Andy Worthington's Blog, page 8

As UK Judge Denies Julian Assange Bail, It’s Time for Joe Biden to Drop the US Extradition Request

A supporter of Julian Assange outside the Old Bailey in London on October 1, 2020, the last day of his extradition hearing. The balloons were part of an initiative celebrating the 14th anniversary of the founding of WikiLeaks, on October 4 (Photo: Andy Worthington).


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Today, at Westminster Magistrates Court, just two days after ruling that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange cannot be extradited to the US, District Judge Vanessa Baraitser refused to grant him bail, consigning him to ongoing imprisonment in the maximum-security Belmarsh prison in south east London.

On Monday, at the Central Criminal Court (the Old Bailey), Judge Baraitser refused to allow the extradition to proceed, ruling that his life would be at risk in a US supermax prison. Judge Baraitser accepted expert testimony and evidence, given during his extradition hearings in September and October, that Assange has Asperger’s Syndrome and has expressed suicidal ideations, and that the US authorities would be unable to prevent him from committing suicide in a supermax prison, a decision with precedents in the cases of Gary McKinnon and Lauri Love, whose extradition was also prevented by British judges.

Assange must now await a possible appeal against Monday’s ruling, with Judge Baraitser recognizing the US government’s right to do so when she stated today that, “As a matter of fairness, the US must be allowed to challenge my decision.”

She also suggested that Assange “still has an incentive to abscond from these, as yet unresolved, proceedings,” adding that he “had already demonstrated a willingness to flout” the orders of the court — a reference to when, as the Guardian described it, “he absconded eight years ago to enter the Ecuadorian embassy.” However, as his lawyers explained in court, the circumstances then were “totally different” and, as the Guardian put it, “he now had the opportunity to be reunited in the UK with his partner and two young children,” and “would live at their address and wear an ankle tag.”

On Monday, when she refused to allow the extradition, Judge Baraitser, nevertheless, pointedly refused to accept any of Assange’s defence team’s arguments about how Assange, as a journalist and publisher, should not be prosecuted for releasing leaked classified US government information, whose publication was in the public interest, or, indeed, that the extradition treaty must not be used for political purposes.

However, it is not known whether the US will actually appeal, despite prosecutors having bullishly asserted that they would do so after Judge Baraitser delivered her ruling on Monday. As the Guardian reported yesterday, Zachary Terwilliger, the US prosecutor appointed to Assange’s case by Donald Trump, said, “as it was announced that he was stepping down as the US attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia,” that he was “uncertain if Joe Biden’s incoming White House administration will continue to seek [his] extradition.”

Terwilliger told NPR, “It will be very interesting to see what happens with this case. There’ll be some decisions to be made. Some of this does come down to resources and where you’re going to focus your energies.”

Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond, Virginia, told the Guardian that he thought it “likely” that the US Justice Department would “file an appeal before the president leaves office on 20 January and attempt to refute the judge’s views on the US prison system,” although that position could — and should — be dropped by the incoming Biden administration.

Tobias added, “The major decisions will fall to Biden and the new administration, namely his attorney general and US attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, where Assange was charged and would be tried, and those officials may not be confirmed for several months.” As the Guardian described it, Assange’s case would be “one of the first major issues that Biden and the new DoJ leadership were likely to face and assumed symbolic and actual importance.”

As Tobias put it, “My sense is that Biden and his team will not allow the issue to be decided by attrition but will want to seriously consider all of the relevant issues and make the best possible decision.”

That “best possible decision” ought to include revisiting the Obama administration’s position on Assange, described by Glenn Greenwald in the title of an article for the Intercept in November 2018, as follows: “As the Obama DOJ Concluded, Prosecution of Julian Assange for Publishing Documents Poses Grave Threats to Press Freedom.”

Noting how, at the time, “actual and real threats to press freedoms that began with the Obama DOJ and have escalated with the Trump DOJ — such as aggressive attempts to unearth and prosecute sources — have gone largely ignored if not applauded,” Greenwald stated, however, that “prosecuting Assange and/or WikiLeaks for publishing classified documents would be in an entirely different universe of press freedom threats.”

As Greenwald proceeded to explain:

Reporting on the secret acts of government officials or powerful financial actors — including by publishing documents taken without authorization — is at the core of investigative journalism. From the Pentagon Papers to the Panama Papers to the Snowden disclosures to publication of Trump’s tax returns to the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, some of the most important journalism over the last several decades has occurred because it is legal and constitutional to publish secret documents even if the sources of those documents obtained them through illicit or even illegal means.

The Obama DOJ — despite launching notoriously aggressive attacks on press freedoms — recognized this critical principle when it came to WikiLeaks. It spent years exploring whether it could criminally charge Assange and WikiLeaks for publishing classified information. It ultimately decided it would not do so, and could not do so, consistent with the press freedom guarantee of the First Amendment. After all, the Obama DOJ concluded, such a prosecution would pose a severe threat to press freedom because there would be no way to prosecute Assange for publishing classified documents without also prosecuting the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian and others for doing exactly the same thing.

Under Trump, the case against Assange has increasingly focused on hacking rather than publishing, and this aspect of the case was noticeably remarked upon by Judge Baraitser on Monday, but the rather more salient truth is that it is a cover for what remains a fundamental assault on press freedoms of exactly the kind that caused the Obama administration to blanch and then to turn away.

Joe Biden should — indeed, must — reach the same conclusion, and, as a result, drop the extradition case against Julian Assange.

* * * * *

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 music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison 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, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from eight years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

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, The Complete Guantánamo Files, 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.

Judge Refuses to Allow WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange’s Extradition to the US, Citing Suicide Risk

Longtime Julian Assange supporter Elsa Collins near the Old Bailey today, January 4, 2021, after District Judge Vanessa Baraitser unexpectedly prevented WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s extradition to the US (Photo: Andy Worthington).


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In a totally unexpected ruling in the Old Bailey this morning, District Judge Vanessa Baraitser refused to allow WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s extradition to the US to proceed, on the basis that, as court-watcher Kevin Gosztola described it in a tweet, she was “satisfied that procedures described by [the] US would not prevent Assange from finding a way to commit suicide in [a] US supermax prison.”

Gosztola added, powerfully, “The United States government’s mass incarceration system just lost them their case against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.”

In an unjust world in which good news seems to be in ever dwindling supply, this is extraordinarily good news. The US has 14 days to appeal, but it is uncertain if they will do so, as the mental health and suicide risk argument is essentially unassailable, and has been used effectively before — in the cases of Gary McKinnon and Lauri Love, who both have Asperger’s Syndrome. Julian’s Asperger’s has, to my mind, rarely been adequately recognized before, until it was diagnosed by an expert witness in his extradition hearing in September, which now seems to have played a key role in preventing his extradition.

As Kevin Gosztola subsequently explained in a follow-up article for Shadowproof, accepting that Julian “would likely be imprisoned at a supermax prison in the US under special administrative measures (SAMs)”, Judge Baraitser stated, “I am satisfied that, in these harsh conditions, Mr. Assange’s mental health would deteriorate causing him to commit suicide with the ‘single minded determination’ of his autism spectrum disorder,” adding, “I find that the mental condition of Mr. Assange is such that it would be oppressive to extradite him to the United States of America.”

It is to be hoped that the British government will now recognize that it can no longer hold Julian, who has been imprisoned in the maximum-security Belmarsh prison in south east London since May 2019, when his asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy was revoked by a new, pro-US regime. A bail hearing has been scheduled for Wednesday, when, it is reasonable to expect, Julian will walk free.

While this is undoubtedly a case of a cloud with a silver lining, the cloud still remains. As Judge Baraitser ran though the main points of her ruling this morning — before dropping her bombshell — she had led everyone to conclude that she was intending to approve Julian’s extradition, as she methodically refuted every other challenge put forward by his defence team, including, most contentiously, her claim that the US-UK extradition treaty’s clear prohibition of extradition for political purposes did not apply.

