Andy Worthington's Blog, page 79

Guantánamo Reviews: US Accepts that Former “Black Site” Prisoner, Like Five Others, Wasn’t Part of Al-Qaeda Plot, As Another Prisoner is Approved for Release

As the countdown to the end of the Obama presidency continues (see the Countdown to Close Guantánamo we launched last month), and with just 329 days left for President Obama to fulfill the promise to close the prison that he made on his second day in office back in January 2009, we are reassured that progress continues in the Periodic Review Boards set up in 2013 to review the cases of all the prisoners not already approved for release and not facing trials — currently 46 of the 91 men still held, as one man has been approved for release, and another, seeking release, has had the military acknowledge that they exaggerated his role, and that he was “a low-level militant not part of an al-Qaida terrorist cell as previously believed,” as the Associated Press described it. Moreover, by extension, the same admission should apply to five other men seized at the same time as him, who are also still held and awaiting PRBs.

Just ten of the 91 men still held are facing trials, and of the 35 men already approved for release, eleven have been approved for release by PRBs, to add to seven others already freed after being approved for release.

In total, of the 21 decisions reached by the PRBs, 18 have led to recommendations that the men in question should be released — a success rate of 86%, which 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.

That 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, but that has taken many years to come to light, in part through the release of formerly classified military files by WikiLeaks in 2011. However, it has also become apparent in the last six years that some of those decisions were based on fears that the prisoners posed a threat to the US, because, for example, they were regarded as non-compliant prisoners who came into conflict with the guard force, although all that may have proved in reality is that they resented their seemingly endless imprisonment without charge or trial.

On February 18, the 18th prisoner to have his release recommended by a PRB was Majid Mahmud Abdu Ahmed aka Majid Ahmad (ISN 41), a Yemeni whose case I discussed here, when his PRB took place last month. As I noted in that article, he “was just 21 when he was seized crossing from Afghanistan to Pakistan in December 2001. The group of around 30 men he was captured with were identified, by their captors, as the ‘Dirty Thirty,’ and implausible claims were made that this group of generally very young Yemenis were somehow bodyguards for Osama bin Laden, something that I have always found implausible.”

In approving his release, by consensus, having “determined that continued law of war detention of the detainee is no longer necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States,” the review board noted Ahmed’s “relative candor in discussing his time in Afghanistan, acceptance of the mistakes he made, and a credible desire to not repeat those mistakes. Further, the board considered the detainee’s age when he went to Afghanistan and having matured since entering detention, the detainee’s compliance while in detention at Guantánamo, and that the detainee has taken opportunities to educate himself while at Guantánamo.”

The board also “strongly recommend[ed] resettlement to an Arabic-speaking country and also recommend[ed] resettlement with reintegration support.”

The plot that wasn’t

Two days earlier, the 25th prisoner to face a PRB, Ayyub Murshid Ali Salih, aka Ayoub Murshid Ali Saleh (ISN 836), must have been reassured that the hyperbole about him is finally dying down after over 13 years in US custody without charge or trial. 37 years old, he is one of six Yemenis seized in house raids in Karachi, Pakistan on September 11, 2002, the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. This was the same day that “high-value detainee” Ramzi bin al-Shibh was captured, along with Hassan bin Attash, the 17-year old brother of Walid bin Attash, another “high-value detainee” captured in April 2003.

While bin al-Shibh entered the CIA’s network of “black sites” for the next four years, and bin Attash was flown for torture by proxy in Jordan before reemerging at Guantánamo in September 2004, Saleh and the five others seized in the Karachi house raids ended up in a “black site” in Afghanistan, known as the “dark prison,” for around six weeks, according to a chart released to accompany the Senate Intelligence Committee’s CIA torture report in December 2014, until they were flown to Guantánamo, where they have remained ever since.

Little is known publicly of their stories, as only one of them, Musa’ab al-Madhwani, had his habeas corpus petition examined by a judge, following the groundbreaking Supreme Court ruling granting the prisoners constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights in June 2008. Al-Madhwani’s habeas petition was turned down by District Judge Thomas F. Hogan in December 2009, but Judge Hogan was not persuaded that he was dangerous.

As I explained at the time:

[A]lthough Judge Hogan “said that the government had met its burden in proving the accusations [that he had connections with al-Qaeda] he did not think Madhwani was dangerous.” Noting that he has been a “model prisoner” since his arrival at Guantánamo in October 2002, he explained, “There is nothing in the record now that he poses any greater threat than those detainees who have already been released.”

Moreover, Judge Hogan refused to rely on any statements that al-Madhwani had made to interrogators at Guantánamo, ruling that they were “tainted by abusive interrogation techniques,” to which he was subjected in the weeks after his capture, before his arrival at Guantánamo, when he was sent to the “Dark Prison” near Kabul, a facility run by the CIA, which, in numerous accounts by released prisoners, resembled nothing less than a medieval torture dungeon, with the addition of extremely loud music and noise 24 hours a day.

Only one other man out of the six — Hail al-Maythali — has spoken openly about his torture, saying  “there was very bad torture conducted on people,” including himself, which was “so bad that he knew by making up and agreeing to the training it would stop the torture.” He added that “his testicles were disfigured to the point where they cannot be repaired.”

However, it is clear that all six were tortured, just as it seems reasonable to assume that, like Musa’ab al-Madhwani, all six do not “pose … any greater threat than those detainees who have already been released,” to echo Judge Hogan (for further information about the six, who have the ISN numbers 836-841, see my article from October 2010).

And in fact, the US military has finally acknowledged officially that it has spent over 13 years exaggerating the threat posed by Ayoub Ali Saleh — and I strongly suspect that similar back-pedalling will be apparent for the other five members of the spectral “Karachi Six.”

The unclassified summary of evidence for Ayoub Ali Saleh’s PRB describes him as “one of the Yemenis arrested during the 11 September 2002 raids in Karachi, Pakistan later labelled as the ‘Karachi Six’ based on concerns that they were part of an al Qa’lda operational cell intended to support a future attack.”

Crucially, however, the summary added:

Based on a review of all available reporting, we judge that this label more accurately reflects the common circumstances of their arrest and that it is more likely the six Yemenis were elements of a large pool of Yemeni fighters that senior al-Qa’ida planners considered potentially available to support future operations. Our review of available intelligence indicates that he probably did not play a major role in terrorist operations, leading us to disagree with previous US government assessments that he was involved in a 2002 plot to conduct an attack in Karachi, Pakistan.

After describing him as “a low-ranking Yemeni militant who we assess trained in Afghanistan before 9/11 and subsequently met senior al-Qa’ida figures in Pakistan,” the military noted that he “traveled from Yemen to Afghanistan in mid-2000, where he probably was trained in military tactics at al-Qa’ida’s al-Farouq camp,” although “[a]fter 9/11, be tried to return to Yemen by traveling through Pakistan to Iran. An Iranian crackdown on suspected al-Qa’ida associates, however, probably prompted him to return to Pakistan where Pakistani authorities arrested him at an al-Qa’ida safehouse in Karachi in September 2002.”

Regarding the so-called plot, the summary continued, “Our most credible information about the Karachi plot makes no mention of YM-836 and states that al-Qa’ida planned to recruit Pakistanis to carry out the attack. In addition, several other detainees have reported that YM- 836 was waiting to travel to Yemen when he was captured rather than involved in attack planning.”

