Andy Worthington's Blog, page 93

Report Damns American Psychological Association for Collusion in US Torture Program

On July 11, a damning new report concluded that US psychologists, via their largest professional organization, the American Psychological Association (APA), betrayed their core principles by working far too closely with the CIA and the Pentagon on interrogations in the post-9/11 “war on terror,” and, in the process, provided what appeared to be justification for the Bush administration’s torture program.

The 542-page report, entitled, “Independent Review Relating to APA Ethics Guidelines, National Security Interrogations, and Torture,” is “the result of a seven-month investigation by a team led by David Hoffman, a Chicago lawyer with the firm Sidley Austin at the request of the psychology association’s board,” as the New York Times explained in the article that broke the story. That article was by James Risen, and the APA had commissioned the report last year after the publication of Risen’s book Pay Any Price: Greed, Power and Endless War, which, as the magazine Science described it, “accused the organization of providing cover for torture.”

In his article, Risen began by pointing out how crucial the support of psychologists was for the Bush administration’s abusive treatment of prisoners during interrogations after the 9/11 attacks. He stated that the Hoffman report concluded that, although the CIA’s health professionals “repeatedly criticized the agency’s post-Sept. 11 interrogation program,” their protests “were rebuffed by prominent outside psychologists who lent credibility to the program.”

The report, he continued, “raises repeated questions about the collaboration between psychologists and officials at both the CIA and the Pentagon,” and “concludes that some of the association’s top officials, including its ethics director [Stephen Behnke], sought to curry favor with Pentagon officials by seeking to keep the association’s ethics policies in line with the Defense Department’s interrogation policies, while several prominent outside psychologists took actions that aided the CIA’s interrogation program and helped protect it from growing dissent inside the agency.”

As the report described it, the APA’s ethics office “prioritized the protection of psychologists — even those who might have engaged in unethical behavior — above the protection of the public.” As Risen described it, Stephen Behnke “coordinated the group’s public policy statements on interrogations with a top military psychologist … and then received a Pentagon contract to help train interrogators while he was working at the association, without the knowledge of the association’s board.”

Risen also explained that the report noted that ‘[t]wo former presidents of the psychological association were on a CIA advisory committee,” and that “[o]ne of them [Joseph Matarazzo] gave the agency an opinion that sleep deprivation did not constitute torture, and later held a small ownership stake in a consulting company founded by two men who oversaw the agency’s interrogation program.” Those two men are former military psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, who worked on the SERE program (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape), which was designed to train US personnel to resist torture if captured by a hostile enemy, and who reverse-engineered that program for the Bush administration’s torture program, even though they had no experience of conducting interrogations in the real world. I have been reporting their stories for many years (see here, here and here), and I wrote a song about their role in the torture program, for my band The Four Fathers, which is featured on our debut album, “Love and War” (available here) and is entitled, “81 Million Dollars” — the amount Mitchell and Jessen were paid for their brutal and worthless torture consultancy.

As the article in Science also explained:

The report’s most damning findings concern a 2005 APA committee called the Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS). The task force was created in the midst of revelations that detainees were subjected to “enhanced interrogation” at U.S. government facilities in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and that psychologists were intimately involved in both the design and practice of these efforts.

As Hoffman discovered through interviews, medics within the intelligence community were “not on board” with such interrogations. To quell this internal resistance, the government hoped to enlist support from APA, psychology’s largest professional organization. And the PENS task force provided it, concluding in a 2005 statement that it was ethical for psychologists to take part in the interrogation program.

The article in Science added, “The PENS decision sparked protests by many APA members, some of whom called for withholding dues” — and some of whom left the organization entirely, as I have discovered over the years through my friendship with a number of US psychologists opposed to the use of torture, However, Hoffman found that they were ignored. “Being involved in the intentional harming of detainees … could do lasting damage to the integrity and reputation of psychology, a profession that purports to ‘do no harm,’” he noted, but “these countervailing concerns were simply not considered or were highly subordinated to APA’s strategic goals.” As Hoffman put it, the APA “sought to maintain its privileged relationship with the Pentagon,” which is “a massive employer of psychologists.”

As Al-Jazeera described it, the report also “showed that ‘current and former APA officials had very substantial interactions with the CIA in the 2001 to 2004 time period’ when the agency was using ‘techniques like waterboarding, harsh physical actions such as “walling”, forced stress positions’, and the intentional deprivation of necessities, such as sleep and a temperature-controlled environment.”

After the Hoffman report was made public on Friday, the American Psychological Association issued an apology. Former APA president Nadine Kaslow said in a statement, “The actions, policies and lack of independence from government influence described in the Hoffman report represented a failure to live up to our core values. We profoundly regret and apologize for the behavior and the consequences that ensued.”

Prior to the publication of the report, Stephen Behnke left his post as the APA’s ethics director, and three senior officials —  Norman Anderson the CEO, Michael Honaker, the deputy CEO, and Rhea Farberman, the communications chief — resigned after its publication, as the Guardian explained.

The Guardian added that Stephen Soldz, “a longtime APA critic on torture affiliated with Physicians for Human Rights,” responded to news of the departures by saying, “This is a major step toward reforming the APA and the profession.” he added, “I hope it is only the beginning of change. The selection of the right CEO will be crucial.”

As the Guardian also noted, “Soldz is part of a group pushing for the APA to refer the Hoffman report to the FBI and Justice Department for potential criminal inquiries. Thus far, the APA has committed to providing the report to the Senate committees overseeing the military and CIA, and a call to end all psychologist participation in US interrogation and detention operations is slated for APA consideration at a major conference next month.” To date, however, “there is no indication from the Justice Department that it intends to revisit the politically fraught question of legal accountability for torture, which ended in 2012 without prosecutions. The defense department, which still assigns psychologists to Guantanamo Bay, has yet to comment; and the White House has stayed out of the fray.”

For those who want to know more, I recommend the work of my friend and colleague Jeffrey Kaye, a psychologist in California, and I also recommend the transcript of the opening comments made by Stephen Soldz and his colleague Steven Meisner at a two-hour meeting with the board of the APA on July 2, 2015. Also see the April 2015 report, with Soldz, Meisner and Nathaniel Raymond as lead authors, “All the President’s Psychologists: The American Psychological Association’s Secret Complicity with the White House and US Intelligence Community in Support of the CIA’s ‘Enhanced’ Interrogation Program.”

Below I’m also cross-posting two articles that I found to be particularly useful: an editorial in Nature, which provides a good account of the history of psychologists’ interaction with the military — and also addresses the most important points in the Hoffman report; and a New York Times editorial from December 16, 2014, a week after the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the CIA torture program was released, with its harrowing details of the brutality and pointlessness of the program. The editorial focus specifically on “the deep complicity of psychologists and doctors in torturing suspected terrorists,” expressing disgust at the reports of Mitchell and Jessen’s role, and including mention of the Hoffman report, which has just begun at the time, as well as quotes from the American Medical Association and the president of the APA, who “called torture ‘morally reprehensible‘ and said the application of ‘learned helplessness‘ on detainees was a ‘perversion of psychological science.'”

If only those conclusions had been reached earlier, before all the torture and abuse began, without which, of course, the brutal interrogations of the “war on terror” would not have been able to take place.

Lessons must be learned after psychology torture inquiry

Nature editorial, July 14, 2015

In 1917, when the field of psychology was young and struggling to gain acceptance in science, the American Psychological Association (APA) needed a friend. Like many at the time, it decided to assist the war effort by working with the US military. The collaboration was largely benign: efforts to assess which recruits were fit to be soldiers led to the first formal study of variation in human intelligence. Later, psychologists studied the effects of war on soldiers returning home, fuelling the case for making the First World War “the war to end all wars”.

That was not to be, but psychology, and the APA in particular, continued its close bond with military and intelligence agencies. The relationship is not inherently problematic: indeed, the US Department of Defense (DOD) spends tens of millions of dollars each year on research into post-traumatic stress disorder and other psychological and psychiatric complications of war. The DOD, which employs around 700 psychologists, was a key ally in psychologists obtaining the authority to write prescriptions in the 1980s. And the APA has at times taken a stand against DOD policies: as early as 1991, the organization protested against the Pentagon’s policy of stopping openly gay people from serving in the military by banning DOD advertisements in APA publications.

Nevertheless, the tone of the alliance between US agencies and psychologists has darkened over the past century. Most famous is the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) mind-control programme MKUltra during the cold-war era, in which psychologists helped the CIA to develop and test interrogation techniques involving the use of hallucinogenic drugs and hypnosis.

Given this history, it should be no surprise that the APA has continued to cultivate a close relationship with the agencies. Last week, a long-awaited external report confirmed suspicions of the APA’s involvement in the torture of detainees following the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 and the ensuing ‘war on terror’ (see go.nature.com/4vpdob). Starting in 2005, the report found, APA officials worked with the DOD to keep the organization’s ethics guidelines loose enough to justify the participation of psychologists in the DOD’s ‘enhanced interrogation’ programme. As a result, the DOD and CIA could easily brush aside the ethical concerns of their own psychologists: the APA had given the programme its imprimatur.

The story is rife with conflicts of interest: according to the report, six of the nine voting psychologists on the APA task force that wrote the guidelines had consulting relationships with the DOD or CIA, and one former APA president owned a financial stake in the consulting company that oversaw the CIA interrogation programme. As criticism surfaced, the APA defended itself by formally condemning torture while doing nothing to stop its members from participating. Meanwhile, Guantanamo Bay’s chief military psychologist told an APA meeting: “If we removed psychologists from these facilities, people are going to die.” It is an assertion that does more to reveal the disgraceful state of the programme than to offer a moral defence.

Not only did APA psychologists deem the torture programme ethical, but they also gave it a patina of legitimacy by trying to cast it as research. The “studies” — which violate every consent rule for human subjects, including the CIA’s own — involved questions about the acceptable limits of human suffering and how well various techniques could yield useful information from a prisoner. There is no evidence that the United States gained any useful information in this way.

The scientific basis for the interrogation programme was questionable from the start. The theory of ‘learned helplessness’ was developed to test psychiatric drugs by measuring how long mice will try to swim in a bucket of water — depressed animals will give up sooner and allow themselves to be rescued. The psychologists who developed the CIA’s interrogation techniques reversed this idea, theorizing that simulating the experience of drowning, or waterboarding, could induce despair in human detainees until they gave up their story.

The APA has apologized for its failings and has indicated that it will revise its policies to prohibit psychologists from participating in military interrogations. It has also parted company with its ethics director, who the report named as leading the collusion with the military. More heads are likely to roll, and some psychologists could even face prosecution.

The American Psychiatric Association and the American Medical Association forbade their members in 2006 from participating in the interrogation programmes. This is in keeping with the Geneva Convention, an international agreement signed in 1929 and revised nearly 70 years ago to do away with torture and abusive experimentation on prisoners of war. The APA deserves all the criticism it receives and more, for its willingness to forswear global consensus in the interest of making a deal with the devil.

Tortured by Psychologists and Doctors

New York Times editorial, December 16, 2014

One of the most disturbing revelations in the Senate report on the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation program was the deep complicity of psychologists and doctors in torturing suspected terrorists. We already knew from earlier reports that health professionals had facilitated the torture by advising the interrogators when their brutal tactics might inadvertently kill a prisoner.

The ghastly new revelation is that two psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, who devised a list of coercive techniques to be used in questioning prisoners also personally conducted interrogations in which they tortured some C.I.A. detainees. They earned tens of millions of dollars under contracts for those services.

The report also cites other health professionals who participated, including unidentified C.I.A. medical officers or doctors who cleared prisoners for interrogation and played a central role in deciding whether to continue or adjust procedures when a prisoner developed severe medical problems.

The report was produced by Democratic staff members of the Senate Intelligence Committee who examined more than six million pages of internal C.I.A. documents. Although Republican critics are complaining that the report is biased, it is by far the most thorough inquiry into the interrogation program yet conducted.

