Andy Worthington's Blog, page 84

Presenting the First Annotated List of the 64 Guantánamo Prisoners Eligible for Periodic Review Boards

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

Check out the list here.

On Monday, we published the first annotated list of the 64 Guantánamo prisoners eligible for Periodic Review Boards, which we hope will be useful to anyone who wants detailed information about who is still held at Guantánamo (also feel free to check out our full prisoner list here, listing all 107 men still held).

71 men were initially listed as eligible for Periodic Review Boards — 46 who were designated for ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established shortly after taking office in 2009 (which issued its final report in January 2010), and 25 others who were recommended for prosecution by the task force, until the basis for prosecuting them — generally, charges of providing material support for terrorism — were struck down by the appeals court in Washington D.C. in two particular rulings in October 2012 and January 2013.

Of the 71, five were freed, and two others were reabsorbed into the ailing military commission system, leaving 64 men eligible for PRBs. 20 have had reviews since the PRBs began two years ago, with 15 approved for release (of whom four have been freed) and two others awaiting decisions, but 44 others are still awaiting reviews, and at the current rate it will take over four years — until sometime in 2020 — until they are all completed.

This is unacceptable, as it is already six years since the majority of these men were told that their cases would be reviewed, and by the time the last reviews take place it will have been ten long years since the process began. This is wrong under any circumstances, but it is also alarming that the process is moving so slowly when 83% of those whose cases have been reviewed have ended up being recommended for release.

As well as containing links to articles I have written over the last two years about the reviews of the 20 men who have so far had their cases considered, the list also includes the names of the 44 others awaiting reviews, and, in some cases, links to articles providing information about their cases. 20 of these men were recommended for continued imprisonment by the task force, while 22 others were initially recommended for prosecution. Of the 20 men whose cases have so far been reviewed, all but one were initially in the former category.

This group — of which nine men, interestingly, were initially recommended for “possible transfer to imprisonment in the US” — are mostly Yemenis, but also include prisoners from five other countries, and several of them previously had their habeas corpus petitions turned down by US judges.

The latter group includes five of the 14 “high-value detainees” transferred to Guantánamo from CIA “black sites” in September 2006, including Abu Zubyadah, for whom the CIA’s torture program was developed, Hambali and Abu Faraj al-Libi, as well as other men held — and also tortured — in “black sites,” and two notorious torture victims from Guantánamo itself, Mohammed al-Qahtani, an alleged 20th hijacker for the 9/11 attacks, and best-selling author Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who, last week, asked a judge to order the government to speed up his review, something that the Justice Department lawyers showed no willingness to accept.

When I wrote about the PRBs last month, I quoted from an article Jenifer Fenton had written for Al-Jazeera, in which she spoke to Steve Vladeck, law professor and co-editor-in-chief of Just Security, who noted that, although the “most intractable ‘too dangerous to release’ category” is shrinking, it was “hard to predict what this ‘scorecard’ means for future hearings, because it could be that the relatively ‘easier’ prisoner cases might be resolved first.”

This may be partly true, but as Vladeck also explained, “At a minimum … it underscores the extent to which a growing number of detainees don’t meet the Obama Administration’s own standard for continuing military detention, even though they had previously been categorized as ‘too dangerous to release.'”

He also said the PRB process “raises the question of why eligible prisoners have had to wait so long to be provided a hearing,” as Fenton put it. “With every clearance,” Vladeck said, “the government’s foot-dragging looks more and more like it’s trying to forestall the inevitable, even if there are benign reasons for the delay.”

We agree, and we believe, moreover, that it is hugely important for President Obama to find a way to speed up the review process over the coming year, his last in office.

What you can do now

If you agree, please call the White House on 202-456-1111 or 202-456-1414 and ask President Obama to speed up the PRB process. You can also submit a comment online.

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.

A Hunger for Justice at Guantánamo as Witness Against Torture Video of Thanksgiving Fast Gets 900,000 Views

It’s rare that Guantánamo, and the plight of the men still held there — mostly for nearly 14 years, and nearly all without charge or trial — gets significant media coverage. The last time was in 2013, after the prisoners themselves grabbed the world’s attention by embarking on a prison-wide hunger strike. Two petitions launched at the time (on Avaaz and Change.org) secured, between them, nearly a million signatures, and contributed to the exertion of such pressure on President Obama, both domestically and internationally, that he promised to resume releasing prisoners, after nearly three years of inaction prompted by cynical obstructions raised by Congress and an unwillingness on the president’s part to spend political capital overcoming those obstructions, even though he had the means to do so.

Since then, President Obama has released 59 men, which is progress, but 107 remain, and 48 of those men have also been approved for release, most since 2009, when the high-level inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force, appointed by President Obama shortly after taking office, reviewed the cases of all the men still held, and recommended releasing them (156 men), putting them on trial (36 men, later reduced to 10), or continuing to hold them without charge or trial (48, later raised to 71), on the extremely flimsy basis that they were “too dangerous to release,” but that insufficient evidence existed to put them on trial.

Last week, activists from Witness Against Torture, a campaigning group that announced itself to the world in December 2005 by visiting Cuba and protesting outside Guantánamo, revisited its origins on its 10th anniversary, repeating its protest after 14 members of the group attended a peace conference in Havana. The Guardian covered the story, which was soon picked up on by other media outlets.

The Guardian then published another story, and Jeremy Varon of WAT had an op-ed published in The Hill, but the high point in the media coverage was undoubtedly Al-Jazeera’s video showing the activists fasting at a table for Thanksgiving in the Cuban countryside, with one of  them hooded, representing the men at Guantánamo, and particularly those who are on a hunger strike and are being force-fed. The video also included short interviews with Matthew Daloisio of WAT, Enmanuel Candelario of the New York-based Peace Poets, and Maha Hilal, the Executive Director of the National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms, and, to date, it has been viewed nearly 900,000 times on Facebook.

The video is below, via YouTube:

Note: The photos used in the video are by Justin Norman, who is Witness Against Torture‘s designer, responsible for the website, and the posters available there. He is also a friend. Last year, he set up the website for the We Stand With Shaker campaign, which I co-launched with the activist Joanne MacInnes, and in 2013 I commissioned him to set up the Close Guantánamo campaign’s Gitmo Clock, to mark how many days it is since President Obama’s promise to resume releasing prisoners from Guantánamo, and how many men have been freed. See all of Justin’s photos from the Cuba trip here, here and here.

Please also check out this video of the Peace Poets performing on WAT’s first night in Cuba.

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.

Please Listen to Benjamin Ferencz, the Last Nuremberg Prosecutor, Explain His Implacable Opposition to War

[image error]So the sabre-rattling in the West has begun yet again, cruelly and idiotically calling for more bombing in Syria, one of the most devastated countries in the world, in response to the recent terrorist attacks in Paris — even though the terrorists were European citizens, and even though the ongoing war in Syria has, to date, created a refugee crisis unprecedented in modern history. In response, I’m hoping that anyone interested in peace — and in understanding the true horrors of war — will find the time to listen to a profoundly enlightening interview I came across by chance last Friday, on the 70th anniversary of the day the Nuremberg trials began.

On BBC Radio 4, the PM programme interviewed Benjamin Ferencz, 95, the last surviving prosecutor from the trials, who was just 27 years old when, in 1947, he became the Chief Prosecutor in the ninth of the twelve Nuremberg trials, of 24 officers of the Einsatzgruppen, mobile SS death squads, who operated behind the front line in Nazi-occupied eastern Europe. and who, from 1941 to 1943 alone, murdered more than one million Jews and tens of thousands of other people, including gypsies and the disabled.

Ferencz’s testimony about what he witnessed at the liberation of the Nazis’ death camps, and his experience of the trials — and his subsequent conviction that he had to devote his life to peace — ought to be required listening for everyone, from our politicians to every single one of our fellow citizens.

As he explained in his book PlanetHood: The Key to Your Future, co-written with Ken Keyes, Jr. and published in 1988, “Indelibly seared into my memory are the scenes I witnessed while liberating these centers of death and destruction. Camps like Buchenwald, Mauthausen, and Dachau are vividly imprinted in my mind’s eye. Even today, when I close my eyes, I witness a deadly vision I can never forget — the crematoria aglow with the fire of burning flesh, the mounds of emaciated corpses stacked like cordwood waiting to be burned … I had peered into Hell.”

Through his writings from the 1970s onwards, Ferencz was instrumental in establishing the International Criminal Court, and is hugely critical of the US refusal to ratify the treaty establishing the ICC, when it finally became a reality in 2002.

The 12-minute BBC interview with Ferencz is available here, and will hopefully remain available on the BBC’s website. He has, as he says, spent his life “trying to create a more humane world, a world where the illegal use of armed force will be recognized as a crime against humanity,” and he spoke about the death camps, the trials, and the lack of remorse of those who had been responsible for the murder of a million people, mostly Jews. His recollections are extremely powerful, and not diminished by some inappropriate questions by the presenter.

Towards the end of the interview, Ferencz says, “I know the horrors of war, and you have to eliminate war if you want to eliminate the horrors and the rape and all the other crimes that go with war. Now many people would think that I’m crazy for trying to stop war, but ask yourself whether the man who is trying to stop war is crazy or the people who send people out, every day now, in all parts of the world, to kill other people they don’t know, and to drop bombs from drones and other things, knowing  that innocent people will certainly die in that process. Who is crazy? Who is a murderer here? Let them be tried in the court of public opinion, which is the ultimate court.”

Below is an excerpt from the interview, on YouTube, about the death camps, illustrated with devastatingly powerful footage from the time. It was clips like this that I saw on “The World at War” as a 10-year old, which made me a lifelong pacifist, and I wish I could say that it had the same impression on others, enough to bring wars to an end; instead, of course, the last 14 years have seen untold bloodshed, and from Afghanistan to Iraq, and from Libya to Syria, the involvement of the West in creating these horrors has, shamefully, been immense.

If you share my views, and if you haven’t already done so, please do something to mark your opposition to the current round of warmongering. In the UK, there is a petition to the UK government opposing airstrikes on Syria, which currently has over 20,000 signatures, and a Care2 petition that currently has over 33,000 signatures, and that enables signatories to write to their MPs — and you can also write to your MP here, to ask them to vote against airstrikes.

There are also protests in London, and across the country, taking place on Saturday.

Note: Also see this article on Benjamin Ferencz from the Atlantic in 2014.

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.

