Qahtani’s PTSD symptoms are not only “consistent with those exhibited by survivors of torture,” but also that they “have been present for years.”

Given the present state of Mr. al-Qahtani’s mental health, Dr. Keram believes that he “will likely require lifelong mental health care,” at least initially in an “inpatient or residential” setting. In her view, “appropriate treatment” of Mr. al-Qahtani’s complex condition “requires a culturally-informed multi-disciplinary approach” that would include “supportive psychotherapy, cognitive-behavioral therapy, skills-based therapy, and psychotropic medication.”

Crucially, Dr. Keram concludes “that Mr. al-Qahtani cannot receive effective treatment for his current mental health conditions while he remains in U.S. custody at GTMO or elsewhere, despite the best efforts of available and competent clinicians.” Among the factors precluding effective treatment of Mr. al-Qahtani’s mental illnesses in U.S. custody is his lack of trust in medical and mental health personnel at Guantánamo owing to their predecessors’ involvement in his interrogations and torture. Also, Dr. Keram finds that, “given the unique role of family in Mr. al-Qahtani’s previous episodes of psychiatric illness, it is imperative that his family members actively participate in his treatment.”

Dr. Keram’s conclusion, therefore, is that Mr. al-Qahtani would receive effective treatment if he is repatriated to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The Saudi Ministry of Interior’s custodial rehabilitation and aftercare program for former Guantánamo prisoners would provide Mr. al-Qahtani with the medical attention he direly needs on an inpatient basis, while access to his family would complement his treatment. We have obtained a written assurance from the Saudi Ministry of Interior addressed to the members of this Periodic Review Board, offering security and humane treatment guarantees regarding Mr. al-Qahtani and expressing its readiness to welcome him in its rehabilitation and aftercare program.

Turning to Mr. al-Qahtani’s family, as their sworn letters and the videos they recorded for the Board amply attest, they are prepared to provide him with all of the emotional, personal, and financial support and guidance he will need should he be repatriated to Saudi Arabia and committed in its rehabilitation and aftercare program. Mr. al-Qahtani’s family includes many relatives who are in the Saudi military and police or otherwise in government service. They have every interest in ensuring Mr. al-Qahtani’s successful reintegration into family life and society, if he is ever medically cleared for release from the care of the Saudi rehabilitation program.

Today, you will hear from Mr. al-Qahtani himself. He will probably tell you what he has often told us — that his only wish is to go home and lead a peaceful, steady life. Despite the horrific abuse that he barely survived in U.S. custody, Mr. al-Qahtani bears no ill will towards the United States or any other country or government. Proof of that can be found in his record of compliance as a prisoner at Guantánamo and in his good relations with the guard force. In numerous conversations with us over the years, Mr. al-Qahtani has also made it abundantly clear that he does not support al-Qaida’s ideology or its methods, and that he abhors wanton acts of violence against civilians, irrespective of their nationality or religion.

In sum, we have no reason to believe that the U.S. government knew of Mr. al-Qahtani’s debilitating mental illnesses at the time it took him into its custody, or that it deliberately exploited those ailments in its interrogations of Mr. al-Qahtani. The facts nonetheless remain the same: our government apprehended a severely mentally disabled man, brought him to Guantánamo, and intentionally and systematically tortured him there.

Perhaps more than any other prisoner, Mohammed al-Qahtani’s continuing imprisonment at Guantánamo represents everything about the prison that is inconsistent with our proclaimed national values, offending allies and critics alike the world over. To begin to turn the page on this ugly chapter in our country’s recent history, surely, our government must release from its custody the one man whose torture it has officially acknowledged.

This Board should repatriate Mr. al-Qahtani to Saudi Arabia, where he will be committed in one of that country’s advanced psychiatric facilities — an opportunity that he and his family sadly did not seize in 2000. Once there, Mr. al-Qahtani will receive the treatment that he has needed for far too long and he will not pose a threat to the United States or anyone else.

Thank you for taking into consideration the information we have provided. We remain at your disposal to address any questions you may have regarding Mr. al-Qahtani.