The supposedly scientific underpinnings of the interrogation program turn out to be ludicrous. The two psychologists who were hired in an atmosphere of panic in the months after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, had no experience as interrogators, no specialized knowledge of Al Qaeda, no background in counterterrorism, and no relevant cultural or linguistic expertise.

They relied on the psychological theory known as “learned helplessness,” which they believed would make prisoners passive and depressed and cause them to cooperate in providing information. They and others employed a range of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” including shackling people in painful positions, keeping them awake for more than a week at a time, locking them in coffin-sized boxes and repeated waterboarding. There is no evidence — other than self-serving claims by those who authorized the interrogation program — that it provided useful intelligence.

The American Medical Association said that the participation of doctors in torture and coercive interrogation “is a violation of core ethical values.” The president of the American Psychological Association called torture “morally reprehensible” and said the application of “learned helplessness” on detainees was a “perversion of psychological science.” In response to complaints that the A.P.A.’s ethics code was modified to allow such interrogations, it has commissioned an independent review into whether it colluded with the government’s use of torture.

Health care professionals who engaged in or abetted torture should have their professional licenses revoked and, depending on the degree of culpability, be prosecuted criminally. None of this seems likely for Mr. Mitchell or Mr. Jessen. (A complaint filed against Mr. Mitchell to revoke his license to practice psychology failed.) The best we can hope for is that laying bare the record will deter future unethical behavior by health professionals.

To ensure that result, Congress ought to enact legislation or the president ought to issue executive orders that explicitly prohibits all forms of torture and bars health professionals from direct involvement in interrogations. If Republicans feel the Senate report was biased, they should create a federal commission to investigate the role health professionals played in this barbaric undertaking.

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.

Despite His Conviction Being Quashed Three Times, Guantánamo Prisoner Ali Hamza Al-Bahlul Remains in Solitary Confinement

For some prisoners held in the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, it seems there really is no way out. One example would seem to be Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, a 45-year old Yemeni prisoner and a propagandist for al-Qaeda, who made a promotional video glorifying the attack on the USS Cole in October 2000, in which 17 US soldiers died, and who received a life sentence for providing material support for terrorism, conspiring with al-Qaeda and soliciting murder after a one-sided military commission trial in the dying days of the Bush administration.

Al-Bahlul has been held in solitary confinement ever since — on what is known as “Convicts’ Corridor,” according to Carol Rosenberg of the Miami Herald, even though, since January 2013, he has had every part of his conviction overturned in the US courts — most recently in a ruling by the appeals court in Washington D.C. (the D.C. Circuit Court) on June 12.

In January 2013, a three-judge panel in the D.C. Circuit Court overturned the material support and solicitation convictions, on the basis that the charges of which he was convicted were not recognized as war crimes at the time he was accused of committing them; or, to put it another way, that they had been invented as war crimes by Congress. That ruling was confirmed by a full panel of judges in July 2014, and the judges last month overturned the conspiracy conviction — on the basis that conspiracy is not a crime under the international law of war.

I didn’t have time to write about that ruling at the time, but it was a huge blow — another huge blow — to the tattered credibility of the military commissions. Only eight convictions have been secured since the commissions were first revived by the Bush administration in November 2001. The commissions were ruled illegal by the Supreme Court in June 2006, but were revived again by Congress later that year, and revived again under President Obama in 2009, although they should never have been revived at all, as they are, simply, not fit for purpose.

Rosenberg first wrote about “Convicts’ Corridor” — a block in Camp 5 — in February 2011, when four men convicted in the military commissions were held: the former child prisoner Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen, and Ibrahim al-Qosi and Noor Uthman Muhammed, from Sudan. Al-Qosi was repatriated in July 2012, Khadr in September 2012, and Noor Uthman Muhammed in December 2013, following the terms of their plea deals.

Back in February 2011, military defense lawyers said that “Convicts’ Corridor” was “especially austere” and that their clients were “doing hard time reminiscent of Guantánamo’s early years when interrogators isolated captives of interest.” The military disputed that. Carol Rosenberg noted that, although each man spent “12 or more hours a day locked behind a steel door inside a 12-by-8-foot cell equipped with a bed, a sink and a toilet,” they got “up to eight hours off the cellblock in an open-air recreation yard,” and “[i]f recreation time coincide[d] with one of Islam’s five times daily calls to prayer, the convicts [could] pray together. If it coincide[d] with meal time, they [could] eat together.”

For the last 20 months, however, al-Bahlul has been completely alone.

Army Col. David Heath, the commander of the Joint Detention Group, who is in charge of the guard force, told Carol Rosenberg last week that, “absent a specific order to change the status of Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, [he] remains a convict,” unlike the 115 other prisoners who are described as “detainees,” including, as Rosenberg also noted, “the six former CIA captives who await death-penalty trials by military commission and two who have provisionally pleaded guilty but not been sentenced.”

As Rosenberg also noted, Col. Heath said that al-Bahlul, who is “considered a compliant convict,” remains on “Convicts’ Corridor” because he “has received no specific order from his military chain-of-command to move him. If so ordered, Heath said, he would then consult with the captive to see whether he was interested in joining other medium-security, cooperative captives in a communal cellblock.”

As Col. Heath put it, “If he reverted to detainee status, given his compliancy level, he would be entitled to communal.” It is not known, however, if al-Bahlul would wish to move, even if he is given the opportunity to do so, although, if he did, he would be the first convicted prisoner to do so. However, Rosenberg noted that, according to military commanders at the prison, “[a]n undisclosed number of other compliant captives voluntarily live in solitary cells … rather than join the majority living in groups of a dozen or more who pray, eat, watch TV and play some sports together with the exception of two hours of daily lockdown in individual cell situations.”

While we wait to see if al-Bahlul’s status changes, or if the Obama administration will yet again appeal, either to a full panel in the D.C. Circuit Court, or to the Supreme Court, I’m cross-posting below the editorial published in the New York Times following al-Bahlul’s third and hugely significant court victory — and below that are my thoughts on the military’s rather ludicrous claims that seven men — in addition to the seven “high-value detainees” currently involved in extensive, and seemingly endless pre-trial hearings — might still be prosecuted, when a sober analysis of the situation would, instead, indicate that no one else will be charged.

A Rebuke to Military Tribunals

New York Times editorial, June 18, 2015

In 2008, Ali al-Bahlul, a propagandist for Al-Qaeda who has been held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, since early 2002, was convicted by the military tribunal there and sentenced to life in prison. But officials had no evidence that Mr. Bahlul was involved in any war crimes, so they charged him instead with domestic crimes, including conspiracy and material support of terrorism.

Last Friday, a panel of the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., reversed Mr. Bahlul’s conspiracy conviction because, it said, the Constitution only permits military tribunals to handle prosecutions of war crimes, like intentionally targeting civilians. (The court previously threw out the other charges on narrower grounds.)

The 2-1 decision, by Circuit Judge Judith Rogers, was a major rebuke to the government’s persistent and misguided reliance on the tribunals, which operate in a legal no man’s land, unconstrained by standard constitutional guarantees and rules of evidence that define the functioning of the nation’s civilian courts.

Of course, that was the whole point of the tribunals, as their architects in the Bush administration saw it: they held out the promise of relatively quick trials and easy convictions, beyond the reach of the Constitution and the scrutiny of the American public. But it didn’t work out that way. As with Mr. Bahlul, most of the prisoners at Guantánamo could not be linked to specific attacks. So in 2006 and 2009, Congress gave the tribunals the authority to try certain domestic crimes, even though legal scholars had repeatedly warned that this was an unconstitutional transfer of jurisdiction away from the federal courts.

The appellate panel’s majority agreed. If the government were to prevail, Judge David Tatel wrote in concurrence, “Congress would have virtually unlimited authority to bring any crime within the jurisdiction of military commissions — even theft or murder — so long as it related in some way to an ongoing war or the armed forces.”

America’s civilian courts are not just the constitutionally proper place to try federal crimes, Judge Tatel added, they are very good at it. “Federal courts hand down thousands of conspiracy convictions each year, on everything from gun-running to financial fraud to, most important here, terrorism.”

In fact, federal prosecutors have won almost 200 “jihadist-related” terrorism and national-security cases since Sept. 11, Judge Tatel pointed out. Most of these involved conspiracy charges — including the case against the potential 20th hijacker, Zacarias Moussaoui. Meanwhile, the commissions have resulted in only eight convictions, despite charges against about 200 detainees — and all but one of those convictions were based on charges that are not war crimes. The commissions’ former chief prosecutor called this record a “litany of failure.”

In other words, while the commissions continue to stumble, the federal courts are more than capable of handling the prosecution of people like Mr. Bahlul without hiding from the mandates of the Constitution. And the tribunals may still try detainees for war crimes, as they are continuing to do with the five men charged with orchestrating the 9/11 attacks.

The Obama administration, which has also fought to allow the tribunals to try conspiracy cases, could still ask the full appeals court to reconsider the panel’s ruling, or it could appeal directly to the Supreme Court. Either route would be a mistake.

The Guantánamo Bay detention center still holds 116 men 13 years after it was opened, nearly half of whom have long been cleared for release, and each of whom costs Americans about $2.7 million a year to imprison. It is a legal and constitutional black hole that dishonors principles of justice and due process. Mr. Obama promised to close it the moment he became president, but Congress has stubbornly refused to let that happen. Now, after last week’s ruling, almost no one remains who can be prosecuted by the military tribunals at Guantánamo.

*****

Despite the likelihood that al-Bahlul would win his appeal against his conspiracy charge, making it probable that the only trials that can continue are those of the alleged 9/11 co-conspirators (Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others) and of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the Miami Herald reported that, in March, Pentagon officials were still hoping to prosecute another seven of the men still held, even though, of the eight convictions to date, four have now been overturned — in the cases of Salim Hamdan, Noor Uthman Muhammed and David Hicks, as well as al-Bahlul. In addition, Omar Khadr is challenging his 2010 conviction, and of the other three convictions, two of the men in question — Majid Khan and Ahmed al-Darbi — are still at Guantánamo, and their sentences are dependent on their cooperation.

The Miami Herald article noted that “[t]he long-range vision for trials through 2019 was included in a 362-page release of internal discussions surrounding a since abandoned plan to base judges permanently” at Guantánamo — a plan that went down with the judges like a lead balloon. Prosecutors had tried to keep the documents secret, but a judge, Air Force Col. Vance Spath, “reviewed them and ruled they could be released.”

The names of six prisoners featured on a chart dated October 31, 2014 include the “high value detainees” Mohd Farik bin Amin and Bashir bin Lap (aka Mohammed bin Lep), Malaysians who were captured in Bangkok in 2003 and held in CIA “black sites.” They are alleged accomplices of  Hambali (Riduan Isomuddin — or Isamuddin), who was added as a seventh name in November after Army Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, the chief war crimes prosecutor, conceded in a memo that he had been “inadvertently omitted” from the list.

However, revelations in the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report into the CIA torture program, released in December, may well have derailed the plans. As the Miami Herald noted, “Agents stripped, shackled and deprived Hambali of sleep to soften him up for his 2003 interrogations, according to a public portion of the report, and an interrogator subsequently told him he would never have his day in court because ‘we can never let the world know what I have done to you.’”

It was also noted that, after Hambali’s capture in August 2003, President George W. Bush “called him ‘one of the world’s most lethal terrorists’ and said that he was ‘suspected of planning major terrorist operations’ — notably an al-Qaida affiliate’s 2002 bombing of a nightclub in the Indonesian resort of Bali that killed 202 people.” However, the Senate report quoted a CIA cable from November 2003, which stated, “Hambali’s role in al-Qaida terrorist activity was more limited than the CIA had assessed prior to his capture,” adding that al-Qaida members “thought him incapable of ‘leading an effort to plan, orchestrate and execute complicated operations on his own.'”

