Andy Worthington's Blog, page 77

The American Lawyer’s Six Guantánamo Bar Profiles: Thomas Wilner, David Remes, Jennifer Cowan, Wells Dixon, David Nevin and Lee Wolosky

The November 2015 issue of The American Lawyer featured a “Special Report: The Guantánamo Bar,” consisting of six interviews with attorneys who have worked on Guantánamo. I’m cross-posting them below, as I think they will be of interest, and I also estimate that many of you will not have come across them previously.

The six lawyers featured were: Thomas Wilner of Shearman & Sterling; David Remes, formerly of Covington & Burling; Jennifer Cowan of Debevoise & Plimpton; J. Wells Dixon of the Center for Constitutional Rights; Public Defender David Nevin; and Lee Wolosky of Boies, Schiller & Flexner. Wolosky was appointed last June as the White House’s special envoy for Guantánamo closure, while the rest have represented prisoners held at Guantánamo.

Thomas Wilner represented a number of Kuwaiti prisoners, and also represented the prisoners in their habeas corpus cases before the Supreme Court in 2004 and 2008. He is co-founder, with me, of the Close Guantánamo campaign, launched in January 2012, through which, for the last four years, we have been attempting to educate people about why Guantánamo must be closed, and who is held there, and I’m pleased to note that The American Lawyer described him as “the most vocal proponent in the Guantánamo bar for the closure of the offshore prison.”

I also know David Remes (who has represented over two dozen prisoners, mostly Yemenis) and Wells Dixon (who “oversees a staff of four attorneys, two paralegals, a political adviser and two fellows” at CCR), although I have not met Jennifer Cowan (whose firm has represented five prisoners), David Nevin (who represents Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) or Lee Wolosky, but I am pleased to see them all interviewed, and I hope you agree that the six interviews provide a fascinating insight into Guantánamo. Please note that all the links in the interviews below are ones that I have added.

The Pioneer: Thomas Wilner

Shearman & Sterling’s Thomas Wilner recalls the TV footage of detainees, clad in orange jumpsuits, being herded into open-air cages in Guantánamo in early 2002. “My first reaction was, ‘Thank God we got these guys who did this horrible thing to us,'” he says. Two months later, however, Wilner, then a partner in the firm’s Washington, D.C., office handling a variety of trade, litigation and government regulatory matters, got a call from some wealthy Kuwaiti families whose sons or husbands had gone missing in 2001. Could he help with a missing persons matter?

Ultimately, a dozen were found to be in U.S. custody at Guantánamo, and Wilner would represent all of them. He soon came to wonder whether his clients had been arrested by mistake. Families in Kuwait showed him evidence they said proved that their son or husband had gone to Afghanistan to do charitable work. Further investigation revealed that most had been arrested by Pakistani tribespeople and police after they had crossed the border to escape U.S. air strikes in Afghanistan and sold as “Arab terrorists” into U.S. custody for bounties.

Wilner’s matter would quickly evolve into one of the first Guantánamo habeas corpus suits. Filed on May 1, 2002, his suit on behalf of the Kuwaitis would eventually be consolidated on appeal with the Center for Constitutional Rights’ original case, Rasul v. Bush.

Coming two years before other large U.S. firms got involved, Wilner’s decision to help the Kuwaiti detainees was radioactive; there was a real risk that Shearman’s clients would object. When Shearman’s then-senior partner, David Heleniak, heard about the case, he “was furious,” Wilner says. Wilner volunteered to resign from the firm to pursue the case, but Heleniak wouldn’t let him. Despite some bad press, including a Wall Street Journal report that noted that the firm was “handsomely paid” by the Kuwaitis, Shearman’s commitment would continue for the next decade. (Shearman says it donated its hourly fees from the case to charity.)

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Rasul opened the doors to individual habeas cases on behalf of detainees, and hundreds would eventually be filed. But even after the Rasul ruling, there still wasn’t a protocol for how to do it. “We said, ‘We want to go visit our clients,'” Wilner recalls. “The government waffled, then said, ‘You can only go in if we can eavesdrop on your conversations.'” Shearman went back to court, winning a key ruling prohibiting the government from doing so.

Then, in a pattern that would be repeated after future landmark pro-detainee decisions, Congress passed legislation eliminating habeas rights completely, prompting another suit by CCR, Shearman, Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr and other firms. Those cases, later consolidated on appeal as Boumediene v. Bush, invalidated the legislation and affirmed that the detainees’ habeas rights were guaranteed by the Constitution.

While many other habeas lawyers fought alongside Wilner in those landmark cases, Wilner has also taken the fight to Capitol Hill throughout the past decade. In the past five years, as Republicans have attempted to undermine the president’s ability to transfer cleared detainees and to close the base, Sen. Carl Levin, D.-Michigan (now retired), sought out Wilner’s advice repeatedly in finding ways to soften the language of such legislation.

In late 2010, as part of its annual National Defense Authorization Act, Congress blocked transfers of any detainee not ordered released by a court, unless the secretary of defense issued a personal certification ensuring that the individual transferred “cannot engage or re-engage in any terrorist activity” — an impossibly high bar. The next year, an amendment, drafted by Levin and vetted by Wilner and others, allows the president to waive certification requirements if he or she determines that the country receiving the detainee had taken steps to “substantially mitigate” the risk that the detainee would become a threat again. Eventually, that waiver, combined with additional amendments in 2013, would hasten the transfer of scores of detainees cleared by a presidential multiagency task force.

Though he no longer has any clients at Guantánamo, Wilner remains among the most deeply engaged lawyers in the private bar pushing detainee issues politically. He continues to work with the administration and key members of Congress, including senators Richard Durbin, Dianne Feinstein and John McCain.

He’s also the most vocal proponent in the Guantánamo bar for the closure of the offshore prison. “Tom Wilner has always been full-throated and passionate about closing Guantánamo,” says Morgan, Lewis & Bockius counsel P. Sabin Willett, who represented a group of Uighurs who were all transferred to third-party countries. “For him, it’s a patriotic duty as much as anything else.”

Wilner says that the unbroken string of D.C. Circuit court decisions backing the government’s right to indefinitely detain prisoners at Guantánamo Bay has cut the heart out of the Gitmo bar’s legal efforts. “A lot of the people involved in the habeas cases now — it’s just wheel-spinning in the courts,” Wilner says. “The real battle is to get the White House to act. By not acting, the administration has allowed Congress to harden restrictions against transfers and closure.”

The Solo Practitioner: David Remes

While most habeas counsel have seen their Guantánamo docket wither, David Remes has doubled down on his. With the backing of his former firm, Covington & Burling, Remes currently represents 17 clients, 16 of them Yemeni, more than any other lawyer or firm. Over the past 11 years, he has represented more than two dozen.

He and others at Covington, among the first to volunteer to take on the habeas cases, were originally assigned 13 Yemeni clients. At a peak in the mid-2000s, more than a dozen lawyers and staff worked on the cases, providing the litigation muscle behind some watershed Supreme Court cases, including Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and Boumediene v. Bush. Though Covington won five habeas cases in federal district court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit negated those victories.

Unlike most other habeas counsel, Remes found his roles as Covington partner and Guantánamo advocate increasingly difficult to combine. His public, often adversarial stances, whether on detainee mistreatment or limitations on his ability to represent his clients, set him apart from most other law firm volunteers. Things came to a head in July 2008 at a news conference in Yemen. Acting on impulse, Remes demonstrated just how invasive the Guantánamo guards’ genital searches of detainees were: He thumbed around the waistline of his pants; his belt came undone, and his trousers fell. Photographs were taken. Within days, he had resigned from the firm. “It hastened the inevitable,” Remes says. “I had gradually lost interest in anything else at the firm. I couldn’t be a lawyer-activist and also a Covington corporate lawyer.”

Operating as a solo human rights lawyer, Remes has continued to co-counsel with his former firm on 15 cases. Since 2008, he’s partnered with Brian Foster, a senior associate who has had the lead role on several habeas cases, supported by seven other lawyers at the firm.

When the habeas cases stalled, however, Remes pivoted into a new area. He’s one of the handful of private lawyers assisting the so-called forever detainees — 51 men categorized in 2009 as “law of war detainees,” including some referred for prosecution but never charged — before the newly created Periodic Review Board (PRB). The interagency board, rolled out by the Obama administration in 2011, is tasked with reviewing the status of those detainees who were previously deemed too difficult to try but too dangerous to release. It operates much like a parole board, evaluating not the legality of a detainee’s detention, but what risk, if any, he still poses.

Remes, with Covington providing assistance, has helped three Yemeni detainees win “cleared” status, though all remain detained awaiting transfers. In July, he assisted a fourth, whose status hadn’t yet been decided at press time; six more of his clients await review.

In written and oral submissions on behalf of his client Mahmud Al Mujahid, for example, Remes told the board that Mujahid, allegedly one of scores of bodyguards of Osama bin Laden, was a “natural leader” and a “peacemaker” at the camp. But what most appeared to sway the board in its November 2013 decision clearing Mujahid, he believes, was the testimony of a former Yemeni foreign minister who spoke about Mujahid’s high standing in Yemeni society as the scion of an ancient family of judges and lawyers. Another Remes client, Abdel Malik Wahab, also an alleged former bin Laden bodyguard, was cleared after his second PRB hearing last December; Remes believes that Wahhab’s new personal appeal to be reunited with his wife and daughter resonated with the board.

Hearings, like everything in Guantánamo, initially moved at a snail’s pace, but since spring, the tempo has quickened; of 17 completed status reviews, 13 have been cleared [note: now 20 out of 24]. “I do think the board feels the pressure to move quickly,” Remes says. “There is a new sense of urgency.”

Remes says he is sustained by the deep personal connections he has forged with his clients and their families over scores of visits to Guantánamo and 11 trips to Yemen. One client in particular haunts him: Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, who died in his cell of a drug overdose in 2012. The military called the death a suicide, though Remes and others dispute the finding.

Captured in 2001 by Pakistani authorities and transferred to U.S. custody, Latif was among the earliest to be sent to Guantánamo in January 2002. He was cleared three times by the Bush-era military Combatant Status Review Tribunals, and approved for transfer, but the Bush administration wouldn’t release him and other cleared Yemenis.

