Andy Worthington's Blog, page 85

A Photo and a Message from Shaker Aamer to His Supporters

So the following message and the accompanying photo here — made available by Shaker Aamer, who, until October 30, was the last British resident in Guantánamo — really need no additional explanation, except to say that Shaker made them available to Joanne MacInnes and I, as the co-directors of the We Stand With Shaker campaign, specifically so that he could thank everyone who worked so hard for his release. Thanking everyone is something that has been weighing on his mind as he recovers from his long ordeal, and begins to get used to his freedom. We wish him all the best, and are glad to see him looking so well, and so evidently full of spirit and kindness.

Shaker Aamer’s message to all his supporters

Hi Joanne and Andy,

Please send this message below to all of those who campaigned with We Stand With Shaker, the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign, those who fasted for me, MPs, and everyone else you know who has fought for my release.

I can’t tell you how much I want to speak to all of you and stand with all of you, carrying on the struggle for justice for everybody who has been oppressed and needs our help. If there is one thing we can do to save the whole world it is to fight for justice. We will work hard together to close Guantánamo and every unlawful facility run by any government worldwide. Justice has no colour or religion or race.

I promise all of you good people — those whose names I know, and those whose names I do not know — that my heart and my spirit feel your thoughts of justice. I care for you all.

Yours sincerely,

Shaker Aamer ISN 239

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.

First Photos Published of Shaker Aamer Since His Release from Guantánamo

This afternoon, the first photos appeared in the British media of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident held at Guantánamo, following his release from the prison on October 30. The photos appear to have been taken by paparazzi near his family home in London — and while I think it’s a pity that those close to Shaker didn’t issue  a photo themselves, I’m delighted to see Shaker looking so well, just eleven days after his release.

The photo I’ve posted here was published on the website of the Daily Telegraph, and other photos were on the website of the Sun, the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror.

Unfortunately, although the photos show an evidently likeable person, and hint at the indomitable spirit that kept him going throughout his long ordeal in US custody, the text accompanying the photos was not always supportive — and the online comments, of course, are best avoided completely.

So the Telegraph, unfortunately, described how Shaker “was believed to be an al-Qaida recruiter,” and only later in its article added that “in 2007 the allegations against him were dropped and he was cleared for release.” The Telegraph also noted that he “is now expected to receive a £1 million compensation package from the UK taxpayer,” as though any wrongdoing by the UK government, for which compensation is secured, might come from a difference source — ministers’ own pockets, for example.

A similar tone was taken by the Sun, which noted that “he flew home on Friday October 30 aboard a taxpayer-funded private jet” — again, as if there was any other kind of government funding — and stated that “[t]he Americans believed Aamer was an al-Qaeda recruiter with ties to Osama bin Laden,” although they added that he “has always protested his innocence — claiming to have only been carrying out charity work.”

The Mail, which vigorously backed the campaign for his release, was more generous in its coverage, although it was noted, not for the first time, that the flight back to the UK from Guantánamo “is thought to have cost an estimated £70,000.” The Mail also wrote that Shaker “is now believed to be in line for a £1m payout from the government,” adding that this is part of a “compensation deal” that “was agreed in 2010 between the British Government and lawyers representing Guantánamo detainees following legal action.”

The Mail also repeated the description of Shaker in US military files “as a ‘close associate of Osama Bin Laden’, who fought in the battle of Tora Bora in Afghanistan,” noting that he “insists he was working for a charity in Afghanistan when he was kidnapped and handed to US forces in 2001,” but unfortunately even the Mail failed to do the research required to demonstrate, as I explained in my article “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Truth, Lies and Distortions in the Coverage of Shaker Aamer, Soon to be Freed from Guantánamo,” that the allegations against Shaker were made by notoriously unreliable witnesses.

The Mirror, meanwhile, described how Shaker spent “14 years locked up in the brutal American prison in Cuba,” and stated that, although the US “believed Aamer was an al-Qaeda recruiter with ties to Osama bin Laden,” they “never charged him with an offence and there was some doubt over his arrest.”

In conclusion, then, although I was very pleased to see Shaker, and in such a natural, normal environment, just walking in the street, I look forward to hearing from him, in his own words, very soon.

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, calling for the immediate release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, 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 the Release of Shaker Aamer from Guantánamo with Richie Allen

It’s ten days since Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, was released and brought back to the UK to be reunited with his family, and after an immediate media whirlwind everything went very quiet, with a few noble exceptions — Richie Allen, the Manchester-based Irish broadcaster, Scott Horton, the US libertarian, and Peter B. Collins, the West Coast progressive radio host — who all got in touch and asked for interviews.

I’ve known all three for some time, and tonight I’m promoting my interview with Richie available — it’s on YouTube via David Icke’s website, and you can also find it here on Podomatic. The other two shows aren’t available right now — Scott’s website has been down for a few days, and my interview with Peter, for Sibel Edmonds’ Boiling Frogs website, hasn’t been uploaded yet.

In a 30-minute interview, I spoke to Richie about Shaker’s release, and attempted to answer questions about how his health might be — a question that I couldn’t really answer, as those close to him are keeping very quiet right now, and allowing him to recover in peace.

However, I was able to explain how, at Guantánamo, he suffered from a range of physical and mental ailments that were identified nearly two years ago, when an independent medical expert was allowed to visit him, and how, as someone who persistently resisted the injustices of the “war on terror,” advocating for the rights of all the prisoners, he was subjected to regular violence — and also spent much of his time at Guantánamo in isolation.

The show is below:

Richie and I also spoke about some of the particularly unpleasant episodes in the “war on terror” that Shaker knew about — the presence of British agents in the room while he was being violently abused by US operatives in Afghanistan, before his transfer to Guantánamo; his experiences after his capture, when Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the head of an independent training camp that was not aligned with Al-Qaeda, was flown to Egypt, where, under torture, he made a false confession that Al-Qaeda was meeting Saddam Hussein to obtain chemical weapons; and his claims that he was tortured on the night that three men died in Guantánamo, allegedly by committing suicide, in June 2006.

I pointed out that these incidents are all publicly known, and that both the British and American governments are adept at avoiding any kind of accountability for their actions, but that, nevertheless, it appears that his release was delayed, year after year, simply to avoid embarrassment for the US and the UK.

I also spoke about how we need an independent, judge-led inquiry into British complicity in torture and other abuses of the “war on terror,” and contrasted the UK’s relentless secrecy with the publication, last December, of the 500-page executive summary of the US Senate Intelligence Committee’s report into the CIA’s torture program, which, although subject to redactions, demonstrated far more transparency than has been forthcoming in the UK.

We also spoke about the so-called Snoopers’ Charter that the British government is currently hoping to pass, which I oppose wholeheartedly, and I noted with approval the opposition to it of the Conservative MP David Davis (the co-chair of the All-Party Shaker Aamer Parliamentary Group), who, at the weekend, was interviewed by the Observer — see “Tory rebel David Davis: ‘We haven’t had a Stasi or a Gestapo in Britain, so people are intellectually lazy about surveillance.’”

I hope you have time to listen to my interview, that you like it, and that you’ll share it if you do. I’ll post links to the other shows as soon as they’re available.

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, calling for the immediate release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, 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.

