Andy Worthington's Blog, page 91

Quarterly Fundraiser: Seeking $3500 (£2300) for My Guantánamo Work

Please support my work!

Dear friends and supporters,

Every three months, I ask you, if you can, to make a donation to support my work on Guantánamo and related issues — accountability for torture, for example, and the We Stand With Shaker campaign, the specific campaign to free Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, which I launched last November with the activist Joanne MacInnes. I’m hoping to raise $3,500 (£2,300) for the next three months, which is just $270 (£180) a week for my constant advocacy and campaigning on behalf of the Guantánamo prisoners.

As my work is primarily reader-funded (I receive no outside funding for this website, or for my work on the We Stand With Shaker campaign), any amount will be gratefully received, whether it is $25, $100 or $500 — or any amount in any other currency (£15, £60 or £300, for example). PayPal will convert any currency you pay into dollars.

If you can help out at all, please click on the “Donate” button above to donate via PayPal (and I should add that you don’t need to be a PayPal member to use PayPal).

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.

It is now ten years since I first began researching the stories of the prisoners held at Guantánamo, and back in September 2005 all that was available were the scattered accounts of prisoners already released, a few accounts that had emerged from within the prison, via the men’s lawyers, who had begun visiting them at the start of the year, and two speculative lists of who might be held, compiled by the Washington Post and the British NGO Cageprisoners.

I spent some time searching online for every scrap of information about the prisoners, and began compiling a list of my own, but it was another six months until I began researching and writing about Guantánamo on a full-time basis, when the Pentagon lost a lawsuit and was obliged to release 8,000 pages of documents about the prisoners, which I then analyzed in depth for my book The Guantánamo Files.

Ten years on, and sadly there is no sign that the closure of Guantánamo, promised nearly five years and eight months ago by President Obama, will happen before he leaves office in January 2017. His administration is looking at ways to move dozens of prisoners to the US mainland so that Guantánamo itself can be closed, but he faces opposition in Congress, and, of the 116 men still held, he is still holding 52 men who have been approved for release — most since 2009 — and holding them year after year is completely unacceptable.

With your financial support, I will continue to work towards the closure of Guantánamo, conducting research, writing articles and opinion pieces and trying to come up with new initiatives to help to get the prison closed. It remains a potent icon of the injustice that was shamefully implemented by the Bush administration, with compete disdain for domestic and international laws and treaties regarding the treatment of prisoners, and as long as it remains open it ought to be a source of undying shame for everyone responsible for its continued existence.

As I have often mentioned, and will continue to do so, President Obama is in charge of a prison where men continue to be held indefinitely without charge or trial, which is unacceptable in any country that claims to respect the rule of law. The prison should never have been opened, and must be closed as soon as possible.

With thanks, as ever, for your interest in my work. I honestly couldn’t do what I do without your help, and I will be very grateful if you can make any kind of donation to support me.

Andy Worthington

London

September 7, 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.

Life After Guantánamo: Attorney Tells the Story of a Father and Son Freed, But Separated By 1,850 Miles

Back in 2006, when I began working full-time on Guantánamo, researching the stories of the men held there for my book The Guantánamo Files, which was published in September 2007, the main research I undertook involved a detailed analysis of 8,000 pages of documents relating to the prisoners that had been released in 2006 as a result of freedom of information submissions and federal lawsuits submitted by the Associated Press.

The documents consisted primarily of unclassified allegations against the prisoners and transcripts of various review processes — the Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs) and Administrative Review Boards (ARBs) — that had been conducted from 2004 onwards, purportedly to establish the status of the prisoners, although these processes were so one-sided and what passed for evidence was generally so poor that, as the AP put it, all the transcripts generally revealed about the prisoners was “the often vague reasons the United States used for locking them up.”

Also included in the releases by the Pentagon were the first ever lists of the prisoners that had been made public, and, although all the files released required significant cross-referencing to create a coherent account of all the prisoners held at Guantánamo, past and present, I was able, over a period of 14 months, to do just that, producing the first — and still the only — comprehensive account of all the prisoners who, in such a cavalier and unsubstantiated manner, had been described by the Bush administration as “the worst of the worst.”

The overwhelming majority of the men held — I would say as many as 97 percent of the 779 men held throughout Guantánamo’s history (of whom 116 remain) — had no involvement with terrorism, and were either humble foot soldiers for the Taliban or civilians unlucky enough to be in the wrong time and the wrong place while the US was handing out substantial bounty payments to its Afghan and Pakistani allies for anyone who could be packaged up as being involved with al-Qaeda and/or the Taliban.

Two of the men whose stories I pieced together at this time were Syrians – Abdul Nasir al-Tumani, in his early 40s, and his son Mohammed, 19 years old at the time of his capture according to the US authorities, but just 17 according to his own account – who, like roughly a third of the men and boys held at Guantánamo, were captured after crossing the Afghan border into Pakistan. These prisoners were all routinely regarded as “unlawful enemy combatants,” but in fact, while that label, invented by the US, shamefully failed to distinguish between soldiers and terrorists, it also failed to recognise that all manner of civilians had been fleeing Afghanistan in addition to those who were allegedly combatants — economic migrants, those fleeing religious persecution, missionaries, those involved in providing humanitarian aid, and businessmen.

As I described the father and son’s story in The Guantánamo Files:

The father had travelled to Afghanistan in1999 in search of work, finding a job in a restaurant in Kabul and bringing ten members of his family over in June 2001, including Mohammed, his grandmother and an eight-month old baby. Another six family members — his uncle’s family — arrived a week before 9/11, but after hearing about the attack on America the family fled to Jalalabad, where they stayed for a month, and then made their way on foot to Pakistan. On the way, their guide advised al-Tumani to let the women and children travel by car, to make them less of a target for highway robbers, but when he and his son arrived in Pakistan the local villagers handed them over to the Pakistani army.

Both men had eventually been recommended for release, but it had taken time for the US to find third countries that were prepared to offer them new homes. In August 2009, the son, Mohammed, was given a new home in Portugal, and in July 2010 his father was also resettled — but, disgracefully, not in Portugal but 1,850 miles away, in Cape Verde, an island nation off the west coast of Africa that was formerly colonized by the Portuguese.

I later spoke to Mohammed by telephone, on a visit to the United States, at the studio of Peter B. Collins, along with Debra Sweet, the director of the World Can’t Wait, and I had often wondered what had happened to him, and how — if — he had managed to stay in touch with his father. So I was pleased when, early this year, their lawyer, Pardiss Kebriaei of the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, wrote a detailed story about them that was published in Harper’s Magazine. Initially behind a paywall, it is now publicly available, and I’m cross-posting it below for the benefit of anyone who missed it when it was first published. It is a heartbreaking tale of wrongful arrest (sadly typical of the”war on terror”), of torture, of mental breakdown, isolation (three years of solitary confinement for Muhammed), and, eventually, after a one-hour reunion of father and son, release — but with no apology and no compensation for innocent lives ruined.

It is a powerful story, reminding me of why I have been working to get Guantánamo closed for the last ten years, and I hope you have the time to read it, and to share it if you find it as compelling as I did. I also wonder if, unlike me, you will be able to remain dry-eyed throughout it. I hope not.

Please note that Pardiss uses their correct names, not those used by their captors: Abdul Nasser and Muhammed Khantumani.

Life After Guantánamo: A father and son’s story

By Pardiss Kebriaei, Harper’s Magazine, April 2015

In 2008, I became the lawyer for Abdul Nasser Khantumani and his son Muhammed, two men who were being held at Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, in Cuba. When the United States took them into custody, in 2001, Abdul Nasser was in his forties; Muhammed was still a teenager, with a year of high school left. There’s a picture of him as a boy in Syria, not long before his life changed. He’s at the beach with his younger cousins, their arms draped over one another’s shoulders. He’s skinny and soaked, his wet hair plastered to his forehead.

On December 20, 2008, Muhammed cut one of his wrists in his cell. He smeared his blood on the walls, writing “COUNTRY OF INJUSTICE IS AMERICA.” Once his wounds had been treated, he wrote me a letter in which he listed the reasons for his act:

Being in this place, having been arrested when I was 17 years old
The continuous psychological pressure and the torture that I currently endure
The torture endured by prisoners in general
Being apart from my father
Current general torture

In another letter, he wrote diagonally, in all caps,

I SAY TO AMERICA DO WHATEVER YOU WANT THE PRISON HAD MADE MY HEART SUCH AS THE STONE FEEL WITH COMPLETE HOPELESSNESS I DON’T KNOW IF SOME PEOPLE KNOW THAT.

Muhammed had learned English in high school, and he had practiced it with the guards at Guantánamo and with his lawyers from the Center for Constitutional Rights, where I work. (I’ve corrected Muhammed’s misspellings and condensed some of his correspondence.) When I first met him, more than seven years after he was detained without charge, he had given up hope that he would ever be released. It took him a long time to change his mind.

The Khantumanis’ path to Guantánamo began in 2000, when Abdul Nasser left Syria after years of struggling to earn a living as a cook in his hometown of Aleppo. He ended up in Kabul, Afghanistan, where he didn’t need a visa to start a business, with the hope of opening a restaurant. In the summer of 2001, he called for his family to join him: his wife, his mother, his grandson, his brother, his in-laws, and his children — sixteen people in all.

Following the attack on the World Trade Center that September, word spread that the United States was planning to invade Afghanistan. Abdul Nasser gathered his family and drove east toward Pakistan, the closest border. When they stopped in Jalalabad, locals there told Abdul Nasser that it would be safer for the family to split into smaller groups before crossing the border. Everyone else made it out of Afghanistan and back home to Syria safely. Muhammed and Abdul Nasser, however, were arrested once they arrived in Pakistan.

They were not alone. In the aftermath of 9/11, the United States gave bundles of cash to Afghan warlords and to the Pakistani government for assistance in capturing suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters. The Pakistani authorities turned over hundreds of men to U.S. custody, often with little or no evidence of wrongdoing.

The first round of questioning was conducted by the Pakistanis. The Americans joined them for later sessions, when the Pakistani interrogators broke Muhammed’s nose and tried to get him to say that he and his father were Al Qaeda. He points to his nose, which is still slightly crooked, every time we talk about what happened back then.

From Pakistan, Muhammed and Abdul Nasser were transferred back to Afghanistan — to Kandahar, where the United States had turned the city’s old airport into a temporary prison to dump and sort through its captives. The first night, guards knocked Abdul Nasser to the ground, put a boot on the back of his head, and bore down. They fractured his forehead. It’s still slightly indented.

Muhammed and Abdul Nasser were held in Kandahar for a month while American interrogators decided whether to ship them to Guantánamo. The criteria for detention at Guantánamo were broad. All captured Al Qaeda, Taliban, and foreign fighters, along with anyone “who may pose a threat to U.S. interests [or] may have intelligence value,” were marked for transfer. “I’m sure we’ll find that the first sort wasn’t perfect,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld remarked in an interview at the time.

The flight to Guantánamo was long, and Muhammed said it was hard to breathe through the hoods the prisoners were forced to wear. They were ordered not to speak, but the plane was still loud with voices. Men were shouting, “Oh God, oh God, oh God.” Muhammed would hear someone get kicked, then, “Oh God, oh God, oh God,” then another kick, over and over.

Muhammed and Abdul Nasser landed in Guantánamo in February 2002, just a month after the detention camp opened. Guards hustled the hooded prisoners onto a white school bus, which was ferried across the bay to the prison side of the U.S. naval base. More than 300 men were already being held there, outside, in six-by-eight-foot cells made of chain-link fencing.

When Muhammed’s hood came off that night, two months after his arrest in Pakistan, he was inside a cage, under floodlights, surrounded by the green hills of Cuba.

In late 2004, Muhammed and Abdul Nasser prepared long statements for their Combatant Status Review Tribunals, improvised military panels that had been created by President Bush to circumvent the Supreme Court’s decision, made earlier that year, to allow detainees to seek court review of their detention. At the time, father and son were in separate cells but within earshot of each other. Abdul Nasser had never gone to high school, so Muhammed helped him with his statement, at the risk of being punished for talking.

I have audio recordings of the hearings. Muhammed tittered nervously at odd moments during his testimony, as when he talked about getting his nose broken in Pakistan, or when he described being shocked with electric cables, threatened with rendition, and told that his family had been killed. Like other Guantánamo detainees, he hadn’t spoken to anyone but interrogators, guards, and a few other traumatized prisoners for years, so he felt strange in front of the panel, with press and other observers in the room.

On the recordings, Abdul Nasser’s voice sounds thin and emotional. He is five foot seven and 160 pounds, an inch taller and an inch wider than his son, with a gray beard and a receding hairline. When we first met, I tried not to show surprise when he told me his age. (He was forty-nine.) Muhammed said that even though he always felt fear in Guantánamo — of torture, of separation from his father — there was a different torment for men like Abdul Nasser who had left children and a wife behind. A few times during his hearing, Abdul Nasser’s alto voice went even higher than usual, as when he asked the members of the panel if they thought he would have brought his sixty-seven-year-old mother and eight-month-old grandson to Kabul if he’d known the September 11 attacks were coming.

I recently asked Muhammed about one of the tribunal members who sounded troubled by his testimony. “Yes, that person was sympathetic when I talked about my torture,” he said. “You could see it on their face. I felt like their hands were tied.”

The tribunal determined that Muhammed and Abdul Nasser were properly considered enemy combatants and ordered their continued detention. The government reached the same conclusion in almost all of the cases it reviewed.

Muhammed thinks that he started to crack sometime in 2005. That was the year he and his father were moved into separate camps. Interrogators learned early on that proximity to Abdul Nasser was a “comfort item” they could manipulate to try to make Muhammed talk. After Muhammed became uncooperative, they relocated him as a form of punishment. It would be years before they would hear each other’s voices again.

Muhammed started smearing excrement on his cell walls. He kicked a guard, and bit another. In late 2006, his “noncompliant” behavior got him sent to the base’s newly constructed supermax prison — Camp 6 — where he would later cut his wrists. In Camp 6, Muhammed was held in a windowless concrete-and-steel cell for at least twenty-two hours a day. He stayed in solitary confinement almost continuously for the next three years.

After Muhammed cut his wrists, I spoke with him on the phone. “Please do something,” he screamed. “I can’t be patient anymore.” I filed an emergency request asking for him to be moved from solitary confinement to his father’s camp. It was denied. Prison officials said that Muhammed had narcissistic traits and had cut himself to get attention. A few years earlier, an official at the State Department had called three alleged suicides at Guantánamo “a good PR move.”

In January 2009, after the Obama Administration took office and ordered Guantánamo’s closure, the government formed a task force to reevaluate the status of each detainee. Of the 779 men who had been held at the prison, the Bush Administration had already released more than 500. When President Obama took over, 242 detainees remained. The task force completed its work within the year, unanimously concluding that the continued detention of 126 men — more than half of the population — was not necessary for national security. In May, Muhammed and Abdul Nasser were told they were approved for transfer.

