Andy Worthington's Blog, page 75

Please Send Us Your Photos for May 14, Marking 250 Days Left in the Countdown to Close Guantánamo

Print off a poster here, take a photo with it, like former Guantánamo prisoner Moazzam Begg, and send it to us!

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.

Next Saturday, May 14, is the next milestone in the Countdown to Close Guantánamo that we launched in January, to count down the last year of the Obama presidency, and to remind President Obama of his promise to close the prison before he leaves office, which he first made on his second day in office in January 2009.

Launched on January 20 with exactly one year to go — by Close Guantánamo co-founder Andy Worthington and music legend Roger Waters on Democracy Now! — the countdown has continued with posters every 50 days. 350 days was on February 4, and 300 days was on March 25, and we’re now asking you for your photos for next Saturday, May 14, marking 250 days to go.

Over 300 supporters from across the US and around the world — including some celebrities — have so far sent in photos, which can be seen here and here, and we are delighted to invite you to join them. Shown above is former Guantánamo prisoner Moazzam Begg, who I photographed at a Parliamentary briefing last month about the case of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Guantánamo prisoner and best-selling author, whose memoir, Guantánamo Diary, written in the prison, was published last year to widespread acclaim. See here for the campaign to free Slahi.

Please also visit, like, share and tweet the Gitmo Clock, which we recently relaunched as part of the Countdown to Close Guantánamo, and which is counting down the days, hours, minutes and seconds until the end of Obama’s presidency. The original clock was launched in 2013 to count how many days it was since President Obama’s May 2013 promise to resume releasing prisoners from Guantánamo, after nearly three years in which releases had largely ground to a halt because of unprincipled Congressional opposition, and the president ‘s refusal to spend political capital overcoming those obstacles, even though he had the means to do so.

At the time, 166 men were still held, but in the last three years 86 men have been freed, leaving just 80 men still held. At the start of the year, via the Pentagon, President Obama finally delivered a long-promised plan to close Guantánamo to Congress, which I wrote about here. It has been reassuring to hear that the administration intends to release all the prisoners approved for release by summer — currently 26 of the men still held, and it is also reassuring to hear that the administration intends to hold Periodic Review Boards for all those who are eligible for them by the fall. The PRBs are reviewing the cases of everyone not already approved for release (by President Obama’s high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force in 2010) or facing trials (and just ten men are in this latter category), and have already approved 20 men for release.

We hope that several dozen more men — at least — are also approved for release by PRBs, but for President Obama to close Guantánamo he either needs the support of Congress, or, if that is not possible, he needs to close the prison via an executive order, something that former White House counsel Greg Craig and Cliff Sloan, the former State Department envoy for Guantánamo closure, believe is possible.

We also hope that Congress can be persuaded to support President Obama, for the reasons we have always explained — because Guantánamo damages America’s belief that it is founded on, and respects the rule of law every day that it remains open, and because it also damages its reputation around the world.

We are aware that some advocates for Guantánamo’s closure are adamant that, for the prison to be closed, no one must be transferred to the US mainland to be held without charge or trial. However, we must respectfully disagree with this position. The US has the right to hold prisoners seized in wartime without charge or trial until the end of hostilities, and although the Guantánamo prisoners have been deprived of the rights to which they were entitled under the Geneva Conventions, the US government is still able to make a case that they are held according to the laws of war.

Moreover, if they are moved to the US mainland, we fervently believe that they will have rights under the US Constitution that, to date, they have been deprived of — in particular, since appeals court judges in Washington, D.C., in 2010-11, cynically gutted habeas corpus of all meaning for the prisoners, despite their resounding Supreme Court victories in 2004 and 2008. It is also noticeable that the Supreme Court has persistently failed to take back control of detainee issues from the appeals court.

Describing the prisoners’ rights if moved to the US mainland, “Close Guantánamo” co-founder Tom Wilner has explained:

If the detainees are brought to the United States, the government loses its prime argument for denying them constitutional rights. The imprisonment of anyone without charge or trial on the US mainland is radically at odds with any concept of constitutional due process. Bringing them to the United States means that they would almost certainly have full constitutional rights and the ability to effectively challenge their detentions in court. They would then no longer be dependent solely on the largesse of the Obama administration, or whatever administration happens to follow it, but could gain relief through the courts.

That said, it would obviously make sense for the US to prosecute anyone it wants to carry on holding who is allegedly involved in any way with terrorism, and we hope the administration is looking closely not only at prosecuting in federal court those currently in interminable pre-trial hearings in the largely discredited military commissions, but also in adding to their number anyone else against whom a criminal case can be made.

In conclusion, we hope that President Obama recognizes the importance of fulfilling his promise to close Guantánamo before he leaves office. If he is succeeded by a Democrat, it is probable that efforts to close the prison will continue, but that is not the case with the Republican challengers, and, in any case, the health of President Obama’s legacy depends on not having failed, over the course of eight long years, to fulfill a promise to close the stain on America’s reputation that is Guantánamo that he made back in January 2009.

Thank you for your support.

What else you can do

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

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

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

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

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

Ha Ha! The Tories Lose London

[image error]Good news for a change, as the Tories definitively lose control of London (OK, I’m slightly jumping the gun, but the Guardian is reporting that “Sadiq Khan ‘has won’ London mayoral race,” and Jeremy Corbyn has already sent Khan his congratulations). The Tories, who were already down in terms of MPs after last year’s General Election (when 45 of the capital’s 73 Parliamentary seats went to Labour), have now lost the Mayor, with Labour’s Sadiq Khan soundly beating Zac Goldsmith, and in the capital-wide elections for members of the Greater London Assembly, with 14 of the 25 seats counted, Labour had nine seats (a gain of one), and the Tories had five (a loss of one). The BBC reported that 43% of Londoners had voted Labour, 31% had voted Tory, and the Green Party had come third.

This is good news for Sadiq Khan, of course, but also for Jeremy Corbyn, in his first electoral test as Labour Party leader, and for the Labour Party as a whole the results are a vindication of his leadership — especially satisfying after the artificial anti-Semitism row that Labour right-wingers and a throughly unprincipled mainstream media were all too delighted to promote. At the time of writing Labour had held almost all its council seats across England, and had also held 29 seats in Wales (just short of a majority). The only dimmed light is in Scotland, where the SNP continues to replace them as the party of the left — and where, shockingly, the Tories pushed them into third place.

In London, of course, the Tories persistently shot themselves in the foot. Zac Goldsmith failed to connect with people and looked like he didn’t want the job — and it’s interesting to see how people aren’t fooled by a lack of desire for the job. However, his woes multiplied in the last few weeks when he hired the black propagandist Lynton Crosby, the Australian who has been behind the Tories’ relentlessly black propaganda for the last six years, which, it is important to note, is single-handedly responsible for the horrendous increase in the petty hatreds that have come to typify modern Britain — dominated, in particular, by racism, but also targeting anyone vulnerable, as can be seen by the government’s relentless assault on the unemployed and the disabled.

In the last few weeks of the campaign, Goldsmith tried to smear Sadiq Khan for his association with alleged terrorist sympathisers, but all that was achieved was to alienate London’s large Muslim community, many members of which, it turned out, were natural Tory voters, being, by and large, socially conservative. The main focus of the Tories’ own goal was Muslim community organiser and human rights campaigner Suliman Gani, who Goldsmith described as a “repellent” individual, based on false claims that he is some sort of extremist, while failing to remember that he had actually been photographed with Gani, and failing to do any research to establish that Gani is a man of peace who despises extremism, and also that he had been very strongly inclined to vote Conservative.

Prime Minister David Cameron them jumped into the fray, disgracefully alleging that Gani was a supporter of Islamic State (IS), when nothing could be further from the truth, as the journalist Peter Oborne demonstrated in a hard-hitting column on Monday, Open letter to Downing Street: You still owe Suliman Gani an apology, and as myself and others have demonstrated by launching a petition on Change.org, “David Cameron must apologise to Suliman Gani,” which I encourage you to sign, as we seek to hold David Cameron accountable for his disgraceful lies and distortions.

Last night, I’m glad to note, Andrew Boff, the leader of the Tories on the GLA, laid into Goldsmith’s campaign. He said the negative campaigning about Muslims “was effectively saying that people of conservative religious views are not to be trusted and you should not share a platform with them. That’s outrageous.” He added that the campaign had “done real damage” and had “blown up bridges” the Conservatives had built with London’s Muslim communities, and today Lady Warsi, the former chairman of the Tory party, tweeted that Goldsmith’s campaign “lost us the election, our reputation & credibility on issues of race and religion.”

Anything that damages the Tories is to be welcomed, after the last six years of ideologically-motivated austerity, in which the poor, the unemployed and the disabled have been victimised in particular, hard-working people have been — and continue to be — relentlessly squeezed (across class barriers, and with a devastating effect on almost anyone who is young), and everything has been done that is possible to make the rich richer and to facilitate the dominance of the global super-rich.

In London, the dominant theme of Tory rule under the colossally self-serving Boris Johnson has — with central government backing — been an unfettered housing bubble, including the creation of swathes of overpriced housing in ever taller tower blocks, across the city as a whole, a squeeze on social housing, and the lack of any limits on private rents, which have spiralled out of control, extorting an ever-increasing amount of the weekly pay of hard-working Londoners from all walks of life, and facilitating the growth of a whole new legion of despicable slum landlords.

So it’s good riddance to Boris, whose political career will, hopefully, sink if we vote to stay in the EU in six weeks’ time — and what a wasted eight years it has been for the people of London in general. I hope never again to have to put up with so many people seduced by a privileged clown who is allegedly funny, when (a) he isn’t, and (b) being funny is the qualification for a comedian, not for a politician in charge of a globally important city.

Good news politically is rare in the UK. At 16, I watched helplessly, too young to vote, as Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister and proceeded to burn Britain to the ground to satiate her hatred of the working class, and to shift the country’s focus to one based on greed, a miserable and poisonous legacy that has dominated my entire adult life.

Thatcher made my 20s miserable, although she couldn’t completely destroy the spirit of dissent, as the sudden and unexpected emergence of the rave scene at the end of the ’80s demonstrated, along with the widespread resistance to the hated poll tax. The John Major years were, in hindsight, a time when the establishment’s grip on society was shockingly weak, as young people undermined them repeatedly, raving, road protesting and refusing to accept the dull conformity and the yawning chasm between rich and poor that is central to a greed-based, selfish society.

Then we had Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, who, of course, were, more than anything, a continuation of Tory rule, and a disappointment in myriad ways — not just because of Blair’s crusader-like support for the illegal invasion of Iraq and the enthusiastic embrace of George W. Bush’s cruel, inept and misconceived “war on terror,” but also because of the party’s embrace of the City, banks and corporations as the drivers of policy, and the placing of a huge housing bubble as the heart of the economy, which, of course, was a precursor to the current bubble under the Tories, and was only derailed — temporarily — by the banker-led global crash of 2008, for which no one has been held accountable. And it was this crisis, of course, which, with an almost inconceivable sleight of hand, facilitated the rise of the Tories under David Cameron and George Osborne and their various cabinets of cruel and inadequate ministers, and their nasty austerity scam that continues to plague us.

So against this backdrop, I can’t help but rejoicing in the fall of the Tories in London, and the widespread demonstration of support for Jeremy Corbyn, as a socialist leader of the Labour Party. For London’s sake, I hope Sadiq Khan remembers that the people of London don’t need Boris-lite, but need someone who genuinely cares about them and is not afraid to embrace socialism, but for now, at least, I’d like to congratulate him, a Muslim, and the son of bus driver, on becoming London’s Mayor — and helping to deal a major blow to the credibility of the Tories that, I fervently hope, is a taste of much more to come.

Note: In celebration, why not have a listen to my band The Four Fathers playing my song, Tory Bullshit Blues? I’m happy to tell you that, yesterday, on Election Day, myself and band member Richard Clare re-recorded it, with me delivering a new vocal performance and Richard playing a new guitar part on his recently-purchased and rather beautiful Ibanez guitar. I’ll be making the new version available as a download very soon, as well as another version we recorded yesterday for the US market, Neo-Liberal Bullshit Blues, which features slightly amended lyrics — mentioning Ronald Reagan instead of Thatcher, and Donald Trump.

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.

On Polling Day, Friends of Muslim Community Organiser Suliman Gani Launch Petition Demanding Apology from David Cameron for Making False Allegations Against Him

Please sign and share the petition, calling for David Cameron to apologise to Suliman Gani, which currently has over 1,100 signatures.

Yesterday evening, friends of Suliman Gani launched a petition on Change.org, urging Prime Minister David Cameron to retract allegations he made two weeks ago about Muslim community organiser Suliman Gani. At Prime Minister’s Questions, David Cameron called him a supporter of Islamic State (IS), when nothing could be further from the truth. Mr Gani has, in fact, appeared at an event called ‘The Evils of Isis’, at which he condemned their actions, and has repeatedly explained how their actions are un-Islamic.

The Prime Minister’s false allegations were part of an effort to undermine Sadiq Khan prior to today’s London Mayoral elections, which also involved Zac Goldsmith, who called Mr. Gani “one of the most repellent figures in this country”, while failing to remember that he had a photo taken with Mr. Gani at an event last year, and also failing to recognise that Mr. Gani has long expressed support for and interest in the Conservative Party.

Today, as Londoners go to the polls to vote for the capital’s next Mayor, please sign and share the petition , and please vote wisely.

Mr. Gani’s friends, who include the campaigners Joanne MacInnes and Joy Hurcombe, the neurologist and campaigner Dr. David Nicholl, the author Anna Perera and myself, call on David Cameron to “retract his words and issue a full and unreserved apology in the House of Commons at the earliest opportunity,” and remind him of the code of conduct for all government ministers, including himself, which he updated last October. Paragraph 1.2.c states: “It is of paramount importance that ministers give accurate and truthful information to Parliament, correcting any inadvertent error at the earliest opportunity. Ministers who knowingly mislead Parliament will be expected to offer their resignation.”