We Stand With Shaker’s 1st Anniversary, 100 Celebrity Photos and a Vigil on Thursday

Today (November 24) is the 1st anniversary of the launch of the We Stand With Shaker campaign, created by myself and the activist Joanne MacInnes to call for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, who was finally freed — after unprecedented pressure on the US government by MPs, the media and campaigners — on October 30.

The inflatable figure proved to be one of those campaigning tools that captured people’s imagination, and our launch a year ago — attended by Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters, Clive Stafford Smith of Reprieve, comedian Jeremy Hardy, activist Peter Tatchell and the MPs John McDonnell (Labour, Hayes and Harlington, and now the Shadow Chancellor) and Caroline Lucas (Green, Brighton Pavilion) — was swiftly followed by high-level support from the Daily Mail, which ran a front-page story condemning Shaker’s ongoing imprisonment, seven years after he was first approved for release by the US authorities, and then followed up with support for the campaign, publishing our open letter to David Cameron, which MPs and our celebrity supporters signed in significant numbers.

The campaign — and the ongoing campaigning of the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign, as well as the political pressure that began to be exerted when, at the same time that We Stand With Shaker was launched, John McDonnell set up the All-Party Shaker Aamer Parliamentary Group — led to David Cameron raising the issue of Shaker’s ongoing imprisonment with Barack Obama at a meeting in January (when the president promised to “prioritise” his case), and, in March, led to a Parliamentary debate at which the British government supported the motion, “That this House calls on the US Government to release Shaker Aamer from his imprisonment in Guantánamo Bay and to allow him to return to his family in the UK.” Read the transcript here and here.

Speaking for the British government, Tobias Ellwood, a Tory MP and a junior minister in the Foreign Office, said, “I hope I have made it clear that the UK Government are absolutely committed to securing the release of Mr Aamer. Today I would like to underline that commitment and join the House in calling for the US Government to approve the release of Shaker Aamer to the UK.”

In May, a Parliamentary delegation of MPs from the Shaker Aamer Parliamentary Group — the Conservative MPs David Davis and Andrew Mitchell, and the Labour MPs Jeremy Corbyn (now the Leader of the Labour Party) and Andy Slaughter — visited Washington D.C. to “meet with individuals, officials and organisations who may be able to influence events and keep President Obama to his promise to ‘prioritise’ Shaker Aamer’s case and to ensure his release as a matter of the utmost urgency.” With the assistance of the US lawyer Tom Wilner, with whom I co-founded the ongoing “Close Guantánamo” campaign in 2012, the delegation met with Senators including John McCain and Dianne Feinstein, as well as representatives of the Obama administration, raising Shaker’s profile with key members of Congress, and reinforcing their message with a hard-hitting New York Times op-ed, entitled, “Obama’s Slap in Britain’s Face.”

Throughout the year, We Stand With Shaker also kept up pressure on the US government, with Roger Waters turning up for the presentation of a giant Valentine’s Day card at the US Embassy on February 14, almost a hundred celebrities and MPs signing an open letter to President Obama on Independence Day (July 4), including Boris Johnson, Sir Patrick Stewart OBE, Ralph Fiennes, Peter Gabriel and Sting, and over 400 celebrities, MPs and concerned citizens from around the world signing up to Fast For Shaker in October, after the news of Shaker’s release had been announced, when, nevertheless, there were reasons to doubt that Shaker would actually be released, and Shaker himself had embarked on a hunger strike.

Shaker is now a free man — and he recently sent a photo and message to his supporters, and will soon be telling his story via the mainstream media. However, the struggle to close Guantánamo continues.

Members of the US campaigning group Witness Against Torture are currently in Cuba, attending an International Seminar for Peace and the Elimination of Foreign Military Bases and calling for the closure of Guantánamo, and, in solidarity, We Stand With Shaker and the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign are holding a lunchtime vigil outside the US Embassy on Thanksgiving Day, Thursday 26 November, from 12.30 to 1.30pm. The giant inflatable figure of Shaker will be there, wearing a “Close Guantánamo” message, I’ll be there with Joanne, and we are hoping to also have a message of support for Shaker. Please come along if you can!

Below, to mark the anniversary of the launch of We Stand With Shaker, is a list of 100 photos of celebrities and MPs  standing With Shaker, as originally published on our website (and also on our Facebook and Twitter pages), which can be shared via Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. In addition, photos of supporters holding up placards showing their support for Shaker — and those who joined the Fast For Shaker — can be found here.

The 100 photos of MPs, celebrities and activists who stood with Shaker Aamer

1 Roger Waters, Clive Stafford Smith, Andy Worthington, Joanne MacInnes and Caroline Lucas MP (at the launch of We Stand With Shaker, 24 November 2014)

2 Joanne MacInnes, Roger Waters and Andy Worthington (at the launch of We Stand With Shaker, 24 November 2014)

3 Clive Stafford Smith, founder and director, Reprieve

4 George Galloway MP (Respect, Bradford West)

5 Roger Waters, musician, ex-Pink Floyd

6 Caroline Lucas MP (Green, Brighton Pavilion)

7 Shaykh Suliman Ghani, teacher and broadcaster

8 Benjamin Zephaniah, dub poet and writer

9 John McDonnell MP (Labour, Hayes and Harlington, and founder and co-chair of the Shaker Aamer Parliamentary Group)

10 Jeremy Hardy, comedian

11 Diane Abbott MP (Labour, Hackney North and Stoke Newington)

12 Nick Davies, journalist

13 Sara Pascoe, comedian

14 Natalie Bennett, leader of the Green Party

15 Janet Ellis, actress and TV presenter

16 Andy Slaughter MP (Labour, Hammersmith)

17 Mark Thomas, comedian and author

18 Jean Lambert MEP (Green Party, London)

19 Seumas Milne, journalist

20 Sarah Gillespie, singer-songwriter

21 John Pilger, journalist and documentary film-maker

22 Denis Halliday, former UN Assistant Secretary-General

23 Juliet Stevenson, actress

24 Frankie Boyle, comedian

25 Mark Rylance, actor and director

26 John Rees, writer, broadcaster, co-founder, Stop the War Coalition

27 Mark Durkan MP (SDLP, Foyle)

28 Jeremy Corbyn MP (Labour, Islington North)

29 Vanessa Redgrave, actress

30 Helena Kennedy QC, Labour peer

31 Lisa Appignanesi, writer, former President of English PEN

32 Harriet Walter, actress

33 Norman Baker MP (Liberal Democrat, Lewes)

34 Yasmin Qureshi MP (Labour, Bolton South East)

35 Gillian Slovo, novelist and playwright, co-author, ‘Guantánamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom’

36 Tom Wilner, US lawyer, Counsel of Record for the Guantánamo prisoners in their Supreme Court cases in 2004 and 2008

37 Peter Oborne, journalist

38 Baroness Jenny Jones (Green, London Assembly member)

39 The staff of Reprieve

40 Ken Loach, film director

41 William Hoyland, Jan Chappell, Alan Parnaby, Gillian Slovo, Daniel Cerqueira, Nicolas Kent, Patrick Robinson and Sacha Wares, ‘Guantánamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom’ cast and creators

42 Hamja Ahsan, human rights activist

43 Rhys Ifans, actor

44 Julian Huppert MP (Liberal Democrat, Cambridge)

45 Bill Paterson, actor

46 Sir Bob Russell MP (Liberal Democrat, Colchester)

47 John Leech MP (Liberal Democrat, Manchester Withington)

48 Ann Clwyd MP (Labour, Cynon Valley)

49 Cori Crider, lawyer, Reprieve

50 Roger Godsiff MP (Labour, Birmingham Hall Green)

51 Anna Perera, author, ‘Guantánamo Boy’

52 David Ward MP (Liberal Democrat, Bradford East)

53 Mike Leigh, writer, film director and theatre director

54 Nicolas Kent, theatre director

55 Roger Waters, musician, ex-Pink Floyd (at the Valentine’s Day protest for Shaker outside the US Embassy)

56 Nick Harvey MP (Liberal Democrat, North Devon)

57 Clare Solomon, journalist and activist

58 Alistair Burt MP (Conservative, North East Bedfordshire)

59 Gavin Shuker MP (Labour and Cooperative, Luton South)

60 Matt Foot, solicitor

61 George Barda, Occupy

62 Stephen Timms MP (Labour, East Ham)

63 Maxine Peake, actress

64 Shaker Aamer’s sons with Ray Silk of the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign and Suliman Gani

65 Kate Allen, Director, Amnesty International UK

66 Mark Lazarowicz MP (Labour/Co-operative, Edinburgh North and Leith)

67 Hywel Williams MP (Plaid Cymru, Arfon)

68 Neil Carmichael MP (Conservative, Stroud)

69 Elfyn Llwyd MP (Plaid Cymru, Dwyfor Meirionnydd)

70 Kate Hoey MP (Labour, Vauxhall)

71 Lindsey German, Stop the War Coalition

72 Bruce Kent, peace activist

73 Yvonne Ridley, journalist and broadcaster

74 David Nicholl, neurologist and human rights campaigner

75 Peter Tatchell, human rights campaigner

76 David Knopfler, musician

77 Emma King, Alex Hassell, Miranda Nolan, Brodie Ross, Guy Paul, Harriet Walter and Josh Roche, ‘Death of a Salesman’ cast and assistant director

78 Charlie Hart and Pearl TN, musicians

79 Sir Richard Eyre, theatre director

80 Chris Nineham, Stop the War Coalition

81 Hugh Brody, anthropologist, writer and director

82 Jacob Rees-Mogg MP (Conservative, North East Somerset)

83 Tania Mathias MP (Conservative, Twickenham)

84 Shahrar Ali, deputy leader of the Green Party

85 Clive Lewis MP (Labour, Norwich South)

86 Gareth Thomas MP (Labour and Co-operative, Harrow West)

87 Ian Murray MP (Labour, Edinburgh South)

88 Russell Brand, comedian, activist, author and actor

89 Julie Hesmondhalgh, actress

90 Rebecca Long-Bailey MP (Labour, Salford and Eccles)

91 Medea Benjamin, US political activist and co-founder of Code Pink

92 John Pugh MP (Liberal Democrat, Southport)

93 Andy McDonald MP (Labour, Middlesbrough)

94 Todd Pierce, former Guantánamo military defense attorney

95 Dominic Grieve MP (Conservative, Beaconsfield) and former Attorney General

96 Mostafa Rajaai, NUS International Students’ Officer

97 Charlie Winston, musician

98 David Morrissey, Andy Slaughter MP, Saeed Siddique, John McDonnell MP, Clive Lewis MP, Caroline Lucas MP, Joy Hurcombe, Suliman Gani and Sara Pascoe (at the launch of Fast For Shaker)

99 Andy Worthington, John McDonnell MP and Joanne MacInnes (at the launch of Fast For Shaker)

100 Owen Jones, journalist

And — last but not least! — Shaker Aamer himself, photographed after his release from Guantánamo and his return to the UK on 30 October 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, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

Andy Worthington: An Archive of Guantánamo Articles and Other Writing – Part 17, July to December 2014

Please support my work!