The Khantumanis could not return to Syria; they feared that the Assad regime would assume they were terrorists and torture them. Muhammed wrote a letter for me to give to the foreign ministries of several countries, asking for asylum:

Me and my dad are looking for a country to live in with no risks or hazards. Please if you like to offer some help don’t wait because seriously I can’t endure any more. I’ve seen the hell and I’m still in the beginning of my life.

A delegation from the Portuguese government came to Guantánamo to meet the men who had been approved for transfer. To help Muhammed and Abdul Nasser prepare for their interviews, I was allowed an hour-long phone call with each of them. “Put yourself in their shoes,” I told Muhammed. “They’ve never met anyone at Guantánamo. They’ve only heard what the United States has said about everyone here for years. Tell them you were a high school student when you were detained, that you’ve been through things most people can’t imagine. That you’re working on your English and your vocabulary is getting better than mine. That we talk about your dad’s cooking and your love for fried potatoes, which is so great that you once told your mother you love fried potatoes more than her. That you haven’t heard your mom say your name in seven years.”

Muhammed had just ended a two-week hunger strike, and he said he’d been given a pill that made him vomit up blood. He couldn’t sleep because of constant noise from the guards on his cellblock. “He’s in terrible condition,” I wrote in my notes. We spent at least half the time talking about his hunger strike and his vomiting.

My prep with Abdul Nasser went better. “God willing, wherever they put me, I want to live a quiet life with my family,” he said. For months, I’d been trying to send him orthopedic shoes for his foot pain, but the camp authorities wouldn’t deliver the package. “Don’t forget to bring me my shoes in Portugal,” he teased before we got off the phone.

The next conversation I had with Muhammed was more difficult. “I have good news and hard news,” I told him. “The good news is, Portugal is offering you resettlement. The hard news is that they are offering only you resettlement right now, along with another Syrian man. They are undecided about your father.” Muhammed was silent for a long time.

A few days later, he wrote a letter to his father that explained Portugal’s decision and made clear his distress about what he should do. When I gave the letter to Abdul Nasser, he didn’t hesitate. “Tell him he can go,” he said. “Go, and don’t be sorry.”

I asked the prison authorities to allow Muhammed to see Abdul Nasser so that he could hear his father’s blessing for himself. We got them an hour together, with one embrace at the beginning, one at the end, and no touching in between. I would not be alone with them in the room; a few guards would be joining us.

The afternoon of the meeting, Muhammed was already waiting when I walked in. He was sitting on the edge of his seat, across from an empty chair. I’d brought food from a Syrian bakery in Brooklyn — stuffed grape leaves, kibbe, and baklava — plus the usual staples from the base: pizza from Pizza Hut, salad from McDonald’s, fruit from the Navy Exchange. I spread it all out on paper plates as if we were getting ready for a party. Muhammed would be seeing his father for the first time in four years.

We heard the clinking of shackles outside the door. It opened a moment later and there was Abdul Nasser, in his baggy white-is-for-compliant T-shirt, elastic-waist pants, and flip-flops, a head shorter than the guards gripping his elbows on either side. He let out a choked laugh when he saw Muhammed, his eyes crinkling and filling with tears. The guards shuffled him over for the first embrace. He reached for his son and buried his face in Muhammed’s shoulder. They stood clasping each other, laughing, softly greeting each other in Arabic, while the rest of us looked down, or away.

Muhammed and Abdul Nasser sat down, faces shining, ankles shackled. An hour to reunite, say goodbye, seek forgiveness, give strength, imagine the future. They started with food. A salad, some fruit. At one point the rules slipped away, and Muhammed passed a plate of blackberries to his father, then to one of the guards. Not bad, the guard said, leaning forward to take another.

The meeting ended with the second embrace. “This isn’t goodbye,” Abdul Nasser said.

Muhammed had a list of twenty questions about what awaited him in Portugal, including “Are we going to get a home,” “In which city are we going to live,” “Are we going to be able to bring our family,” and “Is there potatoes enough or not.” He also wanted to ensure that he wouldn’t be sent back to Syria or to the United States or to “any other country that we may face risks or torture there.”

The U.S. government wouldn’t give me details about what Muhammed could expect in Portugal, so I gave him a picture book — Living in Portugal — and an Arabic-Portuguese dictionary. Muhammed told me he tried to memorize some Portuguese words in the days before his release, when he was still in solitary confinement, but he couldn’t do it.

Abdul Nasser asked me to give Muhammed a parting message. “Tell him to pursue his studies — computers or English,” he said. Muhammed asked me to tell Abdul Nasser to take care of his health, and that we would send news once he got to Portugal. “Tell him things are going to get better soon,” he said.

It was late one night in August 2009 when guards came to Muhammed’s cell and told him it was time to go. He was hooded and shackled — the same way he was hauled in seven years earlier — for the ride to the air terminal. We’d bought civilian clothes for his arrival in Lisbon: a button-down shirt, pants with a zipper, shoes with laces — all novelties.

When the plane reached Lisbon, Muhammed and Moammar Badawi Dokhan, the Syrian man released with him, were taken to a government villa on the outskirts of Lisbon. They were luckier in the resettlement lottery than the men released to Slovakia a few months later, whose reintegration to civilian life began in a quasi-detention facility.

A group of caretakers from the Portuguese government lived with the men 24/7, but that was fine with Muhammed. The government provided everything he needed, even if it controlled everything he did. He didn’t want to be alone anyway. The caretakers were warm to him, and he grew to like them. “They’re like Arabs,” he said.

Muhammed gave me dozens of pictures from his first few weeks to take back to Abdul Nasser. Muhammed squatting by a plant outside the villa. Muhammed standing in the kitchen next to a counter stacked with food. Muhammed in sunglasses, posing on a beachfront next to a tour bus. Muhammed after a swim, pale, sprawled on a lawn chair, eyes closed, face tilted up to the sun.

Articles in Portuguese and international newspapers that announced his arrival momentarily broke his reverie. They mentioned his suicide attempt, called him unstable, and labeled him a terrorist. The Portuguese caretakers joked with him and the other man, trying to put them at ease. One of the articles said that Dokhan once shook bin Laden’s hand. “Which hand? Can we take a picture?” they asked. Muhammed wasn’t consoled. He wrote a letter and asked me to give it to the Portuguese government.

Dear gentle. I don’t know how to thank you regarding whatever you had done to us. Let me introduce myself to you. I am Muhammed and my father is Abdul Nasser. I was born in 1983.

Sir what has been done by the news journalists is all untrue. I like to assure you that me or my father or the guy who lives with me now are not terrorists or have anything to do with them. America itself said that and cleared us from any terrorism problem and you know that already.

When I met with the Portuguese delegation I told them look I know America had told a lot of surreal information, so please feel free and ask me anything that you like to know, nothing will be hidden from you. I spoke with them about many things and I specialized which information was real or not.

So sir be sure that we are innocent and the days will prove that to you. The media as you know needs to work to get money. So even if we say not true, not true, every day we are going to hear new and new things from them. But I prefer to close my ear to it, especially for someone like me who was in G.T.M.O. under the legal age.

In late November, Muhammed graduated from the villa to an apartment in Lisbon. The Portuguese government rented another apartment across the hall, for his caretakers. He had a stipend but no plan for self-sufficiency, and his immigration status was still unresolved. He began learning Portuguese, got his eyes and teeth checked. He was allowed unlimited free calls to his government team thanks to a “friends and family” calling plan, but had no way to be with his real family.

Once, when he went to buy dinner plates at a housewares store, the shopkeeper thought he looked suspicious and called the police. An officer interrogated him on the street. Where is your I.D.? Where do you live? Muhammed walked him back to his apartment and called the caretakers to explain to the nice officer why he had no legal I.D. “Don’t leave the apartment by yourself again,” the team told him, “at least for now.”

It took Muhammed weeks to locate his family in Syria. All of his eight-year-old phone numbers had new owners. Finally, through a former neighbor, he made contact. More than a dozen relatives got on the landline in his sister’s house, one after another.

He gave me a long list of messages to take back to Abdul Nasser: Your nephew who was fourteen when you saw him is studying to be a lawyer. Your daughter had a baby girl who is four years old now. Your wife cried for a few minutes when she got on the phone. She is still patient and waiting for you. I told her that I was living in a house, cooking, and washing dishes, and she didn’t believe me. She said I never washed dishes when I was in Syria. I told her that I would try to find you a wife when you are released. She said she would cut me to pieces if I tried.

Muhammed spent a lot of time cooking for no one in particular, with his laptop open on the kitchen counter so that he could chat on Skype while he worked. His main Skype buddy was a former detainee named Mahrar Rafat al Quwari, a Palestinian who had been resettled in Hungary just after Muhammed arrived in Portugal. Al Quwari had been cleared to leave Guantánamo even earlier than Muhammed — in 2007, under the Bush Administration — but because he was stateless, he had stayed in prison during the three years it took the U.S. government to find a country that would take him. Half the time he and Muhammed didn’t even talk. They just went about their business while Skype was open so they could hear the sound of someone else in the room. Once when I visited, we all had dinner together — Muhammed and I at the table, al Quwari on the laptop. We held Muhammed’s dishes up to the screen to show al Quwari what he was missing.

Muhammed tried to stay busy in other ways. He and Dokhan took Portuguese lessons together. He went on a mission to find the most cost-efficient calling card to Syria. He made daily trips to the housewares store, buying a few items at a time to increase the number of outings. He played soccer with an amateur league, though he dropped out after a while: he didn’t want to tell his teammates about his past. He let his aunt try to set him up with a girl back home, but that went nowhere; there was no chance that the Syrian government was going to let her travel to Portugal — it had already rejected his family’s request to visit him. All the while, he held on to the hope that his father would soon be with him, even if his mother couldn’t be. He took pictures of himself dining alone that he asked me to give to Abdul Nasser. “Let’s see who is the better cook when you are here,” he said in a message to his father.

By early 2010, after it became clear that Portugal was not going to allow Abdul Nasser to join his son, Muhammed wrote a letter to the Portuguese authorities:

Greetings to whom it may concern

The purpose of this letter is not to blame you for what happened to me, and I am neither seeking to share with you that feeling of sadness that has been haunting me.

When you sent your delegation to meet with me in Guantánamo, even though I was still imprisoned and was suffering from torture, it made me feel as if I was already released from prison, because I met with human beings who have that sense of humanity. I also felt that the brutality which had been inflicted on me for the last 8 years was just about to end; and indeed, it ended. I felt optimistic when I was told, “Come now and if the program goes well there will be a great chance for your father to join you.”

I was truly very enthusiastic about building my future despite the trauma I suffered from being separated from my father. What made me even more enthusiastic was the amount of assistance I received from the Portuguese government. In fact no one can deny nor ignore what you have done for me.

Yet now that I have crossed half the road I feel day after day that things are going backwards. I am physically free, yet I feel like I am mentally imprisoned. This is the worst kind of detention.

You too are all fathers and mothers and you can feel what I feel. You may choose to live away from them, but I am sure you can visit them and they can visit you as well. In my case I can’t visit them and they can’t visit me, and you all know that.

It is very easy for the U.S. government to use a political argument to separate me from my father. It’s easy for a country to do such a thing when it claims to be the beacon of humanity, to be against torture and against human rights violations, yet it does it solely through slogans and words. However, what is really stunning is when an E.U. country like Portugal condones America’s actions when we all know that Portugal is considered the second country in the world following Sweden when it has to do with protecting families. I’m not trying here to dictate to Portugal what it should do in this case, yet I feel I should tell Portugal that it shouldn’t have taken me without my father, because it was for humanitarian reasons that they decided to take me.

I sincerely say that what the Portuguese government has done for me was magnificent. However, I will not live here without my father and he cannot lead his life without me either. No one should ask why someone would make such a request. Nevertheless, I will mention some of these reasons:

This is my basic right and it is based on Portuguese laws that stipulate that after spending one full year in Portugal a refugee is entitled to bring a family member to the country.
My father is an older man and needs to be taken care of, and no one but me could offer him the care he needs. One might say that he is not that old and my response would be, “Don’t forget that he has been in jail and tortured for close to nine years.”
My father has little reading and writing capabilities and that will make it hard for him to live alone.
My father does not speak a foreign language which is an important thing. Look how difficult it was for you to find me a language instructor who is fluent in both Arabic and Portuguese. I am willing to take care of teaching my father Portuguese.
We cannot reunite with any of our relatives. I am all he’s got and he’s all I got.
We don’t have any relative who lives in a foreign country and who could go and live with him.
It is not going to be easy for him to find a job because of his age and the time he spent in prison.

I will not accept to live without my father, and no decent person would accept to turn it into a political matter. If the reason is financial I am willing to give up everything and in return be reunited with my father. If the problem is the purchase of the airline ticket, Albania, Palau, and Bermuda are much poorer than Portugal and still took close to 10 men.

Finally, I don’t want to leave Portugal if you bring me back my father who is all my life, yet I don’t want to stay here if my father can’t come to live with me. When they took my father away from me in prison I felt like I don’t have anything left in life, and when he was brought back to me I felt like I became life itself. I will never give up my father, and if I’ll ever have to do it that will mean that I am ready to give up my life.

I apologize for taking too much of your time but I am asking you to put yourselves in my shoes.

Thank you very much.

In 2010, Cape Verde, a former Portuguese colony off the coast of Senegal, agreed to take Abdul Nasser. I showed him where it was on a map, drawing a line from Cuba to a small archipelago in the Atlantic. “It’s another island?” he asked.

Muhammed thought it sounded like a terrible idea. He wrote out a numbered list and told me to give it to his father:

It is going to be so hard for you to speak the language
You are going to be transferred alone
You are going to a country that you didn’t ever know or entered it before
There is no one from your family can join you because they are not allowed to travel
It may be like another Guantánamo but with small shape
There is no guarantees from any side — American or Portuguese — that they are going to gather us in the future

So please think completely and don’t do anything before consultation.

Abdul Nasser wanted assurances that he would be able to reunite with his family. But he had also spent nearly a year in Guantánamo since Muhammed had been released. And the threat of congressional restrictions on transfers was looming. By the time Cape Verde made a concrete offer, Abdul Nasser had made up his mind. “The matter is out of our hands,” he said. “I’ve had enough. Let me get out of this hole.”

Abdul Nasser was transferred to Cape Verde on July 19, 2010. A few months later, Congress passed its restrictions. The Obama Administration abandoned its efforts to close the prison for the next three years. Dozens of men cleared for release were trapped in Guantánamo.

In the days leading up to Abdul Nasser’s transfer, Muhammed had shared more wisdom with his father.

Try to speak with the military before you leave the block. Tell them, I don’t want you to hood me or cover my ears. Be patient, they may search your genitals.

In the airplane try to ask for restroom, they will allow it. They won’t leave the door open.

Try to ask for a walk inside the plane every hour. Tell them, I need to walk. They will allow it.

When you get there, there will be a car waiting with a few people. When you get in the car, ask for a call with me directly.

Don’t be shocked when you get there. Remember to shake people’s hands. The man with me forgot to say hello and shake hands.

The first week, you will be amazed at the little things. Don’t be surprised if you sleep and you cover your head, and you think, am I allowed to cover my head? It is crazy when you remember where you were and where you are.

