Andy Worthington's Blog, page 81

Video: On Democracy Now! Roger Waters and Andy Worthington Discuss the Countdown to Close Guantánamo and the Campaign to Free Shaker Aamer

[image error]Last Friday, during my brief US tour to campaign for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay on and around the 14th anniversary of the opening of the prison (on Jan. 11), I was invited onto Democracy Now! with my friend and supporter, the music legend Roger Waters, the chief songwriter with Pink Floyd, to discuss the Countdown to Close Guantánamo, the new campaign I’ve just launched to get Guantánamo close for good before President Obama leaves office next January, and the successful campaign to free Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo.

The video of our discussion — plus Roger playing his version of “We Shall Overcome” with 16-year old cellist Alexander Rohatyn — was the lead item on today’s show, and is now online and posted below (the song is here). Please share it widely!

The Countdown to Close Guantánamo is a new initiative, launched via the Close Guantánamo campaign that I set up in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, with the US attorney Tom Wilner (who represented the Guantánamo prisoners in their Supreme Court cases in 2004 and 2008). We set up the website and campaign to call for the prison’s closure and to educate people about why it must be closed — because it is a legal, moral and ethical abomination, and because indefinite detention without charge or trial is unacceptable — and the Countdown to Close Guantánamo is our effort to keep pressure on President Obama, in his last year in office, to get Guantánamo closed, once and for all, before his presidency ends next January.

With one year to go, we are encouraging people to print off a poster calling for President Obama to close Guantánamo, to take a photo with the poster, and to email it to us, or post it on our Facebook page or via Twitter. All the photos will go up on our website — see Celebrity Photos and Public Photos — and on social media. if you want to send a message, and if you want to identify where in the world you are, then please do so as well.

We are following up on the success of the We Stand With Shaker campaign, launched by myself and the activist Joanne MacInnes in November 2014, which featured celebrities and MPs standing with a giant inflatable figure of Shaker Aamer, and which also featured members of the public, from around the world, holding signs in solidarity with Shaker, an initiative we repeated just before Shaker’s release with the Fast For Shaker.

On Democracy Now! Roger spoke eloquently about how he became involved in the campaign to free Shaker, via a letter sent to him by Shaker’s lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, in which Shaker quoted from Roger’s Pink Floyd song, “Hey You,” and he explained how he then became involved in the We Stand With Shaker campaign. I also spoke about how We Stand With Shaker added to the pressure exerted by the long-running Save Shaker Aamer Campaign, and how MPs — from across the political spectrum — became involved, as did the media, and, in particular, the Daily Mail, helping to secure Shaker’s release last October. Roger brilliantly describes Shaker’s spirit, and many photos from the campaign are also shown, plus some rare footage of the inflatable in action.

I hope you will watch the video, and will share it, and I also hope that you will get involved in the Countdown to Close Guantánamo. We need to make sure that this is the year that Guantánamo is finally shut for good.

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

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

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

The “Countdown to Close Guantánamo” Launches: Send in Your Photos Asking President Obama to Fulfill His Promise to Close the Prison

[image error]I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012 with US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email. In the photo here, former Guantánamo prisoner Shaker Aamer supports the new “Countdown to Close Guantánamo” initiative. Please send in your own photos — see below for details!

January 20, 2016 marked the beginning of the last year of the Obama presidency, and tomorrow (January 22) marks the seventh anniversary of President Obama’s promise to close the lawless prison at Guantánamo Bay within a year, which he made on his second day in office in January 2009. To highlight the president’s last chance to fulfill his promise to close the prison, the “Close Guantánamo” campaign has launched a new initiative, the “Countdown to Close Guantánamo.”

The “Countdown to Close Guantánamo” encourages celebrities, lawmakers and concerned members of the public, from the US and around the world, to take photos of themselves holding signs counting down to the end of the Obama presidency, urging President Obama to close the prison before the inauguration of the next president on January 20, 2017.

A sign reading, “President Obama, you have one year left to close Guantánamo” can be printed off here, and it will be followed, throughout the year, by signs counting down every 50 days — “350 days” will be on February 4, “300 days” on March 25, and so on.

Please print off the poster , take a photo of yourself holding it, and send it to: info@closeguantanamo.org.

If you would like to send a message to accompany your photo, please feel free to do so. You can also let us know where you’re located if you want (village/town/city and country). We will be publishing all the photos on the website, and also on our Facebook and Twitter pages. As well as Shaker Aamer, we already have photos of music legends Roger Waters (ex-Pink Floyd) and Brian Eno, other former Guantánamo prisoners, and members of the public, and these will be published very soon.

“Close Guantánamo” was established in January 2012 by the US attorney Tom Wilner (who represented the Guantánamo prisoners in their habeas corpus cases before the US Supreme Court in 2004 and 2008) and the British journalist Andy Worthington to provide important information about Guantánamo and the men held there, and to work towards the prison’s closure.

In November 2014, Andy established the “We Stand With Shaker” campaign in the UK, with the activist Joanne MacInnes, to work towards securing the release of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, and last May Tom arranged for a delegation of British lawmakers seeking Shaker’s release to meet with Senators including John McCain and Dianne Feinstein. In October, eight years after he was first told that the US no longer wanted to hold him, Shaker Aamer was finally freed, and returned to his family in the UK.

“We Stand With Shaker” featured celebrities and lawmakers standing with a giant inflatable figure of Shaker Aamer, but we also encouraged members of the public to send in photos of themselves holding signs in support of Shaker’s release, and the success of this — and of the “Fast For Shaker” initiative launched just before Shaker’s release, when celebrities and concerned members of the public stood with signs — inspired us to encourage everyone who wants to see Guantánamo closed to get involved in this new campaign, which, we hope, will attract widespread support.

To coincide with the launch of the “Countdown to Close Guantánamo,” we are calling on President Obama to observe the following five demands regarding the closure of the prison and the 91 men still held — of whom 34 have been approved for release, 44 are awaiting Periodic Review Boards (or the results of PRBs) to establish whether they too should be approved for release, three have had their ongoing detention approved by PRBs (subject to further reviews), and just ten men are facing, or have faced trials.

1. Release all the men approved for release, as swiftly as possible

There are currently 34 men in this category. 24 were approved for release in January 2010 by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established shortly after taking office in January 2009. Ten others were approved for release in the last two years by Periodic Review Boards, established in 2013 to review the cases of all the men not already approved for release by the task force, and not facing trials.

2. Speed up the Periodic Review Boards for those still awaiting reviews

Currently, 41 men are awaiting Periodic Review Boards, but only four of those men have dates set for their reviews. Since the PRBs began, in November 2013, 23 men have had their cases reviewed, 20 decisions have been taken, and 17 of those have resulted in the men being recommended for release — a success rate of 85%. However, at the current rate, the first round of reviews will not be completed until 2020. This is unacceptable. It means that some of the men will have waited ten years for a review, even though, when President Obama set up the PRBs in an executive order in March 2011, he promised, “For each detainee, an initial review shall commence as soon as possible but no later than 1 year from the date of this order.”

3. Hold trials for the seven men awaiting trials

In order to close Guantánamo, President Obama needs to be able to bring a number of prisoners to the US mainland — those to be put on trial, which, we believe, should be in federal court rather than in a version of the discredited military commissions on US soil, and others to be held according to the laws of war, pending new legal challenges. Seven men are currently in pre-trial hearings, including the five men accused of being co-conspirators in the 9/11 attacks. Two others have accepted plea deals, but have not yet been sentenced, and one other man was given a life sentence after a military commission in 2008, a verdict he is currently challenging in the courts.

4. Consent to the entry of habeas orders

The law allows the administration to release prisoners pursuant to court order. As a result, there is no Congressional restriction on the release of men who prevail in their habeas corpus cases and receive a habeas order of release, whereas, for those men the administration wants to release without a habeas order of release, Congress has demanded that the defense secretary provides a 30-day notification prior to any release, and certifies that measures have been taken to mitigate any risk. Despite this, the administration has contested virtually every habeas case, even for men approved for release by the task force, and has taken advantage of an unduly restrictive legal regime imposed by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to do so. Most legal scholars agree that the legal regime is wrong and inconsistent with the Supreme Court’s decision in Boumediene v. Bush (2008), granting the prisoners constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights. The administration should stop taking advantage of that restrictive regime to win cases. It should stop contesting these cases. and instead should consent to the entry of habeas orders.

5. Appoint a senior official in the White House to oversee the closure of Guantánamo

As we have been saying since 2013, when President Obama appointed envoys for the closure of Guantánamo to roles in the State Department and the Pentagon, appointing someone to oversee the closure of Guantánamo in the White House would be the most constructive way for the president to try to fulfill his as yet unfulfilled seven year promise to close the prison. As the New York Times noted in an editorial in the New Year, “Pentagon officials can do a lot to thwart releases during Mr. Obama’s last year in office. He can make that less likely by empowering a senior official to set clear goals and deadlines, and order defense officials to meet them.”

*****

In addition to the demands above, we recognize that not everyone the president intends to move from Guantánamo to the US mainland, so that he can close the prison, will either be charged or released, and we accept that the government will argue that some prisoners can continue to be held in accordance with the laws of war.

We hope this number will be as small as possible, as seems likely if the PRBs continue to approve prisoners for release in significant numbers, and while we do not approve of the government’s failure to treat these men as prisoners of war for the last 14 years, we are convinced that, on the US mainland, they will have constitutional rights previously denied to them, and will be able to launch new legal challenges that are not open to them at Guantánamo.

We also acknowledge that it is not yet known how Guantánamo will be closed. We hope that Congress, which has imposed a ban on bringing any prisoner to the US mainland for any reason, will work with President Obama when a detailed plan for the prison’s closure is delivered to lawmakers, and we anticipate that any plan can only suggest that prisoners facing trials be held in federal prisons, while anyone not facing charges be held in a military facility.