Friends,

This article is the 17th in an ongoing series of articles listing all my work in chronological order. It’s a project I began in January 2010, when I put together the first chronological lists of all my articles, in the hope that doing so would make it as easy as possible for readers and researchers to navigate my work — the 2,525 articles I have published since I began publishing articles here in May 2007, which, otherwise, are not available in chronological order in any readily accessible form.

I first began researching the Bush administration’s “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo and the 779 men (and boys) held there nearly ten years ago, in the fall of 2005, and began researching and writing about it on a full-time basis in March 2006. Initially, I spent 14 months researching and writing my book The Guantánamo Files, based, largely, on 8,000 pages of documents publicly released by the Pentagon in the spring of 2006, and, since May 2007, I have continued to write about the men held there, on an almost daily basis, as an independent investigative journalist — for two and a half years under President Bush, and, shockingly, for what is now nearly seven years under President Obama.

My mission, as it has been since my research first revealed the scale of the injustice at Guantánamo, continues to revolve around four main aims — to humanize the prisoners by telling their stories; to expose the many lies told about them to supposedly justify their detention; to push for the prison’s closure and the absolute repudiation of indefinite detention without charge or trial as US policy; and to call for those who initiated, implemented and supported indefinite detention and torture to be held accountable for their actions.

As I highlight every three months through my quarterly fundraising appeals, I have undertaken the majority of this work as a reader-supported journalist and activist, so if you can support my work please click on the “Donate” button above to donate via PayPal.

This 17th list, covering July to December 2014, includes articles about 17 prisoners released from Guantánamo in the period (five more were released on December 30, but I didn’t write about them until the start of January 2015, to be featured in the next list). This was progress of a sort (because just six men were released in the first six months of 2014), but it still left dozens of men held at Guantánamo who have been approved for release (at the time of writing, 48 out of the 107 men still held).

Throughout this period, the latest review process at Guantánamo, the Periodic Review Boards, continued, as did the legal challenge embarked upon by a force-fed prisoner, Abu Wa’el Dhiab, who succeeded in getting a US judge to order the government to release videotapes of his force-feeding and “forcible cell extractions,” prior to being released in December.

Also of significance was the launch, in November, of We Stand With Shaker, a campaign I established with the activist Joanne MacInnes, which contributed to the release of Shaker on October 30 this year — a real triumph for campaigners around the world facing what appear to be insurmountable odds.

This was also the time when, finally, the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report into the CIA torture program was published, which sent shockwaves through US society, and revealed, in no uncertain terms, how cruel and brutal and pointless the program had been, and how the CIA had lied to everyone about its alleged significance. Sadly, no one has yet been held accountable, but the very fact that it was commissioned and published is some sort of triumph for the US system of checks and balances, as it is, frankly, inconceivable that a similar project could be undertaken in the UK, with the British Establishment’s obsessive secrecy and unwillingness to be held accountable for anything.

Throughout the period covered by this list, I also continued to write, when time allowed, about the disgraceful war being waged on public services by the Tory-led government here in the UK.

As I always explain when I publish these lists, I remain convinced, through detailed research, through comments from insiders with knowledge of Guantánamo, and through an analysis of classified military documents released by WikiLeaks, that between 95 and 97 percent of the 779 men and boys imprisoned in total were either completely innocent people, seized as a result of dubious intelligence or sold for bounty payments, or Taliban foot soldiers, recruited to fight an inter-Muslim civil war that began long before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and that had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or international terrorism.

The articles I wrote between July and December 2014 are listed below, separated into two categories: articles about Guantánamo and related issues, and articles about British politics. I hope you find the list useful, and will share it if you do.

An archive of Guantánamo articles: Part 17, July to December 2014

July 2014

1. Guantánamo campaigns: For Ramadan, Please Write to the Prisoners in Guantánamo, Forgotten Again

2. Video, Guantánamo, military commissions: Video: Todd Pierce Discusses the Lawlessness of Guantánamo’s Military Commissions on “London Real”

3. Guantánamo, interviews: Andy Worthington’s Interview about Guantánamo and Torture for Columbia University’s Rule of Law Oral History Project

4. Guantánamo, interviews: The Rule of Law Oral History Project: How the Guantánamo Prisoners Have Been Failed by All Three Branches of the US Government

5. Guantánamo, military commissions: The 9/11 Trial at Guantánamo: The Dark Farce Continues

6. Omar Khadr: Canadian Appeals Court Rules That Former Guantánamo Prisoner Omar Khadr Should Be Serving a Youth Sentence

7. Guantánamo, hunger strikes: For the First Time, A Nurse at Guantánamo Refuses to Take Part in Force-Feedings, Calls Them a “Criminal Act”

8. Guantánamo, military commissions: More Farcical Proceedings at the Military Commissions in Guantánamo

9. Guantánamo, hunger strikes: Guantánamo Hunger Striker Abu Wa’el Dhiab’s Wife Calls for Videos of his Force-Feeding to be Made Public

10. Shaker Aamer, UK politics: Photos: Free Shaker Aamer from Guantánamo – Parliamentary Vigil, July 16, 2014

11. Diego Garcia, US-UK extradition: Britain’s latest counterterrorism disasters (for Al-Jazeera – my post here)

12. Guantánamo, Periodic Review Boards: Guantánamo Review Boards Clear Kuwaiti Prisoner Fawzi Al-Odah for Release, But Defend Ongoing Imprisonment of Fayiz Al-Kandari

August 2014

13. Torture, extraordinary rendition:European Court of Human Rights Delivers Powerful Condemnation of US Torture Program and Poland’s Role Hosting a CIA “Black Site”

14. Guantánamo campaigns: Free the Yemenis! Gitmo Clock Marks 450 Days Since President Obama’s Promise to Resume Releasing Prisoners from Guantánamo

15. Guantánamo, hunger strikes, US courts: US Judge Orders Guantánamo Authorities to Allow Independent Doctors to Assess Health of Hunger Striker Abu Wa’el Dhiab

16. Guantánamo, hunger strikes: “Most of the Hunger Strikers Are Vomiting on the Torture Chairs”: Emad Hassan’s Latest Harrowing Letter from Guantánamo

17. Prisoners released from Guantánamo: Pentagon Defends Bowe Bergdahl/Guantánamo Prisoner Swap as Government Accountability Office Delivers Critical Opinion

18. Guantánamo media: Guantánamo Torture Victim Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Harrowing Memoir to be Published in January 2015

19. Guantánamo, military commissions: Ali Hamza Al-Bahlul, David Hicks and the Legal Collapse of the Military Commissions at Guantánamo

20. Shaker Aamer: Guantánamo Violence: Prisoners Report Shaker Aamer “Beaten,” Another Man Assaulted “For Nearly Two Hours”

September 2014

21. Bagram, Guantánamo: Two Long-Term Yemeni Prisoners Repatriated from Bagram; Are Guantánamo Yemenis Next?

22. Closing Guantánamo: What’s Happening with Guantánamo?

23. Video, Closing Guantánamo: Video: Andy Worthington Discusses the Need to Close Guantánamo on CCTV America with David Remes and J.D. Gordon

24. 9/11 anniversary, Closing Guantánamo: Calling for the Closure of Guantánamo on the 13th Anniversary of the 9/11 Attacks

25. Guantánamo, hunger strikes: The Despair of Guantánamo’s Most Prominent Hunger Striker

26. US enemy combatants, US courts: Shameful: US Judge Increases Prison Sentence of Tortured US Enemy Combatant Jose Padilla

27. Closing Guantánamo: On Guantánamo, No News is Bad News

28. Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, US courts: Life Sentence for Sulaiman Abu Ghaith Discredits Guantánamo’s Military Commissions

29. Abu Qatada, UK politics: Abu Qatada’s Release in Jordan Discredits Tory Hysteria About the Need to Dismiss Human Rights Law

October 2014

30. Moazzam Begg, UK politics: Charges Against Moazzam Begg Dropped; Why Was He Ever Held in the First Place?

31. Guantánamo, hunger strikes, US courts: Judge in Guantánamo Force-Feeding Case Rejects Government’s Call for Secret Hearing

32. Guantánamo, hunger strikes, US courts: In Ground-Breaking Ruling, US Judge Gladys Kessler Orders Guantánamo Force-Feeding Videos to be Made Public

33. Guantánamo campaigns: Gitmo Clock: 500 Days Since Obama’s Promise to Resume Releasing Prisoners; 79 Cleared Men Still Held

34. Guantánamo, hunger strikes, US courts: Experts Deliver Damning Testimony at Guantánamo Force-Feeding Trial

35. Closing Guantánamo: Is President Obama Planning an Executive Order for the Closure of Guantánamo?

36. Torture: Q&A with Andy Worthington After Screening of “Doctors of the Dark Side” in Balham, October 26, 2014

37. Shaker Aamer, UK politics: Shaker Aamer’s Abuse in Guantánamo Dismissed by British Foreign Secretary

38. Guantánamo, hunger strikes, US courts: Judge Grants Government a Month’s Delay in Release of Guantánamo Force-Feeding Videotapes

39. Guantánamo, Periodic Review Boards: Fifth Guantánamo Prisoner’s Release Recommended by Periodic Review Board, But When Will These Men Be Released?