All of the family sends you their best, best, best congratulations. They are just waiting to hear your voice.

I visited Abdul Nasser a few weeks after he arrived in Cape Verde. An official from the government picked me up from the airport in Praia and drove toward the mountains on the outskirts of the city. Eventually we arrived at the only house on a rocky strip of beach. We were 1,850 miles from Portugal.

I had brought Abdul Nasser his orthopedic shoes. He laughed and held back tears when he saw me take them out of my bag. I stood in the kitchen while he cooked a lunchtime feast for us of fish and fried potatoes, in honor of Muhammed.

A few weeks later, when I was back in New York, I set up a conference call with Muhammed, Abdul Nasser, and their family in Syria.

“Who’s the next person?” I asked Muhammed.

“My aunt,” he called out over seven excited voices having three separate conversations in Arabic. “I gave you the number.”

We had ten people on the call, one from Lisbon, another from Cape Verde, seven from Aleppo, and me. The family’s first reunion after nearly a decade apart. They were laughing, whooping, crying, talking over one another. I stood for a moment listening to the party before I left the room to let them have their privacy.

The family conference calls continued for nearly another year. Portugal and Cape Verde, perhaps under pressure from the United States, wouldn’t permit Muhammed and Abdul Nasser to visit each other. Syria still wouldn’t permit the rest of the family to leave the country.

Abdul Nasser probably needed the calls the most, since he couldn’t communicate with anyone around him. He didn’t have his son’s knack for languages, and the island didn’t have the infrastructure to help him learn. He depended entirely on an interpreter — an Arabic speaker the government found abroad and flew to Cape Verde — to be his voice at the market, at the doctor’s office, at meetings with his government contacts.

In March 2013, Muhammed got permission to fly to Turkey to see his family. They had fled the civil war in Syria four months earlier and were living in a refugee camp near Gaziantep. By then Muhammed and Abdul Nasser had lost nearly a dozen relatives in the violence.

Traveling with Muhammed to meet his family for the first time was his wife. She and Muhammed had met two years earlier and had just gotten married. When he saw his family at the hotel in Gaziantep, he had to stop himself from sprinting across the lobby. There was his eight-month-old nephew, now twelve, and his niece, now seven years old, who almost knocked him down when she hugged him. Standing behind them was his mother, who held him for a very long time.

Muhammed told me that their faces were dusty from the refugee camp. It was shocking to see them, he said. They had all aged so much.

Abdul Nasser wasn’t allowed to leave his island for the reunion. Muhammed took many pictures of their tear-streaked faces to hold up for Abdul Nasser over Skype. He has gotten used to documenting his life in photographs for his father.

Two years later, Abdul Nasser remains alone in Cape Verde. The rest of the family is still in Gaziantep. But not too long ago, I got an email from Muhammed.

Well, I am a little bit angry at you because I emailed you last week to share in my happiness, but you didn’t see it or receive it. But I like to tell you that you have been an aunt since the Valentine day.

My dear daughter was born on 14th of February and here she is.

He attached a picture. Muhammed’s daughter is a fuzzy bundle nestled in the crook of his arm. He’s holding her up, looking into the camera, touching his cheek to her forehead.

It had been nearly five years since his release. He didn’t look like a former prisoner. He looked like a new dad.

Note: The photo at the top of this article is a screenshot from an interview with Pardiss Kebriaei on Democracy Now, available here. Please also see Pardiss’s video in which she mentioned the Khantumanis after Sen. Tom Cotton visited Guantánamo and made inflammatory comments about the prisoners earlier this year.

Huge Victory for Prison Reform as California Ends Indeterminate Long-Term Solitary Confinement

On Tuesday, a significant victory took place in the long struggle by campaigners — and prisoners themselves — to improve detention conditions in US prisons, when a settlement was reached in Ashker v. Governor of California, a federal class action lawsuit on behalf of prisoners held in the Security Housing Unit (SHU) at California’s Pelican Bay State Prison who have spent a decade or more in solitary confinement.

In a press release, the Center for Constitutional Rights, whose lawyers represented the prisoners, with co-counsel from other lawyers’ firms and the organizations California Prison Focus and Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, stated that the “landmark” settlement “will effectively end indeterminate, long-term solitary confinement in all California state prisons,” resulting in “a dramatic reduction in the number of people in solitary across the state and a new program that could be a model for other states going forward.”

As CCR noted, the class action “was brought in 2012 on behalf of prisoners held in solitary confinement at the Pelican Bay prison, often without any violent conduct or serious rule infractions, often for more than a decade, and all without any meaningful process for transfer out of isolation and back to the general prison population.” The case argued that California’s use of prolonged solitary confinement “constitutes cruel and unusual punishment and denies prisoners the right to due process.”

All this was inarguable, and yet it has taken decades to reach this momentous point. Back in July 2011, I picked up on the Pelican Bay story when, first of all, I received a press release from the Prison Hunger Strike Solidarity Coalition in Oakland, California, as prisoners held in Pelican Bay and five other Californian prisons embarked on a hunger strike, and, secondly, when I received a message from my friend Debra Sweet of the World Can’t Wait, who asked me “if I saw similarities between America’s domestic prisons and the hunger strikers of Pelican Bay and the prisoners at Guantánamo.” Debra stated that the Pelican Bay hunger strike came about “in response to conditions in the Security Housing Units (SHU) of extreme isolation, brutality, deprivation — conditions so severe they violate the US Constitution and international laws on torture. Very significantly, the strike has brought together Black and Latino prisoners who are normally set against each other. They are asserting their own humanity and challenging others to reclaim their humanity by standing with them.”

Hunger strikers at one of the prisons, Corcoran State Prison, released a statement that said, “Our indefinite isolation here is both inhumane and illegal and the proponents of the prison industrial complex are hoping that their campaign to dehumanize us has succeeded to the degree that you don’t care and will allow the torture to continue in your name. It is our belief that they have woefully underestimated the decency, principles and humanity of the people. Join us in opposing this injustice without end. Thank you for your time and support.”

The prisoners had five demands, one of which involved a call for an end to solitary confinement for those perceived to be gang members. These perceptions are often wrong — CCR noted that they were often based on evidence “as innocuous as having supposedly gang-related artwork or tattoos” — and yet those regarded as gang members could then be put into solitary for years — or decades — with no way out. The prisoners also complained about “debriefing,” or “offering up information about fellow prisoners particularly regarding gang status,” which was “often demanded in return for better food or release from the SHU.”

In an article for FireDogLake, Kevin Gosztola explained how solitary confinement had become popular in the 1980s, as a way of isolating potentially troublesome prisoners, who were “confined to their cells without yard time, work or any kind of rehabilitative programming.” He added that, “in 1989 California built the first supermax — Pelican Bay. There was a supermax boom in the 1990s, and today, 40 states and the federal government have supermax prisons holding upwards of 25,000 inmates. Tens of thousands more are held in solitary confinement in lockdown units within other prisons and jails. There’s no up-to-date nationwide count, but according to best estimates, there are at least 75,000 and perhaps more than 100,000 prisoners in solitary confinement on any given day in America.”

As the author and university professor Colin Daylon wrote for the New York Times, “Many of these prisoners [in solitary confinement] have been sent to virtually total isolation and enforced idleness for no crime, not even for alleged infractions of prison regulations. Their isolation, which can last for decades, is often not explicitly disciplinary, and therefore not subject to court oversight. Their treatment is simply a matter of administrative convenience. Solitary confinement has been transmuted from an occasional tool of discipline into a widespread form of preventive detention.”

I continued to report on the hunger strikes and the demands for an end to indiscriminate solitary confinement in July 2011, cross-posting the devastatingly powerful New Yorker article ‘Hellhole’, about long-term solitary confinement and why it is torture, and following the hunger strikers into the fall, and into 2012, when, “Comparing their conditions to a ‘living coffin,’ 400 California prisoners held in long-term or indefinite solitary confinement petitioned the United Nations … to intervene on behalf of all of the more than 4,000 prisoners similarly situated,” as a local paper put it.

Shortly after that, Ashker v. California was filed, amending an earlier pro se lawsuit that was filed, in 2009, by two Pelican Bay SHU prisoners, Todd Ashker and Danny Troxell.

And while the lawyers must be thanked for all their hard work, two of CCR’s attorneys on the case, Alexis Agathocleous and Rachel Meeropol, made clear that none of this would have been possible without the prisoners themselves. In an article on CCR’s website, they wrote:

The struggle to end California’s extreme use of solitary confinement has always been led by people in prison and their families, organizing through the prison walls. Incarcerated activists first brought the case that became Ashker and organized the hunger strikes that made the barbaric reality of solitary a political and policy issue. Throughout the lawsuit, our plaintiffs were involved at every step, and the settlement gives them an unprecedented role in monitoring compliance with its terms. Their organizing efforts – in the face of unimaginable obstacles – have been extraordinary.

They also made available an extraordinary video featuring the Ashker plaintiffs, held between 14 and 25 years in solitary confinement — Todd Ashker, Sitawa Nantambu Janaa, Paul Redd, Jeffrey Franklin, George Franco and Gabriel Reyes.

That video is posted below via YouTube:

Nine of the prisoners — Todd Ashker, Sitawa Nantambu Jamaa, Luis Esquivel, George Franco. Richard Johnson, Paul Redd, Gabriel Reyes, George Ruiz and Danny Troxell — also issued the following statement:

This settlement represents a monumental victory for prisoners and an important step toward our goal of ending solitary confinement in California, and across the country. California’s agreement to abandon indeterminate SHU confinement based on gang affiliation demonstrates the power of unity and collective action. This victory was achieved by the efforts of people in prison, their families and loved ones, lawyers, and outside supporters.

Our movement rests on a foundation of unity: our Agreement to End Hostilities. It is our hope that this groundbreaking agreement to end the violence between the various ethnic groups in California prisons will inspire not only state prisoners, but also jail detainees, county prisoners and our communities on the street, to oppose ethnic and racial violence. From this foundation, the prisoners’ human rights movement is awakening the conscience of the nation to recognize that we are fellow human beings.

As the recent statements of President Obama and of Justice Kennedy illustrate, the nation is turning against solitary confinement. We celebrate this victory while, at the same time, we recognize that achieving our goal of fundamentally transforming the criminal justice system and stopping the practice of warehousing people in prison will be a protracted struggle. We are fully committed to that effort, and invite you to join us.

Lead attorney Jules Lobel, the President of the Center for Constitutional Rights, also issued a statement, calling the settlement “the result of the extraordinary organizing the prisoners managed to accomplish despite extreme conditions,” and adding, “This far-reaching settlement represents a major change in California’s cruel and unconstitutional solitary confinement system. There is a mounting awareness across the nation of the devastating consequences of solitary — some key reforms California agreed to will hopefully be a model for other states.”

Carol Strickman, staff attorney at Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, also said, after the settlement was announced, “The seeds of this victory are in the unity of the prisoners in their peaceful hunger strike of 2011. That courageous and principled protest galvanized support on both sides of the prison walls for a legal challenge to California’s use of solitary confinement.”

As CCR noted, when Ashker was first filed in 2012, “more than 500 prisoners had been isolated in the Security Housing Unit (SHU) at Pelican Bay for over 10 years, and 78 had been there for more than 20 years. They spent 22½ to 24 hours every day in a cramped, concrete, windowless cell, and were denied telephone calls, physical contact with visitors, and vocational, recreational, and educational programming.” Hundreds of other prisoners throughout California, CCR also noted, “have been held in similar SHU conditions.”

CCR added that the settlement “transforms California’s use of solitary confinement from a status-based system to a behavior-based system; prisoners will no longer be sent to solitary based solely on gang affiliation, but rather based on infraction of specific serious rules violations. It also limits the amount of time a prisoner can spend in the Pelican Bay SHU and provides a two-year step-down program for transfer from SHU to general population.”

The agreement also “creates a new non-solitary but high-security unit for the minority of prisoners who have been held in any SHU for more than 10 years and who have a recent serious rule violation. They will be able to interact with other prisoners, have small-group recreation and educational and vocational programming, and contact visits.”

Extensive expert evidence submitted in the case had established “severe physical and psychological harm among California SHU prisoners as a result of prolonged solitary confinement.” The plaintiffs “worked with 10 experts in the fields of psychology, neuroscience, medicine, prison security and classification, and international human rights law,” and the reports provided “an unprecedented and holistic analysis of the impact of prolonged solitary confinement on human beings,” as well as “guidance in the construction of the settlement reforms.”

As CCR also noted, the key reforms include the following:

Prisoners will no longer be sent to solitary based solely on gang affiliation, but rather based on specific serious rules violations. The  Ashker settlement ends California’s status-based practice of solitary confinement, transforming it into a behavior-based system.
Under the system challenged in the lawsuit, Prisoners validated as gang affiliates used to face indefinite SHU confinement, with a review for possible release to general population only once every six years, at which even a single piece of evidence of alleged continued gang affiliation led to another six years of solitary confinement. That evidence was often as problematic as the original evidence used to send them to SHU – for example, a book, a poem, or a tattoo that was deemed to be gang-related.
Under the settlement, California will generally no longer impose indeterminate SHU sentences. Instead, after serving a determinate sentence for a SHU offense, prisoners whose offense is related to gang activity will enter a two-year, four-step, step-down program to return to the general prisoner population.  Prisoners will receive increased privileges at each step of the step-down program.
California will review all current gang-validated SHU prisoners within one year of the settlement to determine whether they should be released from solitary under the settlement terms.  The vast majority of such prisoners are expected to be released.
Virtually no prisoner will ever be held in the SHU for more than 10 continuous years.
California will create a modified general-population unit for a very small number of prisoners who repeatedly violate prison rules or have been in solitary over 10 years but have recently committed a serious offense. As a high-security but non-isolation environment, this new unit allows prison administrators to begin to balance the humanity of the prisoners with the security of the prison, creating a realistic alternative to long-term solitary for the minority of  “hard cases.” Prisoners held in this unit will be allowed to move around the unit without restraints, will be afforded as much out-of-cell time as other general population prisoners, and can receive contact visits.
Prisoners themselves will have a role in monitoring compliance with the settlement agreement. Prisoner representatives will meet regularly with California prison officials to review the progress of the settlement, discuss programming and step-down program improvements, and monitor prison conditions.

Responding to the settlement, the New York Times noted how “Craig Haney, a psychologist who studied the effects of isolation on prisoners at Pelican Bay State Prison in Northern California — the prisoners at the heart of this settlement — used the term ‘social death’ to describe the impact on their psyche.” The Times added that “[a] number of corrections officials across the country are also coming to see locking up inmates for years at a time as ineffective.”

Providing figures for the reforms, the Times also noted that, at the time of the settlement, “2,858 prisoners were in solitary housing units across the state,” but “that figure could fall by as many as 1,800 inmates, bringing it ‘more in line with other states,'” as Jeffrey Beard, the secretary of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, said at a news conference, although more than 1,100 prisoners remain in solitary confinement in the windowless cells of Pelican Bay

Beard called the settlement “part of an effort the state had already been making to reduce the number of prisoners in solitary confinement.” As the Times described it, he said that “[m]ore than 1,000 inmates who had been held in isolation units because of gang affiliations have already been released over the last several years, and few have caused problems in the general population.”