We also do not yet know what President Obama will do if Congress refuses to work with him, although we were reassured when, in November, Greg Craig, who was White House Counsel in 2009, and Cliff Sloan, the envoy for Guantánamo closure in the State Department from 2013-14, wrote that, despite the Congressional ban on transfers to the US, “Under Article II of the Constitution, the president has exclusive authority to determine the facilities in which military detainees are held.”

For more about our position regarding the closure of Guantánamo, see our article from November, “Playing Politics with the Closure of Guantánamo,” and our article in the New Year publicizing a panel discussion at New America in Washington, D.C. on January 11, at which Tom and I spoke in detail about how the prison can be closed. The video of that event — also featuring the academic Karen Greenberg and moderated by New America’s Peter Bergen — is here.

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

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

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

Pentagon Blocks Prisoner Releases from Guantánamo – Including 74-Pound Yemeni Hunger Striker

As the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba begins its 15th year of operations, there has been a flurry of mainstream media interest, in part because 2016 is President Obama’s last year in office, and yet, when he was first inaugurated in January 2009, he promised to close Guantánamo within a year, an unfulfilled promise that is bound to tarnish his legacy unless he can make good on that promise in his last twelve months in office.

A major report was recently published by Reuters, which focused in particular on the ways in which the Pentagon has been obstructing the release of prisoners, as was clear from the title of the article by Charles Levinson and David Rohde: “Pentagon thwarts Obama’s effort to close Guantánamo.”

Blocking the release of 74-pound hunger striker Tariq Ba Odah

The article began with a damning revelation about Tariq Ba Odah, a Yemeni prisoner who has been on a hunger strike for seven years, and whose weight has dropped, alarmingly, to just 74 pounds (from 148 pounds on his arrival at the prison in 2002), and who is at risk of death. Ba Odah has been unsuccessful in his recent efforts to persuade a judge to order his release, but he is eligible for release anyway. Back in 2009, when President Obama established the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force to assess all the prisoners’ cases, he was one of 30 Yemenis approved for release but placed in “conditional detention,” a category invented by the task force, which recommended that those placed in this category should only be freed when it was assessed — by whom, it was not explained — that the security situation in Yemen had improved.

However, as the entire US establishment has agreed that the security situation in Yemen is so grave that no Yemenis are to be repatriated, Ba Odah can be freed if a third country can be found that is prepared to offer him a new home, and to provide security assurances that are amenable to the US, like three of the 30 Yemenis placed in “conditional detention” in 2009. One was freed in the United Arab Emirates in November, and the other two were freed just days ago in Ghana, in the first of 17 planned releases from the prison in early 2016.

Nevertheless, as Reuters explained, although State Department officials invited a foreign delegation to Guantánamo in September — from a country that was not identified publicly — “to persuade the group to take … Ba Odah to their country,” these efforts were apparently thwarted by the Pentagon. As Reuters described it, “The foreign officials told the administration they would first need to review Ba Odah’s medical records.” Because of his hunger strike, they “wanted to make sure they could care for him.”

For six weeks, however, “Pentagon officials declined to release the records, citing patient privacy concerns,” and as a result the delegation “canceled its visit.” When officials then promised to provide the medical records, the delegation traveled to Guantánamo and “appeared set to take the prisoner off US hands,” as Reuters described the officials’ comments, but the Pentagon “again withheld Ba Odah’s full medical file.”

As Reuters also explained, “Multiple members of the National Security Council have intervened to demand that the Pentagon turn over his complete medical file,” but the Pentagon “has held firm,” and continues to cite patient privacy concerns.

Tariq Ba Odah’s lawyer, Omar Farah of the Center for Constitutional Rights, lambasted the Pentagon for its “baseless” claims. “Invoking privacy concerns is a shameless, transparent excuse to mask [Pentagon] intransigence,” he said, adding, “Mr. Ba Odah has provided his full, informed consent to the release of his medical records.”

A pattern of obstruction

The Reuters article proceeded to explain that, through “interviews with multiple current and former administration officials involved in the effort to close Guantánamo,” the struggle over Ba Odah’s medical records “was part of a pattern.” Since Obama became president seven years ago, the officials said, “Pentagon officials have been throwing up bureaucratic obstacles to thwart [his] plan to close Guantánamo.”

James Dobbins, the State Department special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan from 2013 to 2014, told Reuters that “[n]egotiating prisoner releases with the Pentagon was like ‘punching a pillow.'” As he put it, DoD officials “would come to a meeting, they would not make a counter-argument,” but then “nothing would happen.” He explained that the Pentagon’s obstruction “resulted in four Afghan detainees spending an additional four years in Guantánamo after being approved for transfer.”

Officials also explained that the transfers of six prisoners to Uruguay and five to Kazakhstan (in December 2014) and of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, and Ahmed Ould Abdel Aziz, a Mauritanian (in October 2015), “were delayed for months or years by Pentagon resistance or inaction.”

In order to slow down the release of prisoners, Pentagon officials “have refused to provide photographs, complete medical records and other basic documentation to foreign governments willing to take” prisoners, according to the officials, who added that they “have made it increasingly difficult for foreign delegations to visit Guantánamo,” have “limited the time foreign officials can interview” prisoners and have “barred delegations from spending the night at Guantánamo.”

As Reuters noted, this obstruction has undoubtedly contributed significantly to the thwarting of President Obama’s intention to close Guantánamo, announced on the campaign trail in 2008, and promised on his second day in office. When he took office, there were 242 men at Guantánamo, “down from a peak of about 680 in 2003,” but today there are still 103 men held, and 44 of those, like Tariq Ba Odah, have been approved for release — 35 since 2009, and nine in the last two years via a new review process, the Periodic Review Boards.

Pentagon officials “denied any intentional effort to slow transfers,” and a White House spokesman “denied discord with the Pentagon,” but these positions were clearly at odds with the accounts given by the officials who spoke to Reuters for their report.

Tellingly, former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said in an interview that it was “natural for the Pentagon to be cautious on transfers that could result in detainees rejoining the fight against US forces,” as Reuters put it. “Look at where most of the casualties have come from — it’s the military,” he said.

The officials also confirmed that it was the Pentagon’s “slow pace in approving transfers” that “was a factor in President Obama’s decision to remove Hagel in February” last year. However, “amid continuing Pentagon delays,” his replacement, Ashton Carter, found himself “upbraided” by President Obama in a one-on-one meeting in September. Since then, as Reuters noted, “the Pentagon has been more cooperative” — hence the 17 men released — or scheduled to be released — January.

Nevertheless, the officials who spoke to Reuters emphasized that military officials “continue to make transfers more difficult and protracted than necessary,” and General John F. Kelly, the head of US Southern Command, which includes Guantánamo, was singled out for particular criticism. As Reuters described it, “They said that Kelly, whose son was killed fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, opposes the president’s policy of closing Guantanamo, and that he and his command have created obstacles for visiting delegations.”

Kelly denied the claims, but this is not the first time he has faced criticism. As Spencer Ackerman noted for the Guardian in August, and as I wrote about here, in an article entitled, “Ignoring President Obama, the Pentagon Blocks Shaker Aamer’s Release from Guantánamo,” Ackerman wrote, “The well of opposition to the transfers does not end with the defense secretary. Carter is supported by the staff of the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, as well as the powerful General John Kelly, head of US southern command, which oversees Guantánamo.”

How President Obama failed to keep his promise to close Guantánamo

In a handy re-cap of Obama’s presidency vis-à-vis Guantánamo, Reuters explained how, on his second day in office, Obama “signed an executive order mandating an immediate review of all 242 detainees then held in Guantánamo and requiring the closure of the detention center. A year later, a task force that included the Defense Department and US intelligence agencies unanimously concluded that 156 detainees were low enough security threats to be transferred to foreign countries.”

In the meantime, however, as Reuters described it, members of Congress “seized on reports that transferred detainees had returned to the fight to demand that Guantánamo remain open.” I would add that some lawmakers wanted — and still want — to have somewhere they can hold people indefinitely without charge or trial, and without having to explain themselves at all, and that this is at least as significant an explanation for the prison remaining open as the supposed — and exaggerated — recidivism issues, which I have written about repeatedly over the years, most recently here.

Reuters cited one example of a recidivist, “Abdul Qayum Zakir, also known as ‘Mullah Zakir,’ who hid his identity from Guantánamo interrogators and became the Taliban’s top military commander after his release.” He was then “responsible for hundreds of American deaths after returning to Afghanistan,” according to David Sedney, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia from 2009 to 2013. However, it is important to note that he — and other dangerous Afghans released — would not have been freed if the Pentagon had sought advice from its allies in Afghanistan, which, alarmingly, it never did.

Reuters then explained how, in late 2010, “Congress passed a law requiring the secretary of defense to personally certify to Congress that a released detainee ‘cannot engage or re-engage in any terrorist activity,'” an onerous imposition that meant that releases from the prison “slowed to a trickle.” Between January 2011 and August 2013, just five prisoners were freed “under an exception to the new law that allowed court-ordered releases to bypass the newly legislated requirements,” even though 86 men at the time had been approved for release by the task force. By January 2013, as Reuters described it, “the outlook was so bleak that the State Department shuttered the office tasked with handling the closure of Guantánamo” — although it must also be noted that throughout this period,president Obama sat on his hands, unwilling to spend political capital bypassing Congress, even though a waiver in the legislation allowed him to do so.

Explaining more about this period, Michael Williams, the former State Department deputy envoy for closing Guantánamo, said that, throughout these years, William Lietzau, deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee policy, “was not supportive of a Guantánamo closure policy” and was “an obstacle to transfers inside the Pentagon.”

