Andy Worthington's Blog, page 90

Periodic Review Board Approves Release of Fayiz Al-Kandari, the Last Kuwaiti in Guantánamo

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

On Thursday, the same day that it was announced that a Moroccan prisoner, Younous Chekkouri, had been repatriated from Guantánamo, it was also announced that Fayiz al-Kandari, the last Kuwaiti in the prison, had been approved for release by a Periodic Review Board.

The PRBs are made up 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 they are slowly making their way through the cases of 46 men designated for ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established in 2009, and 25 others initially recommended for prosecution until the legitimacy of Guantánamo’s military commissions was shredded by US judges in 2012 and 2013.

And in case you’re wondering — yes, it is unacceptable that a task force appointed by President Obama recommended 46 men for ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial — on the basis that they are “too dangerous to release,” but that insufficient evidence exists to put them on trial — because that means it is not evidence, but dubious information that would not stand up to objective scrutiny — the fruits of torture or other abuse, or of the bribery or exhaustion of prisoners, who were relentlessly encouraged to rat on their fellow prisoners or to incriminate themselves.

And yes, it is also unacceptable that President Obama took the task force’s advice, and issued an executive order (in 2011) for these men’s ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial. When he did so, he tried to sweeten the pill by promising to set up periodic reviews to evaluate whether or not these men were regarded as remaining a threat, but the PRBs did not begin until November 2013, and they are still moving far too slowly. 17 men have had their cases reviewed since November 2013, but 52 others are still waiting — 30 “forever prisoners” (those recommended for ongoing detention by the task force) and 22 others who were originally recommended for prosecution until the basis for their prosecution collapsed. Without an increase in the frequency of the PRBs, these men will not all have had their reviews until sometime in 2021.

Nevertheless, the recommendation that Fayiz should be released is a big deal, because, last year, he had gone before a PRB, and the board members had recommended that he should continue to be held, because they concluded that he “almost certainly retains an extremist mindset and had close ties with high-level al-Qaeda leaders in the past.”

As I mentioned at the time, the board reached its conclusions “even though there is no evidence for either claim,” because, “[a]s I explained back in 2009 in a major profile of al-Kandari, his history is one of caring for others and engaging in charitable activities, and the allegations of his involvement with al-Qaeda simply do not stand up under scrutiny.” Fayiz “arrived in Afghanistan in August 2001, and had no time to do any of the things of which he has been accused — which, absurdly, include a claim that, in a ridiculously short amount of time, he became a spiritual adviser to Osama bin Laden.”

The recommendation that Fayiz should be released is also a big deal for Tom Wilner and I, the co-founders of “Close Guantánamo,” because Tom was his first attorney at Guantánamo, and because I was invited to visit Kuwait in 2012 by Barry Wingard, his military defense attorney (based on a brief period when, absurdly, the Bush administration had wanted to try him in a military commission).

Responding to the news of Fayiz being approved for release, Tom said, “I am overjoyed about the decision on Fayiz. It has been far too long. There was no valid basis for detaining him in the first place.”

During my visit to Kuwait, where I also spent time with Tom (including our TV appearance here), I was introduced to Fayiz’s family, who were friendly, intelligent and supportive, and as a result I was even more convinced of Fayiz’s innocence, and of the enormous support that awaited him in Kuwait to ease his rehabilitation into society. Like Tom, I truly believe that there was no reason for him to have been held in the first place — like so many of those held throughout Guantánamo’s ignominious 13-year history, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

That rehabilitation, I’m glad to say, will soon be happening.

In its final determination, the board members, “by consensus,” determined that Fayiz’s “continued law of war detention … does not remain necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States,” and noted that they had determined that any threat he might be considered to pose “can be adequately mitigated by the Kuwaiti government’s commitment to require and maintain the detainee’s participation in a rehabilitation program and to implement robust security measures to include monitoring and travel restrictions.”

After last year’s perceived problems with Fayiz’s attitude, the board members also noted that he “demonstrated a willingness to examine his religious beliefs and engaged more openly” with them. They also noted his “willingness to engage with Kuwaiti officials and rehabilitation center staff members, comply with security requirements, and disassociate with negative influences since his last hearing,” and were also evidently persuaded by the fact that Fayiz’s family “is committed to restructure their living situation to provide more direct support to his reintegration,” and that “his cousins, who are prominent in Kuwaiti society, are willing to help supervise and guide [him] upon his return to Kuwait.”

Required by the board is Fayiz’s “participation in a full rehabilitation program for at least one year of in-patient rehabilitation to achieve the necessary progress in his mental and behavioral health in order to reintegrate him with his family and society,” but this will clearly not be a problem, as Fawzi al-Odah, the penultimate Kuwaiti in Guantánamo, who was approved for release by a PRB last year, was repatriated in November, and is adjusting well to his return in the rehabilitation center — which I visited when I was in Kuwait in 2012, and which is well equipped to look after former prisoners.

Speaking to the Miami Herald, Barry Wingard “called the military’s claims of association with bin Laden ‘completely unproven,'” and called it “ridiculous” that bin Laden “would seek a kid in his second year of religious study as his adviser, propagandist or significant recruiter.” He also said al-Kandari was in Afghanistan “performing charitable undertakings” at the time of the US-led invasion in October 2001, and was seized as he was “trying to head home ‘to return to his studies.'” He added, “I have yet to see anything tangible or admissible in a real court that ties him to any crime.”

Barry told me, on behalf of the team of US personnel who have worked on his case, “We are delighted that Fayiz will soon be released from Guantánamo, and look forward to his return to his family in Kuwait. Although we hope for bright days ahead, we should never forget that Fayiz was kept in GTMO for over fourteen years without a trial and forced to endure some of the harshest treatment in modern times.”

He added, “Our team has flown to GTMO more than seventy times, Kuwait fifteen times, and spent thousands of hours over seven years defending Fayiz. We’ve been by Fayiz’s side when he was forced into solitary confinement, we loudly protested prison conditions, we took his hand as he struggled through a year long hunger strike. In short, we kept Fayiz connected to the world when the world tried to turn the page on GTMO. We unconditionally reminded the world that Fayiz is an innocent human being and is illegally being held in America’s offshore prison colony. As attorneys, there can be no higher calling than requiring powerful governments to prove each and every assertion it makes against every single individual.”

In the Miami Herald, Carol Rosenberg, who noted that Fayiz “was an active participant in the widespread hunger strike that swept through the prison in early 2013,” and “was being force-fed in April 2013, his lawyer said at the time, because the 5-foot, 6-inch man had withered to 108 pounds and had the waist of a small child,” noted that it is not yet known “how swiftly the Kuwaiti government, in keeping with past practice, would dispatch a jet to fetch him from the base.”

Before that can happen, Obama administration officials “must prepare a departure packet for the signature of Defense Secretary Ash Carter, who in turn is required to give Congress 30 days notice” as a result of legislation introduced by Congress over the last five years.

The decision to recommend Fayiz for release means that 53 of the 115 prisoners still held have been approved for release — 43 since 2009, when the decisions were taken by President Obama’s task force to approve their release, and ten since January 2014 via the PRBs. Just two of those approved for release by the PRBs have been freed — Fawzi al-Odah and a Saudi — and the big problem for most of those approved for release but still held — 43 of the 53 — is that they are Yemenis, and the entire US establishment is unwilling to repatriate them because of fears about the security situation in their home country. This means that third countries must be found that will take them in, but although new homes have been found for 18 Yemenis in the last year, it is not acceptable for the others to wait year after year when they were told that the US no longer wants to hold them.

I applaud the decision to release Fayiz al-Kandari, but it remains hugely important that all the other men approved for release — all those Yemenis and nine other men, including Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo — are also freed as well.

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,’ was released in July 2015). 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.

On Omar Khadr’s 29th Birthday, Bail Conditions Eased; Allowed to Visit Grandparents, and Electronic Tag Removed

Today (September 19) is the 29th birthday of former Guantánamo prisoner Omar Khadr, and it is, I think, fair to say that it will be his best birthday since before he was seized by US forces after a firefight in Afghanistan, where he had been taken by his father, in July 2002, when he was just 15 years old. Treated brutally in US custody, he ended up agreeing to a plea deal in a trial by military commission, in October 2010, just to get out of Guantánamo and to return home. As a result of his plea deal, he received an eight-year sentence, with one year to be served in Guantánamo, and the rest in Canada.

In the end, the Canadian government — which has persistently violated his rights, and unconditionally backed the US in its outrageous treatment of a juvenile prisoner, who was supposed to be rehabilitated rather then punished — dragged its heels securing his return, which eventually took place in September 2012. He was then — unfairly and unjustly — imprisoned in a maximum-security prison until that decision was eventually overturned, and in May a judge granted him bail, pending the outcome of an appeal against his conviction in the US.

So this birthday — the one I expect he will be enjoying to the full — is the first he has spent in freedom since his 15th birthday, back in 2001, and yesterday he received some good news regarding the restrictions under which he was granted bail back in May that can only be adding to his enjoyment today.