40. Torture, Closing Guantánamo: 12 Nobel Peace Prize Winners Tell President Obama to Reveal Full Details of the US Torture Program and to Close Guantánamo

41. Omar Khadr: Omar Khadr Urges Canadian Government to Respect the Law While Dealing with National Security Issues

November 2014

42. UK torture: UK Appeals Court Rules Abdel Hakim Belhaj, Rendered to Torture in Gaddafi’s Libya, Can Sue British Government

43. Guantánamo, hunger strikes: 76 US Lawmakers Ask Obama to Let Them See Guantánamo Force-Feeding Videos

44. Prisoners released from Guantánamo: Fawzi Al-Odah Freed from Guantánamo, Returns Home to Kuwait

45. Guantánamo, hunger strikes, US courts: Disappointment as US Judge Upholds Force-Feeding of Hunger Striking Guantánamo Prisoner Abu Wa’el Dhiab

46. Guantánamo media, Shaker Aamer: Shaker Aamer’s Universal Declaration of No Human Rights, Part of Vice’s Compelling New Feature on Guantánamo

47. UK torture: UK Human Rights Groups Dismiss Rendition and Torture Inquiry as a Whitewash

48. Shaker Aamer, We Stand With Shaker: “We Stand With Shaker,” A New Campaign Calling for the Release of Shaker Aamer from Guantánamo, Launches Monday Nov. 24

49. Shaker Aamer: Andy Worthington Speaks at Parliamentary Meeting Calling for the Release of Shaker Aamer from Guantánamo, November 25, 2014

50. Shaker Aamer, We Stand With Shaker: We Stand With Shaker: Send Us Your Photos In Solidarity with Shaker Aamer, the Last British Resident in Guantánamo

51. Shaker Aamer, We Stand With Shaker: We Stand With Shaker: Come to the Launch in London on Monday Nov. 24 Calling for the Release of Shaker Aamer from Guantánamo

52. Shaker Aamer, We Stand With Shaker: STOP PRESS! Roger Waters Flies into London to Support Monday Launch of We Stand With Shaker Campaign

53. Video, Shaker Aamer, We Stand With Shaker: We Stand With Shaker Website Launches, Plus Campaign Video Featuring My “Song for Shaker Aamer” With My Band The Four Fathers

54. Shaker Aamer: Why is Shaker Aamer still at Gitmo? (for Al-Jazeera America – my post here)

55. Prisoners released from Guantánamo: Who Are the Five Guantánamo Prisoners Given New Homes in Georgia and Slovakia and Who Is the Repatriated Saudi?

56. Video, Shaker Aamer, We Stand With Shaker: Video: Andy Worthington Speaks at the Launch of We Stand With Shaker, the Campaign to Free Shaker Aamer from Guantánamo

57. Video, Shaker Aamer, We Stand With Shaker: Video: Andy Worthington Promotes We Stand With Shaker on George Galloway’s Sputnik Show on RT

December 2014

58. Guantánamo, military commissions: Former Guantánamo Military Defense Attorney Todd Pierce Interviewed by the Talking Dog

59. Closing Guantánamo: More Guantánamo Releases Planned Despite Hostility in Congress

60. Guantánamo, hunger strikes: UN Says Force-Feeding at Guantánamo Constitutes Ill-Treatment in Violation of the Convention Against Torture

61. Prisoners released from Guantánamo: Who Are the Six Men Freed from Guantánamo and Given New Homes in Uruguay?

62. Torture, Senate torture report: Punishment, not apology after CIA torture report (for Al-Jazeera – my post here)

63. Video, Shaker Aamer, We Stand With Shaker: Video: Juliet Stevenson and David Morrissey Star in New Film About Shaker Aamer for Human Rights Day, Calling for His Release from Guantánamo

64. Shaker Aamer, We Stand With Shaker: Come and See Andy Worthington and the Four Fathers Play the Campaign Song for We Stand With Shaker in London on Saturday

65. Video, Shaker Aamer, We Stand With Shaker: Video: We Stand With Shaker – Andy Worthington on RT, and the Islam Channel on the Human Rights Day Event with Mark Rylance and Vanessa Redgrave

66. Radio, Shaker Aamer, torture Radio: Andy Worthington Discusses the Senate Torture Report, Guantánamo and We Stand With Shaker with Scott Horton and Pippa Jones

67. Shaker Aamer, We Stand With Shaker: We Stand With Shaker: Open Letter to David Cameron Calls for Release of Shaker Aamer from Guantánamo and His Return to the UK

68. Shaker Aamer: Shaker Aamer Speaks from Guantánamo, and His Family Talk About His 13-Year Ordeal

69. Torture, Senate torture report: Why Guantánamo Mustn’t Be Forgotten in the Fallout from the CIA Torture Report

70. Life after Guantánamo: New Life in Uruguay for Six Former Guantánamo Prisoners

71. Prisoners released from Guantánamo: Four Insignificant Afghan Prisoners Released from Guantánamo

72. Shaker Aamer: Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters Calls for the Release of Shaker Aamer from Guantánamo

73. Video, Shaker Aamer, We Stand With Shaker: Video: For We Stand With Shaker, Frankie Boyle Discusses Shaker Aamer’s Case with Sara Pascoe

An archive of articles about British politics and related issues, July to December 2014

[image error]1. Music festivals: Photos: The Wonderful WOMAD Festival, Charlton Park, Wiltshire, July 2014

2. Save the NHS: Save the NHS: Please Join the Jarrow Marchers in London on Saturday September 6, 2014

3. Save the NHS: Save the NHS: Photos of the People’s March for the NHS in London, September 6, 2014

4. Bedroom tax: Humiliating Tory Defeat in Parliament Over the Reviled and Unjust Bedroom Tax

5. Climate change: Photos: The People’s Climate March, London, September 21, 2014

6. Housing crisis: Photos and Essay: The Inspiring Council House Occupation in Stratford That Is Resonating Across London

7. TTIP: Please Join the European Protests Against the Dangerous Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) on October 11, 2014

8. Video, TTIP: Video: I Speak to RT about the Dangers of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) + My Photos of the London Protest

9. Radio, TTIP: Radio: I Discuss Guantánamo, Shaker Aamer, TTIP and the Corporate Takeover of our Lives with Richie Allen on Volcania Radio

10. Anti-austerity protests: Please Support “Britain Needs A Pay Rise,” the TUC March and Rally in London on Saturday, October 18

11. Photos, anti-austerity protests: Photos: “Britain Needs A Pay Rise,” The TUC-Led Protest in London, October 18, 2014 (1/2)

12. Photos, anti-austerity protests: Photos: “Britain Needs A Pay Rise,” The TUC-Led Protest in London, October 18, 2014 (2/2)

13. Activism: Andy Worthington Takes Part in UCLU Amnesty Event, “Why Did I Become An Activist?” on Tuesday October 28, 2014

14. Activism, pacifism: No More War; Wearing a White Poppy for Peace

15. Save the NHS: Victory for Labour MP’s Private Member’s Bill To Repeal the Tory Privatisation of the NHS and Exempt the NHS from the TTIP Agreement

16. Housing crisis: Support Hoxton’s New Era Estate Tenants in Their Struggle Against Rapacious US Landlord Westbrook Partners

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.

Radio: Andy Worthington and Debra Sweet of the World Can’t Wait Discuss Shaker Aamer and Closing Guantánamo with Cat Watters

Below is an interview I undertook with the New York-based activist Cat Watters, on her show Organic News, on Awake Radio, which took place just after the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, who was released and returned to the UK on October 30. Also on the show was my friend Debra Sweet, of the World Can’t Wait, who, every January, gets me over to the US for tours calling for the closure of Guantánamo, timed to coincide with the anniversary of the prison’s opening (see my last three visits here, here and here).

The main topic of discussion  of course, was Shaker’s release after a long, long campaign to secure his freedom, in which I played a part through the We Stand With Shaker campaign that I launched a year ago with the activist Joanne MacInnes.

Debra also spoke — about the prison-wide hunger strike in 2013 that did so much to remind the world of the prisoners’ plight, in which, of course, Shaker played a part, as I explained at the time — see here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

The show is below, via YouTube (audio only):

We also spoke about the hypocrisy and stupidity of the “war on terror” — and of Western foreign policy in general — and then moved on to Shaker’s health, which, in turn, led to a discussion of how Guantánamo has been used by the authorities as a place of human experimentation, via extensive and well-chronicled medical and psychological abuse.

Cat also mentioned Shaker’s connection to Roger Waters, who became involved in Shaker’s case after his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, sent him a letter from Guantánamo stating how much he liked the Pink Floyd song, “Hey You,” which Roger wrote, and I explained how supportive Roger has been of my work and of We Stand With Shaker.

We also spoke about Roger’s commendable involvement with the BDS movement (Boycott Divestment and Sanctions), described by Roger as “a non violent movement to oppose Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, and violations of international law and Palestinian human rights,” and has repeatedly tried to get significant figures in the music industry not to play in Israel, and Debra then made a point of mentioning how Quentin Tarantino has received significant and unacceptable criticism and threats — from the police — after showing his support for the Black Lives Matter movement.

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

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.

Playing Politics with the Closure of Guantánamo

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

Supporters of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign have long been aware that the very existence of the “war on terror” prison at the US naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba is an affront to all notions that the United States respects justice and the rule of law, and we remember that as the closure of the prison becomes, yet again, an undignified game of political football, with Congress continuing to erect obstacles to the release of prisoners and the transfer of anyone to the US mainland for any reason, and the Obama administration trying to come up with a workable plan for the prison’s closure.

Although Congress, the week after the 9/11 attacks, passed a law — the Authorization for Use of Military Force — that purports to justify the detention of prisoners without charge or trial at Guantánamo, and the Supreme Court ruled in June 2004 that the government can hold them until the end of hostilities, this thin legal veneer has persistently failed to disguise the fact that everything about Guantánamo is wrong.

The Bush administration established the prison to be beyond the reach of the US courts, and for nearly two and a half years the men — and boys — held there had no rights whatsoever. In June 2004, the Supreme Court ruled that they had habeas corpus rights, a ruling that allowed lawyers into the prison, breaking the veil of secrecy that had shrouded the prison for all that time, enabling torture and other forms  of abuse to take place. Even so, it was not until June 2006 that the Supreme Court, in another ruling, reminded the administration that no one can be held without rights, and that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibits torture and “humiliating and degrading treatment,” applied to everyone in US custody.

As well as refusing to recognize the necessity to treat prisoners humanely, the Bush administration also refused to recognize that people can only be deprived of their liberty by one of two means: either they are charged with a crime and put on trial, or they are prisoners of war, with the protections of the Geneva Conventions. Instead, the “illegal enemy combatants” of Guantánamo — a notion invented by the administration’s lawyers — were put forward for trials in a deeply flawed trial system (the military commissions), or were consigned to indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial.

Under pressure from the courts, the administration set up various military review processes to approve prisoners for release, or bowed to diplomatic pressure from allies to free them, but this was all political, and nothing to do with the law. In 2008, when the Supreme Court ruled for the second time that the prisoners had habeas corpus rights (after Congress had unconstitutionally take them away in legislation in 2005 and 2006), several dozen men managed to have their cases reviewed by impartial judges, who, in most cases, ruled that the government had failed to provide sufficient evidence to justify their imprisonment and successfully ordered their release.

