Andy Worthington's Blog, page 83

For Christmas, Buy My Books on the UK Counter-Culture and Guantánamo and My Music with The Four Fathers

If anyone out there hasn’t yet completed their Christmas shopping and would like to buy any of my work, I’m delighted to let you know that all three of my books — about Guantánamo and the UK counter-culture — are still available, as is the album “Love and War,” recorded with my band The Four Fathers and released just a few months ago.

From me you can buy my first two books, Stonehenge: Celebration & Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield.

Stonehenge: Celebration & Subversion is a social history of Stonehenge, interweaving the stories of the outsiders drawn to Stonehenge, primarily over the last hundred years — Druids, other pagans, revellers, festival-goers, anarchists, new travellers and environmental activists — with the monument’s archeological history, and also featuring nearly 150 photos. If you’re buying this from me from anywhere other than the UK, please see this page.  You can also buy it from Amazon in the US.

The Battle of the Beanfield focuses on the events of June 1, 1985, when a convoy of travellers driving to Stonehenge to establish what would have been the 12th annual free festival were ambushed, assaulted and arrested with unprecedented brutality by a quasi-military police force of over 1,300 officers drawn from six counties and the MoD, in what has become known as the Battle of the Beanfield. The book features extracts from the police radio log and in-depth interviews with a range of people who were there on the day, as well as over 100 photos. Again, if you’re buying this from me from anywhere other than the UK, please see this page.

I also have a few copies of my third book, The Guantánamo Files — the book that launched my current career as an expert on Guantánamo, and a campaigner for the closure of the prison — but only rather expensive hardback copies. I sold all my paperbacks, but a few copies are still available via Amazon — in the UK and in the US. Amazon also has the book on Kindle. If you want one of the few hardback copies left, and are ordering from outside the UK, please see this page.

You can also buy “Love and War,” the album I recorded with my band The Four Fathers, who play a mix of rock and roots reggae, and are not afraid of political engagement. The album is available on Bandcamp, where you can either buy it as an 8-track download, or buy individual tracks to download, or you can buy it as CD with two bonus tracks. The album primarily features original songs I have written, including “Song for Shaker Aamer,” which was used in the campaign video for the We Stand With Shaker campaign I established last November with an activist friend, Joanne MacInnes, “81 Million Dollars,” about the US torture program, and two denunciations of the cynical “age of austerity” imposed after the banker-led global economic crash of 2008, “Tory Bullshit Blues” and the roots rocking anthem “Fighting Injustice,” which is a live favourite. The bonus tracks on the CD are covers of Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War,” and a groovy, folky take on “I Will Survive.”

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.

Shaker Aamer Discusses His 13 Years in Guantánamo, Built to “Destroy Human Beings,” and Adjusting to Freedom Since His Release

The Mail on Sunday yesterday featured the first interview conducted by Shaker Aamer since his release from Guantánamo six weeks ago, and below, following my first article yesterday, are excerpts dealing with his 13 years and eight months in Guantánamo — over 5,000 days — and his adjustment to life since his release: the changes in the world, and, in particular, getting to know his family again after so long separated from them. Also included are great anecdotes about Shaker helping someone in a wheelchair — a rather typical act, I believe, for someone renowned for wanting to help others — and what happened when he tried to open a bank account. As the co-founder of the We Stand With Shaker campaign, established just over a year ago to call for his release, it is reassuring to me that he has now undertaken major media interviews — including with ITV News and with The Victoria Derbyshire Show on BBC2, broadcast today — and that he will, hopefully, soon be free to devote more of his time to campaign for the closure of Guantánamo. If viewers outside the UK have difficulty accessing the broadcasts, there are clips from the BBC interview on Twitter here, here and here.

Please also feel free to listen to me on BBC Radio London this morning. The section on Shaker began at At 01:06:27, and my interview started at 01:08:26 and finished at 01:15:10. A good interview, I thought. Please have a listen, and share it if you agree. And please also free to check out my interview with Wandsworth Radio, recorded in the evening.

Shaker Aamer speaks about Guantánamo

Remembering brutality in Guantánamo, and recalling, in particular, the approach of the Forcible Cell Extraction team, six armored soldiers, empowered to suppress, with violence, any perceived infringement of the rules, Shaker told David Rose, “You feel scared.” In Shaker’s case, FCE visits to his cell were shockingly regular, and as he said, “You know you can get hurt, because there are some huge guys there, 18, 20 stone guys, muscular. You could be paralyzed. Anything can happen. Anything.”

As the FCE team arrived, Shaker was sitting on his bed. He recalled, “The watch commander screamed: ‘239, get down on your face, do not resist!’ But, as usual, I was not going to lie down, because the cell is so small that if you lay face down, you stick your face in the hole which is the toilet.”

Nevertheless, the FCE team, using their riot shields, forced him to the ground. “It’s like a train hitting you,” Shaker said, adding, “You are already breathing hard and they are on top of you. They lift you up and press their shields against you so your body is like the meat in a sandwich.”

And all the while, the FCE team members scream. Shaker said, “They only shout one thing, ‘Stop resisting’. I was not resisting at all — how could I?”

“Bizarrely,” as Rose noted, “the whole incident was being filmed, because the camp has to provide a ‘combat cameraman’ for all FCE actions,” making videotapes that, in one prisoner’s case, a judge has ordered to be released to a number of media organizations, to the consternation of the authorities. As Shaker explained, “It’s ‘combat’, because to them, this is a war — the cameraman is going to war. All the time they are shouting for the camera’s benefit, ‘Stop resisting, 239, stop resisting.'”

As Rose noted, after they had “dragged him out of the cell, and flipped him backwards and forwards on the dirty corridor floor, searching him under his clothing,” they “released him, and, bruised and battered, he was locked again in his cell.”

And the trigger for this incident? An apple stem. “Before I was in Guantánamo,” Shaker said, “I always carried a toothpick. They wouldn’t let me have one, so I thought, I’ll keep the stem of an apple, and use that.” An apple had been included with the prisoners’ dinner that night, but after a guard asked Shaker to give his stem back, he explained, “It was in my mouth. I refused. I said I need it to pick my teeth. But apparently, this apple stem was going to affect the system. It cannot be allowed.”

However, despite the violence, Shaker noted that the FCE team failed. As they were walking away, he said, “I called to them through the hatch: ‘Come on, why didn’t you take it?'” — and he then stuck out his tongue to show that the stem was still in his mouth.

In his 13 years and eight months in Guantánamo, Shaker estimates that he was the victim of the FCE team on many hundreds of occasions. In 2012 alone, he said, he was FCE’d 370 times.

The last occasion came just two months before his release, because, as David Rose put it, “he refused to give four vials of blood, demanded on the spurious grounds that the authorities were checking inmates for tuberculosis.” My coverage of that, which partly led to the launch of the Fast For Shaker campaign, just before Shaker’s release, is here.

As Shaker told David Rose, Guantánamo “has been built for one purpose — to destroy human beings. There actually used to be a sign on a wall that said ‘Rodeo Range’. A rodeo is where you break horses. There you are trying to break human beings, you are trying to make them like horses.”

As Rose also explained, “What makes Aamer remarkable is his consistent refusal, year after year, to give in to this pressure — to try to maintain some semblance of control over his life, even if this amounted to nothing more than keeping an apple stem to pick his teeth. His defiance, he admits, probably delayed his release. It was also how he survived, and clung to his sanity.”

As he also noted, “Aamer was in Guantánamo for so long that it is impossible to provide a complete narrative.” Then again, as Shaker told him, “There is no such thing as Guantánamo in the past or Guantánamo in the future. There is no time, because there is still no limit to what they can do. What they did ten, twelve years ago, they can do it today. Who is going to stop them?”

After arriving during the days of Camp X-Ray — the outdoor cages, like animal pens, which are now closed and overgrown — Shaker spent only a few days, in his entire 13 years and eight months at Guantánamo, in Camp 6, built in 2006, which is for prisoners viewed as compliant, who “are allowed out of their cells for ten hours a day, to eat together and play sports.”

He spent much more time in Camp 5, described by Rose as “much more Spartan: there, inmates spend 23 hours a day locked up, taking bland, tasteless meals in Styrofoam ‘clam shells’, with just an hour for a shower and outdoor recreation.” Shaker told him that “one of the most unbearable aspects of Guantánamo” for him was that “Camp 5 was close to the soldiers’ kitchen, from which he inhaled the delicious smell of barbecued meat three times a week, yet was never given it.”

Shaker also “spent many months in solitary confinement” in Camp Five Echo, the prison’s isolation wing. Sometimes, he explained, he “had access to books,” and one of his  favorite books was George Orwell’s 1984, which, as Rose described it accurately, is a novel “about torture and dictatorship,” and unusual for being a book of relevance to Guantánamo that made it past the censors. At other times, he explained, “he was deprived even of this: weeks and months when the days became a sterile, meaningless blur.”

He also explained that “[t]here were also interrogations — ‘appointments’ as they were called.” Over the years, Shaker said, “he had about 200 interrogators, all repeating the same questions he’d already been asked in Afghanistan, along with allegations about his supposed — and hotly denied — recruitment for jihadi groups in London.”

He added, as Rose described it, that “appointments” were often “accompanied by torture: sleep deprivation; being left shackled to the floor in a room colder than freezing point, for up to 36 hours at a time; being bombarded with continuous, deafening rock music.”

“The cold temperatures: my God, that was terrible,” he said, adding, “They just leave you, tied to a ring in the floor: sometimes the interrogator doesn’t even come. You shout, you bang, you scream. They don’t let you go to the toilet: if you need it, you go on yourself. And nobody bothers about you, that’s it.”

According to US personnel who have spoken about Guantánamo before, these techniques, disturbingly, were applied between 2002 and 2004 to around a sixth of the men held; in other words, at least 100 prisoners. And for some, the worst aspect of the torture program was what was euphemistically named the “frequent flier program,” when prisoners were moved every few hours from cell to cell, for days, weeks or even months, as a technique for sleep deprivation.

In the spring of 2005, as Shaker put it, “he decided he’d had enough.” As he said, “I just stopped talking to the interrogators. I refused to answer any more questions.”

Soon after came the biggest mass hunger strike in the prison’s history, which, Rose noted, was “led by Aamer, though he had been in solitary for months. Using a fork to scratch away the glue around his cell window, he broke the soundproof seal, allowing him to shout to prisoners in the recreation area outside. Shaker said, “I called out, ‘Who is outside? and then we transfer[ed] information.”

The news, as Rose put it, “spread from corridor to corridor, and then, inadvertently, the authorities gave Aamer a chance to disseminate it further,” when he was subjected to the “frequent flier program,” which had evidently not stopped in 2004, but which “allowed him to contact more inmates.”

Shaker said, “I remember the day my weight dropped below nine stone, when I’d been on hunger strike for almost two months. For days, I’d also refused water. I was less than half the size I had been when I was taken prisoner. I saw myself in the mirror. I started laughing, because I was so skinny. Then I remembered my wife, Zin, and I was crying at the same time. I saw her in front me, falling down and dying because of the way I looked: nothing but bones.”

He added, “They took me to the hospital and put me in a wheelchair, because I couldn’t walk. They wanted to give me a ‘banana bag’: intravenous fluid with potassium and glucose. Seven times the nurse tried to give me an I/V, but he couldn’t find a vein. He said, ‘this guy has to drink water, he is so dehydrated we cannot stick a needle in him.’ The colonel, Mike Bumgarner, came. He goes, ‘come on, Shaker, please don’t do this to me. Take a bottle of water.’ I said OK, and I drank.”

The date, David Rose noted, “is engraved in Aamer’s memory: July 27, 2005.” He added. “It was the closest he had come to death. But it was also a turning point. Fearful the strike would become unmanageable, Bumgarner negotiated with Aamer, who then took charge of what became known as ‘the Shaker government’ — a committee of six prisoners who were allowed to move, handcuffed and under escort, throughout the camps. The idea was to sound out opinion, to look for ways to ease the tension in ways acceptable to both the authorities and inmates.”

