Andy Worthington's Blog, page 88

Fast For Shaker: Press Launch of New Campaign in Solidarity with Shaker Aamer, on a Hunger Strike in Guantánamo, London, Thursday 15th October

I’m in a hurry, so please see below for the press release for tomorrow’s launch, in London, of We Stand With Shaker‘s new initiative, Fast For Shaker. This morning, I was at a meeting of the All-Party Shaker Aamer Parliamentary Group with MPs David Davis, Andrew Mitchell, Andy Slaughter, Tania Mathias and others, plus lots of campaigners.

Then I was in Kensington for an interview on London Live, about the launch of Fast For Shaker, which I hope is online somewhere. More info later. For now, here’s the press release. if you’re in London, please come along! Otherwise, keep signing up for the fast, and send in photos!

Celebrities, MPs and Campaigners Start Rolling 24-Hour Fast in Solidarity with Shaker Aamer, on a Hunger Strike in Guantánamo

MPs David Davis, John McDonnell, Caroline Lucas,  Andy Slaughter, Tania Mathias, Tom Brake Attend, Plus Shaker’s Father-In-Law Saeed Siddique, representatives of Reprieve, Actor David Morrissey and Comedian Sara Pascoe

WHERE: Old Palace Yard, by the George V statue, opposite the Houses of Parliament, SW1P 3JY.

WHEN: 1pm, Thursday 15th October 2015.

A new initiative, Fast For Shaker, created by the We Stand With Shaker campaign, is being launched outside Parliament on Thursday, with the MPs David Davis, John McDonnell, Caroline Lucas, Andy Slaughter, Tania Mathias and Tom Brake of the Shaker Aamer Parliamentary Group. John McDonnell established the group last November, and is co-chair with David, and the MPs attending represent the group’s cross-party support.

Also attending are: Shaker Aamer’s father-in-law Saeed Siddique, representatives of Reprieve (Shaker’s lawyers), the actor David Morrissey, the comedian Sara Pascoe, We Stand With Shaker’s co-directors Joanne MacInnes and Andy Worthington, Joy Hurcombe, the chair of the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign, and numerous campaigners.

Over 200 supporters have already pledged to Fast For Shaker, including Shaker Aamer’s family, his lawyers Clive Stafford Smith and Cori Crider of Reprieve, the musician Roger Waters (ex-Pink Floyd), actors Mark Rylance, Maxine Peake and Harriet Walter, comedian Frankie Boyle, and MPs including David Davis, the co-chair of the Shaker Aamer Parliamentary Group, Andy Slaughter and Clive Lewis.

Supporters in the US are also fasting in solidarity with Shaker, including  actor Ed Asner, former Guantánamo guard Brandon Neely, retired FBI agent Coleen Rowley, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, Code Pink activist Medea Benjamin, and members of the campaigning group Witness Against Torture.

The Fast For Shaker website is here.

The US authorities told the British government on 25th September that Shaker Aamer, the last British resident held in the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, will be released and returned to his family in the UK after being held for nearly 14 years without charge or trial.

By US law, 30 days’ notice must be given to Congress before any prisoner can be freed from Guantánamo. In the meantime, however, Shaker has embarked on a hunger strike in protest at his ongoing abuse and his fears that, in his weakened state, he won’t live to see his family again.

Fast For Shaker is intended to show solidarity with Shaker, to encourage him to give up his hunger strike, and to keep pressure on the Obama administration to release him. He could be released by 24th October, at the end of Congress’s 30-day notification period, although there is no guarantee that he will be released immediately.

Andy Worthington said, “We are grateful to the media, to our celebrity supporters, to the MPs of all parties prepared to Fast For Shaker, and to the supporters in the UK, the US and around the world who have come together to show solidarity with Shaker and to keep up the pressure for his release.”

As Cori Crider of Reprieve said when pledging to fast, “I just saw Shaker in Guantánamo and I told him about what all you are doing to try to encourage him to be healthy. Under the censorship rules I am not allowed to say what he said, but I AM allowed to report that he gave all of you a very big smile.”

For further information, please contact:

Joanne MacInnes on 07867 553580 or joannemacinnes@icloud.com

Andy Worthington on 020 8691 9316 or standwithshaker@gmail.com

In the US: Jeremy Varon on 732-979-3119 or jvaron@aol.com

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.

Video: Andy Worthington Discusses Shaker Aamer, Guantánamo and Fast For Shaker on the Victoria Derbyshire Show on BBC2

Yesterday morning, I appeared on the Victoria Derbyshire show on BBC2, to discuss the launch of Fast For Shaker, the new initiative launched by activist Joanne MacInnes and I, the co-directors of the We Stand With Shaker campaign, calling for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison. I’m delighted to report that over 200 people — 188 on the calendar, plus others on the celebrity schedule — have so signed up to Fast For Shaker. The relay fast, with people pledging to fast for 24 hours on a day of their choice — and with a commitment to continue until Shaker is released — begins on Thursday October 15.

A two-minute clip from my interview, with Joanna Gosling, is here, on the Twitter feed for the show .

When I posted it on Facebook, I wrote, “Follow the link and see a two-minute clip of me on Victoria Derbyshire’s show on BBC2 this morning, talking about Shaker Aamer, as the co-founder of the We Stand With Shaker campaign, my hopes that he will be released from Guantánamo within the next two weeks, and our determination to keep pressure on the Obama administration to honour its commitment to release him as soon as the 30-day notification to Congress is up, which we’re doing by encouraging supporters to ‎Fast With Shaker, who is on a hunger strike, for a 24-hour period starting on Thursday.”

The entire show is also on iPlayer for the next month, starting at 36:15 and ending at 43:45.

When I posted the link on Facebook, I explained how, as well as talking about Fast For Shaker, “I also talk about the unreliability of the US government’s so-called evidence, why so many innocent men were seized (because most of Guantánamo’s prisoners were seized by the US’s Afghan or Pakistani allies, at a time when the US was making substantial bounty payments for alleged al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects), and why, even if any of the prisoners had done anything wrong, indefinite detention without charge or trial is unacceptable. if they committed crimes, they should have been prosecuted in a court of law, and if they were soldiers they should have been held as prisoners of war and protected by the Geneva Conventions. Instead, they were deliberately held without any rights whatsoever, and that situation, lamentably, has not essentially changed.”

These are important themes, and I was delighted to have the opportunity to talk about them. Please read my article, “WikiLeaks Reveals Secret Guantánamo Files, Exposes Detention Policy as a Construct of Lies,” for more information about unreliable witnesses at Guantánamo.

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

How Laurie Anderson Brought Guantánamo to New York

[image error]I’ve been very busy lately — mainly with the launch of Fast For Shaker, a new campaign for Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo — and didn’t have the time until now to write about a fascinating project by the artist Laurie Anderson, who staged an event, in New York — “Habeas Corpus” — where she beamed in, live, a giant 3D projection of former Guantánamo child prisoner Mohammed el-Gharani.

Mohammed was one of at least 23 juveniles held at Guantánamo, although only three were officially acknowledged. See Al-Jazeera’s important new documentary, Growing up Guantánamo, for more about this — it focuses on Asadullah Rahman, an Afghan who was just ten when he was seized and sent to Guantánamo with two other Afghan boys.

At Guantánamo, where Mohammed was held between 2002 and 2009, he was subjected to torture, as the US denied his true age (14 or just 15 when he was seized) and tried to tie him in to all manner of ridiculous plots — like an invented al-Qaeda cell in London, which he was supposed to have been part of, even though he was only 11 at the time, and had never left Saudi Arabia, where he was born to parents from Chad. I first wrote about him in my book The Guantánamo Files, in 2007, and then wrote a profile of him in April 2008, Guantánamo’s forgotten child: the sad story of Mohammed El-Gharani, covered a judge granting his habeas corpus petition in January 2009, and his release in June 2009, followed by further complications relating to his return to Chad, despite his parents living in Saudi Arabia — see Mohammed speaking to Al-Jazeera here, for example, and this report from an investigator with his lawyers at Reprieve in December 2009, and please, if you have time, read the long interview with him, by the journalist Jérôme Tubiana, which was published in the London Review of Books in December 2011.

Laurie Anderson’s three-day installation attracted widespread media coverage, I’m glad to note, and I love the photos accompanying this article — of Reprieve’s founder Clive Stafford Smith and strategic director Cori Crider standing with Mohammed at the New York event. See coverage in Rolling Stone, The Intercept, the Guardian, Newsweek and the Nation.

As John Knefel wrote for the Nation:

Fourteen years after 9/11, the United States still suffers from the many sins of George W Bush, Dick Cheney, and their co-conspirators. Arguably, President Obama’s greatest mistake in office was to effectively immunize the previous administration from any official accountability, thus shifting the burden from the government to civil society to reckon with the crimes committed by the US during the “Global War on Terror.” In the absence of criminal trials for top policy makers — or a comprehensive truth and reconciliation commission — artists, activists, journalists, and human-rights advocates have been forced to tell the stories that both the Bush and Obama administrations would rather ignore.

For those reasons, “Habeas Corpus” is a wholly necessary work of art; as is a recent documentary about Omar Khadr, another child held at Guantánamo; as is the recent autobiography of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who is still imprisoned on the island. And yet, what art cannot do is ensure that GWOT-era crimes won’t happen again.

Even now, indefinite detention without charge or trial remains a feature of Guantánamo. The US government continues to insist that a subset of the prisoner population there, sometimes called the “forever prisoners,” are too dangerous to release but impossible to charge with a crime because of a lack of usable evidence.

Below, I’m also cross-posting Laurie Anderson’s fascinating article from the New Yorker, which explains how she came to meet Mohammed, how the show developed, and why it is so important.

Laurie’s article contains a fascinating section about Shaker Aamer, for whom I have been campaigning for many years — not just in the last week setting up Fast For Shaker, but, in the last 11 months, through the We Stand With Shaker campaign, and before that, for many years, as a journalist and campaigner. As with many prisoners, Shaker was a source of comfort and advice for Mohammed, and Laurie describes her conversation with him about Shaker as follows:

We talked about Shaker Aamer. Shaker, the last remaining British resident at Guantánamo who was pulled in at the same time as Mohammed, was brought to Guantánamo on the same plane, shackled, and blindfolded. He had taken care of Mohammed and had become his mentor. The only time that Mohammed cried was when he talked about people who had been kind to him. When he talked about Shaker, he broke down. Shaker Aamer is still in Guantánamo, now in solitary confinement. The day that Mohammed was released, he was the only one who was able to yell to him, “All the best! Goodbye! Goodbye!”

Another couple of key passages for me: firstly, Laurie talking about how mention of Guantánamo is treated by people in general in the US, even over 14 years since the “war on terror” was declared by President Bush:

I spoke with a few close friends about the project, and several of them had a lot of reservations. The word “Guantánamo” sets off sirens. People would literally recoil. Their heads would move back almost as if I’d just punched them. One of the saddest parts of this project was hearing from several groups of kids who told me in different ways, somewhat shyly, that they were afraid to talk about Guantánamo because they might get “on some kind of list.”

And secondly, Mohammed’s words, during Laurie’s meetings with him in Africa:

Mohammed concluded his stories looking right into the camera lens and addressing President Obama, “Please honor your promise and close Guantánamo,” he said, calmly. I noticed that Kat [Craig, of Reprieve] was quietly crying, her armor not as thick as I had imagined. And I could see that she was crying because Mohammed was speaking for himself, and because he was so clear and assertive.

I wish I’d been able to see the show.

Below is a short video of Mohammed speaking, as used in the show, and below that Laurie’s article:

Key in the Ocean from Canal Street Communications on Vimeo.

Readers may also want to see another important New York artist, Patti Smith, talking about Guantánamo on Democracy Now! last week, remembering her song for the German Guantánamo prisoner Murat Kurnaz, “Without Chains.”

Bringing Guantánamo to Park Avenue

By Laurie Anderson, New Yorker, September 23, 2015

I’ve been trying to describe an upcoming project called “Habeas Corpus,” and it’s much harder than I thought. There are just too many angles. “Why are you doing this?” my friends keep asking. Sometimes I no longer know myself.

I am what is known as a “multimedia artist.” I chose that description because it doesn’t mean anything. Who isn’t multimedia these days? But it allows me to work in many different ways — music, writing, performance, film, electronics, and painting — without provoking the art police, who love to tell artists to get back into their category.

[image error]For the past six months, I’ve been collaborating with a former Guantánamo detainee, Mohammed el Gharani, preparing a work of art that we are making together. From October 2nd through the 4th, we will be streaming the image of Mohammed into the Park Avenue Armory. He will be sitting in a chair in a studio in West Africa, and his live image will be broadcast to New York City and wrapped onto a large three-dimensional cast of his body. His figure — more than three times life size, inspired by the Lincoln Memorial, in Washington, D.C. — will sit in the cavernous drill hall.