This was the high point for legal accountability, but after ideologically-driven judges in the appeals court in Washington D.C. changed the rules, insisting that everything the government said should be treated as reliable, they succeeded in shutting down the prisoners’ habeas rights, and since then their fate has once more been a political game.

Guantánamo under President Obama

On taking office in 2009, President Obama established a high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force to review the cases of all the men he had inherited from his predecessor. In January 2010, the task force recommended that, of the 240 men held at the time, 156 should be released, 36 should be prosecuted, and 48 others should continue to be held, on the alarming and fundamentally unjustifiable basis that they were “too dangerous to release,” but that insufficient evidence existed to put them on trial. This is unacceptable because, like so much of what passes for “evidence” in Guantánamo, the information relied upon by the government was produced through the torture or abuse of prisoners, or by bribing them to make false statements in exchange for better living conditions.

It is also worth noting that, in the task force’s careful language, those recommended for release were actually “approved for transfer” out of Guantánamo, but the result is the same: a high-level government review process decided that the US no longer wanted to continue holding them.

Although Congress has, since 2010, raised significant obstacles to the release of prisoners, and has banned the administration from bringing any of them to the US mainland for any reason, 130 of those 240 men have been freed, and 107 are still held. Three others have died at Guantánamo.

Of the 107, 37 were approved for release by the task force, and 10 are facing or have faced trials. The others — 60 men in total — were either regarded as “too dangerous to release” or were recommended for prosecution, until the appeals court in Washington D.C. issued a number of devastating rulings establishing that the military commissions involved war crimes invented by Congress. As a result, the court overturned most of the handful of convictions obtained in the military commissions — as well as making prosecutions impossible for most of those recommended for prosecution by the task force.

After the task force recommended 48 men for ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial because they were “too dangerous to release,” despite a lack of evidence against them, President Obama issued an executive order specifically approving their ongoing imprisonment, although he also promised that they would receive periodic reviews to establish if the alleged threat they posed diminished with the passing of time.

This process, which only began in November 2013, has involved the prisoners, with the support of their lawyers and of military representatives assigned to them, putting together detailed proposals for why they can safely be released to resume peaceful, productive lives. The proposals are presented to a review board 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.

71 men were deemed eligible for the Periodic Review Boards (reduced to 64 after five were released in a prisoner swap, one accepted a plea deal in military commission proceedings, and another was put forward for a military commission trial), but the results have been impressive. Of the 18 men whose cases have so far been decided, 15 have been recommended for release, a success rate, for the prisoners, of 83%.

It should noted, however, that just four of these men have so far been released, leaving eleven others to add to the 37 approved for release by the task force in January 2010.

The absolute obligation to release the 48 men approved for release

The fate of these 48 men ought to be fairly uncontentious. Approved for release by one of two high-level government review processes, the only question that should be asked is where they are to be released. The majority of the 48 — 39 men in total — are Yemenis, and the entire US establishment agrees that no Yemeni should be repatriated, because of the security situation in Yemen, so third countries must be found that will offer them new homes, as has happened, in the last year, with 23 Yemenis approved for release being resettled in other countries — most recently, the United Arab Emirates.

However, lawmakers have added new restrictions to this year’s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which, in part, caused President Obama to veto the bill last month. Congress responded by dealing with all the president’s other complaints but refusing to budge on Guantánamo. As Marty Lederman noted for Just Security, “Last Thursday, the House voted 370-58 to approve an amended version of the NDAA, with those restrictions still in place. This Tuesday, the Senate did likewise, by a vote of 91-3. And the White House has indicated that the President will sign the bill.”

Lederman also noted:

Section 1034 of the House-passed NDAA will require the Secretary of Defense to make certain “certifications” before transferring any of the detainees, including the (approximately) half who already have been cleared for transfer to nations overseas. As the President wrote in his veto statement, these pre-transfer requirements would be “more onerous” than even the “unwarranted” restrictions imposed by current law.

As he also explained, “The principal innovations in section 1034 (compared to current law) are that the Secretary must provide more information to Congress, and he must certify that the nation to which we are transferring a detainee ‘has agreed to share with the United States any information that is related to the individual.'” He also wrote, “Because the President has decided to sign the NDAA, I’m assuming (or I hope, anyway) he has concluded that the new conditions will continue to permit him to transfer all, or virtually all, of the first half of the detainee population before the end of his Term.”

We hope so too, as otherwise Congress is crossing an unacceptable line.

The urgent need to speed up reviews for the 49 remaining “forever prisoners”

When it comes to the men facing Periodic Review Boards — dubbed “forever prisoners’ by the media — there are two particular concerns. The first is that the PRBs, with their 83% success rate, are moving far too slowly. It has taken two years to review the cases of 19 prisoners (one recommendation is still pending), but another 49 men are waiting, and at the current rate they will not all have received a review until the end of 2020.

Moreover, the decisions of the PRBs are not only relevant to the individuals  concerned; they are also of enormous relevance to the proposed disposition of all the remaining prisoners.

To close Guantánamo, President Obama needs to release all those approved for release, and to move everyone else to the US mainland. Just ten men are facing trials, or have faced a trial or have accepted a plea deal, and it is to be hoped that, if they are moved to the US mainland, the discredited military commissions will be scrapped and they will face federal court trials.

This, however, appears to be a less contentious proposal than the question of what should happen to the “forever prisoners.” Here at “Close Guantánamo,” we have absolutely no desire to see anyone brought to the US mainland to be held without charge or trial, but while some NGOs and lawyers are campaigning and lobbying to prevent this happening at all costs, we believe that, looking at the situation pragmatically, some men will have to be transferred for Guantánamo to close, because the government will not, in reality, abandon its belief that some of the men it still holds are “too dangerous to release,” while continuing to acknowledge that insufficient evidence exists to put them on trial.

However, we hope this number will be as small as possible as a result of the PRBs that are still to come — perhaps no more than a dozen or so in addition to the ten facing trials — and, moreover, we believe that, on the US mainland, these men will have rights they do not have at Guantánamo.

As “Close Guantánamo” co-founder Tom Wilner describes it:

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

For this to happen, however, Congress must either be persuaded to drop its ban on bringing prisoners to the US mainland for any reason, or President Obama must take unilateral action.

We are currently hearing that a long-mooted plan for the closure of the prison will be delivered to Congress in the near future, identifying seven possible sites for holding prisoners — “the US Disciplinary Barracks and Midwest Joint Regional Corrections Facility at Leavenworth, Kansas; the Consolidated Naval Brig, Charleston, South Carolina; the Federal Correctional Complex, which includes the medium, maximum and supermax facilities in Florence, Colorado; and the Colorado State Penitentiary II in Canon City, Colorado, also known as the Centennial Correctional Facility,” as the Associated Press described it.

We regard it as unthinkable that anyone would be held in federal prison unless they were being tried in federal court, and we hope that the administration regards a military facility as the only option for anyone not facing a trial. But at present, of course, we are some way from any of this becoming a reality.

Sen John McCain, the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has long been critical of the administration’s failure to submit a plan for the closure of Guantánamo to Congress. Two weeks ago, he said, “I’ve asked for six and a half years for this administration to come forward with a plan — a plan that we could implement in order to close Guantánamo. They have never come forward with one and it would have to be approved by Congress.”

And last week, as Politico explained, McCain said, “If it has all these different options, it’s not a plan. It’s passing the buck over to the Congress of the United States, knowing full well without a specific plan that it doesn’t have any chance.” He added, however, that this was “maybe laying the groundwork for what the president did on immigration, which is the executive order.”

This, or something like it, may be exactly what the administration is thinking, if Congress refuses to cooperate.

Greg Craig and Cliff Sloan’s important op-ed in the Washington Post

In the Washington Post, on November 6, Greg Craig, who was White House Counsel in 2009, and Cliff Sloan, the envoy for Guantánamo closure in the State Department from 2013-14, explained how it might happen. In an op-ed entitled, “The president doesn’t need Congress’s permission to close Guantánamo,” they wrote, “Some maintain that the congressional ban on transfers from Guantánamo to the United States prevents closure without congressional approval. But that is wrong. Under Article II of the Constitution, the president has exclusive authority to determine the facilities in which military detainees are held. Obama has the authority to move forward. He should use it.”

As they proceeded to explain, “Congress has enacted legislation banning the use of funds to transfer Guantánamo detainees to the United States for any purpose, including incarceration and prosecution. But that irrational prohibition need not inhibit the closure of the facility. The restriction is plainly unconstitutional.”

They added that, although the Constitution “assigns Congress the important power to ‘declare war,'” Article II “designates the president as ‘Commander in Chief’ of the military,” who “has the exclusive authority to make tactical military decisions.”

“Congress,” they explained, “can declare war but cannot direct the conduct of military campaigns. It can pass generally applicable military regulations but cannot direct the military’s response to contingent developments. It can authorize detentions and military tribunals and broadly regulate the treatment of prisoners of war, but it cannot direct specific facilities in which specific detainees must be held and tried.”

“Yet that,” they proceeded to explain, “is precisely what Congress has attempted,” with its “purported ban on funding any movement of detainees from Guantánamo Bay to the United States,” which “restricts where ‘law-of-war’ detainees can be held and prevents the president from discharging his constitutionally assigned function of making tactical military decisions. Accordingly, it violates the separation of powers.”

They also stated, “The determination on where to hold detainees is a tactical judgment at the very core of the president’s role as commander in chief, equivalent to decisions on the disposition of troops and the use of equipment. The question here is not whether the president can unilaterally take the nation to war or hold detainees without congressional authorization. The question is whether Congress can tell the president where military detainees must be held. The answer is an emphatic no. One need not accept a particularly broad view of executive authority — let alone the Bush administration’s sweeping view that the president has “exclusive and virtually unfettered control over the disposition of enemy soldiers and agents captured in time of war” (an extravagant assertion with which we disagree) — to see that the restrictions Congress has imposed are unconstitutional.”

Craig and Sloan also noted that “congressional intrusion is fundamentally at odds” with a historical analysis of detention, in which “[d]ecisions about the location of detention have long been understood to fall within the president’s exclusive purview.” In World War II, for example, “Congress passed general laws regulating the treatment of more than 7 million prisoners of war held by the United States — including some 400,000 housed in US detention facilities — but it conspicuously did not specify in which facilities any particular prisoners could be held.”