His habeas case also proved a dead end. A year after the Boumediene decision, Latif was ordered freed by a U.S. district judge, who said he wasn’t convinced by the government’s uncorroborated evidence — a single interrogation report — that Latif was involved with al-Qaida. The government appealed, and the D.C. Circuit reversed.

The court ruled that judges had to presume that the government’s evidence, even an uncorroborated intelligence report, was true unless there was “clear evidence to the contrary,” shifting the burden of proof to the detainee.

In 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal. Latif, who had spent years in a hunger strike to protest his continued detention, force-fed via a nasal tube and in solitary confinement, “was in utter despair” by the time he died, Remes says.

The Innovator: Jennifer Cowan

In January 2009, a week before President Obama was sworn in, Debevoise & Plimpton counsel Jennifer Cowan was visiting her clients detained at Guantánamo when she thought to herself, “I have to remember everything about this place, because it’s not going to be here soon.”

She was wrong: A decade since she first took five cases on, Cowan, now the firm’s pro bono counsel, still represents two Yemeni detainees, one cleared for transfer in 2010 and the other recommended for continued detention without charge. Her team has continued to win individual habeas cases, despite court rollbacks of detainee rights.

Cowan says that on her first trip to Guantánamo in early 2006, her clients were “rightfully suspicious of us.” They had already been held four years and interrogated by many people. “Then, one day, a new set of Americans shows up and says, ‘Hi, we’re your lawyers, and by the way, we’ve visited your families in Yemen,” she says. Trust developed over dozens of trips to the base, where she and her colleagues would talk with each client for hours over fast food from a commissary as well as Middle Eastern food, until outside food was banned in July.

The food ban is just the most recent of many restrictions that Cowan and her clients have contended with. In 2008, for instance, the prison began subjecting detainees to groin searches anytime that they left their cells. In 2013, a federal district judge ordered the searches ended, calling them unnecessary and finding that they were meant to “actively discourage” detainees from meeting with their lawyers. (The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit later overturned that decision.)

Cowan and her team gained the release of an Afghani client, Haji Bismullah, days before Obama’s inauguration in 2009. They did so by providing the government with evidence, which the firm developed itself, that, rather than being an enemy combatant, Bismullah had fought the Taliban — that he was, in fact, a member of the pro-American Afghan government. Among the evidence were sworn statements from Afghan officials that Bismullah had been framed by Taliban collaborators who wanted to take over his provincial position; one accuser had even stolen his car after his arrest.

The Debevoise lawyers also gained the release of a Sudanese client, Ibrahim Idris, who is bipolar and diabetic. He had been cleared in 2009, but as is the case with many Sudanese, his case had been stayed indefinitely. In October 2013, the Debevoise team obtained a habeas writ for Idris using a novel argument: not that Idris wasn’t being legitimately held, but because he was unable to function independently, he was no longer a battlefield threat and should be released under Army regulations governing the treatment of detainees. It remains the only court-ordered release of a detainee by a U.S. district court since 2010.

Because a court-ordered release falls under an exception to the congressional ban on detainee transfers to state sponsors of terrorism such as Sudan, Idris was flown home two months later. When Cowan received a message that his plane had landed in Khartoum, she burst into tears. Although Idris wanders the house all night mutely, his family tells her that he seems content.

Idris was joined on that flight by another Sudanese detainee, one of the few who had pled guilty to a war crime. He had already completed his sentence. Says Cowan: “It is a source of great frustration to everyone that the ones who have been lucky enough to be accused of specific crimes and plead guilty have been released, but those who haven’t faced charges are still there, with no avenue to release.”

The Point Man: J. Wells Dixon

J. Wells Dixon moved to New York from Hartford on Sept. 11, 2001, to start a job as an associate at Kramer Levin Frankel & Naftalis. At the time, he says, he could never have imagined that 14 years later, he’d be representing a defendant who is now a cooperator against some of the defendants in the 9/11 attacks.

Dixon’s client, Majid Khan, whom he shares with cocounsel, Jenner & Block partner Katya Jestin, a former prosecutor in the Eastern District of New York, is the only one of 14 so-called high-value detainees who has pleaded guilty to any crimes. Khan has acknowledged working with Khalid Shaikh Mohammad in Pakistan after 9/11 on other terror plots, including couriering funds to al-Qaida associates to fund a hotel bombing in Jakarta and discussing other possible terrorist strikes in the U.S.

Khan, a Pakistani who grew up in Baltimore and received political asylum in the United States in 1998, is just one of dozens of detainees represented over the years by Dixon, the senior staff attorney overseeing the Guantánamo cases for the Center for Constititional Rights (CCR). Unlike Khan, the rest of his clients have never been accused of a crime. While most have been repatriated or transferred to third countries over the years, Dixon still represents four detainees, including Khan.

In 2005, CCR tapped Kramer Levin to represent seven Chinese Uighurs held at Guantánamo since 2002. Dixon, then an associate at the firm, joined senior white-collar defense partners Gary Naftalis, Paul Schoeman and Eric Tirschwell in representing them.

The first thing his first Uighur client told Dixon in 2006 was that he had been cleared by a Combatant Status Review Panel four years earlier — information that the government had withheld from his attorneys. “That sort of set the hook for me,” Dixon says. Within a year, Kramer Levin agreed to loan Dixon to CCR, a temporary arrangement that became permanent in 2007. Dixon now oversees a staff of four attorneys, two paralegals, a political adviser and two fellows.

Over the years, Khan has told his legal team about his torture and mistreatment, but much remained classified even after some of Khan’s torture was outlined in a Senate report last year. Recently declassified notes provide more detail: Khan was beaten repeatedly, waterboarded twice, hung from a beam for days, and spent much of 2003 in total darkness. He is expected to be sentenced next year for charges that include murder, spying and conspiracy in an al-Qaida bombing in Indonesia, a plot to kill then-Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and a plan to blow up gas stations in the United States.

Although Dixon has traveled far from the career path he’d imagined in 2001, his story is similar to the Guantánamo bar’s other Big Law members. “I came to these cases like a lot of lawyers,” he says. “The idea that the government would create a prison entirely outside the law was against everything I’d been taught as a lawyer and as a citizen. It was shocking to me.”

The Public Defender: David Nevin

In his 37-year legal career, David Nevin of Boise’s Nevin, Benjamin, McKay & Bartlett has often taken on clients other lawyers shy away from. He won an acquittal for Kevin Harris, a co-defendant in the 1993 criminal trial arising from a shootout with federal agents in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and for Sami al-Hussayen, a Saudi graduate student at the University of Idaho accused in 2004 of involvement in terrorist activities.

Still, the magnitude of his current case, representing accused 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, is far beyond any other he’s handled. The government has called the case, which involves five 9/11 defendants and is still years away from trial, the largest criminal investigation in history. By comparison, the defense team in the 2006 federal district court criminal trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, which relied on similar evidence, hired 70 lawyers just to read the 350,000 police reports from dozens of countries that were entered into the government’s case.

Nevin’s client, one of 14 high-value detainees, was captured in 2003 and originally held at overseas “black sites,” where he endured CIA interrogations that included being waterboarded at least 183 times. He has not entered a plea in this case, but in earlier proceedings he claimed responsibility for the attacks.

Pretrial hearings, held at a courtroom at Guantánamo equipped with time-delayed speakers and controls to allow officials to block testimony considered classified, have been held up repeatedly since 2009, when the military commissions were reconstituted. For the past 18 months, the hearings have been derailed over now-confirmed accusations that the FBI tried to infiltrate a defense team. Earlier delays were prompted by the discovery of a listening device hidden in a smoke detector in a client meeting room, and a defendant’s complaint that a court-appointed interpreter had previously been used in his CIA interrogations.

Nevin, who has visited the base roughly 75 times since 2008, says he expects hearings in mid-October to finally go forward. Unlike colleagues in the habeas bar, who volunteer their time, he and other defense counsel are being paid $184 an hour by the U.S. government — federal public defender rates for a capital case.

Still, the real discovery battles haven’t even begun. Those disputes revolve around the admissibility of information gained under torture. While his client’s admissions during his torture have been ruled inadmissible, defense counsel for the five are likely to challenge prosecutors’ efforts to introduce evidence that came from others who were tortured. Also a point of contention: admissions made by defendants during their reinterrogation at Guantánamo, which defense counsel assert are also tainted by the past trauma their clients experienced. Meanwhile, the government has rejected, on national security grounds, defense efforts to gain access to all the evidence.

“There’s a tension between national security and the idea of a fair trial,” Nevin says, adding that it’s hard to imagine how the still-untested court will find a way through these and other issues. “You have an immovable object meeting an irresistible force. I just don’t know how that all comes out in the end.”

The Diplomat: Lee Wolosky

As a litigation partner at Boies, Schiller & Flexner, Lee Wolosky is accustomed to pressure and to the spotlight. In his new post as the White House’s special envoy for Guantánamo closure, he’ll have both, in spades. Appointed June 30, Wolosky has just 14 months to find homes for detainees cleared for transfer. As of mid-October, there were 53 of them, although that number will rise as the administration speeds up review of previously uncleared detainees in an attempt to winnow down the population from its current 114 to a score or two.

It won’t be easy. The Pentagon has historically dragged its feet in signing off on approved transfers, and the administration is contending with election-year politics and a proposed defense appropriations bill that would further limit detainee transfers.

Surprisingly, President Barack Obama has been less successful than his predecessor in transferring detainees. George W. Bush resettled 532 detainees; Obama, just 124 to date [note: since this interview, 22 more men have been freed, and 37 of the 91 remaining prisoners are currently approved for release]. The first Guantánamo envoy, Daniel Fried, a career diplomat appointed to the role in 2009, got scores of captives sent home before a congressional mandate shut down his efforts down in 2011. Just four detainees were transferred in the next two years; though Obama retained the right to waive congressional restrictions, he never used the option. The office was closed until May 2013, when Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom litigation partner Cliff Sloan was appointed; he gained the release of 39 detainees before resigning last December, frustrated at the slow pace of transfers.

But habeas lawyers have high hopes for Wolosky, who combines courtroom toughness with Beltway insider status. He had a two-year stint as White House director of transnational threats before moving to Boies Schiller’s New York office in 2001. There he handled major litigation on behalf of former American International Group Inc. CEO and cochair Maurice “Hank” Greenberg, as well as families of terrorism victims in terrorism-financing cases.