Two weeks ago, as I described it, he “asked a Canadian court to ease his bail conditions, so he can fly to Toronto to visit his family, attend a night course at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT), and get to early morning prayers,” and last week Justice June Ross of the Court of Queen’s Bench of Alberta agreed to relax his curfew to allow him to attend night classes and early morning prayers, reserving judgment on his other request until this week. On Friday (September 18), as hoped, his bail conditions have been eased still further. As the Edmonton Journal reported, Justice Ross said that he “can travel to visit his grandparents in Toronto for two weeks this fall.” In addition, his electronic tag will be removed.

As the Toronto Star described, Justice Ross “said it is important that some restrictions remain, to ensure Khadr doesn’t have terrorist associations. But she added that he has complied with all conditions since he was released four months ago, and a gradual release into the community ‘is the best way to ensure he doesn’t pose a danger to the public.'” She added, “There is no reason why he should not have a visit with his family.”

For the Toronto visit, as the Edmonton Journal put it, he must travel with Dennis Edney, his lawyer for many years, in whose house he is living, and is also required to “stay with his maternal grandparents or his Toronto lawyer John Philipps, provide a phone number and address, and report to his bail supervisor.” In a sign of how micro-managed his freedoms are, despite these concessions, he “will be allowed to speak to his maternal grandparents in a language other than English, but not his controversial mother or sister Zaynab, both of whom now live outside Canada. Three brothers and one other sister live in Toronto.”

The Toronto Star noted, however, that it is not clear whether Omar is allowed to fly.

His other long-term lawyer, Nathan Whitling, said he was “trying to determine whether Khadr is on Canada’s no-fly list,” adding that if he “can’t take a plane over four provinces, he may not go.”

“We’re not 100-per-cent sure yet,” Whitling said after the judge had amended Khadr’s bail conditions, and a spokesman for Public Safety Canada “said he cannot reveal names on the Specified Persons List.” The Toronto Star added, “The federal Passenger Protect Program supplies airlines with a list of people considered a threat to civil aviation. An advisory panel that includes representatives of the RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police], Canadian Security Intelligence Service, the Canada Border Services Agency and Justice and Transport departments recommend names.” The Public Safety Minister, Steven Blaney, who “has repeatedly described Khadr as a hardened terrorist who should be serving his full sentence behind bars,” has “the final say on who is put on the list.”

Amending Omar’s bail conditions, Justice Ross accepted that the electronic ankle bracelet was “an unusual condition for bail and a ‘significant restriction on his liberty and person privacy’ and so should be removed.” She added, as the Edmonton Journal put it, “Police can fund other ‘commonly used’ measures to ensure he is obeying his curfew, such as personal visits” to Edney’s home, “and installing a land-line telephone.”

In addition, Omar’s computer use “will still be monitored,” but Justice Ross “ordered the removal of a remote monitoring program that is causing problems in operation of the home computer and a new laptop Khadr purchased in June.” She also said that the justice system had “confirmed it will not provide technical support to Khadr to deal with those problems. So the software will be removed and police can find a ‘low-tech’ way to monitor the sites he visits.”

Furthermore, as part of the process of “ensur[ing] he does not come into contact with extremist views, Khadr must continue to live with the Edneys and abide by a midnight to five a.m. curfew. He must also inform his bail supervisor of any overnight visits with friends within the province.”

Omar said he was “pleased” with the relaxed conditions and was “keen to go swimming and play soccer” as soon as the tag was removed.

Note: Last week, “Guantánamo’s Child,” a documentary film about Omar, directed by Patrick Reed and Michelle Shephard, had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. See this article, and also see this interview with Michelle Shephard.

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,’ was released in July 2015). 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.

Fears for Guantánamo Prisoner Released in Morocco But Held Incommunicado in a Secret Location

Reprieve, the international human rights organization whose lawyers represent prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay, has just learned that one of its clients, Younous Chekkouri (aka Younus Chekhouri), a 47-year old Moroccan national, has been repatriated from Morocco, but is being held incommunicado and in a secret location.

In a press release, Reprieve notes that its representatives “have been unable to meet or speak to him since the US handed him to Moroccan authorities. He is being held in an unknown location, and has not been allowed so far to contact his local lawyer, in apparent violation of Moroccan law.”

They also add that they are “increasingly concerned for the safety and well-being” of their client.

I have covered Younous’ story many times over the years. See my archive here, and see this love letter that he wrote to his wife last year. Also see “My Road to Guantánamo,” published by Vice News last November, in which he told the story of his capture and explained why he did not wish to return to Morocco and was seeking a third country to offer him a new home — a wish that has obviously been ignored by the US authorities.

Describing his story on their website, Reprieve states:

Younous was born in Morocco, but moved to Pakistan when he was 22 years old with his siblings where further education was more affordable. After a series of family tragedies, he struggled financially to stay in Pakistan and tried to find work and cheaper studies in Yemen and Syria.

A strong believer in giving back to society, he moved to Afghanistan in June 2001 where he worked for a charity assisting local Moroccan youths. He fled the instability post 9/11, but was rounded up and sold to US forces.

As I explained when posting his love letter last February:

In contrast to Younus’s own account, the US authorities accused him of running a military training camp near Kabul, even though he has repeatedly explained that he was profoundly disillusioned by the fighting amongst Muslims that has plagued Afghanistan’s recent history. The US authorities also described him as a “close associate” of Osama bin Laden, but he has repeatedly expressed his implacable opposition to the havoc wreaked on the country by bin Laden, describing him as “a crazy person,” and adding that “what he does is bad for Islam.”

In addition, Younus has always been one of the most peaceful prisoners in Guantánamo, and, as I discovered last year, when he took part in the prison-wide hunger strike that did so much to remind the world of Guantánamo’s existence, he is a Sufi Muslim, something that makes it even more improbable that he would have been running a training camp. For further information, please read Reprieve director Clive Stafford Smith’s account of a conversation with Younus during the early months of the hunger strike, and Younus’s own detailed account.

As Reprieve described it in today’s press release, “Younous spent 14 years in US detention, despite being unanimously cleared for release by the six main US government security and intelligence agencies — including the CIA, FBI, and Departments of State and Defense — in 2009. This decision stated that Younous posed no threat whatsoever to either the US or its allies. In all the time Younous was held by the US, he was not charged with any crime and did not face a trial.”

They added, “Younous’ only concern upon his release was to be reunited with his family and to be allowed to start rebuilding his life.”

Cori Crider, Reprieve’s strategic director and Younous’ lawyer, said, “There is no reason for the Moroccan authorities to prolong Younous’ detention after all he has suffered over 14 years. Younous is thankful for all their diplomatic efforts to secure his release — it is inexplicable, therefore, that they would now prevent him from returning to those who love him and who are waiting to help him back onto his feet. He must be permitted to see his lawyers and his family without further delay.”

Note: With the release of Younous Chekkouri, 115 prisoners remain at Guantánamo. 52 of these men have been approved for release.

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

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

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

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009 (out of the 532 released by President Bush), and the 121 prisoners released from February 2009 to June 2015 (by President Obama), whose stories are covered in more detail than is available anywhere else –- either in print or on the internet –- although many of them, of course, are also covered in The Guantánamo Files, and for the stories of the other 390 prisoners released by President Bush, see my archive of articles based on the classified military files released by WikiLeaks in 2011: June 2007 –- 2 Tunisians, 4 Yemenis (here, here and here); July 2007 –- 16 Saudis; August 2007 –- 1 Bahraini, 5 Afghans; September 2007 –- 16 Saudis; 1 Mauritanian; 1 Libyan, 1 Yemeni, 6 Afghans; November 2007 –- 3 Jordanians, 8 Afghans; 14 Saudis; December 2007 –- 2 Sudanese; 13 Afghans (here and here); 3 British residents; 10 Saudis; May 2008 –- 3 Sudanese, 1 Moroccan, 5 Afghans (here, here and here); July 2008 –- 2 Algerians; 1 Qatari, 1 United Arab Emirati, 1 Afghan; August 2008 –- 2 Algerians; September 2008 –- 1 Pakistani, 2 Afghans (here and here); 1 Sudanese, 1 Algerian; November 2008 –- 1 Kazakh, 1 Somali, 1 Tajik; 2 Algerians; 1 Yemeni (Salim Hamdan), repatriated to serve out the last month of his sentence; December 2008 –- 3 Bosnian Algerians; January 2009 –- 1 Afghan, 1 Algerian, 4 Iraqis; February 2009 — 1 British resident (Binyam Mohamed); May 2009 —1 Bosnian Algerian (Lakhdar Boumediene); June 2009 — 1 Chadian (Mohammed El-Gharani); 4 Uighurs to Bermuda; 1 Iraqi; 3 Saudis (here and here); August 2009 — 1 Afghan (Mohamed Jawad); 2 Syrians to Portugal; September 2009 — 1 Yemeni; 2 Uzbeks to Ireland (here and here); October 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti, 1 prisoner of undisclosed nationality to Belgium; 6 Uighurs to Palau; November 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian to France, 1 unidentified Palestinian to Hungary, 2 Tunisians to Italian custody; December 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti (Fouad al-Rabiah); 2 Somalis; 4 Afghans; 6 Yemenis; January 2010 — 2 Algerians, 1 Uzbek to Switzerland; 1 Egyptian, 1 Azerbaijani and 1 Tunisian to Slovakia; February 2010 — 1 Egyptian, 1 Libyan, 1 Tunisian to Albania; 1 Palestinian to Spain; March 2010 — 1 Libyan, 2 unidentified prisoners to Georgia, 2 Uighurs to Switzerland; May 2010 — 1 Syrian to Bulgaria, 1 Yemeni to Spain; July 2010 — 1 Yemeni (Mohammed Hassan Odaini); 1 Algerian; 1 Syrian to Cape Verde, 1 Uzbek to Latvia, 1 unidentified Afghan to Spain; September 2010 — 1 Palestinian, 1 Syrian to Germany; January 2011 — 1 Algerian; April 2012 — 2 Uighurs to El Salvador; July 2012 — 1 Sudanese; September 2012 — 1 Canadian (Omar Khadr) to ongoing imprisonment in Canada; August 2013 — 2 Algerians; December 2013 — 2 Algerians; 2 Saudis; 2 Sudanese; 3 Uighurs to Slovakia; March 2014 — 1 Algerian (Ahmed Belbacha); May 2014 — 5 Afghans to Qatar (in a prisoner swap for US PoW Bowe Bergdahl); November 2014 — 1 Kuwaiti (Fawzi al-Odah); 3 Yemenis to Georgia, 1 Yemeni and 1 Tunisian to Slovakia, and 1 Saudi; December 2014 — 4 Syrians, a Palestinian and a Tunisian to Uruguay; 4 Afghans; 2 Tunisians and 3 Yemenis to Kazakhstan; January 2015 — 4 Yemenis to Oman, 1 Yemeni to Estonia; June 2015 — 6 Yemenis to Oman.