The others intended for prosecution are the Yemenis Abdu Ali Sharqawi (aka Sharqawi Abdu Ali al-Haj), an alleged former recruiter of bodyguards for Osama bin Laden, known as “Riyadh the Facilitator,” and Sanad al-Kazimi (aka al-Kazmi), allegedly a bodyguard for bin Laden. However, both men’s torture in secret CIA prisons, before their arrival at Guantánamo in September 2004, was public knowledge even before the executive summary of the torture report was issued – see here and here, for example — which would complicate plans for prosecutions, even if the government’s allegations are trustworthy, something that is by no means certain.

Also listed is Abdul Zahir, an Afghan first charged with attacking civilians in the first incarnation of the military commissions under President Bush, whose case I wrote about here. The charges against him were dropped, and never reinstated when the commissions were revived in 2006 and again in 2009.

The last of the seven, ludicrously, is the Egyptian Tariq al-Sawah, who was approved for release by a Periodic Review Board in February, “suggesting a trial has since been ruled out,” as the Miami Herald politely described it. Al-Sawah had been put forward for a trial in 2008, but the charges had been dropped, and it was always a ridiculous proposal, as he has apparently been one of the most productive informants in the prison, and it is, frankly, insane to suggest that informants should be prosecuted for their efforts.

In Guantánamo, however, as anyone playing close attention realizes, the insane can — and often is — re-imagined as sensible policy. In the real world, however, all the latest news has done is to make it clearer than ever that the military commissions at Guantánamo should be scrapped, and those who can be tried should be moved to the US mainland to face federal court trials — while everyone else is released.

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.

US Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo Force-Feeding Tapes, Condemns Government Delays

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.

Sick of delaying tactics, a US federal court judge has ordered the government to stop wasting time with “frivolous” appeals against her rulings, and to release videotapes showing a Guantánamo prisoner being brutally force-fed.

On October 3 last year, in the District Court in Washington D.C., Judge Gladys Kessler ordered the government to prepare for public release 32 videotapes of a Guantánamo prisoner, Abu Wa’el Dhiab, being dragged from his cell and force-fed. The tapes contained 11 hours of footage in total, and, as I explained at the time, Judge Kessler responded to the government’s concerns about the need for anonymity for US personnel by ordering them to be “redacted for ‘all identifiers of individuals’ other than Mr. Dhiab.”

That was over nine months ago, and on Friday (July 10), Judge Kessler ordered the government to “complete all national security-related redactions to the first eight tapes — which show Abu Wa’el Dhiab being forcibly removed from his cell and tube-fed — by August 31, and to complete other key redactions by September 30,” as Mr. Dhiab’s lawyers at Reprieve explained in a press release.

Reprieve added, “The tapes were first filed to court as classified evidence in a legal challenge to prison conditions at Guantánamo Bay, Dhiab v Obama. 16 press organizations, including [the] Associated Press, the Washington Post and the New York Times, intervened seeking the videos’ release to the public on First Amendment grounds. Judge Kessler ordered them to be released; the Obama Administration then appealed in what Judge Kessler called ‘as frivolous an appeal as I’ve ever seen.'”

A month ago, a panel of three appeals court judges turned down that appeal, and in a hearing on Thursday (July 9), Judge Kessler made clear her frustration with what Reprieve called the government’s “protracted delaying tactics” in the case. Not only is it over nine months since Judge Kessler’s order, but it is over a year since the 16 media organizations first sought the public release of the videotapes, and two years since Dhiab — who was finally freed from Guantánamo and resettled in Uruguay in December — first sought to have restrictions imposed on the authorities’ claimed right to force-feed him as they wished, without any outside scrutiny. He has stated that he was subjected to force-feeding about 1,300 times during his imprisonment.

As Reprieve explained, in court on Thursday, lawyers for the Justice Department “made two main points, which found little favor with Judge Kessler.” Firstly, after nine months, they had the nerve to ask the court “to reconsider its prior order to release the videotapes,” and secondly they “claimed it would take several more months for the Obama Administration to redact any tapes,” contradicting the government’s “previous assessment that they would need five weeks to redact all 32 tapes.”

When Andrew Warden of the Justice Department “began asserting that it would take until the end of August to prepare even 8 of 32 tapes,” Judge Kessler “interjected very swiftly,” and stated, “No, that’s not how we are going to it. The Government has made it possible to delay this for, according to my count, eight and a half months. Eight and a half months. The Government’s appeal was as frivolous an appeal as I have ever seen. Of course the Court of Appeals didn’t have jurisdiction. The minute I heard you were going to go up [to the Court of Appeals] I remember then talking to my law clerk saying, ‘I don’t understand this, the case is still on my docket. The Court of Appeals doesn’t have jurisdiction now.’ But that’s neither here nor there.”

Making clear that “she was not going to tolerate excessive further delay on the part of the Justice Department,” Judge Kessler added, “We are going to move as fast as we can.”

The Intercept reported that the following exchanges had taken place in the courtroom. David Schulz, attorney for the media organizations, said of the government’s proposed timetable, “This whole thing is a ploy. It’s delay, delay, delay.”

Eric Lewis, counsel for Mr. Dhiab, was “incredulous,” as The Intercept put it. “Last year, they could do 32 tapes in five weeks,” he said. “This year, they can do 8 tapes in seven weeks.”

The Intercept added that the government’s response was to pin the delay “on the Pentagon’s video editors, and claiming that the process has ‘proven to be much more burdensome and time-consuming.'” Andrew Warden told the court, “This is a very difficult project that is to some degree unprecedented,” adding, “there are real practical and technological burdens with the redaction process.” He explained, “There are 30 frames per second, and the video editors have to go frame by frame to redact names, faces and other personally-identifiable information.

Dhiab’s attorney “responded with skepticism,” as The Intercept put it. Eric Lewis said, “Video editors do that all the time. It’s a matter of commitment and resources.” As a compromise, Eric Lewis suggested, “rather than putting all 32 tapes through editing, which will be painfully time-consuming based on the government’s track record thus far, that only an hour-and-a-half long compilation video go through the redaction process and be released to the public.” Lewis said, “We’re looking for a way to break though this and make up for a great deal of lost time.”

Prior to the ruling, Cori Crider, Mr. Dhiab’s attorney at Reprieve, said, “The Defense Department has been playing stall ball from the second we forced them to turn over this grisly secret footage, and they remain determined to keep every second of it out of the hands of the US media. Their motive is obvious: if Americans were permitted to see the truth in these tapes, the conversation about Guantánamo would change overnight.”

Afterwards, she said, “This is a great win for the US press, and for the First Amendment. The Obama Administration has been kicking and screaming to avoid processing even one minute of this footage, and never wanted to have to give a specific reason for keeping it secret. That is because the real reason for trying to hide Mr. Dhiab’s face is that what he suffered is a scandal and an embarrassment to the Administration that allowed it.

She added, “The Government has been rightly chided by the judge and now will be made to give real reasons for every frame of this footage that they want to keep hidden from the public. Images of a suffering detainee are matters of public importance and should no more be suppressed than those of Abu Ghraib, Eric Garner or Rodney King. An Administration truly committed to transparency would release the tapes forthwith. That’s why the US press is intervening in this case, and the courts are standing firm to preserve our right to see what is being done in our name.”

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.

George Osborne’s Savage Cuts to Some of the UK’s Most Vulnerable People in His ‘Emergency Budget’

What a horrible, despicable bunch of vicious bullies the Tories are, obsessed with making the poor poorer and the rich richer, while cynically dressing up their abuse in the language of fairness and aspiration.

In the Tories’ first budget since the electorate bizarrely freed them from the restraints of coalition with the Liberal Democrats, the Chancellor, George Osborne, delivered an ‘emergency budget’ that was, no doubt, supposed to make us feel that we are in a state of emergency, still in need of savage cuts for the health of the economy, even though the false and damaging rationale for austerity has been thoroughly discredited time and again by economists, who understand that it actually stifles economic health. How Osborne has got away with his cruelty and stupidity for so many years almost beggars belief, as he has not managed to save any money, despite making life miserable for millions, but our bent media urging people to turn on one another  — and a sad propensity for British people to revert to Puritan self-flagellation when prompted — seem to be to blame.

And so Osborne’s budget hit poor people hard on a number of fronts, while hiding much of the pain behind one generous gesture inherited from the Lib Dems and another that is nowhere near as good as it sounds. The former is the raising of the threshold at which tax is paid, to to £11,000 a year, while the latter is the surprise announcement of what George Osborne described as a ‘National Living Wage.’

This was supposed to hide another policy tweak that is nakedly for the benefit of the rich — the raising of the threshold at which inheritance tax is paid, so that £1m houses can now be handed on to children without the state taking a penny, an increase from £650,000. Even the Daily Telegraph had trouble justifying that. “Today’s emergency Budget has brought huge inheritance tax savings for people with expensive properties,” an article explained.

It was also supposed to divert us from noticing a cut in corporation tax, and while a clampdown on non-doms was promised, the non-doms’ lawyers will no doubt ensure that their wealthy clients yet again worm their way out of paying their share of the UK’s tax burden.

At the poorer end of society, Osborne cut maintenance grants for poorer students, and, with huge repercussions, reduced the benefit cap he previously introduced from £26,000 to £23,000 in London and £20,000 elsewhere, all under the pretence — backed, I’m sad to say, by a dim and malicious electorate — that most of that money goes to the benefit claimant rather than his or her landlord. As the Guardian explained in an editorial on the eve of the budget, the benefit cap is “a disgraceful policy that’s about to get worse,” and a scheme “cooked up out of slogans, which arbitrarily punishes children for being born into big families.”

Here’s more:

It did not start out with the hunt for a solution to any policy problem, but with the hunt for a slogan for Mr Osborne’s 2010 conference speech. “Nobody on benefits should be allowed to earn more than the average wage” sounds like a winning line. The difficulty is that the comparison is dishonest, as even Iain Duncan Smith was reported as objecting at the time. Median pay might have been £26,000 a year, but this was gross pre-tax earnings for an individual, as opposed to the disposable income of a whole family, which for working and workless alike has always also depended on child benefits and help with the rent. The result of this deliberate confusion is to arbitrarily punish children born into big families paying high rents. Experts calculated that, even in unfashionable parts of London, some youngsters would end up being raised on as little as 62p a day.

Tough choices are often required, but what marks this move out as nasty is the lack of any defensible principle. If the aim is, say, saving on housing benefit, that should be capped directly; likewise targeted cuts can always be made to any other benefit. Instead, in order to swell an inflammatory headline figure about maximal sponging, all the payments to a household are lumped together before this cap is applied. The effect is to sever the connection, which has existed since the workhouse, between the number of mouths to feed and the support provided. No wonder the supreme court ruled that the cap breached the UN convention on the rights of the child.

Overall, as the Guardian explained in another editorial yesterday, the cuts in George Osborne’s budget “are savage cuts, which will greatly impoverish many low-paid workers and disabled people, and most particularly poor children.” As for the supposed living wage, it is, in reality, nothing more than a moderate rise in the minimum wage — but only for those over 25. Those under 25 will continue to be treated as second-class beings.

In addition, as the Guardian explained, “this isn’t a living wage in the real sense of a pay rate carefully calculated in line with what workers need to live on. Mr. Osborne’s proposal is instead for a rebranded minimum wage, starting at £7.20 an hour next year, less than the real living wage of £9.65 in London and £7.85 elsewhere. Crucially, these numbers are calculated on the assumption that families can access the very tax credits that were being butchered while all attention was on Mr Osborne’s ‘living wage’. Before the budget, the Resolution Foundation had warned that deep cuts in tax credits would push the London living wage up to well above £11.”

The Guardian added that, for most low-paid workers, “cuts to benefits and tax credits will overwhelm the gain”, in some cases by thousands of pounds a year. The Guardian also explained, “For all the talk of rewarding hard work, the government is going to start snatching tax credits back at lower levels of earnings than presently, and will also snatch them away faster too, deepening the poverty trap.”