Very truly yours,

Prof. Ramzi Kassem

Main Street Legal Services, Inc.

City University of  New York School of Law

Shayana Kadidal, Esq.

Center for Constitutional Rights

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,’ is available for download or on CD via Bandcamp — also see here). 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 Held at Guantánamo Since 2007, But Never Heard From Before, Seeks Release Via Periodic Peview Board

Last week, Haroon al-Afghani, who is around 35 years old and was one of the last prisoners to arrive at Guantánamo, in June 2007, became the 46th prisoner to face a Periodic Review Board. This latest of many review processes at Guantánamo began in November 2013 to provide reviews akin to parole boards for 71 men — 46 described as “too dangerous to release” by the previous review process, the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established shortly after taking office in January 2009, and 25 others recommended for prosecution by the task force, until the basis for prosecutions largely collapsed in 2012-13, after appeals court judges threw out a number of convictions on the basis that the war crimes for which the men had been sentenced were not legitimate war crimes, and had been invented by Congress.

By the time the PRBs began, seven men had been removed from consideration — five “forever prisoners” were freed in a prisoner exchange, and two men initially recommended for prosecutions agreed to plea deals in the military commissions. Of the 64 remaining prisoners eligible for PRBs, 35 decisions have so far been taken — and 24 of those decisions have been recommendations for release, demonstrating, if any proof were needed, that the task force’s assessments of the men back in 2010 were unacceptably exaggerated.

Al-Afghani was one of the men recommended for prosecution by the task force in 2010, but in truth there never seemed to have been a viable war crimes case against him. Although the Pentagon described him, when he arrived at Guantánamo, as a “dangerous terror suspect,” who was “known to be associated with high-level militants in Afghanistan,” and had apparently “admitted to serving as a courier for al-Qaeda Senior Leadership (AQSL),” it seemed more probable that he had been part of a militia that, although opposed to the US, was not something to genuinely consider in anything other than a military context.

As the Pentagon described it, there was “significant information available” that he was a senior commander of Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin (HIG), led by the warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who, ironically, had been one of the major recipients of billions of dollars of American money to fight the Soviet Union in the 1980s, which was channeled to him through his supporters in Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI. According to the Pentagon, al-Afghani “commanded multiple HIG terrorist cells that conducted improvised explosive device (IED) attacks in Nangarhar Province” (centered on Jalalabad) and was ”assessed to have had regular contact with senior AQ [al-Qaeda] and HIG leadership.”

Shamefully, al-Afghani was not given an administrative review after his arrival at Guantánamo — a Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT) — which would have made some information about him publicly available, and he is the only prisoner not to be assigned a number specific to Guantánamo. His number, ISN 3148, is actually  a number from Bagram. The conclusion to be drawn from all this can only be that he was never regarded as a significant threat — as a CSRT is required to be eligible for a military commission trial.

Al-Afghani also had no legal representation until very recently, when Reprieve began to represent him. On the day of his PRB, Reprieve issued a press release explaining how Shelby Sullivan-Bennis, who represented him at his PRB, only met him for the first time the week before, adding that she “is severely limited by military classification rules, and cannot say much about her new client besides the following statement,” a powerful indictment of the secrecy that, for some men, like Haroon al-Afghani, never seems to have dissipated:

Very little is known to the world about Haroon, and Guantánamo’s secrecy laws currently ban me from filling in the blanks. I can say that my new client is every bit as heartbroken by the senseless violence in Orlando as I am, and presented for his Monday meeting with tears in his eyes.

I can also say that the bright-eyed, chatty young man I met for the first time last week is not allowed to meet me alone for more than ten minutes before government representatives forcibly remove him from the room. At his Board hearing today, Haroon will not be allowed to see the evidence against him; the Board can hold its findings against him without ever asking him if the information is true.

As Haroon was removed from our meeting, he was told to be grateful for the fifteen minutes attorney access he got. He looks to me for an answer: “Are they right … should I be grateful?” his eyes ask. I tell him to trust me. But I am flatly terrified of what will become of Haroon and those like him. I went to law school to be a part of the American justice system, but in Guantánamo, I cannot find it.