I had planned this as a meditation about real time and telepresence: how to be there and not there at the same time. Like all former Guantánamo detainees, Mohammed is not allowed to come to the U.S. I had imagined “Habeas Corpus” as a work of silent witness, deriving its power from live streaming, technology, and stillness — a work of equally balanced presence and absence.

But things were shifting. As it turns out, my collaborator Mohammed is eager to speak about his ordeal. And once he began to talk, the project changed direction. So, in the installation, once every hour, when Mohammed takes a break in West Africa, the statue will shift to playback, and it will speak. We recorded these playback sections in June. They include several hair-raising and moving stories about Mohammed’s time in Guantánamo. We also made a film, which will be shown in an adjoining exhibition room, in which he talks at greater length about what happened to him.

Gradually, the truth about Guantánamo has come out. For the most part, these prisoners were never the bad guys. They were not the worst of the worst. Most of them knew less about Al Qaeda than I did. They were taxi drivers, students, photographers, journalists, and goat herders. Many were purchased by the U.S. from the Northern Alliance, in Afghanistan, for five thousand dollars. Some have been held for almost fifteen years, many in solitary confinement. All interrogated. Most tortured. Most of the remaining prisoners have been cleared of all charges, but they remain in Guantánamo with no recourse.

Mohammed was one of the youngest detainees in Guantánamo. He was imprisoned for almost eight years, between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one. He was interrogated and tortured for years, and, after the evidence against him was dismissed, he was released by a U.S. federal judge, in 2009. He is now twenty-seven and living in West Africa.

Although my work is sometimes political, I have always tried to stay far away from polemics. I hate it when people tell me what to do. I think, “You don’t even know me! How could you possibly tell me what to do?” So I make work that’s made of questions, not answers. And, as this particular work moved away from a silent meditation toward language and stories, it came to rest on the most basic of all questions: What is truth? What is suffering? What is justice?

The history of this project is a long one. I’ve made works using telepresence before, but, for various legal and logistical reasons, never in the United States. In 1997, I designed a work in a small town in Austria for the cultural center — a thirteenth-century church — and its neighboring high-security prison. My plan was to build a video studio in the prison, where a prisoner would sit still for two months. His image would be beamed onto a life-sized cast of his body that would be placed in the apse of the church. It would be a kind of living statue, made of light and plaster. The work, called “Life,” would be about the function of telepresence in contemporary culture and the contrasting attitudes toward the body held by the church (incarnation) and the prison (incarceration). After working on this for several months, the project was cancelled, for reasons having to do with ownership of the prisoner’s image. Once incarcerated, the prisoner no longer owns his own image and so cannot let anyone else use it. The work was never completed.

Shortly after that, I began working on a collaboration that would have beamed prisoners at New York’s Sing Sing prison into the Whitney Museum, a work highlighting the functions of two very different heavily guarded institutions. A few weeks after this version was abandoned, for technical reasons, I was describing it to Germano Celant, a curator-at-large. An hour after our meeting, he faxed me a terse “have located prison and cultural institution.” We did the project that spring in Milan as a collaboration between the Fondazione Prada and San Vittore prison.

The most difficult part of this work, for me, was the exploitation angle. A prisoner sits motionless for months in a museum, and I sign my name to it as “my” art work. Germano and I decided to spend time in the prison, talking to inmates and looking for a willing collaborator. The prisoners I worked with at San Vittore were white-collar criminals, extremely smart men responsible in various ways for dismantling the Italian economy. They knew Greek and Latin and were charming and courteous. They were allowed to cook in the well-equipped prison kitchen, and they had big knives and wine collections. They were busy writing books and articles and could receive visitors. Most of them were wearing Armani and, sometimes, if it was chilly, some would wear very stylish quilted vests. The only thing that was off about their outfits was the shoes. They were wearing slippers, because they were going nowhere. Ever.

The Italian prisoners discussed the project with us while subtly directing my attention, in their expert and seemingly offhand lawyerly way, toward an inmate who was sitting quietly in the corner. Soon, I was directing all my attention and questions to him. They had, of course, decided who my collaborator would be. Santino was a bank robber and murderer, having inadvertently shot some people on his way out of the bank. He was serving a life sentence. He was also a writer. He began to engage with me in the conversation, asking questions. I said, “Santino, if we collaborate on this project, what do you think about it? How do you see it?” He said, “I see it as a virtual escape.” And I said, “You’re my man.” Finally, the show opened. It was called “Dal Vivo,” or “from life.”

When I saw the living statue of Santino, I was shocked. He didn’t look like a prisoner. He looked like a judge. Distant. Remote. Regal. His girlfriend came to the gallery every day and stood near the statue, but he was unable to see her. The eeriness of real time.

I had always wanted to do this telepresence project in the United States, especially given the privatization of prisons, the rising numbers of prisoners, and the staggering statistic that the U.S. now has, by far, the largest prison population in the world. So when I was invited by the Park Avenue Armory, a couple of years ago, to do an installation, I proposed a version of “Dal Vivo” that would stream the images of twelve inmates from upstate New York prisons who were serving life sentences, wrapping the projections onto three-dimensional, double-sized casts of their bodies.

We spent months meeting people and talking to wardens. We got in touch with the Prison Mindfulness Institute and many of the organizations that work with prisoners teaching them meditation techniques. At the end of three months, we were told that Homeland Security would never allow this to happen in the U.S. because of the live-streaming element.

Next, Alex Poots, the artistic director at the Armory, said, “O.K., what’s Plan B?” I didn’t have a Plan B. I had been so determined to make this work, and so disappointed when it didn’t happen, that I had little energy for yet another new idea. I finally came up with a halfhearted pageant — a series of events, on floats or in cars, that would represent moments in history and consciousness. The installation was going to be a road, then a zone, then a no man’s land featuring scenes of cave people looking at the moon, a backward clock, the Kennedy Cadillac in Dallas.

I had temporarily unplugged my “tweedar” — the detector I use to measure the nauseatingly mannered content of art works. Projects like “My art is counting all the steps I took from here to the gallery and then assigning them corresponding musical notes and then playing them through the buttonholes of the shirt of my dead father.” I’ve done enough of these myself to be able to identify them pretty quickly. Nonetheless, my tweedar was locked in the red zone.

The project was foundering. I had no idea how to push it forward anymore. Then, last March, through a series of quick and unlikely circumstances, I met Ben Wizner of the American Civil Liberties Union, who suggested getting in touch with Reprieve, an international human rights group that works with prisoners facing capital punishment as well as detainees from Guantánamo. I remember the first call I made to Reprieve. I was speaking in a high, manic voice about real time and talking statues and virtual appearance. I was talking too fast. The line kept glitching out. I was breathless, the way I get when I’m really excited about a project. It sounded idiotic and incoherent. However, after a couple of minutes, instead of a polite “thank you,” the voice on the end of the line said, “Tell me more.”

I was talking to Kat Craig, an attorney at Reprieve, and after a couple more phone calls, she said that she might have a client who might be interested in working with me on the project. His name was Mohammed el Gharani, and he had been one of the youngest detainees at Guantánamo. She told me that he wanted to know more.

I was dumbstruck. I began to read about Mohammed’s story. He is a Chadian who had been living in Saudi Arabia and had been captured in Pakistan in a raid on a mosque. On the Internet, there was an enormous amount of conflicting information. The basics were clear. I began to learn about the work of Reprieve and the Center for Constitutional Rights. Kat made an appointment to connect me with Mohammed.

The first time I spoke with Mohammed was March 26th. I was getting ready to give a lecture at Harvard University. I kept losing the connection, and I was getting more and more anxious. What would this man make of this project? What could we possibly have in common? Finally, Kat completed the conference call, and I heard his voice. Light. Soft. He spoke English with a mixture of accents: Caribbean, West African, and Arabic. It was surely as awkward for him as it was for me, but we talked anyway about why and how we might do this together. Mohammed said his motivation was to help his brothers in Guantánamo.

My work is basically about stories and what happens when they are told and retold. And what motivations might be behind alternate versions. Mohammed’s redacted story, as well as the obvious inventions about his actions, and how they arose and got entangled, became a big part of our work together.

I have tried many times to imagine the process of interrogation. What does your own story sound like to you after so many repetitions, denials, revisions? What is it to ask and to answer hundreds of questions about your life? In his book “Guantánamo,” the French writer Frank Smith translates the transcripts of interrogations, and the interrogator and the detainee begin to merge. The French pronoun on, as in “one knows” or “one thinks” — our “royal we” — becomes more and more mysterious as we lose track of who’s asking whom and what authority is and what a story is. In the transcripts, there are also chilling pauses “No response from the detainee.” What does this pause mean? Is the detainee being waterboarded? Electroshocked? This is no ordinary conversation. It is language and stories in the service of confession, corroboration, and coercion. Among Mohammed’s first interrogators was a woman who began the session by saying, “Think of me as your mother.”

Mohammed was accused of belonging to an Al Qaeda cell in London in 1998. At the time, Mohammed was eleven and living in Saudi Arabia with his very poor family, tending goats. The U.S. government’s story proposed that a devious and precocious child could somehow find his way from Saudi Arabia to London and link with a major terrorist operation. It was oddly satisfying that Mohammed could use the same ninja power to jump half a world away and appear, like magic, live in the U.S., sitting in the Armory.

I spoke with a few close friends about the project, and several of them had a lot of reservations. The word “Guantánamo” sets off sirens. People would literally recoil. Their heads would move back almost as if I’d just punched them. One of the saddest parts of this project was hearing from several groups of kids who told me in different ways, somewhat shyly, that they were afraid to talk about Guantánamo because they might get “on some kind of list.”

“You should tell it like a case of mistaken identity,” one friend advised. Another fumed, “That’s not a mistake, that’s profiling.” The more I learned about Mohammed’s capture, the more I found out about the moment when the U.S. needed to produce bad guys and used bounties, false information, torture, and fear to create the prisoners they wanted. The more I thought about Mohammed’s story, the more connected it was to profiling in general and what seemed like the weekly event of another black man getting shot by the police. I tried to stay focussed. Don’t take it all on, I told myself. I began to have nightmares, looped visions of prisons.

Yet the more I learned, the more I realized that prosecuting “the war on terror” was all about stories. How you describe your experience. This is something I know well from my work, but I was watching it happen in the world. The U.S. government had declared the detainees “non-persons,” and so they were not eligible for apologies or reparations. The Geneva Conventions did not apply to them. They could be held indefinitely and tortured, but only because the torture was relabeled “enhanced interrogation” and because Guantánamo was not the U.S. There were also no suicides, only “manipulative self-injurious behavior.”

Viewed from another angle, “Habeas Corpus” is also a work about cameras. I just wish Susan Sontag were still around. I know she would write a clear and killer essay about what happened when the camera and the gun got welded together and about how adding lenses to guns increased the deadly aim of drones and how police body cameras and bystanders’ video recordings affect police brutality. And also how cameras are used in prisons.

My aim in this work is also to suggest some of the changes that occur in a culture that increasingly operates on remote. Many transactions happen at a distance — friendships, shopping, and even war. And cameras are the tools and links.  There are so many of these conversations lately: Are there more crimes, or are there just more cameras? I’m thinking of the bulky box cameras that people once used to photograph lynchings in the nineteen-twenties and thirties.

This work also became about information. While we’re proud of living in an information culture, there are huge blank spots in what we know. Guantánamo has been called the “American Gulag,” and, along with other offshore black sites, it is a blacked-out area on the map. I’m thinking of the term “information poverty.” There’s so little information about Guantánamo in the U.S. And so much resistance and fear. How can I make something that celebrates our right to find things out for ourselves? The right to be free? How can I do this without being self-righteous and strident?

In April, I arrived at the airport in West Africa, and the hot air clobbered me. I passed signs with many exclamation marks and pictures of people with Ebola and yellow fever. A man snatched my bag. “Give me that!” I yelled, and grabbed it back. We tugged it back and forth for a while. I can’t stand it when people help me with suitcases. At the hotel, I knocked on Kat’s door. We were meeting for the first time. She was sitting in the hot room, unpacking a lot of stuff. She was friendly and chatty. She was clear and confident, and I could see why Mohammed trusts her. There was no air-conditioning in my room, and I lay down and listened to the sounds of constant heavy traffic.

It was a sweltering morning, and I decided to do T’ai Chi in the hotel’s airless gym. “Listen behind you,” are my teacher’s instructions about how to begin T’ai Chi. I was working on the nineteen form and suddenly felt someone looking at me. I turned around and saw a gap-toothed man in his twenties. He gave a half wave and then left. Later that morning, I met him again. He was with Kat, who introduced him as my collaborator, Mohammed el Gharani. The three of us talked for hours in one of the hotel rooms. There was a lot of secrecy around the meetings. Kat was always present. The bond between the two of them was touching. We stopped several times and left Mohammed alone in the room so that he could pray.

At first, Mohammed and I were both shy and hesitant. I was one of the few Americans he had met who wasn’t his interrogator, torturer, or guard. I had never talked with someone like him before. I was acutely aware of his physical presence. His back had been seriously injured. He was still missing teeth. His head had been smashed. I couldn’t forget, even for a minute, that it was my country that had done this. It kept making me feel like throwing up. Later, we talked outside in the sweltering courtyard. Mohammed is a runner, and we discussed how hard it is to run in the heat. He said he has two kids.

