Andy Worthington's Blog, page 78

Call for an End to Housing Greed: Come to the National Demonstration Against the Housing Bill in London, Sun. Mar. 13

Where to begin in discussing Britain’s housing crisis? Since the Labour victory in 1997 we have been disastrously misled by governments prioritising an endless housing bubble as an alternative to anything resembling an actual functioning economy. The only break in this divisive and unfair policy came after the global banking crash of 2008, but since the Tories got back into power in 2010, via a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, the bubble has been back with a vengeance.

The latest phase of the revived bubble is, as is now taken for granted, promoted via interest rates that are permanently near zero, making savings appear pointless, and housing the only attractive investment — and also, of course, via the permanent wooing of foreign investors from every part of the world, who are somehow persuaded that the overpriced towers rising up everywhere in London are good value for money. With the addition of a shortage of supply, dating back to the enforced decline of social housing under Margaret Thatcher, who sold council homes but refused to allow councils to build new properties, and chronic under-investment for 30 years, it becomes possible to understand how housing is now out of reach for more and more of London’s workers — even professional couples with generous financial support from their parents.

As the Guardian reported in an article last September, “Revealed: the widening gulf between salaries and house prices”:

In 1995, the median income in London was £19,000 and the median house price was £83,000, meaning that people were spending 4.4 times their income on buying a property. But by 2012-13, the median income in London had increased to £24,600 and the median house price in the capital had increased to £300,000, meaning people were forced to spend 12.2 times their income on a house.

At these kind of prices, of course, few workers can actually afford to buy in London, a situation unprecedented in living memory, and one that has no justification except  to enrich the already rich — and the entire mortgage industry — at the expense of everyone else.

In addition, the cost of renting in London has also gone through the roof, as the Evening Standard highlighted last July, in an article entitled, “Rents in EVERY London postcode are ‘unaffordable’ for workers on Living Wage.”

The Standard article drew on research by SpareRoom.co.uk establishing that workers paid £9.15 an hour — the London Living Wage at the time, which is now £9.40 an hour — had to spend 56.1% of their income on rent, and also noted that apprentices were completely unable to afford rent anywhere in the capital. I’ve also done my own calculations, and have worked out that anyone on George Osborne’s delusional living wage of £7.20 has to pay a shocking 71.3% of their income on rent.

Not only does this divert a huge amount of money into comparatively few hands, but it also strangles London’s economy in general, as less and less people have any earnings left over to spend on the goods and services that a huge section of those working are employed to make, sell and provide. Without money circulating, and as those priced out leave London in greater numbers, the wider economy in the capital will start grinding to a halt.

While this is happening, the government is also determined to destroy social housing, which delivers the only genuinely affordable rents available — with the exception of those few individuals who bought their rental properties years ago and are not motivated by the relentless greed that is the norm nowadays. However, the social renting sector has already been undermined by the government’s insistence that all new social tenancies should be set at what ministers, with breathtaking cynicism, have defined as affordable, which is 80% of market rents; in other words, not affordable at all for most people.

In addition, the government has been attacking social tenants who receive benefits, introducing the reviled “bedroom tax” — whereby millionaires with more rooms than they can count penalise social tenants for having what can be twisted into the notion of being a “spare room,” and also introducing another breathtakingly cynical and unjust policy, known as “pay to stay.”

Via this disgusting innovation, council tenants who earn more than the median wage will be made to pay market rents, doubling, tripling or even quadrupling what they have to pay, and meaning that, as the Observer reported last month, according to a report commissioned by the Local Government Association, “almost 60,000 households in England will be unable to afford to remain in their council properties from April next year.”

When this was floated last summer, Sky News published a disgraceful story entitled, “Crackdown On ‘Rich’ Council House Tenants,” claiming that “pay to stay,” directed at “anyone earning over £40,000 in London or £30,000 outside the capital,” will make sure that “[b]ig earners living in council houses or flats and paying cheap subsidised rents are to lose the perk in a Budget crackdown.” Elsewhere in the article, the plan was described as “a purge on rich council house tenants.” What is so disgraceful about this, as anyone who does the tiniest amount of research should realise, is that £30,000 outside London and £40,000 in London is actually the median income for a couple, meaning that “rich” and “big earners” are completely incorrect descriptions, as the median income is what 50 percent of people earn more than, and 50 percent earn less than, and those on the median income cannot, with any honesty whatsoever, be described as either “rich” or “big earners.”

Much of the government’s latest assault on social housing in particular is contained in the latest Housing and Planning Bill, where “pay to stay” was introduced, and it is the object of a national demonstration this Sunday, March 13, in London, organised by the Kill the Housing Bill campaign, which points out that, as well as introducing “pay to stay,” the proposed legislation “[f]orces local authorities to sell ‘high value’ properties on the private market when they become empty – the biggest council housing sell-off in generations,” “[a]bolishes 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.”

Campaigners will assemble at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, WC2A 3TL, at noon on Sunday and will then march on Parliament to oppose the Housing and Planning Bill and, as the Kill the Housing Bill campaign describes it, to “demand: secure homes for all, rent controls, and homes for people not for profit.” The campaigners add that the bill, which is currently in the House of Lords, will “make the UK’s housing crisis much worse, send rent and house prices soaring and spells the end of council and social housing.”

The Kill the Housing Bill campaign is supported by Defend Council Housing, Radical Housing Network, Focus E15 campaign, Momentum, People’s Assembly, GMB Union, National Union of Teachers (NUT), Communication Workers Union (CWU), Bakers Union, Unite Housing Workers, London Gypsy Traveller Unit, National Bargee Travellers Association, Leeds Hands Off Our Homes, The Green Party, John McDonnell MP and many other organisations and individuals, including other MPs, members of the House of Lords and celebrities, and, the campaigners note, the march and rally “will be attended by council tenants, home owners, private renters, architects, students, migrants groups, women’s campaigns, trade unionists and many more.” It is also hoped that, as well as John McDonnell, the Shadow Chancellor, and a longtime supporter of social housing, Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, Green MP Caroline Lucas and Natalie Bennett, the Green Party leader, will be able to attend, and to speak at the rally outside Parliament at 2pm.

Speaking of the campaign, John McDonnell said, “People are desperate for a stable and decent home they can actually afford to live in but the Tories’ Housing Bill will make the housing crisis drastically worse. Labour is opposing it in Parliament but I’m also opposing it outside Parliament by supporting the Kill the Housing Bill demonstration on the 13th March. Millions of people across the country are struggling to afford to rent or buy a home but the Government is callous in its disregard for people’s right to secure themselves the right to a decent home. This bill demonstrates the worst attack on social housing provision seen in decades. It will result in more genuinely affordable social housing units being sold off which is scandalous when we have such a severe housing crisis on our hands. Under this Tory Government homelessness is already sharply on the rise and thousands are being socially cleansed from our cities.”

Caroline Lucas said, “I am proud to support the Kill the Housing Bill campaign in their fight to stand up and defend the right to a secure and truly affordable home for everyone. The Government had an opportunity to utterly rethink the housing model but instead they have put another nail in the coffin for social housing. This Bill is being used to pull the rug from underneath those who rely on our already limited stock of social housing, destroying the very bricks and mortar of the welfare state. It is also a sure fire way to extend — not end — the housing crisis.”

A Kill the Housing Bill campaign spokesperson added, “The Tories’ Housing Bill aims to destroy council housing, and will hit everyone on low or middle incomes trying to rent or buy. It condemns millions to a lifetime of insecure, expensive private renting. Everyone deserves a decent home, but landlords, developers and the rich will be the only ones to benefit from this Bill.”

For more information, see the website of the Kill the Housing Bill campaign. Also see Shelter’s assessment of the Housing Bill and this commentary by Architects 4 Social Housing. For further information, please contact the organisers by email, or call Joe Beswick on 07873 557040 or Katya Nasim on 07791 018631.

Please also check out Our House: A Pop-Up Community Centre, in which housing activists have occupied 221 Brompton Road, Kensington, SW3 2EJ, stating, “We have occupied a building in the heart of the most expensive part of London to host a community-led occupation in protest at the Tories Housing Bill, the housing crisis and to highlight the insanity of empty properties when thousands are homeless.”

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

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

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

Quarterly Fundraiser Day 3: Still Seeking $2600 (£1800) to Support My Guantánamo Work

Please support my work!

Dear friends and supporters,

This week is my latest quarterly fundraiser, in which I’m hoping to raise $3500 (£2400) to support my work on Guantánamo and related issues for the next three months. That’s just $270 (£180) a week for my full-time, independent work on Guantánamo, writing 50-60 articles every quarter, and campaigning to get the prison closed. Thanks to the generosity of ten supporters, I’ve raised $900 (£600) since launching the fundraiser on Monday, but I’m still hoping to raise $2600 (£1800) to reach my target.

In case you don’t know, most of my work is reader-funded. I receive no institutional funding for this website, and I really can’t continue to do the work I do without your support. Any amount will be gratefully received, whether it is $25, $100 or $500 — or any amount in any other currency (£15, £50 or £250, for example). PayPal will convert any currency you pay into dollars, which I chose as my main currency because the majority of my supporters are in the US.

So if you can help out at all, please click on the “Donate” button above to donate via PayPal (and I should add that you don’t need to be a PayPal member to use PayPal). 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 I seek your support for the next 13 weeks, this is a reflective time for me, because it’s exactly ten years since I began working full-time on Guantánamo. Tonight, exactly ten years ago, I watched “The Road to Guantánamo,” about the Tipton Three, on Channel 4, one of three events at this time that turned my part-time interest in Guantánamo — and research I had been undertaking since September 2005 — into an all-consuming, full-time affair that has largely dominated my life ever since.

The second event ten years ago was my purchase of — and avid reading of — Moazzam Begg’s book Enemy Combatant, which also came out in March 2006, and the third was the Pentagon being forced to release over 5,000 pages of documents relating to the prisoners, after losing a FOIA lawsuit submitted by the Associated Press, which happened on March 3, 2006 — although it was not until April 19, 2006, when a list of 558 prisoners was released, and May 15, 2006, when a full list of the 759 men who had held at that time was released, that it became possible to ascertain who the 5,000 pages of documents referred to, and for me to begin the research that led to the publication of my book The Guantánamo Files in  2007, and my full-time journalism about Guantánamo, which I began at the end of May 2007.

Ten years on, that research continues to inform my knowledge of the prisoners, and to help me to continue to write about them, and I expect that, at some time this year, my tally of articles about Guantánamo will reach the 2,000 mark (it’s currently 1,920). Anyone interested in following my ten years of writing about Guantánamo will find all the articles listed chronologically here and here.

Since I started my work, it would be fair to say that many more journalists have become involved in the story of Guantánamo and its prisoners, but I believe that I still have an important role to play, and I hope you agree, and will support my work if you are able to do so. As ever, I must conclude by pointing out that I really can’t do what I do without your support.

Andy Worthington

London

March 9, 2016

Note: As a ten-year anniversary bonus, “The Road to Guantánamo” is 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.

Save the NHS: Please Sign Petition and Ask Your MP to Attend 2nd Reading of the NHS Reinstatement Bill This Friday, Mar. 11

There are so many horrible aspects to life in the UK under the Tories that it’s sometimes difficult to keep track of them all, unless you’re unfortunate enough to be affected by all of them — the unfettered housing bubble, for example, and the similarly unregulated private rental market, coupled with a sustained assault on social housing; the assault on the unemployed and the disabled; the demonisation of Muslims; the hardhearted approach to the current refugee crisis; the refusal to tackle the tsunami of anti-immigrant hysteria that has gripped the country since the global banking crisis of 2008 and that has, in fact, more often than not been deliberately stoked by the media, largely with the complicity of politicians; the endless widening of the gap between the rich and the poor; the Prime Minister’s failure to challenge his own right-wingers and UKIP by refusing to call a referendum on Europe, which any credible leader would have done; and, of course, the remorseless assault on the NHS.