In its unclassified summary for the PRB, the US authorities reiterated some of the claims made when al-Afghani first arrived at Guantánamo, describing him as “a Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin (HIG) commander who organized and led attacks on Coalition forces in Afghanistan and for a time served as a link between senior al-Qa’ida members and other anti-Coalition fighters.” The summary also claimed that he “worked as a courier for al-Qa’ida military commander Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi (IZ-10026) until 2004 or 2005, provided logistics support to fighters aligned with al-Qa’ida and HIG, and probably collaborated on operational matters with leaders of other anti-Coalition groups.” It was also noted that he was “[a]rrested by Afghan security forces with six HIG associates on 4 February 2007 and transferred to Bagram on 5 May 2007.” In his own defence, in discussions with interrogators, al-Afghani stated that he only saw al-Iraqi “approximately eight times.” and ceased to have contact with “Arabs” long before his capture.

In Guantánamo, it was noted that al-Afghani had “incurred a moderate number of disciplinary infractions relative to other detainees — of which the majority were failures to comply with instructions from the guard force, according to Joint Task Force Guantánamo’s (JTF-GTMO) record of his compliance.” Crucially, it was also noted that he “has not voiced his views of extremism,” although he “has repeatedly focused on medical issues and writing letters to camp staff with requests and queries about his PRB status.”

In conclusion, the summary noted that he “probably would prefer to return to Afghanistan or Pakistan, where the majority of his family lives,” but where, the authors of the summary suggested, “he would have ample opportunities to reengage in terrorist activities if he chose to do so, most likely with HIG but also potentially with his former associates in al-Qa’ida, the Afghan Taliban, or Pakistani extremist groups.”

Below, I’m cross-posting the opening statements made by al-Afghani’s personal representatives (military personnel appointed to represent prisoners in their PRBs) and by Shelby Sullivan-Bennis, but prior to that I also think it useful to also refer to an article for Al-Jazeera, from January this year, in which Sami Yousafzai and Jenifer Fenton tried to fill in some of the considerable blanks in al-Afghani’s case.

The Al-Jazeera profile

Examining the circumstances of al-Afghani’s capture, Yousafzai and Fenton pointed out that, according to a report by Joint Task Force Guantánamo (JTF-GTMO), which runs the prison, and which was included in the classified military files released by WikiLeaks in 2011, he was captured with six other men who were also suspected of being HIG associates, although “that claim comes from just one source, identified in JTF-GTMO report footnotes as TD-314/08910-07, a CIA report serial number” from 2007. In contrast, one of his family members told Yousafzai and Fenton, “I think he was alone while captured.”

Yousafzai and Fenton also noted “a further accusation by the US that Afghani was an improvised explosive device expert in charge of cells targeting US and coalition forces,” adding, “This intelligence comes from two sources, identified only as CIR 316/00242-07 and IIR 6 105 4594 07. ‘CIR’ could be a criminal investigative report from the Department of Defense investigative task force, and ‘IIR’ indicates a non-CIA report.” They asked an expert on Afghanistan, who was “recognized as such by the Guantánamo military commissions,” but was not familiar with al-Afghani’s case, to review his file, and the expert said his file “reminds me of the broad swath of disparate bits of [information] from various interrogations done over years and documented often by newly initiated persons in the JTF overseen by newish [and] temporary supervisors.”

The expert added that it was “plausible” that someone notable like Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi “would have trusted a native speaker as a courier … [because] Al-Qaeda leadership knew even the best linguist Arabs spoke Dari, [Pashto], Urdu and Farsi with an accent and could not hide in plain site like natives.”

Al-Afghani, it was noted, is fluent in Arabic, Pashto and Farsi, but the expert added that “there was not much … integration of Al-Qaeda Arabs with Afghans or Pakistanis in operation or combat matters,” and cited two main reasons: “lack of trust and language barriers.” In conclusion, the expert said, witheringly, the JTF-GTMO report was nothing more than “pandering and wishful writing.”