Lietzau left his job in 2013, and “denied obstructing transfers,” telling Reuters that, “in many cases, delays resulted from his concerns about the ability of foreign countries to monitor transferred detainees.” As he asked “You have guys who are cleared for transfer, but there is no way to get the assurances, so what do you do then?” The answer, it must be said, should have been to not make too many demands on the prisoners’ home countries or host countries, because, after all, these were — and are — men approved for release by high-level, inter-agency review processes, whose release is only approved because it is regarded that they do not pose a sufficient threat to continue holding. However, because of the semi-permanent state of hysteria about Guantánamo, emanating from those who want it kept open, getting out of the prison has become like getting out of an ever-growing series of airlocks — one door opens, only to reveal another that is closed.

In May 2013, responding to international criticism in response to a prison-wide hunger strike — from men who despaired at ever being released, or given anything resembling justice — President Obama promised to resume releasing prisoners; or, as Reuters put it, perhaps rather rather too grandly, “unveiled a new push to close the prison.” It was certainly true that he “appointed two new envoys, one at the Pentagon and one at the State Department, to oversee the prison’s closure,” and it is fair, I think, to say that “one of their top priorities was to transfer as many prisoners as possible to countries willing to take them.” However, as both myself and the US attorney Tom Wilner, with whom I founded the “Close Guantánamo” campaign in 2012, have pointed out, if he really meant business he would have appointed someone in the White House to deal with Guantánamo’s closure.

Delays in the release of four insignificant Afghans

It was during this timeframe, as Reuters described it, that the State Department “proposed that four low-risk Afghan detainees be transferred back to Afghanistan” — Khi Ali Gul, Shawali Khan, Abdul Ghani and Mohammed Zahir, who “ranged in age from their early 40s to their early 60s.” As Reuters put it, “All had been at Guantánamo for seven years but never formally charged with a crime, and all had been cleared for release by the interagency review board years earlier.”

In Gul’s case, Reuters noted, “State Department officials argued that he was almost certainly innocent.” James Dobbins, the State Department special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan from 2013 to 2014, said, “The consensus was that he had never had any contact with the insurgency or al Qaeda.” Moreover — and as I explained in my profiling of the four men prior to their release and afterwards — none of the four constituted any kind of a threat. As Dobbins put it eloquently and powerfully, “I can say with confidence we have captured, detained and released thousands of people who have done worse things than these four.”

This was acknowledged in discussions between the Taliban and the US in 2012 regarding a proposed prisoner swap for captured US soldier Bowe Bergdahl. As Reuters described it, “Taliban negotiators said they didn’t want the four men because the four weren’t senior Taliban members.” As Reuters also noted, “Afterwards, State Department officials began referring to them as the ‘JV four’ or ‘Junior Varsity four,’ for their seeming lack of importance to Taliban fighters.”

In summer 2013, the four Afghans were added to a list of prisoners prioritized for release, but DoD officials “resisted.” Reuters reported that, at a meeting in the Pentagon, an unnamed “mid-level Defense Department official” said that transferring the four “might be the president’s priority, but it’s not the Pentagon’s priority or the priority of the people in this building.”

Supported by the White House, however, the State Department continued making plans for the men’s release. By spring 2014, they “were about to be sent home,” but then Gen. Joseph Dunford, who, at the time, was the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, “sent a memo to the State Department warning that the release of the four detainees would endanger his troops in Afghanistan.”

With an incompetence that is all too frequent when it comes to Guantánamo, it was not until the memo reached the State Department that Gen. Dunford’s mistake was recognized. State Department officials “realized he was citing intelligence about a different group of Afghans who were more senior Taliban” — the men eventually swapped for Bergdahl in May 2014. They “pointed out the error, but it was too late. The transfer was halted.”

David Sedney, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia from 2009 to 2013, told Reuters “there was broad resistance within the Pentagon to releasing the four Afghans because between 30 and 50 percent of the roughly 200 Afghan detainees repatriated by the Bush administration had rejoined the fight.” By way of explanation, Sedney added, “The government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai often freed detainees as soon as they returned home.” These figures, however, are unsubstantiated, and, I believe, are quite seriously exaggerated. In addition, President Karzai often released men because there was clearly no case against them, and, had they been held at Bagram instead of Guantánamo, where largely random Afghans were only sent until November 2003, they would have been released many years before.

Finally, on December 20, 2014, the four were flown back to Afghanistan, “nearly five years after they were cleared for release,” as Reuters put it, adding, “Since then, none have returned to the fight, according to US intelligence officials.”

Reuters sought interviews with the men, but Khi Ali Gul “declined a request for an interview,” However, Mohammed Zahir, who is now in his early 60s and was “one of the three Afghans considered low-level Taliban,” according to the report, “works as a guard at a school in Kabul,” and he agreed to speak. He told Reuters that “the primary evidence against him — Taliban documents found in his home — were from his work as an administrator in the Intelligence Ministry when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan.”

He added a poignant anecdote, explaining that, when US soldiers flew home with him, one “spoke with him briefly before handing him over to Afghan officials,” as Reuters put it. In Zahir’s words: “The American soldier tapped on my shoulder and said, ‘I am sorry.’ I don’t know why they kept me there for 13 long years without proving my guilt or crime.”

Delays in the release of five men to Kazakhstan

Reuters’ report also explained how “Pentagon obstacles delayed and nearly derailed other transfers.” In early 2014, Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev “offered to take as many as eight Guantánamo detainees.” As Reuters described it, “eager for a counterweight to an increasingly assertive Russia,” he “hoped to strengthen his relationship with Washington.”

Kazakh officials then “asked to send a delegation to Guantánamo for three days to videotape interviews with prisoners before deciding which ones to accept,” a perfectly reasonable request. As was also noted, Kazakh psychologists and intelligence experts “wanted to study the interviews for signs of deception.”

However, according to “multiple current and former administration officials,” Pentagon officials “forbade the delegation to videotape the interviews, nixed plans for a multi-day visit, ordered detainee interviews shortened, and put new restrictive classifications on documents” requested by the Kazakh authorities.

Senior commanders in Joint Task Force Guantánamo, which runs the prison, said the visiting officials “would be allowed one hour with each prisoner and one day at the detention centre.” Reuters noted that “[a]llowing taped interviews had been common practice with foreign delegations,” but with the Kazakh delegation Tthe Pentagon “banned them on the grounds that the practice would violate the Geneva Conventions’ prohibition on using prisoners of war for ‘public curiosity,'” which was not only obstructive, but also both pompous and hypocritical, considering the extent to which the prisoners’ rights have generally been ignored over the last 14 years.

Reuters added that, after “two weeks of failed talks,” the Kazakh authorities “said they were canceling the visit and wouldn’t take any detainees,” at which point an “alarmed White House intervened, ordering the Pentagon to compromise,” as officials described it.

The compromise allowed the delegation “two hours with each detainee,” and, in addition, they “would be allowed to stay one night at Guantánamo.” They “would not be allowed to bring recording equipment with them,” but the military “agreed to videotape the interviews and provide [them] with copies of the tapes.”

The visit went ahead, but  six weeks later the Kazakh authorities hadn’t received the videos. An official said, “They were calling us every couple of days, saying, ‘Where are the videos?'”

Again, the White House intervened, ordering the Pentagon to hand over the videos, but although the Pentagon complied, and sent the videos to the State Department, they had been classified “Secret/ NOFORN,” meaning that it was “illegal to share the material with a foreign country.” Obama’s officials complained again, and the videos were then reclassified. However, when the Kazakh authorities received them, they rang to complain. “The video,” as Reuters put it, “had been processed to look as if it had been shot through dimpled glass,” and because they “wanted to scrutinize detainees’ body language and facial expressions,” it was “useless.”

White House officials then intervened for a third time to demand a compromise, and finally, last December, almost a year after the process of transferring the men out of Guantánamo began, the five men were flown to Kazakhstan.

Other delays — and obstruction in the release of Shaker Aamer

Reuters also explained how, this fall, a foreign government “was invited to Guantánamo to interview eight detainees for possible transfer, ” noting, as described above, that this is “a process that can take several days.” However, according to Obama administration officials, General Kelly “instituted a new policy, suddenly banning the delegation from spending the night” at the prison. As a result, the delegation, from an unidentified country, “was forced to commute 90 minutes by plane each morning and afternoon from Miami, adding tens of thousands of dollars in government plane bills to US taxpayers.”

More disturbing, however, is the blunt conclusion to this anecdote, like the one about Tariq Ba Odah at the start of this article. “In December,” Reuters wrote, “the country decided to take no detainees.”

It was also noted that, during a visit in the fall by another foreign delegation, “Kelly’s command further cut interview times with detainees, to as little as 45 minutes each, making it harder for foreign officials to assess potential transfers.”

The final accounts concern Shaker Aamer, for whose release I have spent many years campaigning, including, from November 2014, through the We Stand With Shaker campaign that I established with the activist Joanne MacInnes, which used a giant inflatable figure of Shaker — and extensive support from celebrities and MPs — to raise awareness of, and outrage about his continued imprisonment, despite the face that he was approved for release in 2007 and 2009. He was finally freed on October 30 last year.

After noting that, in private meetings, “some Pentagon officials have been dismissive of Obama’s policy” — of releasing prisoners and moving towards closing the prison — Reuters reported that, in January last year, after the president “publicly pledged” to “respond to a five-year-old British request for the repatriation” of  Shaker Aamer, “a senior Pentagon official mocked that vow at an interagency meeting on transfers.”

According to an administration official who was present at the meeting, the Pentagon official said, “We will prioritize him — right at the back of the line where he belongs,” to which a senior National Security Council official replied, “That’s not what the president meant.”

For many years, I have explained that one of the many grave injustices of Guantánamo is that, because the release of any prisoner is a political process, it is far too easy to continue holding anyone perceived as troublesome, like Shaker Aamer, who speaks with extraordinary eloquence about the torture and injustice of the “war on terror,” by shunting them to the back of the queue of prisoners approved for release.