It was also noted that Saleh “has had a poor compliance record” at Guantánamo, “including numerous incidents of assaulting or threatening to assault guards.” However, his behavior “has improved since 2013 … possibly because he now views compliance as a way to increase the likelihood of his transfer.” It was also noted that, as well as having been someone who was seized while trying to go home, he “has provided little information of value, has given contradictory accounts of his background — at one point completely recanting his previous statements — and has not been responsive to interrogators since 2004.”

Below is the opening statement by his personal representatives — the military personnel assigned to help the prisoners with their PRBs — who noted that he has acknowledged that “he has made mistakes in his past, to include transgressions with the guards at a time when most of the camp was on a hunger strike,” and stressed that he now “has a new outlook on life,” and wishes only to resume his civilian life in peace.

Periodic Review Board Initial Hearing

Ayyub Murshid Ali Salih, ISN 836

Personal Representative Opening Statement

Members of the Board, we are the personal representatives for Ayyub Murshid Ali Salih. Ayyub was extremely happy when we made our initial visit to notify him about the Periodic Review Board process. He realizes this review process provides him the best opportunity to leave Guantánamo and become a free man. He also recognizes that in order to get the Board’s recommendation for transfer, he must answer your questions truthfully and honestly. Ayyub is here and ready for your questions.

Ayyub admitted that he has made mistakes in his past, to include transgressions with the guards at a time when most of the camp was on a hunger strike. However, many things have changed since that time, and he has a new outlook on life. He hopes that his transfer from Guantánamo will make up for the lost years of his life.

Ayyub dreams to find a wife and start a family of his own where he can be a contributing member of society, avoid any political problems and enjoy living in a society that is acceptable of people from diverse cultures and different religions. So, he is willing to be transferred to any country to get on with his life.

Ayyub has experience as a shopkeeper, having worked in his family’s store when he was growing up. After securing a job, he would like to return to college and study business administration, work on his communication skills and gain some computer proficiency to help ensure his success. Additionally, his family is able to provide financial assistance during his transition to freedom, and they are willing to provide the support he will need to live a normal life with a wife and children.

Ayyub has not expressed any ill will or anger about his detention at Guantánamo. He has denounced terrorist acts and organizations that claim to base those acts upon religion. Ayyub wants to make it perfectly clear to the Board that he is not a threat to the United States or any other country.

Note: I will shortly be posting my report on the latest PRB, for Mohammed Al-Ansi (ISN 029), another Yemeni, which took place on February 23. Five more PRBs have also been scheduled: for Suhayl Abdul Anam Al-Sharabi aka Zohair Al-Shorabi (ISN 569), another Yemeni, on March 1, Saifullah Paracha (ISN 1094), a Pakistani, on March 8, Sharqawi Abdu Ali Al-Hajj (ISN 1457), another Yemeni, on March 15, Obaidullah (ISN 762), an Afghan, on April 19, and Abd Al-Salam Al-Hilah (ISN 1463), another Yemeni, on May 3.

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.

Time’s Running Out: My Analysis of the Guantánamo Closure Plan Delivered to Congress by President Obama

I wrote the following article — as “President Obama Delivers Guantánamo Closure Plan to Congress; Will It Work?” — 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. For further commentary on President Obama’s plan, listen to me on The Monocle Daily, and also check out my interview on Sputnik.

Yesterday (February 23, 2016), President Obama delivered a long-awaited plan to Congress, prepared by the Department of Defense, laying out in detail how he proposes, with the help of lawmakers, to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay — where 91 men are still held — before he leaves office.

As explained in a White House briefing that accompanied the plan, the four main points of the plan are as follows, and our comments are below each point.

1. “We’ll continue to securely and responsibly transfer to other countries the 35 detainees already approved for transfer. This process involves extensive and careful coordination across our federal government to ensure that our national security interests are met when an individual is transferred to another country. We insist, for example, that foreign countries institute strong security measures.”

We say:

Get on with it!

24 of the 35 men approved for release but still held were approved for release at least six years ago, by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established shortly after taking office for the first time in January 2009. It is an absolute disgrace that anyone approved for release should be held for so long after they were first told that the US no longer wanted to hold them. We note that 20 of these men are Yemenis, and that the entire US establishment believes that it is unsafe to repatriate any Yemeni prisoners, but we also note that new homes have been found, in the last year and a half, for 36 Yemenis, and we urge the administration to speed up the release and relocation of these men, and of the four non-Yemeni nationals approved for release by the task force, if they cannot be safely repatriated.

The other eleven men were approved for release in the last 25 months by Periodic Review Boards, set up in 2013 to review the cases of all the prisoners not already approved for release or facing trials. Again, nine of these men are Yemenis, while the other two are from Libya and Afghanistan, but all should be released as swiftly as possible, to third countries if they cannot be sent home.

2. “We’ll accelerate the periodic reviews of remaining detainees to determine whether their continued detention is necessary. Our review board, including representatives from across government, will look at all relevant information, including current intelligence. If certain detainees no longer pose a continuing significant threat, they may be eligible for transfer to another country.”

We say:

This is hugely important, as we have been saying since last year when looking at plans for the closure of Guantánamo. The Periodic Review Boards have, to date, approved 18 prisoners for release out of the 21 cases in which decisions have been reached. Unfortunately, it has taken 27 months to get to this point, and there are still 43 men awaiting reviews — or, in a handful of cases, the decisions of reviews that have already taken place. For all of these men, reviews need to take place before President Obama leaves office, and the process therefore needs to be speeded up considerably. It is reassuring to see the administration, for the first time, conceding that it needs to “accelerate” the PRBs, but now we need to see that happen.

In addition, it is worth noting that  the success rate of approving prisoners for release after their PRBs is 86%, a rate that is profoundly impressive in and of itself, but is even more significant when it is considered that these are men described by President Obama’s task force in 2010 as “too dangerous to release,” or men who were put forward for trials until the basis for trials largely collapsed under scrutiny by US appeals courts. The men were described as “too dangerous to release,” even though the task force admitted it had insufficient evidence to put them on trial, and the PRBs have belatedly been establishing, therefore, that this was an irresponsible categorization, as they are not in fact “too dangerous to release” after all.

3. “We’ll continue to use all legal tools to deal with the remaining detainees still held under law of war detention. Currently, 10 detainees are in some stage of the military commissions process — a process we reformed in my first year in office with bipartisan support from Congress. Still, these commissions are very costly and have resulted in years without a resolution. We’re therefore outlining additional changes to improve these commissions, which would require Congressional action.”

We say:

We are disappointed to hear that the military commissions are continuing, as they are clearly not fit for purpose. Ongoing proceedings are largely stalled, because the system is so broken, and of the eight convictions already secured, mostly via plea deals, four have already been overturned on appeal, and more may not survive judicial scrutiny. We believe that federal courts are the only appropriate venue for trying those accused of terrorism, and point out how successfully the US courts have dealt with terrorism cases in the last 14 years.

We are intrigued by the suggestion, in the plan, that the administration is “considering whether there are … legislative changes … that might enable detainees who are interested in pleading guilty in Article III courts, and serving prison sentences according to our criminal laws, to do so.” We think that could be useful, and hope that Congress will work with the administration on this.