We went back to the room, and I set up two small clay figures and closed the drapes. I aimed the projector at them, and they sprang to life. I tried to explain: so this will be you, but very big, and it will all happen in a huge space. I showed him pictures of the Park Avenue Armory. We looked at the tiny glowing figures. I doubt that I was giving him any idea of what I was trying to do.

I had a lot of questions, but only managed to ask a few, and they were oblique. I listened. Sometimes I talked about my meditation teacher. I told Mohammed that my teacher said, “Try to practice how to feel sad without actually being sad.” We talked about whether that was really possible. We talked about people who were inspiring. He talked about Nelson Mandela. I talked about my friends and family and the death of my husband. Once in a while, Mohammed bent his head and cried. How was it possible for him to be here talking to me at all? Kat reminded me that asking questions had been central to all his interrogations, and she said that, as his lawyer, she had to remind herself — and him, too — that he didn’t have to answer the questions if he didn’t want to. Mohammed learned English in prison. The first words he learned were, as he put it, “the ‘F’ and the ‘N’ words, because that’s what the Americans called me.”

We drove around with our producer. The sky was dark purple and stormy, the pollution was chokingly thick. We visited several furniture stores looking for the Lay-Z-Boy-style chair that Mohammed would sit in. Since his back had been injured in the torture sessions and stressful physical situations were part of his prison experience, we decided to build a chair, designed especially for him, that would provide enough support to him to sit for long periods of time.

Kat and I also looked for new eyeglasses for Mohammed because the glasses he was wearing automatically darken in the light, and we wanted to be able to see his eyes in the projection. Kat is thorough, relentless, kind, and efficient. I told her that these conversations were making me feel so physically sick, giving me constant headaches. I asked her how she could stand knowing so many details about this much suffering. She gave me a brisk, professional answer. Lawyers, actors, and lots of other people, too, have an armor that separates and protects them from their jobs. I don’t have that, and it was starting to become really difficult.

On later days, Kat and Mohammed and I would talk for hours in the hotel room. He told us about the guard who told all the prisoners, “See this thick wall? You will never get out, and I will throw the key into the ocean, and you’ll be here forever, and my grandson will be guarding you.” He talked about interrogation and about the guards who were taken to Ground Zero before going to Guantánamo. He talked about missing his family. He described pepper spray and forcible cell extraction. He talked about being shackled and blindfolded and thrown onto a plane. We jumped around between the years that he was in the camp and his release. His stories transfixed me. They rolled out in long sentences. He described the day that a detainee told his interrogator that he’d had a dream that a submarine came to Guantánamo to rescue the detainees. That night, he said, Guantánamo Bay was filled with helicopters and ships with their searchlights on, looking for the dream submarine.

We continued after lunch. He said that one of the hardest things to endure was that there was no logic or reason or even pattern to the torture, and that was one of the reasons it drove people crazy. It was random, sudden. He described arriving on the plane with no idea where he was. After almost eight years, his release was finally ordered. He then spent six months in Camp Iguana, where he was constantly asked, “Do you hate Americans?”

For Mohammed, there had been no explanation. “After all this, what is justice for you, Mohammed?” I asked.

“An apology,” he said.

Back in New York, we began to assemble the team for cutting the statue. The plans for the live feed got more specific, elaborate. The brilliant technical director designed increasingly redundant systems for the intercontinental transmissions.

I met with a friend of mine who is a judge, and I described the project to her. She leaned in toward me and said in a half voice: “Do you have legal representation? ” Even though I know my friend and she was sitting there in running shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt, her voice had the tone of a judge, and it had not occurred to me to get a lawyer. Her concern and authority suddenly made me very nervous. I thought of all the times in my life when I’ve been completely unqualified to be where I was. This seemed to be one of them.

I flashed back to the night, long ago, when I was playing at the Berlin Jazz Festival. I was in the middle of one of my songs, which are basically stories with many conversational-like pauses. A man from the back of the hall used one of these pauses to yell, “Play jazz!” I froze. He had a point. This was a jazz festival. The problem was that I didn’t know any jazz.

In June, I took my next trip back to Africa. We had assembled a team to shoot the first phase of the project, and we met at the studio. To create the effect of a person sitting in a chair, the figure actually has to be tilted backward, reclining slightly, as if in a business-class airplane seat. Kat, Mohammed, and I talked about what he would say for the playback section of the installation.

We talked about torture and ERFing, waterboarding, and solitary confinement. I began to feel the way I did when I saw the first images of Abu Ghraib. Nauseated. Hot. I could hear myself speed-talking: “But Americans! We’re … we’re … we’re good people,” I was saying. “We’re generous, and we help people.” I kept offering up examples of American generosity. Next, we talked about hunger strikes and beatings. Mohammed concluded his stories looking right into the camera lens and addressing President Obama, “Please honor your promise and close Guantánamo,” he said, calmly. I noticed that Kat was quietly crying, her armor not as thick as I had imagined. And I could see that she was crying because Mohammed was speaking for himself, and because he was so clear and assertive.

I thought of how lucky I was to be working with Mohammed, who is articulate, likable, handsome, and humble. His skills and personality were making the project so easy to do. I know of several human-rights groups who have exhibited paintings and published the poems of prisoners in a well-intentioned effort to show the humanity of the prisoners they work with. While I admire this, it has always bothered me a bit, too. Why should the prisoners have to be creative and likable people? I wanted to think that if the detainee that Reprieve had recommended to me was angry, bitter, and couldn’t write a poem to save his life, I would still want to work with him. Then again, maybe my own ego was starting to get involved. And I didn’t want that to happen.

As an artist, I am committed to seeing things the way they are, not the way I think they could be or should be. But faced with the facts of American racism, sexism, law breaking, and violence, I’m having a hard time maintaining my belief in the across-the-board openheartedness of my countrymen. Also, although there are journalistic aspects to this project, I am an artist first, so, if faced with having to choose between something beautiful and something true, I would choose the beautiful, because I trust my senses more than my rational mind.

The talks went on. We talked about Shaker Aamer. Shaker, the last remaining British resident at Guantánamo who was pulled in at the same time as Mohammed, was brought to Guantánamo on the same plane, shackled, and blindfolded. He had taken care of Mohammed and had become his mentor. The only time that Mohammed cried was when he talked about people who had been kind to him. When he talked about Shaker, he broke down. Shaker Aamer is still in Guantánamo, now in solitary confinement. The day that Mohammed was released, he was the only one who was able to yell to him, “All the best! Goodbye! Goodbye!”

Right now we are in the late stages of planning. The exhibition is becoming real. It’s going to be a crazy week. We finished carving the statue of Mohammed, and it looks like a Cubist work, a series of sliding planes to accommodate the projection. We’re preparing the live show that will happen each night. I’ve just heard that Clive Stafford Smith, the founder of Reprieve, will come to New York for the show’s opening.

I’m holding my breath.

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.

Fast For Shaker: New Campaign Launched – Please Join Celebrities and MPs Fasting in Solidarity with Shaker Aamer, on a Hunger Strike in Guantánamo

Since getting the news last weekend that Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, has embarked on a hunger strike and fears that he won’t make it out of Guantánamo alive, despite being told on September 25 that he will be freed soon, Joanne MacInnes and I, the co-founders and co-directors of the We Stand With Shaker campaign, have been working like crazy to get a new campaign going.

And with the wonderful support of web designer Tuqire Hussain, we are now delighted to launch Fast For Shaker, a new website and campaign in which we’re asking celebrities, MPs, campaigners and concerned citizens to embark on a hunger strike of their own, for a day — or more, if you wish — in solidarity with Shaker, starting on Thursday October 15, when the campaign is officially launched.

Please Pledge a Fast (and share on Facebook and Twitter after doing so), send in a photo of yourself on the day of your fast, with a poster downloadable here, to join our Supporters Photos, check out the Calendar here, and check out the celebrity list here. Please also read the Fasting Guidelines.

Please also note that we’re using the hashtag #FastForShaker.

Below is a version of the press release we sent out today, already picked up on by the Daily Mail, which, I’m delighted to note, used my quote.

Campaigners Launch Hunger Strike In Solidarity With Shaker Aamer,

Last UK Resident in Guantánamo

Hunger strikers include Clive Stafford Smith, Shaker Aamer’s family,

MPs David Davis, John McDonnell and Caroline Lucas,

comedian Frankie Boyle and actors Mark Rylance, David Morrissey,

Harriet Walter and Maxine Peake

Today the We Stand With Shaker campaign launches a new initiative, Fast For Shaker, in which celebrities, MPs and members of the public are being encouraged to show solidarity with Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, by undertaking a hunger strike for a minimum of 24 hours. The initiative starts on Thursday 15th October.

The website is here.

There will be a press launch on Thursday 15th October at 1pm, in Old Palace Yard, by the George V statue, opposite the Houses of Parliament, which MPs and other supporters of the campaign will be attending.

Shaker was told on 25th September that he will be released and returned to his family in the UK after being held for nearly 14 years without charge or trial, but 30 days’ notice must be given to Congress before any prisoner can be freed from Guantánamo, and in the meantime he has embarked on a hunger strike protesting his constant and ongoing abuse. He fears that due to his weakened state he won’t live to see his family again.

The hunger strike is intended to show solidarity with Shaker, to encourage him to give up his own hunger strike, and to keep up the pressure for his release. He could be freed as early as 24th October, but there is no guarantee he will be freed immediately.

Those taking part are choosing a day on which to stage a hunger strike, with celebrities and MPs already scheduled to fast through to the end of the month, if necessary. Supporters have pledged that they will continue to hunger strike until he is freed.

Those who wish to fast in solidarity with Shaker can make a pledge to do so on the website, and are encouraged to take a photo with a downloadable poster and to send it to us to be posted on the website.

Fast For Shaker is supported by Reprieve, and, in the US, Witness Against Torture and Code Pink are also mobilising supporters to become involved in the hunger strike.

Shaker Aamer’s family said, “Thanks you all so much for taking part if this fasting. We are touched. Our family we will be jointing in the fasts with all of you. Let’s all bring Shaker home.”

John McDonnell MP, Shadow Chancellor and the founder and co-chair of the Shaker Aamer Parliamentary Group, said, “I stand in solidarity with Shaker in the determined hope that he is released soon to return to his family.”

Andy Worthington, co-director of the We Stand With Shaker campaign, said, “After the great news that Shaker Aamer is to be released from Guantánamo, we were all disturbed to discover that he is on a hunger strike, and wanted to show solidarity with him, and to encourage him to give up his hunger strike. We very much hope that he will be released at the end of the 30-day period required by Congress before prisoners can be freed, but we will continue with the hunger strike if he is not. After nearly 14 years in US custody, treated brutally and never charged or tried, Shaker needs to be back with his family in London.”

Joanne MacInnes, co-director of the We Stand With Shaker campaign, said, “I hope our Fast For Shaker will give him a great boost knowing that so many of us, MPs, campaigners, Muslim leaders, artists and the public care deeply what happens to him. We want to send a message to Shaker and the authorities at Guantánamo that we will not tolerate the abuse and humiliation of Shaker and other prisoners. We have his back! And we expect to have him returned no later than the 25th – hopefully a bit stronger mentally and physically because of our act of solidarity. We hope he lets us take over his protest allowing him to get better.”

Note: At the time of writing, other high-profile fasters include the MPs Andy Slaughter (Labour), Tania Mathias (Conservative), Clive Lewis (Labour) and Tom Brake (Liberal Democrat), the cross-bench peer Lord Hylton, the comedian Sara Pascoe, Medea Benjamin of Code Pink, the musicians David Knopfler and Charlie Winston, the US actor Ed Asner, former Guantánamo guard Brandon Neely, Todd Pierce, Army Maj. (retired), former military defense attorney in the military commissions at Guantánamo, Coleen Rowley, retired FBI Agent and former Minneapolis Division Legal Counsel, journalist Yvonne Ridley and neurologist and human rights campaigner Dr. David Nicholl.

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.

Fan of Shakira, Taylor Swift and Game of Thrones Asks Review Board to Free Him from Guantánamo, As an Afghan is Approved for Release

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

Last week, Mansoor al-Zahari, a Guantánamo prisoner from Yemen, who has embraced western culture, becoming a fan of Shakira, Taylor Swift and Game of Thrones, became the 19th prisoner to have his case reviewed by a Periodic Review Board — the review process, established two years ago, to review the cases of all the prisoners not facing trials (just ten of the 114 men still held) and not already approved for release by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established shortly after taking office in January 2009 (43 others).