As a result, the chilling effect of the extradition request on the freedom of the press remains, essentially, unchallenged, but this is an ongoing struggle, as advocates for press freedom constantly need to remind our leaders that having government wrongdoing exposed by whistleblowing, and published by the press is what differentiates liberal democracies from dictatorships.

Tomorrow we can resume that crucial struggle, but today we should all take a moment to celebrate another significant blow to the US-UK Extradition Treaty, and another unmitigated condemnation of the brutality of the US prison system — as well as the return of hope to a long-demonized individual, Julian Assange, who may now, finally, be reunited with his partner Stella Moris and their two young sons.

* * * * *

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 music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison 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, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from eight years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

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, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

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

Radio: I Discuss London’s Housing Crisis and Covid’s Impact on Business Rents with Andy Bungay, Plus Three Four Fathers Songs

A deserted Piccadilly Circus on Christmas Day, 2020, an unpublished photo from Andy Worthington’s photo-journalism project ‘The State of London.’


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Recently I spoke to Andy Bungay of Riverside Radio, a community radio station in Wandsworth, for his show ‘The Chiminea’, which was broadcast on Boxing Day, and is available here on Mixcloud.

Andy and I have been speaking for several years, and it’s always great to talk to him.  Our 50-minute segment of the two and a half hour show began just under 21 minutes in, when Andy played ‘Fighting Injustice’, the first of three songs by my band The Four Fathers, which has long been a live favourite, and whose chorus is something of a mantra of mine — “If you ain’t fighting injustice / You’re living on the dark side.”

We then began our discussion by taking about my photo-journalism project ‘The State of London’, which I began in 2012, and which involves me cycling and taking photos on a daily basis throughout London’s 120 postcodes, and, since 2017, posting a photo a day, with an accompanying story, on Facebook.

Andy and I spoke on December 11, when I had just returned from a trip to Notting Hill (from south east London), and where, as I told Andy, local businesspeople were bemoaning the Covid-induced demise of the foreign tourist industry, although on Portobello Road it was a market day, and I actually found the area quite busy, although not as much so as the West End, which was packed with shoppers and revellers.

This was in the brief period between the month-long lockdown in November, and the Tier 4 restrictions that were introduced just two weeks after that lockdown ended, when shopping and socialising was quite massively encouraged by the government — and by London’s Mayor, Sadiq Khan — even though, on the government’s part, at least, it was already known that a much more infectious stain of Covid was already on the loose.

Andy also asked me about Grenfell Tower, and the fire in June 2017 that killed 72 of its inhabitants, which led directly to my involvement in housing activism in the years since. We spoke about the ongoing official inquiry, and how it has been hearing about the shameful — and criminal — behaviour of the firms responsible for the flammable cladding that was used during the tower’s refurbishment, and how they knew how dangerous it was, but worked assiduously to cover up the truth, and I lamented how little the mainstream media seemed to be interested.

I also spoke about how, when it comes to the cladding scandal, it involves leaseholders of private flats, as well as tenants of social housing, and in response to a question from Andy about how the authorities like to dismiss those in Grenfell as having lower incomes, I explained how that unacceptable point of view doesn’t even reflect reality, because social housing estates almost always include private renters in flats bought through Margaret Thatcher’s ‘Right to Buy’ initiative, and often sold on to private landlords. This ought to undermine the “sink estate” narrative used by cynical politicians to justify estate demolition programmes for the profits of builders and developers, but somehow — presumably largely because of mainstream media bias — it doesn’t.

40 minutes into the show, Andy played ‘Grenfell’, the second song by The Four Fathers, playing the live version recorded by a German TV crew that is available on YouTube, although anyone interested can also find the studio version, recorded with Charlie Hart, who also played accordion on it, here.

Afterwards, Andy and I spoke about how the mixture of tenures in social housing actually demonstrates aspects of social mobility, and provides what is often the only affordable rent for “aspirational” young people in an overheated, out of control rental market, and I stressed how unjust it is that, if you try to do what society suggests you should do if you’re ambitious — buy an “entry-level” flat on a council estate — you will be punished rather than rewarded if you buy on an estate where demolition is planned.

At 46 minutes, we discussed the Save Reginald Save Tidemill campaign, in which activists, myself included, tried to save a community garden in Deptford from destruction for an inappropriate housing development. The garden, as I told Andy, had been built in the late ‘90s for the Tidemill primary school, designed by teachers, parents and pupils, and it remained the school’s garden until 2012, when the old Victorian school closed, and moved to a brand-new site nearby.

Property guardians then moved into the old school, also opening up the garden, and when they were moved on, the local community took on the garden until final plans for its redevelopment were approved. That happened in September 2017, which was when I got involved, and we then began putting on regular events in the garden, and when, at the end of August 2018, the council wanted the garden back, we occupied it instead, because, for the previous six years, they had persistently refused to listen to local demands — for a green space that was also environmentally significant, because the garden’s trees had been found to absorb some of the worst of the particulate pollution on the nearby roads, where pollution levels had been measured that were six times over the safety limits recommended by the World Health Organisation.

The occupation lasted for two months, and included our participation in the internationally known Deptford X arts festival, but we were, eventually, violently evicted by famously union-busting bailiffs hired by Lewisham Council, a Labour council. We then saw off the first set of tree-killers hired to cut down all the garden’s trees, but in February 2019 a second company finished the job, bulldozing all the trees. It has taken until now for the development to proceed, but it was always, sadly, about the money. As I explained to Andy, the entire development site — the old school, the garden and a block of council flats next door, Reginald House — is worth between £80m and £100m, and the garden, therefore, is worth at least £20m to £25m —  money that our autonomous space simply didn’t have, of course.

Andy and I then spoke about the crisis in local democracy, in which I pointed out how councillors are elected on a shockingly low turnout (often by less than 20% of the registered electorate), and how, in Lewisham, the tendency for power to be concentrated in one party’s hands is so extreme that all 54 councillors are Labour, meaning that there is absolutely no dissent. As I told Andy, imagine the House of Commons with just one party as a way of realising quite how unbalanced this situation is.

Andy then mentioned the Tories’ recently announced intention to overhaul local planning, enabling developers to bypass councils entirely, but I noted that this high-handed approach was not only criticised by housing experts, but also by councils — both Tory and Labour — who resented what amounted to a deranged power grab by central government.

As I noted, however, this particular revolt doesn’t upset the bigger picture of the housing crisis, driven by government cuts in David Cameron and George Osborne’s cynical “age of austerity”, which began eleven years ago, and has never ended, and which has obliged housing associations and Labour councils to either largely become private developers themselves, or to cosy up to developers and to put their profiteering priorities before any other concerns. I also explained, however, that I don’t think social housing providers or local politicians should be let off the hook for the enthusiasm with which so many of them have embraced these effects, because, sadly, the reality is that they “don’t really want to have to deal with poorer people.”

57 minutes into the show, Andy played the third and last song by The Four Fathers — ‘Affordable’ , a punky blast of indignation about the most-abused word in the English language when it comes to housing.

Resuming the discussion afterwards, I described a general policy, at the local government level, of pushing poorer people out, and, instead, attracting “aspirational” people, and explained how this was not only an insult to hard-working underpaid Londoners, but also completely failed to understand quite how many Londoners are not paid enough to buy into, or even to rent in London’s greedily overheated housing bubble. As I described it, the politics aims at a wealthier demographic than what actually exists on the ground.

Andy then spoke about the numbers of families left with almost no disposable income because of the cost of living, and we then moved on to discuss whether or not the entire overpriced property economy can survive Covid, with both residential and business rents hit hard by the collapse of tourism and the hospitality and entertainment sectors, and with most of the retail sector also severely damaged.

On a positive note, I mentioned how, although some homeowners are leaving the city for the country, driving up house prices there, in central London residential rents are down by as much as 34%, in large part, it seems, because there are no longer any foreign students with wealthy parents, while the entire office rental sector is also under pressure, because so many office workers are now working successfully from home, and happy to avoid crushing, overpriced commuter journeys.