We are also interested in hearing that some prisoners might be transferred for prosecution in other countries, something that, in some cases, might well have been constructive had it happened years ago — in the cases of a small number of men accused of acts of terrorism in other countries, for example.

4. “We’re going to work with Congress to find a secure location in the United States to hold remaining detainees. These are detainees who are subject to military commissions, as well as those who cannot yet be transferred to other countries or who we’ve determined must continue to be detained because they pose a continuing significant threat. We are not identifying a specific facility today.”

We say:

We wish the president every success in working with Congress, although we note that, if lawmakers continue to obstruct him needlessly and opportunistically, as they have since they first passed laws prohibiting him from bringing any prisoners from Guantánamo to the US mainland for any reason, the he should heed the advice of former White House Counsel Greg Craig, and Cliff Sloan, the former State Department envoy for Guantánamo closure, who, in November, wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post, entitled, “The president doesn’t need Congress’s permission to close Guantánamo,” in which they stated, “Under Article II of the Constitution, the president has exclusive authority to determine the facilities in which military detainees are held. Obama has the authority to move forward. He should use it.”

Of course, we have no enthusiasm for anyone being held without charge or trial, whether at Guantánamo, or on US soil, but we recognize that the administration will continue to argue that some of the men described as “too dangerous to release” should continue to be held. We regard it as essential that this number is as small as possible — hence the need to speed up the PRB process — and we also, crucially, believe that, on US soil, these men will have the ability to challenge the basis of their detention in the courts with more success than they had at Guantánamo, where the habeas corpus legislation was cynically shut down by appeals court judges.

When the Associated Press wrote about this three weeks ago, officials speaking off the record spoke about 24 men being moved to the US, including those facing trials. That is still more than we would hope for, as our research and that of intelligence analysts suggests that no more than eight men, in addition to those facing trials, were involved in activities harmful to US national security, but it is considerably better than the 56 men who, currently, are not approved for release.

In closing, and reiterating what we have said above, the best thing that can happen now is for the Periodic Review Boards to be speeded up considerably, not only in the interests of justice for those awaiting reviews, but as the best way of making sure that as few men as possible — and only those genuinely accused of terrorist activities — are held as the end of Obama’s presidency approaches, and the uncertain process of electing the next president begins.

When that next inauguration happens, on January 20, 2017, it would be better for justice and for America’s standing in the world if the prison at Guantánamo Bay were already closed for good.

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.

Former Guantánamo Prisoner Younous Chekkouri’s First Interview Since Being Released from Prison in Morocco

Finally freed from prison in Morocco on February 11, 149 days after he was released from Guantánamo, Younous Chekkouri (aka Younus Chekhouri) spoke to the Associated Press last week on the terrace of a cafe in his hometown, Safi, with his younger brother Ridouane, who was freed from Guantánamo in 2004.

I have been covering Younous’s story for many years, as I recognized in my research for my book The Guantánamo Files, published in 2007, that he strenuously denied having had anything to do with Osama bin Laden or al-Qaeda, whose philosophy he despised, and in the years that followed nothing deterred me from this opinion, as I found out that Younous was one of the best-behaved prisoners in Guantánamo, and was also a Sufi Muslim, “whose form of religion,” as the AP described it, accurately, “is viewed with suspicion by extremist groups like IS and al-Qaida.” See my archive of articles about Younous here and here.

In its interview last week, the AP noted that, according to unclassified US military documents provided by Younous’s lawyers at the London-based legal organization Reprieve, and submitted to the US authorities as part of Younous’ habeas corpus proceedings, “he suffered serious abuse at the hands of the United States, in detention in Afghanistan,” part of which “involved threats made against his younger brother, Ridouane.”

Younous confirmed this. “They would try to use my brother against me,” he said, recalling on when the brothers were initially held Kandahar. While Ridouane “gaze[d] down,” as the AP put it, Younous said, “They broke his arm.”

He also explained — as he always maintained in Guantánamo — that “he went to Afghanistan after a number of years studying Sufism in various countries across the Mideast, including Sudan, Yemen, and Syria, among others.” The AP noted that, in court documents, he was “quoted as saying he was looking for work as a recently married 31-year-old, initially traveling with his wife,” adding that, in the course of their interview with him, conducted by Samia Errazzouki and Lori Hinnant, he described himself as “something of a tourist.”

After being “picked up by bounty hunters along with suspected al-Qaida fighters and others in December 2001,” Younous said that he was taken to Pakistan, and delivered to a room “where I was greeted by people with blonde hair and blue eyes. They immediately asked me which terrorist group I belonged to.”

Younous didn’t belong to any kind of terrorist organization, but it was not until 2009 that this was acknowledged by the US military, in Younous’ habeas proceedings, in which, as the AP described it, the US authorities “acknowledg[ed] in court documents that the allegations against him were trumped up by fellow detainees determined to be unreliable. They included one described as ‘a pathological liar’ and another who was repeatedly subjected to waterboarding, ‘parroting whatever his torturers wanted to hear.'” — accurate descriptions of torture victim Abu Zubaydah and the notorious liar Yasim Basardah, who told lies about at least 130 prisoners, and who said of Younous that he was the “big commander” for Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora.

The discredited claims against Younous also involved allegations that he had ties to the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group (GICM, or Groupe Islamique Combattant Marocain), although, as the AP noted, these were allegations the US “later withdrew.” However, the head of the Central Bureau of Judicial Investigations in Morocco has said that the Moroccan government “can choose to maintain the allegations dropped by the US,” even though that would be ridiculous, because of Younous’ Sufism.

Imprisoned for 149 days after his return, “without any charges or detailed explanation of why,” as the AP put it, he is not yet completely free. As the AP described it, his lawyer Khalil Idrissi has pointed out that he has a hearing on February 23, which “will determine whether or not he will face charges of ‘conspiring against national security.”‘

He also remains under scrutiny. As the AP noted, within 20 minutes of meeting its reporters, Younous “receive[d] a phone call from a local security official asking about the group’s authorization to film him, two plainclothes officers approache[d] him directly, and a uniformed officer request[ed] authorization from the AP.”

According to reports, as the AP noted, at least four Moroccans held in Guantánamo “have joined extremist fighters in Syria, including one later arrested in Spain for recruiting, and the North African kingdom keeps a close watch on the rest,” although, significantly, Younous has no interest in those fighting in Syria. He “vow[ed] not to be among the estimated 2,000 Moroccans who have chosen to join the Islamic State group,” and said, “Islam is innocent of this group and its actions. They are criminals.” He also explained that other Guantánamo prisoners “also followed the news” at the prison, which was where he heard about IS, and “widely echoed his condemnations” of the group.

Turning to his time in Guantánamo, Younous “breathe[d] deeply and request[ed] a break,” before recounting his experiences. “The only positive part about Guantánamo was that I ate three meals a day there,” he said, comparing life in the prison to “The Hunger Games,” which, as the AP noted, was a film he “watched during his imprisonment.”

He added, “I was subject to all sorts of dark torture and sexual abuse in Guantánamo and Kandahar,” as, in the AP’s words, his brother “hand[ed] him tissues for the tears streaming down his face.”