Chef Held at Guantánamo Calls Shaker Aamer a “Beautiful, Great Man” But Warns of Difficulties Adapting to Freedom

The Guardian, yesterday, featured former Guantánamo prisoner Ahmed Errachidi speaking of his admiration for Shaker Aamer, the British resident released from the prison on October 30, but warning that it will be difficult for him to adapt to his freedom after nearly 14 years in US custody.

A Moroccan national and a chef, Errachidi, 49, had lived and worked in London for 18 years before he travelled to Pakistan and then Afghanistan in late 2001 in what appears to have been an ill-conceived combination of a business trip and a desire to aid the Afghan people. Seized and taken to Guantánamo, he was initially regarded as a significant prisoner. As Ben Quinn explained in an article for the Guardian, “he earned the nickname ‘The General’ by guards, after he was cast as the unofficial leader of more than 700 detainees — organising protests that included hunger strikes, a role he says occurred largely because he was one of the few English speakers.”

Oddly, Quinn failed to mention that Errachidi was bipolar, and suffered psychotic episodes at Guantánamo, sometimes during interrogations, and that it wasn’t until he was assigned Clive Stafford Smith as a lawyer that a claim that he was in a training camp was debunked, when Stafford Smith was able to secure the wage slips from a restaurant in Bond Street where Errachidi was actually working at the time. That was the key evidence that paved the way for his release in April 2007. Quinn also neglected to mention that, in 2013, his memoir, The General: The Ordinary Man Who Challenged Guantánamo, was published by Random House.

I first wrote about Ahmed in 2006, in my book The Guantánamo Files, and again in June 2007, after his release, which was when he first got in touch with me, and we have been in intermittent contact ever since. I also wrote about his book in 2011, when it was first announced, and again on its publication in 2013.

Nevertheless, Quinn’s article not only captured some powerful insights into Errachidi’s post-Guantánamo life; it also featured some wonderful comments about Shaker Aamer, who, Errachidi said, was a “beautiful, great man” and about whom he said, as Quinn put it, that he “played a similar role to him.”

“All the time in Guantánamo he would stand up for and help other prisoners,” Errachidi said, adding, “If he had a British passport he would not have been there all this time — he would have left with Moazzam Begg and the other British when they left around 2004 and 2005. Also, as anyone who speaks English, who is vocal and who stood up to the army, they regarded [Shaker] as a suspicious person, someone who is dangerous and dislikes the Americans and so on. They regarded him as someone who needed more attention. It happened to me as well.”

Errachidi also said that “readjustment to normal life after his five-and-half year imprisonment has not been easy,” as Quinn put it. “Now when you walk down the street you keep asking yourself: ‘Do these people know who I am? Do they know I came from Guantánamo?’” Errachidi said, adding, “Plus you have nightmares. The worst is when a prisoner will see an orange uniform and see himself back in Guantánamo. That is a nightmare that a lot of detainees have.”

Errachidi also explained that he now owns a restaurant and cafe in Morocco, although he added, “The big problem I have faced here is that everybody is very cautious when they are talking to me. No one asks for my phone number. No one asks me about Guantánamo. Perhaps they feel it will bring back the pain, but I actually wish that they would ask me questions.”

He also said, “I’ve wanted to keep a low profile and wanted my privacy, but now I feel an obligation to talk about Guantánamo. I want to talk to people, I want to enlighten them, to go in front of Congress and tell the people of America and the world about the truth of what happened.”

I hope he gets the opportunity, although he may not be welcomed everywhere — as another former prisoner, Mourad Benchellali, a French citizen, discovered last week. Although he has been working on deradicalization programs for many years, the Canadian authorities arrested him on his arrival in Canada, to take part in a documentary film, and to attend a conference, and then sent him back home.

As Ben Quinn put it, Errachidi also explained that “it would be the simple things, such as being able to take a few steps without shackles, through to the mental impact that might include nightmares of being back in a cage at the US base, that would be the hardest for Aamer to deal with.”

Errachidi was also asked about Jamal al-Harith, a former prisoner (and a Muslim convert who was born Ronald Fiddler), who, as Quinn put it, “was freed from Guantánamo in 2004 after lobbying by the British government and who is now said by his wife to be in an Islamic State-controlled area of Syria.”

“I’m very surprised at that and I feel sorry for anyone who would join Isis because he would be naive and misled,” Errachidi said perceptively. He added, “In Guantánamo you find a lot of people who had nothing to do with anything the British or the Americans were claiming. They were the scapegoats.” He also pointed out that he “can’t speak for” any of his fellow prisoners about “[w]hat they are going to do after Guantánamo.”

Errachidi also explained that he “has recently been able to get a passport again and wants to travel” — “to the UK” (which is, perhaps, possible) and “perhaps even the US” (which is, I think, extremely unlikely, although it is worth him trying, and trying to make a big fuss if, as I expect, he is turned down).

He also told Ben Quinn, “I have a very successful business but I am not happy because justice has not been done,” adding, “I’m not passionate about food in the way I used to be, for example. I lost interest.” He also said, “Guantánamo is not behind me, and it’s the same for a lot of prisoners. Unfortunately it is ahead of every prisoner. He sees Guantánamo in his eyes. It’s hard to put it behind them.”

In his final comments about Shaker Aamer, Errachidi reflected on the fact that he will be “negotiating many … day to day sensations which will suddenly seem new.” As he put it, “In normal life, you go to the kitchen and put the gas on and see the fire. But in the case of a detainee who has not seen fire for years and has been living in a cell, everything around him is steel, apart from toilet paper and the mattress. Glass, wood — he’ll be touching things he hasn’t touched for 13 years.”

Note: The photo at the top of this article is from an Indymedia article from September 2005, about a protest outside Hiatt’s, who make the shackles used at Guantánamo. The great protest band Seize The Day played, and campaigners present included Clive Stafford Smith and Dr. David Nicholl, still very much involved in the Guantánamo story and Shaker Aamer’s case, and Mark Thomas, who stood with the giant inflatable figure of Shaker that was at the heart of the We Stand With Shaker campaign I launched last year with Joanne MacInnes — as did Clive and David.

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, calling for the immediate release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, 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.

Eroding Hyperbole: The Steady Reclassification of Guantánamo’s “Forever Prisoners”

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.

Despite the relentless fearmongering of Republican supporters of Guantánamo, claims that the prison holds a significant number of people who pose a threat to the US continue to be eroded; primarily, in recent years, through the deliberations of Periodic Review Boards — panels consisting of representatives of the Departments of State, Defense, Justice and Homeland Security, as well as the office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who hear from the prisoners, their lawyers and their military representatives via video-link from Guantánamo, where the men are able to make a case for why they should be approved for release.

The men in question have, with some accuracy, been dubbed “forever prisoners” by the media. Originally numbering 71 men, they comprised two groups: 46 men assessed to be “too dangerous to release” by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established shortly after taking office in January 2009 to recommend whether the men he inherited from George W. Bush should be released or prosecuted. This third alarming option — “too dangerous to release” — was, as far as we know, dreamt up by the task force itself, for prisoners regarded as a threat but against whom insufficient evidence existed to put them on trial.

Reading between the lines, this meant tainted evidence — in other words, men regarded as unprovably dangerous because the evidence against them was derived through the use of torture or other forms of abuse, making it fundamentally untrustworthy — or, in some (perhaps many) cases, a perceived attitude problem: prisoners who, though perhaps understandably aggrieved at being held without charge or trial for over a decade in abusive conditions, had threatened retaliation, however hollow those threats may have been, that were taken seriously by the authorities.