I also pointed out how retail businesses were paying an insane amount of money pre-Covid, explaining how, in general, it meant that only corporate chains could afford to be in business in central London in the first place. I cited an example I had uncovered during my research for ‘The State of London’, establishing that, in a single site on the ground floor of a newly built office block in Soho, The Ivy, as part of its banker-backed expansion, was paying £670,000 a year in rent; in other words, nearly £2,000 a day, 365 days a year, just for the rent for a single restaurant.

As I noted, the pre-Covid West End was reliant on huge numbers of people just to get by, and that world has suddenly crashed, with landlords put in a position where they only have two choices — either to be supportive to their existing tenants, cutting rents and not seeking repayment later, or facing the prospect of having their properties empty and shuttered for the foreseeable future, with no income whatsoever.

I pointed out that this should lead to a massive reduction in profiteering, and hoped that it will lead to a situation in which small and interesting businesses can open in the West End, because has become so samey, but whether or not that happens is, like so much in life right now, largely unknown and unknowable.

Our discussion ended at 1:09:30, and I hope you have time to listen to it — and I look forward to talking to Andy again sometime this 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 music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison 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, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from eight years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

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, The Complete Guantánamo Files, 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.

Joe Biden’s Guantánamo: New York Times Highlights Decaying Prison Cells and Broken Judicial System; Observer Notes Return of Hope

A composite image of President-elect Joe Biden and the prison at Guantánamo Bay.


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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 the guessing game that is the incoming Biden administration’s policy regarding the moral stain on the US that is the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, which will mark the 19th anniversary of its opening just two weeks’ time, three New York Times reporters — Carol Rosenberg, Charlie Savage and Eric Schmitt — recently highlighted some of the issues that Joe Biden will have to address when he take office, in an article entitled, “‘In Bad Shape and Getting Worse,’ Guantánamo Poses Headaches for Biden.”

The Times largely sidestepped the glaring injustice of the entire facility — where 40 men are still held, for the most part, in open-ended indefinite detention without charge or trial, in defiance of domestic and international norms regarding imprisonment — focusing instead on the prison’s “decaying infrastructure” and its broken judicial system, the military commissions.

On the bigger picture, the reporters noted only that Biden “has yet to lay out plans for Guantánamo,” but that, “according to people familiar with transition deliberations,” his administration “is not expected to repeat President Barack Obama’s splashy but ultimately unmet promise in 2009 to close the prison within a year.”

Referring to the annual National Defense Authorization Act, which Republicans used to restrict Barack Obama’s efforts to close the prison, the Times added, “A law prohibits bringing detainees to a domestic prison, as Mr. Obama had proposed doing,” and also noted that Biden “said during his campaign that congressional consent is needed to close Guantánamo” — which may be true, although it shouldn’t prevent Biden from undertaking numerous actions that will reduce the prison’s population, for which Congressional approval isn’t required, as discussed in particular in A Roadmap for the Closure of Guantánamo, President Elect Biden, It’s Time to Close Guantánamo and A Guantánamo Insider’s Detailed Proposal for How Joe Biden Can Finally Close the Prison.

The prison’s “decaying infrastructure”

Regarding the prison’s “decaying infrastructure,” the Times article began by noting that, during tropical rains this summer and fall, “raw sewage sloshed inside the cells” of the secretive Camp 7, where 14 “high-value detainees” are held, mostly since George W. Bush moved them from CIA “black sites” in September 2006.

Based on what the prisoners told their lawyers, the Times stated, “It was a problem for prisoners and guards alike. Power flickered off and on. Toilets overflowed. Water suddenly became scalding hot. Cell doors got stuck.” Brig. Gen. John G. Baker of the Marines, the chief defense counsel for military commissions, who recently, after two weeks of quarantine at the base, “became the first defense lawyer to meet with a prisoner in person during the coronavirus pandemic,” said, “Camp 7 is in bad shape, getting worse. There has been maintenance done that doesn’t seem to fix things. Walls are cracked. You can see light in the walls between the cells. The floor is cracked. The water is inconsistent and hot.”

As the Times reported, “One solution under consideration, according to people familiar with internal deliberations, is to close Camp 7 and move the former CIA prisoners to the main prison complex while still segregating them in a special housing unit, where they would be unable to communicate with the general population of 26 lower-level detainees.”

This would allow the military to reduce the numbers of guards and other personnel — currently 1,500 — which would also reduce the prison’s costs; currently $14 million per prisoner per year, a figure that, as the Times noted, is “more than 150 times what taxpayers pay per domestic terrorism inmate.”

That, however, “would require the approvalof the CIA, which has a say in operations at Camp 7 through a memorandum of agreement signed in 2006 by Donald H. Rumsfeld and Michael V. Hayden, the defense secretary and the CIA director at the time.” As the Times added, “The details remain largely classified, but the role of the agency at Camp 7 has permitted the CIA to control the flow of information from and about the prisoners — their memories of torture at the black sites, where they were held and by whom — through classification, segregation, surveillance and a specially trained unit of guards called Task Force Platinum.”

As the Times also noted, “Certain details have emerged through declassification, leaks and military commissions hearings,” but, disgracefully, “some CIA secrets remain.” The Times also pointed out that the government “treats even the location of Camp 7 as a secret, although the facility, tucked away in the hills northwest of the main compound, is clearly visible in satellite photographs.”

The consolidation plan, the Times explained, emerged after Congress repeatedly rejected a request by the Pentagon for a new, wheelchair-accessible Camp 7, “as part of a 25-year plan based on the assumption that, because Congress blocked the Obama administration’s plan to close the prison, some detainees would grow old and die at Guantánamo Bay” — although lawmakers had no qualms about funding “a new $124 million dormitory-style barracks for about 850 prison guards, which is now being built across the street from the base McDonald’s.”

Moving the Camp 7 prisoners to Camps 5 and 6 would allow them access to “a clinic, including a mental health unit with a padded cell, a dental chair for the general population of prisoners and an intensive care unit with capacity to medically isolate up to four patients at a time,” but Adm. Craig S. Faller, who oversees the prison as the head of US Southern Command, “declined to discuss the details beyond describing consolidation as part of a ‘right-sizing’ approach to troop deployments at the prison,” which can only move forward as “a policy decision.”

Rethinking the “dysfunctional” military commissions

The Times also noted that a “particularly thorny policy question facing the Biden administration is whether to rethink the military commissions system setup to try the detainees who have been charged,” adding that the trial system “has moved at a glacial pace that has rendered it all but dysfunctional,” an analysis that would have been no less correct, and would have had much more power, had the reporters simply described it as “dysfunctional” rather than “all but dysfunctional.”

As they proceeded to explain, “Eight years after their arraignment, the death-penalty trial of Mr. Mohammed and four other men accused of conspiring in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people, remains stuck in pretrial hearings. Year after year, prospects for what could be a very lengthy trial — even before years of inevitable appeals — keep receding; the latest delays, partly caused by travel restrictions during the coronavirus pandemic, mean the trial cannot begin before the 20th anniversary of the attacks.” They might also have added that the relentless churn of judges also contributes massively to the delays.

As the Times proceeded to explain, federal courts “have proved far more effective at bringing terrorists to trial and obtaining convictions that withstand appeal; but each year, Congress prohibits the transfer of detainees from Guantánamo to the mainland for any reason — not for a trial or medical care, nor to serve time on a sentence or even for execution.”

Another way to break the deadlock would be to accept plea deals, although that would involve the government “giving up on seeking the execution of the accused 9/11 conspirators,” and as the Times noted, Jim Mattis, Trump’s first defense secretary, “fired the top lawyers overseeing the military commissions in 2018 while they were exploring the possibility of exchanging guilty pleas for life in prison.”