Seriously Ill Libyan Approved for Release from Guantánamo by Periodic Review Board

Back in June, Omar Mohammed Khalifh (ISN 695, identified by the US authorities as Omar Khalif Mohammed Abu Baker or Omar Khalifa Mohammed Abu Bakr), a Libyan prisoner (and an amputee) at Guantánamo who is 42 or 43 years old, underwent a Periodic Review Board to ascertain whether he should be recommended for release or continue to be held without charge or trial, as I wrote about here, and on August 20 he was recommended for release, although that information was not made publicly available until last week.

In its Unclassified Summary of Final Determination, the review board stated that, “by consensus,” they “determined 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.”

The PRBs, which are made up 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, were established in 2013 to review the cases of the “forever prisoners,” 48 men who were designated for ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that was appointed by President Obama in 2009 to review the cases of all the prisoners still held at the time to decide whether they should be released or put on trial, or whether they should continue to be held without charge or trial.

17 of the “forever prisoners” have so far had their cases reviewed, and eleven have now been recommended for release, with four men recommended for ongoing detention, and two awaiting the results of their reviews.

This is good news, because, when the task force recommended the 48 men for ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial, they did so on the basis that they were “too dangerous to release,” but that insufficient evidence existed to put them on trial, and in 2011 President Obama accepted the recommendations, issuing an executive order authorizing the men’s ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial, while promising periodic reviews of their cases.

The problem with all this is that the so-called evidence, therefore, is not evidence at all, but, for the most part, a collection of dubious information derived from the prisoners themselves, or from their fellow prisoners, while being tortured or otherwise abused, which does not, of course, make for reliable information. Other dubious statements were made by prisoners who were bribed, with the promise of better living conditions, or who had mental health issues, or who could simply no longer put up with the relentless pressure of interrogations, and decided to say yes to whatever allegations were put their way.

When it came to Omar Mohammed Khalifh, my friend, the former prisoner Omar Deghayes (a Libyan national and British resident), told me in 2010 how he was one of the prisoners who had told lies because of the pressure of interrogations, but how that had not helped him (and in fact, Omar Deghayes spoke to me after Omar Khalifh’s habeas corpus petition was turned down because a judge had been sufficiently persuaded by the so-called “evidence”):

“They call him ‘The General,'” Deghayes told me, “not because of anything he has done, but because he decided that life would be easier for him in Guantánamo if he said yes to every allegation laid against him.” Even so, as Deghayes also explained, this cooperation has been futile, as Khalifh has been subjected to appalling ill-treatment, held in a notorious psychiatric block where the use of torture was routine, and denied access to adequate medical attention for the many problems that afflict him, beyond the loss of his leg. As Deghayes described it, “He has lost his sight in one eye, has heart problems and high blood pressure, and his remaining leg is mostly made of metal, from an old accident in Libya a long time ago when a wall fell on him. He describes himself as being nothing more than ‘the spare parts of a car.'”

Unfortunately, although Khalifh has been recommended for release, it is unlikely that he will be released soon, as Libya is too chaotic for the US to recommend his repatriation, and a third country will need to be found that will take him in. This will not be easy, as it is clear that he is quite severely ill. In its Unclassified Summary of Final Determination, the review board recommended his transfer “to a country with the ability to provide structured, inpatient medical care to adequately address his physical and mental health needs,” and also recommended transfer “to an Arabic speaking country to facilitate the detainee’s medical treatment and in accordance with his preference.” In the meantime, while he is still held, the board encouraged him “to positively engage with the JTF-GTMO medical staff while the US Government undertakes transfer efforts.”

His health condition — his “significantly compromised health condition” — was also one of the factors the board listed for mitigating any risk based on his alleged “past terrorist-related activities and connections,” along with his “record of compliance with camp rules, and positive, constructive role in the detention environment, including mediating concerns raised between other detainees and guard staff,” and his “recent engagement with his family illustrating his intent to move forward in a positive manner.”

Although I have written about Khalifh many times over the years, I had always thought that he was seized in a house raid in Karachi, Pakistan in February 2002, and not, as I now realize, in a house in Faisalabad, Pakistan on March 28, 2002, the same day that Abu Zubaydah — a training camp facilitator mistakenly identified as a senior al-Qaeda figure, for whom the CIA’s torture program was first developed — was seized in another house raid in Faisalabad.

I had previously thought that the house Khalifh was seized in, the Issa house, held 15 people who ended up at Guantánamo, but the addition of Khalifh now makes a total of 16 in the house. As I described it in June, when two of these men, both Yemenis, were released in Oman:

They mostly claimed that they were students, and ten of them had been released prior to this latest batch of releases, two after having their habeas corpus petitions granted, two at the end of 2014 (a Yemeni and a Palestinian), and two more who were released in Oman in January.

Another man, Ali al-Salami, was, sadly, one of three prisoners who died at Guantánamo, in mysterious circumstances, in June 2006, reportedly by committing suicide, although that explanation has been seriously challenged in the years since (see my article remembering the men’s deaths here).

As I also explained in an article in October 2010 describing the circumstances of the arrest of the men:

In May 2009, Judge Gladys Kessler, ruling on the habeas corpus petition of one of the [men], Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed, who described himself as a student, savaged the government for drawing on the testimony of witnesses whose unreliability was acknowledged by the authorities, and for attempting to create a “mosaic” of intelligence that was thoroughly unconvincing, and she also made a point of stating, “It is likely, based on evidence in the record, that at least a majority of the [redacted] guests were indeed students, living at a guest house that was located close to a university.”

Below I’m posting the opening statement that Omar Mohammed Khalifh presented to his review board in June, which was not publicly available at the time. I hope it helps to reinforce the notion that he is no threat to the US, and never was, having instead been forced into exile through opposition to Col. Gaddafi, ending up twice being severely injured physically — once as a result of an accident in Sudan in 1995, where he was working as a truck driver after fleeing Libya, and again in Afghanistan, in 1997 or 1998, where he had fled after facing persecution in Pakistan, when he stepped on a landmine. As the Miami Herald described it, his lawyer, Ramzi Kassem, stated that he “has no right leg below the knee from a 1998 landmine accident in Afghanistan and a left leg held together by metal pins from a 1995 construction work site accident in Sudan,” and also explained that he “is blind in his left eye and has glaucoma in his right eye, as well as shrapnel in his left side.”

Periodic Review Board (PRB), 23 Jun 2015

Omar Khalif Mohammed Abu Baker Mahjour Umar, ISN 695

Detainee Opening Statement

This is an overview of my biography, outlining a period of my life before my detention.

My family consists of four brothers and four sisters, where I was the youngest. Our relationship with each other was extremely tight. We were a tight-knit family. I was so happy living with my family.

I also used to live in a socially harmonious neighborhood where everybody used to feel like family. We were a group of boys with similar age; we used to engage together daily and seasonally, in the same recreational and social activities.

I had an excellent relationship with my relatives, especially my two aunts and their families. We would travel together outside the city during the spring and summer seasons. We enjoyed nature and sightseeing. In addition, due to my social and friendly character, I had a lot of friends.

I fostered great relationships with a lot of talented artists and intellectual friends, some of whom were singers and poets. I enjoyed attending weddings, concerts and folk dancing. In addition, I was a gifted snorkeler, and I loved to cruise the sea.

In general, my life was a happy one. I had a full life ahead of me. I enjoyed spending time with my family, my friends, my relatives and my hobbies. My curiosity and my affection have helped me so much to get acquainted with all that is new. Perhaps, that’s why I succeeded to form all kinds of relationships with different spectrums of the Libyan society.