As I mentioned last May, just before our thoroughly depressing General Election, when our sole Green MP, Caroline Lucas, launched a Private Members’ Bill, the National Health Service Bill (HC Bill 37), generally known the NHS Reinstatement Bill, with the support of eleven MPs from four other parties (including Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell), “Ever since the Tory-led coalition government passed the wretched Health and Social Care Act in 2011 (after David Cameron blatantly lied to the British people, by falsely promising ‘no more of the tiresome, meddlesome, top-down re-structures that have dominated the last decade of the NHS’), privatisation of the greatest and most important institution in the UK, the NHS (National Health Service, founded in 1948), has been increasing to an alarming degree.”

As I also noted last May, I have been involved in trying to save the NHS ever since the Tories first got back into power in 2010. As I stated, “I campaigned against the passage of the Health and Social Care Act at the time (see here and here), and then became heavily involved in the successful campaign to save my local hospital, in Lewisham, in south east London, from savage cuts (see here, here and here). [In 2014] I campaigned to resist the Tories’ spiteful response to Lewisham’s success, which became known as the “hospital closure clause” (see here and here), and covered the People’s March for the NHS, a grass-roots initiative that involved a recreation of the Jarrow March from the 1930s to save the NHS (see here and here).”

Last May, I also noted how, introducing the NHS reinstatement bill in March, Caroline Lucas wrote, “The Bill proposes to fully restore the NHS as an accountable public service — with time and flexibility for implementation — and so reversing 25 years of marketisation, for an NHS that is truly public, joined-up, fully protected and free at the point of delivery. Scotland and Wales have already reversed marketisation and restored their NHS without immense upheaval. England can too.”

She added, “Far from being another top-down, centralised re-structuring, the Bill — crucially — reinstates the Secretary of State’s responsibility for the provision of services, something the Health and Social Care Act 2012 (HSCA) severed. The Bill would strip away the costly market mechanisms that waste NHS money which could be spent on patient care.”

The bill received its first reading last July, but on a first reading there is no debate, so the bill’s first major opportunity to make its mark is this Friday, March 11, when it receives its second reading, and MPs will be able to discuss it. See the bill’s progress here.

Currently, 77 MPs are supporting the bill, and I’m providing a list of them all below, with thanks to the Campaign for the NHS Reinstatement Bill, which put the list together.

Please write to your MP to ask them to support the bill, if they have not already pledged their support. In particular, we need to see many more Labour MPs involved in supporting it. As well as Caroline, there are 18 Labour MPs, one Liberal Democrat, one Plaid Cymru MP, one independent and 55 SNP (Scottish National Party) MPs.

Please also sign the 38 Degrees petition put together by the NHS Reinstatement Bill Group, which includes the bill’s co-authors Professor Allyson Pollock and lawyer Peter Roderick. It was launched on February 11, but I’m disappointed to note that it has so far attracted less than 21,000 signatures.

Under the heading, “Why is this important?” the authors explained:

The NHS in England is being dismantled. NHS services — including acute and emergency, children’s, elderly and maternity care — have been deliberately underfunded since 2010. The comprehensive care we’ve come to expect continues to be cut back.

Many services have been handed to private companies such as Virgin, Serco and US giant United Health, hiding behind the NHS logo. Valuable NHS buildings and land are being sold off to property developers, often as a result of the exorbitant costs of paying for new hospitals built under the Private Finance Initiative (PFI).

These are our services and our assets. We the public own them. And polls repeatedly show that most of us want to keep our NHS.

Privatised services cost the NHS and tax payer far more than when provided by our publicly owned and publicly run NHS.

That is because public health systems don’t seek profits. They don’t need to pay dividends to shareholders. They don’t have the added costs of private sector loans. And they don’t have to pay the management fees that private companies charge.

A public NHS also doesn’t have privatisation’s heavy marketing and contract administration costs of extra lawyers, accountants and management — at least £4.5 billion annually on one estimate and rising. Just cutting them, not NHS services, would go a long way to cover the shortfall between government underfunding and the NHS’ needs over the next 5 years.

These huge commercial costs and the chaos caused by the ongoing NHS fragmentation are the direct result of privatisation. This is endangering the quality and safety of our public healthcare.

Privatisation isn’t just bad for the tax-payer. It’s bad for our health.

That is why we need the National Health Service Bill to remove the costs and waste of privatisation. The NHS Bill will reinstate the NHS as a proper public service.

*****

Last weekend, a letter in support of the bill was also published in the Guardian, signed by hundreds of celebrities and medical professionals, including the actors Keira Knightley, Damian Lewis, Sienna Miller, Jonathan Pryce and Michael Sheen, the writers and authors Joan Bakewell, Julian Barnes, Alan Bennett, William Boyd, Melvyn Bragg and Alexei Sayle, the directors Sir Richard Eyre, Stephen Frears, Ken Loach and Jonathan Miller, the ballerina Darcey Bussell, and model Cara Delivingne. A detailed list of signatories is on the Guardian website, and additional signatories are here.

The text of the letter is below:

Why we support the cross-party NHS bill

Letter, The Guardian, March 5, 2016

NHS services and assets, including blood supplies, nurses, scanning and diagnostic services, ambulances, care homes, hospital beds and buildings – which the British public own – are being handed over to UK and foreign private companies. This is being done without a public mandate. Privatised services cost the NHS and taxpayer far more than when provided by our publicly owned and publicly run NHS. That is because public health systems don’t seek profits. They don’t need to pay dividends to shareholders. They don’t have the added costs of private sector loans. And they don’t have privatisation’s heavy and unnecessary marketising costs of contracts, billings and all the extra administration involved.

The huge commercial costs and chaos caused by the ongoing NHS fragmentation are the direct result of privatisation. This is endangering the quality and safety of our public healthcare. That is why we need the National Health Service bill.

The cross-party NHS bill to bring back the NHS in England as a national universal service and to get rid of the expensive, chaotic internal and external market is due to have its second reading in the House of Commons on Friday 11 March. It is supported by thousands of individuals and by Labour, Green, SNP and Lib Dem MPs, including Caroline Lucas, Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell. We urge MPs to do everything they can to make sure the bill is debated, and to vote in favour of it so that it proceeds to the next stage.

*****

There’s also a protest outside Parliament in support of the bill on its second reading on Friday, which is on Facebook here. Other events are taking place in Brighton Leeds, Manchester and Sheffield (see here for details).

The list of MPs supporting the NHS Reinstatement Bill

1. Caroline Lucas (Green, Brighton Pavilion)

2. David Anderson (Labour, Blaydon)

3. Richard Burgon (Labour, Leeds East)

4. Jeremy Corbyn (Labour, Islington North)

5. Nicholas Dakin (Labour, Scunthorpe)

6. Peter Dowd (Labour, Bootle)

7. Roger Godsiff (Labour, Birmingham Hall Green)

8. Margaret Greenwood (Labour, Wirral West)

9. Kelvin Hopkins (Labour, Luton North)

10. Ian Lavery (Labour, Wansbeck)

11. Clive Lewis (Labour, Norwich South)

12. Rob Marris (Labour, Wolverhampton South West)

13. Rachael Maskell (Labour, York Central)

14. John McDonnell (Labour, Hayes and Harlington)

15. Ian Mearns (Labour, Gateshead)

16. Steve Pound (Labour, Ealing North)

17. Cat Smith (Labour, Lancaster and Fleetwood)

18. Keir Starmer (Labour, Holborn and St Pancras)

19. Catherine West (Labour, Hornsey and Wood Green)

20. John Pugh (Liberal Democrat, Southport)

21. Hywel Williams (Plaid Cymru, Arfon)

22. Richard Arkless (SNP, Dumfries and Galloway)

23. Hannah Bardell (SNP, Livingston)

24. Mhairi Black (SNP, Paisley and Renfrewshire South)

25. Ian Blackford (SNP, Skye and Lochaber)

26. Kirsty Blackman (SNP, Aberdeen North)

27. Phil Boswell (SNP, Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill)

28. Deidre Brock (SNP, Edinburgh North and Leith)

29. Alan Brown (SNP, Kilmarnock and Loudoun)

30. Lisa Cameron (SNP, East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow)

31. Douglas Chapman (SNP, Dunfermline and West Fife)

32. Joanna Cherry (SNP, Edinburgh South West)

33. Ronnie Cowan (SNP, Inverclyde)

34. Angela Crawley (SNP, Lanark and Hamilton East)

35. Martyn Day (SNP, Linlithgow and East Falkirk)

36. Martin Docherty (SNP, West Dunbartonshire)

37. Stuart Donaldson (SNP, West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine)

38. Marion Fellows (SNP, Motherwell and Wishaw)

39. Margaret Ferrier (SNP, Rutherglen and Hamilton West)

40. Stephen Gethins (SNP, North East Fife)

41. Patricia Gibson (SNP, North Ayrshire and Arran)

42. Patrick Grady (SNP, Glasgow North)

43. Peter Grant (SNP, Glenrothes)

44. Neil Gray (SNP, Airdrie and Shotts)

45. Drew Hendry (SNP, Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey)

46. Stewart Hosie (SNP, Dundee East)

47. George Kerevan (SNP, East Lothian)

48. Calum Kerr (SNP, Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk)

49. Chris Law (SNP, Dundee West)

50. Angus MacNeil (SNP, Na h-Eileanan an Iar)

51. Callum McCaig (SNP, Aberdeen South)

52. Stuart McDonald (SNP, Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East)

53. Stewart McDonald (SNP, Glasgow South)

54. Natalie McGarry (SNP, Glasgow East)

55. Anne McLaughlin (SNP, Glasgow North East)

56. John McNally (SNP, Falkirk)

57. Paul Monaghan (SNP, Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross)

58. Carol Monaghan (SNP, Glasgow North West)

59. Roger Mullin (SNP, Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath)

60. Gavin Newlands (SNP, Paisley and Renfrewshire North)

61. John Nicolson (SNP, East Dunbartonshire)

62. Brendan O’Hara (SNP, Argyll and Bute)

63. Kirsten Oswald (SNP, East Renfrewshire)

64. Steven Paterson (SNP, Stirling)

65. Angus Robertson (SNP, Moray)

66. Alex Salmond (SNP, Gordon)

67. Tasmina Sheikh (SNP, Ochil and South Perthshire)

68. Tommy Sheppard (SNP, Edinburgh East)

69. Chris Stephens (SNP, Glasgow South West)

70. Alison Thewliss (SNP, Glasgow Central)

71. Owen Thompson (SNP, Midlothian)

72. Michael Weir (SNP, Angus)

73. Corri Wilson (SNP, Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock)

74. Eilidh Whiteford (SNP, Banff and Buchan)

75. Philippa Whitford (SNP, Ayrshire)

76. Pete Wishart (SNP, Perth and North Perthshire)

77. Michelle Thomson (Independent, Edinburgh West – resigned SNP whip in Sept 2015)

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 Quarterly Fundraiser: I’m Hoping to Raise $3500 (£2400) for My Guantánamo Work

Please support my work!

Dear friends and supporters,

It’s that time of year, and I hope that, if you value my work, you can help me out.