Part of the problem for the government, according to people familiar with the discussions at the time, was that “defense lawyers had been seeking assurances that the defendants could serve their life sentences at Guantánamo rather than in the harsher, isolating ‘supermax’ prison at Florence, Colo., where men convicted in federal court of terrorism crimes typically serve time.” For a system built on the notion of the harshest punishment possible, this was obviously anathema, but maybe it could be revived without life sentences at Guantánamo being an option; after all, as the Times noted, otherwise “the Guantánamo prison would most likely have to remain open for decades — and the Pentagon would again be confronted with the question of whether to build a facility capable of geriatric and end-of-life health care.”

A “tentative hope” for the “forever prisoners”

On another front, Julian Borger for the Observer noted, in an article on December 13, that “Guantánamo’s last inmates detect a glimmer of hope after 19 years inside.”

Borger quoted Khalid Qassim, a Yemeni seized in Afghanistan in December 2001, who is one of 26 of the 40 men still held who are regarded by responsible media outlets as “forever prisoners,” their ongoing imprisonment approved, on a regular basis, by Periodic Review Boards, panels of officials who assess whether or not they still constitute a threat to the US.

Qassim, who we have written about extensively (see here and here), told his lawyer by phone, “I think it’s OK for me to be happy about the result. But at the same time, it’s not like, day one, Biden is going to say ‘let’s release Khalid.’” He added, “A lot of the detainees are feeling better. It’s a relief, you know? We know nothing will happen on day one, but at least our cases won’t be stagnant, we won’t be totally forgotten.”

As Borger noted, “How far the Biden administration will go to extricate Qassim and his fellow inmates from the judicial black hole established in Guantánamo in 2002 will say a lot about the president-elect’s determination to break with the past, and with the counter-terrorism response to the 9/11 attacks, that has shaped US foreign and security policy ever since.”

He noted that, to date, Biden “has said very little about his plans for Guantánamo, other than restating his intention to close it.” In June, his campaign team put out a statement stating that the prison’s existence “undermines American national security by fuelling terrorist recruitment and is at odds with our values as a country” — a position very similar to that taken by Barack Obama — but all a transition official told the Observer, as an update, was that “[t]he president-elect stands by that.”

Maya Foa, the director of the advocacy group Reprieve, told the Observer, “For four years, Guantánamo policy has essentially been set by a Trump tweet, posted before he was even in office, saying there should be no more releases. The first thing Joe Biden should do is resume the transfer process.”

This involves releasing five men approved for release under Obama, but still held when Trump took office, and a sixth man just approved for release by a PRB, probably via the Office of the Envoy for Guantánamo Closure, which was mothballed by Donald Trump.

The Observer also made reference to the position taken by Benjamin Farley, a Guantánamo defence lawyer who worked in the State Department office negotiating transfers in the Obama administration, whose article we cross-posted as A Guantánamo Insider’s Detailed Proposal for How Joe Biden Can Finally Close the Prison, who proposed that “up to 30 of the prisoners could be repatriated or resettled by reviving the mechanisms that Trump dismantled, without needing permission from Congress,” partly by “reframing the criteria used by the PRB in assessing whether continued detention is ‘necessary to protect against a significant threat to the security of the US.’”

As Borger described it, “At present the PRB operates like a parole board, looking for signs of contrition. Instead, Farley argues, it should give favourable weight to each prisoner’s likely future threat in terms of their age, mental and physical state, and to whether a detainee has been subjected to torture.”

We’re pleased that Benjamin Farley’s proposals are being discussed, and we hope that the Biden administration is amenable to suggestions about how it can significantly reduce Guantánamo’s population without even needing to involve Congress. Nearly 19 years after the prison opened, it is, to be blunt. time for the US to accept that anyone who isn’t going to be charged should be released, and those who are charged should be tried in a functional judicial system.

* * * * *

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 music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison 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, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from eight years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

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, The Complete Guantánamo Files, 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.

Torture Victims Lead Call for Torture Apologists Avril Haines and Mike Morell Not to be Confirmed as Director of National Intelligence and CIA Director

Avril Haines and Mike Morell, who both have a troubling history as torture apologists. In an open letter, opponents of torture, myself included, urge President-elect Biden not to nominate Mike Morell as CIA Director, and urge the Senate not to confirm Biden’s appointment of Avril Haines as Director of National Intelligence.


Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

I’m delighted to be a signatory to an open letter, initiated by Medea Benjamin of CODEPINK and Marcy Winograd of Progressive Democrats of America and CODEPINKCONGRESS, urging President-elect Joe Biden not to nominate Mike Morell as CIA Director, and asking the Senate not to approve Biden’s nominee Avril Haines as Director of National Intelligence (the head of the 16 branches of the US Intelligence Community) — and I’m particularly gratified that I was able to reach out to a number of former Guantánamo prisoners to encourage them to sign the letter.

Both Morell and Haynes have a troubling history of defending torture. Morell, who was a CIA analyst under George W. Bush, and Deputy and Acting CIA Director under Barack Obama, defended the use of torture when speaking to VICE in 2015. “I don’t like calling it torture for one simple reason: to call it torture says my guys were torturers,” he said, adding, “I’m gonna defend my guys till my last breath.” As Medea Benjamin and Marcy Winograd explained in an article for Common Dreams yesterday, Morell “put his CIA buddies above truth, the law and basic decency.”

Hopefully, as they also noted, “Morell’s traction may be on the wane with the Biden administration … after progressives launched a campaign against [him], and Senator Ron Wyden — a powerful Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee — called him a ‘torture apologist’ and said his appointment to head the CIA was a ‘non starter.’”

As for Avril Haines, Deputy Director of the CIA under Obama, Medea Benjamin and Marcy Winograd noted that she “has an inside-the-beltway reputation for being nice and soft spoken,” but “was a little too nice to CIA agents who hacked the computers of Senate Intelligence Committee investigators looking into the CIA use of torture,” when she “chose not to discipline those CIA hackers who violated the separation of powers, crossing the boundary line and beaching the firewall between the executive and legislative branches. To add insult to injury, Haines led the team that redacted an exhaustive 5-year, 6,000-page Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture until it was reduced to a censored, 500-page summary smeared with black ink to cover up the screaming horrors and shield those responsible.”

What is clearly needed, in both posts, are people who were never embroiled in the disgusting and disgraceful torture program, and have never sought to defend it, because anything less tends, even tacitly, to endorse what took place in the US’s post-9/11 torture program, one of whose outposts — Guantánamo — is still open, shamefully, and about to mark the 19th anniversary of its opening.

Open Letter to President-Elect Biden & U.S. Senate from Torture Victims and their Advocates Opposed to Mike Morell for CIA and Avril Haines for National Intelligence

As survivors of torture and their advocates, we urge President-elect Biden not to nominate Mike Morell for CIA Director and ask the Senate not to approve Biden’s nominee Avril Haines as Director of National Intelligence.

Both Morell and Haines have troubling records on torture — a form of violence with lingering effects: anxiety, stress, physical and psychological trauma. We know because we have lived this nightmare, either personally or as advocates of survivors forever haunted by past torture.

We believe that the record of Morell and Haines disqualifies them from directing intelligence agencies. Their appointment would undermine the rule of law and U.S. credibility around the world. It would be a callous rebuke to people like ourselves and all those who care about human rights and the protection of basic dignity.

Morell, a CIA analyst under Bush and both Deputy and Acting CIA Director under Obama, has defended the Agency’s “enhanced interrogation” practices. These included waterboarding, physical beatings, sleep deprivation, stress positions, and sexual humiliation. These practices have commonly, and rightly, been denounced as torture. In July 2014, President Obama plainly admitted, “We tortured some folks.”

That same year, the Senate Intelligence Committee issued the 500-page summary of its “Torture Report.” Drawing on millions of pages of internal CIA documents, the report denounced CIA torture as both inhumane and ineffective. It concluded that the Agency’s use of torture was far more frequent and gruesome than previously acknowleged. Senate investigators also documented that the CIA had lied to Congress, the President, and the American people by falsely insisting that its “enhanced interrogations” had forced detainees to reveal critical information, and thereby thwarted terrorists plots.