The simplicity of the Libyan people in the community helped me a lot in this regard. Quite frankly, that’s why I have so many acquaintances and friends in that simple Libyan community. But there was a segment of that society with which I didn’t have any connection. So that led me, as a curious individual, to try to get to know the religious segment of society, and I started to visit their mosques.

At first I frequented the mosques a little bit, and then gradually, I started to visit the mosques regularly. I met new friends in this simple religious community, and I started to identify with them, and to discover a spectrum of new mosques. My love and curiosity continued to lead me to travel to new cities, discovering new mosques, new people and a new spectrum.

I used to feel happy, tranquil and safe, but unfortunately, I was surprised when I learned that Colonel Gaddafi was fighting the members of this social component. Then I was arrested by members of the Libyan Homeland Security who interrogated me, and asked me why I prayed in several mosques in this city and several other cities. I told them that this was my social nature; I told them that I liked to meet new people and identify with various communities.

Then I told the investigator that I travelled to many towns to visit theaters, poets, singers in order to get to know them. So, why did he not ask me about those travels? The investigator was satisfied with my reply and released me after they ascertained that I did not do anything contrary to the law, or commit any harm to anybody. After, they recognized that my religious education was inadequate and weak. However, they continued to monitor me anyway!

In 1995, the Libyan government carried out a new campaign of arrests on mosques’ worshipers. I found myself confronted with three options: to get out of the country; get arrested and go to prison; or take up arms and fight Gaddafi. I chose to get out of the country.

I did not have any other choice but to go to the Sudan; so I escaped through the desert, because I had neither money nor a passport and was under surveillance.

I went to the Sudan on the grounds that Sudan was a temporary station, until I got the necessary funds to travel to Europe. Because I didn’t have a passport and lacked adequate funds, I had to stay a little bit longer than I expected in the Sudan. At first, I was very unhappy with my surroundings, the intensity of the heat in that country and the dusty climate. As a social human being, I began to know the people of this country and discovered that they are a kind, good-natured and friendly people. I liked them at once, and I felt the warmth of their friendship and identified with them.

As I said, I liked the people of the Sudan and decided to live and stay with them, and I was thinking seriously of marriage and stability there and actually started looking for work. One of my Libyan friends encouraged me to apply for a job with a trucking company as a truck driver. I loved the idea. This work would give me the opportunity to travel and move around between different parts of the country so that I could get to know and see new environments and new people. So I began working as a truck driver.

But after six months I got into a very bad accident. I had severe fractures and the company where I worked refused to pay my medical expenses and assumed that my injury was not a job related accident. Of course the field of medicine in the Sudan was very mediocre. I had to treat myself on my own expense with the help of some Libyan migrants in the Sudan. But my injury and my treatment took a long time to heal, and at the same time, Colonel Gaddafi was putting pressure on the Sudanese government to hand over the Libyan immigrants in the Sudan. The Sudanese government actually began to arrest the Libyan immigrants and handed them over to the Libyan government.

I had to get out of the Sudan. Some friends helped me to put together some money and a passport, and I traveled to Karachi at the end of 1996. However, when I got there, I was very shocked because of poor living conditions in Pakistan, the hot climate and the terrible odor. I was even on the verge of returning back to Libya to surrender myself to Gaddafi, instead of staying in this terrible environment. But some Libyans calmed me down and suggested to me to travel to Peshawar in the outskirts of the city of Karachi.

I lived in Peshawar with some Libyan friends. Actually, Peshawar was much better than Karachi, and I started to pursue my medical treatment. I gradually started looking for a passport and a visa in order to depart for Europe. But regrettably, the government of Pakistan started to hand over some of the Libyans to Gaddafi at his request. They began a large campaign of arrests. I did not find any other option but to depart to Afghanistan, because of its closeness to the border. In addition, I didn’t have the means to get out of Pakistan. I entered the city of Jalalabad and met new Libyans; this took place around the end of 1997. I lived in the city for some time, and then some friends suggested to me to visit a camp outside the city of Jalalabad in order to get to know the environment there. The idea aroused my curiosity and my hobby in discovering new things. I agreed and began to train a little bit with some light weapons and soldier exercises as much as my health allowed me, as my health was poor in addition to my injuries. I stayed there for several months, enjoying my time, the beauty of nature and the surrounding ravines in the neighborhood.

Then, I went back to the city and began to wander the country and mingle with its people. Then I went to Kabul for a visit, and I returned back to Jalalabad and kept navigating between these two cities. In one of my visits, some friends invited me to tour the battle lines between Taliban forces and Shah Masud [Ahmad Shah Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance, assassinated two days before the 9/11 attacks].

My curiosity led me to accept their invitation, but unfortunately while en route, I stepped on an old landmine that was lying on the side of the road. I lost my foot and shrapnel ravaged my entire body. Once again, I started a new cycle of medical treatment. Because I was not linked to any organization or group, and did not have any money for treatment, I decided to be treated in regular Afghan hospitals. In addition, my other foot was infected from the old accident that took place in the Sudan. I become almost totally disabled.

During my medical treatment, I stayed temporarily at the Arab guest houses. Then, I travelled to Pakistan looking for better medical treatment. Because of lack of funds, I was not successful. I decided to return back to Afghanistan and contacted the Red Cross office in Kabul to be fitted with a new prosthesis. They told me I needed an additional surgery in order to fit me with a suitable artificial limb. I was so frustrated because this was my fourth surgery. As you may know I previously underwent three painful surgeries. Fortunately, however, I found an Italian hospital who agreed to perform my surgery and to treat me free of charge.

I returned back to the Red Cross Office in Kabul, and fitted with my artificial limb, and I started a new phase of rehabilitation in July 2001. My muscles were very weak because of the lack of movement during the past four years.

After the events of September 11, I tried to leave from Afghanistan, but I didn’t have a passport or the funds to sustain me. So just before the American invasion of Afghanistan I decided to leave through Pakistan. I stayed for some time with some Libyan friends in Peshawar, but the situation was awkward. They were married and I felt very embarrassed. I spoke with some friends about my situation and they suggested that I move to a different place, until they could arrange for a passport and some funds. I went to live in Faisalabad city, and I stayed with some Yemeni students. After two months, the Pakistani government forces raided the house and arrested everybody.

The Pakistani government sold us to the American forces under the pretext that we were terrorists. I was interrogated in Pakistan and Afghanistan. During the third phase of interrogation, the American interrogator told me that they would release me if my injury was not related to fighting.

When I transferred to Bagram detention center in Afghanistan, I started to cooperate with the interrogator and the administrator in charge of the detention center. I provided advice regarding their treatment of the Qur’an and religious ways. I told them that this religion has not come from AI Qaeda. It had been around for 14 centuries and is believed by 1.5 billion human beings.

When they transferred me to Guantanamo Bay, I cooperated with the administration and was involved with fixing many problems that happened between the detainees and the administration. For example, I helped mediate the strike that happened in October 2002. In February of 2003, I also solved a big problem that had lasted for almost two months.

After you have heard about my past, present and plans and hope for the future, I trust in your decision, and I am sure that you will release me.

Note: For anyone interested, the transcript of the public session of the PRB (without Khalifh) and the transcript of the session with Khalifh are also available.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose debut album, ‘Love and War,’ was released in July 2015). 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.

“The More We Get Close to What We Want, The Farther It Goes”: Shaker Aamer’s Endlessly Thwarted Hope of Being Released from Guantánamo

On Saturday, Jeremy Corbyn, a prominent supporter in Parliament of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, was elected, by a landslide, as the leader of the Labour Party, something that was unimaginable just three months ago. Jeremy is a member of the Shaker Aamer Parliamentary Group, and in May he visited Washington D.C. with three of his Parliamentary colleagues, to meet with Senators and representatives of the Obama administration, to try and secure Shaker’s release.

The Shaker Aamer Parliamentary Group was established last November by John McDonnell MP, Jeremy’s close friend and colleague on the left of the Party, who, yesterday, was appointed by Jeremy as Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Shaker now has two prominent supporters in previously unexpected high-profile positions, and I hope this fact is not lost on the Obama administration, which continues to hold Shaker needlessly. Cleared for release in 2007 (under George W. Bush) and again in 2009 under President Obama, he could be released in a month’s time if the will existed to free him, 30 days being the amount of time that lawmakers in Congress have required the defense secretary to give them before freeing any prisoner.

Other supporters of Shaker in the shadow cabinet are Diane Abbott, the shadow secretary of state for international development, and Ian Murray, the shadow secretary of state for Scotland, and while we wait to see how the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn will raise Shaker’s case (which I’m sure will happen soon), I’m cross-posting below an article about Shaker that was published in the Mail on Sunday, written by Ramzi Kassem, a professor at the City University of New York School of Law, who I have known for many years — and have also spoken with on occasion.