As he looked out at the ocean, he said, “I’m finally tasting freedom,” although since his release from prison, “he has been left to fend for himself, unable to purchase the proper medication to treat his depression and post-traumatic stress disorder,” as the AP put it. Nevertheless, he “remains hopeful about his future,” and with good reason, as he is “due to be reunited with his Algerian wife, who is in her homeland, in about two weeks,” and theirs is a true love story, as he explained.

“Ours is a unique story, worthy of a Hollywood film,” he said, and “pull[ed] out a Valentine’s Day card his wife sent him while he was in Guantánamo, filled with hearts and a long, hand-written poem in Arabic.”

Now 46, Younous told the AP he was aware that he and his wife “are no longer the young couple they were when he was detained, and he feels robbed of the fatherhood he dreamed of while in Guantánamo, when he would write to an imagined daughter.”

He added, “I saw my niece yesterday and embraced her. I went to sleep that night thinking she was my daughter.” Holding back tears, in the AP’s words, he said of the US authorities, “They’ve deprived me of being a father.”

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: Close Guantánamo with Roger Waters and Justice for Tamir Rice with Witness Against Torture

See my photos on Flickr here!

I’ve recently posted two sets of photos from my US visit last month to call for the closure of the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, which, shamefully, is still open, despite President Obama’s promise to close it within a year on his second day on office in January 2009. The visit, as with my January visits every year since 2011, was timed to coincide with the anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, where 91 men are still held, almost all without charge or trial, in defiance of the values the US claims to uphold.

The two photo sets I have previously posted were of my first ever visit to Florida — a lightning visit to attend a protest outside the gates of the headquarters of US Southern Command — and the annual protest outside the White House on January 11, the 14th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, involving groups including Amnesty International, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Witness Against Torture and the World Can’t Wait. My thanks to Debra Sweet of the World Can’t Wait for organizing my trip, as she has every January since 2011.

I was representing two other groups I co-founded, Close Guantánamo, the campaign and website I set up four years ago with the US attorney Tom Wilner, and We Stand With Shaker, the campaign to free Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, which played a part in securing Shaker’s release in October. To celebrate, I brought the giant inflatable figure of Shaker that was at the heart of the campaign to the US for the very first time.

While I was in the US, I also took part in  a number of other events, and this third and final photo set from my US campaigning in January 2016 includes photos from these various events.

On the evening of January 10, I spoke about We Stand With Shaker and sang my “Song for Shaker Aamer” at “Visions of Homecoming: Close Guantánamo!” This was an event put together by Witness Against Torture, CODEPINK, and Bronx-based spoken word performers The Peace Poets, primarily to reflect on and celebrate their recent visit to Cuba to raise awareness of the need to close Guantánamo through a number of creative events undertaken within sight of the prison. I was delighted to have been asked to take part in this great evening of solidarity, and the video of me singing “Song for Shaker Aamer” is below.

As well as photos from this event, this set also includes photos from Witness Against Torture’s protest outside the Department of Justice on January 12, calling for justice in the case of Tamir Rice, the 12-year old shot dead by police in Cleveland, Ohio in November 2014 — just one of the hundreds of black children and young men shot with impunity by the police in the US every year.

This was a very moving event, as the protesters — myself included — sang a song written by The Peace Poets written for the occasion, and I reflected on how impressive it has been to watch the Black Lives Matter movement grow, but, at the same time, of course, how depressing it is that so many black people are killed by the police in the US — and, in addition, how disgraceful it is that the US imprisons, per capita, so many more people than anywhere else in the world, and how many of those people are also black.

After the DoJ protest, I joined another protest down the road from the Capitol, highlighting the many crimes of the government on the day of President Obama’s State of the Union speech, which I watched later with Witness Against Torture activists after they had packed up after their ten-day vigil and were enjoying pizza and beer in a local pizza place that was empty except for us. Watching the whole of the SOTU address was quite surreal, as I have never before had to endure such a long and sustained collection of platitudes — although I do give President Obama credit for speaking out about the disgraceful discrimination against Muslims that, at the time, was particularly focused on some reprehensible comments made by Donald Trump, whose very political existence shows how far any pretense at balanced political discourse has slipped.

The following day I got a lift to New York City with Debra Sweet and the actor and writer Chris Brandt, and the next evening I was in Harlem, speaking at Revolution Books (see the video here), and taking some photos for the Countdown to Close Guantánamo. A special guest was my friend and supporter Roger Waters, the former chief songwriter for Pink Floyd, and afterwards Roger took me to dinner, and, as part of an appearance on Democracy Now! the morning after, which I had arranged earlier (and which you can see here), paid a visit to the house where 16-year old cellist Alexander Rohatyn lives, who Roger had arranged to accompany him on the show in a version of “We Shall Overcome,” which you can see here.

I had a few more days in New York City after all this excitement, before I flew home to London, but no more Guantánamo-related events. I took some great photos out and about in Brooklyn, where I was staying, and in Manhattan, and I hope I’ll find the opportunity to post them sometime, but for now, if you’re interested, check out the photos I posted of my wanderings in New York City in 2012 and 2013.

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

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

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

The Struggle to Close Guantánamo and to Free Shaker Aamer: A Talk by Andy Worthington at Exeter University Amnesty International Society, Feb. 25

It’s something of a rarity these days for me to be asked to speak about Guantánamo to students in the UK, so I’m delighted to be going to Exeter University next Thursday to talk to the Amnesty International Student Society about my work on Guantánamo and the campaigns to get the prison closed — Close Guantánamo and the Countdown to Close Guantánamo (also see here) — and, in 2014-15, to secure the release of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, via the We Stand With Shaker campaign, which involved persuading celebrities and MPs to stand with a giant inflatable figure of Shaker Aamer.

My talk is entitled, ‘The Struggle to Close Guantánamo and to Free Shaker Aamer,’ the Facebook page is here, and it’s a free event, open to the public, so if you’re at the university, or in the Exeter area and can come along, I’ll see you there. The address is: the Amory Moot Room, Amory Building, Streatham Campus, home to the university’s law school. A map is here, on which the Amory Building is no. 29.

Please also note that if you’re at any other university and want me to talk about Guantánamo, I am generally available to do so — get in touch. If you’re in London or within striking distance of London, we can also combine a talk with a gig with my band The Four Fathers, playing politically-charged roots reggae and rock, with songs about Guantánamo (including ‘Song for Shaker Aamer‘, featured in the campaign video for We Stand With Shaker), torture (‘81 Million Dollars‘, about the US torture program), and the Tories’ cynical and brutal ‘age of austerity‘ here in the UK, and the need for an economic revolution based on socialism and environmentalism (check out our album ‘Love and War’ here). The combination of a talk and live music is something we did with great success just before Christmas at Deptford Cinema — see the videos below:

And finally, here’s the description of next Thursday’s event that I sent to the Exeter University Amnesty International Society:

Andy Worthington is a journalist and human rights activist. He wrote the book on Guantánamo — The Guantánamo Files, published in 2007, which tells the stories of all the men held at Guantanamo, via a forensic analysis of 8000 pages of documents released by the Pentagon. For ten years, Andy has been researching Guantánamo, writing about it, and campaigning to get it closed. In 2012 he co-founded the Close Guantánamo campaign with US attorney Tom Wilner, and in 2014 he set up We Stand With Shaker with activist Joanne MacInnes, calling for the release of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo.