“We’ve got 53 people to move,” Wolosky says. “That’s ultimately the metric of success.” He says his office will find countries willing to take all the cleared detainees. The bigger challenge, he concedes, may be shepherding those transfers through the federal bureaucracy. Six agencies have to sign off on each one: The U.S. departments of Defense, Justice, Homeland Security and State, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Those agencies are split. While Obama has commanded Wolosky and his counterpart at the Department of Defense, Paul Lewis, to transfer as many cleared detainees as possible, the Pentagon has repeatedly stalled on approving them, while the Justice Department maintains a rigid policy of opposing all habeas petitions, even for very sick detainees.

The latter policy is now under review, The New York Times and others reported this summer. One impetus said to cause a rift in the administration was the much-publicized case of Tariq Ba Odah, a Yemeni detainee cleared in 2009 who has been on a hunger strike for eight years. Citing Ba Odah’s severe physical and psychological deterioration — he now weighs 75 pounds — his lawyers petitioned for his release on humanitarian grounds. In September, after months of delays that it said were needed to review its position, the Justice Department filed a brief opposing his release.

Wolosky won’t comment on the reports, but notes that “it does impact our diplomatic engagement if we have a schizophrenic policy.” In September, after a quiet two months, things started to move. In just 10 days, three cleared detainees were suddenly released, including two Saudis and a Moroccan. More may be announced soon.

“When we hold people for 13 or 14 years without charging them criminally and are facing the prospect that they may die in custody without due process, that’s a fundamental miscarriage of justice,” Wolosky says. “That’s something we need to fix.”

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 the Countdown to Close Guantánamo, Photos Remind President Obama He Has Just 300 Days Left

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.

As an additional point of interest, this is my 2600th post since I began writing articles about Guantánamo on a full-time basis in May 2007. If you wish to make a donation to support my work, most of which is reader-funded, then please feel free to do so — I am still hoping to raise $1100 of my $3500 target for the next three months. Click on the ‘Donate’ button below to make a donation via PayPal.

Yesterday, March 25, marked 300 days until the end of Barack Obama’s Presidency, and, to mark the occasion, celebrities and concerned citizens across the US and around the world have been taking photos of themselves with posters, as part of the Countdown to Close Guantánamo campaign, reminding President Obama that he has just 300 days left to close the prison, as he promised to do on his second day in office back in January 2009. The poster is here, and you can send it to us here.

The actors David Morrissey and Juliet Stevenson, and the lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, the founder of Reprieve, which represents men still held at Guantánamo, are supporting the campaign, along with around 80 other people from the US and elsewhere, who, to date, have sent in photos of themselves with posters reminding the president that he has just 300 days left, to add to the 180 photos sent in when the campaign was launched in January, and marking 350 days last month. All the photos are available on the website here and here, and some are also on our Facebook and Twitter pages.

The Countdown to Close Guantánamo is an initiative of the Close Guantánamo campaign, which I founded in January 2012 (as a journalist, activist and Guantánamo expert) with the attorney Tom Wilner, who represented the Guantánamo prisoners in their habeas corpus cases before the Supreme Court in 2004 and 2008. I launched the Countdown to Close Guantánamo in January this year with music legend Roger Waters (ex-Pink Floyd) on Democracy Now!

Since January, when President Obama released 21 men, there has, unfortunately, been little action on Guantánamo. 91 men are still held, even though 37 of these men have been approved for release (or “approved for transfer” in Guantánamo-speak) — 24 since 2010, through the deliberations of the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established shortly after taking office in 2009, and 13 through the deliberations of Periodic Review Boards, another high-level review process established in 2013 to review the cases of prisoners not already approved for release and not facing trials (just ten men are in this latter category).

Last month, President Obama delivered a plan for Guantánamo’s closure to Congress, promising to release the men approved for release and to continue with the Periodic Review Boards, and hoping to work with Congress to get the prison closed once and for all. Officials spoke about the prisoners approved for release being freed by summer, and the first round of PRBs being completed by the fall, and the Countdown to Close Guantánamo’s regular reminders of how many days he has left are intended to maintain pressure and awareness on the need for Guantánamo to be closed before President Obama leaves office.

The next date is May 14, marking 250 days to go, and 200 days falls on July 3, the day before Independence Day.

Speaking of the Countdown to Close Guantánamo reaching the 300-day mark, Tom Wilner said:

“Closing Guantánamo was one of the principal commitments President Obama made upon assuming office. He should not depart office leaving that lawless prison behind.”

Andy Worthington said:

“It is never good news when President Obama goes quiet on Guantánamo. Delivering a plan to Congress is not enough. The President needs to free those men already approved for release, some of whom have been waiting for their freedom for over six years since they were first told the US no longer wanted to hold them. He also needs make sure the Periodic Review Boards continue. To date they have approved for release 20 out of 24 men who, for too many years, were mistakenly described as ‘too dangerous to release.’ President Obama needs to know that the world is watching, and that he must close the prison as he promised before leaving office. Guantánamo is a legal, moral and ethical abomination, and every days it remains open is an affront to the notions of justice and respect for the rule of law that the US claims to hold dear.”

What else you can do now

To remind President Obama of his promise to close Guantánamo before he leaves office, call the White House on 202-456-1111 or 202-456-1414 or submit a comment online.

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.

Please Ask Your MPs to Support Caroline Lucas’s Early Day Motion Calling for the Closure of Guantánamo

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Contact your MP here.

Last week, Britain’s Green MP, Caroline Lucas, with the support of five other MPs, tabled an Early Day Motion (EDM 1260), entitled, ‘The Closure of Guantánamo Bay,’ which states, “That this House welcomes President Obama’s latest plan to fulfil his pledge to close Guantánamo Bay by the end of his Presidency; notes that this is President Obama’s last year in office and that his first executive order in January 2009 was to close Guantánamo; further notes that a recent US Senate report recognised the systematic use of torture in Guantánamo; believes that Guantánamo is now synonymous with torture, rendition and indefinite detention, rendering it a symbol of human rights abuses; further welcomes the release and return to the UK of British resident Shaker Aamer from nearly 14 years imprisonment in Guantánamo without charge or trial, but notes that 91 prisoners remain in Guantánamo; notes that many of these have been cleared for release without charge or trial so should be released without delay; further believes that the remaining detainees should have their full human rights restored and should either be released to countries that will respect their human rights or be given a fair trial; and urges the Government to support President Obama’s effort to close Guantánamo Bay but oppose any moves simply to relocate detainees from Guantánamo to another detention facility in the US.”

This is a comprehensive synopsis of the situation at Guantánamo with just 300 days left of the Obama Presidency, as currently highlighted by the Countdown to Close Guantánamo that I launched in January with music legend Roger Waters — mentioning the 91 men still held, even though 36 of them have been approved for release, the Senate Torture Report, and of course the release of Shaker Aamer.

Caroline has persistently opposed the existence of Guantánamo, tabling Early Day Motions calling for the prison’s closure in 2010 and 2011 (EDM 1093 and EDM 2558), and she was also one of the founding members of the All-Party Shaker Aamer Parliamentary Group set up by John McDonnell MP (Labour, Hayes and Harlington) in November 2014, which played a major role in securing the release of Shaker Aamer from Guantánamo last October.

The latest EDM was tabled on March 15, and, to date, has secured 25 signatures in total — Caroline, the EDM’s five sponsors, and 19 others. Six Labour MPs have so far signed it, one Tory, Caroline, as our only Green MP, as well as eleven SNP MPs, three Plaid Cymru MPs and three SDLP MPs.

Below is the list of MPs, and if your MP isn’t there, please contact them to ask them to sign the EDM, which you can do via WriteToThem. For reference, please have a look at the MPs who joined the Shaker Aamer Parliamentary Group, and the 51 MPs who signed an EDM for Shaker in September.

Signatories to EDM 1260, ‘The Closure of Guantánamo Bay’ 

Caroline Lucas (Green, Brighton Pavilion)

Mark Durkan (SDLP, Foyle)

Jonathan Edwards (Plaid Cymru, Carmarthen East and Dinefwr)

Alan Meale (Labour, Mansfield)

Liz Saville Roberts (Plaid Cymru, Dwyfor Meirionnydd)

Hywel Williams (Plaid Cymru, Arfon)

Also signed by:

Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh (SNP, Ochil and South Perthshire)

Mhairi Black (SNP, Paisley and Renfrewshire South )

Phil Boswell (SNP, Coatbridge Chryston and Bellshill)

Peter Bottomley (Conservative, Worthing West)

Deirdre Brock (SNP, Edinburgh North and Leith)

Ronnie Campbell (Labour, Blyth Valley)

Joanna Cherry (SNP, Edinburgh South West)

Jim Cunningham (Labour, Coventry South)

Paul Flynn (Labour, Newport West)

Kelvin Hopkins (Labour, Luton North )

Chris Law (SNP, Dundee West)

Alasdair McDonnell (SDLP, Belfast South)

Paul Monaghan (SNP, Caithness Sutherland and Easter Ross)

Gavin Newlands (SNP, Paisley and Renfrewshire North)

Margaret Ritchie (SDLP, South Down)

Christopher Stephens (SNP, Glasgow South West)

Owen Thompson (SNP, Midlothian)

Keith Vaz (Labour, Leicester East)

Mike Weir (SNP, Angus)

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.

29th Periodic Review Board at Guantánamo – for Sharqawi Ali Al-Hajj, Alleged Al-Qaeda Facilitator

Last week, Sharqawi Abdu Ali Al-Hajj (aka Abdu Ali Sharqawi), a 41-year old Yemeni, became the 29th Guantánamo prisoner to have his case considered by a Periodic Review Board, the review process that, since 2013, has been reviewing the cases of all the prisoners not facing trials (just ten men) and those 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.

Of the 91 men currently held, 24 were approved for release by the task force but are still held, while 12 others have been approved for release by Periodic Review Boards. Discounting the ten facing trials, that leaves 45 men awaiting PRBs, or the results of PRBs, which, it seems certain, will add to the number of men approved for release

23 men have so far had decisions taken on their PRBs, and in 19 of those cases the review boards have recommended them for release, a success rate of 83%. What ought to make this shameful for the administration is that the men facing PRBs were described by the task force as “too dangerous to release” six years ago, but those claims have unravelled under further scrutiny. At the time, the task force accepted that it was holding men who couldn’t be put on trial, because the information used to defend their detention wouldn’t stand up in a court, but refused to acknowledge that this meant that it was fundamentally unreliable. The task force also regarded men as dangerous based on their resistance in Guantánamo, but the PRBs are now functioning more like a parole process, and allowing prisoners the opportunity to demonstrate why they do not pose a threat, and will not pose a threat  in the future.