It was also noted, “Workers who fall sufficiently sick to satisfy an increasingly harsh bureaucracy that it simply isn’t feasible to class them as jobseekers are facing a benefit cut of around 30%, the sort of retrenchment more often associated with Greece. And where China once operated a one-child policy, Mr Osborne is now imposing a two-child rule on the poor. Tax credits will no longer be paid for third and fourth children, dismissing them as a luxury indulgence on the part of the parents, as opposed to young human beings with their own material needs and their own rights.”

I have other, more personal complaints — about George Osborne’s plan to charge market rents to those in social housing who have managed to nudge their heads above the UK median income, and are portrayed by the Tories and by lazy journalists — yet again — as “high earners,” but these can wait for a follow-up article.

For now, it will be sufficient, I hope, to sign off by encouraging my fellow citizens, who are awake and who understand what is going on, to oppose the Tories’ plans with every fibre of their being. Labour — with the exception of Jeremy Corbyn — seems to have no idea how to establish a coherent opposition to the Tories’ obsession with implementing endless austerity, a version of what the Troika of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund has subjected Greece to, resulting in a strangled economy that can barely function, let alone pay off monstrous, unpayable debts. Here the mantra that the deficit must be reduced at all costs indicates an inflexible malaise at the heart of British politics, but also an ideological obsession on the part of the Tories with privatisation and low taxes for the rich that blinds them to the Greek-style reality that a mass of people strangled so violently that they have no money left over after working all week cannot support a fully functioning economy.

Note: For further analysis of the Bullingdon Club photo, see the following articles in the Daily Mail and the Guardian. Also see this Daily Mail article for a Bullingdon Club photo of an unbearably smug David Cameron in 1987, and an analysis of it here.

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.

Write to the Guantánamo Prisoners, Don’t Let Them Be Forgotten

Every six months, I ask people to write to the prisoners in Guantánamo, to let them — and the US authorities — know that they have not been forgotten.

The letter-writing campaign was started five years ago by two Facebook friends, Shahrina J. Ahmed and Mahfuja Bint Ammu, and it has been repeated every six months (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here for my articles encouraging opponents of Guantánamo to write to the prisoners). Their latest campaign coincided with the start of Ramadan, on June 12, and I’m following up in the hope that, as Ramadan continues, you too can send a letter to some or all of the men to let them know they’ve not been forgotten.

Since the start of February, when — slightly belatedly — I last encouraged opponents of Guantánamo to write to the prisoners, just six men have been released. 116 men are now held — 44 cleared for release in January 2010 by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force established by President Obama when he took office in 2009, and eight others cleared for release in the last year and a half by a new review process, the Periodic Review Boards, which started in 2013.

In the list below, I have divided the remaining 116 prisoners into those cleared for release (52), those listed as being eligible for Periodic Review Boards (54) and those charged or tried in the military commissions system (10). Please note that I have largely kept the spelling used by the US authorities in the “Final Dispositions” of the Guantánamo Review Task Force, which was released through FOIA legislation in June 2013. Even though these names are often inaccurate, they are the names by which the men are officially known in Guantánamo  — even though, in their everyday dealings with the US authorities, they are all still referred to, not as human beings with names, but as numbers.

Writing to the prisoners

If you are an Arabic speaker, or speak any other languages spoken by the prisoners besides English, feel free to write in those languages. Do please note that any messages that can be construed as political should be avoided, as they may lead to the letters not making it past the Pentagon’s censors, but be aware that your messages may not get through anyway — although please don’t let that put you off.

When writing to the prisoners please ensure you include their full name and ISN (internment serial number) below (these are the numbers before their names, i.e. Shaker Aamer is ISN 239).

Please address all letters to:

Detainee Name

Detainee ISN

U.S. Naval Station

Guantánamo Bay

Washington, D.C. 20355

United States of America

Please also include a return address on the envelope.

The 52 prisoners approved for release

Below are the names of the 52 prisoners in Guantánamo — out of the remaining 116 — who have been cleared for release — or “approved for transfer,” as the authorities prefer. The phrase used by the task force to describe the recommendations for the first 14 of these men was “[t]ransfer to a country outside the United States that will implement appropriate security measures.” Their identities were first revealed in September 2012. See below for the 30 other Yemenis recommended for “conditional detention,” and also for the eight men recommended for release last year and this year by Periodic Review Boards.

The 7 non-Yemeni prisoners approved for release

ISN 038 Ridah Bin Saleh al Yazidi (Tunisia)

ISN 189 Salem Abdu Salam Ghereby (Libya)

ISN 197 Younis Abdurrahman Chekkouri (Morocco)

ISN 239 Shaker Aamer (UK-Saudi Arabia)

ISN 257 Imar Hamzayavich Abdulayev (Tajikistan)

ISN 309 Mjuayn Al-Din Jamal Al-Din Abd Al Fadhil Abd Al-Sattar (UAE)

ISN 757 Ahmed Abdel Aziz (Mauritania)

The 7 Yemeni prisoners approved for release

ISN 153 Fayiz Ahmad Yahia Suleiman (Yemen)

ISN 163 Khalid Abd Al Jabbar Muhammad Uthman Al Qadasi (Yemen)

ISN 249 Muhammed Abdullah Al Hamiri (Yemen)

ISN 255 Said Muhammad Salih Hatim (Yemen)

ISN 511 Sulaiman Awath Silaiman Bin Agell Al Nahdi (Yemen)

ISN 554 Fahmi Salem Said Al-Asani (Yemen)

ISN 566 Mansour Mohamed Mutaya Ali (Yemen)

The 30 Yemeni prisoners approved for release but designated for “conditional detention”

These men were cleared for release by the task force, although the task force members conjured up a new category for them, “conditional detention,” which it described as being “based on the current security environment in that country.” The task force added, “They are not approved for repatriation to Yemen at this time, but may be transferred to third countries, or repatriated to Yemen in the future if the current moratorium on transfers to Yemen is lifted and other security conditions are met.”

ISN 026 Fahed Abdullah Ahmad Ghazi (Yemen)

ISN 030 Ahmed Umar Abdullah al-Hikimi (Yemen)

ISN 033 Mohammed Al-Adahi (Yemen)

ISN 040 Abdel Qadir Al-Mudafari (Yemen)

ISN 043 Samir Naji Al Hasan Moqbil (Yemen)

ISN 088 Adham Mohamed Ali Awad (Yemen)

ISN 091 Abdel Al Saleh (Yemen)

ISN 115 Abdul Rahman Mohammed Saleh (Yemen)

ISN 117 Mukhtar Anaje (Yemen)

ISN 165 Adil Said Haj Ubayd (Yemen)

ISN 167 Ali Yahya Mahdi (Yemen)

ISN 171 Abu Bakr ibn Ali Muhammad al Ahdal (Yemen)

ISN 178 Tariq Ali Abdullah Ba Odah (Yemen)

ISN 202 Mahmoud Omar Muhammad Bin Atef (Yemen)

ISN 223 Abd al-Rahman Sulayman (Yemen)

ISN 233 Abd al-Razaq Muhammed Salih (Yemen)

ISN 240 Abdallah Yahya Yusif Al Shibli (Yemen)

ISN 251 Muhammad Said Salim Bin Salman (Yemen)

ISN 321 Ahmed Yaslam Said Kuman (Yemen)

ISN 440 Muhammad Ali Abdallah Muhammad Bwazir (Yemen)

ISN 461 Abd al Rahman al-Qyati (Yemen)

ISN 498 Mohammed Ahmen Said Haider (Yemen)

ISN 506 Mohammed Khalid Salih al-Dhuby (Yemen)

ISN 509 Mohammed Nasir Yahi Khussrof (Yemen)

ISN 549 Umar Said Salim Al-Dini (Yemen)

ISN 550 Walid Said bin Said Zaid (Yemen)

ISN 578 Abdul al-Aziz Abduh Abdullah Ali Al Suwaydi (Yemen)

ISN 688 Fahmi Abdullah Ahmed al-Tawlaqi (Yemen)

ISN 728 Abdul Muhammad Nassir al-Muhajari (Yemen)

ISN 893 Tawfiq Nasir Awad Al-Bihani (Yemen)

The eight prisoners approved for release by Periodic Review Boards

ISN 031 Mahmud Abd Al Aziz Al Mujahid (Yemen)

ISN 037 Abdel Malik Ahmed Abdel Wahab al Rahabi (Yemen)

ISN 042 Abd al Rahman Shalbi Isa Uwaydah (Saudi Arabia)

ISN 045 Ali Ahmad al-Rahizi (Yemen)

ISN 128 Ghaleb Nassar al Bihani (Yemen)

ISN 235 Saeed Ahmed Mohammed Abdullah Sarem Jarabh (Yemen)

ISN 324 Mashur Abdullah Muqbil Ahmed al-Sabri (Yemen)

ISN 535 Tariq Mahmoud Ahmed Al Sawah (Egypt)

The 54 prisoners eligible for Periodic Review Boards

Of the 54 remaining prisoners notified that they were eligible for Periodic Review Boards in April 2013, the first 32 were recommended for continued imprisonment without charge or trial in January 2010 by President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force, and the 22 others were recommended for prosecution in the military commissions, but those intended prosecutions were dropped after judges dismissed the convictions against two prisoners on the basis that the war crimes for which they has been tried had actually been invented by Congress and were not legally recognized.

The 21 prisoners recommended in January 2010 for continued detention (without possible transfer to imprisonment in the US), but determined to be eligible for a Periodic Review Board in April 2013

ISN 028 Moath Hamza Ahmed al-Alwi (Yemen)

ISN 041 Majid Mahmud Abdu Ahmed (Yemen)

ISN 044 Muhammed Rajab Sadiq Abu Ghanim (Yemen)

ISN 131 Salem Ahmad Hadi Bin Kanad (Yemen)

ISN 195 Mohammed Abd al Rahman al Shumrant (Saudi Arabia)

ISN 242 Khalid Ahmed Qasim (Yemen)

ISN 244 Abdul Latif Nasir (Morocco)

ISN 434 Mustafa Abd al-Qawi Abd al-Aziz al-Shamiri (Yemen)

ISN 441 Abdul Rahman Ahmed (Yemen)

ISN 508 Salman Yahya Hassan Mohammad Rabei’i (Yemen)

ISN 552 Faez Mohammed Ahmed al-Kandari (Kuwait)

ISN 695 Omar Khalif Mohammed Abu Baker Mahjour Umar (Libya)

ISN 708 Ismael Ali Faraj Ali Bakush (Libya)

ISN 836 Ayub Murshid Ali Salih (Yemen)

ISN 837 Bashir Nasir Ali al-Marwalah (Yemen)

ISN 838 Shawqi Awad Balzuhair (Yemen)

ISN 839 Musab Omar Ali al-Mudwani (Yemen)

ISN 840 Hail Aziz Ahmed al-Maythali (Yemen)

ISN 841 Said Salih Said Nashir (Yemen)

ISN 1045 Mohammed Kamin (Afghanistan)

ISN 10025 Mohammed Abdul Malik Bajabu (Kenya)

Note: 131, 195, 242 and 552 had their ongoing imprisonment approved by Periodic Review Boards in 2014 and 2015.

