Andy Worthington's Blog, page 73

Remembering Guantánamo’s Dead

Every year, I publish an article remembering the men who died at Guantánamo in what, in 2013, I first described as “the season of death” at the prison — the end of May and the start of June, when six men died: three on June 9, 2006, one on May 30, 2007, another on June 1, 2009, and the last on May 22, 2011.

Of the six, only the last death — of Hajji Nassim, an Afghan known in Guantánamo as Inayatullah — appears very clearly to have been a suicide. Nassim had profound mental health issues (as well as being a case of mistaken identity), but although there was no reason to suspect foul play, it is, as I explained last year, “disturbing and disgraceful that a profoundly troubled man, who was not who the authorities pretended he was, died instead of being released.”

Doubts have also been raised about the deaths in 2007 and 2009, as I also explained last year, when I wrote:

My very first articles, in May/June 2007, were written in response to the alleged death by suicide, on May 30, 2007, of a Saudi prisoner, Abdul Rahman al-Amri. Former prisoner Omar Deghayes later told me that al-Amri had been profoundly upset by the sexual harassment at Guantánamo — enough, perhaps, to lead him to take his own life — but Jeff Kaye (psychologist and journalist) later looked into the investigation into his death and found another murky story, as he did for Muhammad Salih (aka Mohammed al-Hanashi), another long-term hunger striker and agitator who died on June 1, 2009.

Muhammad Salih had been a cell block leader, who stood up against the injustice to which the prisoners were subjected (see former prisoner Binyam Mohamed’s article about him here), and as such his case contained eerie parallels to the cases of the three men who died on June 9, 2006, who had also been long-term hunger strikers and were well-known to their fellow prisoners.

According to the US authorities, the three men — Yasser al-Zahrani, a Saudi who was just 17 years old when he was seized in Afghanistan at the end of 2001, Ali al-Salami, a Yemeni, and Mani al-Utaybi, another Saudi — committed suicide, but that always seemed implausible, as the prisoners were meant to be constantly monitored, and were not supposed to have access to sheets with which to hang themselves, even without factoring in the fact that all three were thorns in the side of the authorities.

However, although I covered the story with skepticism over the years — including when the NCIS produced a half-hearted report justifying the official line — the story only really blew wide open in January 2010, when Harper’s Magazine published “The Guantánamo Suicides” by the journalist and law professor Scott Horton, in which, drawing on testimony by a number of former military personnel — in particular, Staff Sgt. Joseph Hickman, who was in charge of the guard towers and was on duty on the night the men died — a chilling new narrative emerged: that, on the night the men died, vehicles had driven in and out of Camp Delta, to a shadowy facility known to the soldiers as “Camp No,” and later revealed to have been a secret facility called “Penny Lane,” where, it would appear, they had been tortured and killed, and where, it was also to be presumed, the rags had been stuffed down their throats that contributed to their deaths. Mention of the rags was removed from the official reporting, and, of course, it is implausible that men hanging themselves in their cells could, as well as tying themselves up, also stuff rags down their own throats.

Although widely praised, Hickman and Horton’s story hit a brick wall in the Obama administration, and has never been adequately investigated. In January 2015, Hickman’s book about the deaths, Murder in Camp Delta, was published by Simon & Schuster, but that too failed to dent the wall of official silence shielding the deaths from further scrutiny.

18 months on from the Senate Intelligence Committee’s witheringly critical report on the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program, and with a whole new trove of CIA documents just released through FOIA legislation revealing new and shocking details about torture, murder and cover-ups in the “war on terror,” it is surely time that the events of June 9, 2006 are officially revisited.

Below, I’m cross-posting a short op-ed Joseph Hickman wrote for Shadowproof (formerly FireDogLake), the excellent investigative site run by Kevin Gosztola, in which, on the 10th anniversary of the three deaths, Hickman wrote about how the deaths and their cover-up constituted a war crime, and called once more for transparency and justice.

I can only echo his words, and, to explain a little more of the story from Hickman’s perspective, I’m also posting excerpts from the interview Hickman did last February with Brooklyn-based blogger The Talking Dog, who has been conducting interviews with people intimately connected to the Guantánamo story for many years.

An excerpt from Joseph Hickman’s interview with The Talking Dog, February 2015

The first thing that matters [about the circumstances surrounding the three deaths on June 9, 2006] is that the NCIS immediately asserted that I was “only” a perimeter guard and not in a position to see what happened. That was, of course, a half truth. Half of my duties were inside Camp Delta. I was in a position to see what happened from inside the camp, and this “perimeter guard” characterization irritates me.

I was on duty. I was a reconnaissance soldier, which means you are trained in observation and what you see is important. That night I visited a number of positions. I was in charge of the solders at all of the towers inside Camp Delta. Tower 1 was only thirty-five feet from the medical clinic … it is also less than 50 yards from the walkway in Camp 1, with a clear view of it. I was also next to the entrance to Camp Delta. In the tower, I saw the white paddy wagon (which, of course, could pass without inspection or having to sign in) … I saw it back up to Camp 1, and I saw two guards get out and put a detainee in the vehicle. And then I saw the van make a right, and then a left — leaving Camp America. And then I saw the van return around twenty minutes later, and repeat the process with a second detainee.

Now this was a Friday night — there were no commissions scheduled, and there wasn’t a different camp outside the perimeter to take them to … but where were they going?

And then the van returned a third time. This time, I went to ACP [access control point] Roosevelt, the exit from Camp America, and watched. If the van went right, it would be going to the main part of the Guantánamo base — where the McDonalds, the PX and other facilities were. But if it went left, that led only to the beach (for personnel’s recreation) or to Camp No — the road led nowhere else. And the van went left. I knew it wasn’t taking detainees to the beach. This made me curious, as my only conclusion was that the van was going to Camp No. And so, I continued to do my duties of making rounds of my men’s positions.

At 11:30 pm that night, the van returned to Camp Delta. I was back in Tower 1. The van backed up to the medical clinic. I was back in Tower 1, with a clear view of the medical clinic. The van backed up to the medical clinic — my view was obstructed by the van’s doors — but I watched the guards take stretchers into the clinic. Twenty to thirty minutes later, the lights in the camp all went on, and all hell seemed to be breaking loose.

I got down from the tower, and found a Navy corpsman (or medic) who I knew, and she told me that three detainees had stuffed rags down their throats and killed themselves. I knew something horrible was happening.

I asked the guards under my command for their observations. Three guards were stationed 20 feet from the medical clinic, and they reported that no detainees had come from Camp 1 — the only movement of detainees had been the paddy wagon. In fact, none of the guards in my command, who were watching the camp all night, saw anyone transported from any camp — other than the paddy wagon.

The next morning, of course, Col. Bumgarner gave us his talk about what “actually happened” — the detainees choked to death on rags — and what we would see in the news: that they simultaneously hanged themselves and were found that way in their cells … and we were ordered not to talk about it. Nonetheless, I was sure we would be asked about what we observed, by someone. Again, I asked the tower guards in Camp 1 — was anyone transported? The answer was consistent — no. And so, if they didn’t see it, it didn’t happen. And they did not see detainees taken from Camp 1 (where they supposedly hanged themselves in their cells) to the medical clinic. It did not happen.

And the NCIS did not contact me, or my men — ever.

At the time, I tried to put this behind me. But some details stick with you: it is just so hard to kill yourself at Guantánamo. I am aware of the suicide attempt during an attorney visit you described [of Juma al-Dossari] … that was a gap in security that was solved — and even the detainee in that situation still failed in his attempt. It’s just so hard to do it.

But the biggest thing is what just couldn’t add up: three men simultaneously (in non-contiguous cells) tying their hands together, putting masks on, forming nooses, shoving rags down their throat, and then managing to hang themselves simultaneously while being watched by soldiers every three minutes.

I should also note than I came forward to speak to the Justice Department — it was not just me. Seven guards came forward to tell them what we observed.

And finally, I can tell you that the way I ended the book — noting that I can’t name names, but nonetheless, from all I know, I consider what happened on June 9, 2006 “murder” (notwithstanding that a clever lawyer might characterize it as something else) — I put out the evidence I found. This is what I believe, but the reader can decide. I still think it was murder.

Ten Years Ago, I Saw the Real Guantánamo and it Changed My Life

By Joseph Hickman, Shadowproof, June 9, 2016

Ten years ago today, I was on duty as the sergeant of the guard at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba (GTMO). While I was standing in a watchtower inside Camp Delta overlooking the detainees, I saw something that would radically change my life.

I witnessed three detainees leave the camp in a white van and be transported to a top secret CIA facility, only to return to the camp a few hours later, dead. Over the next few hours, after the bodies returned to Camp Delta, I watched a cover-up being orchestrated by the GTMO Command. My commander flat-out lied to the media about what happened, claiming the detainees committed suicide in their cells as a form of asymmetrical warfare.

That day ten years ago shook the foundation of all I thought to be true. Prior to that night, I was a “true believer” — I was a proud soldier in the U.S. Military, I was one of the good guys in the Global War on Terror. After that night, I began to question those beliefs.

When I first arrived at GTMO a few months prior to that evening, I had my doubts about whether GTMO was a humane place. I was appalled at the conditions of the camp and the treatment of the detainees. But somehow I always found a way to rationalize what I saw. The treatment of the detainees was harsh and their living conditions inhumane. They looked more like poor farmers than the “worst of the worst” terrorists in the world; but my country told me they were and I believed them.

On June 9, 2006, all of that changed. Three men died on my watch. I knew the three detainees did not die in their cells. I knew they were murdered outside of the camp at a top secret CIA facility that the U.S. government denied existed. This was inexcusable. It was a war crime.

Even though going against the U.S. military’s official story of what happened that day would most assuredly end my military career, it was my duty as a soldier to report it. I went to the U.S. Army Inspector General and the Justice Department and reported what I witnessed. After I reported it to the Justice Department, they opened an official investigation and the FBI spent almost a year looking into my allegations.

They finally contacted my attorney and told him that while “the gist of what I reported was true,” they were closing the case, and were not going to pursue any charges against those involved.

Shortly after the Justice Department decision, I left the military. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about that night. I have spent years investigating the deaths and other issues concerning GTMO. I wrote a book laying out all the facts about what happened that night, hoping that one day another investigation will be opened and truth and justice will prevail. Though my hope for that is fading, I will never give up.

Since that night, a lot has changed at GTMO. Most of the detainees have been released and sent home or sent to different countries to try to start a new life. Unfortunately, there are still dozens of people being detained in GTMO with no evidence against them, living the nightmare of being held without charge or due process.

GTMO needs to be closed. Yet it remains open, and the GTMO command claims it is transparent and has nothing to hide. They even set up VIP tours for reporters, politicians, and attorneys. The tours are rehearsed for weeks prior to the VIPs’ arrival on the Island. They show the VIPs only what they want them to see, making it appear as if they are hiding nothing.

In reality, GTMO is shrouded in secrecy. No reporter, politician, or attorney, has ever seen the real GTMO. The only people that have seen it are the detainees, the guards, and the GTMO command. If they ever did see the real GTMO, maybe then justice would be served.

Note: In remembering Guantánamo’s dead, I also want to make sure that I acknowledge the three other men who died — Abdul Razaq Hekmati, who died of cancer in December 2007, and who was a profound case of mistaken identity, as I explained in a front-page New York Times story with Carlotta Gall in February 2008, Awal Gul, an Afghan who died after taking exercise in February 2011, and Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, a Yemeni with mental health problems, repeatedly cleared for release, who died in September 2012 (and whose death is also a disputed suicide).

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.

Two More Prisoners – A Moroccan and an Afghan – Seek Release from Guantánamo Via Periodic Review Boards, as Two More Men Have Their Detention Upheld

Last week, the Obama administration’s efforts to reduce the number of men held at Guantánamo, via Periodic Review Boards, continued with two more reviews. The PRBs were established in 2013 to review the cases of 41 men regarded as “too dangerous to release,” and 23 others recommended for prosecution, and were moving with glacial slowness until this year, when, realizing that time was running out, President Obama and his officials took steps to speed up the process.

35 cases have, to date, been decided by the PRBs, and in 24 of those cases, the board members have recommended the men for release, while upholding the detention of 11 others. This is a success rate for the prisoners of 69%, rather undermining the claims, made in 2010 by President Obama’s high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force, that the men described as “too dangerous to release” deserved that designation, even though the task force had conceded that insufficient evidence existed to put the men on trial.

In fact that description — “too dangerous to release” —  has severely unravelled under the scrutiny of the PRBs, as 22 of those recommended for release had been placed in that category by the task force. The task force was rather more successful with its decisions regarding the alleged threat posed by those it thought should be prosecuted, as five of the eleven recommended of ongoing imprisonment had initially been recommended for prosecution by the task force.

Two of those decisions took place last week, in the cases of Sanad Ali Yislam al- Kazimi (ISN 1453), a Yemeni citizen, and a former CIA “black site” prisoner, and Mohammed Abdul Malik Bajabu (ISN 10025), the prison’s sole Kenyan, and one of the last men to arrive at the prison in 2007.

Sanad al-Kazimi’s imprisonment is upheld

Both men had their cases reviewed last month, and I wrote about al-Kazimi’s review here, noting that, although the government described him as a member of al-Qaeda, albeit one who was “a somewhat disruptive and insubordinate figure” within the ranks of the organization.

In their final determination, dated June 9, the board members determined, by consensus, as is required, “that continued law of war detention of [al-Kazimi] remains necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States.”

In making this determination, the board members “considered [his] close and prolonged relationships with senior al-Qa’ida members, including after 9/11,” and also noted his “military training, his probable familial ties to al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), his history of violence and non-compliance toward the guards and interrogators, and his vague plans for post-detention life.”

However, the board members also acknowledged positive aspects of al-Kazimi’s behavior and attitudes, noting that they “greatly appreciated [his] candor” and saw “his devotion to his family as a positive.” They also recognized his “increased cooperation with detention staff” and also “appreciate[d] his personal development,” and, for his next review, an administrative file review in roughly six months’ time, they “look[ed] forward to seeing: continued compliance; increased engagement with mental healthcare staff to further improve his skills for dealing with conflict, stress, and change; continued participation in coursework at GTMO; and greater detail on his post-detention plan if family reunification is not possible in the near future.”