Exactly ten years ago, I began working full-time on Guantánamo, first writing my book The Guantánamo Files, and then, since May 2007, the 1,919 articles about Guantánamo I have written so far, which are all published here.

Every three months, I ask you, if you can, to make a donation to support my work on Guantánamo and related issues. I’m hoping to raise $3,500 (£2,400) for the next three months, which is just $270 (£180) a week for my regular writing about Guantánamo, telling the prisoners’ stories, and campaigning to get the prison closed.

If you don’t already know, I need to let you know that most of my work is reader-funded. I receive no institutional funding for this website, and I really can’t continue to do the work I do without your support. Any amount will be gratefully received, whether it is $25, $100 or $500 — or any amount in any other currency (£15, £50 or £250, for example). PayPal will convert any currency you pay into dollars, which I chose as my main currency because the majority of my supporters are in the US.

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

We are now in the 15th year of operations at Guantánamo, and although President Obama recently delivered a plan to Congress for the prison’s closure before he leaves office, it is by no means certain that Congress will cooperate with him, or that, if necessary, he can do it without lawmakers’ support.

As a result, we need to keep up the pressure on the Obama administration to get Guantánamo closed once and for all. I continue to campaign for Guantánamo’s closure — through the Countdown to Close Guantánamo, for example, and through my regular reporting, including my detailed scrutiny of the Periodic Review Boards — and with your help I will continue to do as much as I can, through my writing, research, campaigning, media appearances and personal appearances, to work towards Guantánamo’s closure.

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

Andy Worthington

London

March 7, 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.

The Countdown to Close Guantánamo: For Mar. 25, Send Us Your Photos and Tell Obama He Has Just 300 Days Left to Close the Prison

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

In January, to mark the last year of the Obama presidency, music legend Roger Waters and I launched the Countdown to Close Guantánamo on Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman. The initiative was designed to allow people to have their say in keeping up the pressure on President Obama to fulfill the promise to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay that he made on his second day in office in January 2009.

The Countdown to Close Guantánamo involves supporters of our campaign and of the need for the prison’s closure taking photos of themselves with posters counting down to the end of Barack Obama’s presidency. The first poster — marking 1 year to go — was for January 20, the second — 350 days — was for February 4, and we are now calling for supporters to print off the poster marking 300 days, and to send it to us by March 25.

If you’d like to include a personalized message, please do, and if you want you can also let us know where you are, to demonstrate the breadth of support for the closure of Guantánamo across the US, and around the world.

For future reference, 250 days will be on May 14, and 200 days is on July 3, just in time for Independence Day.

So far we have had an enthusiastic response to the initiative, and there are nearly 180 photos on the website, on the pages here and here. Some of the photos have also been posted photos on social media, on our Facebook and Twitter pages.

Do check out the supporters from across the US, from the UK and from other countries, including Roger Waters, Brian Eno, John McDonnell MP, Andy Slaughter MP, the journalist Yvonne Ridley, FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley, former Guantánamo military defense attorney Todd Pierce, and a number of former prisoners — Shaker Aamer, Moazzam Begg, Ruhal Ahmed, Shafiq Rasul and Asif Iqbal, and, in Algeria, Djamel Ameziane.

Since we launched the Countdown to Close Guantánamo, President Obama has delivered to Congress a long-promised plan for closing the prison, prepared by the Department of Defense, which I wrote about two weeks ago.

However, it is not known if Congress will cooperate, and drop its long-standing ban on any Guantánamo prisoner being brought to the US mainland for any reason, a ban which, of course, needs to be dropped for Guantánamo to be closed, unless President Obama follows the advice of those who are telling him that, as the Commander in Chief, he can bypass Congress in dealing with the disposition of prisoners.

Last week, defense secretary Ashton Carter “made it clear that Congress will have to change the law if the government wants to move some remaining detainees at the Guantánamo Bay prison to a facility on US soil,” as CBS News described it.

Carter said that creating an alternative detention center on the US mainland for the men to be moved from Guantánamo “can’t be done unless Congress acts, which means that Congress has to support the idea that it would be good to move this facility or the detainees to the United States.” He added that it would be “good if it can be done, but it cannot be done under current law. The law has to be changed. That is the reason to put a proposal to put in front of Congress.”

In addition, the need to keep up pressure for the closure of Guantánamo was made clear on Friday, when a CNN/IRC poll revealed that 56% of interviewees spoken to by telephone between February 24 and 27 thought that Guantánamo should stay open, while 40% said it should be closed. This was lower than the 60% to 39% breakdown of interviewees in March 2010, but it is noticeable that the only time there was a majority supporting the closure of Guantánamo — by 51% to 47% — was from January 12-15, 2009, just as Barack Obama was about to take office.

At that time, of course, the closure of Guantánamo was a campaign promise, widely regarded as something that would come to pass. Now, of course, President Obama needs to ensure that his failure to honor a promise he made on his second day in office does not tarnish his legacy, although Guantánamo is more than just a campaign promise, of course. Every day it stays open mocks the US’s claim to be a nation that respects the rule of law, so please help us keep it in the spotlight, and send us your photos!

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.

Write to the Guantánamo Prisoners in President Obama’s Last Year in Office

Please support my work!

Every six months or so, I ask people to write to the prisoners in Guantánamo, to let them — and the US authorities — know that they have not been forgotten. In President Obama’s last year in office, there seems to be some hope that — finally — he will fulfil the promise he made on his second day in office in January 2009, to close the prison for good, but as with all things to do with this wretched prison outside the law, any potential good news about Guantánamo can only be celebrated when it has actually happened, and there are, still, reasons to fear that it may not happen — obstruction from Congress, for example, or the president’s inability to act unilaterally if Congress refuses to cooperate with him.

The letter-writing campaign was started nearly six years ago by two Facebook friends, Shahrina J. Ahmed and Mahfuja Bint Ammu, and, as I mentioned above, it has been repeated every six months, more or less (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here for my articles encouraging people to write to the prisoners).

Since last July, when I last encouraged people to write to the prisoners, there has been significant progress in working towards the closure of the prison, as 25 men have been freed. The prison now holds 91 men, and 36 of these men have been approved for release — 24 in January 2010 by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established when he took office in 2009, and 12 others approved for release in the last two years by a new review process, the Periodic Review Boards, which started in 2013.

In the list below, I have divided the remaining 91 prisoners into those cleared for release (36), those eligible for Periodic Review Boards, awaiting reviews or awaiting the results of reviews (45) and those charged or tried in the military commissions system (10). Please note that I have largely kept the spelling used by the US authorities in the “Final Dispositions” of the Guantánamo Review Task Force, which was released through FOIA legislation in June 2013. Even though these names are often inaccurate, they are the names by which the men are officially known in Guantánamo  — although, primarily, it should be noted, those held are not referred to by any name at all, but are instead identified solely by their prisoner numbers (ISNs, which stands for “internment serial numbers”).

Writing to the prisoners

If you are an Arabic speaker, or speak any other languages spoken by the prisoners besides English, feel free to write in those languages. Do please note that any messages that can be construed as political should be avoided, as they may lead to the letters not making it past the Pentagon’s censors, but be aware that your messages may not get through anyway — although please don’t let that put you off.

When writing to the prisoners please ensure you include their full name and ISN (internment serial number) below (these are the numbers before their names, i.e. hunger striker Tariq Ba Odah is ISN 178).

Please address all letters to:

Detainee Name

Detainee ISN

U.S. Naval Station

Guantánamo Bay

Washington, D.C. 20355

United States of America

Please also include a return address on the envelope.

The 36 prisoners approved for release

Below are the names of the 36 prisoners in Guantánamo — out of the remaining 91 — who have been cleared for release — or “approved for transfer,” as the authorities prefer. The phrase used by the task force to describe the recommendations for the first seven of these men was “[t]ransfer to a country outside the United States that will implement appropriate security measures.” Their identities were first revealed in September 2012. See below for 17 other Yemenis recommended for “conditional detention,” and also for the 12 men recommended for release since January 2014 by Periodic Review Boards but still held (seven others have been freed).

The 4 non-Yemeni prisoners approved for release since 2010

ISN 038 Ridah Bin Saleh al Yazidi (Tunisia)

ISN 189 Salem Abdu Salam Ghereby (Libya)

ISN 257 Imar Hamzayavich Abdulayev (Tajikistan) aka Umar Abdulayev

ISN 309 Mjuayn Al-Din Jamal Al-Din Abd Al Fadhil Abd Al-Sattar (UAE)

The 3 Yemeni prisoners approved for release since 2010

ISN 153 Fayiz Ahmad Yahia Suleiman (Yemen)

ISN 249 Muhammed Abdullah Al Hamiri (Yemen)

ISN 566 Mansour Mohamed Mutaya Ali (Yemen)

The 17 Yemeni prisoners approved for release but designated for “conditional detention”

These men were cleared for release by the task force, although the task force members conjured up a new category for them, “conditional detention,” which it described as being “based on the current security environment in that country.” The task force added, “They are not approved for repatriation to Yemen at this time, but may be transferred to third countries, or repatriated to Yemen in the future if the current moratorium on transfers to Yemen is lifted and other security conditions are met.” 13 of the 30 have been released since the fall of 2015.

ISN 030 Ahmed Umar Abdullah al-Hikimi (Yemen)

ISN 033 Mohammed Al-Adahi (Yemen)

ISN 040 Abdel Qadir Al-Mudafari (Yemen)

ISN 091 Abdel Al Saleh (Yemen)

ISN 115 Abdul Rahman Mohammed Saleh (Yemen)

ISN 167 Ali Yahya Mahdi (Yemen)

ISN 178 Tariq Ali Abdullah Ba Odah (Yemen)

ISN 223 Abd al-Rahman Sulayman (Yemen)

ISN 240 Abdallah Yahya Yusif Al Shibli (Yemen)

ISN 321 Ahmed Yaslam Said Kuman (Yemen)

ISN 440 Muhammad Ali Abdallah Muhammad Bwazir (Yemen) aka Bawazir

ISN 461 Abd al Rahman al-Qyati (Yemen)

ISN 498 Mohammed Ahmen Said Haider (Yemen)

ISN 509 Mohammed Nasir Yahi Khussrof (Yemen)

ISN 550 Walid Said bin Said Zaid (Yemen)

ISN 728 Abdul Muhammad Nassir al-Muhajari (Yemen)

ISN 893 Tawfiq Nasir Awad Al-Bihani (Yemen)

The 12 prisoners approved for release by Periodic Review Boards

ISN 031 Mahmud Abd Al Aziz Al Mujahid (Yemen)

ISN 037 Abdel Malik Ahmed Abdel Wahab al Rahabi (Yemen)

ISN 041 Majid Mahmud Abdu Ahmed (Yemen)

ISN 128 Ghaleb Nassar al Bihani (Yemen)

ISN 235 Saeed Ahmed Mohammed Abdullah Sarem Jarabh (Yemen)

ISN 324 Mashur Abdullah Muqbil Ahmed al-Sabri (Yemen)

ISN 434 Mustafa Abd al-Qawi Abd al-Aziz al-Shamiri (Yemen)

ISN 441 Abdul Rahman Ahmed (Yemen) aka Mansoor al-Zahari

ISN 576 Zahar Omar Hamis bin Hamdoun (Yemen)

ISN 695 Omar Khalif Mohammed Abu Baker Mahjour Umar (Libya)

ISN 1045 Mohammed Kamin (Afghanistan)

ISN 1119 Ahmid al Razak (Afghanistan) aka Haji Hamidullah

The 45 prisoners eligible for Periodic Review Boards (or awaiting the results of them, or awaiting further reviews)

Of the 46 remaining prisoners notified that they were eligible for Periodic Review Boards in April 2013, the first 24 listed below were recommended for continued imprisonment without charge or trial in January 2010 by President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force, and the 22 others were recommended for prosecution in the military commissions, but those intended prosecutions were dropped after judges dismissed the convictions against two prisoners on the basis that the war crimes for which they has been tried had actually been invented by Congress and were not legally recognized.