As Shaker said, “I was trying to get them to agree to fulfil the Geneva Convention.” However, as Rose noted, “That proved impossible, and on August 8, the experiment ended — with Aamer back in solitary.” For more information on the strike, see Tim Golden’s 2006 article for the New York Times, “The Battle for Guantánamo.”

Meanwhile, as Rose put it, Shaker “had made a surprising discovery. It was already known that some prisoners were being given exceptional privileges for ‘snitching’ on other inmates, such as trips to the ‘Love Shack’, where they would be given hamburgers and shown pornographic videos. Indeed, Aamer says that his interrogators made three futile attempts to recruit him.”

He explained, “We had heard rumors that there were detainees who were paid to infiltrate Guantánamo. These guys were doing a job. One is to infiltrate. Two is to spy, to hear. Three is to cause issues between the brothers. Four, to report of any kind of grouping.”

After the hunger strike, Shaker came to believe that the rumors had to be true. He said, “I had cruised around the camps and I had counted everybody. I went into every camp, and I knew how many cells there were in each one.” However, although, at this time, Guantánamo’s official prisoner total was 530, Shaker is convinced that “there were dozens more — all of them, he presumes, what he calls ‘hired prisoners.'”

When ‘the Shaker government’ collapsed, Shaker spent his longest period in solitary confinement — almost two years, way beyond the acceptable amount of time that anyone should held in solitary confinement.

During this period, Shaker was approved for release from Guantánamo, as he was again in 2009, by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that the new president, Barack Obama, established shortly after taking office in January 2009.

Even before that decision was reached, however, Shaker was supposed to have been released. Speaking of the release, in February 2009, of the British resident Binyam Mohamed, Shaker said, “I was supposed to be on that aeroplane”

Instead, as David Rose described it, “an officer said he might be sent to Saudi Arabia. He says he was ready to agree, provided his wife and children could join him, but as soon as he raised this issue, the offer was withdrawn.”

In Britain, however, “demands to free him were gathering strength.” In their regular visits to him Shaker’s lawyers, led by Clive Stafford Smith of Reprieve, told him about the support he had from MPs, newspapers and campaigns — both the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign and We Stand With Shaker.

At this point, he told David Rose, his morale “was ‘like a candle’ that could have blown out.” As he said, “You guys protected it. All those who fought for justice for me, who joined in those protests — I can never thank you enough.”

And yet, even at the end, Guantánamo “stuck to its protocols.” Shaker’s “last argument with a guard came just an hour before he left the camp, when he was told he could not shout goodbyes to other inmates. When he got on the bus that was to take him to the ferry across Guantánamo Bay, the way to the airport, it had blacked-out windows. Going straight to the jetty would have taken five minutes, but he was driven around in circles for two hours, apparently so he would not get an impression of the camp’s layout — even though this has been visible on Google Earth for years.”

“But at last, Rose added, “his ordeal was ending. In the middle of the hot, Cuban night, he stood on the airstrip tarmac, his hands bound with plastic cuffs. Shaker said, “I think I am the only detainee for whom the colonel himself, David Heath, came and cut the cuffs off my hands. He looked at me and said, ‘You are a free man’. That was a beautiful moment.”

Recalling a low point in his 13-year ordeal in Guantánamo, Shaker also spoke about how his interrogators had tried to bribe him to make a false confession with photos of his children, which is cross-posted below:

Any long-term prisoner with a wife and family will find separation painful. But for Shaker Aamer, the deep isolation of fortress Guantánamo made this agony far worse. All forms of intimate communication were impossible in the jail. The rare letters the authorities allowed were censored and strictly monitored.

Aamer’s wife Zinneera sent him family photos, only for his interrogators to use them as a weapon: ‘They refused to give me my kids’ pictures for years, but they put them on the walls in the interrogation room. Imagine if you did not see your kids for four or five years, and then one day they take you in for interrogation.

“I go inside and I see pictures all over the wall, big pictures, small pictures, everywhere. I will not forget that day, because I left them when they were little kids, and I could see they had grown up. They wanted to break me down, and they told me, if you want your kids’ pictures, you have to talk to us.” But this meant one thing — to confess to terrorist crimes he had not committed.

Aamer refused, insisting as ever he had done nothing wrong, and that he had no information that could help the fight against terrorism. Eventually, “guards came to pick me up. I went and kissed the pictures by the door. The guard asked me why I was doing that, and I told him: ‘these are my kids, and they refused to give me their pictures.'”

One day in 2009, after more than seven years in Guantánamo, Aamer was told without warning he had a phone call: “They wouldn’t tell me who, but they said it’s really something important. I thought my mother had died. I sat down in a room and they gave me the phone and then I found it was my wife. I thought she would be crying, but actually I was the one who was crying. I was crying like a baby on the phone, truly. I also spoke to my daughter Johaina and I was crying with her, too. A lot of men are too scared to cry because they think crying is weakness. I don’t believe that. When these tears come out, I think it’s your heart, it’s what makes your heart alive.”

In 2012, the family was allowed the first of several video calls, using Skype. Aamer cried then too: “I can barely describe what I was feeling. It’s happiness mixed with fear, mixed with anger, mixed with everything. Love and hate together.”

Life after Guantánamo

Below is an edited version of Shaker’s thoughts about his freedom and being reunited with his family, published under the heading, “Joy I dreamed of for 14 years: From hell to ecstatic reunion.”

David Rose began by writing about his return to the UK, when he arrived at Biggin Hill Airport at lunchtime on October 30. “I was in the aeroplane, talking to a policeman and someone from the Home Office,” Shaker said, adding, “But still there, in the back of my mind, I was wondering: is it really true, is it really going to be England, am I really going to be meeting my family?”

He told David Rose that he still feared “that small percentage of possibility that it could have been a trick — it could be Saudi Arabia, it could be anywhere.” Rose noted how he was “used to disappointment,” and “was still reflexively trying to protect himself.” In Shaker’s words, “Just in case. I didn’t want to be shocked, I didn’t want to be surprised.”

However, as the plane descended, Shaker “gazed through the window at an unmistakeably English landscape of green chalk downs and autumnal woods,” and “felt confident.” He said, “We landed and at last I was sure: I saw England. And I thought, my God. I really am back.”

As the plane door opened, “he was struck by the deliciously cool and damp English air: weather very different to the tropical heat of Guantánamo,” as David Rose described it. Shaker said, “As soon as they opened it [the door], I said to the Met officer next to me: ‘That is my first breath of freedom.’ Everything looked British. I was overwhelmed.”

As Rose described it, “His emotions were in turmoil. Although he had known for several weeks he was finally set for release, he hadn’t been told when he would leave Guantánamo. When the day finally came, he was given just an hour to take a shower, gather his meagre possessions and prepare for the journey ahead.”

“I walked down the steps, and I was just so happy, because I knew I really was free,” Shaker said, adding, “Yet I also felt apprehensive. I was worried that they might take me somewhere to ask me questions. But the Home Office guy who had come to meet me had this huge smile on his face. Everybody was telling me, ‘welcome back’, the officials, the one who came with the fingerprint stuff, they were actually happy to see me … they had tears in their eyes.”

Next came “an exhaustive medical check-up” and then the reunion with his family. On that first evening, as David Rose described it, “he was finally re-united with his wife, Zinneera — though not yet his children — in the privacy of a friend’s London apartment, so no one would know where they were.”

Shaker said, “At last that moment I’d dreamt of came and she came through the door. That instant washed away the pain of 14 years. It washed away the tiredness, the agony, the stress. It was like it no longer existed. I hugged her, she hugged me, and we just wept. I stayed with her that night and we couldn’t sleep actually, we were just talking and talking. I was scared to meet the kids at first: I told her, I just wanted to be with her because I needed to know who these kids are — I can’t just see them, I don’t want to do something that will make them fear me. So I saw Zin only. She reassured me. She said, ‘Don’t worry, they are very strong kids, they are very beautiful kids.’ I asked her about who they are, how they feel, how they do things, and we kept talking about them all the next day, morning till night. And then, in the evening, they came.”

David Rose wrote that his first meeting — with his daughter Johaina, who had just turned 18, and his sons Michael, 16, Saif 15, and Faris, 13, who was born on February 14, 2002, the day his father arrived at Guantánamo — was “awkward.”

“I just wanted to hug them and kiss them,” Shaker said. “But they were standing stiff. It tore my heart. They are shy kids to begin with. But they were looking at me and looking away. It was hard.”

However, after he returned to the family home in Battersea, “the distance between them melted away,” as David Rose put it. Shaker said, “The week after I got home, I made a barbecue in the garden, even though the weather was a little bit cold. They loved it: they could see I hadn’t lost my touch as a chef. Now I’m a hard-working man at home, doing the dishes, cleaning the house, and I love cooking for the kids. We’re getting used to each other. I take them to the mosque. When the weather gets better, we’re going to get bikes, go on weekend rides.”

A few weeks later, David Rose met Shaker and his family at Bicester Village, a shopping mall near Oxford, which, as he put it, was Shaker’s “first family outing for 14 years.” He said, “I’m finally living. I’m here with my kids, trying to learn to be a father.”

His sons, Rose noted, “were staring at their smartphones — new models brought as gifts by Shaker’s nephew, who was visiting from Saudi Arabia.”

Shaker also had a smartphone, but admitted, “I haven’t mastered it yet. Not even one per cent of what it can do. This is one of the biggest changes since I went away. People spend so much time looking at them!”

He also mentioned other changes he had noticed. “London seems richer: when you see all the new buildings, the cars,” he said. “And the people are different, too. Before, when you walked in the street, you heard only English being spoken. Now if you go out, you will hear ten or 15 languages, from Eastern Europe, China, everywhere. London is truly becoming a cosmopolitan city.”

Faris, who “loves to sketch buildings and would like to be an architect,” told David Rose about the moment he saw his father for the first time. “It was so amazing,” he said. “Even now, my senses are telling me that he’s back, but in my brain, I still can’t believe it. When I was younger, I used to think he might possibly never come back. Yet now he’s here.”

Shaker, speaking of that first meeting, said that when he first met Faris, “I told him, I don’t expect you to love me straight away. I just want you to trust me, because it’s hard to love someone when you don’t know them.”

Michael, who was just two when his father was first detained, said, “I have no memory of him then. Mum used to tell us that our dad was in school, but his teacher wouldn’t let him come home. Then one day a letter came from Guantánamo. My sister read it and we started researching what was happening on the internet. That’s when it hit us that he was a prisoner, that he was gone, and that he might never be coming back. There were a few times when we thought he might be coming, but he didn’t. But when other detainees were released, I was happy, because I felt he might be next.”

Rose also noted that Shaker said that freedom “has brought other, simple joys: above all, something almost everyone takes for granted” – that of “being treated like a normal human being.”

Shaker said, “A few days ago, I was with my daughter, using our Oyster cards to go through the gates on the Tube, and there was this guy in a wheelchair. He asked me for help, to push him to the bus station. He was a clean-shaven white guy and I’m an Arab with a beard. I said, ‘Of course I will help you, and I’m so happy you asked me.’ It was a little bit uphill and I pushed him all the way and I was talking to him. Fourteen years I’ve been controlled, 14 years I haven’t talked to a normal human being, and here is somebody who will talk to me, who isn’t scared. I was so happy because I felt like, yes, this is it, I’m back.”

Shaker recalled another occasion, when he went to open a bank account. As he sat with a member of staff, filling in the form, he said, “And then we came to, ‘OK, Mr Aamer, where did you live three years ago?’ I said I was living in America. He said, ‘Beautiful, for how long?’ I said for the past 14 years. He goes, ‘OK, could you please give me the address?’ I’m not going to lie to my bank, so I looked at him and I said, ‘I was in Guantánamo for 14 years.’ His response was shocking. I thought he was going to say, ‘Can you wait a minute I need to speak to my manager.’ Actually he just took my hand and said, ‘I am honoured to talk to you.’ He said, ‘Listen, just come here anytime if you need any help.’ That’s what makes you happy: an average, normal person in the street who knows you have really had a great injustice, but now they are going to try to help you.”