The PRBs consist 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, and, since January 2014, they have approved the release of 14 men — and have only approved the ongoing detention of two others. The process is moving far too slowly — 50 others are awaiting reviews, and at the current rate the first round of reviews will not be completed until 2020 at the earliest. In addition, of the 14 approved for release, just three have been released — in part because, like 37 of those approved for release by the task force but still held, six of the 11 approved for release by the PRBs but still held are Yemenis, and the entire US establishment is unwilling to repatriate Yemenis, because of the security situation in Yemen, and third countries must be found that are prepared to offer them new homes.

Mohammed Kamin is approved for release

However, it is progress, and on October 7 Mohammed Kamin, an Afghan accused of aiding the anti-US insurgency, whose case was reviewed in August, became the 14th prisoner to be recommended for release. The review board, concluding that “continued law of war detention of the detainee does not remain necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States,” stated that they “appreciated [his] high degree of candor regarding his past activities and acknowledgement of mistakes that led to his detention,” noted that he “has been one of the more compliant detainees at Guantánamo and there is an absence of evidence that the detainee has expressed extremist views while in the camps,” and also “considered the presence of family and tribal support available to[him] upon transfer, [his] strong desire to return to his family, [and] the absence of information that [he] harbors anti-American sentiments.” They also “found him credible in his desire to pursue nonextremist goals.”

In a press release, Kamin’s lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights stated that he “was told of the result during an unclassified phone call,” and said, “I cannot tell you how happy I am. I sometimes dream of being free, and am so happy; then I wake up in this facility, and have a different feeling.”

CCR also noted, “Advocates have cited picking up the pace of the PRBs as one of the key elements to closing Guantánamo before President Obama leaves office,” and Senior Managing Attorney Shayana Kadidal said, “As the president reviews his plan for closing Guantánamo, he should accelerate the Periodic Review process to determine the feasibility of transferring more men out of the prison. Clearing Mr. Kamin for release was the right decision. It is also the right decision for numerous other men who remain trapped in indefinite detention at Guantánamo.”

He also said, “The PRBs have cleared 14 of the 16 detainees whose cases they reviewed, which shows that the group of men who supposedly ‘cannot be tried but are too dangerous to release’ is really a null set.”

Mansoor al-Zahari asks to be freed

Last week (on September 29), it was the turn of Mansoor al-Zahari, also identified as Mansoor al-Warifi or, to the Periodic Review Board, Abdul Rahman Ahmed or Mansur Ahmad Saad al-Dayfi (ISN 441), to seek his release via a PRB. Just 22 years old when he was seized in Afghanistan, where he had briefly been, at most, a lowly foot soldier for the Taliban, he is now 36, and even the government accepts that he is insignificant. The unclassified summary for his PRB states that he “probably was a low-level fighter who was aligned with al-Qa’ida, although it is unclear whether he actually joined that group. He traveled to Afghanistan in mid-2001, trained at an al-Qa’ida camp, and was wounded by a coalition airstrike after the 9/11 attacks. Afghan forces captured him in late 2001 and imprisoned him at the Qala-i-Janghi fortress, where he probably did not play a significant role in the subsequent prisoner uprising” (see here for further details). The government also noted that “his behavior has improved since late 2012, and since early 2013 he has expressed nonextremist goals for his life after detention.”

In letters over the summer to Carlos Warner, a Federal Public Defender who has been representing him for seven years, Mansoor’s enthusiasm and sensitivity were very clearly revealed.

In one letter, he praises “the lovely gorgeous troublemaker Taylor Swift,” and in another calls Shakira “a unique singer and dancer,” and asks Warner to send his “best regards” to her. That same letter was titled, “Winter is coming” — a reference to Game of Thrones — which he liked, although all the bloodshed made him feel sick. He also read a book about Martin Luther King, and stated that he was “a great person” who “dedicated his life for what he believed it was right, he fought against suppression, racism and injustice with love and peace, and these two are the most powerful weapons can be used.”

In another letter, he was sorrowful about the state of the world. “WHAT IS HAPPENING TO US AS HUMAN BEING?” he asks, “and for how long are we going to continue acting in such a way as nothing is happening around us?!! When I watch the news sometimes, I cry because the world that I knew once doesn’t exist anymore. All I can see only wasting of human lives everywhere, wars, chaos and distraction. And no one is doing anything about it as if the matter doesn’t concern us.”

Mansoor’s story is not only interesting because of his letters. Although the Bush administration tried hard –and with considerable success — to encourage the US public not to inquire about the men held at Guantánamo, and to accept, instead, that they were “the worst of the worst,” many stories have emerged over the years, and when an opportunity arises for the spotlight to focus on a prisoner, it often turns out that they have a fascinating story.

Mansoor is no exception. Below I’m cross-posting the opening statements to the PRB of his personal representatives (military personnel appointed to represent him), and of one of his lawyers, Beth Jacob, who works for a law firm in New York, and her account is particularly fascinating, revealing, as it does, that Mansoor, who had railed against his imprisonment for many years — leading to his classification as one of the prisoners who were “too dangerous to release” but could not be charged — was completely transformed after he met Andy Hart, a Federal Defender in Ohio, who sadly died two years ago. As Beth Jacob describes it, “Andy encouraged Mansoor to take classes and learn English, and this opened up a whole new world” — of the English language and US culture. As well as liking Taylor Swift, Shakira and Game of Thrones, Mansoor “enjoys watching US sitcoms” and Christopher Nolan movies, and “likes Little House on the Prairie, because it reminds him of his very rural home with few modern conveniences.”

Carlos Warner explained more about Andy Hart — and about Mansoor —  in a letter to the board last month, which he forwarded to me. Explaining that he understood that Mansoor “is not being held for what he allegedly did prior to his detainment, as much as for his conduct while being detained at Guantánamo,” he added, “The allegations leading to his detention are exceptionally if not laughably weak.”

Warner also acknowledged that “between 2002 and 2008 Mansoor was not a model detainee,” and added, “When I met Mansoor in 2008-2009, he was a very angry man who professed his innocence and who waited six years to see a lawyer. He spoke no English and did not understand why he was detained, what legal process was ahead or what his prospects for release were.”

Warner added that, at the time, he found it difficult to connect with Mansoor, in part because he “viewed Guantánamo as a legalistic problem,” whereas now he recognizes that it “has nothing to do with legalities or courts,” and states, “I now see that it is impossible to legally ‘win’ no matter how innocent a client may be.” Andy Hart, however, “approached Guantánamo from a humanitarian perspective.” He not only taught Mansoor English; he also learned Arabic in return. As a result, as Warner stated in the letter, “Mansoor now speaks and writes perfect English. Andy encouraged Mansoor to grow while detained and not to waste his life in a cycle of anger. I witnessed Mansoor’s transformation first-hand, and like to think Andy played a major role in opening new perspectives on Mansoor’s detention to Mansoor … Andy encouraged Mansoor to avail himself of every program or opportunity available to him in Guantánamo. Mansoor, operating off faith, friendship or both, did exactly that — and the results are outstanding.”

He has now, Warner notes, become “a model detainee from the government’s perspective.”

Below are the statements from Mansoor’s PRB, which I hope you have time to read, and that you will share this article if you find it useful. I very much hope that Mansoor will be approved for release, but more than that I hope that the Obama administration will soon find new homes for the many Yemenis approved for release who are still held, because otherwise being approved for release means nothing, and is, instead, a cruelty that would make even a dictator blanch.

Periodic Review Board Initial Hearing, 29 Sep 2015

Abdul Rahman Ahmed, ISN 441

Personal Representative Opening Statement

Good morning ladies and gentlemen, we are the Personal Representatives for Mr. Abdul Rahman Ahmed, whom we address as Mansoor. While working together and preparing for his board, Mansoor has been very enthusiastic, cooperative and forthcoming. He has been looking forward to meeting with you and answering your questions.

During his detention, Mansoor seized many opportunities to educate himself on different subjects as shown by the exhibits submitted in his case file and has earned his GED. This proves he is an excellent and serious student dedicated to advancing his knowledge and improving himself. His contribution to the Yemen Milk & Honey feasibility study and business plan combined with his ability to learn English demonstrates his potential to succeed as a business owner in almost any country. He is an energetic self-starter and resourceful self-learner. Mansoor is ready to begin a new life. build a career, and start a family. He is willing to go to any country that allows him to accomplish these goals while continuing his education. Prior to his detention, he is remembered by the residents in his native village as being a well-behaved and friendly boy.

The teachers, elders, and sheiks in the village speak highly of his academic abilities and peaceful behavior. Despite the challenges and circumstances at Guantánamo, Mansoor has maintained a positive attitude and been cooperative with camp staff which is evident by his current location, communal living. He schedules his day with constructive activities in order to continue growing and maturing. He will show you today that he is no longer a significant threat to the U.S. and is ready to be transferred so that he may start a new life as a business owner, husband, and father.

In closing, I’d like to mention Mansoor’s spirited and dialectic personality because it kept our meetings productive, educational, and even enjoyable at times. Never once however, was he disrespectful to our mission, goals, and authority.

Thank you again for the opportunity to share these opening remarks. We would now like to defer to Mansoor’s Private Counsel for her opening statement.

Periodic Review Board Initial Hearing, 29 Sep 2015

Abdul Rahman Ahmed, ISN 441

Private Counsel Opening Statement

I am Beth Jacob, private counsel for Mansoor Ahmed Rahman Said al Warifi.

I would like to give you a little background about myself, so you can have context to consider my comments about Mansoor. Shortly after law school, I became a prosecutor in the New York City District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan, where I worked for eight years. I was in the Rackets and Frauds Bureaus, investigating and prosecuting organized crime, official corruption, white collar crime, large scale tax evasion and major financial frauds. Along the way, I handled some street crime cases as well.

Some years after I left the District Attorney’s office, I defended the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey — the owner of the World Trade Center complex — in the litigations arising out of the events of September 11, 2001. On a pro bono basis, I also helped victims of that attack make claims against insurers and obtain compensation from the fund established by the United States government for that purpose. Now, most of my work is representing generic pharmaceutical companies in patent infringement litigation against brand pharmaceutical companies. Along with others at my previous firm and my current firm, I have represented men detained at Guantánamo since 2005.

Turning to the immediate question before you: Who is Mansoor today, and what are his attitudes toward the United States? Is there any reason why he should remain detained? Mansoor now is a man who has acquired some education and maturity; he is pretty Westernized and more familiar with much of Western popular culture than I am. He speaks English well, rapidly, and at length about everything from his own experiences, to his favorite singers and TV shows, to his hopes for the future, to his philosophy about life. He gets along with the guards —  while I was there a few weeks ago, one of them gave him a list of recommended books — and is housed in a block for compliant detainees who are comfortable with Western culture. At my first meeting, my female colleague and I walked in wearing scarves over our hair as a courtesy. Mansoor stood up, held out his hand for a handshake, and told us to take the scarves off, they were not necessary.

Mansoor will tell you that his attitudes changed completely starting in 2009, when he was moved from pretty harsh circumstances into communal living and was given a lawyer. That lawyer was Andy Hart, an Ohio federal defender who died several years ago. Andy encouraged Mansoor to take classes and learn English, and this opened up a whole new world. Mansoor was able to see America through American TV and English language writings, and even became a fan of American culture. He likes listening to Taylor Swift. He enjoys watching US sitcoms. He likes Little House on the Prairie. because it reminds him of his very rural home with few modern conveniences. He enjoys Christopher Nolan movies.

In the past six years, Mansoor has taken advantage of every opportunity for education. These studies have been as serious as was possible — not only crafts and health, but also the GED (high school equivalency) program, and languages (he learned English and now has started Spanish). The books he requested include a history of the United States and computer technology, because he would like to go into IT when he is released from Guantánamo — a very realistic and pragmatic choice. As do most of the men down here, he hopes to get married — but, as he will tell you, his view of marriage is pretty modem: He is looking for a wife who will be a friend and a companion, well educated and able to help him make his new life.

Mansoor also is one of the group who put together the Yemen Milk and Honey Farm business proposal, which I gather you are familiar with. This work shows an impressive ability to learn new subjects, to put them together in a realistic and practical way, and to persevere. In addition to its content, the presentation itself is impressive.

Mansoor’s first goal when he is transferred from Guantánamo is to go to college. He actually tried to apply to colleges a few years ago, with the help of his lawyer Andy Hart and the Red Cross. but it is not possible while he is detained here. He is looking forward to a future which is not that different from many young Western men — go to college, go into IT, start a family, start a business.

I have gotten to know Mansoor not only from a half-dozen all-day meetings over the past two months, but also from reading his letters to his habeas counsel over the past six years and talking with his habeas counsel. His current attitudes are not new or assumed for this board. We have asked to submit copies of one or two letters he wrote which demonstrate this.

I also have gotten to know Mansoor from the statements in his support from his family and village. Almost four dozen people from his village sent video statements through short cell phone clips and several others sent writings. We have submitted about a dozen of the videos for you to watch — we can provide them all if you like — and transcriptions of them all. These were collected over a year ago, without lawyer input and long before this hearing was scheduled. Each is very short, but their individual content is not the point. Two things come clear from the collection. The first is that Mansoor has the strong support not only of his immediate and extended family, but also of his entire community. He has a stack of letters from his immediate family and has had regular telephone calls with them since those were allowed.

The simple fact that his brother was able to get so many people to speak on behalf of Mansoor demonstrates that there is a strong and committed community which will provide moral and practical support for Mansoor once he is released. And Mansoor appreciates this and feels strong ties in return. I was with him while we played all of the video clips for him — it took over an hour.

I saw his reaction, and he became emotional, actually tearing up when he saw his father speak and as his friends. family, former teachers, and community leaders all stood to express their support.

The second thing is that in these videos, everyone agreed that Mansoor had been a good student, very smart. and very well-behaved in school. He was not a trouble-maker. I would like to comment specifically on the last two videos that we gave you to watch — an elderly couple. This is a couple in straitened circumstances who Mansoor helped out when he was living at his home. I think when you watch the videos and read the statements, you will agree with this couple’s conclusion: Mansoor was a good boy.

The evidence before you indicates that the good boy they knew has grown into a good man. He has been here for over 13 years, and over that time has matured. He is now a man who is eager to learn about other cultures, and who is able to appreciate attitudes and lifestyles different from his own. He wants to continue his education, and if given a choice would prefer to be sent to a country where that will be possible, and where be can continue to enjoy the Western culture that he has gotten to know and enjoy.

Mansoor is willing to cooperate with any rehabilitation process. He understands that everything cannot happen immediately, and that it will take time before he can create this future. He has shown a willingness to work toward a realistic goal that takes time to achieve — the Milk & Honey Farm prospectus, learning English, taking the courses of the GED curriculum.

I have seen no sense of entitlement in him, no sense of resentment or any grudges. To the contrary, he is grateful for the educational opportunities be has been given here, he is friendly with the guards, he is appreciative of the help of his counsel and his personal representatives.

As his Personal Counsel and his habeas co-counsel, my firm and I stand ready to assist and support Mansoor to make a new and productive life after Guantánamo. I have been through the college application process recently with my children, so perhaps that is one way we can be of help. We also hope to be able to assist in his acclimation to his new country and to life outside of prison.

Whatever problematic statements or activities may be in his past — and we are not here to go through that — in the present Mansoor is poised to be a productive member of society. He presents no threat to the safety of the United States, and he should be cleared for transfer.

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.

Former Guantánamo Prisoner Betrayed by Morocco: Are Diplomatic Assurances Worthless?

I’ve been so busy with the news of the planned release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, that I have a few other stories to catch up on, one being the case of Younous Chekkouri (aka Younus Chekhouri), a Moroccan who was repatriated on September 16, but is now imprisoned and awaiting a trial, in defiance of the diplomatic assurances agreed between the US and Moroccan governments prior to his release.

Immediately after his release, as I wrote about here, Younous was imprisoned incommunicado, in an unknown location. His brother was then allowed to speak to him, and he “said he sounded OK and in good spirits.” However, on September 20, AFP reported that “he was under investigation on suspicion of terror-related offences and would appear before a public prosecutor,” noting that, in Morocco, terror suspects “can be held without charge for 48 hours, which is renewable once,” and Younous “could therefore appear in court on Monday [September 21].”

By September 21, he had has been “placed in ‘provisional detention’ in Morocco’s notorious Salé prison without bail.” He had been allowed to meet with a local lawyer, but the news was not good. Reprieve noted that he was “facing the possibility of charges of ‘attempts to disrupt the security of the country,’” which Cori Crider, his lawyer in London, 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.”

She also said that, at a hearing two weeks ago, “the judge declined to release him, setting another hearing Oct. 22 to decide whether to proceed with a prosecution” based on what Charlie Savage of the Times described as “his suspected conduct before his capture in Afghanistan in 2001.”

“We are extremely concerned that the government of Morocco’s explicit promises about the way it would treat Yunis [a reference to the name by which he is identified by the US, Yunis Shokuri] have not yet been honored,” Crider said, urging the Obama administration to “escalate” discussions with Morocco “to the highest level.”

Noting the importance of the treatment of Younous Chekkouri, Charlie Savage stated, “The credibility of diplomatic assurances about how prisoners will be treated is a key to the Obama administration’s ability to transfer lower-level detainees out of the prison, which President Obama wants to close before he leaves office in 2017.”

He also noted that, although lawyers for Guantánamo prisoners “usually cannot speak about diplomatic assurances related to the transfers of their clients because of a court-imposed protective order, unless the executive branch grants permission,” Reprieve made a sealed filing two weeks ago that was “apparently related to discussing diplomatic assurances in public and in Moroccan court.” Last Wednesday, the Justice Department issued a sealed filing in response, and on Thursday, Reprieve said it “was now permitted to say the following”:

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 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 quoted from below, “essentially eviscerated every allegation” the government made against him.

Between 2008 (when the Supreme Court granted the prisoners constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights) and 2010, judges granted the habeas corpus petitions of 38 prisoners, but the appeals court reversed or vacated nine of these rulings, and the judges also changed the rules, insisting that the lower court had to regard any evidence presented by the government as reliable unless lawyers for the prisoners could prove otherwise, with the result that no further habeas petitions were granted.

In an unsealed filing, Reprieve noted that Salé prison “is infamous for torturing prisoners,” and was the location where “the Moroccans tortured Noureddine Nafia,” Younous’s brother-in-law, creating “false evidence” about the GICM (Groupe Islamique Combattant du Maroc), a group described as “fictive” and as a “supposedly Islamist group,” even though it has a “colonial French name.”

Reprieve also explained that they had “learned that Mr. Chekkouri now faces possible prosecution on the basis of the same spurious allegations that were withdrawn against him in this very case half a decade ago,” adding that “this is inconsistent with the course of events that Petitioner reasonably expected when he decided, with counsel, not to challenge his refoulement to Morocco. None of this was meant to be necessary. Urgent action to ensure that Petitioner’s reasonable expectations are met, along with urgent release of exculpatory information that is on record with this Court, is now Mr. Chekkouri’s only chance of avoiding torture and years more of prison based on false allegations.”

Reprieve also noted that no “exculpatory information” has ever been released to Younous, despite the fact that he has been asking for documents to be released for nearly six years. As Reprieve noted, “The only possible explanation for this delay is that Respondents have devoted effectively no resource to the declassification of these pleadings. The Government is entirely able to process a public version of these documents on the necessary time frame; it is simply a question of prioritization. With Petitioner now in a Salé cell facing, effectively, an unfair retrial of the same allegations, it is vital that he have access to as much defense material as possible as soon as possible.”

Reprieve also noted, “This is also not the first time Petitioner has raised the risk of an unfair trial against him on the basis of long-disproven allegations. Petitioner and the Government have long known of this risk for the simple reason that it happened to another Moroccan man: Said Boujaadia. Mr. Boujaadia (formerly ISN 150, a former Reprieve client) was repatriated from Guantánamo Bay to Morocco on April 30, 2008. He was subsequently prosecuted by Moroccan authorities on the basis of what he reported were near-identical allegations as those he had faced in Guantánamo. In the subsequent trial he had no meaningful access to any exculpatory evidence, and a Moroccan court sentenced Mr. Boujaadia to ten years’ imprisonment.”

They added, “Here the matter is even more stark than it was in Mr. Boujaadia’s case: Mr. Boujaadia had been a defendant in the flawed military commissions [in the trial of Salim Hamdan], but had not had the allegations against him properly tested in federal court. Mr. Chekkouri, however, has tested those allegations. He has had a full hearing in habeas corpus. That test of evidence essentially eviscerated every allegation. Petitioner merely seeks this Court’s assistance in making his case a second time, as he will have to as matters current[ly] proceed. There is something deeply un-American about a process where the government may level accusations against Petitioner in public, and then insist that all “evidence” that might refute this nonsense should remain secret.”

In conclusion, Reprieve also stated, “Although the habeas hearings in this case were some years ago, the Court may recall that the Government’s original Factual Return bore as much resemblance to the final case that the government pressed as a bull mastiff to a Chihuahua. There is no need to debate the obvious fact that the ‘evolution’ of the evidence would assist any defense of Petitioner to demonstrate that he was no part of any terrorist group, Moroccan or otherwise.”

They added, “Time is of the essence. It is apparent that the allegations made against Mr. Chekkouri in Morocco now, for which he may shortly be forced before a patently unfair trial, will overlap to a considerable extent with the earlier, disproven case against him. This is precisely what happened to Mr. Boujaadia. Counsel is urgently seeking to obtain further detail about the precise nature of the evidence against Mr. Chekkouri from Morocco, but local counsel have not yet been permitted to see the prosecutorial file.”

Unfortunately, but predictably, the Justice Department responded by urging the judge not to grant Younous’s request, in a long-winded and obstructive manner that will not be surprising to anyone who has studied closely the Justice Department’s relentless efforts not to do anything to help with the president’s planned closure of Guantánamo.

If you can bear it, check out the following passages for confirmation:

The Guantanamo habeas litigation has involved the filing of many hundreds of classified filings or documents, many of them hundreds of pages in length and involving numerous classified exhibits. The interagency process for preparing public versions of habeas case filings involves several federal agencies’ classification review teams and is both time-consuming and resource intensive. Each page of these documents must be closely scrutinized by multiple agencies before a public version can be created. The teams also perform numerous tasks that must be accomplished concurrently along with the classification review of habeas case filings. Specifically, the same personnel are responsible for an extensive portfolio of work that requires them to review and process an enormous volume of material needed to support the ongoing Guantanamo habeas litigation as well as the prosecutions (both pending and those still contemplated but not yet filed) before military commissions administered by OMC, and the reviews and hearings now being conducted by the PRB. They must assist in reviewing and clearing evidence for the habeas litigation and commission proceedings and also assist in processing motions, briefs, opinions, orders, videos, and transcripts of proceedings, for public release in federal district courts. Additionally, certain of the agency teams handle the review and production of detainee-related material requested under the Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”) and are involved with several detainee-related FOIA suits in litigation before this and other federal district courts, as well as other matters. The priorities in these classification reviews are often subject to tight deadlines and at times conflict.

Also, the creation of public versions of past filings involves more than merely redacting information marked, or based on information marked, as classified; rather, in order to maximize the information disclosed on the public record, the review involves determinations of whether any classified information in those filings can be declassified through a robust, multi-tiered classification review process. Such declassification review is both a resource-intensive and a time-consuming process, with a significant number of documents in the Guantanamo cases yet to be fully reviewed as a result of the many burdensome and competing priorities within the agencies’ classification review teams’ areas of responsibility.

In conclusion, I think Younous deserves much better treatment than the Justice Department is prepared to offer, and I wish Reprieve every success in persuading the Moroccan government to abandon its case against him.

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 Shaker Aamer, the Closure of Guantánamo and His Band The Four Fathers with Peter B. Collins

Located in the Bay Area of California, near San Francisco, Peter B. Collins is a great progressive radio host, and someone I have known for many years. He has interviewed me about Guantánamo numerous times over the years (see here for our interviews from the last three years), and interviews with him are always particularly satisfying — and for listeners, hopefully, very informative — because he is very knowledgeable and because the shows last for an average of an hour, allowing us time to really delve into the multi-faceted injustices of Guantánamo and the “war on terror.”

On this occasion, Peter wanted to speak to me on the back of the news that Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, is to be freed after nearly 14 years in US custody without charge or trial, despite the fact that he was approved for release under President Bush in 2007, and under President Obama in 2009, by a high-level, inter-agency review process.

Peter generously acknowledged the role played in this long-overdue development by the We Stand With Shaker campaign that I launched with the activist Joanne MacInnes last November, which has involved celebrities and MPs standing with a giant inflatable figure of Shaker, and he also promoted my band The Four Fathers and our ‘Song for Shaker Aamer‘, which was used in the We Stand With Shaker campaign video, and which I made available as a download last week — also making available our album ‘Love and War,’ which features the song, as a download or on CD.

Peter and I also talked about the fact that Shaker’s release, when it comes — hopefully no more than 30 days after the announcement ten days ago — will still leave 113 other men at Guantánamo, 52 of whom have, like Shaker, been approved for release, and how most of the other prisoners will never be put on trial, and must either be released — something that the latest review process, the Periodic Review Boards, are currently addressing — or moved to the US mainland if President Obama is finally to fulfill the promise to close Guantánamo that he made on his second day in office back in January 2009.

I do recommend the whole show if Guantánamo, and Shaker Aamer’s case, is of interest to you. You will need a day pass — at a cost of just $1 — to listen to it, or you can also support Peter for $5, $10 or more a month, or $50 for a year. The show will be free to listen to in a fortnight, and I’ll try to make sure I publicize it, but $1 really isn’t much to pay to support Peter’s very worthwhile broadcasting.

This is how Peter described the show on his website, where a short free preview clip is available:

British journalist Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files, returns to talk about the announcement of the release of Shaker Aamer, the last Brit held at Guantánamo, the result of a creative activist campaign led by Worthington.