Yet in his 2015 memoir, Morell asserted without evidence that torture was effective. As the Military Times reported, Senate intelligence committee staffers were so troubled by Morell’s claims that they issued a lengthy rebuttal in a special report. Referencing the CIA’s own documents, the report blasted Morell’s numerous errors and misrepresentation of established facts.

In addition, Morell defended the CIA’s destruction in 2005 of nearly 90 videotapes of the brutal interrogation of Abu Zubaydah and other detainees in CIA black sites. Sought by congress, the courts, and attorneys, the tapes doubtless depicted troubling US conduct. Their destruction came in the wake of the Abu Ghraib abuse revelations, just as the country was vigorously debating the lawfulness and morality of the treatment of detainees.

To defend the elimination of the tapes, as Morell has done, is unconscionable. It defies the transparency our democracy needs to function, while serving to shield from accountability those potentially guilty of grave crimes.

The claim that “torture works” is the great lie used by tormentors throughout history to justify their abuses. When repeated by high-ranking officials to defend post-9/11 torture, it serves to excuse the inexcusable.

Morell has no place in a Biden-Harris administration. His nomination would send a chilling message to torture survivors and other victims of grave injustice that the United States government, including the Biden administration, does not uphold its own stated principles. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) from the Senate Intelligence Committee has said about Morell: “No torture apologist can be confirmed as CIA director. It’s a nonstarter.” We agree and urge the President-elect not to nominate Morell.

We also oppose Avril Haines, another torture apologist, as Director of National Intelligence. Since she has already been nominated, we ask Senators to oppose her confirmation.

As CIA Deputy Director from 2013–2014, Haines overruled the CIA Inspector General by choosing not to punish agency personnel accused of hacking into the Senate Intelligence Committee’s computers during their investigation into the CIA’s use of torture. In addition, Haines was part of the team that redacted the Senate Intelligence Committee’s landmark 6,000-page report on torture, reducing the public portion to a 500-page summary. The full report has been sought by attorneys, human rights advocates, legislators, and scholars seeking a full account of the United States’s troubling conduct.

Haines also supported Trump’s nomination of Gina Haspel for CIA director. Supervising a CIA black site in Thailand in 2002, Haspel was directly implicated in CIA torture. She later drafted the memo authorizing the destruction of the CIA videotapes.

Like Morell, Haines has worked both to defend torture and surpress evidence of it. She too, is incompatible with the stated aim of the Biden-Harris administration to restore integrity and respect for the rule of law to government.

The new administration must show the American people and the world that it acknowledges past disturbing U.S. conduct and will ensure that such abuses never recur. To do that, it needs intelligence leaders who have neither condoned torture nor whitewashed the CIA’s ugly record of using torture. We need intelligence leaders who understand that torture is illegal under international law; that is inhumane; that it is ineffective; that it puts at risk U.S. military personnel, should they be captured by adversaries; and that it violates the restoration of trust in American decency central to Biden’s vision for his presidency.

That is why we urge President-Elect Biden not to nominate Mike Morell for Director of the CIA and the Senate to reject the nomination of Avril Haines for Director of National Intelligence. The people of the United States and the world deserve better.

Signed:

Mohamedou Ould Salahi, tortured prisoner at Guantánamo; held without charge for 14 years; beaten, force fed, deprived of sleep; released in 2016, author, Guantánamo Diary

Djamel Ameziane, Algerian, former Guantánamo detainee, torture survivor imprisoned without charge from 2002–2013, in solitary confinement for a decade, suffered vision loss.

Moazzam Begg, Torture survivor, former Guantánamo prisoner, CAGE, UK; signed confession under torture; while in US custody subjected to sleep deprivation, stress positions, hog tied with hood over head.

Maher Arar, Canadian torture and rendition survivor; whipped with an electrical cord and forced to confess while in US custody in Syria.

Mansoor Adayfi, Released Guantánamo prisoner sold to US forces in Afghanistan for bounty money; imprisoned at Guantánamo without charge for 14 years, seven in isolation; torture surivor; resettled in Serbia; award-winning writer.

Lakhdar Boumediene, Algerian-born citizen of Bosnia and Herzegovina imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay from 2002–2009, force fed for two years; lead plaintiff in Boumediene v. Bush, a 2008 US Supreme Court decision that Guantánamo detainees have the right to habeas corpus in US federal courts.

Carlos Mauricio, College professor kidnapped and tortured by US-backed right-wing death squads in El Salvador; Executive Director: Stop Impunity Project.

Hector Aristizabal, Psychologist and theater artist; torture survivor from Colombia, CoCreator of Reconectando; Theater of the Oppressed.

Sister Dianna Ortiz, US missionary teaching Mayan children, tortured in 1989 by members of the US supported Guatemalan Army.

Jean Marie Kalonji, Congolese youth leader tortured by the police and military, Coordinator of the Fourth Way.

Mario Avila, a Guatemalan torture survivor kidnapped in 1969 and again in 1976 and tortured in clandestine jails under the directives of the U.S. government; Colectivo Guatemalteco Los AngelesTorture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition (TASSC).

Gloria Avila, Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition (TASSC).

Frankie Flores, Torture Survivor from El Salvador; Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition (TASSC).

Jennifer Harbury, Atty, wife of deceased Guatemalan torture victim Efraín Bámaca Velásquez; author, “Truth, Torture and the American Way,” which documents the CIA’s historical use of torture.

Major Todd Pierce (U.S. Army, Retired), Judge Advocate General attorney on the defense teams for Guantánamo military commissions defendants.

Buz Eisenberg, Attorney for Guantánamo detainee.

Jim Dorsey, Attorney for released Guantánamo detainee

Jeffrey S. Kaye, author, Cover-Up at Guantanamo.

Alfred W. McCoy, author, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror.

Marjorie Cohen, Atty, author, The United States And Torture: Interrogation, Incarceration, And Abuse.

Colonel Larry Wilkerson, Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Roy Bourgeois, School of the Americas Watch.

Helen Sklar, Certified Specialist in Immigration Law, represented torture victims from all over the world in asylum proceedings.

Elizabeth Murray, Retired Deputy National Intelligence Office/Near East.

Colonel Ann Wright, US Army Colonel (retired) and former US Diplomat.

Valerie Lucznikowska, September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows.

Jeremy Varon, Witness Against Torture and Professor of History at The New School.

Medea Benjamin, CODEPINK Women for Peace.

Dr. Maha Hilal, Justice for Muslims Collective.

Rebecca Gordon, author, Mainstreaming Torture.

Bogdan Dzakovic, Son of WWII torture victim.

Ray McGovern, Retired CIA officer, Member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

Philip M. Giraldi, former CIA Operations Officer, Executive Director, Council for the National Interest.

John Kiriakou, Former CIA officer imprisoned after whistleblowing re CIA torture.

Coleen Rowley, former FBI special agent and whistleblower.

Greg Thielmann, retired intelligence official, U.S. State Department.

David Swanson, Executive Director, World Beyond War; author, “Torture is Foreplay for War.”

Norman Solomon, Author, War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.

Marcy Winograd, Progressive Democrats of America; 2020 DNC Delegate, author of Open Letter to Joe Biden: Hire New Foreign Policy Advisors, signed by 450 Delegates opposed to torture whitewashing.

Matthew W. Daloisio, Atty, Witness Against Torture.

Andy Worthington, Director, CloseGuantanamo.org, author, The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison.

Nancy Talanian, No More Guantánamos.

Bill Binney, Retired National Security Agency official and whistleblower.

Sue Udry, Executive Director, Defending Rights and Dissent.

Kathy Kelly, Voices for Creative Nonviolence.

Roger Waters, musician, songwriter, “Each Small Candle” – tribute to a torture victim.

Angela Edman, Esq, Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition (TASSC).

Art Laffin, Catholic Worker House.