While most of the PRBs to date have been for men regarded by the task force as “too dangerous to release” (initially 46 men), 25 others were recommended for prosecution by the task force, until the basis for prosecutions largely collapsed as a result of a number of damning verdicts in the appeals court in Washington, D.C., where judges overturned some of the few guilty verdicts secured in the much-criticized military commissions, pointing out that the war crimes in question were not legitimate, and had been invented by Congress.

Of the 25, Al-Hajj is just the fourth to face a PRB, and just one decision has so far been taken (to release Tariq al-Sawah, an Egyptian, who was freed in January), although five others are also scheduled from April to July — see the definitive list I prepared for the Close Guantánamo website for further details.

The government’s case against Sharqawi Abdu Ali Al-Hajj

In Sharqawi Abdu Ali Al-Hajj’s case, his review board will, I’m sure, not look favorably on the fact that “he chose not to participate at his hearing,” as Human Rights First described it in the only article that was published after his PRB. 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.

However, it also seems likely that the board will have serious problems overcoming claims in al-Hajj’s files that, as the unclassified summary prepared by the military describes it, he “is a career jihadist who acted as a prominent financial and travel facilitator for al-Qa’ida members before and after the 9/11 attacks.” This bold opening is slightly undermined by the concession that, although he “probably provided logistic or financial support for al- Qa’ida operations,” he “may not have had foreknowledge of the plots,” but the summary proceeds to explain how he “developed ties to senior al-Qa’ida leaders, such as Usama Bin Ladin and Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, and associated with al-Qa’ida plotters and operatives, including members of the USS Cole bombing and some of the 9/11 hijackers.”

However, what is interesting, I think, is that the summary than describes how “he repeatedly has denied being an al-Qa’ida member, claiming instead that the group trusted him because of his facilitation support.” It should be noted that his nickname, by which he is often referred, is “Riyadh the Facilitator.”

The summary also runs through a history of what is described as “his extremist activity,” which “began in Bosnia in 1995, where he was injured fighting Serbian forces.” It continues, “He tried to join other jihadist causes in Chechnya, East Africa, and Southeast Asia before returning to Yemen in 1999. From there, he facilitated the travel of fighters to Afghanistan, many of whom became Bin Ladin’s bodyguards. In mid-2000, [he] traveled to Afghanistan, where he received basic training at an al-Qa’ida camp, before relocating to Pakistan to help Arab fighters reach Afghanistan. Once Coalition operations began, he ran a guesthouse in Karachi that he used to help Arab fighters flee the region. During this period he also funneled Saudi donations to al-Qa’ida and dispersed money to group members and other Arab fighters.”

The summary also noted that, at Guantánamo, he “has been somewhat compliant, although he has physically assaulted the guards when he perceived his grievances were not addressed.” it was also noted that, “Until late 2004, he provided his interrogators with a wealth of information on his extremist activities and associations before his capture — cooperation he leveraged to improve his living situation.” He has also according to the summary, “demonstrated leadership abilities, which he has used to influence other detainees and manipulate camp dynamics.”

It also seems clear that al-Hajj’s “comments on life after detention,” if he were to be released, will not encourage the board members to approve his release. The summary described how his comments have “centered on continuing to engage in jihad in defense of his religion,” adding that he “remains steadfast in his support for extremist causes and groups — praising recent acts of terrorism — which indicates that he views terrorist attacks as a legitimate form of jihad.” It was also noted that he “probably views America as his enemy, given that he has expressed a desire to fight and kill Americans.”

While the summary also noted that there are “no indications” that his family members, in Taiz, Yemen, “have engaged in extremist activities,” it is alleged that “they are affiliated with al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula members and other Guantánamo detainees,” some of whom are regarded as significant, as another passage makes reference to, noting that al-Hajj “has corresponded with former Guantánamo detainees suspected of reengaging in extremist activity” — although, for the record, I must note that this is both an intrusion on his privacy, and constitutes claims that may or may not be true, but which he cannot adequately address.

Al-Hajj’s torture recognized by the US courts

In contrast to this view is the one presented by his lawyers, who dispute the claims that al-Hajj was significantly involved with Al-Qaeda, and who also point out that he was tortured (a position also accepted by a number of US judges). In a document prepared by the Center for Constitutional Rights, it was stated that, after his capture, in a house raid in Karachi in February 2002, he was “[i]nitially questioned by American interrogators,” and “he freely answered questions about his business in Pakistan, explaining that he was doing what he could to help Yemeni refugees. He was promised that, if he continued to answer questions, he could go home to Yemen.”

Instead, as I have previously discussed, he was sent to Jordan to be tortured on behalf of the US, and was held for two years. He was then sent to Afghanistan, where he was held at the CIA’s “Dark Prison,” and at Bagram, before ending up at Guantánamo in September 2004. In February 2010, his torture was examined by Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. during his deliberations regarding the habeas corpus petition of another Yemeni, Uthman Abdul Rahim Mohammed Uthman.

Judge Kennedy excluded statements made by al-Hajj — and by another “black site” prisoner, Sanad al-Kazimi, whose PRB is forthcoming — because, as he wrote, “The Court will not rely on the statements of Hajj or Kazimi because there is unrebutted evidence in the record that, at the time of the interrogations at which they made the statements, both men had recently been tortured.”

As I noted at the time:

As Judge Kennedy explained, he [al-Hajj] told his lawyer, Kristin B. Wilhelm, that, “while held in Jordan, he ‘was regularly beaten and threatened with electrocution and molestation,’ and he eventually ‘manufactured facts’ and confessed to his interrogators’ allegation ‘in order to make the torture stop.’” In the “Dark Prison,” he added, he was “kept in complete darkness and was subject to continuous loud music.”

I also explained how, in “Double Jeopardy,” a report by Human Rights Watch in 2008 about the men rendered to Jordan by the CIA and subjected torture at Jordanian hands, al-Hajj explained how prisoners were shown photo albums prepared by US interrogators — generally known as “the family album” — and pressurized to identify the men i the photos and to make statements about them, whether they knew them or not. As al-Hajj said:

I was being interrogated all the time, in the evening and in the day. I was shown thousands of photos, and I really mean thousands, I am not exaggerating … And in between all this you have the torture, the abuse, the cursing, humiliation. They had threatened me with being sexually abused and electrocuted. I was told that if I wanted to leave with permanent disability both mental and physical, that that could be arranged. They said they had all the facilities of Jordan to achieve that. I was told that I had to talk, I had to tell them everything.

In 2011, during deliberation regarding Al-Hajj’s habeas corpus petition (which, incidentally, never reached a final decision), Chief Judge Royce Lamberth found that, as CCR described it, al-Hajj “had been tortured.”

In a document related to his Civil Action No 09-745 (RCL), dated June 8, 2011, Judge Lamberth wrote, “At the outset, the Court finds that respondents — who neither admit nor deny petitioner’s allegations regarding his custody in Jordan and Kabul — effectively admit those allegations. Accordingly, the Court accepts petitioner’s allegations as true. In Jordan, petitioner experienced patent coercion during interrogations — including intimidation, regular beatings, and threats of electrocution and violence. In Kabul, he was forced to endure complete darkness and continuous loud music. The Court thus finds that petitioner was subject to physical and psychological coercion in Jordan and Kabul.”

His civilian lawyer, John A. Chandler, added, “After years of torture, an FBI clean team came in to start interrogations anew in the hope of obtaining information that was admissible and not the product of torture. The Courts, however, have held that torture after Karachi excludes all his interrogations. Nearly 10 years later, Sharqawi sits in Guantánamo. His health is ruined by his treatment by or on behalf of our country. He can eat little but yogurt. He weighs perhaps 120 pounds. The United States of America has lost its way.”

While we wait to hear what decision the PRB makes in al-Hajj’s case, it is also important, I believe, for the government to try to revive a case against him that can be presented in a court, if he is to continue to be held. President Obama’s plan for closing the prison envisages a number of men being moved to the US mainland – some for trials, and some for ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial.

This latter number will become ever smaller the more the PRBs recommended prisoners’ release, but I understand that the authorities will continue to declare that some men — perhaps a few dozen — must continue to be held without charge or trial. I believe that these men will have the ability to make fresh legal challenges if they are moved to the US mainland, and I also believe that it will be hard for the government to justify their ongoing imprisonment, so if the government has a case against peep like al-Hajj, it needs to be looking at ways that it can present a case in court — or accept that people cannot be held indefinitely without charge or trial.

Below is the opening statement made by al-Hajj’s personal representatives (military representatives assigned to represent him) at his PRB, where, it is worth noting, the government’s claims that al-Hajj “remains steadfast in his support for extremist causes and groups,” including “praising recent acts of terrorism,” were explicitly refuted. The representatives noted that he “does not support extremist organisations,” and “does not approve of the recent acts by the Islamic State.”

Periodic Review Board Initial Hearing, 15 Mar 2016

Sharqawi Abdu Ali Al-Hajj, ISN 1457

Personal Representative Opening Statement

Members of the Board, we appreciate this opportunity to present you with the case for the transfer of Sharqawi Abdu Ali Al-Hajj. Sharqawi took the occasion of our first meeting to describe his experiences and his hope for the future.

In 1998, as a young man full of idealism and wanting to help oppressed people, Sharqawi travelled to Bosnia. While there, he met with forces from the United States and the United Kingdom and joined the Bosnian Army. After the war, he turned in his weapon and left Bosnia and the army. While being interested in the plight of the poor, meek and oppressed, Sharqawi has disavowed his involvement in war and aggression, because he believes it to be against the will of God.

Sharqawi will be able to rely on the support of his family, who are a respected family and have no relationships with extremists; they were against his leaving Yemen. He has prepared himself for the future, by taking many courses at Guantánamo, including Adobe Photoshop and English.

Sharqawi does not support extremist organizations. He does not approve of the recent acts by the Islamic State as he feels they have killed a lot of innocent people, creating instability in the region. He could never defend such heinous acts.

Sharqawi wants to make it perfectly clear to the Board that he is seeking to go to a stable, peaceful country to start his life over and that he is not a threat to the United States.