I didn’t expect to have my thoughts so perfectly echoed by a senior Pentagon official, but in proving me right, this official has certainly confirmed that justice has no place in Guantánamo, where, instead, those held are political prisoners, or, as Shaker himself describes them, hostages.

Note: See here for a discussion of Reuters’ report, with Charles Levinson and Omar Farah, on Democracy Now! and also check out this New York Times editorial, in which the editors note, “Pentagon officials can do a lot to thwart releases during Mr. Obama’s last year in office. He can make that less likely by empowering a senior official to set clear goals and deadlines, and order defense officials to meet them.” As Tom Wilner and I said in 2013, appointing someone to oversee the closure of Guantánamo in the White House would be the most constructive way for the president to try to fulfill his as yet unfulfilled seven year promise to close the prison.

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

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

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

Video: Andy Worthington Discusses the Struggle to Free Shaker Aamer from Guantánamo, Plays “Song for Shaker Aamer” at Revolution Books, NYC

My short US tour to call for the closure of the lawless prison at Guantánamo Bay is almost over, but it has been a worthwhile visit, with events in Florida, Washington D.C. and New York City. On Thursday, I spoke for the first time at Revolution Books‘ new home in Harlem, about the successful campaign to free Shaker Aamer from Guantánamo, an immensely enjoyable evening in which a special guest in the audience was music legend Roger Waters, a supporter of my work and of the campaign to free Shaker for many years. The day after, Roger and I recorded a show for Democracy Now! which will be aired this week.

For my talk at Revolution Books, I was introduced by Debra Sweet, the national director of the World Can’t Wait, who has been organizing my annual visits on and around the anniversary of the opening of the prison (on January 11) every year since January 2011 — and who first organized visits for me (but not in January), in 2009 and 2010.

The video of the event, via Vimeo, is below. My talk begins at 10:09, and over the next 40 minutes I spoke about the campaign to free Shaker, through the work of the We Stand With Shaker campaign I launched in November 2014 with the activist Joanne MacInnes, the long-running Save Shaker Aamer Campaign, and the crucial support of the media and of MPs, led, initially, by John McDonnell, now the Shadow Chancellor, and then with great cross-party support from MPs including the Conservatives David Davis and Andrew Mitchell, and Jeremy Corbyn, now the leader of the Labour Party.

The video is below, and I hope you have time to watch it, and will share it if you find it useful.

Close Guantanamo NOW: Andy Worthington Speaks on the Battle to Free Shaker Aamer from Revolution Books on Vimeo.

I also spoke about the unreliability of the main allegations against Shaker — in particular, from torture victim Abu Zubaydah and from Yasim Basardah, a Yemeni, now freed, who is well-known as a profoundly unreliable witness. A third unreliable witness was a Saudi, Abdul Hakim Bukhari, who was imprisoned as a spy by the Taliban and, absurdly, sent to Guantánamo — although in my talk, I mistakenly suggested that the false claims made by Bukhari were made by Abdul Rahim al-Ginco (aka Janko), a young Syrian who, like Bukhari, was one of at least eight people freed by the US from Taliban jails only to be sent to Guantánamo.

I also spoke about meeting Shaker after his release, confirming how everything that was said about him — about his charisma, his eloquence and his intelligence — is true. Shaker is also dedicated to resisting and challenging injustice, and speaks of justice constantly. On meeting him, it is obvious that he must have functioned as the US’s suppressed conscience at Guantánamo, loudly and persistently reminding them of the importance of the laws and treaties governing the treatment of prisoners that had been jettisoned by the Bush administration after 9/11.

At the end of my talk, at 49:00, I sang “Song for Shaker Aamer,” the song I wrote about Shaker, and recorded with my band The Four Fathers. The recorded version was featured in the campaign video for We Stand With Shaker, but the version I played, on an acoustic guitar I’d borrowed for the event, has updated lyrics to reflect Shaker’s release.

You can listen to the recorded version here, where you can also buy it as download, for 60p ($0.93), although you are welcome to pay more. It is the opening song on “Love and War”, The Four Fathers’ first album, which is also available to download, or as a CD, which can be posted anywhere in the world.

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

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

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

Video: Will Guantánamo Ever Close? Andy Worthington, Karen Greenberg and Tom Wilner at New America on Jan. 11

Monday was the 14th anniversary of the opening of the dreadful, unforgivable “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where men are held without charge or trial, in defiance of all the laws and treaties that the US swore to uphold until the 9/11 attacks derailed those beliefs — or allowed the country’s leaders to deliberately jettison them in favor of something far more brutal and unaccountable.

On Monday, I attended the annual protest outside the White House organized by over a dozen rights groups, as the co-founder and co-director of the We Stand With Shaker campaign, which played a part in securing the release from Guantánamo in October of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, and as the co-founder of Close Guantánamo, a campaign I established in 2012 with the attorney Tom Wilner (who fought for the prisoners’ habeas corpus rights in the Supreme Court in 2004 and 2008). The video of my speech outside the White House is here.

That afternoon, just around the corner from the White House, at New America (formerly the New America Foundation), Tom Wilner and I were joined by the academic Karen Greenberg for a panel discussion, Guantánamo Bay: Year 14, moderated by New America’s Peter Bergen, author, journalist and an old college friend of mine, which is posted below via Ustream. I’ll also post a YouTube link when it becomes available.

Broadcast live streaming video on Ustream

This was a genuine effort by all of us to address all the issues facing President Obama, the US Congress, the courts and the nation as we count down to the end of the Obama presidency, and the president’s last chance to fulfill the promise to close Guantánamo that he made on his second day in office in January 2009, when he promised to close the prison within a year. Ferocious and unprincipled opposition in Congress, and in parts of his administration (especially the Pentagon and no doubt the CIA) have made this a more uphill struggle than it should have been, although Obama himself failed to help his cause by refusing to spend political capital sidestepping Congressional efforts to prevent him from releasing prisoners, even though a waiver in the legislation allowed him to do so.

I don’t want to go into too much detail about what Karen, Tom and I talked about, what Peter asked us, and what the audience members asked us, as I hope you will watch the whole event. As I have noted above, we genuinely tried to cover all the bases — the sordid history of the prison, the depths of lawlessness it has involved, the current state of affairs, with 34 men approved for release, just ten facing or having faced trials, and 49 risibly, insultingly described as “too dangerous to release,” even though it is acknowledged that insufficient evidence exists to justify this description — or to put them on trial; in other words, that it is not evidence at all, but unreliable information derived through interrogations involving torture, other forms of abuse, or the bribery of prisoners.

My main point is that an ongoing process of reviewing these men’s alleged dangerousness — via Periodic Review Boards — needs to speed up considerably this year if President Obama is to have a chance of fulfilling his promise, and I hope you agree. In the next few days, I’ll be announcing a new initiative via Close Guantánamo — the Countdown to Close Guantánamo — that you can get involved with if, like me, you recognize that Guantánamo is a legal, moral and ethical abomination, and that it is really hugely important to insist that it is closed for good before the end of Obama’s presidency.

To be kept completely up-to-date on this and more, please join us at Close Guantánamo if you haven’t already. I promise to try not to disappoint you as we work on finding new methods to highlight the need to close Guantánamo and on finding creative ways of expressing that demand throughout 2016.

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

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

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

Fayiz Al-Kandari is Free! The Last Kuwaiti in Guantánamo Is Released, Plus a Saudi: Now 103 Men Remain

For Fayiz al-Kandari, the last Kuwaiti held at Guantánamo, who turned 40 at the prison in 2015, there is finally justice, as he was released on Friday January 10 and sent back home, over 14 years after he was first seized in Afghanistan, where, he always maintained, he had traveled to engage in humanitarian aid work.

Fayiz’s release, and that of another prisoner, a Saudi, appears to provide a demonstration of President Obama’s renewed commitment to close Guantánamo in his last year in office, as four men have now been freed in the last few days, and 13 more releases are expected soon. Without a doubt, it also provides further vindication that the Periodic Review Board process at Guantánamo — established in 2013 to review the cases of all the prisoners not already approved for release or facing trials — is working. in the cases of both men, they were recommended for continued imprisonment after PRBs, but were then reviewed again, when they both worked harder to convince the boards that they pose no threat and want only to rebuild their lives in peace — as, it should be noted, do most of the 103 men still held.

Of the 18 cases so far decided in PRBs, 15 have ended with recommendation for the release of the prisoners — a great result when all were previously regarded as “too dangerous to release” — although the process is moving far too slowly. Those 18 cases took over two years, and 42 other men are awaiting reviews, which will not be completed until 2020 at the current pace. If President Obama is serious about closing Guantánamo, he needs to find a way to speed up the process considerably in his last 12 months in office.

The men whose cases are being reviewed were described as “too dangerous to release” by a high-level review process, the Guantánamo Review Task Force, that President Obama established shortly after taking office in 2009. The task force acknowledged that insufficient evidence existed to put them on trial, but failed to mention that it was not, therefore, evidence, but a collection of hearsay and unsubstantiated allegations, some produced through torture or other forms of abuse.

These problems are clear in the case of Fayiz al-Kandari. Absurdly, even though he was only in Afghanistan for about a month before the 9/11 attacks, the US claimed that in that time he “provided instruction to al-Qaeda members and trainees,” “served as an adviser to Osama bin Laden,” and “produced recruitment audio and video tapes which encouraged membership in al-Qaeda and participation in jihad.” When told all this at a farcical review in 2005, he said, “At the end of this exciting story and after all these various accusations, when I spent most of my time alongside bin Laden as his advisor and his religious leader … All this happened in a period of three months, which is the period of time I stayed in Afghanistan? I ask, are these accusations against Fa[y]iz or against Superman?”