He claimed that, in the 1970s and 1980s, “there was a lot of violence in the system,” and “you had to do something to stop the violence,” although he added that “the problem was you had a system that was so overcrowded over the years that they just went from one crisis to anther.”

Explaining the current changes, he said, “We moved slow at first, because this represented a big change. Any time when you try to change something that you’ve been doing for over 30 years, there is the risk of having problems.” However, he added that the department now had “the tools to deal with those people when they emerge” from the solitary units, and he also said, “We don’t believe it’s good for anybody to keep them locked up for 10, 20, 30 years” in isolation, a concession that is welcome, if long overdue.

As the Times noted, “Solitary confinement has come under increasing scrutiny across the country, as research has revealed the effects of long-term isolation on the psyche. The suicide of Kalief Browder in June, after nearly two years in isolation at Rikers Island in New York City, brought renewed attention to young people in solitary confinement. That same month, Justice Anthony Kennedy of the Supreme Court seemed to invite a constitutional challenge to prolonged solitary confinement.”

In an editorial in June, the Times‘ editors noted Justice Kennedy’s comments in the case of Hector Ayala, who has been on California’s death row for 25 years:

It is likely, Mr. Kennedy wrote, that Mr. Ayala “has been held for all or most of the past 20 years or more in a windowless cell no larger than a typical parking spot for 23 hours a day; and in the one hour when he leaves it, he likely is allowed little or no opportunity for conversation or interaction with anyone.” The Supreme Court has rarely mentioned this practice, and it has never ruled on whether the practice violates the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishments. But as Justice Kennedy wrote, this sort of “near-total isolation exacts a terrible price,” long understood by courts and commentators.

In making his point, he quoted Dostoyevsky: “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” He cited the case of Kalief Browder … And he noted research showing that solitary confinement is most harmful to young people and the mentally ill, who often end up in prison.

This is not the first time Justice Kennedy has aired his concerns about solitary confinement — he spoke out against the practice during testimony before Congress in March. But in addressing the brutality of this punishment at length in an opinion, he raises a constitutional question even if some of his colleagues would rather avoid it.

The editorial concluded:

Justice Kennedy seemed eager to consider whether prolonged solitary confinement is unconstitutional. If faced with a lawsuit raising this issue, he wrote, the courts may have to decide “whether workable alternative systems for long-term confinement exist, and, if so, whether a correctional system should be required to adopt them.” In other words, he was saying, bring us a case.

Perhaps one day, Justice Kennedy will have his wish granted — although it is by no means certain that a majority of the Justices would appreciate the raising of such a constitutional question. For now, however, it is worth celebrating the achievements of the prisoners in California, their lawyers — and, I hope, the prison authorities, who seem finally to be accepting that prolonged solitary confinement, which they have embraced more thoroughly than anywhere else in the US, is wrong and must be stopped.

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.

As the Death of Three-Year Old Syrian Refugee Aylan Kurdi Appals All Decent People, Please Sign the E-Petition Asking the UK Government to Accept More Refugees

Please sign and share this e-petition to the British government, calling for more asylum seekers to be accepted into the country, as the UK tries to turn its back on this huge humanitarian crisis.

Amazingly, it has gone from 27,000 signatures last night to over 112,000 signatures this morning, making it eligible for a Parliamentary debate. Please keep signing and sharing it, however, so that the government knows the depth of feeling in this country. UPDATE 4pm: It has now reached 200,000 signatures.

***** 

I’m not posting the photo above of the dead body of three-year old Syrian refugee Aylan Kurdi for sensationalist reasons, but simply because, when it went viral yesterday, it did so because millions of people identified with it, whether they were parents or not.

I am a parent. My son is 15 years old, but I remember vividly when he was three, and when I saw, yesterday, the photo of Aylan’s lifeless body washed up on Bodrum beach in Turkey, I felt his loss viscerally.

I was at that beach just two weeks ago, aware that refugees from Syria were trying to make their way to Europe via the Greek islands, and aware that some of them were dying in search of a new life.

I was already appalled by my government’s disdain for the huge number of refugees leaving Africa and the Middle East — many from countries we have helped to destabilise (Syria and Libya, for example). In May, for example, as the death toll in the Mediterranean reached 1,800 this year, Theresa May, the home secretary, was refusing calls for an EU quota for refugees, and disagreeing with a suggestion by the EU’s High Representative, Federica Mogherini, that “no migrants” intercepted at sea should be “sent back against their will.” The BBC reported that she said, “Such an approach would only act as an increased pull factor across the Mediterranean and encourage more people to put their lives at risk.”

She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that “many of the people coming across the central Mediterranean were not refugees, but economic migrants from places such as Nigeria, Eritrea and Somalia” — an appalling and unfair generalisation, when Eritrea currently has the worst human rights record in the world, and Somalia is a country ravaged by war.

Last week, after it was reported that more than 80 Syrian and Palestinian refugees, many of them young children, had drowned in the Mediterranean, a petition addressed to Theresa May, ‘No more drownings. Immediate sanctuary for those fleeing from war‘, was launched on Change.org, which currently has over 160,000 signatures (up from 135,000 last night).

Please sign and share this petition, and please also sign and share a new petition on Change. org, launched by the Independent, addressed to David Cameron. The petition, ‘Britain must accept its fair share of refugees seeking safety in Europe‘, currently has over 44,000 signatures (up from 13,000 last night), and states, “Millions of men, women and children are fleeing the Middle East and Africa to find safety in the West. The Independent believes Britain must no longer turn a blind eye to their plight and must work with other European Union countries to set and welcome a quota of refugees.”

The timing could not have been more apposite. As the photo of Aylan Kurdi went viral, David Cameron attempted to defend Britain’s inaction, in a display of heartlessness that was astonishing, under the circumstances.

“We have taken a number of genuine asylum seekers from Syrian refugee camps and we keep that under review,” Cameron said, “but we think the most important thing is to try to bring peace and stability to that part of the world. I don’t think there is an answer that can be achieved simply by taking more and more refugees.”

Given how Britain has been involved in Syria — first supporting the opposition to President Assad, and then turning on them — it is extraordinarily hypocritical of Cameron to try and wash his hands of the Syrian refugee crisis.

And, of course, anyone looking at who has done what would discover that, while Germany is pledging to take in 1% of its population — that’s 800,000 asylum seekers — the UK has taken in just 216 Syrian refugees.

As the Washington Post noted, “Of the 4 million Syrians who have fled their country since the war began, including hundreds of thousands who have poured into Europe, the number who have been resettled in Britain could fit on a single London Underground train — with plenty of seats to spare. Just 216 Syrian refugees have qualified for the government’s official relocation program, according to data released last week. (Tube trains seat about 300.) British Prime Minister David Cameron has reassured his anxious public that the total number won’t rise above 1,000.”

Please also, if you haven’t already, sign and share the e-petition I mentioned above, ‘ Accept more asylum seekers and increase support for refugee migrants in the UK ,’ which was launched on August 13.  When I signed it last night, it had 27,000 signatures, within two hours it had reached 48,000 signatures, and this morning I awoke to find that it now has over 112,000 signatories.

Like all e-petitions, it needed 100,000 signatures within six months to be eligible for a Parliamentary debate, but, as I mentioned above, please keep signing and sharing it so the government knows that its callous disregard for the refugees fleeing Syria and elsewhere is not shared by the British people. The petition states, “There is a global refugee crisis. The UK is not offering proportional asylum in comparison with European counterparts. We can’t allow refugees who have risked their lives to escape horrendous conflict and violence to be left living in dire, unsafe and inhumane conditions in Europe. We must help.”

I hope you agree with the sentiments in these petitions, and that, like me, you want people’s humanity and empathy to triumph over the kind of mean, small-minded racism and xenophobia that has been thriving of late. No child should be dying like Aylan Kurdi, and if we all pull together and tell our governments that we will not be silent, and that we demand action, we may just be able to make the world a slightly better place, one in which small children are not dying because of our indifference to their suffering.

Note: If you want to do more, please visit this page on the Independent‘s website, “5 practical ways you can help refugees trying to find safety in Europe,” which includes links for making donations, and for getting involved with grass-roots groups visiting Calais to help those in the refugee camps there.

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.

Mohammed Kamin, an Insignificant Afghan Prisoner in Guantánamo, Asks Review Board to Recommend His Release

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

On August 18, Mohammed Kamin, an Afghan prisoner at Guantánamo who is 36 or 37 years old, became the 17th prisoner to have his case reviewed by a Periodic Review Board, consisting of representatives of the Departments of State, Defense, Justice and Homeland Security, as well as the office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The PRBs were established in 2013 to review the cases of 71 men who had either been recommended for ongoing imprisonment in 2010 by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established after taking office in 2009, or had been recommended for trials — recommendations that were taken off the table when judges ruled that the majority of the charges in those trials (the military commissions) had been invented by Congress, and were not legitimate war crimes at all.

46 men were in the former category, and 25 in the latter, and readers paying close attention will realize that 17 reviews in 21 months is slow progress, and, frankly, an insult to the men whose cases have not yet been heard. At this rate, it will take until 2021 for all the reviews to take place.

Of the 17 reviews undertaken to date, 14 decisions have been taken to date. Ten men have been recommended for release (although only two have been freed), and in four cases the board members have recommended ongoing detention. Two of those four men are awaiting the results of second review boards (Fayiz al-Kandari, the last Kuwaiti in the prison, and Muhammad al-Shumrani, a Saudi), and three other men are awaiting the results of their first reviews — Omar Mohammed Khalifh, a Libyan whose review took place on June 24, Salman Rabei’i, a Yemeni whose review took place on July 14, and Mohammed Kamin.

Kamin, a fairly insignificant Afghan prisoner, was, nevertheless, put forward for a trial by military commission in 2008, although the charges against him were subsequently dropped in 2009.

As I wrote at the time he was charged:

Mohammed Kamin … seems, like many before him, to be an unworthy candidate for any kind of war crimes trial at all. In his charge sheet, he is accused of “providing material support for terrorism,” specifically by receiving training at “an al-Qaeda training camp,” conducting surveillance on US and coalition military bases and activities, planting two mines under a bridge, and launching missiles at the city of Khost while it was occupied by US and coalition forces. He is not charged with harming, let along killing US forces, and were it not for his supposed al-Qaeda connection — he apparently stated in interrogation that he was “recruited by an al-Qaeda cell leader” — it would, I think, be impossible to make the case that he was involved in “terrorism” at all. As it is, I’m prepared to state that his case seems to me to demonstrate how hopelessly blurred the distinctions between military resistance (aka insurgency) and terrorism have become, so that anyone caught fighting US occupation is not engaged in a war (with its own well-established laws) but is automatically part of a global terrorist movement.

Kamin is represented by the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, and Paul Rashkind at the Florida Federal Public Defender’s Office, and the profile of him on the CCR website is illuminating.

CCR noted that Mohammed Kamin was held in US custody in Khowst, in Afghanistan for over a year before his transfer to Guantánamo, and was “among the last group of conventional detainees transferred into Guantánamo in September 2004, several months after the Supreme Court’s decision in Rasul v. Bush extended the right to judicial review to Guantánamo detainees. It appears that a number of those late-arriving detainees were brought to Guantánamo in order to be charged and serve as success stories for the troubled military commission process,” although, as was noted above, the charge against Kamin — providing material support for terrorism — was struck down as a charge in the military commissions by the appeals court in Washington D.C. (the D.C. Circuit Court) in October 2012, in a ruling that dealt a severe blow to the already attired credibility of the commissions.

As CCR noted, “D.C. Circuit decisions have since determined that the offense of providing ‘material support’ cannot be tried by military commission, meaning that Kamin cannot ever legally be charged.”

CCR also noted, “Had he remained in coalition detention in Afghanistan (rather than being sent to Guantánamo to validate the military commission system), he would likely have been put through the national reconciliation system after a few years and released back to the care of his family and made the responsibility of his local community and village leaders. Instead, having been brought to Guantánamo, he has remained there for over a decade.”

At his Periodic Review Board on August 18, Kamin was represented by two personal representatives (US military officers appointed to help him prepare for his PRB), and Shayana Kadidal of the Center for Constitutional Rights, and all those speaking for him were convincing in their calls for his release.

Of particular relevance were the descriptions of Kamin as a family man who wants only to return to his family, including his wife, and the 13-year old son he has not seen since he was an infant, his acknowledgement that he made mistakes in the past, and his behavior in Guantánamo. In the government’s unclassified summary about him, it was noted that he “has been one of the more compliant detainees at Guantánamo and has committed few significant disciplinary infractions, most likely because the detention staff has treated him more humanely than he had expected.”

That summary also ran through his alleged history working with al-Qaeda and the Taliban, while acknowledging that all the information about his activities before his detention “is derived entirely from his own statements, some of which contradict each other.” The authorities also noted that “[l]ittle information is available about [his] current mindset, as he has declined to meet with interrogators since 2007, probably out of frustration that his past cooperation had not led to tangible progress toward his release,” although it was also noted that he “has blamed his former comrades for setting him on the path that led to his detention, and has said he fears their reprisals for providing information to the US.”

The transcripts of the opening statements of his personal representatives and of Shayana Kadidal are cross-posted below. I hope you find them useful, and will share this article if you do. I have been calling for the release of the majority of the remaining Afghan prisoners for many years, and, as Shayana Kadidal noted, the end of the war in Afghanistan, as mentioned repeatedly by President Obama, ought to also to count as a reason for Kamin’s release, even though, just two months ago, a judge turned down a request by a Yemeni prisoner to be freed because of the end of hostilities.

Periodic Review Board Initial Hearing, 18 Aug 2015

Muhammad Kamin, ISN 1045

Opening Statement of Personal Representative

Good Morning, ladies and gentlemen of the Board, we are the Personal Representatives for Mr. Muhammad Kamin. We are accompanied today by Mr. Kamin’s Private Counsel, Shane Kadidal and our Pashto Linguist. I have met Mr. Kamin twelve times and he has always been cooperative and friendly during our meetings, showing the same respect to a female as he would a male. He is the first detainee that I have met that would shake my hand.

When I am trying to get to know a detainee, I try to understand both his personality as well as his culture. During my time getting to know Mr. Kamin, I definitely noticed the Pashtu cultural difference in regards to being a tribal culture. As a PR, I have to ask questions about family support, if recommended for transfer. Early on I noticed that when Mr. Kamin spoke of his family, he was actually referring to his tribe, not his immediate family.

What I learned through these interactions is that Mr. Kamin’s tribe and family are ready to support him upon his return. Since 2010, both the tribal elders and family members have written statements, submitted prior to the board, accepting his support upon release. In addition, Mr. Kamin has a plan to become a grocer; and his uncle intends to help him in support of this endeavor. Mr. Kamin’s Private Counsel has submitted a written statement that if approved for transfer, ongoing support will be available to Mr. Kamin after his transfer from GTMO.