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.

Photos from the ‘Refugees Welcome’ Rally in Trafalgar Square, Mar. 19, 2016

[image error] See my photos on Flickr here!

On March 19, 2016, the organisation Stand Up to Racism held a national demonstration, ‘Refugees Welcome’, to send out a hugely important message to the British government and to other EU governments that refugees are welcome in the UK and across Europe. I wasn’t able to make it to the march, which began at Portland Place, although I was determined to show my face, and made it to Trafalgar Square for the rally, where I took the photo set that I’ve just published on Flickr.

I understand that there were around 15,000 people on the march, which is commendable, of course, but I must mention, as I now do every time I discuss protests, that people opposed to the cruelty and indifference of the Tory government need to get out on the streets and make some noise to show their opposition, as there is no indication that sitting back and waiting until the next General Election in 2020 is a plausible course of action to take on a government that is in power despite securing just 24.9% of registered voters, who are also intent on redrawing electoral boundaries to keep them in power forever.

The timing for the demonstration could hardly have been more fortuitous, as the EU has just reached an agreement with Turkey, described by the Guardian as follows: “Refugees and migrants arriving in Europe will be sent back across the Aegean sea under the terms of a deal between the EU and Turkey that has been criticised by aid agencies as inhumane.”

The agreement followed the emergence of a huge refugee camp in Idomeni, a train stop on the Greek-Macedonian border, which, as the Guardian also explained, in an article on March 17, “has become Europe’s biggest favela: an embarrassment to the values the continent holds so dear.”

The Guardian‘s article continued:

Its tents, clinics and cabins lie on mud-soaked land. Its fields, once fertile, are toxic dumps. Its air is acrid and damp. Children dart this way and that, exhausted, hungry, unwashed. Waterlogged tents surround them – women sitting inside, men sitting in front, attempting vainly to stoke fires on rain-sodden wood.

Everywhere there are lines: of bedraggled refugees queuing for food, of scowling teenage boys waiting for medics, of teenage girls holding babies, of older men and women staring into the distance in disbelief. And everywhere there are piles: of sodden clothes, soaked blankets, muddy shoes, tents, wood, rubbish – the detritus of despair but also desperation of people who never thought that this was where they would end up.

Taking in the camp’s chaotic scenes on Tuesday, the EU’s top immigration official Dimitris Avramopoulos, momentarily struggled to find the words. “These are images that offend us all,” he said, young boys breaking into a fight as they scavenged for wood behind him. “The situation is tragic, an insult to our values and civilisation.”

Idomeni was never meant to happen. It is a bottleneck that abruptly occurred when Macedonia – following other eastern European and Balkan states – arbitrarily decided to seal its frontier. At its most intense, 14,000 people – mainly Syrians and Iraqis but also Afghans, Iranians, Moroccans, Algerians and Tunisians – have converged on this boggy plain, all bound by a common dream to continue their journey into central Europe.

Like the death of Aylan Kurdi last September, and the shame of “The Jungle” in Calais, Europe’s refugee crisis ought to make Europeans respond with generosity to the greatest humanitarian crisis in most people’s lifetimes, and yet, throughout Europe, the barriers are going up physically, and the emotional shutters too. People who were in most cases brought up in a religious context are shunning the care for those less fortunate than ourselves that all religions demand, and we are, above all, demonstrating a lack of compassion and empathy that I find disgraceful.

Across Europe, people living in some of the richest countries on earth — many living in large houses with generous pensions — are claiming that we have no room to support those whose need is absolute and undeniable.

The perceptions of, and indifference or hostility towards the refugee crisis have, of course, followed on from the general anti-immigrant sentiment that has grown uncontrollably in recent years, in large part through the cynical manoeuvring of politicians and their cheerleaders in the right-wing media, which, in the UK at least, exert a powerful form of control over far too many people.

Once, not too long ago, racism and xenophobia were generally not sentiments to be publicly aired, but that has changed, and open hostility is now, shockingly, commonplace. Part of the problem, I understand, is that immigration has grown throughout Europe over the last few decades, but this is something affecting every country, not just the UK (see the map above for details), and the reason, in large part, is that we in Europe are amongst the richest countries on earth, with the most jobs, while those seeking work and refuge in the UK and the rest of Europe are growing up with few if any opportunities for work, in part because of the predatory policies of our own countries, our cynical deals with dictators, and, of course, our unjust wars — in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria.

A link to the photos is also posted below:

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.

Save the NHS from the Tory Butchers: How Doctors Saved Me and My Family, and How People Forget That Insurers Don’t Cover Pre-Existing Conditions

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Exactly five years ago, I was hospitalised — with what turned out to be a blood disease that, manifesting itself via a blood clot, had cut off the blood supply to two of my toes to such an extent that they had turned black, and it was debatable whether they could be saved.

I had first started feeling significant pain in my right foot in the New Year, but had tried to ignore it, both on my US trip in January, to call for the closure of Guantánamo, and on a visit to Poland, at the start of February, on a short tour of “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” the documentary film I co-directed with filmmaker Polly Nash. By the middle of February, however, the pain was so severe that, for a month, I barely slept. Every time I fell asleep, I awoke in blinding agony within just a few minutes. All day and all night, every day and night, this sleep deprivation — ironic for a campaigner against torture, including sleep deprivation — continued without any relief.

I couldn’t get doctors to give me the pain relief I needed, and it took a month until consultants in south east London, where I live, accepted that my situation was so bad that I had to be brought into hospital, to finally be given the morphine that I had needed all along. However, it soon became clear that the hospital I was at had no real plan for what to do with me, so my wife, fortunately, and with my eternal gratitude, pushed for me to be moved to St. Thomas’s, opposite the Houses of Parliament (another irony, surely), where I stayed for a week and half, where some excellent doctors found medication that saved my toes, and where the staff allowed me, like some sort of quietly doped-up maniac, to find the one corner of the ward where I could get wi-fi reception, so that, ridiculously, I could continue working.

Those articles, if you’re interested, are here, here, here and here (cross-posts plus some of my own commentary), plus Syria: Amazingly, The Next Crucible of Revolution in the Middle East? and Political Prisoners in Syria: An Urgent Crisis Now!, my reporting on the earliest stages of Syria’s civil war, On the Anti-Cuts Protest in London, 500,000 Say No to the Coalition Government’s Arrogant, Ideological Butchery of the British State, my report on the 500,000-strong march against the Tories and the austerity programme, which I watched from my hospital window, and Intimations of Mortality — And Why This Is the View From My Bedroom, my confessional article about my illness.

I’m revisiting my illness five years ago not primarily for reasons of self-obsession, but because it remains hugely significant to me that I was looked after by consultants, doctors and nurses working for the NHS; that’s the National Health Service, an organisation that, I have always found, draws people to it because they understand the ethos of working for the common good — for a service that is a business, not a business that provides a service.

As the Tories continue to try to destroy the NHS, having opened the floodgates to private healthcare companies, it’s important to me on this anniversary to sound a few alarms — primarily about how, without being challenged in way that has not yet happened, the Tories will be content to let the NHS fail, as they don’t care about how many people’s health that affects, or how many people die, because they have only one intention: to do away with the existing model, a health service funded through general taxation, and to replace it with a private, insurance-funded system instead — one with the promise of endless profits for the Tories and their cronies, and, of course, the exclusion of the poor.

Please don’t think I’m scaremongering. The Tories are absolutely, obsessively committed to destroying the state provision of almost all services, with a handful of exceptions, including, funnily enough, their own salaries and bloated expenses. Their obsession is a form of mental illness, but one from which they cannot be cured. To save the NHS, they must be removed from power, or have their minds forcibly changed — and I don’t mean for a moment to suggest that saving the NHS, or saving everything else they have their sights on (our schools, for example, and much of the welfare state) can be accomplished by sitting back and waiting for the next General Election in 2020.

Make of that what you will, but bear in mind that my anger at the Tories, and my love of the NHS, comes not only from how the NHS saved me five years ago — and how the blood specialists who have looked after me ever since, at St. Thomas’s sister hospital, Guy’s, have persistently exemplified the same dedicated service as I received in 2011, conducting world-class research while providing a service for everyone, not just those with money.

My anger at the Tories, and my love of the NHS is also derived from how my wife and son’s lives were saved by other consultants, doctors and nurses, at King’s College Hospital, in 1999, when my son was born ten weeks prematurely, and, over the course of the next seven weeks, until he could come home with us, I saw first-hand how the most incredibly dedicated medical personnel provided superb care for every baby in their care — and their distraught parents — and, again, without any regard whatsoever for whether those suffering had money or not.

For roughly half the cost of the US system, made fat on the huge profits of healthcare companies, the NHS, via general taxation, provides a world-class service that excludes no one, and, moreover, doesn’t deal with endemic discrimination and favouritism based on wealth. Both Gordon Brown and David Cameron had reasons to thank the NHS when they had severely ill babies, and while we were in King’s those who must have been thankful that they were able to avail themselves of such dedicated care included a woman from Zimbabwe and a very young woman from the Aylesbury Estate in nearly Walworth.

Crucially, in a system based on taxation, no one asks you when you arrive, critically ill, how you intend to pay for your healthcare, and, when you leave, no one asks you for payment either. For anyone who gets ill in a system dominated by insurance and payments, the stress for those who aren’t fabulously wealthy is immense, and the removal of that stress the single most important thing that society as a whole can provide.

That’s no exaggeration. If you’ve never been ill, then you should know how lucky you are, but you should also know that, young or old, illness — whether mild or catastrophic — can strike any of us at any time, and if, like me, you end up with a rare blood disease, an insurance-based system will have no interest in you. Those with pre-existing health conditions are cared for by the NHS, but will be locked out — or made to pay massively, for life — in the Tories’ vision of the US system.

So if you care, please fight back — and fight back now. It will be too late to whinge if the NHS is destroyed, and I will derive no pleasure from saying I told you so. Act now. Get rid of the Tories (and Labour’s Blairites who are no better), and save our beloved NHS!

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.

Saifullah Paracha, Pakistani Businessman and “Very Compliant” Prisoner, Faces Guantánamo Review Board

I wrote the following article — as “Guantánamo Review Board for Saifullah Paracha, Pakistani Businessman and ‘Very Compliant’ Prisoner, Kidnapped in Thailand in 2003” — for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, with the US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email.