In March 2011, when President Obama signed an executive order authorizing the ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial of these men (originally 48, but two subsequently died), he avoided an outcry from NGOs and lawyers only by promising that they would receive periodic reviews of their cases, to establish, on a regular basis, whether or not they were still regarded as posing a threat.

Those reviews, rather shamefully, did not begin until November 2013, when the 46 men mentioned above were joined by 25 others, who the task force had recommended for prosecution until judges had issued a number of rulings demonstrating that the main charge against them — providing material support for terrorism — was not a recognized war crime, and had been invented by Congress, and began overturning some of the few convictions the broken military commission trial system had managed to achieve.

In the two years since the Periodic Review Boards began, they have approved 15 prisoners for release, out of 18 men whose cases have been reviewed (one other man is still awaiting the board’s decision).

That’s an 83% success rate for the prisoners, which is astonishing.

It is not all good news, of course. Although three of these 15 men have been released, 12 are still held — a Saudi and a Kuwaiti, who will probably be released soon, as well as an Afghan, an Egyptian, a Libyan and seven Yemenis. The latter group joins the 37 other Yemenis approved for release by the Guantánamo Review Task Force in 2009 but still held — along with just four men from other countries who are still left at the prison. The Yemenis are awaiting third countries to offer them new homes, because the entire US establishment is unwilling to repatriate them.

Moreover, 45 other men are still awaiting reviews, and unless the review process speeds up significantly, they will not have had their cases considered until this time in 2020 — well into the next Presidency.

This week, the story of the PRBs was updated with the 18th prisoner being approved for release, a Yemeni who has grown to love US culture — and a third man, a long-term hunger striker, having his ongoing imprisonment recommended, despite not posing a threat.

Mansoor al-Zahari approved for release

The man approved for release, Mansoor al-Zahari, also identified as Mansoor al-Warifi or, to the Periodic Review Board, Abdul Rahman Ahmed or Mansur Ahmad Saad al-Dayfi, was discussed at length in our article a month ago, “Fan of Shakira, Taylor Swift and Game of Thrones Asks Review Board to Free Him from Guantánamo, As an Afghan is Approved for Release.”

As the review board stated in its “Unclassified Summary of Final Determination,” dated October 28, the board members “determined that continued law of war detention … is no longer necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States.”

The board added that, in making their determination, they “noted that the detainee was probably a low-level fighter who was aligned with al-Qaida, although it is unclear whether he actually joined that group, and that he has no known ties to extremism.” The members also “noted the detainee’s efforts to improve himself while in detention, to include becoming fluent in English and completing all courses required for his GED, and considered the significant information exhibiting the detainee’s change in mindset, including largely compliant behavior since 2012.”

The Board also “found the detainee credible in his desire to pursue non-extremist goals and higher education as well as his embrace o f western culture,” and “noted his candor regarding his past activities and acknowledgement of mistakes that led to his detention and his willingness to be resettled in a third country and understanding and acceptance of his need for social support after detention.”

As Carol Rosenberg explained in the Miami Herald, at his review last month, he told the board that “he had become a fan of American popular culture — in particular Taylor Swift and the television shows Boston Legal and Little House on the Prairie. He said he acquired his fluent English at the prison by reading the Jules Verne adventure novel Around the World in 80 Days.”

“It took me eight months to finish the book,” he told the board. “A guard here taught me grammar, when he saw I liked learning English. He would call me and say, ‘class time.'”

As the Miami Herald described it, he also told the board that “when he first got to Guantánamo he was young, 20, and fearful,” and, he stated, “I said many things then because I was angry and scared. I made mistakes. I did stupid things. I regret that now.”

The Miami Herald also noted that, in 2013, al-Zahari was among five men “who designed a business plan for a utopian, self-sufficient ‘Milk & Honey’ farm business in Yemen to illustrate their after-Guantánamo ambitions — and to submit to the parole board.” The newspaper added, “All five of the self-described ‘Board of Directors’ were at the time held in the category of ‘forever prisoner.’ Of the five, three directors have now been approved for release and the other two have yet to get a date for a hearing by the Periodic Review Board.”

The Miami Herald also noted that al-Zahari “has since apparently abandoned that plan. He told the board he wanted to go to college, get a degree in information technology and ‘marry an educated lovely woman who can be my friend and my wife.'”

Moath al-Alwi recommended for ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial

Two days before Mansoor al-Zahari was recommended for release, a review board determined, in the case of Moath al-Alwi (aka Muaz al-Alawi), that “continued law of war detention …remains necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States.” The board assessed that  he had “prior close ties with the Taliban” and noted “his praise for the Taliban as expressed during the hearing.” The board also found him to be “evasive and hostile in response to its questions as well as failing to acknowledge or accept responsibility for his pro actions.” The board members “found minimal evidence of a change in the detainee’s mindset and insufficient detail regarding [his] plans for the future or efforts to prepare himself for life outside of detention.”

In conclusion, the members encouraged him “to work with his family and representatives on his future plans and to be more forthcoming with the Board in future reviews.”

This was a disappointing decision. Al-Alwi, a Yemeni who is a long-term hunger striker, and weighed just 97 pounds at the time of his hearing, as I explained here, was a low-level Taliban recruit when he was seized 14 years ago, and there is indication that he constitutes a threat. For his PRB, he had even been assessed as “compliant” even though he continues to refuse food as a peaceful protest against his ongoing imprisonment.

For Al-Jazeera, Jenifer Fenton spoke to Taliban expert Ahmed Rashid, who, when asked about al-Alwi, said that all of the prisoners at Guantánamo associated with the Taliban “should be released ‘with safeguards.'”

He noted, as Fenton put it, that “the Taliban today consider themselves ‘a nationalist Afghan force not a global jihadist force like al-Qaeda or ISIS,'” and that  in recent years they have “been open to negotiations with both the Americans and the Kabul government”. He told Al-Jazeera via email, “They are now more politically diverse and some are interested in peace. So we can cannot compare [al-Alwi’s] adulation for the Taliban 15 years ago with now.”

While we await further reviews, Fenton spoke to Steve Vladeck, law professor and co-editor-in-chief of Just Security, who noted that the “most intractable ‘too dangerous to release’ category” is shrinking.” He added that 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.”

“At a minimum, though,” he added, “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.”

A former senior US government official who is “personally familiar with many of these Guantánamo cases told Al Jazeera, “Honestly, I don’t believe all are too dangerous to release.” He added, “I am not really convinced … I would want to see their cases heard in court. I would like to see a determination of their status as being ‘too dangerous to release’…determined in court” — whether civilian or military.

Here at “Close Guantánamo,” we appreciate that those who can be charged should be, but we also reflect that, even allowing for variations, the success rate to date in the PRBs — with 15 out of 18 prisoners approved for release — ought more or less to be reflected in the other cases to be considered, leading, eventually, to a relatively small number of “forever prisoners,” compared to the hyperbolic figures initially touted by the task force and accepted uncritically by President Obama nearly six years ago.

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, calling for the immediate release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, 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.

Responses to Shaker Aamer’s Release from Guantánamo – from MPs, and a Poignant and Powerful Article by Cori Crider of Reprieve

Since Shaker Aamer returned to the UK from Guantánamo last Friday, much has been written — most of it, I’m glad to say, positive about a man so evidently wronged; held for nearly 14 years without charge or trial, and approved for release twice, under George W. Bush in 2007, and Barack Obama in 2009.

