Andy Worthington's Blog, page 87

Obama’s Mixed Messages on Guantánamo, as Justice Department Tells Judge Not to Intervene in Case of 75-Pound Hunger Striker at Risk of Death

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.

One day, when we’re looking back on Guantánamo and apportioning blame to those who contributed most powerfully to its cruelty, and to keeping it open long after the most senior officials in two governments conceded that it should be closed, a spotlight will be shone on the lawyers in the Civil Division of the Justice Department who have worked so assiduously to prevent prisoners from being released.

I have criticized these lawyers occasionally, but I have rarely heard any criticism of them in the mainstream media, and yet, from the moment that the Supreme Court granted the prisoners habeas corpus rights in Rasul v. Bush in June 2004, they have been making life difficult for lawyers representing the prisoners, micro-managing their meetings with their clients and their travel arrangements, and often, it is impossible not to conclude, in an effort to obstruct the lawyers’ ability to represent their clients.

In addition, as I noted in an article in August, the Civil Division lawyers “have fought tooth and nail against every single habeas petition submitted by the prisoners, with just one exception — the severely ill Sudanese prisoners Ibrahim Idris, whose petition was granted unopposed in 2013.” I added, “Disgracefully, the Justice Department lawyers have repeatedly challenged habeas petitions submitted by prisoners whose release has already been approved by the Guantánamo Review Task Force,” the high-level, inter-agency task force set up by President Obama shortly after taking office in January 2009, which issued its final report a year later, recommending 156 men for release, 36 for trials and 48 others for ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial, on the alarming basis that they were “too dangerous to release,” but that insufficient evidence existed to put them on trial.

In my article in August, I listed eleven cases in which a lack of joined-up thinking — in the Civil Division, but also, it must be said, in the offices of the president and the Attorney General — meant that men approved for release by the task force either had their habeas petitions successfully challenged by the Justice Department, or had successful petitions overturned by the court of appeals in Washington D.C., home to a number of ideologically biased judges whose obstruction of justice will also be remembered after Guantánamo finally closes.

My article in August followed a decision by the Civil Division to challenge the habeas petition of Tariq Ba Odah, a Yemeni prisoner, who was approved for release to Yemen by the task force, with 29 other Yemenis, on a “conditional” basis, dependent on security concerns being addressed. Now that the situation has worsened in Yemen, the entire US establishment is unwilling to repatriate any Yemenis, but as a result Ba Odah — and these 29 other men — could be released without any problems if a third country could be found that would take him in, as has happened with 18 Yemenis over the last two years.

Ba Odah’s lawyers submitted the habeas petition because they fear for his life, as I explained in an article in June. He weighs just 75 pounds — the weight one would expect a ten-year old to weigh, not a grown man — as a result of being on a hunger strike since 2007, and although he is regularly force-fed with a liquid supplement, the feedings are failing to ensure that he is putting weight on. He weighs just over half what he should to be healthy, and faces chronic organ failure and death.

The government, however — or the Civil Division, at least — disagrees, and last week argued against Ba Odah’s lawyers in the District Court in Washington D.C.

A hearing for Tariq Ba Odah

The judge, District Judge Thomas Hogan, is clearly not happy with Tariq Ba Odah’s situation, or with how the government has been dealing with the prisoners’ habeas rights.

That is, perhaps, not surprising. As the Miami Herald noted, Judge Hogan “wrote the guidelines for how the court at 333 Constitution Ave. would handle Guantánamo cases” after the Supreme Court revisited the prisoners’ habeas rights in Boumediene v. Bush in June 2008, and overturned Congressional efforts to erase Rasul v. Bush by denying the prisoners their rights. In Boumediene, the Supreme Court ruled that Congress had acted unconstitutionally, and granted the prisoners constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights.

That decision led to 38 victories for the prisoners, most of whom were released, until the appeals court — the D.C. Circuit Court — intervened for dark ideological reasons, effectively gutting habeas corpus of all meaning for the Guantánamo prisoners by insisting, ludicrously, that every claim, however risible, that was put forward by the government had to be regarded as presumptively accurate, unless the prisoners, generally shorn of resources in Guantánamo, could disprove it.

Adding insult to injury, the Supreme Court then refused to revisit Boumediene, to add necessary safeguards for the prisoners, and since July 2010 no prisoner has had their habeas petition granted, and most have abandoned trying, adding to the gloom of Guantánamo, where it often seems that it is close to impossible to get released, and that the law has completely failed.