Along with Clive Stafford Smith at Reprieve, Ramzi represents Shaker, along with his students in the Immigrant & Non-Citizen Rights Clinic at CUNY School of Law. The Daily Mail, I’m glad to note, has been supporting the release of Shaker since last November, when, shortly after the launch of the We Stand With Shaker campaign that I co-direct with Joanne MacInnes, the Mail featured Shaker’s case in a front-page story, under the headline, “Held in a hell hole for 13 years without trial: Scandal of the London father locked in Guantánamo with no hope of justice,” and then began supporting the We Stand With Shaker campaign.

Ramzi runs though Shaker’s history at Guantánamo, also making reference to the independent medical examination that he and Reprieve sought in 2013, which was allowed by the authorities, and which led to a detailed assessment of Shaker’s extensive mental and physical ailments by Dr. Emily A. Keram, an independent psychiatrist, which I reported here.

I hope you find Ramzi’s article useful, and will share it if you do.

Why Shaker Aamer must be freed

By Professor Ramzi Kassem, Mail on Sunday, September 13, 2015

When they find out that I travel to Guantánamo Bay regularly and that I represent Shaker Aamer, the Britons I meet here in New York City often ask: ‘How’s Shaker doing?’

Shaker Aamer, my client, has been at Guantánamo Bay since 2002. For that phrase to take on its full meaning, one must first understand that Guantánamo itself offers the starkest and oddest of contrasts. It is a pristine corner of the Caribbean island of Cuba, replete with picture perfect vistas of stunning beaches on piercing blue seas.

But that same tropical paradise has been the stage for countless abuses — some past, some ongoing — inflicted on men like Shaker. It is where Camp X-Ray sits, an array of cages exposed to the elements where scores of human beings were imprisoned, including Shaker. It is where more modern, maximum-security penitentiaries now stand, which is where Shaker spends his days and nights. It is where the CIA ran secret prisons. My conversations with Shaker over the years have granted me a glimpse into his life in that ‘prison of darkness and oppression,’ as the captives there have taken to calling it. I have some understanding of his daily life, of his struggles, of the ways he has devised to survive in that place.

But, still, the question of how Shaker’s doing leaves me at a loss for words. Not because it’s unreasonable, of course.

After all, Shaker’s case is a cause célèbre. He is the last remaining UK resident left at the infamous offshore gulag set up by the United States in Cuba. For years, there has quite rightly been a clamour for his return to London. Even Prime Minister David Cameron, during a White House meeting earlier this year, pressed President Barack Obama, to send Shaker back.

So the question itself could not be more natural. Arriving at a fair answer, however, is far less straightforward.

First come the basic facts about Shaker and his story.

In 2001 he was abducted in Afghanistan where he has always insisted he was doing voluntary work for an Islamic charity, and sold to the American military for a $5,000 (£3,200) bounty.

He was taken away from his three children and his wife, who was pregnant with their fourth child at the time. All of them are British nationals, though Shaker himself is only a British resident, having been born in Saudi Arabia in 1968. He travelled widely in Europe and America and even acted as a translator for the US military during the Gulf War before settling in Britain in 1996.

After his abduction, Shaker was tortured and beaten severely at a number of U.S. prisons in Afghanistan before being shackled, blindfolded, and ear-muffed for the long flight to Cuba, where he arrived on Valentine’s Day in 2002, the very day that his son, Faris, whom he has still not met, was born.

Astonishingly, he has never been charged and has never stood trial.

His detention in Afghanistan was only the start of his ordeal. At Guantánamo, in addition to yet more brutal questioning, he endured endless years in solitary confinement, which is supposed to be used only sparingly if at all by prison authorities, because of the rapid deterioration it can bring about in a prisoner’s mental health.

Even everyday procedures at Guantánamo are calculated to inflict maximum pain and humiliation. A procedure known as ‘Forced Cell Extraction’ (FCE), for example, is used to transport protesting prisoners. A typical extraction begins with the forced extraction team slamming Shaker’s face into the ground. Four American soldiers in full riot gear grab his legs and arms and a fifth takes his head. The team leader pins his feet and arms together behind Shaker at a single point while all the other guards press down on him with their cumulative weight. During each forced extraction, Shaker’s back nearly breaks as they handcuff him using tight, cutting plastic restraints, before subjecting him to a humiliating full-body search.

Describing these practices, Shaker said to me: ‘I don’t wish what happened to us here to happen to any human being, not even my enemy.’

Yet, remarkably, Shaker remained unbroken.

‘Of course, Guantánamo does not define me,’ he told me in a letter. ‘I arrived here bound at the hands and feet, blacked-out goggles covering my eyes, and expecting death. But up until that point, I had been an English teacher, a translator, a volunteer with a humanitarian group, a resident of Great Britain, a husband, and a father of four.’

The daily regime that Shaker endures would be laughable were it not so grotesque.

When the soldiers deem him compliant he is allowed to wear a white or beige jumpsuit rather than the now infamous orange one.

He may be allowed to talk to other prisoners if he’s put into a mixed cellblock.

And the heavily restricted list of books he is allowed to see would include Harry Potter.

When Shaker is compliant he is not subject to immediate violence. He typically rises in the small hours for morning prayers. But after that comes the long, painful hours of emptiness and utter uncertainty. Mental torture or living death. Call it what you will, both are true.

The quotidian details of Shaker’s life at Guantánamo can be as baffling as the dramatically brutal ones. The food, for example, is usually served all mixed up together: the tuna in the fruit salad, the eggs in the oatmeal. And then there’s the dense, oddly shaped pseudo-falafel which Shaker has taken to calling the ‘constipation cube.’ Shaker swears that if it were thrown against a wall with force, that falafel wouldn’t crumble apart but would bounce off. Even the stray cats won’t touch the food, the ones that Shaker tries to care for during what recreation time he is given when deemed ‘compliant’ by prison authorities.

Those days are the good days. But there are plenty of bad days too.

Shaker is not always judged ‘compliant’. To preserve his sanity and self respect he protests against his illegal detention and inhuman treatment.

He often stages sit-ins — refusing to leave his cell or return to his cell from the recreation area — or hunger strikes. Such peaceful protests are not illegal, but at Guantánamo they are punished all the same.

When Shaker is wearing an orange jump suit, the mind-bending assault of solitary confinement resumes. So does forced cell extraction. He is deprived of what the prison administration refers to as ‘amenities’ which, to most people, would be the basics of human dignity. So Shaker is denied a blanket in the arctic air-conditioning employed at Guantánamo, leaving him freezing. He is allowed no reading material except the Koran.

Not even my attorney-client meetings with Shaker are free from the madness. Since beginning work on Guantánamo cases in 2005, I have been to America’s offshore gulag thirty-seven times. American soldiers have to frisk and ‘wand’ me then escort me through a labyrinth of clanking iron gates before I am finally allowed to meet with the last Briton in Guantánamo Bay.

I walk into the shack under the Cuban sun in Camp Echo, where the meetings are held, to find him shackled by the ankle to a steel loop jutting out of the flooring. The prison authorities are usually unmoved by my pleas that he be unshackled for the duration of our meeting. Once or twice in scores of meetings over the years, they relented, but not before making me sign a waiver absolving the U.S. military of any and all responsibility should my client assault me during our meeting!

Still, Shaker has not quit. He routinely stages acts of peaceful disobedience to protest his continuing imprisonment without charge or fair process. His outlook is simple: ‘I stood for justice in this place for thirteen years and I am not going to give up now.’

But it is indisputable that it has all taken its toll on Shaker. I had to file a motion in federal court so the U.S. government would permit Shaker a reliable examination by an independent medical expert — his first such examination in over a decade of captivity. In her report, she diagnosed Shaker with chronic psychological and physical ailments that have gravely diminished his mental health and limited his physical mobility. According to the medical expert, Shaker’s conditions include Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), depression, Special Housing Unit (SHU) Syndrome, and paranoia, as well as severe edema, debilitating headaches, and untreated asthma. Shaker’s treatment will likely span many years, if not his lifetime, and it necessitates his prompt release to the United Kingdom.

Compounding the stress on Shaker’s psyche is the sheer absurdity of his present predicament. Shaker was first cleared for release by a U.S. military panel in 2007, during the Bush Administration. Then, in 2009, he was again cleared for release under President Obama by a taskforce comprising representatives from every single U.S. agency with a stake in national security matters. Responding to Prime Minister Cameron’s entreaty, President Obama promised to ‘prioritise’ Shaker’s case. Yet, the man continues to languish at Guantánamo today, kept prisoner for reasons the American authorities refuse to disclose.

That is the larger context lending full meaning to the following words that Shaker wrote me: ‘We live in a very strange and dark place. We don’t know who to trust or what to trust. The more we get close to what we want, the farther it goes, and we feel we will never get to the end of this.’

As his words reflect, Shaker remains painfully aware of his overall situation. But he has not given up hope, often reminding me that ‘the wheel of justice takes time to turn but it never stops nor will it miss anyone.’

In a meeting, I asked Shaker what regular folks in the United Kingdom could do for him. He didn’t answer me right away but later wrote me a letter. His words might as well have been addressed directly to his fellow Britons.

‘Your role here is critical,’ Shaker wrote. Every call, letter, or email from an ordinary member of the British public to the Prime Minister reminding him to keep Shaker’s case a priority in talks with the United States brings Shaker one step closer to freedom and to being reunited with his wife and family, including the child he has never seen, in London.