Shaker also spoke about his difficulties knowing how to act as a father, mentioning one night when he found his sons still on their phones after being told that it was time to sleep. “I said, ‘Guys, please, don’t make me take all these phones away.’ My fear was they would think, ‘He’s a stranger, why should he do anything to us, why should he take our things?’ I don’t want to do something that makes them hard for them to accept me. I feel I am walking on eggshells here. I don’t want them to think, ‘This guy came only yesterday and now he is controlling everything.'”

He decided, however, that the best response “was to talk to the children, to explain his difficulty.” He told David Rose, “I said, ‘Listen guys, I need you just as much as you need me, I’ve been 14 years away and I did not practise my fatherhood, so please let me.’ I told them, ‘Talk to me, or send me a letter if you cannot talk about something.’ I gave them an example: if you see a girl and you think you like her, tell me, don’t be shy, because that’s normal, that’s your age, and I will explain to you what’s the difference between love and just when you’re a teenager.”

He also said that “he feels they are all making progress,” as Rose put it, and he spoke about Michael, saying, “yesterday I’d been out and when I came back home, he opened the door and he hugged me. I said, ‘Your mother told you to do that,’ and he said, ‘No, no, I want to do it.’ I was so happy because he really hugged me himself, he wants to do it.”

Shaker also said, as David Rose described it, that “he recognises he will never get over Guantánamo entirely,” because “the wounds run too deep.” As he said, “It’s always going to be in the back there in my mind, it’s going to be sitting there, coming back from time to time. It’s a long period of experience and it can’t be just gone.”

Rose also noted that it was clear that Shaker is “just as determined to rebuild his life as he once was, not to be broken by torture.” He said, “You cannot forget it, but you try to seal it, and put it where it’s not really bothering you. The way I grew up with my family, we give trust a lot, and you have seen me, you know me by now, I trust people still. You get along much better if you do. You can’t live your life being careful, having doubts about everything. You must embrace it.”

Shaker Aamer Speaks: First Newspaper Interview Since Release from Guantánamo, in the Mail on Sunday

The Mail on Sunday today featured the first interview conducted by Shaker Aamer since his release from Guantánamo six weeks ago, and below are excerpts dealing with his life from 1989 to February 2002, when he arrived at Guantánamo, providing information not previously discussed — in particular, about the circumstances of his visit to Afghanistan and his capture.

Speaking to David Rose, Shaker spoke about his experiences in the US after he left Saudi Arabia, where he was born in 1966, in Medina. From 1989 to 1995, he explained, as Rose noted, that he “lived mostly in Atlanta, in the US state of Georgia, working as a chef in restaurants. In those days he lived a Westernised life: a lover of rock music, he often attended concerts by his favourite bands — including AC/DC and Ozzy Osbourne. In this period, in 1990, he responded to a US army recruitment drive for Arabic/English translators during the first Gulf War — which is how he came to find himself working for the US infantry in Saudi.”

“First I was in the south, then at a base in Tabuk, near the Jordanian border,” Shaker said, explaining that he needed security clearance for the job. “Of course I had to be checked. I was right inside the US base. I got to know those guys very well, especially the colonel — his name was Johansen. Later, I used to tell my interrogators: call Colonel Johansen, he will tell you I’m not a terrorist, that I’m a good guy, and that I’m telling you the truth. I’m sure they never did.”

I’m sure they never did either, as the US authorities were notorious for failing to follow up on any request by prisoners to contact people who would vouch for them — as I made clear in February 2008 in a front-page story I wrote for the New York Times with Carlotta Gall about just one of the many men this happened to, Abdul Razzaq Hekmati, an Afghan who had helped to free a number of prominent opponents of the Taliban from jail, but died of cancer at Guantánamo without the authorities ever checking his story, as he repeatedly requested.

In 1996, Shaker moved to London, where he met and married Zinneera, a British citizen. He worked as a translator for law firms dealing with immigration issues. However, as David Rose described it, they “found it impossible to raise enough money to buy a house.”

Shaker said, “We ended up staying with friends or with my father-in-law. For four years, we were basically homeless.” He decided to take Zinneera and their three young children to Saudi Arabia, to start a new life, but had problems getting a visa for his wife. It was then, in July 2001, that Moazzam Begg, a friend who ran a Muslim bookshop, “came up with a plan to set up home in Kabul instead, to do development work in rural Afghanistan,” as David Rose put it. They “planned to set up a school and provide water supplies.”

Shaker said of Afghanistan, “There is a great shortage of wells, so people have to walk miles just to get water. Yet it only costs £200 to make a well for a village of 3,000. That is a beautiful thing.”

Rose asked Shaker why he would go to to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, to which he replied, “Do you think I saw 9/11 coming? Of course not! I was just a guy who had spent the previous five years taking care of his wife and children. It wasn’t that I thought the Taliban had created some perfect society, but I thought that there, we could have a better life, and do some good. At that time, the UAE, Qatar, Pakistan, the Saudis all had embassies in Kabul. There were British businessmen who were setting up a mobile phone company, investing millions; all kinds of business was starting to boom. I had German neighbours, who like me felt the country needed help — but no one took them to Guantánamo, because they were Europeans. Going to Afghanistan does not mean I was a terrorist.”

Shaker then explained that, for a period of just a few weeks, the two families enjoyed living in Afghanistan. “We were living comfortably, in a big house with a garden, because there it is so cheap,” he said. Then 9/11 happened, wose significance, he said, he did not, at first, recognize. But as the US prepared for war, Shaker and his family, like all the foreigners in their neighbourhood — an upmarket part of Kabul —  were told to leave.

Shaker said, “The Taliban came to each house and said you have got to get out of here, this is an order.” However, as Shaker explained, they did not know how to leave. By October, when the US-led invasion began, “Afghanistan had become a bloody and confusing war zone,” as David Rose said, but “[t]hey had a car, and took to the road, trying to survive bombing raids and to find a way to Pakistan, staying on the move for a month. Later, Aamer would face claims by interrogators that he took part in the fighting; that he carried a 75lb mortar. All this, he said, is lies — the product of confessions by other prisoners who were tortured” — lies that I partly exposed in an article in early October following the announcement of Shaker’s intended release, entitled, “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Truth, Lies and Distortions in the Coverage of Shaker Aamer, Soon to be Freed from Guantánamo.”

In early November 2001, as David Rose explained, Shaker stated that “they were given shelter in a village near Jalalabad, 50 miles from the border, but the place was insecure.” Shaker said, “It was chaos, and I felt I was being hunted. US planes were not only dropping bombs but leaflets, saying the Arabs are bad people, they want to destroy your country, we don’t have a problem with the Afghani people but we want the foreigners.’ These leaflets, prepared by US PsyOps teams, offered substantial rewards for individuals involved with Al-Qaeda or the Taliban — or those who could be passed off as Al-Qaeda or the Taliban.

One day, as David Rose put it, “Shaker left the house where they were staying — without telling his family — to look at a new place of refuge, where he had been promised they would be safer.” However, when he got back to the village, Zinneera and the children had vanished. As Rose stated, “He was told they were being taken to Pakistan in the company of friendly locals, but had no way of knowing if this was true.”

“It was terrible. I didn’t know what to do,” Shaker said, adding that, as well as not knowing how he would see his family again, he also feared for his life. Soon after that, “he was taken prisoner, by a gang led by another village leader, with whom Shaker is still understandable angry. “One day I will go and see that bastard, because I trusted him,” Shaker said, adding, “I gave him my family’s phone numbers in Saudi Arabia, and I said, if you ever go there you can visit my brother, my family will help you.”

This village leader “demanded money, which Aamer no longer had.” As a result, he “presumes that he — like hundreds of those held at Bagram and later Guantánamo — was ‘sold’, for the bounty promised by the US leaflets. The going rate was $5,000. He was taken first to Jalalabad, then Kabul. Finally he was taken by the Americans.”

Speaking about when he first heard American voices, he said, “I was so happy, because before that, I thought I am going to get killed. A chopper came down and landed, and there were five Americans, and I said, wow, that’s it, they’re going to call Britain and find out who I am, and send me back to England.”

Instead, as David Rose described it, he “was taken in the helicopter to Bagram, and when he disembarked, he was herded into a pen and made to sit on the ground.” As Shaker put it, “I am sitting there relaxed, with a smile on my face, because I’ve got to safety, and it’s going to be a matter of days and I’m going to be back again with my wife. That’s when they said, ‘Take your clothes off.’ There were so many people in front of me, females and big hefty guys, people with guns. I said no. One of them had a big, heavy stick, like a pick-axe handle, and he smashed it on the ground right next to me. He said: ‘You have to, or we’ll kill you.’ ‘I was like, s***, this is serious. I took off my underwear and they made me squat, naked. Then they made me walk around. It was just for humiliation. They gave me a thin blue overall and tied my feet and hands together with zip locks and put me in a cage.'”

Bagram was a particularly brutal place in 2002, as David Rose noted, pointing out that “US military coroners later found that two prisoners were beaten to death, and 15 guards were charged with crimes including homicide,” even though most were found not guilty. I wrote about these and other deaths in an article in July 2009, “When Torture Kills: Ten Murders In US Prisons In Afghanistan.”

Speaking further about Bagram, Shaker said, “They used to step on my face, they used to jump on my face with their boots. Imagine in the freezing cold winter, on concrete in the middle of the airport, and young guards are beating you, they beat the hell out of you with their M16s, and jumping on your face and your body with their boots. These guards were doing it as a systematic torture. Every time somebody arrived, they had to beat the s*** out of him, to make him know that if he does anything wrong, if he tries or thinks of running away he will never make it.”

Shaker told Rose that he “was deprived of sleep for days, made to stand with arms outstretched — another US-authorized technique, known as a ‘stress position’. Twice, he said, he was left alone in an interrogation room with a loaded gun on the table.” As he asked, “What do you want me to do with a gun there? Either I take the gun and kill myself, or I take the gun and as soon as I do you put a bullet in my head.”

He also explained that US Marines “had laid a wooden floor in the cages and hangars, which provided insulation from the sub-zero temperatures. But after a few days, they took all the wood out, leaving bare concrete.” Shaker said that he “had no shoes, and developed frostbite.” Pointing at Rose’s black laptop bag, he said, “My feet were darker than this colour. I didn’t think I would survive.” As a result, to this day “he has to wear two layers of thick ‘pressure socks’ to stop his legs and feet filling with fluid and swelling like balloons.”

As Rose explained, “The risk of infection was serious,” but, as Shaker said, “they didn’t give me antibiotics, not even paracetamol. Then they moved me out, they said I had to walk to another building. I felt like my feet were going to blow up. Pain, pain, pain. I had to walk because otherwise, I will get beaten.”

He also pointed out that he was “doused with iced water.” As he said, “They have a raku, you know, an Afghan hat, and they fill it with freezing cold water and then they stick it on your head. You are soaked, from your head to your legs, and you are freezing.”

Because of this, he said that “although he had initially denied any involvement with terrorism, he was soon ready to agree to anything.” He added that “he cannot remember exactly what he said, because by this time he was hallucinating, and his memory is hazy.” However, he remembered that on one occasion he said, “You know the Second World War? Do you know what’s behind it? I am. I am behind the Second World War.”

He added, “I’d already told the truth, that I was not a terrorist, but he [the interrogator] wouldn’t accept it. So that’s what I said. They torture you for the torture itself, regardless of what you tell them. People don’t understand, they were not looking for anything, they were looking for a black sheep, a scapegoat.”