I first wrote about the various slanders against Suliman Gani two weeks ago, in an article entitled, David Cameron, Zac Goldsmith and Andrew Neil Owe Suliman Gani An Apology for Calling Him “Repellent” and an IS Supporter, which was very well received. Since then, others have become involved in challenging the vile allegations made by David Cameron and Zac Goldsmith; in particular, the journalist Peter Oborne, formerly the chief political commentator of the Daily Telegraph, from which he resigned last year.

Peter Oborne is one of the few establishment figures to tackle racism and Islamophobia where he sees them being used cynically by politicians for political gain — or even as a genuine manifestation of their own biased worldview — and on Monday he published an open letter on Middle East Eye entitled, Open letter to Downing Street: You still owe Suliman Gani an apology, which is well worth reading.

At the same time, I was editing a petition for Suliman Gani that was first drafted by the campaigner Joy Hurcombe, and which was launched yesterday evening by another campaigning friend, Joanne MacInnes. It had been another busy day, as David Cameron repeated his lies about Suliman Gani at Prime Minister’s Questions, and Mr. Gani himself got a few high-profile opportunities to answer back — on ITV News, where he said, “I wish I could sue the Prime Minister,” and on Sky News. Also check out the Daily Mirror‘s coverage.

The text of the petition is below:

David Cameron must apologise to Suliman Gani

On 20th April, during Prime Minister’s Question Time, David Cameron made a damaging and unfounded allegation about Suliman Gani, a British citizen, a teacher and broadcaster, and the former imam of Tooting Islamic Centre, which we call on him to retract.

Seeking to undermine Labour’s Mayoral candidate Sadiq Khan, he said that Khan had shared platforms with extremists, and proceeded to name Suliman Gani, describing him as a supporter of Islamic State (IS). Nothing could be further from the truth. Suliman Gani is a man of peace and a campaigner for human rights who has spoken out publicly against the evils of IS and has regularly engaged in events designed to bring different faiths together.

This personal, disgraceful attack on a well-known and widely respected figure in the Muslim community was made using parliamentary privilege and if expressed outside Parliament would be regarded as defamatory and libellous.

It has caused great distress to Suliman Gani and his family, as well as the many members of the Muslim community and other communities who know him. The Prime Minister must follow the code of conduct for all government ministers, including himself, which he updated last October. Paragraph 1.2.c states: “It is of paramount importance that ministers give accurate and truthful information to Parliament, correcting any inadvertent error at the earliest opportunity. Ministers who knowingly mislead Parliament will be expected to offer their resignation.”

The Prime Minister must retract his words and issue a full and unreserved apology in the House of Commons at the earliest opportunity.

Please support this appeal from friends of Suliman Gani.

Joanne MacInnes

Joy Hurcombe

Dr. David Nicholl

Anna Perera

Andy Worthington

Imogen Tranchell

Ray Silk

Helen White

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 Yemeni “Forever Prisoners” Seek Release from Guantánamo Via Periodic Review Boards

Last week, two more Periodic Review Boards took place for men held in the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The PRBs, which began in November 2013, are reviewing the cases of all the men still held who are not facing trials or were not already approved for release by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established shortly after taking office in January 2009.

The PRBs that took place last week were for the 32nd and 33rd prisoners to have their cases considered. Of the previous 31, 20 have so far been approved for release, eight have had their ongoing imprisonment recommended, and three are awaiting results. Of the decisions taken, the prisoners’ success rate is 71%, a figure that is a stern rebuke to the task force, which either described them as “too dangerous to release,” while conceding that there was insufficient evidence to put them on trial, meaning that there are serious problems with the so-called “evidence,” or recommended them for prosecution in a system — the military commissions — that is so discredited that, after the task force made its recommendations, appeals court judges began overturning some of the few convictions achieved in the commissions, on the basis that the war crimes for which the prisoners had been convicted were not legitimate war crimes at all but had been invented by Congress.

Most of the PRBs to date have been for the “forever prisoners,” those mistakenly described as “too dangerous to release,” and last week’s PRBs were for two more from this group.

Uthman Abd al-Rahim Muhammad Uthman, first ordered to be freed by a judge in 2010

The first man, Uthman Abd al-Rahim Muhammad Uthman (ISN 027), is 36 years old, and, according to the government’s unclassified summary for his PRB, “left Yemen to participate in jihad in Afghanistan.” This much may be true, although Uthman has always maintained that he was a missionary. It may well also be true, as alleged, that he fought in Afghanistan’s Tora Bora mountains, although the authorities’ claim that this was “probably against Coalition Forces” is rather far-fetched, as no western forces were on the ground, only Afghan proxies. What is certainly true is that, in December 2001, he ended up crossing from Afghanistan to Pakistan, “where he was detained,” and was subsequently flown to Guantánamo when the prison opened in January 2002.

What is less clear is whether, as alleged, he was “selected to be a bodyguard for Usama bin Ladin,” as he was just 23 years old at the time, and had only been in Afghanistan since March 2001. In Guantánamo, he and others caught with him have long been described as the “Dirty Thirty,” and have all been accused of being bodyguards for bin Laden, but the evidence has never existed to back up this claim.    One of the men who made the claim is Yasim Basardah (ISN 252), a Yemeni widely acknowledged — including by the US authorities — as Guantánamo’s most prolific liar, who made false claims about at least 120 of his fellow prisoners. In Uthman’s classified military file, released by WikiLeaks in 2011, it is noted that Basardah “identified detainee as a UBL bodyguard whom he saw eating with UBL,” and “felt that due to detainee’s close friendship with UBL that he may have been a guard for UBL for a substantial period of time.”

Another dubious witness is Abdu Ali al-Haji Sharqawi (ISN 1457), aka Sharqawi Abdu Ali Al Hajj, who was recommended for ongoing imprisonment by his PRB just three weeks ago. Uthman’s file stated that Sharqawi “recognised detainee as an individual who became a UBL bodyguard several months prior to 11 September 2001,” but as a US judge, District Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr., noted in February 2010, while evaluating Uthman’s habeas corpus petition, Sharqawi’s statements, and those of another prisoner, Sanad al-Kazimi (ISN 1453), were unreliable because they were both tortured in CIA “black sites.”

Back in February 2010, Judge Kennedy granted Uthman’s habeas petition, as I wrote about in an article entitled, Judge Rules Yemeni’s Detention at Guantánamo Based Solely on Torture, but the government appealed, and in March 2011 that ruling was reversed by the D.C. Circuit Court in a politically-motivated ruling that I dissected in a hard-hitting article at the time, entitled, Mocking the Law, Judges Rule that Evidence Is Not Necessary to Hold Insignificant Guantánamo Prisoners for the Rest of Their Lives.

Five years after this ruling, Uthman maintains, as he always has, that he was not involved with Al-Qaeda. As the unclassified summary for his PRB states, “In interviews, [he] has never admitted to being part of al-Qa’ida or being a bin Ladin bodyguard, and has maintained that he was in Afghanistan to teach Islamic law.” The summary also notes that, according to Joint Task Force Guantánamo, he “has been mostly compliant at the Guantánamo detention facility, and “has committed less than 80 infractions since his arrival — a low number relative to other detainees — the majority of which have been non-violent failures to comply with the guard force.”

Nevertheless, the authorities note how his “statements while at Guantánamo suggest that he retains anti-US sentiments and is sympathetic to extremist causes,” although no examples are cited. It is also noted that he “has received one letter from a former detainee suspected of reengaging in terrorist activities, but did not respond” — a statement that I find shocking because of its casual intrusion on his privacy, and the inference that, if he had respond to a letter sent to him by a former prisoner he would have been tarnished by association.

Below, I’m posting the opening statements made by his personal representatives (military personnel assigned to help him with his PRB) and his attorney, David Remes. The personal representatives were clearly impressed by him, describing him as “polite, sincere and pleasant,” and as having “proven that he has a well-developed set of ethics and a sharp sense of right and wrong.” They added that he “has stated to us on many occasions that he harbors no ill will to the United States for his detention and has a mutual respect for all countries,” and note supportively his business plans (for a sesame oil business), his supportive family in Yemen and Saudi Arabia, and his willingness “to attend a rehabilitation program” — in Saudi Arabia, presumably — “and live his life in peace.”

David Remes stressed Uthman’s “quick mind, and his easygoing and good-humored temperament,” and his business acumen, and clearly hoped repatriation to Yemen would be possible, although I am not convinced of the wisdom of this approach, as the entire US establishment is unwilling to repatriate any Yemenis, because of the unrest on Yemen, and it seems to me that supporting resettlement in Saudi Arabia (as happened recently with nine Yemenis) is the most practical approach.

Below these statements I look at the case of the second Yemeni reviewed last week, Bashir Nasir Ali al-Marwalah (ISN 837).

Periodic Review Board Initial Hearing, 26 Apr 2016

Uthman Abd Al-Rahim Muhammad Uthman, ISN 027

Personal Representative Opening Statement

Ladies and gentlemen of the Board, good morning. We are the Personal Representatives for Uthman Abd al-Rahim Muhammad Uthman, ISN 027. In our submission, we have provided you with information that demonstrates Mr. Uthman does not pose a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States. His family is ready to provide support after his transfer, and most importantly, he is willing to attend a rehabilitation program and live his life in peace.

As Uthman’s Personal Representatives, we’ve met with him face to face on several occasions over the past months. Throughout our interactions, we have found him to be polite, sincere and pleasant. He has proven that he has a well-developed set of ethics and a sharp sense of right and wrong. He has stated to us on many occasions that he harbors no ill will to the United States for his detention and has a mutual respect for all countries.

Uthman’s Personal Counsel, David Remes, has had regular contact with Uthman’s family members. Uthman’s family including his mother, sister and two brothers living in Saudi Arabia are ready and willing to support him in his homecoming. In addition, you have documents from Uthman detailing his desire to start a sesame oil business which he has explored in detailed, to include diversifying into a roadside food cart business.

Last month he lost his brother-in-law to the war in Yemen. He was a member of the Yemeni Army. Uthman has told us, that he views his time in Guantánamo as a learning experience. In Yemen, and subsequently in Afghanistan, he stated he did not have access to television or newspapers like he does now which caused him to have a distorted view of the world.

Uthman has demonstrated that he is open minded and willing to change when he sees hope of a better future. He is 36 years old and wishes to begin to live his life again as soon as possible and start a family of his own. He wishes to put this all behind him and build a normal, healthy life outside Guantánamo. Accordingly, we do not believe that Uthman is a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States.

Periodic Review Board

Statement of David Remes

Private Counsel for Uthman Abd Al-Rahim Muhammad Uthman

April 26, 2016

Good morning. My name is David Remes. I am private counsel for Uthman Abd al-Rahim Muhammad Uthman, ISN 27. I have represented Uthman in his habeas corpus case since July 2004. I have met with him countless times. As I will explain, I hope that the Board will approve Uthman for transfer, with a recommendation that he be repatriated to Yemen.

Uthman would return to a stable, tightly-knit family centered on the mother, the family’s beating heart. He would return to a family with the means to support him while he gets his bearings. His brother who assumed the role of bread-winner 30 years ago, after their father died in a bitter civil war, does not earn merely a “decent living,” as the translation of Uthman’s statement puts it. At the oil company where he has worked for 25 years, his brother, in fact, is both highly regarded and highly paid. The family is relatively affluent. Should Uthman be resettled in Saudi Arabia, his relatives there also have the means to sustain him.

There is no question that Uthman will hit the ground running. Before he went to Afghanistan, Uthman was a successful designer and manufacturer of men’s and women’s clothing wear. He knew his market and catered to it with the trendiest fashions. Uthman’s quick mind, and his easygoing and good-humored temperament, destine him for happiness and success in anything he tries to do.

Uthman’s immediate objective is to reunite with his mother and family. Obviously, that means repatriating him. I have absolutely no concern that Uthman would “rejoin the fight,” whether he is repatriated to Yemen or resettled anywhere else. Just as important, he would return not to Aden itself but to Little Aden. Separated from Aden by the wide Al-Tawahi Harbor, Little Aden has been relatively undisturbed by the turmoil in Aden. Even in Aden, the forces of President Abdrabu Mansur Hadi appear to have the upper hand.

In repatriating Uthman to Yemen, the United States would not only be reuniting a strong, loving family, it would be returning a young man, still in his prime, who can succeed and actually contribute to the community around him. He should be approved for transfer.

Thank you.

Bashir Nasir Ali al-Marwalah, part of a non-existent Al-Qaeda plot

The second PRB last week was for Bashir Nasir Ali al-Marwalah (ISN 837), also 36, who is one of a group of six men seized in house raids in Karachi, Pakistan on September 11, 2002, on the same day that alleged 9/11 co-conspirator Ramzi bin al-Shibh was seized. The six men were then sent to CIA-run torture prisons for six weeks before being sent to Guantánamo. They were initially regarded as recruits for a specific terrorist attack, although the government has long since walked away from this claim, as became apparent when the first of the six, Ayub Murshid Ali Salih (ISN 836), had his PRB in February, and was approved for release in March. Since then, another of the six has had a hearing, although the decision has not yet been announced. Another of the six has his PRB scheduled for May 31.

In an article in October 2010, I described al-Marwalah’s story as follows:

In Guantánamo, al-Marwalah, who had studied nursing in Yemen, admitted traveling to Afghanistan in September 2000 and training at al-Farouq and another camp, but he added that he then returned to Yemen to see his family, and especially his father, who was ill. He said that he then returned to Afghanistan in August 2001 and attended al-Farouq for a second time, but refuted an allegation that he had participated in military operations against the US-led coalition, and said that he had fled to Pakistan after the US-led invasion began. When the tribunal asked him why he had gone to Afghanistan, he said that he wanted to train to fight in Chechnya, and when he was asked, “Are you a member of al-Qaeda?” he said, “I don’t know. I know I am an Arab fighter” (although he also noted that he had not engaged in any actual combat).

In the government’s most recent publicly available allegations, it was noted that, unlike other men who had traveled to Tora Bora, al-Marwalah “and about 400 others” were evacuated to Khost, after “approximately four weeks moving back and forth between two guest houses, one in Kabul, and the other in Bagram,” and that, after traveling through Pakistan, he “stayed in a safe houses” [sic] in Karachi “from July to September 2002.”