It is of course nothing short of disgraceful that the demands already clearly and directly put forth by the United Kingdom, the United States’ closest ally, have thus far been ignored. But the pressure must be kept up all the same, for Shaker’s sake. I will next see Shaker in that same prison shack in Cuba in ten days, and I will update him on Britain’s continuing commitment to his release. We will also discuss many other things, big and small. Perhaps I will be able to take steps to improve his daily existence in that hellhole, however marginally. But there will certainly be many more things that I will be powerless to change. Paradoxically, a person reading these words an ocean away in the United Kingdom may be in a better position to help Shaker by contacting elected representatives to press them on Shaker’s ongoing plight.

The kindness, solidarity, and support already expressed by countless compatriots have not been lost on Shaker. He wrote me recently that ‘truly no words are enough to thank whoever puts his time in service of justice, even if it’s only through prayer or thoughts.’ Hopefully, a little more time and a little more effort will finally bring Shaker home so he can thank you in person.

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,’ was released in July 2015). 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.

Report and Photos: The Massive March for Refugees in London – and Jeremy Corbyn’s Victory

See my photos on Flickr of the huge march in London calling for more refugees to be welcomed in the UK.

For anyone not in thrall to a cruel and self-serving neo-liberal worldview, in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer until we return to some sort of feudal nightmare, yesterday was a truly inspirational day. In the morning, Jeremy Corbyn won the Labour leadership campaign, with an astonishing 251,000 votes — 59.5% of the total, and 49% of the votes cast by full-time party members, rather than those like me who paid £3 to vote for him (and who didn’t get “purged”). Jeremy’s nearest rival, Andy Burnham, got just 19% of the vote, Yvette Cooper got 17% and Liz Kendall got just 4.5%. Read about Jeremy’s vision for the future of the Labour Party and of the UK in an exclusive article in the Observer today.

As I mentioned on Facebook just after the result was announced, “The people have spoken. It’s time for a renewed Labour Party — of the people for the people. This is the most hopeful moment for politics in the UK since before Thatcher’s baleful victory in May 1979. I’m honoured to have got to know Jeremy through his support of the We Stand With Shaker campaign, and look forward to doing whatever I can to support him and to take on and defeat this wretched Tory government.”

In May, before he entered the leadership race, Jeremy visited Washington D.C. as part of a delegation of MPs from the cross-party Shaker Aamer Parliamentary Group, set up by his close friend and campaign manager John McDonnell MP last November, but working to close Guantánamo and to get Shaker Aamer released is just one of Jeremy’s — and John’s — many interests that have long coincided with my own views.

Jeremy entered the leadership race as an anti-austerity candidate, and a rank outsider, as he himself would have acknowledged, but it soon turned out that there was a huge appetite for an antidote not only to the Tory government, but also to its echo in the Labour Party, the right-wingers, or the centre-right that, to far too many people, is largely indistinguishable from the Tories.

Fundamentally honest, Jeremy also refused to play the game of the personality cult, insisting that at the campaign needed to be about the issues rather than image or spin or “branding.” His meetings around the country were packed out, and he encouraged nearly 90,000 people to become involved in the Party, and to vote for him as registered supporters, many of whom will now be joining the Party as full members.

A month ago, on the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, I saw Jeremy speak at a CND event in Tavistock Square. A member of CND since he was 15, he opposes nuclear weapons, wants to scrap the insanely expensive Trident programme, and is, essentially, an anti-war candidate — a pacifist — seeking the highest office in the land, who, of course, joined the rest of us on the side of sanity when Tony Blair, New Labour, the Tories and 86% of the media took us into an illegal war in Iraq in 2003.

Jeremy’s anti-austerity stance is also an area where he is taking a necessary fight to the establishment, and where, I hope, all of us who put the needs of the people before the profits of the rapacious banks and corporations — and the Tories’ (and New Labour’s) obscene pandering to the global super-rich — will be able to get involved in making the case for radical change.

One area where change is urgently needed is to combat the rise of the precariat — those trapped in insecure, low-paid jobs without rights — and another is to urgently tackle the housing crisis, which includes an obscene housing bubble (in London and the south east in particular), private rents out of control, and social housing under threat, and which needs a massive social housebuilding programme to restore some semblance of sanity.

For anyone who wants to help, and who hasn’t already joined the Labour Party, you can do so here, to support Jeremy, who has already asked people to let him know what questions they would like him to ask David Cameron at his first Prime Minister’s Question Time on Wednesday. Tomorrow, I expect, we will hear who is in his shadow cabinet, and very soon, I expect, we will be hearing much more about how we can get involved with the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn, to change politics for the better, and to begin to get some of the 15.7 million people who didn’t vote in the General Election in May to get involved in this new, resurgent socialist alternative to the dreadful neo-liberal status quo.

Yesterday was also the day that a huge march in support of refugees took place in central London — echoed elsewhere in the country — following up on the extraordinary support that has been building over recent weeks as tens of thousands of refugees have entered Europe — from Syria in particular, via Turkey,  but also from other countries ruined by war and/or brutal totalitarian regimes — Afghanistan, for example, and Eritrea, which currently has the world’s worst human rights record.

The march consisted of two separate events whose organisers agreed to make their two separate events into a single event — Refugees Welcome Here and Solidarity with Refugees, organised by Stand up to Racism, the People’s Assembly Against Austerity, the Stop the War Coalition, the Syria Solidarity Movement, the Refugee Council, Refugee Action, Amnesty International, Black Activists Rising Against Cuts (BARAC), Migrant Rights Network, War on Want, Movement Against Xenophobia, Unite Against Fascism, Love Music Hate Racism, Black Out London, Emergency UK, Student Action for Refugees, London2Calais, the British Syrian Medical Society and Avaaz.

For my photos of the day, see my photo set on Flickr here, where I described the day as follows:

Today was a great day for the millions of us who want to see a better world, and are fed up with the existing power structure — the election, by a landslide, of Jeremy Corbyn as the new Labour Party leader, and the march in central London, which was attended by around 100,000 people in solidarity with the refugees fleeing Syria and other countries in numbers not seen since the Second World War.

The existing power structure presides over a hard-hearted and increasingly unequal vision of the UK, in which the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, austerity is cynically used by the Tories to try and destroy the state provision of almost all services, and the refugee crisis is sidelined — and all this by a government that, although it has provided significant financial aid, is only accepting 20,000 refugees, over five years and on a temporary basis, and is now gunning for war, which will only create more refugees, and trying to justify that through the disturbing extrajudicial execution of two British citizens in Syria via an RAF-led drone attack.

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,’ was released in July 2015). 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.

14 Years After 9/11, It’s Time for Guantánamo to Be Closed

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.

14 years after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, it is time to take stock of what has — or hasn’t — been achieved, and what the cost has been for America’s standing in the world, how it sees itself and its values.

Unfortunately, an honest audit delivers an alarming response. As Tom Engelhardt has written in “Mantra for 9/11: Fourteen Years Later, Improbable World,” an article to mark the anniversary:

Fourteen years of wars, interventions, assassinations, torture, kidnappings, black sites, the growth of the American national security state to monumental proportions, and the spread of Islamic extremism across much of the Greater Middle East and Africa. Fourteen years of astronomical expense, bombing campaigns galore, and a military-first foreign policy of repeated defeats, disappointments, and disasters. Fourteen years of a culture of fear in America, of endless alarms and warnings, as well as dire predictions of terrorist attacks. Fourteen years of the burial of American democracy (or rather its recreation as a billionaire’s playground and a source of spectacle and entertainment but not governance). Fourteen years of the spread of secrecy, the classification of every document in sight, the fierce prosecution of whistleblowers, and a faith-based urge to keep Americans “secure” by leaving them in the dark about what their government is doing. Fourteen years of the demobilization of the citizenry. Fourteen years of the rise of the warrior corporation, the transformation of war and intelligence gathering into profit-making activities, and the flocking of countless private contractors to the Pentagon, the NSA, the CIA, and too many other parts of the national security state to keep track of. Fourteen years of our wars coming home in the form of PTSD, the militarization of the police, and the spread of war-zone technology like drones and stingrays to the “homeland.”

Engelhardt’s article is important, but although he mentions torture and black sites, he doesn’t specifically mention indefinite detention without charge or trial, and yet that is a crucial betrayal of American values; indeed, of values upon which all nations that dare to call themselves civilized pride themselves.

And it is at Guantánamo Bay, the US outpost in Cuba, chosen by the Bush administration for a post-9/11 prison that was established to be beyond the reach of US law, that indefinite detention without charge or trial continues.

It was at Guantánamo that the norms of detention policy were dismissed by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their lawyers and advisors. A key part of the post-9/11 global network of CIA black sites for torture, proxy torture prisons and military prisons where the Geneva Conventions were discarded, Guantánamo has remained open while the others have, for the most part, been shut down.

And let us be clear: the prison at Guantánamo Bay, which opened exactly four months after the 9/11 attacks and has now been open for 13 years and eight months, shames the US with each day that it remains open.