The news that President Obama called British Prime Minister Cameron on September 24 to notify him that Shaker Aamer will be released after 13 years in Guantánamo is a major achievement with Worthington and many Britons who joined the effort to win his freedom.  Using a gimmick — a large, inflatable Shaker figure in an orange jumpsuit — and the support of pop stars like Roger Waters, Sting and Peter Gabriel, the group was tireless in drawing attention to the case.

While savoring the moment, Worthington is appropriately guarded, waiting to see Shaker actually returned to England. And he remains concerned about the slow process of releasing cleared prisoners and Obama’s goal of closing Gitmo before he leaves office.

In this wide-ranging conversation, we talk about the process for reviewing and releasing prisoners, and the many obstacles, mostly political. We agree that Obama must show stronger leadership, that at most about two dozen inmates, who have been charged or will be charged, should be transferred to military prisons in the US. Thorny issues remain regarding about 40 Yemenis who have been cleared for release and 25-30 men who are told they will be held indefinitely without charge or trial.

We open the podcast with part of a song by Andy’s group, The Four Fathers.  You can check out their tunes here, and any downloads will support Worthington’s work, with 25% of proceeds from “Song for Shaker” going to the Aamer family.

Note: While looking for an image to accompany this article, I stumbled across a video of me calling for Shaker’s release outside 10 Downing Street on February 14 this year, taken by Vivienne Westwood and posted on YouTube, which I hope is of interest:

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.

Video: Andy Worthington’s Band The Four Fathers Play ‘Tory Bullshit Blues’ Unplugged

Yesterday, to coincide with the Conservative Party Conference, at which Jeremy Hunt has been causing anger by telling hard-working lower-paid voters that they need to work harder — like the famously exploited Chinese people, for example — rather than get tax credits to top up their government-defended inadequate pay, I posted ‘Tory Bullshit Blues,’ a new video on the YouTube channel of my band The Four Fathers, which I launched last week with a version of ‘Song for Shaker Aamer,’ about the last British resident in the US prison at Guantánamo, played by myself and my fellow guitarist/singer in the band, Richard Clare.

‘Tory Bullshit Blues’ is my defence of socialism over the selfishness and greed that has typified the Conservative Party since Margaret Thatcher — and it also challenges the racism of UKIP, blaming immigrants, the unemployed and the disabled for the problems caused by the bankers who were responsible for the global economic crash of 2008, but have not been held accountable for their greed and their crimes.

I first released the version of the song by the whole band — a rattling rock and roller — on Soundcloud before the General Election, and it is also featured on the debut album by The Four Fathers, ‘Love and War,’ which we released as a CD in July, and to download (and also as a CD) two weeks ago.

You can buy ‘Tory Bullshit Blues,’ or any of the other original songs on the album, for 60p ($0.93), or more if you wish, or you can buy the whole eight-track album as a download for £4.50 ($7) or on CD, with two extra tracks, for £7 ($10.85). As with ‘Tory Bullshit Blues,’ you can pay more if you wish for any of the songs or for the album.

The album also features four other original songs of mine — Fighting Injustice (a rousing new roots reggae anthem defending the state provision of services like the NHS and opposing the criminal bankers and the greed of the housing crisis), 81 Million Dollars (calling for accountability for those responsible for the US torture program, including the two CIA contractors, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, who were paid $81m for implementing the program), Sweet Love and Ever After (a love song) and City of Dreams (a countryish lament for the London destroyed by Margaret Thatcher) — plus Rebel Soldier (the old folk song which I gave the roots reggae treatment many years ago), and Richard’s love song, Sea Shanty for Helena.

Richard and I played the acoustic version of the song at my house on September 19, especially for my friend Todd Pierce, a retired military defense attorney who represented prisoners at Guantánamo, and it was filmed by Todd, along with ‘Song for Shaker Aamer’ and another song that I’ll be making available next week.

Please subscribe to the channel if you want to see more, and in the months to come I expect to make more videos available.

Based in Lewisham, in south east London, The Four Fathers are, as the name suggests, four dads — myself on lead vocals and guitar, Richard Clare on guitar and backing vocals, Bren Horstead on drums and percussion and Andrew Fifield on flute and harmonica — plus, last but by no means least, Louis Sills-Clare, Richard’s son, on bass. Do get in touch if you’re interested in having us play at a venue you run or an event you’re organising.

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.

Shaker Aamer’s Latest Words from Guantánamo; On a Hunger Strike, Fearful That He Won’t See His Family Again

Yesterday, just ten days after the announcement that Shaker Aamer is finally to be freed from Guantánamo and returned to his family, was quite a disturbing day for those of us who care about Shaker and his health, as the Mail on Sunday ran a seven-page feature on Shaker that centered on his lawyer Clive Stafford Smith’s report of his latest words from Guantánamo, via a recent phone call.

Shaker stated, as the Mail on Sunday put it, that “he is on a hunger strike in protest at an assault by guards, who, he says, forced him to give blood samples,” and that he is “still being subjected to brutal physical abuse” by the authorities, and he also expressed his fears that he will not make it out of Guantánamo alive. As he said in his own words: “I know there are people who do not want me ever to see the sun again. It means nothing that they have signed papers, as anything can happen before I get out. So if I die, it will be the full responsibility of the Americans.”

This is rather bleak, and it made those of us who worry about Shaker’s health very unsettled. In my conversations with people yesterday, we also reflected on how the news must have been very disturbing for Shaker’s family. However, it is not all darkness. In another key passage, not picked up by the headline writers, Shaker said, powerfully, in words that illuminate his passion for justice and the tenacity that so many of us have admired over the years, “I do not want to be a hero. I am less than a lot of people who suffered in this place. But all this time I stood for certain principles: for human rights, freedom of speech, and democracy. I cannot give up.”

Also included in the newspaper’s coverage were excerpts from Shaker’s 24,000-word statement about his long ordeal, which he provided to Metropolitan Police detectives who visited him at Guantánamo two years ago in response to a court case in the UK in 2009 that involved allegations that he was abused by US personnel in Bagram, Afghanistan, while UK agents were in the room. I’ll cross-post a large excerpt published by the Mail on Sunday in a follow-up article, but a key section, singled out for particular attention by the newspaper, concerned Shaker’s role as a witness to the “extraordinary rendition” of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the head of an independent training camp, not aligned with al-Qaeda, who, after being placed in a coffin, was flown by the CIA to Egypt, where, under torture, he made a false claim about a connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, regarding chemical weapons, that was later used to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003.

I have written extensively about al-Libi over the years — focusing on the extraction and use of the “confession” as a key piece of evidence in the case for the prosecution of Dick Cheney for treason, as discussed in my April 2009 article, Even In Cheney’s Bleak World, The Al-Qaeda-Iraq Torture Story Is A New Low, although, as the Mail on Sunday notes, al-Libi’s treatment and his false confession could also “have grave consequences for Tony Blair and the troubled Chilcot Inquiry into the war.”

In May 2009, I also broke the story (in English) of al-Libi’s profoundly suspicious death (also see here), allegedly by committing suicide, after he had been shunted around various CIA ‘black sites,” including the one at Guantánamo, eventually being returned to Col. Gaddafi who imprisoned him in the notorious Abu Salim prison in Tripoli. Please also see my world exclusive article about al-Libi from June 2009, New Revelations About The Torture Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi.

The Conservative MP David Davis, the co-chair of the Shaker Aamer Parliamentary Group (founded last November by John McDonnell, the other co-chair, and now, of course, Labour’s shadow chancellor) responded to the news by stating that the revelations “‘massively strengthened’ the case for an independent inquiry into Britain’s alleged involvement in the systematic torture of terror suspects,” as the Mail on Sunday described it. Davis said, “The time has come for the Government to face up to Britain’s role in torture and rendition. Only by dealing with it can we restore our nation’s honour and integrity.”

Clive Stafford Smith also made a statement. “It may be that no one has suffered more at Guantánamo than Shaker Aamer, because he stood up for his rights and the rights of others — and for this he has constantly been punished,” he said, adding, “Mr. Cameron’s government likes to harp on about the need for people to take responsibility for their actions. Surely Britain must now accept its responsibility for this.”

Below are Shaker’s words, as delivered to Clive, and at the end of this article are excerpts — and further analysis — of Shaker’s account of the extraordinary rendition of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, and also an account by another of Shaker’s lawyers, Ramzi Kassem, a professor at the City University of New York School of Law, who, with his students, represents Shaker and other Guantánamo prisoners. Ramzi wrote of his visit to Guantánamo last week when he was able to break the news to Shaker of his impending release — news that didn’t register at first, so small had Shaker’s world become, and so stunted his hope. One he realized, however, Ramzi describes how “an impossibly large smile lit up his face and his gaze suddenly grew distant. A door had finally swung open, and he was looking ahead at everything that lay beyond.”

Shaker Aamer speaks from Guantánamo, October 1, 2015

I saw my kids in a dream three days ago. Not as they are today, but as they were when I last saw them, almost 14 years ago. The little children I knew and loved so much no longer exist: they have grown up. I have at least been able to see them: on a handful of rare occasions the Guantánamo authorities have let me talk to my family on a video call via Skype. But the images I have from those conversations are not what I saw in my dream.

The dream brought home to me the scale of the shock I’m about to face. Everything I once knew has changed, almost beyond recognition.

The kids need to see me as a strong father, but that is just not going to happen from the first second I get back. I don’t know how long it is going to be before I can begin to deal with the world out there, beyond the walls of Guantánamo. It may be a day. It may be a week. It may be longer. I just don’t know, just as I don’t know the date of my release. This ordeal won’t be over until it’s over.

I was first cleared for release eight years ago, yet here I still am. I still don’t believe that at last, I’m on my way home. That’s why my message for my wife and kids is: stay strong. Regardless whether it is next month, next year, or even in heaven that I am finally released to be with you, stay strong, because you need to be strong, not because you hear some news that I may be coming home, that may not even be true.

In here, I am laughing, I am joking, but I am also screaming. The wound I carry lies deep inside, and I know this wound will start gushing as soon as I leave this place. Don’t be fooled by my exterior. The reality is that I am a very sensitive person. The moment I touch freedom, 239 [Shaker’s Guantánamo prison number] is going to come back with a lot of issues, and I will need to solve them one by one.

To begin with, I need to re-acclimatise by spending time with my wife. I need to reclaim my personality: to put a name to my prison number.

I have so many people to thank for my freedom. First there are all the people who names begin with the letter J – which also stands for justice. So there is Johina, my beloved daughter. There is Joy Hurcombe, of the Save Shaker [Aamer] Campaign: for all these years she has stood up for me, and I am overwhelmed. There is Joanne MacInnes of We Stand with Shaker. And then there is Jane Ellison, my local MP. I know she is a Minister now, which means there are things she cannot do, but I know she has supported me all this time.

And there is also the Mail on Sunday, which has been campaigning for my release for years, and against the many injustices of Guantánamo since the month it first opened in January 2002. One of the first things I did when I was told I was coming home was to write an article for the paper to publish. I still hope it can be, but it has been held back by the military censor, and I don’t know if it will ever be cleared.

All these people need to be congratulated. The lawyers are doing a job that they swore to do. But these people who stood up for me all these years did not give up.

I say to them you did not do that wastefully. Your fight was for an innocent person. You did a great thing. May God reward you as you deserve for what you did. Our Prophet told us that if you do not thank people, you do not thank God. Words will never be enough, no matter what I say.

But for now, I am still detainee 239, and as I have so many times before, I am enduring abusive treatment. In turn I am protesting in the only way I can — through hunger strike. I am not going to stop this, and by the time I get home my condition will truly have deteriorated.

It started on August 3, when they came to me saying they wanted to check for tuberculosis. They have checked me for this many times before: they know I do not have it, but they said they were doing it to everyone. I told them: ‘Do the skin test’. They said, ‘No, we want blood’. I said, ‘Do the X-ray test’. ‘They said: ‘No, we want blood.’ I refused.

They demanded again. So finally they said they would bring the FCE [the Forcible Cell Extraction team, Guantánamo’s body-armoured specialist rapid reaction force, which has allegedly carried out hundreds of assaults on prisoners — Aamer included]. I said: ‘OK, bring the FCE’.

They came with the FCE. They tied me so freaking tight on the board when they forced me down. I shouted the legal formula — ‘My name is Shaker, I am telling you exactly that I do not want the blood test, I have the right to refuse it. Do you agree you are doing it by force?’

The nurse agreed she was taking it involuntarily. She was an oriental woman. They dragged my arm to one side, stuck in the needle and took four vials of my blood. I said that was too much. They took the blood, and sent me back to my cell.

Over the next two days, I discovered that nobody had blood taken but me. So they lied about doing a TB test on everyone. And even if they were singling me out, this does not explain why they needed four vials. Why did they take so much blood from me? And the TB test? They refused to tell me the result.

I quit eating from then on in protest. I lost 15lb the first week. Straight away they put me on the scales, not once but twice a week. I demanded: ‘Is this an experiment that you are doing on me?’ Last Tuesday I was 182lb. This Tuesday I was 174. Now, on Thursday, I am around 170.