Andy will be talking about his work, including the successful campaign to free Shaker Aamer, who was released in October 2015, and his new initiative, the Countdown to Close Guantánamo, calling for President Obama to fulfil his promise to close Guantánamo before he leaves office.

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: “Close Guantánamo” Protest Outside the White House, Jan. 11, 2016

See my photos on Flickr here!

On January 11, 2016, I was outside the White House, as I have been on January 11 every year since 2011, calling for the closure of the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. I was representing Close Guantánamo, the campaign and website I set up four years ago with the US attorney Tom Wilner, as part of an annual protest organized by numerous rights groups, including Amnesty International, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Witness Against Torture and the World Can’t Wait.

My thanks to Debra Sweet of the World Can’t Wait for organizing my trip, which began with a brief visit — for the first time — to Florida (see my article here, and photos here), and then an early morning flight to Washington, D.C. to meet up with old friends from Witness Against Torture, who were staying, as usual, in a church where they were fasting and protesting on a daily basis, and to take part in a number of events — one on the evening of January 10, at which I spoke about We Stand With Shaker, the campaign to free Shaker Aamer from Guantánamo, and sang my “Song for Shaker Aamer” (see the video here); the main protest on January 11, the 14th anniversary of the opening of the prison, outside the White House; and a couple of protests on January 12 that I’ll make photos available of soon. In the meantime, I hope you have time to check out my January 11 photo set, and to share the photos if you like them.

You can also check out the video of the speech I made outside the White House, and see Witness Against Torture’s collection of videos here.

While I was in Washington, D.C., I also met other friends — Medea Benjamin and Tighe Barry of CODEPINK, who gave me a place to stay, and Tom Wilner, with whom I had a number of interesting meetings (and a lovely meal), and with whom also, on the afternoon of Jan. 11, I appeared in a panel discussion at New America, with the academic Karen Greenberg, moderated by Peter Bergen, about whether or not President Obama can succeed in closing Guantánamo before he leaves office — something I very much hope he can do, as I am making clear with my new initiative, the Countdown to Close Guantánamo — see the photos here and here.

I’ll be posting a final set of photos from my trip soon — of the protests on January 12, and of my time with music legend Roger Waters in New York — but if you missed it, do check out Roger and I on Democracy Now! launching the Countdown to Close Guantánamo.

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.

Obama Plans to Move 24 Guantánamo Prisoners to US Mainland, Send A Dozen for Trials in Other Countries

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

As the Countdown to Close Guantánamo continues, with over 150 people now having submitted photos of themselves holding posters telling President Obama how many days he has left to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay (see the photos here and here), Ben Fox of the Associated Press has provided an informative update about how the Obama administration plans to close the prison before President Obama leaves office.

With just 91 men left at Guantánamo, we have been calling for the 34 men currently approved for release to be released as soon as possible, for arrangements to be made for the men facing (or having faced) trials (just ten of those still held) to be moved to the US mainland, and for reviews to take place as swiftly as possible for the 47 other men, who are all eligible for Periodic Review Boards.

A high-level, inter-agency review process, the PRBs were set up in 2013 to ascertain whether to release or continue holding 46 men previously regarded as “too dangerous to release” (despite a lack of evidence against them) and 25 others recommended for prosecution in military commissions until the courts struck down the charges in most of the trials because they had been invented by Congress.

24 PRBs have taken place to date, and, in the 20 cases decided, 17 men have been recommended for release, an 85% success rate that thoroughly discredits the decision taken by Obama’s task force to describe them as “too dangerous to release.”

However, it has taken over two years to get to this point, which is why we have been maintaining that President Obama needs to speed up the PRB process if he is to complete them before he leaves office.

For those already approved for release, the administration has made clear its intention to release them by summer, via Lee Wolosky, the State Department’s special envoy for Guantánamo Closure, who made a statement to that effect in January.

However, for the 57 others, it has always appeared to us that what is necessary is for the PRBs to be completed, and — from our point of view, based on detailed research into the prisoner’s cases and discussions with intelligence experts — for no more than around 18 men to be moved to the US mainland; the seven facing trials (including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks), plus two who have agreed to plea deals, and another man, Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, who has had his November 2008 conviction overturned in the courts, but is still the subject of an appeal by the government, plus — we estimate — around eight men who will continue to be regarded as too dangerous to release, but who will be able to launch new legal challenges if moved to the US.

Defense secretary Ashton Carter spoke of these men recently, on CNN with Fareed Zakaria, when he said, “There are people in Gitmo who are so dangerous that we cannot transfer them to the custody of another government, no matter how much we trust that government,. The reality is, this portion of the Gitmo population has to be incarcerated somewhere,” and later admitted that this “would have to be in the United States.”

Carter didn’t give a number, but the Associated Press spoke to an administration official, who said, “We are looking at ultimately two dozen people who we would be looking at holding in the United States.”

The Associated Press also noted that, because the military commissions “have proven to be so slow” — and, it should be noted, are, in general, thoroughly discredited — “the government is looking at ‘alternative dispositions’ that would include transferring them overseas for prosecution in another country,” according to the administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. He “declined to say which prisoners or where they might be sent but said they number about a dozen and would be sent to places whose citizens were victims of terrorist attacks.”

One obvious example is Hambali (aka Riduan Isamuddin), the alleged mastermind of the Bali bombings in August 2003. The Indonesians were asking for him to be sent to them for trial back in October 2003, shortly after his capture, but instead he was held in CIA “black sites” until his transfer to Guantánamo with 13 other alleged “high-value detainees” in September 2006.

As was reported at the time:

US President George W Bush promised to return Southeast Asia’s top terror suspect Hambali to Indonesia for trial once American investigators have finished questioning him, an Indonesian government spokesman said yesterday.

The White House confirmed that Bush agreed to try to make sure Hambali was handed over to Indonesia. “He committed to work with them at an appropriate time, that he would work to make sure that Hambali was handed over,” White House communications director Dan Bartlett told reporters in Canberra during Bush’s visit there. “He did not set a timetable for that. Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri seemed reassured by that commitment,” Bartlett said.

Hambali, the alleged operations chief of the al-Qaeda linked Jemaah Islamiah network, was arrested in August in Thailand. The Indonesian citizen has been interrogated by US agents at an undisclosed location ever since.

“Absolutely, Bush promised to hand over Hambali to Indonesia for trial,” Indonesian foreign ministry spokesman Marty Natalegawa told The Associated Press. “The only condition is that the process of interrogation (by US agents) has to be completed. Bush said that still needed more time.”

If 24 men are expected to come to the US mainland (and if a Congressional ban on doing so can be overcome one way or another), and if 12 will face trials elsewhere, that still leaves the PRBs as an important arbiter of who should be held and who can go, as PRBs will need to take place that will confirm that it is safe to release 21 other men currently regarded as “forever prisoners,” but who, according to the official Ben Fox spoke to, will not be brought to the US or sent elsewhere for trials.

We await further news, but, for now, we definitely regard this as progress.

Emptying Guantánamo

We also note that Ben Fox’s article came about because of a resumption of press visits to Guantánamo after several months in which visits were not allowed, for reasons that have not been made clear, and commend him for also providing an effective snapshot of the current situation at the prison.

Fox began by pointing out that “[e]mpty cells outnumber occupied ones,” that a “military task force of 2,000 troops and civilians is now devoted to holding just 91 men,” and that the prison “appears to be winding down despite opposition in Congress” to President Obama’s plan to close it.