As the Miami Herald described it, Judge Hogan, speaking about Boumediene and the prisoners’ right to challenge their detention in federal court, declared that he was “distressed at the failure of Congress and the Executive to effectively provide the legislation to execute that order.”

Instead, he said, prisoners who had been declared to be “no longer a danger to the United States” through executive review processes have been “languishing for years” at Guantánamo.

This indignation is worthy and just, and it is a great shame that the Supreme Court has not embraced the sentiments and decided to act upon them.

Omar Farah, a staff attorney at the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, who represents Ba Odah, pointed out that, although the Justice Department opposes his client’s petition for a court order, “the government does not oppose [his] release.” As he explained, “The government is here fighting for a principle” — and a disgraceful one, as Farah proceeded to describe: “the right to ‘warehouse him in a cell,’ force-feed him and then free him ‘in the time and manner of its choosing.'” Farah added that this was an “alarming and bizarre” interpretation of the Obama administration’s detention authority.

Judge Hogan was also not impressed by the government’s failure to release Ba Odah, given that it has had nearly six years to do so. As Human Rights First described it:

Judge Hogan seemed exasperated when he asked the government’s lawyers why Ba Odah hadn’t yet been transferred. While Ba Odah was born in Yemen, he lived in Saudi Arabia since he was two years old. Judge Hogan asked why he hadn’t been transferred there. It was a question very much worth asking, given that the Obama Administration has safely transferred seven detainees to Saudi Arabia already. Here, the administration could transfer a detainee unanimously cleared for release to a country that has proven it can provide the necessary security assurances to ensure his safe resettlement. Judge Hogan was not persuaded by the government’s claim that it is making efforts to find places to resettle all cleared detainees, saying he is “not quite sure what the government is really doing about transferring [Ba Odah].”

Important analysis by Jonathan Hafetz

Turning to the question of whether or not, under Army regulations and the Geneva Convention’s guidelines for the release of gravely ill prisoners of war, Ba Odah should be released because of how ill he is, which is at the heart of the argument, Jonathan Hafetz, Associate Professor of Law at Seton Hall University School of Law, provide a detailed analysis for Just Security. I’m posting passages from this article below, because Hafetz very clearly explained why the government’s case is so weak, and why the Justice Department lawyers involved should be ashamed, and also asked why the Obama administration specifically has spent too much time sitting on its hands.

Hafetz began by stating, “The case raises two overarching questions: First, whether principles of international humanitarian law (IHL) governing sick prisoners require petitioner Tariq Ba Odah’s immediate repatriation; and second, if they do, whether a federal judge can order this relief.”

As he then explained:

Ba Odah argues that US Army Regulation 190-8 (AR 190-8) requires his release. Chapter 3, section 12(1) of the regulation implements the United States’s obligation under Article 110 of the Third Geneva Convention (GC III) to repatriate prisoners who are seriously ill and unlikely to recover within one year. The government counters that AR 190-8 does not provide any protection here because Ba Odah’s detainee designation is not one to which the regulation’s repatriation provisions apply since he is a ‘former combatant,’ not a prisoner of war (POW) or ‘[o]ther [d]etainee’ awaiting classification. Additionally, the government argues that Ba Odah is not entitled to protection under either AR 190-8 or the Geneva Conventions because his medical condition is the result of his hunger strike and subsequent refusal of treatment. (He has, for example, opposed forced-feeding.) Such self-inflicted injuries, the government argues, citing Article 114 of GC III, are disqualified from protection under IHL.

Neither side cites direct precedent on the application of Article 110 to prisoners whose deteriorating health is due to a hunger strike. Ba Odah nevertheless has the stronger argument on balance. To defeat the applicability of AR 190-8’s repatriation provisions, the government resurrects the Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT) — the same flawed tribunal that the Supreme Court discredited in Boumediene v. Bush. The CSRT’s purpose was never to determine a prisoner’s status under the Geneva Conventions — POW status, for example, was not an option — but rather to confirm a prior executive branch determination that a prisoner was an enemy combatant. The CSRT, which was arguably part of a larger effort by the Bush administration to circumvent IHL protections rather than implement them, should not preclude application of AR 190-8 in this case.