Last week Saifullah Paracha, a Pakistani businessman, and, at 68 years of age, Guantánamo’s oldest current prisoner, became the 28th Guantánamo prisoner to have his potential release considered by a Periodic Review Board (see our full list here). This review process was set up in 2013 to review the cases of all the prisoners not facing trials (just ten men) or already approved for release by President Obama’s high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force in 2010, when almost two-thirds of the remaining prisoners — 156 out of 240 — were recommended for release, or, to use the task force’s careful wording, were “approved for transfer subject to appropriate security measures.”

Of the 28, five decisions have yet to be made, but of the 23 others the success rate for these men securing approval for their release is extremely high — 83% — with 19 men having their release recommended. What makes these decisions particularly important is that they puncture the rhetoric that has surrounded these men — both under George W. Bush, with the glib dismissal of everyone at Guantánamo as “the worst of the worst,” and under Barack Obama, with his task force’s conclusion (more worrying because of its veneer of authority) that 48 of those eligible for PRBs were “too dangerous to release,” even though it was also acknowledged that insufficient evidence existed to put them on trial; in other words, that it was not reliable evidence at all.

In attempting to justify its decisions, the task force noted that its members had relied on “the totality of available information — including credible information that might not be admissible in a criminal prosecution — [which] indicated that the detainee poses a high level of threat that cannot be mitigated sufficiently except through continued detention.”

The task force, however, also noted that one reason some of the 48 were recommended for ongoing detention was not because of anything they were alleged or thought to have done, but because they had “[e]xpressed recidivist intent,” meaning that, “while at Guantánamo,” they had “expressly stated or otherwise exhibited an intent to reengage in extremist activity upon release,” even though they might just have been responding with anger and threats to their long years of imprisonment without any acceptable form of due process, and their inhumane treatment in defiance of all accepted international norms.

When the PRBs finally began in November 2013, almost four years after the task force delivered its recommendations, and almost three years after President Obama explicitly authorized the ongoing imprisonment of the 48, via an executive order, while guaranteeing them reviews that, he promised, would take place within a year, two of the men had died, and 25 others had been added to those eligible for reviews.

These 25 men were originally recommended for prosecution by the task force, but their ability to be prosecuted had collapsed when, in a number of crucial rulings, the appeals court in Washington, D.C., a generally quite Conservative establishment, had struck down some of the few convictions achieved in the military commission trial system, on the basis that the war crimes in question had actually been invented by Congress.

Of the 28 men whose cases have so far been considered by the PRBs, all but three were assigned to the “too dangerous to release” category by the task force in 2010. Only one man previously recommended for prosecution, Tariq al-Sawah, an Egyptian, has had a decision taken on his case, and this was a recommendation for release, last February, that led to his transfer to a new life in Bosnia in January.

The other two are Suhayl al-Sharabi (ISN 569), reviewed on March 1, and Saifullah Paracha (ISN 1094), reviewed on March 8 — and a 29th man, Sharqawi Abdu Ali Al-Hajj (ISN 1457), another Yemeni, whose case I will be writing about very soon, was reviewed on March 15. Observers are watching these cases closely, as President Obama’s intention to close Guantánamo before he leaves office depends, in part, on the number of prisoners still imprisoned after all those approved for release have been transferred, and as yet it is too early to tell how many of those still facing PRBs will succeed in convincing the review boards — made up of representatives of the Departments of State, Defense, Justice and Homeland Security, as well as the office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — that it is safe and appropriate to recommend their release.

35 men are still awaiting reviews, and 19 of them are men initially recommended for prosecution. Forthcoming, in this latter category, are reviews for Obaidullah (ISN 762), an Afghan, in April, Abdul Zahir (ISN 753), another Afghan, and Sanad al-Kazimi (ISN 1453), a Yemeni, in May, Mohamedou Ould Slahi (ISN 760), a Mauritanian and a best-selling author, in June, and Mohammed al-Qahtani (ISN 063), allegedly intended to be the 20th hijacker for the 9/11 attacks, in July (both Slahi and al-Qahtani were subjected to specific torture programs at Guantánamo). Just two of the “too dangerous to release” category currently have reviews scheduled — Uthman Abd al-Rahim Muhammad Uthman (ISN 027), a Yemeni, in April, and Shawqi Awad Balzuhair (ISN 838), another Yemeni, in May.

Saifullah Paracha’s Periodic Review Board

A successful businessman, with extensive business dealings in the US, where he lived for 16 years, Paracha has always been an unlikely terrorist sympathiser, as I first explained nearly ten years ago in my book The Guantánamo Files, where I wrote:

Saifullah Paracha, a 55-year old businessman and philanthropist from Karachi, was arrested after flying into Bangkok for a business trip on 5 July 2003 [in a US-led sting operation]. Rendered to Afghanistan, he spent 14 months in Bagram and was then flown to Guantánamo on 20 September 2004. A graduate in computer science from the New York Institute of Technology, he acknowledged that he had met Osama bin Laden twice, at meetings of businessmen and religious leaders in 1999 and 2000, but denied the allegations against him, which included making investments for al-Qaeda members, translating statements for bin Laden, joining in a plot to smuggle explosives into the US and recommending that nuclear weapons be used against US soldiers. These were indeed wild accusations for anyone familiar with his story. Deeply impressed by all things American, he had lived in the US in the 1980s, running several small businesses, and after returning to Pakistan had made a fortune running a clothes exporting business in partnership with a New York-based Jewish entrepreneur (an unthinkable association for someone who was actually involved with al-Qaeda).

His case is inextricably tied to that of his 23-year old son Uzair, the eldest of his four children, who was detained in New York, where he was marketing apartments to the Pakistani community, four months earlier. Arrested by FBI agents, Uzair was accused of working with [the “high-value detainees”] Ammar al-Baluchi and Majid Khan … to provide false documents to help Khan enter the US to carry out attacks on petrol stations, and was convicted in a US court in November 2005 – even though he said that he was coerced into making a false confession, and both Khan and al-Baluchi made statements that neither Uzair nor his father had ever knowingly aided al-Qaeda – and was sentenced to 30 years’ imprisonment in July 2006. His father remains in Guantánamo, where, although he has heart problems, he has refused to undertake an operation because he does not trust the prison’s surgeons.

I also wrote more about Saifullah and Uzair Paracha in an article in July 2007, entitled Guantánamo’s tangled web: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Majid Khan, dubious US convictions, and a dying man.

Nevertheless, the US authorities maintain that, as described in the unclassified summary of evidence for Saifullah Paracha’s PRB, he was a “facilitator on behalf of al-Qa’ida senior leaders and operational planners,” who, as well as meeting Osama bin Laden, “later worked with external operations chief Khalid Shaykh Muhammad (KU-10024) to facilitate financial transactions and to develop media.”

Writing of the supposed US plot that led to his son’s conviction, the authorities claimed that father and son “tried to help an al-Qa’ida operative travel to the US,” and also claimed that Saifullah Paracha “offered operational suggestions to al-Qa’ida, including advice on how to smuggle explosives into the US that al-Qa’ida planners probably did not take seriously.”

The authorities also noted how Paracha has been a model prisoner in Guantánamo. “Since his arrival at Guantánamo,” they stated unambiguously, “Paracha has shown no indication of extremist sympathies in his interrogations, interactions with other detainees and guard staff.” They added that “he also has shown no remorse for having worked with al-Qa’ida before his detention,” although, as his civilian lawyer, David Remes, explained to the review board, he “cannot show ‘remorse’ for things he maintains he never did.”

The authorities also noted that he “regularly participated in interrogations until early 2015 and has offered some information about al-Qa’ida operatives but generally has avoided incriminating himself or Uzair, his son.” It was acknowledged that he “continues to deny that he knew of any al-Qa’ida plotting,” but the authorities added that he “claims he undertook his terrorist activities for profit rather than out of loyalty to the group,” a claim I have not previously heard.

Turning to his behavior in US custody, the authorities noted that, “While in Guantánamo, Paracha has been very compliant with the detention staff and espouses moderate views and acceptance of Western norms. He has focused on improving cell block conditions and helping some detainees improve their English-language and business skills.”

Finally, the authorities noted that, if he were to be recommended for release, he “has expressed interest in returning to the US” or Pakistan, where he “probably would resume running the family businesses and would seek out opportunities to begin new ventures.” It was also claimed that he had “extensive extremist business contacts established before his detention, including members of the Taliban and Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, “could provide him opportunities to reengage in extremist activity should he choose to do so.”

Writing about his experience before the review board, the Associated Press noted that Paracha “wore the white prison uniform reserved for the prisoners considered the most compliant, as he testified from a trailer on the base before the board, whose members gather in the Washington DC area.”

The AP also noted that, before the hearing, David Remes said that Paracha “was hopeful because the board is supposed to focus on whether the prisoner would pose a threat to the US in the future, and not any alleged past conduct.”

Remes said, “He’s a 68-year-old man. He has a serious heart problem. He has severe diabetes. This is not the man who was seized 14 years ago. The board has to make a fresh assessment.” Remes added that his client “has been a tremendously positive influence on his fellow detainees.”

In the Miami Herald, Carol Rosenberg made mention of Paracha’s long-standing health problems, noting that he “has a long-standing heart condition, and in 2007 used his habeas corpus petition to seek treatment in the United States rather than in remote Cuba. He lost the bid and at one point the Defense Department airlifted a mobile catheterization lab and 21-member team to the outpost to offer a procedure that Paracha ultimately refused.”

Rosenberg also noted that he “also helped five Yemeni detainees design a so-called Milk & Honey farm, a prospectus for an imaginary, utopian self-sufficient collective drawn up in 2014 at Guantánamo’s communal prison to demonstrate a vision of life after detention,” which several of the Yemenis have used in their PRBs.

Rosenberg also noted that Paracha has “a somewhat prominent role” in the so-called Senate Intelligence Committee’s highly critical report into the CIA’s torture program, of which the executive summary was published in December 2014. Rosenberg stated that the report “devotes a section to the ‘identification and arrests’ of Saifullah Paracha and his son” as well as Ali al-Marri, a US resident held as an “enemy combatant” on US soil under George W. Bush, and Majid Khan.