When Shaker returned — in part, I’m prepared to accept, because of the We Stand With Shaker campaign I conceived and ran with Joanne MacInnes — I wrote an article that was widely liked and shared and commented on, publicized the gracious comment Shaker made on his return, posted a photo of myself holding a “Welcome Home Shaker” card that reached over 20,000 people, and made a number of TV and radio appearances during a brief media frenzy that coincided with the long-overdue news of Shaker’s release.

It was so busy that I haven’t had time to thank the supporters who made such a big difference — John McDonnell MP, the Shadow Chancellor, who set up the All-Party Shaker Aamer Parliamentary Group and was its co-chair, the Conservative MP David Davis, the other co-chair, and his colleague Andrew Mitchell, Jeremy Corbyn (now the Leader of the Labour Party), and Andy Slaughter (the Labour MP for Hammersmith), who, with David Davis, visited Washington D.C. in May to call for Shaker’s release. Also noteworthy for her contribution over many years is Caroline Lucas, our sole Green MP.

John McDonnell wrote:

Shaker Aamer’s return to British soil from Guantánamo this morning is a momentous occasion and a tribute to the tireless work of the dedicated campaigners that have fought so resolutely for him to be freed. [His] 14 years of incarceration in Guantánamo Bay, despite never having stood trial, never having been convicted, and cleared for release by successive US administrations is a dark chapter in the history rights abuses.

As chair of the Shaker Aamer Parliamentary Group, I am proud to have contributed to securing his release. We will now do all we can now to provide Shaker and his family with the support they need to reintegrate back into our society and lead a normal life. In the fullness of time we expect now to be given answers to what happened to him, why this gross miscarriage of justice was allowed to occur and the extent of British involvement in his plight.

Jeremy Corbyn wrote:

I attended an all-party delegation to Washington, in May of this year, which demanded his release. The pressure mounted by the British Parliament contributed to Shaker’s freedom. But we must recognise the crucial role played by the steadfastness of his family and the commitment of all those who campaigned for his release, whether they lobbied their MPs or demonstrated on the streets against this huge injustice.

Now that Shaker has been released, the scandal of the Guantánamo detention camp itself must be brought to an end. I hope that Shaker and his family will now be given the time and space to rebuild their lives.

Caroline Lucas wrote (also including a photo of me, which was a pleasant surprise!):

Shaker’s prolonged detention was entirely unjustifiable. The Government and security services must now guarantee the safety of Shaker and his family upon his arrival home. His lawyers must be also allowed to implement a care programme for him without any interference.

Shaker’s case reinforces the urgent need for the judge-led enquiry into UK complicity in torture that the Prime Minister promised in 2010 but then backtracked on.

Huge thanks must also go to Shaker’s indefatigable lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, the founder of Reprieve, who has, of course, spoken extensively about him over the years — and was on the Victoria Derbyshire Show on BBC2 on November 2, at the end of an eight-minute section that began with Dr. David Nicholl, neurologist and human rights campaigner, discussing Shaker’s return as the head of his post-release medical team.

However, the most poignant words I’ve read about Shaker since his return were written by another of his lawyers, Cori Crider, the Strategic Director of Reprieve, in an article for Newsweek that was published on the day of Shaker’s release.

In it, Cori recalled meeting Shaker for the very first time, and explained how and why he stood up to the authorities so persistently. In just a few paragraphs, she captured perfectly the man who has been informing so many of us of the crimes committed at Guantánamo by the US government in his messages from the prison over the years.

And Cori concluded her article by thinking of others, as Shaker had, and as I’m sure he is now — those left behind in Guantánamo, and those, like her client Younous Chekkouri (aka Younus Chekhouri), the Moroccan repatriated six weeks before Shaker, who has been unjustly imprisoned by the Moroccan authorities, as I explained in an article yesterday.

Shaker Aamer’s Lawyer: Obama Must Now Free the Remaining Guantanamo Inmates

By Cori Crider, Newsweek, October 30, 2015

The first contact between a Guantánamo prisoner and a lawyer is often dramatic. You have had plenty of time to worry about how your new client is, and you will have wondered whether he will accept you. Will a man imprisoned without charge or trial and tortured by the U.S. government trust me, a lawyer from rural Texas?

Years ago, I sat in the brutal Cuban sun and imagined what Shaker Aamer would be like. It is hard to believe that today — over a decade on — Aamer has finally been sent home to London, to his British wife and children.

The minders at Camp Echo are bored young military police. Many regard the “detainee lawyer” as a curious species. They have been told the lie that all detainees are somehow connected to 9/11, so any American who has chosen to help them is one step from Osama bin Laden. If anyone has told them the truth — that the majority of Gitmo prisoners, like Shaker, should never have been sent there and pose no threat — they give no sign of it.

“You here for 239?” the sergeant of guard drawled. This was Shaker’s prison number. Throughout his time in Gitmo, he had no name.

A guard escorted me through a warren of chain-link fences and gestured toward a shack. He unbolted and pulled open the cell door. I peered inside, but the contrast between the sun where I stood and the shade of the meeting room was such that I could not make Shaker out at first: He was a shadow at the back of the room.

You can tell a lot about a client from the first moment you look at each other. Some men are withdrawn, depressed. Some look away. Some don’t even lift their heads, they are so tired and sad.

Not Shaker. After the famous photo of him, rotund and serious, the last thing I expected was a massive expanse of grinning teeth. Hard years and intermittent hunger-striking had shrunk him to nothing. I saw a thin, aging man — but my very first memory of Shaker is his smile.

We got to know each other — though the meeting belonged to Shaker, and he had a lot he wanted to say to me. He was warm, engaging, but also defiant, and over our years together, I came to realize the reason Shaker Aamer so irritated the authorities at Gitmo. He stood up to them, in their own language — and he has a quintessentially British sense of fair play.

Shaker also has a Briton’s compassion for the underdog. If a prisoner was punished unfairly or abused, Shaker was the first to object. This got him into trouble — he was one of the first and few to protest in English, and he paid for it dearly, with 14 years of abuse.

While Shaker is, thankfully, set to settle back in London with his family and begin the long journey of recovery and recuperation, we at Reprieve, where we represent prisoners held in Guantánamo Bay and provide legal assistance to many more, have serious work to do to help other men who’ve faced the same ordeal — both those still stuck in Guantánamo and others who’ve had the misfortune to be released only to be detained on arrival.

Among these is my client Younous Chekkouri, a Moroccan man who was just transferred back to his home country after some 14 years of detention at Guantánamo. Since his release [seven] weeks ago, the Moroccan authorities have detained him — violating their assurances to the U.S. that he would not be detained more than 72 hours. Now it appears the Moroccan authorities may even charge this innocent, traumatized man on the basis of evidence so faulty that even the U.S. could never build a case. The Moroccan authorities have steadfastly refused to let me see him, even though I am his lawyer.

In 14 years of imprisonment, Younous was never charged with a crime by the U.S. — like all the men at Gitmo, he was taken there on the basis of a tissue of lies and distortions fed to the U.S. by tortured and coerced prisoners at notorious black sites like Bagram and Kandahar. Last week, the U.S. State Department finally admitted, in an unclassified letter to Reprieve, what we knew all along — that years ago it “withdrew all reliance” on its own faulty “evidence” during secretive U.S. court proceedings, ultimately accepting that Younous should be released.