Yousafzai and Fenton also spoke to a relative of al-Afghani, establishing that he was born in on around 1981 in the Sherzad district of Nangarhar province in Afghanistan. The relative explained how his family had “a long history” of belonging to Hezb-e-Islami Afghanistan (HIA), a political party that preceded the establishment of HIG. “It is not a crime to be a member of the HIA,” the relative said, explaining that al-Afghani was not a “big name” or “important figure” in the group, and that his affiliation “was ordinary, like millions of other Afghans who are members of the HIA.”

The relative also said that al-Afghani “is not capable of killing anyone,” and is “innocent, a victim of local jealousy,” adding that this was “not an uncommon story for many Afghans rounded up by US or Afghan forces on the basis of false information.”

The relative added, “He was just a normal young boy,” pointing out that he “was a student when the Taliban was in power,” and “studied economics at Hayatabad Science University in Peshawar, Pakistan.” Although his file mentioned that “his association with senior Al-Qaeda members extended to include Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,” the relative said that that men like KSM and Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi “would not have met with a ‘simple young boy like Haroon.’” he called the allegations “total baseless propaganda,” and added that, “if someone is tortured, he will claim he has been to the ‘sky and the moon.’”

Another source, however, described al-Afghani as having been close to “Arabs” (Al-Qaeda members), and also opponents of the Afghan government. One source noted he “was said to be charging ‘Arabs’ for an unspecified service,” and an Afghan intelligence official, who worked as a government security officer from 2006 to 2008 and had access to a file about al-Afghani, said Afghan and US officials “kept day-to-day information about Afghani’s movements in the Jalozai refugee camp near Peshawar.” The source said, “We had reports about his roaming with Al-Qaeda, but we don’t know if he was involved directly in any attack. Perhaps US found more solid evidences that led him to Gitmo.”

Or perhaps, as so often, hunches were regarded as equivalent to evidence.

Whatever the case — and it is not known whether the PRB, whatever decision is taken, will shed clear light on who exactly al-Afghani is — what is clear is that after his disappearance his family did not know where he was for about three years until they “received a letter from him from Guantánamo via the International Committee of the Red Cross.” In the letter he said, “I am in Gitmo. Pray for me … I am OK.”

Yousafzai and Fenton established that he “was married not too long before he was taken, and he has a daughter, who is still young,” adding that his wife “lives in a refugee camp with another family member.” They also stated, “Every six months, the family used to wait for his letters. Family members were then allowed to have phone conversations with him, and now they go to a Red Cross office in Kabul or Pakistan to Skype with Afghani every five weeks or so.”

They also stated, “When one of the family members first saw Afghani, he looked older than his age, he was complaining of headaches, and he had dark circles around his eyes.” However, the relative added, “He said he is OK. We were so happy seeing him after such very long time.”

Below, in the hope of shedding further light on the largely unknown figure of Haroon al-Afghani, are the opening statements from his PRB — from his personal representatives, who gave his name as Asadullah Haroongul, and explained how it was “very apparent” that “he does not possess hard-line extremist ideals, especially with regards to women,” and from Shelby Sullivan-Bennis, who noted how he “has come a long way since he arrived at Guantánamo,” having ”taken advantage of many of the courses offered and excelled in all of them,” and having been “compliant during his time in detention.” She and the representatives also noted his devotion to his wife and daughter, with Sullivan-Bennis adding that “he feels immensely guilty for having left [them] to fend for themselves.” She also noted Reprieve’s expertise in resettlement programs, specifically voting how he has relatives in Pakistan and the UK, where Reprieve has offices.

In conclusion, based on everything I have read, I share Haroon al-Afghani’s representatives’ assertions that he should be released, and I hope the review board agrees.

Periodic Review Board [Initial] Hearing, 14 June 2016

Haroon Al-Afghani, ISN 3148

Personal Representative Opening Statement

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen of the Board. We are the Personal Representatives of ISN 3148. We will be assisting Asadullah Haroongul this morning with his case.

Since our initial notification, Haroon has attended all meetings with us and has earnestly participated in the Periodic Review Process. Based on our interaction with Haroon as well as the way he talks about his daughter and her education, it is very apparent that he does not possess hard-line extremist ideals, especially with regards to women.