On the merits of Ba Odah’s claim, the government relies principally on Article 114 of GC III, which, according to the Commentary, was intended to preclude repatriation for prisoners who ‘wilfully inflict injuries on their person.’ But nothing in the Geneva Convention’s text or in the Commentary suggests that this bar should apply to someone like Ba Odah, whose medical condition was not self-inflicted in the common sense meaning of the term — like injuries from a self-inflicted knife or gunshot wound — but rather are the secondary effect of a hunger strike undertaken to protest the illegality of his prolonged indefinite detention.

While the law may not be entirely clear, any doubts should be resolved in Ba Odah’s favor. The Commentary on Article 114 states that the fact of willful self-injury ‘must be clearly established,’ suggesting a presumption in favor of repatriation. Further, if Ba Odah remains at Guantánamo, there is a good possibility that his condition will worsen and that he will die. That possibility is difficult to square with relevant IHL principles. The sole legitimate purpose for continuing to detain uncharged prisoners at Guantánamo is to prevent their return to the armed conflict. But in Ba Odah’s case, that purpose no longer holds because he has provisionally been cleared for release based on a future threat assessment. The government cannot continue to claim legal authority to hold a prisoner after 13 years of imprisonment based on IHL principles when those principles now support his release.

Hafetz also noted, “The government’s final argument — that the court cannot order relief even if Ba Odah is legally entitled to it — is the weakest of all. This argument is a thinly veiled attempt to turn the clock back and re-litigate the basic claim that the US repeatedly fought and lost in a string of Supreme Court rulings: that determinations regarding prisoners at Guantánamo are reserved exclusively to the political branches.”

He explained how the D.C. Circuit’s ruling in Aamer v. Obama, “finding that courts can hear challenges to conditions of confinement in habeas, further underscores that there should be no dispute about the district court’s authority to decide Ba Odah’s motion.” That case, named after Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, ended up being used by Abu Wa’el Dhiab, a Syrian prisoner, to embark on a struggle with the government to get videotapes of his force-feeding and abusive cell extractions released — a case that continues, with media organizations seeking public release of those videotapes, while Dhiab himself has been released and resettled in Uruguay.

Judge Hogan was unwilling to order Ba Odah’s release, but he did not sidestep the responsibility to do something. As the Miami Herald put it, he said Ba Odah “might be entitled to a ‘Mixed Medical Commission’ to evaluate his health and, if the Pentagon didn’t order one or release him, the court might do it.” The newspaper added, “Under the commission formula, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter would authorize a three-doctor panel to evaluate whether Ba Odah’s health condition merits release. The military would name one doctor, the captive’s advocates would chose another and the third would come from the International Red Cross.”

Justice Department attorney Ronald Wiltsie was unimpressed. He argued that Ba Odah “was not entitled to the medical repatriation privilege” for prisoners of war that accompanies the medical panel review,” and called Ba Odah “a properly classified member of al-Qaida and the Taliban who is lawfully detained until the United States arranges his release.” He also urged Judge Hogan “to stay out of the case,” warning that the prisoners “might see starvation as a way out,” in the Miami Herald‘s words. “It will greatly hurt the efforts at safety and security at Guantánamo as other detainees look for a way to invoke medical relief,” Wiltsie suggested.

That shows a heartlessness that was not echoed by Judge Hogan, who, while pondering Ba Odah’s state of mind, stated, “I’ve got no question that we have a seriously ill petitioner,” at one point in the proceedings. As the Miami Herald also noted, he also “wondered aloud whether the US government was trying to send him ‘to a state where a government can take care of him properly,'” and “also spent considerable time wondering whether [his] poor health was a ‘self-induced illness,’ and whether if [he] were diagnosed with a mental illness that should influence consideration of his case.”

The government’s lawyers take the position that they “want him to cooperate with the Navy medical team at Guantánamo that conducts the forced-feedings,” but Omar Farah pointed out that Ba Odah, “held in solitary confinement and sometimes tackled and shackled and taken from his cell to the feedings, does not trust the military medical staff and requires independent outside care.”

While we await the government’s presumably inevitable challenge, it is also worth noting that Jonathan Hafetz criticized the Obama administration, not just the Justice Department, for failing to pursue a different course of action.

As Hafetz put it, “what may be most troubling about Ba Odah’s case is that the Obama administration is even fighting it at all. Obama has repeatedly vowed to close Guantánamo and transfer those remaining prisoners whom the US no longer has an interest in detaining. To that end, the administration is still trying to enlist foreign countries to help find homes for the numerous Guantánamo detainees it has cleared for transfer” (currently 54 of the 114 remaining prisoners).