Rosenberg noted that Saifullah Paracha in particular “figures in a debate on whether the CIA really needed to use enhanced interrogation techniques to identify him as a suspect,” and reveals that the Senate report “also shows the CIA in May 2003 eager to capture and interrogate Paracha ‘with alacrity,’ something that did not happen.” She also noted that it “casts doubt on CIA suspicions that the Parachas were trying to smuggle explosives into the United States, noting ‘the relative ease of acquiring explosive material in the United States.'”

Below are the opening statements made by Paracha’s personal representatives (military personnel appointed to represent him) and by David Remes. The representatives made note of his “calm demeanor,” his lack of “ill will or anger” towards the US, and his desire only to be reunited with his family, while Remes spoke extensively about his role as a “model detainee” and positive influence on many younger prisoners, explaining how he encouraged them to accept lawyers after they were granted habeas corpus rights in 2004 and to take part in the PRBs,  and how he “discourages conflict and calms detainees when they are agitated,” and “promotes harmony among religions.”

Periodic Review Board Initial Hearing, 08 Mar 2016

Saifullah Abdullah Paracha, ISN 1094

Personal Representative Opening Statement

Good morning, we are the Personal Representatives for Saifullah Abdullah Paracha, a 68 year-old man who has always been an exemplary detainee, evident in both his behavior for fellow detainees and towards the administration.

As the Personal Representatives for Saifullah, we can account that he has attended every meeting, been prepared and readily willing to participate throughout this process. In addition, he has persuaded other detainees to participate in the PRB process in order to sagaciously participate in their own PRB allowing a better process. He has a calm demeanor. His consistent character demonstrates he will remain the same peaceful and stable person outside of GTMO.

Saifullah would be the first to tell you that he has no problem with the United States. His ability to speak both English and Urdu has enabled him to teach other detainees as well as be a mediator between fellow Urdu speaking detainees allowing communications in a closed off community. As one of the oldest detainees in Guantánamo, many of his peers look to him for guidance and even consider Saifullah a father figure. He hopes that his transfer from Guantánamo will make up for the lost years of his life. Saifullah wants nothing more than to return to his loving wife and children. He is willing to be transferred to any country in order to move on with his life.

Saifullah was an extremely successful businessman and once he is transferred, he wants to continue his business. He has the skill set and talent to be successful in whatever country he is repatriated. Additionally, his family is ready to supply support wherever this may be, although they would like him to return to Pakistan to be the head-of-household for both his wife and kids, who will rely on him.

Saifullah has not expressed any ill will or anger about his detention at Guantánamo. He has denounced terrorist acts and organizations. Saifullah hopes today that you will find he is not a threat to the U.S. by answering your questions so he can return home.

Periodic Review Board Initial Hearing, 08 Mar 2016

Saifullah Abdullah Paracha, ISN 1094

Opening Statement of Private Counsel David H. Remes

Good morning. I am David Remes, private counsel for Saifullah Abdullah Paracha. Mr. Paracha is a citizen of Pakistan. At 68, he is the oldest remaining Guantánamo detainee. I have represented him since 2005 and speak frequently with his family in Pakistan and America.

Mr. Paracha respectfully asks that the Board recommend him for transfer. He wishes to be brought either to Pakistan or America. In Pakistan, he will reunite with his wife of 36 years, and their two daughters and large extended family, rebuild his businesses and build new ones, and live a normal peaceful life. In America, he and his wife will live normal lives among their large contingent of relatives here, who include one of his brothers, one of his sisters, his two sons, and 22 nieces and nephews.

Wherever he goes, Mr. Paracha, who suffers from chronic medical conditions, will require medical observation and care.

Mr. Paracha is certainly well prepared for life in America or any other English-speaking country. He lived in the U.S. from 1970 to 1986 and married here. Born into extreme poverty in a remote Punjab village in 1947, he came to America when he was 24 and became a successful businessman. He owned travel agencies which facilitated travel between the U.S. and Pakistan, and he produced a weekly television program for the Pakistani population in New Jersey.

When Mr. Paracha returned to Pakistan in 1986, he and an American partner established an export-import business, which acted as a buying agent in Pakistan for American retail giants, such as Wal-Mart and K-Mart, placing orders for garments and other merchandise made in Pakistan. Mr. Paracha also set up a television production company, which produced plays and programs designed to promote religious harmony.

Mr. Paracha is fluent in English and avidly follows the news in the English-language news media. Mr. Paracha does not speak Arabic. He often beats me to the punch when we discuss political or economic developments here and abroad. Mr. Paracha also has faith that the United States can play a constructive role in world affairs. Among the items we submitted to the Board are pre-9/11 letters that he wrote to President George W. Bush and former President George H.W. Bush proposing ways to bridge the divide between the Western and Arab worlds.

Mr. Paracha is and has always been a model detainee. He has always been held in quarters reserved for the most compliant detainees. Remarkably, he has stayed cheerful and upbeat despite his unfortunate circumstances. Guards and camp officials enjoy his company, and he always talked freely and openly with his interrogators. Of course, Mr. Paracha cannot show “remorse” for things he maintains he never did.

Mr. Paracha has been an enormously positive influence on other detainees. Other detainees call him “Uncle,” a term of great respect for male elders, and seek out his advice. Wise and understanding, he discourages conflict and calms detainees when they are agitated. He promotes harmony among religions. He taught classes in business administration and English. Once, when other facilities were unavailable, he set up class in a cell.

Mr. Paracha also counseled cooperation with the government in the judicial and administrative review process. When the Supreme Court in 2004 gave detainees the green light to pursue habeas corpus cases, Mr. Paracha urged his fellows to accept help from the American lawyers. When the Periodic Review Board opened for business in July 2013, he urged them to participate in the process.

Saifullah Paracha harbors no animosity to the U.S. On the contrary, he has many family members here and is willing to be resettled here. Once, when asked if he is half-Pakistani and half-American, he replied that he is entirely Pakistani and entirely American. Nor does Mr. Paracha have any sympathy for terrorism or radical Islam. On the contrary, he has publicly denounced terrorism as un-Islamic and will continue to speak against it, wherever he is sent.

Model detainee. Mentor to younger detainees. Counselor of tolerance, understanding, and cooperation. Paterfamilias of a great extended family, with members in Pakistan and America. A man at home in the U.S. and at ease with Western culture and ways. A man who opposes and denounces violent extremism. This man, Saifullah Paracha, is no threat to the United States, and the Board should recommend him for transfer.

Thank you.

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

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

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

Photos: The Kill the Housing Bill March, Seeking Housing Justice, London, Mar. 13, 2016

See my photos on Flickr here!

On Sunday March 13, 2016, housing campaigners held a national demonstration against the Tory government’s latest Housing Bill, a disgraceful piece of legislation that introduces what the government has cynically described as “pay to stay,” whereby families in council housing, on median incomes (£30,000 nationally, £40,000 in London) will be made to pay market rents, doubling, tripling or even quadrupling what they pay. The move will affect tens of thousands of families, with research indicating that 60,000 families will be unable to afford to live in their homes anymore, while those that are able to do so will be financially crippled by a government that, disgracefully, claims to represent hard-working families, but is actually doing the opposite.

As the Kill the Housing Bill campaign notes, the bill also “forces local authorities to sell ‘high value’ properties on the private market when they become empty – the biggest council housing sell-off in generations,” “abolishes new secure lifetime tenancies in council housing, replacing them with 2-5 year tenancies,” and “[d]oes nothing to address the housing crisis, and instead replaces obligations to build social housing with Cameron’s unaffordable ‘starter homes’ — requiring an annual income of £70,000 in London.”

For a more detailed analysis of the UK’s housing crisis — and the crisis in London, where the greed is particularly focused — see my article written before the march, Call for an End to Housing Greed: Come to the National Demonstration Against the Housing Bill in London, Sun. Mar. 13. I’ll also be writing more on the subject very soon.

It was good to see several thousand people out on Sunday, and it was a relief that the sun shone on us all, but it did, above all, make me wonder what it will take for people to get active to save things they care abut that the Tories are determined to destroy — the NHS, for example, and, for those who live in it, social housing.

However, with 60,000 families facing the loss of their homes because of George Osborne’s hideous “pay to stay” policy, I have to ask myself why so many of those affected weren’t on the streets on Sunday. Perhaps, sadly, many of them do not yet know what is going to happen to them — which, if so, is a particularly harsh indictment of the ignorance at the heart of the so-called “information age” — or perhaps they are too ground down by the enervating malaise of the here and now, when, it seems, we go meekly to our doom like lambs to the slaughter, numbed by the lies and spin of politicians and the media, paralysed by our dismal culture and hypnotised by our gadgets, our smart phones and the promise of endless shopping.

Whatever the truth, I hope we find a way to wake up in significant numbers before all is lost.

A link to the photos is also posted below:

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

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

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

Yemeni Is 27th Guantánamo Prisoner to Face Periodic Review Board; 4th Man Has Detention Upheld, 36 Others Await Reviews

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In the long-running saga of ascertaining who is held at Guantánamo, and what should happen to them, the Bush administration’s refusal to recognize domestically and internationally accepted norms governing the treatment of prisoners continues to cast a long and baleful shadow over proceedings.

In the summer of 2004, in a rebuke to the Supreme Court, which granted the prisoners habeas corpus rights in a ruling in June of that year (in Rasul v. Bush), the Bush administration instigated Combatant Status Review Tribunals, intended, for the most part, to rubber-stamp the prisoners’ prior designation as “unlawful enemy combatants,” who could be held without any rights whatsoever. These were followed by Administrative Review Boards, with much the same function.

When he took office in 2009, President Obama set up a high-level, inter-agency review process, the Guantánamo Review Task Force, as a result of which 48 men were recommended for ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial.

In March 2011, President Obama issued an executive order authorizing these men’s ongoing imprisonment, but promising them further reviews to be completed within a year. Shamefully, these did not begin until November 2013, but since then the reviews — the Periodic Review Boards — have been reviewing these men’s cases, and have also begun to review the cases of 25 other men initially recommended for prosecution by the task force, until the basis for prosecution spectacularly collapsed under scrutiny in the appeals court in Washington, D.C.

28 of these reviews have currently taken place, and in the plan for the closure of the prison that was recently delivered to Congress, the Obama administration promised to complete them all by the fall — which, unfortunately, will be four and a half years later than originally promised, although to some extent, of course, it is better for them to be late than for them not to have taken place at all.