The suggestion, then, is that al-Kazimi might be able to demonstrate a coherent plan for life after Guantánamo, although I am not sure that his Al-Qaeda membership will be so easily forgotten, and if that is the case then I would urge the administration to find some way to charge him rather than relying on endless detention without charge or trial.

Mohammed Abdul Malik Bajabu’s imprisonment is upheld

I wrote about Mohammed Abdul Malik Bajabu’s PRB here, noting that the US authorities believe him to have been a member of Al-Qaeda in East Africa, who reportedly played a role in terrorist attacks in Kenya in November 2002 that killed 13 people and wounded 80 others, although they also acknowledged that, at Guantánamo, he has been “a highly compliant detainee,” who “has not expressed continued support for extremist activity or anti-US sentiments, although he is critical of US foreign policy.”

In their final determination, also on June 9, and again determining that “continued law of war detention … remains necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States,” the board members “considered [his] past involvement in terrorist activities including a close relationship with high-level operational planners and members of al-Qa’ida in East Africa, and his participation in the preparation and execution of the November 2002 attacks in Mombasa, Kenya,” and “also noted [his] total lack of candor regarding his pre-detention activities, the lack of a plan for his future should he be transferred, and no information provided regarding the available family support should he be transferred.”

On the latter points, it is clear, Abdul Malik made much less of a positive impression on the board than Sanad al-Kazimi, and will have to significantly change his attitude of he is to attempt to impress them.

Abdul Latif Nasir’s Periodic Review Board

While these decisions were being taken, the first of last week’s reviews took place, on June 7, for Abdul Latif Nasir (ISN 244), the last Moroccan in Guantánamo, who is 51 years old, and was designated as “too dangerous to release” by President Obama’s task force in 2010.

Back in April 2008, I described how Nasir “had worked as a small-scale businessman in Libya and Sudan, and had also spent time in Yemen and Pakistan. He was captured in Afghanistan in late 2001, and has explained that he was attracted to the country because of its Islamic scholars and its piety. In Guantánamo, he has experienced particularly harsh treatment, because he stands up for the rights of his fellow prisoners, and refuses to keep silent in the face of injustice.”

In September 2010, I also explained how Nasir had “stated that he was not a member of al-Qaeda, and that he ‘disagreed with what bin Laden and al-Qaeda were doing outside of Afghanistan.’” I also noted that he had stated that “he did not think Osama bin Laden was in a position to issue a fatwa because he is not an Islamic scholar,” and condemned the 9/11 attacks because it was “against Islamic principles to attack innocent people.”

However, I didn’t know much more about him, except that he had taken part in the prison-wide hunger strike in 2013, and as a result, I was intrigued to see what the US authorities currently thought about him, and on looking at the unclassified summary provided by the authorities it seems to me that the combination of Nasir’s low-level status as a combatant, his good behavior in Guantánamo and his lack of connections with any terrorists means that he could well be recommended for release.

In the unclassified summary, the authorities described how Nasir “had been a conservative Muslim member of the non-violent but illegal Moroccan Sufi Islam group, Jamaat al-Adl Wa al-Ihassan, in the 1980s,” and “was recruited to fight in Chechnya by a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group in 1996 while working at one of Usama bin Ladin’s charcoal production companies in Sudan.”

He then apparently “traveled to Yemen on his way to Chechnya, but was rerouted to Afghanistan in 1997 to receive training in weapons, topography, and explosives at al-Qa’ida camps.” He allegedly “became a weapons trainer at al-Farouq training camp and a member of the al-Qa’ida training subcommittee,” and “had occasional access to senior al-Qa’ida members, including Usama bin Ladin,”although on this latter point it seems clear that he had no leadership or decision-making role.

It was also claimed that he “fought for several years with the Taliban on the front lines in Kabul and Bagram, Afghanistan, and again at Tora Bora, as a commander and weapons trainer,” after he had “led a retreat” from Jalalabad to Tora Bora.

In Guantánamo, the summary noted, he “has committed a low number of disciplinary infractions compared to other detainees and most of his infractions have been failures to comply with Guantánamo guard force orders.”

It was also noted that he had been “cooperative with interrogators early on in his detention, but later retracted many of his earlier statements about his extremist activities and has refused to meet with interrogators or discuss his past since September 2007, with the exception of one session in September 2011.” Because of this lack of cooperation with interrogators, the authorities noted that they “lack insight into his current mindset and whether he would pursue extremist activity after detention,” although it was pointed out that he “has not expressed extremist views against US citizens, but almost certainly resents the United States government and those he sees as responsible for his prolonged detainment.” It was also claimed that he “has defended fighting jihad in certain circumstances and supports sharia law, which could make transfer to and integration into non-Muslim countries difficult,” although, if freed, there is no obstacle to his return to Morocco, where, crucially, he has supportive family members.

As the summary concluded, importantly, he “has had no contact with former Guantánamo detainees or individuals involved in terrorism-related activities while at Guantánamo.” He also “maintains close contact with his family in Morocco,” and “would almost certainly prefer transfer to Morocco to be with his family, who are willing and able to financially assist him with his reintegration into society.”

Below I’m posting the opening statements of one of his personal representatives (military personnel appointed to help the prisoners prepare for their PRBs) and of one of his lawyers, Shelby Sullivan-Bennis of Reprieve. The personal representative noted that he “is considered to be a thoughtful, intelligent and kind man by his fellow detainees,” and that he has availed himself of all the educational opportunities offered to him, and these observations were repeated and amplified by his attorney, who stated, “That Nasir is an introspective, intelligent, and kind-hearted man who, after all this time, seeks only to return to a family that is ready to receive him back has been consistently demonstrated over the years.” She also discussed his learning, his closeness to his family, and the job opportunities awaiting him should he be released; specifically, “full-time work at his older brother’s very successful water treatment company,” and also discussed in detail Reprieve’s expertise in helping former prisoners resettle and rebuild their lives.

Periodic Review Board Initial Full Hearing, 07 Jun 2016

Abdul Latif Nasir, ISN 244

Personal Representative Opening Statement

Members of the Board, I am the Personal Representative for Abdul Latif Nasir, ISN 244. I will be assisting Nasir with his Private Counsel this morning.

I can sincerely state that Nasir is considered to be a thoughtful, intelligent and kind man by his fellow detainees. He is very grateful to have this opportunity to have his case heard today.

Nasir is eager to begin this process in hopes to begin his life and move forward. As such, his time in Guantánamo Bay (GTMO) has been spent wisely. For example, he has attended many classes offered such as English, Math and Computer Science. But his appetite for continuing to learn does not stop there. He continues to learn on his own through self-education. He has created a 2,000 word English/Arabic dictionary (hand written) that he uses daily to practice his English language skills. While somewhat shy, he still manages to speak to those in English in an effort to better his skills, whenever possible. In my meetings with him, we rarely used a linguist to communicate. He both understands and writes in English very well. He also reads books and watches movies in English frequently.

Nasir is an educated man, with a high school equivalent education and one additional year at the collegiate level. Nasir concentrated his studies in Math and Science. For a short time he also studied at a technical institute. Computer Science is the area of most interest to Nasir and he hopes to work in that field in the future. However, he knows that computer science is constantly evolving and it will take some time to learn everything required to find employment. In the meantime, Nasir is willing and prepared to work for his brother’s business in order to start his future in the right direction. He is patient and understands that his time lost has created a hurdle that he can only overcome with hard work and determination.

Nasir has been a compliant detainee while at GTMO, taking advantage of communal living. Therefore, he has allowed himself to be more exposed to various cultures and religious backgrounds. Nasir feels that this cultural exposure has aided in understanding various points of view allowing him to better appreciate others’ customs and beliefs. Of course, this will only serve to help with his transition into the next phase of his life.

Nasir deeply regrets his actions of the past. I am very confident that Nasir has a strong desire to put this unfortunate period o f his life behind him and move on. Nasir will seek to reintegrate into society, marry and have a family of his own. Nasir has not made any negative comments or expressed any ill will towards the United States nor displayed any evidence of an interest in extremist activities.

I appreciate your time in this matter and your consideration for a transfer recommendation.

May 23, 2016

Statement by Shelby Sullivan-Bennis, Private Counsel for Abdul Latif Nasir (ISN 244)

Periodic Review Board Hearing Scheduled June 7, 2016

Esteemed Periodic Review Board Members,

My name is Shelby Sullivan-Bennis. It is my privilege to represent Abdul Latif Nasir and to appear before this board. I do so in conjunction with my fellow private counsel, Thomas Anthony Durkin, partner of Durkin and Roberts.

Over the course of many years, our lawyers at Reprieve have gotten to know Mr. Nasir quite well. And based on that long experience we can say a few things about him without reservation.

That Nasir is an introspective, intelligent, and kind-hearted man who, after all this time, seeks only to return to a family that is ready to receive him back has been consistently demonstrated over the years. It is not a picture manufactured for the benefit of this Periodic Review Board as today’s hearing date has approached. Nor has his behavior changed radically since the widespread improvement in camp conditions that took place in early 2009. Instead — as the materials before this Board demonstrate — these personal traits and the strong support of his family have been on consistent display over the many years he has spent here in Guantánamo.

Mr. Nasir has come a long way since he was sold for a bounty into American captivity back in 2002, having never experienced U.S. or Western culture. One small iteration of how far he has come are the pleasant meetings in English that I, as a female attorney, have enjoyed with Mr. Nasir. He once knew no English; and his culture would not have permitted him to meet with a female lawyer. Over the years, he has learned the English language, and also learned to work with and respect me.

His disciplinary status at Guantánamo has been compliant. He is allowed all privileges and has presented eagerly, helpfully, and gratefully to all meetings with his Private Counsel and Personal Representative.

Mr. Nasir loves and excels at the myriad courses of which he has taken advantage in his time at Guantánamo. With a background in math and science, he naturally excels in computer science and life skills courses, but has also developed a very good understanding of English. He meets with me entirely without the assistance of an interpreter, and we are able to communicate complex details quite well; in the event of confusion, he has always been patient with me.

Mr. Nasir has — famously, across the whole prison base — drafted his very own 2,000-word English to Arabic dictionary by hand, a sample of which is included in our submission. Since arrival at Guantánamo, Mr. Nasir has made a continuing effort to use this opportunity to further learn and integrate and he has inarguably succeeded at both.

If released from Guantánamo, Mr. Nasir intends to begin full-time work at his older brother’s very successful water treatment company in Morocco, surrounded by a supportive and stable family. Mr. Nasir’s brother owns and runs a company that installs water treatment systems for swimming pools and other external and internal pools and water features. The company has both commercial and private clients, and the majority of their business comes from installing pools in Moroccan hotels. His brother has stated in his submissions before the board, and multiple times over the years, that he is prepared and eager to train Mr. Nasir to be a water treatment engineer and give him a job working with him at his company.

He will live with his family in their five-bedroom home in Casablanca, and will have ready access to several local service providers, including medical and psychological health facilities based in Casablanca with whom my office has direct contracts for provision of services to our clients. [A footnote stated, “As our ‘Life After Guantánamo’ project statement submitted to this board details, we have built particularly good relations with the ‘Association Medicale de Rehabilitation des Victimes de la Torture (AMRVT),’ a medical treatment center for victims of torture. The AMRVT’s staff is preeminent in the region as an assessment and service provide for people who have lived through trauma, and the center is conveniently based in the Nasir family hometown of Casablanca”].

Indeed, Mr. Nasir’s entire family has resided legally in Morocco for decades and is well established. His family support network in Morocco is strong; his two brothers, five sisters, three nieces, and four nephews all stand willing and able to support Mr. Nasir’s reintegration into Morocco, physically, economically, and emotionally. He has been in regular contact with them through the video calls facilitated by the Red Cross. As the letters, videos and photographs we have submitted to the Board attests, the members of his extended family and community have been ready and eager to have him back throughout the length of his detention, and they remain so today.

The family has provided ample evidence to the Board, in written and video-recorded form directly attesting to their readiness to welcome and support Mr. Nasir. The videos feature ten members of Mr. Nasir’s family currently living in Morocco, all offering their considerable resources in support of his return; he will not be welcomed by one or two people, but a household of stable, working family to help reintegrate him into society and give him purpose.

From Reprieve’s experience with over three dozen repatriated and resettled Guantánamo prisoners, we have concluded that the most important factor which determines former detainees’ success in life is family support. Team members have met the newborn babies of many of the men we have worked with and watched as they have re-focused their lives on parental responsibilities and bringing up their children as best they can. The extent and nature of the support that Mr. Nasir’s family is prepared to provide set the ideal conditions for his release.

We have a program set up to help our clients reintegrate into society called “Life After Guantánamo,” which is funded by the United Nations. This is a program that serves the interests of each relevant stakeholder — the client needs the help, and we (the United States) want the client to do well. For several clients who were resettled and repatriated by both Administrations, we worked with the State Department and host governments on transition plans for clients; we have served as an ongoing point of contact for local authorities; we have facilitated financial support and referrals for needs ranging from job placement to mental health care. We were a trusted and experienced resource in facilitating a successful transition for these clients, who are now rebuilding their lives; a number of former Reprieve clients have even successfully pursued higher education at universities after leaving Guantánamo. Finally, as mentioned, we have specific experience working with groups on the ground in Morocco. We would of course offer the same assistance for Mr. Nasir.

Thank you for taking into consideration the information we have provided. We respectfully submit that Mr. Nasir should be approved for transfer from Guantánamo consistent with the President’s mandate to lose the prison. I remain at your disposal to assist with any questions you may have regarding Mr. Nasir.