He proceeded to ask, “So why dig in and fight the case of a cleared prisoner, particularly one in such perilous condition? It cannot help the US on the diplomatic front, as the State Department explained in its commendable, but ultimately unsuccessful, effort to persuade the administration not to oppose Ba Odah’s request for relief.

He also stated, “A judicial order directing Ba Odah’s release would have important practical consequences. In addition to aiding resettlement efforts, it would remove Ba Odah from the restrictions Congress has placed on detainee transfers, which exempt judicial orders. Those restrictions are likely to grow more restrictive in the National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2016, underscoring the imperative of judicial action as a counterweight to deliberate and irresponsible obstruction by Congress.”

In closing, Hafetz wrote that “Ba Odah’s case demonstrates Obama’s conflicted — if not borderline schizophrenic — approach to the prison’s closure, where the president’s lofty statements about needing to shutter Guantánamo are undercut by his administration’s court filings in individual cases designed to extend the confinement of its prisoners for no good reason.”

Here at “Close Guantánamo” we wholeheartedly agree, and call for there to be some grown-up and responsible oversight of the Civil Division, to speed up, rather than slowing down the closure of Guantánamo, as we approach President Obama’s last year in office, and the dwindling time still available to him to fulfill the promise to close Guantánamo that he made on his second day in office back in January 2009.

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.

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Published on October 23, 2015 12:45

Radio: Andy Worthington Speaks to Anastasia Kyriacou About Guantánamo, We Stand With Shaker and Fast For Shaker

On Sunday, I was delighted to be interviewed by journalist and activist Anastasia Kyriacou for her show on Shoreditch Radio, ‘Anastasia Says.’ The show is here, and it lasts for 45 minutes.

Over the course of the show, I was allowed to explain how I became involved in the story of Guantánamo, why it is such a moral, legal and ethical abomination, and why, far too often, the liberal media, by insisting on “objectivity,” plays into the hands of the dark forces running our world — because the right-wing media does no such thing (see Fox News, the Sun and much of the Daily Mail‘s output, for example), and because the injustices of the world demand our involvement not our detached commentary.

Anastasia and I also spoke about my campaigning — from Close Guantánamo, which I established with the US lawyer Tom Wilner in 2012, to We Stand With Shaker, which I established last November with Joanne MacInnes to highlight the case of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, by asking celebrities and MPs to stand with a giant inflatable figure of Shaker, and Fast For Shaker, launched just two weeks ago, in which Joanne and I have been asking celebrities, MPs and concerned citizens around the world to fast for 24 hours in solidarity with Shaker, who is due to be released this weekend.

Anastasia was a great host, and I hope our paths cross again, as she is passionate about human rights and social justice, and the world needs as many young people as possible who care about the need for — and the possibility of — radical change.

At the end of the show, I’m glad to note, Anastasia also played ‘Song for Shaker Aamer‘, the song I wrote and played with my band The Four Fathers, which was featured in the campaign video for the We Stand With Shaker campaign. Check it out here, and listen to our whole album, ‘Love and War’, here, where it’s also available to buy as a download or on CD.

I hope you enjoy the show, and that you’ll share it if you do.

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

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Published on October 22, 2015 15:11

Guantánamo’s Tainted Evidence: US Government Publicly Concedes Its Case Against Ex-Prisoner Facing Trial in Morocco Collapsed in 2011

In an important concession, the US government has publicly admitted that the information it drew on to describe former Guantánamo prisoner Younous Chekkouri (aka Younus Chekhouri) as a threat was profoundly unreliable, and that it ceased to accept it as reliable back in 2011.

Chekkouri was repatriated to his home country of Morocco from Guantánamo on September 16, and, as his lawyers at the London-based legal charity Reprieve described it in a press release, just issued, “His transfer was subject to diplomatic assurances between Morocco and the US, which included agreements that there was no basis to charge him; that Morocco would not prosecute him; and that he would be detained no longer than 72 hours. However, after his arrival in Morocco Mr. Chekkouri was taken to Salé prison near Rabat, where he continues to be held in violation of the assurances.”

At a court hearing tomorrow (October 22), the Moroccan investigating magistrate “will determine whether Mr. Chekkouri should be set free,” as Reprieve described it, adding, “It is believed that the Moroccan authorities are detaining Mr. Chekkouri on the basis of the same allegations that the US government has now withdrawn against him.”