The 11 prisoners recommended in January 2010 for continued detention (with possible transfer to imprisonment in the US), but determined to be eligible for a Periodic Review Board in April 2013

ISN 027 Uthman Abd al-Rahim Muhammad Uthman (Yemen)

ISN 029 Mohammed al-Ansi (Yemen)

ISN 522 Yassim Qasim Mohammed Ismail Qasim (Yemen)

ISN 560 Haji Wali Muhammed (Afghanistan)

ISN 576 Zahar Omar Hamis bin Hamdoun (Yemen)

ISN 975 Karim Bostan (Afghanistan)

ISN 1017 Omar Mohammed Ali al-Rammah (Yemen)

ISN 1119 Ahmid al Razak (Afghanistan)

ISN 1463 Abd al-Salam al-Hilah (Yemen)

ISN 10023 Guleed Hassan Ahmed (Somalia)

ISN 10029 Muhammad Rahim (Afghanistan)

The 22 prisoners recommended for prosecution but not charged, who were determined to be eligible for a Periodic Review Board in April 2013

ISN 063 Mohamed Mani Ahmad al Kahtani (Saudi Arabia)

ISN 569 Suhayl Abdul Anam al Sharabi (Yemen)

ISN 682 Abdullah Al Sharbi (Saudi Arabia)

ISN 685 Said bin Brahim bin Umran Bakush (Algeria) aka Abdelrazak Ali

ISN 694 Sufyian Barhoumi (Algeria)

ISN 696 Jabran Al Qahtani (Saudi Arabia)

ISN 702 Ravil Mingazov (Russia)

ISN 753 Abdul Sahir (Afghanistan)

ISN 760 Mohamedou Ould Slahi (Mauritania)

ISN 762 Obaidullah (Afghanistan)

ISN 1094 Saifullah Paracha (Pakistan)

ISN 1453 Sanad Al Kazimi (Yemen)

ISN 1456 Hassan Bin Attash (Saudi Arabia)

ISN 1457 Sharqawi Abdu Ali Al Hajj (Yemen)

ISN 1460 Abdul Rabbani (Pakistan)

ISN 1461 Mohammed Rabbani (Pakistan)

ISN 10016 Zayn al-Ibidin Muhammed Husayn aka Abu Zubaydah

ISN 10017 Mustafa Faraj Muhammed Masud al-Jadid al-Usaybi (Libya)

ISN 10019 Encep Nurjaman (Hambali) (Indonesia)

ISN 10021 Mohd Farik bin Amin (Malaysia)

ISN 10022 Bashir bin Lap (Malaysia)

ISN 3148 Haroon al-Afghani (Afghanistan)

The 10 prisoners charged or tried

The seven prisoners currently facing charges

ISN 10011 Mustafa Ahmad al Hawsawi (Saudi Arabia)

ISN 10013 Ramzi Bin Al Shibh (Yemen)

ISN 10014 Walid Mohammed Bin Attash (Yemen)

ISN 10015 Mohammed al Nashiri (Saudi Arabia)

ISN 10018 Ali abd al Aziz Ali (Pakistan)

ISN 10024 Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (Kuwait)

ISN 10026 Nashwan abd al-Razzaq abd al-Baqi (Hadi) (Iraq)

The two prisoners already convicted via plea deal

ISN 768 Ahmed Al-Darbi (Saudi Arabia)

ISN 10020 Majid Khan (Pakistan)

One other prisoner convicted under President Bush

ISN 039 Ali Hamza al-Bahlul (Yemen)

He was not included in the task force’s deliberations, as he had been tried and convicted in a one-sided trial by military commission in October 2008, at which he refused to mount a defense. His conviction was dismissed by an appeals court in a series of rulings from January 2013 to June 2015 — although the government may yet appeal to the Supreme Court.

Note: For further information about the prisoners, see my six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list (Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five and Part Six).

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.

Buy It Here! Love and War, the Debut Album by Andy Worthington’s Band The Four Fathers Launches Today

I’m delighted to report that I’ve just taken delivery of the first batch of CDs of ‘Love and War’, the debut album by my band The Four Fathers. Featuring ten tracks — seven originals, two covers and a radical reworking of an old English folk song — ‘Love and War’ is available to buy for just £7/$11, plus postage and packing (£1.25 in the UK, £2.95 for Europe and £3.65 for the US and the rest of the world). Copies can be sent anywhere in the world.

The album, recorded, mixed and mastered in south east London from November 2014 to June 2015, features six of my original songs, including ‘Song for Shaker Aamer’, which is featured in the campaign video for We Stand With Shaker, the campaign calling for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, which I established with the activist Joanne MacInnes last November — and see here for our open letter to President Obama for US Independence Day. For anyone who doesn’t know, I have been researching and writing about Guantánamo and campaigning to get the prison closed down since 2006.

Also included are other new songs I have written recently — ‘Tory Bullshit Blues’, which was made available via SoundCloud just before the General Election in May, the love song ‘Sweet Love and Ever After’, and ‘Fighting Injustice’, a storming roots reggae number that also fulfils the band’s description of itself as playing “Rock, folk, blues and roots reggae. Not afraid of political engagement.”

Another new song of mine is ’81 Million Dollars’, about the Bush administration’s torture program, $81m being the amount that the architects of the program, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, were paid by the US government to develop the cruel, pointless and illegal covert program for which no one has yet been held accountable. The song is a rallying cry for campaigners calling for those who authorized and implemented the torture program to be prosecuted.

The album also features the London country blues number ‘City of Dreams’, which I wrote while living in Brixton 1987 — and completed last year! — and ‘Rebel Soldier’, an old English folk song that I first set to a reggae rhythm in Brixton in 1986.

Guitarist and backing singer Richard Clare’s love song ‘Sea Shanty for Helena’ is also included, as are versions of Bob Dylan’s ‘Masters of War’ and a folky, groovy take on the disco classic ‘I Will Survive’.

The Four Fathers are: Andy Worthington (lead vocals and guitar), Richard Clare (guitar and backing vocals, lead vocals on ‘Sea Shanty for Helena’), Bren Horstead (drums, bongos and percussion), Andrew Fifield (flute and harmonica) and Louis Sills-Clare (bass).

To order ‘Love and War’, please click on the drop down menu below, which provides costs for the UK, Europe and the US and the rest of the world. Postage and packing costs are included in the totals below.

The account is set up for pounds sterling, but PayPal will convert it from whatever currency you use to pay — and you don’t need to have a PayPal account to use it. For the US, the cost works out at $16.60.

Buy ‘Love and War’ by The Four Fathers


UK £8.25 GBPEurope £9.95 GBPUS and the rest of the world £10.65 GBP

If you’re in the UK and want to send a cheque, please send a cheque for £8.25 to:

Andy Worthington

164A Tressillian Road

London

SE4 1XY

Note: For those wishing to download the album, or individual tracks from it, please follow us on Facebook, where details will be announced soon.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers). 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.

Over 90 Celebrities and MPs Sign Open Letter to President Obama Calling for Shaker Aamer’s Release from Guantánamo on US Independence Day

I’m delighted to report that, today, US Independence Day (July 4), the following open letter to President Obama, calling for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, was published by the Guardian, on its website, which has seven million readers worldwide, and picked up on by the Daily Mail, Sky News and ITV News. Also see this Guardian article (a version of which was published in the newspaper), accompanying the publication of the letter.

I wrote the letter for the We Stand With Shaker campaign , which I founded, with the activist Joanne MacInnes, in November, and Jo has spent the last few weeks assiduously securing signatures. Celebrity supporters include Sir Patrick Stewart OBE, Ralph Fiennes, Russell Brand, Roger Waters, Peter Gabriel, Sting, Richard E. Grant, Mark Rylance, Juliet Stevenson, David Morrissey, Frankie Boyle, Ken Loach, Mike Leigh and Michael Brearley.

Late yesterday afternoon, we secured the support of Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, who joined dozens of other MPs, including two former Attorney Generals, Keir Starmer and Dominic Grieve, and the six MPs who lead the cross-party Shaker Aamer Parliamentary Group: the co-chairs, John McDonnell (Lab.) and David Davis (Con.), and the four officers of the group: Andrew Mitchell (Con.), Jeremy Corbyn (Lab.), Caroline Lucas (Green) and Andy Slaughter (Lab.).

In a press release, I stated: “As the US celebrates its independence, the continued imprisonment of Shaker Aamer is a disgrace. How can Americans celebrate their independence from executive tyranny when a modern-day symbol of it, the prison at Guantánamo, remains open, and Shaker Aamer continues to be held, despite being approved for release eight years ago?”

I added: “Indefinite detention without charge or trial undermines America’s notion of itself as a country founded on the rule of law and is a hallmark of tyrannical regimes. It is even more cruel to review the cases of prisoners, and to tell them their imprisonment is no longer required, but then to carry on holding them year after year. Shaker Aamer must be freed as soon as possible and returned to his family in the UK.”

The letter is below. If you like it, please share it widely, and please also share the letter as published on the Guardian‘s website.

A Letter to President Obama on Independence Day Calling for Shaker Aamer’s Release from Guantánamo

Dear President Obama,

On the day that the United States celebrates its independence, we the undersigned ask you to facilitate the transfer from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, and his return to his family in the U.K. — his British wife and his four British children.

The majority of us are British citizens, and it has not escaped our notice that, while the U.S. is celebrating its freedom, and its foundation under the rule of law, the continuing detention of men at Guantánamo — largely without charge or trial — continues to undermine America’s notion of itself and its international standing.

The U.S. authorities have given no indication over the years that they have any intention to charge Shaker Aamer with any criminal offence. Indeed, he is one of 52 men still held who have long been approved for release from Guantánamo after interagency reviews. In his case, he has twice been approved for release from the base – in 2007, under President Bush, and again, in 2010, by your Guantánamo Review Task Force.

We note that the Prime Minster, David Cameron, has asked you to release him, that the British Government supported a Parliamentary motion calling for his release in March, and that a cross-party delegation of MPs visited Washington, D.C. in May to seek to establish a timeline for his release. Although they met with Senators, and with the envoys for Guantánamo closure, no one was able to tell them when Mr. Aamer would be released.

We cannot understand the difficulty involved in releasing him to the U.K., a close ally of the U.S.A., including on counter-terrorism. The MPs noted in an op-ed in the New York Times on June 8: “There is simply no reason, domestic or international, for the United States to keep Mr. Aamer in custody.”

The MPs also stated: “It is difficult for us to shake off the depressing notion that the Obama administration is indifferent to the repeated requests of the British government. It is a slap in the face for America’s staunchest friend.”

Just three weeks ago, the U.S. Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, visited the U.K. to take part in a ceremony marking the 800th anniversary of the signing of the Magna Carta, the document that introduced habeas corpus to the world. The right not to be imprisoned without a fair trial has become the centrepiece of respect for the rule of law all around the world, and yet, when Ms. Lynch stated at Runnymede that the fundamental principles of the Magna Carta have “given hopes to those who face oppression” and have “given a voice to those yearning for the redress of wrongs”, it was impossible not to think of Shaker Aamer, and others in Guantánamo, also “yearning for the redress of wrongs”, but finding that yearning repeatedly unfulfilled.

As we congratulate you on the celebration of your country’s independence, we also urge you to address the ongoing and unjustifiable detention of Shaker Aamer without further delay.