It was at Bagram, where he was known as detainee 005, that, “just before 11pm on January 7, 2002,” he “dared to hope,” when a guard told him that Tony Blair was arriving that night. As Rose put it, “He believed if someone in Blair’s entourage saw his desperate condition, they would help him. They could reassure the Americans he was no terrorist.” However, although he “met three British plain-clothed officials who he believed to have arrived on Blair’s flight,” they were not there to help him,  even though he “had lost weight, had frostbitten feet, and bore bruises from repeated beatings.”

Shaker said, “The first British guy said his name was John; he said he knew about me from London. He told me openly he was from MI5, and that he had a file on me. But the first thing he said when he saw me was, ‘Shaker, you look like a ghost.’ With the torture, with the beating, I didn’t even know what I looked like. I hadn’t seen my face in months.”

However, “‘John’ did nothing to assist him. Worse, later in the course of the British officers’ visit, Aamer said, one of John’s colleagues was present in an interrogation room when he was subjected to the torture known as ‘walling’ — having his head smashed against a wall while he sat shackled in a chair. The Americans called this an ‘enhanced interrogation technique’, and though it was never approved for use by British officers, it had been authorised by the Bush administration.”

Shaker added that, inside the interrogation room, “They were shooting questions without listening to answers. ‘You did this or that, why did you do that, where did you go.’ “They were accusing me of fighting with Bin Laden in the battle of Tora Bora; of being in charge of weapons stores; of being a terrorist recruiter – though I’d only been in Afghanistan for a few weeks. I start to try to talk but everybody is just shouting and screaming around me. Then suddenly I feel it — douff — this American guy grabs me by the head, and he slams it backwards against the wall. In my mind I think I must try to save my head so I tried to bring it forwards, but as soon as I do he grabs it again and bashes it: douff, then back again, douff, douff, douff.”

Shaker said that he didn’t completely lose consciousness, but “I was completely disorientated. So I sat like this, dizzy and disorientated, my eyes shut, and the guards moved me back to the cage.” The British officer who saw this, he said, had a “posh English accent, a very white guy with blond hair,” but he “did nothing to object or intervene.” The article added that further details of “alleged complicity by UK personnel in [his] ill-treatment” cannot currently be published, because of Shaker’s current lawsuit against the British government.

Three weeks after the British visit, Shaker “was flown to another US base at Kandahar, where the abuse continued, and then, after a further fortnight, he was put on the third detainee flight to Guantánamo. As he said, “My number was five at Bagram, 449 in Kandahar and 239 in Guantánamo.”

Describing what Shaker had said about the journey to Guantánamo, David Rose stated, “The seemingly endless journey, spent shackled, dressed in orange overalls and an adult nappy, blindfolded and unable to hear through ear defenders, was horrific.” He also noted, “Before it started, he had been forced to shower, naked again in front of soldiers with vicious dogs. He had his beard and head forcibly shaved, and had been sprayed all over with insecticide.” As he said, “I just accepted everything. What could I do? I knew if I said something, I was going to get bashed.”

Nevertheless, as he told Rose, he “felt optimistic.” As he said, “After so much fear and torture, I thought that when we got to Guantánamo, that would be the end of it.”

The next 5,000 days, however, would prove how wrong that assessment was.

See more — about Shaker’s experiences in Guantánamo, and his reunion his family and his efforts to readjust to civilian life in the UK — in an article to follow.

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.

On Human Rights Day, A Call for the US to Close Guantánamo, and for the UK to Defend the Human Rights Act

Please support my work!

Over 60 years ago, in the wake of the horrors of World War II, when people with power and influence were determined to do whatever they could to prevent such barbarity from taking place again, the United Nations was established, the Geneva Conventions were rewritten, and representatives of 17 countries drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly exactly 67 years ago, on December 10, 1948. Human Rights Day itself was established 65 years ago, on December 10, 1950.

A powerful attempt to establish “a common standard of achievements for all peoples and all nations,” the UDHR set out, for the first time, and in 30 articles, fundamental human rights that were to be universally protected.

These include protection from torture and “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment,” protection from “arbitrary arrest,” and the right to “a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.” The UDHR also stated, “Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence.”

I mention these articles in particular (Articles 5, 9, 10 and 11), because they seem very much to apply to the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, which is still open nearly seven years after President Obama first declared that he would close it within a year. A legal, moral and ethical abomination, Guantánamo is still used to hold people without proper rights. For the most part, the men still there (currently 107 men) are held indefinitely without charge or trial, even though holding people indefinitely without charge or trial isn’t supposed to happen in countries that claim to respect the rule of law, and the only acceptable way to deprive anyone of their liberty is as a criminal suspect, or as a convicted criminal after a trial, or as a prisoner of war, protected by the Geneva Conventions.

Some years ago, the BBC World Service ran a feature on the UDHR, with links to each of the articles, choosing Guantánamo for Article 10, Right to fair public hearing by Independent tribunal, and last year Vice News published the Universal Declaration of No Human Rights, written by Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, which I cross-posted and wrote about here.

Last December, We Stand With Shaker, the campaign I co-founded with Joanne MacInnes, worked with students in London to make a film featuring excerpts from Shaker’s Universal Declaration of No Human Rights, featuring Juliet Stevenson and David Morrissey, and I’m posting that video below as a reminder of how disgracefully human rights have been jettisoned at Guantánamo.

What you can do now

To remind President Obama of the need for Guantánamo to be closed, call the White House on 202-456-1111 or 202-456-1414 or submit a comment online.

Save the Human Rights Act

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was the inspiration for the European Convention on Human Rights, drafted in 1950 by the Council of Europe, founded in 1949, which promotes human rights, democracy and the rule of law in its member states (10 originally, and now 47, representing 820 million people in total). In turn, it led to and led to the establishment of the European Court of Human Rights.

It’s important to note that the Council of Europe is an independent body, and is not to be confused with the European Union, although membership of the Council of Europe is a requirement for EU member states.

An offshoot of the ECHR, in the UK, is the Human Rights Act, which, as Bella Sankey, Liberty’s director of policy, explained in a recent article for the Huffington Post, “was passed in 1998 with overwhelming cross-party support and Tory leadership endorsement,” and “was a long-held ambition of the Society of Conservative Lawyers.”

Now, however, the Tories under David Cameron want to repeal the Human Rights Act, an act of idiocy, intended to pander to tabloid editors and the vindictive streak that runs through the Party, unchallenged, largely to suggest — wrongly — that we can and should be free to deport whoever we want, under any circumstances, when our leaders want (in the cases of alleged terror suspects, it should be noted). In fact, the HRA is essential for all of us, because it protects us from abuse by the state.

As Liberty states:

Our Human Rights Act protects every one of us: young and old; wealthy and poor; you and your neighbour. Our HRA has already achieved so much. It’s held the State to account for spying on us; safeguarded our soldiers; and supported peaceful protest. It’s helped rape victims; defended domestic violence sufferers; and guarded against slavery. It’s protected those in care; shielded press freedom; and provided answers for grieving families.

My in-depth analysis of why the Tories’ plan to repeal the act — and replace it with a British Bill of Rights — is so stupid was published back in May, just after the General Election. My article wa entitled, “What Does It Say About the Tories That They Want to Scrap Human Rights Legislation?” and in it I wrote the following about how, in order to repeal the HRA, we would need to withdraw from the ECHR:

[W]ithdrawal from the Convention would mean withdrawing from the Council of Europe, and … EU membership requires CoE membership. Are we to see a ridiculous situation whereby a referendum on leaving Europe, which David Cameron doesn’t even want, goes ahead and is promoted by the Tories, with ruinous effects on British business, simply because the Tories don’t like some of the minor constraints on their actions that are enshrined in human rights legislation?

To understand quite how ridiculous this is, it’s worth pointing out how the current situation actually gives the UK more, not less influence over the European Court of Human Rights — providing yet more confirmation that the Tories’ plans are idiotic, designed to appeal to legally illiterate right-wingers, and demonstrating how much this particular batch of Tories hates being told what it cannot do.

On Human Rights Day, Shadow Human Rights Minister Andy Slaughter and Shadow Foreign Office Minister Diana Johnson have written an article for the Daily Mirror, stating, “Michael Gove should celebrate Human Rights Day by dropping plans to scrap the Act.” The Guardian reported on December 2 that Michael Gove has in fact delayed announcing detailed changes until next year, but that is not enough, as former Attorney General Dominic Grieve made clear in an article in June, and law professor Philippe Sands made clear in an article in October.

What you can do now

See Liberty’s pages on the HRA here, their mythbuster here, and their campaign page here. Also see Amnesty International’s campaign pages here and 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.

Quarterly Fundraiser Day 3: Still Hoping to Raise $2800 (£1800) for My Guantánamo Work

Please support my work!

Dear friends and supporters,

It’s the third day of my quarterly fundraiser, in which I’m asking you, my readers and supporters, to donate to support my work on Guantánamo and related issues.

As a freelance investigative journalist, commentator and campaigner, I’ve carved out a niche here on the internet over the last eight and half years, writing over 1,850 articles about Guantánamo since May 2007, and, crucially, most of this work — along with most of my media and public appearances — is reader-funded, so any amount will be gratefully received, whether it is $25, $100 or $500 — or any amount in any other currency (£15, £50 or £250, for example). PayPal will convert any currency you pay into dollars, which I chose as my main currency because the majority of my supporters are in the US.

As well as running this website without any institutional funding whatsoever, making me 100% dependent on your support, I also co-directed the We Stand With Shaker campaign, which played a part in securing the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, on October 30, without any financial support either, except for that provided by you, my readers and supporters.

So if you can help out at all, please click on the “Donate” button above to donate via PayPal (and I should add that you don’t need to be a PayPal member to use PayPal). You can also make a recurring payment on a monthly basis by ticking the box marked, “Make This Recurring (Monthly),” and if you are able to do so, it would be very much appreciated.

Readers can pay via PayPal from anywhere in the world, but if you’re in the UK and want to help without using PayPal, you can send me a cheque (address here — scroll down to the bottom of the page), and if you’re not a PayPal user and want to send cash from anywhere else in the world, that’s also an option. Please note, however, that foreign checks are no longer accepted at UK banks — only electronic transfers. Do, however, contact me if you’d like to support me by paying directly into my account.

As I mentioned on Monday, when launching this latest fundraiser, it’s hugely important, with just over 13 months of Barack Obama’s presidency remaining, that those of us who want to see Guantánamo closed need to keep exerting pressure on President Obama and on Congress to try and make its closure a reality by the time the next president is inaugurated, in January 2017. I will be publicising ways in which this pressure can be exerted in the weeks to come, but for now, please check out my article, “Playing Politics with the Closure of Guantánamo.”

As I also mentioned on Monday, I really can’t do what I do without your help, and I’ll be extremely grateful if you can make any kind of donation to support me.

Andy Worthington

London

December 9, 2015

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose debut album, ‘Love and War,’ is available for download or on CD via Bandcamp — also see here). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign, 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.

In London, Andy Worthington Discusses Shaker Aamer and Guantánamo, and His Band The Four Fathers Play Three Gigs

If you’re in London — or nearby — and interested in hearing me talk about Guantánamo and the campaign to free Shaker Aamer, and/or to see my band The Four Fathers play our mix of politically-infused rock and roots reggae, then I’d be delighted to see you at any of the events taking place in the coming weeks in south east London.

First up, on Saturday December 12, is a free 20-minute set at Brockley Christmas Market, on Coulgate Street, next to Brockley station, in London SE4. This is a free gig, as part of an afternoon of music to accompany the market’s plentiful stalls selling great food and drink, and arts and crafts for Christmas. We’re playing at 2pm, and amongst the other acts playing is my son Tyler, who will be beatboxing at 3.30pm.

Two events are taking place on the following Friday, December 18. First up, at 5.30pm, is a free half-hour set at the Honor Oak Christmas Experience, a Christmas event on the Honor Oak Estate, at 50 Turnham Road, London SE4 2JD.