Mr. Kamin once said to me, “I am a human and I know I made mistakes.” Since I have known him, he has always seemed sincere, not denying his past but learning from his mistakes. Another area that points to his character is the fact that while at GTMO, he has been one of the most compliant detainees. Mr. Kamin has changed.

In this forward looking process, Mr. Kamin has a plan for an occupation and a family life and also a large amount of tribal support. He harbors no ill will towards the U.S. He is here today ready to answer your questions so that you can see for yourself that he does not pose a significant threat toward the United States. We respectfully ask that you consider Mr. Kamin to be recommended for transfer. Let him return to his tribe to have a second chance at life.

We will be happy to answer any questions you may have throughout this proceeding. I will now defer to Mr. Kadidal, the Private Counsel for Mr. Kamin, for his opening statement.

Periodic Review Board Initial Hearing, 18 Aug 2015

Muhammad Kamin, ISN 1045

Private Counsel Statement

My name is Shayana Kadidal. I am the managing attorney of the Guantánamo litigation project at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City. It is my privilege to represent Mohammed Kamin and to appear before this board today.

I do so on behalf of my fellow private counsel, Wells Dixon of CCR and Paul Rashkind. Mr. Rashkind has represented Mr. Kamin for over six years and throughout that time has had the benefit of sharing research with a succession of excellent military commission defense counsel, including his former Army counsel, whose letter of support the Board has before it. Over the course of those many years, we as a group have gotten to know Mr. Kamin quite well. And based on that long experience we can say a few things about him without reservation.

First of all, our client desires nothing more than to return to life with his extended family, his elderly father, and wife and young son in Afghanistan. The former Army counsel’s letter speaks eloquently of how Kamin begins meetings with him by asking after the counsel’s family, how Kamin “has more than once indicated … the respect he has for his wife who has remained by his side through all these years,” and how “he yearns for the day when he can once again hold his family members in his arms and tell them, in person, that he loves them.”

His family support network in Afghanistan is strong. He has been in regular contact with them thru the video calls facilitated by the Red Cross. As the stack of letters, videos and photographs we submitted to the Board attests, the members of his extended family and community have been ready and eager to have him back throughout the length of his detention, and they remain so today.

The life he would return to is the same life his father has known: a simple local existence. His father was a farmer who has made the upwardly-mobile transition to being a small-scale merchant. That is a life uncomplicated enough to facilitate the sometimes-difficult transition back to civilian society, but that also would provide opportunities to accommodate normal aspirations for social mobility that may arise once Mr. Kamin’s transition back to life outside this prison is complete.

There is every reason to believe that he will make that transition successfully. By no one’s account is our client ideological in his mindset. Throughout his detention he has dealt exceptionally well with others — with the guards and the authorities, with the Arabic-speaking detainees who comprise the majority of the prison population, and with a variety of his own counsel and Pashto-language interpreters. Guantánamo is a difficult place to be and can be especially so for those whose linguistic community comprises only a tiny subset of the prison, but Mr. Kamin has dealt with his prolonged detention with grace throughout his eleven years here.

Both his open-mindedness and his respect for others have been noted throughout the record before this Board. The former Army counsel’s letter says that “Mr. Kamin has been unfailingly polite, cordial, and pleasant in every interaction I or any member of his team have had with him,” and that the Army counsel has “found [him] to be both intelligent and intellectually curious,” and has “come to appreciate his perspective on historical, cultural and political matters.” The Army counsel even notes “[a]s one seemingly minor, but illuminating example, [that,] unlike many detainees, [Mr. Kamin] has no objection to the participation of a female translator on his team … and in fact has built a relationship of mutual trust and respect with his female translator, routinely addressing her by the respectful, if colloquial, term of ‘aunt’ during our meetings.” His previous Navy military counsel, has reinforced every one of those points in her letter of support, stating that in three years and over 30 meetings, Kamin “never spoke or acted in any way that one might associate with religious extremism” and that she “never saw him act in a way that led me to believe he had anti-American views.” These are not the judgments of people naive to the consequences of religious extremism or antipathy to the United States — The former Army counsel is himself a decorated combat veteran deployed to Baghdad in 2003 and 2004. For other individuals whose detention is reviewed here, this Board may feel the need to question whether the detainee harbors longstanding feelings of resentment against the United States or its foreign policy, against unfamiliar cultures or different religions. None of those issues are remotely present in this case.

That Kamin is a respectful, tolerant and introspective man who simply aspires to return to a family and community that are ready to receive him back has been consistently demonstrated over the many years of his detention. It is not a portrait manufactured for the benefit of this Periodic Review Board as today’s hearing date has approached. Nor has the picture of his personality changed radically since the widespread improvement in camp conditions that took place in early 2009. Instead — as the materials before this Board demonstrate — these personal traits and the strong support of his family have been on consistent display over the many years he has spent here in Guantánamo.

Though this is not a court of law, I mention two legal matters only because they bear on the question of whether there remain viable alternatives to clearing our client for release: First, recent decisions of the D.C. Circuit have now made it entirely clear that Kamin cannot be charged by military commission. Second, the President has repeatedly stated that our direct involvement in the conflict in Afghanistan — the ongoing nature of which has been the justification for Kamin’s continued detention without charge — is at an end, which must bring into question the legal basis for that detention.

Fortunately, as an Afghan, his repatriation would not be problematic. Kamin’s private counsel stand ready to assist his repatriation and reintegration into society. CCR has special expertise in this regard, having done the same for a large number of clients repatriated or resettled around the world. For several clients who were resettled and repatriated by the Administration from 2009 onwards, we worked with the State Department and host governments on transition plans for clients; we visited clients multiple times after release; we served as an ongoing point of contact for local authorities; we provided financial assistance and referrals for needs ranging from live-in interpreters to mental health care; and we partnered with other NGOs and organizations to help address other needs. We were a trusted and experienced resource in facilitating a successful transition for these clients, who are now rebuilding their lives; a number of former CCR clients have even successfully pursued higher education at universities after leaving Guantánamo. Finally, we have specific experience working with groups on the ground in Afghanistan. We would of course offer the same assistance for Mr. Kamin.

CCR and Mr. Rashkind have represented dozens of detainees since 2002, and we have absolute confidence that Mr. Kamin will not pose a threat to the national security of the United States if released. We respectfully submit that he should be approved for transfer from Guantánamo consistent with the President ‘s mandate to close the prison.

*****

In the profile of Mohammed Kamin on the CCR website, the contributions in support of his release were spelled out more clearly. CCR noted, “Kamin has received an enormous number of support letters as part of his PRB submissions. Four of the military lawyers who worked on his commissions defense over the years have written letters in support of his clearance, including among their number individuals who served in combat in Iraq and in Afghanistan and several Bronze Star recipients. Those letters attest that he is not bitter about his years of detention, and wants nothing more than to return to life with his wife, child, and larger family in Khowst. He has also received letters of support from various civil society and political leaders in Afghanistan: elders, maliks, and imams from Khowst province, local Senators and members of Parliament, the president of his provincial council, and the president of the Afghan Human Rights Organization — all endorsing his release and offering their support in assisting his transition back to life as a free man.”

It is to be hoped that these endorsements will be sufficient for the review board to recommend Kamin’s release, which, we believe, is long overdue, as it is for the majority of the remaining Afghans, whose cases I have written about repeatedly over the years.

Note: Three more Periodic Review Boards are forthcoming in the coming months. The PRB for Moath Hamza Ahmed Al-Alwi aka Muaz al-Alawi (ISN 028), a Yemeni, is on September 22, the PRB for Abdul Rahman Ahmed aka al-Qyati (ISN 441), another Yemeni, is on September 29, and Ahmid Al Razak aka Haji Hamidullah (ISN 1119), another Afghan, was notified that a PRB was forthcoming on August 25.

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.

Watch Spike Lee’s “When the Levees Broke” for the 10th Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, When US Racism Was Openly Revealed

I remember, ten years ago, being profoundly shocked by the almost indescribably inept response of the Bush administration to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which struck New Orleans on August 29, 2005, and thinking that it showed two things above all: firstly, that racism remained a horrendous blight on the nation, as it was New Orleans’ poor and black population that suffered the most, and that, I was convinced, would be socially cleansed as the clean-up began; and, secondly, that this is what happens when governments put private profit and the slashing of federal budgets before the common good.

I recall, in particular, the tens of thousands of displaced residents crammed into the Superdome in apocalyptic fashion, as though the US was some sort of failed state, and the incongruous images of soldiers with guns treating citizens as criminal suspects as a humanitarian disaster engulfed the city because of incidences of looting in some of the few parts of the city that were not drowning.

In all, the flooding from Hurricane Katrina led to about 80% of New Orleans being submerged. More than 400,000 residents were displaced out of a total population of about 470,000, and 1,800 people died across the whole of the Gulf Coast hit by the hurricane. The economic cost was around $100bn, but figures don’t reveal the human cost of the destroyed and displaced lives, or, indeed, the cost to the credibility of the Bush administration, which callously showed the American people and the world how little it cared about poor black people in New Orleans.

A year after Katrina, I watched Spike Lee’s magisterial documentary film, “When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts” uninterrupted on BBC4, which was so engrossing that I didn’t leave my seat for the whole of the four hours of the broadcast. Heartwarming in its humanity, as revealed in the recollections of its many residents interviewed by Lee in the weeks after the disaster, the film also shines an unerring light on the cost-cutting and incompetence involved in the city’s woefully insufficient flood protections, and on the incompetence of FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, whose competence had been fatally undermined under George W. Bush and the leadership of its unqualified director Michael D. Brown.

I believe the documentary is not only Spike Lee’s finest work, but one of the most important documentary films ever made about racism, inequality, and corrupt and inept government, and to mark the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, I encourage anyone who hasn’t seen “When the Levees Broke” to watch the documentary below, available in two parts via YouTube.

Ten years on, 100,000 black people have indeed disappeared from New Orleans. Population statistics show that, from 2000 to 2103, the population has changed as follows.

In 2000, the white population of New Orleans was 128,871; in 2013, this figure was 117,377
In 2000, the Hispanic population of New Orleans was 14,826; in 2013, this figure was 20,849
In 2000, the black or African American population of New Orleans was 323,392; in 2013, this figure was 223,742

Reconstruction has, of course, taken place extensively in parts of New Orleans, and tourism has almost returned to pre-Katrina levels, but poorer, predominantly black areas like the Lower Ninth Ward have not recovered. As the Guardian noted in an article about New Orleans’ “uneven recovery and unending divisions,”  which included an interview with Ronald Lewis, a retired streetcar worker who runs the House of Dance and Feathers, “a miniature museum of New Orleans community culture dedicated to the marching groups that form parades for occasions such as Mardi Gras”:

[T]he Lower Ninth is still a section of New Orleans defined by absence. The neighbours who died or never came back. The stores and services that no longer exist. Those who had no savings or were unable to negotiate the labyrinthine insurance and compensation processes and were submerged by bureaucracy.

A walk along Tupelo Street, where Lewis lives, is the Lower Ninth in a nutshell: some repaired houses, some new ones and some that are wooden skeletons, abandoned wrecks buried amid chest-high weeds. The waves subsided long ago but their consequences never did.

In a country still wracked by racism — discernible in the disproportionate number of black men in prison (around 13% of the US population is African American, but African Americans made up around 40% of the 2.3 million prisoners in the US in 2009), and in the impunity with which black men are killed by the police — the legacy of Hurricane Katrina is another reminder of how, although a black man is president, the US continues to be dogged by a disturbing and fundamental racism.

Note: Also of interest on this anniversary is the Guardian‘s article, “10 years after the storm: has New Orleans learned the lessons of Hurricane Katrina?”

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.

Yemeni Prisoner Zaher Hamdoun Says He Is “Buried in a Grave Called Guantánamo”

On Friday, the Guardian published words from Guantánamo written by Zaher Hamdoun (ISN 576), also identified as Zaher bin Hamdoun (or Zahir bin Hamdoun), a Yemeni held at the prison since May 2002. Hamdoun’s words were interspersed with commentary by his lawyer, Pardiss Kebriaei, a Senior Staff Attorney at the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights.

I’m cross-posting the article below, which is worth reading not only for Hamdoun’s own words about his long ordeal, but also for Pardiss Kebriaei’s frustration with the review process — the Periodic Review Boards — established by President Obama in 2013 to examine the cases of all the prisoners still held when he took office who were not subsequently approved for release in 2010 by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force he appointed (44 of the 116 men still held) or who have not been put forward for trials (just ten of the men still held).

Hamdoun is one of 47 men awaiting a chance to pitch for his release through a Periodic Review Board, a process that, as Kebriaei notes, is appallingly slow. “At the rate prisoners’ reviews are going,” she writes, “the administration will not finish by the time Obama leaves office.” Just 17 reviews have taken place since November 2013, and, as a result, ten men have been approved for release (but just two have been freed), four others have had their ongoing detention approved (but two are awaiting the results of a second review), and three others are awaiting the results of their reviews.

Kebriaei doesn’t write about how her client, seized in a house raid in Pakistan in February 2002, came to be on the list of prisoners eligible for Periodic Review Boards, but that too is enlightening, as he is one of dozens of men who were regarded as “too dangerous to release” by the task force, even though it was also acknowledged that insufficient evidence existed to put them on trial. What this means, of course, is that the information relied upon by the government is fundamentally untrustworthy, consisting primarily of statements made by the prisoners’ fellow inmates, largely in circumstances that were not conducive to them telling the truth.

Examples in Hamdoun’s file — in which the authorities tried to claim, improbably, that, although he was just 22 or 23 years old at the time of his capture, he was an al-Qaeda member, who had been a trainer in a military camp — came, for example, from the notorious torture victim Abu Zubaydah, for whom the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program was first developed, from Yasim Basardah, a Yemeni well-known as the most prolific liar within Guantánamo, and from Adel al-Zamel, a Kuwaiti who has stated publicly that, under duress, he made false statements about people he didn’t know.

‘I have become a body without a soul': 13 years detained in Guantánamo

By Pardiss Kebriaei, the Guardian, August 28, 2015

It’s been four years since the Obama administration promised to review indefinite detentions. For my client there, it’s been one long nightmare.

I feel like there is a heavy weight on my chest – it’s as if I’m breathing through a needle hole. And then I ask myself, “If I write or say something, is anybody going to listen to me? Is it really going to make any difference?”

Zaher Hamdoun is a 36-year-old Yemeni man who has been detained in Guantánamo without charge since he was 22, one of 116 prisoners still detained there six years after Obama promised to close the facility. After I visited him earlier this summer, he followed up with a letter filled with questions.

Will there be a day when I will live like others live? Like a person who has freedom, dignity, a home, a family, a job, a wife and children?

Hamdoun is not among the 52 men approved for transfer from Guantánamo, nor is he in a dwindling group of detainees the government plans to charge. He is in a nebulous middle category of people the Obama administration has determined it is not going to charge but doesn’t know if it is ever going to release. Though the president in 2011 ordered periodic administrative reviews of men in this group to ensure that any continuing detentions were “carefully justified,” the reviews didn’t start until a mass hunger strike broke out in 2013 and forced Guantánamo back onto the administration’s agenda. Still today, the majority of men haven’t been reviewed, including Hamdoun.