Yours sincerely,

Clive Stafford Smith, founder, Reprieve

Kate Allen, director, Amnesty International UK

Shami Chakrabarti, director, Liberty

Dr. Shuja Shafi, Secretary General, Muslim Council of Great Britain

Boris Johnson MP, Mayor of London, (Conservative, Uxbridge and South Ruislip)

John McDonnell MP (Labour, Hayes and Harlington, co-chair, Shaker Aamer Parliamentary Group)

David Davis MP (Conservative, Haltemprice and Howden, co-chair, Shaker Aamer Parliamentary Group)

Andrew Mitchell MP (Conservative, Sutton Coldfield, officer, Shaker Aamer Parliamentary Group)

Jeremy Corbyn MP (Labour, Islington North, officer, Shaker Aamer Parliamentary Group), Labour leadership candidate

Andy Slaughter MP (Labour, Hammersmith, officer, Shaker Aamer Parliamentary Group), Shadow Justice Minister

Caroline Lucas MP (Green, Brighton Pavilion, officer, Shaker Aamer Parliamentary Group)

Sir Patrick Stewart OBE, actor

Ralph Fiennes, actor

Russell Brand, comedian, activist, actor

Roger Waters, musician, ex-Pink Floyd

Peter Gabriel, musician

Sting, musician

Juliet Stevenson OBE, actress, Olivier Award winner

David Morrissey, actor and director

Mark Rylance, actor, two Tony Awards

Richard E. Grant, actor

Rhys Ifans, BAFTA award-winning actor

Nick Davies, special correspondent, the Guardian

Sophie Ellis-Bextor, singer

Sir Richard Eyre, theatre director

David Hare, playwright, two Tony Awards, two Academy Award nominations

Ken Loach, film director

Mike Leigh, film director and writer

Frankie Boyle, comedian

Sara Pascoe, comedian

Maxine Peake, actress

Peter Oborne, journalist and author

Gillian Slovo, writer, Golden PEN Award winner

Lisa Appignanesi OBE, writer

Susie Orbach, psychotherapist and writer

Michael Brearley OBE, former England cricket captain

Natalie Bennett, leader, the Green Party of England and Wales

Denis Halliday, former Assistant Secretary-General, United Nations

Anna Perera, author, Guantanamo Boy

Julie Hesmondhalgh, actress

Dr. David Nicholl, neurologist, human rights activist

Lindsay German, convener, Stop The War Coalition

Sir Iqbal Sacranie, Chairman, Board Of Trustees, Balham Mosque

Shaykh Suliman Ghani, teacher and broadcaster

Peter Tatchell, human rights activist

Bianca Jagger, Bianca Jagger Human Rights Foundation

Moazzam Begg, human rights activist

Janet Ellis, actress, TV presenter, author

Jeremy Hardy, comedian

Charlie Winston, musician

Benjamin Zephaniah, poet and author

Harriet Walter DBE, actress, cast member, Death Of A Salesman

Guy Paul, actor, cast member, Death Of A Salesman

Miranda Nolan, actress, cast member, Death Of A Salesman

Alex Hassell, actor, cast member, Death Of A Salesman

Emma King, actress, cast member, Death Of A Salesman

Brodie Ross, actor, cast member, Death Of A Salesman

SE (His Excellency) Prince Stefano Massimo di Roccasecca dei Volsci

Sir Alan Duncan MP (Conservative, Rutland and Melton)

Ann Clywd MP (Labour, Cynon Valley)

Andrew Smith MP (Labour, Oxford East)

Andrew Tyrie MP (Conservative, Chichester)

Clive Lewis MP (Labour, Norwich South)

Diane Abbott MP (Labour, Hackney North and Stoke Newington), Mayoral candidate for London

Dominic Grieve MP (Conservative, Beaconfield), former Attorney General

Gareth Thomas MP (Labour Co-operative, Harrow West), Mayoral candidate for London

Gavin Shuker MP (Labour, Luton South)

Sir Gerald Kaufman MP (Labour, Manchester Gorton)

Hywel Williams MP (Plaid Cymru, Arfon)

Ian Murray MP (Labour, Edinburgh South), Shadow Secretary Of State For Scotland

John Pugh MP (Liberal Democrat Southport)

Kate Hoey MP (Labour, Vauxhall)

Keir Starmer MP (Labour, Holborn and St Pancras) former Attorney General

Kelvin Hopkins MP (Labour, Luton North)

Mark Durkan MP (SDLP, Foyle)

Neil Carmichael MP (Conservative, Stroud)

Sir Peter Bottomley MP (Conservative, Worthing West)

Rebecca Long Bailey MP (Labour, Salford and Eccles)

Roger Godsiff MP (Labour, Birmingham Hall Green)

Sadiq Khan MP (Labour, Tooting), Mayoral candidate for London

Stephen Timms MP (Labour, East Ham)

Tania Mathias MP (Conservative, Twickenham)

Tom Brake MP (Liberal Democrat, Carshalton and Wallington)

Yasmin Qureshi MP (Labour, Bolton South East)

Jean Lambert MEP (Green, London)

George Galloway, Mayoral candidate for London

Tessa Jowell, Mayoral candidate for London

Baroness Helena Kennedy QC (Labour, House of Lords)

Baroness Jenny Jones (Green, House of Lords)

Lord Hylton (Crossbench, House of Lords)

Joanne MacInnes, co-director, We Stand With Shaker

Andy Worthington, co-director, We Stand With Shaker

Joy Hurcombe, Chair, Save Shaker Aamer campaign

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). 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.

Abdul Rahman Shalabi, Guantánamo Hunger Striker for Ten Years, Is Approved for Release to Saudi Arabia

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.

I’m pleased to report that Abdul Rahman Shalabi (ISN 042), a Saudi at Guantánamo, who has, astonishingly, been on a hunger strike for ten years, has been approved for release by a Periodic Review Board, which explained, in its final determination regarding Shalabi’s case, “The Periodic Review Board, by consensus, determined continued law of war detention of the detainee is no longer necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States.”

The PRBs — which consist of representatives of the Departments of State, Defense, Justice and Homeland Security, as well as the office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — were established in 2013 to review the cases of prisoners who had neither been approved for release by the high-level, multi-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established shortly after first taking office in 2009, nor had been put forward for trials.

Originally, there were 48 men in this category of prisoners neither approved for release nor for trials, but two died before the PRBs began. To these 46 were added 25 others, originally recommended for trials, until the trial system at Guantánamo began to unravel spectacularly, with a series of damning rulings, by judges in the generally quite conservative appeals court in Washington D.C. The D.C. Circuit Court judges established that what the government called war crimes were no such thing, and had been invented by Congress, thereby rendering the entire trial system of the “war on terror” to be only one notch up from useless and thoroughly discredited.

If there was never any justification for most of the men put forward for prosecution by the task force to have been charged, huge problems were also apparent with the task force’s decision to describe 48 men as too dangerous to release, even though they acknowledged that insufficient evidence existed to put them on trial. In far too many cases, these decisions were taken because of a certain credulity regarding allegations in the prisoners’ files, which are filled, to an alarming degree, with worthless or highly suspect statements, made by the prisoners themselves, or by their fellow prisoners, when subjected to torture, other forms of abuse, or bribery — with the promise of comfort items for cooperative prisoners — none of which are conducive to telling the truth.

In Abdul Rahman Shalabi’s case, the most damaging claim was that he was a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden. However, as I explained at the time of his PRB in April, although he was “described as one of the ‘Dirty Thirty,’ captured crossing from Afghanistan to Pakistan in December 2001, who were all initially described as bin Laden bodyguards … that has never seemed likely, as the men in question were generally young, and had not been in Afghanistan for long prior to their capture.”

I added, “Shalabi had been there slightly longer, having apparently arrived in Afghanistan in the late 1990s, but there is no independent verification of his supposed status. The authorities noted that he has ‘denied any involvement with al-Qa’ida,’ but claimed that ‘several other detainees — including senior al-Qa’ida figures and other former bodyguards — have separately identified him as a Bin Ladin [sic] bodyguard.” These claims are, of course, unreliable, especially in the cases of alleged “senior al-Qa’ida figures,” because they were all subjected to torture in CIA custody.

In its final determination, the board members explained that they acknowledged Shalabi’s “past terrorist-related activities and connections,” but added that they “found that in light of the factors and conditions of transfer identified below, the risk the detainee presents can be adequately mitigated.” Shalabi, they added, “does not appear to be in contact with any extremists and his family has no known ties to extremism.”

The board members added, “In making this determination, the Board was confident about the efficacy of the Saudi rehabilitation program and Saudi Arabia’s ability to monitor the detainee after completion of the program and noted the detainee’s credible desire to participate in the Saudi rehabilitation program and reintegrate into society. The Board also considered the detainee’s well-established family, their willingness and ability to support him upon his return, and their prior success in assisting with the rehabilitation and reintegration of a former Guantánamo detainee [his nephew Sultan al-Uwaydha (ISN 059), who was repatriated to Saudi Arabia in 2007].”

The Board also “noted the detainee’s recognition of his health situation and his commitment to continue his recent efforts to improve it” — a reference, I imagine, to the long-term effects of his hunger strike, although that was not spelled out.

As I explained in April, “Shalabi … weighed 124 pounds when he arrived at Guantánamo in January 2002, but has rarely weighed more than 110 pounds since he began his hunger strike in August 2005, as part of the largest hunger strike in the prison’s history. At one point, in November 2005, he weighed just 100 pounds (PDF) … In September 2009, after four years of being force-fed daily, Shalabi weighed just 108 pounds, and wrote a distressing letter to his lawyers, in which he stated, ‘I am a human who is being treated like an animal.’ In November 2009, when his letter was included in a court submission, one of his lawyers, Julia Tarver Mason, stated, ‘He’s two pounds away from organ failure and death.'”

Below I’m posting the statement made by Shalabi’s lawyer, Julia Tarver Mason-Wood, during his PRB, which was not available online at the time of the April hearing. In it, Tarver-Wood provides a detailed analysis of her client, based on almost ten years of visiting him and, more recently, talking to him on the phone.

Statement by Julia Tarver Mason-Wood for the Periodic Review Board for Abdul Rahman Shalabi, April 21, 2015

Good morning. My name is Julia Tarver Mason-Wood and I am the private counsel for Abdul Rahman Shalabi. Thank you so much for this opportunity to represent Mr. Shalabi in this review process.

I have represented Mr. Shalabi on a pro bono basis for almost a decade. I’ve had numerous in-person and telephonic calls with him over the years. Mr. Shalabi is no longer the young man in his early twenties who left his home and family in Saudi Arabia and went to Afghanistan. Today, as he approaches his 40th birthday, he seems much older than his 40 years. Yet even in his ailing physical health, he is intent to turn a corner in his life and now wants nothing more but to return to live in peace with his mother, sisters and brothers in Saudi Arabia.

Through our written submission and our discussion with you today, I hope that you will see a man who has matured from his youthful past and is ready to turn the page. I want to emphasize at the outset that Mr. Shalabi believes in the periodic review board process and has been eager to participate since he first learned that he was notified for a hearing. Over the past few months, he has worked diligently and patiently with his personal representatives and with us to prepare for today’s hearing.

More than anything else, Mr. Shalabi desires to return home to his family in Saudi Arabia to be reunited with his mother, two brothers and three sisters. From the very first phone call that Mr. Shalabi had to tell his family that he had been scheduled for a PRB hearing before this body, several family members set out immediately to write letters enthusiastically supporting his transfer home. As you can see from their moving statements, Mr. Shalabi is very close with his family, particularly his mother, and they fully support his transition home. This support will enable Mr. Shalabi to lead a peaceful and productive life when he returns. His oldest brother has already registered and furnished an apartment for him. And his brother and his younger brother are the owners of successful real estate and construction businesses, and they intend to employ Mr. Shalabi as soon as he is able and ready to begin work. Additionally, Mr. Shalabi’s mother and sister are devoted to finding him a suitable wife, so that he can realize his dream of getting married and just having children.

Now, these aren’t just the words of a hopeful family or a naive family. These are assurances you can trust from a family with a proven track record. Back in November 2007, Mr. Shalabi’s own nephew, Sultan Ahmed Dirdeer Musa Al Uwaydha, ISN 059, was repatriated from Guantanamo to Saudi Arabia. With the support of Mr. Shalabi’s own family, Mr. Uwaydha graduated from the Saudi Rehabilitation Care Program, got married, and started his own family. In Mr. Shalabi’s own words, his nephew received a chance at a peaceful life, took it, and does not look back. Mr. Shalabi is hopeful for the same opportunity, and I urge the Board to strongly take into account the demonstrated success of Mr. Shalabi’s family and the Saudi rehabilitation program in preventing Mr. Uwaydha from engaging in any hostile activities after his release.