Sandra and Ulis Williams, Activists, School of the Americas Watch.

Martin Melkonian, Teachers for Human Rights.

Johnny Zokovitch, Executive Director, Pax Christi USA.

Uwe Jacobs, Psychologist, Survivors International.

Rev. Emma Jordan-Simpson, Executive Director, Fellowship of Reconciliation.

Frank Goldsmith and Robin Kirk, Co-chairs, North Carolina Commission of Inquiry on Torture.

Linda Lewis, Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence.

Dr. Mary Helen White, Physicians for Human Rights, works with torture victims.

Adrienne Kinne, President, Veterans For Peace.

Garette Reppenhagen, Executive Director, Veterans For Peace.

C. Peter Dougherty, Co Founder, Meta Peace Team.

Sara Olson, Women Against Military Madness, Tackling Torture Committee.

Julie Alley, Witness Against Torture

* * * * *

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 music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison 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, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from eight years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

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, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

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

Radio: I Discuss Hopes for Guantánamo’s Closure Under Joe Biden, and Julian Assange’s Extradition, with Chris Cook on Gorilla Radio

A composite image of the prison at Guantánamo Bay on the day it opened, January 11, 2002, and WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange.


Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

Chris Cook, in Victoria, British Columbia, hosts a great weekly progressive radio show, Gorilla Radio, and I’m delighted to have been talking to him on a regular basis — mostly about Guantánamo — for many years now.

I spoke to Chris recently for an hour, and you can find the show on his website here, and also here as an MP3. A shorter version of the interview was included in the show that was broadcast on December 17, featuring journalist and author John Helmer in the first half (and the MP3 of that show is here).

I began by providing a brief history of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, which will mark the shameful 19th anniversary of its opening in just three weeks’ time, and I stressed how, under Donald Trump, the prison has essentially been sealed shut for the last four years. Bearing that in mind, there is now hope that, at the very least, some of the remaining 40 prisoners will be freed, and there will progress towards the prison’s closure.

Halfway through the hour, we spoke about the proposed extradition of WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange, following up on the statements I submitted in his defence during his recent hearing in London, which were based on my work with WikiLeaks in 2011 as a media partner on the release of classified military files from Guantánamo, and my efforts, frustrated by the prosecutors, to actually deliver this evidence in person in the courtroom. I explained how I believe that the entire process may well have been a sham, designed to create the illusion of fairness and impartiality, when the judge had already reached her decision, which will be announced on January 4.

I also spoke about the need for Joe Biden to drop the extradition request, which was launched under Donald Trump, because Joe Biden was Vice President when Barack Obama decided not to seek Assange’s extradition, having been warned, in no uncertain terms, of the chilling effect it would have on press freedoms, and the US’s cherished First Amendment.

With 15 minutes to go, Chris asked me about my ongoing photo-journalism project ‘The State of London’, which I began eight and a half years ago, and which has involved me cycling and taking photos on a daily basis throughout London’s 120 postcodes, and capturing the changes in London over that time, in particular the omnivorous march of predatory global capital, and I was pleased to be able to announced that I’ve just entered into a book deal for an illustrated narrative book based on the project, to be published in 2022.

We also spoke about the impact of Covid on London, as discussed in my article, Covid, Ghost Cities and the Collapse of Property Prices in the West End and the City of London, regarding the challenging situation for the real estate business in London — involving both commercial and residential rents — as offices have emptied, and rents in central London have been falling; primarily, it seems, because of the complete disappearance of foreign students with wealthy parents.

In conclusion, Chris asked me about my band The Four Fathers, and we discussed the disastrous effect of Covid on live culture, before Chris played out the show with our song, ‘Riot.’

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

In closing, here’s how Chris described our interview:

If the measure of a society is how its weakest are treated, then do we deserve more than the precipitous societal decline witnessed these last decades? As millions careen into extreme poverty and the Bastille is full to bursting — while the very few accumulate vast wealth undreamed of by either the Captains of the Gilded Age or courtiers of Versailles — the real impoverishment of our civilization is a terminal dearth of popular conscience and abandonment of the moral compass. Nowhere is that better evinced than in Guantánamo Bay, the 21st Century’s Devil’s Island.

* * * * *

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 music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison 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, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from eight years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

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, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

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

In Trump’s Dying Days, Guantánamo Review Board Approves Yemeni Prisoner for Release

On the left: Said Salih Said Nashir (aka Hani Saleh Rashid Abdullah), a Yemeni prisoner at Guantánamo who has just had his release approved by a Periodic Review Board. The other men are Moath al-Alwi and Omar al-Rammah, who, unfortunately, had their ongoing imprisonment upheld by PRBs, nearly three and four years respectively since their hearings took place.


Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

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 the three years and eleven months since Donald Trump’s inauguration, there has been — until now — no good news from Guantánamo. That first piece of good news, reported by NPR on December 11, is that Said Salih Said Nashir, a 46-year old Yemeni held at Guantánamo without charge or trial for 18 years, has been unanimously approved for release from the prison by a Periodic Review Board.

Consisting of a panel of military and intelligence officials, the Periodic Review Boards were established by President Obama, to review the cases of men held at Guantánamo who had not been recommended for release by Obama’s first high-level review process, the Guantánamo Review Task Force.

The task force’s report — recommending 156 prisoners for release, 36 for prosecution, and 48 for ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial — was issued in January 2010, but by the time the PRBs took place, beginning in November 2013, just 41 of the 48 men recommended for ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial remained: two had died, and five others — high-ranking Taliban officials — were freed in a prisoner swap.

In addition, 23 of the 36 men recommended for prosecution by the task force were made eligible for the PRBs instead, largely because the trial system chosen for the Guantánamo prisoners — the military commissions — was collapsing under legal challenges, as some of the handful of convictions secured since the commissions were contentiously dragged back to life from the history books had been overturned on appeal, with judges ruling — as the government had been warned — that most of its charges, including the most common charge of providing material support for terrorism, were not in fact war crimes.

In Obama’s last three years in office, the PRBs reviewed the cases of all 64 of these prisoners, and in 38 cases recommended the men for release, with all but two of them released before Obama left office. The 26 others — accurately described as “forever prisoners” by the mainstream media — have continued to have their cases reviewed by the PRBs under Donald Trump, but, with a commander in chief who tweeted, even before he took office, that “there must be no more releases from Gitmo,” no one was recommended for release until this latest news came through, and, for the most part, the prisoners boycotted the process, having concluded that it had become meaningless.

Recommended for release

Said Salih Said Nashir (also identified as Hani Saleh Rashid Abdullah) broke with this trend, attending his PRB hearing last November, and on October 29 (in a decision not known until last week) the board, “by consensus, 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.”

The decision was long overdue — but the delay is, sadly, typical of the exaggerated sense of caution that has typified bureaucratic assessments of the prisoners’ significance throughout Guantánamo’s history.

In Nashir’s case, he should have been recommended for release after his PRB hearing in April 2016. As I reported at the time:

He is one of a group of six men seized in house raids in Karachi, Pakistan on September 11, 2002, on the same day that alleged 9/11 co-conspirator Ramzi bin al-Shibh was seized, who were then sent to CIA-run torture prisons for six weeks. They were initially regarded as recruits for a specific terrorist attack, although the government has long since walked away from this claim, as became apparent when the first of the six, Ayub Murshid Ali Salih (ISN 836), had his PRB in February, and was approved for release last month.

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

In the months that followed, all the other members of the non-existent “Karachi Six” cell were also recommended for release, and all five men were subsequently released, although they all had to be resettled in third countries, because of a long-standing prohibition against repatriating Yemeni prisoners, based on the security situation in their home country. One of the five was sent to Cape Verde, two others were sent to Oman, and the other two, unfortunately, were sent to the United Arab Emirates, where, instead of the freedom they were promised, they have been subjected instead to ongoing imprisonment and abuse in secret prisons.