These accounts are very similar to what the government has in its unclassified summary, in which it is claimed that al-Marwalah “was a low-level Yemeni militant who traveled to Afghanistan in the fall of 2000 to support the jihadist cause in Chechnya and train to fight with Muslims against the Russians. He received instruction at an al-Qa’ida camp, returned to Sanaa, Yemen in December 2000, and then travelled again to Afghanistan in fall 2001 and received additional militant training. After 9/11, [he] briefly went to the front lines against the Northern Alliance near Bagram, Afghanistan, although he claimed he never saw action [and] subsequently moved through a series of safehouses in Afghanistan and Pakistan, possibly waiting to return to Yemen.”

Refuting the claims that he was part of an Al-Qaeda plot, the summary described him as “one of the Yemenis arrested during the 11 September 2002 raids in Karachi, Pakistan later labelled as the ‘Karachi Six’ based on concerns that they were part of an al-Qa’ida operational cell intended to support a future attack.” Crucially, the summary added, “We judge that this label more accurately reflects the common circumstances of their arrest and that it is more likely the six Yemenis were elements of a large pool of Yemeni fighters that senior al-Qa’ida planners considered potentially available to support future operations.”

The summary added, specifically dealing with al-Marwalah’s case, that, “Although his role in al-Qa’ida operational plotting is unverified, his last will and testament found in the Karachi raids included a martyrdom statement.” This is meant to sound significant, and may have had some significance for the 23-year old al-Marwalah, although I don’t see it as relating to the 36-year old currently at Guantánamo.

The summary also noted that, at Guantánamo, al-Marwalah has been extremely well-behaved. He “has been highly compliant with the guard staff and has committed no significant disciplinary infractions apart from participating in one non-religious hunger strike in 2013,” the summary stated. It was also noted that, in debriefings, he “has never admitted to an affiliation with al-Qa’ida, has never expressed anti-American sentiment, and has denied any role in or knowledge of future terrorist activity against the US.” However, a note of caution was sounded with the assessment that some of his statements “suggest deception and withholding of information, including an unwillingness to expand on his activities in Afghanistan and Pakistan, his knowledge of senior al-Qa’ida members, and his understanding of al-Qa’ida operations and martyrdom.”

With what I regard as unnecessary caution, the summary added that, “As a result, while [al-Marwalah] has voiced a desire to return to his family, get married, and get a job upon release, we do not know if this intent is genuine.” It was also noted that he “has maintained close contact with his Sanaa-based family, including two brothers who probably are involved with AQAP [Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula], one of whom is currently in prison in Sanaa.” The “probably” in the previous sentence rather undermines its intended impact, but in any case, although the summary concluded with a warning that, “Should he reconnect with his brothers upon release, they could provide him access to extremist networks in Yemen and the opportunity to reengage,” even if the willingness was there, which I find unlikely, he will not in any case be repatriated to Yemen, and if approved for release will have to be found a third country prepared to offer him a new home.

Below I’m posting the opening statements of his personal representatives and his attorney, Erin E. Thomas, who made a good case for his release. The representatives described him as “a serious, thoughtful man” from “a large family that works in the medical field,” and stressed how he has retained his interest in medicine at Guantánamo, assisting his fellow prisoners and engaging with medical personnel, and has also learned English, and also noted how he “has learned from his mistakes and deeply regrets his actions in the past.” Erin Thomas also highlighted his regrets, his dedication to medicine, to learning English, and to art, and also described in detail the support of his family, including “working with the Red Cross to obtain a petition for his release, which has been signed by nearly 100 individuals attesting to Bashir’s good character.” She also described how he “has the personal qualities necessary to lead a successful and peaceful life,” adding, “I know him to be a kind, compassionate, and sincere person.”

Periodic Review Board Initial Hearing, 28 Apr 2016

Bashir Nasir Ali Al-Marwalah, ISN 837

Personal Representative Opening Statement

Members of the Board, we are the Personal Representatives for Bashir Nashir Ali Al-Marwalah. When we first went to meet Bashir, he explained to me that he was very happy that we were there and he felt hopeful for the future. His demeanor is one of a serious, thoughtful man which both my partner and I can confirm.

Bashir comes from a large family that works in the medical field. Bashir learned how to work in the medical field by accompanying his father to work throughout his school years. Bashir graduated from the Higher Institute for Health Services, Nursing School Branch. Upon his transfer, even if Bashir is not able to return to Yemen, his education and experience will serve him well wherever he is reintegrated. Bashir’s goals for his future involve continuing his education, as he values knowledge, a career, building his own family and someday reconnecting with his family back home.

Bashir has spent much of his time reading and studying the medical field. In fact, whenever he has the chance, he helps other detainees with his medical knowledge. Bashir also takes the opportunity to engage with medical personnel to ask questions in order to keep his skills sharp. Bashir has spent much of his time reading many health and medical books and journals which we have included as an exhibit in his case file. In fact, because of Bashir’s passion for health, he has requested that he be allowed to assist medical personnel here at Guantánamo Bay (GTMO) in the treatment of other detainees.

As you will see during Bashir’s opening statement [note: not made publicly available], he is also working on his English. He will not leave GTMO the same way he arrived. Bashir has broadened his mind. He has the support of his family and is looking to create a successful career and future. Additionally Bashir made friends with American attorneys who have worked with him in the past. These attorneys have stated they stand ready to offer support for Bashir wherever he may be transferred.

We appreciate you taking time to hear his case and your consideration for transfer. Bashir has learned from his mistakes and deeply regrets his actions in the past. As a result Bashir does not pose a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States. Bashir understands that in order to be recommended for transfer he must first gain the board’s unanimous recommendation for transfer. Therefore he is willing and ready to answer any and all of your questions. We and Bashir’s Private Counsel are here throughout this proceeding to answer your questions as well.

Statement of Private Counsel Erin E. Thomas

Members of the Board, good morning. I am Erin Thomas, private counsel for Bashir Nasir Ali al-Marwalah. Bashir and I first met in early 2011, when I was an attorney at Allen & Overy LLP. Bashir is now a client of my current firm, Covington & Burling LLP. I am thankful for the opportunity to explain to the Board why Bashir does not present a threat to the security of the United States or its allies.

Bashir deeply regrets the choices that he made as a young man, and their cost to both himself and the members of his family. If Bashir had not chosen to leave Yemen, he would still be close to his beloved family. As the oldest brother, he would have been around to provide guidance to his siblings. He would know his youngest sister and youngest brother who were both born after Bashir left. He would have a career, and likely a family of his own. His children would play with their cousins under the care of Bashir’s mother, just as his sisters’ children do while their own mothers go to work.

In short, Bashir longs for the things he has lost. He is ready to put the past behind him, and is eager to build a productive life outside of Guantánamo. Importantly, Bashir has demonstrated that he is very well-positioned to accomplish these goals.

First, He is trained as a nurse. He was employed at the Republic Hospital in Sana’a fulfilling a life-long dream to work in the medical field and help people. Bashir was an exemplary and well-liked nurse, as attested to by the support statements of 12 colleagues and teachers.

While at Guantánamo, Bashir has continued his nursing education. At Bashir’s request, his lawyers have sent him numerous medical books in English and Arabic. Bashir frequently brings his coursework to meetings with his attorneys, covered with painstaking notes and translations of medical vocabulary.

Bashir also completed a life skills and nutrition course with a 96% average. Bashir proactively seeks out other opportunities to improve his medical training, including practicing vocabulary with doctors from the Red Cross and in the camps.

Bashir’s nursing expertise will allow him to build a career in any country to which he is transferred. Bashir appreciates, however, that his Yemeni credentials may not be immediately recognized in another country, and has no objection to taking a less specialized job, for example as a home health aide or orderly.

Second, Bashir has used his time in Guantánamo to improve other skills. When we first met, Bashir and I communicated through a translator. Now we can hold a three hour meeting speaking exclusively in English. When he is not studying, Bashir stays productive with activities such as art classes. Bashir has the full support from his art teacher.

Bashir is also preparing himself to be a loving husband and father. He left Yemen a young, unmarried man who never had the opportunity to be in a relationship with a woman. Bashir studies materials on healthy relationships and child rearing. He desires a wife who is a true partner in life.

Third, Bashir enjoys a strong support network. Bashir is much loved and deeply missed by his family. They are proud of his efforts to improve his education while in Guantánamo.

Bashir’s family has demonstrated that they will do whatever they can to support him. They have furnished an apartment for him in Sana’a. While they recognize that Bashir cannot return to Yemen at this time, they can rent or sell the apartment to support him in another country. His family has also purchased wedding jewelry for his future wife. If this jewelry cannot be used, the family can sell it and send the proceeds to him.

Bashir’s father and siblings are employed, and have remained so during a very difficult period in Yemen. Bashir’s father, one sister as well as his two brothers are all employed at the Republic Hospital. Another sister recently began working at a private hospital nearby. The family has property in Sana’a and in the village of Bayt al-Marwalah.

Bashir’s family also actively assisted with the preparation of this submission, working with the Red Cross to obtain a petition for his release, which has been signed by nearly 100 individuals attesting to Bashir’s good character. Bashir’s oldest sister, is a busy, working mother of four, obtained the character affidavits and Bashir’s school and employment records during a period when Sana’a has been wracked by fighting and faces severe restrictions on its infrastructure and communications network. In short, Bashir’s loving family can — and has demonstrated that they will — support him financially and emotionally following his transfer.

Bashir’s former attorneys have also pledged their support. I too am prepared to assist Bashir through phone conversations, visits if possible, financial assistance, and serving as a point of contact for authorities in his country of transfer if needed. I have experience with this through my support of a former detainee client who was transferred to Europe. We are in regular contact, and I plan to visit him later this year. I am also assisting him in completing college courses that I enrolled him in while he was in Guantánamo.

Bashir’s current and former law firms, Covington & Burling and Allen & Overy, are also prepared to explore whether they have any useful contacts in Bashir’s proposed or actual country of transfer that could assist with Bashir’s transition to life post-Guantánamo. The human rights organization Reprieve has offered to share contacts, best practices, and other resources for supporting a client after transfer.

Fourth, Bashir has the personal qualities necessary to lead a successful and peaceful life. I know him to be a kind, compassionate, and sincere person. Throughout his decade-long relationship with his American attorneys, he has been unfailingly gracious, thankful for our work, and curious about the way we live. He sends thank you notes after we visit, and letters of congratulations when we get married or have children. Bashir has never expressed bitterness, anti-American sentiment, or extremist views to us.

Bashir’s lawyers are far from the only people who feel this way. Bashir’s written submission includes letters and videos of support from family, friends, and colleagues, as well as fellow detainees. Bashir’s good nature extends to the Guantánamo guard force. His unclassified summary confirms that his behavior has been highly compliant.

*****

Fifteen years ago, a young man made a decision he regrets. In the intervening years, that man has matured, reflected on his regret, and worked tirelessly to channel that regret into self-improvement. A strong support network stands behind him, ready to help. He sits before you, ready to answer your questions and to tell you about the new life that he longs to begin. I am confident that Bashir will not let anything distract him from accomplishing his goals.

Members of the Board, thank you for your time and consideration. I respectfully submit that you should recommend Bashir al-Marwalah for transfer.

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.

In Historic Ruling, US Court Allows Lawsuit Against James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, Architects of CIA Torture Program, to Proceed

In a hugely significant court ruling on April 22, US District Court Senior Judge Justin Quackenbush, in Spokane, Washington State, allowed a lawsuit to proceed against James Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen, the psychologists who designed and implemented the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program. Both men had worked for the military’s SERE program (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape), which trains US personnel to resist torture, if captured by a hostile enemy, by subjecting them to torture techniques to prepare them to resist.

The case was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), on behalf of three victims of the torture program — Gul Rahman, who died, and Suleiman Abdullah Salim and Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud, who are both still alive.

As the ACLU described it, when Judge Quackenbush announced his ruling from the bench, he “gave attorneys in the case 30 days to come up with a plan for discovery, a first in a lawsuit concerning CIA torture.”

ACLU Staff Attorney Dror Ladin, who had argued the men’s case in court, said afterwards, “This is a historic win in the fight to hold the people responsible for torture accountable for their despicable and unlawful actions. Thanks to this unprecedented ruling, CIA victims will be able to call their torturers to account in court for the first time.”

Steven Watt, a Senior Staff Attorney with the ACLU, told The Intercept, “This is amazing, this is unprecedented. This is the first step towards accountability.”

Judge Quackenbush turned down a motion submitted by Mitchell and Jessen, who had argued that the lawsuit should be dismissed because the judiciary could not consider the case. That, they said, was because it was a “political question” that only the executive and legislative branches of government were able to make decisions about. Mitchell and Jessen, as the ACLU put it, “also argued that they have immunity from lawsuits because they were working as government contractors.”

As the ACLU also explained, until this ruling, “every lawsuit trying to hold people accountable for the CIA torture program has been dismissed before reaching the merits because the government successfully argued that letting the cases proceed would reveal state secrets.” A notorious example is the Jeppesen case, in which a number of victims of rendition and torture tried to sue a Boeing subsidiary for its role in their rendition, but were blocked by the government in September 2010 (under Barack Obama), who invoked the “state secrets” doctrine (basically, a blanket argument for secrecy for unspecified reasons of “national security,” which, in reality, cover up crimes or incompetence, or both).

However, in this case, “earlier this month [and] in an unprecedented move,” as the ACLU described it, “the Justice Department filed a ‘statement of interest’ in the case but specifically did not invoke the state-secrets privilege. To the contrary, the government indicated that it would be open to the case proceeding to discovery if certain information is off limits, such as the identities of covert CIA operatives.” The ACLU added that its lawyers believe they “can come to an agreement with the Justice Department on a set of procedures for information that is not relevant to the lawsuit.”

Of the three plaintiffs, the first is the family of Gul Rahman, an Afghan who was tortured to death. As the ACLU explained, “He was an Afghan refugee living in Pakistan with his wife and their four daughters, making a living selling wood to fellow residents of their refugee camp,” but after he was swept up and mistakenly thought to be of significance, “An autopsy and internal CIA review found the cause of death to be hypothermia caused ‘in part by being forced to sit on the bare concrete floor without pants’ with contributing factors of ‘dehydration, lack of food, and immobility due to “short chaining.”‘ The family has never been officially notified of his death, and his body has never been returned to them for burial.” The stories of other prisoners who were killed in Afghanistan can be found in my July 2009 article, When Torture Kills: Ten Murders In US Prisons In Afghanistan.