14 prisoners recommended in January 2010 for continued detention (without possible transfer to imprisonment in the US), but determined to be eligible for a Periodic Review Board in April 2013

ISN 028 Moath Hamza Ahmed al-Alwi (Yemen)

ISN 044 Muhammed Rajab Sadiq Abu Ghanim (Yemen)

ISN 131 Salem Ahmad Hadi Bin Kanad (Yemen)

ISN 242 Khalid Ahmed Qasim (Yemen)

ISN 244 Abdul Latif Nasir (Morocco)

ISN 508 Salman Yahya Hassan Mohammad Rabei’i (Yemen)

ISN 708 Ismael Ali Faraj Ali Bakush (Libya)

ISN 836 Ayub Murshid Ali Salih (Yemen)

ISN 837 Bashir Nasir Ali al-Marwalah (Yemen)

ISN 838 Shawqi Awad Balzuhair (Yemen)

ISN 839 Musab Omar Ali al-Mudwani (Yemen)

ISN 840 Hail Aziz Ahmed al-Maythali (Yemen)

ISN 841 Said Salih Said Nashir (Yemen)

ISN 10025 Mohammed Abdul Malik Bajabu (Kenya)

Note: 028, 131 and 242 had their ongoing imprisonment approved by Periodic Review Boards in 2014 and 2015.

Nine prisoners recommended in January 2010 for continued detention (with possible transfer to imprisonment in the US), but determined to be eligible for a Periodic Review Board in April 2013

ISN 027 Uthman Abd al-Rahim Muhammad Uthman (Yemen)

ISN 029 Mohammed al-Ansi (Yemen)

ISN 522 Yassim Qasim Mohammed Ismail Qasim (Yemen)

ISN 560 Haji Wali Muhammed (Afghanistan)

ISN 975 Karim Bostan (Afghanistan)

ISN 1017 Omar Mohammed Ali al-Rammah (Yemen)

ISN 1463 Abd al-Salam al-Hilah (Yemen)

ISN 10023 Guleed Hassan Ahmed (Somalia)

ISN 10029 Muhammad Rahim (Afghanistan)

The 22 prisoners recommended for prosecution but not charged, who were determined to be eligible for a Periodic Review Board in April 2013

ISN 063 Mohamed Mani Ahmad al Kahtani (Saudi Arabia)

ISN 569 Suhayl Abdul Anam al Sharabi (Yemen)

ISN 682 Abdullah Al Sharbi (Saudi Arabia)

ISN 685 Said bin Brahim bin Umran Bakush (Algeria) aka Abdelrazak Ali

ISN 694 Sufyian Barhoumi (Algeria)

ISN 696 Jabran Al Qahtani (Saudi Arabia)

ISN 702 Ravil Mingazov (Russia)

ISN 753 Abdul Sahir (Afghanistan) aka Zahir

ISN 760 Mohamedou Ould Slahi (Mauritania)

ISN 762 Obaidullah (Afghanistan)

ISN 1094 Saifullah Paracha (Pakistan)

ISN 1453 Sanad Al Kazimi (Yemen)

ISN 1456 Hassan Bin Attash (Saudi Arabia)

ISN 1457 Sharqawi Abdu Ali Al Hajj (Yemen)

ISN 1460 Abdul Rabbani (Pakistan)

ISN 1461 Mohammed Rabbani (Pakistan) aka Ahmad Rabbani

ISN 10016 Zayn al-Ibidin Muhammed Husayn aka Abu Zubaydah

ISN 10017 Mustafa Faraj Muhammed Masud al-Jadid al-Usaybi (Libya) akka Abu Faraj al-Libi

ISN 10019 Encep Nurjaman (Hambali) (Indonesia)

ISN 10021 Mohd Farik bin Amin (Malaysia)

ISN 10022 Bashir bin Lap (Malaysia)

ISN 3148 Haroon al-Afghani (Afghanistan)

The 10 prisoners charged or tried

The seven prisoners currently facing charges

ISN 10011 Mustafa Ahmad al Hawsawi (Saudi Arabia)

ISN 10013 Ramzi Bin Al Shibh (Yemen)

ISN 10014 Walid Mohammed Bin Attash (Yemen)

ISN 10015 Mohammed al Nashiri (Saudi Arabia) aka Abd al-Rahim al Nashiri

ISN 10018 Ali abd al Aziz Ali (Pakistan)

ISN 10024 Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (Kuwait)

ISN 10026 Nashwan abd al-Razzaq abd al-Baqi (Hadi) (Iraq)

The two prisoners already convicted via plea deal

ISN 768 Ahmed Al-Darbi (Saudi Arabia)

ISN 10020 Majid Khan (Pakistan)

One other prisoner convicted under President Bush

ISN 039 Ali Hamza al-Bahlul (Yemen)

He was not included in the task force’s deliberations, as he had been tried and convicted in a one-sided trial by military commission in October 2008, at which he refused to mount a defense. His conviction was dismissed by an appeals court in January 2013, although the government is appealing that ruling.

Note: For further information about the prisoners, see my six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list (Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five and Part Six).

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.

Andy Worthington: An Archive of Guantánamo Articles and Other Writing – Part 18, January to June 2015

Please support my work!

This article is the 18th in an ongoing series of articles listing all my work in chronological order. It’s a project I began in January 2010, when I put together the first chronological lists of all my articles, in the hope that doing so would make it as easy as possible for readers and researchers to navigate my work — the 2,584 articles I have published since I began publishing articles here in May 2007, which, otherwise, are not available in chronological order in any readily accessible form.

I first began researching the Bush administration’s “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo and the 779 men (and boys) held there over ten years ago, in the fall of 2005, and began researching and writing about it on a full-time basis exactly ten years ago in March 2006, when the Pentagon lost a FOIA lawsuit and was obliged to release 8,000 pages of documents relating to the prisoners. Initially, I spent 14 months researching and writing my book The Guantánamo Files, based on those documents, and, since May 2007, I have continued to write about the men held there, on an almost daily basis, as an independent investigative journalist — for two and a half years under President Bush, and, shockingly, for what is now over seven years under President Obama.

As I note every time I put together a chronological list of my articles, my mission, as it has been since my research first revealed the scale of the injustice at Guantánamo, continues to revolve around four main aims — to humanize the prisoners by telling their stories; to expose the many lies told about them to supposedly justify their detention; to push for the prison’s closure and the absolute repudiation of indefinite detention without charge or trial as US policy; and to call for those who initiated, implemented and supported indefinite detention and torture to be held accountable for their actions.

I am also about to embark on my first quarterly fundraising appeal of 2016, when I ask readers, if they can, to support my work, most of which is undertaken without any institutional support — or, to put it another way, to help to fund me as a reader-supported journalist and activist, reliant on your support. I’m trying to raise $3500 for the next three months, so if you can support my work — with a donation however large or small — then please click on the “Donate” button above to donate via PayPal.

The period covered by this 18th list, from January to June 2015, was not a good period for the release of prisoners, as just six men were freed — in June. However, I continued to work as tirelessly as possible to push for action from the US government. As with every year since 2011, I visited the US in January to call for the closure of the prison, including at the protest outside the White House on January 11, the anniversary of the opening of the prison in 2002, and throughout this period I also continued to work diligently on the We Stand With Shaker campaign that I launched in November 2014 with the activist Joanne MacInnes.

That campaign contributed to the release of Shaker on October 30, 2015 — a real triumph for campaigners around the world facing what appear to be insurmountable odds, but from January to June, as we came up with new campaigning ideas, like February’s “There is no love in Guantánamo” campaign, featuring Roger Waters, we had no idea if he would actually be freed. In March, the government backed a motion calling for his release, put forward by the Shaker Aamer Parliamentary Group, led by the MPs John McDonnell and David Davis, and in May Davis, with his colleague Andrew Mitchell, and with the Labour MPs Andy Slaughter and future party leader Jeremy Corbyn, visited the US to call for Shaker’s release, a visit that the US attorney Tom Wilner, my colleague in another campaign, the Close Guantánamo campaign, helped by arranging visits with a number of influential Senators.

Throughout this period, the latest review process at Guantánamo, the Periodic Review Boards, continued, and former child prisoner Omar Khadr was finally freed on bail in Canada, appearing in public for the first time and cutting through all the scaremongering hyperbole about him with his modesty and charm.

Throughout the period covered by this list, I also continued to write, when time allowed, about the disgraceful war being waged on public services by the Tory-led government here in the UK, and our sad General Election, when the Tories, with just 24.4% of the electorate on their side, nevertheless ended up with 51% of the seats. My band The Four Fathers‘ song “Tory Bullshit Blues” failed to dent their relative popularity, sadly, and in June I remembered how it was 30 years since an earlier Tory nightmare, Margaret Thatcher, had crushed dissent by travellers and festival-goers at the Battle of the Beanfield.

As I always explain when I publish these lists, I remain convinced, through detailed research, through comments from insiders with knowledge of Guantánamo, and through an analysis of classified military documents released by WikiLeaks, that between 95 and 97 percent of the 779 men and boys imprisoned in total were either completely innocent people, seized as a result of dubious intelligence or sold for bounty payments, or Taliban foot soldiers, recruited to fight an inter-Muslim civil war that began long before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and that had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or international terrorism.

The articles I wrote between January and June 2015 are listed below, separated into two categories: articles about Guantánamo, and articles about British politics. I hope you find the list useful, and will share it if you do.

An archive of Guantánamo articles: Part 18, January to June 2015

January 2015

1. Yemenis in Guantánamo: As Three Yemenis Are Freed from Guantánamo, Video Highlights Plight of 52 Others, Long Cleared for Release

2. Guantánamo anniversary, US visit: Close Guantánamo: Andy Worthington’s US Tour Dates, January 8-15, 2015

3. Prisoners released from Guantánamo: Who Are the Five Guantánamo Prisoners Given New Homes in Kazakhstan?

4. Shaker Aamer: Shaker Aamer’s First Phone Call from Guantánamo to His Lawyers Since Publication of the Senate Torture Report

5. Guantánamo anniversary: As Guantánamo’s 14th Year of Operations Begins, This Must Be the Year It Closes

6. Guantánamo campaigns: Gitmo Clock Marks 600 Days Since President Obama’s Promise to Resume Releasing Prisoners from Guantánamo; 59 Cleared Prisoners Remain

7. Video, Guantánamo anniversary, US visit: Video: Andy Worthington Calls for the Closure of Guantánamo Outside the White House on January 11, 2015

8. Video, Guantánamo anniversary, US visit: Video: At New America, Andy Worthington, Tom Wilner and Col. Morris Davis Discuss the Closure of Guantánamo and the CIA Torture Report

9. Guantánamo anniversary, US visit, radio: Radio, TV and Live Events: Andy Worthington Discusses Guantánamo and the Need to Close the Prison During His US Tour

10. Prisoners released from Guantánamo: Who Are the Five Yemenis Released from Guantánamo and Given New Homes in Oman and Estonia?