He added that officials at Guantánamo “portrayed the environment as calmer, with few attacks on the Army soldiers who guard the men and fewer disciplinary problems overall, perhaps related to the fact that for many their long period of confinement is nearing an end.” Army Col. David Heath, who commands the guard force, said, “I believe there is some optimism on the part of the detainees who are left here that they might be next.”

Fox also noted that “Obama is expected later this month to submit a Guantánamo closure plan to Congress,” where, as he added, “it is likely to encounter the same resistance that has prevented the president from making good on the vow to close the facility he made shortly after taking office” — although it should be mentioned that the president has long had a waiver in the legislation allowing him to bypass Congress if he wished, a waiver he has never used.

As Ben Fox explained, however, when it comes to current Congressional opposition, officials hope that soon “there may be so few prisoners,” with the planned release of those already cleared for release, “that some of the opposition will melt away” — in part, at least, because the less prisoners there are, the more insanely expensive it becomes to continue to imprison those who remain. The administration official said, as Fox described it, that “through a combination of measures they could reduce the number of prisoners currently held at Guantánamo to an ‘irreducible number,’ that could be small enough to make their presence in the United States acceptable to Congress.”

Fox also noted that the Justice Department is “considering an argument by lawyers for Guantánamo prisoners that some could be charged in federal court,” an option that was dropped, to what should be President Obama’s eternal shame, after he withdrew proposals to hold the 9/11 trial in federal court in New York after Republicans mounted a ludicrous scaremongering campaign against it.

Wells Dixon, a lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who represents Majid Khan, another alleged “high-value detainee,” who agreed to a plea deal at Guantánamo in exchange for testifying at the 9/11 trial (whenever that will be), “welcomed that approach,” as Ben Fox described it. Dixon said, “I do think as a general matter that if the administration is serious about closing Guantánamo they are going to have to think creatively about options like federal court prosecutions.”

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.

Ex-Guantánamo Prisoner Younous Chekkouri Finally Freed in Morocco After 149 Days’ Imprisonment; Thanks Supporters

Great news from the legal organization Reprieve, whose lawyers represent men held at Guantánamo Bay, as one of their clients, Younous Chekkouri (aka Younus Chekhouri), has finally been freed to be reunited with his family, 149 days after he was flown home to Morocco from Guantánamo. Younous was imprisoned on his arrival, despite assurances, made to the US by the Moroccan government, that he would be held no more than 72 hours, and it has taken until now for him to finally be granted the freedom that has eluded him since he was first seized in Afghanistan over 14 years ago.

Six years before his release, Younous was approved for release by President Obama’s high-level inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force, and in 2010, during habeas corpus proceedings, the US government admitted, as Reprieve described it this evening in a press release, that “their central allegation against him — believed to be the reason for his detention in Morocco — was based on unreliable information extracted primarily through torture.” That information related to his alleged membership in a terrorist organisation, a claim that, it is clear, was absolutely groundless. In October last year, while Younous was imprisoned in Morocco, the US Department of Justice “released a letter publicly conceding this point,” as Reprieve put it, and as I also discussed in an article at the time, Guantánamo’s Tainted Evidence: US Government Publicly Concedes Its Case Against Ex-Prisoner Facing Trial in Morocco Collapsed in 2011.

My other articles following Younous’s release from Guantánamo, discussing his disgraceful imprisonment in Morocco, were Fears for Guantánamo Prisoner Released in Morocco But Held Incommunicado in a Secret Location (immediately after his release), Former Guantánamo Prisoner Betrayed by Morocco: Are Diplomatic Assurances Worthless? (in October), Moroccan Released from Guantánamo Facing Kangaroo Court Trial Back Home As Wife Says She Is “Still Living a Nightmare” (in November), and, last month, Former Guantánamo Prisoner Younous Chekkouri Illegally Imprisoned in Morocco; As Murat Kurnaz Calls for His Release, Please Ask John Kerry to Act, in which, as noted in the title, I helped promote an email campaign launched by Reprieve, asking the US Secretary of State John Kerry to keep up the pressure on the Moroccan government.

I have not met Younous, but it was always obvious to me, from the accounts of him in Guantánamo, and from his own words, reported in documents made publicly available from 2006 onwards, that he was a demonstrably peaceful man, who never posed a threat to the US and should not have been held, and I am absolutely delighted to hear of his release.

Cori Crider, his attorney at Reprieve, said this evening, “It has been a years-long struggle to get Younous out to his family, but his new life starts today. He is one of the kindest, gentlest souls I had the privilege to represent in my years going to Guantánamo, and I am so pleased he will spend tonight with his family. Reprieve looks forward to his being reunited with his beloved wife and Morocco closing this case, as the United States did long ago.”

Eric Lewis, the chair of Reprieve US, who also helped represent Younous, said, “We are delighted that Younous has been released. There was no basis to hold him, for the last five months in Morocco or the previous 14 years in Guantánamo. He should be allowed to get on with his life. We are grateful to all those who have fought to right this injustice.”

Younous himself said, “I want to thank everyone who has helped me through these hard times, my lawyers, everyone in the United States and Europe and Morocco who has stood by me and been my friend the whole time. I cannot believe I am free and will see my family soon. I am so happy. Thank you.”

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

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

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

Photos: Close Guantánamo Protest in Florida, Part of Andy Worthington’s US Tour, Jan. 9, 2016

See my photos on Flickr here!

On January 9, 2016, at the start of my latest short US tour, I was in Florida, on behalf of two groups I co-founded, Close Guantánamo and We Stand With Shaker, for a protest outside the headquarters of Southcom — US Southern Command — which oversees the prison at Guantánamo Bay. This was my sixth US visit on and around January 11, the anniversary of the opening of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo — and my thanks again to Debra Sweet of the World Can’t Wait for organizing it.

The event on January 9 was put together by an enthusiastic group of young people campaigning as POWIR (People’s Opposition to War, Imperialism, and Racism), and I met the main organizers on the night of my arrival from London, January 8, at the apartment of two of them, Cassia and Conor, where the group were preparing banners and placards.

The headquarters of US Southern Command (Southcom), which oversees Guantánamo, is in Doral, just outside Miami, and we met at a busy intersection at 2pm, and then walked to the gates of Southcom’s HQ. Outside the gates, I was one of the speakers calling for the closure of Guantánamo, along with Medea Benjamin of CODEPINK, who had come down from Washington, D.C. with fellow activist Tighe Barry, and afterwards a few dozen of us went for Tex-Mex food, which not only gave me a great opportunity to socialize, but also enabled me to soak up some of the lovely Florida heat that would be lost to me, very early the morning after, as I flew to Washington, D.C.

My thanks to my hosts during my brief visit to Florida — the activist David Gibson, who picked me up from the airport on the evening of January 8 and drove me where I needed to go, and World Can’t Wait supporter Eric Hopley, who took me to the airport very early in the morning on January 10, and who also indulged me by driving me up the coast for a spot of sightseeing on the evening of January 9. The traffic was bad, and the beach largely inaccessible by car, but when we eventually found a spot to take a quick stroll, it was very enjoyable to gaze out briefly at the ocean in darkness, while a few people had picnics on the beach, and to reflect on how, in my ten years of working on Guantánamo, my Florida visit was the closest I had come to the prison itself.