The second plaintiff is Suleiman Abdullah Salim, a fisherman from Tanzania. As the ACLU explained, “The US military released him over five years after his abduction with a letter acknowledging that he poses no threat to the United States. He now lives in Zanzibar with his wife and his young daughter.” A video of Suleiman speaking about his ordeal, “Here the Rain Never Finishes,” is posted below, via YouTube, and further details of his account are posted below, from the ACLU’s detailed feature about the case, Out of the Darkness.

The third plaintiff is Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud. As the ACLU described it, “He fled his native Libya in 1991, fearing persecution for his opposition to Muammar Gadhafi’s dictatorship. In 2003, Ben Soud was captured in a joint US-Pakistani raid on his home and sent to two secret CIA prisons in Afghanistan, where he was held and tortured for over two years. Ben Soud saw Mitchell in the first of these prisons, later identifying him as a man present in a room where CIA interrogators were torturing him by forcibly submerging him in ice water. Ben Soud was freed in 2011 after Gadhafi was deposed, and he now lives with his wife and three children.”

Mohamed’s testimony, from “Out of Darkness,’ is also posted below.

The torture to which the men were subjected was detailed in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report into the CIA’s torture program, of which the damning 500-page executive summary was published in December 2014, playing an important role in facilitating this case, and in ensuring that the government can no longer hide behind towering walls of secrecy to shield itself from calls for accountability. In Mitchell and Jessen’s case, the report spelled out, unambiguously, that they had no expertise whatsoever of real-life interrogations. “Neither psychologist had experience as an interrogator, nor did either have specialized knowledge of al-Qa’ida, a background in terrorism, or any relevant regional, cultural, or linguistic expertise,” the report stated.

The lawsuit was filed in federal court in Washington State, because that is where Mitchell, Jessen & Associates was based, and it is where Jessen still lives. Mitchell and Jessen’s company, as the torture report also revealed, received $81 million for its work, a revelation that disturbed me and angered me to such an extent that I wrote a song about it, 81 Million Dollars, which I performed with my band The Four Fathers on our debut album Love and War.

As the ACLU also explained, “The plaintiffs are suing Mitchell and Jessen under the Alien Tort Statute — which allows federal lawsuits for gross human rights violations — for their commission of torture; cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment; non-consensual human experimentation; and war crimes.”

The ACLU further described Mitchell and Jessen as having “performed illegal human experimentation on CIA prisoners to test and refine the program,” also noting that they “personally took part in torture sessions,” and adding that the torture methods devised by Mitchell and Jessen and used on the three plaintiffs and others included “slamming them into walls, stuffing them inside coffin-like boxes, exposing them to extreme temperatures and ear-splitting levels of music, starving them, inflicting various kinds of water torture, depriving them of sleep for days, and chaining them in stress positions designed for pain and to keep them awake for days on end.” The ACLU added, “The two victims who survived still suffer physically and psychologically from the effects of their torture.”

The ACLU also explained how, “Citing experiments conducted on dogs in the 1960s, Mitchell and Jessen proposed to the CIA a program based on the intentional infliction of intense pain and suffering, both physical and mental.” In the experiments from the 1960s, “dogs were subjected to random electric shocks, and they eventually collapsed into a passive state termed ‘learned helplessness.'” Mitchell and Jessen, groundlessly, claimed that, “if humans were psychologically destroyed through torture and abuse, they would become totally unable to resist demands for information.”

Disgracefully, as detailed in the torture report, and in the excerpts from the ACLU’s report below, “The CIA let Mitchell and Jessen themselves evaluate the effectiveness of their torture in ‘breaking’ detainees, and the agency has since admitted that this was a mistake”; a case of understatement if ever there was one.

Excerpts from the ACLU feature, “Out of Darkness”

The CIA used the music of an Irish boyband called Westlife to torture Suleiman Abdullah in Afghanistan.

His interrogators would intersperse a syrupy song called “My Love” with heavy metal, played on repeat at ear-splitting volume. They told Suleiman, a newly wed fisherman from Tanzania, that they were playing the love song especially for him. Suleiman had married his wife Magida only two weeks before the CIA and Kenyan agents abducted him in Somalia, where he had settled while fishing and trading around the Swahili Coast. He would never see Magida again.

The music pounded constantly as part of a scheme to assault prisoners’ senses. It stopped only when a CD skipped or needed changing. When that happened, prisoners would call to one another in a desperate attempt to find out who was being held alongside them. A putrid smell that reminded Suleiman of rotting seaweed permeated the prison. His cell was pitch black; he couldn’t see a thing. The U.S. government refers to the prison as “COBALT.” Suleiman calls it “The Darkness.”

For more than a month, Suleiman endured an incessant barrage of torture techniques designed to psychologically destroy him. His torturers repeatedly doused him with ice-cold water. They beat him and slammed him into walls. They hung him from a metal rod, his toes barely touching the floor. They chained him in other painful stress positions for days at a time. They starved him, deprived him of sleep, and stuffed him inside small boxes. With the torture came terrifying interrogation sessions in which he was grilled about what he was doing in Somalia and the names of people, all but one of whom he’d never heard of.

After four or five weeks of this relentless pain and suffering, Suleiman’s torturers assessed him as psychologically broken and incapable of resisting them. Suleiman could take no more. He decided to end his life by consuming painkillers he had stockpiled. But as he began to take the pills, guards stormed into his cell to stop him. He was then shackled, hooded, and driven a short distance to another CIA prison close by — a prison Suleiman came to know as the “Salt Pit.” Although Suleiman’s torture would continue for many years more, the very worst of it was over.

A year and two months later, the CIA handed Suleiman over to the U.S. military, which imprisoned him at Bagram, also in Afghanistan. Finally, in 2008, after more than five years in U.S. custody, with no charges ever leveled against him, he was sent home with a document confirming he posed no threat to the United States. His family had heard nothing of him since his disappearance, and they had presumed him dead.

But even once home in his native Zanzibar, Suleiman felt far from free. Constant flashbacks transported him back to his torture at the hands of his CIA captors. After years of near-starvation he was unable to eat normally. He suffered splitting headaches and pain throughout his body from the torture. Prolonged isolation left him unaccustomed to human interaction. Despite repeated attempts, he couldn’t find Magida. Unable to sleep due to the torment of his memories and the physical pain, he found limited solace playing with his family’s rabbits in the middle of the night.

“I was afraid of so many things,” he says in the halting English he acquired in prison. “Everyone thought I’m crazy.”

Suleiman, a reggae-loving fisherman who had once been known as “Travolta” for his prowess on the dance floor, had become a shell of himself.

* * * * *

“That’s him,” Mohamed Ben Soud said earlier this year in a meeting with his lawyer, ACLU Staff Attorney Steven Watt, pointing at a photo of James Mitchell. “He was there.”

Mohamed saw James Mitchell several times while he was imprisoned at COBALT, where the CIA held him for a year following his capture in April 2003 during a joint US-Pakistani raid on his home. Mohamed fled his native Libya in 1991, fearing his persecution for his opposition to the Gaddafi regime. He was living in Pakistan with his wife and infant child at the time of his disappearance. As Human Rights Watch has detailed, a rapprochement between Washington and Gaddafi resulted in Libya supplying the United States with the names of citizens it claimed were terrorism suspects.

Mitchell, Mohamed says, made an appearance at his water torture sessions at COBALT, the same CIA prison where the agency had held Suleiman a month earlier. Mitchell seemed to be observing and supervising the proceedings. That description accords with what we know from the Senate report about the many facets of Mitchell and Jessen’s roles. The CIA didn’t just contract the two to devise and administer the torture program. It also had them evaluating their own theory and work. That included monitoring the application of torture techniques and calibrating them in accordance with their ultimate goal of inducing learned helplessness.

CIA personnel would complain about the conflict of interest inherent in the same people evaluating the effectiveness of techniques from which they were reaping enormous profits. The Senate report quotes a CIA Office of Medical Services memorandum reading:

OMS concerns about conflict of interest … were nowhere more graphic than in the setting in which the same individuals applied an EIT which only they were approved to employ, judged both its effectiveness and detainee resilience, and implicitly proposed continued use of the technique — at a daily compensation reported to be $1800/day, or four times that of interrogators who could not use the technique.

The course of Mohamed’s torture adhered closely to the “procedures” the CIA laid out in a 2004 memo to the Justice Department. Even before arriving at COBALT, Mohamed was subjected to “conditioning” procedures designed to cause terror and vulnerability. He was rendered to COBALT hooded, handcuffed, and shackled. When he arrived, an American woman told him he was a prisoner of the CIA, that human rights ended on September 11, and that no laws applied in the prison.

Quickly, his torture escalated. For much of the next year, CIA personnel kept Mohamed naked and chained to the wall in one of three painful stress positions designed to keep him awake. He was held in complete isolation in a dungeon-like cell, starved, with no bed, blanket, or light. A bucket served as his toilet. Ear-splitting music pounded constantly. The stench was unbearable. He was kept naked for weeks. He wasn’t permitted to wash for five months.

For Mohamed the prolonged sleep deprivation was the most debilitating part of his torture: It drove him close to madness. Mohamed’s torturers kept him awake in many different ways. They chained him in painful stress positions — seated when his broken leg was in a cast, standing once it was removed. Guards banged on his door every hour. Once his broken leg had healed, they added to his torment. Guards would take him from his cell and force him to march around the prison naked for “15 minutes every half-hour through the night and into the morning.” They bombarded him with music. Once, his captors deprived him of sleep for some 36 hours, hanging him naked by his arms from a metal rod where he balanced on the tips of his toes. His legs became engorged with fluid, and he started to hallucinate.

His torturers introduced water torture into their regimen some two weeks after Mohamed arrived in COBALT. They would submerge him naked in ice water, his cuffed hands forced over his head, until a doctor deemed his temperature dangerously low and warm water would be thrown on him. When his cast began to disintegrate from the water, a doctor first covered it in plastic, and when that didn’t work, designed a cast that could be easily removed during the sessions. During later sessions, Mohamed’s torturers placed a hood over his head before he was doused to make him feel like he was drowning.

After some two months of torture in COBALT, Mohamed’s captors stopped the most aggressive phase of his torture, deeming him sufficiently “broken” and “cooperative.” Eight months later, April 2004, Mohamed was transferred to a second CIA-run prison, codenamed ORANGE in the Senate report. He spent the next several months in solitary confinement, chained to the wall when he wasn’t being interrogated. In August 2004, the United States rendered him into the hands of the same Gadaffi government he had fled fearing persecution more than a decade previously. Sentenced to life in prison following an unfair trial, Mohamed eventually won his freedom in February 2011, a day after the start of the revolution that led to Gadaffi’s overthrow. Today, he lives in Misrata, Libya, together with his wife and three young children. Mohamed continues to suffer the effects of his torture at COBALT.  He suffers from hearing loss, a damaged sense of taste and smell, and regular pains in his leg, which he can’t walk on for a significant length of time.

Note: See all the documents about the case here.

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

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

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

14 Years Incommunicado: Abu Zubaydah, Guantánamo Prisoner, CIA Torture Victim, and the Al-Qaeda Leader Who Wasn’t

[image error]Over ten years since I started working full-time on Guantánamo, there has been undeniable progress in some areas, and absolutely no movement in others. Hundreds of prisoners have been freed, which has been hugely important for a place in which only a few percent of the men — and boys — held there have ever, realistically, been accused of involvement with terrorism, and, after far too many years of delays and inaction, President Obama has been pushing to finally get the prison closed, albeit over seven years since he first promised to do so within a year.

Just 80 men are currently held, and while it is still unclear if the president will be able to close Guantánamo before he leaves office, as Congress will have to drop its ban on bringing any prisoner to the US mainland for any reason, or he will have to close it by executive action, which may or may not be practical or possible, it is conceivable that the end of Guantánamo is within sight.

And yet, for all of the men abused in Guantánamo, and elsewhere in America’s brutal “war on terror,” it is noticeable that no one has been held accountable for their suffering, and, for some of the 80 men still held, it also appears that no end to their suffering is in sight. I’m thinking in particular of some of the so-called “high-value detainees,” 15 men, including 13 who were brought to the US from CIA “black sites” — torture prisons — in September 2006, after up to four and a half years held incommunicado. One of those men — the first to be seized, in fact — may be the most unfortunate of all: Abu Zubaydah.

It’s dispiriting for me to realize that I’ve been writing about Abu Zubaydah for ten years, but there has been no progress in his case. I wrote about him first in my book The Guantánamo Files, and, between 2008 and 2010, in a number of articles in which I tried to highlight the significance of his case — for example, The Insignificance and Insanity of Abu Zubaydah: Ex-Guantánamo Prisoner Confirms FBI’s Doubts, Lost In Guantánamo: The Faisalabad 16, Abu Zubaydah: The Futility Of Torture and A Trail of Broken Lives, Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos (Part One), Who Authorized The Torture of Abu Zubaydah?, Abu Zubaydah’s Torture Diary, Abu Zubaydah: Tortured for Nothing, Abu Zubaydah and the Case Against Torture Architect James Mitchell, How Jay Bybee Has Approved the Prosecution of CIA Operatives for Torture and In Abu Zubaydah’s Case, Court Relies on Propaganda and Lies.

Briefly, his story is as follows: Seized in a house raid in Faisalabad in Pakistan on March 28, 2002, when he was severely wounded, he then became the first victim of the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program, flown to Thailand and subjected to horrendous torture, including being waterboarded 83 times. Four and a half years later, after being shunted around various other “black sites,” including Poland (for which the European Court of Human Rights awarded him $148,000 damages in February 2015) he ended up at Guantánamo, where, over time, the government has walked back from all its original outrageous claims about him being a senior member of Al-Qaeda and even having knowledge of the 9/11 attacks, let alone being involved in them.

However, for the “high-value detainees” in general, Guantánamo has become another type of “black site,” one in which, although the explicit torture may have stopped, they remain deprived of justice, and, if not charged in the military commission trial system, also remain completely cut off from the outside world.