11. Photos, Guantánamo anniversary, US visit, torture: Photos and Report: Occupying Dick Cheney’s House and Protesting About Guantánamo, Torture and Drones Outside CIA HQ

12. Guantánamo, Periodic Review Boards: Progress Towards Closing Guantánamo, As Periodic Review Boards Resume with the Case of a Seriously Ill Egyptian

13. Video, Guantánamo anniversary, US visit: Video: Andy Worthington Speaks About Guantánamo and We Stand With Shaker in New York, Plus Lawyers Ramzi Kassem and Omar Farah

14. Photos, Guantánamo anniversary, US visit: Photos: “Close Guantánamo” Protest Outside the White House on January 11, 2015, the 13th Anniversary of Prison’s Opening

15. Video, Guantánamo anniversary, US visit: Video: Andy Worthington Talks About Guantánamo and the Need to Close the Prison at Western New England School of Law

16. Guantánamo anniversary, US visit, radio: Radio: Two Recent Interviews with Andy Worthington About Guantánamo as the Prison Begins Its 14th Year of Operations

February 2015

17. Guantánamo campaigns: Please Write to the Prisoners in Guantánamo, Let Them Know They Have Not Been Forgotten

18. Video, Guantánamo anniversary, US visit: Video: Andy Worthington Speaks at “Guantánamo At 13: How Obama Can Close the Illegal Prison” in Northampton, Massachusetts

19. Guantánamo, torture: Andy Worthington Speaks at Two London Events on the CIA Torture Report and the Banned Books of Guantánamo, February 2015

20. Shaker Aamer, We Stand With Shaker: We Stand With Shaker: Send a Valentine’s Card for Shaker Aamer to the US Ambassador in London, to Ask for His Release from Guantánamo

21. Guantánamo anniversary, US visit, radio: Radio: Andy Worthington Discusses Guantánamo and We Stand With Shaker on KBOO FM in Portland and Radio Islam in Chicago

22. Shaker Aamer: On Eve of 13th Anniversary of Shaker Aamer’s Arrival at Guantánamo, Renewed Calls for Action from Barack Obama and David Cameron

23. Shaker Aamer, We Stand With Shaker: US Ambassador Snubs 60 Celebrities and MPs Calling for Release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer

24. Shaker Aamer: “There’s a Part of Our Heart That’s Missing”: Shaker Aamer’s Sons Speak to Sky News on 13th Anniversary of His Arrival at Guantánamo

25. Shaker Aamer, We Stand With Shaker: Photos: “There is No Love in Guantánamo” – We Stand With Shaker Protest at the US Embassy in London, February 13, 2015

26. Guantánamo, Mohamedou Ould Slahi: A Tale of Two Guantánamos: Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s World of Torture vs. the Senate’s Terrorist Fantasies

27. Guantánamo, military commissions, David Hicks: The collapse of Guantánamo’s military commissions (for Al-Jazeera – my post here)

28. Photos, Shaker Aamer: Photos: 13 Years in Guantánamo – Protest for Shaker Aamer Outside 10 Downing Street, February 14, 2015

29. UK protest, legal aid, We Stand With Shaker: Defending 800 Years of Habeas Corpus: We Stand With Shaker Attends Not the Global Law Summit in London on Monday

30. Photos, UK protest, legal aid, We Stand With Shaker: Photos and Report: Celebrating Magna Carta and Habeas Corpus and Campaigning to Save Legal Aid at the Not the Global Law Summit in London

31. Guantánamo, military commissions, David Hicks, Shaker Aamer, radio: Radio: Andy Worthington Speaks to Michael Slate and Scott Horton About Guantánamo, David Hicks and Shaker Aamer

32. Guantánamo, Periodic Review Boards: As Last Egyptian Is Cleared for Release from Guantánamo, Another Yemeni Faces Periodic Review Board

33. “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo”: Deptford Screening of “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” + Q&A with Andy Worthington, March 6

March 2015

[image error]34. Torture, extraordinary rendition: European Court of Human Rights Orders Poland to Pay $262,000 to CIA “Black Site” Prisoners

35. Video, torture: Video: Andy Worthington Discusses the US Torture Program with Lembit Opik on Press TV

36. Guantánamo, torture, radio: Radio: Andy Worthington Discusses Guantánamo, Torture and the Failed Military Commissions with Jon Gold

37. Guantánamo, Periodic Review Boards: 13th Guantánamo Prisoner Seeks Release Through Periodic Review Board

38. Shaker Aamer, UK politics: Please Ask your MP to Support the Parliamentary Debate for Shaker Aamer, Mar 17

39. Shaker Aamer, UK politics: March 17: Come to the Green Card Lobby of MPs Before the Shaker Aamer Parliamentary Debate

40. Guantánamo, David Hicks: An Interview With David Hicks Following the Dismissal of His Guantánamo Conviction

41. Life after Guantánamo: Guantánamo Prisoners Released in Uruguay Struggle to Adapt to Freedom

42. Shaker Aamer: 284 British Imams and Community Leaders Call for Shaker Aamer’s Release from Guantánamo

43. Shaker Aamer, UK politics: UK Government Backs Parliamentary Motion to Secure Release of Shaker Aamer from Guantánamo

44. Shaker Aamer, UK politics: The Full Text of the Parliamentary Debate for Shaker Aamer, the Last British Resident in Guantánamo (1/2)

45. Shaker Aamer, UK politics: The Full Text of the Parliamentary Debate for Shaker Aamer, the Last British Resident in Guantánamo (2/2)

46. Guantánamo, Periodic Review Boards: Periodic Review Boards at Guantánamo: Another Yemeni Cleared for Release, Another Approved for Ongoing Detention

47. Guantánamo op-eds: Dispelling the Myths of Guantánamo Bay (for the Chicago Tribune, with Tom Wilner – my post here)

48. Guantánamo interviews: Strangers in a Strange Land: My Interview About the Struggles of the Six Men Freed from Guantánamo in Uruguay

April 2015

49. Guantánamo, hunger strikes: Guantánamo “An Endless Horror Movie”: Hunger Striker Appeals for Help to Inter-American Commission on Human Rights

50. Guantánamo, Afghanistan: Prisoners in Guantánamo Ask to be Freed Because of the End of the War in Afghanistan

51. Guantánamo, hunger strikes: Sen. Dianne Feinstein Urges Pentagon to End “Unnecessary” Force-Feeding at Guantánamo

52. Life after Guantánamo: Former Hunger Striker Abu Wa’el Dhiab and Other Guantánamo Prisoners Freed in Uruguay Discuss Their Problems

53. Guantánamo, hunger strikes: 90-Pound Guantánamo Hunger Striker Appeals in Court for Assistance from Pakistani Government

54. Shaker Aamer, We Stand With Shaker: We Stand With Shaker Aamer: 70th Celebrity Photo Published, As Campaign to Free Him from Guantánamo Continues

55. Guantánamo campaigns: As Gitmo Clock Marks 700 Days Since Obama’s Promise to Resume Releasing Prisoners, 57th Man Is Approved For Release

56. Guantánamo, Shaker Aamer: Obama to Release Ten Guantánamo Prisoners Including Shaker Aamer, Says Washington Post

57. Omar Khadr: Canadian Judge Grants Bail to Former Guantánamo Prisoner Omar Khadr

58. Closing Guantánamo: Cliff Sloan, Former Envoy for Guantánamo Closure, On Why Cleared Prisoners, Including Shaker Aamer, Must Be Freed

59. Guantánamo, Periodic Review Boards: Abdul Rahman Shalabi, Hunger Striker Since 2005, Asks Review Board to Approve His Release from Guantánamo

May 2015

60. Omar Khadr: Former Guantánamo Prisoner Omar Khadr Says He Is “Ready” for Freedom; All Decent People Must Agree

61. Omar Khadr: Video: Omar Khadr Speaks, Says, “Freedom Is Way Better Than I Thought”

62. Closing Guantánamo: Senators Leahy, Feinstein and Durbin Tell Obama to Free 57 Cleared Guantánamo Prisoners “As Quickly As Possible”

63. Omar Khadr: Canadian Supreme Court Rules That Omar Khadr Was A Juvenile Prisoner, Not An Adult

64. Closing Guantánamo, Supreme Court: Retired Justice John Paul Stevens Calls for Compensation for the 57 Cleared Guantánamo Prisoners Still Held

65. Closing Guantánamo: Rights Groups Send An Open Letter to President Obama and Ashton Carter: Free the 57 Guantánamo Prisoners Approved for Release

66. Shaker Aamer: MPs Visit US to Discuss the Release of Shaker Aamer from Guantánamo with John McCain and Dianne Feinstein

67. Guantánamo: Former Guantánamo Prisoner Asim Al-Khalaqi Dies in Kazakhstan, Four Months After Being Freed

68. Abu Zubaydah: Incommunicado Forever: The Colossal Injustice of Torture Victim Abu Zubaydah’s Ongoing Imprisonment Without Charge or Trial at Guantánamo

69. Shaker Aamer: Clive Stafford Smith Confirms That Shaker Aamer Could Be Released from Guantánamo in June

70. Conditions in Guantánamo: “Petty and Nasty”: Guantánamo Commander Bans Lawyers From Bringing Food to Share with Prisoners

June 2015

71. Shaker Aamer: Shaker Aamer’s Latest Words from Guantánamo; Thanks Roger Waters, Says, “I Am An Innocent Man and a Good Person”

72. Guantánamo, hunger strikes, US courts: Appeals Court Refuses to Allow Government to Block Release of Guantánamo Force-Feeding Tapes

73. Life after Guantánamo: Der Spiegel Publishes Detailed Profile of the Former Guantánamo Prisoners in Uruguay, Struggling to Adapt to a New Life

74. Omar Khadr: Omar Khadr Speaks: Major Profile of Former Guantánamo Prisoner in the Toronto Star

75. Shaker Aamer: New York Times Publishes British MPs’ Hard-Hitting Op-Ed Calling for Shaker Aamer’s Release from Guantánamo

76. Deaths at Guantánamo: Remembering the Season of Death at Guantánamo

77. Prisoners released from Guantánamo: Who Are the Six Yemenis Freed from Guantánamo and Resettled in Oman?

78. Closing Guantánamo: The Path to Closing Guantánamo

79. Torture, accountability: Six Months After the CIA Torture Report, We’re Still Waiting for Accountability

80. Guantánamo, hunger strikes, US courts: Skeletal, 75-Pound Guantánamo Hunger Striker Tariq Ba Odah Seeks Release; Medical Experts Fear For His Life

81. Guantánamo, Periodic Review Boards: Shrapnel-Damaged Libyan Amputee Seeks Release from Guantánamo via Periodic Review Board

An archive of articles about British politics, January to June 2015

1. Housing crisis: Join the ‘March for Homes’ in London This Saturday, January 31

2. Housing crisis: Photos: On the March for Homes, Thousands Defy the Rain to Demand Secure and Affordable Housing for Ordinary Londoners

3. Housing crisis: London’s Housing Crisis: Please Support the Sweets Way Tenants Facing Eviction in Barnet

4. Homelessness: Photos: March for the Homeless Opposite 10 Downing Street, London, April 15, 2015

5. Protest music: Andy Worthington’s Band The Four Fathers Release Free Song, ‘Tory Bullshit Blues’

6. Save the NHS: Please Support the Campaign for the Reinstatement of a Publicly-Owned NHS

7. UK election: Time for Proportional Representation: Whatever the Outcome of the General Election, Our Voting System is Unfair and Unrepresentative

8. UK election: UK Election: Tory Victory A Disaster for the People of Britain and the Democratic Process

9. Human rights: What Does It Say About the Tories That They Want to Scrap Human Rights Legislation?

10. Unemployment: The Scandal of Demonising the Unemployed When There Aren’t Enough Jobs

11. Battle of the Beanfield, Stonehenge, civil liberties: It’s 30 Years Since Margaret Thatcher Trashed the Travellers’ Movement at the Battle of the Beanfield

12. Anti-austerity protests: Photos: London Protests Against the Tories and Austerity

13: Habeas corpus, Shaker Aamer: 800 Years of Magna Carta: The Stench of Hypocrisy Regarding Habeas Corpus for Shaker Aamer and Other Guantánamo Prisoners

14. Anti-austerity protests: Photos: The Impressive 250,000-Strong Anti-Austerity March in London

15. Stonehenge, civil liberties: Stonehenge and the Summer Solstice, 30 Years After the Battle of the Beanfield

16. Battle of the Beanfield, Stonehenge, civil liberties, Guantánamo: Guantánamo, Stonehenge Book Readings and Music: Two Events with Hamja Ahsan – Radio Show on Sunday June 28, and Art Event in Hackney Wick on July 2

17. Anti-austerity protests: Video: Charlotte Church’s Inspirational Anti-Austerity Speech on June 20

And one about Europe: Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay: It’s Time for Greece to Say No to the Murderous Austerity of Its Creditors

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.