Nashir, meanwhile, had his ongoing imprisonment approved in November 2016, and although a follow-up hearing was swiftly scheduled, in December 2016, the board reached the same decision in January 2017, and he then had to wait until last November for another opportunity to persuade the board that he didn’t pose a threat to the US.

At that hearing, his attorney, Charley Carpenter, who has represented Nashir since 2005, reminded the board that Hani, as he knows him, “is a relatively simple, perhaps naive, man, not given to artifice or scheming,” who finds the hearings “highly stressful,” and sought to address concerns the board had raised in 2016 about his client’s past activities, which he had clearly spent some time investigating.

His contributions, and that of his fellow attorney, Steve Truitt, evidently helped to persuade the board to approve Hani’s release, with the board members stating in their decision that they had “considered [his] low level of training and lack of leadership position in Al Qaeda or the Taliban, [his] candor regarding his activities in Afghanistan and with Al Qaeda, and [his] efforts to improve himself while in detention, to including taking numerous courses at Guantánamo.” They also noted “the ability and willingness of [his] family to support him in the event of a transfer, [his] credible plan for supporting himself in the event of a transfer, and significant improvement in [his] compliance since his last hearing in 2016.”

In conclusion, the board members recommended “the following condition[s] that relate to the detainee’s transfer: robust security assurances to include monitoring, travel restrictions and integration support, as agreed to by relevant USG departments and agencies.”

Speaking to NPR, Charley Carpenter called the decision “recognition, as we’ve always thought, that continued imprisonment of this man doesn’t help the national security of the United States.”

Carpenter added that the process to date was “a long odyssey — and it isn’t over yet,” but pointed out that it “means that a significant hurdle in his effort to go home has been cleared.” As he also explained, he is “optimistic that the incoming administration will renew efforts to move people out of the prison [at] Guantánamo.”

Nashir now joins five other men approved for release under Obama, but not released before Trump took office — two men approved for release by the PRBs, and three approved for release by the Guantánamo Review Task Force.

What needs to happen now

Whatever else may happen with Joe Biden and Guantánamo — whether, for example, he ends up with control of Congress and is prepared to spend political capital to finally close the prison — it seems pretty clear that NGOs and lawyers will exert pressure on him to release the men already approved for release, and also to recognize a need to act on what I described above as “the exaggerated sense of caution that has typified bureaucratic assessments of the prisoners’ significance throughout Guantánamo’s history.”

While Said Nashir waited nearly a year for the PRB’s decision in his case, others have waited even longer for decisions, suggesting that the board was seriously conflicted about whether to recommend release or ongoing imprisonment. Moath al-Alwi, a talented artist known for his extraordinary models of sailing ships made out of discarded materials, last had his case reviewed on March 27, 2018, and the board didn’t deliver its decision until October 29 this year — the same day as Nashir’s decision — although in al-Alwi’s case they recommended ongoing imprisonment, as they also did in the case of Omar al-Rammah, a Yemeni seized in a dubious mission in Georgia in 2002, whose hearing took place on February 9, 2017.

Even putting aside for a moment the unacceptable delay in delivering decisions in these cases (nearly three years and four years, respectively), it remains clear to those who are able to step back from Guantánamo’s institutionalized sense of caution that neither of these men has committed crimes that, in any other circumstance, would justify nearly 20 years’ imprisonment, and the same is true of other men still held, whose perceived dangerousness seems to relate primarily to their perceived attitude in custody, or to disputed assessments of their significance — men like Khalid Qassim, Asadullah Haroon Gul and Saifullah Paracha, to name just three.

I will be writing more about these and other cases in the coming months, but for now I’d like to leave you with the notion that Joe Biden needs to move swiftly to appoint an official to deal with Guantánamo, to secure the release of prisoners, and to assess how to review prisoners’ cases in a way that is more appropriate than the PRBs.

* * * * *

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 music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison 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, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from eight years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

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, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

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

Radio: My One-Hour Interview With Peter B. Collins About Closing Guantánamo, and Julian Assange’s Extradition Hearing

Andy Worthington marking 6,900 days of the existence of the prison at Guantánamo Bay and calling on President Elect Joe Biden to close it, on December 1, 2020, and a campaigner calling for an end to the proposed extradition to the US of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, outside the Old Bailey in London on October 1, 2020.


Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! This week is my latest quarterly fundraising week, and I’m trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

Last week I was honoured to be asked by the veteran talk radio host Peter B. Collins to take part in what is being billed as his ‘Last Interview’ series, as he retires from regular broadcasting after a 47-year career which began with him covering Watergate when he was just 19.

The show is available here, and here as an MP3 — and as this is my quarterly fundraising week, please be aware that I don’t receive any payment for my various TV and radio appearances, so if you can help with a donation, to enable me to keep writing about, campaigning about and talking about Guantánamo (and other human rights issues) across a variety of media, it will be very greatly appreciated!

Peter first interviewed me about Guantánamo — if I recall correctly, gazing back into the mists of time — back in 2009, and we have spoken many times since, as he largely moved from hosting talk radio shows into running his own subscriber-based podcasts.

It has always been a pleasure to talk to Peter, as he is so well-informed about all the topics he discusses with his guests, and his show will be sorely missed by those who value a consistently intelligent and challenging analysis of US politics from a non-partisan left-wing perspective — “from the Left Coast”, as Peter describes his Bay Area location.

I hope you have time to listen to the show, and that you’ll share it if you find it useful.

Peter’s description of the show is below:

Will Joe Biden release prisoners, and ultimately close Guantánamo? British journalist Andy Worthington returns to talk about America’s Caribbean gulag and his role in the British extradition hearings for Julian Assange. Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files, and has dedicated more than 15 years of his life to expose and end the use of the prison complex that has undermined America’s reputation and claims of liberty and justice. Get his latest reporting here.

We open with some speculation about Biden’s potential for action on Gitmo, since he has not taken a public position during the presidential campaign. Worthington hopes he will permit the release of 5 prisoners who were cleared during the last year of the Obama administration, and amend the laws that prevent Guantánamo prisoners from being brought to the US to at least allow for emergency medical care, especially for elderly men.

We discuss Obama’s failure to close Guantánamo — which he lamented in a recent interview with Stephen Colbert — and related issues, like Obama’s legal equivocation about the rights of “forever prisoners” who may never be charged, tried, or released. While it’s easy to blame Republicans, many Democratic leaders oppose any changes to Guantánamo policy.

And near the end, Worthington shares his observations about the recent extradition hearings for Julian Assange, where Worthington was scheduled to testify. In the end, he submitted a statement describing how WikiLeaks release of the Guantánamo files produced evidence of American war crimes.

Andy’s important work is supported by contributions, so if you are able, please chip in!

* * * * *

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 music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison 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, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from eight years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

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, The Complete Guantánamo Files, 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: Seeking $2500 (£2000) For My Work Campaigning to Get Guantánamo Closed in 2021

Andy Worthington calling for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay outside the White House on January 11, 2020, the 18th anniversary of its opening, and interviewed on RT, in what was the only US broadcast media coverage of the anniversary.


Please click on the ‘Donate’ button below to make a donation towards the $2,500 (£2,000) I’m trying to raise to support my work on Guantánamo into 2021.

 

Dear friends and supporters,

It’s 15 years since I first began researching, writing about, and campaigning to get the shameful and disgraceful prison at Guantánamo Bay closed, and every three months I ask you, if you can, to support my work. Over the last 15 years, I’ve written over 2,300 articles about Guantánamo, had a book published, set up two campaigns, co-directed a film, worked with the UN and WikiLeaks, and made numerous TV, radio and personal appearances as part of the long struggle to free men from the prison — almost all held indefinitely without charge or trial — and, ultimately, to get the prison closed.