Very Truly Yours,

Shelby Sullivan-Bennis

Reprieve US

Abdul Zahir’s Periodic Review Board

Two days after Abdul Latif Nasir’s PRB, on June 9, another review took place for Abdul Zahir (ISN 753), a 43- or 44-year old Afghan. As I explained in November 2010:

Zahir, who was captured in July 2002, was accused of being a translator for al-Qaeda member Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi (ISN 10026) and a money courier for members of al-Qaeda and Taliban, and of taking part in a grenade attack on a vehicle carrying Toronto Star journalist Kathleen Kenna, her husband Hadi Dadashian, photographer Bernard Weil, and an Afghan driver in Zormat on March 4, 2002. Zahir was put forward for a trial by Military Commission in January 2006, when he stated that he did not take part in the grenade attack, and was the only one of the ten prisoners charged in the first incarnation of the Commissions who was not charged again after the Commissions were ruled illegal by Congress in June 2006, and were revived by Congress later that year.

On December 27, 2009, Kathleen Kenna, who was seriously injured in the attack, wrote an op-ed for the Toronto Star in which she wrote, “For almost eight years, we have all waited for justice. We don’t seek retribution. We’ve made it clear we cannot identify our attackers. We seek real justice, not a contrived justice. My conscience is divided: As a woman committed to social justice in everyday life, I want a public trial at a court where the defendant would enjoy the same rights to which we’re entitled under American and international law. As someone horribly wounded, then disabled, by the explosion, I want as fair a trial as possible at a time of war … We know nothing about Zahir’s arrest, but he was held at Guantánamo without charges for almost four years — far longer than is normally allowed under peacetime law. Unlike those awaiting criminal trials, Zahir was held without access to a lawyer of his choice, without a chance to tell his family his whereabouts. He wasn’t charged with war crimes until Jan. 2006: attacking civilians, aiding the enemy, and conspiracy. I don’t believe in indefinite detention without trial.”

However, what is noticeable about the unclassified summary for Zahir’s PRB is how there is no mention whatsoever of the grenade attack, from which it must be concluded that the US authorities no longer think that he had any involvement in it. In fact, as the summary makes clear, the authorities also acknowledge that, at the time of his capture, Zahir was “probably misidentified as [an] individual who had ties to al-Qa’ida weapons facilitation activities.”

As the summary stated, Abdul Zahir “was an Afghan insurgent captured by US military forces in July 2002 during a raid targeting an individual named Abdul Bari — an alias used by [Zahir] — who was believed to be involved in the production and distribution of chemical or biological weapons for al-Qa’ida. Because of Abdul Bari’s efforts to coordinate a shipment of unspecified items on behalf of the Taliban, US military forces targeted a compound in Hesarak village, Logar Province, Afghanistan, and captured [Zahir]. US forces recovered samples of unknown substances in the raid, including a white powder, that were initially believed to be chemical or biological agents, although other information later proved the samples to have been salt, sugar, and petroleum jelly.” Crucially, the summary stated, “While [Zahir] subsequently admitted during interviews to using the alias Abdul Bari on the phone — a fairly common name in the country — he ultimately provided no actionable information relative to al-Qa’ida’s weapons network, and we assess that AF-753 was probably misidentified as the individual who had ties to al-Qa’ida weapons facilitation activities.”

The summary proceeded to note that Zahir “probably worked as a bookkeeper and Arabic and Pashto translator from mid-to-late 1995 until late 2001 for al-Qa’ida military commander Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi,” who arrived at Guantánamo in 2007. Rather confusingly, the summary also claimed that, “[d]uring this same time frame, [he] probably worked for an Afghan Taliban commander also named Abdul Hadi,” and that, “[f]rom at least as early as March 2002 until his July 2002 capture, he also probably served as a low-level member of a Taliban cell.”

The claims are all vague, all preceded by the use of the word “probably,” and it may be the case, therefore, that few, if any of the allegations are reliable. Equally vaguely, it was also stated that Zahir “may have been recruited to translate in several al-Iraqi-owned guesthouses in Kabul where he probably had limited access to senior leaders from al-Qa’ida and other extremist groups.” It was also noted that, while he “has admitted to working for al-Iraqi and the Taliban, he says that he was coerced to do so under threats to his family’s safety and he has denied any direct involvement with the Taliban outside of his role as a translator,” which may well be true, of course.

The authorities also noted that Zahir “has been moderately compliant with the staff at Guantánamo and has committed an average number of infractions relative to the full detainee population,” adding, “We assess he has minimal contact with the broader detainee population and has no official or unofficial leadership roles.” regarding interrogation, it was stated that he “was receptive to direct questioning and met semi-regularly with interrogators until September 2008, probably assessing that cooperation would increase the likelihood of being repatriated, and because he enjoyed the interaction afforded him during interviews.” Since that time, however, he “has not been interviewed,” providing the summary’s authors “with low confidence in our ability to assess his current mindset.”

However, the summary also noted that he “never made statements clearly endorsing or supporting al-Qa’ida — or other extremist ideologies — and since at least 2003 he has sought to distance himself from any allegiance to the group.” In addition, although he “has expressed frustration with the United States over his detention and his perception that he has been charged with a crime,” he “does not appear to view the US as his existential enemy.”

It was also noted that he “corresponds regularly with his immediate and extended family,” ad that his “patriarchal and tribal obligations could serve as a deterrent to reengagement should [he] view these commitments as more important commitments than reestablishing himself with the Taliban or other extremists.”

Below I’m posting the opening statements of one of his personal representatives (military personnel appointed to help the prisoners prepare for their PRBs) and of his attorney, Robert Gensburg. The personal representative, who noted that he has become a poet in Guantánamo, also explained that he had said that “he knows that what he did in the past was wrong, but at the time he was only concerned with feeding his children,” adding, “He now realizes that his work was not legitimate and has expressed regret for his past decisions.” The expression of remorse is a key element in the review board’s deliberations, and it is to be hope that Zahir himself also made this clear in his discussion with the board members. For his part, Robert Gensburg, who has represented Zahir for over ten years, spoke about his client “has always been polite, calm, friendly and kind to me and the several colleagues who have worked with me on his case,” and is “uncommonly intelligent and thoughtful.”

Periodic Review Board Initial Hearing, 09 Jun 2016

Abdul Sahir [Zahir], ISN 753

Personal Representative Opening Statement

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen of the board. I am the Personal Representative for ISN 753. Thank you for the opportunity to present Abdul Zahir’s case this morning.

Abdul has been extremely polite and cooperative from the beginning and has attended all meetings with his Personal Representative. He has become a poet during his time here at Guantánamo Bay and has written many poems, some of which have been submitted to the Board. He has spent a lot of time preparing for this board and has put a great amount of effort into his thoughts and the book that he has developed that he refers to as his “Future Plans.” We have submitted a portion of this book as well to show a little bit about how he views the world now.

Abdul has told me that he knows that what he did in the past was wrong, but at the time he was only concerned with feeding his children. He now realizes that his work was not legitimate and has expressed regret for his past decisions. Based on our conversations, I believe that he is not quite as naive as he once was and has grown and learned during his time here at GTMO and will not make the same mistakes again. His only thoughts now are for his two wives and his three children, and the future he hopes to have with them. He is willing to go to any country, but would prefer an Arab country if possible. However more importantly, he wishes to go someplace where it is legal for him to have two wives, because despite his permission for them to leave him and remarry, they have remained faithful to him and he could not bear to leave either behind. He does of course realize that being reunited might take a while and he is prepared to wait as long as he must.

He has support from his family and village as is evident from the many documents we received pledging support. I believe that Abdul Zahir’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 United States of America.

Thank you for your time and attention. I am pleased to answer any questions you may have throughout these proceedings.

Robert Gensburg’s submission

To: Periodic Review Board

In re: Abdul Zahir, ISN 753

My name is Robert Gensburg. I practice law in Saint Johnsbury, Vermont. I have represented Abdul Zahir, ISN 753, since 2005, when I filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus on his behalf. I respectfully submit that continued law of war detention of Abdul Zahir is not necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States.

Abdul Zahir is a now 43 or 44 year old citizen of Afghanistan. He has three sons. His oldest son is twenty, and he has never seen the youngest. [A footnote read, “The case file that has been submitted to you includes pictures of his sons with their grandfather, Abdul Zahir’s father-in-law”]. He supported his family doing odd jobs: driving a taxi, sheep herding, and eventually becoming a full time translator between his government and Abd al Hadi al Iraqi, one of the high value detainees. It is Abdul Zahir’s association with al Iraqi that landed him in Guantánamo.

In July of 2002, Abdul Zahir was taken into custody at his home in rural Logar province by United States Army forces. He was held at the Bagram Air Force base prison through October, and then transported to Guantánamo in October of that year. The case file that has been submitted to you accurately describes his behavior during the 14 years of his detention, and I will not belabor that here. While in Guantánamo he developed significant and permanent physical problems, which are cursorily described in the case file. Abdul Zahir also suffers from mental health problems, which lately appear to have been brought under control.

Throughout the 11 years of my association with Abdul Zahir, he has always been polite, calm, friendly and kind to me and the several colleagues who have worked with me on his case. He is uncommonly intelligent and thoughtful, although I think he still does not completely understand why lawyers or personal representatives would take up his cause against their own government. At our initial meeting in early 2006 (and today), I was struck by and came to deeply respect his strong moral compass that has been formed by his devotion to Islam.

The letters of support for Abdul Zahir that are included in the case file demonstrate that he will have very strong support in his community and his family upon his return. I suggest that you should attribute particular importance to the statement of support from Abdul Bari Jahani, Afghanistan’s recently appointed Minister of Information and Culture. Minister Jahani is a renowned poet and scholar. He translated for us on some of our conferences with Abdul Zahir, which thrilled our client (and my colleagues and me, too). Minister Jahani was as taken with Abdul Zahir as I was.

I know that the Periodic Review process is a forward looking process, and not a process for rehashing history and protesting innocence. I think it is important for the Board to know, however, that from day one Abdul Zahir has consistently tried to have a hearing before some neutral judge or commission to determine the validity of the claims that the government has made about him. There has been no effort to hide from or avoid those claims. I’ve had literally years of discussions with the Office of Military Commissions and the United States Attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York about Abdul Zahir being given what Judge Henry Friendly called “some kind of hearing.” [See 123 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1267 (1975)] I’ve twice written to the OMC convening authority requesting that she and then he charge Abdul Zahir with something, and similarly to General Martins when he was appointed chief prosecutor. Abdul Zahir has been prepared to face the government’s claims in any forum for the last 14 years. Had he been given that hearing, it would have become obvious that he does not pose a threat, significant or otherwise, to the security of the United States.

Abdul Zahir’s life has been irretrievably damaged. He wants nothing more today than to return to his home and family, to reassemble some kind of normalcy, and to live in peace. As I wrote in the first paragraph, continued law of war detention of Abdul Zahir is not necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States. I urge the Board to recommend that Abdul Zahir be cleared for release and return to his home and family.

Yours truly,

Robert A. Gensburg

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.

Video: RT America’s One-Hour Special on Guantánamo Featuring Andy Worthington, Joe Hickman, Nancy Hollander and Tom Wilner

Last week, I was delighted to take part in an hour-long Guantánamo special on RT America, presented by Simone del Rosario, who had recently visited the prison. Simone began by noting that it was the tenth anniversary of three deaths at Guantánamo — 22-year old Yasser Talal al-Zahrani, a Saudi, who was just 17 years old when he was seized in Afghanistan at the end of 2001, 37-year old Salah Ahmed al-Salami (aka Ali al-Salami), a Yemeni, and 30-year old Mani Shaman al-Utaybi, another Saudi.

The deaths were described by the authorities as a triple suicide, but there have always been doubts about that being feasible — doubts that were particularly highlighted in 2010, when the law professor and journalist Scott Horton wrote an alternative account for Harper’s Magazine, “The Guantánamo Suicides,” that drew in particular on a compelling counter-narrative presented by Staff Sgt. Joseph Hickman, who had been in the prison at the time of the men’s deaths, monitoring activities from the guard towers. Hickman’s book Murder in Camp Delta was published in January 2015, and he was also a contributor to RT America’s show.

After this opening, the show dealt in detail with the case of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Mauritanian national, torture victim and best-selling author (of Guantánamo Diary). Slahi is one of the prisoners still held who were designated for prosecution by the Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established shortly after first taking office in January 2009, until the basis for prosecutions largely collapsed after a number of critical appeals court rulings and he was, instead, put forward for a Periodic Review Board, the latest review process, which began at the end of 2013. Slahi’s PRB took place on June 2, and, in discussing his case, Simone del Rosario also spoke to one of his attorneys, Nancy Hollander.

The full video of the show is below, via YouTube, and I urge you to watch it if you have the time, and to share it if you find it useful:

After the section on Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Simone del Rosario discussed the prison blocks that still exist at Guantánamo — the isolation cells of Camp 5, and Camp 6 with its communal spaces — and spoke to a guard who seemed to break with the military’s efforts at brainwashing by acknowledging that he saw the prisoners as human beings who responded to good and bad treatment as any human being would.

Joseph Hickman was interviewed next, and after that Simone del Rosario turned her attention to the allegations of recidivism — of prisoners “returning to the battlefield” — that have done so much damage during the Obama presidency, as parts of the machinery of government — in the Pentagon and the office of the Director of National Intelligence — have regularly claimed that around 15 percent of the men released from Guantánamo are “confirmed” recidivists, and a similar percentage are “suspected” of recidivism. The two numbers are generally bundled up together by mainstream media outlets, demonstrating a fundamental betrayal of the principles of journalism, and it is also generally overlooked that the authorities provide zero evidence to back up their claims, which, it is completely appropriate to say, are seriously exaggerated.

This was part of what I was asked to discuss, in my segment that began around 33 minutes into the show. I also ran through the story of who is currently held, and explained why they are, fundamentally, political prisoners, and I also explained how this essentially dates back to the original basis of the “war on terror,” when, with breathtaking arrogance, the Bush administration decided that it was going to hold human beings with no rights whatsoever, holding them neither as criminal suspects nor as prisoners of war.