We then rush down the road to Deptford to set up for an event at the Deptford Cinema, a great community cinema at 39 Deptford Broadway, London SE8 4PQ. There’s a bar, and the doors open at 7pm, when there will be some mingling followed, at 8pm, by me delivering a talk, “Shaker Aamer, Guantánamo, Torture and the Struggle for Human Rights,” followed by a Q&A session. The Facebook page for the event is here, and if you can come, please sign up. It costs £5/£3.50 concs.

My talk will be based on my work on Guantánamo over the last ten years, and, in particular, the We Stand With Shaker campaign that I launched last November with an activist friend, Joanne MacInnes, which played a big part in securing the release from Guantánamo on October 30 of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison.

I’ll also be talking about the Close Guantánamo campaign that I launched in 2012, and which I’m hoping will play a part in working towards the closure of Guantánamo in the coming year, which, of course, is also President Obama’s last year in office.

I’ll also be talking about accountability for torture, following the first anniversary of the publication, on December 9, 2014, of the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report about the CIA torture program.

At 9pm, The Four Fathers will be playing a set including four of my political songs — “Song for Shaker Aamer,” which was used in the campaign video for We Stand With Shaker, “81 Million Dollars,” about the US torture program, and “Tory Bullshit Blues” and “Fighting Injustice,” a roots reggae anthem that deals with the need for solidarity to combat the Tories’ lies about austerity. We’ll also play our cover of Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War,” and I hope that we’ll also be able to play some new songs that I’ve written recently that we’ve been rehearsing over the last few months.

We’ll also probably be playing some of our political songs at our earlier gigs along with other covers.

Please note that our album “Love and War” is available here on Bandcamp, where you can listen to it, and buy individual songs, or the whole 8-track album as a download. You can also buy it on CD, which features two extra tracks — our covers of “Masters of War” and “I Will Survive.”

Please also follow us on Facebook, and check out our YouTube channel – and, of course, if you organise gigs and would like us to play, then we’d love to hear from you!

Please also check out my interview with Kevin Gosztola about protest music and The Four Fathers on Shadowproof and this post by Kevin making “Song for Shaker Aamer” Shadowproof’s “Protest Song of the Week.”

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.

Quarterly Fundraiser: I’m Hoping to Raise $3500 to Support My Guantánamo Work

Please support my work!

Dear friends and supporters,

Every three months, I ask you, if you can, to make a donation to support my work on Guantánamo and related issues. I’m hoping to raise $3,500 (£2,300) for the next three months, which is just $270 (£180) a week for my regular writing about Guantánamo, telling the prisoners’ stories, and campaigning to get the prison closed.

My work is primarily reader-funded, so any amount will be gratefully received, whether it is $25, $100 or $500 — or any amount in any other currency (£15, £50 or £250, for example). PayPal will convert any currency you pay into dollars, which I chose as my main currency because the majority of my supporters are in the US.

Please note that I receive no institutional funding for this website, nor have I received any for my work on the We Stand With Shaker campaign, the high-profile campaign, launched last November, which, I’m pleased to be able to say, played a part in securing the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, on October 30.

If you can help out at all, please click on the “Donate” button above to donate via PayPal (and I should add that you don’t need to be a PayPal member to use PayPal). You can also make a recurring payment on a monthly basis by ticking the box marked, “Make This Recurring (Monthly),” and if you are able to do so, it would be very much appreciated.

Readers can pay via PayPal from anywhere in the world, but if you’re in the UK and want to help without using PayPal, you can send me a cheque (address here — scroll down to the bottom of the page), and if you’re not a PayPal user and want to send cash from anywhere else in the world, that’s also an option. Please note, however, that foreign checks are no longer accepted at UK banks — only electronic transfers. Do, however, contact me if you’d like to support me by paying directly into my account.

As we approach the 14th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo (on January 11, 2016), the need for campaigners to keep up the pressure on the Obama administration to get Guantánamo closed once and for all is as great as ever — and I promise that, with your help, I will continue to do as much as I can throughout 2016, through my writing, research, campaigning, media appearances and personal appearances, to work towards Guantánamo’s closure. I recently published my ideas about what needs doing — and what might happen — in an article entitled, “Playing Politics with the Closure of Guantánamo,” and I’ll be doing much more in a similar vein in the weeks and months to come.

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

Andy Worthington

London

December 7, 2015

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose debut album, ‘Love and War,’ is available for download or on CD via Bandcamp — also see here). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign, 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.

For Review at Guantánamo, DoD Acknowledges That 20th “Forever Prisoner” Is Case of Mistaken Identity, As He Seeks Release

The Periodic Review Boards at Guantánamo began two years ago, to review the cases of all the prisoners not already approved for release (48 of the 107 men still held) or put forward for trials (just ten men), and last week I put together the first full annotated list, to assist anyone interested in the reviews to work out who has already has had their cases looked at and who is still awaiting a review.

The PRBs were set up in response to the conclusions reached by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force, which President Obama established shortly after taking office in 2009. The task force suggested that 46 men were “too dangerous to release,” even though they acknowledged that insufficient evidence existed to put them on trial, and President Obama promised periodic reviews of their cases when he approved their ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial in an executive order in March 2011. 25 others — initially recommended for prosecution, were later added to the list, after the basis for trial largely collapsed following a handful of devastating appeals court rulings. The mainstream media have helpfully labelled these men “forever prisoners,” but in reality assessing men as “too dangerous to release” is irresponsible, and not justified by a close examination of the facts.

Shamefully, although President Obama declared, in his March 2011 executive order, that, “For each detainee, an initial review shall commence as soon as possible but no later than 1 year from the date of this order,” we are now nearing the five-year mark, and yet just 20 prisoners have had their cases reviewed, and another 44 are waiting. Of those 20, 18 cases have been decided, and 15 men have been recommended for release, which is a success rate of 83%. This quite solidly demonstrates that the “too dangerous to release” tag was the hyperbolic result of an over-cautious approach to what purported to be the evidence against the men held at Guantánamo by the Guantánamo Review Task Force.

As I noted in the introduction to my list, however, “At the current rate … the PRBs will not be completed until 2020, ten years after the Guantánamo Review Task Force first made its recommendations. This is an unforgivable delay, under any circumstances, but even more so given that, through the PRBs, so many men are having their status revised from ‘forever prisoners’ to men approved for release.”

Much of the basis for the PRBs’ decisions — taken by panels consisting 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 — has involved risk mitigation, as it has become apparent that, in many cases, being regarded as “too dangerous to release” has actually meant being someone who is not regarded as sufficiently compliant or is perceived to have threatened or borne a grudge against their captors. Demonstrating a willingness to move on, and to make serious plans for life after Guantánamo has, as a result, helped many of the men to be approved for release.

However, it should not be forgotten that there are also huge problems with what purports to be the evidence against the men facing PRBs. In general the prisoners’ files, released by WikiLeaks in 2011, reveal all manner of untrustworthy allegations made by unreliable witnesses — men subjected to torture or other forms of abuse, or well-known liars who, in some cases, were rewarded with better living conditions, or, eventually, release from the prison. However, these lies and distortions are not generally acknowledged openly by the authorities.

Last week, however, a serious problem with the evidence became clear when the 20th prisoner, Mustafa al-Shamiri (aka al-Shamyri), had his case reviewed — and, I’m glad to note, media outlets that have generally ignored the PRBs ran stories focused on how he was a case of mistaken identity (see

Mustafa al-Shamiri, the 20th prisoner to make his case before a Periodic Review Board

A 37-year old Yemeni, Mustafa al-Shamiri appears to have been nothing more than a simple foot solder, recruited via a fatwa in Yemen to go to Afghanistan to support the Taliban. However, in his “Detainee Profile,” made publicly available on the eve of his hearing last week, the Pentagon conceded that he was “previously assessed” as “an al-Qa’ida facilitator or courier, as well as a trainer, but we now judge that these activities were carried out by other known extremists with names or aliases similar to [his].” The profile added, “Further analysis of the reporting that supported past judgments that [al-Shamiri] was an al-Qa’ida facilitator, courier, or trainer has revealed inconsistent biographical, descriptive, or locational data that now leads us to assess that [he] did not hold any of these roles.”

This is not unusual, as the primary purpose of intelligence at Guantánamo appears to have been to try to ramp up the importance of those held, to justify their imprisonment, and to distract anyone from realizing the terrible truth — that the overwhelming majority of the men taken to Guantánamo were either innocent civilians or lowly foot soldiers.

As I explained when profiling al-Shamiri back in 2010, he “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.” Most of those men have already been released.

As I also stated in 2010, identifying untrustworthy allegations at the time:

[Al-Shamiri] reportedly fought with the Taliban for ten months after answering a fatwa. One unidentified source claimed that he was “a trainer at al-Farouq,” and another allegation stated, implausibly, “Indications are that the detainee was a commander of troops at Tora Bora” (this was impossible, as he was captured before the battle of Tora Bora). One other allegation in particular — that “A detained al Qaida official identified [him] as a Yemeni national who participated in the Bosnian Jihad” — is unlikely, as he would have been only 15 or 16 years old at the time.

Al-Shamiri’s latest profile also reiterated another old claim, that “he may have been collocated at a safehouse in Yemen with operatives who plotted the USS Cole bombing [in 2000, when 17 US sailors were killed], although there are no other indications that he played a role in that operation.” However, this whole claim is deeply suspicious, as the man who made it, Humoud (or Humud) al-Jadani (ISN 230, released in 2007) is someone I have previously noted as a unreliable witness (see here for a another prisoner’s description of him as an “admitted liar,” see here for another prisoner, Hussein Almerfedi, refuting his claims, and see here for the D.C. Circuit Court explaining how it “did not rely on ISN-230’s statements because it found him incredible and wholly unreliable,” in an appeal in which Almerfedi also contended that “exculpatory evidence produced by the government to petitioner after [his habeas] hearing concluded,” relating to al-Jadani, “thoroughly undermine the credibility and reliability of ISN-230 because he was severely abused and mistreated at Guantánamo”).

In the rest of the “Detainee Profile,” the Pentagon noted that past reporting suggested that he “was supportive of fighting to protect other Muslims, but not of global jihad, and there are no indications that his views have changed.” He is also described as having been “largely compliant with the guard force,”  although he has “mostly been uncooperative with interrogators, suggesting that he sees little value in either acting out or cooperating.”

Rather disturbingly, I thought, the fact that he has apparently “corresponded with former Guantánamo detainees,” is taken to indicate they they “would be well-placed to facilitate his reengagement in terrorism should he chose [sic] to return to jihad,” which indicates to me that the authorities consider the mere fact of corresponding with a former prisoner to have a sinister intent, although the profile’s authors at least added, “We have no reason to believe [al-Shamiri] has discussed terrorism, regional conflicts, or violence in general.” In addition, with a ban in place on returning any Yemenis to their home country, there is no chance that al-Shamiri could have his “his reengagement in terrorism” facilitated, even if it was not a far-fetched presumption.

In the Miami Herald, Carol Rosenberg noted that, at his hearing, al-Shamiri, who “appeared groomed and remarkably similar to a 2008 photo of him” in the file released by WikIleaks in 2011, was “seen seated silently in a chair with an oversized white T-shirt,”and “followed a script as an Army lieutenant colonel assigned to help him make his case said his family in Yemen’s capital Sana’a have lined up a wife for him, but did not specify where she lives. The Army officer also said that while Shamiri realizes he can’t go back to his tumultuous homeland, his family will provide ’emotional, spiritual or financial’ support wherever he is sent.”