Haroon has conducted himself in a professional and patient manner throughout all engagements with his Personal Representatives. His study of the English language in the past four years made our meetings very productive. He has a proven history of relatively compliant behavior while detained at Guantánamo. He has also been compliant in his engagement with the Joint Task Force Medical Staff in order to deal with multiple health issues. This teamwork has improved his quality of life.

He has taken advantage of many of the opportunities for education and personal enrichment while detained at Guantánamo. These opportunities include courses in English, Nutrition, and Art.

Haroon is fortunate to have a very supportive family remaining in Pakistan and England comprised of his spouse, daughter, father, mother, brother and three sisters. His family members and the town elders have pledged unwavering financial support, a place of residence, and assistance with employment during his transition to the utmost of their ability.

Subsequently, Haroon will discuss both his past and his desire for a better life for himself in the future. He is open to transfer to any country, but if given his choice, he would prefer to be transferred to Europe. Even though he himself is a Muslim, he has no problem integrating with anyone of any religion. We do believe that Haroon’s desire to pursue a better way of life if transferred from Guantánamo is genuine and that he does not represent a continuing or significant threat to the security of the United States of America.

Thank you for your time and attention. We are pleased to answer any questions you have throughout this proceeding.

Periodic Review Board Initial Hearing, 14 June 2016

Haroon Al-Afghani, ISN 3148

Private Counsel Opening Statement

Esteemed Periodic Review Board Members:

My name is Shelby Sullivan-Bennis. It is my privilege to represent Haroon al-Afghani and to appear before this Board today.

Haroon has come a long way since he arrived at Guantánamo many years ago. He has taken advantage of many of the courses offered and excelled in all of them. He has been compliant during his time in detention and has enjoyed all of the privileges that accompany his status.

Having completed a two-year university program in economics and mastered five different languages, Haroon is more able than most to begin a productive and peaceful life upon release. He wants nothing more than to return to his wife and daughter, whom he feels immensely guilty for having left to fend for themselves. It is his feeling of responsibility to support them that will lead the charge of his search for a better life.

Uniquely, Haroon has not had the benefit of an attorney for the duration of his time here at Guantánamo. Where Reprieve, as habeas attorneys for other detainees, has been able to orchestrate successful inter-governmental communication and placement, Haroon has had only the support of his family to vie for his welfare.

I start now, at quite the late date, on a quest to provide Haroon with the support he should have gotten years ago-enhancing his quality of life, facilitating family, as well as governmental communication, and most importantly, organizing for his release. This is a great undertaking, but Reprieve is likely the best-placed organization for the task.

With affiliate offices in both Pakistan — where Haroon’s wife and daughter live — as well as London — where his sister and her family live — Reprieve is uniquely situated to offer the utmost support to Haroon in his resettlement. We have represented over sixty Guantánamo detainees and our UN-funded “Life After Guantánamo” program has provided on-the-ground support to 38 former detainees and their families (in many cases, we visit the former detainees in-country post release to help them adjust to their new surroundings).

In 2015 alone, we visited 17 former detainees and family members in their home or host countries, working with them and the local government on social integration issues. We consider it our continuing duty to forge relationships with local authorities and non-governmental organizations to provide them with the services they need, and we stand ready to do the same for Haroon.

Thank you for taking into consideration the information we have provided. We respectfully submit that Haroon al-Afghani should be approved for transfer from Guantánamo, consistent with the President’s mandate to close the prison.

Very Truly Yours,

Shelby Sullivan-Bennis

Reprieve US

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,’ is available for download or on CD via Bandcamp — also see here). 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.

The End of Reason: Lies, Distortions and Misplaced Anger in the EU Referendum’s Brexit Camp

I thought it was time to make my feelings clear about the EU referendum vote. I know the EU is a profoundly flawed entity, but as I’ve been saying since David Cameron, demonstrating supreme cowardice, agreed to a referendum to placate UKIP and far right critics in his own party, the only way leaving the EU would be acceptable would be if we immediately had a socialist revolution — and that’s not going to happen. Instead, as former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has explained, we must reform it from within.