This is the case with Abu Zubaydah, and other “high-value detainees” who have not been charged — Abu Faraj al-Libi, Riduan Isamuddin (Hambali) and two alleged accomplices (Modh Farik Bin Amin and Mohammed Bin Lep), Gouled Hassan Dourad, a Somali, and Muhammad Rahim, an Afghan.

The shocking truth — still not realized by most people — is that, for the “high-value detainees,” every single word that they utter to their lawyers is classified, and not a syllable can be publicised to the outside world. For every other prisoner, the presumptive classification of every word that is exchanged between them and their lawyers lasts only until the lawyers submit their notes of their meetings to the Pentagon’s censorship team, who decide what can be released to the public, and what must remain classified. In many cases, I presume, this means that damaging information has remained hidden, but in many other cases what has been unclassified has then been released by lawyers, and has, on occasion, severely embarrassed the authorities.

So what is it about the “high-value detainees” that means that every word they have ever uttered must remain censored? The answer, in a nutshell, is torture. In a desperate effort to shield themselves from accountability for the torture program, officials have ruthlessly silenced its victims, even as the truth has leaked out via other sources, or been made publicly available — in the case of the US Senate Intelligence Committee’s report into the CIA torture program, whose executive summary was released in December 2014.

For those facing military commission trials, there have been intermittent opportunities to mention their torture, but the main reason the trials are moving so slowly is that, fundamentally, one side — the government — is committed to hiding the evidence of torture, while the other, the defense teams, are, of course, committed to exposing it. However, Abu Zubyadah, and the other men who have not been charged, do not even have the opportunity to sneak in a mention of their torture during hearings, as has happened on occasion with the five men charged as co-conspirators in the 9/11 attacks.

In a new effort to highlight the ongoing injustice of Abu Zubaydah’s case, Rebecca Gordon, who teaches in the Philosophy department at the University of San Francisco, and is the author of a newly-published book, American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes, has just published a reminder of his case, “The Al-Qaeda Leader Who Wasn’t,” for Tom Dispatch (later cross-posted on CounterPunch, the Nation and elsewhere), which I’m also cross-posting below, with Tom Engelhardt’s introduction, because what happened to Abu Zubaydah remains so significant.

I’m pleased to note that Rebecca draws on another of my articles dealing with Abu Zubaydah, Even In Cheney’s Bleak World, The Al-Qaeda-Iraq Torture Story Is A New Low, in which I first called for Dick Cheney’s prosecution for war crimes, and I’m delighted that she has written a whole book about the ongoing necessity for those who authorized the torture program to be held accountable.

However, what has stuck with me most from this article is a startling anecdote about Abu Zubaydah that was revealed in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report, when, as Rebecca Gordon describes it:

CIA headquarters assured those who were interrogating Zubaydah that he would “never be placed in a situation where he has any significant contact with others and/or has the opportunity to be released.” In fact, “all major players are in concurrence,” stated the agency, that he “should remain incommunicado for the remainder of his life.”

I hope you have time to read the article below, and to share it if you find it useful — and remember, without accountability, as Rebecca Gordon points out in her conclusion, there is no guarantee that the horrors of the “war on terror” won’t happen again. In addition, as I always try to point out, without accountability, the poisonous notion that torture is acceptable, or necessary, continues to infect America’s collective psyche, with the disastrous effects that Tom Engelhardt highlights in his introduction to the article — in the bragging of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz that, if elected, they would enthusiastically indulge in new actions that are war crimes. This just provides more proof, if any was required, that those in high office in the US who have already committed war crimes need to be prosecuted.

Intro: Exhibit One in Any Future American War Crimes Trial by Tom Engelhardt

Let’s take a moment to think about the ultimate strangeness of our American world. In recent months, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz have offered a range of hair-raising suggestions: as president, one or the other of them might order the U.S. military and the CIA to commit acts that would include the waterboarding of terror suspects (or “a hell of a lot worse”), the killing of the relatives of terrorists, and the carpet bombing of parts of Syria. All of these would, legally speaking, be war crimes. This has caused shock among many Americans in quite established quarters who have decried the possibility of such a president, suggesting that the two of them are calling for outright illegal acts, actual “war crimes,” and that the U.S. military and others would be justified in rejecting such orders. In this context, for instance, CIA Director John Brennan recently made it clear that no Agency operative under his command would ever waterboard a suspect in response to orders of such a nature from a future president. (“I will not agree to carry out some of these tactics and techniques I’ve heard bandied about because this institution needs to endure.”)

These acts, in other words, are considered beyond the pale when Donald Trump suggests them, but here’s the strangeness of it all: what The Donald is only mouthing off about, a perfectly real American president (and vice president and secretary of defense, and so on) actually did. Among other things, under the euphemistic term “enhanced interrogation techniques,” they ordered the CIA to use classic torture practices including waterboarding (which, in blunter times, had been known as “the water torture”). They also let the U.S. military loose to torture and abuse prisoners in their custody. They green-lighted the CIA to kidnap terror suspects (who sometimes turned out to be perfectly innocent people) off the streets of cities around the world, as well as from the backlands of the planet, and transported them to the prisons of some of the worst torture regimes or to secret detention centers (“black sites”) the CIA was allowed to set up in compliant countries. In other words, a perfectly real administration ordered and oversaw perfectly real crimes. (Its top officials even reportedly had torture techniques demonstrated to them in the White House.)

At the time, the CIA fulfilled its orders to a T and without complaint. A lone CIA officer spoke out publicly in opposition to such a program and was jailed for disclosing classified information to a journalist. (He would be the only CIA official to go to jail for the Agency’s acts of torture.) At places like Abu Ghraib, the military similarly carried out its orders without significant complaint or resistance. The mainstream media generally adopted the euphemism “enhanced interrogation techniques” or “harsh techniques” in its reporting — no “torture” or “war crimes” for them then. And back in the post-2001 years, John Brennan, then deputy executive director of the CIA, didn’t offer a peep of protest about what he surely knew was going on in his own agency. In 2014, in fact, as its director he actually defended such torture practices for producing “intelligence that helped thwart attack plans, capture terrorists, and save lives.” In addition, none of those who ordered or oversaw torture and other criminal behavior (a number of whom would sell their memoirs for millions of dollars) suffered in the slightest for the acts that were performed on their watch and at their behest.

To sum up: when Donald Trump says such things it’s a future nightmare to be called by its rightful name and denounced, as well as rejected and resisted by military and intelligence officials. When an American president and his top officials actually did such things, however, it was another story entirely. Today, TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon catches the nightmarish quality of those years, now largely buried, in the grim case of a single mistreated human being. It should make Americans shudder. She has also just published a new book, American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes, that couldn’t be more relevant.  It’s a must-read for a country conveniently without a memory. Tom

The Al-Qaeda Leader Who Wasn’t: The Shameful Ordeal of Abu Zubaydah

By Rebecca Gordon, Tom Dispatch, April 24, 2016

The allegations against the man were serious indeed.

* Donald Rumsfeld said he was “if not the number two, very close to the number two person” in al-Qaeda.

* The Central Intelligence Agency informed Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee that he “served as Usama Bin Laden’s senior lieutenant. In that capacity, he has managed a network of training camps … He also acted as al-Qaeda’s coordinator of external contacts and foreign communications.”

* CIA Director Michael Hayden would tell the press in 2008 that 25% of all the information his agency had gathered about al-Qaeda from human sources “originated” with one other detainee and him.

* George W. Bush would use his case to justify the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation program,” claiming that “he had run a terrorist camp in Afghanistan where some of the 9/11 hijackers trained” and that “he helped smuggle al-Qaeda leaders out of Afghanistan” so they would not be captured by U.S. military forces.

None of it was true.

And even if it had been true, what the CIA did to Abu Zubaydah — with the knowledge and approval of the highest government officials — is a prime example of the kind of still-unpunished crimes that officials like Dick Cheney, George Bush, and Donald Rumsfeld committed in the so-called Global War on Terror.

So who was this infamous figure, and where is he now? His name is Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, but he is better known by his Arabic nickname, Abu Zubaydah. And as far as we know, he is still in solitary detention in Guantánamo.

A Saudi national, in the 1980s Zubaydah helped run the Khaldan camp, a mujahedeen training facility set up in Afghanistan with CIA help during the Soviet occupation of that country. In other words, Zubaydah was then an American ally in the fight against the Soviets, one of President Ronald Reagan’s “freedom fighters.”  (But then again, so in effect was Osama bin Laden.)

Zubaydah’s later fate in the hands of the CIA was of a far grimmer nature. He had the dubious luck to be the subject of a number of CIA “firsts”: the first post-9/11 prisoner to be waterboarded; the first to be experimented on by psychologists working as CIA contractors; one of the first of the Agency’s “ghost prisoners” (detainees hidden from the world, including the International Committee of the Red Cross which, under the Geneva Conventions, must be allowed access to every prisoner of war); and one of the first prisoners to be cited in a memo written by Jay Bybee for the Bush administration on what the CIA could “legally” do to a detainee without supposedly violating U.S. federal laws against torture.

Zubaydah’s story is — or at least should be — the iconic tale of the illegal extremes to which the Bush administration and the CIA went in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. And yet former officials, from CIA head Michael Hayden to Vice President Dick Cheney to George W. Bush himself, have presented it as a glowing example of the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” to extract desperately needed information from the “evildoers” of that time.

Zubaydah was an early experiment in post-9/11 CIA practices and here’s the remarkable thing (though it has yet to become part of the mainstream media accounts of his case): it was all a big lie. Zubaydah wasn’t involved with al-Qaeda; he was the ringleader of nothing; he never took part in planning for the 9/11 attacks. He was brutally mistreated and, in another kind of world, would be exhibit one in the war crimes trials of America’s top leaders and its major intelligence agency.

Yet notorious as he once was, he’s been forgotten by all but his lawyers and a few tenacious reporters. He shouldn’t have been. He was the test case for the kind of torture that Donald Trump now wants the U.S. government to bring back, presumably because it “worked” so well the first time. With Republican presidential hopefuls promising future war crimes, it’s worth reconsidering his case and thinking about how to prevent it from happening again. After all, it’s only because no one has been held to account for the years of Bush administration torture practices that Trump and others feel free to promise even more and “yuger” war crimes in the future.

Experiments in Torture

In [March] 2002, a group of FBI agents, CIA agents, and Pakistani forces captured Zubaydah (along with about 50 other men) in Faisalabad, Pakistan. In the process, he was severely injured — shot in the thigh, testicle, and stomach. He might well have died, had the CIA not flown in an American surgeon to patch him up. The Agency’s interest in his health was, however, anything but humanitarian. Its officials wanted to interrogate him and, even after he had recovered sufficiently to be questioned, his captors occasionally withheld pain medication as a means of torture.

When he “lost” his left eye under mysterious circumstances while in CIA custody, the agency’s concern again was not for his health. The December 2014 torture report produced by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (despite CIA opposition that included hacking into the committee’s computers) described the situation this way: with his left eye gone, “[i]n October 2002, DETENTION SITE GREEN [now known to be Thailand] recommended that the vision in his right eye be tested, noting that ‘[w]e have a lot riding upon his ability to see, read, and write.’ DETENTION SITE GREEN stressed that ‘this request is driven by our intelligence needs [not] humanitarian concern for AZ.’

The CIA then set to work interrogating Zubaydah with the help of two contractors, the psychologists Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell. Zubaydah would be the first human subject on whom those two, who were former instructors at the Air Force’s SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) training center, could test their theories about using torture to induce what they called “learned helplessness,” meant to reduce a suspect’s resistance to interrogation. Their price? Only $81 million.

CIA records show that, using a plan drawn up by Jessen and Mitchell, Abu Zubaydah’s interrogators would waterboard him an almost unimaginable 83 times in the course of a single month; that is, they would strap him to a wooden board, place a cloth over his entire face, and gradually pour water through the cloth until he began to drown. At one point during this endlessly repeated ordeal, the Senate committee reported that Zubaydah became “completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth.”

Each of those 83 uses of what was called “the watering cycle” consisted of four steps:

“1) demands for information interspersed with the application of the water just short of blocking his airway 2) escalation of the amount of water applied until it blocked his airway and he started to have involuntary spasms 3) raising the water-board to clear subject’s airway 4) lowering of the water-board and return to demands for information.”

The CIA videotaped Zubaydah undergoing each of these “cycles,” only to destroy those tapes in 2005 when news of their existence surfaced and the embarrassment (and possible future culpability) of the Agency seemed increasingly to be at stake. CIA Director Michael Hayden would later assure CNN that the tapes had been destroyed only because “they no longer had ‘intelligence value’ and they posed a security risk.” Whose “security” was at risk if the tapes became public? Most likely, that of the Agency’s operatives and contractors who were breaking multiple national and international laws against torture, along with the high CIA and Bush administration officials who had directly approved their actions.

In addition to the waterboarding, the Senate torture report indicates that Zubaydah endured excruciating stress positions (which cause terrible pain without leaving a mark); sleep deprivation (for up to 180 hours, which generally induces hallucinations or psychosis); unrelenting exposure to loud noises (another psychosis-inducer); “walling” (the Agency’s term for repeatedly slamming the shoulder blades into a “flexible, false wall,” though Zubaydah told the International Committee of the Red Cross that when this was first done to him, “he was slammed directly against a hard concrete wall”); and confinement for hours in a box so cramped that he could not stand up inside it. All of these methods of torture had been given explicit approval in a memo written to the CIA’s head lawyer, John Rizzo, by Jay Bybee, who was then serving in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. In that memo Bybee approved the use of 10 different “techniques” on Zubaydah.

It seems likely that, while the CIA was torturing Zubaydah at Jessen’s and Mitchell’s direction for whatever information he might have, it was also using him to test the “effectiveness” of waterboarding as a torture technique. If so, the agency and its contractors violated not only international law, but the U.S. War Crimes Act, which expressly forbids experimenting on prisoners.

What might lead us to think that Zubaydah’s treatment was, in part, an experiment? In a May 30, 2005, memo sent to Rizzo, Steven Bradbury, head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, discussed the CIA’s record keeping. There was, Bradbury commented, method to the CIA’s brutality. “Careful records are kept of each interrogation,” he wrote. This procedure, he continued, “allows for ongoing evaluation of the efficacy of each technique and its potential for any unintended or inappropriate results.” In other words, with the support of the Bush Justice Department, the CIA was keeping careful records of an experimental procedure designed to evaluate how well waterboarding worked.