Back in 2009, his military defense lawyer Barry Wingard, assigned to him when he was briefly put forward for a military commission trial in 2008 on the basis of the ridiculous claims outlined above, reported in an op-ed in the Washington Post about how he and Fayiz regularly spoke about the lack of justice at Guantánamo:

Each time I travel to Guantánamo Bay to visit Fayiz, his first question is, “Have you found justice for me today?” This leads to an awkward hesitation. “Unfortunately, Fayiz,” I tell him, “I have no justice today.”

I have followed Fayiz’s story closely for many years. In September 2007, I interviewed the US attorney Tom Wilner for “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” a documentary film I co-directed with filmmaker Polly Nash. Tom had represented all 12 Kuwaiti prisoners in the early days of Guantánamo’s existence, when lawyers first fought for, and eventually won the right to visit Guantánamo to meet prisoners and submit habeas corpus petitions on their behalf. He had got to know Fayiz, and explained how he was a “great guy” who, from childhood, had given half of his allowance to help  the poor and needy. His visit to Afghanistan, it seemed clear, was a continuation of this devotion to charitable work.

I asked Tom for his thoughts on Fayiz’s release, and he sent me the following by email:

I am thrilled that Fayiz has finally been released from Guantánamo after almost 14 years. He should never have been there in the first place. He was never charged with any crime, and the only allegations ever made against him came from other detainees who were rewarded for making those allegations and later recanted them or were well known for  making false accusations against others.

I represented Fayiz for more than two and a half years before I finally got to meet him in January 2005 after we had won the first case before the Supreme Court. We connected immediately. Fayiz is extremely bright, warm and charismatic, with a wonderful smile and an ebullient sense of humor. He is also a bit of a poet and philosopher with a passion for justice and compassion for those less fortunate. He is exactly the type of person we want on our side.

In October 2009, I wrote a major profile of Fayiz for Truthout, based in part on questions that Barry Wingard had asked him on my behalf, and in February 2012, I traveled to Kuwait, in a trip organised by Barry, where I also met with Tom Wilner and appeared in a TV discussion with him about Fayiz and Fawzi al-Odah, the other Kuwaiti held at the time, who was freed in November 2014 (after being approved for release by a PRB). I also met and was welcomed by his family, and on meeting them it became even more apparent to me that the US had no case against him.

In an email, Barry Wingard described how Fayiz’s release “is yet another example of the Orwellian reality that GTMO represents,” adding, “If a government is permitted to hold others without charge for a decade and a half, commit torture, and claim they are fighting a word, ‘terror,’ rest assured you are not safe.”

He added:

Fayiz returns to Kuwait a survivor, he has survived beatings, psychological and mental torment, and a number of hunger of strikes that in all likelihood caused internal damage. In response, Fayiz would say: “Never give them the power by doing what they want. What they want is you to hate them. If you hate them, they are in your head. Forgive them and show them kindness, in so doing the hatred weighs them down. In time, that weight becomes too much and they will look to you as the example.”

Wingard also stated, “We should never forget the legacy of GTMO, and the effect of mobs making irrational decisions. Of the 779 men held at GTMO, fewer than 15 will be given something that resembles a trial. Over 650 men are guilty of nothing. What makes you feel secure that you or a family member will not be next?”

The release of Muhammad al-Shumrani

On January 11, the 14th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, Muhammad al-Shumrani, a Saudi, who also turned 40 in 2015, was released. A Saudi jet came to pick him up, as has happened with all the Saudis released from the prison, to begin his rehabilitation. On September 11, when he was recommended for release, the board “acknowledged the detainee’s past terrorist-related activities and connections but determined [his] threat can be adequately mitigated by Saudi Arabia.” Specifically, they had “confidence in the efficacy of the Saudi rehabilitation program and Saudi Arabia’s ability to monitor the detainee after completion of the program,” and they also “found the detainee credible on his desire to participate in the program.’”

They also noted his “strong desire to engage in scholarly religious discussion and receive guidance from clerics at the rehabilitation centre about Islam and his willingness to submit to the authority of the Saudi government.” The board also noted that al-Shumrani had been “candid with the board, including regarding his presence on the battlefield and world view, and articulated a commitment to fulfilling his role within his family over taking up arms or continuing to engage in jihad.”

In an email to the Miami Herald, his lawyer, Martha Rayner, said that he “looks forward to participating in the Saudi rehabilitation program and reuniting with his family.” The newspaper also picked up on a comment made during his review in August by his personal representatives (military personnel appointed to represent him), who noted that he had “slipped quietly into middle age” during his 13 years at Guantánamo — as, of course, have so many of the the men still held, who pose a threat only in the minds of easily scared lawmakers and cynical representatives of the media.

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

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

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

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009 (out of the 532 released by President Bush), and the 132 prisoners released from February 2009 to early January 2016 (by President Obama), whose stories are covered in more detail than is available anywhere else –- either in print or on the internet –- although many of them, of course, are also covered in The Guantánamo Files, and for the stories of the other 390 prisoners released by President Bush, see my archive of articles based on the classified military files released by WikiLeaks in 2011: June 2007 –- 2 Tunisians, 4 Yemenis (here, here and here); July 2007 –- 16 Saudis; August 2007 –- 1 Bahraini, 5 Afghans; September 2007 –- 16 Saudis; 1 Mauritanian; 1 Libyan, 1 Yemeni, 6 Afghans; November 2007 –- 3 Jordanians, 8 Afghans; 14 Saudis; December 2007 –- 2 Sudanese; 13 Afghans (here and here); 3 British residents; 10 Saudis; May 2008 –- 3 Sudanese, 1 Moroccan, 5 Afghans (here, here and here); July 2008 –- 2 Algerians; 1 Qatari, 1 United Arab Emirati, 1 Afghan; August 2008 –- 2 Algerians; September 2008 –- 1 Pakistani, 2 Afghans (here and here); 1 Sudanese, 1 Algerian; November 2008 –- 1 Kazakh, 1 Somali, 1 Tajik; 2 Algerians; 1 Yemeni (Salim Hamdan), repatriated to serve out the last month of his sentence; December 2008 –- 3 Bosnian Algerians; January 2009 –- 1 Afghan, 1 Algerian, 4 Iraqis; February 2009 — 1 British resident (Binyam Mohamed); May 2009 —1 Bosnian Algerian (Lakhdar Boumediene); June 2009 — 1 Chadian (Mohammed El-Gharani); 4 Uighurs to Bermuda; 1 Iraqi; 3 Saudis (here and here); August 2009 — 1 Afghan (Mohamed Jawad); 2 Syrians to Portugal; September 2009 — 1 Yemeni; 2 Uzbeks to Ireland (here and here); October 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti, 1 prisoner of undisclosed nationality to Belgium; 6 Uighurs to Palau; November 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian to France, 1 unidentified Palestinian to Hungary, 2 Tunisians to Italian custody; December 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti (Fouad al-Rabiah); 2 Somalis; 4 Afghans; 6 Yemenis; January 2010 — 2 Algerians, 1 Uzbek to Switzerland; 1 Egyptian, 1 Azerbaijani and 1 Tunisian to Slovakia; February 2010 — 1 Egyptian, 1 Libyan, 1 Tunisian to Albania; 1 Palestinian to Spain; March 2010 — 1 Libyan, 2 unidentified prisoners to Georgia, 2 Uighurs to Switzerland; May 2010 — 1 Syrian to Bulgaria, 1 Yemeni to Spain; July 2010 — 1 Yemeni (Mohammed Hassan Odaini); 1 Algerian; 1 Syrian to Cape Verde, 1 Uzbek to Latvia, 1 unidentified Afghan to Spain; September 2010 — 1 Palestinian, 1 Syrian to Germany; January 2011 — 1 Algerian; April 2012 — 2 Uighurs to El Salvador; July 2012 — 1 Sudanese; September 2012 — 1 Canadian (Omar Khadr) to ongoing imprisonment in Canada; August 2013 — 2 Algerians; December 2013 — 2 Algerians; 2 Saudis; 2 Sudanese; 3 Uighurs to Slovakia; March 2014 — 1 Algerian (Ahmed Belbacha); May 2014 — 5 Afghans to Qatar (in a prisoner swap for US PoW Bowe Bergdahl); November 2014 — 1 Kuwaiti (Fawzi al-Odah); 3 Yemenis to Georgia, 1 Yemeni and 1 Tunisian to Slovakia, and 1 Saudi; December 2014 — 4 Syrians, a Palestinian and a Tunisian to Uruguay; 4 Afghans; 2 Tunisians and 3 Yemenis to Kazakhstan; January 2015 — 4 Yemenis to Oman, 1 Yemeni to Estonia; June 2015 — 6 Yemenis to Oman; September 2015 — 1 Moroccan and 1 Saudi; October 2015 — 1 Mauritanian and 1 British resident (Shaker Aamer); November 2015 — 5 Yemenis to the United Arab Emirates; January 2016 — 2 Yemenis to Ghana.

Videos: On 14th Anniversary of Opening of Guantánamo, Andy Worthington Speaks Outside the White House, Shaker Aamer Speaks in London

Yesterday was the 14th anniversary of the opening of the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, and I was honored to attend a powerful protest outside the White House, featuring representatives of over a dozen rights groups, and with prominent roles played by the activists of Witness Against Torture. I had spent much of the previous day at the church where many dozens of them are staying, engaged in a 10-day fast and daily actions across the capital aimed at raising awareness of the injustice of Guantánamo and the plight of the men held there, and, in the evening, had joined them and representatives of Code Pink, the Center for Constitutional Rights and other organizations at “Visions of Homecoming: Close Guantánamo!”

This was an event celebrating the groups’ visit to Cuba in November, where I also spoke about We Stand With Shaker (the campaign I co-founded in November 2014, with the activist Joanne MacInnes, to call for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison) and played “Song for Shaker Aamer,” the song I wrote that, with my band The Four Fathers, featured in the We Stand With Shaker campaign video (and on our album “Love and War“). Other performances on the night came from The Peace Poets, spoken word artists from the Bronx who I always find wonderfully uplifting, combining sharp rhymes and tough themes with an extraordinary humanity. I hope to post videos of performances from the evening in the near future — including my own!