A leave vote will be a vote for the terrible racism and intolerance that has been ramped up as a result of the referendum, but that has been cynically promoted by the media and politicians for far too long. A leave vote is not only an unwise leap into the dark economically, but will legitimise the leadership ambitions of Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Iain Duncan Smith and Nigel Farage — who are all disgraceful, self-seeking, deluded and/or sociopathic figures — and the racism, xenophobia and Islamophobia that they have been so shamefully promoting. In addition, please don’t think for a moment that I’m defending David Cameron and other ministers who are currently calling for us to remain in the EU, because they have criticised Europe relentlessly over the years, and have undertaken more than their fair share of immigrant-bashing and Islamophobia.

What depresses me profoundly is how, through self-delusion, as well as the encouragement of the media and politicians, far too many of my fellow citizens have concluded that immigration and the EU are the reasons they are feeling so put upon and isolated, when the truth is that everything they are complaining about is actually the fault of the bankers who caused the global crash in 2008, the politicians of all the main parties who have unquestioningly supported big business and the banks over the needs of the people, and the Tories (whether Leave or Remain supporters) who, since 2010, have presided over an “age of austerity” designed to cynically dismantle the British state in an unprecedented manner, which has involved punishing the poor, the unemployed and the disabled while further enriching those who are already well-off, and pandering relentlessly to the global super-rich.

I posted a version of the three paragraphs above on Facebook, with the photo of myself wearing a T-shirt provided by the Britain Stronger In Europe campaign group, and in this article I’d like to add a few more thoughts, primarily in relation to “Brexit supporters have unleashed furies even they can’t control,” an article Polly Toynbee wrote for the Guardian last week, after she spent time with the Labour MP Margaret Hodge in Barking, and also with Labour supporters in the party’s London HQ, who were making calls to Labour voters around the country in the hope of persuading them to vote to stay in the EU. The results, as Toynbee reported, “were grim.” She continued:

“Out”, “Out” and “Out” in call after call, only a couple for remain. “I’ve been Labour all my life, but I’m for leave,” they said. Why? Always the same – immigrants first; that mythical £350m saving on money sent to Brussels second; “I want my country back” third …

Try arguing with facts and you get nowhere. Warn these Labour people what a Johnson/Gove government would do and they don’t care. Warn about the loss of workers’ rights and they don’t listen – maybe that’s already irrelevant to millions in crap jobs such as at Uber or Sports Direct. “We’re full up. Sorry, there’s no room for more. Can’t get GP appointments, can’t get into our schools, no housing.” If you tell these Labour voters that’s because of Tory austerity cuts, still they blame “immigrants getting everything first”. Warn about a Brexit recession leading to far worse cuts and they just say, “Stop them coming, make room for our own first.”

Toynbee followed up by spending time in Essex with the MP Margaret Hodge, who hosts weekly meetings in Barking for constituents to discuss whatever is on their minds. As she explained, “When the BNP shockingly won 12 council seats, those open-door meetings dealing with everyday grievances saw her make the case and beat them off, so the BNP lost every seat.”

Last week, around 50 constituents turned up, discussing normal concerns – as Toynbee described it, “parking, fly-tipping and houses in multiple occupation crammed with migrants by rogue landlords.” However, at the end of the session, when she asked those who had turned up about the referendum, “the mood changed”:

“We didn’t come to talk about that!” one angry woman said, others agreeing. “We came about parking!” But Hodge insisted, making an eloquent remain case: shrinking services are caused by Tory austerity that halved their council’s budget, more than migrants. The room bristled with antagonism. “Do you want to be governed by Brussels?” one shouted out. “You’re being sold a false prospectus, a bunch of lies,” she said, to no avail. One said: “When I get out at the station, I think I’m in another country. Labour opened the floodgates.”

As Toynbee also noted, although these constituents like Hodge, who is a “well-respected, diligent” MP, “they weren’t listening. She demolished the £350m myth, but they clung to it. She told them housing shortages were due to Tory sell-offs and failure to build but a young man protested that he was falling further down the waiting list, with immigrants put first. Barking’s long-time residents come first, she said, but she was not believed.”