I’ll be posting some photos soon of the rest of my trip — in Washington, D.C. and New York City — but for now I hope you enjoy this set, and will share it. If you want to know more, you can watch the video of me speaking outside the White House, you can see me on Democracy Now! with Roger Waters launching my new initiative, the Countdown to Close Guantánamo, and you can watch me singing my “Song for Shaker Aamer” in Washington, D.C. here. You can also watch my panel discussion about whether or not President Obama can succeed in closing Guantánamo, with my Close Guantánamo colleague Tom Wilner, and the academic Karen Greenberg.

My thanks, as ever, for your interest in closing Guantánamo! if you haven’t yet done so, please check out my latest initiative, the Countdown to Close Guantánamo (also see here).

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

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

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

Guantánamo Lawyers Complain About Slow Progress of Periodic Review Boards

Yesterday I published an article about the most recent Periodic Review Board to take place at Guantánamo, and I was reminded of how I’ve overlooked a couple of interesting articles about the PRBs published in the Guardian over the last six weeks.

When it comes to President Obama’s intention to close Guantánamo before he leaves office next January, the most crucial focus for his administration needs to be the Periodic Review Boards, featuring representatives of the Departments of State, Defense, Justice and Homeland Security, and the offices of the Director of National Intelligence and Joint Chiefs of Staff, as I have been highlighting through the recently launched Countdown to Close Guantánamo. Of the 91 men still held, 34 have been approved for release, and ten are undergoing trials (or have already been through the trial process), leaving 47 others in a disturbing limbo.

Half these men were, alarmingly, described as “too dangerous to release” by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established shortly after taking office in 2009, even though the task force acknowledged that insufficient evidence existed to put them on trial.

What this means, of course, that it cannot legitimately be regarded as evidence at all, but should, more accurately, be regarded as unreliable information produced mainly through the interrogations of the prisoners themselves, when the use of torture, abuse and bribery were widespread.

And in reviewing the cases of the men described as “too dangerous to release,” it has indeed become apparent that this is a damaging and inaccurate description. 20 men have had decisions made following their reviews, and in 17 cases — 85% of the total — the review boards have recommended them for release.

However, it has taken over two years to get to this point, and 40 other men are still awaiting reviews. Half of these men were described as “too dangerous to release,” while the other half consists of men who were recommended for military commission trials until the basis for the trials collapsed under scrutiny by appeals court judges (on the basis that the war crimes prosecuted had actually been invented by Congress).

Unless the PRB process is speeded up, however, it is clear that many of these 40 men will not have had their cases reviewed by the time President Obama leaves office, even though, when he issued an executive order approving the detention of the men deemed “too dangerous to release” in March 2011, he promised that the reviews would be completed within a year.

Moreover, for President Obama to succeed in closing Guantánamo before he leaves office, he must find a way to transfer everyone still held to the US mainland, except those approved for release, and it would be helpful for that number to be as small as possible. The larger the number, the more conservative critics will howl about the spectral dangers posed by the men being moved to US soil, and the more liberal critics will complain about indefinite detention without charge or trial being enshrined on the US mainland (a legitimate fear, although one that I am convinced will open up new opportunities for them to challenge the basis of their detention in the courts, as is my “Close Guantánamo” colleague, Tom Wilner).

At present, for example, just four men are awaiting PRBs, which will be taking place over the next month. However, no further PRBs have been announced, even though four will need to take place every month if all the reviews are to be completed before Obama leaves office.

On December 26, the Guardian addressed some of the problems with the PRBs in an article entitled, “Guantánamo Bay lawyers call bluff on Obama’s promise to close prison.”

In that article, Ed Pilkington pointed out that, despite President Obama “stepp[ing] up the rhetoric, promising to redouble efforts to close the prison while also heavily criticising the Republican-controlled Congress for blocking moves to transfer prisoners out of the prison to the US mainland,” and the release of 16 men in January, “attorneys at the sharp end of representing the detainees are protesting that though the pace is being picked up in reviewing cases, it remains too sluggish to meet the January 2017 deadline.” Pilkington added that the lawyers “see Obama’s criticism of Congress as a smokescreen to obscure the fact that a primary source of the current inertia lies not on Capitol Hill but within his own administration.”

Pardiss Kebriaei, a senior attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, said, “There are signs of progress, but at the current pace the administration will not get through all the detainees and give them a proper chance of transfer by the time Obama steps down.”

Pilkington noted that lawyers were reporting that “the review boards are now being convened more rapidly,” but, as I mentioned above, it is far from clear that they will take place quickly enough for everyone eligible to have had their cases reviewed by the time Obama leaves office. The “current stasis,” as Pilkington described it, leaves the 36 men who currently have not yet received a date for their PRBs “in the Kafkaesque position of not yet even having been given their initial review under the PRB system, a broken promise under the letter of Obama’s executive order that has nothing to do with Congress.”

Lawyers for the prisoners told the Guardian that, as Pilkington put it, “such a glacial pace of activity can only be explained by lack of political will within the White House or resistance from senior officials within the administration” — and this latter point was explored in detail in “Pentagon thwarts Obama’s effort to close Guantánamo,” an article for Reuters, by Charles Levinson and David Rohde, that was published just after the Guardian‘s article (see here for my analysis of the Reuters article).

One of the lawyers who spoke openly of his disappointment with the Obama administration was Gary Thompson, based in Washington, D.C., who represents Ravil Mingazov, an ethnic Tatar from the former Soviet Union, who is one of the 36 men who have not yet had dates given for their PRBs.

Mingazov, who left his homeland because of religious persecution, had his habeas corpus petition granted in May 2010, but that successful petition was appealed by Justice Department lawyers. As Pilkington described it in an article last November examining Mingazov’s current efforts to to rejoin his family — his 15-year-old son Yusef and former wife Dilyara — who were granted political asylum in the UK last year, and who live in Nottingham with other relatives of Mingazov’s, “Despite Obama’s declared intention to close the prison, it was officials from his own administration who appealed the ruling and persuaded the DC circuit court of appeals to impose a stay on the order. That stay remains in place today with no sign of activity on behalf of government officials to try and lift it.”

Gary Thompson told the Guardian, “It’s a joke. The Obama administration set up the PRB process when it suited their political needs, to give them political cover, then did nothing about it.”

Thompson added that, as the Guardian described it, “the experience of the PRBs had soured his view of Obama’s frequently repeated pledge to close the military prison,” and meant that “he now treats any announcement by the White House on Guantánamo with deep suspicion.” As he said, “It’s just the government’s next administrative joke — the next Alice in Wonderland procedure that will prove to be as hollow as those that came earlier.”

Ed Pilkington also explained how, at times, “the failure to move ahead with cases has astonished even those used to the Kafkaesque conditions of Guantánamo,” citing Mari Newman and Darold Killmer, the lawyers for Musa’ab al-Madhwani, a Yemeni who narrowly had his habeas corpus petition turned down in December 2009. As the Guardian described it, his lawyers were told, “every time they inquired about the status of his PRB hearing,” that “his file had not yet been assembled and therefore no official has been assigned to him and no PRB hearing had been scheduled.” The Guardian added, “This was almost five years after the PRB system was ordered by Obama and more than 13 years after [al-Madhwani] arrived at the prison.”