My interview, also via YouTube, is below, for anyone interested in seeing it as a stand-alone piece:

My interview was followed by an interview with Tom Wilner, with whom I co-founded the Close Guantánamo campaign in 2012. Tom represented the Kuwaiti prisoners held at Guantánamo, and was also Counsel of Record to the prisoners as they petitioned the Supreme Court to grant them habeas corpus rights — efforts which were successful twice, in June 2004, in a victory that allowed lawyers to begin representing the men held at Guantánamo, even though Congress subsequently moved to block the men’s habeas rights, and in June 2008, when the Supreme Court rebuked Congress for having acted unconstitutionally, and granted them constitutionally guaranteed habeas rights.

However, although the 2008 ruling led to dozens of prisoners securing their release after District Court judges ruled on their habeas petitions, telling the government that they had failed to establish that they were connected to Al-Qaeda or the Taliban, politically motivated appeals court judges in Washington, D.C. began overturning or vacating those rulings, and changed the rules regarding the habeas petitions — telling the lower court judges that everything the government alleged was to be treated as presumptively accurate — so that, since July 2010, not a single habeas corpus petition has been won by the prisoners.

Disgracefully, the Supreme Court has repeatedly failed to confront this injustice, but, as Tom explained, one route out of the impasse ought to be for the Obama administration to allow an appeal to be heard by the full, en banc appeals court in Washington, D.C., which is now less dominated by profoundly conservative judges that it was in 2010-11.

At the end of the show, three more lawyers were interviewed — Gary Thompson, who represents Ravil Mingazov, a Russian citizen also facing a Periodic Review Board (on June 24), and military defense lawyer James Connell and his colleague Alka Pradhan, who represent “high-value detainee” Ammar al-Baluchi (aka Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali), one of the alleged 9/11 co-conspirators facing a trial by military commission. All three spoke eloquently about the failures of justice since the “war on terror” began, with Connell, in particular, noting how, disgracefully, the makers of the Hollywood film Zero Dark Thirty were given more information about his case than his lawyers.

My thanks to RT America for producing this show, which, as often with RT, is the sort of program that mainstream US media should be producing, but which, of course, is spectacularly lacking on the main US networks.

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.

Radio: Andy Worthington’s Hour-Long Guantánamo Interview on Wake-Up Call Podcast

Please support my work!

Have an hour to spare? Want to hear me talk in detail about Guantánamo? Then please listen to me on Wake-Up Call Podcast with Adam Camac and Daniel Laguros, who “interview experts on foreign relations, economics, current events, politics, political theory, and more every weekday.”

They decided to call the show “The Horrible Guantánamo Bay Facility,” which I think is accurate, as I was able to explain in detail what a thoroughly disgraceful facility Guantánamo is at every level.

I began by explaining why the naval base at Guantánamo Bay was chosen as the location for an offshore facility that was supposed to be beyond the reach of the US courts, and how, of course, creating somewhere outside the law made it shamefully easy to begin torturing the men — and boys — who were swept up in the “war on terror” and held there.

See below for the interview on YouTube (and you can also listen to it here):

Following the introductory comments I mentioned above, I spoke about how the fundamental problem with the Bush administration’s detention policies in the “war on terror” was that, in seeking to establish a way of holding people without any rights whatsoever as human beings, senior officials decided, unwisely, that there was a third way to hold people beyond the established routes — that they are charged with a criminal offence and put on trial, or are taken off the battlefield, and held unmolested, with the protections of the Geneva Conventions, until the end of hostilities.

I proceeded to speak about the prisoners’ long struggle to secure habeas corpus rights, and how, briefly, that led to the release of dozens of prisoners, until politically motivated appeals court judges changed the rules governing the prisoners’ habeas petitions, effectively gutting habeas corpus of all meaning for those held at Guantánamo.

I then spoke about the forms of torture implemented at Guantánamo, and moved on from that to the shameful history of the military commissions, which have failed, throughout Guantánamo’s history, to deliver anything resembling justice to the handful of men who have faced trials. I also discussed the long and so far unsuccessful quest for accountability for the senior officials, up to and including George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their lawyers, who implemented the torture, rendition and indefinite detention without charge or trial that were at the heart of the detention policies in the “war on terror.”

I proceeded to discuss how competent tribunals (also known as battlefield tribunals), to separate combatants from civilians, were not implemented in the “war on terror,” and how this was just one of the many mistakes that led to people being held at Guantánamo who were not even soldiers, let alone terrorists, and how, of course, the Bush administration’s disastrous policies dangerously and irresponsibly blurred the differences between civilians, soldiers and terrorists.

I also spoke about the story of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, freed last year as the result of a multi-faceted campaign, including my own contribution via the We Stand With Shaker campaign that I co-founded with activist Joanne McInnes in 2014, and, in connection with Shaker’s story, I also explained why the classified military files released by WikiLeaks in 2011 are full of profoundly unreliable statements made by prisoners who were subjected to torture or other forms of abuse, or were bribed to make statements with the promise of enter living conditions.

I also ran through the history of Guantánamo under President Obama, explaining how unprincipled opposition from Republicans, combined with Obama’s reluctance to spend political capital overcoming those obstacles, has left him with less than six months to fulfil the promise he made on his second day in office, nearly seven and a half years ago, to close Guantánamo within a year.

There was much more in the show than I have described above, and I hope you have time to listen to it, and to share it if you find it useful.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose debut album, ‘Love and War,’ 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.

Quarterly Fundraiser Day 3: Your Support is Vital for My Guantánamo Work – $3200 ($2200) Still Needed!

Please support my work!

Dear friends and supporters,

I know times are tough all round, but I’m in desperate need of support from you to finance my ongoing project to call for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay through my independent journalism, my research, commentary, public appearances, media appearances, and social media work. Most of this work is unpaid — or, to be more accurate, is reader-funded. Without your support, I cannot continue to do what I’ve been doing for the last ten years. I have no institutional backing, and no mainstream media operation behind me.

Since launching my latest fundraiser on Monday, I have received $300 (£200) in donations, but I’m still trying to raise another $3300 (£2200). That’s just $270 (£185) a week for the next three months — not a huge amount, I hope, for all the work that I do to try and bring to an end the long-standing disgrace and injustice that the prison at Guantánamo is, and will be until it is closed once and for all.

So please, if you can help out at all, click on the “Donate” button above to donate via PayPal (and I should add that you don’t need to be a PayPal member to use PayPal). You can also make a recurring payment on a monthly basis by ticking the box marked, “Make This Recurring (Monthly),” and if you are able to do so, it would be very much appreciated.

Any amount will be gratefully received, whether it is $25, $100 or $500 — or any amount in any other currency (£15, £50 or £250, for example). PayPal will convert any currency you pay into dollars, which I chose as my main currency because the majority of my supporters are in the US.

Readers can pay via PayPal from anywhere in the world, but if you’re in the UK and want to help without using PayPal, you can send me a cheque (address here — scroll down to the bottom of the page), and if you’re not a PayPal user and want to send cash from anywhere else in the world, that’s also an option. Please note, however, that foreign checks are no longer accepted at UK banks — only electronic transfers. Do, however, contact me if you’d like to support me by paying directly into my account.

With just 225 days left for President Obama to close Guantánamo, I’ll be doing what I can to educate people about the need for the prison to be closed before he leaves office — via the Countdown to Close Guantánamo that I launched in January, and also via my current focus on the Periodic Review Boards at Guantánamo, which are currently reviewing the cases of the many dozens of prisoners who, six years ago, were described by a US review process as “too dangerous to release.” That has turned out to be a rather disgraceful exaggeration, because, currently, 24 of the 33 men whose cases have been decided have been recommended for release.

You can see all my recent articles on the PRBs here and here, and you can also rest assured that, with your help, I will continue to do all I can to get the prison at Guantánamo closed once and for all.

Andy Worthington

London

June 8, 2016

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.

Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Torture Victim and Best-Selling Author, Seeks Release from Guantánamo

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. Also, please listen to me talking about Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s case on Sputnik International, and please sign the petitions to Ashton Carter calling for his release — on Change.org and via the ACLU.

Last Thursday, one of the few well-known prisoners at Guantánamo, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a 45-year old Mauritanian, became the 44th prisoner to face a Periodic Review Board. Slahi was subjected to a specially tailored torture program in Guantánamo, approved by Bush’s defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and, though still imprisoned, is a best-selling author. While imprisoned, he wrote a memoir that, after a long struggle with the US government, was published in redacted form. Nevertheless, the power of Slahi’s account of his life, his rendition, his torture and his long years in Guantánamo, is such that the book, Guantánamo Diary, has become a best-seller.

Although the Bush administration attempted to make a case that Slahi was a member of Al-Qaeda, which was why they put pressure on the Mauritanian government to hand him over to them in November 2001, and why he was subsequently tortured in Jordan (on behalf of the US) and in Guantánamo by US operatives, the case evaporated under scrutiny. In April 2010, Judge James Robertson, a US District Court judge, after scrutinizing his habeas corpus petition, ordered his release, finding that the government had failed to establish that what looked suspicious in his case — primarily, the fact that he was related to senior Al-Qaeda member Abu Hafs, and, while living in Germany, had met some of the 9/11 hijackers and had helped them to visit Afghanistan for military training — was actually evidence of involvement with Al-Qaeda. Shahi has admitted that he had joined Al-Qaeda, but that was in 1992, when he had visited Afghanistan during the civil war that followed the Soviet withdrawal, and he insisted that he had not maintained any contact with the organization after that time.

The government, however, refused to accept Judge Robertson’s ruling, and appealed, and in November 2010 the D.C. Circuit Court vacated that ruling, sending it back to the lower court to be reconsidered, where, as I described it in an article about Shahi’s case in April, “it has languished ever since, mocking all notions of justice every day it has remained unaddressed.”

Judge Robertson was not the first US official to act on Shahi’s behalf, based on the evidence — or a lack of it. As Jess Bravin explained for the Wall Street Journal:

The Marine officer assigned to prosecute Mr. Slahi before a military commission, Lt. Col. Stuart Couch, uncovered details of the interrogation program, which in addition to physical abuse included a mock execution of Mr. Slahi and a threat to take his mother prisoner and place her amid Guantánamo’s all-male population. Col. Couch said it was an implicit threat that Mr. Slahi’s mother would be raped.

After reviewing reports showing that weeks of physical and psychological abuse had induced Mr. Slahi to hallucinate, Col. Couch told superiors the case couldn’t be prosecuted.

Bravin added, “The case has been shelved ever since, leaving US officials uncertain how it can be resolved.” He also pointed out that, “After the interrogation plan ended, Mr. Slahi received privileged treatment at Guantánamo, including his own quarters and a garden to tend, as well as telephone calls to his relatives.” What he neglected to mention was that this took place after Slahi had been broken by torture, and had become what the authorities regarded as a useful informant, although that is a conclusion that doesn’t seem to be borne out by what is in the classified military files relating to the prisoners, as released by Wikileaks in 2011.

Another man who knows Slahi’s case, and who spoke to the Guardian, is Col. Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor of the military commissions, who resigned in 2007, after he was placed in a chain of command under William J. Haynes, the Pentagon’s chief lawyer, who supported using information obtained through torture as evidence.

Davis “recalled meeting Slahi on multiple occasions in 2006 and 2007,” and, as Spencer Ackerman described it, Slahi, who was “considered a sufficiently compliant detainee to receive housing privileges, brewed hot mint tea for the prosecutor, despite the baking Cuban heat.” Davis said he had received what he described as “an ‘extensive briefing’ on Slahi from investigators who had looked into his case for years,” as a result of which he “declined to charge Slahi with any offense.” As he put it, “The consensus was there was no proof he did anything hostile towards the United States.”

Slahi’s PRB is the first opportunity he has had since 2010 to ask to be freed. The PRBs were set up in 2013 to review the cases of all the prisoners not facing trials (just ten of the remaining 80 prisoners), and not already approved for release by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established when he first took office in January 2009. They work like parole boards, and, for prisoners to be recommended for release, require agreement from all those involved — representatives of the Departments of State, Defense, Justice and Homeland Security, as well as the office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Those facing the PRBs are, for the most part, men described as “too dangerous to release” by the task force, which, however, also acknowledged that insufficient evidence existed to put them on trial; in other words, that it was not evidence at all, but unreliable information extracted through the use of torture or other forms of abuse. 46 men were regarded as “too dangerous to release,” and 18 others were initially recommended for prosecution by the task force, but were made eligible for PRBs instead when, in 2012-13, judges in the appeals court in Washington, D.C. dismissed some of the few convictions secured in Guantánamo’s military commission trial system.

However, since the PRBs began at the end of 2013, 33 cases have so far been decided, and in 24 of those cases the boards have recommended the men for release, discrediting the task force’s decision, back in 2010, to describe them as “too dangerous to release.” This is a success rate overall of 73%, although it is less for those who had initially been put forward for prosecution, a category that includes Slahi. Of the five cases so far decided for men initially recommended for prosecution, just two men have been recommended for release, and three for ongoing imprisonment. For further information, see my definitive Periodic Review Board list here.

Mohamedou Ould Shahi’s Periodic Review Board

For Slahi’s PRB, his personal representatives (military personnel appointed to help prisoners prepare for their reviews) were clearly impressed by him — describing him as “uniquely talented,” and as “one of the most compliant detainees with the detention staff,” whose “conduct has continuously been exceptional.” They also called him “an advocate for peace,” who, “[o]n several occasions … expressed that his intention is to live a life free of violence, where he can be a provider for his adopted children and teach them not to make the same transgressions he has made,” and also explained that he “understands his past mistakes and during detention has pursued a new direction in life.”

Theresa Duncan, one of his attorneys, who has represented him for over ten years (along with Nancy Hollander), also spoke warmly about him, noting that he “does not present any threat to the United States nor has he ever taken any hostile action against our country,” and adding, “In all the years I have known him, Mohamedou has never even expressed hostility to the United States or its people.” Duncan also noted “the meaningful relationships” he has “developed with individual people” — . the military personnel who “have given him books, movies, clothing, and other souvenirs to mark those relationships,” and she specifically mentioned the guard who, in a first, submitted a letter to the PRB, stating that, “based on his interactions with Mohamedou at Guantánamo, be ‘would like to eventually see [Mohamedou] again’ and ‘would be pleased to welcome’ Mohamedou into his home.”