Julian Assange: 600+ Rights Groups and Individuals Condemn UK and Sweden for Failing to Recognize UN Arbitrary Detention Finding

Yesterday, March 1, over 600 rights groups and prominent individuals — including Ai Weiwei, Pussy Riot, Naomi Klein, Arundhati Roy, Brian Eno, Ken Loach, Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, the former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, and the Northern Irish peace activist Mairead Maguire — delivered an open letter to the British and Swedish governments (via the EU reformist group DiEM25), at the 31st United Nations Human Rights Council meeting in Geneva, urging the two governments to respect the finding last month by the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention that Assange — the WikiLeaks founder, who, in 2010 and 2011, released the Iraq and Afghan war logs, a trove of US diplomatic cables from around the world, and the Guantánamo files, all originally leaked by Chelsea Manning — has been subjected to arbitrary detention. This was “partially,” as the Guardian explained, “on the grounds that Swedish prosecutors used disproportionate methods, including a European arrest warrant, rather than initially interviewing him in the UK.” The statement was delivered to the Swedish and UK Permanent Representatives to the United Nations.

Noam Chomsky said, “Julian Assange should have been freed a long time ago.  The judgment of the UN Working Group is welcome, and should be implemented forthwith.” Mads Andenas, professor of international law at Oxford All Souls, and the UN Special Rapporteur on Arbitrary Detention, said, “UK politicians [have] aimed at weakening the authority of the UN body for short-term opportunistic gain.”

Assange has been living for over three and a half years in the Ecuadorian Embassy, behind Harrod’s, in Knightsbridge, in London, where he first sought asylum in June 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden to face questioning over rape and sexual assault allegations, which he has always denied.

Both the British and Swedish governments refused to accept the UN’s findings. As the Guardian described it, “Philip Hammond, the UK foreign secretary, dismissed the UN report as ‘ridiculous’, called it ‘flawed in law’ and described Assange as a fugitive from justice,” and when the finding was issued last month, Anna Ekberg, a spokesperson for the Swedish foreign ministry, said, “The UN working group on arbitrary detention has concluded that Mr Assange is arbitrarily detained. The working group’s view differs from that of the Swedish authorities.”

The statement delivered at the UN yesterday states:

We the undersigned, including legal and human rights organisations, academics, and policymakers condemn the reactions of the governments of Sweden and the United Kingdom to the finding by the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention that Julian Assange is arbitrarily detained.

The governments of Sweden and the United Kingdom are setting a dangerous precedent that undermines the United Nations Human Rights system as a whole. We urge Sweden and the United Kingdom to respect the binding nature of the human rights covenants on which the decision is based, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; as well as the independence, integrity and authority of the Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights and the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention.

We therefore call on the governments of Sweden and the United Kingdom to comply without further delay with the Working Group’s findings and “ensure the right of free movement of Mr. Assange and accord him an enforceable right to compensation, in accordance with article 9(5) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Writing of Julian Assange’s current status, the statement’s authors noted that he was “granted political asylum by Ecuador in response to the pending prosecution against him in the US in relation to WikiLeaks publications, which include revelations of the US spying on allied governments, as well as the UN Secretary General and the UNHCR.” They added that the US has stated that its pending prosecution against WikiLeaks, which is being handled by the Department of Justice National Security Division and Criminal Division, is ongoing.

The statement’s authors also wrote about the current status of the “preliminary” investigation in Sweden, stating that Julian Assange “has not been charged at any stage and has already previously been cleared,” adding, “For the one allegation remaining in the ‘preliminary investigation’ the woman says the police ‘made it up’, ‘railroaded’ her and that she did not intend to file a complaint.” See the pages here and here on the Justice for Assange website for more information.

The full list of signatories is below, and as the letter’s authors noted, it includes more than 500 high profile signatories from more than 60 countries, more than 100 human and legal rights organizations including 16 national associations of lawyers and jurists, 50 international law professors, former judges and jurists, four Nobel Peace Prize winners, 25 Freedom of expression organizations including Reporters Without Borders, the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) and The Freedom of the Press Foundation, UN Special Rapporteur on Arbitrary Detention Mads Adenas and five other former UN Special Rapporteurs, Experts and Working Group Chairs, the cities of Madrid and Barcelona, and over 100 academics from 65 universities.”

Signatories

Organizations

Acceso Libre, Venezuela

ACI Participa, Honduras

ActiveWatch-Media Monitoring Agency, Romania

Acção Académica para o Desenvolvimento das Comunidades Rurais, Mozambique

Agencia Latinoamericana de Información, Bolivia

Agência Publica, Brazil

Alternative Intervention of Athens Lawyers (AIAL), Greece

American Association of Jurists (AAJ), US

Arab Lawyers Union (ALU), Middle East

Articulação de Empregados Rurais do estado de MG (ADERE-MG), Brazil

Artistas, Cientificos y Movimientos Sociales, Cuba

Asamblea Nacional de Afectados Ambientales, Mexico

Asociación Mayoritaria de Afrodescendientes del Ecuador AMAE, Ecuador

Asociación por los Derechos Civiles (ADC), Argentina

Association for Freedom of Thought and Expression, Egypt

Associação de Rádios Públicas do Brasil (ARPUB), Brazil

Associação Portuguesa de Juristas Democratas (APJD) (Portuguese Association of Democratic Jurists), Portugal

Australian Lawyers for Human Rights, Australia

Brazilian Association for Investigative Journalism, Brazil

Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, Canada

Capitulo Cubano De La Red En Defensa De La Humanidad De Intelectuales, Cuba

Center for Constitutional Rights, US

Center for International Law, Singapore

Centre Europe-Tiers Monde (CETIM), Switzerland

Centre for Independent Journalism, Malaysia

CHARTA 2008, Sweden

City of A Coruña, Spain

City of Barcelona, Spain

City of Madrid, Spain

Code Pink, US

Coletivo Juntos! – Por outro futuro, Brazil

Comision Nacional de Organizaciones Sociales de Uruguay, Urugauy

Comissão Pastoral da Terra (CPT), Brazil

Comite Carioca de Solidariedade a Cuba, Brazil

Comite en Solidaridad con la Causa Arabe, Spain

Comité Chileno De Solidaridad Con Palestina, Chile

Comité de Derechos Humanos de Base de Chiapas Digna Ochoa, Mexico

Comité de Solidaridad con los Pueblos, Latin America

Comité Permanente por la Defensa de los Derechos Humanos CDH, Ecuador

Comunidad de Software Libre de Nicaragua (GUL-NIC), Nicaragua

Confederación de Trabajadores y Servidores Públicos Nacional OSTNA, Ecuador

Confederación Intercultural Campesina del Ecuador AMARU, Ecuador

Consulta Popular, Brazil

Convergencia Nacional de Organizaciones Sociales del Ecuador, Ecuador

Cooperativa de Trabalho em Comunicação e Cultura Desacato, Brazil

Coordenação Nacional de Entidades Negras (CONEN), Brazil

Coordinador Nacional Agrario de Colombia CNA, Colombia

Cuba Si France, France

Demand Progress, US

Democratic Alliance for Knowledge Freedom, India

Derechos Digitales, Chile

Electronic Frontier Foundation, US

Equal Education Law Centre, South Africa

Eva Joly Institute for Justice & Democracy (EJI), Iceland

Executiva Nacional dos Estudantes de Biologia (ENEBIO), Brazil

Federación Española Pro Derechos Humanos, Spain

Federación Internacional Pro Derechos Humanos-España, Spain

Federação dos Estudantes de Agronomia do Brasil (FEAB), Brazil

Festivales Solidarios de Guatemala, Guatemala

Fora do Eixo, Brazil

Foro de Abogados de Izquierdas-red de Abogados Democratas (FAI-RADE), Spain

Foro de Comunicación para la Integración de Nuestra América, Latin America

Foundation for Fundamental Rights, Pakistan

Free Software Foundation Tamil Nadu, India

Free Software Mancha West Bengal, India

Free Software Movement Karnataka, India

Free Software Movement Maharashtra, India

Free Software Movement of India, India

Freedom of the Press Foundation, US

Fundacion Karisma, Colombia

Fundación Imagen, Bolivia

Fundación Pueblo Índio del Ecuador, Ecuador

Fundación Vivian Trías, Urugauy

Fórum Nacional pela Democratização da Comunicação (FNDC), Brazil

Giuristi Democratici (Italian Democratic Lawyers Association), Italy

Grupo Tortura Nunca Mais – Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Guerrilleros Por la Paz GUEPAZ, Colombia

HackLab de Cochabamba, Bolivia

Hagámonos El Paro, Guatemala

Human Rights Law Network (HRLN), India

Initiative for Freedom of Expression, Turkey

Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti, US

Institute for Reporters’ Freedom and Safety, Azerbaijan

Instituto Brasileiro de Estudos Políticos-IBEP, Brazil

International Association of Democratic Lawyers

Intersindical Central da Classe Trabalhadora, Brazil

IT for Change, India

Japanese Lawyers International Solidarity Association (JALISA), Japan

Joao Daniel, Federal Congress Representative, Workers Party, Sergipe, Brazil

JustNet Coalition, India

Juventud en Progreso, Ecuador

Jóvenes ante la Emergencia Nacional, Mexico

La Corporación Colectivo de Abogados “José Alvear Restrepo” (CCAJAR), Colombia

La Quadrature du Net, France

Levante Popular da Juventude, Brazil

Liga Española Pro Derechos Humanos, Spain

Luna del Sur A.C. Oaxaca, Mexico

Marcha Mundial das Mulheres (MMM), Brazil

Movimento de Mulheres Camponesas (MMC), Brazil

Movimento dos Atingidos por Barragens (MAB), Brazil

Movimento dos Pequenos Agricultores (MPA), Brazil

Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais sem Terra (MST), Brazil

Movimento Nacional de Rádios Comunitárias (MNRC), Brazil

Movimiento de Liberación Nacional, Mexico

Movimiento De Solidaridad Nuestra America, Mexico

Movimiento Mega, Brazil

National Association of Democratic Lawyers of South Africa (NADEL), South Africa

National Lawyers Guild, US

National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers, Philippines

Nouvelles Alternatives pour le Développement Durable en Afrique (NADDAF), Togo

O Grupo tortura Nunca Mais, Brazil

Observatorio por el Cierre de la Escuela de las Américas, Chile

Observatório da Mulher, Brazil

Organización de Solidaridad de los Pueblos de África, Asia y América Latina (OSPAAAL), Cuba