Of course, everyone knows I am leaving. But I am only going to take what sustenance I need to keep alive, minimally alive. I will be very sick when I come back home. If anything happens to me before I do, it will be the Americans who are responsible. I am not going to do anything to myself. I know there are people who, even now, are working hard to keep me here.

I know there are people who do not want me ever to see the sun again. It means nothing that they have signed papers, as anything can happen before I get out. So if I die, it will be the full responsibility of the Americans.

The doctor came today [Thursday, October 1]. I told him: ‘Shame on you. If you have any shame you will never come by me.’ He brought a translator, a nurse, and an army paramedic to be witnesses, as he wanted to have witnesses that I was refusing whatever he came to say. I said: ‘You are the same doctor who was in Bagram, the same as in Kandahar and the same as every doctor in Guantánamo — I do not see the face, I see the uniform. You are a tool, you are not a true doctor. You want to write in your documents that you keep trying to help me but I refuse. If I die suddenly, you will say that I chose to die.’

Lately, I have become very interested in reading about Japanese war crimes in World War Two. The film ‘Unbroken‘ is about Louis Zamperini, an American captured by Japan. ‘They deprived us of our title to be prisoners of war so that they could do anything they wanted to us,’ he wrote then. ‘They enslaved us so that we were nothing.’

I could not believe this was 70 years ago. It was just the same as what the Americans have done to us — deprived us of the title of prisoners of war, and decided they can do what they want with us. The Americans treated us as badly as the Japanese did the Americans.

A few years after the war ended, the Americans forgave everyone and set their own Japanese prisoners free. They decided to forget about that time, as they wanted to be friends with Japan. Yet here we are at Guantánamo, 14 years later, and nobody is putting an end to all this.

I do not want to be a hero. I am less than a lot of people who suffered in this place. But all this time I stood for certain principles: for human rights, freedom of speech, and democracy. I cannot give up.

The irony is, I learnt to be this way from Americans. It was they who taught me to shout loudly if I want people to hear me. I went to America to learn this. When I was nine years old an American family from New York lived next to my house in Saudi Arabia. The father encouraged me to go to America to learn all those good things. My father said I should not go, so I said goodbye to him. He would not give me money to study. So I went to the US with $200 in my pocket. I worked hard. I had a bank account. I had a car. I did that by myself, inspired by the American way of life.

When I was kidnapped in Afghanistan at the end of 2001, I had a big smile on my face. The interrogator asked me why I was smiling. I told him, ‘Because you are Americans. You know I did nothing, so you’re going to send me home.’ How wrong I was. How much I have lost. But though I can barely grasp it, it seems that the belief I had then is finally going to come true.

Shaker Aamer’s recollections about Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi

The Mail on Sunday introduced its section on Shaker Aamer’s recollections about Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi by stating that his police statement “leads to one especially damning conclusion: that Britain must have known so-called intelligence that was used to justify the war in Iraq was based on evidence obtained under torture,” adding, “This conclusion will have grave implications for Tony Blair, his former Ministers, MI6, the Chilcot Inquiry and Scotland Yard. It also gives a chilling insight into why Aamer has been held so long in Guantánamo.”

As the Mail on Sunday described it, Shaker told the British detectives that “two British intelligence officers were present when Al-Libi was being abused, and when he was later rendered to Egypt,” a claim that, as far as I know, has not been made publicly before.

The newspaper also noted that al-Libi’s false confession — that Saddam Hussein “had supplied chemical and biological weapons to Al Qaeda terrorists, and trained them in their use,” came only after he was “locked in a tiny cage for more than 80 hours,” and was then “severely beaten.”

Shaker Aamer also told the detectives “how he was brought into a Bagram interrogation room where Al-Libi was present, tied to a chair,” because “[t]he interrogators apparently hoped that each man would give up information about the other, perhaps in the hope of securing more favourable treatment.”

In his statement, Shaker said, “I was a witness to the torture of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi in Bagram. His case seems to me to be particularly important, and my witnessing of it particularly relevant to my on-going detention. Because he was detained in November 2001, and I was one of the first five other prisoners in Bagram where he was being held, I was in a rather unique position as a witness to what was going on with him. He was there being abused at the same time I was. He was there being abused when the British came there. Indeed, I was taken into the room in the Bagram detention facility where he was being held. Clearly the fact that I was a witness to all this does not make the US want to let me free, for fear that I may be a witness to one of the most colossal mistakes of all those made in the last eleven years.”

The Mail on Sunday also explained that, since making his statement to the police, Shaker has also given further details to Clive Stafford Smith, who said that, “from his nearby cage, Aamer saw a coffin being taken into the interrogation room where he had seen Al-Libi. Later, he saw the coffin being taken out, and assumed the prisoner had died.”

He added that Shaker’s witnessing of these events “may well be the real reason why his release from Guantánamo has been delayed for so long.” As he put it, “Al-Libi’s torture and its disastrous consequences amount to the single most embarrassing event in the history of the war on terror.”

Ramzi Kassem describes breaking the news to Shaker of his impending release

It was not my first time walking up the dusty path to the gate of Camp Echo at Guantánamo. Over the past decade, in nearly forty trips to the prison, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve walked that way, heading to or from meetings with shackled clients.

But this was no ordinary client meeting. I had come to inform my client Shaker Aamer that, after fourteen years in captivity without charge, trial, or fair process, he was about to be set free and returned to his wife and their four children in Britain.

News had broken that morning that the U.S. Defense Secretary had forwarded notification to Congress of the U.S. government’s intent to transfer Shaker to Britain. Under U.S. law, that notification begins a thirty-day countdown. At the end of that period, around October 24th, the path will be clear to Shaker’s release. His return home could take place anytime on or after that date.

Still, the routine remained all too familiar. The soldiers riffled through my legal papers then ‘wanded’ me for metal contraband before escorting me through another set of clanking iron gates to one of the plywood shacks where attorney-client meetings take place in Guantánamo.

Shaker was sitting, shackled by one ankle to a steel loop jutting out of the shack’s flooring. He wore jumpsuit pants in signature Guantánamo orange. He had taken off the top, however, because of the tropical heat, and was in a sleeveless white undershirt. His beard thick and dark, his long hair braided neatly and resting over his right shoulder, Shaker also sported a knitted white Muslim prayer cap, off to the side. This was exactly how he wore his cap when we first met in that shack, almost four years earlier, in October 2011.

Shaker stood up to shake my hand and we exchanged customary holiday greetings as it was Eid al-Adha, the most important holiday on the Muslim calendar. I sat down, inhaled deeply, paused, and said, in Arabic: ‘Shaker, finally, the end of your ordeal seems near.’ I then explained that morning’s news and its implications as clearly as I could.

Shaker sat silently with a blank stare on his face. After a few, long seconds, he began to tell me about his prison-issued shoes, how they were falling apart, held together only by duct tape. He took off and held up the black sneakers, unraveling the tape. They were tattered and dismembered as a beggar’s. The Guantánamo prison administration had not replaced them since 2010.

It dawned on me that my news of his impending release didn’t register; it simply washed over him, leaving no trace. After fourteen endless years, the only normal reaction would be to grasp onto something he knew to be concrete and real: the problem of these shoes in this prison.

I decided to interrupt his disquisition about the shoes. ‘Shaker,’ I said, ‘please listen to me carefully.’ And I repeated everything I had shared earlier. Shaker looked at me, his eyes wide, and asked: ‘Are you being serious right now?’ Then an impossibly large smile lit up his face and his gaze suddenly grew distant. A door had finally swung open, and he was looking ahead at everything that lay beyond.

Laughing at his own earlier digression, Shaker quipped that the Guantánamo prison administration now had no choice but to issue him new shoes — they couldn’t possibly risk embarrassment by letting him return to the United Kingdom with these hideous things on his feet!

He also expressed hope that it would be a British plane — not an American military plane — that would take him home. The last thing Shaker wants is to relive his terrifying flight to Cuba over a decade ago, where he was chained in a painful position, blindfolded, ear-muffed, and cold.

Shaker shared with me that he hadn’t slept properly in almost an entire month, the uncertainty of his situation gnawing away at his rest. The night before our morning meeting, he had barely slept two hours.

In the morning, the soldiers moving him from his cellblock to Camp Echo insisted on conducting a groin search for the first time in weeks. One guard asked Shaker if he wanted to ‘refuse’ his legal meeting in order to avoid the humiliating search. Shaker wondered if the prison administration wanted to keep the news from him by preventing our meeting.

We spent the remainder of our time together contemplating Shaker’s return home. Overjoyed though he felt, like many past clients, Shaker was discovering that the prospect of life after Guantánamo is not free of worry. Naturally, Shaker is anxious as well. He knows that his reintegration into his family’s life and into society at large will be challenging at times.

Shaker and his family will need time and privacy to overcome that challenge and slowly begin to rebuild their lives together. Shaker hopes that the good people of Britain will understand his desire to avoid publicity as he takes his first tentative steps as a free man and embarks on the lengthy process of getting reacquainted with his loved ones.

Of course, Shaker is infinitely grateful to his supporters in Britain and beyond, and to his legal team, for all that they have done over these long years in the name of justice, and for everything they will continue to do to ensure his prompt return home. He hopes to thank everyone directly, in due time. But, once he is finally released, Shaker asks for everyone’s patience and forbearance as he and his family take the time they need to heal and adjust, away from the spotlight.

As I looked at Shaker and thought of all the years he had spent in captivity, all he had lost, the horrendous abuse he had survived, how mightily he had struggled to preserve his dignity, one thing became obvious. Shaker Aamer should get to leave Guantánamo and go home on his own terms. It’s the least we can do for him.

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.

“This Is The New Politics”: John McDonnell’s Inspiring Speech to the Labour Party Conference Includes Announcement of Establishment of Powerful Left-Wing Economic Advisory Board

The last week has been so busy for me with developments relating to the announcement of the imminent release of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, that I didn’t have time to cover the Labour Party Conference, and to express my delight at seeing Jeremy Corbyn as the new leader of the Party and John McDonnell as the shadow chancellor delivering their message of hope and change — yes, really! — to the conference.

Jeremy’s election, by a landslide, came about because of his refreshing honesty and decency, something that I know about through following his work for many years — and that of John McDonnell, his closest Parliamentary colleague — and being involved with them in the campaign to free Shaker Aamer (John set up the Shaker Aamer Parliamentary Group last November, and Jeremy, as a member, visited Washington D.C. in May as part of a cross-party group of MPs calling for Shaker’s release). It is fair to say that everyone who cares about injustice — in issues of social justice, the unfettered greed of the banks and the housing market, the persecution of minorities, workers’ rights, and many more issues — will have discovered over the years that John and Jeremy have taken up their cause, along with another indefatigable opponent of injustice, Caroline Lucas, Britain’s sole Green MP.

It has been wonderfully refreshing to know that, everywhere I go, people I know and care about are delighted that Jeremy has been elected, and are also delighted that John is the shadow chancellor. 60,000 people have joined the Labour Party since Jeremy’s victory on 12 September, and his appeal to the young and the disenfranchised and those fed up with the greed and cynicism of most politicians means that he might well be able to draw in a significant number of the 15.7 million people in the UK who don’t vote. There are, I think it’s fair to say, millions of us in this country who care about all kinds of injustice that are firmly established in the political status quo, and finally we have elected representatives taking on the government and presenting an alternative view that is so refreshing that I can’t help reflecting regularly on the fact that there has been no robust opposition to the prevailing neo-liberal world view, with its focus on selfishness and enriching the rich, since before Tony Blair became the leader of the Labour Party over 20 years ago.

So what is it that we have been missing, in addition to the honesty and decency? In a word, socialism; essentially, the belief that everyone should be looked after, that society should be organised around the common good, rather then the insatiable greed of the few and the ever-increasing impoverishment of the many, which is the current model. Those gunning for Jeremy — within his own party, and in the media, which, for the most part, has been behaving appallingly since his election — reveal, by their actions, that, whether they self-identify as Tory, Labour or Liberal Democrat, they represent the selfish, self-interested elite who have come to dominate almost all political discourse over the last 18 years (since Tony Blair’s victory in 1997).

These are the richest 25% of society, who earn more than the average, and are an intrinsic part of the status quo, the modern British “establishment” as identified by Owen Jones in his best-selling book, The Establishment. Their comfort is based on the exploitation of others, whether directly, through, for example, profiting from an artificially sustained housing bubble, or indirectly, through investments in the corporate world, whose sole purpose is profit without any socially responsible angle. And we will continue to drift backwards in time, eventually ending up with some sort of modern twist on feudalism, and the kind of chasm between rich and poor that blights so much of the developing world, unless we take a stand and demand a political system that puts us, the people, before the unfettered profiteering of the few.

I was particularly delighted by John McDonnell’s speech to the Labour Party Conference, which typified this resurgent opposition to the greed and self-interest of the establishment politics that has stifled dissent for decades, and that pretends there is no alternative.