This was Abu Zubaydah’s impression as well. “I was told during this period that I was one of the first to receive these interrogation techniques,” Zubaydah would later tell the International Committee of the Red Cross, “so no rules applied. It felt like they were experimenting and trying out techniques to be used later on other people.”

In addition to the videotaping, the CIA’s Office of Medical Services required a meticulous written record of every waterboarding session. The details to be recorded were spelled out clearly:

“In order to best inform future medical judgments and recommendations, it is important that every application of the waterboard be thoroughly documented: how long each application (and the entire procedure) lasted, how much water was used in the process (realizing that much splashes off), how exactly the water was applied, if a seal was achieved, if the naso- or oropharynx was filled, what sort of volume was expelled, how long was the break between applications, and how the subject looked between each treatment.”

Again, these were clearly meant to be the records of an experimental procedure, focusing as they did on how much water was effective; whether a “seal” was achieved (so no air could enter the victim’s lungs); whether the naso- or oropharynx (that is, the nose and throat) were so full of water the victim could not breathe; and just how much the “subject” vomited up.

It was with Zubaydah that the CIA also began its post-9/11 practice of hiding detainees from the International Committee of the Red Cross by transferring them to its “black sites,” the secret prisons it was setting up in countries with complacent or complicit regimes around the world. Such unacknowledged detainees came to be known as “ghost prisoners,” because they had no official existence. As the Senate torture report noted, “In part to avoid declaring Abu Zubaydah to the International Committee of the Red Cross, which would be required if he were detained at a U.S. military base, the CIA decided to seek authorization to clandestinely detain Abu Zubaydah at a facility in Country _______ [now known to have been Thailand].”

Tortured and Circular Reasoning

As British investigative journalist Andy Worthington reported in 2009, the Bush administration used Abu Zubaydah’s “interrogation” results to help justify the greatest crime of that administration, the unprovoked, illegal invasion of Iraq. Officials leaked to the media that he had confessed to knowing about a secret agreement involving Osama bin Laden, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (who later led al-Qaeda in Iraq), and Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein to work together “to destabilize the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq.” Of course, it was all lies. Zubaydah couldn’t have known about such an arrangement, first because it was, as Worthington says, “absurd,” and second, because Zubaydah was not a member of al-Qaeda at all.

In fact, the evidence that Zubaydah had anything to do with al-Qaeda was beyond circumstantial — it was entirely circular. The administration’s reasoning went something like this: Zubaydah, a “senior al-Qaeda lieutenant,” ran the Khaldan camp in Afghanistan; therefore, Khaldan was an al-Qaeda camp; if Khaldan was an al Qaeda camp, then Zubaydah must have been a senior al Qaeda official.

They then used their “enhanced techniques” to drag what they wanted to hear out of a man whose life bore no relation to the tortured lies he evidently finally told his captors. Not surprisingly, no aspect of the administration’s formula proved accurate.  It was true that, for several years, the Bush administration routinely referred to Khaldan as an al-Qaeda training camp, but the CIA was well aware that this wasn’t so.

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report, for instance, made this crystal clear, quoting an August 16, 2006, CIA Intelligence Assessment, “Countering Misconceptions About Training Camps in Afghanistan, 1990-2001” this way:

“Khaldan Not Affiliated With Al-Qa’ida. A common misperception in outside articles is that Khaldan camp was run by al-Qa’ida. Pre-11 September 2001 reporting miscast Abu Zubaydah as a ‘senior al-Qa’ida lieutenant,’ which led to the inference that the Khaldan camp he was administering was tied to Usama bin Laden.”

Not only was Zubaydah not a senior al-Qaeda lieutenant, he had, according to the report, been turned down for membership in al-Qaeda as early as 1993 and the CIA knew it by at least 2006, if not far sooner. Nevertheless, the month after it privately clarified the nature of the Khaldan camp and Zubaydah’s lack of al-Qaeda connections, President Bush used the story of Zubaydah’s capture and interrogation in a speech to the nation justifying the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program. He then claimed that Zubaydah had “helped smuggle Al Qaida leaders out of Afghanistan.”

In the same speech, Bush told the nation, “Our intelligence community believes [Zubaydah] had run a terrorist camp in Afghanistan where some of the 9/11 hijackers trained” (a reference presumably to Khaldan). Perhaps the CIA should have been looking instead at some of the people who actually trained the hijackers — the operators of flight schools in the United States, where, according to a September 23, 2001 Washington Post story, the FBI already knew “terrorists” were learning to fly 747s.

In June 2007, the Bush administration doubled down on its claim that Zubaydah was involved with 9/11. At a hearing before the congressional Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, State Department Legal Adviser John Bellinger, discussing why the Guantánamo prison needed to remain open, explained that it “serves a very important purpose, to hold and detain individuals who are extremely dangerous… [like] Abu Zubaydah, people who have been planners of 9/11.”

Charges Withdrawn

In September 2009, the U.S. government quietly withdrew its many allegations against Abu Zubaydah. His attorneys had filed a habeas corpus petition on his behalf; that is, a petition to excercise the constitutional right of anyone in government custody to know on what charges they are being held. In that context, they were asking the government to supply certain documents to help substantiate their claim that his continued detention in Guantánamo was illegal. The new Obama administration replied with a 109-page brief filed in the U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia, which is legally designated to hear the habeas cases of Guantánamo detainees.

The bulk of that brief came down to a government argument that was curious indeed, given the years of bragging about Zubaydah’s central role in al-Qaeda’s activities.  It claimed that there was no reason to turn over any “exculpatory” documents demonstrating that he was not a member of al-Qaeda, or that he had no involvement in 9/11 or any other terrorist activity — because the government was no longer claiming that any of those things were true.

The government’s lawyers went on to claim, bizarrely enough, that the Bush administration had never “contended that [Zubaydah] had any personal involvement in planning or executing … the attacks of September 11, 2001.” They added that “the Government also has not contended in this proceeding that, at the time of his capture, [Zubaydah] had knowledge of any specific impending terrorist operations” — an especially curious claim, since the prevention of such future attacks was how the CIA justified its torture of Zubaydah in the first place. Far from believing that he was “if not the number two, very close to the number two person in” al-Qaeda, as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had once claimed, “the Government has not contended in this proceeding that [Zubaydah] was a member of al-Qaida or otherwise formally identified with al-Qaida.”

And so, the case against the man who was waterboarded 83 times and contributed supposedly crucial information to the CIA on al-Qaeda plotting was oh-so-quietly withdrawn without either fuss or media attention.  Exhibit one was now exhibit none.

Seven years after the initial filing of Zubaydah’s habeas petition, the DC District Court has yet to rule on it. Given the court’s average 751-day turnaround time on such petitions, this is an extraordinary length of time. Here, justice delayed is truly justice denied.

Perhaps we should not be surprised, however. According to the Senate Intelligence Committee report, CIA headquarters assured those who were interrogating Zubaydah that he would “never be placed in a situation where he has any significant contact with others and/or has the opportunity to be released.” In fact, “all major players are in concurrence,” stated the agency, that he “should remain incommunicado for the remainder of his life.” And so far, that’s exactly what’s happened.

The capture, torture, and propaganda use of Abu Zubaydah is the perfect example of the U.S. government’s unique combination of willful law-breaking, ass-covering memo-writing, and what some Salvadorans I once worked with called “strategic incompetence.” The fact that no one — not George Bush or Dick Cheney, not Jessen or Mitchell, nor multiple directors of the CIA — has been held accountable means that, unless we are very lucky, we will see more of the same in the future.

Note: Please also see former New York Times foreign correspondent Raymond Bonner’s expansive legal pleading, filed last week, “demanding the public release of a variety of motions, responses and court orders relating to the case Zubaydah filed in 2008 challenging the legality of his detention,” as Politico described it. Bonner wrote about Abu Zubaydah’s case last year, in an article I cross-posted here.

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

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

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

Heartless: The 289 Tory MPs Who Voted To Prevent 3,000 Refugee Children from Joining Their Relatives in the UK

Please sign the new e-petition to the British government, “Britain must not turn its back on child refugees in Europe”, which has secured over 25,000 signatures in 24 hours.

On Monday evening, the cruelty of this government was, yet again, laid bare, when, by 294 votes to 276, MPs voted against an amendment to the Immigration Bill tabled by Lord Alf Dubs, who, as the BBC described it, “arrived in the UK in 1939 as a six-year-old refugee fleeing the persecution of Jews in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia.”

The amendment, calling on the government to take in 3,000 unaccompanied refugee children, already in Europe, who have relatives in the UK, was defeated “after the Home Office persuaded most potential Tory rebels that it was doing enough to help child refugees in Syria and neighbouring countries,” as the Guardian described it.

Home Office minister James Brokenshire said during the debate that the government could not support a policy that would “inadvertently create a situation in which families see an advantage in sending children alone, ahead and in the hands of traffickers, putting their lives at risk by attempting treacherous sea crossings to Europe which would be the worst of all outcomes.”

However, Keir Starmer, the shadow immigration minister, disagreed, and voiced the concerns I and numerous other British citizens have. “What it boils down to,” Starmer stated, “is to say we must abandon these children to their fate, lest if we do anything, others may follow in their footsteps. I am not prepared to take that position.”

Speaking on the Today programme on Radio 4, he said, “We are witnessing the worst refugee crisis since the Second World War. Hundreds of thousands of people are making treacherous journeys. Some of those are children on their own and between something like 26,000 as a minimum and possibly something up to 95,000 of those children are in Europe and they are stranded.”

Citing a “chilling statistic” from Europol, about how “10,000 vulnerable child refugees are unaccounted for and have effectively vanished,” he added, “The great fear is that these children are slipping into sexual exploitation and into trafficking. They are trapped in Europe and we have to do something about it now. I applaud what the Government is doing in the regions; I think the resettlement program they have put in place is very good. But it’s not an either-or situation; we cannot turn our backs on these vulnerable children in Europe. And history will judge us on this one.”

289 Tories voted against the amendment, and I have listed them (and the other five MPs who voted against the amendment) below. If they are your MPs, do write to them and let them know how disappointed you are.

Just five Tories voted against it, and others abstained. The rebels were: Geoffrey Cox (Torridge and West Devon), Dr. Tania Mathias (Twickenham), Stephen Phillips QC (Sleaford and North Hykeham), Will Quince (Colchester) and David Warburton (Somerset and Frome).

Tania Mathias, who I got to know through her support for the We Stand With Shaker campaign (and the Fast For Shaker initiative), said accepting children at risk of harm in Europe was the “right thing to do”. Stephen Phillips, the BBC noted, said “exceptional times call for exceptional measures”, and “urg[ed] colleagues to back the amendment.”

In the Huffington Post, Phillips wrote:

The amendment concerned those unaccompanied children who are already in Europe, who have faced unspeakable horrors in their homelands, and who are exposed daily to violence and exploitation we can only imagine. They have lost or become separated from their families, often for reasons over which they have no control. They have braved the journey to our continent hoping for safety, only to end up in camps or on the streets. And they are children.

These children are in Europe, but they are in danger. They are at risk from sexual abuse and human trafficking. Europol estimates that 10,000 of them went missing last year, even after they had been registered with the authorities. And as a former Archbishop of Canterbury pointed out in a national newspaper over the weekend, doctors report that as many as half of them require treatment for sexually transmitted diseases, almost certainly acquired from sexual exploitation during their journey to Europe.

We have a proud history in the UK of helping refugees escaping from appalling horrors, particularly children. Had we not given safe haven via the Kindertransport programme to thousands of Jewish children in the run up to the Second World War, most would have died in the Holocaust. We took in refugees from Iran and Vietnam, and those fleeing Idi Amin in Uganda. We did the right thing, and I believe we must do so again.

But my conviction on this also comes from the fact that I am a father. Many of the children in these European camps are the same age as mine, and I think about what I would want for them if they were in the appalling situation which these children face. I would want them to be safe, warm, well-fed and given a chance to create a life for themselves away from conflict. That’s why I voted against the Government on this issue, and, if the Lords stick to their guns, it’s why I will continue to do so.

Lord Dubs has now tabled another amendment, which the Lords voted through last night. As the BBC explained, “The government has been defeated again in the House of Lords over calls to take in child refugees from Europe. A new amendment to the Immigration Bill from Labour’s Lord Dubs was backed by 279 votes to 172. It would force ministers to arrange the relocation of children who have made it to Europe into the UK, with the total number to be decided by the government.”

Lord Dubs also launched a new petition to the government, “Britain must not turn its back on child refugees in Europe,” which states:

The Government should accept the call to give sanctuary to child refugees who are alone and at risk in Europe.

95,000 child refugees are on their own in Europe as a result of the refugee crisis. They are sleeping rough and in makeshift camps, desperately vulnerable to abuse and to trafficking into modern slavery.

We rightly look back with pride at the leadership our nation showed in rescuing 10,000 children from Europe through the Kindertransport.

The second amendment will now go back to the Commons, so please sign and share the petition to let the government know that we do not share their flint-heartedness.

For further information, see the report, “The Long Wait,” by the Refugee Rights Data Project.

Below are the names of the MPs who voted against the amendment, via , where you can find links to their voting records.