They also argued against those who “have argued that the Guantánamo restriction is legitimate because it is a limitation on appropriated funds,” noting that “it makes no difference that Congress styled the ban as a funding restriction. Almost 70 years ago, in United States v. Lovett, the Supreme Court ruled that Congress may not use its appropriations power to achieve goals otherwise beyond its constitutional authority. Congress cannot, for example, condition military funding on a requirement that the president target a particular enemy combatant at a particular time and place. The principle is precisely the same with the location of detention and prosecution for detainees.”

In conclusion, they wrote that “Congress has tried to force the president to maintain a specific military detention facility for specific detainees that, in his judgment, is harmful to US national security and far too costly. That is no way to conduct a war, and the Constitution does not permit it.” If Congress “is unable or unwilling to work with him,” they added, “Obama should use his exclusive authority as commander in chief to move the limited number of detainees who cannot be transferred to foreign countries to secure institutions in the United States, shutter this notorious facility, and end this blight on American values and national security.”

Here at “Close Guantanamo,” we agree — although we would also have added that this “limited number of detainees” must then either face trials or be allowed to challenge the basis of their detention in a meaningful manner, with all the additional safeguards preventing indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial that exist on the US mainland compared to Guantánamo.

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

Five Yemenis Freed from Guantánamo, Given New Homes in the United Arab Emirates

There’s good news from Guantánamo, as five Yemenis, approved for release from the prison in 2005, 2007 and 2014, have finally been freed, and given new homes in the United Arab Emirates.

As the New York Times reported, the resettlement “was the first of its kind to the United Arab Emirates, which had previously taken in just one former Guantánamo detainee, in 2008 — its own citizen,” Abdullah al-Hamiri, whose story I discussed here.

The Times also explained that, “In May, President Obama met at Camp David with leaders or representatives of the six Middle Eastern countries that make up the Gulf Cooperation Council, including a representative from the United Arab Emirates. The main topic of discussion was the nuclear agreement with Iran, but officials familiar with the deliberations said Mr. Obama had also pressed them to consider resettling groups of detainees. The deal announced on Sunday appears to be the first fruits of those talks.”

With these releases, 107 men remain in Guantánamo, although the Times also noted that “an official familiar with internal deliberations” said that “[a]s many as 17 other proposed transfers of lower-level detainees are in the bureaucratic pipeline.”

48 of these men have been recommended for release, 37 by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force, which President Obama established shortly after taking office in January 2009. Eleven others have been approved for release, since January 2014, by Periodic Review Boards, another high-level review process established in 2013 to review the cases of all those still held who were not already approved for release, and are not facing trials (which just ten men are).

The majority of these 48 men — 39 of them — are Yemenis, and the problem for them has been that the entire US establishment is unwilling to repatriate them, so third countries have had to be found that are prepared to offer them new homes. With these releases, President Obama has, in the last year, released 23 Yemenis.

From my point of view, the shock — reflecting on these releases  — is quite how long these men have waited to be freed since they were first told that the US no longer wanted to hold them. Four of the five were approved for release by President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force, which issued its final report nearly six years ago, in January 2010, while the fifth was approved for release last year by a Periodic Review Board.

However, as I mentioned in my opening paragraph, one of the five, Said al-Busayss (ISN 165, aka Adil Said al Haj Obeid al Busayss), 42, had previously been recommended for release in 2005, under President Bush, by a military review board known as an Administrative Review Board (ARB), as I explained in an article in June 2012, “Guantánamo Scandal: The 40 Prisoners Still Held But Cleared for Release At Least Five Years Ago.”

A foot soldier with the Taliban, he apparently “fought on the front lines until his unit withdrew, when he was given the option of staying or escaping. Choosing the latter, he fled to Pakistan, where he ‘surrendered his weapon and was arrested by Pakistani police,’” as I described it in my book The Guantánamo Files, and in an article in 2010.

In my 2012 article, “Guantánamo Scandal: The 40 Prisoners Still Held But Cleared for Release At Least Five Years Ago,” I also explained, “In the classified US military files relating to the Guantánamo prisoners, which were released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, al-Busayss’s file was a ‘Recommendation to Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),’ dated September 3, 2004.” Quite what that meant was unexplained, as it was extremely rare for any receiving country to imprison men released from Guantánamo, because of course, any alleged evidence against them was generally worthless because of the abusive conditions in which they had been held.

When the task force reviewed his case in 2009, he was one of 30 Yemenis who were approved for release but held in what the task force described as “conditional detention.” which meant that they were to be held until it was decided that the security situation in Yemen had improved — although the task force, which invented this categorization, gave no indication of how this was to be decided, or who was to make the decision.

Three of the other men were approved for release by the task force without being placed in “conditional detention,” and all three had also been approved for release in 2007.

In the classified US military files relating to the Guantánamo prisoners, which were released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file for Khalid al-Qadasi, 47, was a “Recommendation for Transfer Out of DoD Control (TRO),” dated January 22, 2007.

As I explained in an article in 2010:

Little is known of al-Qadasi, because, as the authorities at Guantánamo have explained, “he claims that he is willing to spend the rest of his life in prison and has emphatically stated that he would rather die than answer questions.” The authorities have apparently ascertained that he served in the Yemeni army as a young man and traveled to Afghanistan in July 2001, and al-Qadasi has apparently stated that he “left Yemen for Pakistan to obtain medical treatment,” and has also said that he “never possessed any weapons in Afghanistan, as he was unable to fight due to his bad back.”

The authorities refuted these claims, claiming that he was “a probable member of al-Qaida,” who “participated in hostilities against US and Coalition forces” in Tora Bora, but the main claim against him — that he was “a Yemeni who fought in Tora Bora” — was made by Guantánamo’s most notorious liar, Yasim Muhammad Basardah (ISN 252), whose unreliability I discussed here — and also see the Guardian‘s important coverage.

In the files released by WikiLeaks, the file for Sulaiman al-Nahdi (ISN 511), 41, was a “Recommendation for Transfer Out of DoD Control (TRO),” dated August 13, 2007, although, disgracefully, the Justice Department refused to acknowledge that he had been approved for release twice, under President Bush and by President Obama’s task force, and challenged his habeas corpus petition, instead of, logically, not contesting it. Al-Nahdi subsequently had his habeas corpus petition denied, in February 2010.

A similar story is that of Fehmi al-Assani (ISN 554, aka Fahmi Salem Said al Sani), 38, for whom a transfer recommendation was made after his Administrative Review Board Round Three, on July 30, 2007 (PDF, p. 338). In the files released by WikiLeaks, his file was a “Recommendation to Retain under DoD Control (DoD),” dated October 22, 2004. Like Sulaiman al-Nahdi, he then had his habeas corpus petition denied, in February 2010, after the Justice Department challenged his petition, which they did not need to have done.

Both of these men appear to have been nothing more than recently recruited foot soldiers for the Taliban at the time of their capture, while the last of the five men to be freed, Ali Ahmad al-Razihi (ISN 045, aka Ali Ahmad Muhammad al Rahizi), 36, was, for some time, regarded, erroneously, as a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden.

Al-Razihi had his case reviewed by a Periodic Review Board on March 20, 2014, and was approved for release on April 23, 2014, and as I explained at the time, although he was initially regarded as one of the “Dirty 30,” a group of men captured in December 2001 who were considered to be bodyguards for Osama bin Laden.

Prior to his PRB, as I explained at the time:

[It was] noted that he was only “possibly” a bin Laden bodyguard. The PRB summary describe[d] the origin of this claim as “detainee reporting of questionable credibility”, adding, “FBI and other interviews of Guantánamo detainees identified that [al-Razihi] served as a bodyguard for Bin Laden, although one of them later recanted the allegation.”

In his classified military file, released by WikiLeaks in 2011, the prisoner who recanted his statements was identified as Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Saudi tortured at Guantánamo, while another alleged witness, who didn’t recant his statements, and who “photo-identified detainee as a UBL bodyguard on three separate occasions,” was the notorious liar referred to above, a Yemeni named Yasim Basardah, who was released from Guantánamo in 2010.

In conclusion, it is commendable that these five men have finally been released, and I hope they will be able to resume their lives in peace, and with support, in the UAE. I now look forward to hearing about the releases of the 17 other men mentioned by the New York Times as awaiting release, and then the 31 others currently awaiting release. I also hope that the PRBs will speed up in the new year, as there are still 45 men awaiting reviews, and President Obama is running out of time to fulfill his long-unfulfilled promise, made on his second day in office in January 2009, to close Guantánamo for good.