Clive Stafford Smith, the founder of Reprieve, which represents six men still held at Guantánamo, told the Guardian that the system “was so sluggish that official correspondence with the Obama administration regularly fell by the wayside.” He explained that “over the past 18 months he has written at least five official legal letters asking for an initial PRB hearing for his client Ahmad Rabbani — all of them receiving no reply.”

Stafford Smith pierced to the heart of the problem with the PRBs. “It’s impossible to understand why they don’t hold a PRB every single day,” he said. “They have dozens of military lawyers there, but they aren’t being used. That suggests to me that the Obama administration has made an active decision not to do what it promised to do.”

Rabbani, who was a taxi driver in Karachi, is one of ten prisoners sent to Guantánamo in September 2004 after being held in “black sites”. As Ed Pilkington described it, “The US Senate intelligence committee report on CIA torture revealed that Rabbani was arrested in a case of mistaken identity – he had been assumed to be the wanted al-Qaida member Hassan Gul [aka Hassan Ghul].”

Pilkington also noted that Rabbani “is a prolific writer from his prison cell and has described his despair over the lack of progress on his request for a PRB hearing.” In a letter to Clive Stafford Smith, he wrote:

President Obama promised to close the prison years ago. He formed the PRB and all individual countries agreed to receive their nationals. But months and months have passed, the number of people who have been released through the PRB can be counted on two hands. It’s so incredibly slow. How long will it take for me?

I ask the American people to search for the truth, for the truth of the continuous existence of the prison at Guantánamo. I ask the American people, who claim to protect human rights, to practice what they preach — for where is equality and justice and democracy?

The Guardian also cited the case of Mohammed al-Qahtani, alleged to be the intended 20th hijacker for the 9/11 attacks, whose torture was openly admitted by a senior Pentagon official in January 2009, in the only case in which torture at Guantánamo has been admitted.

Al-Qahtani went on a hunger strike “to protest at the lack of any progress on his PRB,” and his attorney, Ramzi Kassem, a law professor at the City University of New York, said that his client had still “not been granted a date for his first review hearing,” and had “not even been assigned a personal representative who deals with the organisational aspects of the process.”

Ramzi Kassem explained, “All he wants is what he’s entitled to under Obama’s own process. That’s why he went on hunger strike — not to ask for release but because he wants a PRB date. And yet there’s been total silence, he hasn’t even been given a tentative hearing date.”

Ed Pilkington noted that “[t]he full story of precisely why the blockage has occurred and who is responsible has yet to be told.” He added, however, that details that emerging last year in individual cases, including that of Shaker Aamer, released in October, “indicated that resistance high up in the Pentagon has been a consistent problem,” the same problem identified by Reuters at the end of last year. Pilkington also noted that the previous defense secretary Chuck Hagel and the current defense secretary Ashton Carter, who have to sign off on any prisoner releases, as required by Congress, have both “demonstrated their anxiety [about releasing prisoners] in the context of a new wave of anti-US extremism from Isis and al-Qaida-linked groups.”

David Remes, based in Washington, D.C., who represents a number of Yemeni prisoners, including the first two men given PRB hearings, told the Guardian that “he saw the Department of Defense as the most immoveable part of the US government.” Remes said, “DoD is fighting a rearguard action against PRBs and against prisoner transfers. It’s a very powerful bureaucracy.”

However, Ed Pilkington also made the point that it is not only the Pentagon that “has acted as a drag on closure,” because the Justice Department “has played its part too, using its authority to foil the release of prisoners that have been ordered by federal courts under habeas petitions.” I have complained about this in previous articles — see here, for example — including in the case of Tariq Ba Odah, mentioned in the Guardian article. A Yemeni, who grew up in Saudi Arabia and has been approved for release since 2009, he has been on a hunger strike since 2007, and weighs just 74 pounds.

While the Reuters article revealed that the Pentagon had obstructed the release of medical records in his case, putting off a country that was planning to offer him a new home, Justice Department lawyers have also played a major role in obstructing his release, fighting in federal court to stop a judge from ordering the government to release him because of the threat to his life of further force-feeding through a habeas corpus petition. As Pardiss Kebriaei said, “It’s entirely inconsistent to fight in court the detainees who the administration itself cleared six years ago. That’s the administration shooting itself in the foot, not Congress.”

On the 14th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, Spencer Ackerman added an update for the Guardian, noting that, although the PRB process was “supposed to be a crucial part of Barack Obama’s plan to close Guantánamo Bay,” it transpired that “frustrated officials” concluded that the PRB process “contains a major flaw which allows the process to grind almost to a halt.”

As Ackerman stated, “Even after the agency representatives on the panel decide a detainee’s fate, a month-long review process begins, which allows the agency chiefs an opportunity to overrule their subordinates and prevent a detainee from going free.” He added that officials had told him that “[e]ven if no one registers an objection … the 30-day holding pattern persists, freezing into place the complex machinery of getting a detainee out of Guantánamo Bay,” even though, “[u]sually … the PRB representatives reach a determination on a detainee rapidly, often on the very day the board holds a hearing to evaluate” his case.

Ackerman added that “the delay period allows bureaucrats to slow-walk providing their superiors with the results, effectively placing the process in a holding pattern where a decision on a detainee’s fate is hostage to a ‘non-objection’, waiting until the agencies simply indicate that they will not object to a decision.” In practice, officials said, this process “often stretches beyond the month-long wait period, helping explain why PRB decisions drag out for months,” even though, as Ackerman added, the PRB “reaches decisions by consensus, and often even unanimity.”

As Ackerman also noted, “Until the review period ends, even a detainee whom all five PRB members approve for transfer is not formally designated eligible to leave Guantánamo Bay.” He added, “Diplomats cannot begin the often laborious negotiations with foreign governments to find places to send someone.” Furthermore, “veteran negotiators” told him, “The longer the process extends … the more circumstances abroad can change — an election changes governments, an economic downturn preoccupies them, a war destabilizes them — that affect a country’s willingness or ability to take a Guantánamo detainee.”

A spokesman for detention policy in the Pentagon, Commander Gary Ross, said of the 30-day wait, “When the PRB process was created, principals, who approved the PRB procedures, wanted to ensure they were involved in the decisions regarding those detainees at Guantánamo Bay who had not yet been approved for transfer.”

It is not publicly known how often objections have been raised by any of the bosses of those who hold the reviews — James Clapper, John Kerry, Ashton Carter, General Joe Dunford and Jeh Johnson — but an official involved in the processtold Ackerman “it occurs ‘numerous times, on the high end’, providing another venue for subterfuge within a bureaucracy that has at times compounded congressional opposition to closing Guantánamo with its own obstinacy.”

Wells Dixon of the Center for Constitutional Rights told the Guardian, “The non-objection period is just another opportunity for insubordinate defense officials to undermine transfer efforts and run out the clock on closing Guantánamo. It makes absolutely no sense to allow a lengthy period for bureaucrats who don’t support closing Guantánamo to block unanimous inter-agency determinations.”

It would be hard to argue with Wells Dixon’s conclusion, and I hope that, in the very near future, we will see a strenuous effort by the Obama administration to ensure that the 36 men eligible for Periodic Review Boards that have not yet been scheduled will be told that dates have been set before the end of the year.

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.