If Morocco — a close ally — charges Younous on the selfsame charges, it will be to the eternal shame of the U.S. government.

Shaker paid the bitterest price for insisting on the rights enshrined in Britain’s Magna Carta. The Obama administration has finally freed him to his home country, but Guantánamo remains open — and Younous catastrophically imprisoned based on the mistake of the U.S. Now that Shaker is home, the U.S. must urgently turn to the many others whose rights it has trampled on for 14 years.

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, calling for the immediate release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, 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.

Moroccan Released from Guantánamo Facing Kangaroo Court Trial Back Home As Wife Says She Is “Still Living a Nightmare”

What a disturbing farce. Seven weeks ago, on September 17, Younous Chekkouri (aka Younus Chekhouri), a Moroccan prisoner at Guantánamo, approved for release since 2009, was repatriated, but as I explained at the time, from the beginning there were fears that the diplomatic assurances agreed by the US with Morocco were being ignored, as Younous was imprisoned on his return. 47 years old, he left Morocco at the age of 22, living in Pakistan, Yemen and Syria, and ending up in Afghanistan, where he worked for a charity that helped young Moroccans, and lived with his wife Abla.

As his lawyers, at Reprieve, described it at the time, he was “unanimously cleared for release by the six main US government security and intelligence agencies — including the CIA, FBI, and Departments of State and Defense — in 2009,” a decision that involved the conclusion that he “posed no threat whatsoever to either the US or its allies.”

Cori Crider, Reprieve’s strategic director and his lawyer, added, “There is no reason for the Moroccan authorities to prolong Younous’ detention after all he has suffered over 14 years.”

Nevertheless, three days after his return, AFP reported that Morocco’s prosecutor general had acknowledged that Younous had been detained, stating that he “was taken into custody” on his return, “was under investigation on suspicion of terror-related offences and would appear before a public prosecutor.”

As I explained in an article on October 7, Reprieve noted that he was “facing the possibility of charges of ‘attempts to disrupt the security of the country,’” which Cori Crider described as “utterly baseless.”

Speaking to the New York Times last Thursday, Crider said that, before Younous was transferred home, “State Department officials had conveyed to Reprieve that the Moroccan government had promised to release him within 72 hours and did not intend to charge him with a crime.”

Reprieve also explained how, “On March 12, 2015, the State Department indicated to Reprieve staff at a meeting that their officials had received the following specific assurances about Mr. Chekkouri: that he would not be detained in Morocco for longer than 72 hours; that Morocco had pledged that it had no intention to lodge charges against Petitioner; and that Morocco had heard and accepted the stated view of the State Department that there was no cause to charge Petitioner with an offense.”

In my October 7 article, I also noted how, “In a further effort to help Younous, Reprieve asked the District Court in Washington D.C. to provide them with unclassified information about Younous — for use in the court in Morocco — from his habeas corpus hearings, which appear to have been protracted and inconclusive, but which, as Reprieve described it in a court filing … ‘essentially eviscerated every allegation’ the government made against him.”

On October 21, as I explained in another article, the US government “publicly admitted that the information it drew on to describe [Younous] as a threat was profoundly unreliable, and that it ceased to accept it as reliable back in 2011.”

The US government’s concession came in a letter from the Justice Department, and Reprieve noted:

The concession — made during a US habeas case brought by Mr. Chekkouri with the help of human rights organization Reprieve — confirms that the evidence used to make the allegation was unreliable. During those proceedings, Mr. Chekkouri explained in federal court that the information resulted from a mixture of the torture of himself and other prisoners, as well as stories fabricated by informers within Guantánamo who concocted false stories on hundreds of other prisoners in order to win better treatment in the prison.

The day after, however, a judge refused to release Younous, and stated that he wanted a report about the letter.

Yesterday, Reprieve confirmed that they “had submitted the DoJ letter to the Moroccan court ahead of today’s hearing,” but all the judge said was that “he would look at a ‘detailed interrogation’ of the facts, including testimony from several witnesses.”

Reprieve noted that the hearing coincided, uncomfortably for the US, with a visit to Rabat by Attorney General Loretta Lynch, visiting “for a US-sponsored summit on judicial cooperation and law enforcement.” According to a US government press release, Reprieve noted, “The joint US-Moroccan event … will see the US Justice and State Departments support a ‘regional workshop’ focused on ‘questions of […] mutual legal assistance.'”

Cori Crider write to Ms. Lynch asking her to “urgently intervene with Moroccan authorities, urging them to honor their prior assurances regarding Mr. Chekkouri.”

She added:

Reprieve understands the aim of your visit is to discuss judicial cooperation – but the United States cannot in good conscience continue to cooperate with an entity that does not respect its bilateral agreements with the US. In addition, cooperation on terrorism prosecutions is inadvisable when Mr. Chekkouri may shortly be charged based on long‐disavowed torture evidence from Guantánamo (or from the dungeons of Morocco itself). This is a critical opportunity for you to proactively affirm the principle of the rule of law.

During a meeting with the US Ambassador to Morocco, The Honorable Dwight Bush, earlier this month, I raised the issue of the violated assurances. If he viewed their violation and the potential prosecution of Mr Chekkouri as a problem he declined to offer any assistance. Your line attorneys at the DOJ Civil Division, however, are aware of their representations on these matters to the District Court throughout the habeas process, and that there is a pending matter in federal court concerning Mr. Chekkouri’s fate.

I hope to read very soon that Mr. Chekkouri has at last been reunited with his family, and that your presence signals an intention on the part of the United States government to put its full diplomatic and political weight into enforcing the diplomatic agreement. Having procured his agreement to go to Morocco, the US government has an ongoing ethical responsibility to Mr. Chekkouri.

In a comment after the hearing, Crider said:

Today’s postponement sadly means yet another month of unjust detention for Younous, an innocent man. The US Government itself has conceded that it had to pull the core of its case against Younous in the US, and yet he is facing trial for the selfsame nonsense. We will defend him robustly, but there is no need for him to go through this pointless exercise. The assurances should be kept and the charges should be dropped. How can the Justice Department propose closer links with its Moroccan ally unless Morocco actually honors its agreements with the United States? Attorney General Lynch and the rest of the Obama Administration ought to to keep the promise they made my client many months ago, and see to it that he is released to his family without delay.

This evening, there was a shocking update. As Reprieve explained in a press release entitled, “Morocco claims it ‘never gave assurances to US’ on treatment of former Gitmo prisoner,” Reprieve stated:

At a joint press conference today with US Attorney General Loretta Lynch — who is in Morocco for a summit on judicial cooperation — Morocco’s Justice Minister Mustafa Ramid denied that any assurances had been given. He told journalists: “It’s true that we negotiated with Washington to bring Chekkouri to Morocco but we never gave any assurances on his release.” Journalists attending the press conference were not permitted to ask Ms. Lynch questions, and she did not comment on the case. Reprieve wrote to Ms. Lynch this week asking her to raise Younous’ case urgently during her visit, but has yet to receive any response.

Commenting, Cori Crider said, “Someone is just not telling the truth here. Either US State Department officials misled me and my client about Morocco’s intentions when my client was in Guantánamo, or Moroccan officials have been making diplomatic promises freely and breaking them just as fast. Which is it? And if the State Department did tell Mr. Chekkouri the truth and the promises have been broken, why isn’t this being made a major issue in US-Moroccan relations now?”