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

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

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

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009 (out of the 532 released by President Bush), and the 125 prisoners released from February 2009 to October 2015 (by President Obama), whose stories are covered in more detail than is available anywhere else –- either in print or on the internet –- although many of them, of course, are also covered in The Guantánamo Files, and for the stories of the other 390 prisoners released by President Bush, see my archive of articles based on the classified military files released by WikiLeaks in 2011: June 2007 –- 2 Tunisians, 4 Yemenis (here, here and here); July 2007 –- 16 Saudis; August 2007 –- 1 Bahraini, 5 Afghans; September 2007 –- 16 Saudis; 1 Mauritanian; 1 Libyan, 1 Yemeni, 6 Afghans; November 2007 –- 3 Jordanians, 8 Afghans; 14 Saudis; December 2007 –- 2 Sudanese; 13 Afghans (here and here); 3 British residents; 10 Saudis; May 2008 –- 3 Sudanese, 1 Moroccan, 5 Afghans (here, here and here); July 2008 –- 2 Algerians; 1 Qatari, 1 United Arab Emirati, 1 Afghan; August 2008 –- 2 Algerians; September 2008 –- 1 Pakistani, 2 Afghans (here and here); 1 Sudanese, 1 Algerian; November 2008 –- 1 Kazakh, 1 Somali, 1 Tajik; 2 Algerians; 1 Yemeni (Salim Hamdan), repatriated to serve out the last month of his sentence; December 2008 –- 3 Bosnian Algerians; January 2009 –- 1 Afghan, 1 Algerian, 4 Iraqis; February 2009 — 1 British resident (Binyam Mohamed); May 2009 —1 Bosnian Algerian (Lakhdar Boumediene); June 2009 — 1 Chadian (Mohammed El-Gharani); 4 Uighurs to Bermuda; 1 Iraqi; 3 Saudis (here and here); August 2009 — 1 Afghan (Mohamed Jawad); 2 Syrians to Portugal; September 2009 — 1 Yemeni; 2 Uzbeks to Ireland (here and here); October 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti, 1 prisoner of undisclosed nationality to Belgium; 6 Uighurs to Palau; November 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian to France, 1 unidentified Palestinian to Hungary, 2 Tunisians to Italian custody; December 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti (Fouad al-Rabiah); 2 Somalis; 4 Afghans; 6 Yemenis; January 2010 — 2 Algerians, 1 Uzbek to Switzerland; 1 Egyptian, 1 Azerbaijani and 1 Tunisian to Slovakia; February 2010 — 1 Egyptian, 1 Libyan, 1 Tunisian to Albania; 1 Palestinian to Spain; March 2010 — 1 Libyan, 2 unidentified prisoners to Georgia, 2 Uighurs to Switzerland; May 2010 — 1 Syrian to Bulgaria, 1 Yemeni to Spain; July 2010 — 1 Yemeni (Mohammed Hassan Odaini); 1 Algerian; 1 Syrian to Cape Verde, 1 Uzbek to Latvia, 1 unidentified Afghan to Spain; September 2010 — 1 Palestinian, 1 Syrian to Germany; January 2011 — 1 Algerian; April 2012 — 2 Uighurs to El Salvador; July 2012 — 1 Sudanese; September 2012 — 1 Canadian (Omar Khadr) to ongoing imprisonment in Canada; August 2013 — 2 Algerians; December 2013 — 2 Algerians; 2 Saudis; 2 Sudanese; 3 Uighurs to Slovakia; March 2014 — 1 Algerian (Ahmed Belbacha); May 2014 — 5 Afghans to Qatar (in a prisoner swap for US PoW Bowe Bergdahl); November 2014 — 1 Kuwaiti (Fawzi al-Odah); 3 Yemenis to Georgia, 1 Yemeni and 1 Tunisian to Slovakia, and 1 Saudi; December 2014 — 4 Syrians, a Palestinian and a Tunisian to Uruguay; 4 Afghans; 2 Tunisians and 3 Yemenis to Kazakhstan; January 2015 — 4 Yemenis to Oman, 1 Yemeni to Estonia; June 2015 — 6 Yemenis to Oman; September 2015 — 1 Moroccan and 1 Saudi; October 2015 — 1 Mauritanian and 1 British resident (Shaker Aamer).

Podcast: Andy Worthington of The Four Fathers Interviewed About Protest Music By Kevin Gosztola of Shadowproof

Two weeks ago, the journalist Kevin Gosztola made my “Song for Shaker Aamer,” by my band The Four Fathers, his “Protest Song of the Week” on his website Shadowproof, which he established in August when FireDoglake, for which he had been writing for several years, came to an end.

It was wonderful to be featured on Shadowproof, as part of a “Protest Music Project” that Kevin set up when the website launched, which to date, has featured a dozen songs from around the world, and the “Top 25 Protest Albums of the 2010s (So Far),” and just as wonderful when Kevin asked if I’d be prepared to be interviewed about “what influenced [me] to become a writer and performer of protest music,” and to discuss the protest songs on The Four Fathers’ self-released debut album, “Love and War,” available to listen to, to download or to buy as a CD on Bandcamp.

Our 45-minute interview, with Kevin playing excerpts from “Song for Shaker Aamer,” “Fighting Injustice,” “81 Million Dollars” (about the US torture program) and “Tory Bullshit Blues,” is on the Shadowproof website, and is also available here as an MP3. Also included is an excerpt from one of my favourite protest songs, Bob Dylan’s “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” (as performed on the 1975 Rolling Thunder tour).

A transcript of the first half of the interview is posted below, courtesy of Kevin, with the second half to follow next week.

I do hope you’ll listen to it, and will share it if you do. I’m very pleased that Kevin describes the “Protest Music Project” as “part of a continued effort to push back against the idea that there is an absence of protest music or protest singers and bands,” and I’m also encouraged that he wrote, “Hopefully, this is the start of something tremendously engaging at Shadowproof. I intend to do many more interviews about protest music with musicians like Andy.”

Below is the transcript of the first part of the interview.

Kevin Gosztola: First, for people who are unfamiliar with what you do, share a bit because you’ve been busy these past few weeks, especially since the British prisoner who was in Guantánamo, Shaker Aamer, has been released. So talk about what you do and what you’ve been up to these past few weeks.

Andy Worthington: To give a little bit of the bigger perspective, I’ve been researching and writing about Guantánamo for nearly ten years. As a result of having done so much research, it’s an issue that — as well as reporting about, I think it’s something I find essential to campaign about as well, to get the place closed down, because it’s such a legal, ethical, and moral abomination; you know, such a disgrace on every level. So, that’s what I’ve been doing.

Although I’ve been obviously writing all this time and I write a lot about Guantánamo, I’ve also been involved in campaigns. So a few years ago I set up the “Close Guantánamo” campaign with Tom Wilner, who is a U.S. lawyer who represented the Guantánamo prisoners in their Supreme Court cases. And then last year I set up a campaign here in the U.K. with an activist friend, Joanne MacInnes, called “We Stand With Shaker,” which was aimed principally at raising attention about the case of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo. And we did this through an idea that I had, which was a giant inflatable figure.

My intention was that it would pop up whenever senior government ministers were — everywhere — and would literally be the elephant in the room. But, of course, you can’t actually go around inflating giant figures near the Prime Minister or other senior officials of government or you’d be very swiftly arrested. But we worked out that it was something that might catch on if we could try and get MPs (because there were supportive MPs) and celebrities involved. It kind of took off really. We ended up with a lot of people involved.

It wasn’t just us. The mainstream media in the U.K. got behind Shaker’s case in a way I have to say would be hard to imagine in the U.S. And also there was such significant parliamentary support across the board; so, major people in the Conservative Party as well as the Labour Party, proper cross-party support. We ended up getting Shaker Aamer out, which happened on the 30th of October.

I’m very glad to have been involved in that, in the sense of a campaign that worked, because I suppose we spend a lot of time fighting against things that are long-standing injustices that take such a long time to deal with that actually getting some kind of success does feel quite good.

Kevin Gosztola: Let’s get into your music and talk about it. For people who are unaware, your album is called “Love and War,” and you’re distributing it through Bandcamp. This album has eight different songs and one of them is called “Song for Shaker Aamer.” Can you talk about putting that song together?

Andy Worthington: What happened really, Kevin, is I decided life is too short not to fulfill your dreams. So one of the things I have always loved to do alongside writing was singing, writing songs, playing the guitar, playing music. With some friends, we got together and we started off playing covers. We started off playing a few older songs I had written. Then, I found I was actually really enjoying using music as another outlet for what I do through my journalism; so, writing about topical issues that concern me. As you call it on your site where you’re looking at “Protest Songs of the Week,” I got involved in protest music, essentially.

I’m quite capable every now and then of writing the odd love song, but I like music that reflects my concerns, and my concerns primarily are about politics. So one of the things that arose is this kind of quite bouncy, cheery, roots reggae tune. Roots reggae from the late ’70s is the music I grew up with, particularly with the punk music at the time, and Bob Dylan. This is the kind of music that has left an indelible impression on me. So I love reggae music.

It just turned out that here was this tune that is quite sunny and upbeat, but I used that to carry the message of Shaker Aamer, still held in Guantánamo.

Kevin Gosztola: It strikes me, since you talk about your influences a little bit, and listening to roots reggae and punk, I know that in the U.K there is quite a history with punk music and roots reggae groups tapping into protest music to push campaigns. I think people who hear this interview may probably be well aware of the band, The Specials, and the success they had with their “Free Nelson Mandela.” And so, I think “Song for Shaker Aamer” is almost along those lines.

Andy Worthington: I hope so. The Special AKA’s song for Nelson Mandela was such a massive thing. But music now has become atomised, so that, obviously, along with so much of culture, it is difficult to know how you can get a message out to a lot of people. But, you know, I am glad that people who have heard “Song for Shaker Aamer” really get it, really like it, and really understand that it is coming from that kind of tradition.

And, you know, what we didn’t talk about, Kevin, it’s probably worth noting that I took the liberty of taking some of Shaker’s words, the only recorded words of his from Guantánamo, which a U.S. TV crew recorded when they were on a visit two years ago. They didn’t know he was there, but he knew they were there. And as they walked through his corridor, he started shouting out these eloquent messages about letting the world come and visit to see how things are in Guantánamo. Incredibly powerful.

I think that obviously that really adds some weight to the song. But, I am very glad to hear that it works as a protest song. That’s what I’ve been doing with some of the other songs that are on the album, and I’m actually on a creative roll right now and I’ve been writing a whole load of new songs. Most of those are dealing with political issues.

As far as I can see, to appropriate a rather corny phrase, but one I believe is quite true: if you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention. I know what the score is in the U.S. because I’ve been working on the Guantánamo issues for so many years, but I live here in the U.K. I’m certainly under no illusions, and nor should anybody in the U.S. be under any illusions that the kind of barking mad Republicans that you have is a particularly American phenomenon, but we also have a crazy right-wing government at the moment, who mean very deliberate harm to pretty much everybody in this country who isn’t rich.

Kevin Gosztola: That’s a good segue into the next song that you have here, which is “Tory Bullshit Blues.” It’s pretty obvious what kind of statement you’re trying to make, but let’s get into how you derived inspiration for this song.

Andy Worthington: This song is just a kind of fast clattering blues. I think the direct inspiration for it would be listening to songs like “Subterranean Homesick Blues” by Bob Dylan. It’s definitely a big part of the story of the political music that I like to listen to. As a young man, particularly when I was at university, I really got into Bob Dylan. And so Bob Dylan’s political songs really mean a lot to me, as we were mentioning before. Actually, they came a bit after the kind of punk and new wave music that I was growing up with as a teenager — a lot of politics ran through that. And then, when I was at university, that’s when I also got into reggae music. And reggae music at that time, of course, was extremely political with a conscious message that so many artists were portraying and one that really resonated with me. So, “Tory Bullshit Blues” fits that ’60s-style of fast rock and roll protest song.

It’s my attempt at comparing and contrasting Thatcherism, and what that was in the States was Reaganism — Reagan and Thatcher in the ’80s and their destruction, as it was in the U.K., of the state, and the liberation of the financial services industry to start making money. I think the modern story of the mess that we’re in is really the result of those things, where the ball was set rolling by Reagan and Thatcher in the ’80s.

Kevin Gosztola: Another song that I really appreciate on this album is “Fighting Injustice,” which you wrote. It’s about this austerity that is not only in the United States but fairly global at this point in time in history. I like the whole lyric of “living on the dark side,” and I imagine you may have pulled that out of your time covering dark subjects like Guantánamo.