Reprieve also noted:

In a letter released today, the US Justice Department concedes that several years ago the US “withdrew all reliance” on ‘all evidence identifying Mr. Chekkouri with the group known as Group Islamique Combatant Maroc [sic] ‘GICM.'” 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.

This is not only important for Mr. Chekkouri, but also for other prisoners whose files are full of lies. As I explained in a recent article about Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, refuting allegations made by Robin Simcox of the Islamophobic British black propaganda organization, the Henry Jackson Society:

Simcox repeated allegations from the classified military file on Shaker, compiled in 2007, as though what is contained in the files released by WikiLeaks bears any relation to reality. In fact, the files are full of unreliable statements made by prisoners who were subjected to torture or other abuse at Guantánamo, in CIA “black sites” or in other facilities in the “war on terror,” where they were regularly — often relentlessly — shown photo albums, referred to as “the family album,” of other prisoners, and sometimes of genuine terror suspects, until they acknowledged knowing them, or having seen them, whether that was true or not (see this article for an example from a proxy CIA torture prison in Jordan). Prisoners were also bribed with better living conditions, or had mental health issues that were remorselessly exploited by their interrogators, while other prisoners, unable to cope with the unending interrogations, gave up resisting and, by their own admission, said yes to every allegation that was suggested to them, without any care for its relationship to the truth.

The information in the files is, therefore, almost completely worthless without being backed up by further independent investigation, and yet Simcox parades verifiably unreliable witnesses as though they were truthful — Abu Zubaydah, for example, for whom the torture program was invented, whose desperate lies litter the files, Yasim Muhammad Basardah, a Yemeni notorious as Guantánamo’s most prolific liar, whose unreliability was well-known to the US authorities, and Abdul Bukhary (aka Abdul-Hakim Bukhari), another recognized liar, who had been imprisoned by al-Qaeda as a spy, and was liberated by US forces from a Taliban jail before being sent, inexplicably, to Guantánamo. As the New York Times explained in April 2011, Bukhari’s file contained the following acceptance, by the US authorities, of his unreliability: “Detainee admitted that he provided information in a deliberately misleading manner in order to receive incentives from his debriefers.”

This is how I described Basardah when I worked with WikiLeaks on the release of the Guantánamo files in 2011: “Yasim Basardah (ISN 252), a Yemeni known as a notorious liar. As the Washington Post reported in February 2009, he was given preferential treatment in Guantánamo after becoming what some officials regarded as a significant informant, although there were many reasons to be doubtful. As the Post noted, ‘military officials … expressed reservations about the credibility of their star witness since 2004,’ and in 2006, in an article for the National Journal, Corine Hegland described how, after a Combatant Status Review Tribunal at which a prisoner had taken exception to information provided by Basardah, placing him at a training camp before he had even arrived in Afghanistan, his personal representative (a military official assigned instead of a lawyer) investigated Basardah’s file, and found that he had made similar claims against 60 other prisoners. In January 2009, in the District Court in Washington D.C., Judge Richard Leon (an appointee of George W. Bush) excluded Basardah’s statements while granting the habeas corpus petition of Mohammed El-Gharani, a Chadian national who was just 14 years old when he was seized in a raid on a mosque in Pakistan. Judge Leon noted that the government had ‘specifically cautioned against relying on his statements without independent corroboration,’ and in other habeas cases that followed, other judges relied on this precedent, discrediting the ‘star witness’ stlll further.”

To return to Younous Chekkouri’s case, Reprieve explained that the letter released by the Justice Department contains “a partial summary” of the US government’s position, adding, “While not a complete picture of the near-total collapse of the case against Younous in the US habeas process, the document is the only evidence relating to the habeas case that the Justice Department would agree to release to Mr. Chekkouri’s lawyers in time to enable his defense on the same spurious charges in Morocco.”

His lawyers at Reprieve, who are in Morocco “seeking to see Mr. Chekkouri and defend him in court,” are also “urgently seek[ing] to provide the letter to the investigating magistrate and to Moroccan government officials.” As they note, they have “raised concerns that he now faces potential prosecution for long-disproven allegations that the United States withdrew years ago.”