The 294 MPs who voted to prevent 3,000 refugee children from joining their relatives in the UK

Conservatives:

Nigel Adams, Selby and Ainsty

Adam Afriyie, Windsor

Peter Aldous, Waveney

Lucy Allan, Telford

Sir David Amess, Southend West

Stuart Andrew, Pudsey

Caroline Ansell, Eastbourne

Edward Argar, Charnwood

Victoria Atkins, Louth and Horncastle

Richard Bacon, South Norfolk

Steven Baker, Wycombe

Harriett Baldwin, West Worcestershire

Stephen Barclay, North East Cambridgeshire

John Baron, Basildon and Billericay

Gavin Barwell, Croydon Central

Guto Bebb, Aberconwy

Sir Henry Bellingham, North West Norfolk

Richard Benyon, Newbury

Sir Paul Beresford, Mole Valley

Jake Berry, Rossendale and Darwen

James Berry, Kingston and Surbiton

Andrew Bingham, High Peak

Crispin Blunt, Reigate

Peter Bone, Wellingborough

Victoria Borwick, Kensington

Sir Peter Bottomley, Worthing West

Karen Bradley, Staffordshire Moorlands

Graham Brady, Altrincham and Sale West

Julian Brazier, Canterbury

Steve Brine, Winchester

James Brokenshire, Old Bexley and Sidcup

Fiona Bruce, Congleton

Robert Buckland, South Swindon

Conor Burns, Bournemouth West

Sir Simon Burns, Chelmsford

David Burrowes, Enfield, Southgate

Alistair Burt, North East Bedfordshire

Neil Carmichael, Stroud

James Cartlidge, South Suffolk

Sir William Cash, Stone

Maria Caulfield, Lewes

Alex Chalk, Cheltenham

Rehman Chishti, Gillingham and Rainham

Christopher Chope, Christchurch

Jo Churchill, Bury St. Edmunds

Greg Clark, Tunbridge Wells

Kenneth Clarke, Rushcliffe

James Cleverly, Braintree

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, The Cotswolds

Dr. Therese Coffey, Suffolk Coastal

Damian Collins, Folkestone and Hythe

Oliver Colvile, Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport

Alberto Costa, South Leicestershire

Stephen Crabb, Preseli Pembrokeshire

Byron Davies, Gower

Glyn Davies, Montgomeryshire

Mims Davies, Eastleigh

Philip Davies, Shipley

Caroline Dinenage, Gosport

Jonathan Djanogly, Huntingdon

Michelle Donelan, Chippenham

Steve Double, St Austell and Newquay

Oliver Dowden, Hertsmere

Jackie Doyle-Price, Thurrock

Richard Drax, South Dorset

Flick Drummond, Portsmouth South

James Duddridge, Rochford and Southend East

Iain Duncan Smith, Chingford and Woodford Green

Philip Dunne, Ludlow

Michael Ellis, Northampton North

Jane Ellison, Battersea

Tobias Ellwood, Bournemouth East

Charlie Elphicke, Dover

George Eustice, Camborne and Redruth

Graham Evans, Weaver Vale

Nigel Evans, Ribble Valley

David Evennett, Bexleyheath and Crayford

Michael Fabricant, Lichfield

Michael Fallon, Sevenoaks

Suella Fernandes, Fareham

Mark Field, Cities of London and Westminster

Kevin Foster, Torbay

Dr. Liam Fox, North Somerset

Lucy Frazer, South East Cambridgeshire

George Freeman, Mid Norfolk

Mike Freer, Finchley and Golders Green

Sir Roger Gale, North Thanet

Sir Edward Garnier, Harborough

Mark Garnier, Wyre Forest

David Gauke, South West Hertfordshire

Nusrat Ghani, Wealden

Nick Gibb, Bognor Regis and Littlehampton

Cheryl Gillan, Chesham and Amersham

John Glen, Salisbury

Robert Goodwill, Scarborough and Whitby

Michael Gove, Surrey Heath

Richard Graham, Gloucester

Helen Grant, Maidstone and The Weald

Chris Grayling, Epsom and Ewell

Chris Green, Bolton West

Damian Green, Ashford

Dominic Grieve, Beaconsfield

Andrew Griffiths, Burton

Ben Gummer, Ipswich

Sam Gyimah, East Surrey

Robert Halfon, Harlow

Luke Hall, Thornbury and Yate

Stephen Hammond, Wimbledon

Matthew Hancock, West Suffolk

Greg Hands, Chelsea and Fulham

Mark Harper, Forest of Dean

Richard Harrington, Watford

Rebecca Harris, Castle Point

Simon Hart, Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire

Sir Alan Haselhurst, Saffron Walden

Sir Oliver Heald, North East Hertfordshire

James Heappey, Wells

Chris Heaton-Harris, Daventry

Peter Heaton-Jones, North Devon

Gordon Henderson, Sittingbourne and Sheppey

Nick Herbert, Arundel and South Downs

Damian Hinds, East Hampshire

Philip Hollobone, Kettering

Adam Holloway, Gravesham

Kris Hopkins, Keighley

Sir Gerald Howarth, Aldershot

John Howell, Henley

Ben Howlett, Bath

Nigel Huddleston, Mid Worcestershire

Jeremy Hunt, South West Surrey

Nick Hurd, Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner

Stewart Jackson, Peterborough

Sajid Javid, Bromsgrove

Ranil Jayawardena, North East Hampshire

Bernard Jenkin, Harwich and North Essex

Andrea Jenkyns, Morley and Outwood

Robert Jenrick, Newark

Boris Johnson, Uxbridge and South Ruislip

Gareth Johnson, Dartford

Joseph Johnson, Orpington

Andrew Jones, Harrogate and Knaresborough

David Jones, Clwyd West

Marcus Jones, Nuneaton

Daniel Kawczynski, Shrewsbury and Atcham

Seema Kennedy, South Ribble

Simon Kirby, Brighton, Kemptown

Sir Greg Knight, East Yorkshire

Julian Knight, Solihull

Kwasi Kwarteng, Spelthorne

Mark Lancaster, Milton Keynes North

Pauline Latham, Mid Derbyshire

Andrea Leadsom, South Northamptonshire

Dr. Phillip Lee, Bracknell

Jeremy Lefroy, Stafford

Sir Edward Leigh, Gainsborough

Charlotte Leslie, Bristol North West

Oliver Letwin, West Dorset

Brandon Lewis, Great Yarmouth

Dr. Julian Lewis, New Forest East

Ian Liddell-Grainger, Bridgwater and West Somerset

David Lidington, Aylesbury

Peter Lilley, Hitchin and Harpenden

Jack Lopresti, Filton and Bradley Stoke

Jonathan Lord, Woking

Tim Loughton, East Worthing and Shoreham

Karen Lumley, Redditch

Craig Mackinlay, South Thanet

David Mackintosh, Northampton South

Anne Main, St Albans

Alan Mak, Havant

Kit Malthouse, North West Hampshire

Scott Mann, North Cornwall

Theresa May, Maidenhead

Paul Maynard, BlackpoolNorth and Cleveleys

Karl McCartney, Lincoln

Patrick McLoughlin, Derbyshire Dales

Stephen McPartland, Stevenage

Mark Menzies, Fylde

Huw Merriman, Bexhill and Battle

Stephen Metcalfe, South Basildon and East Thurrock

Maria Miller, Basingstoke

Amanda Milling, Cannock Chase

Nigel Mills, Amber Valley

Anne Milton, Guildford

Penny Mordaunt, Portsmouth North

Nicky Morgan, Loughborough

Anne Marie Morris, Newton Abbot

David Morris, Morecambe and Lunesdale

James Morris, Halesowen and Rowley Regis

Wendy Morton, Aldridge-Brownhills

David Mowat, Warrington South

Sheryll Murray, South East Cornwall

Andrew Murrison, South West Wiltshire

Sarah Newton, Truro and Falmouth

Caroline Nokes, Romsey and Southampton North

Jesse Norman, Hereford and South Herefordshire

David Nuttall, Bury North

Dr. Matthew Offord, Hendon

Guy Opperman, Hexham

Neil Parish, Tiverton and Honiton

Priti Patel, Witham

Owen Paterson, North Shropshire

Mark Pawsey, Rugby

Mike Penning, Hemel Hempstead

John Penrose, Weston-Super-Mare

Andrew Percy, Brigg and Goole

Claire Perry, Devizes

Chris Philp, Croydon South

Sir Eric Pickles, Brentwood and Ongar

Christopher Pincher, Tamworth

Dr. Daniel Poulter, Central Suffolk and North Ipswich

Rebecca Pow, Taunton Deane

Victoria Prentis, Banbury

Mark Prisk, Hertford and Stortford

Mark Pritchard, The Wrekin

Tom Pursglove, Corby

Jeremy Quin, Horsham

Dominic Raab, Esher and Walton

John Redwood, Wokingham

Jacob Rees-Mogg, North East Somerset

Laurence Robertson, Tewkesbury

Mary Robinson, Cheadle

Andrew Rosindell, Romford

Amber Rudd, Hastings and Rye

David Rutley, Macclesfield

Antoinette Sandbach, Eddisbury

Paul Scully, Sutton and Cheam

Andrew Selous, South West Bedfordshire

Grant Shapps, Welwyn Hatfield

Alok Sharma, Reading West

Alec Shelbrooke, Elmet and Rothwell

Keith Simpson, Broadland

Chris Skidmore, Kingswood

Chloe Smith, Norwich North

Henry Smith, Crawley

Julian Smith, Skipton and Ripon

Royston Smith, Southampton, Itchen

Sir Nicholas Soames, Mid Sussex

Amanda Solloway, Derby North

Anna Soubry, Broxtowe

Caroline Spelman, Meriden

Mark Spencer, Sherwood

Andrew Stephenson, Pendle

John Stevenson, Carlisle

Bob Stewart, Beckenham

Iain Stewart, Milton Keynes South

Rory Stewart, Penrith and The Border

Gary Streeter, South West Devon

Mel Stride, Central Devon

Graham Stuart, Beverley and Holderness

Julian Sturdy, York Outer

Rishi Sunak, Richmond (Yorks)

Desmond Swayne, New Forest West

Hugo Swire, East Devon

Robert Syms, Poole

Derek Thomas, St Ives

Maggie Throup, Erewash

Edward Timpson, Crewe and Nantwich

Kelly Tolhurst, Rochester and Strood

Justin Tomlinson, North Swindon

Michael Tomlinson, Mid Dorset and North Poole

Craig Tracey, North Warwickshire

David Tredinnick, Bosworth

Anne-Marie Trevelyan, Berwick-upon-Tweed

Liz Truss, South West Norfolk

Thomas Tugendhat, Tonbridge and Malling

Andrew Turner, Isle of Wight

Andrew Tyrie, Chichester

Ed Vaizey, Wantage

Shailesh Vara, North West Cambridgeshire

Martin Vickers, Cleethorpes

Theresa Villiers, Chipping Barnet

Charles Walker, Broxbourne

Robin Walker, Worcester

Matt Warman, Boston and Skegness

Dame Angela Watkinson, Hornchurch and Upminster

Helen Whately, Faversham and Mid Kent

Heather Wheeler, South Derbyshire

Chris White, Warwick and Leamington

Craig Whittaker, Calder Valley

John Whittingdale, Maldon

Bill Wiggin, North Herefordshire

Craig Williams, Cardiff North

Gavin Williamson, South Staffordshire

Rob Wilson, Reading East

Dr. Sarah Wollaston, Totnes

Mike Wood, Dudley South

William Wragg, Hazel Grove

Jeremy Wright, Kenilworth and Southam

DUP:

Gregory Campbell, East Londonderry

Jim Shannon, Strangford

UKIP:

Douglas Carswell, Clacton

UUP:

Tom Elliott, Fermanagh and South Tyrone

Danny Kinahan, South Antrim

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.

31st Periodic Review Board Takes Place, for Yemeni at Guantánamo, as 8th Prisoner Has His Detention Upheld

Last week, as I reported here, a Periodic Review Board was convened to look at the case of Obaidullah, an Afghan prisoner at Guantánamo, to see if he can be approved for release. The PRBs are a high-level, US government process, assessing the cases of prisoners who are not facing trials, and have not already been approved for release by the last review process, the Guantánamo Review Task Force, which President Obama established shortly after taking office in January 2009.

31 men have so far had their cases considered, and in 20 cases have been approved for release, while eight men have had their ongoing imprisonment approved (although they are eligible for further reviews), and three are awaiting the results of their reviews.

The 31st prisoner to have his case considered, two days after Obaidullah, was Hani Saleh Rashid Abdullah (ISN 841), a 46-year old Yemeni, also identified as Said Salih Said Nashir. He is one of a group of six men seized in house raids in Karachi, Pakistan on September 11, 2002, on the same day that alleged 9/11 co-conspirator Ramzi bin al-Shibh was seized, who were then sent to CIA-tun torture prisons for six weeks. They were initially regarded as recruits for a specific terrorist attack, although the government has long since walked away from this claim, as became apparent when the first of the six, Ayub Murshid Ali Salih (ISN 836), had his PRB in February, and was approved for release last month.

Crucially, the government conceded that, although the six Yemenis were initially “labeled as the ‘Karachi Six,’ based on concerns that they were part of an al Qa’ida operational cell intended to support a future attack,” it had become apparent that “a review of all available reporting” indicated that “this label more accurately reflects the common circumstances of their arrest and that it is more likely the six Yemenis were elements of a large pool of Yemeni fighters that senior al-Qa’ida planners considered potentially available to support future operations.”

The government’s profile of Abdullah added that he “was probably intended by al-Qa’ida senior leaders to return to Yemen to support eventual attacks in Saudi Arabia, but [he] may not have been witting of these plans.” The profile also stated that he “traveled to fight in Afghanistan in June 2001, trained at al-Qa’ida’s al-Farouq camp, and admitted to a close association with some of the group’s external operations planners and senior leadership, including senior al-Qa’ida operative and 9/11 conspirator Walid bin Attash, better known as Khallad (YM-10014).” It is not known, however, whether this “close association” actually existed, or was invented during interrogations.

The authorities also noted that he “has committed less than 70 infractions since his arrival in 2002 until March 2015, a low number relative to other detainees,” although they also claimed that he “has repeatedly attempted to minimize his role within al-Qa’ida, evade questions, and manipulate interrogators,” and “has also expressed continued support for jihad against “legitimate” military or government targets, has celebrated the idea of Muslims killing invaders, and has requested, on occasion, to see news footage of past al-Qa’ida attacks.” It was also noted that he “has also continued to defend terrorist tactics and violence to overthrow un-Islamic governments, repel invaders, or in order to seek revenge.” In contrast, back in 2010, when I wrote about his case, I noted that he had “stated he would never kill innocent women or children in the United States because it was against his religion.”

Abdullah also said he was “willing to go anywhere and participate in a rehabilitation program in order to leave Guantánamo,” and wanted the board members to know that he “ran a small business and was an experienced electrician in Yemen — skills that could potentially help him gain employment outside of GTMO.” It was also noted that, as of August 2015, “he was attending all available life skill courses” at Guantánamo.