Andy Worthington: Certainly, “the dark side” is, famously, Dick Cheney’s line about what the United States was going to do after the 9/11 attacks. “We’ll have to go to the dark side, if you will,” is what he said. It’s associated with him. I used the phrase in connection with him elsewhere, but I suppose having spent so long looking at Guantánamo and the “war on terror,” and then also to find what’s in some ways stealthily crept up on us since the global crash in ’08 is that our governments are now cynically further enriching the rich, not punishing them for what happened, and deliberately making false economic rationales for making life as difficult as possible for all the poorer and more vulnerable people in society. That it’s all very connected.

And so it seemed very appropriate when I was writing that song that “the dark side” that I’m hoping to entice people away from is something that across the board is defending illegal wars, drone killings, indefinite detention without charge or trial, torture, as well as the types of economic terrorism that I think that our governments are responsible for both domestically and internationally.

It’s a slightly bigger issue here in Europe than it is in the States about having a right-wing government trying to undermine the state provision of services. The narrative in the United States, it seems to me, is a little bit weird, in that people have this notion that there is no socialism in the United States, when actually an infrastructure of a functioning economy is essentially socialist in so many ways. Everybody pays into something that is for the common good. People are kind of fooled in the United States to think that is something terrible and everybody is robust and frontiers-like and self-sufficient. When in fact, a lot of the elements of what government does can be viewed as socialist, and a lot of those things are actually good for all of us.

In Europe, we have much more of an understanding that we as taxpayers pay money to our governments to provide us with a range of services. Therefore, I think we’re warier of having a radical right-wing government like the terrible people that we have in power in the U.K. at the moment, who are saying “we want to privatize everything in this country,” apart from — obviously what they’re not saying is their own salaries and a few other parts of the defense industry and a few other parts of the judiciary. But they’re so carried away at the moment with themselves that they are even starting to talk openly in public about how they want to privatize almost everything.

This is dangerous. This is so obvious when it comes to what it means for something like our National Health Service, which is an astonishingly good service. I have been very ill. My family have been very ill. I think it is fair to say that all of us quite possibly owe our lives to the NHS. But the NHS works on the basis that a proportion of everybody’s tax money goes into it to support everybody. It’s a kind of generalized insurance that is paid for by the whole population, apart from the people who are very poor. What it ends up with is that everybody gets access to it if they need it.

If you get really ill in this country, nobody asks you how much money you’ve got. When you go into hospital, nobody’s asking you how much money you’ve got. When they send you home, nobody’s asking you how much money you’ve got. Nobody asks you to pay for it because, whatever it is, the 10 percent of our GDP that goes to support the NHS, which comes from our taxpayers’ money, means that it works on that basis. And I know from talking to my American friends the stress that comes from living in the States where you don’t have that absolute provision of free treatment to everybody who needs it, and what an absolute miracle it is.

Kevin Gosztola: Everyone in America likes to talk about not wasting taxpayer dollars, but you have a song called “81 Million Dollars.” And this is about money that the U.S. government spent on the CIA torture architects. James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen were these architects, who developed these techniques. I’m really impressed by this song. It’s a really topical storytelling kind of a song, and it’s very — well, I can see looking at your Bandcamp page that you’ve gotten some praise from people who are in the field, who have connections to the military, who appreciate you calling attention to this through your music. So talk about coming up with “81 Million Dollars.”

Andy Worthington: A part of me hopes that it will be picked up on by anti-torture activists in the U.S. My intention wasn’t that when I wrote it. My intention was anger and indignation at the revelation that Mitchell and Jessen, the contractors who basically set up and ran the CIA’s torture program, that the company they set up was paid $81 million for doing that. That amount just struck me as so wrong.

I suppose it is difficult to figure out how creativity is expressed when you’re writing a song. Does the music come first? Do you have a tune? How do you get the lyrics in there? I can’t really explain that. Generally things — I probably get a tune and then try and come up with lyrics. I’ll come up with a [musical] idea and then try and fit what kind of narrative it is around it.

So the tune kind of turned up out of nowhere, and then I realized what I needed to put over it in a kind of spoken word way — it’s not entirely sung — was something that would express what the key elements were about the torture program and who some of the key players were. Just to get that down in the form of the song was something that felt very important to me.

It remains important to me because I think that these are people who have evaded accountability for their responsibility for their crimes in introducing this program, which was brutal and in the end pointless. No information was obtained from it that was vital, and such terrible harm was caused.

That’s the intent, really, is that this hopefully will be something that can strike a chord with other people, who are calling for accountability, because this song does build to me intoning this list of senior officials from President Bush downward, who I describe as war criminals, and calling for people to be held responsible.

Kevin Gosztola: One of the things I noticed is that the “We Stand With Shaker” campaign benefited from being able to reach out and involve other musicians. I noticed the picture that you have on your album — you’re actually pictured with Roger Waters. He’s someone I think of as a good example of using his music in a political way to bring attention to issues, even when some of it is more subtly political than this protest music that you’ve written.

Roger Waters is this figure in music that will call out other musicians when their politics are really bad. And so, you have some experience with Roger. What do you appreciate about how he’s gone after musicians?

Andy Worthington: I first met Roger a bit less than two years ago, and the Rolling Stones were about to play in Tel Aviv. Roger has this thing of — he’s constantly trying in a major high-profile way to stop major recording artists from going and playing in Israel.

His explanation is entirely appropriate. He says this is no different from what was going on in South Africa in the 1980s, and yet in South Africa we managed to mobilize almost the whole of the entertainment industry to put pressure on South Africa, and yet this isn’t happening with Israel.

When I met him, he was wondering if there was any way to persuade the Rolling Stones, which there wasn’t. I don’t think that anything would stop their money-making machine. Then, I was disappointed to find out that Neil Young was going to play there. I didn’t know where that was coming from.

Every now and then Roger pops up in the news because he sent a letter to some other artist, who is intent on playing there. And that plus the pressure from campaigners I know sometimes makes people withdraw from going there. It’s kind of sad and a reflection on the general depoliticization of the entertainment industry these days that there are so few prominent musicians who are prepared to make a political stand. And Roger, really, when you start looking around, there’s Roger standing out really clearly.

Kevin Gosztola: Part of the ’80s was really defined by the boycott, and it seems like musicians don’t have the stomach or the guts to do something like that. When they have an opportunity when they should be sticking their neck out in this sort of way and say I’m not going to play Israel or I’m not going to play Jerusalem, they are still going through with it.

Andy Worthington: In the U.K., I don’t think pressure was exerted. This is not about Israel but about being contentious after 9/11. At the time of the Iraq invasion — so now looking back at it that wasn’t long after 9/11, yet all those people who tried to put their head above the parapet to be critical of it; of course, what happened to the Dixie Chicks? They were slaughtered for their criticism of the illegal invasion of Iraq.

I remember seeing a brilliant film. To redress the fact that I mentioned Neil Young shouldn’t have played in Israel, I would like to say how brilliant I think he was when he went on an anti-war tour of the U.S., which must have been around 2005 — but I can’t be entirely sure of that. He got Crosby, Stills, and Nash to go on the road with him [actually it was 2006, and the resulting film, “CSNY: Déjà Vu,” was released in 2008.]

Every night these kind of Republican redneck fans of Neil Young were showing up and booing at him and walking out. Every night he didn’t care. He just carried on regardless. It took a lot of nerve on his part, but it was incredibly powerful, to see him absolutely backing up his belief in what was important. It’s another shining example I think of what we’ve been talking about — the power of when musicians do engage in political issues.

[Continued in Part 2.]

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.

Radio: Andy Worthington Discusses Shaker Aamer’s Release and the Future of Guantánamo with Scott Horton and Peter B. Collins

In the wake of the wonderful news that Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, has finally been released from the prison, and returned, a free man, to his family in the UK, a couple of old friends from the US — Scott Horton and Peter B. Collins — interviewed me for their radio shows.

Scott and I have been talking — generally several times a year —  since 2007, primarily about Guantánamo, but also about torture, Bagram prison in Afghanistan, and other aspects of the “war on terror” that George W. Bush launched after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and that President Obama has failed to fully repudiate.

Our 20-minute interview is here, as an MP3. Scott’s own website has been having problems for the last week — it was down for many days, and now it’s back up, but the last few years’ interviews are still missing.

Scott asked me about Shaker and his release, of course, so I was delighted to have the opportunity to explain why the allegations against him in his classified military files are so thoroughly unreliable (see here for more), and I also explained how he was “the most prominent prisoner for resisting the injustice of the detention program introduced by the United States after the 9/11 attacks ,” who was “always standing up for the rights of his fellow prisoners,” and endlessly irritated the authorities. I also explained how it was undoubtedly his outspoken nature that delayed his release for so long.

I also discussed the role of government lawyers in advising their bosses never to accept responsibility for any mistakes — not just in Shaker’s case, but across the board — and Scott and I also talked about the failed military commissions, and the current wrangling about closing Guantánamo, which I’ll be discussing in detail here within the next couple of days.

I also spoke to Peter B. Collins for his show, “Processing Distortion,” on Boiling Frogs Post, the website established by FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds.

Our hour-long interview was entitled, “Will Obama Close Gitmo?” and it was a particularly good interview. To listen to it, however, you will have to subscribe for at least a month to Boiling Frogs Post, for $7 — although that does give you access to five different radio shows and a video round table. To whet your appetite, there’s a one-minute clip of me here expressing indignation about cynical — or scared –lawmakers and their ridiculous and insulting black propaganda about Guantánamo.

This is how Peter described the show:

As an author and journalist, Andy Worthington is an expert on America’s offshore island prison, Guantánamo. As an activist, he helped lead a year-long campaign to free Shaker Aamer, the last British prisoner who finally went home on October 30. We talk about his return and reunion with family, and the ordeal he experienced as the most high-profile inmate released so far. When he’s healthy — physically and psychologically — Aamer is expected to expose much about his detention, torture, hunger strikes, and the complicity of British officials and intelligence agents in his almost 14-year detention without trial or charge. Worthington also talks about Sen. Feinstein’s recent call to close Guantánamo, and the irrational objections expressed by many American leaders.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files and covers America’s gulag on his blog. He is also a member of The Four Fathers, a music group that updated their ‘Song for Shaker‘ after Aamer’s return to England.

I hope you have time to listen to Scott’s show, and that you’ll subscribe to BFP so you can hear my interview with Peter and many, many other interviews, and that you’ll share all this information if you find it useful.

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.