Organização “Coletivo Quilombo”, Brazil

Palestinian Center for Human Rights, Gaza, Palestine

Pastoral da Juventude Rural (PJR), Brazil

Periódico Resumen Latinoamericano , Latin America

Podemos, Spain

Prensa Comunitaria, Guatemala

President del Partido Revolucionario Febrerista, Paraguay

President Fundación Manuel Gondra, Paraguay

Progress Lawyers Network, Belgium

Progressive Global Commons

Proyecto de Derechos Económicos, Sociales y Culturales (ProDesc), Mexico

Proyecto mARTadero, Bolivia

Red Alba TV, Latin America

Red Alternativa de Informacion Vientos del Sur VISUR, Colombia

Red Latina Sin Fronteras, Latin America

Red Nacional Communia, Brazil

Red Tz’ikin, Guatemala

Rede Ecumênica da Juventude (REJU), Brazil

Reporters Without Borders / Reporters Sans Frontières, France

Revista Reflexión, Peru

Rättssäkerhetsorganisationen (The Rule of Law Organisation), Sweden

Secretaría Operativa de ALBA, Latin America

Sindicato Unificado dos Petroleiros de São Paulo, Brazil

Society for Knowledge Commons, India

Southeast Asian Press Alliance (SEAPA), Thailand

Spanish Association for International Human Rights Law (AEDIDH), Spain

Sursiendo, Costa Rica

Swadhin, India

Swecha, India

The Haitian Platform to Advocate Alternative Development (PAPDA), Haiti

Union de Juristas de Cuba, Cuba

Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina

Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Peru

Universidad Popular del Buen Vivir, Ecuador

União da Juventude Rebelião (UJR), Brazil

União da Juventude Socialista (UJS), Brazil

União Nacional dos Estudantes (UNE), Brazil

Veterans for Peace, US

Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), Switzerland

World Forum for Alternatives, Venezuela

Individuals

Enrique Acosta Estévez, Human Rights Activist, Paraguay

Mirta Acuna de Baravalle, Co founder Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, Argentina

Phillip Adams AO, Journalist, Australia

Juan Agosto, Journalist, Argentina

Shahzad Akbar, Human rights lawyer, Foundation for Fundamental Rights (FFR), Pakistan

Santiago Alba-Rico, Writer, Spain

Marina Albiol, Member of the European Parliament, Spain

Professor Manuel Alcántara Sáez, Professors of Politics, Spain

Tariq Ali, Writer and Publisher, UK/Pakistan

Martín Almada, American Asociation of Jurists Executive Committee, Right Livelihood Award winner 2002, Paraguay

Azyz Amami, Blogger and cyber-activist, Tunisia

Slim Amamou, Activist and former Secretary of State for Sport and Youth, Tunisa

Alejandra Ancheia, Executive Director and Founder, ProDESC, Mexico

Alejandra Ancheita, Human Rights Defender, Mexico

Professor Mads Andenas, Former UN Special Rapporteur on Arbitrary Detention, Norway

Jacob Appelbaum, journalist and programmer, Tor Project, US

Profa. Dra. Renata Aquino Ribeiro, Universidade Federal do Ceará, Brazil

Carmen Aristegui, Anchor of Aristegui CNN Español, Mexico

Renata Avila, Lawyer, Guatemala

Pepe Baeza, Photographic Editor, Spain

Aral Balkan, Founder of Ind.ie, Turkey

Olivia Ball, Human Rights Specialist, Australia

Edith Ballantyne, Secretary General (WILPF) 1969 – 92, awarded Gandhi Peace Award 1996, Switzerland

Adam Bandt, MP, Australia

Greg Barns, barrister & former National President of the Australian Lawyers Alliance, Australia

David Barsamian, Investigative Journalist, Armenian-American

Andrew Bartlett, Research Fellow, ANU, Australia

Helene Bergman, Journalist, Sweden

Patricia Bermúdez, Iniciativa Guayaquil, Ecuador

Almudena Bernabeu, Director Transitional Justice Program, Center for Justice & Accountability, Spain

Valeria Betancourt, Internet Rights Expert, Ecuador

Frei Betto, Writer, Brazil

Jeremy Bigwood, Investigative Reporter, US

Johann Binninge, Founder and Chairman of the Legal Certainty Organization, Sweden

William Blum, Author, US

Professor Atilio A. Boron, Political scientist, University of Buenos Aires, Argentina

Luchezar Boyadjiev, Artist, Bulgaria

Estela Bravo, Documentary filmmaker, US

Dr. Benedetta Brevini, Journalist and Lecturer, Australia

Professor Jean Bricmont, Academic, University of Louvain (UCL), Belgium

Luis Britto-García, Writer, Venezuela

Gilbert Brownstone, President, Brownstone Foundation, US

Dr. Fernando Buen Abad Domínguez, Academic, Writer, Cinema director NY University, Philosopher, Writer, Mexico

Dr. Scott Burchill, Senior Lecturer, Deakin University, Australia

Al Burke, Editor Nordic News Network, Sweden

Julian Burnside, QC, Australia

Professor Tom Bäckström, Academic, University Friedrich-Alexander (Erlangen-Nürnberg), Germany

Maria Stella Caceres, Director: Museum of Memory: Dictatorship and Human Rights, Paraguay

Dr. Agnes Callamard, Director Colombia University Global Freedom of Expression Project, former Chef de Cabinet Amnesty International, US

Maria Augusta Calle, Asambleísta de PAIS, Presidenta Comisión RRII d Asamblea Nacional, Ecuador

Peter Carey, Author, Australia

Remo Gerardo Carlotto, Diputado de la nación Argentina por la Provincia de Buenos Aires, Argentina

Mike Carlton, Journalist, Australia

Guillermo Carmona, President of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Chamber of Deputies, Argentina

Anibal Carrillo, 2013 Presidental Candidate, Paraguay

Jordi Casanova, Political Officer, Dominican Republic

Bernard Cassen, Academic, University of Paris 8, France

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Afghan Approved for Release from Guantánamo, as Lawyer Presents Persuasive Case for Release of Yemeni Who Has Become A Prolific Artist

As the dust settles on President Obama’s plan to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay before he leaves office, and defense secretary Ashton Carter urges Congress to drop its ban on bringing prisoners to the US mainland, one key element of the plan — Periodic Review Boards, assessing, on a case by case basis, whether or not around half of the 91 men still held can be released — continue to deliver significant results.

Two weeks ago, a Yemeni, Majid Ahmad — once, I believe, mistakenly described as a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden — was approved for release, and last week the Periodic Review Secretariat announced another release, bringing the total number of men approved for release to 19, out of 22 results, a success rate of 86%. 36 of the 91 men still held have now been approved for release, 24 since 2010, and 12 through the PRBs (to add to the seven men already freed as a result of the PRBs).

As I noted last week, the success rate “reveals the extent to which dangerous hyperbole has played such a significant part in the story of Guantánamo, as these are men regarded six years ago as ‘too dangerous to release’ by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established shortly after taking office, even though the task force also conceded that insufficient evidence existed to put them on trial,” which “should have been a sign that the information used to continued imprisoning these men was profoundly unreliable, produced through the use of torture or other forms of abuse, or through bribing prisoners with better living conditions.”

38 other men are still awaiting reviews, and four other reviews — including one described below — have not yet delivered opinions, but it is reassuring that President Obama promised, in his prison closure plan, to complete the first round of the PRBs by the fall, not just because the men have been waiting since their cases were reviewed in 2009 for the reviews to take place, but also because the success rate to date indicates that dozens more prisoners may also be approved for release.

This will bring the population of Guantánamo that the administration wants to put on trial or to continue holding to a small enough number that supporters of Guantánamo will find it difficult to argue that the prison should remain open, when it costs hundreds of millions of dollars a year to hold just a few dozen men.

Haji Hamidullah, an Afghan, approved for release

The man who was approved for release (on February 11, although the decision was not announced until last week) is Haji Hamidullah, also identified in Guantánamo as Ahmid Al Razak or Haji Hamdullah, who is 52 or 53 years old.

His case was reviewed on January 12, and I wrote about it here, noting that, in 2012, I had described how he is “the son of a Mullah and someone with political influence, who explained that he had been imprisoned by the Taliban, and had then fled to Pakistan, only returning after the US-led invasion, when, he said, an opponent fed false information about him to US forces, alleging that he controlled a cache of weapons and led a group of 30 men who had conspired to attack coalition forces near Kabul.”

In its Unclassified Summary of Final Determination, the review board, after noting that, “by consensus,” they had “determined that continued law of war detention … is no longer necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States,” explained how they had concluded that Haji Hamidullah “does not support a jihadist ideology, has been highly compliant, and has sought to moderate the behavior of others,” and also “considered [his] age and health problems, and the lack of clear information regarding his involvement wilh al-Qa’ida or the Taliban.”

During his review, in January, his attorney, Stephen D. Brown, asked the board “to release Hamdullah to a Muslim country other than Afghanistan or Pakistan,” as the Miami Herald described it, “so that he can spend the remainder of his years with his two wives in peace, and without concern for his own safety,” as Brown put it.

The Miami Herald also noted that “Brown made the request before a Yemeni captive refused to leave [Guantánamo] for resettlement in Europe, citing fear of going to a country where he didn’t have family. After that Jan. 20 episode, the special State Department envoy for Guantánamo closure remarked, ‘We’re not a travel agency.'”

Muhammad al-Ansi, a Yemeni who has become an artist, seeks release

The 26th review, which took place last Tuesday, February 23, was for Muhammad al-Ansi (aka Mohammed al-Ansi), a 40- or 41-year old Yemeni also identified as a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden — although, as with Majid Ahmad, it has never been adequately explained how or why Osama bin Laden was accepting young men with little experience to guard him, rather than battle-hardened warriors.

The unclassified summary for his PRB also suggested that he probably took part in advanced training, and had been “considered for participation in a suicide attack or deployment to the West.” In Guantánamo, it was noted, he “has posed a low threat towards the guard force, according to Joint Task Force Guantánamo (JTF-GTMO) compliance reports, and the majority of his infractions have been relatively minor, mostly consisting of non-physical transgressions.”

It was also noted that al-Ansi “has indicated that his time at Guantánamo has broadened his world view, which differs substantially from his pre-detention mindset, and we assess he is perceived to be a leader now among the more moderate detainees and has assumed a role as a mediator among differing groups since 2011.”

Despite this very positive assessment, it was noted that he “probably still harbors sympathies towards extremists and has made statements that could be interpreted as sympathetic to extremist causes.” Those putting the assessment together also made a point of referring to his communication with former prisoners, which strikes me as a rather unacceptable intrusion on the prisoners’ privacy, given that they presumably have no way of knowing which former prisoners are regarded a suspicious, and whether those suspicions are justified. As the assessment noted, “He continues to communicate with former detainees” but “does not directly communicate with any known extremists outside of Guantánamo.”

It was also noted that he “has expressed a desire to go to a country other than Yemen — particularly other Arabic speaking nations such as Qatar, Oman, or Saudi Arabia — but has also said he would relocate anywhere as long as he is treated fairly and given an opportunity to succeed.” he has also “expressed interest in furthering his education, starting a family and finding a job, which would allow him to support his family.”