Duncan also addressed some of the claims made by the authorities in their unclassified summary (where Slahi was described as Mahamedou Ould Slahi). In the summary, it was noted that he “traveled from Germany to Afghanistan in 1991 and again in 1992 to join the mujahidin in their fight against the Afghan communist regime. There, he trained at al-Qa’ida’s al-Farouq camp, swore bay’at to al-Qa’ida, and prepared to fight at the Battle of Gardez.” As she explained, the attorneys “submitted a report from an expert in the field of terrorism,” who “spent seven years as a case officer with the CIA, most of which was devoted to supporting the Afghan insurgency against the communists in the 1980s and 90s,” and who “explains the differences between al Qaeda in the early 1990s, when it and the United States were aligned, and the al Qaeda that came into being much later, with which Mohamedou played no part.”

The summary also claimed that, “Between trips, he recruited for the Afghan jihad,” and that, “[f]or the next nine years, [he] lived mostly in Germany, spending time in Canada and Mauritania, and recruited primarily for the Bosnian and Chechen jihads.”  The summary added that he “facilitated the travel of future 9/11 operational coordinator Ramzi bin al-Shibh (YM-10013) and two future 9/11 hijackers to Chechnya via Afghanistan in 1999,” and that he “was arrested in Senegal in January 2000 and moved to Mauritania, where he was arrested again in November 2001.” Despite these efforts to portray him as some sort of full-time recruiter for jihad during this period, the summary contradicted these claims by explaining that, throughout this time, he actually “worked as an engineer at various technology companies and developed extensive electronics and computer skills.”

He certainly did meet bin al-Shibh and two of the 9/11 hijackers, and helped with their travel, but other aspects of the summary are clearly untrue. He wasn’t, for example, “arrested again in November 2001” in Mauritania, but was seized by his own government, at the request of the US, so that he could be rendered to torture in Jordan — not quite the lawful apprehension that being “arrested” suggests.

Moreover, as Theresa Duncan also notes, the allegations in the government’s profile “were also made in Mohamedou’s habeas case,” when “[t]he court rejected those allegations as a basis for the government’s detention of Mohamedou.”

The unclassified summary also addressed Slahi’s nation of jihad, which his personal representatives also discussed, noting that he “denounces any violent form of jihad. For him, jihad means to simply uphold your responsibilities and to take care of your family.” The government’s summary largely recognized this, noting that, “Throughout his detention, [Slahi] has maintained his support for jihad, but clarifies that his notion of jihad neither condones the killing of innocent people nor supports Bin Ladin’s ‘version of justice.’”

The summary also noted that Slahi “has criticized US policies several times,” but added that “his complaints are directed at the American Government, not the American people.” It was also noted that, “On several occasions, [he] has expressed to interrogators his intention to pursue a non-extremist life after Guantánamo, preferably back in Germany,” which also reflects his lawyers’ perspective.

The summary also noted that, “If repatriated to Mauritania, [Slahi] probably would reunite with his family, take care of his sisters, and start a business,” adding that, “If the Mauritanian Government did not restrict [his] travel, he probably would travel internationally to promote his book Guantánamo Diary, which was released in January 2015. He might also pursue relocation to Germany if he was not satisfied with his reintegration assistance in Mauritania.”

In conclusion, the summary claimed that Slahi “established a broad network of terrorist contacts while living in Germany, Canada, and Mauritania,” adding that, “Although most of his extremist contacts have since been detained or killed, [his] relation to Abu Hafs al-Mauritani — a former al-Qa’ida senior leader currently residing in Mauritania — could provide him with an avenue to reengage, should he decide to do so.”

I don’t believe it is accurate to describe Slahi as having “established a broad network of terrorist contacts,” and, moreover, as Theresa Duncan explained, with regard to the Abu Hafs allegation, Slahi’s lawyer secured a submission form Abu Hafs, who pointed out that “he cooperated with American authorities upon his return to Mauritania in 2012, meeting with members of the FBI over the course of two months. Since then, he has had no contact with law enforcement and lives a peaceful life in Mauritania.”

Below I’m posting the full text of the personal representative’s opening statement, and of Theresa Duncan’s statement, but before that I’d like to leave the final word on Shahi’s PRB to Col. Morris Davis, who also wrote to the PRB on his behalf.

“We’ve had him confined at Guantánamo for nearly 14 years,” Col. Davis told the Guardian. “If we can’t muster enough evidence to charge him with something in that length of time, then how do we justify continuing to incarcerate him? Would we shrug and say ‘OK’ if an American was imprisoned for 14 years without ever been charged, much less tried and convicted?”

Davis added, “I haven’t seen him in nearly nine years and I can’t guarantee what he will or won’t do in the future, but I lose more sleep worrying about threats within our borders than I do about Mohamedou Slahi.”

Periodic Review Board, 2 June 2016

Mohamedou Ould Slahi, ISN 760

Personal Representative Statement

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen of the board. We are the Personal Representatives for ISN 760. Thank you for the opportunity to present Mr. Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s case.

During his time at Guantánamo Bay, Mohamedou has been one of the most compliant detainees with the detention staff. His conduct has continuously been exceptional. Ever since he arrived at Guantánamo Bay, Mohamedou has been an advocate for peace. On several occasions, Mohamedou expressed that his intention is to live a life free of violence, where he can be a provider for his adopted children and teach them not to make the same transgressions he has made.

Mohamedou understands his past mistakes and during detention has pursued a new direction in life. He believes what al-Qa’ida has done is wrong and wants nothing to do with the organization or its members. Mohamedou strongly desires peace and denounces any violent form of jihad. For him, jihad means to simply uphold your responsibilities and to take care of your family.

Mohamedou is uniquely talented and can speak multiple languages very well including English. He has been extremely productive in taking advantage of the numerous learning and life improvement opportunities provided to him. He is self-educated in multiple subjects and has technical computer skills he can rely on for employment. Some of his greatest suffering at Guantánamo has been from the fact he cannot provide for his family while in detention. In this regard, Mohamedou plans to pursue a small business and write books to support himself and other family members. Additionally, his family has expressed a desire to help support him as necessary and enable him to lead a simple life after detention. Multiple family members and friends have also pledged to provide him financial support. Mohamedou’s brother, who works as a computer engineer, will support him financially whether he is released to live in Germany, Mauritania or any other location the board sees fit.

We are certain that Mohamedou’s intentions after Guantánamo are genuine, that he possesses sound judgment, and that he is good for his word. We firmly believe he does not represent a continued significant threat to the United States of America. Mohamedou is open to transfer to any country, but would prefer Mauritania or Germany where he can be a productive member of society and care for his dependent children.

Thank you for your time and attention. We are pleased to answer any questions you may have throughout these proceedings.

Opening Statement of Private Counsel Theresa Duncan

My name is Theresa Duncan and I am private counsel for Mohamedou Ould Slahi. I have represented Mohamedou for over a decade. In that time, I have come to know Mohamedou well, having spent hundreds of hours meeting with him. I also know members of his family well, as I have spoken with them many times and visited them for two weeks in Mauritania in 2014.

Mohamedou does not present any threat to the United States nor has he ever taken any hostile action against our country. In all the years I have known him, Mohamedou has never even expressed hostility to the United States or its people. Despite all that the U.S. government has done to him, Mohamedou has made clear he holds no grudge against anyone at Guantánamo. Indeed, as noted in his book, Guantánamo Diary, Mohamedou dreams to one day have tea with the military personnel he met at Guantánamo “after having learned so much from one another.”

I am happy to address in detail any allegations against Mohamedou, and Mohamedou is too. We expect much of that will need to be covered in the closed session. However, I wish to make two general points in response to the unclassified Guantánamo Detainee Profile. First, the allegations in that profile were also made in Mohamedou’s habeas case. The court rejected those allegations as a basis for the government’s detention of Mohamedou.

In 2010, after reviewing all the government’s evidence and listening to Mohamedou testify under oath for a day and a half, federal Judge James Robertson concluded Mohamedou was not a member of al Qaeda at the time of his capture in 2001 and ordered his immediate release. [In a footnote, Theresa Duncan added, “Judge Robertson ruled on three Guantánamo habeas petitions before retiring in 2010. Mohamedou’s was the only petition Judge Robertson granted. Ironically, the two  men whose petitions Judge Robertson denied have been released from Guantánamo”]. Although the government appealed that decision and Mohamedou’s case was then sent back to the district court, Judge Robertson remains the only independent person to have reviewed all the evidence in the case to date. Relatedly, a former chief prosecutor for the military commissions investigated the case against Mohamedou and concluded, “there is absolutely no evidence that Mr. Slahi ever engaged in any acts of hostility towards the United States.”

Second, the allegations regarding Mohamedou’s travels to and actions in Afghanistan in the early 1990s must be considered in their historical context. To this end, we have submitted a report from an expert in the field of terrorism. This expert spent seven years as a case officer with the CIA, most of which was devoted to supporting the Afghan insurgency against the communists in the 1980s and 90s. He explains the differences between al Qaeda in the early 1990s, when it and the United States were aligned, and the al Qaeda that came into being much later, with which Mohamedou played no part.

Mohamedou has had no disciplinary infractions at Guantánamo. None. But perhaps what is most striking about Moharnedou’s interactions with detention staff are the meaningful relationships he developed with individual people. Over the years, military personnel have given him books, movies, clothing, and other souvenirs to mark those relationships. I have personally witnessed the warm interactions between Mohamedou and the men and women who guard him.

Included in the materials we have submitted to the Board is a letter from a former guard who writes that, based on his interactions with Mohamedou at Guantánamo, be “would like to eventually see [Mohamedou] again” and “would be pleased to welcome” Mohamedou into his home.

Mohamedou has also developed deep and enduring relationships with his lawyers. As my co-counsel, Nancy Hollander, writes in her submission to you: “If I could invite him to my home in the US, I would gladly have him stay with me as long as he wished.” I feel the same way. Mohamedou has become a dear friend to me and to Nancy. Before I visited Mauritania, Mohamedou told his family about me to help them prepare for my visit. I was touched by the special meals the family prepared at Mohamedou’s request and by the care I was shown throughout my visit. It reminded me of the care Mohamedou has always shown Nancy, me and others during our visits with him.

At Guantánamo, Mohamedou has continued his education and worked to stay abreast of developments in computer technology. At his request, detention staff and counsel have provided Mohamedou with computer programming books. For years, he had access to a computer that he used to practice his skills. He has perfected his English and learned Spanish and Turkish. He reads voraciously, writes fiction and poetry, and has begun studying art as a way to keep his mind active.

Mohamedou is a natural teacher. Over the years he has helped guards and other detainees with their studies. During his phone calls with his family, Mohamedou encourages his nieces and nephews to continue their education and I know he looks forward to helping them with their studies when he is released.

Mohamedou has a large support network committed not just to his peaceful reintegration after release, but to helping him achieve personal and professional success, either in Mauritania, his home country, or in Germany, where he once lived and still thinks of as a home. We have provided a letter confirming that the Mauritanian government will welcome him home if he is returned there. Mauritania has a history of successfully reintegrating former Guantánamo prisoners, having done so twice before. We have included declarations from two former Guantánamo detainees describing their positive experiences upon their return to Mauritania. Mohamedou’s friends and family have committed to provide him with personal support. Two friends, one who works for the Mauritanian government and another who is a respected physician, have committed to help him secure employment.

Mohamedou’s oldest brother can provide him employment as an accountant in his retail business. His youngest brother is a German citizen who would provide housing and other support should Mohamedou be released to Germany. Mohamedou also wants a career as a writer regardless of where he lives. The American editor of his book has committed to work with Mohamedou on future literary projects.

Mohamedou’s legal team is fully committed to providing whatever assistance is necessary to assure his success. Nancy and I intend to travel to wherever Mohamedou is sent and to stay as long as necessary to help him restart his life. Our co-counsel at the ACLU will visit him, too, and will provide reintegration support, including through their connections within the international NGO community. A board-certified psychiatrist, who is a retired Brigadier General, has submitted information to you about Mohamedou’s resilience and positive capacity for reintegration. To help ensure a successful transition from years of detention, he has agreed to travel to wherever Mohamedou is sent and to spend several weeks with him to assist in his transition.

The unclassified profile expresses a concern that Mohamedou’s relation to Abu Hafs al Mauritani “could provide him with an opportunity to reengage, should he decide to do so.” This concern is misplaced. There is no evidence that Moharnedou seeks to do anything other than live a peaceful, productive life after his release from Guantánamo. And as Abu Hafs explains in the declaration we submitted to you, he cooperated with American authorities upon his return to Mauritania in 2012, meeting with members of the FBI over the course of two months. Since then, he has had no contact with law enforcement and lives a peaceful life in Mauritania.

In conclusion, Mohamedou will not pose any threat to the United States if he is released. He is poised to contribute to his family and his community. He has the support of his family and friends, including those of us who have gotten to know him at Guantánamo. I hope that you will understand why that is when you talk with him today. We ask you to approve Mohamedou’s transfer from Guantanamo.

Thank you.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose debut album, ‘Love and War,’ 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.

It’s My Quarterly Fundraiser: Can You Help Me Raise $3500 (£2400) to Support My Guantánamo Work?

Please support my work!

Dear friends and supporters,

It’s that time of the year again when I ask you, if you can, to make a donation to  support my work on Guantánamo, and related issues. Any amount, however large or small, will be gratefully received, as most of my work is only possible through your donations. I don’t have the backing of a mainstream media outlet, and I don’t have the backing of an institution; I am, instead, very much a creation of the modern online world — a reader-funded investigative journalist and commentator — and almost everything I do is only possible because of your support.

So if you can help out at all, please click on the “Donate” button above to donate via PayPal (and I should add that you don’t need to be a PayPal member to use PayPal).

$3500 (£2400) is just $270 (£185) a week for the next three months — not a huge amount for the 50 or so articles I write every quarter, plus all the social media work, and the personal appearances and media appearances I also undertake, most of which are also unpaid.

Any amount will be gratefully received, whether it is $25, $100 or $500 — or any amount in any other currency (£15, £50 or £250, for example). PayPal will convert any currency you pay into dollars, which I chose as my main currency because the majority of my supporters are in the US.