Though he has been a Guantánamo prisoner for almost 14 years without charge, and doesn’t know if he will ever be released, the administration says this is not indefinite detention. When I met with him, he asked me questions I couldn’t answer.

Will Obama’s conscience weigh on him when he remembers that tens of human beings who have fathers, mothers, wives and children have been waiting here for over 13 years, and some of them died before even seeing their loved ones again? Will his conscience weigh on him and make him finally put an end to this matter? Or are we going to remain the victims of political conflicts, which we have nothing to do with?

We discussed the reasons for the fits and starts of progress on Guantánamo – the political fear-mongering, judicial abdication, administration dysfunction, the public exhaustion.

Many people have written, demonstrated, spoken out, filed lawsuits in courts, held sit-ins and repeatedly gone on hunger strikes for long periods of time. Hopelessness has, without a rival, become the master of the situation. Mystery surrounds us from every direction, and hope has become something that we only read about in novels and stories.

At the rate prisoners’ reviews are going, the administration will not finish by the time Obama leaves office. Of those reviewed, most have been approved for transfer, but they continue to languish. They’ve been added to the administration’s long list of people waiting for release, most for years.

The reviews are far from a panacea. They don’t reach the underlying harm of the administration’s sanction of perpetual detention without charge. They can only limit the incidence, and in even this they are so far failing.

I have become a body without a soul. I breathe, eat and drink, but I don’t belong to the world of living creatures. I rather belong to another world, a world that is buried in a grave called Guantánamo. I fall asleep and then wake up to realize that my soul and my thoughts belong to that world I watch on television, or read about in books. That is all I can say about the ordeal I’ve been enduring.

I’ll see Hamdoun again soon. He is still waiting to be heard.

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 Shocking Story of Y: Imprisoned in the UK Without Charge or Trial on the Basis of Secret Evidence Since 2003

The “war on terror” declared by the Bush administration after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 has, primarily, been an American obsession, with the prison at Guantánamo Bay operating as its most well-known icon. Other notable aspects of the US’s cruel and disproportionate response to 9/11 are Bagram in Afghanistan, eventually handed over to the Afghan authorities, but the site of several deaths of prisoners in the early years of the “war on terror,” the network of secret CIA “black sites” most recently exposed in the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report about the CIA’s torture program, and, it should be noted, Camp Bucca in Iraq, where ISIS was formed.

As an op-ed in New York Times explained last October, “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State, spent nearly five years imprisoned at Camp Bucca in southern Iraq. A majority of the other top Islamic State leaders were also former prisoners, including: Abu Muslim al-Turkmani, Abu Louay, Abu Kassem, Abu Jurnas, Abu Shema and Abu Suja. Before their detention, Mr. al-Baghdadi and others were violent radicals, intent on attacking America. Their time in prison deepened their extremism and gave them opportunities to broaden their following. At Camp Bucca, for example, the most radical figures were held alongside less threatening individuals, some of whom were not guilty of any violent crime. Coalition prisons became recruitment centers and training grounds for the terrorists the United States is now fighting.”

It has long been known that the assistance of many other countries was required for the “war on terror” — from sharing intelligence and turning a blind eye to rendition flights to, in some cases, hosting “black sites.” In a report for the United Nations in 2010, on which I was the lead writer, 39 countries were identified, and in 2013, in “Globalizing Torture,” the Open Society Justice Initiative identified 54 countries complicit in the rendition, torture and indefinite detention without or trial of “war on terror” prisoners.

Less noted, generally, is how other countries have adopted their own policies of indefinite detention without charge or trial — like Australia and Canada, for example, and, of course, the UK, America’s closest ally in the “war on terror.”

I have, over the years — and particularly from 2009-10 (see here, here, here, here and here) — written extensively about the system of indefinite detention without charge or trial in the UK, imposed after the 9/11 attacks, which involved: a number of foreign nationals being imprisoned without charge or trial on the basis of secret evidence; immigration bail, a form of house arrest implemented while the government tried to deport alleged terror suspects in contravention of the UN Convention Against Torture; and control orders — replaced by TPIMs (Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures) under the Tories — which also involved a form of house arrest, and which were applied to British nationals as well as foreign nationals.

Since 2010, I have largely covered other aspects of Britain’s shameful counter-terrorism policies — extradition to the US (see here, here and here), and the Tories’ obsession with stripping dual nationals suspected of terrorism of their citizenship (see here and here), although I have also continued to keep an eye on the deportation of alleged terror suspects — primarily in the case of Abu Qatada, commonly referred to by the government and the media as al-Qaeda’s ambassador in Europe, despite there being, apparently, no evidence with which to charge him in the UK.

For the government, sending Abu Qatada back to Jordan became an obsession, even though he faced the risk of torture, or of an unfair trial based on information obtained through the torture of others, and it is still his case that largely informs the idiocy of the Tories’ latest plans to withdraw from European human right legislation.

Ironically, when Abu Qatada was finally returned to Jordan, the case against him collapsed. However, other men — all Algerians — are still held under a form of house arrest, based on a shocking Law Lords ruling in February 2009, dealing with their cases and that of Abu Qatada, in which, as I explained in an article in April 2012:

[I]n February 2009, the Law Lords finally endorsed the forced repatriation of foreign nationals to countries with dubious human rights records, despite their fears of torture, ruling that the cleric Abu Qatada, routinely described as Osama bin Laden’s spiritual advisor in Europe (even though no court has ever established whether or not that was true), could be returned to Jordan, and that a handful of Algerians could also be repatriated.

The reasons for believing that Abu Qatada and the Algerians would be safe — and that Britain would not be deliberately undermining the UN Convention Against Torture — were, to be blunt, ludicrous. The Lords claimed that Qatada was too famous to be tortured, and that, in any case, human rights groups would be able to monitor Jordan’s compliance with its promise to treat him humanely. The same outsourcing of responsibility was extended to Algeria, where, the Lords claimed, Amnesty International would be able to monitor the Algerian government’s compliance with its promise.

In recent years, however, there has been very little mention of the Algerians, and so it came as a pleasant surprise when, on July 5, the Observer published a profile of one of these men, publicly identified only as Y, by Ian Cobain, which captures his Kafkaesque existence (the choice of adjective is appropriate), and which ought to appal anyone concerned with justice in the UK.

On reviewing my involvement with these cases (and my involvement with Y’s case began here), I was rather shocked to note that it is four and half years since Y’s case was last featured prominently, in an event at Amnesty International’s Human Rights Centre, organised by my friend Saleyha Ahsan. This was to promote Ricin! The Inside Story of the Terror Plot That Never Was, written (with the journalist Fiona Bawdon) by Lawrence Archer, one of the jurors in the farcical 2004 ricin trial. At the meeting, memorably, the chair, Peter Oborne, spoke to Y by phone, in a call that moved him and the entire audience who were listening intently as his words were amplified for everyone to hear. Despite all he had been through, he was extremely gracious and humble.

Please note too that, as Ian Cobain notes, seven other men, mostly compatriots of Y, are still held in similarly Kafkaesque conditions, on immigration bail arranged by SIAC, the Special Immigration Appeals Commission, a secret terrorism court that has no place in a country that claims to respect the law and, as Dinah Rose QC explained in a powerful statement at a Parliamentary meeting on secret evidence in 2009, one that claims to respect the principles of open justice.

Ian’s article is cross-posted below. I had meant to post it shortly after it was first published, but it came out at a busy time for the We Stand With Shaker campaign, and I have only just found the time to write an introduction to it, and to make it available now. I’m glad to see that nearly as thousand people shared it when it was published, but I hope my crosspost enables it to reach a whole new audience, and that you will share it if you find it useful.

Walk down the wrong street and you’re back in prison: the Kafkaesque life of a terror suspect in Britain

By Ian Cobain, The Observer, July 5, 2015

Since Algerian asylum seeker Y was arrested in 2003, he has spent years behind bars or unable to move more than a few miles, yet he has never been convicted of a crime. What is it like to exist under such extraordinary restrictions?

This is a true story.

One January morning, Y went to the cashpoint near his home to draw out some money. When the machine swallowed his card, he went into the bank, where he was told he needed to contact the card provider.

He arranged to visit a local branch of his own bank, where he was introduced to the manager. Y noticed that the manager appeared to be slightly nervous. A man and a woman walked over to Y, asked him to confirm his name, then asked him to accompany them to another office at the bank. Inside, six or seven policemen were waiting. Y was informed that he was being arrested as a suspected terrorist. He was handcuffed, and led away.

That was in 2003. Since then, Y has been convicted of no criminal offence — “not so much as a parking ticket”, he says — yet has spent years behind bars. When allowed out of prison, he has faced extraordinary restrictions on his movements.

Y is told in which house he must live. At one point, he was told in which town he must reside. On first arriving at his new home, he is given a map of the neighbourhood, on which is marked a boundary beyond which he cannot stray. If he crosses the boundary, he may be sent to jail. He is told how long he can remain outside his home: initially, he was allowed out for just two hours each afternoon. He must wear an electronic tag, which is linked to a sensor in his home, and must telephone the company that operates the tag every morning and every evening. If he fails to make the call, he may be sent to jail.

Y cannot meet anyone without the prior permission of the government. Any prospective employer must agree to be vetted by the government and, as a result, few are prepared to give him a job. If he returns to education, the government will decide what he can study.

Visitors are not permitted to remain in his home overnight. He has recently been given permission to buy a computer, but he must connect to the internet by cable, and is barred from using email, Skype or any form of social media. If he attempts to do so, he may be sent to jail.

And then there is the little matter of his name. When Franz Kafka wrote The Trial, his story of a young man who is subjected to a bewildering legal process that he can never influence, the novelist at least gave his protagonist, Josef K, a first name.

By order of a court, the Guardian cannot publish Y’s real name. We may identify him only as Y. If we breach the order, I may be sent to jail.

All this is happening in Britain in 2015.

Y was born 45 years ago in a town in western Algeria, where he worked for many years as a tax inspector. He was a supporter of the Islamic Salvation Front, an Islamist political party whose imminent victory in the general election of January 1992 was annulled by a military coup. After the coup, members of the party were arrested or murdered, and the country slid into civil war. Y was detained and severely beaten: he still carries the scars. The Algerian government says he is a terrorist. It is an allegation he denies.

In 1998, he left Algeria for Spain, and, in 2000, he arrived in the UK. In Algeria, meanwhile, he was tried in absentia, convicted of criminal association, and sentenced to death.

In the UK, Y claimed asylum and, in 2001, was given indefinite leave to remain. He settled in north London and helped to run the bookshop at the mosque in Finsbury Park, which would later become infamously and inextricably linked with the preacher Abu Hamza.

In early January 2003, as the countdown began to the invasion of Iraq, police raided a flat above a pharmacy in nearby Wood Green and arrested six men on suspicion of attempting to use the seeds of castor oil plants to make ricin, the highly toxic protein.

The media went into overdrive. The Mirror, for example, gave over its entire front page to a graphic showing a skull and crossbones over a map of Britain, below the banner headline: “IT’S HERE”. The BBC reported that sales of gas masks were soaring.

Tony Blair said “the find” highlighted the dangers of weapons of mass destruction, while the then US secretary of state, Colin Powell, referred to the “UK poison cell” while making the case for the invasion of Iraq to the UN.

It was against this background that Y was arrested: his fingerprints were found on a ricin recipe discovered at the Wood Green flat. The only problem with the ricin plot was that there was no ricin. None. There never had been any, but there was no public admission of this until 2005, when a government scientist was compelled to reveal the truth while giving evidence at the Old Bailey, where Y and the other men were on trial, accused of conspiracy to murder.

Clearly somebody at the flat had been up to no good, in a bumbling sort of way: there were a small number of ingredients that could be used in an attempt to manufacture ricin, plus the recipe. And one of the defendants, Kamel Bourgass, was extraordinarily dangerous: while on the run after the Wood Green raid, he stabbed to death a Manchester policer officer, Stephen Oake.

Y’s defence was that he operated the photocopier at the mosque bookshop, and that his fingerprints would be on thousands of documents he had never read; he said he had never met Bourgass. At the end of the trial, Bourgass was convicted of the lesser charge of conspiring to cause a public nuisance. He had already been jailed for life for the murder. Y and three other defendants were cleared — the jury was unanimous — and the prosecution of four further men was abandoned.

Y, who had been held in Belmarsh high-security prison in south-east London, was a free man, but that did not last long. The Home Office gave notice that it was going to attempt to deport him to Algeria, regardless of the death sentence hanging over him, and a few months later he was detained, pending deportation. He is almost philosophical about this turn of events: “It was after 7/7 and the home secretary — I think it was Charles Clarke at that time — had to show that he was doing something.”

The jurors were furious, however. Two of them, who had subsequently befriended Y, wrote in the Guardian that a government “that seems bent on chiselling away at civil liberties” was ignoring their verdict.

And Y was about to have his first dealings with the Special Immigration Appeals Commission, or Siac, a place for which the adjective Kafkaesque could have been created.

Siac is the extraordinarily secretive court that deals with appeals against government proposals to deport people believed to pose a risk to national security. Aptly, perhaps, it convenes underground, in the basement of a building off Chancery Lane in central London. There is a curtain around the witness box from which unseen members of MI5 give evidence, and a screen down the centre of the court to shield government observers from the gaze of members of the public or the press.

Not that many journalists attend Siac. One of the few who does, the BBC home affairs correspondent Dominic Casciani, says: “It’s the only court I can think of where I can be told there is a case of national importance, only to find the doors locked and no clear indication of when they are going to open.”

It is not only the journalists who are turfed out of court on a regular basis: so, too, are the appellants and their lawyers. Whenever the government deploys what it euphemistically calls “closed evidence”, the appellants can be represented only by government-appointed barristers known as “special advocates”. And once the special advocates have seen the government’s secret evidence, they cannot talk to the appellants to take instructions.

As a consequence, Y cannot know the evidence that the government relies on at Siac. It is clear, however, that MI5 believes the Old Bailey jury reached the wrong verdict, and, in 2006, after seeing the secret evidence, Siac concluded that he did pose a risk to national security.

Y was released on bail from Belmarsh and went to live in the house of a man in east London, a peace activist who wished to help. “The problem was that he had to keep his computer locked in a box, and his daughter had to get permission from the Home Office to visit him. Even his cleaner had to get permission to come inside the house.”

Y told the Home Office he wanted to move and was found a new home in north London. At this point, he was allowed out of the building for two hours each day, between midday and 2pm. The house was on a road opposite a park, but he was forbidden to enter: the boundary on the map that he was given ran down the middle of the road. “Why were the boundaries drawn that way? I was never told.”

Later that year, when the government began to believe it had a chance of deporting Y, he was detained once more so that he could not abscond. This time he was sent to Long Lartin maximum security prison in Worcestershire. Bail was refused — for “reasons which can only be given in closed”, said the Siac judge — and Y began receiving treatment for depression. It was almost two years before he was released, and this time he was told he must live in a house in a small town 45 miles north of London.