The summary also noted that, if al-Ansi returned to Yemen, where his family live near Sana’a, “the turbulent situation along with past associates who remain in Yemen would provide [him] a conduit for reengagement” — although that is irrelevant, as the entire US establishment will not contemplate repatriating any Yemenis.

Below are the opening statements made by al-Ansi’s personal representatives, (military personnel appointed to represent him), who noted that he has “constructively engaged with the Joint Task Force Medical Staff in order to deal with chronic health issues,” and has “taken advantage of all the opportunities for education and personal enrichment while detained at Guantanamo,” and his civilian lawyer, Lisa Strauss, who provided a detailed and very powerful explanation of al-Ansi’s development over the eight years she has known him. Noting that she has “dedicated over two thousand hours to his case,” she explained how he has become a prolific artist, how he is “at peace with his fellow detainees and the guards as reflected in the minimal disciplinary infractions,” and how he loves American culture.

Periodic Review Board [Initial] Hearing, 23 Feb 2016

Muhammad al-Ansi, ISN 029

Personal Representative Opening Statement

Good morning ladies and gentlemen of the Board. We are the Personal Representatives of Muhammad al-Ansi. We will be assisting Mr. al-Ansi this morning with his case, aided by his Counsel, Ms. Lisa Strauss.

Mr. al-Ansi has earnestly participated in the Periodic Review Process. He has maintained a record of perfect attendance for meetings with his Personal Representatives and Counsel.

Mr. al-Ansi has conducted himself in a professional manner throughout all engagements with Counsel and his representatives. We would characterize his personality as very reserved, yet warm.

He has a proven history of compliant behavior while detained at Guantánamo. He has also constructively engaged with the Joint Task Force Medical Staff in order to deal with chronic health issues. This constructive teamwork has greatly improved his physical condition and quality of life. He has since resolutely pursued a daily regimen of self care which includes cardiovascular activities such as treadmill and elliptical training.

He has taken advantage of all the opportunities for education and personal enrichment while detained at Guantánamo.

These opportunities include courses in mathematics, science, English, Spanish, life skills, computers, health and art. He has a record of outstanding academic performance and has proven to be a prolific artist, producing over 200 quality works of art. We have provided examples of his coursework and art in his case submission.

Mr. al-Ansi is fortunate to have a very supportive family remaining in Yemen comprised of his mother, three brothers and one sister. The family has willingly pledged to support his transition to the utmost of their ability.

Later, Mr. al-Ansi will discuss both his past life and his desire for a better life for himself in the future. We are confident that Mr. al-Ansi’s desire to pursue a better way of life if transferred from Guantánamo is genuine and that he does not represent a continuing or significant threat to the security of the United States of America. He is open to transfer to any country, but would prefer an Arabic speaking country if possible.

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

Periodic Review Board Initial Hearing, 23 Feb 2016

Muhammad al-Ansi, ISN 029

Private Counsel Opening Statement (Lisa Strauss)

I am very grateful to be here today to speak on behalf of my client, Muhammad al Ansi. I would also like to thank the Personal Representatives, who have taken time away from their families to meet with Muhammad in connection with this process.

I am a partner at the law firm of Bondurant, Mixson & Elmore, LLP, in Atlanta, Georgia, where for the last fourteen years, I have primarily represented corporations and individuals in business disputes.

Before joining the firm, I served as a law clerk in the federal district court in Atlanta. I have represented Muhammad since 2008. I have dedicated over two thousand hours to his case, and have traveled to the base over twenty times.

By now, the Board is familiar with statements from private counsel detailing their clients’ Guantánamo education, the willingness of families to welcome detainees home, and their client’s lack of hostility to the United States. Muhammad also has these same factors supporting his clearance for release, as detailed by the declarations of each of his siblings and mother, letters from his instructors at Guantánamo, and his remarkably low record of disciplinary infractions.

I would like instead to focus on some unique circumstances that also help his position.

But first, looking to the future, my law firm has a longstanding relationship with the Carter Center in Atlanta. The Carter Center was founded in 1982 by President Carter and his wife Rosalynn in partnership with Emory University and its mission is “to advance peace and health worldwide.” My law firm previously represented another detainee who was released in 2007. The Carter Center took an active role in that detainee’s swift repatriation to his home country, where it was questionable whether he would be welcomed. The Carter Center has pledged to similarly assist Mr. al Ansi with resettlement if this Periodic Review Board determines he is no longer a threat, and we have submitted a letter to that effect. As the Carter Center’s website states: “[t]he Center believes that people can improve their own lives when provided with the necessary skills, knowledge, and access to resources.” As a philanthropic organization that has significant resources, the Carter Center could provide this added layer of support and supervision.

A second supporting factor is that I represent only one client in Guantánamo, unlike some of the larger law firms and organizations. As a result, I estimate that I have spent close to three hundred hours with Muhammad over the past eight years. I could say that I have watched him mature, but it would be more correct to say that we have matured together. I knew that he was artistic, even in the beginning. His initial drawings were simple — ballpoint pen on the backs of letters we sent — and they often depicted hands in chains, tears, and metaphors for sadness and injustice. These drawings reflect our early conversations, which often focused on his frustrations over the typical prison injustices: insufficient supplies, bad food, petty disputes with guards, and medical problems.

But a few years ago, Muhammad began painting in earnest. Encouraged by his peers, he began attending art lessons. He started painting on canvas and whatever paper he could find, using oils, pastels and water colors. They are mostly peaceful landscapes – mountains, oceans, tropical locations, and a few scenes from his homeland. He told me they reflect where he longs to travel. We have included a commendation of achievement for his artwork by the instructor in the prison and a small sampling of his work. This year he made cards for other detainees to send holiday notes and greetings home. I have collected over two hundred of his paintings and drawings.

He is at peace with his fellow detainees and the guards as reflected in the minimal disciplinary infractions, none serious and none physical.

A third unique fact is that Muhammad’s respect and admiration for American culture is not new or recently undertaken. We have always discussed movies, television, food, magazines, and my situation as a working wife and mother. He loves the Fast & Furious movie series; he loves The Walking Dead (a zombie television program filmed in my hometown); he loves National Geographic. He respects women and speaks often of his yearning to fall in love and have children. Indeed, at our first meeting over seven years ago, I wondered whether he would accept a young female attorney. But he shook my hand, told me not to bother with head coverings and/or bringing my male colleagues solely to interact with him on my behalf.

This attitude is indicative of the more secular and Westernized culture to which Muhammad was exposed because of his father’s employment at a Saudi oil company and his elementary schooling in Saudi Arabia. The recent photographs in his file of his brothers, nieces, and nephews could have been taken in the United States given their Western dress, sunglasses, and grooming, including their clean shaven faces, which is of particular cultural significance.

I have had numerous conversations with his family, going through their statements in great detail as they have a great respect for the significance of the oaths they have taken. They have been very gracious and respectful for my help and the legal process, and I can hear through the phone the heart break they have suffered from Muhammad’s long absence. They are sincerely willing to do anything it takes to secure his release, including selling valuable land in the event they need additional funds, although they do not think that will be necessary. They recognize that Yemen may not be the best place for Muhammad to start a new life given the political unrest that has affected university study and reduced employment opportunities. They have pledged to help Muhammad financially if relocated to a third country, to secure medical and psychological treatment for him, and for some family members to join him for long-term visits. Alternatively, they are willing to welcome him home, to shelter and provide for him there, and to help get him on his feet. Of course,they tell me their top priority is to get him married, and I think he would agree.

Muhammad has never expressed hostility towards the United States or any desire for retribution. We have discussed his differences with the guards and interrogators over the years but he understands that they have a job to do and that they are working under difficult circumstances.

Finally, I understand that is this not the venue to address the legal basis of Mr. al Ansi’s detention. However, we previously disputed the factual and legal basis for his detention in his habeas action, and those disputes remain unresolved. Even the unclassified dossier reflects the uncertainty about his past by using words like “may” and “probably.” In 2001, he was under 20 years old, his education incomplete, and he lacked the strategic or technical skills required to plan or carry out any threatening attacks on any party. Nothing about his time in Guantánamo changes that assessment.

I respectfully request that you clear him for release and resettlement wherever you deem in his best interests.

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: Stop Trident National Demo, Trafalgar Square, London, Feb. 27, 2016

See my photos on Flickr here!

Yesterday, February 27, 2016, I cycled into central London to show my support for what turned out to be the largest anti-nuclear protest for a generation, organised by CND (the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament). Tens of thousands of people from across the UK marched from Marble Arch to Trafalgar Square to call for the British government not to renew the Trident nuclear submarine and missile programme, which, it is estimated, will cost £100 billion over 25 years.

As a lifelong opponent of nuclear weapons, I find it mind-boggling that the Tories — and large parts of the Labour Party — want to renew this ruinously expensive programme when we are supposed to be committed to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which calls for disarmament as well as non-proliferation, and when we can clearly ill-afford it, as the Tories’ “age of austerity” continues to wither and destroy the very notion of the state as something that should provide a safety net for everyone, without which we seem to be committed only to an ever-increasing gulf between the rich and the poor.

MPs are expected to vote on the renewal of Trident at some point this year, and unfortunately the Parliamentary Labour Party is not entirely united behind Jeremy Corbyn, who spoke at the rally, and who has been a lifelong member of CND. See my article from last summer — and my photos — of Jeremy at CND’s Hiroshima Day 70th Anniversary Ceremony in Tavistock Square for a further show of his commitment to peace.

At yesterday’s rally, Jeremy said, “We live in a world where so many things are possible. Where peace is possible in so many places. You don’t achieve peace by planning for war, grabbing resources and not respecting each other’s human rights.” He also said, “Today’s demonstration is an expression of many people’s opinions and views. I’m here because I believe in a nuclear-free Britain and a nuclear-free future.”

He also pointed out that he has asked shadow defence secretary Emily Thornberry “to carry out a review of Labour defence policy, including its stance on Trident renewal,” as the BBC described it, and called for workers on Trident to have their skills diverted into other projects to prevent unemployment should he succeed in getting the programme closed down.

Even if that is not possible, there is no valid argument for the UK to have such an insanely expensive programme. I understand that it is, to a large extent, payment for our membership of a nuclear club that plays a key role in the UN Security Council, and that those attached to Britain’s exaggerated importance in the world will not want to let go of it, but sensible analysts — as opposed to politicians with ego and pride problems — recognise that, even if we were to continue with something along the lines of Trident, the current model is disproportionately huge and expensive, even accepting that those involved in renewing it, or calling for its renewal, have a hugely inflated perception of the UK’s role in global affairs.

Also speaking at yesterday’s rally were Nicola Sturgeon and Leanne Wood, the leaders of the SNP and Plaid Cymru, and, for the Green Party, Caroline Lucas MP. Other speakers included Vanessa Redgrave, Tariq Ali and Lindsey German of the Stop the War Coalition.

Nicola Sturgeon said, “It is the exception to the rule to possess nuclear weapons, let that message ring out loudly and clearly. The use of Trident nuclear weapons would bring about human devastation and suffering on an unimaginable scale.”

Leanne Wood said, “The world has been and continues to be an unstable and unpredictable place but there are some values that we should hold on to through peace, through war, through instability and unpredictability. It is never acceptable, it is never justifiable to unleash weapons of mass destruction on a population. Nuclear weapons belong in the dustbin of history alongside the Cold War.”

Note: Please also see RT’s report about Royal Navy submariner-turned-whistleblower William McNeilly, who “leaked a report exposing 30 safety and security failures documented over his three-month tour on board one of Britain’s Vanguard submarines.”

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.