While we await an answer, I’m cross-posting below a touching article Younous’s wife Abla wrote for Newsweek, which was published on November 3.

The US Has Consigned My Innocent Husband to a Moroccan Jail

By Abla Chekkouri, Newsweek, November 3, 2015

I fainted when I got the call that my husband, Younous Chekkouri, had finally left Guantánamo Bay: 14 years of worry, misery and loneliness. Our life together splintered. All that was going to end.

He was going home to Morocco. The U.S. government apparently had “diplomatic assurances” from the Moroccans guaranteeing his quick release and his freedom.

But now, a month and a half later, I am still living my nightmare. My husband is still in prison, and going before a judge November 4 to face possible charges. I can barely say it.

Those charges are based on the false information which was concocted out of the violent early days of Guantánamo interrogations, and then sent by the Americans to their Moroccan counterparts. The “diplomatic assurances” were supposed to correct that. Both governments were supposed to have agreed that the information was nonsense.

I want to ask Secretary of State John Kerry why he is allowing this to happen to Younous and me all over again.

He may not care about us, or about atoning for what the U.S. did to my husband. But how is President Obama ever going to close Guantánamo if these diplomatic assurances are shown to be worthless? How will America ever be able to deal with this prison in a way that upholds its values? How many cleared men like my husband will stay there for want of safe destinations to go?

I last spoke to Younous over a crackly phone line on August 25. He told me that he would be released soon. I told him I was terrified: So many awful things have been published about him, I just knew that people wouldn’t accept that he is innocent.

They should. In 2010, six U.S. agencies — including the CIA and FBI — looked at every detail in my husband’s file and all agreed he should be cleared for released. At the same time, when Younous’s lawyers managed to challenge the legality of his detention in a U.S. court, the government was forced to withdraw almost every allegation because it had no reliable evidence. But I know how these lies can stick.

Younous told me not to worry. He told me about the assurances from the Moroccan government. He wouldn’t be detained for more than 72 hours. He wouldn’t be charged. The Moroccans understood that all the allegations against him were false — based on nothing but torture and bribery of desperate prisoners during the early days of Guantánamo.

Three weeks later, I got a call from Younous’s family to let me know he had arrived in Morocco. They said he was being interrogated, and that we’d just have to wait until after the weekend of the Eid festival for him to be released.

I hated the thought of him being interrogated again. He has had 14 years of endless questions. I’ve lived through that too: 14 years of asking myself every day why this nightmare was happening, and what he and I could possibly have done to deserve it.

But 72 hours came and went. Silence in my house. The same silence there has been for the last 14 years. Waiting for his voice at the end of the line. Now nearly two months have gone by, and I’m still waiting. I won’t say this to him, but I don’t have much more strength.

The U.S. government’s secrecy is not helping. I am told that Younous’s lawyers cannot even present the Moroccan court with the defense evidence that was used by Reprieve in U.S. court. The U.S. government has classified that information, and is refusing to release it — even though it proves my husband’s innocence.

Many Americans think that the torture that took place in Guantánamo all those years ago is now in the past. I am not so lucky: It is my daily reality. I have lost 14 years of my life to that torture, and the false slurs it created against my husband.

If he was the man described in those allegations, why would I have married him? Do you think I would have spent 14 long years waiting for him?

Secretary Kerry, I am asking one thing of you. Hold the Moroccan government to its promises. Please get them to release my husband from prison. After 14 years of injustice, I just want this nightmare to end. I just want Younous back by my side.

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, calling for the immediate release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, 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.

Mauritanian, Cleared for Release Since 2009, Finally Repatriated from Guantánamo

The news about the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, has been so all-consuming that I’ve had no time to report about another prisoner release last week — of Ahmed Ould Abdel Aziz, a Mauritanian who, like 41 other men still held, was approved for release six years ago by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established shortly after taking office in January 2009.

112 men are still held at Guantánamo, and 12 other men have been approved for release since January 2014 by Periodic Review Boards, making 53 men altogether who have been approved for release but are still held.

Ahmed, 45, is a cultured man, seized by mistake in a house raid in Pakistan over 13 years ago, who wants only to be reunited with his family. As three of his lawyers, John Holland, Anna Holland Edwards and Erica Grossman, stated in an article for Close Guantánamo, the website I co-founded with the US lawyer Tom Wilner, in June 2013:

Ahmed is an educated and cultured man. He speaks several languages fluently including French, English and Arabic. He is very engaging, likable and has a very sharp wit. He is also an inveterate reader with widespread interests ranging from literature, to physics, to all forms of religious thought, to developments in space, politics, inventions and nature.

One of the lawyers “asked him how he persevered with all he has suffered while imprisoned. He said in response that he endures because he ‘resides in the immortality of my soul.'”

His lawyers also explained:

As a young man he made his living in Kandahar by teaching Arabic and Islam to children. He has still never seen or spoken to his son, as his wife was pregnant at the time of his arrest and sale for a bounty. In fact, we brought the first pictures of his son to him. More than anything on earth, Ahmed wants to be with his wife and his son. He wants to help her raise him during the remaining formative years of his life.

Speaking to Carol Rosenberg of the Miami Herald after his release, another of his lawyers, Clive Stafford Smith, the founder of Reprieve, said he “would be reunited with his wife and now 15-year-old son” in Mauritania, and that he “plans to work as a copy editor at a newspaper run by his brother-in-law,” as the Miami Herald put it.

“While it’s great that Ahmed is home with his family, it’s 14 years late, and long after he was cleared,” Stafford Smith said. “His release was only delayed because he, an innocent man, routinely protested his mistreatment.”

As Rosenberg described it, his release “was repeatedly delayed at the Pentagon by officials wary about letting him go, most recently in April after the detention center notified the Pentagon that Aziz had declared his intent to join ISIS once repatriated.” His lawyers, in contrast, “argued that menacing mouthiness should not be a factor on whether a detainee gets out of Guantánamo,” something that, it seems to me, is far too often overlooked when men abused and deprived of justice for years lash out verbally at their captors.

Ask yourself: wouldn’t you?

The Miami Herald also noted that sources with knowledge of Abdel Aziz’s release said that, “while former Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel would not sign off on the transfer, the current Pentagon chief, Ash Carter, did — more than 30 days ago — and then notified Congress of the pending release.” The Washington Post reported back in April that his release was imminent, as I explained here.

John Holland, based in Denver, called the release “far too long in coming,” adding that Abdel Aziz “spent six long years in detention after being unanimously approved for release. The delay has been agonizing for him and his family. Fortunately, his family has a strong support network in place and ready in Mauritania to help Mr. Aziz reintegrate into normal life.”

For Al-Jazeera America, Jenifer Fenton spoke to Nasser Weddady, a Mauritanian-American activist and expert on Mauritania, who said that, under President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, the West African country “highly regards its relationship with the US, and it is virtually guaranteed ‘they will abide by the letter of the [prisoner] transfer agreement’ with the US.”

Weddady also said he believes Abdel Aziz “will be under mild surveillance and generally treated well as long as he keeps a relatively low profile.”

He added that “no one in Mauritania believes Aziz was or is Al-Qaeda,” and pointed out that “civil society groups in Mauritania have been supportive of the prisoners,” and, as he put it, there is “popular anger about Guantánamo. They believe these men have been unjustly locked up” by the US and successive Mauritanian governments “did zilch to help them.”