A video of John’s speech is posted below, via YouTube, and I’m also posting below the entire text of his speech, as made available by the Daily Mirror:

John spoke eloquently about austerity — and it is worth repeating that Jeremy was specifically elected as the only anti-austerity candidate — mentioning the case of Michael O’Sullivan, a disabled 60-year old father of two, who killed himself after a corrupt assessment process, administered by an immoral corporation, found him fit for work and cut his benefits.

John stated bluntly, “Austerity is not an economic necessity, it’s a political choice,” and added, “The leadership of the Conservative Party made a conscious decision six years ago that the very richest would be protected and it wouldn’t be those who caused the economic crisis, who would pay for it. Although they said they were one nation Tories, they’ve demonstrated time and time again, they don’t represent one nation, they represent the 1 per cent.”

John also spoke about tacking corporate tax evasion and tax avoidance (mentioning, by name, Starbucks, Vodafone, Amazon and Google), and the corporate welfare bill, recently estimated to be as much as £93bn a year. He also spoke of his opposition to tax cuts for the rich, and the recent scandal of the Tories cutting working tax credits for hard-working people, and promised a new social homebuilding programme, something that is urgently required to enable hard-working people to have a life beyond working to pay their landlord or their mortgage lender, and to puncture the outrageous house price inflation that, for the first time in my lifetime, is leading to an exodus of talented creative people and essential workers from London.

He also spoke about rail re-nationalisation — and, in future, will presumably speak about other nationalisations for the common good — breaking the establishment’s hypnotic lie that the public sector is somehow “bad” and the private sector “good,” and although he didn’t specifically mention the NHS, I know that both Jeremy and John want the NHS back at the heart of Britain, as the greatest example of a public service for all that is financed through general taxation. He also promised a review of the roles of the Bank of England and HMRC.

He also, in the key moment in his speech in terms of policy, announced that he had just established an Economic Advisory Committee “to advise us on the development and implementation of our economic strategy,” involving “the unchallengeable expertise of some of the world’s leading economic thinkers including Joseph Stiglitz, Thomas Piketty, Professor Mariana Mazzucato, Simon Wren Lewis, Ann Pettifor and former member of the Bank of England Monetary Committee, David Blanchflower and many, many others drawn in for their specialist knowledge.”

This, it must be stressed, is at the heart of Jeremy and John’s plan for what, later in his speech, John described as “the new politics,” and I find it reassuring that dozens of economists endorsed these economic plans during Jeremy’s campaign.

John McDonnell’s Speech to the Labour Party Conference, September 28, 2015

Comrades,

I warn you this is not my usual rant, they get me into trouble and I’ve promised Jeremy to behave myself.

Jeremy and I sat down at the beginning of his campaign for the Labour leadership to discuss what they call the strap line for his campaign leaflets and posters. We came up with the strapline you see now: Straight talking, honest politics. It just embodied for me what Jeremy Corbyn is all about. So, in the spirit of straight talking, honest politics, here’s some straight talking.

At the heart of Jeremy’s campaign, upon which he received such a huge mandate, was the rejection of austerity politics. But austerity is just a word, almost meaningless to many people. What does it actually mean?

Well, for Michael O’Sullivan austerity was more than a word. Michael suffered from severe mental illness. He was certified by his GP as unable to work, but, despite the evidence submitted by three doctors, he was assessed by the company given the contract for the work capability assessment as fit for work. Michael killed himself after his benefits were removed. The coroner concluded his death was a direct result of the decision in his case.

I don’t believe Michael’s case stands alone. I am grateful to Michael’s family for allowing me to mention him today. I send them, I am sure on behalf of all us here, our heartfelt sympathy and condolences. But also I want them to know that this party, when we return to Government, will end this brutal treatment of disabled people.

Austerity is also not just a word for the 100,000 children in homeless families who tonight will be going to bed not in a home of their own but in a bed and breakfast or temporary accommodation. On behalf of this party I give those children my solemn promise that when we return to government we will build you all a decent and secure home in which to live.

Austerity is not just a word for the women and families across the country being hit hardest by cuts to public services. Women still face an average 19.1 per cent pay gap at work. Labour will tackle the pay gap, oppose the cuts to our public services and end discrimination in our society.

Whenever we cite examples of what austerity really means the Conservatives always argue that no matter what the social cost of their austerity policies, they are necessary to rescue our economy.

Let’s be clear: Austerity is not an economic necessity, it’s a political choice.

The leadership of the Conservative Party made a conscious decision six years ago that the very richest would be protected and it wouldn’t be those who caused the economic crisis, who would pay for it. Although they said they were one nation Tories, they’ve demonstrated time and time again, they don’t represent one nation, they represent the 1 per cent. When we challenge their austerity programme, the Conservatives accuse us of being deficit deniers.

Let me make this absolutely clear: Of course we accept that there is a deficit but we will take no lessons from a chancellor who promised to wipe out the deficit in one Parliament but didn’t get through half, who promised to pay down the debt but has increased it by 50 per cent.

I tell you straight from here on in Labour will always ensure that this country lives within its means. We will tackle the deficit but this is the dividing line between Labour and Conservative. Unlike them, we will not tackle the deficit on the backs of middle and low earners and especially by attacking the poorest in our society. We have always prided ourselves on being a fair and compassionate people in this country and we are. We will tackle the deficit fairly and we can do it.

Here’s how: We will dynamically grow our economy. We will strategically invest in the key industries and sectors that will deliver the sustainable long term economic growth this country needs. Economic growth that will reach all sections, all regions and all nations of our country. And I mean it.

I was devastated by Labour’s losses in Scotland. The SNP has now voted against the living wage, against capping rent levels and just last week voted against fair taxes in Scotland to spend on schools. So here is my message to the people of Scotland: Labour is now the only anti-austerity party. Now’s the time to come home.

We will halt the Conservative tax cuts to the wealthy paid for by cuts to families income. Three weeks ago we saw one of the starkest examples of the difference between us and the Conservatives. The Conservatives cut tax credits to working families to pay for a multi billion pound cut in inheritance tax. Families who had done everything asked of them, working hard but dependent on tax credits to make up for low pay. They will have £1300 taken from them to pay for a tax cut to the wealthiest 4 per cent of the population.

The Conservatives argued that they’d introduced a so-called living wage to make up for the tax credit cut. But we all know that it was neither a living wage nor according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies did it make up for the amount families lost. I tell you now, when we return to office, we will introduce a real living wage.

Labour’s plan to balance the books will be aggressive. We will force people like Starbucks, Vodafone, Amazon and Google and all the others to pay their fair share of taxes. Let me tell you also, there will be cuts to tackle the deficit but our cuts will not be the number of police officers on our streets or nurses in our hospitals or teachers in our classrooms.

There will be cuts to the corporate welfare system. There will be cuts to subsidies paid to companies that take the money and fail to provide the jobs. Cuts to the use of taxpayers’ money subsidising poverty paying bosses. Cuts to the billion pound tax breaks given to buy to let landlords for repairing their properties, whether they undertake the repairs or not. And cuts to the housing benefit bill when we build the homes we need and control exorbitant rents.

Where money needs to be raised it will be raised from fairer, more progressive taxation. We will be lifting the burden from middle and low-income earners paying for a crisis they did not cause.

If we inherit a deficit in 2020, fiscal policy will be used to pay down the debt and lower the deficit but at a speed that does not put into jeopardy sustainable economic growth. We’ll use active monetary policy to stimulate demand where necessary. We’ll also turn the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills into a powerful economic development department, in charge of public investment, infrastructure planning and setting new standards at work for all employees.

This is a radical departure not just from neoliberalism but from the way past administrations tried to run the economy.

Why? Well we just don’t think the current model can deliver. We don’t think that destroying industries and then subsidising a low pay economy through the tax system is a good idea. But our radicalism, it comes with a burden. We need to prove to the British people we can run the economy better than the rich elite that runs it now.

That’s why today I have established an Economic Advisory Committee to advise us on the development and implementation of our economic strategy.

We will draw on the unchallengeable expertise of some of the world’s leading economic thinkers including Joseph Stiglitz, Thomas Piketty, Professor Mariana Mazzucato, Simon Wren Lewis, Ann Pettifor and former member of the Bank of England Monetary Committee, David Blanchflower and many, many others drawn in for their specialist knowledge.

I give you this undertaking that every policy we propose and every economic instrument we consider for use will be rigorously tested to its extreme before we introduce it in government. And we will demand that the Office of Budget Responsibility and the Bank of England put their resources at our disposal to test, test and test again to demonstrate our plans are workable and affordable. These bodies are paid for by taxpayers and therefore should be accessible to all parties represented in Parliament. In government we will establish and abide by that convention.

The foundation stones of our economic policy are prosperity and social justice. We will create what Mariana Mazzucato describes as the entrepreneurial state. A strategic state works in partnership with businesses, entrepreneurs and workers to stimulate growth. Government’s role is to provide the opportunity for massive advances in technology, skills and organisational change that will drive up productivity, create new innovative products and new markets. That requires patient long term finance for investment in research from an effectively resourced and empowered national investment bank.

A successful and fair economy cannot be created without the full involvement of its workforce. That’s why restoring trade union rights and extending them to ensure workers are involved in determining the future of their companies is critical to securing the skills, development and innovation to compete in a globalised economy. We will promote modern alternative public, co-operative, worker controlled and genuinely mutual forms of ownership.

At this stage let me say that I found the Conservatives rant against Jeremy’s proposal to bring rail back into public ownership ironic when George Osborne was touring China selling off to the Chinese State Bank any British asset he could lay his hands on. It seems the state nationalising our assets is OK with the Tories as long as it’s the Chinese state or in the case of our railways the Dutch or French.

Institutional change has to reflect our policy change. I want us to stand back and review the major institutions that are charged with managing our economy to check that they are fit for purpose and how they can be made more effective. As a start I have invited Lord Bob Kerslake, former head of the civil service, to bring together a team to review the operation of the Treasury itself. I will also be setting up a review of the Bank of England.

Let me be clear that we will guarantee the independence of the Bank of England. It is time though to open a debate on the Bank’s mandate that was set by Parliament 18 years ago. The mandate focuses on inflation, and even there the Bank regularly fails to meet its target. We will launch a debate on expanding that mandate to include new objectives for its Monetary Policy Committee including growth, employment and earnings.

We will review the operation and resourcing of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs to ensure that HMRC is capable of addressing tax evasion and avoidance and modernising our tax collection system. This is how we will prepare for the future and the day we return to government.

Let me now return to today’s economy because to be frank, I am fearful for the present. George Osborne fought the last election on the myth that the slowest economic recovery from recession in a century has been some sort of economic success. In reality the Tories presided over the longest fall in workers’ pay since Queen Victoria sat on the throne. A recovery based upon rising house prices, growing consumer credit, and inadequate reform of the financial sector. An imbalanced economy overwhelmingly reliant on insecure jobs in the service sector.

Our balance of payments deficit, which is the gap between what we earn from the rest of the world and what we pay to the rest of the world, is at the highest levels it’s been since modern records began. I worry that the same pre-crash warning signs are reappearing. The UK economy is in recovery despite the Chancellor’s policies and not because of them.

You know the narrative George Osborne wanted to present of us this week. Deficit deniers risking the security of the nation etc. It was so obvious you could write it yourself blindfolded. He has brought forward his grandiose fiscal charter not as serious policy making but as a political stunt. A trap for us to fall into. We are not playing those games any more.

Let me explain the significance of what we are doing today. We are embarking on the immense task of changing the economic discourse in this country. Step by step:

First, we are throwing off that ridiculous charge that we are deficit deniers.

Second, we are saying tackling the deficit is important, but we are rejecting austerity as the means to do it.

Third, we are setting out an alternative based upon dynamically growing our economy, ending the tax cuts for the rich and addressing the scourge of tax evasion and avoidance.

Fourth, having cleared that debris from our path we are opening up a national discussion on the reality of the roles of deficits, surpluses, long-term investment, debt and monetary policy.

Fifth, we will develop a coherent, concrete alternative that grows a green, sustainable, prosperous economy for all.

We are moving on the economic debate in this country from puerile knockabout to an adult conversation. I believe the British people are fed up of being patronised and talked down to by politicians with little more than silly slogans and misleading analogies.

This is an immense task. That’s why we need to draw upon all the talents outside and inside the party. I admit that I was disappointed that after Jeremy’s election some refused to serve. In the spirit of solidarity upon which our movement was founded, I say: come back and help us succeed.

We are in an era of new politics. People will be encouraged to express their views in constructive debate. Don’t mistake debate for division. Don’t mistake democracy for disunity.

This is the new politics. Many still don’t understand its potential. As socialists we will display our competence with our compassion. Idealists, yes, but ours is a pragmatic idealism to get things done, to transform our society. We remain inspired by the belief and hope that another world is possible. This is our opportunity to prove it. Let’s seize it.

Solidarity.

Note: Please also see Jeremy’s speech on video, and the text of it, available on the website of the Daily Mirror — and the speech is also available on YouTube.

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).

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