On this dreadful anniversary, when we must all pause to recall the 2,977 people who lost their lives, we must not shy away from also addressing the fallout from the Bush administration’s cruel and misguided response to the attacks, and to call for the closure of Guantánamo.

Searching for a prison on the US mainland

In recent weeks, we have been hearing about the Obama administration’s proposals to find a facility on the US mainland to hold some of the men still held at Guantánamo, so the prison at the naval base in Cuba can be shut down — primarily, the Fort Leavenworth military detention facility in Kansas and the Navy Brig in Charleston, South Carolina.

Typically, there has been opposition from Republican lawmakers to these suggestions and others, which should come as no surprise to anyone, let alone the administration, because, for many years now, the Republicans have been raising cynical obstructions to President Obama’s plans to close the prison. These include a ban on bringing any prisoners to the US mainland for any reason, and a requirement that Congress be notified 30 days before any planned prisoner release, and that the defense secretary sign off on any planned release, certifying that steps have been taken to mitigate any risk to the US.

However, what has been lost in all the scaremongering, for the most part, is an analysis of the 116 men still held, and what the proposal to close the prison means.

For 53 of these men, the proposals ought not to affect them, as they should be released — and the majority of them should have been released years ago.

44 of them were told over five years ago that the US no longer wanted to hold them, after the deliberations of the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established shortly after taking office in 2009. The task force issued its final report in January 2010, and yet these men — 37 Yemenis and seven men from other countries, including Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison — are still held.

The other nine men — seven Yemenis, an Egyptian and a Libyan — have been approved for release in the last 20 months by Periodic Review Boards, which 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. The PRBs were established to review the cases of all the men not already approved for release or facing trials — the latter consisting of just ten of the 116 men still held.

Releasing these men ought to be a priority for the government, as we at Close Guantánamo have stressed repeatedly. Indefinite dentition without charge or trial is the hallmark of a dictatorship, and yet even a dictatorship would not be so cruel as to dream up a review process, undertake those reviews, recommend men for release and then not release them, because that is a particularly cruel form of injustice.

President Obama ought to care about this injustice, as should defense secretary Ashton Carter, who, shamefully, has not yet signed off on the release of a single prisoner since taking up his position in February (the six men released in Oman in June were part of a deal approved under his predecessor, Chuck Hagel).

As Daphne Eviatar noted in a recent article for Just Security:

[I]t’s not clear why the Secretary of Defense isn’t more focused on transferring the 52 detainees at Guantánamo who’ve already been cleared for release for many years. He is reportedly the stumbling block to their leaving.

Whether it’s the sickly, 75-pound Tariq Ba Odah who was cleared to leave six years ago or the [44] Yemenis who could be transferred to other countries with security protections, transferring the detainees who’ve been cleared to go by a painstaking multi-agency review process ought to be Secretary Carter’s number one concern right now. After all, these men, none convicted or even accused of any crime, have been imprisoned for more than a decade. They remain at Guantánamo at the absurd cost of $3.4 million per detainee annually. Few will lament their transfer. And the fewer that remain at Guantánamo, the more absurd the cost will become of maintaining them there.

The “forever prisoners”

Once these 53 men are removed from consideration regarding the closure of Guantánamo (as they should be through their release), it becomes apparent that the move to the US mainland is envisaged for just 63 men — the ten facing trials, and 53 others who are all eligible for Periodic Review Boards. In some cases, these men were recommended for prosecution by the Guantánamo Review Task Force, but the proposed charges evaporated when the appeals court in Washington D.C. ruled decisively (in a number of rulings from 2013 to this year) that the administration was trying to prosecute people on war crimes charges that were not legitimate, and had been invented by Congress.

In other cases, the task force concluded that the men in question were “too dangerous to release,” but that insufficient evidence existed to put them on trial. 48 men were initially placed in this category, and when President Obama issued an executive order authorizing their ongoing detention without charge or trial, in March 2011, he was embarrassed enough to include a promise that they would receive periodic reviews of their cases, to see if they were still regarded as “too dangerous to release.” Those reviews are the PRBs, which didn’t commence until November 2013, and whose remit was broadened to include a number of men originally recommended for prosecution, as outlined above.

However what this discussion misses is the crucial problem with a government body deciding that people are “too dangerous to release,” but that insufficient evidence exists to put them on trial. What that means, bluntly, is that the so-called evidence is no such thing — and in the formerly classified military files relating to the Guantánamo prisoners (the Detainee Assessment Briefs that were admirably released by WikiLeaks in 2011 after they were leaked by Pvt. Chelsea Manning), it is clear that the so-called evidence consists, in large part, of statements made by other prisoners, either in Guantánamo, in Afghanistan prior to their transfer to Guantánamo, or in CIA “black sites,” and that torture and other forms of abuse render much of it meaningless.

In addition, as Daphne Eviatar pointed out in her article, the reviews will “likely lead to more detainees being eligible for transfer, especially since so many of them were captured based on unreliable information from foreign intelligence agents, many of whom were paid bounties to turn suspects over” — two other themes that may have been lost in the discussion of Guantánamo over the years: the extent to which prisoners were overwhelmingly seized not by US forces, but by their Afghan and Pakistani allies, and the extent to which the widespread offer of bounty payments  (of, on average, $5,000 a head — a huge amount of money in that part of the world) for al-Qaeda and/or Taliban suspects created a market for innocent people to be sold to the US.

It is also clear, from a detailed analysis of those making the allegations in the files released by WikiLeaks that they also include statements made by prisoners who lied, either to gain privileges, or because they had mental health issues, or simply because they could no longer stand the relentless pressure of interrogations, when they — along with every other prisoner, including those in the “black sites” — were repeatedly shown photo albums of other prisoners (referred to by the US authorities as “the family album”) and pressurized to say that they knew people whether they did or not.

In the months to come, I will be conducting a renewed analysis of these files, but for now it is my hope that people will begin to reflect on the extent to which the supposed evidence against the prisoners is profoundly and irredeemably untrustworthy, and will recognize that many of these 53 men will end up being approved for release after their Periodic Review Boards.

To that end, another important message for the administration is to increase the speed with which the PRBs take place, because just 17 prisoners have had their cases reviewed in the 22 months since the PRBs were set up, and with 53 men still awaiting reviews, the initial process of reviewing everyone will not be completed until May 2021 unless it speeds up significantly.

Closing Guantánamo

In the end, Tom Wilner and I, the founders of Close Guantánamo, believe that serious questions should be asked before any prisoner is transferred to the US —  except those facing trials, which should take place in federal court rather than in the thoroughly discredited military commissions. We do, however, acknowledge that the administration may not immediately accept that everyone else should be released, although we are sure that an objective analysis of the so-called evidence will indicate that few of those not facing trials can legitimately be regarded as significant.

After all, in 2004, a New York Times article reported, “In interviews, dozens of high-level military, intelligence and law enforcement officials in the United States, Europe and the Middle East said that, contrary to the repeated assertions of senior administration officials, none of the detainees at the United States Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay ranked as leaders or senior operatives of al-Qaida.” At that time, 750 of the 779 men held in total by the military at Guantánamo were already at the prison, or had already been released. After that, 14 “high-value detainees” were moved to Guantánamo from “black sites,” amongst them some of the men currently facing trials.

If the administration insists on transferring a few dozen men in total to the US mainland, having released everyone else, Tom and I remain convinced that they will find it impossible to hold them for long without putting them on trial, because we believe that the US Constitution does not permit indefinite detention without charge or trial.

For now, however, we call on the government to speed up the release of prisoners, and to speed up the Periodic Review Boards, and to President Obama we say that, if Ashton Carter — or anyone else in the Pentagon — is the stumbling block to any of these releases, he must expend political capital overcoming those obstacles.

Just as the president has the power to bypass Congress, if he wishes to exercise it, so too can he override an intransigent Department of Defense. It should not come to that, but if it does come to any sort of showdown, only one man in this scenario is the President of the United States and the Commander in Chief, and that man, Barack Obama, must not leave office without  fulfilling the promise he made on his second day as president in January 2009 — to close the prison at Guantánamo that remains  a legal, ethical, and moral abomination.

Note: The photo at the top of this article is from my Flickr set from January 11, 2014. Also see my photo set from January 11, 2012, see two sets of photos from January 11, 2013, and see this set from January 11, 2015.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose debut album, ‘Love and War,’ was released in July 2015). 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.

Labour Frontrunner Jeremy Corbyn Joins Cross-Party Signatories on Early Day Motion Calling for Shaker Aamer’s Release from Guantánamo

Today, following a meeting of the Shaker Aamer Parliamentary Group yesterday, which I attended, as the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, it was decided that an Early Day Motion would be submitted by Andrew Mitchell MP (Con., Sutton Coldfield), calling for the Obama administration to release Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, from the prison, and to return him to the UK, to rejoin his family in London.

Andrew is one of four MPs from the All-Party Parliamentary Group who visited Washington D.C. in May to try to secure Shaker’s release. When the EDM was submitted, it was also signed by the other three MPs from the delegation — Jeremy Corbyn (Lab., Islington North), the frontrunner in the Labour leadership campaign, David Davis (Con., Haltemprice and Howden), the co-chair of the Shaker Aamer Parliamentary Group, and Andy Slaughter (Lab., Hammersmith).