In discussing his possible release, it was noted that he “would have avenues for reengagement in jihad if he returned to Yemen,” because his sister is married to the brother of Khalid Ahmed Qasim (ISN 242), who is also held at Guantánamo (and was turned down for release by a PRB), and Yasser Ahmed Qasim, described as a “conspirator” in the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000. It was also noted that his family “is believed to be living in al-Burayqah, an area reported to have a strong AQAP [Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula] presence.” This, however, is irrelevant to considerations of his release, because, if he were to be recommended for release, he would not be sent back to Yemen, as the entire US establishment refuses to send any Yemenis home, and would need to be rehoused in a third country, far from his family.

The reviews last week are part of a new, and belated trend to review two cases a week, to make sure that all those eligible for PRBs have their cases reviewed before President Obama leaves office. This should have happened years ago — by March 2012 at the latest, in fact, because it was in March 2011 that President Obama issued an executive order authorizing the ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial of 46 men, as recommended by his task force, but with the proviso that they would have their cases reviewed within a year. The task force based its decisions on claims that the men in question were “too dangerous to release,” while acknowledging that insufficient evidence existed to put them on trial; in other words, that it was not actually evidence at all, but was based on dubious statements made by the prisoners themselves, or their fellow prisoners, after being tortured or otherwise abused, or bribed with the promise of more favorable conditions.

The reviews, however, did not even begin until November 2013, and although they currently have a success rate of 71%, rather discrediting the “too dangerous to release” tag as unjustifiably hyperbolic, 36 men are still awaiting reviews or the results of reviews, and as a result it is reassuring to hear that reviews are now being scheduled twice-weekly.

Around the same time that Abdullah’s review was taking place, the authorities announced that the eighth prisoner to have his ongoing imprisonment upheld was Sharqawi Abdu Ali Al-Hajj aka Abdu Ali Sharqawi (ISN 1457), in a decision taken on April 14.

In its final determination, the board, “by consensus, determined that continued law of war detention of the detainee remains necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States.”

The board members added that they had considered that Al-Hajj had “developed ties to senior al-Qaida leaders such as Usama Bin Laden and Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, associated with al-Qaida plotters and operatives including members of the USS Cole bombing and some of the 9/11 hijackers, and probably provided logistical and financial support for al-Qaida operations to include facilitating the travel of fighters from Yemen.”

It was also noted that his “statements and behavior while in detention indicate that he remains committed to engaging in violent acts against the United States,” and the board members also remarked on their “difficulty in assessing his current mindset and credibility due to his decision to not participate in the hearing, and insufficient information presented to the Board regarding his plans if transferred and the support that he would have if transferred.”

As I noted at the time of his review, his failure to turn up for his hearing would have counted against him to a significant extent. As I stated, “Most of the prisoners reviewed to date have accepted that a recommendation for their release can only come about, if at all, through their full engagement with the process, and it is, of course, unimaginable that anyone in the penal system would have parole granted if they refused to turn up to attend a hearing.”

Of course, his failure to attend the hearing would not have been the primary reason that his efforts to secure his release were turned down. He is one of 25 prisoners made eligible for PRBs back in 2013 who were initially recommended for prosecution by the task force in 2010, and last March the Miami Herald noted (as I discussed here) how Pentagon officials were still hoping to prosecute another seven of the men still held, including Al-Hajj, indicating that he remains someone unlikely to be approved for release — and if this is the case, then it would be preferable if he were to be put forward for prosecution if there are crimes of which he is accused, rather than continuing to be held indefinitely without charge or trial.

Below, I’m also cross-posting the opening statements made at Said Nashir’s PRB by his personal representatives (military personnel appointed to help the prisoners prepared for their hearings), and by his attorney, Charles H. Carpenter, which I hope you will find useful.

The representatives, who only met him around six weeks ago,  had found him to be a very positive person, always smiling, and Carpenter, who has known him much longer, has described him, over the course of his 11-year relationship with him, as someone who has “remained optimistic and focused on the future,” has always sought out educational opportunities, and is “devoted to his family,” and it will, I think, be appropriate for the board to recommend his release.

Periodic Review Board Initial Hearing, 21 Apr 2016

Said Salih Said Nashir, ISN 841

Personal Representative Opening Statement

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen of the Board. We are the Personal Representatives for ISN 841, Mr. Hani Saleh Rashid Abdullah. We will be assisting Mr. Abdullah with his case this morning, along with the assistance of his Private Counsel.

Hani has been overjoyed and eager to participate in the Periodic Review process since we first met with him in mid-March 2016. When we explained why we were meeting with him, not only did he express his happiness, but it was obvious by the way his face lit up. He has maintained his positive attitude throughout all of our meetings and has always been gracious and respectful towards us. What is probably most amazing is that he is almost always smiling. Even when discussing hardship, he maintains his humor. He tells his stories much in the same way one might tell of a terrible situation where, with time, the memory of has become a little less painful. Perhaps even to the point where one might be able to see at least a small amount of humor in it.

During our meetings, Hani has expressed his desire to return home to reunite with his family, although he does realize that it is not likely that he would be transferred to Yemen. He is open to transfer to any country, but would prefer an Arabic-speaking country, if possible. He is willing to participate in any rehabilitation or reintegration program as well. He looks forward to getting married after his transfer from Guantánamo Bay, and starting his own family. He also hopes that at some point his sisters and brothers could visit him and he could get to know the youngest members of his close-knit family who were born during his detention. His 10 years of experience as an electrician, as well as the classes he has taken while here at GTMO, will help him to find employment regardless of where he is transferred.

Hani has been a compliant detainee and has taken advantage of the many educational opportunities here at the detention facility. He has learned basic computer skills, including how to use Photoshop, and has taken classes in art, life skills and English. He has done well in all courses and his teachers speak highly of him. By being exposed to so many people of various cultural and religious backgrounds here at GTMO, Hani has also had a chance to better understand and appreciate their beliefs and customs which will also serve him well wherever he is transferred.

We are confident that Rani’s desire to pursue a better way of life if transferred from Guantánamo Bay is genuine and that he bears no ill will towards anyone. We remain convinced that Hani does not pose a significant threat to security of the United States or any of its allies.

Thank you for your time and attention and we look forward to answering any questions you may have during this Board.

Statement of Charles H. Carpenter

Good morning, ladies and Gentlemen of the Board. I am Charley Carpenter, and am here as private counsel to ISN 841. Thank you for the opportunity to address you today.

I am a member of the bars of Montana, Idaho, Maryland, and the District of Columbia and, together with Stephen M. Truitt, have been representing Hani Saleh Rashid Abdullah (ISN 841) since January 2005. I have visited Abdullah more than a dozen times over the years, and have come to know him well.

We were first engaged to represent Abdullah by his sister, who lives with her husband in Bahrain. Abdullah’s family had learned from the Red Crescent that he was in US captivity, and wanted a lawyer to represent him in a petition for a writ of habeas corpus.

We first visited Abdullah in June of 2005. He described for us his brief experience n Afghanistan prior to fleeing that country in late 2001, and his efforts to get home to Yemen for the next 10 months or so. He also described the horrendous treatment to which he was subjected in the “Prison of Darkness” after his arrest in Pakistan. It was particularly striking to me that he seemed, less than three years after that ordeal, to be nearly without rancor, and to have a fairly positive outlook on life.

My experiences with him over the ensuing 11 years have borne that out: though the ups and downs of the delays in his case, and the changes in conditions at the prison, Abdullah has remained optimistic and focused on the future. From the beginning, he has asked us about educational opportunities, and has had us find written material to supplement the classes he has been taking while in the prison. He has maintained a healthy sense of humor — sometimes a little dry, but always fairly positive. He has never seemed angry, nor motivated to do harm.

Abdullah has been devoted to his family throughout our representation of him. He was always as interested in family news as in the progress in our case, and has always expressed the hope that he would be reunited with them. Mr. Truitt and I visited with Abdullah’s oldest brother in Yemen in 2008, and I met Abdullah’s father at the time. They were, and remain, devoted to helping Abdullah rebuild his life once he is released. Neither Abdullah nor his family has ever expressed to me any sentiment that could be called either political or religious extremism, nor do they seem inclined in that way in any sense.

Similarly, Mr. Truitt and I stand ready to help Abdullah re-integrate to the extent we can — our post-Guantánamo work with our other client ISN 519 has been rewarding for us and helpful for him.

Thanks again for the opportunity to speak to you. I would be happy to answer any questions.

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: On RT, Andy Worthington Discusses the Relaunched Gitmo Clock, the Countdown to Close Guantanamo and Whether Obama Will Close the Prison

Watch me on RT here. Visit, like, share and retweet the Gitmo Clock here.

Today, I was delighted to appear on RT to discuss the Gitmo Clock that I relaunched yesterday to count down the days, hours, minutes and seconds left for President Obama to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay. The first version of the clock was launched in the summer of 2013 to count the number of days since President Obama’s May 2013 promise to resume releasing prisoners from  Guantánamo, and how many men had been released.

This new version of the Gitmo Clock is part of the Countdown to Close Guantánamo that I launched in January, as the co-director of the Close Guantánamo campaign. Below is a cross-post of the article I published on Close Guantánamo yesterday for the relaunch of the clock, preceded by a transcript of excerpts from the RT interview.

RT: Obama is surely aware that time is running out. Do you think your reminder will be what kicks him into action? Is the closure of Gitmo going to finally happen before he leaves office?

Andy Worthington: I very much hope so, as do all the people who have been working so hard for so many years to get this wretched place closed down. What I am trying to do with the campaign here is just to keep the pressure on, keep reminding the President — the clock is part of that. We’ve got a Countdown to Close Guantanamo, where every 50 days we’ve got people standing with posters. The numbers are going down; just reminding him that time is running out.

RT: But if that was so easy for him to do that, of course it would have been done. There is a lot more to it in the background. What are the sticking points here?

Andy Worthington: I have to say that President Obama has moved very slowly at various times during his presidency, when he’s been faced with pretty unprincipled, but pretty severe opposition in Congress. Congress is the main problem. Lawmakers have been doing everything they can to make it extremely difficult for him to close Guantanamo. But he hasn’t been willing to spend the political capital to overcome their resistance. And he has had the means to do that. What we’ve got now is clearly a concerted effort by the administration with time running out to actually move towards getting it closed…

RT: You said “towards.” You don’t actually think it’s going to happen?

Andy Worthington: It is really hard to know. He is reducing the number of prisoners there. He’ll say to Congress: Look, it’s costing an insane amount of money to hold a smaller and smaller amount of people, because the fixed costs for running the place are the same, whether you’ve got a few dozen people, or hundreds.

He may prevail in persuading Congress. Otherwise we’re not sure yet whether he can do it by an executive order, or whether he is going to be left to hand it over to his successor. If that is a Democrat, it looks less problematical about achieving it…

The obstacle he has is that the laws that are currently in place prohibit him from closing it by moving prisoners to the mainland, which is what would need to fulfill his promise. So will Congress play ball with him, or will he have to do it without Congress? We are still waiting to see.

For the Countdown to Close Guantánamo, We Relaunch the Gitmo Clock, Counting Days Obama Has Left to Close the Prison Before He Leaves Office

By Andy Worthington, Close Guantánamo, April 24, 2016

Yesterday, the Close Guantánamo campaign relaunched the Gitmo Clock,  which we first set up in the summer of 2013 to count the number of days since President Obama’s May 2013 promise to resume releasing prisoners from the prison at Guantánamo Bay (after several years of inaction, prompted by Congressional obstruction), and also to count the number of prisoners released. See this RT article for a screenshot of the first version of the clock.

This new version counts down how many days President Obama has left until he leaves office, to fulfill the promise to close Guantánamo that he made on his second day as president back in January 2009.

Please visit the Gitmo Clock , like it, share it and retweet it if you want to see Guantánamo closed.

The Close Guantánamo campaign was set up on January 11, 2012, the 10th anniversary of the opening of the prison, by myself and the attorney Tom Wilner, who represented the Guantánamo prisoners in their Supreme Court cases in 2004 and 2008, when they successfully sought habeas corpus rights.

In January this year, Tom and I set up a new initiative, the Countdown to Close Guantánamo, which Andy launched on Democracy Now! with the music legend Roger Waters (ex-Pink Floyd), and the relaunched Gitmo Clock is part of this initiative. For the Countdown, celebrities (including the actors David Morrissey and Juliet Stevenson and the musician and producer Brian Eno), politicians, former prisoners and concerned members of the public across the US and worldwide have been taking photos of themselves with signs telling President Obama how many days he has left to close the prison before he leaves office.

Over 300 photos are on the website (here and here), with supporters holding up signs marking one year to go (on Jan. 20), 350 days (on Feb. 4), and 300 days (on Mar. 25).

The next milestone is 250 days to go (on May 14), and in the meantime the Gitmo Clock is counting down from today, with just 270 days left for President Obama to fulfill his promise. To take part in the Countdown to Close Guantánamo, take a photo with a poster and email it it to us for May 14.

80 prisoners are still held at Guantánamo, and 26 of those men have been approved for release — 15 since 2010, when President Obama’s high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force decided whether the prisoners held when Obama took office should be released or prosecuted, or whether they should continue to be held without charge or trial, and eleven since January 2014, as a result of the ongoing deliberations of Periodic Review Boards, established to review the cases of all the men not already approved for release or facing trials.

The administration has promised to release everyone approved for release by summer, and to ensure that all the Periodic Review Boards are completed before the end of Obama’s presidency, but it is still by no means clear whether or not the president will manage to persuade Congress to back his plan to move the remaining prisoners to the US mainland, so that Guantánamo can finally be closed. We know that many campaigners, activists and lawyers are troubled by the prospect of indefinite detention being moved to the US mainland, rather than being shut down once and for all, but as we have always maintained, we believe that, on the mainland, they will have new opportunities to challenge the basis of their detention that have been denied them at Guantánamo for too many years.

Note: Thanks to Justin Norman for designing the Gitmo Clock.

Photos and Report: Parliamentary Meeting for Guantánamo Prisoner Mohamedou Ould Slahi, April 19, 2016

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