You can also make a recurring payment on a monthly basis by ticking the box marked, “Make This Recurring (Monthly),” and if you are able to do so, it would be very much appreciated.

Readers can pay via PayPal from anywhere in the world, but if you’re in the UK and want to help without using PayPal, you can send me a cheque (address here — scroll down to the bottom of the page), and if you’re not a PayPal user and want to send cash from anywhere else in the world, that’s also an option. Please note, however, that foreign checks are no longer accepted at UK banks — only electronic transfers. Do, however, contact me if you’d like to support me by paying directly into my account.

It’s now over ten years since I began working on Guantánamo — first of all via my book The Guantánamo Files, and, since May 2007, via this website. I recently missed the 9th anniversary of the start of my online journalism (on May 31, 2007, after a Saudi prisoner had died at Guantánamo), but you can find that first post here, and my Guantánamo archive now contains nearly 2,000 articles. In recent months, I have been assiduously covering the latest stage in Guantánamo’s long and ignoble history — the Periodic Review Boards, which function like parole boards, and have been reviewing the cases of all the prisoners not already approved for release or facing trials. These are proving successful for the prisoners — with a 73% success rate so far — and they are crucial in moving towards the closure of the prison.

Despite this, the coverage of the Periodic Review Boards in the mainstream media has generally been poor, and, ten years after I began this work, it seems that my knowledge and my voice is still necessary to shine a light on what is happening at Guantánamo, to explain what it means, and to tell the prisoners’ stories.

With your help, I will keep pushing to get Guantánamo closed throughout the next three months, focusing in particular on the PRBs, which are currently taking place twice a week, whilst also making sure that I keep an eye on any other developments, and also continuing to promote the Countdown to Close Guantánamo that I’m running through the Close Guantánamo campaign that I also run — which, incidentally, has some financial backing this year, but will be without funding next year, even though, I suspect, its presence will still be needed, as it looks unlikely that President Obama will succeed in closing the prison before he leaves office.

My thanks, as ever, for your interest in my work. As I noted above, I genuinely can’t do what I do without your help, and I will be very grateful if you can make any kind of donation to support me.

Andy Worthington

London

June 6, 2016

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.

Periodic Review Boards: Two Prisoners Recommended for Release from Guantánamo, Two Have Detention Upheld, Another Seeks Release

It’s been a busy week at Guantánamo, with two Periodic Review Boards taking place, two prisoners being approved for release after reviews in April, and two others having their ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial upheld.

The Periodic Review Boards — which involve representatives of the Departments of State, Defense, Justice and Homeland Security, as well as the office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — were established in 2013 to review the cases of all the men still held who are not facing trials (and just ten men are in this category), or who had not already been approved for release by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force, which, in 2009, reviewed the cases of all the men held when President Obama took office.

71 men were originally eligible for PRBs, a number reduced to 64 when five men were freed, and two were charged in the military commissions. 46 of the men were described as “too dangerous to release” by the task force, which acknowledged, however, that insufficient evidence existed to put them on trial — meaning, of course, that it was not evidence at all, but, in large part, consisted of unreliable statements made by the prisoners themselves, or their fellow prisoners, when the use of torture and other forms of abuse were widespread. 18 others had been recommended for prosecution by the task force, until the basis for prosecution largely collapsed after a number of highly critical appeals court rulings, in which judges dismissed some of the few convictions secured in the troubled military commission system, on the basis that the war crimes in question had been invented by Congress.

33 cases have so far been decided (see my definitive PRB list for details), and in 24 of those the review boards have recommended the prisoners for release, while upholding the detention of nine others. That is a success rate for the prisoners of 73%, which rather severely dents the credibility of the task force’s assessments, revealing them to have been seriously over-cautious.

Bashir al-Marwalah, member of a non-existent Al-Qaeda cell in Karachi, is approved for release

Four of those decisions took place last week. The first of the two men recommended for release was Bashir Nasir Ali al-Marwalah (ISN 837), a Yemeni seized in Karachi, Pakistan on September 11, 2002, the 1st anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, on the same day that “high-value detainee” and alleged 9/11 co-conspirator Ramzi bin al-Shibh was seized. Al-Marwalah was seized with five other men, who were all held and tortured in a CIA “black site” in Afghanistan before being flown to Guantánamo. Crucially, they were initially regarded as members of an active Al-Qaeda cell, planning an attack in Karachi, and were described as the “Karachi Six,” but when the first of the six, Ayub Murshid Ali Salih (ISN 836), had his PRB in February, it emerged for the first time, publicly, that the six men were nothing more than “elements of a large pool of Yemeni fighters that senior al-Qa’ida planners considered potentially available to support future operations.”

Ayub Salih was recommended for release in March, and in April Bashir al-Marwalah and another of the six, Hani Saleh Rashid Abdullah (ISN 841), also identified as Said Salih Said Nashir, had their cases reviewed. A decision has not yet been announced in Hani Abdullah’s case, but on May 31, the board announced that, by consensus, as is required, its members had “determined that continued law of war detention of [Bashir al-Marwalah] is no longer necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States.”

In making its determination, the board members “considered that, despite some minimization regarding his prior associations, the detainee showed a relatively high level of candor regarding his reasons for traveling to Afghanistan and his activities while there,” and “also noted that [he] took personal responsibility for his actions and understands the impact of those actions.” This kind of recognition, on a prisoner’s part, of the significance of their alleged wrongdoing, coupled with demonstrable contrition, is a major factor in securing a recommendation for release, as would be expected from the closest analogy to the PRBs, which, in the federal prison system, is a parole board.

The board members also considered that al-Marwalah “has taken extensive efforts to improve himself in detention through classes and keeping up with his medical knowledge, has been highly compliant with the guard staff, has not committed any significant disciplinary infractions, and has never expressed anti-American sentiment or made comments supporting extremism” — this latter point, in particular, also being a major deciding factor in a recommendation for release.

The board members also noted that al-Marwalah “has credible plans for the future, has shown an ability to achieve those plans, and had extensive letters of support to include offers to assist with his integration in a new country upon transfer” — all of which, again, are factors that assure them that the prisoners in question are motivated to build a new life and have supportive families.

In addition, the mention of al-Marwalah’s “integration in a new country upon transfer” is required because, as with all the Yemenis, the entire US establishment is unwilling to repatriate them, because of the security situation in Yemen, and third countries must be found that are prepared to offer the a new home. in al-Marwalah’s case, the board also noted that his transfer “to a country outside of Yemen” is “consistent with [his] stated desire.”

On the same day that the decision was taken in Bashir al-Marwalah’s case, another of the six, Shawqi Awad Balzuhair (ISN 838), had his case reviewed, and I’m posting details of that at the end of this article. The last two members of the non-existent “Karachi Six,” Musab Omar Ali al-Mudwani (ISN 839), aka Musa’ab al-Madhwani, and Hail Aziz Ahmed al-Maythali (ISN 840) will have their reviews on June 28 and June 30.

Karim Boston, an Afghan shopkeeper, is approved for release

The second prisoner to have his release recommended last week — on June 2 — was Karim Bostan (ISN 975), an Afghan shopkeeper and preacher regarded — implausibly, I have always thought — as the leader of an Al-Qaeda bombing cell. His case was reviewed a month ago, and two weeks ago his alleged accomplice, Obaidullah, was also approved for release.

In its final determination, the board, having again determined, by consensus, “that continued law of war detention of the detainee does not remain necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States,” made a point of stating that, although they recognized that Bostan “presents some level of threat in light of his past activities and associations,” and also noted that he “did not have a realistic vision for his post-detention life,” they “found that in light of the factors and conditions of transfer identified below, the risk [he] presents can be adequately mitigated.”

Those factors and conditions of transfer are that Bostan “has been highly compliant while in detention” and “has not expressed any intent to reengage in extremist activity or espoused any anti-US sentiment that would indicate he views the US as an enemy,” In addition, the board members noted his “expressed support for the Government of Afghanistan, the Constitution of Afghanistan, and reconciliation.”

The board members were also impressed by Bostan’s “credible statements regarding his commitment to live a peaceful life,” and had “also considered [his] efforts to improve himself while in detention and his ability to provide clear examples to the Board regarding how he has changed while in detention and his appreciation for the opportunities available to him at Guantanamo.”

In conclusion, the board recommended him for release “preferably to a country with reintegration support,” adding that, “[p]ending transfer,” he should “work on a realistic plan for reintegration.”

After unexplained ten-month wait, foot soldier Salman Rabei’i is recommended for ongoing imprisonment

Of the two men recommended of ongoing imprisonment, the first was Salman Yahya Hassan Mohammad Rabei’i (ISN 508), a Yemeni whose case was reviewed last July. A decision in his case was taken on May 19, but not announced until now, and, moreover, very little explanation was provided, just the mantra — “that continued law of war detention of the detainee remains necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States” — and a note that he “will receive a file review as soon as practicable.” File reviews are purely administrative reviews that are supposed to take place every six months for men recommended for ongoing imprisonment, pending full reviews, which take place between one and two years after the initial review.

It is impossible to speculate accurately about why the board approved Rabei’i’s ongoing imprisonment, but it may have been because he wasn’t perceived to have shown contrition for his actions, even though he only appears to have been a foot soldier. What may also have been significant, however, is the perceived extremist sympathies of some of his family members.

Uthman Abd al-Rahim Muhammad Uthman, alleged Osama bin Laden bodyguard, is recommended for ongoing imprisonment

The second man to have his detention upheld — in a decision taken on May 26, but not announced immediately — was Uthman Abd al-Rahim Muhammad Uthman (ISN 27). a Yemeni whose review took place a month before. Uthman is one of the so-called “Dirty Thirty,” a group of men captured together in December 2001, crossing from Afghanistan to Pakistan, who, implausibly, were described as bodyguards for Osama bin Laden, even though many of them were very young, and had only been in Afghanistan for a few months, and it was more sensible to regard them as, for the most part, nothing more than foot soldiers in the Taliban’s war with the Northern Alliance.

In its final determination, the board members, having determined, by consensus, that “continued law of war detention of the detainee remains necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States,” stated that they had “considered [his] past involvement in terrorist activities to include receiving combat training, staying in al-Qaeda guesthouses, fighting in the Tora Bora mountains probably against Coalition Forces, and his selection to be a bodyguard for Usama Bin Ladin.”

The board members also stated that Uthman’s “explanation for why he went to Afghanistan and what he did there was not credible,” referring, no doubt, to his insistence that he had traveled to Afghanistan to work as a missionary. They added that they “considered that [his] vague answers and almost complete lack of candor made it difficult for the Board to assess his current state of mind and intentions for the future, and that his prior statements suggests that he retains anti-US sentiments and is sympathetic to extremist causes.”

In conclusion, the board members stated that they were looking forward to reviewing his file in six months and, in the meantime, encouraged him “to continue to be compliant and take classes, to prepare a more detailed plan for the future, and to be more candid in future reviews.”

Shawki Awad Balzuhair, another member of the non-existent Al-Qaeda cell in Karachi, asks to be freed

In addition to the decisions mentioned above, two reviews also took place last week. The second of these, on June 2, attracted significant media attention, because it was for the Mauritanian prisoner Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a notorious torture victim and the author of Guantánamo Diary, a best-selling account of his rendition, torture and imprisonment. I’ll be writing about Shahi’s PRB in a separate article (and please feel free to listen to my radio interview about his case here), but for now I’m going to conclude this particular article by looking at the PRB that took place two days earlier, for Shawqi Awad Balzuhair (aka Shawki Balzuhair), a 35-year old Yemeni, and another of the non-existent “Karachi Six” Al-Qaeda cell I discussed in detail above.

Writing about his case in 2010, I stated:

In Guantánamo, Balzuhair was accused of traveling to Afghanistan in April or May 2001, attending al-Farouq [a training camp associated with Al-Qaeda in the years before the 9/11 attacks], and serving on the Taliban front lines near Bagram. In the most recent publicly available documents, it was noted that he “decided to go to Afghanistan after viewing a video about Chechnya, and became concerned about the Palestinian struggle for independence.” Balzuhair’s route out of Afghanistan apparently involved staying, in a variety of house with “about 20 others” from September to December 2001, and then living “wth a group of about 60 Arabs in the mountains of Afghanistan near Zormat.” From there, he ended up in Karachi, where, after an ill-fated diversion in Iran (as with Ayoub Saleh and Musa’ab al-Madhwani), he was seized after also staying in a house in Quetta for a month and “another house near a rail road track for another month.” As with the other five men, there were no allegations that he had engaged in combat at any point in his travels.

In its unclassified summary for his PRB, the government described him as “a low-level Yemeni militant who traveled to Afghanistan in mid-2001, received basic training at an al-Qa’ida camp, and served on the frontlines before 9/11,” adding, “Following the onset of Coalition operations, he fled to Pakistan where he met senior al-Qa’ida figures who were arranging his return to Yemen.” As with other members of the spectral “Karachi Six” cell, it was also noted that he and the other men seized “were elements of a large pool of Yemeni fighters that senior al-Qa’ida planners considered potentially available to support future operations,” and that Balzuhair himself “was probably awaiting a chance to return to Yemen when he was arrested at the Karachi safehouse.”

Turning to Guantánamo, the summary noted that Balzuhair “has been highly compliant with the guard force … since his arrival in October 2002 and has committed a low number of infractions compared to other detainees, according to Joint Task Force-Guantánamo (JTF-GTMO).” This will certainly contribute positively to his request  be recommended for release, but the summary was more critical of his cooperation — or lack of it — with interrogators, explaining that, “Early in his detention, he provided information of moderate value about the activities of al-Qa’ida leaders; however, he has also admitted to lying to interrogators based on his allegation of mistreatment and rarely participates in interrogations, suggesting he sees little value in cooperating.”