Rosenberg was watching what she described as “a carefully scripted pre-approved ceremonial opening of the hearing,” which is all that the media are allowed to see. His military representatives — assigned to help him prepare for his hearing — spoke to the review board panel, who meet in a secure location in Virginia, by video link, and I’m posting their opening statement below. They noted that he was “earnestly preparing for his life after” Guantánamo, where he has studied English and art, and has also learned “carpentry and cooking,” which Carol Rosenberg described as “skills the prison has never acknowledged offering in its briefings on special classes taught by Pentagon paid contractors.” His representative also “said he had helped guards settle disputes as a block leader, and ‘does have remorse for choosing the wrong path early in life.'”

Periodic Review Board Initial Hearing, 01 Dec 2015

Mustafa Abd Al-Qawi Abd Al-Aziz Al-Shamiri, ISN 434

Personal Representative Opening Statement

Ladies and Gentlemen of the Board, we are the Personal Representatives for ISN 434. Thank you for the opportunity to present Mustafa Abd al-Qawi Abd al-Aziz al-Shamiri’s case.

From our initial encounter and all subsequent meetings, Mustafa has been very cooperative, enthusiastic, and supportive in the preparation for his Periodic Review Board. From the onset, he has demonstrated a consistent positive attitude towards life after GTMO. He has a strong desire to obtain an education in order to provide for a future spouse that his family has already located for him. In his approximate thirteen years at GTMO, Mustafa has been compliant receiving few disciplinary infractions. During his recent time as a block leader, he was regularly commended by the Officer in Charge for solving routine daily detainee issues.

Mustafa will show you today that he is not a continuing significant threat to the United States of America. He is earnestly preparing for his life after GTMO. During his time in detention, he has attended English and Art classes, in addition to acquiring carpentry and cooking skills. During the last feast, Mustafa generously took the time to prepare over thirty plates of pastries for his fellow detainees. When I asked him why he would make pastries for his fellow detainees, he said it’s because it makes him feel like he can give back and share with people.

Mustafa does have remorse for choosing the wrong path early in life. He has vocalized to us that while he cannot change the past, he would definitely have chosen a different path. He wants to make a life for himself. He is aware that Yemen is not an option and he is willing to go to any country that will accept him. As he has a large family that has been waiting for his release since his arrival in GTMO, where even the women work outside of the home, he will have family support wherever he is located whether it is emotional, spiritual, or financial. He is prepared to begin life outside of GTMO.

We are here to answer any questions you may have throughout this proceeding.

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.

Labour’s Dilemma: What Should Be Done with the 66 MPs Who Voted with the Tories to Approve Airstrikes in Syria?

So the warmongers are happy now, as our planes began bombing Syria within hours of Wednesday’s vote in the House of Commons, as civilians die, because they always do, and as we’re told that this is the start of years of war. What  a shame and a disgrace. This century, this millennium, since the trigger of 9/11, which Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda intended to destabilise us, and to drag us into wars we couldn’t win, we have been mired in disaster in Afghanistan and we plumbed the depths in Iraq, and, when the Labour government gave way to the Tory-led coalition government, and, in turn, the Tories alone, in May’s particularly depressing General Election, we got involved in the destruction of Libya and, after a burst of sanity in 2013, when Parliament voted against bombing Syria, we got back in the game with bombing against Daesh (ISIS/ISIL) in Iraq, which has now been extended to Syria.

Wars of choice, for the whole of this time, so that my son, who is 16 in two weeks, doesn’t remember a time when we weren’t at war. My son was just one year old when we enthusiastically joined the Bush administration’s invasion of Afghanistan, and hideously overstayed our welcome after toppling the Taliban. My son was three when we illegally invaded Iraq, an invasion in which our Prime Minister, Tony Blair, was not Bush’s poodle, as many in the UK think, but was the key ally who gave legitimacy to Bush’s lawless plans.

And these endless wars? They are now longer in duration than the two World Wars combined, and yet they have never had more than the faintest trace of justification — only, arguably, in Afghanistan, at the beginning, although I didn’t agree with that particular invasion either, as wars without proper plans — attributes which all these wars share — are a recipe for disaster. And here we are, 14 years later, with no end in sight, bombing more civilians in Syria.

Yes, we say we have military targets, we say we are clever, but we’re not. Bombs always kill civilians. No one knows quite how many civilians have died in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and now Syria as a result of our bombs, but it is in the hundreds of thousands, at the every least. Blood is on the hands of those who authorised our bombs to be dropped — from Tony Blair to his cabinet to the MPs of all parties who backed him, and the media who did so too, and, more recently, with david Cameron taking Blair’s place.

On Wednesday, MPs spent all day debating David Cameron’s proposals to bomb Syria — a knee-jerk reaction to the terrorist attacks in Paris, which, whatever their connection to Daesh, were carried out by European citizens. He tried to claim Daesh is a threat to our national security here in the UK, he lied about there being 70,000 moderate fighters waiting for our help, when the situation on the ground is much more complicated than that, and he called all his critics “terrorist sympathisers.” He tried to hide his desire not to be left out of the latest warmongering coalition, and he and others tried, with varying measures of failure, to disguise how, fundamentally, they like being at war.

The House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee disagreed with David Cameron, and even Britain’s newspapers, dominated by right-wingers, failed to respond enthusiastically to the pounding of war drums from No. 10. On the eve of the vote, less than 50% of the British people were convinced. And yet, on the night, the bombing was approved by 397 votes to 223. The Tories “whipped” their MPs into line (such a horrible word, although apt, like a description of public school violence), but Jeremy Corbyn gave his MPs a free vote.

Some have criticised him for this, but to do otherwise would have been to have walked into a trap — set by his own opponents within the Labour party, who, suicidally, would have used it as the trigger for a coup — I say suicidally, because Jeremy Corbyn was elected as leader by a majority of party members, and none of his opponents have shown any ability to endear themselves to members of the public, or even members of their own party, with anything approaching his appeal.

This was true, in the leadership election, for all his opponents — Yvette Cooper, Andy Burnham and Liz Kendall — and although the media enthusiastically congratulated Hilary Benn for his warmongering speech on Wednesday night (predictably, providing yet another excuse to bash Jeremy, as they do so relentlessly and so disgracefully), there is no sign that his speech (which I saw, partly, and cynically, as his leadership pitch) will endear him to people either — and, of course, to those who remember his father, the great anti-war campaigner Tony Benn, his son’s warmongering (from Iraq onwards) is profoundly depressing (see Tony Benn here, arguing against Iraq airstrikes in 1998).

Jeremy Corbyn, of course, didn’t vote for war and nor did 152 of his colleagues. I commend him, as I commend those 152 MPs, and as I also commend the other MPs who voted against the proposals: the seven Tory rebels — John Baron (Basildon & Billericay), David Davis (Haltemprice & Howden), Gordon Henderson (Sittingbourne & Sheppey), Philip Hollobone (Kettering), Julian Lewis (New Forest East), Stephen McPartland (Stevenage) and Andrew Tyrie (Chichester) — plus the 53 SNP MPs, the three SDLP MPs, the two Lib Dems who defied their whip (Norman Lamb and Mark Williams), the two Plaid Cymru MPs, and Green MP Caroline Lucas.

They established that a case had not been made for us to bomb Syria, and, as we now find ourselves embroiled in what may well be an the open-ended war, even with British troops sent senselessly to die.

Below, I’m publishing the list of the 153 MPs who voted against the Tories’ proposals, and for anyone who wants to identify which of those MPs are truly committed not just to peace (and against senseless war), but also to social justice and, I would say, the socialist values of the Labour party, I’ve also noted which of these MPs also voted against the Tories’ wretched welfare cuts, back in July, when Harriet Harman was acting leader, and 48 Labour MPs defied the whip.

As the Guardian noted at the time, Harman “had urged Labour MPs to send a message to the electorate that they were listening to concerns over welfare payments by abstaining on the welfare bill after voting for an amendment that set out the party’s objections to the bill,” but 48 principled MPs objected — including Jeremy Corbyn, then the frontrunner in the leadership contest, John McDonnell, and three of the London mayoral candidates (Diane Abbott, David Lammy and the eventual winner of that contest, Sadiq Khan). All the other leadership candidates abstained.

I’m also posting the names of the 66 Labour MPs who voted with the Tories in support of airstrikes in Syria — and I note that only one of them voted against the welfare bill in July — because I want to be on record as stating that I believe it is appropriate for everyone who supports the Labour Party, or who wants a credible alternative to the Tories, to ask if these are the kind of people who should be trying to take the party into the future — and to suggest that, if there is to be a revived and revitalised Labour Party that remembers its roots, then some of these MPs should be deselected by their constituents.

Many are Blairites, who, to my mind, have lost touch with what the party should be, and who, since 2010, have failed to realise that being like the Tories but a bit less nasty isn’t electorally viable. it may be that socialism isn’t electorally viable, either, but I think we need to have a clear alternative to the Tories, i think we need that alternative to be socialist, and I also think it’s obvious that there are millions of us who are actually excited about the possibilities, and are hugely relieved that there is now a genuine alternative to the me-me-me-obsessed, big business-loving, poor-bashing selfishness and greed that has been mainstream politics, whether Tory or Labour, for the last 20 years.

Please note that members of the Shadow Cabinet are marked with asterisks — and of particular concern, it seems to me, should be the 11 members of the Shadow Cabinet who voted with the Tories, as opposed to the 16 who stood with Jeremy Corbyn. Please also note that there was one abstention on Wednesday by another Shadow Cabinet member, chief whip Rosie Winterton, and another four Labour MPs abstained (as did seven Tories). Five other labour MPs were not present, two of whom opposed the welfare bill. The 48th MP who voted against the welfare bill was Michael Meacher, who, sadly, died in October, but whose seat (Oldham West and Royton) was won on Thursday night by his Labour successor, Jim McMahon, with a thumping majority that reinforces Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. Michael Meacher, of course, was one of the 36 MPs who nominated Jeremy Corbyn for his leadership bid, and I think I can safely say that he would also have voted with Jeremy Corbyn on Wednesday night.

The 153 Labour MPs who voted against airstrikes in Syria

* Diane Abbott (Hackney North & Stoke Newington) Shadow secretary of state for international development, also voted against welfare bill in July

Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East & Saddleworth) also voted against welfare bill in July

Rushanara Ali (Bethnal Green & Bow)

Graham Allen (Nottingham North)

David Anderson (Blaydon) also voted against welfare bill in July

* Jon Ashworth (Leicester South) Shadow minister without portfolio

Clive Betts (Sheffield South East)

Roberta Blackman-Woods (Durham, City of)

Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central)

Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West)

Lyn Brown (West Ham)

Nick Brown (Newcastle upon Tyne East)

Karen Buck (Westminster North)

Richard Burden (Birmingham Northfield)

Richard Burgon (Leeds East) also voted against welfare bill in July

* Andy Burnham (Leigh) Shadow home secretary

Dawn Butler (Brent Central) also voted against welfare bill in July

Liam Byrne (Birmingham Hodge Hill)

Ruth Cadbury (Brentford & Isleworth)

Ronnie Campbell (Blyth Valley)

Sarah Champion (Rotherham)

Julie Cooper (Burnley)

* Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) Leader of the Labour Party, also voted against welfare bill in July

David Crausby (Bolton North East)

Jon Cruddas (Dagenham & Rainham)

John Cryer (Leyton & Wanstead)

Judith Cummins (Bradford South)

Alex Cunningham (Stockton North)

Jim Cunningham (Coventry South)

Nic Dakin (Scunthorpe)

Geraint Davies (Swansea West) also voted against welfare bill in July

Peter Dowd (Bootle) also voted against welfare bill in July

Jack Dromey (Birmingham Erdington)

Clive Efford (Eltham)

Julie Elliott (Sunderland Central)

Bill Esterson (Sefton Central)

Chris Evans (Islwyn)

Paul Farrelly (Newcastle-under-Lyme)

Rob Flello (Stoke-on-Trent South)

Paul Flynn (Newport West) also voted against welfare bill in July

Yvonne Fovargue (Makerfield)

Vicky Foxcroft (Lewisham Deptford)

Barry Gardiner (Brent North)

Pat Glass (Durham North West)