Fenton also noted how the former prisoner Moazzam Begg, a British national who was held at Bagram with Abdel Aziz back in 2002, said he “was very concerned about his wife,” who is an Indian national. Begg said that “the violent past and tense relationship between Pakistan and her country ‘added another layer of fear'” for him.

Fenton added, “Talking was forbidden, but the two were able at times to have whispered conversations at Bagram. Once Aziz wrote a simple phrase in French on a piece of paper, ‘I am very sad these days and I miss my family,’ Begg recalled.”

His lawyers also recalled presenting Abdel Aziz with a letter telling him he had been approved for release, which must have been around six years ago. “He was so grateful. He was so hopeful,” they said.

Six years later, that hope has finally turned into reality.

See here for a video, in Arabic, of Ahmed Ould Abdel Aziz’s return home.

His release leaves just one Mauritanian at the prison, Mohamedou Ould Slahi. As I mentioned in a recent article, following a BBC World Service show that also featured his lawyer, Nancy Hollander, Slahi “is still held, despite a judge ordering his release in 2010, and despite being a best-selling, award-winning author, whose book Guantánamo Diary was published at the start of this year. Hollander spent six years wrangling with the US authorities to allow its publication, and spoke about how, sadly, Slahi is becoming increasingly desperate, as his long and unjustifiable imprisonment continues, seemingly without end.”

The same must, sadly, be true of many of the men still held — not just the 53 men approved for release, but the 59 others, either awaiting reviews that are moving with glacial slowness, or, in just ten cases, awaiting trials that never seem to happen.

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, calling for the immediate release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, 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).

‘Song for Shaker Aamer’ by Andy Worthington’s Band The Four Fathers is ‘Protest Song of the Week’ on Kevin Gosztola’s Shadowproof

[image error]I’m honoured that the investigative journalist Kevin Gosztola has promoted “Song for Shaker Aamer,” played by my band The Four Fathers, as his “Protest Song of the Week” on Shadowproof, the website he set up three months ago, after FireDogLake, where he’d been working for several years, ceased operations.

It is wonderful to have a serious political website actively promoting protest music, as the gutting of politics from music is one of the more baleful developments in the dumbing-down of culture over the last two decades. Growing up in the late 70s and early 80s, politics permeated music. A common reference point was the social and political upheaval of the 1960s, and my adolescence also coincided with the politics of the punk and post-punk period, with particularly significant songs being the Clash’s “London Calling” and the Specials’ “Ghost Town.”

I’m delighted that “Song for Shaker Aamer” is being celebrated by Shadowproof. Check out the other “Protest Songs of the Week” here, including, recently, “Omar” by “riot folk” singer-songwriter Ryan Harvey, about the refugee crisis, and “Innocent Criminals” by the Palestinian hip-hop group DAM.

Kevin has asked to interview me for Shadowproof about protest music and my take on it, so I’ll refrain for saying any more just now, except to direct readers to The Four Fathers’ debut album, “Love and War,” available to download, or on CD. You can listen to any of the songs, buy them individually, or buy the album as an 8-track download, or as a CD with two extra tracks, one of which is “Masters of War,” by another musician who brought politics into music — Bob Dylan, whose political songwriting was particularly prominent in the early 1960s, but has frequently resurfaced since.

As well as including “Song for Shaker Aamer,” The Four Fathers’ “Love and War” includes the following political songs:

Fighting Injustice (my rousing new roots reggae anthem defending socialism and opposing the criminal bankers and the greed of the housing crisis)

81 Million Dollars (my call for those responsible for the US torture program to be held accountable)

Tory Bullshit Blues (my warning of the dangers of the Tories and UKIP)

City of Dreams (my countryish lament for the London destroyed by Thatcher)

Writing of “Song for Shaker Aamer,” Kevin Gosztola noted that what “perhaps makes [the song] so enduring is how it pays tribute to the man who dissented and resisted from within Guantánamo all throughout his detention. He led hunger strikes and spoke out for the human rights of prisoners.”

Kevin added:

In fact, the song opens with Aamer’s voice, which was recorded by a “60 Minutes” crew. He is heard crying, “Please we are tired. Either you leave us to die in peace or either you tell the world truth. Open up the place. Let the world come and visit.”

Aamer’s words punctuate the song, giving it more gravitas and affirming why he is one of the more inspirational men to have been detained at Guantánamo.

Below is the campaign video for the We Stand With Shaker campaign, launched last November by Andy and Joanne MacInnes, featuring “Song for Shaker”:

And below is a version recorded live at a band rehersal last Saturday, with the lyrics amended to reflect Shaker’s release:

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, calling for the immediate release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, 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’s TV and Radio Appearances Following the Release of Shaker Aamer from Guantánamo

Following Friday’s sudden news of the arrival back in the UK of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, there was a sudden media frenzy, the likes of which I’ve never experienced. For several hours, the phone was ringing off the hook, I was conducting interview after interview — on the phone or by Skype — with Skype calls incoming while I was being interviewed, and the phone ringing incessantly, as I found myself unable to switch it off.

Below is a brief run-through of where my media appearances can be found. Apologies for the delay, but it’s taken me many hours to track everything down, and I simply didn’t have the time – or was, frankly, too exhausted and in need of distraction — to do so until now.

After making a brief statement to the Press Association (as featured in this Independent article), I spoke briefly by phone to Sky News (their coverage is here), and then took part in the Victoria Derbyshire Show on BBC2. The show has featured Shaker’s story twice in recent weeks. I appeared on it following the launch of Fast For Shaker, the campaign I set up with my colleague Joanne MacInnes as an off-shoot of our We Stand With Shaker campaign, and Shaker’s own words, read out by an actor, were featured in another show shortly after.

Shaker’s release was the lead story, and I was delighted to be given seven minutes to talk to presenter Joanna Gosling, which gave me time to explain, in particular, why people should be extremely wary of what purports to be the evidence used to hold, year after year, men held without charge or trial — a situation that ought to be intolerable to anyone who claims to respect the rule of law.

The show is here , and is available for the next 25 days. My interview runs from 8:40 to 15:40.

I then spoke briefly to London Live, who interviewed me during the launch of Fast For Shaker last month, and was then interviewed on the BBC World Service, for World Update with Dan Damon. The feature on Shaker begins at 48:35 and lasts until 52:40, and I had the opportunity to discuss why Shaker was held for so long — primarily because he was so outspoken — and also, briefly, to discuss the unreliability of the allegations against him.

Around 10am, I spoke briefly to RT, where Joanne MacInnes was also interviewed. RT published a transcript of what I said, which is posted below. I began by responding to a question about how we heard about Shaker’s story from inside Guantánamo:

We managed to hear a lot, partly through his lawyers and partly the statement that he made to the Metropolitan Police a few years ago because they were investigating his claims that British agents were in the room in Afghanistan when he was being abused by the US operatives. So, things have emerged over the years. I think it is clear that Shaker Aamer was treated very brutally when he was first in custody in Afghanistan. As a result of that he made a number of false statements.

And since he’s been in Guantánamo, from the beginning, Shaker has campaigned relentlessly in US custody against the manner in which he and others have been treated. He’s demanded they should be treated according to established rules and regulations regarding prisoners which, of course, they didn’t do after 9/11. And as a result of that he has been treated very badly in Guantánamo; he spent a lot of time in solitary confinement because the US authorities try to isolate prisoners who could have any influence over other prisoners like Shaker Aamer, for example, who is articulate and outspoken.