Cori Crider, Reprieve’s Strategic Director and Younous Chekkouri’s US lawyer, said, “The US government hates to admit it made a mistake holding Younous Chekkouri for 14 years without charge on the basis of a false allegation, but that’s just what this letter means. The core of their case against him for years was that he was a founder of this Moroccan group — and, as the government now admits, we knocked that falsehood back years ago. The tragedy is that Younous is now potentially going to be charged in a Moroccan process for the self-same false allegation. The US Government has not done remotely enough to keep its promise to Mr. Chekkouri or to hold the Moroccan government to its promise. They must act now, and be sure Mr. Chekkouri is released tomorrow, before it is too late.”

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.

View more on Andy Worthington's website »

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Published on October 21, 2015 04:41

Five Days to Go: The Countdown to Shaker Aamer’s Release from Guantánamo

Today, October 20, marks five days to the anticipated release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison. It was announced on September 25 that he would be coming back to his family in the UK — eight long years after he was first told that the US no longer wanted to hold him — and that announcement coincided with the start of the 30-day notification period required by Congress before a prisoner can be freed. As a result, campaigners expect him to be home on Sunday.

With Guantánamo, however, nothing is certain until it has happened, and as a result, last week, myself and Joanne MacInnes — the co-founders and co-directors of the We Stand With Shaker campaign, launched last November to publicise Shaker’s plight through the use of a large inflatable figure of him — set up a new campaign, Fast For Shaker, encouraging supporters to fast for a day in solidarity with Shaker (who is on a hunger strike in Guantánamo), and also to keep up pressure on the Obama administration to make sure he is freed as soon as the 30-day notification period is over. That campaign continues, with, to date, 283 people having pledged to fast — and 33 of those are fasting today.

Also today, in a further initiative to keep the pressure on, the We Stand With Shaker campaign is counting down to the date when Shaker should be a free man with the first in a series of countdown posters. Today’s poster, ‘5 Days to Go’, is held by Malila Durant, the 11-year old daughter of Joanne MacInnes. Tomorrow, the actress Harriet Walter and the actor Guy Paul will be holding signs, and this initiative will continue until Saturday.

Below is further information about the countdown events taking place this week, including events in London tomorrow and on Saturday. I hope to see you if you’re available! It’s a version of the press release that was sent out earlier today.

Five days to go: Today, 20th October, celebrity fasters, as part of the Fast For Shaker campaign, are the comedians Frankie Boyle and Sara Pascoe, the actress Juliet Stevenson and the actress and TV presenter Janet Ellis. It is also the 18th birthday of Shaker’s daughter Johina, who he has not seen since she was four.

Four days to go: Tomorrow, 21st October, the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign will be holding its regular Wednesday vigil in Parliament Square from 1-3pm, where campaigners will have posters counting down to Sunday, reading ‘4 Days To Go.’ Those fasting include the musician Roger Waters (ex-Pink Floyd), actor and director Mark Rylance, John McDonnell MP (Labour), Caroline Lucas MP (Green), Jennie Formby, the Political Director of Unite, and Medea Benjamin of Code Pink in the US.

Three days to go: On Thursday 22nd October, fasters include Rebecca Long Bailey MP (Labour), Natalie Bennett, the leader of the Green Party, Jenny Jones, Green Party London Assembly member, and author and journalist Yvonne Ridley.

Two days to go: On Friday 23rd October, fasters include Cortney Busch, one of Shaker’s lawyers at Reprieve, and the musician David Knopfler.

One day to go: On Saturday 24th October, marking Shaker’s 5000th day in Guantánamo — and hopefully his last — the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign (with We Stand With Shaker, the London Guantánamo Campaign and the Stop the War Coalition) are holding a vigil for Shaker outside 10 Downing Street from 2-4pm, with speakers and music. Andy Worthington — hopefully with a few members of his band The Four Fathers — will play an acoustic version of his ‘Song for Shaker Aamer‘, featured in the campaign video for We Stand With Shaker. Those fasting include actor David Morrissey (on his 2nd day), Suliman Gani, teacher, broadcaster and family friend, and Sir Iqbal Sacranie OBE, former Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Britain.

Andy Worthington, co-director of the We Stand With Shaker campaign, said, “Time has run out for the dark forces that have kept Shaker imprisoned for eight years since he was first told the US no longer wanted to hold him. We hope those in power have got the message, and that Shaker will be back in the UK on Sunday. We look forward to welcoming him home, and if he is not back by Sunday, MPs, campaigners and celebrities stand ready to make even more noise than we have to date.”

In a letter to the Guardian, Joy Hurcombe, the chair of the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign, added, “Our campaign to save Shaker Aamer will get louder and stronger if he is not released this time. Shaker Aamer must be free or all of us are in chains.”