Of the 23 men whose cases have been decided to date, 19 have led to recommendations that the men in question be released, while just four men have had their ongoing imprisonment approved (although it should be noted that they are entitled to further reviews). In addition, five decisions have yet to be taken.

That is an 83% success rate, which is remarkable in its own right, but is even more so when you consider that these are men who were initially — and ill-advisedly –described by the task force as being “too dangerous to release,” even though the task force also acknowledged that insufficient evidence existed to put them on trial. What this actually meant was that the evidence was no such thing, and was an unreliable collection of statements made by the prisoners themselves, or by their fellow prisoners, as a result of torture or other forms of abuse, or through bribing them with the promise of perks and better living conditions.

A fourth prisoner has his request for release turned down

On March 3, Yassim Qasim Mohammed Ismail Qasim (ISN 522), a Yemeni also known as Yasin Ismail or Yassin Ismail, had his ongoing imprisonment approved by a Periodic Review Board. His review took place a month ago, when his personal representatives (military personnel appointed to represent him) made a case that he has developed a “passion for health,” and has “started counseling other detainees in nutrition to increase their knowledge in an effort to assist with their quality of life,” and his lawyer explained how he “has lost the wanderlust and thirst for adventure he had at age 22,” and “simply wants to get on with his life.”

Nevertheless, the review board concluded that his “continued law of war detention … remains necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States,” noting his “prior history with weapons training and combat experience over a prolonged period of time in Afghanistan,” and “the frequency, specificity, and recent nature of [his] expressions of support for extremist behaviour, available pathways to reengagement, limited record of compliance, and lack of candour.”

The board added that they look forward to reviewing Ismail’s case in six months’ time, and encouraged him “to continue his recent display of compliant behavior, to take advantage of educational and counseling opportunities, to work with his private counsel and personal representatives to further develop post-detention plans, and to be increasingly open in communications with the Board.”

The 27th prisoner to face a Periodic Review Board

The 27th prisoner to have his case reviewed was Suhayl Abduh Anam al-Sharabi aka Zohair al-Shorabi (ISN 569), a Yemeni who is one of 22 prisoners facing PRBs who were initially recommended for prosecution. Just one man recommended for prosecution has so far had a PRB — Tariq al-Sawah, an Egyptian, whose review was successful, and who was freed in Bosnia in January — but another, Saifullah Paracha (ISN 1094), a Pakistani businessman kidnapped in Thailand in 2003 and held in “black sites” before being flown to Guantánamo in September 2004, had his PRB on March 8, which I’ll be writing about very soon, and also forthcoming are reviews for Sharqawi Abdu Ali Al Hajj (ISN 1457), a Yemeni subjected to torture in “black sites,” on March 15, Obaidullah (ISN 762), an Afghan whose military lawyers established his innocence five years ago, on April 19, and, on June 2, Mohamedou Ould Slahi (ISN 760), a Mauritanian and the best-selling author of “Guantánamo Diary,” who had his habeas corpus petition granted in March 2010, although it was later vacated and sent back to the lower court, where, shamefully, it has languished ever since, in November 2010.

Zohair al-Shorabi is one of 17 men seized in a number of house raids in Karachi, Pakistan on February 7, 2002, and, as I noted in an article in September 2010:

[He] stated in Guantánamo that he went to Pakistan in 1999 to find work, and that he subsequently established a trading business. However, the US authorities allege that he attended a Libyan training camp near Kabul, and fought on the Taliban front lines. At one point, he was also accused of working as a guard at Kandahar airport before the 9/11 attacks, where he was “seen in the company of Osama bin Laden and another senior al-Qaeda operative,” and is “believed to be al-Qaeda because of his access to Osama bin Laden.” However, while this allegation matched a pattern of false statements made by one of al-Shorabi’s fellow prisoners, identified by the FBI as a notorious liar who had falsely accused 60 prisoners in Guantánamo, he was also picked out for two even more worrying allegations: that, on an unspecified date, he traveled to Malaysia, where he allegedly stayed with Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, two of the 9/11 hijackers, and that he was “one of seven individuals selected as martyrs” for a future terrorist operation.

The unclassified summary prepared for the Periodic Review Board supports this assessment, describing him as “part of al-Qa’ida external operations chief Khalid Shaykh Muhammad’s (KU-10024) plot to conduct 9/11-style attacks in Southeast Asia [who] traveled to Malaysia, where he stayed with al-Qa’ida operative Walid Muhammad Salih Bin Attash (YM- 10014) and two of the 9/11 hijackers.” He was also described as a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden. For what it’s worth, I have serious doubts that a future terrorist operation was planned — and al-Shorabi’s previously classified military file, released by WikiLeaks in 2011, states that “[t]he purpose of the trip to Malaysia was to accompany [bin Attash] to the hospital for his fitting for a prosthetic leg.”

It is unknown how much of the information about al-Shorabi is accurate reporting. The military concedes that “[m]ost reporting about [his] involvement in al-Qa’ida is from other detainees, who consistently state that he was a Bin Ladin bodyguard and may have been associated with an aborted hijacking plot in Southeast Asia.” Al-Shorabi himself has only “admitted to al-Qa’ida membership once, and has since denied involvement with the group.” Perhaps more importantly, he has also “denied knowledge of any al-Qa’ida operational plans.”

It was also noted that, at Guantánamo, he “has made anti-US statements and expressed support for extremism,” has “provided little information of value,” and has also “had a poor compliance record for the majority of his detention, including assaults on the guards and more than 1,000 forced cell extractions” during his long-term hunger striking (which, for the record, was described by the authorities, according to the latest spin, as a “long-term, non-religious fast”). It was also noted, however, that “he ended his fast in November 2014, probably because he wants to remain in communal living,” according to Joint Task Force Guantánamo, since when his “compliance record has improved.”

It was also noted that he “has no known ongoing terrorism connections and maintains only intermittent contact with his family in Taiz, Yemen, who do not appear to be involved in terrorist activity.” The summary added that, “If repatriated, the political instability and AQAP activity in Yemen would provide opportunities to reengage,” but although this indicates that he has no terrorism connections outside  Guantánamo, it is irrelevant regarding whether or not he should be released, as the entire US establishment agrees that no Yemenis should be repatriated. More significant is the assessment that al-Shorabi “has not discussed any definite post-detention plans,” without which a recommendation for release is highly unlikely.

Included on the Periodic Review Secretariat’s website is the opening statement of al-Shorabi’s personal representatives (military personnel appointed to represent him in his PRB). I imagine that his lawyers also made a statement, although that is not included. However, the personal representatives succeeded in painting a different portrait of al-Shorabi than that presented by the military — of a sports enthusiast desperately missing his family, who wants only to get on with his life, who “wishes to stay out of any and all conflicts,” and who “has not expressed any ill will or anger about his detention at Guantánamo.”

Periodic Review Board Initial Hearing, 01 Mar 2016

Suhayl Abdul Anam Al Sharabi, ISN 569

Personal Representative Opening Statement

Members of the Board, we are the personal representatives for Suhayl Abduh Anam al Sharabi. Suhayl was extremely happy, when we made our initial visit to notify him of his entry into the Periodic Review Board process, and we were pleasantly surprised to see that Suhayl was very cooperative and receptive to meet with us. Indeed, he was anxious to get to know us and to tell his story. During our first meeting he explained his background, his childhood, his family and the future he hopes to have.

As is the case in many families in his village, Suhayl comes from a large family. His father and mother are both still alive and miss him terribly. He has three brothers that have started their own families and are productive members of society. Suhayl has three sisters that are married with their own families as well. They live peacefully in the same village and wish to stay together. Suhayl’s family places a high value on respect and the golden rule of treating each other as they would like to be treated. Together they are ready to welcome him back and move forward with him.

One of Suhayl’s passions is sports; in particular, he enjoys playing and watching soccer. He aspires to become a sports administrator for a soccer team someday. In the meantime, he continually follows and supports the Brazilian National Team, and he spends his time with other detainees discussing sports and of course, his team’s chances of winning the World Cup.

Since his time in Guantánamo, Suhayl has come to believe strongly in mutual respect. His fellow detainees would attest to this fact. He deeply desires to reunite with his family and to start one of his own. In terms of the conflicts in his homeland, he is saddened about the attacks and that innocent people are caught up in such terrible strife. He wishes to stay out of any and all conflicts. In fact, he wishes to stay out of other people’s business and to focus on his own well being and future. Suhayl has not expressed any ill will or anger about his detention at Guantánamo, and he has expressed the great sadness that has happened to his family. While Suhayl would prefer to be transferred to an Arabic Speaking country, it is not necessary. Suhayl is willing to take part in a rehabilitation program and wants to make it perfectly clear to the Board that he is not a threat to the United States. Suhayl looks forward to answering your 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.

PLEASE Support My Guantánamo Work: $200 (£140) a Week Needed for the Next Three Months

[image error] Please support my work!

Dear friends, supporters and passing strangers,

I hate to scaremonger, but it’s Day 5 of my quarterly fundraiser, and, although 14 supporters have been so kind as to donate over $1000 (£700) to support my work on Guantánamo for the next three months, that’s just $75 (£55) a week, which isn’t enough to live on. So I’m still $2400 (£1700) short of my target, and won’t be able to continue working as I do unless I can make a significant dent in that shortfall.

Those of you who follow my work know that most of what I do is entirely reader-supported, and involves a whole range of activities — research, writing, campaigning, media interviews and public speaking — as well as the hosting fees and maintenance costs associated with running a website.

I’m still trying to raise just $200 (£140) a week for the next three months, which, I think, isn’t a huge amount for all that I do — the 45-50 articles I write every quarter, for example, plus the extensive social media promotion, responding to emails and media requests, and generally being someone prepared to talk about Guantánamo at the drop of a hat. I know this isn’t unique for writers, but it’s worth bearing in mind that, in many walks of life, no one would regularly work for nothing, whereas many writers — and other creative people — are routinely expected to do so.

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

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

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

As always, thanks for your interest in my work, which is greatly appreciated. And if you’re interested in other ways you can support me, you can always buy my books The Battle of the Beanfield and Stonehenge: Celebration & Subversion, or my band The Four Fathers’ album ‘Love and War,’ available on CD or as a download (and see here for the video of me singing “Song for Shaker Aamer” from which the photo at the top of this article was taken).

Andy Worthington

London

March 11, 2016

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

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

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign.