Andy Worthington's Blog, page 82

Close Guantánamo Now: Andy Worthington’s US Tour on the 14th Anniversary of the Prison’s Opening, January 8-18, 2016

This Friday (January 8), I’m flying from London to Miami for a short US tour to coincide with the 14th anniversary of the opening of the prison at Guantánamo Bay on January 11. I’ll be flying up to Washington D.C. on the 10th, protesting outside the White House on the 11th, and moving on to New York City on the 13th, where I have an event lined up in Harlem on the 14th, and where I will be staying until the 18th.

I’m traveling as an expert on Guantánamo, with nearly ten years of experience as a researcher, writer, campaigner and public speaker about the prison and the men held there, the author of The Guantánamo Files, the co-director of “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” and the co-founder and co-director of two campaigns: Close Guantanamo and We Stand With Shaker. I’m also hoping to return to the US later in the year with a new book, collection the nest of my writing about Guantánamo over the last eight years, and if you’re a publisher, or have funding ideas, or would like to stage an event for me as part of a tour when the book is published, then please get in touch.

Please also get in touch if you want to contact me on my forthcoming tour, either to interview me (for TV, radio or online) or to arrange a last-minute event. You can also contact Debra Sweet, the national director of the World Can’t Wait, who, as in previous years, is organizing my visit. And while I’m in New York, I’ll have a guitar, and will be delighted to play some of my political songs, including “Song for Shaker Aamer” and “81 Million Dollars,” about the US torture program, which I normally play with my band The Four Fathers. If any musician would like to play with me, do get in touch.

This will be my sixth year of visiting the US on the anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, and I hope it will be my last, although I’m not holding my breath for that. President Obama has made progress in recent years towards fulfilling his promise — made on his second day in office in January 2009 — to close Guantánamo, but that promise was to close the prison within a year, and it’s now seven years later, and the wretched place is still open. See the archives for my previous visits — in 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015.

We have been hearing lately that, of the 107 men still held, 17 will be released around the anniversary, which is very good news, of course, but it will still leave 31 men approved for release but still held — many since January 2010, when the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that Obama established shortly after taking office issued its final report. I should not need to add that it is, of course, completely unacceptable for anyone to be held, year after year, despite being told that the US no longer wants to hold them.

Just ten men are facing — or have faced — trials (and I should pause to allow the significance of that small number to sink in), while 49 others are awaiting reviews — or the result of reviews — to ascertain whether they too should be approved for release. The task force originally described these men as too dangerous to release, while conceding that there was a lack of evidence against them, or recommended them for prosecutions, but the basis for prosecutions has been collapsing for years, and the alleged dangerousness of these men has been eroded as the reviews have proceeded. Although the process has been far too slow, of 18 cases so far decided, 15 have resulted in the men in question being approved for release. This is an 83% success rate, and a thorough debunking of the hyperbolic description of them as too dangerous to release.

President Obama needs to speed up the process of releasing prisoners, and the process of reviewing those not already approved for release or facing trials, but he will still face a struggle with Congress, where a number of Republicans, in particular, have made it their malignant mission to keep Guantánamo open. They claim this is because of national security concerns, but the real reason is that they like having somewhere they can hold people indefinitely without charge or trial, flouting their nation’s claim to respect the rule of law, and every day they get to maintain their dark wishes is another day that America’s self-regard is clouded by a deep and corrosive injustice.

In a recent article on the World Can’t Wait website, Debra Sweet wrote of my visit, “The week of January 9 we are bringing British journalist Andy Worthington to the US as part of protesting Guantánamo. Many of us have relied on Andy’s relentless, detailed reporting on Guantánamo and the individuals who the US government would like to disappear forever. Andy doesn’t simply report ‘objectively’ but also campaigns for justice for these men, playing a key role in mobilizing people in the UK to bring British resident and Guantánamo detainee Shaker Aamer home this fall.”

I should add that you will need to watch this space for specific news about my visit, Shaker Aamer and the anniversary of the prison’s opening.

Below is my itinerary, and if you’re in Miami, Washington DC or New York City, or are coming to the capital for the January 11 protest, then I hope to meet you. Let’s make 2016 the year that we get Guantánamo closed! — and if you haven’t already joined the Close Guantánamo campaign that I established four years ago with the US attorney Tom Wilner, then please do so now. Just an email address is required to be counted as an opponent of Guantánamo and to receive two email newsletters every month.

Please note that all the events are free.

Saturday January 9, 2016, 2-4pm: Miami Protest to Shut Down Guantanamo Bay, US Southern Command HQ

March starts at NW 36th St & NW 87th Ave, Doral and ends at US Southern Command, 9301 NW 33rd St, Doral

Speakers include Andy Worthington, Debra Sweet and Medea Benjamin of Code Pink. 

Organized by People’s Opposition to War, Imperialism, and Racism with sponsors including Code Pink, Black Lives Matter and the National Lawyers Guild, and endorsers including the World Can’t Wait and SOA Watch.

See the Facebook page.

Sunday January 10, 2016, 5-7pm: Visions of Homecoming: Close Guantanamo!

Impact Hub DC, 419 7th Street NW, 3rd Floor, Washington, DC 20004

With The Peace Poets, Witness Against Torture, Code Pink, the Center for Constitutional Rights and Andy Worthington.

New York-based spoken word artists and educators The Peace Poets perform, Witness Against Torture and Code Pink activists discuss their recent trip to Guantánamo, lawyers from the Center for Constitutional Rights discuss their clients in Guantánamo, and Andy Worthington discusses the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign, which contributed to the release in October of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison.

Organized by Witness Against Torture, Code Pink, the National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms and The Peace Poets.

See the Facebook page. Please also see this Facebook page for information about Witness Against Torture’s 11-day fast for justice in Washington, D.C.

Monday January 11, 2016, 12 noon: Close Guantánamo NOW! Annual J11 Protest

The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, D.C. 20500

Speakers include Andy Worthington and representatives of all the organisations involved in the protest.

Organized by Amnesty International USA, the Bill of Rights Defense Committee and Defending Dissent Foundation, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Close Guantánamo, Code Pink, the National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms, the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition, Witness Against Torture and the World Can’t Wait.

See the Facebook page.

Monday January 11, 2016, 3-4.45pm: Guantanamo Bay: Year 14

New America, 740 15th St., N.W., Suite 900, Washington, D.C. 20005

With Andy Worthington, Karen Greenberg and Tom Wilner. Moderated by Peter Bergen.

Andy Worthington is joined by attorney Tom Wilner, with whom he co-founded the Close Guantánamo campaign in January 2012, to discuss “what can or can’t be done in the next year, and whether President Obama’s promise [to close Guantánamo] will ever be fulfilled,” with Karen Greenberg, Director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University and author of The Least Worst Place: Guantánamo’s First 100 Days. Tom Wilner, a lawyer with Shearman & Sterling LLP, was the Counsel of Record to Guantánamo prisoners in the two US​ Supreme Court decisions that established their right to habeas corpus and in the case that established their right to counsel.

Join the conversation online using the hashtag #GTMO14th and following @NatSecNAF on Twitter.

Map and Directions. You can RSVP here.

Thursday January 14, 2016, 7pm: Andy Worthington on the Successful Struggle to Free Shaker Aamer from Guantánamo

Revolution Books, 437 Malcolm X Blvd, Harlem, New York, NY 10037

With Andy Worthington.

At Revolution Books’ new store in Harlem, Andy Worthington will be discussing the We Stand With Shaker campaign, which he established in November 2014 with the activist Joanne MacInnes, to campaign for the release of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, who was freed in October 2015. The campaign attracted over a hundred celebrity and MP supporters, who stood and were photographed with a giant inflatable figure of Shaker that was at the heart of the campaign. Many of the supporters signed an open letter to President Obama that Andy wrote, which was published in the Guardian on July 4.

See the Facebook page.

Andy will also be attending a State of the Union protest at 1.30pm on Tuesday January 12, on the east side of The Capitol, across from the Supreme Court, organized by the National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance, with the support of the World Can’t Wait, Witness Against Torture, Know Drones and other groups, to give an alternative State of the Union message and petition to President Obama and the US Congress on the day that President Obama makes his State of the Union speech. See the Facebook page.

Please note that there are also events in Huntington Beach, CA and Mexico City on January 10, and in New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago on January 11. There is also a protest in London on January 11.

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.

Former Guantánamo Prisoner Younous Chekkouri Illegally Imprisoned in Morocco; As Murat Kurnaz Calls for His Release, Please Ask John Kerry to Act

Please write to John Kerry!

Three and a half months ago, in September 2015, Younous Chekkouri (aka Younus Chekhouri), a Moroccan national held at Guantánamo for nearly 14 years, was repatriated. As his lawyers, at the London-based legal charity Reprieve noted, he was “unanimously cleared for release by the six main US government security and intelligence agencies — including the CIA, FBI, and Departments of State and Defense” in 2009, and yet it took another six years to secure his release.

Significantly, his return to Morocco — where he had previously feared being repatriated because of human rights concerns — only took place because the US authorities were told that the Moroccan government accepted that there was no case against Younous.

However, on his return, as I noted at the time, he was imprisoned. I followed up on that story in October, in two articles, “Former Guantánamo Prisoner Betrayed by Morocco: Are Diplomatic Assurances Worthless?” and “Guantánamo’s Tainted Evidence: US Government Publicly Concedes Its Case Against Ex-Prisoner Facing Trial in Morocco Collapsed in 2011,” and again in November, when  his wife Abla wrote an article for Newsweek, in which she asked John Kerry, the US Secretary of State, to intervene. “Secretary Kerry, I am asking one thing of you,” she wrote. “Hold the Moroccan government to its promises. Please get them to release my husband from prison. After 14 years of injustice, I just want this nightmare to end. I just want Younous back by my side.”

Below is an article about Younous written by a friend of his from Guantánamo — Murat Kurnaz, the prison’s only German prisoner, who was freed in August 2006 — which was published by the Guardian on December 30. The two men did not know each other before they ended up in US custody — Murat Kurnaz was kidnapped from a bus in Pakistan, while Younous Chekkouri was working in Afghanistan when he was seized. As Murat notes, however, “You can make friends in even the most difficult of circumstances.” Younous, it turned out, spoke to him in German after both men ended up in US custody in the brutal US prison in Kandahar in late 2001, because he has an uncle who lives in Germany, and he told Murat he “had learned some German as a young boy in Morocco.”

Murat also notes how Younous’s lawyers told him that the Moroccan authorities had “agreed that Younous would not be charged with any crime upon his arrival there and that he would not be detained in Morocco for longer than 72 hours,” assurances that turned out to be “completely worthless.” He also contrasted the circumstances of Younous’s return with those of the British resident Shaker Aamer and the Mauritanian Ahmed Ould Abdel Aziz, also released recently, who were both freed outright on their return.

Please visit this page on Reprieve’s website where supporters can email John Kerry to ask him, as Younous’s wife did, to help free Younous.

As Reprieve note, “Younous endured 14 years of wrongful imprisonment in Guantánamo. The injustice he has suffered must end now — the US government has admitted it had no basis for his detention in Guantánamo, and the State Department must not allow the Moroccan government to flout its assurances. Email US Secretary of State John Kerry — ask him to make sure the Moroccan authorities live up to their promise and release Younous to his family without delay.”

My friend was released from Guantánamo Bay — only to be locked up again

By Murat Kurnaz, The Guardian, December 30, 2015

Younous Chekkouri found himself behind bars in Morocco immediately after being released by US officials, despite assurances that he would be free

You can make friends in even the most difficult of circumstances. Younous Chekkouri and I were both brought to the US prison in Kandahar, Afghanistan, after 9/11 and were both moved to Guantánamo together in January 2002. Despite the horrific conditions, the torture and the constant humiliation, Younous and I became friends.

It was 14 years ago now since Younous, then a young man, turned to me and spoke in German in Kandahar. It surprised me because he was Moroccan, but he told me he had learned some German as a young boy in Morocco. I remember Younous as an extremely friendly man. He had a reserved and calm manner.

In 2010, the US administration decided that Younous did not pose any threat to the US — or to any of its allies. Six US federal agencies unanimously cleared him for release. But he has not spent one day in freedom since.

For the past 14 years, time has stopped for him. I can barely believe that he must now be 47 years old. When I first got to know him he was in his early 30s. For 14 years, Younous, an innocent man, languished in Guantánamo Bay. On 16 September, he was finally released from that hellhole of a prison — when I heard, I was so relieved. Finally my friend would join me in freedom. But it didn’t turn out that way. Upon his arrival in Morocco, Younous was detained and the Moroccan authorities have still not set him free.

I learned from Younous’s lawyers at the international human rights organization Reprieve, that the US claimed to have successfully negotiated diplomatic assurances with the Moroccans. They had allegedly agreed that Younous would not be charged with any crime upon his arrival there and that he would not be detained in Morocco for longer than 72 hours. These assurances were apparently completely worthless. Younous has been behind bars in a Moroccan prison for over 72 days [note: currently 109 days].

Recently, Barack Obama has promised to present a plan to close Guantánamo once and for all. It has been nine years since I was finally released. I can now spend time with my family and lead a quiet life. But Younous is still in prison, locked away from his wife, his brother, from any semblance of freedom. His cell in Guantánamo has just been exchanged for one in Morocco.

Why would the Moroccans want to keep this man in prison? And what is the United States doing to enforce their agreement with them?

In these past few months, several detainees were sent back to their home countries. Shaker Aamer, for example, was released to the UK where he received immediate medical attention and was warmly welcomed by many people, including by many members of parliament. Another man, Ahmed Abdelaziz, returned to Mauritania and the authorities said on the same day that there was no case against him and that he was a free man.

Shaker and Ahmed are both now back together with their families. As for me, I have my freedom back. I returned to Germany to a job, a life. It makes me sad to think of all these other cases and to compare them to the terrible situation Younous finds himself in.

For me it is not easy to suppress the images of Guantánamo. I am haunted by my own memories, the isolation cell, the food and sleep deprivation, the beatings, the daily humiliation and the brutality. And I keep thinking about the men I met while I was in that place.

Younous’s family are so worried about him. They want nothing more than to have him back home. Younous would often speak to me about his family, especially his wife Abla. In September, she thought that Younous was finally coming home to her. Now her hopes have been crushed.

No one can change what happened to Younous and his family over the last 14 years. But a better future is still possible for them. I can now live a normal life in Germany, despite the fact I cannot and will not forget what happened to me. The same is possible for Younous.

Mr Obama must stand up to his promise to my friend and make sure that Younous finally walks free. I appeal to Mr Obama not let this important moment pass. He must speak to the Moroccan authorities and hold them to their word. It is not too late.

I wish my dear friend Younous the physical and spiritual strength to persevere despite his ongoing hardship. I hope that he, too, will have the chance of a new beginning.

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.

Videos: Andy Worthington’s Band The Four Fathers Play “Masters of War” and “81 Million Dollars”

Buy our album here!

Below are the last two videos from an event before Christmas at Deptford Cinema, a community cinema in south east London, when I talked about Guantánamo, and my band The Four Fathers played a set of political songs. I spoke about my ten years of research, writing and campaigning about Guantánamo, including the We Stand With Shaker campaign that I launched in November 2014 with the activist Joanne MacInnes to secure the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, who was finally freed on October 30 after nearly 14 years in US custody.

Following my talk, The Four Fathers played eight songs — “Song for Shaker Aamer,”  the song I wrote that was featured in the campaign video for We Stand With Shaker, updated to reflect Shaker’s release, my roots reggae anthem “Fighting Injustice,” band member Richard Clare’s song “She’s Back” (about Pussy Riot), a cover of Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War,” and four other songs of mine, “Tory Bullshit Blues” and “81 Million Dollars,” about the US torture program ($81m being the amount that was paid, by the Bush administration, to two contractors, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, who set up and ran the program), and the new songs “Riot” and “London.”

You can buy our album “Love and War” here, as an eight-track download, or on CD with two extra tracks (including “Masters of War”) — or you can buy tracks individually from just 60p ($0.93) each, although you’re welcome to pay more to support us.

Recordings of the event were made by a friend, Andrew, and I’ve been making them available since. The video of my talk is here, which I posted before Christmas, on Christmas Day I posted the video of “Song for Shaker Aamer,” and a few days ago I posted two more videos — of “Fighting Injustice” and “She’s Back.” Below are two more videos — of “Masters of War” and “81 Million Dollars.”

“Masters of War” by The Four Fathers, Deptford Cinema, December 18, 2015

“81 Million Dollars” by The Four Fathers, Deptford Cinema, December 18, 2015

I hope you like them and will share them if you do. Please also feel free to subscribe to our YouTube channel — and if you want to book me for a talk, or to have the band play, please do get in touch.

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.

President Obama on Closing Guantánamo

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.

A week before Christmas, at a press conference, President Obama spoke about Guantánamo, and we wanted to make sure that our supporters know exactly what he said, as it is significant for the coming year — Obama’s last in office — to know what he has planned, and what he thinks of the opposition to his plans in Congress, where Republicans have been imposing restrictions on his ability to release prisoners and to close the prison for most of his presidency, including a ban on bringing prisoners to the US mainland for any reason.

Below are President Obama’s comments, interspersed with our commentary. We hope you find it useful. The president’s comments came in response to a question by the journalist David Jackson.

David Jackson: Thank you, Mr. President. A Gitmo question. Congress has made it pretty clear that they’re just not going to let you transfer prisoners to the United States for trial. But some people think you already have the executive authority to transfer those prisoners and close Gitmo itself next year. My question is, do you believe you have that authority and are you willing to exercise it to close that place?

The President: Well, first of all, we’ve been working systematically — another example of persistence — in reducing the population. We have a review process. Those who are eligible for transfer we locate in countries that have accepted some of these detainees. They monitor them, and it’s been determined that they can be transferred. And my expectation is by early next year, we should have reduced that population below 100. And we will continue to steadily chip away at the numbers in Guantánamo.

WE SAY: We are glad that President Obama spoke about the men approved for release and the efforts to release them. There are, however, 48 men approved for release out of the 107 men still held, and 37 of these men were approved for release six years ago by the Guantánamo Review Task Force that the president established shortly after he first took office in January 2009. Holding men for so long who have been approved for release is unforgivable, as we have repeatedly made clear. We also hope that the recent mentions in the mainstream media of 17 releases in the new year will turn out to be true.

The other 11 men approved for release had their cases reviewed in the last two years by Periodic Review Boards, established to review the cases of everyone not already approved for release or facing a trial (and there are just ten men in this latter category). The PRBs have had an astonishing success rate for the prisoners — 15 out of 18 men’s cases reviewed to date have ended with recommendations for their release (a success rate of 83%), but the process is moving far too slowly. 43 men are currently awaiting reviews, as explained in our definitive PRB list, published at the start of December, and at the current rate these will not be completed until long after Obama leaves office. The president therefore needs to do all in his power to speed up the reviews in 2016.

The President: There’s going to come to a point where we have an irreducible population — people who pose a significant threat, but for various reasons, it’s difficult for us to try them in an Article III court. Some of those folks are going through a military commission process. But there’s going to be a challenge there.

Now, at that stage, I’m presenting a plan to Congress about how we can close Guantánamo. I’m not going to automatically assume that Congress says no. I’m not being coy, David. I think it’s fair to say that there’s going to be significant resistance from some quarters to that.  But I think we can make a very strong argument that it doesn’t make sense for us to be spending an extra $100 million, $200 million, $300 million, $500 million, a billion dollars, to have a secure setting for 50, 60, 70 people.  And we will wait until Congress has definitively said no to a well-thought-out plan with numbers attached to it before we say anything definitive about my executive authority here.  I think it’s far preferable if I can get stuff done with Congress.

WE SAY: It is not just for reasons of justice that President Obama needs to speed up the PRB process. His talk of people who cannot be tried should set alarm bells ringing for anyone who respects the rule of law, as it appears to endorse the policy of indefinite detention without charge or trial that has existed at Guantánamo since it opened in January 2002. However, we recognize that, according to the laws of war, President Obama has the right to hold people until the end of hostilities. As a result, he is entitled to transfer prisoners to the US mainland to be held without charge or trial, but the prisoners will have constitutional rights denied to them at Guantánamo, and will be able to launch new lawsuits that, we believe, will severely challenge the supposed justification for their ongoing imprisonment.

As “Close Guantánamo” co-founder Tom Wilner has explained, “If the detainees are brought to the United States, the government loses its prime argument for denying them constitutional rights. The imprisonment of anyone without charge or trial on the US mainland is radically at odds with any concept of constitutional due process. Bringing them to the United States means that they would almost certainly have full constitutional rights and the ability to effectively challenge their detentions in court. They would then no longer be dependent solely on the largesse of the Obama administration, or whatever administration happens to follow it, but could gain relief through the courts.”

David Jackson: So actually you could — right — [close Guantánamo] on your own?

The President: David, as I said — and I think you’ve seen me on a whole bunch of issues like immigration — I’m not going to be forward-leaning on what I can do without Congress before I’ve tested what I can do with Congress. And every once in a while, they’ll surprise you, and this may be one of those places — because I think we can make a really strong argument. Guantánamo continues to be one of the key magnets for jihadi recruitment.

To Roberta [Rampton]’s question earlier about how do they propagandize and convince somebody here in the United States who may not have a criminal record or a history of terrorist activity to start shooting — this is part of what they feed, this notion of a gross injustice, that America is not living up to its professed ideals. We know that. We see the Internet traffic. We see how Guantánamo has been used to create this mythology that America is at war with Islam. And for us to close it is part of our counterterrorism strategy that is supported by our military, our diplomatic, and our intelligence teams.

So when you combine that with the fact that it’s really expensive that we are essentially at this point detaining a handful of people and each person is costing several million dollars to detain, when there are more efficient ways of doing it, I think we can make a strong argument.

But I’ll take your point that it will be an uphill battle. Now, every battle I’ve had with Congress over the last five years has been uphill. But we keep on surprising you by actually getting some stuff done. Sometimes that may prove necessary, but we try not to get out ahead of ourselves on that.

WE SAY: President Obama is correct to call Guantánamo “one of the key magnets for jihadi recruitment.” In our mission statement, when we founded “Close Guantánamo” in 2012, we quoted President Obama, in a speech in early 2009, stating that, “instead of serving as a tool to counter terrorism, Guantánamo became a symbol that helped al-Qaeda recruit terrorists to its cause. Indeed, the existence of Guantánamo likely created more terrorists around the world than it ever detained.” We also agree with the president about the outrageous cost of Guantánamo, and as we also stated in our mission statement, we believe that Guantánamo “undermines our bedrock commitment to the rule of law, making that fundamental principle less secure for all Americans.”

We also hope, of course, that President Obama will be able to close Guantánamo with the support of Congress, and we remember that, back in May 2013, in a major speech on national security at the National Archives, he said, of Guantánamo, “there is no justification beyond politics for Congress to prevent us from closing a facility that should never have been opened.”

However, we are prepared for Congress to fail to cooperate with the president, and we bear in mind the op-ed in the Washington Post in November by Greg Craig, who was White House Counsel in 2009, and Cliff Sloan, the envoy for Guantánamo closure in the State Department from 2013-14, entitled, “The president doesn’t need Congress’s permission to close Guantánamo.” Craig and Sloan wrote, “Some maintain that the congressional ban on transfers from Guantánamo to the United States prevents closure without congressional approval. But that is wrong. Under Article II of the Constitution, the president has exclusive authority to determine the facilities in which military detainees are held. Obama has the authority to move forward. He should use it.”

What you can do now

To ask President Obama to speed up the release of prisoners from Guantánamo, and the Periodic Review Boards, call the White House on 202-456-1111 or 202-456-1414 or submit a comment online.

You can also call the Department of Defense and ask Defense Secretary Ashton Carter to speed up prisoner releases and the PRB process on 703-571-3343.

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.

Videos: Andy Worthington’s Band The Four Fathers Play “Fighting Injustice” and “She’s Back”

Buy our album here!

On December 18, I gave a talk about Guantánamo, my research into the men held there, the lawlessness and cruelty of the prison, and my writing and campaigning for nearly ten years to educate people about the prison and, ultimately, to get it closed, at an event held at the Deptford Cinema, a community cinema in south east London that I wholeheartedly recommend. I spoke not just about my research and my writing, but also the Close Guantánamo campaign I launched nearly four years ago with the US attorney Tom Wilner (who represented the Guantánamo prisoners in their habeas corpus cases before the US Supreme Court), and We Stand With Shaker, the campaign I launched last November with the activist Joanne MacInnes to secure the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, who was finally freed on October 30 after nearly 14 years in US custody.

With what I hope is an innovative approach to combining politics, education and entertainment, my talk was followed by a set of political songs by my band The Four Fathers, and I’m delighted that a friend, Andrew — who became involved in We Stand With Shaker via his involvement in CAAB (the Campaign for the Accountability of American Bases), for whom I was a speaker at their annual July 4 protest at the NSA’s Menwith Hill spy base in Yorkshire in 2013 — recorded my talk and most of our set, which he has made available via YouTube.

The video of my talk is here, which I posted before Christmas, and on Christmas Day I posted the video of The Four Fathers playing “Song for Shaker Aamer,” the song I wrote that was featured in the campaign video for We Stand With Shaker, updated to reflect Shaker’s release.

Below are two more videos of songs from our set — the first, “Fighting Injustice,” a roots reggae anthem and a live favourite, which defends socialism, attacks bankers and politicians for the global crash in 2008, and laments the greed behind London’s current and unprecedented housing bubble, and “She’s Back,” a new song by guitarist Richard Clare about Pussy Riot.

“Fighting Injustice” by The Four Fathers, Deptford Cinema, December 18, 2015

“She’s Back” by The Four Fathers, Deptford Cinema, December 18, 2015

Overall, we played eight songs — as well as “Song for Shaker Aamer,” “Fighting Injustice” and “She’s Back,” a cover of Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War,” my songs “Tory Bullshit Blues” and “81 Million Dollars,” about the US torture program, and my new songs “Riot” and “London.”

You can buy our album “Love and War” here, as an eight-track download, or on CD with two extra tracks (including Masters of War) — or you can buy tracks individually from just 60p ($0.93) each, although you’re welcome to pay more to support us.

I’ll be posting another couple of videos in the near future, as I prepare for my imminent US trip to call for the closure of Guantánamo on the 14th anniversary of the prison’s opening (on January 11), and if the combination of a talk by me and a set by The Four Fathers is of interest, and you can put on an event in London or nearby (or even if you want just me talking, or just the band playing), then please do get in touch.

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’s Band The Four Fathers Play “Song For Shaker Aamer” at Deptford Cinema, Dec. 18, 2015

One week ago, on December 18, I gave a talk about my writing about Guantánamo and my campaigning to get the prison closed, including the We Stand With Shaker campaign, at Deptford Cinema in south east London, followed by a set by my band The Four Fathers, playing our repertoire of political songs.

In a previous article, I made available a video of my talk, filmed by a friend and campaigner, Andrew, who, I’m delighted to say, also filmed us playing an updated Song for Shaker Aamer, used in the campaign video for We Stand With Shaker, which was launched last November by myself and activist Joanne MacInnes to push for the release of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, particularly by encouraging celebrities and MPs to stand with a giant inflatable figure of Shaker — a campaign that, I’m glad to note, met with considerable support.

After Shaker’s release on October 30, I amended the lyrics to reflect that he is now a free man. This was the version we played at Deptford Cinema, and, for Christmas — when, I believe, everyone, whatever their religion or belief system, should be encouraged to think about those less fortunate than ourselves, and to help those suffering injustice — I’m pleased to be making it available below via YouTube. The song is about Shaker Aamer, but it also deals with the fundamentally unjust nature of the system of imprisonment without charge or trial at Guantánamo, where 107 men remain. If you find this unacceptable, and want to do something about it, please feel free to join the Close Guantánamo campaign that I set up nearly four years ago with the US attorney Tom Wilner, who has represented Guantánamo prisoners, and advocated on their behalf in their Supreme Court cases in 2004 and 2008.

Song for Shaker Aamer is the opening track on The Four Fathers’ debut album, Love and War, which you can listen to on our Bandcamp page, and which you can buy as a download, or on CD with two extra tracks. You can also buy individual tracks to download if you wish.

As I also mentioned in my previous article, this was the very first time I had undertaken a multi-media evening of my work, in which I spoke about my writing about Guantánamo and my campaigning to get the prison closed, followed by a set by The Four Fathers, playing our political songs. However, both myself and the band would be delighted to do it again, so if anyone in London wants to follow up with a similar evening of a talk followed by music, or if it’s something that might appeal as part of a festival line-up, then please get in touch.

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

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 Guantánamo, Shaker Aamer and We Stand With Shaker at Deptford Cinema, Dec. 18, 2015

On Friday, I was delighted to present, for the first time, a multi-media evening of my work, in which I spoke about my writing about Guantánamo and my campaigning to get the prison closed, including the We Stand With Shaker campaign, followed by a set by my band The Four Fathers, playing our repertoire of political songs. If anyone in London wants to follow up with a similar evening of a talk followed by music, then please get in touch.

The event was at Deptford Cinema, a great little independent community cinema in south east London — the only independent cinema in the Borough of Lewisham, in fact — which is well worth anyone’s support, and I’m delighted that a friend, Andrew, filmed my talk and has made a significant part of it available on YouTube.

Andrew became involved in We Stand With Shaker via his involvement in CAAB (the Campaign for the Accountability of American Bases), for whom I was a speaker at their annual July 4 protest at the NSA’s Menwith Hill spy base in Yorkshire in 2013, and I’m grateful to him for recording it and making it available to a wider audience.

The 44-minute video is below, and I hope you have time to watch it, and to share it if you find it useful:

I first spoke about how I became involved with Guantánamo, and how I spent 14 months researching and analyzing the 8,000 pages of documents that the Pentagon was obliged to release after losing a freedom of information lawsuit in 2006, which was the basis of my book The Guantánamo Files, published in 2007. Since then, I have been working full-time as an independent journalist, researcher and human rights campaigner, publishing over 1,800 articles about Guantánamo, and also setting up the Close Guantánamo campaign with US attorney Tom Wilner on 2012, and We Stand With Shaker with the activist Joanne MacInnes in November 2014, dedicated to securing the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison.

Andrew began recording as I was speaking about Shaker, who, as a result of concerted action by campaigners, MPs and the media, was freed on October 30 — eight years after he was first told the US no longer wanted to hold him — and returned to his family in London, a free man at last. I spoke about his case, showed some short clips from his recent BBC interview, and also showed some photos from his secret visit to Parliament on November 17, when he met MPs and supporters from We Stand With Shaker and the long-running Save Shaker Aamer Campaign.

As the photo above shows, I was one of the people who met Shaker that day, discovering first-hand, for the first time, his charisma, his passion for justice, and the resilience that helped him, amazingly, endure over 13 years and eight months in Guantánamo, and to emerge looking and sounding remarkably well.

The video ends with a Q&A session with members of the audience, involving questions about, to cite just a few examples, whether or not Guantánamo will ever close, and whether the US still maintains any “black sites” around the world.

After my talk, as mentioned above, my band The Four Fathers played a set of eight songs — my compositions Song for Shaker Aamer, Tory Bullshit Blues and Fighting Injustice, a cover of Bob Dylan’s Masters of War, She’s Back (guitarist Richard Clare’s song about Pussy Riot), my new songs Riot and London, and 81 Million Dollars, my song about the US torture program.

You can buy our album Love and War here, as a download, or on CD, and the video of us playing Song for Shaker Aamer at Deptford Cinema with new lyrics reflecting Shaker’s release is here, with more videos to follow, hopefully. The song was originally used in the campaign video for We Stand With Shaker, last November.

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 and Joanne MacInnes Discuss the Success of We Stand With Shaker on George Galloway’s Sputnik Show on RT

On Saturday, Joanne MacInnes and I, the co-founders and co-directors of the We Stand With Shaker campaign, which successfully campaigned — with other campaigners, with MPs and with the support of media including the Daily Mail — to secure the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, appeared on George Galloway’s Sputnik Show on RT (filmed on Thursday) to discuss the success of the campaign, how Shaker is doing since his release, what the future holds, and the unreliable nature of the so-called evidence against him (something I had particularly wanted to emphasize).

George — and Gayatri, his wife, who co-hosts the show with him — spoke to Jo and I last November, just after we launched the campaign, and it was great to be invited back to celebrate, as, of course, struggles against colossal injustices undertaken by major world powers do not always end so well — and for the 107 men still held at Guantánamo, of course, the injustice is far from over.

This was how George introduced the show:

Shaker Aamer, an innocent man, spent 14 years without charge in illegal detention and endured around 200 sessions of “enhanced interrogation,” much of it qualifying as torture. He would still be in Guantánamo Bay if it had not been for the help of principled politicians, both Tory and Labour, and the magnificent campaign spearheaded by Joanne MacInnes and Andy Worthington. They return to Sputnik this week to give us an update.

Below is the show via YouTube (please note that, just after a minute into the show, there are several seconds of silence, when the sound is inexplicably lost):

The show is also here, on the RT website. And stay tuned for the second half of the show, when political analyst Charlie Wolf discusses the malignant phenomenon that is Donald Trump — and if you care to, please also pay a visit to fimmaker Michael Moore’s “We Are All Muslim” page if you want to express your opposition to Trump’s dangerous and unacceptable Islamophobia.

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: After Guantánamo, Shaker Aamer’s 90-Minute BBC Interview with Victoria Derbyshire

On Monday, after an exclusive interview with the Mail on Sunday, published the day before (which I wrote about here and here), both the BBC and ITV News ran interviews with Shaker Aamer, who, until October 30, was the last British resident in the prison.

I am delighted to have played a part in securing Shaker’s release through ten years of writing about Guantánamo, and campaigning to get the prison closed, and, for the last eleven months of Shaker’s imprisonment, through the We Stand With Shaker campaign that I launched with the activist Joanne MacInnes last November.

I have also had the pleasure of meeting Shaker since his release, and was delighted to find that everything I had worked out about him from the reports that have emerged from Guantánamo and from those who know him — his eloquence, his intelligence and his implacable devotion to tackling injustice — was accurate, and this was also evident in his interview with Victoria Derbyshire for her morning show on BBC2, which I’m posting below via YouTube where it has already received over 55,000 views.

Note: Please be aware there are a few glitches in the video, where the sound and images are lost for a few seconds and there is only disturbing white noise.

Much of Shaker’s testimony is, of course, very harrowing — aspects of his capture, imprisonment in brutal conditions in Afghanistan, and, of course, his 13 years and eight months in Guantánamo — but I’m  glad to note there are also opportunities to see his dancing eyes and his winning smile, when discussing happier things, or when dark humour provides an opportunity for his extraordinary energy to express itself.

So please, if you have the time, watch the video and share it with your friends and family. Watch Shaker talk about being reunited with his family, and the joys and difficulties that brings, about why he went to Afghanistan in July 2001, how he was seized — along with so many others, fleeing the death and destruction that followed the US-led invasion after 9/11, in search only of safety but instead finding betrayal, as anyone who could be sold to the US as a member of al-Qaeda or the Taliban was sold by the US’s Afghan and Pakistani allies.

Watch Shaker talk about the brutality of his treatment in US custody in Bagram, in Afghanistan, and how a British agent was present while he was being violently abused by his US captors, watch as he talks about how an interrogator in Kandahar threatened to rape his five-year old daughter, and watch also how — for legal reasons, presumably — he is not yet able to speak freely about what happened to Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the training camp director who he encountered after his capture, and who was then flown to Egypt where he was tortured and told lies about connections between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein that were used to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. Al-Libi later recanted his lies, but was returned to Col. Gaddafi in Libya, where he died in prison in May 2009, allegedly by committing suicide, although that explanation has always seemed extremely unlikely.

Asked if Tony Blair and Jack Straw should be prosecuted for their involvement in his treatment, Shaker responds that he is only interested in them telling the truth, and what particularly motivates him is a desire to see Guantánamo closed (this is from 35:50 to 36:50).

He then speaks about the brutality in Kandahar, which was even worse than in Bagram, and then responds to the allegations against him, which can be found in the classified military file released by WikiLeaks in 2011. He responded to Victoria Derbyshire’s questions about these allegations by, quite accurately, denying them all, because they are all profoundly untrustworthy, as I touched upon in my article from early October, “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Truth, Lies and Distortions in the Coverage of Shaker Aamer, Soon to be Freed from Guantánamo.”

The interview then deals with Shaker’s time at Guantánamo. Asked how to describe it, he compares it to Azkaban from the Harry Potter books, which sucks out all the happiness from life — and later calls it a world of mental and physical destruction engineered by psychologists, who “know how to manipulate you and to make you get scared.” He also speaks about the specific torture program that took place in the early years, when prisoners were held in isolation, subjected to extreme cold, loud music and noise, short-shackled in painful positions, and more — and see below for his confirmation that, for some prisoners, this kind of abuse has never stopped.

Shaker also speaks about the Extreme Reaction Force (ERF), the teams of armed guards who punish any perceived infringement of the rules with brutality. Shaker was subjected to ERF attacks on hundreds of occasions, and, asked why he resisted — in connection with an apple stem, for example, which he used as a toothpick — he explained that it was important for him not to be broken, something that was made abundantly clear throughout his imprisonment.

Shaker also speaks about the three deaths at the prison on June 9, 2006 — evidently not believing the official story that it was a triple suicide — which he mentions in the preamble to discussing how he became friends with ants during a horrendously long period of isolation. He also speaks about how important the cats that roamed the grounds were to the prisoners, and he also discusses the birds he befriended.

Asked more about the night of the three deaths, Shaker explains, as he has before, that he was tortured that night, adding — as was not known before — that it was because the guards wanted to take a retina scan and a photo, which he wouldn’t allow. He was then held in isolation for a month, without being told what had happened, but when asked to speak more about the deaths he said he was not able to talk about it right now, but will when he can — again, presumably, for legal reasons.

Asked how he coped with being approved for release but not freed — for eight years in total, from 2007 until his release two months ago — he says he blames himself for not going to Saudi Arabia, as the authorities wanted in 2007, and again in 2009, when, in addition, he thought Guantánamo would soon be closed, because of President Obama’s promise to close it within a year of taking office. He also, however, explains why he was extremely wary of returning to Saudi Arabia.

Shaker also speaks, with powerful indignation, about how torture is still used at Guantánamo on prisoners regarded as uncooperative — hunger strikers, for example, who are still held in Camp Five Echo, which I wrote about here and here (in the latter case, via Shaker himself).

Shaker also thanks those who campaigned to free him, and who kept his spirits up when he found it difficult to maintain his extraordinary resilience, and he specifically mentions Joy Hurcombe, the chair of the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign, and Jo and myself from We Stand With Shaker.

When he is asked, “Will Guantánamo ever close?” Shaker says yes, and when asked when that will be, he says, “When the world knows the truth about it.”

For my part, I hope to be able to help Shaker to tell the truth about Guantánamo and to get the prison closed.

Towards the end of the interview, Shaker gets to speak about a song that meant a lot to him as a young person, when he was working in the US — “Here I Go Again” by Whitesnake — and repeats the chorus:

Here I go again on my own

Goin’ down the only road I’ve ever known

Like a drifter I was born to walk alone

An’ I’ve made up my mind, I ain’t wasting no more time

I hope, one day, that Shaker will join me on stage with my band The Four Fathers — to sing “Here I Go Again” if he wants — but primarily to take part in my “Song for Shaker Aamer,” which was used in the campaign video for We Stand With Shaker, and which features Shaker shouting from his cell in Guantánamo during a visit by a US TV crew in 2013.

At the very end of the interview, Shaker points out that rethinking what has happened since 9/11 — including the existence of Guantánamo — is necessary for the US and its allies. As he says, “Justice will bring justice and injustice will bring injustice.”

I am with you, Shaker!

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.

Zahir Hamdoun, the 21st Guantánamo Prisoner Seeking Release Via A Periodic Review Board

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.

Last Tuesday, the 21st prisoner to face a Periodic Review Board at Guantánamo — Zahir Hamdoun, a 36-year old Yemeni — asked the board, made up of representatives of the Departments of State, Defense, Justice and Homeland Security, as well as the office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to approve his release from the prison. The board members communicate with Guantánamo by video feed, and hear directly from the prisoners and their representatives, although very little of what takes place is open to the media, and, by extension, the public.

The PRBs, which began in November 2013, were established to review the cases of 46 men deemed “too dangerous to release” in 2010 by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established shortly after taking office in January 2009, plus 25 others originally recommended for prosecution — until the basis for prosecution largely collapsed under judicial scrutiny.

The description of 46 men as “too dangerous to release” sounds dramatic, but in fact the task force conceded that insufficient evidence existed to put these men on trial, so instead of “too dangerous to release” a better description would have been “subjected to unreliable information, in many cases obtained through torture, or other forms of abuse, or bribery, or regarded as a threat because of their attitude while unjustly imprisoned for years without charge or trial.”

Since the PRBs, 18 cases have been decided, and in 15 cases these men, allegedly “too dangerous to release,” have actually been approved for release, exposing that designation as hyperbole. For further details, see my definitive PRB list here.

Unfortunately, the reviews are moving far too slowly, and 43 men are still awaiting reviews, which, at the current rate, will not be completed until sometime in 2020. This, unacceptably, will be ten long years after the task force’s initial recommendations, which, from the beginning, were accompanied by discussions about these men receiving periodic reviews of their cases.

Little has been heard about Zahir Hamdoun — aka Zaher Hamdoun or Zahar Hamdoun, and also identified as Zaher bin Hamdoun or Zahir bin Hamdoun — during his long imprisonment, but in August Pardiss Kebriaei of the Center for Constitutional Rights, appointed to his case in the last few years, had an article published in the Guardian featuring Hamdoun’s words interspersed with her own commentary (which I also wrote about here). In a moving statement, Hamdoun said:

I have become a body without a soul. I breathe, eat and drink, but I don’t belong to the world of living creatures. I rather belong to another world, a world that is buried in a grave called Guantánamo. I fall asleep and then wake up to realize that my soul and my thoughts belong to that world I watch on television, or read about in books. That is all I can say about the ordeal I’ve been enduring.

Hamdoun is one of several prisoners seized in a variety of house raids in Karachi, Pakistan in February 2002, and, as I explained in August, “the authorities tried to claim, improbably, that, although he was just 22 or 23 years old at the time of his capture, he was an al-Qaeda member, who had been a trainer in a military camp.” However, these claims came, for example, from the notorious torture victim Abu Zubaydah, for whom the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program was first developed, from Yasim Basardah (aka Mohammed Basardah), a Yemeni well-known as the most prolific liar in Guantánamo, and from Adel al-Zamel, a Kuwaiti who has stated publicly that, under duress, he made false statements about people he didn’t know.”

Last Tuesday, when Hamdoun went before his review board, Pardiss Kebriaei told the board that CCR was prepared to offer years of long-term support for him ranging from “financial assistance and referrals for needs large and small, ranging from live-in interpreters and mental health care, to laptops and language CDs.” Both Kebriaei and Hamdoun understand that he will not be permitted to return to Yemen, because of fears about the security situation in the country, and that, if approved for release, a third country must be found that will offer him a new home. Kebriaei also spoke extensively about his family’s support for him.

A military officer assigned to represent him, a woman, also pointed out that Hamdoun “shook my hand enthusiastically” when they first met, and explained that he “has expressed regret for the decisions he has made in the past,” adding that “he has been exposed to a variety of cultures and religions while here and understands the importance of respecting everyone regardless of beliefs. He knows it is important to treat everyone as you wish to be treated.”

In contrast, the authorities claimed that Hamdoun had been a trainer at a military camp in Afghanistan — a claim based on dubious statements by other prisoners — although it was conceded that it was not known “whether the formally joined al-Qa’ida.” Regarding his behavior in custody, it was noted that he has been “polite but uncooperative.” It was also claimed that he “dislikes the US,” although this was described as “an emotion that probably is motivated more by frustration over his continuing detention than by a commitment to global jihad.” It was also noted that the authorities “have seen no indications that [Hamdoun] or his family members have close ties to terrorists outside of Guantánamo,” and while concerns were expressed about him returning Yemen, we know that will not happen, and of greater interest is the fact that he “has relatives in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE,” even though the authorities “do not know whether they would be able to support him.”

Below I’m posting the opening statements made by his personal representatives, and by Pardiss Kebriaei, which I believe shed greater light on why Hamdoun is not a threat to the US and should be recommended for release.

Periodic Review Board Initial Hearing, 08 Dec 2015

Zahar Omar Hamis Bin Hamdoun, ISN 576

Personal Representative Opening Statement

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen of the Board. We are the Personal Representatives for Mr. Zahar Omar Hamis Bin Hamdoun. We are joined by his Private Counsel and translator.

At my first meeting with Zahar, he stood and shook my hand enthusiastically. From the beginning, it was obvious that the fact that I was female did not concern him. Before the meeting was over, he gave me one of his drawings as a gift to show his appreciation for my assistance in this process. Over the past three months, we have met with Zahar close to 50 hours and he has been very cooperative, enthusiastic, polite and forthcoming with all of his answers.

Zahar has expressed regret for the decisions he has made in the past. Working to enhance his education and learn new skills, he has grown as a person during his time at GTMO. He has been exposed to a variety of cultures and religions while here and understands the importance of respecting everyone, regardless of beliefs. He knows it is important to treat everyone as you wish to be treated.

When he is transferred, he wishes to marry and start a family of his own. If possible, he wishes to continue his education as this is a duty in his family for both male or female. As for work, it will depend on the economy where he is transferred, but he would like to open a store, perhaps selling groceries, as he has experience as part of his family’s business. He is willing to go to any country and he understands that returning to Yemen is not an option. Zahar is also willing to participate in any rehabilitation or reintegration program necessary.

As much as he wishes to see his mother and family again, he really does not wish to return to Yemen as there is no future due to the current instability. Of course, he does hope to someday be allowed to bring his mother, if only for a visit, wherever he may end up. Regardless of where he is transferred, he will have the full support of his family. The distance is inconsequential, as his eldest brother, who is like a father, already provides support to his family in Yemen, while living in a different country. He will do the same for Zahar.

Based on everything we have seen and heard during our time with Zahar, we do not believe he is a continuing significant threat to the United States or its interests.

We are happy to answer any questions that you may have throughout this proceeding. At this time, Zahar’s Private Counsel will present an opening statement. Thank you for your time and consideration.

Periodic Review Board Initial Hearing, 08 Dec 2015

Zahar Omar Hamis Bin Hamdoun, ISN 576

Private Counsel Pardiss Kebriaei Opening Statement

Members of the Board, good morning.

I have represented Guantánamo detainees since 2007, including several men whom the government has successfully resettled. I have been working with Mr. Hamdoun for over two years.

I would like to use my time to underscore or expand on a few points in Mr. Hamdoun’s personal statement.

The first concerns his family. In recent months, I have been in regular conversation with Mr. Hamdoun’s family, in particular, two of his older brothers, for the purpose of preparing for this review. They put me on speakerphone while their mother listens in the background in the same home Mr. Hamdoun grew up in. They are a stable, close-knit group. Hard work and education are core values reflected in the paths of Mr. Hamdoun’s siblings, down to his youngest sister, who graduated from college a few years ago, and his youngest brother, who is still trying to attend his college classes in Sana’a despite the circumstances. We have submitted information about them each, and Mr. Hamdoun will say more about how they sustain him. I want just to make two brief points, since Mr. Hamdoun has not been able to speak to his family since his review process began. One is to emphasize that the family knows that Mr. Hamdoun may not be transferred to Yemen, and they accept that possibility. In my initial conversations with one of the older brothers, while the other siblings and their mother gathered around his cell phone, I broached the subject gingerly, anticipating a fair amount of questions and frustration. Their response: “Yes, this is obvious.” They know the circumstances in their country. They are honest people who have no desire to interfere with the terms of any transfer agreement and bring additional difficulty to Mr. Hamdoun or themselves. What they want is a chance for Mr. Hamdoun to rebuild his life, wherever that may be.

Additionally, I want to note that the materials included in Mr. Hamdoun’s submission unfortunately do not reflect the family’s effort to support this review process. Mr. Hamdoun’s mother and several of his siblings had intended to submit videotaped oral statements. They spent weeks preparing their thoughts and coordinating with us on the logistics. That plan was thwarted, remarkably, by a cyclone (Chapala) in the Gulf of Aden that made a rare landfall in their region in early November, the first in decades. A week later, a second major cyclone (Megh) struck their region. Needless to say, power outages and record-level flooding in the wake of the storms prevented them from being able to provide, before our deadline, the materials they had intended to prepare.

The second area I want to expand on concerns the support Mr. Hamdoun would have after transfer from my organization in particular. We have had the experience of supporting the reintegration of several clients over the years. I have included a document in our submission specifying the range of assistance we have provided in the past and are ready to offer Mr. Hamdoun, depending on what might be necessary. My experience with two clients whom the Administration resettled in 2009 and 2010 provides a good snapshot. In those cases, we worked with the State Department and host governments on transition plans for the men; we visited them multiple times after release; we served as an ongoing point of contact for local authorities to help problem-solve as issues arose; we provided financial assistance and referrals for needs large and small, ranging from live-in interpreters and mental health care, to laptops and language CDs; and we tapped into our wide network of regional and local partners to help address other needs. We were a trusted and experienced resource in facilitating the transition of these clients. Critically, our support continued long-term, for several years. We would be ready to provide the same breadth and depth of support to Mr. Hamdoun.

The third issue I want briefly to address concerns his past conduct. Mr. Hamdoun regrets his decision to go to Afghanistan in 1999, as he expresses in his statement [not included in the publicly available documents]. But the question of his activities there is not settled, as the unclassified detainee profile also indicates. Mr. Hamdoun brought a habeas petition disputing the allegations against him, which was never ultimately decided by the district court. I would be glad to address Mr. Hamdoun’s own narrative in more detail in the closed session.

I would like to offer a final personal observation based on my experience working with Mr. Hamdoun over the course of the past two years, against the background of the eight years I have been working with detainees. In our meetings, he is attentive and earnest. He is not withdrawn. He does not decline visits. He apologizes when he brings requests. He comes to listen, work and try. He recognizes his limitations. He tells me he has moments of low energy. He is unsettled by his inability to communicate with his family. He is frustrated about his situation. All of these are real. But I have not seen someone resigned, hardened or remote. I have seen effort — someone very much wanting and trying to believe in a better future. Someone very much wanting to be before you today. I have worked with clients after release, for years. Reintegration is a long process that takes effort, engagement and hope. Mr. Hamdoun has shown these qualities, which will serve him well going forward.

Thank you for your consideration.

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.

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