The summary also noted that he “has provided little insight into his views of extremism or violence, hindering our understanding of whether he would pursue extremist activity after detention,” although it is, I’m sure, significant that he “has not expressed or demonstrated any sympathy or support for al-Qa’ida, its global ideology, or other radical Islamic views.” The summary added that this was “probably” because of him “judging that this may improve his chances of release,” although I don’t see that as an interpretation that should be accepted uncritically, even though the summary also noted that, “[e]arly in his detention, [he] expressed hatred toward the US and said that he was being held unjustly.” Also of relevance is the assessment that he “does not appear to have any direct associations with at-large extremists.”

In contrast, it will no doubt be of concern to the board that, as the summary described it, Balzuhair “has not expressed a clear plan for how he would support himself if he left Guantánamo,” with the authors of the summary thinking that “he would struggle to acclimate to civilian life because he has admitted to dropping out of school and appears to lack vocational skills.”

In conclusion, the summary explained that Balzuhair “probably would prefer to be transferred to Yemen to be close to his family, but they probably are experiencing financial hardship because of Yemen’s ongoing conflict and we do not know if they would be able to support him financially.” This, however, is irrelevant, because, as discussed above, the entire US establishment is unwilling to repatriate any Yemenis, and, if recommended for release, third countries must be found that are prepared to offer them new homes.

Below, I’m also posting the opening statement made by Balzuhair’s personal representative, a member of the US military appointed to help him prepare for his PRB. The PR explained to the board that his “temperament will aid in his transfer as he gets along well with others, as seen by getting along with both detainees and the guard force,” and that he has been studying to become a carpenter at Guantánamo, “a versatile occupation, capable of being used throughout the world wherever he may be transferred.” The PR also explained that he has a very supportive family, who have “created a nest egg for him” via a family inheritance. No statement was included form his attorney, but he is represented, as the PR noted that his attorney has provided him with “self-study books … to enhance his ability in carpentry projects.”

Periodic Review Board Initial Full Hearing, 31 May 2016

Shawqi Awad Balzuhair, ISN 838

Personal Representative Opening Statement

Good Morning, Ladies and Gentlemen of the Board. I am the Personal Representative for Shawqi Awad Balzuhair. I have met with Mr. Balzuhair multiple times in preparation for the Periodic Review process and I can attest that he has always attended each meeting. He is quite pleasant and is looking forward to answering your questions today in hopes of reuniting with his family.

What I have learned about Shawqi through my interactions with him is that his family has prepared for his return. They will continue to be a supportive family no matter where he is transferred. While the family has considered that Shawqi may not return to Yemen, they are preparing for him financially and have created a nest egg for him. There was an inheritance left to him which has been divided among the unmarried family members. In addition, while Yemen is experiencing much unrest, all members in his family continue to work and some have two jobs. Each family member has confirmed financial support for Shawqi after his release from Guantánamo. As we know, support comes in many forms. Shawqi’s family will also continue to support him emotionally and spiritually as they have done during his years in GTMO. Of course, once he leaves GTMO, they will have a greater ability due to the freedoms allowed from cellphone and internet contact. They will be able to encourage and help him more.

Shawqi is preparing for life after GTMO by developing his mind and his skill sets. While in Guantánamo, he has developed an interest in carpentry. Based upon an instructor’s recommendation, who noted that Shawqi was able to visualize objects in 3 dimensions, Shawqi has developed a passion for building. Shawqi added math classes and requested self-study books from his Private Counsel to enhance his ability in carpentry projects. He has also taken additional classes in English, Life Skills and Art. Carpentry is a versatile occupation, capable of being used throughout the world wherever he may be transferred.

Shawqi’s temperament will aid in his transfer as he gets along well with others, as seen by getting along with both detainees and the guard force. He has learned quite a bit about other cultures while he has lived in GTMO. As [with] most detainees, he is hoping to start his life after GTMO by finding a wife. He knows that he will have to work hard and he is willing to do so, with the help of his family and the active goals he is striving towards such as learning new skills.

So, he is here today to answer your questions openly. I will be here throughout if you have any questions for me. Thank you.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose debut album, ‘Love and War,’ 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.

Sufyian Barhoumi, An Extremely Well-Behaved Algerian, Seeks Release from Guantánamo Via Periodic Review Board

Last Thursday, two days after Saeed Bakhouche, an Algerian, sought release from Guantánamo via a Periodic Review Board, a high-level, inter-agency US government review process, established in 2013, another Algerian, Sufyian Barhoumi, also went before a PRB to ask for his freedom, and was the 41st prisoner to do so. Of the 30 decisions already taken, 23 have resulted in recommendations for the prisoners’ release, while just seven have resulted in recommendations for the men’s continued detention — and even those are subject to further review. This is a success rate for the prisoners of 77%, thoroughly undermining the excessive caution and misplaced zeal for prosecution that, in 2010, led the previous high-level review process, the Guantánamo Review Task Force, to describe the men who were later made eligible for PRBs as “too dangerous to release” or as candidates for prosecution.

The former were largely groundless claims, in a prison full of statements obtained through torture and other forms of coercion, while the latter was based on a mistaken understanding of what constitutes war crimes, spelled out in a number of appeals court rulings in 2012 and 2013, which humiliated the government by dismissing some of the handful of convictions secured in the military commission trial system on the embarrassing basis that the war crimes for which the men in question has been convicted had actually been invented by Congress.

Barhoumi, whose prisoner number is 694, is 41 years old, and, as his lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights explain, he was “born and raised in Algiers, where his mother still lives and his late father practiced law.” CCR also explain that, as a young man, he “lived in various countries in Europe – Spain, France, and England – as a farm worker and then a street merchant for about four years,” before traveling to Afghanistan, and then Pakistan, where he ended up in US custody.

In US documents, he is also identified as Sufiyan Ibn Muhammad Barhumi, and his PRB, following Saeed Bakhouche’s, and, the week before, Jabran al-Qahtani’s, was the third in a row examining the cases of men seized in a house raid in Faisalabad, Pakistan, on March 28, 2002, which led to the capture of Abu Zubaydah. As I explained in my article about Saeed Bakhouche’s PRB, Zubaydah was regarded as a “high-value detainee,” and the CIA’s brutal and ineffective post-9/11 torture program was first developed for use on him.

As I also explained, however:

Crucially, the Bush administration’s claims that he was a significant figure in Al-Qaeda — no. 3 in the organization, after Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri — have been thoroughly discredited in the years since, and in 2009 the Justice Department conceded that he was not a member of Al-Qaeda, and probably had not known in advance about the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

Instead, Abu Zubaydah was the gatekeeper of a independent training camp in Afghanistan, Khaldan, which was not affiliated with Al-Qaeda, and which was closed by its emir, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, after Osama bin Laden sought to bring it under Al-Qaeda’s control. The evidence suggests that, after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, Abu Zubaydah, as would be expected from someone with a great experience of logistics, was responsible for helping men, women and children – civilians as well as soldiers – to escape from the chaos of Afghanistan, and to wait in Pakistan until arrangements could be made for them to return home.

Barhoumi was put forward for a trial by military commission in 2005, until the Supreme Court ruled in 2006, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, that the military commission trial system lacked “the power to proceed because its structures and procedures violate[d] both the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Geneva Conventions.” When Congress revived the commissions, Barhoumi was again put forward for a trial, in May 2008, along with two Saudis, Jabran al-Qahtani (see above) and Ghassan al-Sharbi (who is also eligible for a PRB), and Binyam Mohamed, a British resident freed in 2009. As I wrote when Barhoumi was charged:

[A]ccused of being a trainer for the bomb-making group, [he] has gone so far as to strenuously deny the allegations against him. In his tribunal at Guantánamo [his Combatant Status Review Tribunal], he admitted traveling to Afghanistan for military training in 1999, but pointed out that this was long before 9/11, and insisted that, having been shown a video of atrocities in Chechnya at a mosque in the UK, where he lived for two years, his intention was to train to fight in Chechnya. He explained that, after leaving Afghanistan, he traveled “from house to house,” ending up at the safe house in Faisalabad where he was seized with Abu Zubaydah. He added, however, that he was only there for ten days before the raid, and claimed that the allegations were the result of “hearsay” and of “people testifying against me.” He claimed that his interrogators told him, “people are talking about you a lot,” and suggested that, because he was arrested with Abu Zubaydah, “they dumped everything on me and said I was al-Qaeda also.”

The charges against him were then dropped (in October 2008), and were then filed again in January 2009, although they didn’t survive the change of administration, and Barhoumi has not been charged under President Obama.

After the Supreme Court granted the prisoners constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights in June 2008, in Boumediene v. Bush, Barhoumi had his habeas corpus petition turned down (in September 2009). This ruling was then confirmed by the appeals court in June 2010, as I discussed in detail at the time, in an article entitled, In Abu Zubaydah’s Case, Court Relies on Propaganda and Lies.

By 2013, he was so fed up with having become held in an endless legal limbo that he asked to be charged with war crimes, on the basis that there seemed to be no other way out of Guantánamo, but prosecutors showed no interest in charging him again.

And so, nearly three years later, Barhoumi has finally been given an opportunity to get out of Guantánamo, via a PRB that has revealed important information about him that was not previously well-known – that, as his attorney, Shayana Kadidal of the Center for Constitutional Rights explained in a submission to the board, he is a ”natural diplomat,” and popular with both his fellow prisoners and the guard force. As Kadidal put it, “I personally have never seen any other detainee treated by the guards as well as Barhoumi, even at times when relations between prisoners and the authorities were at a low point.” He added, “If the language barrier is one of the greatest causes of misunderstandings and conflict at GTMO, he’s used his language skills to help both prisoners and guards quash problems before they grew too big to tame. It has not gone unappreciated by either group.”

I hope you have time to read Kadidal’s statement in full, as I found it painted a convincing portrait of a man who “describes himself as a ‘people person,’ a born salesman,” and has “the calmness, humility, patience, and joy in living that allow him to look forward to life as a free man in the future” – in Algeria, where, it should also be noted, there are no examples of recidivism, as the government keeps a close eye on former prisoners.

In its unclassified summary for the PRB, the government confirmed Kadidal’s accounts of Barhoumi’s behavior at Guantánamo, describing how, since his arrival in June 2002, he “has accrued a low number of disciplinary infractions compared to the rest of the detainee population, and is considered to be compliant with the Guantánamo detention staff, according to JTF-GTMO reporting.” The summary added that JTF-GTMO have also stated that “[m]ost of [his] infractions have been minor instances of failing to follow instructions or camp rules, probably as a show of passive resistance or as a means to achieve individual concessions, rather than to make political or ideological statements.”

The summary also ran through his history – or a version of it – explaining how he “illegally immigrated” to UK from Algeria in the 1990s and was allegedly “radicalized and recruited at the Baker Street Mosque in London to travel to Afghanistan for jihad.” He then “obtained a falsified passport in the UK and traveled to Afghanistan in 1999, intending to fight in Chechnya but ultimately deciding to stay in Afghanistan because of tight Russian border security and because of an injury he suffered to his left hand while training to disarm land mines.”

The summary suggested that he “received advanced training at several camps in Afghanistan, including at Khaldan and Derunta,” but then runs out of conviction, noting that “he probably was not a member of al-Qa’ida or the Taliban,” although he apparently (emphasis added) “worked with multiple violent extremist groups as part of the Khaldan group, was well known by several leaders in al-Qaida, and traveled to several training camps and guest houses throughout Afghanistan between 2000 and 2001 to provide training in remote control improvised explosive devices (RCIEDs).”

He then, according to the summary, “most likely traveled to Tora Bora with members of al-Qa’ida [emphasis added, again], eventually fleeing to Pakistan and staying at several safehouses along the way while evading Pakistan authorities before finally agreeing to provide training on how to construct RCIEDs” at the safehouse of Abu Zubaydah, wrongly identified as a “well-known al-Qa’ida facilitator.” While there, the summary claimed, he “probably [emphasis added again] agreed to join Zubaydah’s Martyr’s Brigade [an alleged militia that was only mentioned for the first time in court papers in 2010] and plot further attacks against the United States.” It was also noted that he “probably blames Zubaydah for his detention at Guantánamo,” and in 2005 said, “All my problems are because I was in the house with Abu Zubaydah.”

The summary also stated that, although he “has answered questions regarding his travel to Afghanistan and the training he underwent,” he “has largely avoided implicating himself as an explosives expert or trainer,” and “has maintained in interviews throughout his detention that he only wanted to fight in Chechnya and was not a member of al-Qa’ida or any other extremist group,” claims which may well be true, although it is difficult to know if the board members would accept this, or if, as is more probable, they would have been expecting Barhoumi to accept the allegations against him, but to show contrition in order to possibly secure an approval for his release. If freed, the authorities noted that he “has stated that he would like to be reunited with his mother in Algeria,” and also noted, usefully, “We have not identified any associations between [Barhoumi] and at-large terrorists.” The summary added that, “given his skillset as an experienced RCIED expert and trainer, [he] could serve as a valuable asset to extremist groups should he seek to re-engage,” although this seems highly unlikely, as Barhoumi has shown no desire to be involved with terrorism, and, in any case, as mentioned above, the Algerian government keeps a close eye on former prisoners.

Below, I’m cross-posting the opening statement of Barhoumi’s personal representatives (military personnel appointed to help the prisoners prepare for their PRBs), who explained that he “has realized and regretted all of his mistakes,” and “has no ill-will toward the United States,” and below that Shayana Kadidal’s submission to the board.

Periodic Review Board Initial Hearing, 26 May 2016

Sufyian Barhoumi, ISN 694

Personal Representative Opening Statement

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen of the Board. As Sufyian Barhoumi’ s (ISN 694) Personal Representatives, we would like to thank the Board for allowing us this opportunity to demonstrate how Sufyian is no longer a continuing significant threat to the United States.

Sufyian comes from a large middle-class family, and when the economy of Algeria was in the depths of a serious recession, Sufyian, like many unemployed Algerian youths, decided to leave the country in search of a better opportunity. After stowing away on a ship to Europe, he literally worked his way from Spain through France and eventually ended up in the United Kingdom. While living and working in London for nearly a year and a half, he was shown videos of the Russian carnage and mayhem that were occurring in Chechnya, and he wanted to go there and help the Chechens. In order to do that, he made arrangements to travel to Afghanistan to receive some training that he would be able to use in Chechnya. However, Sufyian never made it to Chechnya; the cold weather, difficult terrain and the numerous border guards, coupled with his injuries, subsequent surgeries and physical therapy, forced him to abandon that plan. After the U.S. response to the events of September 11th, he sought to return to Algeria to be with his mother, but he was captured and brought to Guantánamo.