Showing the breadth of cross-party support demonstrated by the campaign to get Shaker released, Andrew also secured the support of Tim Farron (Liberal Democrat, Westmorland and Lonsdale), the new leader of the Liberal Democrats, who spoke at the Parliamentary debate for Shaker in March, and Alex Salmond (Scottish National Party, Gordon), the former leader of the SNP, and early signatories to the EDM were John McDonnell (Lab., Hayes and Harlington), the co-chair of the Parliamentary Group, who established the group last November, Dominic Grieve (Con., Beaconsfield), the former Attorney General, and Caroline Lucas (Green, Brighton Pavilion), who has been a supporter from the beginning.

The EDM (EDM 413) states:

That this House calls on the US administration to release Shaker Aamer from his imprisonment in Guantanamo Bay; notes that he has now been incarcerated for 13 years without charge; further notes that he has twice been cleared for release and transfer, under President Bush in 2007 and President Obama in 2009; supports the call made by the Prime Minister for his release and return to the UK; notes the unanimous resolution of the House of 17 March 2015 that Shaker Aamer be released; and asserts that the defeat of terrorism will only be achieved by upholding the principle of the rule of law — to the protection of which Mr Shaker Aamer is entitled.

Other signatories who have already come on board include Peter Bottomley (Con., Worthing West), Tania Mathias (Con., Twickenham), Mark Durkan (SDLP, Foyle) and Graham Allen (Lab., Nottingham North).

If you’re in the UK, please can you write to your MP and ask them to add their name to the EDM — and can you also ask them to join the Shaker Aamer Parliamentary Group, and to let Joanne MacInnes, the co-chair of We Stand With Shaker, know if they are willing to join.

We can see no reason why hundreds of MPs will not sign the EDM — after all, it has serious cross-party support, and it reflects the government’s support for the Parliamentary motion on March 17 this year. In addition, as the Guardian noted in its coverage of the EDM, “David Cameron has raised Aamer’s case with Obama twice this year — at their meeting in the White House in January and at the G7 summit in Bavaria in June.”

As the Guardian also noted, the EDM “says that terrorism will only be defeated by upholding the rule of law, whose protection should apply to Aamer,” adding, “The MPs hope the Commons motion … will highlight the case of Aamer, who was was seized by bounty hunters in Afghanistan and handed over to US forces in December 2001. Two months later, he was rendered to the US military prison on Cuba. US authorities have made it clear that they have no intention of charging him.” It was also noted, “Aamer has accused UK security and intelligence officials of falsely claiming that he was a member of an al-Qaida network in London.”

The Guardian also stated, “Aamer, who was born in Saudi Arabia and has four children with his British wife, has twice been approved for release from Guantánamo. The first time was in 2007 under George W Bush, followed in 2010 by Barack Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force.”

Thanks for your interest in Shaker’s case. Please share this widely — and get everyone you know in the UK to write to their MPs — if you want to see this long and unacceptable injustice brought to an end.

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,’ was released in July 2015). 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.

Quarterly Fundraiser Day 3: Still Seeking $3000 (£2000) to Support My Guantánamo Work

Please support my work!

Dear friends and supporters,

I’m currently trying to raise $3000 (£2000) to support my work on Guantánamo — including the We Stand With Shaker campaign — for the next three months. If you appreciate what I do, any donation, however large or small — $25, $100 or $500, or any amount in any other currency — will be very gratefully received, as most of what I do is only possible because it’s funded by you, my readers and supporters.

If you can help out at all, please click on the “Donate” button above to donate via PayPal. You don’t need to be a PayPal member to use PayPal, and PayPal will convert any currency you pay into dollars.

You can also make a recurring payment on a monthly basis by ticking the box marked, “Make This Recurring (Monthly),” and if you are able to do so, it would be very much appreciated. If you make a recurring payment of at least $15 a month, or if you make a one-off donation of $200 or more, I’ll send you a free copy of my band The Four Fathers’ debut album, ‘Love and War’, on CD. The album includes six original songs of mine, including ‘Song for Shaker Aamer’, featured in the campaign video for We Stand With Shaker, and ’81 Million Dollars’, about the US torture program. 

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

Since launching this latest fundraiser on Monday, I have received $500 (£300) in donations, but I need to raise the rest of my target to make my ongoing work viable. As well as researching and writing about Guantánamo, and publishing articles every couple of days, I also attend events, undertake radio interviews and deal with all kinds of requests on a regular basis — and all my work as the co-founder and co-director of the We Stand With Shaker campaign, calling for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, is also unpaid.

Since my last fundraiser, I have continued to campaign for the closure of Guantánamo, and to educate people about the men held, and, for US Independence Day, I wrote the open letter to President Obama calling for Shaker Aamer’s release, which was signed by nearly a hundred celebrities and MPs, including Sir Patrick Stewart OBE, Ralph Fiennes, Russell Brand, Roger Waters, Peter Gabriel, Sting and Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London.

With your help, I will continue this work. At present, for example, I’m working on an update to my definitive prisoner list, which I first put together in 2010, and most recently updated last year, and in the months to come — in the run-up to the 14th anniversary of the opening of the prison in January — I will be working on ways to keep up pressure on the Obama administration and on Congress to get Guantánamo closed before President Obama leaves office in January 2017.

I hope you can help me.

With thanks, as ever, for your support.

Andy Worthington

London

September 9, 2015

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose debut album, ‘Love and War,’ was released in July 2015). 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.

Former Guantánamo Prisoner Omar Khadr Asks for Bail Conditions to be Eased So He Can Visit His Family

The former Guantánamo prisoner Omar Khadr, who was freed on bail in May, after spending two years and eight months in Canadian prisons (and nearly ten years in Guantánamo), has asked a Canadian court to ease his bail conditions, so he can fly to Toronto to visit his family, attend a night course at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT), and get to early morning prayers.

As the Canadian Press described it, he was granted bail “pending his appeal in the US against his 2010 conviction for war crimes by a widely discredited military commission at Guantánamo Bay” — “widely discredited” being something of an understatement.

Although no one has ever disputed the fact that Omar was a model prisoner, and has not been in any trouble since being freed from prison and allowed to live with his lawyer Dennis Edney and his wife, the bail conditions are harsh. As the Canadian Press described it, he is “required to communicate with his family … only in English and under the Edneys’ supervision,” and is not allowed to leave Alberta, except to stay at Edney’s vacation home in British Columbia.

He also has to wear an electronic tag, on his ankle, which, in a supporting affidavit, he called “uncomfortable,” adding, “It has also gone off several times and made noise all the time, even when I am in full compliance with my conditions. This can be particularly embarrassing.” The Edmonton Journal added that he complained that his electronic tag “hinders his full integration into the community,” and also noted that the bail conditions restrict his computer use, but he would “like to use computers in Edmonton public libraries.”

In the affidavit, Omar also stated, “My release and reintegration into the community have been going great. I have been embraced by many members of the community and made many new friends.” The Edmonton Journal noted that, in his affidavit, he also expressed “optimism about his summer activities reintegrating into Edmonton — cycling, meeting friends, connecting with a mosque, continuing his high school studies and preparing for university.”

As the Canadian Press described it, “Khadr’s maternal grandparents live in Toronto. He says his grandmother is ill and his grandfather barely speaks English. As a result, he says, he wants to be able to visit them and converse in another language without the Edneys present.” He also “says he wants to see his mother, siblings, and other relatives during a two-week visit to Toronto, either this month or next.”

In his affidavit, Omar stated, “I am now an adult and I think independently. Even if the members of my family were to wish to influence my religious or other views, they would not be able to control or influence me in any negative manner.” He added, however, “None of my family members are involved in any illegal activity.”

As the Edmonton Journal described his other reasons for asking for hs bail conditions to be relaxed, “Khadr must be home between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. — that does not give him enough time to get home from his 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. night course at NAIT to train as an emergency medical responder. Under the curfew, he can’t go for early bike rides or make overnight visits to his new friends in Canmore [and] Lac La Biche,” as well as his family in Toronto.

The Canadian Press also noted that there had been no immediate response from the government regarding Omar’s application to the court, which is expected to hear the case on September 11. The government still maintains that Omar should not have been released on bail, and is appealing the decision, although “it has yet to request a date or file supporting documents.”

The Canadian Press also noted that, “despite the government’s objections, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled the eight-year sentence the [military] commission gave Khadr as part of his plea bargain amounts to a youth sentence,” which “means he would have been eligible for statutory release Aug. 19, according to Correctional Service Canada.”

Nate Whitling, another of Omar’s lawyers, wrote in the application, “The original conditions are no longer necessary or in the public interest,” and US military psychiatrist Stephen Xenakis, who has “spent many hours with Khadr including a visit this summer, sent a letter in support,” as the Edmonton Journal described it, in which he stated that Omar is a “fully alert, oriented co-operative young man,” who has “publicly denounced violence.”

Note: See below for the trailer, on YouTube, for “Guantánamo’s Child,” directed by Patrick Reed and Michelle Shephard, which has its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 14 at the Isabel Bader Theatre.

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,’ was released in July 2015). 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.