Like his nephew, Mr. Shalabi is eager to participate in the Saudi Arabia rehabilitation program and will cooperate fully with any stipulations his country places upon him. I would like to direct your attention to the attached statement we have provided from Saudi Arabian Ministry of Interior, pledging that Mr. Shalabi will be welcomed home with the same security and human treatment assurances that have facilitated the transfer of over 100 detainees from Guantanamo to Saudi Arabia, including former hunger strikers, such as Ahmed Zaid Salem Zuhair, ISN 669. We have also provided you with what I hope is a comprehensive memorandum that provides color on the Saudi rehabilitation program, explains why it has been successful in rehabilitating countless other former Guantanamo detainees, and further analyzes the reasons why Mr. Shalabi should be repatriated to his home country through this program.

Nevertheless, Mr. Shalabi is open to being resettled in another country if that would expedite his transfer out of Guantanamo. As in Saudi Arabia, he would seek to rehabilitate himself and live a peaceful life. Wherever Mr. Shalabi goes, he wishes to settle down, get married and have a family of his own, and put the past behind him.

Finally, Mr. Shalabi wants to make clear that he harbors no ill will to the United States, the American people, and non-Muslims. Mr. Shalabi recognizes that he has struggled with his almost 14-year confinement. He has been on a peaceful, but long term, hunger strike since 2005. And at times, his frustrations with the conditions of confinement has lead him to act out and be uncooperative with the detention staff. But Mr. Shalabi’s behavior is not rooted in ill will toward the United States. Instead, he has exercised a peaceful means of protest by refusing to consume food and has largely cooperated with the enteral feedings he has been provided on a daily basis over the last nine years. You will hear from Mr. Shalabi’s doctors who will tell you that it is not uncommon for individuals in·Mr. Shalabi’s condition to attempt to exercise these basic forms of control over aspects of their daily living.

As he will explain to you, Mr. Shalabi is a teacher of Islam, which he believes is a religion of peace, not war. Mr. Shalabi will tell you that he does not support terrorism or the killing of innocent people; he steadfastly believes that such acts are contrary to the Quran and to the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed. Furthermore, in assessing Mr. Shalabi’s behavior in detention, I encourage you to consider the written statements from Mr. Shalabi’s doctors as well as the live testimony that they will provide to you later today.

The bottom line is that Mr. Shalabi wishes to move beyond the past and look to the future. He is committed to spending his remaining days in peace with his family. Based on his testimony, his doctor’s testimony, his family’s statements, his family’s prior success in rehabilitating his nephew, as well as the proven success of the Saudi rehabilitation program in rehabilitating similarly situated individuals, Mr. Shalabi should not be considered a significant and continuing threat to the security of the United States.

I urge the Board to approve Mr. Shalabi for transfer to Saudi Arabia and recommend that he be transferred as soon as possible to begin his rehabilitation.

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). 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.

Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay: It’s Time for Greece to Say No to the Murderous Austerity of Its Creditors

I couldn’t let this week pass without a mention of the crisis in Greece, where the left-wing Syriza government has called a referendum for Sunday, so that the Greek people can either approve — or turn down — the latest crippling austerity package from the Troika of the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. If they choose yes, the slow death of the economy and of Greek society will continue — a slow death that appears to have no end and will continue, generation after generation — and if they say no, it looks like they will have to leave the Euro, entering uncharted waters and dealing a major blow to the entire Euro project that will have repercussions way beyond Greece’s borders.

I have not written about Greece for many years, but back in 2011, when revolution was in the air via the Arab Spring, and I had recently visited Greece, for a family holiday, just before the collapse of the Greek economy began in earnest, I wrote a number of articles — The Revolution Reaches Europe: Tens of Thousands Protest in Greece and Spain, Crisis in Greece: Experts Call for Return of the Drachma, As Prime Minister Cancels Bailout Referendum, We Are All Greece: Expert Explains How the Greek Crisis is Being Manipulated by Banks and Governments to Enslave Us All (featuring a video in which, as I explained at the time, “Spanish author and professor Pedro Olalla, who has been living in Athens since 1994, discuss[es] the crisis, what it means for Greece, and for the wider European community, in which, in clear language that can be understood by those without specific economic expertise, he explains how Greece’s crisis has largely been manufactured by financial speculators and their willing and unquestioning servants in government”), New Perspectives on the Euro Crisis, and the Need for Greece to Default, Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay: Greeks Rise Up Against Austerity, and, in 2012, Greek Despair: Will the EU and the Bankers Finally Accept That Austerity is Killing Greece? and Austerity Under Attack in Europe: Can Socialism Offer A Cure, and Keep Fascists and Conservatives at Bay?

Some of those previous articles summed up my position, which hasn’t changed since. The Troika’s punishment of Greece for having lived beyond its means (after it was allowed into the Euro project when it shouldn’t have been) is a disaster of almost unbelievable cruelty — a siege conducted using modern methods; in this case, horrendous austerity measures that are so punishing that, as well as crippling Greek society and the economy, with essential services savagely cut, unemployment rampant, and suicides on the rise, are so severe that the economy cannot recover, and, moreover, the debts will never be paid off.

Unless the Troika realises this, and significant debts are written off, Greece’s living death will continue — possibly without end — which appears to be a form of economic torture. The alternative — leaving the Euro — is fraught with problems, which is, I think, an indictment of the failures of the Euro project, as what Greece should have been able to do from the beginning was to devalue its currency to become competitive, which, for example, would have allowed it to become, once again, the cheap holiday destination it used to be, and would have made its exports viable.

Below I’m posting an article from ROAR Magazine (Reflections on a Revolution), which I first came across in 2011 during the Arab Spring. This particular article is by Leonidas Oikonomakis, a PhD researcher in Social Movement Studies at the European University Institute, a rapper with the Greek hip-hop formation Social Waste, and an editor for ROAR Magazine. An unwilling exile from his home country, he chronicles a few key events in Greece’s recent history, and concludes with a cry for support for a “no” vote on the basis that it restores a necessary dignity to the Greek people. I also recommend his colleague Jerome Roos’ article here, which includes the following key passage:

The gravest irony is that, all this time, there was a very straightforward and socially acceptable way out of the deadlock. The sensible solution would have been to write off a significant chunk of Greece’s debt. But, as even the IMF has since officially admitted, this option was politically unpalatable to Greece’s “partners” from the very start. In the early years, the Europeans feared that a debt write-down would lead to the collapse of some of their biggest private banks. Now that Greece’s debt has effectively been socialized, these same European leaders fear an electoral backlash from their Euroskeptical taxpayers, who now stand to bear the brunt of the impending Greek default.

In other words, it was the very intransigence of the creditors, the utter unwillingness to tell their own voters the truth about the Greek bailout and their stubborn refusal to even contemplate a sustainable and socially just resolution of the crisis, that led us to this dramatic apotheosis.

I’m also cross-posting an article by the economist Joseph Stiglitz, published in the Guardian, in which, while conceding that “[n]either alternative — approval or rejection of the Troika’s terms — will be easy, and both carry huge risks,” a “no” vote to the continuing asphyxiating austerity is marginally preferable.

Stiglitz states, in a blunt condemnation of the Troika’s actions, “I can think of no depression, ever, that has been so deliberate and had such catastrophic consequences: Greece’s rate of youth unemployment, for example, now exceeds 60%.”

His most penetrating paragraph, however, is the following, which reveals how, throughout the European Commission, the ECB and the IMF, ideology has destroyed common sense and fairness. “We should be clear,” he writes, “almost none of the huge amount of money loaned to Greece has actually gone there. It has gone to pay out private-sector creditors — including German and French banks. Greece has gotten but a pittance, but it has paid a high price to preserve these countries’ banking systems. The IMF and the other ‘official’ creditors do not need the money that is being demanded. Under a business-as-usual scenario, the money received would most likely just be lent out again to Greece.”

I hope you find these articles useful, if you haven’t read them already, and that you will share my compassion for the Greek people, who should not be expected to continue living in an economic nightmare that has no end. As Joseph Stiglitz states, “A yes vote would mean depression almost without end,” whereas “a no vote would at least open the possibility that Greece, with its strong democratic tradition, might grasp its destiny in its own hands.” Or, as Leonidas Oikonomakis puts it, a “no” vote is “a matter of dignity” — and, I should add, a necessary message to Greece’s creditors that the Troika’s debt machine is all-consuming monster, out of control, which is at least as much to blame as those it lent money to for the inability of the indebted to pay back debts that should never have been allowed in the first place.

No more ‘Yes to all’: time for a proud and dignified ‘NO!’

By Leonidas Oikonomakis, ROAR, June 29, 2015

Finally, the Greek people will be able to say a dignified ‘NO!’ to austerity. We owe it to those who suffered, those who migrated — and those who died.

First Scene: Kastelorizo island, April 2010

The then-Prime Minister Giorgakis Papandreou (son of Andreas and grandson of Giorgos) appeared on state television to send his televised message to the Greek people from the harbor of Kastelorizo: “Our ship is sinking,” he said, “and we have to turn to our partners, the IMF and the EU, who will provide us with a safe harbor where we can rebuild it.”

As the saying has it: “a ship is safe in harbor — but that’s not what ships are for.” However, this is how Greece’s self-destructive dance with the Troika began. At the time, the country’s public debt was at 120% of GDP, the unemployment rate at 12%, the youth unemployment rate at around 30%, and suicide rates were an unfamiliar concept.

Second Scene: Syntagma Square, June 29, 2011

All I can remember is my friends’ faces covered in Maalox, teargas grenades and Molotov cocktails all over the place, even inside the Metro, the riot police going on a frenzy and beating up people, and — above all — the repetition of those “Yes to all!” statements on the radio, expressed by the majority of deputies inside the Greek Parliament.

It was the day Parliament would vote on the so-called mid-term agreement, a new round of austerity measures that included the shrinking of the Greek public sector and welfare state and the privatization of key state assets. It was also during the heyday of the  Movement of the Squares, whose activists had called for a 48-hour general strike starting on June 28.

For the day after — the day of the vote — the plan was to “besiege” the Parliament so deputies wouldn’t be able to enter and vote, or if they did so at least they would feel the pressure from outside and vote no. Ambitious plan, you may say, Quixotic even, but that was what the Syntagma Assembly had decided.

It didn’t work.

“Yes to all,” the deputies said … gas grenades were falling … Maalox for those affected … chemicals … “Say no, for god’s sake!” … people fainting in the metro … beatings … arrests … the cops in the square destroying the camp … and yet again: “Yes to all …” I think those “Yeses to all” hurt us more than any of the chemicals or the beatings of the cops.

Third Scene: Florence, June 2015

Like many of my friends, a generation of well-educated young people (owing to the fact that education in Greece is free), I don’t live in the country anymore. Still, I follow the political and economic developments and I try to spread the word of the economic and social destruction Greece is going through as much as I can.

You know, when we were finishing our university studies we were known as the “Generation of 700 euros”: a generation of well-educated young people who were obliged to live on 700 euros per month, the lowest salary in Greece at the time, which was considered far too little for anyone to survive in dignity in Athens, Thessaloniki, or any other of the big cities in the country.

Little did we know back then that, five years later, under the austerity measures dictated by the economists of the Troika and imposed by a series of slavish Greek governments, the lowest salary would have fallen to 500 euros, our parents’ salaries and grandparents’ pensions (which were not that generous either) would have been slashed by 30-40%, that the unemployment rate would reach 28%, the youth unemployment rate 50%, that suicide rates would quadruple, and that a neo-Nazi party would be in Parliament.

At the same time, the public debt skyrocketed to 180% of GDP, the rich (who would obviously benefit from the 40% reduction in worker salaries) kept becoming richer, and many of us (200,000, to be more specific, or roughly 2% of the population) would be forced to emigrate as a result of the crisis. The world’s biggest brain drain, as The Guardian called it.

None of the above is a coincidence. All of this is the direct result of the social and economic policies imposed by the Troika with the help of Greece’s “Yes to all” governments. Exactly the same policies that they are trying to blackmail Greece into continuing today.