Despite this being a Labour stronghold, the Barking and Dagenham Post found 67% support for Brexit. Toynbee recognised how immigration could be perceived to be to blame for people’s dissatisfactions, despite it not being a true reflection of the situation. She noted, “As high-status Ford jobs are swapped for low-paid warehouse work, indignation is diverted daily against migrants by the Mail, Sun, Sunday Times and the rest. “Fury over plot to let 1.5m Turks into Britain” was Monday’s latest from the Daily Mail,” promoting what, sadly, are its usual lies, as Turks have no interest in joining the EU, and the EU has no intention of allowing Turkey to join. But facts, of course, just get in the way of propaganda.

As Toynbee described it, “This is the sound of Britain breaking.” She continued by imagining two years down the line, after a Brexit win, with people seeing “no change, [the] same migrants, [and the] same sense of powerlessness,” and with, potentially, an economy in recession, and “reliant on City and property bubbles, low skills, low productivity, [and] atrophied public services,” a situation in which Boris Johnson and Michael Gove “risk losing control of the furies they have unleashed,” usurped by “some yet-worse demagogue who calls for throwing out migrants already here.”

Is this a dystopian fantasy? Perhaps. But it’s something I was already thinking before Thomas Mair, a mentally ill man, long interested in fascism, responded to the fever pitch of racism stirred up by those who want us to leave Europe — and particularly, it seems to me, by Nigel Farage’s latest unacceptably racist poster — that he killed the MP Jo Cox, who was, notably, an advocate for the rights of refugees. In court today, when asked his name, Mair responded by stating that his name was “death to traitors, freedom for Britain.”

I have watched as racism has grown and become acceptable over the last ten years or so — as the ungrounded rumours about preferential treatment for immigrants, in jobs and housing, became louder, even though the housing story has never been true, and, when it comes to employment, it is always the employers, and not those employed, who dictate who gets work and what wages are involved. I watched with rising alarm in the run-up to the 2010 General Election, when Gordon Brown was condemned for having correctly described a woman with whom he had had an encounter in Rochdale, who had discussed being overrun by eastern Europeans, as a “sort of bigoted woman.”

In recent years, however, the racism has crept out of the shadows and is no longer whispered, and I have become wary of getting involved in discussions with people in the street, as often, regardless of people’s background, I end up hearing how immigrants are to blame for everything — often from people who are themselves 2nd generation immigrants. If we vote to leave on Thursday, I genuinely fear that calls for the enforced repatriation of those regarded as unwelcome immigrants will only become louder.

In closing, I can only reiterate how much I believe people have been fooled, blaming immigrants for problems caused by bankers, politicians and the global super-rich. It is true that immigration rates are higher than they have been in a generation, but that is because of our wars and our greed, and because we in Western Europe (in Britain, France, Germany, Austria, Holland, Belgium and Scandinavia) are amongst the richest countries in the world. From inside and outside the EU people are drawn to us to seek work, and it is genuinely difficult to see how it could be any different if we left the EU.

London and the south east, for example, have greater work opportunities than almost anywhere else in the world— even if wages and the cost of housing rather take the sheen off the opportunities. If British people are feeling sidelined — and they clearly are, and in significant numbers — the answer is to look at those who claim to be our leaders, and those who regard themselves as the elite, with their arrogance, their greed and their uncontrolled sense of entitlement, and not to engage in the disgraceful scapegoating of people who, fleeing war, violence or broken economies, are not the deserving target of anyone’s anger.

Note: For further analysis, see John Harris’s Guardian article, “Britain is in the midst of a working-class revolt,” and Neil Ascherson’s New York Times article, “From Great Britain to Little England,” and please also watch this powerful video of Professor Michael Dougan, Professor of European Law at the University of Liverpool, lucidly explaining why it is not in Britain’s best interests to withdraw from the EU.

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,’ is available for download or on CD via Bandcamp — also see here). 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.