For further information, please contact:

Joanne MacInnes on 07867 553580 or by email.

Andy Worthington on 020 8691 9316 or by email.

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.

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Published on October 20, 2015 12:11

Video: Andy Worthington’s Band The Four Fathers Play “81 Million Dollars” About the US Torture Program, Calling for Bush, Cheney and Others to be Held Accountable

To coincide with some renewed activity in connection with the Bush administration’s torture program — namely, the ACLU suing James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, the former military psychologists who set up the program — I’m taking the opportunity to make available a video of my song ‘81 Million Dollars‘ about the torture program, and about Mitchell and Jessen.

$81m is the amount Mitchell and Jessen were paid for taking their experience as psychologists involved in the US military’s SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) program — which involved subjecting US personnel to torture to prepare them if they were seized by a hostile enemy — and reverse-engineering it for use in real-life situations, something for which they were abjectly unqualified.

The result, as the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s CIA torture report made clear last December, was unspeakably brutal and pointless, producing no information that could not have been produced without the use of torture. It also involved the CIA lying about its actions.

See below for the video, of myself and Richard Clare of my band The Four Fathers, playing the song last month while my friend Todd Pierce (the former military defense attorney who represented Guantánamo prisoners in their military commission trials) was staying with me. Please note also that the version by the full band is available here on Bandcamp, where those interested can buy it for just 60p ($0.93), or as part of the whole of our album ‘Love and War’ — as a download or on CD.

I’m also cross-posting below the Guardian‘s article about the ACLU’s lawsuit. I’d have preferred to write something myself, but I’m permanently short of time at the moment because of the ongoing demands of the Fast For Shaker campaign I launched last week, so please do forgive me. Here’s the 82-page complaint, and the ACLU’s post announcing it.

CIA torture survivors sue psychologists who designed infamous program

By Spencer Ackerman, the Guardian, October 13, 2015

Survivors of CIA torture have sued the contractor psychologists who designed one of the most infamous programs of the post-9/11 era.

In an extraordinary step, psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen now face a federal lawsuit for their role in convincing the CIA to subject terror suspects to mock drowning, painful bodily contortions, sleep and dietary deprivation and other methods long rejected by much of the world as torture.

In practice, CIA torture meant disappearances, mock executions, anal penetration performed under cover of “rehydration” and at least one man who froze to death, according to a landmark Senate report last year. Versions of the techniques migrated from the CIA’s undocumented prisons, known as black sites, to US military usage at Guantánamo Bay, Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan and Abu Ghraib in Iraq.

On behalf of torture survivors Suleiman Abdullah Salim and Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud, as well as a representative of the estate of Gul Rahman – who froze to death in a CIA black site in Afghanistan – the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed the suit against Mitchell and Jessen on Tuesday in a federal court in Washington state, where the two currently reside. They seek compensatory damages of at least $75,000.

The suit calls the torture program a “joint criminal enterprise” and a “war crime” in which the CIA, Mitchell and Jessen colluded and from which Mitchell and Jessen financially profited.

Although numerous US government investigations have pierced the veneer of secrecy around the torture program, the program’s government architects have faced no legal reprisal. A Justice Department inquiry ended in 2012 without prosecutions. The new lawsuit, aimed not at government officials but the contractors Mitchell and Jessen, aims to break the trend.

“This case is about ensuring that the people behind the torture program are held accountable so history doesn’t repeat itself,” Steven Watt, one of the ACLU attorneys representing the three ex-detainees, told the Guardian.

“Impunity for torture sends the dangerous message to US and foreign officials that there will be no consequences for future abuses.

“This lawsuit is different from past ones because public government documents now provide exhaustive details on the CIA torture program, and they identify the people who were tortured and how it happened. The government has long abused the ‘state secrets’ privilege to prevent accountability for torture but at this stage, any claim that the torture of our clients is a state secret would be absurd.”

One of the litigants reacted to his torture by attempting to kill himself. Another was kept naked for “more than a month”, the suit alleges, and was subjected to “a form of waterboarding”.

Salim, a Tanzanian fisherman, said in a video published by the Guardian that flashbacks from his ordeal in CIA custody are a permanent part of his life. After five years in CIA and then US military custody, Salim’s captors released him unceremoniously from Bagram in August 2008, presenting him with a memo stating that the US determined him not to pose a threat to the US.