At yesterday’s rally, I spoke about the success of the campaign to release Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, from the prison, but stressed how hard it had been to get just one man freed to America’s closest ally, involving the concerted efforts of many dozens of MPs and a range newspapers from across the political spectrum, campaigners and members of the general public, and even a request for action from David Cameron to Barack Obama.

The video of  me talking outside the White House, filmed by Justin Norman of Witness Against Torture, is below, via YouTube. It is also on Facebook.

I also brought with me the giant inflatable figure of Shaker Aamer that was at the heart of the We Stand With Shaker campaign, and that helped to raise awareness of Shaker’s plight. Held for nearly 14 years until his release in October, he was told in 2007 and in 2009 that the US no longer wanted to hold him, but he continued to be held because of his eloquence, outspokenness and charm.

I also spoke about how disgraceful it is to approve men for release but then not free them — as it was for Shaker, as it is for 44 of the 103 men still held, and as it was for the two Yemeni men just released in Ghana, who were told in 2005 and 2006 that the US no longer wanted to hold them, and I stressed how important it is not only for these men to be freed, but also for the review process for the other men (apart for the ten men facing trials) to be speeded up. 15 out of 18 men whose cases have been reviewed — by the Periodic Review Boards — have been recommended for release, but 43 men are still awaiting reviews, five years after they were first told they would have their cases reviewed within a year.

I hope you like the video and will share it if you do.

While myself and others were talking outside the White House, the real Shaker Aamer and six other former prisoners were in London, outside the US Embassy, also calling for the closure of the prison, and below is a powerful video, produced for Al-Jazeera, of Shaker meeting someone he had not seen for 14 years, and former prisoner Ruhal Ahmed speaking about how Guantánamo still haunts him, and how depressing it is that President Obama had failed to close the prison as he promised.

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

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

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

Jan. 11 Protest at the White House: Rights Groups Call for President Obama to Close Guantánamo

Tomorrow is the 14th anniversary of the opening of the US “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and, as I have for the last five years, I will be outside the White House, as part of a protest involving over a dozen rights groups, calling for the closure of the prison as swiftly as possible.

My presence at the protest is part of a short US tour I’m undertaking to highlight the necessity to close Guantánamo without further delay. on Friday I flew into Miami form London — my first ever visit to Florida — where I was greeted by a great group of peace and social justice activists, and where, on Saturday, I attended a rally and march to the gates of US Southern Command, responsible for overseeing Guantánamo. Outside Southcom HQ, I spoke about the need for the prison to be closed, to end the torture of those held indefinitely without charge or trial, and to restore, to the US, some notion that this remains a country that respects justice and the rule of law, and that the illegality and brutality of the country’s response to 9/11 can finally be overcome. My thanks to the People’s Opposition to War, Imperialism, and Racism (POWIR) for organizing this event, and I’d like to say that what made it particularly impressive was the number of young people involved.

This year I have brought with me a giant inflatable figure of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, who was finally freed from the prison on October 30, eight years after he was first told that the US no longer wanted to hold him, under President Bush, and six years after he was also approved for release by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established shortly after first taking office in January 2009.

The inflatable figure of Shaker Aamer was the centerpiece of a campaign to free Shaker, the We Stand With Shaker campaign, that I co-founded in the UK in November 2014 with an activist friend, Joanne MacInnes. In the eleven months leading up to Shaker’s release, over a hundred celebrities and MPs stood with the inflatable, and were photographed with it, adding to the pressure for Shaker’s release that also came from MPs, the media and other campaigners. On Monday, seven former Guantánamo prisoners — including Shaker Aamer — will be campaigning for the prison’s closure outside the US Embassy in London, and there will be some simultaneous reporting from both capitals.

The inflatable will stay in the US, and will be used by campaigners throughout the year as we all work together to make 2016 the year that Guantánamo is closed for good.

Below is the press release issued by the groups involved in the protest outside the White House, including Close Guantánamo, the campaign I co-founded in January 2012 with US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us — an email address is all that is required to be counted as an opponent of Guantánamo and to receive two email updates every month. We will shortly be launching a new initiative, the Countdown to Close Guantánamo, which will be the focus of our work in 2016, as we call for the release of the 45 men already approved for release, a speeding up of the review process — the Periodic Review Boards — for the men not already approved for release and not facing trials (over 40 of the 104 men still held), and for those facing or having faced trials (just ten men in total) and as few of the other prisoners as possible, to be moved to the US mainland so that Guantánamo can be closed.

Groups to Rally Monday at White House on 14th Guantánamo Anniversary

Coalition Demands Obama Step Up Pace of Transfers and Review Boards, Take Charge of Insubordinate DOD, and Finally Close Prison

Washington, DC – This Monday, a coalition of human rights activists, torture survivors, Guantánamo attorneys, and members of diverse faith communities will hold a rally at the White House to mark the 14th anniversary of the first arrival of detainees at Guantánamo on January 11, 2002.

The coalition is calling on the Obama administration in its last, crucial year in office, to close Guantánamo and end indefinite detention. With recent transfers, 104 men remain at Guantánamo, dozens of them cleared for release, the majority from Yemen.

The rally will include a giant, inflatable figure of Shaker Aamer – the last UK resident held at Guantánamo, released in October. The figure was displayed outside the British Parliament where MPs and celebrities posed with it to press for Mr. Aamer’s release. Members of the coalition will share the words of Mr. Aamer and of Mohammed al-Hamiri, Ghaleb al-Bihani, Zaher Hamdoun, and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, all of whom remain at Guantánamo. The rally will be followed by a “detainee procession” of figures in orange jumpsuits and black hoods and signs marking the anniversary.

The organizations drafted a call to action:

Last Chance for Leadership: Close Guantánamo

President Obama has just one year left to fulfill his first-term promise by closing Guantánamo and ending indefinite detention. Doing so will demonstrate leadership and fidelity to the principles on which he campaigned and won office.

On January 11, 2016, the prison at Guantánamo will enter its 15th year of operation. More than 100 men remain there; the vast majority will never be charged with crimes. Dozens of prisoners are cleared for transfer. Some remain on hunger strike and are force-fed, and a handful are facing charges in unfair trials. There has been no accountability for the torture that many detainees have suffered.

Though Congress has placed obstacles to closing Guantánamo, President Obama can and should make significant progress towards reducing the population and shuttering the prison. He must order the Secretary of Defense to expedite transfers and accelerate the Periodic Review Board process, and tell the Justice Department not to reflexively oppose habeas petitions in federal court. He must also reject a policy of indefinite detention, and formally try or release all detainees.

In addition, President Obama should order all relevant agencies to read the full Senate torture report. Refusing to read the report, more than a year after receiving it, reflects the “bury your head in the sand” mentality that will prevent the country from adequately learning from its past and permanently ending torture. Further, the Obama administration should prompt the Department of Justice to open a new, comprehensive investigation into the clear acts of criminality described in the report.

Now is the time for Obama to accomplish a central goal of his administration by closing Guantánamo. There is today a renewed climate of fear and hate reminiscent of the post-September 11 mindset that led to torture and indefinite detention in the first place. Guantánamo is the bitter legacy of a politics of fear, which must be rejected.

This is the president’s last chance to keep his promise and close Guantánamo. If he does not do so, there is a real chance that the current detainees will die there, and that more detainees will join them.

We cannot let that happen. Close Guantánamo now.

Schedule

12:00pm: Interfaith service in front of the White House sponsored by the National Religious Coalition Against Torture

12:30pm: Rally and program in front of the White House, followed by procession

Sponsors: Amnesty International USA, Bill of Rights Defense Committee and Defending Dissent Foundation, Center for Constitutional Rights, CODEPINK, Council on American-Islamic Relations, CloseGuantánamo.org, Interfaith Action for Human Rights, National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms, National Religious Campaign Against Torture, No More Guantánamos, September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition (TASSC), Witness Against Torture, and others.

Organizational Quotes

“Every year, for the last seven years, concerned activists and citizens have called on President Obama to fulfill his promise during his first year in office and demanded that Guantánamo be closed once and for all; every year, these calls have remained unheeded. This is President Obama’s final year in office. That means this is also his final opportunity to  follow through on his promise, shut down Guantánamo, and restore some semblance of dignity to our justice system. This opportunity must not be left ignored.”

Dr. Zainab Chaudry, Interfaith Action for Human Rights

“It’s not enough for President Obama to say he tried, but that Congress and other obstacles are preventing him from closing Guantánamo. Obama has the authority to make significant progress. He is the Commander in Chief, yet officials within the Department of Defense openly defy his policy objectives and derail closure efforts. He could order the Department of Justice not to fight the habeas petitions of cleared men like 74-lb Tariq Ba Odah, but he hasn’t. There are more than 40 men, cleared for release, who could go home today, yet they continue to languish as the prison enters its 15th year. The president has real choices in front of him. Now is the time for him to take meaningful action. The clock is ticking.”

Aliya Hussain, Center for Constitutional Rights

“In November 2015, a CODEPINK delegation traveled to Guantánamo Bay and met with members of the Cuban government and civil society who are calling for the base to be closed immediately and the land given back to the Cubans. The Cubans are horrified that the United States government has committed torture on their land and continues to indefinitely detain prisoners who have never been charged with any crime. The prison facility within the naval base is a stain on US foreign policy, and we urge President Obama to issue an executive order to close the prison — and the base — immediately.”

Nancy Mancias, organizer, CODEPINK

“One day let alone 14 years is too long for the U.S. to imprison one hundred men at Guantánamo without charge or trial. For seven years the president has promised to close this prison – a blemish on our nation’s commitment to the rule of law – yet the situation has not improved. We are responsible for safeguarding the constitutional values which are meant to protect all Americans, persons who reside in the U.S., and those in our custody from the abuses of indefinite detention and lack of due process. We must shut down Guantánamo.”

Nihad Awad, national executive director, Council on American-Islamic Relations

“It must be stated clearly and boldly that the premise upon which Guantánamo Bay prison exists is illegal. Moreover, the prison symbolizes the ways in which Muslims have been dehumanized, while at the same time, criminalizing the Muslim identity by virtue of housing a population of men adhering to Islam. While the number of prisoners has decreased from its height at 779 to 104, it is disturbing that the United States government continues to house men cleared for release while holding others hostage in protracted military commissions that seemingly have no resolution in sight. We call on President Obama to close the prison once and for all and end the destructive policies of the War on Terror that have so callously targeted Muslims.”

Dr. Maha Hilal, executive director, National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms

“After fourteen years, our experience with an official policy of detaining suspected terrorists without trial has not brought us security, but only more fear, more terrorism and worst of all, a deep stain on our honor and debasement of our most basic values. It’s long past time for us to end this inhumane and profoundly ineffective experiment with lawlessness.”

Bruce Miller, president, No More Guantánamos

“As an organization that serves torture survivors from all over the world, TASSC is appalled by the fact that Guantánamo – synonymous with a U.S. torture chamber – is still open after 14 years. During his last year in office, President Obama should honor his promise to finally close this facility and either release the detainees or transfer them to other locations where they have access to justice.”

Gizachew Emiru, Esq., executive director, Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition (TASSC)

“As Guantánamo enters its fifteenth year of operation, there is a real risk it is becoming a permanent offshore prison for an endless global war. The longer Guantánamo stays open, the more likely it is to become a fixture of U.S. counterterrorism — and a permanent system of American injustice. President Obama has just one year left in office to make good on his commitment to close Guantánamo. His human rights legacy, and that of the nation, are on the line. It won’t be easy, but President Obama can and must come through.”

Naureen Shah, director of Amnesty International USA’s Security With Human Rights Program

“Guantánamo is a moral disaster zone where the U.S. tortured people and continues to hold people without charge or trial, some for more than a decade. It would be a grave sin and a national disgrace for President Obama to leave office without closing Guantánamo.”

Rev. Ron Stief, executive director, National Religious Campaign Against Torture

“Guantánamo is the bitter legacy of the vengeful over-reaction to 9-11. A politics of fear and Islamophobia still rage. The United States can never truly embrace human rights, the rule of law, and its own democratic values so long as Guantánamo remains open. Obama doesn’t get points for trying to close the prison. Either he gets it done this year, or adds to his disgrace on this issue.

Mason Otaibi, Witness Against Torture

“It’s now or never. Seven years after he promised to close Guantánamo within a year, President Obama now has just one year left to make sure that a failure to close the prison, as promised, is not part of his legacy. There must be no more excuses. Guantánamo is a legal, moral and ethical abomination, and every day it remains open poisons the U.S.’s claims to be a nation that respects the rule of law.” Andy Worthington, CloseGuantanamo.org

Contact: Jeremy Varon, Witness Against Torture, 732.979.3119, jvaron@aol.com

Debra Sweet, World Can’t Wait, 718.809.3803, debrasweet@worldcantwait.net

Jen Nessel, jnessel@ccrjustice.org

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

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

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

Seven Ex-Guantánamo Prisoners Unite in London to Call for Prison’s Closure on Jan. 11; Shaker Aamer Photographed With Inflatable Figure of Himself Outside US Embassy

Monday January 11 is the 14th anniversary of the opening of the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, and, as over a dozen rights groups hold a protest outside the White House, calling for President Obama to close Guantánamo in his last year in office, seven former Guantánamo prisoners from the UK will gather outside the US Embassy to also demand the closure of the prison.

The seven former prisoners are Shaker Aamer, Moazzam Begg, Ruhal Ahmad, Asif Iqbal, Shafiq Rasul, Bisher al-Rawi and Tarek Dergoul.

Ruhal Ahmad, Asif Iqbal and Shafiq Rasul (the Tipton Three) and Tarek Dergoul were released in 2004, Moazzam Begg was released in 2005, Bisher al-Rawi in 2007, and, after extraordinary campaigning from activists, MPs and the media, Shaker Aamer was released on October 30, 2015, eight years after he was first told that the US no longer wanted to hold him.

As the co-founder and co-director of the We Stand With Shaker campaign (with Joanne Macinnes), I will be taking part in the protest outside the White House, as part of a short tour to coincide with the 14th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, and I have brought with from the UK the giant inflatable figure of Shaker Aamer that was the centerpiece of the campaign. The photo above is of Shaker outside the US Embassy on January 7, when Joanne MacInnes and I met up with him to take the photo with campaign photographer Stefano Massimo.

Speaking about the protest and the anniversary, Shaker Aamer said:

Even though I’ve been free for over two months, I haven’t yet seen my fellow hostages from Guantánamo. This will be a momentous day when we gather for the first time to fulfil our ambition to see the closure of the prison and justice for our brothers still held there.

I look forward to standing with everyone — all the brothers, my MP supporters and freedom campaigners — on this extremely important mission of closing Guantánamo before President Obama leaves office. They might not let us come to America in person but they can’t stop our spirit and our message from reaching the American public and the rest of the world.

This is my statement from Florida, where I am right now, and where I’m taking part in a protest and march to US Southern Command this afternoon:

I’ve traveled to the US to call for the closure of Guantánamo on 11 January, the 14th anniversary of the opening of the prison. I have brought the giant inflatable figure of Shaker Aamer with me to carry Shaker’s message calling for the closure of the prison because he cannot go in person, and also to highlight the particular success of the campaign to free him, for which British MPs, the media, campaigners and members of the public who called for his release should be proud.

The inflatable of Shaker Aamer will stay in the US and be used as a campaign tool, taken on tour all over the country in support of President Obama’s efforts to finally close Guantánamo in his last year in office, and to finally remove this shameful stain on the US’s reputation as a country that respects the rule of law.

Jeremy Varon, a spokesperson for Witness Against Torture, one of the groups organizing the White House protest, said:

Now is the time for Obama to accomplish a central goal of his administration by closing Guantánamo. There is today a renewed climate of fear and hate reminiscent of the post-September 11 mindset that led to torture and indefinite detention in the first place. Guantánamo is the bitter legacy of a politics of fear, which must be rejected.

The seven former Guantánamo prisoners will be available for photos outside the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square from 3.15-3.30pm. The Embassy is at 24 Grosvenor Square, London W1A 2LQ.

Three of the former prisoners – Shaker Aamer, Moazzam Begg and Ruhal Ahmed – will be available for interview (strictly by prior arrangement) from 3.30-4.15pm, and Moazzam Begg will be available for pre-recorded interviews prior to the event.

The London Guantánamo Campaign will be holding a vigil outside the embassy from 6-8pm. They will be joined by the former prisoners along with MPs and celebrities who support the campaign, and who supported the We Stand With Shaker campaign. Interviewees will be available during the vigil.

For further information or to arrange interviews, please contact We Stand with Shaker co-director Joanne MacInnes on +44 (0)7867 553580 or by email.

In the US, please contact Jeremy Varon on 732-979-3119 or by email

or email Andy Worthington.

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

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

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

Two Yemeni Prisoners Released from Guantánamo to Ghana; 105 Men Remain

Yesterday, the Pentagon announced that it had released two Yemeni prisoners from Guantánamo to new homes in Ghana. These releases are the first since November, when five Yemenis were given new homes in the United Arab Emirates, releases that followed the release of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, and the Mauritanian Ahmed Ould Abdel Aziz, at the end of October. With these releases, 105 men remain at the prison — including 46 also approved for release, ten facing (or having faced) trials, and 43 others awaiting reviews promised five years ago but not yet delivered. Three others had their ongoing imprisonment approved by the review boards, and another three are awaiting the results of theirs.

The release of these two Yemenis is progress, of course, and, as we heard last month, another 15 releases are expected in the near future. With the 14th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo taking place on Monday, this is a good time for President Obama to be making sure that men are being freed, to maintain the focus on his intention to close Guantánamo before he leaves office, and to neutralize the sting of critics pointing out that, on January 22, it will be seven years since he promised to close Guantánamo within a year.

The two Yemenis released — who were both born in Saudi Arabia, but to Yemeni parents — are men I identified in June 2012 in a major article about the failures to release prisoners approved for release, entitled, “Guantánamo Scandal: The 40 Prisoners Still Held But Cleared for Release At Least Five Years Ago.” The five years in the title, of course, is now eight and half years, and both of these men were first approved for release long before President Bush left office. They were then approved for release again under President Obama, following the deliberations of the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that Obama established shortly after taking office in January 2009.

156 men were approved for release by the task force, but 30 of these men, all Yemenis, were assigned to category called “conditional detention,” invented by the task force, which stipulated that their release was dependent on some perceived improvement in the security situation in Yemen. However, as the entire US establishment is unwilling to repatriate any Yemenis, their release, like their remaining compatriots approved for release without a “conditional detention” tag, has instead become dependent on third countries being found that are prepared to take them in, and that can meet the US’s security concerns. Of the 30, the first was one of the five men released in the UAE in November, and the two men released in Ghana are the second and third of the 30.

The first of the two men released in Ghana is Mahmoud Bin Atef (ISN 202), born in 1979, who was actually approved for release over ten years ago, as I explained in my June 2012 article:

In the classified US military files relating to the Guantánamo prisoners, which were released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, bin Atef’s file was a “Recommendation for Continued Detention Under DoD Control (CD),” dated December 28, 2007, which repeated a similar recommendation issued on December 16, 2006. However, he was approved for transfer/release after Administrative Review Board Round One, which was held at Guantanamo in 2005 (see PDF).

The discrepancy, as is typical at Guantánamo, came about because of the existence of multiple review processes and the complete absence of any competent oversight. Similar discrepancies can be found in many other cases between the military reviews (the Combatant Status Review Tribunals and the Administrative Review Boards) and the files released by WikiLeaks (the Detainee Assessment Briefs), and it is also worth noting that eleven men approved for release by reviews then had their habeas corpus petitions successfully challenged in court by the Justice Department — again, without anyone providing competent oversight.

The second man freed in Ghana, Khalid al-Dhuby (ISN 506), born in 1981, was approved for release nine years ago, on Christmas Day 2006. In my June 2012 article, I wrote:

In the classified US military files relating to the Guantánamo prisoners, which were released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, al-Dhuby’s file was a “Recommendation for Transfer Out of DoD Control (TRO),” dated December 25, 2006. A transfer recommendation was also made after his Administrative Review Board Round Three, on May 22, 2007 (PDF, p. 195).

I can’t really explain sufficiently how disgraceful I find it that men approved for release years before President Obama took office were held until the eve of the 14th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, but that is part of the disgusting reality of Guantánamo, and the lamentable truth is that, as I have been saying for many years, when President Obama inherited around 66 men already approved for release under President Bush — including these two men — he should have released them immediately.

The failure to do so gives a rather longer perspective to the comments in the Washington Post about the state of Guantánamo following these releases. After noting that 105 men now remain in the prison, the Post stated, “That figure includes 46 inmates who have already been approved for settlement overseas but whose release has been held up amid negotiations with potential host countries and, more significantly, by lawmakers’ distaste for prisoner transfers.” The Guardian, in turn, wrote that, although Obama’s task force “decided both men posed a minimal risk to national security and ought to be transferred … years of a self-imposed ban on transferring detainees to Yemen, congressional acrimony and internal bureaucratic “foot-dragging”, according to [a] US official, kept both men at Guantánamo, alongside dozens of others.”

So who are Mahmoud Bin Atef and Khalid al-Dhuby?

As I mentioned in an article in September 2010, Bin Atef was accused of arriving in Afghanistan for jihad in June 2001, training at al-Farouq, and fighting on the Taliban front lines. In an interrogation, he apparently stated that “his enemies were the Northern Alliance,” and also stated that “he never shot at or killed anyone,” and that, although he “was asked to take an oath to Osama bin Laden, [he] did not take one since he might have been obligated to do things that he might not want to do.”

Bin Atef is also one of around 50 prisoners held at Guantánamo who, as I described it in 2010, “survived the Qala-i-Janghi massacre in November 2001, which followed the surrender of the northern city of Kunduz, when several hundred Taliban foot soldiers — and, it seems, a number of civilians — all of whom had been told that they would be allowed to return home if they surrendered, were taken to a fortress run by General Rashid Dostum of the Northern Alliance. Fearing that they were about to be killed, a number of the men started an uprising, which was suppressed by the Northern Alliance, acting with support from US and British Special Forces, and US bombers. Hundreds of the prisoners died, but around 80 survived being bombed and flooded in the basement of the fort, and around 50 of these men ended up at Guantánamo.” With Bin Atef’s release, only about eight of these men remain at Guantánamo.

Speaking to the Washington Post, his attorney, George Clarke, said he was “nearly killed” during the massacre. He called his client “a low-level member of the group,” and said, “He wasn’t part of any planning.”

The Associated Press had more from Clarke, who explained how Bin Atef was “a block leader at Guantánamo, serving as a liaison between guards and detainees.” He said, “Do they think he is a threat? No. He’s a positive character. He’s a very smart guy and I really wish him the best.”

Clarke also pointed out how, “like many other prisoners freed from Guantánamo and forced to start new lives in unfamiliar places,” the two “will face a challenge in Ghana.” However, he added, “Bin Atef at least was eager for the opportunity to find a job and start a family,” as the AP described it. As Clarke said, “He wants to get the hell out of Guantánamo. I don’t think there’s a detainee there now who wouldn’t take any place.”

I wrote about Khalid al-Dhuby in an article in October 2010, when I stated:

Allegedly recruited for military training in Afghanistan after being shown videos of atrocities in Chechnya, al-Dhuby reportedly arrived at [the] al-Farouq [training camp] in late July 2001, and trained for a month and a half until the camp closed. He was then taken to Tora Bora, where he “stayed in one of several caves large enough to fit three or four people,” and then left the area with a group of other men. He said that as they passed through a valley he “saw planes dropping bombs on their location and stated the bombing went on for one night,” and added that he “hid from the bombs until the next morning,” but that many of the men traveling with him “were killed and injured by the bombing.” After the bombing, he was seized by Northern Alliance soldiers and held in an Afghan prison in Kabul before being handed over — or sold — to US forces. At Guantánamo, he maintained that he had never fired a shot at anyone, that he “was not a fighter or a killer,” and that he only “wanted to train to protect himself and his family as well as defend his country.”

In the Miami Herald, Carol Rosenberg noted that al-Dhuby “apparently had no lawyer, unlike Bin Atef, and nobody to speak for him on his release.” She also pointed out that he “had an older brother at Guantanamo,” who “was sent to Georgia,” in November 2014, adding, “The brother, Salah Mohammed al-Thabbi [aka Salah al-Thabi or Salah al-Zabe], also Saudi-born, was approved for release as far back as 2004 but had nowhere to go because he was Yemeni.”

The Guardian noted that the US official who spoke to them said that “quiet negotiations with Ghana to take Guantánamo detainees unfolded over the past year.” The AP had more. In a statement, Ghana’s foreign ministry suggested that the men’s stay may not be permanent. “We have indicated our readiness to accept them for a period of two years, after which they may leave the country,” it read.

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

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

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

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009 (out of the 532 released by President Bush), and the 130 prisoners released from February 2009 to November 2015 (by President Obama), whose stories are covered in more detail than is available anywhere else –- either in print or on the internet –- although many of them, of course, are also covered in The Guantánamo Files, and for the stories of the other 390 prisoners released by President Bush, see my archive of articles based on the classified military files released by WikiLeaks in 2011: June 2007 –- 2 Tunisians, 4 Yemenis (here, here and here); July 2007 –- 16 Saudis; August 2007 –- 1 Bahraini, 5 Afghans; September 2007 –- 16 Saudis; 1 Mauritanian; 1 Libyan, 1 Yemeni, 6 Afghans; November 2007 –- 3 Jordanians, 8 Afghans; 14 Saudis; December 2007 –- 2 Sudanese; 13 Afghans (here and here); 3 British residents; 10 Saudis; May 2008 –- 3 Sudanese, 1 Moroccan, 5 Afghans (here, here and here); July 2008 –- 2 Algerians; 1 Qatari, 1 United Arab Emirati, 1 Afghan; August 2008 –- 2 Algerians; September 2008 –- 1 Pakistani, 2 Afghans (here and here); 1 Sudanese, 1 Algerian; November 2008 –- 1 Kazakh, 1 Somali, 1 Tajik; 2 Algerians; 1 Yemeni (Salim Hamdan), repatriated to serve out the last month of his sentence; December 2008 –- 3 Bosnian Algerians; January 2009 –- 1 Afghan, 1 Algerian, 4 Iraqis; February 2009 — 1 British resident (Binyam Mohamed); May 2009 —1 Bosnian Algerian (Lakhdar Boumediene); June 2009 — 1 Chadian (Mohammed El-Gharani); 4 Uighurs to Bermuda; 1 Iraqi; 3 Saudis (here and here); August 2009 — 1 Afghan (Mohamed Jawad); 2 Syrians to Portugal; September 2009 — 1 Yemeni; 2 Uzbeks to Ireland (here and here); October 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti, 1 prisoner of undisclosed nationality to Belgium; 6 Uighurs to Palau; November 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian to France, 1 unidentified Palestinian to Hungary, 2 Tunisians to Italian custody; December 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti (Fouad al-Rabiah); 2 Somalis; 4 Afghans; 6 Yemenis; January 2010 — 2 Algerians, 1 Uzbek to Switzerland; 1 Egyptian, 1 Azerbaijani and 1 Tunisian to Slovakia; February 2010 — 1 Egyptian, 1 Libyan, 1 Tunisian to Albania; 1 Palestinian to Spain; March 2010 — 1 Libyan, 2 unidentified prisoners to Georgia, 2 Uighurs to Switzerland; May 2010 — 1 Syrian to Bulgaria, 1 Yemeni to Spain; July 2010 — 1 Yemeni (Mohammed Hassan Odaini); 1 Algerian; 1 Syrian to Cape Verde, 1 Uzbek to Latvia, 1 unidentified Afghan to Spain; September 2010 — 1 Palestinian, 1 Syrian to Germany; January 2011 — 1 Algerian; April 2012 — 2 Uighurs to El Salvador; July 2012 — 1 Sudanese; September 2012 — 1 Canadian (Omar Khadr) to ongoing imprisonment in Canada; August 2013 — 2 Algerians; December 2013 — 2 Algerians; 2 Saudis; 2 Sudanese; 3 Uighurs to Slovakia; March 2014 — 1 Algerian (Ahmed Belbacha); May 2014 — 5 Afghans to Qatar (in a prisoner swap for US PoW Bowe Bergdahl); November 2014 — 1 Kuwaiti (Fawzi al-Odah); 3 Yemenis to Georgia, 1 Yemeni and 1 Tunisian to Slovakia, and 1 Saudi; December 2014 — 4 Syrians, a Palestinian and a Tunisian to Uruguay; 4 Afghans; 2 Tunisians and 3 Yemenis to Kazakhstan; January 2015 — 4 Yemenis to Oman, 1 Yemeni to Estonia; June 2015 — 6 Yemenis to Oman; September 2015 — 1 Moroccan and 1 Saudi; October 2015 — 1 Mauritanian and 1 British resident (Shaker Aamer); November 2015 — 5 Yemenis to the United Arab Emirates.