Mary Glindon (Tyneside North) also voted against welfare bill in July

Roger Godsiff (Birmingham Hall Green) also voted against welfare bill in July

* Kate Green (Stretford & Urmston) Shadow minister for women and equalities

* Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) Shadow secretary of state for transport

Margaret Greenwood (Wirral West) also voted against welfare bill in July

* Nia Griffith (Llanelli) Shadow secretary of state for Wales

Andrew Gwynne (Denton & Reddish)

Louise Haigh (Sheffield Heeley) also voted against welfare bill in July

Fabian Hamilton (Leeds North East)

David Hanson (Delyn)

Harry Harpham (Sheffield Brightside & Hillsborough)

Carolyn Harris (Swansea East) also voted against welfare bill in July

Helen Hayes (Dulwich & West Norwood)

Sue Hayman (Workington) also voted against welfare bill in July

* John Healey (Wentworth & Dearne) Shadow minister for housing and planning

Mark Hendrick (Preston)

Stephen Hepburn (Jarrow)

Meg Hillier (Hackney South & Shoreditch)

Sharon Hodgson (Washington & Sunderland West)

Kate Hoey (Vauxhall)

Kate Hollern (Blackburn)

Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North) was teller for the rebels who voted against welfare bill in July

Rupa Huq (Ealing Central & Acton)

Imran Hussain (Bradford East) also voted against welfare bill in July

Huw Irranca-Davies (Ogmore)

Diana Johnson (Hull North)

Gerald Jones (Merthyr Tydfil & Rhymney) also voted against welfare bill in July

Mike Kane (Wythenshawe & Sale East)

Sir Gerald Kaufman (Manchester Gorton) also voted against welfare bill in July

Barbara Keeley (Worsley & Eccles South)

Sadiq Khan (Tooting) also voted against welfare bill in July

Stephen Kinnock (Aberavon)

David Lammy (Tottenham) also voted against welfare bill in July

Ian Lavery (Wansbeck) also voted against welfare bill in July

Emma Lewell-Buck (South Shields)

Clive Lewis (Norwich South) also voted against welfare bill in July

Ivan Lewis (Bury South)

Rebecca Long Bailey (Salford & Eccles) also voted against welfare bill in July

Ian Lucas (Wrexham)

Steve McCabe (Birmingham Selly Oak)

* Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) Shadow secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs

Andy McDonald (Middlesbrough) also voted against welfare bill in July

* John McDonnell (Hayes & Harlington) Shadow chancellor of the exchequer, also voted against welfare bill in July

Liz McInnes (Heywood & Middleton) also voted against welfare bill in July

* Catherine McKinnell (Newcastle upon Tyne North) Shadow attorney general

Fiona Mactaggart (Slough)

Justin Madders (Ellesmere Port & Neston)

Shabana Mahmood (Birmingham Ladywood)

* Seema Malhotra (Feltham & Heston) Shadow chief secretary to the Treasury

John Mann (Bassetlaw)

Rob Marris (Wolverhampton South West) also voted against welfare bill in July

Gordon Marsden (Blackpool South)

Rachael Maskell (York Central) also voted against welfare bill in July

Chris Matheson (Chester, City of)

Alan Meale (Mansfield)

Ian Mearns (Gateshead) also voted against welfare bill in July

Ed Miliband (Doncaster North)

Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) also voted against welfare bill in July

Jessica Morden (Newport East)

Grahame Morris (Easington) also voted against welfare bill in July

* Ian Murray (Edinburgh South) Shadow secretary of state for Scotland

* Lisa Nandy (Wigan) Shadow secretary of state for energy and climate change

Melanie Onn (Great Grimsby)

Chi Onwurah (Newcastle upon Tyne Central)

Kate Osamor (Edmonton) also voted against welfare bill in July

Albert Owen (Ynys Mon)

Teresa Pearce (Erith & Thamesmead) also voted against welfare bill in July

Matthew Pennycook (Greenwich & Woolwich)

Toby Perkins (Chesterfield)

Jess Phillips (Birmingham Yardley)

Stephen Pound (Ealing North)

Yasmin Qureshi (Bolton South East)

Angela Rayner (Ashton Under Lyne)

Christina Rees (Neath)

Rachel Reeves (Leeds West)

Jonathan Reynolds (Stalybridge & Hyde)

Marie Rimmer (St Helens South & Whiston) also voted against welfare bill in July

Steve Rotheram (Liverpool Walton)

Naseem Shah (Bradford West)

Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield)

Paula Sherriff (Dewsbury) also voted against welfare bill in July

Gavin Shuker (Luton South)

Tulip Siddiq (Hampstead & Kilburn) also voted against welfare bill in July

Dennis Skinner (Bolsover) also voted against welfare bill in July

Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith)

Andrew Smith (Oxford East)

Cat Smith (Lancaster & Fleetwood) also voted against welfare bill in July

Jeff Smith (Manchester Withington)

Nick Smith (Blaenau Gwent)

* Owen Smith (Pontypridd) Shadow secretary of state for work and pensions

Karin Smyth (Bristol South)

Keir Starmer (Holborn & St Pancras)

Jo Stevens (Cardiff Central) also voted against welfare bill in July

Wes Streeting (Ilford North)

Graham Stringer (Blackley & Broughton) also voted against welfare bill in July

Mark Tami (Alyn & Deeside)

Nick Thomas-Symonds (Torfaen)

Emily Thornberry (Islington South & Finsbury)

Stephen Timms (East Ham)

* Jon Trickett (Hemsworth) Shadow secretary of state for communities and local government, shadow minister for the constitutional convention

Karl Turner (Hull East)

Derek Twigg (Halton)

Stephen Twigg (Liverpool West Derby)

Valerie Vaz (Walsall South)

Catherine West (Hornsey & Wood Green)

Alan Whitehead (Southampton Test)

David Winnick (Walsall North) also voted against welfare bill in July

Iain Wright (Hartlepool) also voted against welfare bill in July

Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) also voted against welfare bill in July

The 66 Labour MPs who voted for airstrikes in Syria

* Heidi Alexander (Lewisham East) Shadow secretary of state for health

Ian Austin (Dudley North)

Adrian Bailey (West Bromwich West)

Kevin Barron (Rother Valley)

Margaret Beckett (Derby South)

* Hilary Benn (Leeds Central) Shadow foreign secretary

* Luciana Berger (Liverpool Wavertree) Shadow minister for mental health

Tom Blenkinsop (Middlesbrough South & Cleveland East)

Ben Bradshaw (Exeter)

* Chris Bryant (Rhondda) Shadow leader of the House of Commons

Alan Campbell (Tynemouth)

Jenny Chapman (Darlington)

* Vernon Coaker (Gedling) Shadow secretary of state for Northern Ireland

Ann Coffey (Stockport)

Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract & Castleford)

Neil Coyle (Bermondsey & Old Southwark)

Mary Creagh (Wakefield)

Stella Creasy (Walthamstow)

Simon Danczuk (Rochdale)

Wayne David (Caerphilly)

* Gloria De Piero (Ashfield) Shadow minister for young people and voter registration

Stephen Doughty (Cardiff South & Penarth)

Jim Dowd (Lewisham West & Penge)

* Michael Dugher (Barnsley East) Shadow secretary of state for culture, media and sport

* Angela Eagle (Wallasey) Shadow first secretary of state, shadow secretary of state for business, innovation and skills

* Maria Eagle (Garston & Halewood) Shadow secretary of state for defence

Louise Ellman (Liverpool Riverside)

Frank Field (Birkenhead)

Jim Fitzpatrick (Poplar & Limehouse)

Colleen Fletcher (Coventry North East)

Caroline Flint (Don Valley)

Harriet Harman (Camberwell & Peckham)

Margaret Hodge (Barking)

George Howarth (Knowsley)

Tristram Hunt (Stoke-on-Trent Central)

Dan Jarvis (Barnsley Central)

Alan Johnson (Hull West & Hessle)

Graham Jones (Hyndburn)

Helen Jones (Warrington North) BUT voted against welfare bill in July

Kevan Jones (Durham North)

Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South)

Liz Kendall (Leicester West)

Dr Peter Kyle (Hove)

Chris Leslie (Nottingham East)

Holly Lynch (Halifax)

Siobhain McDonagh (Mitcham & Morden)

Pat McFadden (Wolverhampton South East)

Conor McGinn (St Helens North)

Alison McGovern (Wirral South)

Bridget Phillipson (Houghton & Sunderland South)

* Lucy Powell (Manchester Central) Shadow secretary of state for education

Jamie Reed (Copeland)

Emma Reynolds (Wolverhampton North East)

Geoffrey Robinson (Coventry North West)

Joan Ryan (Enfield North)

Ruth Smeeth (Stoke-on-Trent North)

Angela Smith (Penistone & Stocksbridge)

John Spellar (Warley)

Gisela Stuart (Birmingham Edgbaston)

Gareth Thomas (Harrow West)

Anna Turley (Redcar)

Chuka Umunna (Streatham)

Keith Vaz (Leicester East)

* Tom Watson (West Bromwich East) Deputy leader of the Labour Party, party chair and shadow minister for the Cabinet Office

Phil Wilson (Sedgefield)

John Woodcock (Barrow & Furness)

The 5 Labour MPs who abstained in the Syria vote

Jo Cox (Batley and Spen)

Khalid Mahmood (Birmingham Perry Barr)

Steve Reed (Croydon North)

Virendra Sharma (Ealing Southall)

* Rosie Winterton (Doncaster Central) Opposition chief whip

The 5 Labour MPs who were unable to attend the Syria vote

Ann Clwyd (Cynon Valley) voted against welfare bill in July

Rosie Cooper (West Lancashire)

Thangam Debbonaire (Bristol West)

Mike Gapes (Ilford South)

Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) voted against welfare bill in July

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.

Haji Ghalib, the Afghan Freed from Guantánamo Who Is Now Fighting Isis and the Taliban

When it comes to reports about prisoners released from Guantánamo, there has, since President Obama took office, been an aggressive black propaganda policy — firstly from within the Pentagon and latterly from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — painting a false picture of the alleged rate of “recidivism” amongst former prisoners, a trend that has also been echoed in the mainstream media, which has repeatedly published whatever nonsense it has been told without questioning it, or asking for anything resembling proof from those government departments that are responsible. For some background, see my articles here, here, here and here – and my appearance on Democracy Now! in January 2010.

The three outstanding problems with the supposed recidivism rate — beyond the lamentable truth that no information backing up the claims has been made publicly available since 2009, and that the media should therefore have been very wary of it — are, firstly, that lazy or cynical media outlets regular add up the numbers of former prisoners described as “confirmed” and “suspected” recidivists to reach an alarming grand total, which, in recent years, is over 25% of those released, when the numbers of those “suspected” of recidivism are based on unverified, single source reporting, and may very well be unreliable. Back in March 2012, for example, as I explained in my article, “Guantánamo and Recidivism: The Media’s Ongoing Failure to Question Official Statistics,” Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale said, “Someone on the ‘suspected’ list could very possibly not be engaged in activities that are counter to our national security interests.” (emphasis added).

The second huge problem with the reports is that even the “confirmed” rate is, very evidently, exaggerated, as it is, to be blunt, inconceivable that as many former prisoners as alleged can have been engaged in military or terrorist activities against the US. In the latest DNI report, for example, made available in September 2015, it is claimed that 117 former prisoners (17.9% of those released) are “Confirmed of Reengaging,” but no indication is given of how that can be possible. Claims can certainly be made for a few dozen “recidivists” — primarily in Afghanistan, and amongst those few former Gulf prisoners who apparently set up an Al-Qaeda offshoot in Yemen — but the figure of 117 is simply implausible.

A third important reason for disputing the claims, as noted by the Constitution Project, is that the overwhelming majority of those allegedly “Confirmed of Reengaging” — 111 of the 117 — were released under President Bush, and only six men released by President Obama — just 4.9% of those released on his watch — are regarded as being recidivists; in other words, the current threat is just 4.9%, and as a result, as the Constitution Project explained, “95.1% of detainees transferred during the Obama presidency have not reengaged.”