“You can’t sleep, you can’t eat, you can’t smell,” said Salim, who says his CIA captors chained his arms and legs to a metal hoop in his cell that forced him into a squatting position so uncomfortable it prevented him from sleeping. Like other detainees, Salim was doused in ice-cold water and then wrapped in a freezing plastic sheet. According to the lawsuit, Salim hid painkillers he was given in order to hoard a dose strong enough for an ultimately unsuccessful suicide attempt.

“Flashbacks come anytime, so much they make you crazy,” Salim said in the video.

Ben Soud, who now lives in his native Libya, was taken to a CIA black site in Afghanistan, and for extended periods permitted “sleep only for minutes at a time because of painful stress positions, constant blaring music, and guards banging loudly on the door of his cell every hour or so”, the suit claims. Guards paraded him naked around the black site for “15 minutes every half hour through the night and into the morning”, according to the Senate report.

Although the CIA only acknowledges waterboarding three detainees – Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Abdul al-Rahim al-Nashiri – the lawsuit claims the agency subjected Ben Soud to a “form of waterboarding”.

“He was strapped to a wooden board that could spin around 360 degrees,” the suit claims.

“His interrogators spun him around on this board with a hood over his head covering his nose and mouth. While strapped to the board with his head lower than his feet, his interrogators poured buckets of cold water him. While they did not pour water directly over his mouth and nose, they threatened to do so if he didn’t cooperate.”

Ben Soud was also treated with the same frigid-water dousing and plastic-sheet coating that Salim received, only Ben Soud reported the freezing water being treated with a gel-like substance, causing it to stick to his body.

Famously, Jessen and Mitchell, former instructors in the military’s Survival Evasion Resistance Escape (SERE) program to counter torture, revised torture techniques from the SERE training and proposed to use them on CIA detainees.

They faced their first test case in the spring of 2002, after the CIA captured Abu Zubaydah, then thought to be a senior member of al-Qaida, and took him to Thailand. Although Zubaydah spoke openly with his FBI interrogators who sought to establish a rapport with him, Mitchell cabled the CIA’s Counterrorism Center “nearly every day” for permission to torture him.

CIA personnel, with Mitchell overseeing, waterboarded Zubaydah 83 times in the span of a month. Eventually, according to the Senate intelligence committee’s report – which gives Mitchell and Jessen the pseudonyms Grayson Swigert and Hammond Dunbar – Zubaydah would submit to torture after hearing his captors snap their fingers twice. They forced him into “confinement boxes”, one the size of a coffin and the other just two and a half feet square and 21 inches deep.

Now missing an eye, Zubaydah is still detained at Guantánamo Bay, although the CIA no longer believes he is a member of al-Qaida. The Senate intelligence committee concluded the torture techniques did not produce any useful intelligence; the CIA’s official position as of 2014 is that the question is unanswerable. But the 2002 test case convinced the CIA, supported by the Bush White House, of the value of torture.

The torture of Abu Zubaydah, who is not a party to the lawsuit, began weeks before the US Justice Department provided its August 2002 legal blessing, since withdrawn, to the CIA torture program. An adviser to Condoleezza Rice would later inform the Bush-era secretary of state that use of the techniques Mitchell and Jessen implemented amounted to a “felony war crime”.

A Spokane-based company the two founded, Mitchell and Jessen Associates, would secure $75m from the CIA in contracts, in addition to a further $6.1m from the agency for legal expenses in the event of criminal or civil action stemming from the contract. Although Barack Obama banned CIA torture by executive order on the second day of his presidency, the CIA continued to cover the company’s legal bills until 2012. Mitchell and Jessen themselves each received more than $1m from their contracts.

The suit does not claim that Mitchell and Jessen were present during the torture of Salim, Ben Soud and Rahman. But it derives their culpability through the application of the torture techniques – prolonged sleep deprivation, nudity, “stress positions”, cramped confinement – that the two psychologists provided to the CIA, which implemented the techniques.

“Defendants are directly liable,” the suit charges, “because they designed, developed, and implemented a program for the CIA intended to inflict physical and mental pain and suffering on Plaintiffs, and because Plaintiffs were tortured and subjected to cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment as a consequence of their inclusion in that program.”

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.

View more on Andy Worthington's website »

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Published on October 19, 2015 14:10

Video: Andy Worthington’s Band The Four Fathers Play ’81 Million Dollars’ About the US Torture Program, Calling for Bush, Cheney and Others to be Held Accountable