However, this time we are being asked by the government — that of Alexis Tsipras — what we really want it to do. And for once, we will be able to say a proud and dignified ‘NO!’, as we had always wanted the deputies who were supposed to be representing us to say! We owe it to our friends who migrated, our parents and grandparents who saw their salaries and pensions being slashed, our comrades who were beaten up and arrested by the cops, and to our dead: to Pavlos and Shehzad Luqman, who were assassinated by Golden Dawn, and to the thousands who committed suicide over the course of the past five years.

It is a matter of dignity — something that can not be measured and cannot fit into the Troika’s economic statistics, but that can give strength to the humiliated to rise up against those who have humiliated them for so long.

Joseph Stiglitz: how I would vote in the Greek referendum

The Guardian, June 29, 2015

Neither alternative — approval or rejection of the Troika’s terms — will be easy, and both carry huge risks

The rising crescendo of bickering and acrimony within Europe might seem to outsiders to be the inevitable result of the bitter endgame playing out between Greece and its creditors. In fact, European leaders are finally beginning to reveal the true nature of the ongoing debt dispute, and the answer is not pleasant: it is about power and democracy much more than money and economics.

Of course, the economics behind the programme that the “troika” (the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund) foisted on Greece five years ago has been abysmal, resulting in a 25% decline in the country’s GDP. I can think of no depression, ever, that has been so deliberate and had such catastrophic consequences: Greece’s rate of youth unemployment, for example, now exceeds 60%.

It is startling that the troika has refused to accept responsibility for any of this or admit how bad its forecasts and models have been. But what is even more surprising is that Europe’s leaders have not even learned. The troika is still demanding that Greece achieve a primary budget surplus (excluding interest payments) of 3.5% of GDP by 2018.

Economists around the world have condemned that target as punitive, because aiming for it will inevitably result in a deeper downturn. Indeed, even if Greece’s debt is restructured beyond anything imaginable, the country will remain in depression if voters there commit to the troika’s target in the snap referendum to be held this weekend.

In terms of transforming a large primary deficit into a surplus, few countries have accomplished anything like what the Greeks have achieved in the last five years. And, though the cost in terms of human suffering has been extremely high, the Greek government’s recent proposals went a long way toward meeting its creditors’ demands.

We should be clear: almost none of the huge amount of money loaned to Greece has actually gone there. It has gone to pay out private-sector creditors — including German and French banks. Greece has gotten but a pittance, but it has paid a high price to preserve these countries’ banking systems. The IMF and the other “official” creditors do not need the money that is being demanded. Under a business-as-usual scenario, the money received would most likely just be lent out again to Greece.

But, again, it’s not about the money. It’s about using “deadlines” to force Greece to knuckle under, and to accept the unacceptable — not only austerity measures, but other regressive and punitive policies.

But why would Europe do this? Why are European Union leaders resisting the referendum and refusing even to extend by a few days the June 30 deadline for Greece’s next payment to the IMF? Isn’t Europe all about democracy?

In January, Greece’s citizens voted for a government committed to ending austerity. If the government were simply fulfilling its campaign promises, it would already have rejected the proposal. But it wanted to give Greeks a chance to weigh in on this issue, so critical for their country’s future wellbeing.

That concern for popular legitimacy is incompatible with the politics of the eurozone, which was never a very democratic project. Most of its members’ governments did not seek their people’s approval to turn over their monetary sovereignty to the ECB. When Sweden’s did, Swedes said no. They understood that unemployment would rise if the country’s monetary policy were set by a central bank that focused single-mindedly on inflation (and also that there would be insufficient attention to financial stability). The economy would suffer, because the economic model underlying the eurozone was predicated on power relationships that disadvantaged workers.

And, sure enough, what we are seeing now, 16 years after the eurozone institutionalised those relationships, is the antithesis of democracy: many European leaders want to see the end of prime minister Alexis Tsipras’ leftist government. After all, it is extremely inconvenient to have in Greece a government that is so opposed to the types of policies that have done so much to increase inequality in so many advanced countries, and that is so committed to curbing the unbridled power of wealth. They seem to believe that they can eventually bring down the Greek government by bullying it into accepting an agreement that contravenes its mandate.

It is hard to advise Greeks how to vote on 5 July. Neither alternative — approval or rejection of the troika’s terms — will be easy, and both carry huge risks. A yes vote would mean depression almost without end. Perhaps a depleted country — one that has sold off all of its assets, and whose bright young people have emigrated — might finally get debt forgiveness; perhaps, having shrivelled into a middle-income economy, Greece might finally be able to get assistance from the World Bank. All of this might happen in the next decade, or perhaps in the decade after that.

By contrast, a no vote would at least open the possibility that Greece, with its strong democratic tradition, might grasp its destiny in its own hands. Greeks might gain the opportunity to shape a future that, though perhaps not as prosperous as the past, is far more hopeful than the unconscionable torture of the present.

I know how I would vote.

Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics, is University Professor at Columbia University. His most recent book, co-authored with Bruce Greenwald, is Creating a Learning Society: A New Approach to Growth, Development, and Social Progress.

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). 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.

Shrapnel-Damaged Libyan Amputee Seeks Release from Guantánamo via Periodic Review Board

On June 24, Omar Mohammed Khalifh (ISN 695, identified by the US authorities as Omar Khalif Mohammed Abu Baker or Omar Khalifa Mohammed Abu Bakr), a Libyan prisoner at Guantánamo who is 42 or 43 years old, took part in a Periodic Review Board, a process that involved him talking by video-link, accompanied by his civilian lawyer and two US military personal designated as “personal representatives,” who also spoke on his behalf, to 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, in a secure facility near Washington D.C.

Khalifh is one of 39 prisoners still held who were designated for ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial in January 2010 by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established shortly after taking office in 2009 to review the cases of all the prisoners held at that time and to recommend whether they should be freed or prosecuted, or whether they should continue to be held without charge or trial, because they were regarded as too dangerous to release, but it was acknowledged that insufficient evidence existed to put them on trial.

In a world that respects the rule of law, this third option is a disgrace, as it gives weight to information that is too flimsy to be regarded as evidence and should therefore be discredited — often because it was derived through the use of torture or other abuse.

However, in President Obama’s America, in 2011, it was considered an appropriate measure to take, although, to keep rights groups and conscientious lawyers off his back, President Obama ordered regular reviews for the men — who were dubbed “forever prisoners” by the media — when he approved their ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial in an executive order in March 2011.

Shamefully, the first review didn’t take place until November 2013, but since that time 15 prisoners have now had their cases reviewed, and, of the 14 prior to Khalifh, ten have had their releases approved — although only two have so far been freed, leaving the other eight to join the 44 other men still held — out of 116 in total — who were approved for release by the task force in January 2010 but are still held.

In Guantánamo, the wheels of justice, when they have not been destroyed or hidden or misplaced, move exceedingly slowly.

29 of the “forever prisoners” still held were told in 2013 that they were eligible for PRBs, but have not yet had their cases considered, and, in addition, out of 36 men that the task force approved for prosecution in 2010, 22 were subsequently told that they too would be eligible for PRBs, although only one of those men has had his case reviewed — and that was obviously because the man in question, an Egyptian named Tariq al-Sawah, is very ill, although he has not yet been released, four months after the PRB’s decision to approve him for release.

Omar Mohammed Khalifh, the 15th prisoner to face a PRB, is largely unknown to the general public, although those paying close attention to Guantánamo issues will know that he is an amputee, and that his habeas corpus petition was turned down by a US judge in April 2010, as I explained in an article at the time, entitled, Judge Denies Habeas Petition of an Ill and Abused Libyan in Guantánamo.

In that article, I drew on the profile of Khalifh that I wrote in 2006/07 for my book The Guantánamo Files, noting that the US authorities claimed he was a military trainer for the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), opponents of Col. Gaddafi who had largely ended up living in exile in Taliban-run Afghanistan and in Pakistan, and that he had connections to al-Qaeda. As I explained, however:

One of his lawyers, Edmund Burke, refuted all the allegations … He acknowledged that his client had been a member of the LIFG, and had worked for the Taliban as a mine cleaner until 1998, when his right leg was severely damaged by a land mine, but said that he spent the ensuing years moving from hospital to hospital in Afghanistan to receive treatment for his leg, which was eventually amputated. He added that he moved to Pakistan in 2001, and was living in a school for boys when it was raided by Pakistani police. Pointing out that his client “can’t bear his weight on his good leg and only hobbles about with the help of a walker or crutches,” he explained, “It’s very hard to imagine him as a combatant of any kind.”

Moreover, in 2010, as I also explained, the former prisoner Omar Deghayes told me that Khalifh’s status has been exaggerated by the authorities in Guantánamo:

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

For his PRB, the US authorities drew on the previously aired claims about his past, even though they are not necessarily reliable, for the most part — especially as the allegations include the claim that “Pakistani security forces detained him in March 2002 at a safehouse run by senior al-Qa’ida figure Abu Zubaydah,” when that is simply not true, as he was apprehended in Karachi in February 2002.

Also included is mention of the LIFG, of him travelling to Sudan where he worked for a company owned by Osama bin Laden, and claims that he became a military trainer in Afghanistan. It was also noted that he “has been moderately compliant with the guard staff relative to other detainees at Guantánamo and has committed few serious infractions since 2007,” and that, “Since [Libyan leader Col.] Qadhafi’s death in 2011, [he] has expressed some interest in returning to Libya because he no longer felt like he would be persecuted by the Libyan Government. In 2014, however, he said that he no longer wanted to be repatriated to Libya, probably because of the instability there.”

It was also noted that “[t]here are no indications that he is in direct contact with any terrorists outside Guantánamo,” although he has apparently “attempted to relay greetings to several Libyan former detainees, including one who has emerged as an extremist leader,” even though no indication was given as to how he was supposed to have tried to establish contact with these former prisoners, when his every move is subject to scrutiny.

It was also noted that, “If repatriated to Libya, [he] probably would seek out his remaining family members in his hometown of al-Bayda, which is situated between Darnah and Benghazi, areas where extremists operate freely.”

In their opening statement, his military representatives stated, “We have met with Omar and gotten to know him through several meetings over the past 6 months, as well as the letters that he has sent us. We hope you will see that he is a man who is peaceful, compliant, and also has quite a sense of humor. He has chosen the peaceful path while here at Guantánamo, even acting as a mediator on multiple occasions between the other detainees and the security forces. He does not harbor anger against the United States nor any other Western Nation. He simply desires to live a happy life with his family.”

They added, “Omar is here with us today during Ramadan. He is ready to openly answer any and all questions you may have for him regardless of subject matter. We believe that the information provided will demonstrate that Omar is not a significant threat to the security of the United States of America. Thank you for your time and consideration in this matter.”

According to the Associated Press, his lawyer, Ramzi Kassem, “told the Periodic Review Board there is no evidence Khalif had any direct role in attacks on the US and he would not pose a threat if released.” Kassem “also said prison is extremely difficult for Khalif because of his wounds,” and the AP proceeded to explain, “He lost part of a leg from a land mine explosion in Afghanistan in 1998 and his other leg was shattered in a construction site accident. He has shrapnel in his left arm and left leg, and he is blind in his left eye.”

It is not known when a decision will be announced in Khalifh’s case, but in the meantime two more prisoners are awaiting reviews: Salman Yahya Hassan Mohammad Rabei’i (ISN 508), a Yemeni whose PRB is on July 14, and Mohammed Kamin (ISN 1045), an Afghan who was notified that his PRB is forthcoming on May 19. Two other prisoners who were recommended for continuing detention after their PRBs last year will also have second PRBs: Fayiz al-Kandari (ISN 552), the last Kuwaiti in Guantánamo, who was notified on April 21, and Muhammad Abd al-Rahman al-Shumrani (ISN 195), a Saudi who was notified on April 30.

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). 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.