In the New York Times at the weekend, another more positive take on the reporting about former prisoners took place with the publication of an article about Haji Ghalib (aka Hajji Ghalib), an Afghan former prisoner, who, since his release in 2007, has become a formidable opponent not just of the Taliban, but also of efforts by Isis fighters to make inroads into Afghanistan.

Ghalib, it should be noted, is one of several dozen Afghan prisoners I identified in my research for my book The Guantánamo Files as having worked with US forces, but who ended up at Guantánamo because of rivalries with other Afghans, who took advantage of the Americans’ generally woeful intelligence, and their inability or unwillingness to cross-reference information about prisoners, to get their rivals banished to the US prison in Cuba. See the front-page story I wrote for the New York Times with Carlotta Gall, in February 2008, about Abdul Razzaq Hekmati, a heroic opponent of the Taliban, whose appeals for verification of his story were repeatedly ignored. Hekmati died of cancer at Guantánamo in December 2007, but the Bush administration never acknowledged its mistake.

In The Guantánamo Files, I wrote about Haji Ghalib as follows:

40-year old Haji Ghalib, the chief of police for a district in Jalalabad, and one of his officers, 32-year Kako Kandahari, were captured together, after US and Afghan forces searched their compound and identified weapons and explosives that they thought were going to be used against them. Both men pointed out, however, that they fought with the Americans in Tora Bora. “I captured a lot of al-Qaeda and Arabs that were turned over to the Americans,” Ghalib said, “and I see those people here that I helped capture in Afghanistan.” He explained that he thought he may have been betrayed by one of the commanders in Tora Bora, because he “let about 40 [al-Qaeda] escape so I got on the phone and cussed at him and that is why I am here.”

In 2008, Ghalib also told Tom Lasseter of McClatchy Newspapers (as later reported here) that he was detained “in a basement at an airstrip in Jalalabad during March 2003” by Special Forces troops, and added, “At night they would strap me down on a cot, and put a bucket of water on the floor, in front of my head. And then they would tip the cot forward and dunk my head in the bucket … They would leave my head underwater and then jerk it out by my hair. I sometimes lost consciousness.”

In 2012, the BBC World Service found him unemployed, “living in a cold damp apartment in Kabul,” but since then he has been at the forefront of resistance to the Taliban — although at great personal cost. 19 of his relatives, including both of his wives, his daughters, a sister and a grandchild, have been killed by the Taliban — almost all as a result of a bomb planted in a coffin — and Haji Ghalib’s descriptions of his life reveal how much he has suffered. “I don’t have good memories of life, to be honest,” he says, adding, “Everything has been fighting and killing.”

Ironically, those who falsely imprisoned him for five years now occasionally help him out. As the Times article notes, “the American military sometimes supports his men with airstrikes — although Mr. Ghalib complains that there are too few bombers and drones for his taste.”

Another sad note in the article concerns an Afghan poet and gemstone dealer named Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost, with whom Haji Ghalib was friends in Guantánamo, but who “now leads the Islamic State fighters whom Mr. Ghalib’s forces are trying to drive out of eastern Afghanistan.” As the Times put it, “Mr. Dost, a dour but quick-witted man who was known for the poetry he etched into the side of coffee cups for lack of better writing materials, was adamant that there was only one course of action after their release: Go to Pakistan and start waging jihad. He spoke of uniting the whole Muslim world.”

What I find sad about this is that, although Muslim Dost undoubtedly features in the DNI list of recidivists, it seems obvious that his profoundly negative experiences in Guantánamo must have played some part in radicalizing him. See this article from 2006, the year after his release, when he was calling on the US to return his poems, and preparing to publish a book about his experiences. Also see my profile of him here, which mentions his clashes with, and imprisonment by the Pakistani authorities following his release, and which also makes clear that it may be factors that have nothing to do with the US that have played the most significant role in turning him into an Isis soldier.

I hope you have time to read the article about Haji Ghalib, and to reflect on his bravery — and on how Guantánamo ruined his life, and led, in part, to the loss of his family, as everyone released from Guantánamo becomes a target for those opposed to the US, and often face retaliation if they don’t cooperate.

Once in Guantánamo, Afghan Now Leads War Against Taliban and ISIS

By Joseph Goldstein, New York Times, November 27, 2015

Hajji Ghalib did just what the American military feared he would after his release from the Guantánamo Bay prison camp: He returned to the Afghan battlefield.

But rather than worrying about Mr. Ghalib, the Americans might have considered encouraging him. Lean and weather-beaten, he is now leading the fight against the Taliban and the Islamic State across a stretch of eastern Afghanistan.

His effectiveness has led to appointments as the Afghan government’s senior representative in some of the country’s most war-ravaged districts. Afghan and American officials alike describe him as a fiercely effective fighter against the insurgency, and the American military sometimes supports his men with airstrikes — although Mr. Ghalib complains that there are too few bombers and drones for his taste.

Accounts of former Guantánamo detainees who went on to fight alongside the Taliban or Islamic State have become familiar. So are those of innocents swept up in the American dragnet and dumped in the prison camp without recourse or appeal. But this is a new one: the story of a man wrongly branded an enemy combatant and imprisoned in Guantánamo for four years, only to emerge as a steadfast American ally on the battlefield.

At 54, Mr. Ghalib’s face is creased, and his eyes are both exhausted and watchful, as though all they really expect to see is the next bad turn that will befall his life. There have been many, including the death of both wives, his daughters, a sister and a grandchild at the hands of the Taliban.

“I don’t have good memories of life, to be honest,” Mr. Ghalib said.

In a recent interview in Kabul, he cataloged the enemies he has fought during a life of struggle — first the Soviets, during the jihad of the 1980s; then the Taliban over the next three decades; and now the Islamic State.

More slowly, he recounted the long list of relatives he lost over these decades of calamity, from a brother who died in the war against the Soviets in the 1980s to his 70-year-old brother-in-law, who was beheaded this month. The Taliban killed more than 19 relatives in all.

“Everything has been fighting and killing,” he lamented.

Now, his latest fight has even pitted him against a man he once considered a close friend: a poet named Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost, whom he lived alongside in Guantánamo.

While Mr. Ghalib chose to reject bitterness and fight on behalf of the American-backed government, his former friend Mr. Dost now leads the Islamic State fighters whom Mr. Ghalib’s forces are trying to drive out of eastern Afghanistan.

But years ago, stuck in the same camp at Guantánamo, they would spend their days debating politics and religion.

Mr. Dost, a dour but quick-witted man who was known for the poetry he etched into the side of coffee cups for lack of better writing materials, was adamant that there was only one course of action after their release: Go to Pakistan and start waging jihad. He spoke of uniting the whole Muslim world.

Mr. Ghalib had other plans. “I used to argue with them that we are Afghans and we must support Afghanistan,” he said, meaning the current, American-backed government that replaced the Taliban. It was the minority view, but he did not worry about sharing it with Mr. Dost or any of his jailed countrymen. “We were friends with each other despite our views,” he said.

How Mr. Ghalib ended up in American captivity is its own bewildering story. After building a reputation as an effective commander against the Soviets and the Taliban, he became a police chief for the new Afghan government after the Taliban’s ouster in 2001. But in 2003, he was arrested after United States soldiers found explosive devices adjacent to the government compound where he worked. That was apparently close enough. There were also several letters that linked him to Taliban figures, although American officials conceded the letters might have been forged.

One of the military officers weighing the evidence against him explained that he did not “put much credibility to any of these letters,” according to a transcript of the tribunal.

That left Mr. Ghalib flummoxed. “So why are you detaining me?”

At Guantánamo, Mr. Ghalib often explained to his captors that he had been fighting the Taliban for years and had even aided American forces at Tora Bora against Al Qaeda. He recited the names of major anti-Taliban commanders who would vouch for him.

American investigators eventually concluded that the “detainee is not assessed as being a member of Al Qaeda or the Taliban,” according to a military document outlining the evidence. Yet the military nonetheless described Mr. Ghalib as “a medium risk,” noting that he could possibly become a formidable enemy given his years of experience as a combat commander — albeit on the government’s side before his detainment.

Finally, in 2007, Mr. Ghalib was released.

He left Guantánamo angry not only over the “psychological torture” the American military put him through, but also at the Afghan government for never pushing for his release, he recalled. Yet he was determined not to let the hardship of the past four years alter the course of his life.

Mr. Ghalib decided that he would be guided by “the overall pain that my people and my country are going through — that is the most important thing.”

But his own sorrows would only grow in the coming years.

“My dream was to go back and live peacefully at home,” Mr. Ghalib said. “But nobody let me do that.”

It began with a road, or at least the idea of a road, that his tribe, the Shinwari, wanted built in Mr. Ghalib’s home district in Nangarhar Province. As a tribal elder, Mr. Ghalib took a leading role in the internationally financed project.

Almost immediately, the Taliban began to threaten him for working with the foreigners, and soon the insurgents began assassinating his relatives.

Among the first to die was Mr. Ghalib’s brother, caught on his way home from a mosque. After the Ramadan holiday in 2013, the extended family gathered at the gravesite to mourn. But the Taliban had dug up the gravesite and buried a bomb there to punish the family further.

“Eighteen members of my family were killed in that attack,” Mr. Ghalib recounted — almost all women and children.

“My family is finished,” Mr. Ghalib told The Associated Press that afternoon, calling the Taliban “inhuman.”

Back then, Mr. Ghalib had been on a local peace commission, one of many tribal elders seeking to encourage reconciliation with the insurgents. But President Hamid Karzai offered him a chance for revenge. He had little family to look after, and the Taliban would keep coming after him, Mr. Ghalib recalled the president telling him. The president got him a job as governor of Bati Kot, a Taliban-infested district straddling a highway to Pakistan. He quickly organized a local police force and began going after the Taliban.

“When I got into the government, I started to destroy them,” Mr. Ghalib recalled. The Taliban tried to placate him, he said, recalling an unusual phone call he received: The insurgent commander on the line offered to find whoever had planted the bomb at his brother’s grave and hang him.

Mr. Ghalib rejected the terms. “I told them that our enmity has just started.”

This summer, his Shinwari tribesman requested that he be transferred two districts south, to rescue a benighted region called Achin, where a belt of villages had fallen to a new threat: Islamic State fighters under the command of Mr. Dost, his old friend from Guantánamo. The militants had pushed 10 tribal elders into an explosives-lined trench and videotaped the blast that killed them.

When Mr. Ghalib arrived as the new district governor, he placed on his desk a photograph of his 2-year old grandson, killed in the cemetery bombing. “Each time I look at it, it makes my heart burst and that motivates me,” he said. “That’s why I carry on all the operations myself.”

In one battle this summer, Mr. Ghalib described how he and his son led a force of police officers and soldiers against Islamic State fighters who were threatening to overrun Achin’s small district center. After being hit by multiple roadside bomb explosions, most of the forces fell back, leaving Mr. Ghalib and his son alone to face some 15 Islamic State fighters.

“We were able to shoot many,” he said.

At such times, Mr. Ghalib said, he would not be surprised to find Mr. Dost among the jihadists shooting back at him — the rumor is that Mr. Dost is usually on the front lines.

But Mr. Ghalib said that he would have little to say to Mr. Dost at this point: “He slaughters civilians, innocent people and children.”

“We will not spare him if I face him on the battlefield,” Mr. Ghalib said matter-of-factly. And given the chance, he said, “he will also not leave me alive.”

The two last saw each other a decade ago, in 2005, in Guantánamo. The Americans had concluded that Mr. Dost was no longer a threat and sent him home.

“It is very ironic that Muslim Dost got released before me,” Mr. Ghalib said. He himself had two more years to go before the Americans finally released him, too.

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.