As a freelance journalist and campaigner, I’m reliant on your support, as I have no institutional backing. After four long and hard years of hopelessness under Donald Trump, who sealed Guantánamo shut, and entombed the 40 men still held without any prospect of either justice or release, Joe Biden’s victory in last month’s Presidential Election means that hope — of some sort — has returned. It is now reasonable to hope that the release of prisoners — halted under Trump — will resume, and that steps can be taken to revive Barack Obama’s sadly failed policy of closing Guantánamo once and for all.

It may well be that positive progress will not happen without significant pressure being exerted on the Biden administration to do the right thing, but where there is hope — as there really wasn’t under Trump — there is the possibility for meaningful action, and I am looking forward to finding ways to publicize the need for Guantánamo to be closed — hopefully including some sort of film project, and a book collecting the best of my writing about Guantánamo since 2007 — and also to find ways to get you involved, in addition to the ongoing photo campaign via the Close Guantánamo campaign, which I set up in 2012 with the attorney Tom Wilner.

Pressure throughout 2021 is extremely important, because the clock is ticking towards a truly shameful occasion — the 20th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo on January 11, 2022.

If you can make a donation to support my ongoing efforts to close Guantánamo, and/or my photo-journalism, please click on the “Donate” button above to make a payment via PayPal. Any amount will be gratefully received — whether it’s $500, $100, $25 or even $10 — or the equivalent in any other currency.

You can also make a recurring payment on a monthly basis by ticking the box marked, “Make this a monthly donation,” and filling in the amount you wish to donate every month. If you are able to do so, a regular, monthly donation would be very much appreciated.

The donation page is set to dollars, because the majority of those interested in my Guantánamo work are based in the US, but PayPal will convert any amount you wish to pay from any other currency — and you don’t have to have a PayPal account to make a donation.

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 (to 164A Tressillian Road, London SE4 1XY), and if you’re not a PayPal user and want to send cash from anywhere else in the world, that’s also an option. Please note, however, that foreign checks are no longer accepted at UK banks — only electronic transfers. Do, however, contact me if you’d like to support me by paying directly into my account.

With thanks, as ever, for your support.

Andy Worthington
London
December 7, 2020

* * * * *

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 music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison 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, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from eight years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

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, The Complete Guantánamo Files, 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.

“A Big Black Stain That Provides No Benefit Whatsoever”: Lawyers Urge Joe Biden to Close Guantánamo

An unidentified prisoner in the recreation yard of Camp 6 at Guantánamo Bay, probably photographed in 2015 (Photo: AFP).


Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

One month since the Presidential Election, and with less than seven weeks until Joe Biden is inaugurated as the 46th President of the United States, it’s reassuring that the need for the prison at Guantánamo Bay to be closed is being discussed in the US media. 40 men are still held at Guantánamo — five approved for release by high-level government review process under President Obama; nine facing or having faced trials in the military commissions; and 26 others officially held indefinitely without charge or trial.

For the Associated Press — in a story entitled, “Biden’s win means some Guantánamo prisoners may be released,” which was widely picked up on and reported across the US and around the world — longtime Guantánamo watcher Ben Fox began by speaking to attorney Shelby Sullivan-Bennis, who was at  Guantánamo for her client Saifullah Paracha’s latest Periodic Review Board hearing.

Guantánamo’s oldest prisoner, Paracha, 73, whose case I have covered extensively, has diabetes and a heart condition, and is one of the 26 “forever prisoners,” held on an ongoing basis without charge or trial because the US authorities allege that they pose some kind of “threat” to national security. However, as Ben Fox explained, he “went to his latest review board hearing with a degree of hope, something that has been scarce during his 16 years locked up without charges at the US base in Cuba,” because, as he added, he “had two things going for him that he didn’t have at previous hearings: a favorable legal development and the election of Joe Biden.”

The Periodic Review Boards had been set up under President Obama, providing parole-type reviews of the cases of men regarded as too dangerous to release, even though the US authorities also conceded that there was insufficient evidence to put them on trial. 64 men had their cases reviewed under Obama, and 38 of those were recommended for release, but when Trump took office the PRBs — now under a commander in chief who had no interest whatsoever in releasing prisoners from Guantánamo — stopped recommending prisoners for release, and, in response, the prisoners began boycotting their hearings, having correctly concluded that they had become a sham process.

Under Joe Biden, it is now reasonable to expect that the PRBs will once more consider recommending prisoners for release. By phone from Guantánamo on November 19, Shelby Sullivan-Bennis said, “I am more hopeful now simply because we have an administration to look forward to that isn’t dead set on ignoring the existing review process. The simple existence of that on the horizon I think is hope for all of us.”

Ben Fox describes Guantánamo as having once been “a source of global outrage and a symbol of US excess in response to terrorism,” but it “largely faded from the headlines after President Barack Obama failed to close it, even as 40 men continue to be detained there.” That analysis rather misses the point that it also dropped off the radar because Trump, after an initial flurry of belligerent rhetoric, simply sealed it shut, entombing the 40 men still held there, and the media and the American people then largely forgot about it.

He is, however, accurate in stating that those pushing for the closure of Guantánamo “now see a window of opportunity, hoping Biden’s administration will find a way to prosecute those who can be prosecuted and release the rest, extricating the US from a detention center that costs more than $445 million per year.”

Ben Fox notes that Joe Biden’s “precise intentions for Guantánamo remain unclear,” and that Ned Price, a spokesman for the transition team, said only that Biden “supports closing it, but it would be inappropriate to discuss his plans in detail before he’s in office.”

According to Andrea Prasow, deputy Washington director at Human Rights Watch, Biden’s reticence is welcome as a contrast to President Obama’s very prominent promise to close Guantánamo, which, as Fox describes it, “has come to be seen as a strategic mistake that undercut what had been a bipartisan issue.”

As Andrea Prasow explained, “I think it’s more likely to close if it doesn’t become a huge press issue.”

Ben Fox also spoke to two other attorneys, Wells Dixon of the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, and Joseph Margulies, a professor at Cornell Law School, regarding what should happen with Guantánamo under Joe Biden, with options including Biden “authoriz[ing] more military commission plea deals,” the suggestion that some prisoners “could plead guilty in federal court by video and serve any remaining sentence in other countries, so they wouldn’t enter the United States,” and the suggestion that “Biden could defy Congress and bring prisoners to the US, arguing that the ban wouldn’t stand up in court.”

Wells Dixon said, “It’s either do something about it or they die there without charge.”

Ben Fox also notes that, beyond the five men approved for release who need freeing, advocates for the prison’s closure also want the Biden administration “to review the rest, noting that many, had they been convicted in federal court, would have served their sentences and been released at this point.”

As Joseph Margulies said, “Whittle it down to the folks who are being prosecuted and either prosecute them or don’t, but don’t just hang on to them. At great expense, we walk around with this thing around our necks. It does no good. It has no role for national security. It’s just a big black stain that provides no benefit whatsoever.”

Ben Fox also notes that, for Saifullah Paracha’s PRB, Shelby Sullivan-Bennis, speaking by teleconference, “raised his health issues, which include a heart attack in 2006,” and “also raised an important legal development”; namely, the release of his son Uzair, who was “convicted in 2005 in federal court in New York of providing support to terrorism,” but was released and sent back to Pakistan in March this year, after a judge threw out his conviction on the basis that it relied on untrustworthy witness statements, and the government decided not to seek a new trial. As I explained in an article at the time, Uzair Paracha, Victim of Tortured Terrorism Lies, is Freed from US Jail; Why Is His Father Still at Guantánamo?, the release of Uzair makes a mockery of his father’s continued imprisonment, because the case against Saifullah Paracha, which involves al-Qaeda connections that he has always denied, in large part relies on the same witnesses discredited in his son’s case.

As Ben Fox explains, if Saifullah Paracha had “been convicted in the US, his fate might have been the same” as that of his son. Instead, however, “it will likely be in Biden’s hands,” and, as Shelby Sullivan-Bennis described it, time is of the essence. If he is not released, she said, “It could be a death sentence.”

* * * * *

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 music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison 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, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from eight years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

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, The Complete Guantánamo Files, 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.