And he has was also regularly subjected to violence in Guantánamo. Because they have that ‘five man rapid response team’ – heavily armed guys in Guantánamo — and if you infringe the rules in any way they come along and they beat you up. And Shaker has made a point of resisting what he has been told to do in Guantánamo repeatedly on many occasions and as a result he has been subjected to physical violence.

Immediately after this, I spoke to the BBC World Service again, for Outside Source, beginning at 10am. That show is here, and my interview took place at the top of the show, from 1:30 to 4:10. I spoke with Nuala McGovern about the shadowy figures in the intelligence services and/or the military in the US and the UK who were responsible for keeping Shaker detained for so many years after he was first approved for release. I also spoke about how he can embarrass those who held him, but pointed out how it is extremely unlikely that he will have any brand-new revelations that can compare to the details in last year’s Senate Intelligence Committee report into the CIA torture program.

This was followed by an interview on 5 Live, shortly after 11am, on 5 Live Daily with Peter Allen. The section on Shaker starts around eight minutes into the second hour of the show. I spoke to Peter from 01:12 until around 01:16:40, after a brief soundbite from Robin Simcox, from the racist and Islamophobic Henry Jackson Society.

I began by explaining how pleased I was that Shaker is freed, and how he will now have to put his life back together, and I took the opportunity to talk about how those held at Guantánamo, for the most part never charged or tried, have not even been allowed family visits, unlike those convicted of the worst crimes and held in prisons on the US mainland.

Peter spoke about the “shadowy figures” making allegations about Shaker, which was the perfect opportunity for me to briefly explain the fundamental injustices of the “war on terror”: how the US refused to recognise terrorism as a crime, while also refusing to recognize captured soldiers as prisoners of war, to be protected by the Geneva Conventions, and how the majority of the men held at Guantánamo were not captured by US forces on the battlefield, as alleged, but were bought for bounty payments paid to their Afghan and Pakistani allies. I also explained how, on arrival at Guantánamo, the US didn’t know anything about them, and set about obtaining

Information through the torture and abuse of the prisoners, or through bribery — offering them better living conditions.

I also explained how it took so long to release Shaker because of the fundamental lawlessness of Guantánamo; in other words, that release is only possible through a political process, rather than at the end of a sentence or at the end of hostilities, and how fundamentally unjust that is.

This was a particularly good interview, I thought, and it was followed by another BBC interview, on BBC Radio Scotland, where a soundbite was included in the headlines two hours into Stephen Jardine’s show.

In the afternoon, I cycled to Broadcasting House for another BBC World Service interview, this time on the World Have Your Say programme, which was asking the bigger question of whether Guantánamo will ever close.

The 23-minute section on Guantánamo was presented at the start of the show by Chloe Tilly, and is available here , where, unusually, it can also be downloaded as an MP3 .

The show began with an interview from Guantánamo with Miami Herald reporter Carol Rosenberg, who has been covering Guantánamo for far longer than I have, and has sacrificed much of her life to be at the base and in the prison, trying to uncover what she can about the constantly opaque story of Guantánamo. As well as discussing the current situation on the ground at Guantánamo, Carol mentioned Ravil Mingazov, the last Russian prisoner, who is seeking release to the UK, where his son and his ex-wife recently secured asylum.

After Carol’s interview, around nine minutes into the show, I spoke about the run-up to Shaker’s release, and the problem of the 52 other men approved for release but still held — most approved for release since 2009, like Shaker, and whose ongoing imprisonment is, of course, completely unjustifiable.

The show also featured, by phone from New Mexico, Nancy Hollander, the lawyer for Mohamedou Ould Slahi, the Mauritanian prisoner who is still held, despite a judge ordering his release in 2010, and despite being a best-selling, award-winning author, whose book Guantánamo Diary was published at the start of this year. Hollander spent six years wrangling with the US authorities to allow its publication, and spoke about how, sadly, Slahi is becoming increasingly desperate,  as his long and unjustifiable imprisonment continues, seemingly without end.

In response to some inflammatory comments from listeners, I reminded the audience of how important it is to uphold the rule of law, charging and trying, in federal courts, anyone accused of terrorism, and holding soldiers as prisoners of war protected by the Geneva Conventions, and also highlighting, as Nancy did, the disgraceful travesty of justice that is the military commission trial system at Guantánamo.

I also got to speak about the need for those held as “forever prisoners” — regarded as “too dangerous to release” even though the authorities acknowledge that there is insufficient evidence that exists to put them on trial — to have reviews of their cases. The Periodic Review Boards, established in 2013, are reviewing their cases, but with glacial slowness, and they need to take place much more swiftly. As I noted, out of 16 reviews concluded to date, 14 men have been approved for release, but the majority of the remaining 60 prisoners are not facing trials — just ten men are — and are, instead, awaiting PRBs.

After the show, which was worthwhile, but could easily have lasted for a whole hour, I made my way to the City, for an interview with Channel 5 News. Unfortunately, my appearance on Channel 5 News, with Emily Dyer of the Henry Jackson Society, is not available online. However, while waiting in the Green Room, I recorded an interview on BBC Radio London’s Drivetime show with Eddie Nestor.

The show is here, and well worth listening to. The section on Shaker began just before 01:07, and ended at 01:16. Eddie spoke first of all to Andy Slaughter MP, the Labour MP for Hammersmith who was one of the four MPs who visited the US to call for Shaker’s release in May, as a member of the All-Party Shaker Aamer Parliamentary Group.

Eddie was robustly cynical about right-wing claims about Shaker, aired by Davis Lewin, the deputy director of the Henry Jackson Society — which, as I mentioned above, is a dangerously racist and Islamophobic think-tank. For some fireworks, please do listen to me challenging Davis, in no uncertain terms, regarding his farcical claims that the Henry Jackson Society’s lazy parroting of discredited US claims about Shaker, based on torture and abuse, bear any relation to truth and reality.

That was about it for the day, although I did accept a final invitation from the BBC to appear on 5 Live with Stephen Nolan, where there were even more fireworks, as I responded to the languid distortions about Shaker trotted out by Jonathan Foreman, an Anglo-American journalist and a former lawyer, with rather unmitigated indignation.

The show is here, and, like the Drivetime show, is worth a listen. The section on Shaker begins at 6:18, and ends at 28:15, and includes Shaker’s own testimony, voiced by an actor following an email interview with Victoria Derbyshire in 2013, followed by an interview with Suliman Gani, a teacher and broadcaster, who has been a longtime campaigner for Shaker’s release, and a friend of the family. Jonathan Foreman was next, at about 15 minutes in, and by 17:30 I finally got to speak, puncturing Foreman’s posturing about the legality of the capture of Shaker and most of the other men held at Guantánamo, by pointing out that they should have been subjected to competent tribunals, or battlefield tribunals, under the Geneva Conventions (convened from Vietnam onwards to ascertain whether those not wearing uniforms in wartime were combatants or civilians), which the US military were preparing to do until the Bush administration told them they were not conducting them, and that everyone who ended up in US custody was to be regarded as an illegal enemy combatant, without rights and with no ability to challenge the basis of their detention.

Note: If you’re planning to listen to any of these shows, please note that, like the Victoria Derbyshire Show, all the specific BBC radio shows mentioned above are only available on iPlayer for the next 25 days.

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, calling for the immediate release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, 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.