Since his detention in Guantánamo, Sufyian has been a compliant detainee who has been respectful of both the guard force and his fellow detainees. He has realized and regretted all of his mistakes. Sufyian seeks to put the past behind him and look only to the future. He has no ill-will toward the United States, and he believes that the time he spent at Guantánamo has allowed him the opportunity to grow up and mature. He has plans to go into business with his brothers, and his mother already has three marriage candidates selected for him.

Sufyian has realized what extremists have done and are doing, and he would tell young people not to go and fight; instead, he would encourage them to stay at home and take care of their families.

Sufyian is ready to answer any questions the Board may have for him and should be able to prove that he is no longer a continuing significant threat to the United States.

May 16, 2016

Statement of Private Counsel for Sufyian Barhoumi, ISN 694

Members of the Periodic Review Board:

My name is Shayana Kadidal. I am the managing attorney of the Guantánamo litigation project at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City. Together with my colleagues, we’ve represented Mr. Barhoumi for over a decade in his habeas proceedings, and I’ve represented him as lead counsel for more than six years. I’ve also been privileged to work with his excellent military commission defense team, who haven’t had charges to defend against in quite some time, but remain hard at work trying to find creative ways to get Sufyian back home to his mother in Algeria.

What I remember best about my first visits with Mr. Barhoumi is that I could tell even before I walked into the room that he was regarded differently than my other clients; I could sense an air of relaxation in the attitude of the guards escorting me back to the meetings, as if they felt so comfortable with my client that they knew he couldn’t pose a threat to them. The Board has before it a letter from a former guard who still remembers Barhoumi fondly more than ten years later; this is to my knowledge the first time any detainee has managed to submit a letter from a former guard in support of their release. That letter recounts how Barhoumi helped orient newcomers rotating through guard force duty at GTMO, explaining to them — in English — how things were done; how he mediated and helped defuse both camp-wide and personal disputes when they happened; how, when newbies who didn’t know how to handcuff his missing left hand would get frustrated about it, he’d defuse the several layers of tension inherent in the situation by laughing about his disability, and then would show them how to do it.

I personally have never seen any other detainee treated by the guards as well as Barhoumi, even at times when relations between prisoners and the authorities were at a low point. I’ve known plenty of detainees who spoke better English, so that alone doesn’t explain it — in fact, I think the English you’ll hear him speak today at this hearing is more a consequence of his good historical relationships with the guards, which allowed him to practice and improve his language skills during his time here, than the cause of it. If the language barrier is one of the greatest causes of misunderstandings and conflict at GTMO, he’s used his language skills to help both prisoners and guards quash problems before they grew too big to tame. It has not gone unappreciated by either group.

Even putting to one side the language skills, he is a natural diplomat: whenever he needs to raise something uncomfortable with counsel (for example, how they really should visit more often), there’s always a sense for the feelings of the other party. He’ll wait to complain about something in person in a private meeting rather than do it on a monitored call; other times he’ll route requests through intermediaries to blunt their impact. It is this same set of empathic skills that I’m guessing made him a good street merchant, that allow him to enjoy watching cheesy Hollywood movies with his military defense counsel, to befriend Yemenis and Saudis and fellow Algerian prisoners alike, and that allow him to claim the title “best striker in GTMO” — after all, in soccer you can’t score if others won’t feed you the ball. (Barhoumi’s passion for the world’s favorite sport is documented in several of the letters of support before the Board, and his claim to the title is better established now that two professional-level players have been released.) As the letter from his defense counsel notes, he’s always treated everyone with “respect regardless of race, gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation,” here in prison no less than in England and France, where he lived among people of all faiths as neighbors.

Despite losing fourteen years of his life to this facility, Barhoumi has frequently said that he has “no black heart against America.” That’s not because he’s always been treated well here — his psychological brutalization during his first few years of interrogations was well-documented in his habeas case — but rather simply because it’s in his nature to be open to the best that people have to offer. I suppose that is typical of the sort of person who picks up and moves to a new country at age 22. Even now, at nearly twice that age, he has tremendous hopes for the future.

He desperately wants to return home to his mother. In 2012 he offered very publicly to plead guilty to anything the government was willing to charge him with in order to get a date certain when his mother could see him again. The response was that there was nothing they were willing to charge him with. So here he sits, waiting for the government to figure out what if anything it truly believes he might be guilty of. The odds are he will never be tried: as his commission counsel relates, having dropped all their previous charge sheets, “it is clear from my many interactions with military prosecutors that they have no intention of charging him again.”

He has faced this situation with what the Judge called “evident” “personal strength.” In today’s hearing I’m sure you will see many sides of his personality: the proud fatalism that has helped him endure, but also along with it the calmness, humility, patience, and joy in living that allow him to look forward to life as a free man in the future.

As to that future, he sees himself living surrounded by the tight-knit family that economic circumstances first separated him from 21 years ago. The three eldest among his brothers have solid, salaried jobs, and the family owns property that will provide them flexibility in the future. Barhoumi himself will do fine: he describes himself as a “people person,” a born salesman, and I think that’s correct. He had no problem finding work buying and selling goods in Europe in his years there, and I believe he will have no problem finding his way if he goes home. They’ve talked about using some of their family capital to start a patisserie, and it appears that since the last time Barhoumi spoke to them, they’ve bought a small pizza and snack shop.

He’s also worked hard on improving himself here in prison. You already know about the classes he’s taken. A letter from one of his current commission defense counsel notes how he listened to audio book versions of English books to match sound to written word, and used to come to meetings with lists of words he didn’t understand from the English newspapers.

The fact that Barhoumi is from Algeria should make it particularly easy to decide to transfer him home. Every man returned from Guantánamo faces a mandatory period of preventative detention, and every one is then subject to a formal judicial investigation. Most have been tried for the crime of membership in terrorist organizations operating outside Algeria — which is an offense even if the group has no relationship whatsoever to Algeria — and most of the trials have resulted in convictions. Repatriated men are required to report to the police on a regular basis and are also subject to random visits by the authorities. The government also engages in extensive electronic surveillance of communications. Border controls, even in remote desert regions, are tight. As a result, remarkably few foreign fighters with ISIL have come from Algeria. No Algerian repatriated from Guantánamo has received a passport or other travel document of any sort from the Algerian government, none have been permitted to leave the country, and there have been no reported incidents of “recidivism,” either domestically or abroad, among them.

I have complete confidence that Mr. Barhoumi will not pose a threat to the national security of the United States if he is sent home to Algeria. I look forward to helping to answer the Board’s questions about all aspects of this case.

Yours sincerely,

Shayana Kadidal

Private Counsel to ISN 694

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.

It’s Now 31 Years Since the Battle of the Beanfield: Where is the Spirit of Dissent in the UK Today?

Buy my book The Battle of the Beanfield. Also available: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion.

31 years ago, the British state, under Margaret Thatcher, committed one of its most violent acts against its own citizens, at the Battle of the Beanfield, when a group of travellers — men, women and children — who were driving to Stonehenge from Savernake Forest to establish what would have been the 12th annual Stonehenge Free Festival were set upon by tooled-up police from six counties, and the Ministry of Defence. The travellers were outnumbered three to one, while the police were at the height of their use as a paramilitary force by Margaret Thatcher.

The year before, the police had crushed the miners at Orgreave (promoting calls this year for an official inquiry after the belated triumph of victims’ families against the police at the Hillsborough Inquest), and the assault on the travelling community had started shortly after, when a group of travellers were harried from a festival in the north of England. Some of this group joined up with other travellers, festival-goers and green activists at Molesworth, in Cambridgeshire, the planned location for Britain’s second cruise missile base, where a peace camp was set up, following the example of the Women’s peace camp at Greenham Common, set up in opposition to the first cruise missile base. The Molesworth camp was, in turn, shut down by the largest peacetime mobilisation of troops, in February 1985, and for the next four months the travellers were harassed until June 1, when the Battle of the Beanfield took place.

The Beanfield was a horrible example of state violence, with both short-term and long-term implications. Severe damage was done to Britain’s traveller community, who had been seeking to create an alternative culture of free festivals from May to October every year, and who, as Molesworth showed, were not just hedonists, but also had ecological and anti-nuclear aims.

I had attended the last two Stonehenge Free Festivals, and what I experienced had been an astonishing eye-opener, an alternative society that evidently continued the counter-cultural ambitions of the 1960s and 1970s, but that, by the 1980s, had run up against the intolerance of Thatcher’s vision of a new Britain, where dissenters — the “enemy within,” as she called the miners — were crushed, so that corporate capitalism could prevail unchallenged.

The Beanfield did not stamp out dissent, although it paved the way for the notion of the criminalisation of dissent to take hold, which led to repressive laws being passed that clamped down on the freedom of assembly so that it now appears to be some sort of ancient dream, and the police eventually worked out a form of crowd control — kettling — that effectively shuts down unwanted protest.

Nevertheless, following the Beanfield, the government of Margaret Thatcher, and, later, of John Major, was ambushed by the rave scene, when, every weekend, millions of ecstasy-fuelled young people partied in fields and in warehouses across the nation, and by the road protest movement, which saw creative protestors living in trees to stop road expansion programmes (a uniquely British development that does not appear to have been replicated anywhere else). This is turn led to an urban offshoot, Reclaim the Streets, that joyfully took back public spaces — roads — in a way that is now almost unimaginable.

The beginning of the end, after the creative chaos of the Major years, was, I think, the election in 1997 of Tony Blair, who, as I generally describe it, hit us all with a psychic cosh, removing our freedom through a mixture of repression and brainwashing — the former building on the laws passed by the Tories, and taking advantage of the new opportunities for repression and a message of permanent fear that was enabled by the 9/11 attacks (after a few years of serious dissent from the anti-globalisation movement), and the latter through a message of greed and materialism that infected the culture as a whole, and, it seems, significantly changed the way far too many people think.

Below, via YouTube, I’m posting ‘Operation Solstice’, the 1991 documentary the Battle of the Beanfield, and the subsequent trial, in a version that co-director Gareth Morris produced for the 30th anniversary of the Battle of the Beanfield last year:

Every year, the Beanfield anniversary reminds me how much has been lost, and while I’m aware that this is, in part, because I’m becoming older, nothing has yet persuaded me that the current culture — selfish, self-obsessed, materialistic and corporate-enslaved, and with an almost inescapable obsession with suppressing anything that resembles a viable counter-culture by pricing it out or buying it up — has much about it worth celebrating.

We may have grown up to overcome much of the dysfunction that fuelled a lot of the iconoclasm of the ’70s — which has to be a good thing, of course — but in many ways that has left us, in general, quiescent, prone to believe the lies told us by new age-saturated charlatans in PR and marketing, who have convinced us that there is no such things as righteous anger (there is), and unable to fight back against those who have taken advantage of the lack of opposition to feather their own obscenely greedy nests, at the expense of the domestic poor, the globally exploited and impoverished, and, of course, the environment.

To my mind, whatever victories have been achieved in our superficially clever, insatiably greedy society, with its promise of billions of everything — from food, to clothes, to gadgets, to all the treats we’re told we deserve because we’re worth it, because we’re special — are offset by catastrophic climate change, by the greatest refugee crisis of our lifetimes, and by the self-obsessed miserable, isolationist whingeing of an aging population of people who, far from being deprived of anything, are, materially, the most fortunate generation in human history.

As I mark this sad anniversary for the 31st time, I have a dream — of the revival of a vibrant counter-culture — to tear down the dull complacency of the materialistic mainstream, with its smug empty triumphalism, and its cold, cold heart.

Below, as a bonus, I’m posting, also via YouTube, ‘Life in the Fast Lane – The No M11 Story’ by Operation Solstice co-director Neil Goodwin and Mayyasa Al-Malazi, about the road protest movement:

For more on the Beanfield, see my 2009 article for the Guardian, Remember the Battle of the Beanfield, and my accompanying article, In the Guardian: Remembering the Battle of the Beanfield, which provides excerpts from The Battle of the Beanfield. Also see The Battle of the Beanfield 25th Anniversary: An Interview with Phil Shakesby, aka Phil the Beer, a prominent traveller who died six years ago, Remember the Battle of the Beanfield: It’s the 27th Anniversary Today of Thatcher’s Brutal Suppression of Traveller Society, Radio: On Eve of Summer Solstice at Stonehenge, Andy Worthington Discusses the Battle of the Beanfield and Dissent in the UK, It’s 28 Years Since Margaret Thatcher Crushed Travellers at the Battle of the Beanfield, Back in Print: The Battle of the Beanfield, Marking Margaret Thatcher’s Destruction of Britain’s Travellers, It’s 29 Years Since the Battle of the Beanfield, and the World Has Changed Immeasurably and It’s 30 Years Since Margaret Thatcher Trashed the Travellers’ Movement at the Battle of the Beanfield.

For reflections on Stonehenge and the summer solstice, see Stonehenge and the summer solstice: past and present, It’s 25 Years Since The Last Stonehenge Free Festival, Stonehenge Summer Solstice 2010: Remembering the Battle of the Beanfield, RIP Sid Rawle, Land Reformer, Free Festival Pioneer, Stonehenge Stalwart, Happy Summer Solstice to the Revellers at Stonehenge — Is it Really 27 Years Since the Last Free Festival?, Stonehenge and the Summer Solstice: On the 28th Anniversary of the Last Free Festival, Check Out “Festivals Britannia”, Memories of Youth and the Need for Dissent on the 29th Anniversary of the last Stonehenge Free Festival, 30 Years On from the Last Stonehenge Free Festival, Where is the Spirit of Dissent? and Stonehenge and the Summer Solstice, 30 Years After the Battle of the Beanfield.

Also see my article on Margaret Thatcher’s death, “Kindness is Better than Greed”: Photos, and a Response to Margaret Thatcher on the Day of Her Funeral.

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.