“On my second day there I was late returning to the house. It was a Friday, I had been to the nearest mosque, but it was on the other side of the next town and I missed the bus on the way back. I ran, but I was late. The following Monday lots of plainclothes police from London arrived. I was driven straight to Belmarsh, and was back up before Siac in the morning. The judge let me go back to the house.”

Over the years that followed, Y’s case continued to ping-pong back and forth between Siac, the high court and the supreme court. It still does: he’s due back before Siac next month. In theory, he is on Siac bail pending deportation. In reality, he is living a life controlled by the government. He is not alone: seven other men are also on Siac bail.

That life is getting easier. In 2011, Y was allowed to return to London, and now lives in a house in the north of the city that is provided by the Home Office. “It’s got two bedrooms and a garden. It’s quite nice. I’d have been happy with a flat.”

He receives £74 a week in income support benefit, and works as a volunteer at a local Roman Catholic church, carrying out small repairs. As well as being allowed to use a computer at home, he is permitted to carry a simple mobile phone. He assumes his calls are monitored.

Y’s curfew conditions have been eased, and he is required to be at home only between midnight and 8am. His map is bigger too: today, Y’s world stretches all the way from Euston Road on the edge of central London, to the North Circular Road, six miles away. There is one street in the middle that remains out of bounds. “Don’t ask me why.”

In addition, he is permitted to go to the British Museum or the National Gallery, providing he gives 48 hours’ notice. He can also apply for permission to travel further afield and, on occasion, it is granted. He recently travelled to Canterbury, for example, although the Home Office warned him that he was permitted only to visit the cathedral and museum, and not the city itself. “They also said I couldn’t stop for a coffee at the railway station.” He shakes his head. “Someone’s sitting there in an office, making up these conditions.”

Y had been engaged to be married before his 2003 arrest, but the relationship could not survive the strictures of Siac bail. “We split up. She would have been subjected to all the same conditions, and she couldn’t live with all these conditions.”

His relatives live in Algeria and many of his friends eventually fell away. He finds it all but impossible to make new ones. Prearranged meetings need to be agreed with the Home Office. “And people from my community, the Algerian community, when they hear the words Home Office, they run: they’re scared of the Home Office. It’s hard, making friends.”

One of the few who has befriended Y is Bruce Kent, the former Catholic priest and vice president of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. It was while sitting with Kent in a Costa Coffee shop, not far from Y’s home, that Y was pointed out to me.

He seems to be a patient man, and has not lost his sense of humour. From time to time he laughs out loud when describing some of the more absurd curbs that he has faced. At other times he uses the word “normal” to describe the restrictions. “Well, they’re normal to me now. I’ve been living with them for 12 years. They’ve become the norm.”

He still suffers from depression, however, and takes a range of antidepressants as well as sleeping tablets. “And I’m getting forgetful. Maybe it’s the stress. I’m really worried that one day I will forget to make the phone call to the tag company. And then I’ll go back to jail.”

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.

Fayiz Al-Kandari, the Last Kuwaiti in Guantánamo, and a Saudi Prisoner Ask Review Boards to Send Them Home

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.

Since November 2013, 17 prisoners at Guantánamo have had their cases reviewed by Periodic Review Boards, panels consisting of representatives of the Departments of State, Defense, Justice and Homeland Security, as well as the office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The review boards are — albeit slowly — examining the cases of all the men still held who are not facing (or have faced) trials (ten of the 116 men still held) or who have not already been approved for release by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established shortly after taking office in January 2009 (44 of those still held).

Of these 17 men, ten have been approved for release (and two have been freed), while four others have had their ongoing imprisonment approved, on the basis that “continued law of war detention … remains necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States.” Three other decisions have yet to be taken, and 54 other men are still awaiting reviews.

In recent weeks, reviews have also taken place for two of the four men whose review boards concluded that they should continue to be held — Fayiz al-Kandari (aka Faez, Fayez), the last Kuwaiti in Guantánamo, whose ongoing imprisonment was approved last July, and Muhammad Abd al-Rahman al-Shumrani (aka al-Shamrani, al-Shimrani), a Saudi whose ongoing imprisonment was approved last October.

The second review for Fayiz al-Kandari

I have written extensively about Fayiz al-Kandari’s case over the years (see this major profile from 2009), and Tom Wilner, the co-founder with me of the Close Guantánamo campaign, was his attorney for many years. We profiled him shortly after launching Close Guantánamo in February 2012, and Tom and I also visited Kuwait at that time to try to help to secure his release (see here, here and here).

Last June, when his first PRB took place, Fayiz had been disenchanted with the review process, not believing that it could lead to anything positive — after years of enduring other review processes, under George W. Bush, that were travesties of justice. As a result, he did not engage with the process as positively as he could have done, but his opinion changed when his compatriot, Fawzi al-Odah, who had engaged more positively with it, had his release approved, and ended up being released.

Below I’m posting the opening statements of Fayiz’s personal representatives (military officers appointed to represent him) and, more thoroughly, his attorney Eric Lewis, who presented a comprehensive explanation of why Fayiz should be released, including the success of the rehabilitation program, and the hope that Fayiz has in his life.

Fayiz’s own contributions have not been made publicly available, but his attorney’s representations ought to be sufficient to convince all but the most unthinking apologists for Guantánamo’s existence that there is no case against Fayiz, and there never has been, contravening the frankly incredible allegations that have been thrown at him repeatedly during his imprisonment, and that, yet again, were wheeled out by the Pentagon in its unclassified summary for his PRB  — that he was an “al-Qa’ida recruiter and propagandist who probably served as Usama Bin Ladin’s spiritual advisor” (despite being in Afghanistan for only a month before the 9/11 attacks shut down the entire training camp network). It was, however, also noted that Fayiz “continues to deny having ever conducted terrorist acts or had extremist affiliations,” and that he “has remained compliant with the detention staff at Guantánamo since March 2014.”

Periodic Review Board Full Hearing, 27 Jul 2015

Faez Mohammed Ahmed Al-Kandari, ISN 552

Personal Representative Opening Statement

Ladies and Gentlemen of the Board, thank you for hearing our case for Faez Al-Kandari. We appreciate your decision to hold a full Periodic Review Board following the File Review conducted earlier this year. We plan to demonstrate that Faez is not a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States of America.

Since Faez has been able to see his fellow countryman, Fawzi, transferred to Kuwait, and doing well, he has been excited to meet with his Personal Representatives and his Private Counsel to discuss his upcoming board, knowing he has a real possibility of going home to Kuwait. For the first time since his detention began, Faez is excited about his future; he’s excited about seeing his family, again.

As we know, the purpose of this board is to determine if Faez poses a threat to the United States. We submit that Faez is not a significant threat to the United States, and he is ready for transfer.

Once again, our team thanks the Board for this opportunity to present information and evidence on Mr. Al-Kandari’ s behalf.

Periodic Review Board Full Hearing, 27 Jul 2015

Faez Mohammed Ahmed Al-Kandari, ISN 552

Private Counsel Opening Statement

My Name is Eric Lewis, and I am pleased to appear before you this morning as Private Counsel for Fayez Al Kandari.

We are grateful that the Board has granted a full hearing after this Board’s file review earlier this year.

This Board is charged with evaluating whether Fayez will pose an ongoing security threat to the United States or American citizens or any other type of security threat. We are well aware that Fayez had a full review approximately fourteen months ago in which the Board determined that his continued detention was necessary. The Board noted three factors underlying its decision: first the Board observed that Fayez appeared to have residual anger against the United States. Second, the Board was concerned with possible extremist connections of certain family members. Finally, the Board noted a lack of history regarding the efficacy of the rehabilitation program in Kuwait.

I want to address these issues directly so the Board can understand why the concerns expressed last year have been comprehensively addressed and should no longer be viewed as obstacles to Fayez’ release. I hope that at the end of the presentation you will agree that today Fayez poses no ongoing security threat to the United States, its citizens or military personnel or anyone else and that clearing him for repatriation to his home in Kuwait is a wise, just and safe action to take at this time.

Let me begin with the efficacy of the rehabilitation program in Kuwait. Last year, I stood before this Board on behalf of another Kuwaiti, Fawzi Al Odah.

I detailed the clear legal authority of the Government of Kuwait to return Fawzi to a secure and controlled environment, and its sovereign commitment to do so. I spoke at length about the program of the Al Salam Rehabilitation Center, and the commitment of the Government of Kuwait and Fawzi and the Al Odah Family to implement an in-patient residential rehabilitation program for at least one year. The Government of Kuwait also assured at the highest levels that Fawzi’s repatriation would be accomplished with strict oversight and security guarantees. This Board credited the bona fides of the Government of Kuwait, but it did so based on trust rather than history.

Now, we have that history. Now, we know that the Government of Kuwait has fully met and fully implemented its commitments, as has Fawzi Al Odah. The rehabilitation program is in place and working. The head of the rehabilitation program and his team have provided intensive psychotherapy, spiritual counseling, and a variety of other services that will help Fawzi reintegrate into society. You will have seen Fawzi on video and see what a difference the Al Salam Rehabilitation Center has made in his life. He is optimistic; he is happy; he is ready to resume a full, useful and peaceful life. He harbors no ill will toward anyone. He just wants to move forward.

You will also have seen the head of the rehabilitation program on video and you have seen his statement during the file review. He is a highly experienced psychiatrist and a fellow of the Royal Society of Psychiatry in Scotland. He is trusted in this sensitive area at the highest levels in Kuwait. He is confident that Fayez, like Fawzi, will also participate constructively in the program, and he is committed to assuring that Fayez receives all the rehabilitation he requires and to keeping him in the facility until he and his team are satisfied that Fayez is ready to reintegrate peacefully.

It is the opinion of the head of the rehabilitation program that Fayez has truly changed. Fayez has seen that his government can help him if he cooperates. Fayez has learned, and he is cooperating fully.

The head of the rehabilitation program is committed to supervising Fayez’ care and keeping him as an inpatient at the center, on the grounds of the Kuwait Central Prison, until it is safe to release him. That’s in everyone’s interest.

Fayez has eagerly discussed religion with a leading Kuwaiti religious figure who has experience with many young people, including many extremists that he seeks to bring back to a proper, moderate view of Islam.

He views Fayez as well within the mainstream of religious thought in Kuwait, as non-violent and in no way an extremist. He has been appointed to a committee by the Minister ofInformation to develop nationwide strategies and programs to prevent extremism in young people, and Fayez is eager to work with him in the future.

The person responsible for counter-terrorism in Kuwait is a tough man in a tough business. He too has much experience in dealing with extremists. He has also noted Fayez’ progress, his optimism and his desire for a quiet private life. He will make sure that Fayez is subject to the kind of security measures that remove any material security risk. Even after his release, Fayez will be required to check in weekly at his local police station and to be visited at home on a regular basis by the rehabilitation professionals. Fayez’ internet usage, religious instruction, social networks and financial affairs, among other things, will be monitored, and he will surrender his passport and not travel. He will be subject to electronic and physical surveillance and curfew measures. Fayez understands and accepts that he will live his life subject to the scrutiny of his government.

In sum, the Board’s concern that the Kuwait program had no track record has now been addressed. There is a track record and we submit it is an excellent one.

The Board has also expressed concern in its disposition about Fayez’ residual anger against the United States, which the Board perceived during the last hearing. You will hear from Fayez that he approached the last hearing with a great deal of skepticism. After years of CSRTs and ARBs, which did not bring him any closer to home, he did not have confidence that he would get a transparent and comprehensive hearing that could result in his release. So, Fayez withdrew and tried to preserve his dignity by using this one chance to talk to officials of the United States to express his frustration and sense that his long and seemingly indefinite detention was unfair. To be candid, I do not think he was given much hope in advance that the process would be fair or transparent. So, rather than talk about the future, he used the hearing to vent, and this may have come across as hostility.

I think that when you see Fayez today, you will see someone who has learned from experience. He understands that Fawzi Al Odah, whom he thought had false hope, actually had real hope. The defensive cynicism you may have seen last year is gone. Fayez knows you will listen to him; you will inquire into his mind and spirit and take a fair and honest measure of him. No one can be happy about spending 13 [and a half] years here. No one should be. That is human nature. But Fayez bears no anger toward America or Americans. Some of the people he met, especially in the early years, did not treat him gently or with dignity. But many others did. You meet all sorts. Fayez is a proud man, but he is a man who engages with others with energy, enthusiasm and charm. He treats others with respect; of course, he asks for respect from others. He has learned fluent English. He is studying business. He laughs easily. When a man has hope, he is a different man. Fayez has hope. I trust you will get a sense of that today.

Finally, the Board noted concern about Fayez having exposure to extremists in Kuwait, including possible exposure to family members who may harbor extremist views. Fayez has not seen any of his family members for nearly fourteen years. When he left, most of his siblings and cousins were still kids. He accepts that he does not know how the thinking of his relatives may have developed over the years. But he is very clear that he has no wish to have contact with possible extremists or to be involved in political issues in any way. He wants to avoid anyone that would seek to involve him in any political issues, let alone extremism.

Fayez’s parents have made clear that when he comes home, Fayez alone will live with his mother and father. No other relatives will live at home. We have submitted statements from Fayez himself and a video of members of his family, demonstrating their commitment to care for him on his return, which has never been in doubt. The video also demonstrates a plan for his living arrangements after he completes his rehabilitation, which is designed to provide him with monitoring and supervision.

You will also have met his distinguished older first cousins, both of whom have doctorates from leading North American Universities. They will mentor Fayez to facilitate Fayez’ peaceful and constructive return to Kuwaiti society.

I would ask that the board look carefully at the statement of Fayez himself, which is most probative of his mindset, his hopes and his goals, and I invite the Board to spend time questioning Fayez and getting a sense of his mind and spirit. He acknowledges his past frustration and his occasional tendency to be uncooperative, even provocative, arising out of that sense of hopelessness. Now, he sees a realistic path to resuming his life. He acknowledges that he requires a great deal of help, having spent more than thirteen years at Guantánamo Bay. He understands that he is 40. This is a critical opportunity for him to move forward with a productive life.

In sum, Fayez is looking forward to returning to an active, caring, yet strict and responsible government, which wants very much to receive and assist him, to loving parents who yearn to have him at home, and eventually to a wife and family and to a fulfilling life, free of politics. He has spent thirteen and a half years of his life at Guantánamo. He wants only to turn the page and get on with his life. He hopes to demonstrate to you that he presents no material security risk and that his repatriation is the safe, appropriate and eminently correct step to take at this time.

More on Fayiz from Al-Jazeera

In an article for Al-Jazeera, Jenifer Fenton provided further insights into Fayiz’s case, reminding readers of his well-chronicled history of charitable work, and speaking to his cousin Abdullah, who said, “He wants to catch up on lost time. He misses his family a lot.”

Dealing with the risible claim that Fayiz was an “al-Qaeda recruiter and propagandist who probably served as Osama bin Laden’s spiritual adviser,” Fenton noted, drawing on unpublished research I conducted for Fayiz’s case back in 2012, that “[t]he only prisoner who appears to have made such allegations against Kandari was Yasim Basardah,” according to the classified military files released by WikiLeaks in 2011, a Yemeni regarded as notoriously reliable, including by US officials. As she explained, “Even a US military official voiced strong doubts about Basardah’s credibility — telling the Washington Post that he ‘should not be relied upon’ and believing Basardah ‘strains the imagination.'”

As Fenton also noted, “More than a dozen allegations against Kandari in the JTF report come from this one discredited prisoner.” She added that other allegations “come from Guantánamo prisoners who were tortured,” and whose torture was confirmed in the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report about the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program, which was made publicly available in December.

Fenton also explained that former prisoner Adel al-Zamel, who also “testified” against Kandari, “told Al-Jazeera he did not know Kandari so he could not have made damning statements about him — unless he did so under duress and therefore does not recall them.”

She added that “other prisoners’ accounts in the JTF report do not square with travel dates in Kandari’s passport, according to his lawyers.”

Fenton also spoke to Fawzi al-Odah’s father, Khalid, to find out how his son is doing since his return home in November 2014, when he was sent to the Al Salam Rehabilitation Center for “reintegration counselling and physical therapy.” She noted that he is ‘by all accounts adjusting well to his life back home.” His father said, “Fawzi is doing fine. Thank God.”

Fenton also noted that, when Fawzi’s rehabilitation process concludes, probably towards the end of this year, he “will move into a flat at his father’s place and work — and hopefully start a family.” If released, al-Kandari would also be sent to the rehabilitation centre, a move he finds “acceptable,” as Fenton noted, adding that, according to his family, he “thinks the rehabilitation would help him to become a good, contributing member of his society.” She also noted that his family members “cannot bear to think about him not being cleared for transfer.”

In addition, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah al-Mubarak al-Sabah, Kuwait’s minister of state for cabinet affairs, told Al-Jazeera that the Kuwaiti government is “looking forward to receiving [Kandari] back … and is committed to making sure he reintegrates well.”

The second review for Muhammad al-Shumrani

Last May, before Fayiz’s review, Muhammad Abd al-Rahman al-Shumrani refused to attend his review, complaining, as his personal representatives put it, that he “has consistently stated his objection to the body search required to be conducted prior to his attendance at legal meetings or other appointments,” adding that he regards “the body search as conducted, which requires the guard to touch the area near his genitals,” as “humiliating and degrading.”

That, unfortunately, scuppered his chances of being recommended for release, as there was no input to counter the military’s claims, as aired in the latest unclassified summary, that he was an “al-Qa’ida recruiter and fighter,” and that he “almost certainly remains committed to supporting extremist causes, and has continued to incite other detainees against the detention staff at Guantánamo.” Although the authorities also noted that “there are no indications that he has communicated with any extremists outside Guantánamo,”  they claimed that, “Since February 2014, he has indicated possible plans to reengage in terrorist activity, and he has followed the news of ISIL’s growing strength in Iraq and Syria with apparent interest,” adding that he has also “shared little additional insight into his post-transfer plans.”

Below I’m posting the opening statements of his personal representatives, and the testimony of his attorney, Martha Rayner, who urged his release, although his own exchange with the board members is not publicly available.

Periodic Review Board Full Hearing, 04 Aug 2015

Muhammed Abd Al-Rahman Awn Al-Shamrani, ISN 195

Personal Representative Opening Statement

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen of the Board. We are the Personal Representatives of Muhammad Abd-al Rahman Bin A’wan Al-Shamrani. We will be assisting Mr. Al-Shamrani this morning with his case, aided by Martha Rayner, Clinical Associate Professor of Law at Fordham University.

Mr. Al-Shamrani has spent the last 13 and one-half years in detention at Guantánamo Bay. During this time he has endured the death of his father and witnessed from afar the decline of his mother into old-age and poor health. Mr. Al-Shamrani, himself, has slipped quietly into middle-age under detention.

As the Board is aware, this is Mr. Al-Shamrani’s second Periodic Review Board. Mr. Al-Shamrani declined to participate in his first PRB, although he did correspond via letter with his Personal Representatives and submitted his reasons for non-participation to the Board. The Board recommended, in its determination statement recommending his continued law of war detention, that Mr. Al-Shamrani pursue certain courses of action that would be beneficial to him. After reflecting on the Board’s recommendations and seeking the counsel of his family members, he decided to heed the advice of the Board. Specifically, he engaged in dialogue with the delegation representing the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and has fully engaged in the Periodic Review Process since his previous Board. He has maintained a record of perfect attendance for meetings with his Personal Representatives and counsel.

A number of Mr. Al-Shamrani’s traits have impressed us throughout our interactions over the past year:

Candor: He has proven exceedingly forthright and honest in his interactions with us. He is in no way one who will simply “tell you what want you want to hear”.

Civility: He has never failed to be anything less than polite and professional during his interactions and discussions with us.

Insight: He is a thinker who is reflective throughout any discussions he engages in.

Later, Mr. Al-Shamrani will discuss both his past life and his desire for a better life for himself and his family in the future.

We are confident that Mr. Al-Shamrani’s desire to pursue a better way of life if transferred to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is genuine. He is very eager to pursue the curriculum offered by the Kingdom’s Muhammad Bin Nayef Center for Counselling and Care.

Periodic Review Board Full Hearing, 04 Aug 2015

Muhammed Abd Al-Rahman Awn Al-Shamrani, ISN 195

Private Counsel Opening Statement

Dear Periodic Review Board Members, Thank you for providing me with an opportunity to represent Mr. al-Shimrani before you.

And thank you for granting Mr. al-Shimrani a second PRB after determining that a significant question is raised as to whether Mr. al-Shimrani’s continued detention is warranted.

Mr. al-Shimrani was taken into United States military custody at age 26. He was among the first men to be transferred to Guantánamo in January of 2002. He has spent the vast majority of his young adult life detained at Guantánamo — over thirteen and a half years. He is now 40 years old.

I have represented Mr. al-Shimrani pro bono for nine years, since 2006. He has always communicated appreciation and respect for my work on his behalf.

At the first Periodic Review Board, you concluded that detention remained necessary because of Mr. al-Shimrani’s past conduct, his “problematic” behavior since being imprisoned, and, since Mr. al-Shimrani did not attend the prior hearing, the Board’s inability to assess his current mindset. You encouraged him to fully participate in any future review and meet with any representatives of Saudi Arabia who might come to Guantánamo.

Mr. al-Shimrani has fully complied with the Board’s requests. He has participated in preparing for this hearing and will fully participate in today’s hearing by responding to any questions you may have. Mr. al-Shimrani has met numerous times with me and the Personal Representatives during which he has exhibited patience, openness and full cooperation in response to our probing questions. Mr. al-Shimrani [redacted] expressed his willingness to participate in their well-regarded reintegration and rehabilitation program [redacted].

This response to the Board’s directives demonstrates a commitment on Mr. al-Shimrani’s part to engage seriously with this process and with his future. I can assure you, having represented Mr. al-Shimrani for nine years, he is true to himself. He does not take advice or engage in a course of action unless he can engage in it sincerely and transparently. His decision to engage in this process and answer your questions is genuine on his part. He wants to return to his home country and focus on his family and building a peaceful life.

As to Mr. al-Shimrani’s past, he will address that in his statement to you. The core point he wishes to convey is that he is committed to moving on. He wishes to put his past behind him. Both his conduct that led to his imprisonment here and the many years of indefinite detention.

Mr. al-Shimrani welcomes participation in Saudi Arabia’s well established reintegration program, which has been endorsed by the U.S. government and replicated in other countries. This program is designed to be complemented by family support. Mr. al-Shimrani has strong family support. He has three brothers, four sisters, a maternal uncle who has been an integral part of his immediate family since the death of Mr. al-Shimrani’s father in 2007 and an aging mother with health problems. His family has pledged to support his reintegration home. They will provide him with a home, support in establishing employment and beginning a family of his own.

Mr. al-Shimrani will discuss his future plans in his personal statement to you. His plans are concrete and feasible, especially in light of the resources Saudi Arabia is able to provide as part of its reintegration program and in light of the moral support Mr. al-Shimrani’s family has pledged to provide.

The pieces are in place to assure that Mr. al-Shimrani will not pose a significant threat to our country in the future. His transfer to Saudi Arabia — a strong U.S. ally — will assure the mitigation of risk through its reintegration program and continued monitoring.

Respectfully,

Martha Rayner

Clinical Associate Professor of Law

Fordham University School of Law

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.

Disgraceful US Justice Department Secretly Blocks Release from Guantánamo of Gravely Ill Hunger Striker Tariq Ba Odah

“Wonderful.” This is the only word that Guantánamo prisoner Tariq Ba Odah said, over and over, as he “looked through photos of vigils and protests, tweets and Facebook posts, and dozens of articles about efforts to free him” from Guantánamo, at a meeting last week with his lawyer, Omar Farah, of the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights.

Tariq, as regular readers will know, is a Yemeni, and a long-term hunger striker, who has been refusing food since 2007, and is force-fed on a daily basis. He now weighs just 74.5 pounds, and is at risk of death, but the Obama administration refuses to help him. Three weeks ago, I wrote about his lawyers’ efforts to have a US judge order his release because of the very real risk he faces of imminent death.

Tariq’s plight sparked media interest — and gasps of horror from anyone still sensitized enough, after nearly 14 years of the “war on terror” declared by the Bush administration after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, to realize that a man weighing just 74.5 pounds would look like a survivor of — or a corpse at — the concentration camps run by the Nazis.

What makes Tariq’s plight even more revolting, when it comes to the immorality and inhumanity of his captors, is that he was approved for release over five and a half years ago, by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established to review all the prisoners’ cases when he took office in January 2009, but is still held, like 43 other men out of the 116 men still held, who were approved for release at the time.

This is a disgraceful state of affairs, as Cliff Sloan, the veteran diplomat who served as the State Department’s envoy for Guantánamo closure in 2013-14, explained recently. “For those who are approved for transfer, the laws passed by Congress permit it and we should be moving forward with those promptly,” Sloan said, adding, “Any month where we’re not seeing significant numbers of transfers undermines the president’s policy and is unfair to the individuals affected.”

In Tariq’s case, he is still held in particular because, like 36 other men approved for release by the task force (and six others approved for release in the last year and a half by Periodic Review Boards) he is from Yemen, and there is, across the US establishment, a shared conviction that no one from Yemen must be repatriated from Guantánamo, because of concerns about the security situation in their home country.

Better, instead, apparently, that they die at Guantánamo, 2,000 days after they were first told that the US no longer wanted to hold them, and would soon be making arrangements for their release.

In Tariq’s case, the Justice Department compounded this monstrous injustice on August 14 by filing — in secret — a challenge to Tariq’s habeas corpus petition seeking his release because of the threat to his life of further force-feeding.

As the Guardian explained:

In an extremely rare legal manoeuvre, the Obama administration has challenged a legal request to free a hunger-striking Guantánamo Bay detainee entirely in secret.

US officials said the objection to freeing Tariq Ba Odah, who is undernourished to the point of starvation, and the decision to challenge his legal gambit outside of public view, are indications that the Obama administration will fight tenaciously to stop detainees from seeking freedom in federal courts, despite Barack Obama’s oft-repeated pledge to close Guantánamo.

Late on Friday, the US justice department submitted a long-awaited filing in Ba Odah’s habeas corpus petition. The filing was kept under seal, a rarity for a challenge to the so-called “great writ,” the underpinning of Anglo-American jurisprudence.

The filing itself simply reads: “Sealed opposition.”

A US official, speaking anonymously, told the Guardian that “hardline elements within the US defense department are convinced that hunger strikes — referred to euphemistically at Guantánamo as ‘non-religious fasting’ — are functionally a method of warfare,” a disgraceful stance that has echoes of Guantánamo’s then-commander, Rear Adm. Harry Harris, causing outrage in June 2006 when he described the alleged suicides of three men as “an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.”

According to this distorted view of hunger strikes, the Guardian explained, “permitting Ba Odah’s challenge to his detention to go unanswered would both represent a substantive defeat and would encourage intensification of hunger strikes.”

To repeat, then: it is better to let men die at Guantánamo, 2,000 days after they were first told that the US no longer wanted to hold them, and would soon be making arrangements for their release, than it is to free them and to suggest to their fellow prisoners that starving oneself to the point of death for eight years, and being force-fed every day, is a useful strategy.

The official who spoke to the Guardian also “indicated that the motive for sealing the motion was to shield the government from embarrassment, rather than protecting classified information.”

Tariq’s lawyers responded with dismay and anger to the news. Wells Dixon of the Center for Constitutional Rights called the secrecy “rare and unnecessary,” and Omar Farah said, “We are deeply disappointed by this secret filing. It is a transparent attempt to hide the fact that the Obama administration’s interagency process for closing Guantánamo is an incoherent mess, and it is plainly intended to conceal the inconsistency between the administration’s stated intention to close Guantánamo and the steps taken to transfer cleared men. The administration simply wants to avoid public criticism and accountability.”

National security lawyers told the Guardian that they “could not think of a case where the government had filed a sealed challenge to a habeas petition.” Joshua Dratel, who has represented several Guantánamo prisoners, said, “That would be unique, in my experience. I’ve never heard of that in a habeas context. It’s rare in a criminal context.”

A Justice Department spokesperson, speaking to the Guardian, tried to deny that the opposition to Ba Odah’s release contradicted the president’s stated goal of closing Guantánamo, claiming that the filing was only made under seal “in accordance with procedures used in the Guantánamo habeas cases when information regarding detainee medical care and related issues is involved,” and adding that a “public version of the filing is being prepared and will be filed on the public record.”

For Omar Farah, this was nothing but another smokescreen, and one devoid of any meaningful justification. “There is nothing sensitive about this pivotal moment that needs to be withheld from the public,” he said. “Mr. Ba Odah’s grave medical condition is not in dispute. Given that he has been cleared since 2009, there is no dispute about whether he should be approved for transfer. All the president has to decide is whether to exercise his discretion not to contest the motion and release Mr Ba Odah so that he does not die.”

Anyone in any doubt of the urgency of Tariq’s request for his release should reflect on Omar Farah’s words after meeting him at Guantánamo on August 18. “When I met Tariq on Tuesday morning, he had just returned from being tube-fed,” Omar wrote. “He insisted on standing to greet me and CCR’s Ibraham Qatabi, but was unsteady on his feet. Veins protruded from his outstretched arm as he shook our hands. Last Friday’s decision is more than a setback to his legal case. The administration’s position is punitive and senseless and a matter of potentially grave consequences for Tariq.”

I hope that, if the Justice Department — which has an appalling record when it comes to delivering either justice or fairness to the prisoners — cannot be shamed into dropping its opposition to Tariq’s habeas petition, other parts of the Obama administration are working overtime to find him a new home before it is too late.

It is disgraceful that such thoughts need to be uttered, but everything about Guantánamo remains profoundly shameful, and, as ever, every day that the prison remains open, its dark stain on America’s notion of itself as a nation that respects justice and fairness grows larger. Tariq Ba Odah should not be another victim of its murderous and life-sapping lawlessness.

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.